#sadik

“Get off my lap,” he buzzed. “I’ve gotta make coffee.”

“Thought you were still waiting for the sand to heat up.” Herakles hadn’t even opened his eyes.

Sadık brushed a streak of hair out of Herakles’ face. “Should be ready any moment now.”

He’d been itching to do something since this afternoon. Herakles had made them dinner hours earlier – chicken gyros, so that it’d be halal.

At first, Sadık had enjoyed to kick back on the couch while Herakles cooked. Had indulged in the sounds that came from the kitchen and the feeling that had made his heart feel lighter with every beat.

But the feeling had worn off over time. The book he had been reading wasn’t very interesting. One of these stray cats that Herakles let in and out of his house as if they owned it had glared at him from the armchair. He had grown restless.

He enjoyed cooking, after all, even more so for other people.

“Herakles?” He had called from the living room.

“What?”

“Do you need any help?”

“No.”

Sadık had grunted to himself with brows furrowed. He glared back at the cat.

At one point, he had gotten up and strolled into the kitchen.

“Are you sure you don’t need help?”

Herakles had looked up from the rice he’d been washing and glared at him. “Yes. Just go back and take a nap or something.”

Sadık had surveyed the ingredients that laid around, half chopped up at times. “I ain’t sleepy.” A cat had jumped onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Maybe you need someone to keep the cats from eating our dinner.”

“I don’t. You really don’t need to be here,” Herakles had insisted. The cat had jumped onto the table.

Sadık had been kicked out of the kitchen after an argument and being hit in the face with a spoon. The fucking cat had been allowed to stay.

Now most of the cats were gone. Out on the town to wreak havoc. Hunt mice. Serenade each other.

“C’mon, off me now,” Sadık told Herakles. The sun had finally disappeared behind the mountains and stopped poking his eyes out.

Herakles lifted his head and Sadık stood up.

They had to improvise a little, but managed to find a large enough cast-iron pan and a bag of sand. Sadık picked up the long handle of the coffee pot and twirled it twice in his hands.

When he had been a child and travelled all around the Levant with his parents, Sadık had been delighted to see the same thing in every place. Especially because at first, the ritual had seemed like magic to him. The cezve – or ibrik or kanaka or any of the thousand other names it went by – that glided so effortlessly through the smooth hot sand. The foam that bubbled after a few minutes, that threatened to spill but never did.

Mohamed had done it for him the first time he had visited Egypt alone, after his mother’s death. He’d been a grown man by then and his heart had beaten slower since Funda had died, his head heavy with all the shit she’d left him to deal with.

But for this brief evening, he had watched Mohamed slide the kanaka through the hot sand and felt again as if he was seeing magic being worked.

After he had slid the pot through the sand to see if it’d work and then held his hand close to the bottom to see if it had been hot enough, he picked up the coffee grinder. He had an electrical one at home, both in Istanbul and Ankara, and so did Herakles, but using it tonight had rubbed both of them the wrong way. To leave the garden and have the loud mechanic shredding cut through the birds chirping and the dull sound of the city. So Sadık did it by hand, as he did every time he visited his father.

It was probably the best use he had for his strength that had been made necessary by the life he was living. A life his father had no interest in partaking in anymore ever since his wife had died and a life Sadık had little interest in telling him about either. Alaattin had made the right call by moving into the countryside and now using all the time in the world to grind his coffee by hand and light up a charcoal fire to make sand coffee in the evening.

Sadık finally put the coffee grinder down and poured some water into the pot.

There was the distinct sound of heavy fabric rubbing against each other behind his back and he looked over his shoulder.

Herakles had shifted on the couch and watched him with eyes half–lidded.

“Do you want to do that now, too?” Sadık asked him.

“No. I think it’s good that you’ve finally got something to busy yourself with,” Herakles replied and Sadık chortled.

He wondered if Herakles would struggle with the sand. He still remembered when he had been a teen, his parents had just met with their Iraqi partners, who had brought their kid along. When he had dragged them out into the city at night, Sadık had seen the same spark of recognition in the kid’s eyes when they saw the pans filled with hot sand.

He hadn’t expected that spark in Herakles’ eyes when he had told him about it a few weeks later during a visit to Athens.

“Oh, we do that, too. But not with sand.”

“Then what do you use?”

“There’s a shop in town that’s got a fire going to roast nuts and stuff and when they’re about to close, they make coffee in the ashes. I can show it to you, if your … parents would allow it.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about it, I’ll find an excuse.”

Sadık slowly moved the pot along the sand. He lifted it and did it a second time, but quickly pulled it out when too much vapor rose from it. He dropped a few spoons of ground coffee into it and one of sugar. Herakles sometimes liked his coffee toothrottingly sweet, but Sadık wasn’t going to do that with the first batch.

“You’re not doing it the Greek way,” Herakles remarked.

“Why would I?” Sadık replied, focused on the task at hand. He ran the pot through the sand, lifted it and began the movement anew. “It’s similar enough, besides, you like it my way just fine.”

Herakles replied nothing. Some car drove through the neighbourhood. The birds had shut up. The embers of the charcoal fire and a few, distant streetlamps, all in different directions, were the only light.

He heard the couch creak. Herakles feet slapped onto the tiles, before he reached the grass and the ground swallowed the sound. He lit the electric lanterns in the garden.

“I thought of when I first told you about Turkish sand coffee,” Sadık said and laughed. “Can’t believe I was surprised to learn that you Greeks did it, too. Shoulda seen that one coming, Greece isn’t so different from the rest of what used to be Ottoman territory.”

Herakles turned the last lantern on.

“Hm,” he said and walked back to the couch. “We also share a lot of culture with the Balkans.”

Like that pork that I don’t eat. Dinner had been good, Herakles knew how to cook after all. He tried to concentrate on the warm, satisfying feeling of fullness. Not the twinge that Herakles’ words had caused for some reason.

“And I bet that some of that is also due to Ottoman rule,” Sadık said with a grin. “You know, like those spas in Hungary.” He lifted the pot from the sand, since the coffee was almost done anyways, and turned to look at Herakles.

Herakles was sitting up, one foot propped onto the couch and hands clasped together over his knee. “I suppose that’s part of it,” he replied and his voice is as soft as the face that’s framed by locks of brown hair and warm orange light. Sadık allowed himself to stare for a moment. “Is the coffee done?”

“Almost.” He got back to swiping it across the sand. “You know, it’s a pity, if you think about it. We’ve got so much in common, Turks and Greeks, and yet, we can’t get along. Wonder why.”

He shouldn’t have said that. Sadık knew he should not have said that.

Herakles couldn’t keep his voice low and soft, no matter how hard he surely tried. There was an edge to the words: “Probably because you people always act like you own everything.”

Sadık turned to look at him and saw the slightest furrow between Herakles’ brows.

A deeper one settled between his own. “That’s because you people can’t see further than your own nose,” he replied. “If you could get your head out of your own ass, maybe you wouldn’t think everyone’s out to get yours when they just try to be closer.”

Something hissed. Sadık whirled around.

The coffee had spilled over and one drop had hit the sand, which now sizzled as it congealed.

“Siktir!” he shouted and took the pot off the sand. He slammed it down so hard on the tablet he feared it might break and looked at the pan. He turned back to the tablet, grabbed a spoon and scooped the wet sand out of the pan. He flung it to the ground, where it disappeared between blades of grass.

His chest heaved. He felt his heartbeat thrum in his throat. He closed his eyes, but it didn’t help the dizziness that unfolded in his skull.

“Are you alright?” Herakles asked. His voice was soft and flat again. Because there was too much to be said, but nothing that they hadn’t yelled at each other before.

“Yeah,” Sadık said. He swallowed. He picked up the pot and peered inside. There were splashes of coffee on its rim from when he had slammed it down.

Again, the shuffle of fabric and Herakles’ steps. “I’ll throw it away,” he said. A moment later, he put his hand around the handle. His fingers overlapped with Sadık’s.

Sadık didn’t dare to look up at him, lest he did something he’d regret.

“I’ll make some again,” he said and let Herakles take the pot from him.

“Mhm.” That was the only response. Herakles’ steps receded and disappeared into the house.

Sadık dared to lift his head and to breathe, before he staggered back. Away from the coal’s heat that had been lapping at his thighs and arms the whole time. He sat down in the grass and took deep breaths to get the adrenaline out of his system.

Because the backdoor was still open, as was the kitchen window, he could hear Herakles rinse the pot.

You ruined the coffee. He closed his eyes and his head throbbed, because he knew that was what Herakles had wanted to say instead of Are you alright?

He hadn’t said it, because he didn’t want another fight. Or maybe because he hadn’t thought it at all, he tried to remind himself, because Sadık didn’t want another fight either.

He wanted a cup of coffee and Herakles next to him. He wanted talks about philosophy. He wanted to hang onto the other’s lips when they told about mythology and he wanted him to hang onto his own when he recited poetry. More than anything, he wanted to kiss those lips and taste all the godforsaken sugar that Herakles would’ve made him put into their third cup of coffee and have his tongue explore his mouth as if to lick every single last grain of it away himself.

“Tired?”

Sadık jumped when Herakles’ spoke up next to him.

“Lord, one would think you’re a fucking cat yourself with how you sneak up on me.”

“I didn’t sneak up on you. You just were somewhere else.” Herakles looked down on him, with eyes half lidded, and held the pot out so casually that it almost slipped from his fingers.

Yeah, in a far better place than the one we ended up in.

Sadık got to his feet and took it from him.

“Thanks, canım,” he said, voice soft and flat but exhausted, because he was worse at pretending without his mask. He brushed Herakles’ cheek with the back of his knuckles.

Herakles didn’t look at him. He wrapped his own fingers around his hand for a second.

The second passed and Herakles walked back to the couch. Sadık’s fingers felt even colder than before.

He twirled the handle twice. He’d make some coffee and it’d be delicious and if they kept their mouths shut, maybe he’d get to taste it on Herakles’ tongue.

~*~