Wanderlust (9 page)

We went to the Yemenia airline office on Talaat Harb Street, where, dismayed at the price of the Cairo–Sanaa run, we haggled over cups of tea with the general manager, who gave us a generous discount. Mona's uncle sent her the only known extant English-language guidebook to Yemen, an out-of-date Lonely Planet. She didn't have time to read it, so she handed it over to me. I packed my bag and crammed on the plane.

chapter eight

T
he taxi deposited us at dusk
in front of the millennium-old Bab al-Yemen, the gate to the old city, as merchants were closing up their stalls. A swirl of people was hurrying away. Beyond the wall rose stone towers seven or eight stories high, each one decorated with patterns made of white plaster. White arches surrounded the windows, and as darkness fell, the white zigzags painted along the rooflines appeared to glow.

The people around us were mostly men. Young and old, every one of them wore a patterned sarong, a Western-style sport coat, a cloth head wrap, and a large curved dagger sheathed at his waist. A few women traveled in pairs, their human forms invisible, but their cloth tents riotously colored in a radiating pattern of red, blue, yellow, and green.

We stood and watched, and began to feel that everyone else was staring back at us. A little pocket of space formed around us as though we were a disturbance in the current. We shouldered our backpacks, walked toward the gate, and stepped in.

On a plaza just inside, we found a dark, smoke-filled teahouse. The door was low, which made me feel overgrown, but once inside I thought I might have shrunk. The water pipes created a hallucination: They were more than double the height of the
sheesha
pipes in
Egypt, topped with enormous clay bowls big enough to serve soup. The effect was as strange as if chairs had suddenly doubled in height. Because Yemenis are short, the pipes looked even more outsize, towering over their seated and reclining users. When the proprietor offered us tea, we pointed at one of the pipes.

“
Midaq?
” he asked. We nodded uncertainly. “
Midaq!
” he cried across the dim room, and someone else repeated the cry, and it went back toward some invisible tobacco-preparation area. The proprietor directed us to a cot against the wall, and our pipe was procured: a brass tank the size and shape of a pineapple, topped with a four-foottall wooden stem, painted black and decorated with tiny white dots. We leaned back on our cot. From here I felt I could finally recede and watch without being watched; at least a man stepping into the teahouse might not immediately notice the two foreign girls in the corner. Most of the patrons had one cheek swollen, as though it contained a tennis ball. Branches of glossy green leaves, like laurels, were piled everywhere. The leaves were the national intoxicant,
qat,
and several neighbors offered us some from their stash. Still grappling with the long coil of our pipe, though, and conscious that the task of finding a hotel bed lay ahead, we decided new drugs were a step too far.

It was soon clear that the delicate pipes and honey-soaked tobaccos of Cairo had not prepared me for Yemeni shag. The waiter piled dried brown hunks that resembled slabs of evergreen bark into our bowl, then seared them with coals. After a few inhalations my mind unfastened itself and floated toward the top of the room. I was first giddy, then nauseated. “I'm just not going to move until we leave,” I said, and passed Mona the mouthpiece. Time slowed down. Other patrons asked us questions, green spittle flecking their lips. Where were we from? Yes, yes, Amreeka. George Bush bad. People good. The sort of split anyone could understand. Canada, I offered,
but got no flicker of recognition. Where would we stay. Did we need a place. We stopped answering, and they stopped asking. It didn't feel rude. Later I would recognize this moment as the beginning of the glazed period. It occurs three-quarters of the way into any
qat
session. Quiet descends and everyone becomes philosophical.

When we left, the night air was refreshing, the drizzle welcome. We ambled down a narrow alley. Little squares of stained glass in blue, red, and green dotted the walls, until we emerged into the modern part of the city, where we found a businessmen's hotel on Ali Abd al-Mughni Street. Nothing we could afford ever had a private bathroom, but our room was clean and had a balcony. We slept the fulfilling sleep of the deeply tired. In the middle of the night I was awoken by a surreal wail. It was coming from outside. I sat up, confused. It sounded like a siren. “What the fuck is that?” Mona asked from her bed. I stumbled toward our balcony door. The city had turned off every light, so all I could see was pitch-black. I slid open our door, and the keening became louder. It was clear and pure on the night air, taking up the sky. I wondered why people weren't coming out of their homes in alarm. I was half-asleep. And then the familiar words began to resolve themselves. God is great, God is great. My disorientation subsided.

We knew about the call to prayer, had heard it for months. It crackled to life five times a day, part of the din of Cairo. It sounded different in a silent, dark city. Nothing competed for God's attention. It was 5:00 AM. I went back to bed.

After that first night we wore head scarves when we went out in public, something we never did in Cairo unless we were visiting a mosque. This didn't make us look less foreign, because we still wore jeans and
long coats. Our head coverings were ad hoc, pulled from existing wardrobes. Mona wore a Palestinian
kaffiyeh,
and I wore an old Spanish scarf, black with roses. The local women were fully tented, with their faces and bodily outlines obscured. Almost every woman wore a multicolored sheet in the same radiating pattern, with the extra fabric clutched in front by an invisible hand. I wondered if the garish print was a trend, or if it had been around forever. Over their faces each one wore a piece of black, red, and white tie-dyed silk, which clashed aggressively with the other fabric. Occasionally we saw women who, rather than the kaleidoscopic garb, wore black from head to toe, which was the style in Saudi Arabia. All-black was seen as a sign of upward mobility—of a family that had money or had been abroad.

We didn't blend in. Our scarves made us less obvious, a little more ambiguous in our perceived origin. They made us more comfortable; the few times our hair was exposed we felt naked and vulnerable. I've met European women in conservative Muslim countries who've told me not to cover my hair, on the principle that I should act at all times as an ambassador of liberal values. But I regarded it practically. I hoped it might ease my passage through public space more effectively than anything did in Cairo. It also meant I didn't have to think about my hair.

We encountered our first masturbator in Sanaa. We were sitting on a low wall outside a mosque, looking at a map. He appeared in a doorway, maybe twenty yards away, exposing himself from between the folds of his skirt, staring at us and throttling his penis. I nudged Mona, and we jumped up and walked away. We looked back; he was following us. We sped up, and kept checking over our shoulders until we were sure we had lost him.

We came across the second one in Sada, a northern Yemeni town on the fringe of the Empty Quarter, where we were walking around the high city wall. We came to a tall parapet, and I turned to look inside it. I don't know who was more surprised, he or us.

A few days later we caught a group taxi going from Sanaa to Manakha. It left just as the sun started to go down. We'd secured the front seat, which we thought was the optimal position, with knee room, window control, and a safe barrier between us and the other passengers. I got the window—it was my turn—and Mona took the center.

It got dark, we drove into the hills, and Mona dozed on my shoulder. Sometime later I noticed that our driver was grunting. I turned on a penlight, pretending to read, and then turned it in the direction of the driver. My suspicions were confirmed.

“Enough!” I yelled. We ordered him to stop the car. We yelled at him, hurling insults. (“You're ugly! You're a dog!” were among the few in our linguistic range.) We got out and looked around. We'd stopped in remote mountains, so storming away was not an option. We ordered two young men into the front seat and joined the oldest-looking one on a rear bench. The car of eight riders accepted the proceedings with mysterious equanimity. No one spoke up in our defense, but no one argued with us, either. While the car reorganized itself to meet our demands, several passengers stood and stretched their legs, looking resigned, as though patiently waiting out a flat tire. I felt like a ghost, able to affect events in the world of the living, with a rattle here or a knock there, but never really believed to exist.

In Manakha one of the other passengers, now cordial and helpful, showed us where to find the only open hotel. It was in an old family home. We bargained with the proprietor, Ahmad, and he led us
up a steep, narrow, uneven stairwell, until we reached the very top of the house, the room called the
mafraj,
with windows to take in the tower view. I woke with the sun streaming onto me in different colors, shining through the blue and red stained glass. Outside our door I heard the rhythmic swishing of someone sweeping a straw broom across stone. The sweeping went on for so long that it seemed impossible that the small landing could be that dirty. Jumpy about lurkers, I decided to open our door and meet the suspicious party. I found a girl. She straightened and stared directly at me, as if to ask what had taken me so long. She called down the stairs for our breakfast, then approached the room and peeked in. Her eyes paused on every object: sleeping bag, backpack, hiking boot, camera. She said her name was Faiza.

Mona and I took breakfast on the roof, seeing the town by daylight for the first time. It was built into the mountainside in the cradle between two peaks. There were no power lines, no cars, and no roads other than the one we had come in on. The buildings were rough-hewn versions of those in Sanaa: sand-colored with white patterns painted on, zigzags and diamonds and crosses. Below and around the town, terraced rice fields had sculpted the hills into jumbo steps. Stairs for a fairy-tale giant, or a god. Once again, my visual perspective was thrown off. Things were not the right size.

After breakfast we set off. We climbed through the terraced fields, passing hamlet after hamlet, each one balanced more precariously than the last. It was as though, in the absence of roads and power tools, the local builders had developed a single skill: how to make a village as inaccessible and well-defended as possible.

When shadows started to slice across the hillsides, we looked down and saw a sea of white mist below us. The clouds climbed as we descended, so that soon we were enveloped in their cool vapor. During
the rest of our descent, the veil parted and closed, each time revealing something different: a hamlet, a valley, a bend in the trail.