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The café occupies the ground floor of a three-storey building next to the river. Cobbled underfoot, the open-air patio leads an old wooden railing beyond which the Thames makes its way. The patio is often busy, especially at night, no matter what the weather. It is a dingy place that smells of cabbage, coffee and cigarettes, even though you aren't supposed to smoke inside. The outside smells less of cabbage and more of the river. In fact, it stinks of the river, but there are worse things to stink of.
The owner is a slight, oily man who was born in Magadan and smuggled to British Columbia by his father, a merchant seaman who had relatives in the interior, in the Okanogan valley. Three cousins had been sent to the safety of that lush valley during the Blitz, and after the war they took the young boy to England with them. He would never again see his mother or his motherland, but after he grew up he married a Russian girl. You can't get that sort of thing out of your blood. It was bad enough that his mother was a Russian slut who foisted her child off on relatives who didn't even know her. The family would shake their heads ruefully. They would sigh and say, "Russians!" as if that explained everything.
There is a rumour that the not-Russian's Russian wife was a Russian spy at one time, back when she was young and shapely enough for such extravagances. Now she spends her days making rye bread and borscht and has no shape at all. She is older than the owner, or looks it, and pays little attention to the customers. She leaves that to her husband.
The Arbat Café on the Thames River, as Russian as any Russian café ever was in England, while simultaneously being not Russian at all, run by a man who never set foot on the Arbat, keeps British hours and serves British scones with the thick coffee, or tea if you insist. Very cosmopolitan. Perhaps this is what drew Nikolai Luzhin to the place. It was the only taste of home he could stomach when he needed a place to get away from the actually authentic Russian restaurant where he did most of his business.
Nikolai did no business dealings at the Arbat Café. No one bothered him there. Tourists who were partaking in the modern multiculturalism of London paid him no heed. Russians recognized him for what he was and kept their distance. The seats were hard, the tables rickety, both were often damp. The wind was foul and the coffee more Turkish than Russian. It was the perfect place to be alone and think.
Nikolai needed to think.
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