by Dave Eggers
Mokhtar pleaded with the soldiers. “Please. I just want to show them true Yemeni food.” Every time one of the soldiers looked at Willem or Camilo, though, Mokhtar assumed they were sizing up the two foreigners for resale value.
“We’re really just going out to dinner,” Mokhtar said, and even named the restaurant, noting how much better it was than the bland food at the hotel. “You guys can come with us. Meet us there. I’ll buy you dinner.”
Finally the soldiers relented. They let Mokhtar’s group pass, and once they were at the restaurant, eating a fitful dinner, Mokhtar half expected at least one of the soldiers to show up. None did.
—
In good times and bad, kidnappings of foreigners were common in Yemen. In most cases the kidnappings were motivated by a tribe’s desire for money or a prisoner swap, or for the Yemeni government’s attention to their needs and demands. They would kidnap visitors from Europe and Asia and hold them in hopes of bringing awareness to flaws in the electrical grid in their region, for example. Almost without exception the captives were treated well and released unharmed. A year earlier, a Dutch couple, kidnapped outside their home in one of the safest neighborhoods in Sana’a, was held for six months and released unharmed. The couple praised the treatment they’d received and was careful to say how much they still loved Yemen. It was a bizarre but accepted cost of traveling in the country—the imminent possibility one would be kidnapped in order to solve an issue with regional infrastructure.
But the era of al-Qaeda brought a distinct change. In 2009, the mutilated bodies of two German nurses and a South Korean teacher were found, and these and other incidents underlined the marked difference between the Yemeni way and the way of al-Qaeda. All this was on Mokhtar’s mind. He couldn’t put Willem in danger, or allow Willem to put himself in any danger. From the restaurant, they went home shaken but still committed to their coffee caravan.
—
The following night, Willem, Mokhtar and Camilo were invited to dinner at the home of the American head of the NGO, funded by USAID, that was overseeing the entire agricultural project in Yemen. She lived close to the conference hotel, but she insisted they travel in a convoy of three vehicles, with armed contractors. The SUVs passed through the hotel gates and entered her building through another gate, past another pair of armed guards. They’d driven one block.
Before dinner, she served whiskey to Willem and Camilo and tea to Mokhtar, and they talked about the future of coffee in Yemen, and of Yemen itself. She wasn’t optimistic. She’d been in Afghanistan, she said, and the situation in Yemen was far worse. It wasn’t just the Houthis, she said. For Americans, the Houthis were more of a known quantity, and despite their “Death to America” slogans, their behavior so far had been, for a rebel army slowly encircling the city, more or less civilized. For any Americans, or any Westerners, really, the concern was al-Qaeda.
She told them not to leave their hotel again, and traveling anywhere outside the city was out of the question. They couldn’t get a permit to do so anyway, and she couldn’t help them get one.
The coffee caravan was dead. Willem and Camilo were in Yemen as guests of USAID, and the United States couldn’t be responsible for their safety anymore. They had to leave.
The next day, they flew from Sana’a, headed for Ethiopia.
—
Mokhtar lay on the floor of his aunt and uncle’s house, staring at the wall. Willem was gone, and he’d be booking his own flight home soon. It was all over before it began. He’d go back to California. He had to retake the Q test anyway. Maybe finish college. And there was always law school. But he needed money for all that. He thought of the Infinity. He could sleep on his parents’ floor on Treasure Island and go back to being a doorman. Save money for three or four years. He’d have his undergraduate degree by the time he was, what, thirty? Night closed around him. When the 4:00 a.m. call to prayer came, he hadn’t slept.
CHAPTER XXI
A DREAM IN DIFFERENT CLOTHING
IN THE MORNING, HIS young cousins woke and ate and left for school, and Mokhtar had no place to be. He had no meetings and no plan. The coffee workshop was over and he was alone. He knew nothing, so could do nothing. He didn’t know much about varietals and cultivation, soil types or irrigation. He had no money and his heroes were gone.
He wandered Sana’a that day, feeling trampled upon but then again free of the burden of dreams. He had had a dream, and dreams are heavy things, requiring constant care and pruning. Now his dream was gone, and he walked the streets like a man without anything to lose. He could do anything. He could do nothing. He could even stay here, in Yemen. He walked by the University of Sana’a and for no reason he went inside, meandering through the dark ancient hallways until he saw a notice for an agricultural festival happening the next day. Everything grown in Yemen would be represented—bananas, mangos, figs, honey, coffee.
He expected little from it, but he planned to go. He had nowhere else to be. He went back to Mohamed and Kenza’s house and again had a sleepless night. In the bleakest hour, though, he thought of a fruit tree he’d known as a kid. It was in the middle of the Tenderloin. There were few trees in the neighborhood—maybe there were none—none but this one. It was on Ellis Street, just a block from Glide Memorial Church, where the homeless and the city’s most vulnerable lined up for food and shelter. It was a lemon tree. As a kid he’d discovered it, an actual lemon tree in the Tenderloin. At first he thought it was fake—the fruit looked too pristine, too yellow, its skin too smooth. But then he took a lemon down from the tree and smelled it; it was real. He brought it home and cut into it; it was succulent and alive.
On Mohamed and Kenza’s floor, he fell back asleep thinking of that lemon and that tree and having a faint idea why.
—
When he arrived at the festival the next day, he almost laughed. The USAID gathering had been tiny by comparison. The University of Sana’a Agricultural Festival was outdoors and was enormous and, most crucially, it was homegrown, encompassing anyone in Yemen cultivating anything. There were almond growers, honey and guava farmers, wheat producers, purveyors of agricultural equipment and pesticides. All the coffee people were there, too. Mokhtar’s pride swelled, remembering how fertile Yemen was.
Dressed as Rupert, Mokhtar went table to table, unsure how to present himself. Was he with USAID? Not really. The Coffee Quality Institute? No. Was he a student, as his grandfather had recommended? Don’t tell them you’re a buyer, Hamood had said. Willem had said the same thing. Make no promises.
One coffee co-op showed him their beans, which were cracked and of wildly uneven quality. He couldn’t help pointing this out to them. And then he couldn’t help showing them photos, on his phone, of what proper cherries looked like, all ruby red, none of them green. He showed them a photo of an Ethiopian drying bed full of red cherries. The people from the co-op had never seen anything like it.
Mokhtar left the festival with a pocketful of business cards and phone numbers. In particular, a handful of people had stuck in his mind. There was Loof Nasab, a seasoned NGO worker and botanist. And there was Yusuf Hamady, president of the al-Amal Cooperative in Haymah. That night, lying on Mohamed and Kenza’s floor, listening to the sounds of Sana’a at night, he had the thought that he could do his own coffee caravan. Without Willem, he would have to do all the talking. He couldn’t follow, couldn’t learn while quietly observing. He would have to pose as some kind of eminence, someone worthy of the farmers’ time.
—
The next day he called every number he’d gathered, leaving messages and trying to set up appointments. He reached Yusuf Hamady. Mokhtar asked if he’d be able to show him around the farm the next day. Yusuf agreed, so Mokhtar called Loof Nasab. Would he be willing to come along on a visit to Haymah? Loof said he would. Loof, Mokhtar thought, could be a sort of Yemeni Willem, a mentor, an expert. He knew the regions and knew coffee. Beyond that, he knew very little about Loof, and tried not to worry about whether Loof w
ould remain a helper or become an impediment. The words of his grandfather were foremost in his mind: Don’t trust anyone. Don’t partner with anyone. Keep a low profile.
Mokhtar woke at dawn. He and Yusuf planned to meet Loof at six, at the roundabout under the Panasonic building in Sana’a. Mokhtar got up, washed, tucked his bedroll into the corner of Mohamed and Kenza’s living room, and went about the careful process of establishing his look. The look was important, the accessories were crucial. He had to compensate for his youth with the accoutrements of an established man.
First, the watch. Any man of means in Yemen had an impressive watch. Mokhtar’s was Swiss made, silver and sturdy. Not so expensive that it would inspire jealousy or theft, but it was the watch of an executive, a world traveler.
Next, the glasses. He’d only recently realized he was nearsighted. One day a few years back, he’d tried on a friend’s glasses as a joke, and suddenly the world was in high-def. He was on Treasure Island, getting off the bus at night, and when he put the glasses on he saw the crisp outline of the city, the stars, the carved lines of every wave in the Bay. He’d bought hexagonal frames, wire rimmed, made in 1941. They wrapped around the back of the ear, giving him the air of a scholar not unfamiliar with adventure.
Next, the notebook. In Oakland, he and Justin had gone to a store that sold handmade leather goods; Mokhtar wanted a durable but antiquarian-looking notebook that he could take out at key moments, jotting down crucial details from his farm visits. They picked an elaborate notebook whose pages were kept closed by a long leather strap. Never mind that he wouldn’t, in the end, use the notebook or the pen much. It was far easier to type notes into his phone, where he could collate and e-mail them.
The most critical part of the uniform, though, was the ring. The ring had its roots in Yemeni history, in coffee, in the Arab Spring that had led to the downfall of President Saleh. Mokhtar had gotten it a few years earlier and Tawakkol Karman, then the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Prize, and the first Arab woman, and first Yemeni, was instrumental in putting it on Mokhtar’s finger. Karman, who won the Nobel for her work organizing Yemenis during the Arab Spring, came to San Francisco in 2011 to speak at the Boalt School of Law at UC Berkeley. Mokhtar was assigned to be her translator, and at a reception after the event, Mokhtar met one of the organizers, Mohamed Alemeri. Alemeri was wearing a ring with intricate carvings in silver, a carnelian stone inside.
“I know where that ring comes from,” Mokhtar said. There was a neighborhood in Sana’a, Jawhash, where silversmiths, historically most of them Jewish, had been making these rings for centuries. When he told Alemeri this, he was astounded. In the Arab way—make note of something, compliment anything, and it will be offered to you—Alemeri insisted Mokhtar have the ring. “I can’t,” Mokhtar said. They went back and forth until Tawakkol Karman intervened. “Take the ring,” she said. So he took it and knew it would come in handy in Yemen; he could point to the rubylike carnelian stone as the ideal color for a coffee cherry.
He packed a knife, too. Not a Yemeni jambiyah, the traditional dagger worn in the belt, over the stomach, but an American-made knife, twelve inches long, that he wore in a leather side holster he borrowed from Hamood. Looking something like a cross between Indiana Jones and a graduate student of agriculture, Mokhtar was ready.
—
He left Kenza and Mohamed’s apartment at 6:00 a.m. and went to the roundabout that he and Yusuf had agreed upon, the one just outside Sana’a, under the Panasonic building. When Mokhtar arrived, he saw Loof, and looked around, and immediately saw Yusuf, head of the al-Amal Cooperative. He waved to him, and then Mokhtar saw Ali Mohamed, the head of marketing and sales from a different cooperative. No, Mokhtar thought. No, no, no.
Had he double-booked? He knew he had, but didn’t want to believe it just yet. Mokhtar talked to Yusuf. Yusuf told him they’d agreed on this day, this time, this location. But why was Ali Mohamed there? In the flurry of calls he’d made the day before, he must have booked Mohamed Bazel, too. Mokhtar went to him, feeling his stomach in his shoes. Ali Mohamed insisted that he and Mokhtar had agreed upon this day, this time, this roundabout.
He walked back to Yusuf and asked about the possibility of visiting both farms on the same day. Maybe he could go to Yusuf’s co-op first, and then to Ali Mohamed’s?
“They’re hours away from each other,” Yusuf said. “And to do this right, you really have to spend the day with us.”
Mokhtar cursed himself. What kind of moron double-books his first visit to Yemeni coffee farms? He’d immediately instilled doubt in the minds of the first two cooperatives he intended to work with. But for now he had to choose.
He chose Yusuf. He’d met Yusuf at the University of Sana’a, and he seemed the most conscientious.
Mokhtar went to Ali Mohamed and apologized, telling him that they would have to do it another time. Anytime, he said. I’ll make it up to you. There’d been a mistake, one of those things.
Ali Mohamed pulled away, and Mokhtar knew he’d woken before dawn to be there at 6:00 a.m., and now he had a two-hour drive ahead of him, and all of this was for nothing.
“Sorry!” he yelled again as the truck sped off.
—
Mokhtar and Loof went back to Yusuf and got in the truck. Inside they met Mohamed Basel, Yusuf’s right-hand man. Yusuf, tall and thin and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, was president of the al-Amal Cooperative, and Mohamed, shorter, sardonic and with a cheek full of qat, was in charge of sales and marketing.
They talked idly about Sana’a and the roads and their meeting at the university. Yusuf had grown up in the village they were going to, and had been educated at the University of Sana’a and later at the Yemeni air force academy. He’d flown jets for the Yemeni air force, but now had returned to run the collective. He was a deeply sincere and sensitive-looking man, looking less like an ex–fighter pilot and more like an assistant professor of classical poetry.
They left the capital, and the city gave way to the low-slung outer towns of Sana’a, and the highway spread out in front of them, the occasional gas station or mini-mall sitting on either side. Soon the road thinned from four lanes to two and wound in narrow bands, the truck holding tightly to the pavement as it rose and fell through steep mountain passes. The drop-off was a hundred feet, then a thousand. The architecture shed centuries and the evidence of a central government or control fell steadily away.
Most of the men they passed, old and young and teenaged, carried automatic rifles. They were in tribal territory, and as Mokhtar was getting used to this—he’d never in Sana’a or Ibb seen so many men so heavily armed—they rounded a tight hillside and found themselves surrounded. There were twelve armed men blocking the road.
Hamid stopped the truck. The men were agitated, pointing AK-47s at every window. Who are you? What are you doing here? they yelled. On the hillside another twenty men stood armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and German-made G3 assault rifles.
“What’s happening?” Mokhtar asked.
“Don’t worry. Tribal feud,” Loof said.
The men demanded identification from everyone in the truck.
Mokhtar passed his ID through the window.
Mokhtar’s own tribe had been involved in a feud about ten years before. He’d been in the United States at the time, but it was news all over Yemen and among the Yemeni diaspora. Apparently a young man of his tribe, the al-Khanshali, had been in Sana’a, driving a new and prized Land Cruiser. He’d parked it one night and in the morning found it gone, stolen. Word made its way around the neighborhood about who was responsible for the theft, and the thief’s own tribe, the al-Akwa, made it known that this theft would not be countenanced. Whoever the thief was, he didn’t know whom he’d stolen from and didn’t know the strength of the tribe. The leaders of each tribe met and made peace. In a show of contrition and respect, the al-Akwas led a procession that included not just the stolen vehicle, but, as compensatory gifts, another car and a truckload
of cows. Their leader recited a poem of apology and respect, and the leader of the al-Khanshalis recited a poem accepting the gift.
Now Loof explained this was the same kind of thing—a tribal dispute that would be worked out peacefully, despite the appearance of imminent violence. Loof wasn’t concerned, and Yusuf and Hamid weren’t either. But a rogue armed checkpoint on the way to Haymah—this was new, a manifestation of the power vacuum, one that would benefit Saleh. The feeling among Mokhtar’s family was that Saleh was trying to destabilize the country to better make his case that Yemen needed him.
As the tribesmen examined their IDs, Yusuf explained to Mokhtar that the men were looking for members of an opposing tribe. There had been a murder, and they were looking for retribution. If any of their last names belonged to this opposing tribe, the consequences would be grave.
“Don’t worry. We’re not involved,” Yusuf said.
A few minutes later their IDs were returned, and Hamid drove again, everyone in the truck acting as if nothing much had just happened.
—
They drove into Haymah and, at a gas station called Abu Askr, they took a quick right—Mokhtar hadn’t even seen a road there—and descended into a valley. The dirt road was rough, full of holes and covered in rubble. Mokhtar’s head hit the truck roof, and he laughed it off, thinking it couldn’t possibly happen again, and then it did. A dozen more times. He had to position himself with one hand on the ceiling and another on the frame so his head wouldn’t hit the window. The driver didn’t seem to have a consistent strategy. Sometimes he would speed up, as if wanting to simply plow through the rough road, to get it over with, and then he’d slow down, traipsing, camel-like, over the bumps and potholes.