The Café Without a Sign

The café had no sign because Abu Nizar did not believe in signs. This was not an aesthetic choice. It was a position. Signs, in his view, were for businesses that needed to explain themselves. A café that required a sign to attract customers was a café with a problem that a sign could not fix. His wife, Umm Nizar, thought this was idiotic but had stopped saying so in approximately 1998. The café occupied a ground-floor room on a side street in Amman that had no particular reason to attract foot traffic. There were no shops nearby. The nearest mosque was three streets away. A hardware store on the corner had closed in 2011 and now existed as a permanently lowered shutter on which someone had written, in English, "OPEN SOON," a promise that had aged past optimism into surrealism. Despite this, the café was full every evening. This was because Abu Nizar made the best Arabic coffee in the Jabal al-Weibdeh district, and possibly in Amman, and possibly — though he would never say this because boasting was worse than signs — in Jordan. His method was simple. He roasted the beans himself, in a pan, over a gas flame, stirring with a wooden spoon that was older than his marriage. He ground them with cardamom in a brass mortar. He boiled the coffee in a dallah that his father had given him, which had a dent in the side from when his brother had knocked it off a shelf in 1974. The dent did not affect the coffee. Abu Nizar kept the dent for the same reason some men keep scars: not out of sentiment, but because repairing it would erase something that had happened. The customers were regulars. This was inevitable. You could not find the café unless someone brought you, and once someone brought you, you became a regular, because the coffee was that good and the chairs were that comfortable and Abu Nizar remembered what you liked and made it without asking. Hassan came at six. He was a retired civil servant who had worked in the Ministry of Water for thirty-three years and who could, if encouraged, talk about water infrastructure for longer than most people could listen. He was not encouraged. He drank his coffee and read the newspaper and made small sounds of disapproval at the news, which he did not share because he had learned that other people's reactions to the news were less satisfying than his own. Dr. Salwa came at seven. She was a dentist who did not talk about dentistry, which everyone appreciated. She drank her coffee with sugar, which Abu Nizar considered a minor betrayal but prepared without comment. Faris came at eight. He was young, maybe twenty-five, and he brought a laptop and sat in the corner and wrote things he did not show anyone. Abu Nizar had glanced at the screen once, by accident, and seen poetry. He said nothing. Poetry was a private condition, like a rash. You did not mention it unless the person brought it up. The café closed at ten. Abu Nizar washed the cups himself. Umm Nizar had offered to help. He had declined. Washing the cups was part of the job, and the job was the whole thing — the roasting, the grinding, the brewing, the serving, and the cleaning — and removing any piece of it would be like removing a verse from a poem. The poem would still exist. But it would be wrong. Some evenings, after the washing, he sat in the empty café and drank a cup himself. The room smelled of coffee and cardamom and the particular warmth that accumulates in a place where people have been talking and are now gone. The chairs were still arranged the way the customers had left them. Hassan's pushed back from the table at an angle that suggested a man who stands up decisively. Dr. Salwa's tucked in neatly. Faris's pulled close, hunched, the chair of someone who leans into his work. Abu Nizar drank his coffee and did not think about signs. The café did not need a sign. It needed coffee, chairs, and the specific silence of a room that knows it will be full again tomorrow.