potion. Dimm might have been thrown out of the university, but he still had the protection of his godfather and Nadya’s cousin Andrei. It was Papa-Great Andrei’s long, invisible arm that arranged Dimm’s appointment as head of the department of soft drinks in a big Sofia factory. It sounded like a joke, but Dimm was delighted with his job. The secret: the department also dealt with coffee supplies for the city’s cafes so, in a way, it was like making the fox a security guard of a chicken coop.
Dimm started to come home with bigger and bigger bags of brown and pitch black beans whose aroma pushed through the stitching, creating havoc in the house. Glossy, like infant cockroaches, they had a life of their own, rustling, rolling over each other, curious to emerge and have a look at what was going on. What was happening was the brewing of their siblings in a big pot, usually used by Nadya for cooking macaroni. Dimm, another family shaman, conjuring a trance-inducing substance, throwing fistfuls of coffee beans into the impressive brass hand-mill. Soon, mountains of ground coffee lay on the table in front of him. He diligently scooped it all up, even shaking the newspaper that served as a tray into the pot. After adding water sparingly, Dimm watched greedily over the boiling, almost solid liquid, strong as a bronco’s kick, dangerous as a bull’s gore. After a few seconds of bubbling and plonking, the black potion was carefully taken off the hot plate to be served at the table in the traditional coffee pot. This ritual continued to be accompanied by the family’s poker indulgence on some weekends. It was a jolly time, laced with Dimm’s smart and snappy jokes, lashing the totalitarian system beyond the walls of our somehow small and vulnerable home. A lost-generation soul, he often played his ‘rotten capitalist music’ like ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ on the old piano. Occasionally, there was a girl standing by him, squawking karaoke-style to his vigorous playing.
“Puppe, this is a fellow student,” he would introduce her, expecting and unfailingly being rewarded with a motherly outburst from the girl at the sight of his chubby little niece, Puppe, thus mellowing his catch of the day. “We are going to study together. Two hours.”
The wink that accompanied his words was more of an order that I shouldn’t hang around outside the locked door of his room. I was, of course, doing the opposite.
“Leave him alone,” Nadya would snap, emerging from the shadows, also snooping. “He has to catch up with missed lectures, prepare himself to go back to the university, pass exams, and estimate where he has better chances: accountancy, perhaps, or the political economy of communism, God help.” Here, she would make a quick sign of the cross, adding quickly, “Our Andrei can also help.”
Then she would go to look after her domestic chores, cooking a bourgeois meal, like coq au vin, an old half-bald bird, negotiated from the peasants’ market and soaked overnight in the leftovers from Dimm’s scattered alcohol supplies. The meal always made me tipsy.
My attention was suddenly divided, my nose pointing in the direction of the kitchen, my ears drawn closer to the locked bedroom door for a random selection of excited whispers, contagious giggles, small cries and shushed shrieks. Then silence and only the mattress creaking, groaning, bouncing, tuning itself into the rhythm of Ching, ching, ching, chick-a-ching… or perhaps of the political economy of communism.
“Watch out, Dimm,” Nadya warned him after he would accompany the girl home and return with a leering smile on his face. “Remember those militia-marriages!”
I jumped with fright, because I had eavesdropped one of Nadya and Madam Sonya’s confidential conversations, in muted voices, unfinished sentences, deep, meaningful sighs, Madam Sonya’s usual rhetoric question, “Ah well, what do you expect?”
“They need two witnesses… that Dimm has slept with one of these girls, and that’s what he is going to have… force them to a militia-marriage!” Nadya’s voice was moist with tears.
“That’s the regime’s latest idiotic idea to punish people for having sex, what do you expect? They say sex is a bourgeois evil like Coca Cola, classified as an alcoholic drink… communist comrades are peasants that smell of dung and still wear untanned pig leather shoes… Poor us, the old citizens of Sofia, we have to put up with them making all nice highlife people feel like garbage just because they haven’t robbed a dairy farm in the mountain! Partisans, fighters, my arse! But Nadya, the good thing is they can’t force Dimm to militia-marry all the girls he sleeps with.”
“Ah well… ” Nadya was not convinced.
“I don’t see you worry about Margherita getting forced into a militia-marriage.” It was Madam Sonya’s teasing remark.
“It would only do her good,” was Nadya’s retort.
There were two reasons for my fright. The first one, the mere mention of the militia, the image of the uniform or plain-clothed policemen patrolling Dimm’s life, the second that Dimm could marry someone and belong to her and not to me. After all, I was the one to marry him when I grew up! I was surprised, however, to learn that Dimm slept throughout his meetings with those girls instead of studying. But then, again, what were the strange noises coming from behind his locked door?
Dimm’s locked door left me with that sense of anticipation and curiosity that accompanied me over the years every time I was facing a door.
*
As I am facing one now under the sign The Coffee Animals.
Why did I leave the Münster so quickly and turn up here of all places? How about all the museums and galleries that I could have been visiting instead? A tingling sensation builds up around my toes, whirls in my stomach and reaches my skull.
The cow bells’ sound is familiar when I cross the threshold.
Behind the bar is Paul. He lifts his eyes to look at me and a smile leaves faint ripples across his lips.
Bruno is not inside the cafe.
The younger man prepares my coffee. He carefully serves the thumb-size, fine china cup, half-full of hot, black liquid, so thick it might as well have been tar. His intense blue eyes look at me knowingly.
“Where’s Bruno?” I ask casually.
Paul is arranging bowls with sugar sachets. “He comes and goes.”
“Is he coming to work today?”
“To work?” Paul gives me a sideway glance, his eyebrows arching.
“Yes, to work. The other barista. Yesterday he served my coffee.”
An enigmatic smile laced with amusement lights up Paul’s face, he looks even younger, and I wonder whether he shaves. “Bruno? He doesn’t work.”
There are customers coming in. Paul nods ceremoniously to me and walks away to attend to their orders.
Bruno doesn’t work. What was he doing here then?
When Paul comes back, I try another tactic. “I love Van Gogh because of his coffee obsession — in Arles he lived on coffee and bread. It’s there that he tried to kill his friend and fellow artist Gauguin.”
Paul takes his time cutting a thick, wobbly slice of creamy chocolate cake for the order, but I know I have his attention. Finally he answers, “Ma’am, Van Gogh was a poor man.”
I wait for him to deliver the cake. “Paul, by the way, my name’s Arnya, I’d like to hear more about your project — re-enacting that painting…
