# Kopi tubruk

The Kopi Phoenam, in the fragment of Chinatown in Makassar that survives between the Anglican cathedral and the parking lot of the Pasar Pabaeng-Baeng market, has a ceiling-fan rod that has been tilted since 1983, the year a drunk patron hung a cloth jacket on it and the weight bent the metal of the arm for good. Pak Yusuf Bakri, sixty-one years old, white shirt with half sleeves, black sock, wooden clogs that over the years have worn down the parquet of the corridor from the counter to the bathroom at the back, has never had it straightened, not because it costs — it costs thirty or forty thousand rupiah, half a day's work for anyone — but because the tilted rod still turns, the air pushes the mosquitoes against the back wall, and Pak Yusuf has learned in forty years behind a counter that not all crooked things need to be straightened, some work precisely because they are crooked, like certain brass spoons with a curved handle, and like boiling water which, if poured onto coarsely ground Toraja coffee from an angled position of twelve degrees, makes the powder rise and then settle with a movement that anyone who drinks kopi tubruk recognizes, the sound of a breath full of small bubbles, a sound the nine-bar espresso machine in the new franchise fifty meters from the Kopi Phoenam does not make and will never make; and for this reason he keeps the Casio in a drawer.

At three in the afternoon of April 17, a man in his fifties walks in, thin, grey linen jacket, metal glasses, brown leather briefcase, arrived from Sultan Hasanuddin airport that morning, with an appointment an hour away two blocks off. The man sits at the counter, sets the briefcase between his legs, does not order. Pak Yusuf does not ask what he wants, because whoever walks into the Kopi Phoenam at this hour wants a kopi tubruk, and whoever wants anything else leaves immediately on seeing the jute sacks of Toraja on the counter, and the man has not left. Pak Yusuf takes the white cup from the shelf behind — the cup from the Bing Rex Bandung 1982 set, a service he bought at a flea market in Medan in 1994 — puts in three scoops of coarse grind from the jute sack. Three brass scoops equal to a cucchiaino heaped and a half each. The water in the aluminum kettle has been boiling for twenty seconds. He pours from the angle of twelve degrees. The coffee rises and settles with the sound of the small bubbles. He covers the cup with the white porcelain saucer with a green rim. He sets it down in front of the man. He says only: four minutes. The man nods, takes out a notebook.

It is the three minutes of waiting that are the longest moment at the counter of the Kopi Phoenam, because they are minutes in which everything happens except the thing the customer is there for, and in those three minutes, on the day of April 17, a nineteen-year-old boy walks in wearing the white polo of the franchise that will open next week fifty meters away, a polo with the embroidered logo of a stylized cup from which a spiral of steam rises. The boy carries in his hand an A5 flyer printed on heavy paper, crosses the corridor worn down by Pak Yusuf's clogs, reaches the counter, lays the flyer on the dark-wood surface beside the jute sack of Toraja, greets in formal Indonesian. Pak Yusuf takes the flyer without looking at it, lays it on the shelf behind, next to the week's receipts. The boy stays a second longer than necessary. He looks at the cup covered by the saucer, looks at the brass spoon, looks at the aluminum kettle. He asks a question that at the Kopi Phoenam has never been asked by a nineteen-year-old in forty-two years of opening: Bapak, do you also serve espresso? And Pak Yusuf, who to that question could have answered yes, could have said: we are about to install a machine, come back next week — a reply you give to a boy who brings a flyer, a diplomatic reply which in the urban Indonesian of northern Makassar is the correct reply to a trader in the same sector who drops by to introduce himself — Pak Yusuf says: no, kopi tubruk, and he says it in the dry tone he uses when the children of lawyer Darmawan come by wanting a Coca-Cola and the Kopi Phoenam does not sell Coca-Cola and never will.

The boy nods, says terima kasih, leaves. The flyer stays on the shelf behind, covered by last Tuesday's receipt. The man at the counter lifts the saucer. The coffee is ready. The dark-brown grounds have settled at the bottom of the cup in a disk two millimeters thick. The man lifts the cup with two fingers, without touching the handle, takes a slow sip, sets it down. He writes something in the notebook. Takes a second sip. The coffee is still hot, bitter, with the note of the high land of northern Sulawesi that Pak Yusuf has known since the age of twenty-two, when his father, who was the grandfather of lawyer Darmawan's children, taught him to recognize coarsely ground Toraja from finely ground Robusta by smell alone, with his eyes closed, and he got it wrong the first three times and then never got it wrong again.

The man finishes the coffee. Leaves the grounds in the cup, as one does. Pays eight thousand rupiah, adds a thousand-note as a tip. Takes the briefcase. Nods goodbye, walks out into the heat of Jalan Sulawesi. Pak Yusuf takes the cup, carries it to the sink at the back, rinses it. The coffee grounds go down the pipe. He dries the cup with the cotton cloth. Puts it back on the shelf of the Bandung set. Then he takes the flyer from the shelf behind. On the flyer there is the boy in the white polo next to a chromed espresso machine. The caption says: fresh espresso, nine bar, opening April 24, launch promotion thirty-eight percent off. Pak Yusuf does not know what nine bar means. He folds the flyer into four. Puts it under the brass ashtray on the counter. The next customer walks in at three thirty-eight.