Seven Minutes Late

Hakan arrived at the café in Lisbon eleven minutes early, which he later admitted was not the behaviour of a man who was indifferent to the occasion. It had been twelve years since he had last seen Jun-ho, the quiet Korean exchange student with whom he had shared a flat, a leaking kettle and a passion for terrible films. Letters had given way to emails, emails to messages and, eventually, messages to the occasional birthday greeting. Hakan had never decided to stop writing; it had simply happened, the way a tide leaves a harbour. He chose a table by the window and ordered a coffee he did not particularly want. At the agreed hour, the door remained closed. At five past, he was composing in his head the speech of the reasonable man ("Of course, no, it's fine, traffic is terrible"). At ten past, the speech had acquired an edge. What annoyed him was not the delay itself but the discovery that, after all these years, a man could still be so casually unreliable. Jun-ho appeared seven minutes after the hour, which in itself was hardly scandalous. He was out of breath, his hair was damp from the rain, and he was carrying a paper bag in both hands as one carries something that might break. "I am so sorry," he said, and then, in a tone that suggested he had rehearsed it on the tram, "I tried to be early." Hakan's carefully prepared irritation vanished so rapidly that he was almost embarrassed. They stood facing each other for a moment, two men uncertain whether to shake hands or embrace, before settling on an awkward compromise that involved both and satisfied neither. "I went back for this," Jun-ho explained, pushing the bag across the table. Inside, wrapped in newspaper, was a dented kettle, a replica, as it turned out, of the one in their old flat, found after weeks of searching in a second-hand shop. "Terrible kettle," he said. "But I thought we should drink tea from it." Hakan laughed, louder than the café probably approved of. Had anyone told him, an hour earlier, that he would be near tears over a piece of kitchenware, he would have dismissed the idea as absurd. They stayed until the waiters began to stack the chairs. Not once did either mention the years of silence. It seemed to them both unnecessary, in the way that explanations often are between people who need no introduction.