Oliver Benjamin
Roy nodded and said to the monk, “Yes, yes. Why don’t you take
me to the coffee place now. We’ll come back when we’re done.”
The monk shook his head disdainfully. “Very well,” he said, “To
witness a ritual like this would be an insult to Christ. But you have
brought nothing to sacrifice. What will you use for the blood? You
may not kill any of our animals.”
Winfield rummaged around in his ridiculous bag for a moment
and took out half a sandwich. “This will do!” he said.
The monk turned away and walked back up the trail. As far as he
was concerned, Jews were all worshippers of Buda, practitioners of
black magic. And perhaps they had been, long ago when they lived on
Deq, not yet divorced from their pagan past.
As they hiked, Roy considered the possibility of a proto-Jewish
journey down the Nile, slouching away from this lush island. The
parched Sudan, the wasteland of lower Egypt. That would have been
a more fitting land of Nod for the first patriarchs of the Old
Testament. Dried out with little vegetation, hard shale and
recalcitrant sand. It could have been their forty years in the desert,
and would have made more sense than the short hop from Cairo to
Canaan. Maybe Crash had a point. But it all sounded so just-so. So
convenient and circular.
Finally, they arrived at another shore and the monk looked
around at the deserted patch of sun-baked soil. “This used to be a
coffee farm,” the monk said. He sat down on a rock and plucked at a
stem pushing its way from the earth.
“It still could be,” Roy replied. The ground had been plowed and
neat rows had been dug. The earth was evidently being prepared for
new growth. But the monk shook his head knowingly.
“Chat. They will plant chat here. There is more money in chat.
These islands were once full of coffee trees. But now the people, they
grow chat. It has become an obsession.”
Roy dug his fingers into his scalp. This damn weed, this bitter
and acrid aberration that the Ethiopians now indecently fancied was
strangling all his attempts to find the holy fruit. Chat. Everywhere
chat. And so inferior, so needlessly arduous to ingest. Was Ethiopian
coffee on its way to extinction, to be overthrown by an ignoble
pretender? He shook his head mournfully as the monk pulled the
leaves from his pocket and stuffed them in his mouth, chewing them
like some lugubrious farm animal. He pointed gingerly over to some
shade and they sat for a while. Roy, weakened from his travels,
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