by Dave Eggers
Mokhtar was queasy, and the heat was severe, and he was ready to stop, desperate to stop, even though they’d only been in the truck two hours. But he had to maintain a façade of the routine. He was some vaguely defined representative of the Coffee Quality Institute, or USAID, or both, and presumably he’d been on thousands of miles of roads like this. Around every bend the scenery was glorious, with jagged slate-gray mountains striped with impossible terraced gardens. The architecture was simple, adobe of tan and white, the buildings sturdily built and well kept, but often perched atop seemingly unreachable peaks and ridges. Below the villages the hillsides were green with what Mokhtar assumed was coffee.
“That’s mostly qat,” Yusuf said.
Ten years ago, all this would have been about 85 percent coffee, he explained. Twenty years earlier, it would have been all coffee. But every year qat took more of the land.
They passed through small villages, and each time they did, the truck had to slow to walking speed, and the locals came out, wanting to know what was happening, who these men were.
Because Mokhtar and Loof were dressed formally, and had a city look about them, the villagers who approached the truck assumed they were from the United Nations or USAID or some other international entity.
They drove through a half-dozen villages before they arrived at Bait Alam, where Hamid stopped the truck. It was midmorning and already about ninety degrees.
Mokhtar got out, squinted into the sun, and found that a few dozen villagers had surrounded their truck. And now they were breaking into song.
“Peace be upon you, honored guest,” they sang, “Welcome to the land of Bait Alam, where our rivers overflow and our fruits have ripened for you! The tribe of Al-Hamdan welcomes all who cross their land in peace!” This was a zamil, a traditional song of welcome specific to Yemeni villages—each one different and often customized for specific guests and occasions. Mokhtar smiled and thanked them, and when they were finished, the men of the village formed a line. An elder was counting them, head by head.
“What’s happening?” Mokhtar asked Hamid.
“They’re having a lottery for who gets to host you,” Hamid said.
“Come,” Yusuf said, and took Mokhtar’s hand. He followed Yusuf up a steep slope into the hills. A few hundred stone steps brought them into the terraces where the coffee plants were, and for the first time Mokhtar was on a real coffee farm. He touched the leaves. He smelled the leaves. He tried to look professorial and maybe even concerned about some defect he’d found. This is where it all started, he thought. His euphoria lasted a minute or so.
“That’s not coffee,” Yusuf said.
Mokhtar had been carefully examining an olive tree.
“I know that,” Mokhtar said, attempting to recover. “But the vegetation around the coffee plants affects their health.”
He had made this up on the spot, and only later discovered that it was true. Yusuf nodded respectfully and they walked on.
“Here are the coffee plants,” Yusuf said.
Now Mokhtar touched the leaves and saw a constellation of red and green cherries under the leaf cluster. The hillside was covered by an undulating grid of bright green Coffea arabica plants, thriving on what looked to be an arid mountainside. There was the smell of jasmine, the faint hushing of the breeze passing through the dense foliage.
“So what do you think?” Yusuf asked.
“Good?” Mokhtar said.
He didn’t know what Yusuf was looking for. They walked on and soon were joined by a growing throng of farmers and pickers who asked a series of questions:
“The leaves are being eaten by burrow worm. What should we do?”
“What about pesticides?”
“What do you think of the soil here?”
“What’s this white stuff ringing the trunk of this one?”
Mokhtar had no idea. He was no agronomist. This was the first coffee farm he’d ever been to. Not that he could tell anyone this. But Loof was an agronomist, and Loof stepped in.
“That’s sodium,” he said about the white rings. “This plant is getting too much salt.” He began answering the questions, touching the leaves, squatting down, inspecting the soil. He had answers to all their queries, and Mokhtar activated his Tenderloin memorization brain, processing all that Loof said, ready to regurgitate it later. Loof went into the merits of pruning, explaining that every tree was like a family, each bough a child, and that a plant could only support so many healthy boughs—that any boughs that weren’t viable needed to be pruned. He pointed out the different varietals, names of which most of the farmers and pickers didn’t know.
“This is a Tufahi,” he said. “This is Dawiri. This is Udaini.”
The farmers had simply been growing coffee, the generalized coffee of the second wave. Yusuf was aware that there was something out there in the wider world, something changing, some new attention being paid to regions and varietals, but his co-op didn’t have enough information or access. They didn’t know which varietal was which, which thrived where, how best to pick and process cherries of these varying kinds and, most of all, who would pay for it.
Mokhtar was careful. He had a sense that somewhere down the line he could help with the supply chain, and he hoped that he might be able to connect these farmers with high-end buyers in the U.S. and Europe and Japan, but he couldn’t say any of that now. His grandfather had drilled that into him: Don’t make promises unless you’re sure you can deliver. And don’t make them until you have the funds to deliver.
For the time being, then, Mokhtar walked with Yusuf and Loof and he listened. He listened to Loof talk about how best to pick the cherries and when to pick them. He observed Loof’s way of speaking, his mannerisms, and tucked them away for future use. And he tried to keep up as Yusuf and the older, and even elderly, growers and pickers moved up and down the terraces like rabbits. Mokhtar had to be pulled back from cliffs and caught after slipping on steps. The air was thin, and he had to catch his breath. His unsteadiness entertained the local men.
“Who’s that?” Mokhtar asked.
Mokhtar noticed one man sitting alone, under a tall and extraordinarily healthy coffee tree.
“That’s Malik,” Yusuf said. “Our best farmer.”
He sat cross-legged in the shade, looking supremely content.
“He does that a lot,” Yusuf said. “He’s always out here. When he’s not picking, he’s sitting out here among the trees.”
Malik wore a gray pillbox-shaped hat called a kufi, adorned with complex embroidery. Mokhtar was intrigued by the man’s aura and attire, and took a few pictures, noticing that the man had placed his day’s pickings on a towel by his feet. He had about five hundred cherries there, all ruby red.
“That’s why he’s our best farmer,” Yusuf said. Apparently Malik did most of the picking himself, with the help of his wife and a few family members. For them it was not a job or hobby or something delegated to careless hourly workers. It was a calling, something they enjoyed and in which they took a spiritual kind of pride.
In the cooperative, Malik owned perhaps four hundred coffee plants, which stood next to those owned by another farmer. All of the farmers picked their own coffee, which was then mixed together in a mass of cherries, red and green, ripe and rotten. These were then sold to a broker, who usually exploited the financial disadvantage of the farmers. There was no separation of lots or varietals. It was all one heap, sold for whatever price the brokers offered.
Mokhtar approached Malik as he sat under his tree. The man did not stand up or act in any way deferential. In fact, he didn’t seem the least bit surprised or excited to meet this man from Sana’a and America. But when Mokhtar asked if he could take a sample of his cherries back to Sana’a, Malik respectfully agreed.
“We can give you a big bag later on,” Yusuf said.
“I want these,” Mokhtar said. “I want this man’s cherries, and I want them separate from all others.”
—
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sp; For lunch Yusuf brought them to his home. Somehow he’d won the lottery conducted when Mokhtar first arrived. Yusuf’s house was a traditional Yemeni rural dwelling: the first floor was open and dark, intended for livestock. The second floor, and every floor above, was dedicated to a branch of the family. Each of the home’s seven floors was called a house, and each was given to a different family, or families, everyone related. In Yusuf’s home there were four generations.
Mokhtar and Loof were treated to a feast, though one belying the relative poverty of the village. The chicken was lean and gamy. The rice was plentiful, and there was bread, and sahawqah, a salsa-like dish made from the hot peppers the region was known for.
With the meal, served with great ceremony, Mokhtar and Loof were given coffee, which Yusuf noted was made from the coffee trees they’d just walked among. But it wasn’t coffee, not the kind of coffee consumed anywhere else in the world. This was a beverage made from the dried husk of the coffee cherry. It was what Mokhtar and most non-Yemenis called qishr—a sweet kind of tea, caramel colored but with a certain sweetness, a ghost of the cherry, in its center. It was delicious, but it wasn’t coffee. Mokhtar didn’t know how to tell Yusuf this, and knew it didn’t bode well: if the president of the cooperative didn’t know the difference between coffee and tea, then there were more problems than he’d anticipated.
After lunch they sat for qat, and were joined by dozens of men, most of them farmers, many of them other villagers who were interested in the visiting Yemeni American and his Sana’a friend. Everyone was intrigued by Mokhtar, all but one man. Mokhtar had seen him here and there throughout the day. He was a stout man wearing the coat of a former soldier and what looked like a Russian hat, with furry earflaps folded upward. He had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, and two grenades fastened to his chest. Mokhtar had caught his skeptical eyes and asked Yusuf about him.
“That’s the General,” Yusuf said. “Don’t mind him. Hard to please.” He had been a general in the Yemeni army and upon retiring, had bought land in the Haymah Valley, where he planted both qat and coffee; he was one of the largest landowners in the region. The General glared at Mokhtar throughout the meal.
Loof wouldn’t chew qat. He never did. Mokhtar thought it best to indulge, so as not to offend their hosts, but Loof wouldn’t budge. And besides, this was a different style of qat enjoyment. In the city the qat would be pruned neatly, prepared and presented carefully. Here it was dumped in the middle of the floor like kindling. But Mokhtar took leaves and filled his cheek, and they all talked idly until the qat had kicked in. A wave of mild euphoria spread through the room, and Mokhtar chose the moment to present them with the past and future.
He told the men about the birth of coffee, that it was first cultivated here, in Yemen, that it was a central part of the country’s history, their birthright. Most of the men seemed surprised by this. Had they known this? He wasn’t sure. He went on, explaining that the Dutch had stolen the seedlings, had planted them in Java and had given them to France, and the French had planted them in Martinique, and that the Portuguese had smuggled them from the French, had planted them in Brazil, and that now there was a seventy-billion-dollar market for coffee, that everyone seemed to be making money from the bean—everyone but the Yemenis, who had started the whole business in the first place.
Maybe it was the qat, but he had their attention. Even the General was listening, albeit with a look askance. Most of their beans were going to Saudi Arabia, Mokhtar explained. The farmers were selling them for next to nothing, and that needed to change. But first they had to improve their practices. They should harvest cherries only once they were red—and here he showed them his ring, with the carnelian stone inset. And then you need to dry the cherries on aboveground beds, so air can circulate and they dry evenly. Then you need to store them properly, in cool and dry rooms, so they don’t ferment or accumulate mold. Right now, he explained, you’re picking too soon, and the green and yellow and red cherries are being mixed together, and dried improperly, and shipped recklessly, and sorted carelessly if at all. The roasting was a disaster in Saudi, he said, so all along the chain the plants were being disrespected, the beans abused.
He went on, telling them about the Monk of Mokha, about how they needed to reclaim their heritage, and how if they improved their process, if they picked better, dried better, stored and shipped better, the prices might be higher, their wages might be higher.
“Will you help us?” a man asked, and Mokhtar caught the tiniest hint of expectation in the General’s eye.
Me? Mokhtar thought. Not yet at least. He hedged. Though he wanted to, he couldn’t tell them he was looking at all of this not just as a consultant, not just as some vague representative of the CQI or USAID, but as a potential buyer, a potential exporter.
After qat, he and Loof were asked to sign the village registry. Every visitor for centuries had signed it—an enormous book with yellowed pages. Mokhtar signed his name and under it he wrote, With your sweat and blood and hard work, your coffee will be the best in the world. It seemed like the right thing to say.
On the drive back, Yusuf was visibly excited.
“So you can help us get better prices?”
“I don’t know,” Mokhtar said.
“But if we improve our processes, we can get a higher rate?”
“I’m not sure,” Mokhtar said. “Can you improve?”
—
They got back to Sana’a late. The city was quiet, and Mokhtar let himself into Mohamed and Kenza’s house and put his coffee samples under a chair in the corner, unspooled his bedroll, and lay down.
I can’t do this, he thought. No chance.
Somewhere during the long drive home, winding their way through hundreds of miles of two-lane roads, passing countless armed strangers, thinking at any moment that their truck would be stopped again at a checkpoint, Mokhtar’s doubts overtook him. This was the first trip, and he’d already faced a hillside of vengeful tribesmen. He’d bluffed his way through one farm visit, but this was over his head. It was madness.
And there were the loan sharks. He was going to go head-to-head with loan sharks. Loan sharks he knew nothing about. His grandfather was from a powerful tribe, but was Mokhtar ready to cut a bunch of bloodthirsty moneylenders out of the process? Clearly their scruples were questionable—they were subjugating these farmers and had no respect for the quality of the coffee they were selling. What would happen if Mokhtar from San Francisco came in and cut them out of the loop?
And these farms were disastrous. Some of those beans had been stored for five years! The farmers were sitting on them like imperishable currency, as if the beans never aged. And the thing with the tea—did they know the difference between tea from the husk and coffee from the bean? And could he really improve harvesting practices such that the coffee was actually worth significantly more? And who knew if it was any good in the first place? That is, even if they picked it correctly, and dried it correctly, and processed it correctly, and did everything else correctly, who could predict if the coffee was actually any good? The coffee made from these beans might be terrible. And that would be a fact that no amount of supply-chain adjustments could remedy.
And again, he knew nothing. He’d been studying coffee for months, and learning from the best—from Blue Bottle and Willem Boot—and that had given him some knowledge about cupping and roasting, but he didn’t know anything about growing these plants, or harvesting, or sorting. He knew nothing about the actual plant growing in the actual world. Loof had run circles around him.
Nope, he thought. He was a clown. He had a company name, and a logo, but he didn’t know what he was doing. He’d borrowed money from Omar and now it would all be wasted. He could and should go home. He could go to college, study something. He’d lived long enough as a corner-cutter. With this he couldn’t play Fake it till you make it.
CHAPTER XXII
POINT OF DEPARTURE
THEN AGAIN, IT HAD worked before.
> The roundabout became his point of departure. Almost every day for the next three months, he went down to the Panasonic roundabout and got into a different truck, every time venturing out to a different region, determined to visit every one of the thirty-two coffee-producing areas of Yemen. Some were like Haymah—hardworking and reasonably advanced, with farmers he knew that he could work with. Other visits were disheartening. One time he drove seven hours to find that the region was home to only a handful of coffee plants—fewer than twenty. Some farmers he simply didn’t trust.
And the skepticism was mutual. In most of the places he visited, the farmers treated his arrival with polite suspicion. They’d been visited by NGOs more or less continually for decades, and by USAID more regularly after 9/11. Sometimes progress was made, sometimes not. Occasionally a water catcher was built; other times that or any other project was begun but not finished. The intentions of these aid workers and organizers were fine, sometimes unassailable, but the follow-through was inconsistent. This was the backdrop of Mokhtar’s arrival. He would come, well dressed and speaking his classical Arabic, with his American passport and though they wanted to believe he had answers, insight and, most important, some way to get their beans to market for a higher price, they were reluctant to believe.
Still, customs of hospitality dictated that he be treated well. So they would show him their terraces, they would feed him a midday meal, in the afternoon chew qat, and occasionally put him up for a night. Did they expect to see him again? Not entirely. Did they expect him to change their lives? No.