his father’s generation, three qualities were held to be far more important than the number of sheep and goats a man owned. First and foremost came respectability. In this regard the storekeeper had been handicapped by his profession, which ranked low in a strict social hierarchy. At the top were nomads, nobly roaming the country in the time-honored way. Next came those who cultivated the fields and herded animals. They represented the bottom line of acceptability. Beneath the farmers were madaniyeen, or city people, who had been lured by modern invention and severed their ties to the land. Then, only one step above soothsayers, prostitutes, and thieves, came the merchants, a class blighted by popular suspicions of nasabeen, or shiftiness.
Despite society’s inclination to dismiss him altogether, the elder Abu Za’atar transformed a place of minimal commerce into a community center. He wrote letters on the side and kept the coffeepot and the arghileh handy. When none of the men was around to avail themselves of the water pipe, he invited in the village youngsters. There was a whole generation for whom childhood was defined by the sweet taste of fustokiye candy and the tinny orchestra of Tahia Carioca playing on an old gramophone. This ended abruptly when the father died in 1947, and the shop passed to his teenage son.
Za’atar ibn Za’atar had been named after his father, and he, in turn, named his firstborn son after himself. Social custom dictated that he therefore should be known as Abu Za’atar—Father of Za’atar. The term demonstrated the importance attached to the provision of male heirs and was supposed to confer dignity and a sense of responsibility, but Fadhma’s brother treated it like a joke. He was fond of saying that he was the father of himself—self-made and determined. He had time for many things, but not for his father’s social niceties. In the beginning when he took over the store, he dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the pursuit of profit. Given the circumstances, this was something more easily desired than achieved, but he was not discouraged. He canceled the informal credit system his father operated and energetically set about collecting outstanding accounts, some of which had remained unpaid for decades. None of this endeared him to his neighbors.
It was not a question of blind faith. Abu Za’atar was a fellow of wide-ranging interests. He studied the newspapers that came into the shop wrapped around other goods. Although they were six months out of date, he carefully flattened out each sheet and pored over it for hours. The knowledge of current affairs he gained confirmed that his task was not impossible. Success in the world hinged on attitude. All he had to do was take advantage of whatever came his way.
He did not have to wait long. It all started a lifetime ago during a virginal encounter with Palestinian innocence. Once the refugees inundated the isolated mountain village and the camps were set up, the international aid caravan that supplied them encouraged local businesses to get involved, and more than the odd bag of cornmeal was contributed to the store. Ten years later in 1958, everything was turned upside down again when King Faisal II of Iraq was executed. Lebanon was in the throes of its first civil conflict, and Egypt’s charismatic Abdel Nasser formed the United Arab Republic with the Ba’athists of Syria. Abu Za’atar was just the kind of hot-tempered young man that pan-Arab nationalism should have appealed to, but the free market economy had already stolen his heart. The first time he saw refrigerators with automatic interior lighting in black-and-white Hollywood movies, he was forever smitten. When the British backed the teenage King Hussein after the assassination of his grandfather King Abdullah, Abu Za’atar showed his appreciation by hanging Union Jack KEEP CALM—HAVE A CUPPA flags throughout the shop. It was not long before he was the beneficiary of another unexpected reward: a significant investment in Jordan’s infrastructure by the Western countries vilified during the Suez Canal debacle. Their capitalization of Arab countries that were not Egypt resulted in the building of new roads, which connected the village to the rest of the country and allowed access to increased trade all the way down to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea. So began Abu Za’atar’s network of cross-border contacts and the future foundations for a dream still to be conceived, the Marvellous Emporium.
Every ten years a new political upheaval set Abu Za’atar’s cash register ringing. For many, the an-Naksah, the “Setback” of the disastrous 1967 war, was an abject failure. But for the ever-watchful proprietor it provided an unexpected boost. Undoubtedly his country had been fooled into joining that colossal misadventure. The jets a gullible king saw over the West Bank were not Egypt’s, as promised by the irascible Nasser. In 144 hours, Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But whether through victory or defeat, any changeover of government on that scale meant an assembly line of contraband. Even when it arrived soggy and snail infested from the other side of the river, everything was upcycled and put on display. To handle the tonnage, Abu Za’atar constructed a labyrinthine annex to the store. However, the country’s political defeat extracted its own price.
In 1970 the buildup of militarism in Jordan exploded like a pressure cooker, and twenty thousand Palestinian fedayeen were ousted from the country during Black September, another euphemism for an attempted coup and civil war, while their families stayed behind. There was suspicion of spies everywhere and a surge of arms next door in Syria, a few choice samples of which made their way to the emporium. The next conflict came along three years later and was named after the religious holidays of Ramadan—Tishrin—or Yom Kippur, depending on one’s affiliation. When the Gulf States invested in the front line countries against Israel, which didn’t include Jordan, the only benefit Abu Za’atar saw were oversize Syrian cotton underwear and ill-fitting T-shirts.
He returns to his cleaning duties, dusting energetically among the clothes racks, and finds himself in front of an Yves Saint Laurent midi-rain mac near a pyramid of Charles Jourdan shoes in their original boxes. If war made the emporium the best it could be, then the one that contributed the most was Lebanon’s.
“Some quarrel,” the proprietor says to himself, grinning. He isn’t sure when he came up with his observation about nationality and conflict, but it must have been sometime during the country’s fifteen-year-long civil war. It was true then and remains so today: you can take the mettle of a people not by why they fight but what they must sell to continue fighting. Daesh may be oil-rich and fanatically violent, but the detritus of its caliphate cannot rival that of a world-class capital like Beirut, whose castoffs alone effectively fueled the lesser economies of other Arab nations for decades to come.
Rearranging the plastic covering on a nearby clothes rack, Abu Za’atar suddenly feels a surge of affection for his best mate, Hani. They have known each other since the Palestinian refugee camps. Hani was an adolescent when he followed the fighters out of Jordan, and then a decade later he showed up in Abu Za’atar’s store covered head to toe in bling. As the goods and services procurer for an al-Fatah general, he had access to a Mercedes, a chauffeur, and a Romanian mistress.
More crucially, Hani offloaded black-market merchandise hot from Hamra Street in exchange for hard currency. As a deal sweetener, he often threw in a consignment of faux Louis XIV furniture. The profits generated from the enlarged stock enabled Abu Za’atar to make impressive changes to the store. He moved his family from behind the curtain in the store and installed them in splendid isolation on the edge of the growing town. But the real bonus was a massive electric generator, another backhander from his best pal. It encouraged Abu Za’atar to rebrand and power up the newly christened Marvellous Emporium, the flashing neon of which can been seen from space.
After the Lebanese civil war ended, Abu Za’atar felt lethargic and depressed. He thought the emporium had seen better days. Then out of the blue Saddam Hussein did him an enormous favor by invading Kuwait. The international coalition of countries that banded together to punish the Iraqi dictator thankfully did not include his own.
“A smart king is first and foremost entrepreneurial,” Abu Za’atar proclaims to nobody, and waves the microfiber cloth in tremendous appreciation. During the more than decade-long UN sanctions against Iraq, oil tankers filled with Iraqi black gold made their way across Jordan’s eastern border, hung a left, and traveled straight down the King’s Highway
