Various Flavors of Coffee (33 page)

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That evening
Hector seemed a little better, and managed to swallow some stew which Kuma spooned between his lips, but by next morning he was running a fever. I gave him the Dover’s Sudorific, and some Warburg drops, but he was soon streaming with perspi-ration, his face swelled so much he was almost unrecognizable.

“Kuma,” I said, “fetch the medicine woman. Perhaps she can help.And start the boys making a stretcher.”

The medicine woman brought herbs and barks with which she prepared a poultice. Having applied it to Hector’s wounds, she proceeded to chant over him in a high voice, accompanied by rit-ual flicks and movements of the hands. Again, for a while this seemed to be efficacious: toward evening Hector regained consciousness. But he could open only one eye now: the other was too swollen in its socket.

“Robber’?”

“I’m here.” “Plant the seeds.”

“What are you talking about, Hector?”

“The new coffee berries—ye got them in Harar?” “Yes, I have them. But don’t exert yourself—”

“Keep the seedlings shaded with banana leaves.And keep them weeded. Don’t use the Red Gang for weeding, they’re idle bastards.”

“Very well, Hector.”

“Ye’ve made a good start here. It’ll be . . . it’ll be civilized one day, if ye only keep going.That’s the important thing—civilization. Not us.We’re dispensable.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the medicine woman’s murmurs and the painful seesawing of Hector’s breath.

“Tell Emily I’m sorry.” “Emily?”

“Aye. Look after her,Wallis. She’s a grand lassie.” “Of course,” I said, mystified.

“Dinnae let them eat me.”

“No one wants to eat you, Hector.With the possible exception of that damn leopard.”

“After ay’m dead, I want ye to burn my body. Promise, now?” “I keep telling you, Hector, it isn’t going to happen.” I got up

and went to the door of the hut. “Kuma? Where the hell’s that stretcher? We’ll start for Harar as soon as Massa is well enough to travel.”

I turned back to the bed.The medicine woman was bent over Hector’s prostrate head, gesturing, as if she were miming pulling a rope out of his mouth, hand over hand.When she reached the end of her imaginary rope, she seemed to take something off and throw it up into the air.

Hector sighed.“Thank ye.”

A kind of shudder passed through him—one could almost sense the struggle of the body to live, the terrible exertion of the life force that would cling on at any cost. Again the medicine woman mimed the pulling-out and throwing-off. This time Hector just nodded, faintly.Then, with a sudden violent groan, he was still.

More women
came up from the village to prepare the body, while I had the men dig a grave. I waited outside the hut, occasionally taking deep draughts of the Chlorodyne.

The medicine woman came out with Hector’s bloodstained clothing. I nodded toward the fire.“Burn it.”

She hesitated, then took something from one of the pockets and handed it to me. It was a small sheaf of papers—letters, it looked like, tied up with a very old, faded ribbon.

“Thank you.They may be something that should be sent back

to his people.” I pulled the ribbon and glanced at the topmost let-ter. For a moment, I thought I must be hallucinating again. The sender’s address was one I recognized. It was Pinker’s house.

My darling Hector...

I turned the letter over. It was signed
“Your loving Emily.”

I hesitated
—but not for long. Hector was dead, and Emily was thousands of miles away. In those circumstances, scruples hardly seemed to matter.

My darling Hector,

By the time you get this I suppose you will be in Ceylon! How exciting—I cannot tell you how jealous I am, & how much I wish I could be with you. Four years—it seems forever—but I know that you are going to be such a success, and your plantation will do so well, that my father will surely drop his objections before the end of your time there. And in the meantime will you write to me, and tell me everything that you see, so that I can experience it through your eyes, and drink in every moment along with you? How I long to be married properly, so that I can be out there by your side, and not have to live our life together through this medium of pen and paper! I have an Atlas, and every day I calculate how far your little boat must have traveled (just now as I write this you are off the coast of Zanzibar), and try to imagine what you must be seeing...

There was more—there was so much more, but none of it mattered: everything was there in the first few lines.
My father will surely drop his objections....
Hector and Emily. Engaged. It seemed unthinkable, but the evidence was there in front of my eyes. Not only had she once loved Hector, but she had loved him physically, unreservedly, intensely.That was what came through in those love letters, above all—the passion with which she described their

affair, the longing with which she looked forward to their union: how very different from the friendly but guarded tone of her letters to me.

There was no year on the letters, but it was possible to work it out. Hector had gone out to Ceylon when Emily was eighteen. Reading even further between the lines, there had been some sort of scandal.
I wanted to come to Southampton to see you off, but Father thinks the less we are seen together just now the better...

I leafed through the letters until I found what I was looking for.

There it was, about half a dozen letters in.

If we were impetuous it was only from a surfeit of affection: we are not the first, nor will we be the last, to have “jumped the gun” a little—or at least, it would have been a little, had my father not intervened and turned a few weeks into four long years....

She had slept with him. Behind the euphemisms, the truth of what had happened was clear. Miss Emily Pinker, brought up in the Modern style—too modern, Pinker might have reflected; or perhaps he put it down to the lack of a mother’s steadying influence—had thrown herself away on this dour, unprepossessing Scot.

Certain things made sense now: the time I had compared a particularly delicate coffee to a maiden’s breath—no wonder Pinker had not drawn attention to it; no wonder her cheeks had been pink. And when he had realized what I wanted from her, he had said that they must avoid, not a scandal, but
another
scandal. I thought nothing of it at the time, but he must have been aware that her reputation might not survive another battering.

I plunged on through the letters. Gradually one became aware of a shading of tone—Emily, for her part, was not so gushing or so girlish; she seemed to be responding more frequently to comments

or objections made in Hector’s half of the correspondence. And then, finally, after more than a year, there it was:

I do not see how you could be said to be “releasing” me, since I am hardly bound to you by anything more than love—a love I had thought was mutual. I never saw you as being under any kind of obligation or contract, and hope you did not view me in that light either. But if the attractions of travel and adventure are really so much more delightful than family and domesticity, as you say, then of course we must not be married. I cannot in any case conceive of anything more repellent than being wedded to someone who did not wholeheartedly desire it—or me.

It was strange how everything suddenly swung round, like a compass when you take a new turning. I hadn’t liked Hector, yet he had somehow become my friend. He had been my only companion—the only white man—within a hundred miles, yet it turned out I barely knew him. Emily I had understood even less; the irony was that I knew more about her now, when she was three thousand miles away, than I had done in London.

There was one more letter, not so faded.

Dear Hector,

I hardly know how to respond to your last letter. Of course I am delighted that you are considering settling down. I am flattered, too, that you still think of me after all this time. But I have to say that after so long apart I can hardly consider you as a potential husband. Indeed the manner of our separation, and the sentiments you expressed at the time, caused me no little anguish, and if I consequently tried to stop thinking of you with that affection which I had hitherto felt, it was because you yourself indicated that I should do so. However, I cannot stop you coming to England, and doubtless my father will want to invite you to our home, so let us try to remain friends, at least....

That was dated 7th February. Eight weeks before she had started working with me on the Guide. So much hurt and misery, and I had been completely unaware of it.

That night,
the drums started up in the village. When we came to bury Hector next morning, I discovered that the eyes and testicles had been taken from his corpse, gouged from the groin and face in great bloodless wounds. “It is for
ju-ju,
” Jimo said mournfully. “White man’s body plenty big magic.” He mimed someone eating. I stumbled outside and vomited, dry heaves that produced nothing but a terrible retching agony in my stomach. Sickened, I changed my mind about burial, and had them fill the pit with kindling. I watched Hector’s flesh shrivel and burn like an overcooked spit-roast: the fat dripping into the flames made them splutter and turn green. It seemed to me that some of the natives watched with a faintly regretful expression, as if to say that it was all a terrible waste.

After that
I entered a numb daze of horror. As well as the Chlorodyne there were the other drugs, and the emergency whisky. I even tried Jimo’s
khat.
It had a bitter, slightly astringent quality, not unlike chewing lime leaves. At first I thought it did nothing, but gradually I became aware of a faint tingling sensation, as if I had become too big for my body and were somehow seep-ing out of every pore, like a gas. I maintained this state of gaseous intoxication for about a week, chewing a little more every time the effects wore off, before eventually falling asleep and waking with a terrible headache.

And then I realized that, somewhere in that drugged ethereal haze, I had come to a decision.

Dear Emily,

I’m afraid I have some very tragic news. Poor Hector is dead. He was attacked by a leopard, and although I did what I could to save him the wounds became infected almost overnight.

He expressed a wish to be cremated, a wish I carried out immediately after his death.While sorting through his things I came across the enclosed letters from yourself. I have read them—probably I should not have done so, but there it is. Given what they reveal, you will not be surprised to learn that I do not intend to marry you after all. However, I should make clear that this was something I had begun to consider even before I read this correspondence. Briefly, I have fallen in love with someone else.

I wish you the best of happiness in your future life.

Yours—I was going to write “faithfully,” but perhaps in the interests of precision I had better say “sincerely,”

Robert Wallis

So now I was free.

[
fifty
]

“Astringent”—a dry feeling in the mouth, undesirable in coffee.

—international coffee organisation,

The Sensory Evaluation of Coffee

et me be sure I have understood this correctly.” Ibrahim

Bey frowned.“You wish to buy Fikre from me?” “I do.”

“But why?”

“I am in love with her.”

“One cannot love a slave, Robert.This I have learned through bitter experience.”

“Nevertheless, I wish to buy her,” I said stubbornly.

“Robert, Robert . . .” He clapped his hands.“Let us take coffee, and I will endeavor to explain to you why this is a foolish course of action.”

We were in Bey’s house, in a room filled with rugs and filigree lanterns. The reception rooms in these Harar houses were on the

second floor, to catch the cool breezes that trickled down from the mountains toward the end of the afternoon. Ornate carved screens provided privacy from the street, although sometimes one could look down and catch the rolling eye of a camel, just a few feet below.

I said, “I am perfectly serious, Ibrahim. And I assure you I shall not change my mind. But of course I will take coffee, if you wish.” Mulu brought us tiny cups of thick, fragrant arabica.The honeysuckle fragrance reminded me of Fikre, of the sweet coffee taste

of her body. I closed my eyes.
Soon you will be mine.

“So,” Bey said, putting down his cup. “Does this strange idea have anything to do with poor Hector’s death?”

I shook my head.

“But were he alive, he would have forbidden it?” “He was not my keeper.”

“Your business is coffee, Robert. Not slavery.”

“This is not a business matter, Ibrahim. I heard you were thinking of selling. I want to buy.That’s all there is to it.”

“It is true, unfortunately, that I am compelled to sell her. I wish it were not so. But you realize that for you to sell her on would be impossible? Whilst the Emperor tolerates the buying of slaves, no one but an Arab may sell them.”

“It makes no difference—I do not intend to sell.”

He gave me an anguished look. “Your future father-in-law would be furious if he knew about this conversation.”

“Mr. Pinker,” I said carefully,“will never find out.”

“Robert, Robert . . . I think I told you I had to mortgage everything I owned to buy her. It was a moment of madness, one I deeply regret. If I could stop you from making the same mistake, I would.” He paused. “And I think perhaps you do not appreciate just how costly a girl like that actually is.”

“Name your price.”

He said softly,“One thousand pounds.”

I reeled.“I must admit, I had not realized it would be so much.” “I told you it was extortionate. I am certainly not trying to profit by the deal. My conscience—and our friendship—prevents me from doing that, at least. One thousand pounds is what I

paid.”

“She is worth less now, though.” He frowned.“How so?”

He does not suspect. Be calm.
“Because she is older.” “True.What price do you think is fair?”