End of the World and Coffee

       "Daddy, what is ‘coffee’?" Ragnar asked his father at dinner. Árni started. "Where did you hear it?" "In a book about Yule lads, Hildur’s father was reading it to us yesterday. It said, once giantess Grýla ran out of coffee beans and used goat poop instead. And the picture was like a soup, but brown, like... like poo. What sort of bean is that? Does doc Fredarson have them in the greenhouse?" Árni looked around in search of prompts. What explanation would be boring enough to stop further questions? “No, he doesn’t. And it’s just some grass, like lupin, and a tea of its seeds." "And is it grown in Hveragerði?" "No. It doesn’t grow anywhere now. It’s all eaten by sheep." Árni wasn’t going to explain that coffee is a tropical bush. Ragnar would pile too many questions about ‘tropical’, and tropics, and Árni had absolutely no wish to be reminded of the other parts of the world, flags of different countries on barges and yachts, of people on board of those yachts, waving, shouting, smiling, and of turret mount turning with a screech to wipe another red dot from the radars… Don’t remind of it, please! As if it were that easy not to be reminded of a whole life. Books, movies, gadgets, TV, Internet, mobile phones, coffee, vanilla, chocolate, bananas—no, he heard, there are some bananas grown in the greenhouses of Reykir. German cars, French wine, Spanish vacations, Chinese electronics—too many of them to remember. Too many to forget. After discharge from the coast guard, Árni took just some printouts on sheep breeding with him to the countryside. Other people had a larger stock. He couldn’t make his neighbour Bjarni burn all books for children just because they mentioned some things gone. He couldn’t forbid Ragnar to play with Bjarni’s daughter, there were no other children around that age in the village. Some oriental parable (here it went again! He must forget about East, West, South, let there be just North...) said that it was impossible not to think about a white monkey. But Árni was trying his best. During the days, there was so much to think about instead, like where to obtain pipes for a hot pipeline, or, where to arrange a compost pile, or where to scrape some piece of metal for the smith to make a new spade. Factory-forged products would never be imported from China or America anymore. Just like coffee. Later at night, he stared into darkness and listened hard to Guðrún’s breath, but it didn’t have its usual lulling effect. His mind kept pushing up the sound of a coffee machine purring, then turning it into the rattle of a turret. His heart raced as if he did down a large cup of coffee before going to bed. And a memory of the coffee smell lingered around.