The Devil's Cup

by Stewart Lee Allen

  “See them.” He seemed vaguely offended. Ticket—Rimbaud, said the piece of paper. 10 Br. “You see—real house. Government. Not like the others.”

  “You mean there are other Rimbaud houses?”

  “No. Only one.”

  I paid him, and he led me up a narrow interior stairway into a huge chamber, perhaps three thousand square feet, with a fifty-foot-high ceiling ringed by an old-fashioned oval balcony The walls were covered in handpainted canvas “wallpaper,” now so filthy and tattered that I could barely make out the quaint Parisian garden scenes and heraldic devices. Huge dust particles floated about. There was no furniture of any kind.

  The great French poet spent the last days of his life in this surreal château, alone except for his beloved manservant. He wrote no poetry, and his letters were filled with complaints of loneliness, disease, and his financial problems, including a disastrous attempt to sell slaves and guns to the Ethiopian emperor. His prophecy of coming home with “limbs of iron… and fierce eyes” proved false. He returned to France delirious and destitute. His left leg had been amputated. A mysterious infection soon killed him.

  I wandered about for a while, peering over the balcony, touching the walls. The place seemed uninhabited. A boy in rags trailed after me only to flee as soon as I spoke. Pigeons cooed from nests among the tattered wall hangings.

  As I left, the man asked me if I wanted to meet Rimbaud’s descendants.

  “There were daughters,” he said. “Rimbaud’s daughters…”

  “Rimbaud had children?” I asked.

  “Many daughters. Very beautiful girls… so young…” he stopped, suggestively. “You want Rambo girl?”

  To sleep with the bastard offspring of Arthur Rimbaud, I thought; that would be a story. She would be beautiful, as all the women here were, and perfectly arrogant, as behooved one of Ethiopian-French descent. It was tempting. But hadn’t it been a case of Harrarian clap that killed Rimbaud? I declined.

  Don’t roast your coffee beans in the marketplace.

  (Don’t tell secrets to strangers.)

  Oromo nomad saying

  I MET ABERA TESHONE WHILE LOOKING FOR THE HYENA MEN, a caste that feeds Harrar’s trash to the packs of hyenas that gather nightly outside the city walls. The caste started as a way of keeping the animals from entering the city and attacking humans. Today it’s largely a tourist attraction, although the sight of hideous animals accepting garbage from men in rags is not likely to topple the Disney empire.

  Abera, a young man with a withered left leg, had been my guide for the event, and afterward we’d gone for a beer. He wanted to know why I had come to Harrar.

  “Not many tourists come here,” he explained.

  “I noticed. I came here to learn about coffee.” A thought struck me. “Hey, didn’t you say you were an agriculture student? What do you know about its origin?”

  “Do you know the story about Kaldi and the dancing goats?” “Of course,” I said. It’s one of coffee’s mythological chestnuts. It goes like this:

  An Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi one day noticed his best goat dancing about and baaing like a maniac. It seemed to happen after the old billy goat had been nibbling the berries off a certain plant. The goatherd tried a few himself and soon was dancing about, too.

  A holy man wandered by and asked the boy why he was dancing with a goat. The goatherd explained. The monk took some berries home and found that after eating them he could not sleep. It so happened that this holy man was famous for his rather tedious all-night sermons and was having trouble keeping his disciples awake. So he immediately ordered all his disciples, called dervishes, to chew the bean before he preached. The dervishes’ sleepiness vanished, and word spread about the great prophet whose electrifying wisdom kept you awake until dawn.

  Being a city boy, I mentioned to Abera that it seemed strange that the goats would eat berries. Didn’t they normally prefer leafy stuff?

  “Yes, well, perhaps it was so,” he said. “That is how the country folk still make it.”

  “They make coffee out of leaves?”

  “Yes. They call it kati.”

  “Really? I would like to try it. Maybe in a café…”

  “Oh no,” he laughed. “This is only drunk in the home. Hardly anyone in Harrar drinks it today. You must visit the Ogaden. They still drink it.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “The Ogaden? They live now in Jiga-Jiga.” He made the place sound like a disease. “But you can’t go there. It’s very, very dangerous. And those Somalis, those Ogaden, are very arrogant. So rude!”

  “Why? What is the problem?

  “They are rude people!” Abera shook his head angrily at the Ogaden’s poor manners. “Why, just not long ago they did a bad thing to a bus going there. To all the men.”

  “Bad? How bad?”

  “Why, very bad. They killed them.”

  “That’s pretty bad,” I agreed.

  According to Abera, Ogaden bandits had pulled all the men off a bus heading to Jiga-Jiga and demanded they each recite a verse from the Koran. Those who failed were shot in the head. Thousands of the Ogaden, a desert nomad tribe, had recently been forced into refugee settlements as a result of the collapse of the Somali government. The largest camp was near Jiga-Jiga on the Ethiopian/Somali border, and as a consequence the whole area was buzzing with guerrilla activity. The recent turmoil in Mogadishu, where dead American soldiers had been dragged through the streets, had made the Ogaden especially hostile toward Yanks. The situation had grown so difficult that the relief agencies no longer sent white workers to Jiga-Jiga for fear they’d be shot.

  “It is very bad for foreigners to go there,” he said. “But why do you want to go?”

  “I just want a cup of coffee,” I said. “Have you actually been there?”

  “It’s Hell.” Abera looked down his nose. “I urge you not to go.”

  IT WAS A PLEASANT TWO-HOUR DRIVE FROM HARRAR TO Jiga-Jiga, through the so-called Valley of Wonders, although what makes this valley so wondrous I couldn’t say. I had set out at five in the morning, Abera having warned me that drivers refused to return from Jiga-Jiga after two in the afternoon for fear of bandits. He’d recommended I get an early start and head back to Harrar before noon unless I intended to stay overnight, in which case I’d most likely find my hotel robbed at gunpoint. That was assuming, of course, that anyone would be stupid enough to let me stay at their lodge. Was he being a tad paranoid? Perhaps. At any rate, it was a refreshingly cool way to start the day. By the time we’d reached the desert’s edge, however, it had grown so warm that some of my fellow passengers removed the pistols cached beneath their shirts.

  “The human head, once struck off, does not regrow like the rose.” This observation was made by a British officer when Sir Richard Burton proposed visiting here in 1854, and it kept running through my head. The parallels between Burton’s and my quests were starting to seem spooky. We were both seeking mysterious “bodies of water” in Central Africa; my mysterious liquid contained a few coffee beans, but other than that, we were looking for the same thing. Burton wanted to see how the Nile started out; I wanted to see how some of it ended up. Burton wound up with a Somali spear stuck through both cheeks, which is about where I hoped the parallels would cease.

  Jiga-Jiga proved to be a dusty place specializing in huts constructed from flattened Shell oil drums. I popped my head into the first doorway that showed a tray of chipped glasses.

  “Kati?” I inquired in Amharic and Arabic. “Do you have kati?”

  The lady pointed at my tattered straw fedora and burst into giggles. I tried another café. The proprietor shooed me out, as did the next and the next after that. Every time I stepped out onto the street I found yet another six-foot-tall skeleton eyeing me with an ominous disinterest. Men had rifles. Women wore wildly colorful head scarfs. Ogadens, I presumed.

  Suddenly, a wizened old woman, with a string of Christian crosses tattooed about her neck, beckoned m
e into her hut. She started babbling. She seemed frightened. I pantomimed sipping and asked about kati.

  “Kati?” she asked and gestured to a sack full of dirty leaves. She repeated my drinking pantomime. “Kati?”

  “Yes!” I pulled one of the leaves from the sack and sniffed—was this it? The legendary kati, qat shia, Abyssinian Tea, and perhaps the great-grandmother of all coffee drinks? She gestured for me to sit in a corner of the hut and then turned away. Only there was nothing in the corner to sit on. In fact, there was nothing in the hut but the bag of leaves. Was this really a café? No cups, no seats… and where was she going to cook the kati? How did I even know those were coffee leaves?

  The old lady stopped and looked at me suspiciously.

  “Kati?” I repeated.

  “Owwwww,” she sighed in a breathy voice.

  Oh well. She looked honest enough. I crouched on the dirt floor. But what if she drugged me? There was a knock on the door, and a man in a military uniform stuck his head in. He wanted my passport. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing in Jiga-Jiga.

  “Coffee,” I explained lamely. “I was told to come here to drink it.”

  The soldier asked the old lady a question. She shook the bag of leaves.

  “You are a very stupid white man,” he said angrily. “This is a restricted area—very dangerous! Please come with me.”

  “But…she’s going to make some…” I could tell this plea was falling on deaf ears. “Of course, officer,” I said coyly. “May I buy you a cup of tea first?”

  “Tea?” he asked.

  “No, no. I mean kati.”

  “What is that?”

  I started to explain. “No. You must leave. This area is under military control.”

  As he loaded me onto the next van leaving for Harrar, I flashed back to the time some Irish friends were thrown out of East Harlem by two New York cops, despite their protests that they were meeting friends.

  “Don’t be stupid,” one of the cops said after they’d escorted my friends to the nearest subway station. “You’ll never have no friends here.”

  “THE GERMAN PRESIDENT IS COMING TO VISIT JIGA-JIGA,” Abera said when I told him what had happened. “So they made you leave.”

  But he had good news. He’d mentioned my quest to his girlfriend. It turned out her housemate knew how to brew kati, and she’d invited me over for a cup.

  There are actually two types of coffee-leaf beverage. The first, and more common, is kati or kotea, a concoction made of roasted coffee leaves. The other is called amertassa, an earlier version of the drink made from fresh-picked green leaves that are left to dry in the shade for a few days and then brewed without roasting. The market lady from whom we bought our supplies could remember her grandmother drinking amertassa. Now it was almost extinct. She did, however, have a burlap bag full of kati, broad leaves with orange and green highlights.

  Kati and amertassa are strong candidates for being the first cup of coffee, for while Ethiopians have been eating the beans since time immemorial, the first mention of a coffee beverage suggests it was brewed from the plants’ leaves. Kafta was its Arabic name. Some scholars claim it was brewed with leaves from the narcotic plant qat, yet in the early 1400s Arab mystic al-Dhabhani saw Ethiopians “using” qahwa, a clear reference to coffee in a liquid form. So what were the Ethiopians drinking? Quite likely a brew made from coffee leaves: the semimythical Abyssinian Tea. Raw beans were added later in southern Yemen by the Sufi mystic al-Shadhili of Mocha or one of his disciples.2

  Whatever the case, kati is a lovely cuppa. Preparation is simple: dried leaves are roasted on a flat pan until they acquire a dark, tarry texture, then crumbled and brewed over low heat with water, sugar, and a pinch of salt. Cooking time is about ten minutes. The resultant amber-colored liquor has a delicately caramelized, smoky flavor comparable to lapsang souchong (Chinese smoked tea) but more complex, both sweet and salty, with a sensuously gelatinous texture.

  It proved an especially sympathetic combination with the qat leaves Abera had bought for us to chew. Qat is the evil sister to coffee and has addicted much of southern Arabia and East Africa (it has also recently developed a following in the West). The two drugs’ histories are so intertwined that one nickname for the patron saint of coffee drinkers, al-shadhili of Mocha, is “the Father of Two Plants,” qat coffee. Qat is taken by chewing rew leaves and holding the pulp in the cheek until the juices are extracted. I’d first tried it years ago in Kenya and been unimpressed, but the stuff Abera brought that day was electrifying, comparable to low-key Ecstasy. Ecstasy, however, produces a physical and emotional high, whereas quality qat—and Harrar is said to grow the finest—gives a more cerebral euphoria, plunging the chewer into a trance-like state that makes conversation a hypnotically sensual experience.3

  We spent the rest of the day lounging on the raised platform in Abera’s traditional Harrari home. Friends came to visit. More qat was chewed, more kati was brewed, and the afternoon soon lost itself in a qat haze, earnest but idle, where nothing matters so much as expression and understanding. The day was hot, but Abera’s clay house was cool and made comfortable with cushions. We talked about Rod Stewart, for whose haircut Abera confessed a great admiration. Later, during the more serious part of a qat session called Solomon’s Hour, the talk turned to witchcraft. I mentioned the Ethiopian Christian deacon who had claimed Muslims used coffee to lay curses on people. Abera had never heard of this. But here in Harrar, he said, some used it for magical healing.4

  “People come from many miles to Harrar to be healed by these people,” he said.

  “Have you ever seen it done?” I asked.

  “Once.” He shook his head. “I do not approve of these people.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did you see the Zar?”

  “You know about the Zar?”

  “The priest in Addis told me. It’s a devil, right?”

  “No, not exactly. It is the one that comes to the sheykah.” He asked his friend, who worked for a UN agency but spoke no English, a question. “Yes, my friend says the Zar comes to the sheykah. He knows all these people.”

  It turned out that a celebrated sheykah had just returned to Harrar after finishing four years of special training at Ethiopia’s holy Lake Wolla, He was now holding sessions in Harrar every Tuesday and Thursday. Today was Tuesday.

  “Your friend knows these holy men?” I asked.

  “Yes. Some.”

  I hesitated. “Is it possible for a foreigner to go to a healing?”

  “You wish to go?” Abera seemed surprised. “I don’t know…” He asked his friend another question. “He says he does not know. No foreigners go to these things. But he can ask.”

  It took us the rest of the afternoon to locate the sheykah, only to be told that he was still asleep. It’s a holiday, said his groupies; best to come back later. With presents.

  “Presents?” I asked.

  “Yes, that is normal. It is a sign of respect.”

  The plan became that Abera should go alone to buy the “respect” while I went back to the hotel. We’d meet again in the evening. But in the meantime I had to give him some money to buy the presents. I wondered if it was all a scam but produced the money anyhow.

  “What are you going to get them?” I asked before handing it over.

  “Green coffee beans,” he said. “That is what you always give. Two kilos should be enough. Don’t give them anything else! You’re only going to watch, not get healed.”

  1 Kefa, some say, is the root for the word coffee. More contend that coffee derives from the Arabic qahwa, from the root q-h-w-y, “to “make something repugnant.” Qahwa originally referred to wine, which made food repugnant, and was applied to coffee because it made sleep repugnant. It’s interesting to note that Ethiopia is the only country in the world that does not use a word similar to coffee for the brew; there, it’s called buna, which means bean.

  The Kefans also gave us the world’s first baristas, a c
aste called the Tofaco, who not only brewed the king’s coffee but also poured it down his throat.

  2 One theory is that coffee was created as a result of Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho’s supposed introduction of tea to the Arabs in the early 1400s. When China cut off contact with the outside world, the Arabs replaced tea leaves, unobtainable in Arabia, with qat or coffee.

  3 Tea’s equivalent would be leppet-so, a pickled tea leaf chewed in parts of Burma.

  4 Ethiopia is a traditionally Christian nation, whereas coffee is associated with Islam, a relationship that in the past has led to the banning of coffee for Ethiopian Christians.

  Ethiopian Prayer

  Eele buna nagay nuuklen eele buna iijolen haagudatu hoormati haagudatu waan haamtu nuura dow bokai magr nuken.

  Garri/Oromo prayer

  THE COFFEE BEAN HAS LONG been a symbol of power in Harrar. The caste of growers, the Harash, not only bore the city’s name but were forbidden to go beyond its walls lest the art of cultivation be lost. The head of the emir’s bodyguard was allowed a small private coffee garden as a sign of his rank.

  And of course, natives worshiped their coffeepots, as in the prayer above, which translates

  Coffeepot give us peace

  coffeepot let children grow

  let our wealth swell

  please protect us horn evils

  give us rain and grass.

  I think we all pray to the first cup of the day. It’s a silent prayer, sung while the mind is still foggy and blue. “O Magic Cup,” it might go, “carry me above the traffic jam. Keep me civil in the subway.

  And forgive my employer, as you forgive me. Amen.”

  But the prayer from the Garri/Oromo tribe is more serious, part of a ritual called bun-qalle that celebrates sex and death, and in which the coffee bean replaces the fatted ox in a sacrifice to the gods. Among the Garri the husking of the coffee fruit symbolizes slaughter, with the priests biting the heads off the sacrificial creatures. After this, the beans are cooked in butter and chewed by the elders. Their spiritual power thus enhanced, they pronounce a blessing on the proceedings and smear the holy coffee-scented butter on the participants’ foreheads. The beans are then mixed with sweet milk, and everybody drinks the liquid while reciting the prayer.