The Monk of Mokha

  “Almost there,” Mokhtar said. The sky was wide open, the day sunny and clear. Mokhtar could picture the lamb, the beef, the spread his aunt would lay out for them. He’d show Sadeq and Ahmed the view from Hamood’s sixth-floor balcony—you could see all of Ibb from there, a hundred miles in any direction. They’d stay there until they were rested. They’d sleep for days.

  “Shit,” Sadeq said. “Look.”

  Another checkpoint, this one on the coastal road at Al Bura’aiqah—a beautiful beach known for its powder-white sands. Ahmed slowed and stopped. Fifteen men surrounded the truck.

  “Get out,” one of them said. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, wearing a windbreaker and track pants. Across his forehead he wore a thin black bandanna. Mokhtar couldn’t help thinking of the Karate Kid.

  Ahmed got out, his hands raised above his head. Sadeq followed. Mokhtar crawled through the truck cab and out into the bright sun.

  Karate Kid asked where they were going, and Mokhtar explained. He showed him his American passport. Karate Kid seemed impressed. There was a discussion between him and the other men, and calmly Karate Kid returned and said, “Don’t worry. You’re in my command.”

  Mokhtar smiled to himself. Where did Karate Kid get a phrase like that? You’re in my command. All these men playing soldier—they took themselves so seriously. Karate Kid put his hand on Mokhtar’s shoulder.

  “You’re fine,” he said, his face grave. “You’re an American. You don’t have to worry. But these two…I recommend you leave them.”

  “I can’t,” Mokhtar said.

  “We have to take these two to the police station for some questions. You can stay here.”

  “Then you’ll bring them back?”

  “We will,” Karate Kid said.

  There was something in the orderly attitude of the men at this checkpoint, something in the gentle and businesslike demeanor of Karate Kid, that put Mokhtar, Sadeq and Ahmed at ease. Karate Kid calmly said they would be taking Sadeq and Ahmed to a police station, and his associates calmly blindfolded both men and then calmly put them in the back of a white Hilux. Mokhtar, hypnotized by the routine nature of it all, by the casual and efficient way they all went about their business and saw this as a simple bureaucratic procedure, nothing to worry about. He did as he was told, which was to relax, it would only take an hour, no problem.

  —

  Mokhtar stepped from the road to the white sands of the beach and sat down. A small group of popular committee members sat with him, and together they looked out to the Gulf of Aden. Three American warships stood in plain view, a few miles away. Mokhtar thought of how much easier it would have been had the American government simply evacuated its own citizens. There are three ships right there. My God.

  Still, the beach was beautiful. It was empty but for him and his guardians. Mokhtar took off his shoes and buried his feet in the fine white sand, the texture of ash. He ran his hands through it, raising his face to the sun. The soldiers asked Mokhtar about his work, and he found himself showing them photos on his phone—of Haymah, of Bura’a, Hajjah, Bani Matar, Ibb, Utman—all his pictures of the mountain terraces, the astonishments of high-altitude agriculture.

  “That’s Yemen?” one of the younger soldiers asked. He’d never left Aden. He had no idea there were landscapes like that in Yemen.

  Mokhtar said yes, that’s Yemen, that it was all Yemen, that there was so much more to the country than Aden, than Sana’a. More men gathered around Mokhtar as he waved his fingers over his screen, left and right, showing them the drying beds, the red cherries, the bright green leaves, the tanned faces of the farmers, their children.

  Another man, younger than the last, asked the same thing: “That’s really Yemen?”

  —

  The roar of an approaching vehicle snapped them out of their reverie. A white Hilux swerved across the highway and a large man jumped from the truck bed. Immediately he zeroed in on Mokhtar.

  “Come here!” he yelled.

  He was wearing a tracksuit and a leather jacket. Five other men, most of them armed, remained in the back of the truck.

  The atmosphere changed so quickly and radically that Mokhtar found himself leaping to his feet and rushing to meet the man on the road, leaving his sandals on the beach.

  “You’re coming with us. In the truck,” the man in the leather jacket said.

  Mokhtar didn’t see any room in the truck bed, so he moved toward the passenger seat of the cab. Everything had seemed so friendly until then that sitting in the passenger seat seemed most logical, most hospitable, among these new friends of his.

  “No!” the man in leather yelled. “In the back!”

  Mokhtar made his way to the truck bed. Another man grabbed him and began tying his hands behind his back. The material was soft—it seemed like a length of fabric torn from a shirt. Mokhtar wanted to get his sandals from the beach, but he knew it was too late. Whatever was about to happen, he would be barefoot for it.

  Now he was being blindfolded. The blindfold was hastily applied, so Mokhtar could still see through the bottom of the fabric with his right eye—a glimpse of the ground in front of him.

  He was helped into the back of the truck, where he sat on the wheel well, and in seconds they were on the road again. The wind rushed by, the air getting denser. They were heading into the city.

  “You’re a goddamn Houthi,” the leather man yelled through the wind. He was sitting in the truck bed with him.

  “I’m not a Houthi,” Mokhtar said. He tried to remain calm, speaking in his best classical Arabic. He knew they would be listening for any trace of a northern accent.

  “We plan to kill you,” the man in leather said.

  Again Mokhtar tried to remain placid and wise, to project the air of a neutral man, a bystander, a civilized citizen of the world caught in a fight not his own. “Do you really want that on your conscience?” he asked.

  “I have plenty of dead men on my conscience,” the man in leather said. “I killed two of you earlier today.”

  Now Mokhtar believed he might die. All the other popular committee members had been ordinary men and teenagers and middle-aged bank managers forced to take up arms to defend Aden. But this man was a thug, an opportunist, perhaps a madman. Whether or not he believed Mokhtar was a Houthi, he might actually kill him.

  The truck made drastic turns through the city. Mokhtar, smelling diesel, feeling the shadows of tall buildings, contemplated how he might die. Would they shoot him? He thought of the burn of lead passing through his skull. He remembered his uncle Rafik, the Oakland cop, telling him that there was a spot between the eyebrows and the bridge of the nose—if you put a bullet there, he said, it was like an off switch. No pain. Just the end.

  Mokhtar didn’t want to be shot. A knife across the throat, he decided, would be his preference. The men in the truck all had machetes. He thought about asking the man in leather to grant him this—a quick death from a clean blade. That’s how Muslims slaughtered animals to ensure meat was halal. It was a quick and humane death for mammals. He had a vision of his funeral. He pictured the mayor of San Francisco eulogizing him. President Obama might say something, he thought. At least relay a message. Mokhtar Alkhanshali died doing what he loved doing. Was that the right way to die? He thought of his parents, his siblings. He thought of Willem, Jodi, Marlee, Stephen. His death might be a source of inspiration. He would be a martyr. A coffee martyr? He’d lived well. For a few years, at least, he’d lived well. He thought of Treasure Island. Of the Infinity. The sculpture of the coffee-drinking man. No, his story wasn’t such a good story. Not one that would mean much to anyone. A story without an ending.

  He thought of his grandmother at her store in Richgrove. He saw Hamood and his aunt, preparing the great meal in Ibb. Who would eat all that food? he wondered.

  He would die very young. He realized this with a shock. Twenty-five was very young. He thought of Miriam. Justin. Jeremy. Giuliano. They would live on, with the burden o
f their dead friend.

  The truck sped through the city. Mokhtar figured it couldn’t hurt to try something. He’d tell these men his story. He had nothing else.

  “Do you want to hear my story?” he asked the man in leather.

  The man in leather scoffed. “You sure you have it memorized?”

  “Inshallah, I do,” Mokhtar said.

  The men in the truck laughed.

  Mokhtar began, weaving a story of the coffee workers in Haymah and Bura’a, how he was organizing them, trying to improve their methods to prove that Yemeni coffee could be among the best in the world. The whole planet drinks coffee, but it was born here, he said. We should be proud of this. The world should know this. We have the chance to make coffee great, to show the world we have more than civil war and drones and qat.

  When he finished, no one said anything. Mokhtar wasn’t sure the man in leather, or anyone else, had heard him. And now the wind was howling, and they were thundering over a broken road, speeding to a sudden end.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  A GENTLE HAND

  THE TRUCK STOPPED, AND tipped right and left as the men jumped off. Someone, a gentle hand, took him under the arm.

  “Careful here,” the man’s voice said. It was a friendly voice, as gentle as the arm helping him. “Step down.”

  Mokhtar stepped onto the street.

  “Just through here,” the gentle voice said.

  Mokhtar realized he wasn’t dead and might not die. This new voice—who was this gentle new voice? Was it possible that this man would gently lead him to his death? Where was the man in leather?

  “Up these steps,” the gentle voice said. Mokhtar stepped up a flight of stairs and was led down a hallway and through a door. Even blindfolded, he could sense the change in light. He was in a dark space. He flinched, assaulted by rank smells. The air was dense and humid with human sweat, the odor of unwashed men, of stale urine and feces.

  His blindfold was removed, and he took in his surroundings. He was in a small room full of filthy men. A steel-cage door closed behind him. It was a jail cell within a police station.

  He saw Ahmed, who rushed to him.

  “Where’s Sadeq?” Mokhtar asked, but then saw that Sadeq was there, too, just behind Ahmed.

  “I’ve been with you all along,” Sadeq said. He’d been on the truck, too.

  Mokhtar felt above his belt for his money. It was still there. In all this time no one had frisked him. If they had, surely they would have found it. He still had four thousand dollars strapped to his stomach.

  There were ten other men in the room, all wearing rags. One man was asleep on the cement floor, covered in human waste. Men had been defecating everywhere. Mokhtar couldn’t breathe. The smell choked him, his eyes watered.

  “What is this place?” he whispered to Ahmed.

  “Jail,” Ahmed said.

  There was one barred window high on the wall.

  Most of the men appeared to be far gone. They might have been patients in a nightmare facility for the mentally ill. Mokhtar thought of the men he’d seen on the streets of the Tenderloin. In the corner, a man lifted his sarong and squatted. A pool of urine spread around him, a rivulet making its way toward Mokhtar’s bare feet. He backed away, almost running into another prisoner. He asked him how long they’d been there. He expected the man to say months, given his ragged appearance, but the man said, “Four days.”

  Will that be us in four days? Mokhtar thought. Had these been normal men four days ago? No, he thought. Their clothes were scraps, they were muttering to themselves. The popular committees, he surmised, had moved them here to get them out of the way during the fighting. That was the only explanation. They’d rounded up the town’s mentally ill—anyone usually on the street—and put them here for their own safety.

  “I’m gonna fuck your grandmother!” a raspy voice yelled. It was an older man, barefoot and drooling, who continued to scream similar sentiments for the next hour.

  Mokhtar found a place at the back wall and leaned against it. Ahmed came close. “I can’t handle this,” he said. His eyes were desperate.

  “Relax,” Mokhtar said. “There’s nothing we can do. At least we’re safe here.”

  But Ahmed wanted out.

  “I’m gonna fuck your grandmother!” the old man yelled again.

  Mokhtar moved closer to the cell door.

  He overheard two guards talking about the port of Mokha. One guard had family in Djibouti, and apparently there were still ships moving between the two coasts, carrying onions and cattle from Mokha to Djibouti City.

  “I’m gonna fuck your mother. And your sister!”

  “Guard!” Ahmed roared. The crazed man was loud but Ahmed was louder. He was losing his grip. “Guard! Guard! Please! Please!”

  One of the prisoners, this one relatively clean, approached Mokhtar.

  “You met Ammar?” the man said. He described the man in leather. “You’re lucky you lived. See that blood over there?” He pointed to a dark corner. “That’s where he beheaded two guys.”

  Mokhtar didn’t want to look. He wasn’t sure he believed this man, who seemed the sanest madman in the cell.

  “Guard!” Ahmed yelled again.

  Mokhtar and Sadeq tried to calm Ahmed, to no avail. Ahmed couldn’t hold on. “Guard! Guard! Guard!” he wailed.

  “Calm down,” Mokhtar said. “Go to the window. Get some air.”

  Ahmed continued yelling. “Guard! Guard!”

  “Idiot! You’ll get us killed!” Sadeq hissed.

  Finally a young guard came to the door. Ahmed rushed to him, reaching between the bars to grip the guard’s knees. He did his best to kiss them. In Yemen it was a traditional sign of supplication.

  Another official of some kind, an older man with a long beard, appeared behind the guard. He wore a sarong and a polo shirt. He seemed to be a man of some local importance, the highest-ranking official they’d seen since being brought to the station.

  Mokhtar went to him. A beard like that was almost surely a sign that the man was religious—that he might have an appreciation for the schooling Mokhtar had received as a young man.

  “Sir,” Mokhtar said. “I think there’s been a mistake. We don’t belong among these men. I’m a scholar. I spent a year in a madrassa.” Mokhtar had hated his year at the madrassa, but he hoped now it would pay dividends.

  “Where are you from?” the man asked.

  “Ibb,” Mokhtar said. “I studied with your scholars.”

  The man’s attention was piqued. Mokhtar recited Quranic verses in classical Arabic. He chose verses relating to mercy, to hospitality, to the treatment of prisoners.

  The bearded man turned to the guard. “These men don’t belong here. Open the door.”

  Ahmed rose to his feet. Sadeq came to the door. The guard opened it, and the bearded man led them upstairs, one guard trailing them, until they came to a small office. There was a desk but little else.

  The door opened and a familiar face appeared. It took Mokhtar a moment to remember where he’d seen this man. Then he remembered. It was the young man in a tank top and shorts who had told Mokhtar he liked his face. Now, seeing Mokhtar as a prisoner, Tank Top was furious.

  “What’s happening here?” he demanded.

  The bearded man shrugged. The dynamic between the two men was hard to read. The bearded man was at least fifteen years older, but Tank Top seemed to outrank him. Tank Top roared and stomped around, apoplectic about the treatment of Mokhtar and his friends.

  “I can’t believe this!” he yelled. “What are these men doing here? Who approved this?”

  Mokhtar watched Tank Top carefully. The theatricality of his outrage reminded Mokhtar of an amateur good cop/bad cop routine. Tank Top pounded the desk, pounded the wall.

  Another official entered the room. He was clean-shaven and white haired. On a normal day he might have been the police chief. Now he was dressed in civilian clothes, like the rest of the popular committee. He assured
Mokhtar, Ahmed and Sadeq that it was all a mistake. Ammar, the man in leather, was a rogue, he said, and they were free to go.

  The bearded man stepped close to Mokhtar.

  “My wife is from Ibb, too,” he said. “I’m sorry about all this.” His name was Abdul Wasr. He gave Mokhtar his phone number, promising to help if they needed it. Soon the group was laughing about the wild events of the day, the madness of it all. Mokhtar told them about his coffee work, and they told him how impressed they were. Then it was time to go.

  And as with their earlier interrogation, Mokhtar walked out of his captivity in bright camaraderie with his former jailers. As they left the police station, Mokhtar was still telling them how much he could help their cause on the public relations front. He’d translate their messages into English, he said. He’d help them set up a Twitter account, get them on Facebook—he could do all their social media. He was from San Francisco and knew all kinds of people in Silicon Valley, he said. Meanwhile, Ahmed was kneeling before the police chief, kissing his knees.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  SIX ARMED MEN AT THE FOOT OF THE BED

  BUT THEIR TRUCK WAS still at the beach where they’d first been stopped. So Tank Top drove them back to the coast, where they found their truck untouched, the Samsonite still lashed to the truck bed.

  “It’s getting dark,” Tank Top said. It would be dangerous being on the road anywhere near Aden in the dark, he said. He suggested they stay the night and leave in the morning. He knew a safe place.

  Mokhtar had a feeling that this was a mistake, that they should get out while they could, but the afternoon had become evening and Tank Top, who had been so theatrical in his objections to their captivity, still had something in his eyes that indicated he didn’t completely trust Mokhtar’s trio. Leaving in a hurry would arouse more suspicion.

  They got in their truck and followed Tank Top to the Al Ghadeer Hotel and parked in front, on a street otherwise devoid of life.

  Tank Top got out of his SUV and led them into the lobby. He knew the proprietor, a thin, mustached man in his forties. “Take care of these guys,” he said. “They’re my friends.”