Aurelie's Room, The Tsuqeqachye’ki
He did not normally think of such things, and he’d had no right to speak of them. He was ashamed of that as much as anything, that he had been so selfish as to demand comfort from Aurelie, with all that she was in the midst of. He had made her laugh, though, and she was smiling again, as if it had never happened, and he did not think it irredeemable. He hoped it wasn’t, at least, and such hopes felt true, though he supposed he would not have known if they were lies.
Aremu was grinning still when she confirmed it for him, and it didn’t fade. It’s all right, he wanted to say; I think you’ll come to like it. But he didn’t know, not really, and it felt like presuming too much, because he wasn’t even entirely sure what it entailed.
“Oh, yes, of course,” Aremu said, when Aurelie brought the conversation back around to kofi. He picked up the notebook and settled it in his legs once more, holding it in place with his right wrist, and taking his pen in his left hand.
“There are many steps from taking the bean from the plant to having it be ready to drink,” Aremu said, smiling at Aurelie. “We do a lot of them ourselves already, actually. The first step is just cleaning, taking out twigs and leaves, any overripe or underripe berries.”
“Next,” Aremu said, “we dry the beans in the sun. I actually have an idea for a machine to circulate hot air around them and speed up the drying - during the end of the season, when the rains are coming, we’ve lost entire harvests before. If they get too wet, mildew can form. We take them as they dry, turning them over and spreading them out. There’s a feel to it, when they’re done.”
Aremu was smiling. “But that we already do ourselves, and the machine is just an idea, really. It’s the part after that - so the kofi beans is red when it’s taken from the bush. It’s like a little red shell, and inside are two soft mottled beans. The main work is hulling, which is done with millstones, to take the red shell off from the beans. There’s cleaning and sorting, and then, finally, roasting. Then,” he grinned at her, “after all that, you can grind it, brew it, and finally drink it.”
“But much kofi is sold unroasted,” Aremu explained. “Many vendors just want to buy the beans and roast themselves; most Mugrobi prefer to do their own roasting as well. So if we can sort out our own hulling, cleaning, and sorting processes - especially to guarantee quality - we could be largely independent.”
Aremu bent over the paper and began to sketch. “This,” he said, seriously, “is what a hulling machine might look like. The key components...”
Aremu went on; Aurelie was curled up against the bed not too distant. He settled into the comfortable, familiar routine of work; he liked it, what he did, for all he hadn’t once. Such things fascinating him, and he did his best to explain them, too, not just to fill the silence in the small room as clouds and Anaxas passed below, but mostly because he wanted to: to speak, and to be heard.