He set down the little volume when he heard footsteps upon the stairs. He thought he might have to face Annetje, whose silliness would only irritate him, but instead he saw that Hannah had descended halfway down to the cellar. She held a smoky candle in her hand, and she peered with seeming difficulty into the dimly lit room.

“Are you there, senhor?” she called softly.

Miguel could not think how to reply. Hannah had never before come into the cellar, and that she did so without knocking seemed to him unthinkable. He might have been undressed. He recalled that he had not closed the door, so perhaps Hannah believed that to be a sign of his willingness to receive guests. Such a mistake, he determined, must never again be permitted.

“I’m here, senhora.” He set down his bowl of coffee and moved toward the foot of the stairwell. “Do you require me?”

“I smelled something strange,” she told him, taking a few more steps down. “I wanted to make certain all was well.”

No odor, other than fire or vomit, ought to provoke such a response. The coffee was certainly the culprit. Since he had received the beans of Geertruid, Miguel had grown accustomed to the aroma but recognized that it might smell alien to someone unfamiliar with it.

“Oh, the floor is all wet,” Hannah observed. “Have you spilled something?”

“It is the canal, senhora. It floods at night.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “I worry that you’ll grow ill.”

“I do well enough, senhora. And it is better to sleep in the damp than in a heated room with no windows. I inquired of a physician.”

“I wanted to see about the odor.” She sounded confused, as though she had taken too much wine. Now that he thought about it, her voice did have a loose, unformed quality. She seemed to be making an effort to say something more, as though she could not bring herself to her topic. He knew she took undue pleasure in his company, that she loved to look upon him and make idle chatter with him, but to descend to the cellar-had she discovered some new boldness?

“There is no need to so trouble yourself, senhora. The smell is nothing but a new kind of tea. I am sorry it disturbed you.”

“A new kind of tea!” she nearly shouted, as though this had been what she had longed to hear. Miguel, however, did not quite believe it. It was more, he thought, as though she had latched onto some opportunity. Hannah now ventured another step, until she hovered only a few inches above the wet. “Daniel thinks tea a waste of money, but I love it.”

Miguel noticed that Hannah’s scarf had come askew and he could see a thick lock of her black hair dangling across her forehead. As a woman who had returned to Jewish ways only recently, she perhaps did not feel to the depth of her soul the force of the Law that prohibited a married woman from showing her hair to any man but her husband. Miguel had found the injunction strange when he had first arrived in Amsterdam, but he had absorbed its urgency to such a degree that he would hardly have been more shocked had she exposed to him her bare breasts-which were large and of significant interest to him.

As it was, he found this lock of hair strangely exciting. “Perhaps you might taste it someday,” Miguel said, in rapid words that betrayed his discomfort. His face grew hot, and his pulse quickened. His eyes fixed upon this lock of hair. In an instant, he knew what it must feel like to the touch-smooth and brittle at once-and he could smell its musty aroma. Did she know she so exposed herself? Miguel could hardly think so. He wanted to say something so she might undo the error before Daniel discovered it, but if he were to tell her that she had so disrobed herself, mortification might overwhelm her.

“I’ll be happy to share the tea with you some other time,” he told her. “I hope you will close the door to the room when you depart.”

Hannah could not mistake his meaning. “I am sorry to have bothered you, senhor.” She retreated up the stairs.

He thought to call out, to say she had not bothered him. He could not let her walk away feeling foolish. But he knew that was precisely what he ought to do. Let her feel foolish. Let her come down here no more. No good could come of it.

Miguel returned to his writing table and finished his drink. He would not allow himself to think about her, having trouble enough without letting thoughts of his brother’s wife confuse him. Better he should think of how to extract Joachim Waagenaar from his affairs.

Miguel stumbled upon no solutions though the problem kept him awake. Many hours after the household had fallen into quiet, he slipped up to the attic to awaken Annetje, and only after he had spent himself with her did he find any rest.

from

The Factual and Revealing Memoirs of Alonzo Alferonda

Since Miguel Lienzo developed an interest in the wondrous fruit, I had been meeting him in a little coffee tavern in the Plantage run by a Turk I called Mustafa. This may have been his true name or it may not; I have no way of knowing. It was the name of the Turk in a play I had seen once, and this fellow reminded me of that fictional Mohammedan. If he objected to my calling him by that name, he never told me so.

One afternoon when I met Lienzo I had been fortunate enough to be served a most unusual delicacy by Mustafa. I was sitting and enjoying the drink when Lienzo showed himself most eagerly. He had enlisted my aid in a matter of whale oil, and it had turned out rather well for him.

“I hear you’ve done well,” I said, as I signaled Mustafa to bring a cup of the strange mixture he’d been brewing. “How lucky you are to have Alferonda as a friend.”

“I may have done well, but I haven’t yet got that money,” Miguel said. “The broker who bought it, that fellow Ricardo, is refusing to pay me.”

I knew Ricardo, probably better than Miguel did, and I could not have been less surprised. “What? He’s paid you nothing?”

“Nothing. He’s promised in a month or so, and meanwhile my Muscovy agent is demanding I pay in full what I borrowed of him.”

“I, for one, advise that a man should always pay his debts, but I have a proprietary interest in these matters.”

Mustafa now set the drink before Miguel. It was served in a little white bowl, not much bigger than a hollowed-out eggshell. The drink inside had a yellow, almost metallic-gold color, and there was not much of it, for it was very expensive and very rare. Of course, I would not say as much to Miguel. I would pay for his drink.

“What is this?” he asked me.

“You think there is only one kind of coffee? Coffee is like wine: a hundred varieties and flavors. A hundred nations around the world drink it, each with its own preferences, and each has pleasures for the discriminating drinker. My Turkish friend managed to get a small quantity of this treasure from the East Indies, and I convinced him to share it with us.”

Miguel sniffed as cautiously as a cat and, after saying a blessing, raised the little bowl to his lips. His forehead wrinkled at once. “Curious,” he said. “It is muskier than the other coffees I’ve had, but at the same time thinner. What is it?”

“It’s called monkey coffee,” I said. “There is a particular kind of beast in those tropical forests that eats the coffee fruit. Indeed, it eats only the most perfect berries, and so the locals have learned that a flavorful drink can be made from this creature’s droppings.”

Miguel set down the bowl. “This is made from monkey turds?”

“I would not have put it so boldly, but yes.”

“Alonzo, how can you have fed me this abomination? Besides being disgusting, surely it violates the dietary laws.”

“How so?”

“It comes from a monkey, and monkey flesh may not be eaten.”

“But can monkey turds be eaten? I have never heard of them being forbidden.”

“If we may not eat its flesh, how can we eat its turds?”