The Coffee Trader

“You’re tired,” A

Ha

Ha

Ha

Then she began to tell A

And she told the girl other things too, things she now wished she could take back. Even as she’d said them, she knew she had confided too much. Maybe that was even why she’d done it. The thrill of speaking the forbidden, of asking for help in doing what must not be done-it had been all too delicious. And it would most likely be her undoing.

“We’ll go tomorrow?” A

“Yes,” Ha

Ha

Daniel’s teeth were bothering him today. She could see that when they sat down for di

After months of this she had urged him to see a surgeon-a tricky business, since Daniel took great offense if she suggested anything to him. If his hand were on fire and she suggested that he dunk it in a bucket of water, he’d glare at her and let himself burn. To soften the advice, she’d given it in anecdotal form: “Jeronimo Javeza’s wife tells me her husband had a problem tooth pulled by a skilled dentist who works near the Damrak. She says he hasn’t been so comfortable in five years.”

So Daniel had gone but come back with the same troubling teeth with which he’d left the house that morning. “The brute of a surgeon wanted fifteen guilders to pull five teeth,” he’d said. “Three guilders a tooth. For fifteen guilders, a man should get new teeth, not lose old ones.”

Now, at the table, Daniel looked almost ready to aid his excavation with a knife while Miguel blessed the wine. Miguel prayed over everything they ate, over anything that didn’t move. He might pray over his own turds, for all she knew. When Daniel ate alone with her, he would mutter the Hebrew words or mutter some of them if he couldn’t remember the rest. Often he forgot to pray at all. He would always forget when he ate alone, there being no one to impress or instruct. Miguel, however, would bless his food whenever he ate. She’d seen other men of the Vlooyenburg with their Hebrew and their blessings, and often they seemed to her angry or frightening or alien. With Miguel there was delight in his utterances, as though he were remembering something wonderful each time he said the prayers. It was hard not to hear these strange words anew each time he spoke them-not mumbled and swallowed, the way some men did, but clearly articulated, like oratory. She heard the poetry of a foreign tongue, its cadences and repetitions complementary sounds. And she knew things would be different if Miguel, instead of Daniel, were her husband.

This wasn’t just some idle fancy born from her constant reflection that Miguel was far more handsome and robust than his brother. Where Daniel was thin and looked like a beggar in merchant’s clothes, Miguel was round and pink and hearty. Though Miguel was the elder brother, he looked more youthful and healthy. His large black eyes always darted here and there, not nervously like Daniel’s, but with delight and wonder. And his face was so round-delicate and somehow still strong. What would it be like, she wondered, to be married to a man who loved laughter instead of resenting it, who embraced life instead of squinting at it with suspicion?

That was fate’s little irony. She knew her father had been seeking an alliance with the Lienzos and wanted his daughter to marry the elder son. Ha

What would these prayers mean to her if she had married Miguel? Daniel knew almost nothing of the liturgy. He went to synagogue because the parnassim expected it of him, particularly his friend Solomon Parido (whom Ha