She is worth nothing,
I wanted to shout.
She is no longer intact.
“Eight hundred. It is all I have.”
“I bargained for her once, and I have regretted it ever since,” he said heavily.“I will not bargain now. I accept your offer, Robert, although it will leave me considerably out of pocket.Will you want to have her examined?”
“Of course not.You are not the only man of honor here.” “Please, Robert. Don’t do this. I can take her to Arabia and sell
her there.Take a day or two to reconsider—” “Will Austro-Hungarian dollars be acceptable?” He nodded helplessly.“Indeed.”
“I’ll have the money brought round tomorrow.”
“And I will instruct my lawyer to draw up the necessary pa-pers.” He shook his head. “I fear that when you come to your senses you will somehow blame me for this. And when that time comes, you will no longer be my friend.”
I have been tupping her behind your back, you fat oaf.
“I can assure you that I am going into this with my eyes wide open.” I held out my hand.
Still he hesitated. “They say that when you have shaken an Englishman’s hand, there can be no going back on the deal.”
“That is correct.”
He took my hand in both of his.“Then I will shake your hand, Robert. But I tell you frankly that it is with a heavy heart.”
• • •
Eight hundred pounds.
It was, as Bey had said, extortionate. It meant using not just my advance from Pinker, but all the money for the expenses of the plantation, and what little I had made from my own trading.
It was the money that, had things turned out differently, would have enabled me to marry Emily Pinker.
But I would still have fifty or so left. It was not much, but the coffee seeds were planted and paid for, there was enough to pay the villagers, and my other needs were few. Once the crop was growing, I might be able to borrow against its eventual sale. We would be able to survive.Then, once we had some money coming in, we could leave—not for England, of course, but to some other part of Europe: Italy, perhaps, or the South of France. We would exist outside society: artists and rebels, free from the strictures of conventional morality.
The chest
of dollars was too heavy for one man, so I went into the market to find two soldiers to carry it. I took my pistol, in case of robbers, and together we threaded our way through the maze of brown streets.
Darkness rose up around us as if it were being poured into the city from some gigantic pot. But Bey’s house, when we finally got there, was full of lights—tiny candles in filigree lanterns, flickering like stars.
The lawyer, a taciturn Adari, was waiting in the second-floor sitting room. He asked me some questions to make sure I understood what I was doing. I answered him patiently, all the while shooting glances at the door to see if Fikre was going to join us. But of course Bey did not want to risk a scene: as far as he knew, she was greeting this development with her customary fury.
The lawyer presented me with a document in Arabic. “This is her provenance—a bill of sale from the house which last sold her. Do you wish to show it to a lawyer of your own?”
“There is no need.”
He shrugged.“And this is a document certifying that she was a virgin when she was sold.” He placed another document in Arabic in front of me. “I understand you do not wish to have her examined?”
“There is no need,” I repeated.
“Very well.” He laid a third document on the table. “You will have to sign this, to say that you accept her as she is.”
I signed.This time there was also a translation, in poor but tolerable English.
I, the undersigned, do hereby accept the slave known as Fikre, in recompense whereof...
I scanned it and signed that, too.
“And finally, the bill of sale.” The lawyer looked at Bey. “Will you count the money?”
“Robert would not cheat me,” Bey said firmly.
Again I signed my name, while Bey signed the receipt.
“She is yours,” the lawyer said to me. I glanced at the door, but he was handing me a last piece of paper—a simple certificate, bearing a few lines of Arabic text.“This is to confirm it. If you ever set her free, you must tear this up.”
“I understand.”
Still she did not come.
The lawyer took a final cup of coffee. It was Bey’s best, or so the merchant informed me. I could not taste a thing, only a longing for Fikre that saturated my senses and spread like honey through my veins.
Finally, the lawyer left us. “Robert,” Bey said seriously, “you know that I believe you will regret this one day. When that day comes, I want you to remember that it was you who insisted I sell, and not the other way around.”
“I understand.”
At last Fikre came into the room, her face sullen. Mulu was be-hind her, carrying a coffee sack.“I have given her some clothes and so on,” Bey explained. “As a slave she cannot own anything, but they go with her.”
“Thank you.” I took the sack.There were tears in Mulu’s eyes, but he said nothing as he handed it to me.
I held out my hand to her.“Fikre—will you come with me?” “Do I have a choice?” she said furiously.
“No.”
We maintained
the pretense until we were around the first cor-ner.Then I could stand it no longer. I pulled her into a doorway, kissing her, running my hands around her waist, reaching up for her head, pushing it against my lips, devouring her.
At last we pulled apart.“So now I am yours,” she said, grinning. “Exactly.”
“And do you know what you are going to do with me?” “Well,” I said,“whatever it is, I think it’s going to involve quite
a lot of sex.”
[
fifty-one
]
“Caramel”—tasters should be cautioned not to use this attribute to describe a burning note.
—international coffee organisation,
The Sensory Evaluation of Coffee
*
f the days that followed I fi d I can write very little. I can describe the elusive aroma of an Indian Malabar; I can find the words to distinguish between the coffee of Trinidad and that of Tanganyika; I can define the subtle variations between the different grades of Java. Yet of the dozens—scores—of fucks that Fikre and I enjoyed in that period following my purchase of her from Bey, the most ecstatic sex of my life, I can barely recall in any detail more than two or three, let alone find the words to describe them. And yet they were all different, as coffees are different—or even more so, for we worked our way through every possible permutation two bodies would allow.
What I can remember—but still, alas, cannot easily describe—is the sense of physical delight, the playful intoxication of a world reduced to just a room, two bodies and a bed, our lovemaking interrupted only by occasional forays to the market for food. Even those were remarkably infrequent: when we were hungry we sim-ply chewed handfuls of beans from our makeshift mattress and, revived, fell back to pleasuring one another. Or sometimes we would go out to the market, thinking ourselves ravenous, and come back only with great armfuls of flowers, as if we could live on nothing more substantial than their heady fragrance, coffee, and each other’s flesh.
The juncture of her legs was the altar at which I knelt, the cup at which I made my communion. I was Ali Baba, whispering
Open sesame
at the cave, my tongue uncurling like a caliph’s slipper. I was a hummingbird, slipping my beak into the dew-filled calyx. And she, in turn, knelt before me, adoring me with her mouth, her eyes fixed on mine even as I pumped my seed over her lips, her cheeks, garlanding her perfect black shoulders with opalescent pearls of semen. They too tasted of coffee, she told me as she licked them from her fingers; flavored by the beans that were our addiction and our constant diet.
She was entirely without shame, and loving her, I became shameless, too. There was nothing she would not try, no point at which she would say “enough.” If she was very sore, she would ask me to buy opium in the market: we smoked it the Arab way, in a bubbling
narghile.
Between
khat
and coffee and opium and sex, the days passed in a blur of sensations.“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,” the aesthete Walter Pater had written. I knew the truth of it: I lived more intensely in that room than I had ever done before, or would do since.
Sometimes, when I was sleeping, I would half-wake to find her playing with my bollocks, rolling them around in her fingers, staring at them, quite fascinated.Around and around they went in her palm, prodded by her fingertips. . . . I asked her once what it was
about them that so riveted her. She said, in a voice that sounded al-most mesmerized, “Because these are the center of everything. Without these, there is nothing.” I did not understand what she meant, nor did I try to—she had a tendency to mysticism at times. In any case, the prodding of her fingers had aroused me, and I was ready to slide inside her once more.
And then, at last, the banquet of our senses reached its final course.We were sated, and though we still fucked at the least opportunity, it was like having your wineglass refilled when it is still almost full; you do not need to drain each drop. Our minds began to turn at last to the future.
“What do you
mean to do?”
“I’ll have to go back to the plantation.The seedlings will need to be transplanted. It isn’t fair to let Jimo deal with it on his own, and I’ve neglected the place.”
“Shall I come with you?”
“I warn you, it’s pretty rough.There are no feminine comforts.” “I can do without those.”
“Then come.”
“Robert . . . ?” she asked. “Yes?”
“Do you have any plans for me?”
I gestured at the bed.“This is as far as my planning went.” “I meant my . . . status.”
I laughed. “Do you want me to marry you? A white dress, church? All the ceremonies of the bourgeois?”
She shook her head.“I want to be free.” “We
are
free.”
She looked at me intently. “Robert, what I have done with you—I do it because I love you, not because you have a piece of paper.”
She was waiting, I knew, for me to say that I would tear the pa-pers up. Why did I not? It would have proved my love. And yet something held me back. It was, after all, an irrevocable gesture. And deep down, I think I still needed to feel I had that authority over her—as if the love and the ownership were somehow linked. I made a joke of it.“But I fully intend to sell you just as soon as
I find someone better”—something like that, or possibly it was even more clumsy, I can’t now recall.Whatever it was, I think I saw something harden for a moment behind her eyes. Then she nod-ded her head, meekly, and the subject was dropped.
She only mentioned
it one other time.We were in bed, our bod-ies pivoting together in the slow, easy dance of lovers who are not in a hurry.A butterfly beating its wings in the sun.
She whispered “Yes,” and “Now,” and then she suddenly took my head in her hands and said fiercely, “If you give me my freedom, I will give myself back to you. All of me. I will be utterly yours.”
I groaned and said,“I love you.” Not quite the same thing, you see.
A couple
of days before we left for the plantation, we came back from the market to find Mulu sitting on our doorstep. Fikre embraced him so happily that it was several moments before he could hand me Bey’s letter.
My dear Robert,
Mulu is pining without Fikre, and I have no work for him here, so I have taken the liberty of sending him to you. He needs no pay, only his food and lodging.You will find him a good servant so long as he is allowed to tend to Fikre’s needs as well as yours. If you do not want
him, send him back. If you keep him, there is no need to pay me for him—unlike Fikre, his value is very small, though I shall be sorry not to have him.
Your friend, Ibrahim
There was no question of returning him—Fikre was overjoyed to see him, and he her. It was, I suppose, lonely for her sometimes, deprived of female company. But I was not used to having a eu-nuch around—it made me uncomfortable, if the truth be told, the way the two of them were together, almost like two girls, chattering away in a language I could not understand. Sometimes he would help her dress, or bathe, and that too seemed strange to me. Their intimacy was more like that of a lady and her maid than that between a man and a woman.
Once, getting up at night to piss, I found Mulu engaged on the same errand. He half-turned—I glimpsed the terrible scars of his mutilation, shining zigzags of tortured flesh, pink on the black skin. In all other respects he had the genitals of a child.
He gave a cry of embarrassment and turned away, hiding himself. I said nothing—what was there to say? It was horrible— ghastly—but there was nothing I could do.
[
fifty-two
]
“Acrid”—a burnt flavour, sharp, bitter, perhaps irritating.
—sivetz,
Coffee Technology
*
he post from Harar is slow, and it is several weeks be-
fore Robert’s letter arrives, bearing the franks of many countries. It is the Frog who brings it, running from the hallway to
deliver her prize, panting, into Emily’s hands. “Please may I read it?” she begs.“Please?”
“I haven’t read it myself yet. Besides, Robert’s letters to me are private.”
“Please may I have the stamp and the envelope and please may you read me the bits that aren’t private?” the Frog says hopefully. “Look—it’s got something in it. Has he sent you a present?”
Emily does not answer. She has opened the letter, which is more of a package, containing as it does her old letters to Hector. For a moment she does not understand; then she goes white. She scans the note.
“What is it?” the Frog demands.“Is everything all right?”
“No, it isn’t,” Emily says. She gets to her feet.“I had better find Father. I have some very bad news about Hector. And Robert— Robert has . . .”Words fail her, and then the Frog is treated to the extraordinary sight of her oldest sister—her capable, efficient, all-powerful older sister—bursting into tears.