The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

  Mohamed Mugali, the imam from the 7th Street Mosque in Oakland, brought him to Men’s Wearhouse and hooked him up. Mokhtar had no funds for the flight to D.C., so Mugali and a group of activists paid for that, too. Mokhtar showed up at the San Jose Airport at 6:00 a.m., only to find that Mugali, a novice at online ticketing, had booked Mokhtar’s ticket from San Jose, Costa Rica, not San Jose, California.

  The airline took pity on him and he was in D.C. that night. The next day the delegation—they called themselves Yemenis for Change—addressed the State Department, outlining what they saw as the traditional pair of choices for Arab countries in the Middle East, military dictatorship (Libya, Iraq, Egypt) or right-wing theocracy (Iran, Saudi Arabia).

  Their presentation was called the Third Option, and pointed to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, to the tens of thousands of young Egyptian activists who wanted democracy, who harbored no ill will toward the West, who wanted a self-determining nation based on a constitution—a new constitution—and the rule of law.

  The State Department people were politely intrigued. Then the delegation made a request. The United States had to stop supporting Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president of Yemen, to whom they were funneling $200 million in weapons that year.

  The State Department people were nonplussed, but the delegation was invited to the White House, where they gave pretty much the same presentation to a small group of President Obama’s foreign policy advisors. The results were unclear, but the delegation left Pennsylvania Avenue feeling heard and gratified, and Mokhtar and two other delegation members, Mugali and Hesham Hussein, a chemical engineer from California, went on to the Lincoln Memorial.

  “See what you can have in Yemen?” Hussein said. He was standing at the foot of the monument, talking into a video camera—he was making a video message for the protesters in Sana’a. He hoped the video would inspire them. “Wouldn’t you like this kind of freedom in Yemen?” he asked the camera, explaining the work of the delegation, that they’d had audiences at the State Department and White House that day.

  Mokhtar was feeling well pleased. The United States could make terrible mistakes abroad, and particularly in the Middle East, and the matter of the drone strikes was one that the delegation couldn’t agree on how to address, but at the same time there was a certain openness, the ability to say anything you wanted—that was real, and as an American, he felt proud of it. And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a uniformed man moving toward them. The man was wearing blue, and had a badge. Please no, Mokhtar thought.

  “Excuse me,” the man said. He was pink-faced and smiling. “Hi there, how you guys doing?”

  Mokhtar, using his most American English, said they were doing fine. He had a sense where this was headed but prayed he was wrong.

  “What, uh—what language were you guys speaking there?” the officer asked. Mokhtar looked closely at his badge. He wasn’t D.C. police. He was something else. Not Secret Service, but some kind of police force dedicated to the monuments.

  Mokhtar told him they had been speaking Arabic.

  “Arabic, huh?” the officer said, and his eyes seemed to register, for a moment, that he was onto something potentially serious. “You mind if I see your IDs?”

  By now Hussein had stopped videotaping. They handed the officer their IDs, and the officer jogged down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a black car. Mokhtar assumed he was running their names through a database of terror suspects. By now, most of the people visiting the monument were watching the events, stealing glances at Mokhtar’s trio. Some tourists had made a quick exit—possibly thinking some violence was about to erupt between law enforcement and a group of extremists.

  Mokhtar thought of his father, who was already on some kind of registry, he was sure. Just a few years earlier, Faisal and Bushra had been driving through Treasure Island, looking at potential homes to rent, when they were pulled over by police. Someone had seen them driving around the island, Bushra wearing a hijab, and thought they might be casing the area for a potential terrorist strike. Faisal and Bushra had received a kind of apology eventually, but Mokhtar had no doubt that their names, and perhaps his, were on some shadowy database, never to be purged.

  Fifteen minutes later the officer returned to the feet of Lincoln.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “You’re free to go. Or stay.”

  Now, though Mokhtar knew it wasn’t a good idea to escalate any of this, or even extend it a minute into the unknown, he couldn’t help it.

  “Officer,” he said, “what if I told you that I’m an American citizen, and that we just came back from the State Department and the White House, where we were asked to speak? And after a day speaking to important people and feeling good about our democracy, now this will be my experience in D.C.? Because that’s what just happened. If Lincoln were alive, what would he say?” Mokhtar went on this way for a while, until the officer’s face seemed to soften. His eyes weren’t the eyes of a zealot or an ignorant man. They were the eyes of a man acting on orders and with limited information.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” the man said. He apologized a few more times, and seemed to actually mean it. He jogged down the steps, and back into the car, and the car rolled away.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE BUTTON

  FOR THE NEXT FEW years, Mokhtar had no plan. He slept on the floor of his parents’ Treasure Island home, and worked temp jobs. He spent time at UC Berkeley, helping organize students around causes crucial to Arab and Muslim Americans. He spent so much time there that most of the students, Ibrahim Ahmed Ibrahim among them, assumed he was enrolled. But he wasn’t taking classes there, or anywhere. He watched his peers become sophomores, juniors, seniors. He watched them graduate. He watched Miriam graduate. He lost years to indecision, to inaction.

  For a while he worked for Omar Ghazali, a prosperous fruit broker. Omar had grown up in Yemen, and came to the United States in 2004 with nothing and with no particular plan in mind. He drove a taxi for a while, then worked as a security guard, then a valet, and finally tried his hand at buying and distributing California produce. He bought from the Central Valley and sold to San Francisco. Soon, most of the fruit available in Chinatown came through him. The Mission, too. If someone needed ten thousand oranges by the next afternoon, he could get them. Ten tons of Stockton cherries overnight—he could make that happen. He grew a tiny business into a multimillion-dollar operation.

  He gave Mokhtar a job in the Oakland warehouse, loading trucks. Sometimes Mokhtar made deliveries. He called delinquent accounts. He learned that the best California cherries were exported to Japan and could bring as much as one dollar for each cherry. He learned that it mattered which farm produce came from—that an orange from Stockton tasted different from an orange from downstate. He learned, too, that Omar didn’t really need him. He’d given him a job as a favor to a fellow Yemeni, and when Mokhtar had saved enough to pay for classes at City College, Mokhtar was free to go.

  Mokhtar took his savings and enrolled. Then Miriam gave him the satchel. And he bought the laptop with money borrowed from Wallead. He raised money for Somali famine relief. Then he lost it. Omar loaned him the money to give to Islamic Relief, and now Mokhtar was forty-one hundred dollars in debt.

  —

  So he was a doorman, and every day he sat at his Infinity desk, vibrating. Thinking of time slipping. Friends were going to graduate school. His younger brother Wallead was about to graduate from UC Davis. Mokhtar was twenty-five and had four community-college credits to his name.

  He was a doorman. A doorman listening to the inanities and vulgarities of the Infinity residents. A woman had recently spent fifteen minutes on her phone, in the lobby, engaged in a lewd sexual conversation. She knew he could hear; she was no more than five feet away. She didn’t care, or found it entertaining, or alluring, to talk graphically in front of him. Was she worse or better than the resident who made a point to tell him about the eighty thousand dollars’ worth of china she’d had delivered?
Why did he need to know that? At the holidays, she gave him twenty dollars and a cookie.

  But he was thankful for the paycheck. Thankful to be working in a clean and safe place, in a job that was not difficult or dangerous. He had friends in jail. He had friends working in Tenderloin corner stores, shotguns within reach. And Ali Shahin, the kid from the Toukans’ tutoring program, the son of the imam, was dead. He’d gone to Mecca, and within weeks of returning to San Francisco, he was found near Candlestick Park, shot five times in the head. No one knew who did it or why.

  Mokhtar sat at his Infinity desk, knowing that could have been him. He and Ali knew all the same people. Had seen the same things, were seduced by the same temptations. Mokhtar, alive and safe in the Infinity, felt grateful. But he wanted more. He just didn’t know what.

  Justin wanted to be an olive importer. Justin Chen was a friend Mokhtar had made at UC Berkeley—one of the many students there who assumed Mokhtar was enrolled. Every so often Justin would come by and sit on the Infinity lobby’s white leather couch. Maria didn’t allow Lobby Ambassadors to visit with friends, but Justin could pass for a bike messenger, and he and Mokhtar could kill half an hour, Mokhtar hovering between the desk and the front door in his blue suit, opening the Infinity doors while Justin talked about olive oil.

  Justin was finishing up his degree in peace and conflict studies, but what he really wanted to do was grow olives. Mokhtar listened, half-amused and half-exasperated. What did Justin know about olive oil? Justin wanted to buy land in California, grow olives, package olive oil. Specialty olive oil, he said. He’d studied the supply chain and had ideas for improvements. Mokhtar didn’t know what to say. Justin had no family in farming in California. Why olives? Hadn’t he wanted to be a cop at one point? And where would he get the money for an olive farm?

  —

  Sometimes Miriam came by. Miriam had finished college and was helping out at her parents’ deli South of Market. Sometimes she made deliveries for the deli, and when the deliveries were at or near the Infinity, she’d stay with Mokhtar and pass the time until Maria came around.

  Their romance lasted a year, maybe less. There were the obvious obstacles. Mokhtar was from a conservative Yemeni family—the Yemenis being the most insular of Arab communities. It was almost unheard of for a Yemeni American to marry outside the community. Most of Mokhtar’s Yemeni friends, male and female, had entered into arranged unions with Yemenis from the homeland. That was the standard—you go back to Yemen, marry whomever your parents set you up with, natives of Ibb or Sana’a or Aden, the two families going back centuries together. Rare were the instances of Yemeni Americans meeting and marrying other Yemeni Americans, and unheard of was any Yemeni American man marrying a woman whose mother was Palestinian and whose father was a Greek American Jerry Garcia devotee—and both Christian. It was impossible.

  So Mokhtar and Miriam had been careful. They went into it slowly, chastely, always on the lookout for Mokhtar’s dad, circling the city in his bus. When, after weeks of flirtation, they finally admitted to each other that their feelings were romantic, they spent all night walking the city, and at last made their way to Ocean Beach, where Mokhtar had long wanted to take her. The night was clear, the sand was warm from a day of sun, and all was good until it was 3:00 a.m. and they were waiting for the bus home. As it approached, Mokhtar remembered—how could he have forgotten?—that they were on his father’s line, the 5 Fulton, and if he caught them together, there would be formidable woe. So they ran from the bus stop and walked the many miles till she was home.

  Now their friendship was more important to Mokhtar. Miriam was a fighter and he wanted to be a fighter, too. She fought for him. She fought every injustice. She was outraged about Palestine, and outraged by the immigration policies of the U.S. State Department. She encouraged Mokhtar to be vocal. To be involved. She had no fear. Any wrong, local or global, only emboldened her. It was stasis and silence that she couldn’t stand, and every time he saw her, as they sat in the Infinity lobby talking about dreams, or dreams deferred, he felt stronger, more inspired and worse about his current life, opening the doors for wealthy strangers.

  Especially given the existence of the button. It was right next to the phone and had been there all along. When he pushed it, the two glass doors twenty-two feet away opened. The system was quick, quiet, elegant. Using the button, Mokhtar could see a guest coming down the sidewalk and have those doors wide open and ready by the time they arrived. Even better, the button opened both doors. By hand, Mokhtar couldn’t open both doors. They were too heavy and too big. With the button, though, the resident could stride through a fantastically wide and welcoming gateway of glass, unobstructed. They could enter the lobby, and Mokhtar, the Lobby Ambassador, could greet them. He’d be happy to greet them. It cost him nothing to look up and say hello. But to leap from the desk, to rush over, eager and panting, only to push open a door that could be opened with a button—it was a self-evident outrage and an assault on his pride. Especially when the residents passed through the lobby, entered the elevators and flew up, to apartments high above him, places he’d never seen.

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER X

  THE STATUE

  MIRIAM TEXTED ONE DAY. You ever look across the street? she asked. Mokhtar didn’t know what she was talking about. Across the street there’s a statue of a Yemeni dude drinking a big cup of coffee, she told him. She’d just made a delivery from her dad’s deli to the building across the street from the Infinity, and in the courtyard she saw an enormous statue of a man in a thobe with a giant mug lifted to his lips. That’s got to mean something, she said. Maybe this is your thing. What she meant was You’re twenty-five, Mokhtar. Pick a direction for your life.

  He’d been working a hundred and twenty feet away from this statue but he’d never seen it. It was enormous, about twenty feet tall. The man was in midstride, drinking from a giant coffee cup. Mokhtar wasn’t sure about its historical accuracy—the man seemed to be some mash-up of Ethiopian and Yemeni—and why were there cute little flowers all over his thobe? It looked like he was wearing a shower curtain or muumuu. No self-respecting Arab would be wearing flowers all over his thobe.

  But Mokhtar walked into the building, into the lobby across the street from his own lobby, and an encompassing history of coffee in the United States was presented in framed photos and captions. The building had been built by the Hills brothers, Austin and R.W., who in the late 1800s set up a coffee-importing business called Arabian Coffee and Spice Mills. The brothers brought beans to California from around the world and roasted them for distribution all over the West.

  But freshness was a challenge. Every day on oceans or rails and roads, the coffee grew staler. This changed in 1900, when R.W. stumbled upon a way to remove the air from packaging. This became known as vacuum packing, and kept coffee beans fresher for longer, and soon revolutionized the business of coffee. The Hills brothers became phenomenally successful and were instrumental in popularizing coffee in the United States. The graphic version of the statue became their well-known logo, and the company thrived independently for one hundred years. Eventually, long after the brothers died and ceded the company to descendants and strangers, Hills Bros. was sold to Nestlé. Who sold it to Sara Lee. Who sold it to Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA. The company left San Francisco in 1997, moving its headquarters downstate to Glendale.

  But the statue remained, and Mokhtar left the courtyard in a daze. Coffee and Yemen. Some ghost of a memory passed through him. That night, on Treasure Island, he mentioned the statue to his mother. She laughed.

  “We’ve had coffee in our family for hundreds of years,” she said. “Don’t you remember your grandfather’s house in Ibb? He had coffee trees in his yard. He’s still got them. Don’t you know Yemenis were the first to export coffee? Yemenis basically invented coffee. You didn’t know this?”

  —

  Mokhtar went on a research binge. At home, on his phone, he dove in and quickly encountered a long-
running debate about the origins of coffee, and the dual claims, between Ethiopia and Yemen, to its discovery.

  There was widespread agreement that the earliest origin myth involved an Ethiopian shepherd named Khaldi. Apparently Khaldi was far afield with his sheep, allowing them to graze on any vegetation they could find. Every night he slept near them, and all was peaceful until late one night, when he expected them to be resting, he found that his sheep were still up and about. More than up and about—they were jumping, prancing, braying. Khaldi was mystified. He thought they might be possessed. But soon it became clear that they’d been eating beans from the bushes nearby. These were coffee beans. And when Khaldi ate the beans himself, they had the same effect on him—he was shot through with new vigor and mental acuity. He had discovered the coffee bean.

  Wait. No. Not coffee beans, Mokhtar noted. The goats had been eating coffee fruit. Coffee beans were inside the coffee fruit, which grew on lush green bushes. At its most ripe, the coffee fruit was red and looked like a grape. Mokhtar saw the photos online, piles of red cherries like huge ruby-red beads. Coffee was a fruit! Mokhtar remembered this, plucking red cherries from a small tree in his grandfather’s garden. The cherry could be eaten. He remembered eating the flesh of the fruit, which was sweet, and then spitting out the seeds. The seeds were the coffee! It all made sense now. Coffee was a fruit, from a tree, a tree that usually bloomed once a year, and inside each fruit was the coffee bean. And the two halves of the bean were what we typically saw—the tiny bean, oval and with a stripe of concavity down the middle. Two halves of a bean, wrapped inside a fleshy fruit the size of a grape.