Cabal
Grandpa collected coffee beans like a jewel thief. He could find traders in all the nooks and crannies of Addis, from the roadside shops in Meskel Flower to the huts at the Simien mountain base where the lonely widow hoarded her beans. He would bargain ferociously and always paid much less than he should have, never to be found again. He drove for days across the Ethiopian countryside in a rattling sedan, picking up hitchhikers who told him stories of Jerusalem, Mexico City, and Starbucks. He understood the English, Spanish, and French words like a kid catching the falling Autumn leaves. Sometimes he invited them to try coffee beans that he found along the way. He always brewed it himself. First kindling the fire, then roasting the green beans in a hole grill nut pan. Many people can’t stand the smell of roasting coffee beans, but I grew up loving the heady burnt grass smell that never left my grandpa’s beard. He’d fan the freshroasted beans so that their flaky skin blew up around his face. Then he would cook the coffee in his jebena pot. Thick and black as night. The more sugar you add, the more hospitable you are.
Grandpa gave me his best jebena as a wedding gift. I didn’t tell him that my new bride didn’t like coffee, or else he wouldn’t let have let me marry her. But he did find out the next year, when Helina refused to let him give our baby his first sip of coffee. That was the first of many grudges that Grandpa held against Helina. He accused her of being a South African Anglophile, understanding none of the old customs that brought people together. The French Revolution, he told her, began with coffee. At the Palais Royale in Paris, the intellectuals of the day changed their drink from wine to coffee and sparked the most dynamic conversations of their time. Helina was sick of his history lectures and it became difficult for me to take his side.
Grandpa’s trips to the countryside became longer and longer. His visits fewer and far between. Dawit grew up not knowing any of the history that centred on coffee. I told him at least of the goats that first discovered coffee in our own Ethiopian land. But my tales fell flat without Grandpa’s grassy beard and the hot smoke of new coffee brewing. When we moved to the new house, I discovered that the wedding gift jebena was gone. I wondered which American or French tourist was now drinking coffee from mine—from Grandpa’s—favourite jebena. Would Grandpa tell them stories of me? I grew out of the habit of drinking coffee because it no longer came with tales of Grandpa’s sourcing conquests, his brewing innovations. The starry excitement of hearing his sedan rattling in the middle of the night and getting up in my pyjamas to try new beans from Arba Minch. I learnt of coffee’s bitterness for the first time. It was like an old muscle I forgot to exercise. Ten years later, I heard of Grandpa’s death from abroad.
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