The Monk of Mokha

  —

  Stephen offered help with the move, but there wasn’t much to contend with. Mokhtar had one suitcase and two garbage bags. They parked around the corner and carried Mokhtar’s worldly possessions into the lobby of the Infinity Tower B.

  A young man, Jonathan, was working the front desk that day. The phone was ringing and the lobby was frantic. Jonathan was supposed to give Mokhtar the key Jeff had left for him, but he couldn’t find it. Mokhtar and Stephen waited on the lobby’s leather couches.

  “You okay?” Stephen asked.

  “I’m fine. Why?” Mokhtar said.

  “You keep getting up to open the door for people,” Stephen said.

  Mokhtar had been up and down half a dozen times. He couldn’t help it. “Sorry,” he said. “Force of habit.”

  “You don’t work here anymore,” Stephen said.

  “I know. I know,” Mokhtar said.

  —

  A week later, Mokhtar was driving over the Bay Bridge, heading to San Francisco. The city was as bright as a chandelier. His father was in the front seat, his mother in back. They’d just eaten dinner out, Mokhtar’s treat. “Remember the Infinity, where I used to work?” he asked them.

  They remembered.

  “They’re having an open house tonight,” Mokhtar said. “You want to go?”

  His parents had two sons who’d worked at the Infinity, so seeing inside one of the towers wasn’t without interest. But it was eight o’clock on a weekday. Why would the building be holding an open house now?

  There were no other visitors in the lobby. No signs of an open house. Mokhtar hoped only that his parents would believe a little longer. In the elevator he pushed thirty-three. He’d arranged it so Jeff would be gone when they arrived. He slipped the key in the slot and opened the door. As always the city was alive in every window, the candelabra of downtown reflected on the apartment’s polished floors.

  “There’s no one here,” his mother said.

  Mokhtar brought his mother to the balcony and they breathed in the air from the Bay, from the sky at that height, but his father was still near the doorway.

  “He’s afraid of heights,” his mother said. “You didn’t know?”

  Mokhtar didn’t know. They’d never been higher than the third floor, in their old apartment in the Tenderloin.

  Mokhtar brought his mother back inside, and by then his father had seen the photographs. Mokhtar had arranged framed photos of his mother and father on the coffee table.

  “Why are those here?” his mother asked.

  “Mom, Dad, sit down,” Mokhtar said.

  They sat down.

  “I’m doing really well now,” he said. “I’m working hard and the company’s doing well. I want you to be proud of me, and I want to provide for you.” He told them about his coffee, about the orders, about the ship coming.

  “That’s so good, Mokhtar,” his mother said. “But I still don’t understand why those pictures of us are here.”

  “Mom,” Mokhtar said, “because this is where I live.”

  CHAPTER XL

  COFFEE ON THE WATER

  CONDITIONS IN YEMEN WERE deteriorating. Virtually no goods were being shipped out of the country. Activity at the ports was concentrated on importing essentials. Medicine was scarce and the vast majority of the country was suffering from food insecurity. The UN considered Yemen on the brink of famine. No one was prioritizing the export of coffee to international specialty roasters.

  But Mokhtar kept his farmers harvesting. The Widow Warda, the General, and the rest of the farmers of Haymah continued their work—their region was nearly untouched by the war—and they continued to ship the red cherries to Mokhtar’s warehouse in Sana’a. His sorters came to work every day. With the airstrikes, any power they could get had to come from their own diesel-fed generators.

  Mokhtar checked in every morning, at 4:00 a.m. California time. He talked with Andrew and Ali to make sure everyone was safe, and he dealt with financial issues and logistics. The problems came from all sides. One day a sorter was unable to make it to work when a Saudi bomb had cratered the road she needed to take to get to work. Another sorter’s husband was being pressured to fight for the Houthis; they’d had to go into hiding.

  Then there was the matter of the GrainPro bags. That Mokhtar needed the bags at all was good news. They had enough green beans to fill a container. But to transport them by sea, it wasn’t enough to put them in the traditional burlap sacks. If Mokhtar was to send the message that his coffee would be different and superior, it had to start with the packaging, with ensuring that the coffee arrived without the odor of the sea, of the ship’s hold, whatever else it was carrying or had carried.

  GrainPro bags were the industry standard—thick plastic bags that kept moisture in and interfering elements out. In the U.S., or virtually any other part of the world, getting hold of GrainPro bags would be as easy as a phone call and a visit by UPS. But to get these bags to Yemen, during a war, was beyond the realm of reason.

  Mokhtar managed to get twelve hundred bags shipped to Ethiopia. That took two weeks. But no one in Ethiopia could get them to Yemen. He made calls to Djibouti and found a freighter that was making trips between Djibouti City and Mokha. That took another six weeks. In all, it was two months before he could get the bags to Sana’a. There, the sorted coffee was placed in carefully labeled bags. Sealed, the bags were brought to the port of Aden, and were ready to be shipped to Oakland.

  —

  It was difficult sometimes to see all this as essential. People were dying in Yemen. The country was collapsing, and in his San Francisco high-rise, Mokhtar was waking up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to call Sana’a about coffee. About when the container could leave Yemen.

  But there was a lot of money at stake. Omar’s money. His investors’ money. Hubayshi’s money. There was the faith of all his farmers to think about, about their pickers and his processors. And now Mokhtar had his own staff in San Francisco. He’d hired his old friend Ibrahim Ahmed Ibrahim as CFO. (Ibrahim’s wife, Salwa, was being as supportive as she could, given they had a fifteen-month-old baby and her husband had just quit his well-paying job at Intuit to work with Mokhtar, whose most applicable experience was selling shirts and Hondas.) Mokhtar had brought on Jodi and Marlee from Boot as directors of quality control, and his old friend Jeremy as his executive assistant.

  None of this could be sustained unless the coffee left the port. Stephen and Mokhtar talked a dozen times a day, from their respective apartments. They had been working with a shipping company, Atlas, and the company’s owner, Craig Holt, had taken a personal interest in Mokhtar’s mission. For months he’d been wrestling with how to get the coffee out of Yemen. One day in late December, Holt sent word that they’d be picking up Mokhtar’s container on New Year’s Eve.

  On January 1, 2016, the coffee was on the water. The ship was called the MSC Rebecca.

  CHAPTER XLI

  THE LUCIANA

  IN JEDDAH, MOKHTAR’S CONTAINER was transferred from the MSC Rebecca to a larger ship, the MSC Luciana, and the Luciana made its way from Jeddah to Singapore to Long Beach. The trip took almost two months. Finally, late in February, Holt told Mokhtar that his coffee had arrived in the United States and was going through customs in Long Beach. His best estimate was that the container would be in Oakland on Saturday, February 25.

  Mokhtar called his parents and Stephen and Ibrahim, and texted Miriam and Ghassan, Giuliano and Justin. He texted everyone. Come see my coffee come into port, he told them. He planned to have a party on the balcony of the Infinity, with everyone there, everyone he loved, to watch his ship come in. He needed sparkling cider. Nonalcoholic champagne. Soda, cheese, crackers, dip. He had to go to the store.

  Then again, there were no guarantees the coffee would arrive on Saturday at all. There was no telling how long a ship would wait, how long any given container would be searched—especially a container originating in Yemen.

  Mokhtar went to bed
on Thursday and woke up to call Yemen. That was still his routine, calling at three or four in the morning, which was afternoon in Yemen, to check in with Ali and Nurideen. The call that morning was full of trouble. The peace talks were going nowhere. The processing plant had no electricity and the women were worried for their jobs. Mokhtar was worried, too. The next harvest wasn’t for months and there wasn’t much for the women to do. His investors had strongly urged him to lay the women off; it made no sense to keep so many sorters on the payroll when there were no beans to sort.

  But if he laid them off, they’d never get other jobs, not in the middle of a war, and how would Mokhtar find and train another team of sorters for the next harvest? So he kept them—Baghdad, Samera, Raqih, Shams, Alham and Alham (there were two Alhams)—he kept them all on salary. They were grateful, especially given most of their husbands were unemployed in Sana’a, a city under attack.

  —

  Mokhtar woke up late Friday with a head full of dark thoughts, with the unshakable sense that everything was about to go wrong. That the container would be detained. That the beans would arrive spoiled. That he would be buried in debt.

  Stephen was at a wedding in Florida, but he was tracking the latest information about the Luciana. Mokhtar shot him a text, triple-checking the ship’s status. Was it still coming the next day?

  Seconds later, Stephen called. “It’s coming now.”

  “What is?” Mokhtar asked. He sat up in bed.

  “The ship,” Stephen said. “It’ll be in Oakland in two hours.”

  Stephen could see the ship’s progress on his phone. The MSC Luciana was steadily clicking up the coast.

  “It can’t be. You sure?” Mokhtar asked.

  Stephen got off the phone to check with Atlas. Atlas said the latest information indicated the ship would arrive that night at 10:00 p.m. But the tracking app on Stephen’s phone showed the ship speeding up the Pacific coast, approaching the Golden Gate.

  Mokhtar got out of bed. He ran around the apartment. He had no idea what to do. The ship was early. It was scheduled to arrive at two and it was already noon.

  He called his mom and got her voice mail. His dad was driving his bus. He called Miriam, who was down on the peninsula, an hour away.

  Ibrahim was in meetings in San Francisco, wrapping up his last day with Intuit. The only person Mokhtar could reach, and who could make it to the Infinity in time, was the guy writing a book about all this. It was not the way Mokhtar pictured it.

  —

  ON HIS PHONE, Mokhtar watched the little icon that was the MSC Luciana chugging up the coast, one pixel at a time. Past Monterey. Past Pacifica. Mokhtar went to the balcony, thinking he might be able to see the ship. Nothing. It hadn’t passed through the Golden Gate yet.

  The door buzzed. The writer was there, and we stood there, panting, laughing at this, the fact that this was really happening. But there was no nonalcoholic champagne or cider. There were no close friends, no family. It was just the two of us, and the ship was so close.

  Mokhtar watched the app on his phone.

  “Look. It’s going under the Golden Gate Bridge,” he said.

  There it was, the video-game version of the ship, a tiny red arrow on his little screen. Again and again we looked up from the phone and then north, through the city, as if we could see the ship through the hills and buildings blocking the view of the Bay.

  We realized where we’d see it first. There were two buildings, part of 1 Market Plaza, arranged at a diagonal just two blocks north of the Infinity Towers. There was a small gap between them, revealing a small stripe of the Bay’s cobalt blue where the Luciana would pass.

  The sun was high and white. The day was impossibly bright. There were a few sailboats out, a ferry or two, nothing else. No ships. No tankers. Whenever a ship appeared between those towers, it would be the Luciana. There was nothing else like it on the water.

  Below, we could see all of Treasure Island, its low-slung white buildings. “It’s going to go right past my old house,” Mokhtar said.

  He checked his phone again. The Luciana’s red arrow passed Fisherman’s Wharf and was rounding North Beach and the Embarcadero. The real Luciana, we were sure, would be visible any second.

  And there it was. Between the towers, the black nose of the ship.

  “Oh my God,” Mokhtar said.

  The Luciana. It said so right on the bow. The ship was stacked high with containers of white and blue, yellow and green.

  Mokhtar turned on his camera and narrated. “We’re here on the twenty-sixth of February. Between those two buildings, right over there, that ship is carrying eighteen thousand kilograms of the world’s best coffee. From Yemen.”

  The ship was passing Treasure Island, and the Ferry Building, an American flag high above its tower, seagulls circling. Tugboats, two or three or four, guided the Luciana through the Bay. Mokhtar’s phone dinged. It was Ibrahim. He’d left work early and was on his way.

  “You need to come now,” Mokhtar told him. “Double-park the car. Anything.”

  Minutes later Ibrahim was there, too, on the balcony. He and Mokhtar hugged. The Luciana was still passing Treasure Island. Mokhtar called Stephen. He picked up. Stephen’s grinning face, redder from the Florida sun, filled the screen. There were palm trees behind him.

  “You see that?” Mokhtar said. “It’s the Luciana! It’s right there!”

  Stephen tilted the phone to reveal a young woman next to him. “This is Leigh. She’s getting married tomorrow.”

  “Congratulations, Leigh,” Mokhtar said. “I wish you the best in this life. It’s going to be wonderful.” Everything seemed wonderful.

  “Aw man, I wish I was there,” Stephen said.

  “You are,” Mokhtar said. “You are there!”

  He pointed his phone’s camera to the ship so Stephen could watch. They hung up. He had other people to call. Miriam. He reached her, showed her the Luciana passing steadily.

  “Remember the text message you sent me?” he asked.

  You ever look across the street?

  She remembered.

  “But I can’t FaceTime,” she said. “I’m in sweatpants.”

  Mokhtar called his mom. He stood on the edge of the balcony, the ship over his shoulder, the water and Treasure Island just beyond.

  “I love you,” he told her, and kissed the phone.

  And soon the ship was out of view.

  CHAPTER XLII

  THE DOORMEN UNITE AND OPEN THE ROOF

  “WE SHOULD GO TO the roof,” Mokhtar said. “We can see everything from the roof.”

  He led Ibrahim and me downstairs, where a young Lobby Ambassador named Nick was standing behind the front desk. When we all appeared, rushing toward the desk, Nick’s eyes widened as if he expected to be overrun. But Mokhtar knew Nick. Mokhtar had had him over for dinner in his apartment. Nick was from Oakland, had been working at the Infinity for seven months. The front desk was, for him, a stopgap on the way to what he hoped would be a job in finance.

  Now Mokhtar was asking him to break a very clear-cut rule against letting anyone, resident or not, onto the roof. The Infinity roof wasn’t built for entertaining. It was an industrial roof, full of HVACs and cables. There were no adequate railings, nothing at all to accommodate anyone.

  Then again, this was Mokhtar. And there was this ship, Mokhtar was explaining, and it would only come in once, and—

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Fine.”

  He led us into the elevator and to the thirty-fifth floor. He found a nondescript door, and used his master key to open it, sighing all the time. He led us up two flights of stairs and opened another door.

  We were on the roof. It was dizzying and too bright. The view was almost unobstructed. Mokhtar promised Nick we’d be only a minute, that he’d never tell a soul.

  Nick looked worried. He’d not only let a resident and two nonresidents onto the roof, which was not at all ready for visitors, but he’d abandoned his post at the front desk
.

  “Gotta get back,” he said, and disappeared into the building.

  We could still see the ship. It was still chugging toward the Port of Oakland. From the roof, amid the churning machinery that kept the Infinity the right temperature year-round, we saw all of the Bay Bridge, the cars tiny, the trucks so small. We could see the tankers waiting in the South Bay, we saw all of San Francisco, all of Treasure Island.

  Mokhtar couldn’t stop laughing. Then he cried a little. Then he laughed some more. Ibrahim laughed, too. He’d just had his last meeting for Intuit and now he was on the roof of the Infinity, watching their coffee come into port.

  “Look,” Mokhtar said, and pointed down. “You can see the courtyard. The one with the monk.” Ibrahim and I looked and saw, thirty-seven floors down, the corner of the old Hills Bros. courtyard, but the monk was out of view. And soon the Luciana was out of view, too. It had ducked behind Infinity Tower D, the easternmost Infinity, five stories taller than Infinity B and blocking the view of the shipyard.

  “We have to get over there,” Mokhtar said.

  Ibrahim and I insisted that it didn’t matter, we’d seen the ship, there was no reason to go all the way down and up again, to another roof just to see a bit more.

  “It’ll be easy,” Mokhtar said, and he led us down from the roof, into the elevator and down the thirty-five floors, through the lobby, where we thanked Nick and Mokhtar asked if he could let us onto the roof of Tower D.

  “Ask Ana,” Nick said, more anxious than before. “She’s working D.”

  Mokhtar knew Ana. Her full name was Borana Haxhija and she was like a sister. Her parents had fled from Albania, had come to the U.S. around the same time that Mokhtar’s parents came from Yemen. The Haxhijas had settled in the Tenderloin, too, just a few blocks away from where the Alkhanshalis lived between two porn stores. Ana had gone to Galileo High School and now was working two jobs while finishing her degree at San Francisco State. When Mokhtar burst into the lobby and saw her, he knew she’d allow it.