by Dave Eggers
He knew he could improve their cultivation methods. He knew that by merely ensuring that their pickers chose only the cherries that were ripe, the color of the carnelian stone, their quality would rise dramatically. That pruning would increase the production of the plants, and if they dried their cherries on raised drying beds, the quality would rise yet more. If they bagged their beans within plastic, not burlap, they would hold in moisture and improve the taste yet again. These were basic things they could do on the farming side of it. He knew that if he got hold of a better-picked and better-processed class of cherries, he could process them more carefully than had been customary, and then, once they were beans, he could sort them far more carefully than had been done in a hundred years. He was sure his impact could be real.
—
The challenge was staying alive until the next harvest. In his travels this would prove difficult. In the first week, he came down with malaria. He was in Bura’a, in far-western Yemen, and he woke up with yellow eyes. He’d gotten it either in Bura’a or Haymah, but here it was, and he couldn’t move. He had the shakes. His limbs felt withered and weak. His Bura’a hosts gave him pills, but he was sure he would die. They brought him to a local hospital, where he spent two feverish nights.
After recuperating in Sana’a, he went out again, and this time, in Bani Ismail, he was overtaken by a maniacal kind of diarrhea. He spent two days circling the shithole—there were no toilets in the village—feeling sure that the next thing to leave his rectum would be his liver.
A few weeks later, he was visited by what he and everyone assumed was a tapeworm. He ate all day and all night and couldn’t gain weight. Someone said it was his body correcting for the loss of weight incurred during his bouts of malaria and diarrhea. He ate still more and somehow got even thinner.
You can live with it, one friend said. Coexist.
Try kerosene, said another friend.
Apparently this had been a longstanding practice—the drinking of kerosene to kill the parasite. Mokhtar decided to wait it out, and after another week his metabolism returned to normal. He had no idea if the tapeworm had exited on its own accord or if he’d had one in the first place. He had a few weeks to enjoy the functioning of his digestive system before he knew the once-in-a-lifetime pain of a gallstone. He spent another night in the hospital for that, and left a withered man.
He stayed in Yemen three months and was sick every four or five days. He’d been told to be careful with the drinking water, with fruit, with anything that might harbor bacteria—that he was an American and unaccustomed to whatever organisms lived in and were tolerated by Yemenis. And though he knew he should refuse certain foods in certain villages—or most foods, all uncooked foods, all water, all juices, all fruit, in all villages—he couldn’t. He was a guest, and he was a guest needing to be respectful, needing to emphasize his own Yemeni heritage, and not underline his foreignness or preciousness. So he ate whatever was put in front of him and hoped for the best. He got diarrhea too many times to count or care anymore. It was, in the end, a small price to pay as he benefited from the Yeminis’ legendary generosity.
He continued to go out. Back in the car. Over the rutted roads and through the narrow mountain passes and into new villages, where each time he was greeted by men singing traditional zamils, followed by the lottery to determine who would have the honor of hosting him. For lunch and qat always they would arrange mountains of pillows and blankets at the head of the room, propping up Mokhtar like a Mongolian warlord. There was always cold soda—upon Mokhtar’s arrival, the village sent its children miles on foot to get it. And after the tour of the terraces and after lunch and qat, there were gifts, always gifts. If the region was known for mangoes, Mokhtar would leave with more mangoes than he could possibly eat. If honey was made there, he’d leave with enough to fill a tub. And of course each time he left with coffee cherries, a sample of that village’s best, and he’d return to Sana’a to put the samples in a corner of Mohamed and Kenza’s living room, and he’d go back to sleep.
He went to Bait Aaliyah, two hours from Sana’a and over two thousand meters above sea level. Blessed by a plentiful aquifer, its farmers cultivated thirty thousand trees. He went to Bani Matar, about two hours from Sana’a and eighteen hundred meters above sea level. In Bani Ismail, he saw the most prized and expensive of all Yemeni coffee. The beans were small and almost circular, heavily dependent on rainfall. The local cooperative was amiable and organized, but they weren’t sure how much coffee they produced. In a given harvest, they said, they filled two trucks a week, for about eight weeks. Any more detailed measurements, they hadn’t done. In Al-Udain he saw the most visually beautiful beans in all of Yemen. But the trips were not universally successful. In fact, most were not. One day he drove seven hours to Hajjah, which his research said was a coffee-growing region. When he arrived, he found no coffee plants. A local farmer walking on the dusty road was astonished that Mokhtar had come so far for no reason.
“My grandfather’s grandfather grew coffee,” he said. “You’re about a hundred years too late.”
—
Every time Mokhtar returned to Sana’a, Mohamed and Kenza would note the arrival of another bag, and would note that their living room seemed to be shrinking. But they said nothing to Mokhtar, assuming that what he had told them—that he was writing a report on coffee in Yemen—was the unalloyed truth.
After a while, though, he couldn’t deceive them anymore.
“I’m starting a business,” he told them.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” they asked.
The answer was complicated, he said. Hamood had insisted he keep his plans close to the vest. But then there was the matter of how Yemenis saw the domestic coffee business. It wasn’t taken seriously. Saying you were in the coffee business was like saying you sold lollipops. No one made a living selling coffee.
“But this can work,” he told them.
He told them where he’d been and showed them his photos. They were awed. They’d never seen those parts of Yemen. They’d been to Ibb, sure, but not Haymah, not Bura’a, not Hajjah, not Bani Hammad.
“Why didn’t you take us with you?” they said.
—
Sometimes he took their son, Nurideen. At eighteen, he was the oldest of their six children still living at home. He was newly out of school and without prospects. Thinking about college in America, he’d applied for a visa at the U.S. embassy and had been turned down in a comically dismissive way.
“Who’s sponsoring you?” he was asked.
“My brother Akram,” he said. “He works as a janitor at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.”
“San Francisco? That’s the most expensive city in the world!” the agent said, and rejected the application.
After that, Nurideen applied for and received a visa to live and work in South Korea. He flew to Seoul, but when he landed, they wouldn’t accept him. He had all his paperwork in order, but they turned him around and put him back on a plane. He flew to Malaysia instead, a country historically hospitable to Yemenis, and worked for a time in a restaurant where he was underpaid and abused.
Now Mokhtar needed help. He needed someone to come with him to provinces, to help catalog the samples and keep track of the farmers and harvests. Nurideen became Mokhtar’s first employee, with the matter of a proper salary, of course, deferred.
—
Mokhtar continued to go into tribal areas, hours or days from Sana’a, and every time he packed his dagger, and a SIG Sauer pistol. His driver had a semiautomatic rifle. When he was in more troubled or unknown districts, he brought along another man who carried an AK-47 and a grenade. None of this was unusual. There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns—after the United States, it was, per capita the world’s most armed nation. Men wore AKs walking down the street. They brought them to weddings.
When Mokhtar was young, Hamood had given him a pistol, a Colt .45, and Mokhtar still had
it. Eventually he’d bought an old AK-47 and occasionally borrowed Hamood’s 1983 Krinkov. He liked to have them in the truck in case they got caught in a tribal dispute, or if someone tried to get at the cash Mokhtar strapped under his belt. Or in case they needed gasoline.
Rumor had it that those supporting the ousted Saleh bombed the petroleum pipelines. He wanted to sabotage the infrastructure, to convince the Yemeni people that things were better when he was in charge. And so gas sometimes grew scarce, prices skyrocketed and gas lines grew long. When the lines were long, tempers went hot. Someone tried to cut the line, guns were drawn, shots were fired in the air.
—
Mokhtar got so used to being out in the provinces, returning to Sana’a dusty and unwashed, unshaven and dressed in a tribal way, that he forgot, momentarily, to which world he belonged. Once a week he’d be in the capital, and he’d go to the Coffee Corner Café, an upscale place frequented by wealthy and worldly Yemenis, and some Westerners, and there he’d use the wifi and write up his reports.
One morning he walked in, unshowered and ill slept, and he sat near a pair of young women wearing expensive shoes and bright hijabs, their makeup sophisticated and subtle. One of the two pulled out a laptop and began watching the Vampire Diaries without headphones. The whole café could hear the show, its wailing and screaming. The two young women didn’t care. Soon, though, their attention focused on Mokhtar.
“Look at him,” one of the women said. “He’s so barbaric and backward.” It took Mokhtar a second to believe she was talking about him. She spoke in English, thinking Mokhtar was a peasant who had somehow wandered into this sophisticated urban café. He was wearing his dagger and carrying his pistol, and between that and his disheveled state, he understood that she took him for a tribesman from Yemen’s northern hinterlands, who were seen as rough and violent and were often derided by city dwellers.
The Houthis adhered to a branch of Shia Islam called Zaidism, which accounted for about 35 percent of the Muslims in Yemen. Before 1962, the Zaidists had controlled northern Yemen for a thousand years, and the Houthis frequently clashed with their neighbors over territory, with the Saudis to the north and the Yemeni government to the south. In Sana’a, they were considered a nuisance, uncivilized hillbillies bent on wreaking havoc.
“He’s the problem,” the woman continued. “Men like that are holding the whole country back.”
Mokhtar had work to do, and he was tired, but the orator in him was awake and ready. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said in English. “You’re the problem.”
The woman’s mouth dropped open. She looked at Mokhtar like he was an animal that had somehow learned to speak.
“You’re degrading me,” he continued, “while watching your adolescent show without headphones.”
The women watched his mouth, as if struggling to discern whether or not he was being dubbed. They couldn’t figure out how these words, in American English, were coming out of the mouth of this savage.
“You need to respect me,” Mokhtar said, “and you need to respect this space, and the people here, and not make assumptions based on how I look. And actually, I think you should leave.”
And they did.
—
Looking tribal had its advantages. The next time Mokhtar was in Haymah to talk with Yusuf and Malik about drying beds and the next harvest, he woke to a cracking of gunfire in the valley.
He packed his AK and followed the sound to a valley where he found a group of men conducting a target-shooting contest. The General was among them. The General noted Mokhtar’s AK slung over his shoulder.
“You know how to use that?” he asked skeptically.
“I do,” Mokhtar said.
The men were aiming at a small white rock resting on the ridge about seventy yards away. No one had hit it.
“Your turn,” the General said.
Rafik and Rakan had taught Mokhtar to shoot .22s, handguns and AKs at 5 Dogs Range in Bakersfield, just down the road from Richgrove, and Rafik had educated him about the ammunition used by different firearms and the relative accuracy of each. The men shooting that morning were all using modern AKs, which were powerful and efficient, but less accurate than the AK Mokhtar carried, a pre-1974 model. For target shooting, it was the superior tool.
Mokhtar stepped up, aimed, exhaled and shot.
The rock flew off the ridge.
He stepped back, accepted the congratulations of the men and saw something like respect in the face of the General.
Knowing he probably couldn’t make the shot again, and knowing the value of a well-executed mic drop, Mokhtar shouldered his gun and left.
CHAPTER XXIII
OUT OF SANA’A
MOKHTAR CHECKED THE PLANES leaving Sana’a and found one going through Qatar. Mokhtar had to get back to the United States. He needed to test the samples he’d collected—he planned to bring twenty-one lots home—and visit family and see about raising a few hundred thousand dollars so he could come back and actually buy the coffee, if any, that scored well.
He spent five days frantically finishing collecting his samples from up and down central and northern Yemen. This was during Ramadan and during the Houthi takeover of the city of ’Amran, the last northern defense before they could capture Sana’a.
Mokhtar was up until 4:00 a.m. every night milling his samples and going to sleep with coffee dust on his head. Finally, the day before the flight, he packed his clothes. He packed the samples he had at the apartment. Half of his beans were in Ibb—he was storing some with Hubayshi—but they would have to wait. Damn this country, he thought. If this were Amsterdam, he could just FedEx a box tonight, any night. He could leave and call Samir and ask Samir to send them, or Mohamed, or anyone. But in Yemen anything you wanted to get out of the country in any timely way you had to take yourself.
He bought five suitcases and started filling them with twenty-two samples from twenty-one farms—every coffee from every region that had any to offer. What else? He had to get honey. His parents wanted Yemeni honey. They also wanted Yemeni almonds and raisins, so he made sure to go to the old quarter of Sana’a. He called his cousin Nurideen and asked him to help. Nurideen was awake—everyone was awake; it was Ramadan—and together they hired a taxi and spent the small hours rushing around the city gathering everything Mokhtar needed. A dozen gifts for everyone he could think of back in California—postcards, frankincense, aloes, prayer beads, silver rings with carnelian-stone settings, handmade Kashmiri shawls.
—
When Mokhtar’s extended family learned he was flying back to the U.S., a cousin asked him to look after their six-year-old daughter, Dena, who was flying on the same plane to California. Later, Mokhtar would have a hard time explaining how an arrangement like this was made so casually—the transport of a cousin’s daughter, a girl he’d never met, across continents and seas. But getting in and out of Yemen was so difficult, and it was rare when someone like Mokhtar was leaving and could escort a girl like Dena, who was going to see her family in Modesto.
So while Dena packed, Mokhtar and Nurideen continued racing around the sleepless city, feeling very much alive and laughing about it all as the sun was coming up. Then they turned a corner, onto one of Sana’a’s busiest thoroughfares, and drove directly into an active firefight.
Machine-gun fire cracked open the morning. Mokhtar looked up to see the ends of AKs peeking out over the rooftops of buildings on opposite sides of the street. Their driver should have backtracked quickly, but he hadn’t moved.
“Reverse, reverse!” Mokhtar yelled.
“There’s no reverse!” the driver yelled. “Get out and push!”
Mokhtar and Nurideen got out and pushed the taxi backward. They laughed. They couldn’t help it.
“Been nice knowing you,” Mokhtar said. He figured the odds of survival were about sixty–forty.
As they pushed the taxi, Mokhtar noticed a propane tank attached to the trunk. This was common in Yemen, given the gasoline shortag
es—drivers rigged their engines to run on propane.
Mokhtar and Nuri laughed harder. They were pushing a taxi with an exposed propane tank while machine-gun fire rattled over their heads. They couldn’t run away. All their coffee was in the taxi.
—
An hour later, Mokhtar was at the airport, sitting in the waiting area, thinking about all this, the time an hour earlier when he almost died. He looked over and remembered that he had a six-year-old girl with him, and that this girl hadn’t spoken to him yet. Her mother had kissed her forehead and told her to be good and not to make any trouble on the way to America.
She was a beautiful child, with huge dark brown eyes and a tangle of black hair. She was wearing a Hello Kitty shirt and was carrying a SpongeBob backpack and seemed strangely uninterested in Mokhtar, the man taking her on this journey, a trip that would likely keep them together for about twenty-six hours, through Qatar, over the Atlantic to Philadelphia, and on to San Francisco. Dena was unfazed by the whole enterprise—leaving Yemen, leaving Yemen with Mokhtar, whom she barely knew—traveling across deserts and oceans.
“You’re not planning to talk to me?” he said.
She looked at him, said nothing, and looked away. She said nothing all the way to Qatar. There were movies on the plane and Mokhtar badly needed sleep. He woke up as they were landing at Qatar’s Hamad International Airport. They had a ten-hour layover, so Mokhtar bought her lunch, and she ate it contentedly, and eventually Dena fell asleep on his shoulder as they waited for the flight to Philadelphia. She slept through much of that leg, and when she wasn’t asleep, she ate the plastic-wrapped airline food and watched seven hours of cartoons.
—
When they landed in Philadelphia, Mokhtar held Dena’s hand—she was so sleepy she allowed it—and they approached customs. There were two lines, one with a younger man at the booth, the other staffed by an older man, and though neither line was very long, one was faster than the other, so Mokhtar chose that one, and soon found himself greeting the younger man. Later he wondered if this had been an error. It was an impossible game that he and many Arab Americans had been trying to play for years now—was it the younger people in positions of authority who were more likely to be enlightened, understanding, raised in a more diverse and connected world? Or were the older ones, who had seen more of the world’s travelers come through U.S. airports, more understanding?