The cafe with five faces, p.31
The Café with Five Faces, page 31
My conclusion was on the right lines, however, as I returned to find Jimez secretly staring at Jimmy in a way which made me question his sexuality, and Jimmy not at all secretly staring at Nawel in a way which confirmed his inclinations in no uncertain terms.
“Two more slices of Eszterházy, please,” said Jen, breaking off from her conversation with Nawel, who looked a little as if she had been hit by a hurricane. Jen can be quite a forceful interlocuter when she hasn’t got a slice of cake.
Assuming the gentleman were too engaged in their admiration of others to desire any sustenance, I resumed my role as a yo-yo between kitchen and Budapest to cut two very equal portions of the beloved Hungarian dessert. Things hadn’t changed when I rebounded, although they soon did the second the cake appeared in front of Jen.
“That looks lovely,” said Nawel, clearly relieved to receive a brief respite from Jen who, I can only imagine, had been questioning her about her lifestyle, probably with limited subtlety.
Jimmy stroked his ‘designer’ stubble and looked at Jimez with mild curiosity. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” he said, using the cake-induced silence to establish friendly relations. “Jimmy,” he said, holding out a tanned hand.
“Jimez,” came the reply, returning the greeting with a white, sun-starved hand.
“And what do you do?”
“A bit of this and that.” This reply mirrored the conversation Jen and Jimmy had had on their first brief encounter. “But I write a lot,” he added. “Well, a bit, anyway.” It was hardly a series of utterances to inspire belief in his audience. The information seemed to be as much as Jimmy could take. Perhaps he saw too much of himself in his semi-namesake. He was hardly a success in his own preferred sphere either. Such is life (again).
“I love the way you look,” Jen said to Nawel, having finished her second slice with what I considered to be slightly indecent haste. She had a very valid point, though. “Did you buy that stuff in England?”
“In France,” replied the victim of interrogation, struggling with a mouthful of cake she hadn’t expected to be interrupted.
“I’m surprised your culture allows you to look so trendy. I mean, I know there are beautiful women everywhere, but it’s so often hidden.” I had the feeling we’d been down this path of enquiry before, but clearly Jen hadn’t had her curiosity satiated.
“When we first met,” Jimmy interjected, almost to Jen’s annoyance, “she was the only female on the course who wasn’t wearing a headdress. I was quite surprised. I remember my co-tutor and I speculating as to why, but it wasn’t the right time to ask!”
I got the impression this was a conversation Nawel had had with Jimmy more than once and with acquaintances of Jimmy more times than she cared to remember. She bore the burden with fortitude. “My family is Muslim, even though they don’t refer to Islam all the time. Algeria has Islam and traditions. I follow traditions more; it’s a personal belief.”
“How do they regard him?” Jimmy looked mildly affronted at being termed ‘him’, accompanied by a derisory head-jerk in his direction.
“If ‘he’ is anything,” teased Nawel, who clearly did not like being regarded as anything other than an independent entity, “he’s a secret.”
“Ah,” came the knowing response. “British Christianity not looked upon favourably, then?”
“No, it’s not that! I’ve even been to church with him once – just to show my support, you know. I found that rather amusing, in some weird kind of way. But he’s good to make fun of in general. He just feigns indignation and flounces around like a drama queen, which makes it all the funnier.” I detected a certain lack of respect in this description, which I also found rather amusing, to say nothing of accurate! Jimmy seemed to struggling to contain himself from providing evidence to support the drama queen accusation. Nawel dissolved into one of her very alluring giggling fits as her popularity in the room reached new peaks.
Jimmy could sense he was onto a loser and suspected things might get even worse with further probing, unless more cake appeared. Believing even Jen might have had enough after two quickfire slices and, noting that Nawel’s plate and glass were both empty, he stood up.
“Places to go, people to see,” he said in the manner of someone who was very busy and important. Jimmy, to the best of my knowledge, was neither of these things very often. Nawel also looked surprised but put up no resistance. I imagined this was something of a novelty.
“See you again, I hope,” said Jen, apparently mildly disappointed to have had the interaction cut off in its prime.
“Sure,” said Nawel. I rather hoped this was a real ‘sure’ rather than the Lebanese /Arabic ‘sure’, which seems to translate as ‘sometime, maybe never’.
For the second time in two visits, Jimmy and Nawel departed, seeming to leave more questions behind than answers, certainly in the minds of my Budapest regulars.
“Anything else?” I enquired of those left behind.
“I think I’m full,” said Jen, reclining dangerously on the Biedermeier.
Wonders never cease.
As far removed from a Silesian toilet as you can get – Buda Castle, resplendent as always.
2019: 51: Hebden Bridge: Bring Back the Nineties and Noughties!
John-Jeffrey nearly always appears to be somewhere on the scale between tired and knackered. Had I not known he was trying to produce offspring through less than conventional means, I would probably have assumed he was overdoing it in the bedroom. That, unfortunately, is the sad and envious way in which my mind works. At least on this particular afternoon, judged by his own relatively low standards, he was suffering from a mild degree of animation, helped in no small part by the company of his sincere and earnest friend known as Robbie.
“There are some weird ways of saying ‘hello’ around the world, aren’t there?” Robbie was asking rhetorically, in the manner of one who has travelled the globe and encountered such issues, while addressing someone of similar shared experiences.
“I’m sure they’re not weird to the people who say them every day,” John-Jeffrey replied, with well-reasoned logic.
“Obviously,” concurred the horn-rimmed bespectacled one. “I meant ‘weird’ to us. Like ‘cześć’ in Polish, which sounds like someone with a lisp trying to say ‘chest’.”
“Or ‘szia’ in Hungarian, which sounds like ‘see ya’, when you’re actually saying either ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ informally, an anomaly compounded by the fact they often say ‘allo’ as a means of saying ‘goodbye’.” I needed time to process this, but the conversation was continuing unabated, with or without me.
“And then there’s the Russian one…”
“I know the one you mean, but I’ve never been able to say it no matter how often I’ve been drilled,” John-Jeffrey responded in tones of complaint, as though the language item had been invented with the sole aim of frustrating the poor language learner.
“Let’s see if I can get it right,” said the stronger linguist of the two. “‘Zdravstvuyte’,” he stammered with some difficulty and not a great deal of accuracy.
“I think I’ll stick to ‘privet’,” said John-Jeffrey with a sigh.
“Or ‘allo allo’,” proffered Robbie, provoking a shared chuckle.
“Just so long as you don’t say it to a Hungarian who’ll think you’re leaving before you’ve arrived.” John-Jeffrey was amusing himself, if no one else. “What else does ‘allo allo’ mean to you?” he continued, as the mild laughter quickly tailed away.
“A very old British sitcom about the French Resistance during the Second World War,” replied Robbie confidently.
“Actually, it’s one of my favourite cafés in Belgrade.” For some reason, John-Jeffrey seemed rather smug and, possibly out of tiredness, resumed chuckling for no obvious reason.
Robbie clearly felt the subject was in need of a change, although whether the move from the shallow depths of inanity to the rarefied heights of seriousness was called for was questionable. “Any, erm, progress on the, erm, surrogacy front?” he asked hesitantly.
John-Jeffrey sipped at his second double-shot cappuccino. “Just back from another trip.” His mood seemed to change from jovial to resigned with the flick of a switch.
“Not going well?”
“Frustratingly slowly, but otherwise, no real idea. Everything seems in order, but nothing seems to work.” We were left to wonder what wasn’t functioning but didn’t dare to ask. “It’s all a bit surreal at times when half the people you meet, you can’t actually communicate with due to the language barrier. I had to wait around for something like forty minutes at the airport with no one I could call and no one I could ask, and then finally, I was taken to a taxi driver who had an unnerving resemblance to Vladimir Putin and he whisked me away who knows where.” Another couple of very small mouthfuls of a diminishing cappuccino ensued while we waited in silent expectation. “Well, actually, I did know where,” he continued, leaving us with mixed emotions: relief he was safe tinged with disappointment that a tale of international intrigue was not forthcoming.
“So, you’re not preggers yet?” Robbie had a way with words.
“Nothing happens so quickly in this process,” sighed John-Jeffrey. “And I do mean nothing. It’s still unnerving, even after all my visits, to be locked in a room with other people outside knowing you’re inside watching a porno movie and trying to ejaculate into a plastic cup.” Words failed us. John-Jeffrey could have taken this as a lack of interest or a sign of distaste but decided we were, in fact, engrossed and agog. He continued in familiar tones of self-deprecation. “I produced barely a thimbleful the first time; three days later, I don’t know if there’s a word to describe the miniscule measurement of quantity. Perhaps ‘miniscule’,” he decided, with an ironic chortle, after a moment’s consideration. “Talk about a Monday morning palaver – the place was heaving with people, all of them on their mobiles doing I don’t know what, because the wi-fi was down. And the movies also depended on wi-fi, without which, you know, erm… I got so stressed waiting I was barely able to produce anything.” John-Jeffrey was nothing if not honest, almost disturbingly so.
“So, what happens next?”
“We wait and see. Wait and see.” The cappuccino was drained. John-Jeffrey looked at his watch and seemed to have an internal debate with himself before ordering another. I left, wondering if an excessive intake of caffeine affected male fertility, but decided I lacked sufficient evidence to risk a sale.
Robbie appeared to share my reservations and was saying so when I returned a few minutes later with two cappuccinos, one being a treat to myself. “I think you drink too much coffee,” he remarked, happily sipping his fourth beer of the afternoon.
John-Jeffrey raised an eyebrow of disapproval which Robbie didn’t see though the bottom of his glass. “Well, come on,” the sober one retorted, “it’s the only vice I have left! No smoking, no gambling, no drugs, no alcohol, no sex…”
“You’ve never smoked,” Robbie pointed out patiently, as though talking to a child. “And as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never gambled and never taken any drugs unless a doctor told you to.”
“I’ve taken so many of the latter, I could almost be labelled dependent.” John-Jeffrey sighed, yet again; it seemed to come as naturally as breathing. “And as for non-prescription drugs, I tried them twice whilst on the university stage crew many years ago. As a lifetime control freak, that was twice too many.”
I was starting to wonder if my café was becoming a home for the depressed. Robbie’s train of thought appeared to be on the same rails and he decided some reminiscing might help to lighten the atmosphere.
“Do you remember that time you went to a singles’ night in Opole?” I wasn’t sure this constituted a positive change in direction, but I allowed the digression to run its dubious course.
“Ha!” The laugh was heavy with something I couldn’t quite place, but humour wasn’t it. “Well, I remember being obliged to do Chicken Tikka Masala Dave a favour after he was really helpful with some car insurance matter; and that was the favour he wanted.” John-Jeffrey gave the matter a little more thought and did start to see the funny side. “I think I was the youngest person there, a feeling I don’t think I’ve had often, if ever, since, which made me rather too popular for my liking, another feeling I don’t think I’ve had since! There was some dancing involved, and that alone is a recipe for disaster when it includes me. I have all the subtlety of an electric lawnmower with no one in control.”
“Some things never change then,” commented Robbie unsupportively.
“Says you, who swims across a dance floor.”
Robbie coughed without cause and swiftly moved on, or rather back. “So, did you score?”
“It was one of those rare occasions when I did everything possible not to,” responded the former singleton. “Remember, this was our second year in the south of Poland at a time when most people of my age and beyond spoke less English than I spoke Polish, so I was far more scared than interested.”
“I seem to remember you being a darn sight more interested when we ended up sharing a room in a Gdańsk youth hostel with a posse of gorgeous young girls.”
John-Jeffrey had no immediate answer to this, other than to redden a little and drink some more cappuccino. “Well,” he finally began, after solving the conundrum in his head, “there were two reasons: one, there was no danger of commitment as we were so far away from home, and two, there was no danger of them being interested. As is typical of me, and perhaps the majority of the darker sex, one’s level of interest increases in inverse proportion to that of the person or people in question.” Had I wanted sexual chemistry to be explained by means of a mathematical formula, John-Jeffrey would definitely have been my man.
As embarrassing John-Jeffrey a little with tales of his past exploits seemed to be a decent means of cheering him up, Robbie, so often the quiet listener rather than the active stirrer, decided to continue his merry stroll through the annals of their recent, and not-so-recent, history. “What’s the first thing you think of when I say Kuala Lumpur?” he asked.
“Once I get beyond the black walls and ceilings of your staff room, obviously, then I suppose it’s karaoke,” the victim replied. He hung his head in his hands, although I discerned the shame was far more in fun than genuine despair. I rather thought Kuala Lumpur had a lot more going for it than a darkened room and tuneless singing, but who am I to judge?
“I can’t quite remember,” prompted he with the wooden spoon, “what the song was you sang, or rather tried to sing.”
“‘White Wedding’ by Billy Idol, as you know full well,” half-laughed, half-groaned John-Jeffrey. “It’s the one and only time, at least the one and only time I have any recollection of, that I have sung karaoke. Thankfully, it was in a private room with just five of us, but even then, it would never have happened without the excessive consumption of beer and the strong belief that, you apart, I would never see the other partakers again. How wrong can one be?” More cappuccino was consumed. “One of them I never saw again, true, at least not to date, but another I did meet at two professional conferences. As for the third, I still remember walking into a school in Hamburg on the other side of the globe a mere year or so later, heading into the academic manager’s office and thinking, ‘I know you, don’t I?’ And so I did. And she is a really good singer as well, but fortunately, she forgave me my failings in that department and, over the next few visits, she spent a good few evenings introducing me to the various shades of Hamburg nightlife.”
“Including the dodgy ones?”
“More bohemian than dodgy. I usually find the latter, rather inadvertently, by myself!”
Robbie ordered another beer, his fifth, which was quite some going for an afternoon, but I wasn’t going to complain when these two were my sole clientele at the given moment. By the time I came back, their recollections had returned, as was so often the case, to their beloved Poland and Eastern Europe of the 1990s. Their talk of those days was laced with so much fondness, I often wished I had been there.
“Did you ever really decide if you preferred Poland or Hungary?” Robbie was asking.
“Oh yes,” replied John-Jeffrey, with surprising certainty. “When I was in Poland, I preferred Hungary; when I was in Hungary, I preferred Poland. Easy!”
“The grass is always greener, eh?”
“Seems so, rather infuriatingly. Mind you, I always enjoyed travelling between the two; all those trips we used to make between Opole and Budapest.” He almost went misty-eyed at the memory.
“I still laugh at the Polish policeman,” reminisced Robbie.
“Oh yeah, the time we were stopped for supposedly speeding and you were going to get fined, until you gestured to him that you didn’t have the steering wheel. He was so embarrassed at not noticing it was a right-hand drive car, he let us go!”
“Well, it was night-time on a poorly lit road,” said Robbie, in defence of the Polish police force. The fifth beer was liberating his memory and loosening his tongue. “There were some scary journeys, especially when it was an overnight one and your car was only insured for you to drive. I think there was one time when the three girls in the back seat and I were only kept awake and silenced by fear.”
“Fear of what?”
“Your driving.”
“Oh. Well, it was middle of the night and those roads through the Czech forests were irresistible for a bit of rally driving.” John-Jeffrey clearly didn’t think an apology was called for.
“And then coming back one time, it had snowed so much and you were concentrating so hard for so long…”
