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… What was it?”
I win his interest.
“Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. It’s Bruno’s project, more Bruno’s than mine, to turn it into ‘The Coffee Drinkers’.” He prepares another coffee for me. This time he leaves me without a nod and attends to other patrons.
I spend some time digesting our fractured conversation and cast occasional glances to Jose, the Siamese fighting fish, as I sway dreamily in my stool to the rhythm of a song: Marlene Dietrich’s interpretation of ‘You’re The Cream In My Coffee’. I am familiar with the other recordings, too: Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Nat King Cole, the latter is my favourite. As always, Dietrich is putting on an act, this time singing.
Soon I am on my way out. First I have to pay for the coffees and leave a tip for Paul.
I am mean on tips.
Outside it’s not raining much but because I carry the umbrella lent to me by the hotel receptionist, I decide to use it. It’s monocoloured; grey to match the sky, my sagging mood and the rising question, where is he now?
I still have a whole day to fill before packing and I make a quick plan: a leisurely stroll, a visit to a gallery, a small lunch and a look at the train timetable. Finding another cafe in Basel where to hang out for a couple of hours would do me good for sure. If I don’t like the music there, I can listen to my own.
The decision to choose music history for my university studies had to do also with the fact that most of the famous composers and musicians were, let’s use the local term: coffee animals. Mendelssohn, Liszt and Toscanini, for example, were regular customers of the Greco Cafe, the first coffee house in Rome that opened in 1763 just around Piazza di Spagna and is still thriving.
Perhaps I’ll head for Rome. First Milan, then Rome. It’s time to move.
To move on.
It’s getting cold. I exhale, the mist of my breath hangs inside the grey umbrella and triggers other episodes of my childhood to unfold backwards.
*
A favourite game was to draw on a breath-fogged glass. We would pick out a window and blow against the glass pane. The result was a breath-coated patch that demanded a quick artistic performance. I usually managed some scribbles and doodles, but Dimm’s approach was serious. “I want to draw words that are difficult to claim, words like ‘freedom’,” he would say, and press his hands down onto the shrinking ‘canvas’ as if determined to leave a message for generations to come. My breath was thin and shallow, and my puff of mist disappeared even before I had started to swipe my finger over it, but his breath was full of phlegm, and would leave a longer-lasting patch to draw on. Sometimes, he would use only his crooked little finger to mark some tiny lines, whispering, “This is a herd of elephants slaughtered for white piano keys.”
I started to cry over the slaughtered elephants when Madam Sonya appeared.
“Why is Puppe crying?” she asked. “I have all the reasons to cry, but I don’t cry. “Have you got a cigarette?” she said giving Dimm a glance like a search-over.
From an inside pocket of his jacket, Dimm produced a box of Rodopi cigarettes without a filter and offered it to Madam Sonya.
“I am taking two cigarettes,” she declared greedily eyeing the full box and snatching three with her long-nailed manicured fingers like owl talons.
“Don’t you want to light one?” Dimm asked her.
“If you insist,” she purred. This time she fiddled choosing a cigarette as if they were all different, then finally stuck one in her mouth and waited.
I was always in awe of the way people created a long ceremonial event out of a simple thing like lighting a cigarette. This time I wasn’t disappointed either.
Dimm slipped out his Zippo with a gesture borrowed from a gangster film and with a fist wrapped around the flame he offered it to Madam Sonya. The game began: the flickering flame and the tip of the cigarette dancing around each other, delaying the touch in a mockingly serious pantomime. Dimm’s thumb casually straying, sliding under her chin, her both hands suddenly cupping over his as if there was wind in the room ready to blow the flame out. Finally, she took a long puff and slowly and very reluctantly let go of him. I sighed in relief and waited for her to choke on the harsh tobacco. I had all the reasons to hate her. It didn’t help that at the time Madam Sonya declared herself to be my etiquette guru and watched me closely to see whether I used the fork and the knife properly. “Don’t lean down to your plate, bring the food up to your mouth elegantly in small morsels, chew it well, without smacking, keep your mouth closed while you chew, never talk with a full mouth. Then we have to do something about your posture.” She went to the bookshelves and returned with the fat volume of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and a couple of Emile Zola’s novels, full of sexual references, on which I had started to exercise my reading skills. Then she ordered me to walk around the house with the books on my head, keeping my balance so they wouldn’t fall.
“And never squash flies in the air by slapping your hands. It’s not bon ton.” Madam Sonya instructed me.
I bared my teeth at her. “Dimm taught me to develop good reflexes: flies are quick and if I get one in the air that means I am quick. Dimm also folds birds out of paper, flies them around the room and I feed them,” I boasted.
A moan of desperation came from the kitchen.
A bread knife in hand, Nadya appeared at the door, but she was quickly distracted by Madam Sonya, “Nadya, can you imagine what simpletons the proletariat artists are, one has painted a nature mort and the knife on the table was with its sharp side pointing to the right!” There was a pause. Then Madam Sonya went to Nadya, embraced her and started to cry. “In a week’s time I’ll be turning fifty-nine. The bastards took my life. They executed him as ‘an enemy of the people’. What enemy of the people was my poor husband, working all his life, importing textiles from England for the tailors’ shops on Serdica Street where all the brothels were and men’s attire was selling quickly? He would have been sixty-nine, Nadya. It was so French, so chic; the two of us in a sixty-nine clinch.”
“Not in front of the child,” mumbled Nadya, pulling herself away and running back to the kitchen summoned from the smell of burning oil.
I immediately wrote down the number sixty-nine, but it came out as a curly doodle, so I dropped Nadya’s shopping list on which I scribbled and pulled out the heavy typewriter, standing on its back in a black box in the small niche between the bookcase and the adjacent wall. The lid was always dusty, and in between a series of sneezes I undid the lock and dragged the typewriter out. It was a big no-no, because it had once belonged to my grandfather, whose nature and appearance I had to guess through what he had left behind, besides Dimm and Margherita, like this typewriter, a pair of round metal-rimmed glasses, a pince-nez, a silver letter opener with a gravure handle, a mahogany pipe, a black marble inkpot and blotting paper stand, the books in leather binding, an automatic ink pen with a golden nib, and an artificial eye. He lost his own when they sent a parcel with an explosive in it to him. Nadya and Dimm talked often about the attempt on his life after something that he wrote in a newspaper against Nazi Germany.
And the gun. Nobody knew that I knew about the gun. They all thought that hiding it out of my reach on top of the bookcase, almost touching the ceiling, inside a fake volume