Various Flavors of Coffee (21 page)

“You are very welcome,” he repeats.“Samuel has written to me of your venture—your
ad
venture, I should say. And of the Guide, too—I am looking forward to making the acquaintance of that remarkable system. But first—always first!—some coffee. Have you experienced the Abyssinian way of serving it yet?”

“I don’t believe so.”

He smiles.“Mulu! Fikre!”

The Negro comes into the tent and they exchange a few words in Arabic. Bey points to a stool.“Please, sit,” he says to me.

He sits on the other stool, watching me. After a moment the girl comes in. For a moment I actually feel dizzy, such is her effect on me. The cotton robe she is wearing now is darker, almost brown, and it ends at her hips. Underneath she is wearing trousers of pale silk, embroidered with pearls; a long coiled bracelet of cop-per winds itself about her arm like a snake. Before now, I had not seen her eyes properly. They are extraordinarily light, the only thing in that delicate iron-colored face that is: perhaps she has the blood of some European sailor in her ancestry. Pale, almost gray eyes, that meet mine for a moment—an endless moment, their expression inscrutable—then drop, as she kneels and lights incense in a brazier.Tendrils of perfumed smoke fill the tent. Her lips are dark purple, almost black; the color of pomegranates.

“The coffee ceremony,” Bey’s voice says,“consists of three cups,
abol, tona
and
baraka,
taken one after the other.The first is for pleasure, the second provokes contemplation, and the third bestows a blessing. Between them, the Abyssinians believe, they effect a kind of transformation of the spirit.”

The Negro returns with a copper tray. On it are various imple-ments: cups, a black clay pot, a drawstring bag, a napkin and a dish of pink-colored liquid. The girl dips the napkin in the dish and

comes to kneel before me. Just looking at her face makes me want to sigh with pleasure.

Then, surprisingly, she reaches forward and wipes the damp, scented napkin over my own face. It touches my forehead, my closed eyelids, smoothes my cheeks.The aroma of rosewater fills my nostrils, sweet and sharp. I feel her fingers on the other side of the cloth. Her touch is sensual, light, but oddly impersonal. Her perfect face is very close, and then she has moved away again. She pulls at the strings fastening the bag and holds it up to me in both hands.

“Now you must smell the beans, Robert,” Bey’s voice says.

I take the bag from her and raise it to my nose. Instantly I know I have come across these beans already, in London—or a lot very like it. Honeysuckle . . . licorice . . . woodsmoke . . . apple.

“I’ve had this coffee before,” I say.“You sold some to Pinker.”

Bey smiles. “He has trained you well. This is the coffee of the land beyond Harar—the land where you are to make your plantation.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Many names or none, depending on where you are.The world calls it
mocca,
though as you have noticed it is quite different from the moccas of my country. It comes down from Harar by the same ancient slave route we will be following.” I look at him, surprised. “You didn’t know? Yes, the trail we will be following across the desert is one that has been used by slavers for centuries.That, not merely coffee, is the source of Harar’s wealth, and the reason why they have not always invited the attentions of outsiders. But the two trades—coffee and slavery—are connected in other ways as well.”

He is silent a moment.The beans hiss in their pot as they roast. The girl stirs them with a wooden spoon; a rhythmic, ritualized motion. Her fingers are slender, long; the backs are a deep, even black, while the palms and fingertips are almost as light as a European’s.

“How so?” I ask Bey.

“To keep awake as they traveled at night the slavers ate the beans of the
kaffa
bush, mixed with a little butter. In more temperate regions the beans were sometimes discarded—thrown by the wayside whenever the slavers stopped.Where they took root, new areas of coffee production started.”

“Then it was fortunate the traders stopped.”

“Not for their captives. It was at these halts that the boy slaves would be castrated.Then they were buried up to their waists in the hot sand to cauterize the wound. For an unfortunate few, the wounds became infected, and they were left there in the desert to die a painful death.”

Despite the heat, I shiver.“But that’s all in the past now.”

He does not reply. The beans have reached the point which roasters call “first crack,” popping and rattling in their clay pot.The girl tips them onto a plate.The smell intensifies. Scorched tar, ash, peat smoke—but over all of those, a triumphant blaze of that sweet, honeyed, floral aroma. She hands me the plate and I inhale the deep, pan-scorched smell. “These are good,” I say to her politely. Her beautiful fine-boned face is as expressionless as a mask.

“I see she doesn’t understand,” I say as I pass the plate on to Bey. “There you are wrong, Robert. Fikre knows seven languages, including French, English, Amharic and Arabic. But without my permission she will not speak a word in any of them.” He lifts the

plate to his own face and inhales deeply.“Ah!”

I look into the girl’s eyes. Just for a moment there is something in them—a nod, and something more: a kind of despair; an appeal, a silent plea of desperate intensity.

I frown a little, as if to say,
I don’t understand.

For a moment she seems to hesitate.Then she gives the minut-est of shrugs.
I cannot tell you.

I slide my eyes toward Bey.
Why? Because of him?

Another tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
Yes.

She busies herself getting cups, holding them upside down over the smoking myrrh, turning them this way and that to perfume them. Then she pounds the beans in a mortar—quickly, fluidly. Tipping them into a silver coffee-pot, she pours on the boiling water.A gust of steam.The smell is like a fanfare: ecstatic, exultant, a mixture of honeysuckle and spices, lilies and lime.

The pot has a long curved spout like a hummingbird’s beak. She pours coffee in a thin, continuous stream into two cups. As she hands one to me she leans forward, deliberately masking our hands from Bey. I feel something being pushed into my hand, surreptitiously—something small and hard. Casually, as I lift my coffee to my mouth, I glance down.

In my palm is a single coffee bean.

What does it mean? I try to catch her eye but she is still avoiding my gaze. I drink the coffee.Yes, it is as good as the last time, when I had it in Limehouse—perhaps even better: this time my nostrils are full of myrrh and rosewater, my senses tingling with the heat and the incense and the presence of the girl.

The second cup is subtly different—the coffee has been left to steep a little: the flavors are deeper, the mouthfeel thicker. I watch her move; the way the flowing cotton shifts around her as she crouches. She is thin-hipped as a cheetah, and her movements have something of the same fluid, rolling gait. She has evidently decided that she is risking too much: she avoids my eyes even when she must dip the napkin in the rosewater and wash my face in preparation for the next cup. But I discern something in her gesture—her hand lingers, minutely, as she smoothes the damp cloth across my face.

She drops the napkin.We both reach for it at once. Our fingers touch. Her eyes widen, startled.

Please. Be careful.

I squeeze her hand once, reassuring her.
Don’t be frightened.Trust me.Wait.

• • •

Bey, meanwhile,
talks of coffee.We discuss the different kinds of curing process, wet and dry—“As soon as you can, Robert, move to the wet process: the lots are more consistent, and less of the crop is spoiled.” He talks of Harar—“Getting the coffee out is hard, but it will become easier. Menelik is talking of building a railway from the coast to Dire Dawa.You have arrived at the right time: fortunes will be made here soon.”

The third cup
—baraka.
Now the coffee is a little salty: evapora-tion has thickened it. She refreshes it with a sprig of herb that tastes like ginger.

“Do you know what this is, Robert?” Bey asks, taking the sprig and sniffing it.

I shake my head.

“
Tena adam.
The Abyssinians believe it to be an aphrodisiac.The coffee ceremony, you see, has many meanings. Between friends, it is a gesture of friendship; between merchants such as ourselves, a symbol of trust. But between lovers it is a ritual of a different kind. When a woman gives a man coffee, it is a way of showing her de-sire.”

In my left hand, my fingers rotate the bean, small and hard and round. Is this what it means?

“And that is the coffee ceremony. Now I know you will never cheat me. Ha!” His booming laughter fills the tent.

Fikre takes the empty cups and places them carefully on the tray. At the flap of the tent, just beyond his sight, she glances back at me. A flash of white teeth, lips the color of pomegranates, black skin.Then she is gone.

“How long has Fikre been in your service?” I ask, as casually as I can.

Bey looks at me thoughtfully.“She’s very lovely, isn’t she?” I shrug.“Yes, she is, rather.”

He is silent for a moment. Then he says abruptly, “She isn’t in my service, Robert. I own her. She’s a slave.”

I had
half-suspected it. But it is still a shock—an outrage.

“I am telling you this,” Bey fixes me with a fierce look, “because you would have found out anyway, and because I will not lie to you. But I promise you that it is not what it seems. Someday I will tell you how I came to buy her. But not today.”

“What about Mulu?”

He nods.“Him too. Mulu is her
lala—
her maid, protector, servant.”

“So he is a—?”

“A eunuch, yes. He was taken from his tribe as a child and castrated on the journey, just as I described.”

I shudder. It explains something that had been puzzling me about the way Mulu looks: the height of a man, the hairless face of a boy . . .

Bey says gently, “For you British, slavery is the great evil. But things are different here. It is not a question of simply saying to someone,‘Now you are released, go home.’Where could they go? Even if they knew who their own people were, they would not be accepted—they have no status. I give them a better life than they could otherwise hope for.”

I nod.A part of me is appalled at what he is saying. But another part of me is horribly, furiously envious.

[
twenty-seven
]

eally,” Ada says crossly. “I know he is your fi ncé,

Emily, but I do wish Robert would not write quite such condescending things about me.”

Emily sighs.“Is that the one he wrote to the Frog about the villagers and Wagner?”

“It is. I have a good mind to write back.”

“He will be in Abyssinia by now. I am not sure when letters will reach him—he does not seem to reply to any of mine. Besides, Ada, I suspect Robert was merely trying to be amusing. It is his way of keeping his spirits up.”

“Robert has far too much spirit already, if you ask me.”

“All the same, it cannot be easy for him. It is the least we can do to be a little understanding.”

“That is all very well for you to say—to you he is writing sweet nothings and billets-doux.”

“Actually,” Emily says with a wry smile,“Robert is not very good at billets-doux. I think he considers them a corruption of his art.”

Ada snorts.

“You really don’t like him very much, do you?” Emily says quietly.

“I just can’t quite see the point of him. And . . .” She hesitates, for there is a limit to her sisterly disloyalty.“I suppose I’m surprised you like him quite as much as you do.”

“I think it is because he makes me laugh.”

“Speaking for myself,” Ada says primly, “I should not like my husband to be a constant source of hilarity.”

Just then their father bursts into the room. He is holding a two-foot-long thread of white paper from the tickertape machine in his office.“My dears!” he cries.“Would you like to see something marvelous?”

“What is it, Father?”

“Get your coats—we are going to the Exchange. Lyle’s are try-ing to break the sugar corner!”

“But how does that affect us?” Ada said, frowning.

“Directly, not at all. But if they can do it for sugar, we can do it for coffee.Whatever happens, it will be a sight!”

Neither of the girls is quite as excited as he is, but they allow themselves to be hurried into their coats and hats. Their father, meanwhile, is hailing a cab, and they set off through the streets toward the City.

“For many years Lyle’s have faced a situation similar to us,” Pinker explains. “As we are to Howell’s, so they are to Tate’s. But they refuse to be beaten! By marketing their sugar as a syrup, they have begun to establish a name. Now Lyle’s have started to use sugar from their own beet fields in East Anglia: they hope to use it to destroy the corner.”

“I still do not see how that will work,”Ada says with a frown. “Lyle’s will release a huge amount of sugar onto the market all

at once,” Emily explains. “Tate’s syndicate will have to buy it, if they are to keep the price at its artificial level.Then it just becomes a matter of whose nerve holds longest—if Lyle has to stop selling, they will have lost, and the price will stay high; if Tate has to stop buying, they will lose, and the price will tumble.”

“Exactly.” Her father favors her with a smile. “Tate is already under pressure because of the harvest. And Lyle has good reserves. . . . It will be a fascinating contest.”

At the Exchange they are shown up to the public gallery. It is a bit like a theater, Emily thinks, looking down at the scene below her. She sees a large, echoing hall, around which are scattered half a dozen octagonal raised platforms made of mahogany and brass.

“Those are the pits,” her father explains. “The Norfolk pit is this one, just below us.” There are dozens of men milling around the pit he indicates, their attention focused on a blackboard. Emily is reminded of children, waiting in front of a Punch-and-Judy for the puppets to appear. The only activity comes from a man in a bright red bowler hat, writing figures on the board; when he reaches the bottom, he rubs it all out with a wave of a duster and starts again.