“Entschuldigung!” She’s waving at me. I pretend not to see her. Go to the toilets in the staff closet to scroll on my phone. The café is churning that Saturday. A queue outside the door, towers of dirty plates piling in the kitchen sink, pastry flakes and puddles of coffee all over the tables, which everyone is taking issue with. All the baguettes are gone, which pisses everyone off. “No,” I keep telling the customers in my still rudimentary German. “They were sold out by ten this morning.”
“How can they be sold?” They’ll say, and I’ll be kind of startled by that, how hauntingly dimwitted grown adults can be. Hoping it’s an act—feigned outrage over bread, a performance to bully me into a miracle. The alternative is scarier.
But I’ll reply to them in a measured voice. “People buy them, and they sell out,” staring blankly into their faces until they walk out muttering. They hate that, the long, condemning silences. It reminds them of their powerlessness. We’re all powerless. I realise that now. It is the degree that varies, the when and where. In the cafe, I have power over the quality of the coffees. The little roll of paper inside the receipt machine. The cleanliness of the floor, the tables, the toilets. Most else, I hold none at all. That’s the issue today, with the woman waving at me. I can’t control how much time the croissants need to bake. They take twenty minutes, and she wants to argue with me about the physics of the oven.
“A customer is asking for you,” Sandra, pounding on the cubicle door. “On table six.”
“Yeah, I’m just waiting for her to leave.”
“No. Get out,” she rattles the door. Sandra is like this every shift. She has no respect for my privacy, and truly, in her heart, believes she’s better than me in every possible capacity. I loathe that. She’s not my manager, she just wishes she was, but we all wear the same shitty apron. Yes, I’m bad at my job, like catastrophically bad, but most of that comes down to effort. I’d rather die than try hard at this, like Sandra. Caring about being a waiter would sink me into a catatonic depression.
A mark on my knuckle. A scab, surrounded by shiny pink skin, cracked and hardened. Last week, I burned it on a grill. Not on purpose. Sandra acted like I did. Sneering at me and everything, because the chef bandaged up my hand and made me go home. “This is just what you wanted. I hope you’re happy,” she said. When I was outside and knew she couldn’t hear me, I called her an insulting name under my breath. Felt brief vindication, defiance, then very sad and pathetic. This is the new rhythm of my life.
“Jude, I will report you for this.”
I stuff my phone in my pocket and yank the door. She’s standing there with her arms crossed. “Excuse me, please,” I say.
She looks up at me, face all twisted and incredulous.
“You’re blocking my way out of the toilet, Sandra.” She moves, and then I’m pushing back into the café. A wall of noise and activity, of clattering ceramic and the scrape of cutlery. Thud and swish of the door. Steamer hissing, milk jug banging on the counter. Ears ringing with the chaos. “Entschuldigung!” That woman.
“Yes, madam.”
“I have been asking for you repeatedly.”
“What is it?”
“Well, as you can see, I am still waiting for my croissant.”
Checking the clock above the kitchen door, turning back to her. “It’s been ten minutes since you ordered.”
“Yes?”
“And the croissants take twenty. We spoke about this already.”
Trembling hands, palms upward and signaling to me her coffee cup, empty, a brown circle around the rim. “As you can see, I have finished my coffee.”
Wondering if we’re going to do a riddle. “Yes, I see that.”
“I wanted to have my coffee and croissant at the same time.”
“When you ordered, I asked you if you wanted your coffee immediately, or if you wanted to wait for it.”
“I did not want to wait twenty minutes for my coffee.”
“Okay, then you understand why the coffee and the croissant could not be served at the same time. We were putting a fresh batch of pastries in the oven when you arrived. I told you so.”
Her eyes are watering now. She’s upset, or enraged, both at once. “How difficult is it,” she says, voice climbing with every word, “to serve coffee and pastry at the same time? What kind of establishment is this?”
“You could just have another coffee when the pastries are ready.”
“Oh!” she cries. “So I will have to wait for my coffee, then? Wait for all these people to be served before me?” gesturing around her to the heaving café. Dozens of people, and more crowding inside every minute. “Then I will have eaten my croissant by the time my coffee arrives.”
“You could just not eat the croissant. You could leave it on the plate while you wait.”
Her palm smacks against the table, her teaspoon rattling off the saucer. “How stupid are you?” She says, and I blink. Tears in her eyes on the brink of spilling. Looking into them, I wonder what kind of life she has had to lead her to this specific moment. Deranged, hissing at a foreign waiter in some Berlin café because of her indignant refusal to understand the way things basically work. Does she have a family? Would they agree with this outburst or chide her for it? Bizarre to think of her doing this where others can see her.
“I don’t know what to do. Maybe it is a problem with my understanding. German is not my first language.”
“Coffee!” she howls, the whole table shaking now under the force of her rage, gripping the edge of it like she’s afraid she’ll take off like a rocket. “And a croissant. At. The. Same. Time. Can you understand that?”
“Yes. In both cases, you will have to wait. You will have to not drink the coffee or not eat the croissant until the other is ready. I honestly don’t see why that’s so hard for you.”
“I want to speak to the manager.”
“She’s having lunch.”
“Then I am leaving!” A threat, she thinks. Excellent news for me. The sooner the better, actually. I tell her she’ll have to pay for her coffee since she drank it. She hates this. Digs her hand into her bag and produces a handful of coins. Someone at another table gasps as she tosses them right at me. I watch one, two, five cent copper pieces ricochet off me and bounce onto the floor, and don’t bend to retrieve them. Wouldn’t dare crawl around on this floor for money. Keep my chin high.
“Don’t think that’s the right amount.”
She snatches her coat from the back of the chair and flounces off. I just clear the empty cup and bring it into the kitchen. When I reemerge, there’s a coffee order to be delivered. Things just move on like that in here. There’s no time to ruminate. An Americano. Take it to table ten. Easy. Fuck that woman. I hope she has a bad day. I hope her life is bad already, and this day is just the culmination of her choices.
Someone’s child is plucking the copper coins from the floor around the other side of the counter. Don’t see them until too late. Panic, tripping myself up to avoid stepping on little fingers, and the Americano tips over in its saucer. I cry out, the pain of it, of boiling water spilling over my thumb, the side of my hand. Screaming down my wrist. Too afraid of breaking dishes to let the thing fall, so I just hold it and let it burn me. Watch it doing it, scorching my skin furious red. Toss it onto the counter, coffee splashing over the napkins.
The intense pain of it. This is the same hand with the scab from last week, and I’m thinking of the dystopian horror of it all. Burning and scarring my body for a job that pays me seven euros an hour. And nobody is helping me. They’re all just having their lunch and gazing on in dull surprise.
“Jude!” Sandra appears. Livid about something as I clutch my throbbing hand. “You spilled coffee on the napkins. That was our last packet.”
“Yeah. I burned my hand.”
“Oh, of course you did.” Now she’s going off. “Perfect timing, when the café is looking like this. When Claudia is on her lunch break. You do this on purpose. And why are the tables so dirty? Why are there coins on the floor? You weren't going to pick them up?”
She’s still going on at me while I turn and walk away from her, my skin on fire, still burning itself. A vicious pain. I hear her ask where I’m going. Into the staff closet, this shitty scrap of space we’re entitled to. Two meters squared, with a toilet. Entitled for fifteen minutes to shovel my lunch into me on a plastic chair underneath the coat hanger, batting scarves and sleeves out of my face.
“Jude! I’m talking to you. Are you deaf?” She’s followed me in like a hurricane, barrelling through the door. There’s a childhood memory in this scene. It’s in my stomach, too, that lurching, guilty feeling. The knowledge that I’m in deep trouble and I have walked away, and now someone has come to finish me off.
My head’s ringing, but I maintain a blank expression. I’m an adult now. I can do what I want. I calmly remove my apron and leave it on the chair.
“What are you doing? You had your break an hour ago. You can’t…”
I get my coat and scarf and pull them on.
“Jude, I’m serious. I’m going to tell Claudia and she will not be happy about this,” shaky voice on her. Rules are a big deal to Sandra. She fears losing this job. It makes me feel sorry for her.
Push through the door into the cafe. The café is a furnace behind me—noise, steam, heat, Sandra’s voice. Then the door swings shut. Muffled. Distant. The cold bites my skin, burning worse than the coffee. My bike lock clicks. I pedal away, and I never come back.
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