Is There Something in the Coffee?
By: Jill Warner
I stood in the doorway, clutching a pair of bulky plastic 2-liter bottles of Orange Fanta, waiting impatiently after knocking on the door. I shivered in the cool October evening. I hoped that I hadn’t disturbed the whole family, I just needed to see my friend Evalina to share the wonderful news.
I heard footsteps on the stairs and suddenly the door yanked open and a face covered with a white paste poked out. It took me a second to realize that Evalina had a beauty mask on. Upon recognition, she smiled and was obviously surprised by my unannounced visit. I held up the soda bottles with my arms outstretched, grinning uncontrollably.
“Zdravo Evalina!” I bellowed. I spoke the next few words carefully, my enthusiasm barely restrained, “Mojata cestra e…vrabotuva!” My sister is engaged.
Evalina blinked for a moment and then quickly responded, “Chestito!” Congratulations!
I was excited to share the happy news with all of my Macedonian friends, but especially with Evalina. She had predicted my sister’s engagement only two weeks earlier. In Macedonia, as in many places in the world, people socialize with drinking coffee. You risk being a social outcast if you do not visit with your neighbors and friends to drink coffee, almost on a daily basis.
Macedonia, once part of Yugoslavia, is a poor country, but they are very rich in their greatest resource: people. There may not be a lot of money, but there’s a lot of time. Time to visit and get to know the neighbors, time to reminisce, time to complain, and time to dream, all while enjoying coffee and drinks with friends.
Evalina stepped out into the cool night air to embrace me and usher me inside. We quietly climbed up the stairs to her bedroom. Almost all of the lights were out, but I heard a TV playing in one of the other bedrooms. The house was small for Evalina’s large family, hidden behind the drab, concrete block apartment buildings. Evalina’s bedroom was just large enough for a krevet (a futon bed), a small desk, chair, and a coffee table. There were many times I had joined her small group of friends in this room, drinking soda or coffee, eating snacks and exchanging local gossip. We entered Evalina’s bedroom, and I placed the heavy bottles of soda on the creaky, wooden coffee table.
“Checkaij” Evalina said. Wait. Leaving the room suddenly and returning a moment later with two clear plastic cups. “Nazdravije! Chestito!” We toasted to each other.
Evalina pumped me for the details about my sister’s engagement. Of course I would go back home, to the United States, for the wedding. My only sister had always been my closest friend.
The strange thing about it was that I had never met my future brother-in-law; they had met just after I left home to join the Peace Corps and came to Macedonia. I had seen photos of him, tall and lean, standing next to my beaming sister. There was no question that the two of them were madly in love with each other. I couldn’t have been happier when, about a half an hour prior, standing in the living room of my cramped, fourth-floor apartment, rotary phone clutched in hand, my sister gave me the good news. She asked me to be her maid of honor and I literally jumped up and down, shouting, “YES!”
While I shared the details with Evalina, we drank the overly sweet soda and nibbled on crumbly sirene cheese with dry, delicate crackers. Some women in the Balkans have the practice of reading coffee grounds, which is essentially like reading tea leaves. So, not only can you enjoy a cup of potent “Turksko café”, but you can also have your fortune told afterwards.
I always took these things as entertainment with an underscore of skepticism. However, once I remembered Evalina’s prediction and how eerily similar it resonated with my sister’s engagement, I had to acknowledge the amazing coincidence.
“Teeay e prima a ponuda.” You will receive a proposition, she had told me two weeks prior, in the same small bedroom we sat in now. “You will say yes…and you will be very happy.”
Her words reminded me of a Chinese fortune cookie as she added, “You will travel a great distance.”
Yeah, sure, I thought. My job often required me to travel the five-hour bus ride to the capital of Skopje. Nothing new there.
“And you will be very, very happy.” She kept emphasizing. Now, two weeks later, Evalina’s prediction had come true.
As Evalina pumped me for details about the wedding, I pumped Evalina for details about her coffee-ground reading abilities. How long had she been doing it? How did she know how to read them? Evalina just smiled at me like an elderly woman smiles at a young child.
“Neznam,” she said. She didn’t know how it worked; she just read the dark ooze of grounds clinging to the bottom of the cup like one would read the newspaper reports about the rising numbers of unemployment.
Had her predictions come true before? I asked her.
“Nekogash,” she said. Sometimes. She flashed me a humble smile. While we were chatting, she had slowly begun to rub off the gooey, white beauty mask with a small, thin towel. Her long, black curly hair gathered around her thin shoulders.
I looked at Evalina and thought about the many things that made us similar and yet, so very different. She, like many Macedonian women, lived at home with her parents and younger siblings. She would live there until she got married. Once married, she would leave her family forever, and move in with her new husband and his family. Although Evalina was an intelligent woman, and would go on to university, she was likely to join too many other Macedonians who are educated and unemployed or underemployed. Not only that, but she might never leave the small country of one million people, either for work or for pleasure.
I realized that the moment of silence between Evalina and I had become awkward.
“Mozhay da piem minogu café!” I said. Let’s drink another cup of coffee.
Jill Warner is an international primary teacher, writer, and world traveler originally from Seattle, Washington. She has been to all seven continents and lived on five of them. She was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Macedonia from 2005-2007. Jill enjoys travel writing, has published a children's book titled: “An Eiselweizer Story", and is working on a sequel.
Cover Illustration by Bernard Wun @enjoymydrawings
Story Edited by Sarah Boorboor