Many of the Saydjari family carry Turkish blood in the lineage. In some of us, that blood runs thick and brown and sweet. We may thank the Turks for the introduction of that most delightful of treats – Turkish coffee. An old Turkish proverb says: A cup of Turkish coffee invites forty years of friendship.
Sharing a cup of Turkish coffee with my daughter this morning, I drew a deep and comforting breath in front of the fire. I could almost hear the raspy sound of my mother or father stirring the finely ground Arabica coffee in our old traditional brass coffee pot (cezve). Mom and Dad’s instructions were clear.
The coffee must be stirred slowly and in a counterclockwise direction. You must bring a mixture of coffee and sugar to a boil three times (no more, no less). You must remove the pot from the flame between boils, briefly. You must not allow it to boil over (though my father frequently broke that rule).
Then decant the coffee into a demitasse cup and let the coffee grounds settle. If you sip too soon, you get a mouth full of grounds. If you wait too long, the coffee grows cold. Sip to your heart’s content, but if you get greedy and take one too many sips, a mouthful of grounds will be your reward.
So many rules for such a simple beverage, but the ritual is part of the charm. When my father sipped, the sound roared across the room like some great waterfall. He was the loudest coffee sipper in the family. Such dear memories. Time for another sip before it gets cold.
My wonderful sister-in-law sent me the following excerpt following the coffee theme: NOTE: The Siege of Beirut lasted for seven weeks, from 13 June to 12 August 29, 1982. The city was bombed almost constantly by air, sea, and land. Water, power, and food supplies were cut off, and thousands of civilians became casualties.Three o’clock. Daybreak riding on fire. A nightmare coming from the sea. Roosters made of metal. Smoke. Metal preparing a feast for metal the master, and a dawn that flares up in all the senses before it breaks. A roaring that chases me out of bed and throws me into the narrow hallway. I want nothing, and I hope for nothing. I can’t direct my limbs in this pandemonium. No time for caution, and no time for time. If I only knew—if I knew how to organize the crush of this death that keeps pouring forth. If only I knew how to liberate the screams held back in a body that no longer feels like mine from the sheer effort spent to save itself in this uninterrupted chaos of shells. “Enough!” “Enough!” I whisper, to find out it I can still do anything that will guide me to myself and point to the abyss opening in six directions. I can’t surrender to this fate, and I can’t resist it. Steel that howls, only to have other steel bark back. The fever of metal is the song of this dawn. […]I no longer wonder when the steely howling of the sea will stop. I live on the eighth floor of a building that might tempt any sniper, to say nothing of a fleet now transforming the sea into one of the fountainheads of hell. The north face of the building, made of glass, used to give tenants a pleasing view over the wrinkled roof of the sea. But now it offers no shield against stark slaughter. Why did I choose to live here? What a stupid question! I’ve lived here for the past ten years without complaining about the scandal of glass. But how to reach the kitchen? I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being. The aroma of coffee so I can stand my share of this dawn up on its feet. So that we can go together, this day and I, down into the street in search of another place. How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? I measure the period between two shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle of pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn. I switch off the radio, no longer wondering if the wall of this narrow hallway will actually protect me from the rain of rockets. What matters is that a wall be there to veil air fusing into metal, seeking human flesh, making a direct hit, choking it, or scattering shrapnel. In such cases a mere dark curtain is enough to provide an imaginary shield of safety. For death is to see death. I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee. Coffee, for an addict like me, is the key to the day. And coffee, for one who knows it as I do, means making it with your own hands and not having it come to you on a tray, because the bringer of the tray is also the bearer of talk, and the first coffee, the virgin of the silent morning, is spoiled by the first words. Dawn, my dawn, is antithetical to chatter. The aroma of coffee can absorb sounds and go rancid, even if these sounds are nothing more than a gentle “Good morning!” Coffee is the morning silence, early and unhurried, the only silence in which you can be at peace with self and things, creative, standing alone with some water that you reach for in lazy solitude and pour into a small copper pot with a mysterious shine—yellow turning to brown—that you place over a low fire. Oh, that it were a wood fire!—Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, p. 4; pp. 6-7.
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