by Dave Eggers
Mokhtar took the package off the scale and put it back. Again the weight was 4.2 kilos. Now he was curious. He opened the box, and then opened all three bags. The first looked the same. The second was unchanged. But when he opened the third, he saw something shiny and black. It looked like a SIG Sauer handgun. His SIG Sauer handgun. In his rush to get the samples ready, Mokhtar had thrown his handgun in one of the bags and almost sent a loaded weapon to Ethiopia.
—
Willem cupped the samples and found two of the three to be excellent. The Huwaar Valley sample scored 88.75, and the sample from Udain scored 89.5. The Valley of Paradise sample was overfermented, though, and was considered inferior.
But it didn’t matter. Because Hubayshi had followed Mokhtar’s guidelines, now Hubayshi was sitting on ten tons of high-quality beans from Huwaar Valley and seven tons from Udain. And Mokhtar knew he could buy it all. It would cost about two hundred thousand dollars to buy all eighteen thousand kilograms of dried cherries, and with Willem’s help it would not be difficult to make a profit selling the container to specialty retailers in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Hubayshi already had trucks and drivers and knew how to move coffee through the country. All Mokhtar had to do was pay for the beans, process and sort them.
But when he called his investors, certain they’d share his enthusiasm for the high scores and the volume available to them—immediately, he added—they were unmoved. They were concerned about the security situation in the country, they said. Yemen seemed about to implode.
“So?” Hubayshi asked Mokhtar. He was calling daily.
“Just waiting for the funds,” Mokhtar lied. “Any day now.”
Every morning Mokhtar called and pleaded with his investors to actually invest in the start-up he was there to start up, and every day Hubayshi called, wanting to know if Mokhtar was going to pay for the coffee he had committed to buying. Hubayshi was gentle about it, but as the weeks went by, Mokhtar knew he would lose the coffee, one ton at a time. Hubayshi had farmers and collectives to pay, so he sold five tons of the Udaini and then five tons of the Huwaar Valley. Seeing the beans slip away drove Mokhtar to desperation.
In a symbol of goodwill, Hubayshi gave him five tons of the Udaini. He accepted the ten thousand dollars, and the rest of the cost—almost a hundred thousand dollars—on credit. That was not a problem. Mokhtar was sure he would eventually get his investors to buy the coffee they had sent him to buy, but for the time being there was the issue of where to put five tons of coffee.
Mokhtar had no warehouse and he had no mill. He didn’t want to process his beans at Zafir’s mill, given the working conditions. But the only other mill Mokhtar knew about in Sana’a was Rayyan, the operation run by Andrew Nicholson. Nicholson had been the first American that Mokhtar had located in Yemeni coffee. Despite Abdo’s warnings, Mokhtar had no choice. Hubayshi needed his beans moved, and Mokhtar needed a place to process them.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE AMERICANS
WHEN MOKHTAR ARRIVED AT Andrew Nicholson’s mill, his right-hand man, Ali al-Hajry, shot a rifle in the air. The mood was celebratory. Mokhtar greeted Ali and Andrew, and inside, the atmosphere was a perfect inversion of what Mokhtar had been led to believe. The workers were content and friendly. The sorters were singing. Almost immediately Mokhtar realized that Abdo Alghazali had wanted to keep Mokhtar and Andrew apart not because Andrew was an unscrupulous operator but because he knew that Mokhtar and Andrew would get along and that together the two of them would be unstoppable.
Andrew spoke Arabic with an accent specific to Sana’a. For a second Mokhtar and Andrew couldn’t decide which language, Yemeni Arabic or American English, they should use. They decided on English, and Mokhtar heard a drawl from the American southeast. It was incongruous, even comical, coming from the mouth of a man in a sarong, with a Yemeni beard and a highly convincing Yemeni dagger tucked into his belt. He looked about as local as Mokhtar.
But Andrew had grown up in rural Louisiana. He played baseball and married his high school girlfriend, Jennifer. He studied engineering in college and afterward went into sales. Successful but restless, Andrew decided to go back to school, to get into nursing. A few years later, while serving as a nurse at a Houston hospital, he worked with doctors and other professionals from the Muslim and Arabic-speaking worlds, and became intrigued. This was after 9/11, and perhaps reacting against some of the bigotry he’d seen and heard as a child in Louisiana, he found himself drawn to his colleagues from Egypt and Jordan. If nothing else, he wanted them to know they were welcome.
Soon Andrew and Jennifer had decided to move to Yemen to study Arabic. They were in their twenties and more or less unencumbered. They didn’t own a house, and though they’d just had their first child—she was nine months old when they moved to Sana’a—it was an adventure they felt they could only do at that liberated stage of their lives. After eighteen months in the capital, they had made friends and were fluent in Yemeni Arabic. They moved back to Houston, where Andrew became a consultant to companies operating in the Arab world.
One of Andrew’s friends, Sean Marshall, owned a café in Houston, and he introduced Andrew to third-wave specialty coffee. One day they were talking about coffee, its origins and the state of the market, and Sean said, “What if you went back to Yemen and got some samples, and maybe tried to export Yemeni coffee?”
Andrew laughed it off, but in the morning the notion seemed more plausible. Andrew and Jennifer talked it over, and six months later, they moved back to Sana’a. They stayed with friends at first, and every week Andrew drove into the mountains to visit coffee farms and gather information. He returned to the capital with samples, but realized there was no one in Yemen who could properly process the cherries. He had no intention of starting his own processing mill, but without one, he had no business. So he worked with Sean and another partner to expand the scope of the operation. They’d work with farmers, bring beans to Sana’a, process them and export them. They called the company Rayyan.
The scale of the investment was steep, and Rayyan wasn’t profitable in its first year, or second. Andrew couldn’t find reliable employees, but he brought in one good man, Ali al-Hajry, who became deputy director of the mill. Everyone else Andrew hired stole from him. Andrew turned to Ali, and Ali turned to his mother. Ali’s mother went back to her own village, twenty minutes from Sana’a, and put the word out: they were looking for reliable employees who wouldn’t steal. In a few weeks, Ali’s mother filled out the Rayyan staff. She knew everyone working with her son, who was working with the American. They were covered.
Rayyan began operations during the Arab Spring in 2011, but the chaos on the streets did little to diminish the company’s early success. People wanted Yemeni coffee, and Andrew found himself exporting to Japan, China, Europe and North America. The upheavals in Yemen inconvenienced their work occasionally, but Rayyan managed to operate continuously through the rise and fall of President Hadi and the arrival of the Houthis. It was all to be expected when running an export business from Sana’a.
—
Mokhtar and Andrew agreed that they would work together, as partners and not competitors. Mokhtar would seek out high-end coffee in the hinterlands, while Andrew would stay closer to Sana’a and concentrate on exporting more affordable coffee. Rayyan would process Mokhtar’s beans, but Andrew couldn’t do the sorting. He didn’t have the space or the staff.
The ground-floor retail space of Mohamed and Kenza’s building, that had until recently been a corner store where candy and soda were sold, was empty. Mokhtar thought it would make a convenient location, but Nurideen was dubious. The location was convenient, sure, but there was the matter of the demon child who had been sighted there the last time the space was open.
It had happened just a few months ago. In the middle of the day, a thirteen-year-old child had been found standing in front of the store with a knife in his hand, rolling his eyes and speaking in tongues. No one could reason with him, and finally the co
nsensus was that he was possessed by an evil spirit. The boy was taken to an exorcist in Sana’a, who deduced that there was indeed a demon inside him, and that this demon was in love with the child. Given the taint the devil had conferred upon it, the store was closed. Nurideen related all this to Mokhtar.
“We’re talking about the store on the first floor, right?” Mokhtar clarified. He’d been inside a hundred times; he used to buy his phone cards there. Mokhtar didn’t believe that a demon had possessed the child and certainly didn’t believe that the storefront itself was tainted as a result. But the demon-taint had left the storefront empty and the rent affordable. So he leased the space.
“But don’t tell the sorters,” Nurideen warned.
Yemenis are superstitious, and if even one of the sorters was spooked by the story of the demon child inhabiting the storefront, it would be incentive enough for the rest of the sorters to stay at Zafir’s demon-free mill. So Mokhtar told them nothing.
—
He rented the space, and also rented the two adjoining storefronts, and knocked out the walls between. He created a lounge area with couches, a coffee table and carpet. He doubled the pay for Amal and the other sorters, and one day in February of 2015, sixteen sorters left Zafir’s operation and arrived at Mokhtar’s.
Mokhtar made an event out of it. He had never employed anyone, but had picked up a few notions from the progressive California companies where his friends worked. He had in mind a kind of staff-orientation day. He provided coffee and juice and cakes and gathered all sixteen women together, asking them to sit in a circle. They all wore niqabs. He could see only their eyes.
“I want to know about each and every one of you,” he said, and saw in the women’s eyes that this was highly unusual. “Let’s go around the circle, and each of you can tell me your name, where you’re from, and just as an icebreaker, you can tell me a food that represents you and why.”
The women had no clue what he meant. Why would they be a food? Why would an employer want to know such a thing? It took him twenty minutes to explain the concept. Finally, he got one of the women to suggest that if she were a food, she’d be a green apple. She was named Um Riyadh, meaning “mother of Riyadh.” She was the oldest of the group, and Mokhtar could tell she was bolder, more outspoken, than the others.
“Why a green apple?” Mokhtar asked.
“Green apples can be both sweet and sour,” she said. “And I’m the same way. Sometimes I’m sweet. Sometimes bitter. It depends on my mood.”
The other women laughed tentatively.
“Good, good!” Mokhtar said.
But when it was the next woman’s turn, she said the green apple represented her, too. The next woman said the same, that she, too, was a green apple. The women still didn’t understand the concept, and chose to copy one another rather than venture into the unknown.
But he did get their names and hometowns, and he startled them all by knowing something about each of their origins. They expected him to be ignorant of the lesser-known regions of Yemen, but after visiting all thirty-two coffee-producing areas of the country, he knew the land as well as anyone.
Ahlam said she came from Utmah.
“I’ve been there,” Mokhtar said. “Amazing guavas there.”
Um Riyadh said she came from Bani Ismail.
“I’ve been there,” Mokhtar said. “You have those little monkeys that roam around in packs.”
Baghdad said she was from Haymah.
Mokhtar asked her if she came from inner or outer Haymah. She seemed dubious that he would know anything about Haymah. She said she was from outer Haymah.
“Al-Mahjar?” he asked.
“Lower,” she said.
“How about Bait Alel? Bait al-Zabadani?” he asked.
“Almost there,” she said.
“Al-Asaan?” he guessed.
“Yes!” she said.
The room broke open with cheers.
Mokhtar unfolded his laptop and showed them pictures of his journeys across Yemen. They huddled close, disbelieving. They had no idea how diverse Yemen was, how beautiful.
After a few hours he had a sense of them, though he saw no more than their eyes. At Zafir’s plant, the sorters’ area was open to the larger factory, so the women there had to remain in niqabs all day, an uncomfortable and impractical state of affairs, given the labor of sorting and the lack of air-conditioning.
Mokhtar was determined to fix this. He couldn’t operate a company in a busy Sana’a neighborhood with sixteen women uncovered and visible to passersby—the customs of Yemen frustrated him as much as anyone, but he couldn’t risk the entire business to make a point about traditional clothing for Yemeni women. Compromise was necessary for now. He rearranged the space such that there was a large room with high walls and a door that closed and locked from the inside. The sorters could control who entered and when, and when they were alone, they could take off their niqabs and dress and act as they pleased.
Mokhtar thought of the policies he’d wanted to change at the Infinity. He provided free breakfast and lunch. Free wifi, transportation to and from work. He gave them May Day off and a sound system they could connect to their smartphones.
“Do whatever you want to do while you work,” he told them. “You are my golden team.” He felt benevolent and thought that in their little space, they might approximate a Californian kind of operation—liberalized and egalitarian.
But for the first few days, as he trained them, they were ill at ease, and though he’d provided the sound system, every time he walked by their workspace, he heard silence. He added a living room, with couches and a prayer corner. Still nothing.
A week in, though, he heard something. He was on his way to Rayyan when he heard a deep-bass thumping coming from the sorting room. The women had closed their door and locked it from the inside, and Mokhtar stood by the door, feeling sure he recognized the song. It was Usher’s “Yeah!”
From then on, every day there was music coming from the sorting room. Sometimes it was traditional Yemeni music. Sometimes it was Katy Perry—in particular, they loved “Roar.” Often they sang along.
“You’re in front my face,” he told them.
He’d said it the first day, and he said it whenever they had a meeting, whenever he needed to remind them of their importance to him. In following him, they’d risked a great deal and he would not forget it.
“You’re in front my face,” he said every day.
It was an old Yemeni expression, hard to translate into English. It was something you said to a loved one, to a friend, while pointing to your own face. It meant that the person before you was never out of your vision. That you kept them foremost in your mind.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER XXVIII
BEDLAM
IT WAS DECEMBER 31, 2014, three days before the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. There were celebrations all over the country. Mokhtar woke up in his grandfather’s house in Ibb with a plan to work out in the gym around the corner. But when he went downstairs for breakfast, he found his aunt staring at the television. A suicide bomber had struck Ibb.
Forty-nine people had been killed and seventy wounded. It was the first attack of its kind in Ibb, a city accustomed to being distant from this kind of violence. It’s begun, Mokhtar thought. He had to be in Sana’a that day, so he left Ibb and drove north.
When he arrived at Mohamed and Kenza’s house, there were urgent discussions about the implications of a bombing of innocents in Ibb. Even al-Qaeda wouldn’t have perpetrated such an attack in Yemen. It typically directed its fury at Western targets, military targets—not Yemeni civilians.
—
A week later, Mokhtar was back at Mohamed and Kenza’s. One morning after breakfast, he decided to work out. The closest facility was called Health and Sports Club Arnold, named for Schwarzenegger.
He took a taxi, and a few blocks from the gym, he noticed a crowd of men walking into the neighborhood. They were mostly Houthis. The gym,
he realized, was close to the police station, and today was a recruiting day for the police academy. Part of the Houthis’ plan was to stack their members in the police ranks.
Mokhtar paid the driver and decided to walk the few blocks to Arnold’s. He wanted to get a sense of what was happening, taking in the strange sight of so many northerners in the center of Sana’a.
Then the earth convulsed. He fell to his knees. He thought it was an earthquake. He felt the concrete, expecting vibrations, aftershocks. He heard screams. The wail of car alarms. He ran toward the police station and saw the burning flesh. A man’s torso lay on the ground. A woman was screaming. Blood stained the street. He scanned the charred remains of dozens of dead, thinking he saw people he knew.
With a start he remembered that Hathem, Mohamed and Kenza’s second-oldest son, was a cadet at the academy. Mokhtar knew he was home that day, that there was no way he would be among the dead, yet he saw Hathem’s face in the charred husks of men. Soon newspeople arrived. They began filming and taking pictures. Mokhtar put his phone away. He couldn’t look at the carnage anymore. And then he had a thought: Run.
He ran. He knew terrorists often set off a second bomb once rescuers had arrived to treat the wounded from the first. So Mokhtar ran, and everyone around him, thinking he’d seen something, ran, too.
At Mohamed and Kenza’s house, he said nothing. Nurideen knew something was wrong, but Mokhtar didn’t want to burden the family with what he’d seen. They would see the footage on television. Thirty-eight had been killed, sixty had been wounded. Mokhtar didn’t want his family to worry. But privately he wondered what was happening in Yemen and worried the country was going the way of Iraq—a lawless land of sectarian strife, suicide bombs, kidnappings, and the impossibility of untroubled life.