Ballyizget, Spring 1942
The coffeehouses of Bassandas have been bastions of culture, conversation, and political progressivism ever since the 17th century. In the narrow cobbled streets of the walled Old City, gastronomic traditions inherited from the Ottoman Empire and all over the Muslim world held sway; it was possible, within a single block, to buy halvah, tobacco, mint tea, majoom, croissants, baklava, ceviz sucuğu (walnut candy), newspapers in six languages, and the thick-textured, finely-ground Bassandan coffee called Tanrıların Uyarıcı (“stimulant of the Gods”). The beverage had originated in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen and had been described in the 16th century by the German physician and traveler Leonhard Rauwolf as follows:
A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup that is passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu.
By the 17th century, enterprising individuals had smuggled the plants back from Vienna to Ballyizget; the first roaster and coffeehouse in the Old Quarter was opened by an expatriate Russian soldier called Matthias Yordaniya--a conical Zaporozhian Cossack fur cap, commemorating his early manhood, still serving as the signpost of a coffeehouse.
Although the coffeehouses had flourished during the WWII Nazi occupation, whose officers had learned their caffeine habits in Vienna and Berlin, the immediate wake of the War brought a significant downturn in the fortunes of the кофейня (“kafeynya”); due not only to the tremendous economic hardships of the post-War Depression, but also to coffee’s very immediate and negative associations with German culture, and the Russian preference for sweetened mint tea. So by 1946, the oldest of the kafe-houses, even those known worldwide amongst aficionados, were vulnerable to intermittent openings, questionable roasts, and the occasional misuse of—horrifyingly enough—American Nescafé.
One shop that did manage to survive through the worst vicissitudes of interwar depression and Stalinization, on a quiet square in the Old City, had been known in various periods as Jerzy’s, Suleiman’s, Bit'sya Uyezd Ostrov (“The Throbbing Island”), and Smythe’s. By March 1942 however, even Smythe’s was barely keeping its doors open, subsisting on a desultory trade of morning cappuccinos (sometimes made with chicory coffee or other discredited substitutes) and croissants, and a steady if tight-fisted stream of piroshky-and-tea-consuming Russian soldiery.
It was a narrow, deep room, with window-bays that opened out to the street in fine weather and which could be shut up in damp. Inside, under pressed-tin ceilings and creaking fans stained with nicotine, antique samovars hissed and hand-cranked whole-bean grinders rumbled as backdrop to the quiet conversations and rustling newspapers of the clientele. In this post-War depression, almost no hard currency was available, so the slick-haired politicians, paint-smudged artists, decadent poets, short-tempered and hard-drinking editors, and silver-maned heroes of the Revolution(s) stretched their café au lait and espressos and free refills as long as they could.
On an old couch in the least-trafficked corner, furthest from the massive Victorian coal stove which heated the center of the room and whose stovepipes stretched to the four corners of the ceiling like a great tin umbrella, sat a young girl dressed in dark worn clothes, a Red Army greatcoat bundled around her, an old carpetbag and a bundle of books at her feet. After five months of daily visits, the baristas all knew her and now seldom objected when she stretched a single pot of black tea through the coldest part of the early spring mornings—and the eldest of the staff, the motherly kahve uzmanı known as “Madame Altura,” having begun by slipping the girl the previous day’s beignets, was now bringing her soup and spare socks. Calling herself мелодија (“Meyodija”), the girl had appeared on Smythe’s doorstep one snowy morning in late November 1941, ragged and clutching her carpetbag and books.
Now, on a morning of early sunrise and springtime warmth, as the buds on the silver birches along the squares were swelling, she sat with a volume of Rimbaud’s poems open on her lap, scribbling notes in the margins, the soles of her combat-booted feet resting on the sunlit sill of the open window, through which crept the aromas of horse, roasting chestnuts, and wood smoke. The breeze stirred her dark hair and fluttered the pages of the old copy of Les Effarés when she stopped to sip lukewarm tea. Behind the counter, Madame rattled the knock-block and chattered with the old men who came in for their café and Gauloise cigarettes, while sparrows pecked at the crumbs brushed off the sidewalk tables and scattered on the cobbles, the boldest occasionally hopping up to quarter the windowsill around the girl’s feet. A table of boisterous German soldiers—conscripts, by their shoulder-boards—talked and laughed loudly, shouting in broken Bassandan for service when the supply of tea and piroshky ran low.
Behind her, the worn green-painted double doors of the café’s entrance banged back against the door-frame. She glanced sidelong to see a dark-haired young man carrying a worn backpack over one shoulder, and an aluminum suitcase in one hand, dressed in muddy corduroys, hiking boots, and a faded fisherman’s sweater, leaning over the counter, talking animatedly to Madame, who laughed and responded “welcome back!”
Plumping down on a sofa diagonally across from her, he pulled a small wooden flute and a pocketknife out of his shoulder bag, and began painstakingly to carve away at the instrument’s mouthpiece, nearly cross-eyed with concentration. When Madame set the quadruple espresso down next to him, he smiled and said “Teşekkür ederim” while barely looking up from his work. Periodically he would brush the fine shavings from his lap onto the concrete floor, and try one or two soft, disjointed notes on the flute, barely audible over the clatter of the café.
Gradually an aroma drifted across the table, subtle and elusive, an aroma that she recognized but couldn’t place. Finally abandoning all pretense of reading her Rimbaud, she spoke directly to the young man:
“What is that?”
He glanced up with a teasing smile, under a shock of black hair: “It’s a flute.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know that. What’s the smell?”
He smiled again, and held the instrument out to her across the table: “That? Oh, that’s beeswax—you use it to shape the mouthpiece so you can get just the tone you want.”
Taking the flute gingerly, her fingers brushed against the knuckles of his right hand: the skin was rough and calloused, tattooed under the nails with old grease or dirt, but his touch sent a shock up her arm. She raised the instrument to her nose and sniffed the mouthpiece: an aroma like the beeswax candles of her grandmother’s kitchen. Putting it to her lips, to blow a tentative note, she caught an additional aroma—something masculine and unique—and realized that the mouthpiece was still warm with his breath. She glanced up, to see him draining his espresso, smiling at her.
“What’s your name, girl?”
Before she could answer, the double doors banged again, and two tow-headed young men, both obvious foreigners, tumbled into the café. Looking around and spying the flute-player, one called, in a broad American accent, “Benjy! Baba and Madame are outside, with the Jordan—we got to go!” The other glared at the party of Soviet soldiers monopolizing the biggest table, and turned away toward the pastry counter.
Without looking, “Benjy” called over his shoulder “I’ll be right there. You get Bellows away from the pastries and by the time you settle the bill, I’ll be ready.” Leaning forward, he spoke swiftly and under his breath, “Tell me quickly—are you here, at Smythe’s, every day? Will you be here at the weekend?”
She hesitated, and at the same moment, the double doors opened for a third time, and a pale-skinned, slender young woman of Romany appearance, with bangles on her arms, bare feet and henna’d hair, but an unmistakable air of command, stepped inside. Her gaze went round the room like a laser, flicking over the old men hunched on barstools, the other patrons, the café staff behind the counter. Beyond her, a tall, dark figure with a shock of tousled hair stood silhouetted in the sunlit doorway.
Taking in the table of soldiers, she caught “Benjy’s” eye, while speaking aloud over her shoulder to the two young men “Jamey—Bellows—get your drinks and let us go. Yezget-Baba has someone to meet at the Marwah junction by dusk, and that’s eight hours distant, and you’re driving.”
Crossing to the window-seat with light swift steps, watching the soldiers across the room, she spoke quickly and very quietly to the dark-haired young man: “Benjy—we must go. There is a package to be recovered at the Marwah monastery, and there is not much time left. Bring your gear—and hurry.” Her gaze flicked over Meyodija, and she said “Is this a friend?”
Benjy replied: “I think so, Madame Therese. I think—a new friend of Bassanda.”
“Then tell her how to find you again, and come along. Baba thinks we are at risk here.”
The young girl found her voice and said “Yes—yes I’m here almost every day, in the mornings. The baristas give me pastry, and it’s warm.”
By this time the Romany woman Therese, snapping “Go! Go!,” was herding “Jamey” and “Bellows” away from the pastry counter toward the exit doors, cuffing them, ignoring their complaints, and a deep masculine voice took up the command. мелодија turned her head, and saw Benjy looking down at her, his brow furrowed.
“What is your name, then, girl?”
Suddenly dry-mouthed, for reasons she could never later fully explain, she said,
“Meyodija. It’s….it’s Greek. I mean, Macedonian—from the North. It means ‘Melody’.”
Looking up from her deep couch, she saw his face go blank, with a faraway look, and then a slow smile grow upon his face—a smile mostly in the eyes. It was a smile she was to come to know very, very well, in the years to come.
He said slowly, in a soft voice, “Yes. Yes, of course it does.”
He extended his hand. Flustered, she held up on her open palm the small flute he had been carving.
But he caught her hand, and with long, strong, musician’s fingers, closed it gently over the flute, and said “No, you keep it. I’ll come find it—and you.” Then he stooped swiftly, caught up his backpack and aluminum case, and was gone.
Outside, on the pavement, she heard a succession of slammed doors and the roar of a revved engine. Jumping up, she leaned out through the open window, past the sill, and saw an oversized car with a truck-like cab bumping up the cobblestoned road that ascended out of the town square.
Hanging out the passenger door, one foot on the running board and one hand bracing himself upright as he looked back, she saw Benjy. Even at two hundreds yards’ distance, as their eyes met, she felt the force of his gaze. He smiled, and raised his other hand in farewell.
Decades later, when BNRO chroniclers interviewed Binyamin Biraz Ouz and Meyodija Zöld Mezők, the “Majnun and Layla” of ESO legend, Meyodija would smile and say “he had me by the espresso. The flute simply sealed the deal.”
As Yezget-Bey commented, on the topic of their epic story, “Love is the only rebirth that matters.”
[caption: Persian image of Legend of Majnun and Leyla, now in a Ballyizget gallery, but originally hung at Smythe's coffeehouse, in the Old Quarter. Commemorates first meeting of Binyamin Biraz Ouz and Meyodija Zöld Mezők