The Devil's Cup

by Stewart Lee Allen

  “No, no, no,” I said. “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Yes, yes.” He thrust the money back into my hands. “Take.”

  “It’s very pretty,” I said. It came to about fifteen thousand Somali shillings. “I cannot take this. You’re a crazy man.”

  An Ethiopian who spoke better English intervened. The Somali government no longer existed. The money was worthless. I reluctantly accepted the pretty pieces of paper. Mohammed appeared mystified as to why I would only accept his gift if I thought it was worthless.

  Ali was also distraught, mainly because in Yemen she would be obliged to don the veil. She pulled the hem of her robe over her face mockingly.

  “Bad, bad,” she said. “Not in my country.”

  Her face was a wonderful mix of Arab and African features. She plied me with tea and biscuits. I gave her my Arab-English dictionary.

  Around two in the morning they pulled out their prized possession, a Casio minikeyboard. I played them the opening to Mozart’s Sonata in A, but they were more interested in the machine’s auto-rhythm controls, which produced a steady syncopation in whatever style you selected. In the days when coffee made this journey, these two would have been bound for slavery, I thought, listening to the tinselly bossa novas thumping against the wind. Now they were only refugees; I wondered if that qualified as a real improvement.

  1 In the Rastafarian religion, which derives from Ethiopia, God is referred to as Jah.

  Sailing to al-Makkha

  In his travels he passed by a coffee bush and nourished himself, as is the custom of the pious, on its fruit which he found untouched. He found that it made his ain nimble, promoting wakefulness for the performance of religious duties.

  al-Kawakib al-sa’irn bi-a’yan al-mi’a al-’ashira

  by Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi (1570–1651)

  THE SHIP’S MOTOR WOKE ME in the morning. Djibouti had disappeared, and, peering over the railing, all I could see was a heaving sea of turquoise water flecked with whitecaps. It was like looking into a shattered mirror reflecting the sky. It didn’t seem to me that the windstorm had died down at all.

  I noticed that the others had moved their belongings to the lean-to at the rear of the boat. I decided to stay where I was. A wave crashed over the bow and drenched me from head to foot. Another wave crashed over, and another. I was still moving my belongings to the rear with the others’, when I noticed that the deck had started to tilt at a twenty-degree angle.

  The Qasid stopped moving forward. The crew had turned the ship’s nose out of the wind while they bailed water out of the hold and got the ship righted. Boxes were shifted about, and I decided the problem was only that the cargo’s weight had been poorly distributed. Then a fishing vessel came racing by, and I noticed how high it was riding. The Qasid was riding about seven feet lower. Our captain had overloaded the boat.

  We set out and immediately waves started crashing over the bow. Again, we pulled over and bailed. This continued all day. Finally our crew became concerned that the cargo of “cookies” might be damaged by the salt water. The real problem, however, was that the Qasid was carrying mainly booze and AK-47s.

  The booze was from Djibouti, but the guns, I was later told, were returning to Yemen after an unsuccessful sales trip to Eritrea. The weight of all those weapons was pulling us down.

  The crew decided to find an island and wait out the gale. I write “the crew” because I realize now that I never saw Captain Abdou on board. No matter. The three teenagers and two old men who manned the Qasid soon had us anchored next to an island. All of us immediately hung our belongings out to dry. I noted that even here, out of the wind, the gale kept the clothes flapping at a ninety-degree angle. It was, I suppose, really the Red Sea equivalent of an interstate rest stop. But, technically, we were now shipwrecked on a desert island. I was rather pleased. After all the boat’s engine still ran. We’d probably get to Yemen eventually.

  Some of my fellow passengers, however, were less sanguine about the situation. Paulious, for instance, an Ethiopian qat addict. Habitual chewers deprived of their daily mouthful are haunted by the demon katou, and Paulious was perturbed at being stranded in such an obviously qat-free environment.

  “Oh, bad thoughts will come,” he kept whining. “We have to leave.”

  The first fight broke out between an ancient sailor, whom I’d dubbed “the Toothless One,” and a passenger who had tried to steal his qat. The others quickly pulled them apart—Toothless had been threatening the young man with his flip-flop—but it was a bad omen. Toothless had earned his sobriquet when I’d noticed him grinding up a green purée in some sort of mill. At first I’d thought he was preparing food. Later I realized that it was his precious qat. Being toothless, he had to first “chew” it with this mechanical device in order to extract the leaf’s precious juices.

  There was another crew member, a boy of perhaps sixteen, with curly hair, whom I’d caught staring at me a number of times. He had an honest, open face that bordered on simple, and a monkey-like way of moving that made me think he must have spent his life on boats like the Qasid. I was talking with the others and the word America came up. The boy, who was sitting on the crate above us, pointed in puzzlement toward al-Makkha.

  “He is from al-Merica?” he inquired of the others. “Is that near al-Makkha?”

  The others laughed, Paulious loudest of all. “He doesn’t even know what America is!” he said.

  “Is it an island?” the boy asked.

  I pointed northwest. “It’s over there.”

  “By Eritrea?”

  The others laughed again.

  “No, no. It’s very far,” I said. “If you were to go there, you would come first to Eritrea, then Ethiopia, than all of Africa and Turkey and then Europe and then there’s another place, England, and the sea beyond that. A great sea. Beyond all that,” I said, “that’s where America is.” The others translated.

  The boy looked at me as if he just couldn’t understand how a place could be that far away.

  “It’s not as far as it sounds,” I said lamely.

  He looked even more confused. Then his eyes narrowed—the others were still laughing. I think he thought that they were laughing at him and that I was lying, making fun of him. He moved away, with a look wavering between anger and puzzlement, and suddenly I thought, yes, he was right, it was impossibly far. Too far to go, and even if such a voyage was possible, why would anybody want to go so far from home? And why should he care about a place that might as well be on the moon? He, the boy, lived here. He had lived here all his life, probably on this very boat; this was his home, this and al-Makkha and the sand and the sea and the wind and the waiting. And one day he would be the Toothless One sitting by the mast, laughing and stealing orange cream cookies from the cargo. He would be thirty, maybe forty, but he would look much, much older.

  After that, whenever I smiled at him he moved away. He referred to me only as the American, as did all the others. I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting alone.

  The port we were headed for, al-Makkha in Yemen, is still one of the world’s most isolated areas. But back when coffee was brought there by kidnapped Africans, it verged on mythical, at least to Westerners. “Terrifically unhealthy even to sail by” was how the first-century Greek author of the Periplus Maris Erypraei described it. “A land full of ichthyophagoi [fish eaters] who plunder and enslave any who are shipwrecked there.” The Greeks believed that Arabs ate huge lizards and boiled their fat down for oil. Winged dragons were said to guard the coast, which was believed to be contaminated by horrific diseases.

  Much of this propaganda was spread by the Arabs to discourage raiders from attacking the myrrh fields that were crucial to their trading empire. Using ships similar to the Qasid, Arab sailors from Oman were already bringing indigo, diamonds, and sapphires from India. To Africa they carried “weapons from Muza [al-Makkha] of local craftsmanship to gain the good will of the savages.” Back from Africa, they transported
civet, musk, tortoiseshell, and rhino horn.

  And slaves, lots of them, some of whom introduced coffee seeds to Arabia. Numbers are woefully inexact, but zanj slaves were in China by the first century. In 1474, eight thousand African slaves briefly took over Bengal in eastern India. This slave trade reached its apex when Oman’s Black Sultanate ousted the Portuguese and set up headquarters in Zanzibar, circa 1800, enslaving almost half of the population on the Swahili (eastern) coast of Africa.

  We had rice for dinner. There seemed to be flickering lights coming from the direction of the Hanish Islands. I asked if it might be planes dropping bombs. The others said no, it was nothing. Everyone fell into a sullen silence except Paulious, who was getting positively twitchy over the lack of qat. He kept babbling to me how it was good, that the wind was dying, we could go soon. I pointed out the mini sand storms dancing in the darkness atop the island’s ridge, causing trails of silvery starlight to run down the face of the sky

  “Is al-sichan,” he said, giving the dust devils their Ethiopian name. “Bad things will happen.”

  The next day the wind had calmed enough for us to go on. We spied land around sunset and several hours later we dropped anchor just outside the port of al-Makkha. When we tried to dock the next morning, however, we found that Yemen didn’t want us. My fellow passengers, mainly Somali refugees, had no official papers. We were told to anchor twenty-five yards from the dock and stay put, forbidden to arrive, forbidden to leave. For three days and nights we drifted among the port’s derelict ships. Friendships formed and fell apart. More fights broke out. The Somali boy, Mohammed, refused to speak. When I asked what was the matter, he would only look up at the stars and murmur, “Ees so beautiful.”

  HE WAS RIGHT. DURING THE DAY WE COULD SEE THE BONE-WHITE minarets of al-Makkha appearing and disappearing among swirling sandstorms. At night, I lay on my back and watched the stars spin round and round overhead as our boat swung about its anchoring point. Nights were cold. I had no blanket, so I sang Billie Holiday songs to stay warm. When I carried the tune, the Toothless One would reward me with a pack of biscuits. His favorite was “God Bless the Child.”

  My psyche began vomiting up every memory it could get its claws on. Phantom Christmas carols flitted on the winds, and I repeated certain sexual fantasies so often I could feel my lover’s hair curled about my fingers. On the last night I became aware of activity on a nearby wreck. It was half submerged, and I’d assumed it was abandoned. But that night I kept seeing pastel lights flickering from its portholes. Every time our boat swung close by, I would rise on one elbow and peer through the darkness. Someone in the wreck was watching Michael Jackson videos, the “Billy Jean” one with the glowing footsteps. It was hard to be sure, what with the constant motion and my salt-crusted glasses, but I was convinced that Michael Jackson was doing his moonwalk across the water, over and over and over…

  On the third day I woke to find the Qasid pulling up to the dock. The Somali women went behind the veil. My shipmates were loaded into a pickup truck, but I was taken to a small shack surrounded by soldiers wearing checkered Arabian head scarves. Inside was another soldier seated behind a desk.

  “Passport.”

  I handed it over. He flipped through the pages angrily.

  “So,” he said without looking up. “You have just come from…”

  “Ethiopia.”

  “Djibouti, it says. Which is it?”

  “Yes, yes, Djibouti,” I said. “I forgot.”

  He snorted. “You forgot Djibouti. Have you also forgotten the war?”

  “The war? Between Yemen and Eritrea? Of course not.”

  “Of course not.” He leaned back in his chair. “Strange that you, an American, should be here now. Do you know why I say this?”

  It seemed that the war was not going well. The Eritreans had driven the Yemenese off the Hanish Islands. Fifty or so people had died. Serious. And, according to the officer, the whole thing had started when the Eritreans signed over seabed drilling rights to an American oil company. The seabed had been between Eritrea’s shoreline and the islands, so Eritrea had invaded to strengthen its oil claim.

  And now here I was, an American in a funny hat. I was obviously from the CIA.

  “So you have come to al-Makkha,” he said, bobbing his head and smiling at me.

  “Did you find my visa?” I asked.

  “Ah yes,” he said scornfully. “The visa.” He pointed to my belongings, spread out on a table by the wall. “You have camera?”

  “Yes.”

  “You take pictures?”

  “Not in al-Makkha.” I tried to sound outraged. “This is a military zone!”

  “Ah. But why have you come to al-Makkha?”

  “Coffee,” I explained.

  “Coffee? In al-Makkha?”

  “Yes. You know, al-Shadhili…”

  “The mosque?” He reopened my passport and examined the first page. “But it does not say here you are a Muslim.”

  “No, but…”

  “Only Muslims may enter the mosque.”

  “I only want to see…just look.

  “Oh. First you say you come for coffee. Now you say you are a tourist.” He did not believe me. “Yet you come to Yemen with criminals from Eritrea. With a camera.”

  So he was going to lock me up as a spy. Fine with me, I thought. As long as there’s a bed and running water. It might be interesting watching Yemenese bureaucracy run its course. He would send a description, they would have more questions, he would send answers. More questions, more answers, but we both knew that eventually I would be freed.

  The official studied me. Perhaps he saw the images in my mind because suddenly he seemed to decide I wasn’t worth the effort. He made a gesture I came to identify with Yemenese philosophy: he raised his right hand to his ear and made a curious flinging-away gesture with his thumb and first two fingers while rolling his eyes heavenward. Then he ordered two machine-gun-toting soldiers to escort me out.

  “Welcome. Don’t forget your passport.” He handed it over. “But if you have come for coffee you are three hundred years too late.”

  THE PORT OF AL-MAKKHA HAS BEEN SYNONYMOUS WITH COFFEE for almost a thousand years. It was here that the first beans arrived from Africa, and al-Makkha, corrupted to Mocha, later became the universal nickname for the brew. It was also in Mocha, around 1200, that an Islamic hermit named al-Shadhili apparently brewed the first mug. Although Ethiopians were already chewing the bean, and perhaps making a tea from its leaves, al-Shadhili of Mocha is thought by most to be the first to have made a coffee bean drink.

  “It has reached us from many people,” said Fakhr al-Din al-Makki, “that the first one to introduce qahwa [coffee] and to make its use a widespread and popular [custom] in the Yemen was our master Shaykh…’ ali ibn ‘Umar al-Shadhili, one of the masters of the Shadhilya order.”

  There are as many stories about how al-Shadhili made his discovery as there are ways to spell his name. He discovered coffee while walking home from prayers one night; no, he was actually fasting in the wilderness when he discovered the plant’s powers. Some say he lived on nothing but coffee beans for twenty years; others go so far as to claim it was the Archangel Gabriel who revealed that a java-only diet would lead to sainthood. In the oddest version, our hero is unjustly accused of playing footsie with the king’s daughter and banished to the wilderness, where he lives on coffee beans until the Archangel Gabriel reveals to him that the ruler has been struck down by a skin disease that al-Shadhili can cure with a cup of the magic brew.

  Some historical accounts have him, or one of his brethren, visiting Ethiopia, where he observes people drinking coffee and then brings back the habit. Later accounts toss in how a shipload of seasick Portuguese sailors pulled into Mocha. Ill and malnourished, they were on the point of death until the kindly al-Shadhili advised them to try the magic potion he had been drinking for years. The sailors tried it and within days were well enough to set sail. As they departed, al-Sha
dhili is said to have cried out to them, “Remember this, the drink of al-Makkha!” And so the drink that changed history was introduced to the West, and Mocha’s fame was forever assured.

  Whatever. In fact, the Shadhilis are a Sufi sect, and from 1200 to 1500 a handful of Shadhili dervishes wandered around the Arabian peninsula having coffee-scented religious experiences. The group eventually spread as far as Spain, where a syncretic Christian/Muslim group called al-Shadhiliya yet exists, and is so closely associated with coffee that you still ask for a cup of al-Shadhili in Algeria. All anyone really knows is that a member of the Shadhiliya order introduced coffee to the world, that one of them lived in al-Makkha (Mocha), and that whatever it was they drank, it was probably dreadful since they didn’t roast their beans. It seems they may have made a stew of raw beans, leaves, and cardamom. Indeed, there is some evidence that all al-Shadhili of Mocha really did was make a tea from qat leaves, and that it was another Sufi in Aden who later replaced the leaves with beans.

  From this humble start grew a small empire. By the 1400s, when the Turks conquered Yemen, coffee from Mocha was being drunk throughout the Islamic world. When the first English trader visited the port, in 1606, almost half a century before Europe’s first café opened, he reported that there were over thirty-five merchant ships from as far away as India crowding the harbor, all waiting for the bags of coffee that cluttered the docks. In a pleasant reversal from the present currency exchange, the English merchant John Jourdain wrote that Mocha was full of “all kinds of commodities that are so deare that there is no dealing for us…. at the rates they sell them to the merchants from Great Cairo.” Coffee palaces lined the harbor, and princes sat on gold cushions, fanned by hordes of slaves. There was even a private army whose job was to ensure that no infidel stole one of the precious coffee plants.