tale about that other princess that Nadya reads to me.” I fancied that I was named Arnya after Papa-Great Andrei, and soon I’d grow out of my pet name Puppe. Most of the time I had to keep this princess thing to myself. I knew it would not go down well with Dimm.
As it didn’t go down well with him when Papa-Great Andrei would invite me to visit him in his enormous Russian luxury ZIS car, inside which I left chocolate marks everywhere because, yes, there would be real chocolates for Puppe. “Lucky child,” Papa-Great Andrei called me. “You don’t know how lucky you are, you are going to live in the communism, which we are going to build after we finish building the socialism.” “Will Vladimir also live in commanism?” I asked about his eldest son, my favourite among Andrei’s three children. “Oh, he’ll be engineering it!” Andrei exclaimed pinching my nose. “I love you Papa-Great!” I droned. “The other children have a marmalade moustache, I have a chocolate moustache and Dimm has… ” But he was already getting off in front of the yellow building of the National Assembly ordering his driver Simo to take me home. Now I had the whole car for myself and Simo kept a blind eye on me when I rolled on the thick handwoven carpets in the big saloon in the back of the car and opened the cabinet with drinks to ‘expropriate’ a small flat bottle of whiskey for Dimm. But when I told Simo that Nadya was waiting to take me for a walk to the Sofia Central Prison for news of her younger brother who was sent some months ago to a forced-labour-camp, Simo sank into a deep silence and the scowl that dug two deep grooves between his brows never left his face.
That was my childhood, a schizophrenic existence, a swaying pendulum reaching the uttermost extremities within a split second.
The red ruby star erected on the roof of the Communist Party House next to the building of the National Assembly was part of the new monolithic architectural centre copying, like everything else, the Moscow architecture of the day. In the dark and from afar the star reminded me of a red berry, juicy and shiny. I felt guilty for loving the red star because Dimm hated it. It was love for a red berry in the night sky of Sofia pulsating in the dark that made me feel bad.
As if reading my mind Dimm smiled sadly and broke the silence. A nerve was twitching on his cheek when he said, “This chess game drives you nuts. I've got this doctor friend. He has a theory. He says that if people dance for half an hour each day, the loony bins will be closed down. As for me, I don't believe all that jazz. Bullshit! He-he! Jumping around as if someone had stuck a chilli up your arse can prevent you from going mad? No way! Puppe, listen, my liver, my piles and my gall bladder are having their own contest. The winner will help me die happily in my old age.”
After a small pause, a gentle musical rest, he sighed. “I don’t want to die young.”
A tear like a stray half note crawled along his eye. I touched it and licked my finger.
“Let’s play our game,” he said.
The game was to quickly blabber words beginning with the same letter until one of us ran out of them.
“Let’s have ‘D’ for Dimm,” I suggested, totally rapt by the intimacy that elevated me to the status of an adult.
He started: “Drama, Darwin, drum, dare, detail, depth, death, daffodils, dinosaurs, delivery, dedications, dames, dining, Dracula, dungeon, dumb-heads, Dorsey… ching, chick-a-ching, chick-a-ching… ”
Soon, he fell asleep again in the armchair. This time, his snoring told me it would be for a while, a day even, perhaps two.
I put out the cigarette, which was hanging from the corner of his mouth, between saliva bubbles that were rhythmically swelling and deflating with his breathing. It was impossible to drag him to bed, and so, with lots of pushing, I reclined the chair towards the sofa and rolled him onto it. His head landed with a thud, but he didn’t wake, and gravity did the rest, leaving his torso slumped, arms spread-eagled, one leg on the sofa, the other hanging down onto the floor.
*
The rain feels colder and brings me back to the present.
The cable boat, Vogel Gryff, is about to reach the opposite bank. It sails slowly across the river. In my blurred mind it is no longer the Rhine, but the Styx River, the boundary between the Earth and the Underworld, the Hades, and the mythical ferryman Phlegyas is passing the souls of the dead from one side to the other.
The souls of my dead.
For a while, I roam the streets, trying to breathe deeply, trying to detach myself from my misfortunate encounter with the aloof coffee elite, the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers.
My eyes brush against a sign: The Coffee Animals. My legs make an automating turn towards it.
I open the door, pushing my weight into it, grasping the metal knob, fearful it might slip out of my sweaty palms, my fingers a defiant octopus. The sound of cow bells welcomes me, along with a warm wave of condensed coffee vapours. A holistic amount of caffeine shoots through my nostrils and reaches my brain. A deep sigh parts my sticky lips.
I am home.
“Winy? Peachy? Ashy? Woody?” The enticing voice startles me.
“Woody. Allen. The trademark glasses. Thanks.”
The man whirls the cup he is holding under the running tap. A smile like a wreath blooms against the obelisks of his teeth. He shakes the cup to get rid of the excessive drops and places it on a shelf to dry. “Woody: the flavour of floating driftwood, or the acidity of shavings from a violin, a Stradivarius perhaps?”
There is no one else in the cafe.
Yet I feel agoraphobic like on the day when in desperation, Nadya decided to let me recite a poem glorifying the Communist Party, Our Suckling Mother. “It’s not bootlicking, Nadya,” Madam Sonya comforted her. “You have a family to think of. They are after Dimm.” Nadya and I sneaked into the Party club which was overcrowded. Nadya had put in a special effort to dress me so I could look like a proper socialist child. Under the white shirt, dark skirt and knee-length socks I had jersey tights, a sleeveless, thick, woollen pullover that prickled me and made me sweaty and exhausted with heat. It created a sauna effect. I felt I was hyperventilating and my brain went numb. Under the woollen monster, known as a hug-me, around my neck hung a handmade sachet containing a garlic clove and camphor grains designed to eliminate any source of bacteria that could attack me. I felt miserable and about to faint, but Nadya’s eyes showered me with so much love and guilt; I was the lamb she was sacrificing on the altar of the family’s survival. I took a deep breath and tried to show a bit of enthusiasm while reciting the hollow, pompous words anticipating that Nadya might mention this to Papa-Great Andrei and he would buy me a real chocolate and be so proud of me.
*
Now I also take a deep breath and my lungs fill with the hedonistic aroma of freshly ground coffee.
“How about a coffee that has the deep, hypnotic tone of the Ganges, amrita, nectar of immortality?” The man behind the bar steers away from me and dries his hands on a starched tea towel. Then he turns back: a surgeon ready for the operating theatre. “Or like the one my uncle Frank had on a Russian cargo ship? Two sailors stuffed the coffee grounds into his mouth and the captain opened a bottle of vodka.”
“Espresso, thanks.”
He squints, his eyes two Arabica beans — opaque, smooth, dark roast. Where have I seen these eyes?
“I don’t get it.”
