Mother of All Pigs Read online

  The accumulated layers of kitchenware; exotic imported foodstuffs (mainly Asian); sports, casual, and ready-to-wear—men’s, women’s, children’s, toddlers’, and newborns’; absurdly high high heels and flat, sole-destroying trainers; festive decorations for all holidays, including those Islamic (Shia, Sunni, Druze, Alawi, and Ismaili), Christian (Syriac Christian and Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Maronite, and Phalange), and pagan (Yazidi, Zoroastrianism, and Druidic), and the big names in between (Buddha and the Maharishi); syncopated doorbells; Chinese paper cuts; hotel-standard pants presses; analog telephones; electric shoeshine machines; and haute couture nail polish, among thousands of other remarkable products and gadgets, are more than just a jumble of unrelated artifacts. A passerby glancing in through the window would be forgiven for mistaking the Marvellous Emporium for a postmodern aberration of outsider art. Abu Za’atar keenly insists to first-time customers that no one but he alone can prize an object from its exhibition place, citing avalanches as a clear and present danger.

  In the past he considered the emporium a fixed monument to his life on earth, to be dismantled when the appropriate time comes, buried in a landfill, and forgotten. But Umm al-Khanaazeer has made him appreciate its finer aspects. He now considers the Marvellous Emporium a work in progress not necessarily about himself, but one that has been growing organically, with a universally generous purpose. The Featherer vociferously argues with his imaginary critics as he dusts among the shelves. If anyone were to ask him, he would insist he means advancement in the greater sense. No one in the town has been as devoted as he is to improving the public good, even if that means shoving a superstitious people into the present. Right or wrong, politically correct or deeply insulting, he remains an APC—Agent of Progressive Change—the letters of which should appear like a degree from the university of life after his name on the emporium’s neon frontage.

  That is when he is not misled, waylaid, or kneecapped by nostalgia. It is no accident that his inventory through the winding aisles deposits him in a very private place. He takes the tiny key he religiously keeps in his pocket and unlocks the aptly named “booty nest,” a secure, glass-fronted case stuffed with jewelry. Since the Syrian conflict, many more beautiful refugee women have been bombarding the Marvellous Emporium, desperate to sell their gold. But the acquisition of these pieces no longer contains the emotional frisson that once excited him. His current business venture with his nephew pretty much consumes his every want and need. Now he realizes, not without a tinge of bittersweet regret, he has no desire to dose himself with herbal Viagra.

  Despite his apparent disinterest, women have been doubly persistent in their desperation to sell jewelry, and he has been acquiring quite heavy pieces for a song. He casts his eyes over the substantial fortune represented by a deluge of bracelets, brooches, necklaces, hatpins, camel cuff links, stray antique beads, and a fine array of filigree silver and gold in the booty nest. He scrutinizes the mound of glittery, lurid stuff, and still what he so desperately wants eludes him. Roughly yanking the magnifying glass on a chain around his neck and holding it up, he peers cockeyed and peevish through it. An incessant forefinger pecks at the stash and impatiently flips over the only business card kept there to reveal any hidden pieces underneath.

  By the time he excavates a broken pair of tarnished earrings, embossed with a cursive design, he feels feverish. He repositions a more solid, crass gold collar with pink rubies to camouflage and protect the inconspicuous bits of metal, which have an unearthly glow, like the dim recollection he has of a slender Palestinian refugee girl. She sold the cheap earrings to him and he extracted a high price from her for the privilege. It was the first of those kinds of bargains he ever made, all the more satisfying because of his innocence and hers too, although that has never once crossed his mind.

  Abu Za’atar lowers the magnifying glass and carefully closes and locks the glass-fronted chest. He pauses and takes in the Marvellous Emporium rising around him. Despite his hard work and lifelong dedication, even he has difficulty believing how it all began—as a board under a sheltering cloth tied to four poles. The stall back then had but a single purpose: selling the dried thyme-and-sumac mixture sprinkled with sesame dust that gave the family a purpose and a name: za’atar. From a few brittle leaves, seeds, and a secret magic ingredient—onboz seeds from the marijuana plant, to which Abu Za’atar attributes his own predisposition toward flights of fantasy—the tent eventually grew into a short, squat structure along what was becoming a well-used pathway.

  Under his father, the village shop was never much of a money-spinner. Occasionally the wooden shelves overflowed with bags of coffee from Yemen or cotton thread carried along the Silk Road by itinerant salesmen. More often than not the only goods on display were several nondescript, crumpled packages, which remained unopened on an upper shelf, and a large drum of cooking oil. It was simply a question of limited supply and even lower demand. There was very little money to spend on nonessentials; what the farmers could not produce in the fields, they generally did without.

  For 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 past Abu Za’atar’s small town to the Gulf of Aqaba and the sanction-busting world beyond. Everyone within a twenty-mile radius of the illicit trade grew fat.

  Peace is rarely as lucrative as war, but it would be foolhardy to overlook the underpublicized shipments from Israel after the 1994 Camp David Accords. Whenever there is any excitement in the region and someone needs a hard-to-source item, he has become the go-to guy. In 2003, after Saddam was discovered in a hole, Abu Za’atar found himself in a quandary. He didn’t like feeling remorseful—after all, the man and his son Uday were brutal murderers. But to his mind and, more important, his balance sheet, the invading US Army was just as bad, and to add salt to the wound, they were too damn self-sufficient. “Prefab this, prefab that!” he tut-tuts to himself. During their long involvement in Iraq, the Americans flew in, assembled, killed, murdered, raped, and then dismantled, packed up, and flew off again, answerable to no one except their contractors. Only clutter and chemical dumps remained. The renewed American engagement in Iraq against Daesh promises the Marvellous Emporium some paltry but at least easy pickings.

  He can’t complain. Sometimes a lucky dip presents itself, like last month, when a clean-shaven stranger, sporting a neat military-precision haircut, stalked the town. It was obvious he wasn’t just looking around. From across the paved part of the main street, Abu Za’atar watched him spend an inordinate amount of time with Hussein at the butcher’s. Then the fellow in question entered the Marvellous Emporium without a by-your leave, ignored everything on its lovingly arranged shelves, and plunked himself down in the only available comfy chair. The nerve! Abu Za’atar thought. He was not used to such forward behavior.

  However, the stranger had an air of propriety that Abu Za’atar immediately responded to. In an instant he was no longer a purveyor of rare goods but an Armenian tailor. First meetings are often like that—to take the measure of a man. The mysterious stranger soon made his requirements known. He was in the market for information and he heard that Abu Za’atar was well placed to help. Surely he must have been aware that jihadists were using the town as a rat-run?

  The proprietor didn’t confirm, deny, or contradict. If the Jordanians were the paymasters, the bounty would be insignificant. To convince him, the mysterious stranger strongly intimated that “once the Americans are involved, the sky’s the limit”—and Abu Za’atar always appreciated finer distinctions between like-minded business partners to be.

  Emboldened, Abu Za’atar inquired, “And the Israelis?”

  “Their skies watch over us.” The stranger placed his hands side by side and rubbed his forefingers together. “We’ve heard of a cache of weapons,” he went on to say. “We don’t know if they’re for sale or…”

  Abu Za’
atar, smarmily polite, corrects him: “From my understanding, sir, it is an antique collection, I hear, of little value. And I am told it rarely sees the light of day.”

  His visitor only grunted.

  Deferentially the Featherer accepted the man’s business card and locked it in his booty nest for safekeeping. Despite the open-endedness of the exchange, Abu Za’atar took heart that his modest patriotic efforts were being recognized, and his resolve grew to the strength of ten M1 Abram tanks the Americans used to level Iraq. Whenever any occasion appeared, whether orchestrated by a mukhabarat agent, undercover policeman, informant, or con man, he promised himself to squeeze every drop of goodness from it.

  Throughout everything, only Hani, dear Hani, understood the grandiose nature of Abu Za’atar’s plans. His friend had an eye for the imminently advantageous, despite falling from the great heights of civil war profiteering and spending it all on Eastern European prostitutes. It was during a late-night phone conversation when Abu Za’atar started riffing on a heartfelt but unrealized ambition of his: to popularize an internationally known foodstuff for a prickly domestic market.

  “Like opening the first Chinese restaurant in Bethlehem?” Hani asked, exploring the concept.

  “Cold.” Abu Za’atar sometimes played this game with him.

  Hani tried again: “Like baking gluten-free pita bread in Beirut?”

  The Featherer wasn’t quite convinced; in his mind there weren’t enough Arab celiacs to constitute a consumer revolution. “Aim higher.”