The Monk of Mokha

  “Hi!” Mokhtar said in his most American way, to show he had no accent, that he was American raised. It made no difference. Within two minutes the young official put Mokhtar’s passport in a red envelope.

  “Step over here,” the official said. “Don’t worry. You’re not in trouble.”

  —

  Mokhtar and Dena were led into a side room, and when the door opened, he saw a small sea of Arab faces. Strangely enough, though he’d flown plenty inside the United States and in and out of Yemen, he’d never been selected for any secondary screening, no additional interviews, nothing. The novelty, seeing this room firsthand after hearing about it for so many years, activated his sense of the absurd.

  “Salaam alaikum!” he said loudly, giving them a big semicircle wave. Some laughed. Most returned the greeting: “Wa alaikum assalam.” Others seemed too worried or tired or numb. Some had been waiting five and six hours. This was the room where time ceased to have meaning, and some of the men and women in the room seemed far beyond their patience.

  He and Dena sat for a spell, until Mokhtar was approached by a soft-faced official. His nametag said his name was Joel.

  “Hi Mokhtar,” he said. “Can I call you Mo?”

  “No,” Mokhtar said, and then couldn’t help himself. “Can I call you Jo?” Joel smiled indulgently, and Mokhtar smiled, trying to communicate that the screening process was inherently flawed and racist, but he would, for now, maintain a sense of humor.

  Joel seemed apologetic. He said it was just a formality, all this, as they left the room and went down a hallway to a baggage area, where Mokhtar had to claim his suitcases. When Joel saw how many suitcases Mokhtar had checked, he was intrigued, but continued to smile, saying it was not a problem, that this was just a formality, a normal process.

  With the help of another official, the suitcases were taken to a steel table and opened, exposing all his beans in so many plastic bags. Mokhtar knew this would be far too interesting to Joel, and to customs in general. He knew he’d miss his connecting flight. He thought of lawyers he could call on the East Coast.

  “So what do you do?” Joel asked.

  Trying to suppress his frustration, Mokhtar said he worked in coffee, he was an importer, he was helping to improve conditions for Yemeni farmers—and by the way he was doing much of this work with the cooperation of USAID, that he was helping the U.S. government. “My government,” he said, his voice rising. “I’m helping us look good over there!”

  Now Joel was interested, but the tone of the conversation seemed to have changed. He asked Mokhtar about coffee, about which coffees were the best, did Mokhtar think dark roast or light roast was superior, and which was preferred by experts? Mokhtar calmed a bit, and talked with as much levity as he could about varietals, and different roasts, and the effect of elevation on coffee fruits, the relative advantages of Yemeni coffee, how Joel should ask for it at the next café he went to, that soon enough Joel would be able to order coffee imported by Mokhtar himself. And because all this coffee talk seemed to be going so well, Mokhtar allowed himself to believe that he and Dena would soon be permitted to zip up all the suitcases and be on their way.

  But first, Joel said, there was an agricultural screening. All the suitcases were zipped up again, and they pushed them down another hallway and into another room, where they were put on steel tables again.

  A uniformed woman told Mokhtar he couldn’t import all these green samples without documentation and permits, and he lost track of all the things she was saying, because he hadn’t thought of any of this while he’d been packing the beans. He’d survived what might have been a racist interview, but now was confronted by a very legitimate question from this reasonable woman about the legality of importing six suitcases of green beans, which may or may not be bringing along an invasive species or unknown bacteria.

  The woman seemed unsure what category coffee fell into, though. It wasn’t a live plant, after all. These were beans. And while they were talking, she cycled through the usual order of conversation, just as Joel had. You’re from Yemen? And there’s coffee in Yemen? Fertile areas? Things really grow there? I love coffee, she said. Is this good coffee? Can I get it at the grocery store? Does Starbucks sell Yemeni coffee?

  Incredibly, after ten minutes with the agricultural inspector, Mokhtar was rezipping the suitcases and was allowed to proceed. It was either the power of coffee or the power of his charm, but he was on his way, holding tight to Dena’s hand, and feeling very good about all this, and feeling almost sure he would make their connecting flight.

  Then Joel led him to the back of the screening line.

  “You have to go through security again.”

  He put his carry-ons through, put Dena’s SpongeBob backpack on the conveyor, thinking this was the last stage, and not so onerous, really. But after the X-rays and scanners, he and Dena were pulled aside again, and while TSA swabbed his carry-on bag for explosive dust, he turned to see Dena being frisked.

  They were cleared, and they walked down the hallway, looking for the connecting flight, but because they’d come through the agricultural screening, they’d ended up in a strange part of the airport, far from their gate. The TSA staff had directed him where to go, left and right and left again, but now he was lost and outside the security checkpoint again. The only way to get to the gates would be another screening.

  So they went through another screening. After the screening, while rushing to the gate, with a few minutes to make the flight, Mokhtar was met by a random TSA official.

  “Can I ask you some questions?”

  The questions were about Mokhtar’s trip to Yemen, his work, his residence in the United States. The questions went on for ten minutes, long enough that Mokhtar and Dena missed their flight.

  —

  They’d already been at the Philadelphia airport four hours. The next flight was six hours away. Mokhtar went to the airline desk and was greeted by an African American woman, who apologized for his trouble and issued him and Dena new tickets, which had the two of them separated.

  Mokhtar asked for seats together, and the clerk said that was possible, but that he would have to pay extra.

  He paid, and she gave him his new tickets, which bore the code that indicated they’d been singled out for extra screenings.

  “You know what?” he said. “You work in a racist institution. You should know about these things. I’ve been through four hours of screenings and I missed the flight. That’s why I’m here getting a new flight. And you’re putting me through another screening because I’m brown.”

  Mokhtar was on a roll, his voice rising. People around him were listening. He went on—Are you in a union? You work for a racist organization. This is a racist system—until the African American agent, and the white male agent next to her, began apologizing and until the white man came around and leaned down to Dena.

  “You want a sticker?” the man asked.

  “We don’t want your stickers!” Mokhtar said. “We want dignity.”

  Everyone at the gate was listening. A few people clapped. He fumed until the flight boarded, and when he gave his ticket to the agent and the ticket went through the machine, another signal alerted the agent to pull him aside. She looked around and said, “Just go.” He took Dena’s hand and flew.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THIS ONE’S INTERESTING

  “YOU LOST WEIGHT.” THAT was the first thing everyone at Boot said. Mokhtar had lost twenty-five pounds. “You lost your ass,” they noted.

  Mokhtar and Stephen spent ten hours cleaning the Yemeni samples. They were dirty, unsorted, full of broken beans and defects. Once they had something to work with, Stephen carefully roasted all twenty-one varietals, and then Mokhtar and Stephen and Willem held a very official cupping session, to determine whether or not Mokhtar, and by extension Yemen, had any hope in the world of specialty coffee.

  The first batches were dismal.

  “DOA,” said Willem about one after another.


  They were at Boot Coffee in Mill Valley, and Mokhtar was in the moment, hoping for the best with these beans, picturing the farmers he’d met, the General and Malik and Yusuf, whose hopes rose and fell on whether or not their coffee could garner a higher price, a premium price.

  “DOA,” Willem said about another varietal.

  That day they cupped ten varietals, and Willem’s verdict for all ten of them had been the same—not viable. The samples were dirty, earthy, muddy, old and overfermented. Unclean and without merit.

  Mokhtar hadn’t expected anything extraordinary. He figured if he had a few samples that scored in the 80s, he could work with that. He could bring those up to 90 over the course of seasons or years. But so far none of his coffees had cupped over 70. Coffee this bad would not warrant going back to Yemen. There would be no point.

  The next day, Stephen carefully roasted the remaining eleven samples, doing all he could to increase the chances of the coffee clawing its way to respectability. “DOA,” Willem said again.

  Five of the last ten had no value whatsoever. They hadn’t justified the expense of bringing them back from Yemen. Mokhtar didn’t know if there was any point in continuing. He didn’t think he could hear the letters DOA again.

  Then Willem made a sound. A surprised sound.

  “This one’s interesting,” he said.

  —

  A few days later Mokhtar was standing outside Royal Grounds Coffee, a major regional roaster and importer based in Northern California, and he was crying. Willem, Jodi and other Q graders had scored three of Mokhtar’s samples in the 90s. Two were from Haymah, one from Ibb. One was Malik’s.

  Mokhtar had taken the samples to Royal Grounds, and based on the scores, they’d said they would buy eighteen tons. Mokhtar didn’t have eighteen tons of anything, but in theory he could get it. If he could pay for it.

  Again he went to Omar. He told him about the scores, about the promise of significant orders from major roasters and retailers. Omar assembled a small group of investors, all of them Arab Americans who had done well in the tech sector. Together they arranged to loan Mokhtar the funds necessary—about three hundred thousand dollars—to buy a containers’ worth of coffee. There were contingencies, of course. The coffee had to be of the highest quality, and the coffee had to somehow get shipped out of a highly unstable country. And they could not release the money to Mokhtar until he proved the value of the coffee and proved he could get it out.

  Mokhtar agreed. He didn’t know any better and had no other options. And he believed he could do it, even though the last time he had significant amounts of cash he’d put it in a satchel and lost it in a parking lot.

  His parents were proud of his work in Yemen, but didn’t want him to go back. He’d returned twenty-five pounds lighter than when he’d left, his skin pale and his eyes sunken. The malaria and the tapeworm—whatever that had been—had wrecked his body. They worried about his health, but more so about the fact that the Houthis had overtaken Sana’a a few weeks earlier, on September 21, and it was possible the country would devolve into civil war.

  But Mokhtar bought his ticket. The next harvest was coming soon and now he could actually buy coffee. He had to buy coffee—his investors expected it, and he had Royal Grounds waiting for it. Now it was just a matter of finishing his Q-grading test, so he could return to Yemen as the first Arab Q grader in history. Easy.

  Not easy. He took the test again. Again it was Jodi administering it, and it was just as difficult as before, but because he’d come so close before, and because, he thought, he was now in touch with the origins of coffee, and was on a mission propelled by fate and God, he passed.

  In September of 2014, Mokhtar became the world’s first Arab Q grader of arabica coffee, and in October he returned to Yemen, to Haymah. He wanted to visit Malik, the man he’d first seen under the coffee tree. It was his coffee that had scored the highest, that had extended the dream.

  Mokhtar envisioned flying to New York, and then to London, and then to Sana’a, and after driving to Haymah, through the valley untouched by time, he would find Malik under his tree and tell him the news, that his coffee was among the best in the world.

  CHAPTER XXV

  A COUNTRY WITHOUT A GOVERNMENT

  THE CHILDREN HOLDING AK-47S—this was new. Mokhtar landed in Sana’a on October 27, 2014, and was confronted with the patchwork of overlapping military units, security forces and ragtag groups of Houthi or pseudo-Houthi rebels all over the airport and the roads to the capital.

  How did a small group of hillbillies take over the country? Mokhtar had lived in California most of his life and that was the corollary that came to his mind: it was as if some almost-unknown militia from near the Oregon border swept down and took over Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all without any significant resistance. One day Yemen had been ruled by President Hadi, and the next he was on the run, and this northern rebel group, the Houthis—who had scarcely had any real influence on Yemeni politics before—was suddenly in control.

  In September the Houthis took over much of the capital. They had induced the surrender or complicity of most of the Yemeni army forces en route. Because the Yemeni army lacked top-down command, was instead controlled by its officers, few of whom were reliably loyal to Hadi, the progress of the Houthis was largely unimpeded. The Houthis bribed some commanders, and commanders loyal to Saleh eased their path. And then the capital was under their control.

  When Mokhtar walked through the airport, he saw the Houthis everywhere—heavily armed but in traditional dress, with turbans, daggers—all of them strangely coexisting with the regular airport security. Mokhtar got in a taxi and within minutes they approached a checkpoint manned by Houthi forces. Or they were dressed as Houthis. But they were children, no more than thirteen. One looked to be ten.

  They motioned the taxi driver to stop, and he did, and Mokhtar watched as a bizarre game of pantomime began. The children pretended to be men and soldiers, and the driver pretended that he was not noticing or caring that the soldiers were children. The children asked the driver for his papers and his destination, and after a cursory inspection, they allowed him to pass.

  The remarkable thing about the Houthis was that they were polite. Mokhtar had been hearing this from friends in Yemen before he returned, and now he’d seen it at the airport and would see it again and again his first few days in the country. The Houthis spoke graciously, and in general were more professional and considerate than the usual authorities—more efficient and hospitable.

  The taxi was stopped at more checkpoints on the way to the city, some manned by Yemeni police, some by Houthis, and all along Mokhtar hoped the car would not be searched, that he would not be searched. He was carrying ten thousand U.S. dollars, and was sure it would disappear if discovered. His investors had spotted him this much in cash, with the rest contingent on the conditions they’d agreed upon. For the time being, Mokhtar was happy not to have much paper money. Word would get around, and would make him too interesting to the Houthis or thieves. Paramount for him and his safety—and ability to do business in the tribal areas—was to remain uninteresting to all.

  The business he hoped to do was not so complicated. He only needed to visit the coffee-growing regions whose coffee had scored highest, and then help to ensure that their upcoming harvests, in two months’ time, were well monitored and that the cherries were picked at their carnelian-stone ripest. And then he had to buy about eighteen thousand kilograms of dried cherries—he would have to fill a shipping container with coffee. He had no funds to give them as a down payment, and they would be asked to forgo their usual buyers in hopes that a twenty-six-year-old from San Francisco—now he was twenty-six—could somehow secure, from unnamed investors, hundreds of thousands of dollars at some later date.

  Then he would have to get these cherries to Sana’a, where the cherries would be hulled and sorted. But first he had to find or rent a processing plant. And then, if all else went according to
plan—if he could buy the cherries, rent or buy a processing plant, and get the cherries there to process and sort them—then he had to figure out a way to ship eighteen tons of coffee out of Yemen, all during a civil war and while the Houthis controlled most of the ports.

  Not so complicated.

  —

  Mokhtar arrived at Mohamed and Kenza’s house a different man. They knew he had financial backing, at least in theory, and that he’d become a Q grader, which they knew meant a great deal in the coffee world, so they received him with a new kind of deference. He was no longer a student, and he wasn’t a young man claiming to be starting a business. He was in Yemen to actually buy coffee, process it, store it and sell it in the international market. He had returned an Important Man.

  But he was still sleeping on the floor. There was nowhere else.

  With Nurideen, Mokhtar talked about the Houthis, the fact that Sana’a was under Hadi’s control one day in September, and the next it was in the hands of the Houthis, while life in Yemen had gone on more or less uninterrupted. Banks and businesses were open the day of the invasion and open the next day, too. They talked about what effect, if any, the Houthis’ advance would have on Mokhtar’s work, and they concluded it would be minimal.

  But now he would be traveling as an American exporter, carrying large amounts of cash to rural areas controlled by tribal forces. Considerations had to be made. He and Nurideen thought it through. He would need a driver, as usual, but this driver had to be armed. In some parts of the country he would need another guard, and this man should have an AK-47. Mokhtar planned to carry his SIG Sauer, which he usually traveled with in Yemen anyway, and now he’d wear a few grenades. (In Yemen, the grenades were more for show than anything. Men wore them on their chests, attached to vests, as a signal of their willingness to take any argument to its logical conclusion.) On any trip, then, there would need to be at least three guns in any vehicle, and if ever they were transporting coffee, they’d need multiple trucks, each with an armed escort.