by Dave Eggers
They continued south to Aden.
CHAPTER XXXII
ADEN WELCOMES YOU
THE SUN WAS RISING when they entered Aden. As they approached the center of the city, ten men waved the truck down and surrounded it. Mokhtar assumed they were popular committee members. In 2011, popular committees arose in various parts of Yemen, to defend territory against the Houthis and al-Qaeda. In general, popular committees were groups of local men who had banded together, militia-style, as part-time soldiers in times of crisis.
These men were armed but dressed in civilian clothing. One man pointed a gun into the cab. “Get out.”
Mokhtar turned to Ahmed and Sadeq. “Let me talk to them.” They stepped down from the truck. The men converged on them, frisking each of them. They searched the car and found Mokhtar’s gun. News of the Colt .45 excited the crowd of men, and the gun quickly disappeared.
Mokhtar told the group that he was trying to catch a ship from Aden, that the two men with him were his drivers. He showed them his passport, assuming that if they were popular committee members, they would favor an American. The United States was ostensibly their ally.
But things were already out of his control. As he’d been talking, the men had heard Sadeq’s accent and had seen his outfit.
“This guy’s a Houthi,” one of the militiamen said.
Mokhtar turned to find that Sadeq had already been blindfolded and there was a rifle pointed at his back. Mokhtar had to convince these men, who had been fighting the Houthis, who had already lost friends and family to the Houthis, that Sadeq was not a Houthi. But Sadeq seemed to have done everything he could to appear to be a Houthi.
“Itq’h allah, itq’h allah,” Mokhtar told the men. This meant, “Fear God, fear God.” It meant, “Slow down. Think of what you’re doing. God’s watching and will judge you for your actions.”
“He’s with me. He’s just a driver. Not a Houthi,” Mokhtar said, though he really didn’t know who or what Sadeq was. Why had Sadeq agreed to make the drive in the first place? Didn’t it make a certain kind of sense that he was a Houthi? Was he using Mokhtar to get into Aden?
“You’re fine,” one of the men said to Mokhtar. “You can go. But these two have to come with us.”
Mokhtar knew he couldn’t leave Ahmed and Sadeq. The men would kill Sadeq. Maybe Ahmed, too. Mokhtar told the militiamen that wherever they planned to take them, they’d have to take him, too.
“That’s fine,” they said.
Ahmed’s blindfold was removed, and he was allowed to drive, while a popular committee member sat in the cab with Mokhtar and Sadeq, directing Ahmed where to go.
They drove through Aden’s narrow streets until they arrived at what seemed to be a school that had been converted into a popular committee base. Two dozen men milled about on the street outside. More could be seen in the windows. Most had AK-47s.
Mokhtar, Sadeq and Ahmed were ushered out of the truck. As they stepped onto the street, Mokhtar urged Sadeq to stay quiet. “Let me do the talking,” he whispered.
They were led into a first-floor room. The room was largely bare but for a makeshift bed against the wall and a row of chairs facing it. They were told to sit on the bed, and were given cold water. Hospitality, even for prisoners, was always observed in Yemen.
The leader was a man in his forties, wearing a polo shirt, khaki pants and sandals. He asked Mokhtar for his passport. Sitting on the bed, Mokhtar complied. The leader stood in front of the row of chairs, where three other popular committee members sat. He flipped through the pages with great interest.
“When did you go to Dubai?” he asked.
Mokhtar wasn’t sure if this was a test—the stamp indicated the date of entry, after all—or if the man simply didn’t know how such stamps worked. Mokhtar remembered as best he could. “I was there for a specialty coffee event,” he said.
“When did you go to Ethiopia?” the man asked.
Mokhtar tried to remember. It had been the year before. He guessed at the date, and the man moved on.
“When did you go to Paris?” he asked.
“I don’t remember. March, I think,” Mokhtar guessed.
“You went to a foreign country and you don’t remember?” the man asked.
It struck Mokhtar that this man saw his passport as impossibly exotic. He saw Mokhtar as a Yemeni who was also American, who traveled freely to Ethiopia, Paris, Dubai, and yet couldn’t remember the details.
“Listen,” Mokhtar said. “I can’t remember all the dates. I’m stressed.” He told the man in the pink polo shirt that he was trying to catch a ship at the Red Sea port, that he hadn’t been prepared to be quizzed about the dates stamped on his passport. “I just work in coffee,” he said. “Look in my suitcase—it’s just coffee samples. I’m trying to help people, help farmers.” He was talking quickly, and felt some security in their attention, their patience. He needed to stay alive, to keep his companions alive. He needed to keep talking.
“I was just going about my business, like you all were, when these damned Houthis fucked everything up.”
He could see his captors’ expressions change. Their postures softened. Feeling an opening, Mokhtar did something that surprised himself. He got up from the bed and walked over to the other side of the room, where his inquisitors were sitting, and he sat with them, looking back to Ahmed and Sadeq.
“You’re trying to defend your city, your homes,” he continued, “and these goddamned Houthis are invading. They have no right.” He kept talking while looking to Ahmed and Sadeq, as if he’d symbolically separated himself from them and joined the side of the popular committee.
“We shouldn’t have come to Aden. I knew it was dangerous,” Mokhtar said. “I just wanted to be with my fiancée, Summer. We just wanted to go home.”
All the while, he maintained casual eye contact with Ahmed and Sadeq, to make sure they didn’t interrupt or contradict him. His plan, so far, had succeeded. By explaining his business and inventing a fiancée, he’d humanized himself. Now he had to do the same for Ahmed and Sadeq.
“And these two guys were nice enough to help me. I know they look suspicious. This one looks like a hillbilly,” he said, pointing to Sadeq. “But that’s just because they’re so oblivious. They’re just guys who worked at the mill, my coffee mill, and agreed to take me to the port.”
It was almost true.
“We’re on your side, guys,” Mokhtar added.
With that, the tension was gone. Mokhtar knew they would not die.
—
They were led outside, and it was only then that Mokhtar saw that on the front of the truck, the truck they’d driven nine hours through the night, there was a bumper sticker that said GOD IS GREAT. DEATH TO AMERICA. It was the Houthi slogan, rendered in Iranian colors. It was no wonder they’d been waved through all the Houthi checkpoints.
He didn’t know if their captors had seen it, too. He had to assume they had. He had no choice but to point it out. He did, and laughed.
“See?” he said. “We didn’t even know that was there. No wonder we made it through so many checkpoints so easily.”
The popular committee members chuckled, but now there was a new uneasiness. He’d miscalculated. They hadn’t seen the bumper sticker. Now there were too many suspicious elements to Mokhtar and his companions: Sadeq’s clothing, Mokhtar’s American passport and this big empty truck, the three of them driving through the night, entering Aden when everyone else was fleeing. Now this bumper sticker. Mokhtar knew he had to lay it on thick.
“May Allah bless you all,” he said, moving toward the truck. “I wish victory for you guys. I really do. And I think you can do it! I bet you will. I bet you’re gonna beat those Houthi scumbags.”
He started shaking their hands, patting their backs. He smiled, laughed, made it seem that he was some kind of visiting American dignitary inspecting the troops. He thanked them a few more times, and somehow it worked. They were free. Twenty minutes earlier, ten AK-47s ha
d been pointed at their chests and heads. Now they were friends and at liberty to go. The only catch was that the popular committee members had taken Mokhtar’s Colt .45.
Let it go, he told himself.
—
They got into their truck, and at that moment a black SUV pulled into the roundabout. An older woman in a niqab jumped out and greeted Mokhtar in a thick Brooklyn accent. “There you are!” she roared.
This was Summer’s mom. She was glad to see Mokhtar, to see he was safe. Her hands were all over the place, gesturing. Mokhtar assumed Summer was in the SUV, too, so he went to one of the two open windows at the back of the SUV and found a young woman, also in a niqab.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said.
“I’m not Summer,” the woman said.
“I’m over here,” another voice said.
Mokhtar went to the other side of the car, to another pair of eyes looking out of a niqab. “It’s me,” she said. As she’d been waiting for Mokhtar, she said, the Greek ship had left. She expected there to be other ships, other opportunities.
Mokhtar relayed a quick version of their captivity and release. In telling the story, he let them know about the Colt .45 the popular committee had taken, and this, more than any other part of the story, grabbed the attention of Summer’s mother.
“They took your gun?” she said. She was outraged. Her tone was the same as it would have been if some boys on a Brooklyn playground had stolen her son’s basketball. “You have to get it back,” she said.
A cloud of dust approached. A white Montero pulled up and a man leapt out. “What’s happening here?” Tall and well-dressed, he seemed to be a person of some significance.
Summer’s mother took over. She told the man that Mokhtar had been robbed by the popular committee, that he’d been detained, that his handgun had been stolen. Mokhtar was a very important person in the United States, she said. He was a rich man and employed eighty thousand people. And he was her daughter’s fiancée.
Mokhtar had no choice but to go along. He couldn’t contradict her. He looked to Summer for help. Could she get her mother to dial it down? Summer’s eyes said, Stay out of her way.
This new man’s name was Mokhtar, too, and he shared Summer’s mother’s outrage. He promised he would straighten all this out. He would get Mokhtar’s gun back.
A crack opened the sky.
“Snipers,” the other Mokhtar said. He pointed to the rooftops around them. Somewhere amid the five- and six-story buildings, Houthi snipers were aiming at popular committee soldiers.
“Let’s go somewhere safer,” Other Mokhtar said. “I have a hotel. Follow me. We’ll make calls from there. I’ll get your gun.”
Summer’s car was going home, to her family’s place in Aden. She’d call Mokhtar later, she said. Mokhtar apologized again, and the three cars left the roundabout, Mokhtar, Ahmed and Sadeq following Other Mokhtar. Ahmed and Sadeq looked at Mokhtar. They’d had an opportunity to leave but now were heading back into the center of Aden to retrieve a gun. This seemed unwise.
CHAPTER XXXIII
OTHER MOKHTAR
AS THEY FOLLOWED OTHER Mokhtar through Aden, Mokhtar began to have doubts about this plan, too. Did he really need the gun? His grandfather had given it to him, and for that reason alone it was worth retrieving. But then again, they were in the middle of a city about to be overtaken by the Houthis. How many hours did they have before the city was surrounded?
“We should just go back,” Mokhtar said.
“Go back to Sana’a?” Sadeq asked. “Then we definitely need a gun.”
Mokhtar thought about it. Twenty checkpoints heading north. They might need a gun. And Other Mokhtar had promised swift justice.
They followed Other Mokhtar to his hotel. The streets were empty as they entered the lobby. Inside, except for the four guards holding AK-47s, the hotel seemed welcoming, even luxurious. The lobby was wide and clean, and they stepped across the gleaming marble floors, feeling the strangeness of relative splendor amid what would be, surely and soon, a war zone. (The next day, in fact, the hotel would be hit by a mortar.)
Sadeq threw himself on one of the overstuffed black leather couches and directed his attention to an Egyptian movie on a big-screen television. Other Mokhtar disappeared behind the desk and returned with a key. “Go, get showered, relax,” he said. In the meantime, he said, he’d make some calls and straighten out the business of the gun.
—
Mokhtar, Sadeq and Ahmed found themselves in an elevator, tinny music wafting from above, rising to room 303.
They opened the door to a clean room with two double beds.
“I’m taking a shower,” Sadeq said. Ahmed took one afterward, as if they were all on vacation and getting ready for a night out. Mokhtar was too tense to shower, to change. He sat on the bed, looked out the window, paced the room. Was the Greek ship actually gone? he wondered. Summer had seemed unconcerned about that. There would be others, she had promised.
A knock at the door startled him. He opened it to find a waiter bringing mango juice and cookies.
“Compliments of Mokhtar,” the waiter said.
It was the only sustenance they’d had since they left Sana’a eleven hours earlier. Something about the gesture was comforting, even lulling. After they devoured the snacks, Mokhtar found himself suddenly off guard and very tired. He knew it was ill advised to take a nap in circumstances like this, but he lay down on a bed and in seconds he was asleep.
He woke up forty-five minutes later. He asked Ahmed and Sadeq if they’d heard anything from Other Mokhtar. They hadn’t. Refreshed from the nap, Mokhtar was determined to get out of Aden. We’ll get the gun sent to me, he thought. He called Other Mokhtar and told him they planned to leave.
“No, no,” Other Mokhtar said. “I’ll get the gun. Give me an hour. Get some lunch and call me afterward.”
—
It was difficult, weeks and months later, for Mokhtar to explain exactly why he thought it was a good idea to go looking for lunch in the middle of a city under attack. But they got in the truck and drove through the city, looking for a restaurant and, finding nothing, pulled over to ask a man on the sidewalk where they could get lunch.
Sadeq did the inquiring, which was a mistake, for the man heard Sadeq’s accent and immediately changed his posture.
“You a Houthi?” he asked.
Mokhtar tried to rectify things, using his best classical Arabic. He convinced the man they were not members of the sleeper cells that had sent Aden into a paranoid abyss. They turned the truck around and returned to the hotel. He called Other Mokhtar again.
“You get the gun yet?” he asked.
Other Mokhtar had not. The situation was a mess, he said. The popular committees were nothing like an organized body with efficient information flow. He hadn’t been able to get a clear answer from anyone.
“But I’ll send it to you,” he said. “I promise I’ll get it and send it up to Sana’a.”
Mokhtar said that sounded fine, now writing off the gun completely. He asked Other Mokhtar how they could best get out of the city. Would Other Mokhtar help, or at least guarantee safe passage? He mentioned the suspicious man on the sidewalk. And of course there had been the armed welcome they’d received in the first place.
“No problem,” Other Mokhtar said. “You have my phone number. Just tell them you know me. You’ll be fine.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
A QUICK DEATH FROM A CLEAN BLADE
THEY’D FAILED AT GETTING to the Greek ship in time—if there had ever been a Greek ship. And now they had to turn around and make the same nine-hour drive north, all while the Houthis were heading south. But at least they had safe passage out of Aden. Other Mokhtar had given them a specific route that he said would avoid most of the checkpoints. They’d be on the highway in minutes. Outside of Aden, the roads were controlled by the Houthis, and their bumper sticker would take care of efficient passage all the way to Sana’a.
&nb
sp; They drove three blocks from the hotel and encountered their first checkpoint. They stopped, Mokhtar leaned over to explain their situation, and they were waved through. Easy, he thought. He settled back in his seat and thought of Ibb. They’d stop in Ibb and eat well and rest. His aunt would make them a feast. Sadeq and Ahmed deserved that much.
Ahmed stopped again. Another checkpoint. A crowd of men, all with AK-47s, gathered around the truck.
“Where the fuck are you going?” one man asked.
Mokhtar did the talking. He explained the coffee, Summer, the Greek ship, Other Mokhtar.
The men were skeptical. Sadeq looked to Mokhtar, his eyes worried.
Finally a man stepped through the crowd. He was wearing a tank top, long shorts and sandals. “They’re okay,” he said. He was in his late twenties, younger than many of the popular committee members around him, but he seemed to carry extraordinary weight among them. He looked directly at Mokhtar, and something like trust passed between them. “You have a kind face,” Tank Top said. “You have the aura of a nice person. Let them pass.”
The men stepped back from the truck, and Ahmed sped away.
There was no time to contemplate what just happened. There was no pattern to the checkpoints. What happened at each was always different and entirely subjective. A crowd of men could be convinced of anything—that Mokhtar and his companions were Houthis, that they were allies, that they were or weren’t dangerous. Every situation was fluid, eminently volatile. Aden was under siege and there would be little regret for any man killed under those circumstances.
Ahmed drove on. They had only to make it to the coast and they were okay. Another checkpoint stopped them, but a quick conversation granted them passage. Another block, another checkpoint. A few times Mokhtar leaned forward to mention Other Mokhtar, but no one he spoke to seemed to know who this Other Mokhtar was. Still, they made it through five checkpoints and could glimpse the blue sea ahead.