Coffee Grinds

[A short story about short stories, set in Cyprus.]

Coffee Grinds 

The winter was marked by insomnia. I used to lie awake in bed at night, listening to my father fix himself up to the machine he used whenever he couldn’t breathe. It made a noise like the tumble dryer. I’d lie in bed listening: his coughing turning to retching in the bathroom; the cockerel crowing out in the street, stray dogs barking in the valley, his rasping in the hallway. Then the machine, after which a silence stranger than anything else. This is what it will sound like when he’s dead, I thought: just the occasional chink of china, cutlery, a drawer closing. 

Those hours I spent listening to his labours, my mind ran off in so many directions I found it impossible to sleep myself, and we passed most of the nights awake. Sometimes we’d meet in the cavernous living room, rubbing our eyes, our faces, our arms. We’d both climb onto the two-seater, staring out into the dark, low-slung space together. Our bodies, heavy with sleeplessness, cleaved continually to and from one another. The fire would fill the room with epileptic light and we’d thrust out feet into the warm, gasping and sighing at the chill in our bones. 

Sometimes, in those twilight hours, he told me about Greek heroes, old wise-men and local fools. Sometimes he asked me for stories, and I’d ransack my brain to find an anecdote he hadn’t heard, knowing there were few that weren’t of his own devising. And there were so many. We found new words for them, in the same way that my brother was slowly but steadily replacing the parts of his battered old scooter so that what emerged from the wreckage was shiny and bright and beautiful: we tried to spruce up our own little hoard. They got bigger, longer, more incredible, and more beloved: our invisible, pored-over collection. We brought them out for visitors. And we took them to bed with us, when we went.

We sat long hours in that small lounge. And it wasn’t all talk. At times, long periods of silence stretched out between us and then, out of nowhere, he would smack his hand down hard on my leg; catch the back of my head in his hand, squeeze out some solidarity, let my hair run through his fingers. All in the silence. Then he’d put his foot up, bare and shapely, onto the stocky coffee table. “You see this foot?” he’d ask me. Then, “put your foot here.” I’d place mine, much smaller, alongside his, and he’d tell me about the doctors who’d wanted to take a cast of his foot: “it’s perfect, you see,” he’d say to me, deadpan, “this foot, it’s a model foot. An ideal foot.” Then he’d look at mine, frowning. “But what happened here? Tell me how a daughter of mine could have such strange feet, now. Tsch: you took your mother’s feet. Like your nose.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my nose,” I’d tell him.

“Okay, okay,” he’d say, as if he were too tired to argue: “Kyrie eleison! What was the world going to do with you if you were perfect, anyway? You were going to be too much, now.” We’d sit there in our cold comfort and gaze at the mismatched feet, studying the curves of our insteps, the spaces between our toes. We’d put up a hand each, press them together carefully, palms touching, measuring our difference. 

And at various moments in those unbroken hours, both of us expressed to the other the feeling we had that something big was about to happen, something that was somehow bad; but for all our anticipation the thing, when it finally came, still packed a punch.

Two years before that insomniac winter, he had been rushed into hospital with a heart attack, and he liked to remember the texture of that week, when there was a deadline on his life. He liked to remember that doctor. This doctor, he’d say, he came and stood in front of my bed, as I was lying there, and he flicked through the charts at the end of the bed, and he said one word to me. He said “change.” And he left. He went to leave. And I said “wait a minute! What do you mean: change? Change what?” “Your heart,” he told me. Anyway, I started laughing. He said to me “Stop laughing, it’s not a joke.” “It’s not a joke?” I said: “I’m sitting here, you come quickly and look at  my papers, you tell me I need a new heart, and it’s not a joke? Where am I supposed to find a new heart? Do they sell them in the kiosk downstairs?” “That’s not funny,” he said: “Stop laughing.” He loved that story. Anyway, they let me go and they told me I had four days left. He’d get the sense of grandeur down: the dramatic sweep. Nothing changed. I just carried on. I got up; I smoked a few joints; people came round; I drank coffee; I sat; I went to sleep … the week was passing smoothly. And then it was Thursday night – the third day – and I had until Friday. And I woke up on Friday, my wife cooked a big meal … He would smile: the Last Supper. And I went to sleep, and Friday passed and I was still here, and I was still here … and Saturday came, still here, and Sunday … And I called my friend, and I said ‘Call that doctor and tell him to fuck off.’ This was two years ago. Ah, koumpare. Four days. That fucking bastard. You know, when I was in the hospital, my nose was frozen, and I mean frozen. And I couldn’t work it out and I asked this doctor – and this guy’s supposed to be one of the top doctors; they have him on television sometimes, to give his opinion – and he didn’t have any idea about my nose. In the end you know what he said to me? ‘Don’t touch it, then.’ Don’t touch it then! Kyrie Eleison! It was sometimes as if he’d carried on living just to tell it, over and over again.

My father’s heart threatened to give out with each beat; his lungs had been pronounced poisoned. Yet he kept going, getting paler and thinner and slower. His movements grew more and more gentle. He was fading in front of me.  Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t sleep: I thought I was going to miss something. For him, though, the insomnia was more serious. He started to insist that he’d had no sleep at all for five, six, seven days in sequence. He called the doctors and they said it was impossible, that he should be dead, then. He hung up on them, swore, and told his hospital story again. And me, I went in search.

We tried warm milk, old folk songs sung by men with husky voices, and subtitled films. The list of herbal remedies was endless. Just across the road, the botanist, who my father called ‘Mr Sage,’ was busy growing and experimenting with plants of all descriptions. We’d stopped asking for names: we’d never heard of any of them, anyway. When I had tonsillitis, the old man prepared a mixture of herbs for my throat. I saw him crossing the dusty road with them; his tiny, pointy beard supporting his usual serious expression. He gave me strict instructions to boil the plants and gargle with them every hour. “Tell him you did it,” my father said later, when I returned from the doctor’s with antibiotics. We both eyed the bundle of leaves guiltily. For my father’s insomnia, the botanist went on a seemingly endless quest. He’d arrive at our door every few days with a new concoction. And my father, I think, felt obliged to behave as guinea pig, compelled to follow the botanist’s instructions to the letter by the man’s unrelenting dedication. Always knowing the plants would fail him. 

Our winter revolved around the problem of sleep. No one else in the family spoke about it, not when they were all getting ten or more hours every day, though the cat, sprawled indolently across every conceivable surface, managed to goad us through example. “Look at him there,” my father would say, disgusted: “he has sleep in his pocket.” It was true. He’d wake to bury his head in his food bowl for half an hour, then he’d return to the couch, the window ledge, the nook behind the curtain, and slot himself back into the world of sleep. We’d pull him over, tug on his legs, stick fingers in the spaces between the pads on his feet. He learnt to sleep through it all, surrendered his body to sleep: did what we couldn’t.

I was working in a local bingo hall, selling tickets in between the games. The girls took the floor in elegant strides, sweeping round tightly-packed tables with a twist, a turn, holding the tickets aloft, the coloured paper fluttering above taut bodies, under the fluorescent tubes of light. We didn’t finish until half three in the morning, for which inconvenience we were making more than the poutanas in the strip clubs. I’d get home to find my father still sat on the two-seater. Sometimes the cat was with him. Sometimes he was hooked up to his machine, an oxygen mask strapped to his face, his eyes unreadable. 

The girls I worked with were Romanian, or Russian, and hardened from lives spent grafting and scheming, so I found my friends in the kitchen: the fat cook – Anthony – who wanted to go back to Canada, and the kitchen ladies who spent all night with their hands in hot soapy water, talking about their families. I ran for the lowest rung. One night, drinking a coffee out the back, with Anthony, one of the kitchen ladies took my cup from me, turned it on its head. 

“She’s good,” he said to me. 

“I don’t really believe in all that stuff,” I told him. 

“No, really: she’s good. Try. See.” When the grinds had bled out and dried, she came to sit with us, just outside the back door, and turned it in her hand, gazing intently at the patterns laid out across the inside. Anthony threw the remainder of his coffee at two scrawny cats ferreting in the bin bags, and they scuttled off into the night. 

“The man you like,” the woman said to me, “he thinks you’re just a friend. He thinks this is what you want. That’s why nothing happens with him.” I shrugged, reluctant to admit this could be true: these things could always be true. She went back to the cup. “Someone near to you will die soon,” she said. 

“What?” I answered. She ignored me. “She’s meant to say things about long journeys and phone calls and happy news,” I complained to the cook. 

“Yes, you will get some good news in three days,” she said, “or three weeks. But also, someone near to you will die. It will be soon.” She looked up at me as she set the small cup down, brushing off her hands, dusting the magic away. “Don’t worry. It’s okay,” she said. Then she left. 

“You want some macaronia, koukla mou?” Anthony asked. 

I had that anxiety in my gut all night, as I wound my way around the tightly-packed tables. I was a bitch that night. No, I haven’t given you my number. No, I’m not going to. No, I don’t wanna come sit with you. Buy your fucking tickets from someone else then: do you seriously think I care? 

“Take a break,” my boss said. “Go have a coffee with Antonis.” The last thing I wanted to see was another coffee cup. Nikos came and put his arm around me and squeezed before letting go: 

‘You’re okay, koukla mou? You don’t look good.” His black eyes glittered beyond the swell of his shoulder as he lifted a can of Keanita to his mouth. Did he really think I wanted to be friends?

“I’m okay,” I said, as my tongue felt out a few coffee grinds on a tooth. I went and stood in my position, ready to work my section of the room as soon as the game finished. Nikos stood up at his section, his eyes on me. I stormed through the rest of the night in a dazed and demented waltz. He caught me at the end of it: 

“Come to the park with me, aggele mou.” I wanted to go to the park with him, like a sixteen year old, make out among the palm fronds. 

“I have to go home,” I said: “my father’s sick.” I left him where the car window had been, leaning in for a kiss, his hair curling into his eyes.  

A lot of things went through my head on the drive home. 

I used to love the drives home: nothing happening; the mountains swallowed up in the darkness; the illuminated window displays eerie, the mannequins surreal. Music pumping out, insulated against a world in which people ate and worked, and laughed and cried. With the window open, the smoke from my cigarette whipped out, along with the tail ends of my hair. I used to speed through the town, pulling the old car hard round the turns, racing home yet not wanting to ever arrive. You know how many years Odysseus was travelling there, darling? How little of that book is about what happened afterwards? It’s all about the journey, mana mou: that’s all there is. 

That night was different. That night the emptied-out landscape was noisy and took ten minutes of forever. I don’t know what I was expecting to find when I got home, exactly, but when I finally stumbled through the front door, the house was shrouded in silence. 

The lounge was empty. And the kitchen, the yard, and the bathroom. All the lights were off. There was no rasp, no cough. I listened carefully and could vaguely hear my brother’s soft snores in another room. The cat appeared, sycophantic at my feet and breaking the silence with her loud, strained mews. “Quiet,” I told her, but she wouldn’t, not until I put down cat biscuits too fancy for our budget and some cuts of lamb from the previous night’s dinner. If something had happened, wouldn’t everyone still be awake? Wouldn’t someone have called me? I could go and look in the bedroom for myself, but what if I woke him when he’d finally got to sleep? So I sat up in the living room, watching the walls lighten, hearing the birds come out to do their worst. The cat came to purr and sleep on my lap, leaving a wake of long, white hairs. I ate some of the leftovers, shared more of the lamb with the cat; smoked half a pack of cigarettes, weighing in my mind how it would be when he did finally die. 

At around six, my father appeared, ghoulish, at the entrance. I was relieved to see him, but he looked worse than he had for months. “I slept,” he said, grasping the back of the sofa for support. “Finally, I slept. And I feel fucking terrible, now. Kyrie eleison!” He showed me an expansive shrug and I moved over for him. “You didn’t sleep?” he asked. I shook my head. He tut-tutted at me, his head semi-inclined to the floor. He looked stoned, but I knew that wasn’t the case. “Never mind,” he said, bringing his hand down hard on my leg with a wry smile: “the first forty years are difficult. After that it’s okay.” He laughed, like he always did at those lines. And I was happy my thigh stung so sharply, that he had enough strength left for that. My sister appeared, bleary-eyed, shuffling across the stone floor in her pyjamas. 

“Did you tell her what happened?” she asked my father, as she slumped into the couch. Sudden recollection flashed on my father’s face and a small smile dawned there. 

The botanist, across the road, had died suddenly, the previous day, he told me. “Dead, boom, just like that.” It seemed so outlandish. “Yes,” he said, “he woke up, he asked his wife to cut his ear, then he died. Boom.”

“Just like that?” I said. 

“Exactly,” he told me, reaching for his coffee: “exactly like that.” 

“Why did he ask his wife to cut his ear?” I asked, curling toward him, ready for the details. 

“To release the pressure,” he said, as if I was being idiotic. “They told me you were clever, you know.”

“Oh, I am,” I said. “I am.”

“Of course you are: you’re my daughter.” My sister shook the conversation out of her curls and disappeared into the bathroom. 

“That’s terrible for the botanist, though.”

“Yes: Mr Sage.”

“His wife must be devastated.” He shrugged. He wasn’t given to speculating about women and their feelings at the best of times.  

“Okay, it’s bad. It’s unexpected. But this is how life goes. And it was sudden. Probably it didn’t hurt so much.” He told me what he’d heard from the old woman who ran the village shop. It had been getting on for dusk; they’d been held up. Maybe it was this, he said, because it was so dark, or perhaps it was something else entirely, but they had the botanist in his coffin and, when they went to move it, it had slipped as they were sliding it onto the table. It had slipped and the lid had swung open. Bang down on the stone floor. My father started to laugh, and when he leaned back to cough up the phlegm brought on by this good humour, there was a genuine delight in his eyes. “The botanist, he fell out! Sitting up, with his hands in his lap! Imagine him sitting there, looking at them all!” He dissolved into loud laughter, clapping his hands, appealing to the empty room. “Oh my god, oh my god! Imagine it, now!” The laughter brought on a small fit.

“His poor wife: it’s so undignified”  I said. I looked at him bent double. “D’you think he would’ve laughed?” My father paused for a second – recovering; considering – then waved his hand at me.

“Of course he would’ve laughed. What, you think dying makes you serious? It’s funny. He’s up there now; he’s laughing. What else is he gonna do?” His arms swung out from the elbow, palms turned to the gods, the right almost smacking me in the face. He  turned to face me. He looked like he might be coming back to life again: he’d put indignation into his eye.

“Shall I make us some coffee?” I asked.

“Now this is a good idea,” he said: “you see: this is how I know you’re my daughter.” 

“And there’s more,” I told him, moving over to the kitchen to fill the briki. He shook his head at me, not understanding. “I have a new story for you,” I said. 

© Lenya Samanis

 [Published in The Mechanics' Institute Review, 2006]