minarets of al-Makkha appearing and disappearing among swirling sandstorms. At night, I lay on my back and watched the stars spin round and round overhead as our boat swung about its anchoring point. Nights were cold. I had no blanket, so I sang Billie Holiday songs to stay warm. When I carried the tune, the Toothless One would reward me with a pack of biscuits. His favorite was “God Bless the Child.”
My psyche began vomiting up every memory it could get its claws on. Phantom Christmas carols flitted on the winds, and I repeated certain sexual fantasies so often I could feel my lover’s hair curled about my fingers. On the last night I became aware of activity on a nearby wreck. It was half submerged, and I’d assumed it was abandoned. But that night I kept seeing pastel lights flickering from its portholes. Every time our boat swung close by, I would rise on one elbow and peer through the darkness. Someone in the wreck was watching Michael Jackson videos, the “Billy Jean” one with the glowing footsteps. It was hard to be sure, what with the constant motion and my salt-crusted glasses, but I was convinced that Michael Jackson was doing his moonwalk across the water, over and over and over…
On the third day I woke to find the Qasid pulling up to the dock. The Somali women went behind the veil. My shipmates were loaded into a pickup truck, but I was taken to a small shack surrounded by soldiers wearing checkered Arabian head scarves. Inside was another soldier seated behind a desk.
“Passport.”
I handed it over. He flipped through the pages angrily.
“So,” he said without looking up. “You have just come from…”
“Ethiopia.”
“Djibouti, it says. Which is it?”
“Yes, yes, Djibouti,” I said. “I forgot.”
He snorted. “You forgot Djibouti. Have you also forgotten the war?”
“The war? Between Yemen and Eritrea? Of course not.”
“Of course not.” He leaned back in his chair. “Strange that you, an American, should be here now. Do you know why I say this?”
It seemed that the war was not going well. The Eritreans had driven the Yemenese off the Hanish Islands. Fifty or so people had died. Serious. And, according to the officer, the whole thing had started when the Eritreans signed over seabed drilling rights to an American oil company. The seabed had been between Eritrea’s shoreline and the islands, so Eritrea had invaded to strengthen its oil claim.
And now here I was, an American in a funny hat. I was obviously from the CIA.
“So you have come to al-Makkha,” he said, bobbing his head and smiling at me.
“Did you find my visa?” I asked.
“Ah yes,” he said scornfully. “The visa.” He pointed to my belongings, spread out on a table by the wall. “You have camera?”
“Yes.”
“You take pictures?”
“Not in al-Makkha.” I tried to sound outraged. “This is a military zone!”
“Ah. But why have you come to al-Makkha?”
“Coffee,” I explained.
“Coffee? In al-Makkha?”
“Yes. You know, al-Shadhili…”
“The mosque?” He reopened my passport and examined the first page. “But it does not say here you are a Muslim.”
“No, but…”
“Only Muslims may enter the mosque.”
“I only want to see…just look.
“Oh. First you say you come for coffee. Now you say you are a tourist.” He did not believe me. “Yet you come to Yemen with criminals from Eritrea. With a camera.”
So he was going to lock me up as a spy. Fine with me, I thought. As long as there’s a bed and running water. It might be interesting watching Yemenese bureaucracy run its course. He would send a description, they would have more questions, he would send answers. More questions, more answers, but we both knew that eventually I would be freed.
The official studied me. Perhaps he saw the images in my mind because suddenly he seemed to decide I wasn’t worth the effort. He made a gesture I came to identify with Yemenese philosophy: he raised his right hand to his ear and made a curious flinging-away gesture with his thumb and first two fingers while rolling his eyes heavenward. Then he ordered two machine-gun-toting soldiers to escort me out.
“Welcome. Don’t forget your passport.” He handed it over. “But if you have come for coffee you are three hundred years too late.”
THE PORT OF AL-MAKKHA HAS BEEN SYNONYMOUS WITH COFFEE for almost a thousand years. It was here that the first beans arrived from Africa, and al-Makkha, corrupted to Mocha, later became the universal nickname for the brew. It was also in Mocha, around 1200, that an Islamic hermit named al-Shadhili apparently brewed the first mug. Although Ethiopians were already chewing the bean, and perhaps making a tea from its leaves, al-Shadhili of Mocha is thought by most to be the first to have made a coffee bean drink.
“It has reached us from many people,” said Fakhr al-Din al-Makki, “that the first one to introduce qahwa [coffee] and to make its use a widespread and popular [custom] in the Yemen was our master Shaykh…’ ali ibn ‘Umar al-Shadhili, one of the masters of the Shadhilya order.”
There are as many stories about how al-Shadhili made his discovery as there are ways to spell his name. He discovered coffee while walking home from prayers one night; no, he was actually fasting in the wilderness when he discovered the plant’s powers. Some say he lived on nothing but coffee beans for twenty years; others go so far as to claim it was the Archangel Gabriel who revealed that a java-only diet would lead to sainthood. In the oddest version, our hero is unjustly accused of playing footsie with the king’s daughter and banished to the wilderness, where he lives on coffee beans until the Archangel Gabriel reveals to him that the ruler has been struck down by a skin disease that al-Shadhili can cure with a cup of the magic brew.
Some historical accounts have him, or one of his brethren, visiting Ethiopia, where he observes people drinking coffee and then brings back the habit. Later accounts toss in how a shipload of seasick Portuguese sailors pulled into Mocha. Ill and malnourished, they were on the point of death until the kindly al-Shadhili advised them to try the magic potion he had been drinking for years. The sailors tried it and within days were well enough to set sail. As they departed, al-Shadhili is said to have cried out to them, “Remember this, the drink of al-Makkha!” And so the drink that changed history was introduced to the West, and Mocha’s fame was forever assured.
Whatever. In fact, the Shadhilis are a Sufi sect, and from 1200 to 1500 a handful of Shadhili dervishes wandered around the Arabian peninsula having coffee-scented religious experiences. The group eventually spread as far as Spain, where a syncretic Christian/Muslim group called al-Shadhiliya yet exists, and is so closely associated with coffee that you still ask for a cup of al-Shadhili in Algeria. All anyone really knows is that a member of the Shadhiliya order introduced coffee to the world, that one of them lived in al-Makkha (Mocha), and that whatever it was they drank, it was probably dreadful since they didn’t roast their beans. It seems they may have made a stew of raw beans,
