The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

  —

  Mokhtar’s neighbors were close-knit. Their building on Polk was full of Yemeni families, and they looked out for one another. The families went to the same mosque, the kids played soccer in the hallways, and for reasons beyond Mokhtar’s reckoning, most of the kids were sent to school on Treasure Island. It was where a lot of Tenderloin kids went, where a lot of kids without options went. Treasure Island Middle School. It almost sounded romantic. Treasure Island itself was bizarre, an inexplicable man-made mass of contradictions. The navy built it in 1936, sinking 287,000 tons of rock and 50,000 cubic yards of topsoil into San Francisco Bay, just off of a natural island called Yerba Buena and between San Francisco and the East Bay. The island, a military base through World War II, wasn’t called Treasure Island then. The name came afterward, when it was decommissioned and the powers that be, hoping to convert it to commercial use, named it after a book about murderous pirates.

  But no postwar commercial anything happened, really, and the reasons were sensible but not insurmountable. First, there was some mystery about what might be buried in the landmass itself; the navy wasn’t telling what kind of hazardous waste was tucked away, and no one was willing to do the research and abatement necessary. Second, there was increasing concern about where the whole island, which rested only a foot or two above sea level, would be in twenty years, given rising water levels.

  At school, Mokhtar found trouble difficult to avoid. Maybe he was bent toward it. Maybe he was one of the leaders. There were Black kids, Samoan kids, Latino kids, Yemeni kids, and the boys, even at thirteen, were drinking and smoking pot, and both were done on the middle school campus—a patchwork of cement yards with narrow ranch-style buildings, each one a step up from temporary. This was the height of Mokhtar’s days of cutting corners. His parents knew he was going astray. They tried to hold him accountable but he could talk himself out of any trouble. By the seventh grade they stopped listening to him.

  “It’s all excuses,” they said.

  But his teachers knew he had a mind. Mokhtar loved to read. At home, he even had a library. There was no room in the apartment for bookshelves, but on a shelf in the tiny kitchen pantry, below the canned goods and above the shelf that held the pasta and Sazón Goya seasoning, Mokhtar had carved out a home for the books he’d found. Or stolen. Getting the books involved some corner-cutting—he didn’t have money to buy them, but he wanted them there, at home, lined up like they would be in a regular home. A few he borrowed, indefinitely, from the public library. His collection grew. Five books, then ten, then twenty, and soon the one shelf in the pantry really looked like something, like that one dark corner of their kitchen was some kind of legitimate haven for learning.

  And because he didn’t have his own room, or even his own corner of a room, the library was the one place that was his own. He collected Goosebumps books, anime, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings. But nothing meant so much to him as Harry Potter, who lived under a staircase but didn’t belong there, had in fact been chosen for great things. When Mokhtar was tired of being poor, of stepping over homeless addicts, of sleeping with six siblings in one room, his mind drifted and allowed the possibility that maybe he was like Harry, part of this hardscrabble world for now, but destined for something more.

  CHAPTER IV

  SAGE ADVICE FROM GHASSAN TOUKAN

  PART I

  THE AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAM Mokhtar went to, at the Al-Tawheed Mosque on Sutter Street, was run by the Toukans, a Palestinian American family. Ghassan Toukan, just seven years older than Mokhtar, was one of the tutors, and Mokhtar knew he drove Ghassan nuts. Mokhtar did poorly in school and then did poorly after school. He distracted everyone. He did not care. And he did not see Ghassan Toukan, who seemed to excel naturally at everything he did, as the cure.

  “Mokhtar,” Ghassan implored. “Sit down. Do your homework. Do something.”

  Every day Ghassan hassled Mokhtar about the same things, about everything. About behaving. About homework. The wonderful advantages of completing said homework. Mokhtar couldn’t take him seriously. He couldn’t take any of it seriously. He was going to middle school on Treasure Island, a former military base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It was a school for the forgotten. No one was getting out of that middle school and going anywhere that mattered.

  So at the Toukans’ tutoring center, Mokhtar was an agent of chaos. He found a like-minded accomplice in a kid named Ali Shahin. Ali’s father was an imam at another mosque, but Ali, like Mokhtar, was given to distraction. Together they drove Ghassan around the bend. They disrupted. They disturbed. They did no work, and the younger kids saw them doing no work, and this threw off whatever delicate academic equilibrium the Toukans were trying to engender.

  “Mokhtar!” Ghassan yelled. Every day he yelled Mokhtar’s name. He told him to sit, to listen, to learn.

  Instead, Mokhtar and Ali snuck out of the mosque. They walked around the Tenderloin, watching out for Mokhtar’s father. After years as a security guard, and after years applying for a job at MUNI, San Francisco’s system of bus and tram lines, Faisal had gotten a job. He left his late-night security job at the Sequoias and now his hours were rational and steady, the benefits were good for a family of nine—he and Bushra had added two more to the brood—and the position suited his personality. He liked to drive and loved to talk.

  For Mokhtar, though, his father’s new job was a problem. It hemmed him in. It made him paranoid. His father’s routes were different on different days, and Mokhtar could never remember where he’d be driving on any given day. So cutting corners required some care. Mokhtar and his friends would be working a hustle when one of them would look up. Isn’t that your pops, Mokhtar? His father circled his childhood as he circled the city—a kind of sixty-foot roaming conscience.

  He and Ali would go back to the mosque, back to Ghassan and his attempts to control them. And then one day Ghassan snapped. He told the four boys, Mokhtar, Ali and two other disrupters, Ahmed and Hatham, to sit down.

  Ghassan pointed to Hatham. “What’s your dad’s job?”

  “Taxi driver,” Hatham said.

  He pointed to Ahmed. “What’s your dad do?”

  “Janitor,” Ahmed said.

  He pointed to Mokhtar.

  “Bus driver,” Mokhtar said.

  “Fine,” Ghassan said. He knew Ali’s dad was an imam, but he worried about him, too. He worried about all these kids. “Your parents came here as immigrants and they didn’t have choices. Do you want to drive a taxi? Clean toilets? Drive a bus?”

  Mokhtar shrugged. Ahmed and Hatham shrugged. They had no idea what they wanted to do for a living. They were only thirteen. All Mokhtar could think was that he wanted an Xbox.

  “They brought you here so you could have choices,” Ghassan said. “And you’re blowing it. If you want to do something different when you grow up, you’re going to have to get your shit together.”

  CHAPTER V

  YEMEN

  MOKHTAR’S PARENTS AGREED, SO they sent him to Yemen. They thought he needed a change of location, an immersion in his ancestry, some fresh air. Mokhtar went from his family’s one-bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin to his grandfather Hamood’s six-story home in Ibb. There, Mokhtar had his own bedroom. He had his own floor. The house had dozens of rooms, a balcony overlooking a lush valley in the center of the city. It was a castle, really, built by Hamood from nothing.

  Hamood was more than a patriarch; in the Alkhanshali family his influence was impossible to escape. And though he was in his late sixties, he still traveled a hundred miles a day, from Sana’a to Ibb, or out from Ibb to the villages, attending weddings and funerals and mediating tribal disputes. He was no longer a tall man—age had shrunk him, thinned him—but his mind was quick; he was witty and tough. Though largely retired, he was still an éminence grise in Ibb. When he walked into a wedding hall, everyone stood. Some kissed his hand, others kissed his head—a sign of the utmost respect.

  He was bo
rn in the 1940s in Al-Dakhla, a small village inside of Ibb, the fifth of eight children. From a young age, he had the sense that he was his father’s favorite. When he was still young, only nine or ten, his father was embroiled in a land dispute with another tribesman who had the favor of the ruling powers. The dispute landed him in prison, and there, his health quickly deteriorated. Knowing his end was near, he summoned only one of his children, Hamood, to his cell, and this act of favoritism soured Hamood’s relations with his siblings, especially his older brothers. After their father’s death, these brothers ostracized him and would not grant him any of their father’s land.

  At thirteen, Hamood decided to set out on his own. Without shoes and carrying only a knapsack, he left Ibb and walked to Saudi Arabia. He told this story to Mokhtar often.

  “That’s three hundred miles,” Mokhtar would note.

  “And I walked it barefoot,” Hamood would insist.

  Before he set off, though, Hamood asked for a donkey. He informed his brothers that he was leaving, that he would be out of their hair, and all he wanted was a donkey to accompany him, to help carry the load.

  “A donkey is worth more than you,” the brothers said.

  So Hamood left without a donkey.

  In Saudi Arabia, a land awash in oil money and far wealthier than Yemen could ever be, Hamood sold water on the side of the road. He cleaned restaurants. He did any odd job he could, and he saved money to send home to his widowed mother. And whenever he did, he enclosed a note that said, “This is from the boy worth less than a donkey.”

  In his late teens, Hamood went back to Yemen and married a young woman named Zafaran, who had grown up in a neighboring Ibb village. They traveled to Sheffield, England, where Hamood had heard there was good-paying work in the steel mills. Eventually he left for Detroit, where Yemenis were finding work building cars. Hamood worked the assembly line at Chrysler, installing air bags, until, a few years later, he followed Yemeni friends to New York. With his savings, he bought a corner store in Harlem and made it profitable. He bought another in Queens, and though he had to contend with gangs and the Mafia, he was undaunted. The market in Queens did well, too, and soon Hamood was loaning money to his sons and cousins—including Faisal—all of whom opened their own grocery stores and liquor stores in New York and California, all of which paid dividends to Hamood and allowed him to more or less retire in his fifties.

  He bought five acres in Ibb, and gave the builders a sketch he’d drafted himself. It was a bewildering drawing, even by the wildly eccentric architectural standards of Yemen. He wanted the house to look like the house of his imagination—the house he’d had in his mind more than fifty years, since he was a boy in Saudi Arabia. He’d just arrived there, and was still barefoot, was struggling every day to eat, when he came upon a castle on a hill. He remembered it as a castle. It might have been a hospital or mosque, but he never forgot it. He vowed that someday he would build a place like that. So he drew it from memory and when he was finished, it looked like the castle on the hill. For the interior, he did as he pleased. He adhered to no architectural precepts, no Yemeni custom. Some rooms were far larger than normal, some far smaller than normal. Some floors had four bathrooms when none at all were needed. There were balconies everywhere, but the entrances and exits were never in the expected places. If a thief ever tries to steal anything from that house, Zafaran said, they’ll get lost and never get out.

  He began building the house in 1991 and never finished. When Mokhtar arrived and throughout the year he spent in Yemen, there were always workers in the house. At any given time there were five craftsmen adding custom touches, all according to Hamood’s specifications: a new door carved from rare teak, imported tile in the fifth-floor sitting room, new stained glass above the fourth-floor balcony. Walls were covered with his collection of daggers, swords, cowboy hats, holsters and guns. He had a Beretta, an array of Colt .45s, a collection of pistols he’d seen in Bond films and John Wayne movies. Hamood had seen every film John Wayne had ever made, and collected holsters, hats, wore cowboy boots—anything Wayne had worn, he wanted.

  —

  When Mokhtar got to Ibb, just after eighth grade, he had no interest in John Wayne and no interest in Yemen. He missed the action in San Francisco. Hamood sent him to a local school, private and rigorous, and made him walk to it, forty-five minutes each way. Mokhtar spoke some Arabic, but no one in the school spoke English. He was one of the only Americans there. He didn’t wear his clothes correctly. He didn’t know the proper responses to standard greetings. He didn’t know the right Yemeni way to walk, act, smile, not smile. To fit in, he decided he would become super-Yemeni. He worked on his Arabic, ground down his accent, dressed like the Yemeni kids, with a sarong and sandals and the right kind of jacket. He tried to assimilate and master local customs, but the embarrassments were unending.

  One day Mokhtar’s grandmother Zafaran sent him to get a chicken. Mokhtar was used to American groceries, where the chicken had been processed hundreds of miles away, sliced up and wrapped in plastic, unrecognizable as a once-living thing. Now he had to ask the butcher in downtown Ibb for a chicken, which he did successfully enough. The butcher reached for a live chicken and asked Mokhtar another question, which he didn’t understand, but felt it best to answer in the affirmative. The butcher was surprised but shrugged, took the chicken, cut off its head, and put it in a plastic bag, still bleeding prodigiously and covered with feathers.

  When Mokhtar got back to Hamood and Zafaran’s house, holding a plastic bag heavy with chicken blood, Zafaran stared at him. Then she laughed. Mokhtar had a feeling she would call him Dummy, because she often called him Dummy—she called everyone Dummy; it was her favorite word in English.

  “Dummy,” she said.

  Mokhtar left the chicken in the kitchen with one of the maids and went to the living room, where Hamood was hosting guests. There were always guests for lunch, no invitation needed. Mokhtar was enjoying his lunch with these neighbors when Zafaran burst in and told the story of the chicken.

  “Dummy,” she said. “What a dummy!” Everyone laughed.

  But soon Zafaran and Hamood began to trust him with tasks both small and significant. “Go to the bank and cash this check,” Hamood would say, and would hand him a check for three million riyals—about fifteen thousand dollars. Mokhtar would return, navigating the streets of Ibb carrying an enormous bag of money like a cartoon bank robber. Hamood had business all over Ibb, and all over Yemen. He brought Mokhtar on his rounds, teaching him how a businessman carried himself, how a leader walked and talked. The tasks Hamood concocted for him were far-flung and grand. One time he gave Mokhtar a bundle of cash and instructed him to go to Taiz, two hours away, and come back with six tons of a certain kind of stone he needed for the courtyard of the house. Mokhtar returned that evening, leading a caravan of three full flatbed trucks.

  When Mokhtar made a mistake, Hamood was angry only if Mokhtar made an excuse. “Own the error and correct it,” he said. Hamood had a thousand proverbs and maxims. His favorite was Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart. He used that one a lot.

  “What does that mean?” Mokhtar asked.

  “It means that money is ephemeral, moving from person to person,” Hamood said. “It’s a tool. Don’t let it get into your heart or your soul.”

  Mokhtar spent a year with Hamood and Zafaran and returned to the United States changed. Not entirely reformed—there was still significant corner-cutting in high school—but he’d studied classical Arabic, awakened to his Yemeni heritage, and though Hamood hoped Mokhtar might become an imam or an attorney, Mokhtar began instead to see himself in Hamood’s mold, as a man of enterprise. A man who liked to move.

  CHAPTER VI

  RUPERT, ARRIVISTE

  NOT LONG AFTER RETURNING from Yemen, Mokhtar was wearing sweater-vests and working at Banana Republic. His Tenderloin friends were confused. His friends from middle school, startled by the transformation, began calling him Rupert,
like the spiffy animated bear. Mokhtar didn’t mind. He was fifteen and proud to have a job. When he got back from Ibb, he wanted a job, saw a listing at Banana Republic, applied, and got it.

  His parents couldn’t believe it. No one believed it. A Tenderloin kid working at Banana Republic. And not some backwater Banana Republic at the mall, but at the flagship store downtown. When he got the job, he’d expected to be put in the back room, and that’s where he started, but soon he was on the main floor, selling shirts and khakis to businessmen and tourists.

  For Mokhtar, it was a time of radical evolution. He met his first gay man. Mokhtar had spent years in San Francisco and never met a gay dude. Or maybe he had—he probably had—but he hadn’t known it. Not out gay guys like his bosses and coworkers at Banana Republic. They welcomed him, they taught him what went with what, how to fold a marbled cable-knit cardigan, how to hang a pair of Kentfield slim cotton pants. He spent most of his paycheck on clothes—vintage woven-trim henleys, $130 leather shoes, English-cut pants that ended high at the ankle.

  The effect of his appearance on the world was profound. He walked through the city not as a poor Tenderloin kid, his baggy clothes shrouding him with negative assumptions, but as Rupert, the preppy cartoon bear, who was welcome anywhere. He became someone the adults he encountered—at his high school, at the mosque, at any store he entered—trusted and wanted around.

  He was called sir. He was called mister.