Coffee & Sugar
"Zucchero, wie Zucker auf Italienisch. Er ist Kaapi, Kaffee auf Tamil," I said, smiling, exhausted, once the two of us had finally caught our breath. Sugar and coffee. Two names that belonged on the same table and, as far as either of us could tell, nowhere else.
A few minutes earlier neither of us had been smiling. He had sensed it before I did, the way he always does. A shift along his spine, black turning to a thin bright line as the hair rose, his usual restless sniffing replaced by a stillness that meant he had stopped being a passenger on this walk and started being in command of it. The barking began before we saw the other dog at all, and by the time Zucchero came into view the two of them were already negotiating something ancient and entirely unnecessary, the leash pulled to its full length like a rope in a contest neither side could afford to lose in front of the village.
Almost three years ago, in an open field, Zucchero slipped his leash and ran straight at Kaapi, fast and unsure of his own intentions. I let Kaapi go too, on instinct, and the two of them met somewhere in the middle, sniffed, and then simply ran, delighted, side by side, like none of the theatre had ever been necessary. I clipped Kaapi back on and walked away pleased with myself. A few minutes later I turned to see Zucchero's owner sprinting across the same field, arms out, shouting a name that was not going to be obeyed. We live in a village with a street through the middle of it and no field wide enough to forgive that kind of freedom twice, so the two of them have stayed enemies ever since, purely on principle, purely because a leash makes strangers of dogs who already know better.
Kaapi, for the record, has papers that say Yasko von Bächligraben, black and brown, a German Pinscher with a coat that catches the light before you even see him coming. We call him Kaapi. Coffee, in the language of a city he has never seen, for a dog who apparently needed no sugar to make an enemy of one.
At the dining table he is a different animal entirely, patient in a way no training class ever taught him. We finish eating first, always, and only once the plates are cleared does he get the crust off the pizza or the heel of the bread, a rule he has kept since he was old enough to understand there was a rule at all. But patience is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that he keeps four separate sets of manners, one for each of us. For my daughter he performs, turning in a full circle before she has even finished asking, sometimes before she has thought to ask. For me he simply waits, no tricks required. For my wife he minds his posture, because she has told him more than once not to eat like a tarpan, and somehow he has understood the assignment. For my son he is pure mischief, a sibling more than a pet. If one of us tries to give my daughter's command in her place, he tilts his head and does nothing, unconvinced that authority can simply be handed across a table like a piece of bread.
There is one sound he saves for the school run, or the days we drop the kids at the station. It starts nasal and quiet as the car begins to pull away, a thin sound through the nose more than the throat, and it escalates the moment he understands he is locked in and cannot fix this himself. By then it has become something closer to a bark and a cry together, and if you listen for long enough it starts to sound almost like words. Don't you see. You are leaving them behind. Wait, wait. He does this until the platform or the school gate is well out of sight, and then, as suddenly as it started, he stops, satisfied that he has said what needed saying, even if no one turned the car around. He resigned himself to the reunion only a few hours later.
