A Foreign Affair (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

‘Nothing to eat?’

‘I thought you’d prefer something to read.’

‘Why would I want to read the memoirs of a woman who had a much better time travelling in these parts eighty years ago than I’ve had?’ I grumbled, shoving a dog-eared copy of Freya Stark’s
The
Southern
Gates
of
Arabia
straight back in the bag.

‘Are you sure about that? As I recall, she had to summon the RAF to airlift her out of the Wadi Hadramaut when she went down with the measles.’

‘So what? At least she wasn’t condemned to death on a trumped up charge of homosexuality. At least she left Yemen alive!’

‘A fair point.’

The ambassador and I were having this tetchy exchange in the back of the embassy LandCruiser, while being driven at top speed in the direction of the president’s palace through the crowded, pot-holed streets of twilit central Sanaa. It was the height of
qat
downer time, when Yemeni drivers are at their most reckless and pedestrians their most clueless. Hurled from side to side, bumping our heads on the car’s ceiling, overheated and deafened by the hooting of horns and sirens, neither of us were at our best. The presence in the front passenger seat of the security guard I’d merrily instructed to go and fuck his niece at the Silent Valley memorial service a few days before, was further unnerving me. ‘I knew you were trouble, Flashman’ he’d muttered, as I’d climbed aboard.

I was also in two minds about the excursion. On the one hand quitting CLIT’s foul-smelling basement had been a gigantic relief; the ambassador had assured me that the president’s special request for a first-hand account of General al-Majid’s telephonic high treason just might - if I was very, very lucky - win me a stay of execution. On the other hand, with every revolution of the LandCruiser’s wheels, I was travelling further and further away from Sheikh Ahmad, my pole star and raison d’etre.

After skirting mile after mile of the presidential fortress’s high perimeter wall, passing some twenty evenly spaced watchtowers and swinging through the sort of grandiose gateway one might expect to find in a Legoland, the car came to a halt at last. A soldier dressed in fatigues so spanking new they were still shiny indicated that, while the ambassador and I were to follow him inside the fortress, the security guard must remain in the car.

‘Sorry! It’s a “Yemenis only” do by the look of it,’ I teased him.

‘Flasher!’ he retorted.

‘Loser!’ I shot back.

Not a very adult start to an occasion of the deadliest importance: my meeting with a foreign head of state who happened to be in a position to decide whether I lived or died. But of course, I hadn’t begun to face up to that stark truth. Was it TS Eliot who noted something about humans not being able to bear much reality? And don’t the banal and trivial always truffle their way into events of solemn significance? A trouser seam splits as a man proposes marriage; a wig slips as a diva sings her last aria; a child projectile vomits from the prize-giving podium.

We were ushered into a marbled atrium hallway furnished with a shallow plashing fountain that made me want to pee. In the mirrored walls of a corridor entered on the far side of it, I glimpsed myself looking very like Princess Di telling Martin Bashir she wanted to be queen of people’s hearts - all tragic, staring eyes and down-turned mouth. I noted some ghastly Louis XVI repro console tables and another of those giant portraits of the president in a lounge suit and sunglasses astride a fancily caparisoned horse before we arrived in a gloomy reception room the size of a couple of tennis courts, where another camouflage-clad soldier invited us to be seated on a gigantically elongated black velvet sofa. A third served us cans of coke and black tea in what looked like crystal double shot glasses.

‘If I were you, I’d sit down just as soon as you can once we’re in there,’ advised the Scot. ‘He’s short, can’t stand anyone towering over him. Washington’s just recalled my six-footer counterpart to replace him with a teeny Texan. Actually, I’ve got a theory about “vertically challenged” Yemeni rulers; if you read northern Yemeni history, you’ll see that it was all the shorties - Italians, Japs and Chinese - who got preferential treatment here...’

‘Fascinating!’

I think he was trying to distract us both from our forthcoming ordeal. Fortunately, it was time to go in at last. A fifth soldier, accompanied by someone who turned out to be an official interpreter had appeared, the latter speaking into a mobile phone, to usher us through high double doors into the inner sanctum of a smaller reception room furnished with those floor level mattresses around the walls, bolster arm rests and cushions grandly covered in a thickly gold-threaded damask. Table lamps, the same fancy gilt kind Fiona had ordered from John Lewis before Christmas, cast a dim but warm glow over the face of the tiny dark figure lounging in the far corner of the room wearing a
futa
and half-moon spectacles and surrounded by paperwork and mobile phones. I had no trouble recognising the president from the dozens of posters, portrait photos and billboards I’d seen of him.

‘No, please, don’t get up!’ I told him, traversing the few yards of carpet in a flash. Confidently extending my hand to shake, I’d plonked myself straight down beside him before he could move a muscle. He looked a little startled, as if he might rise to his feet anyway to greet the ambassador, but the latter had clumsily followed my lead by scooting across the room in my wake and lowering himself heavily onto the cushions on the other side of me. I gave the president a chance to regain the initiative and take charge. He ordered a soldier to bring us refreshments and indicated to the interpreter that he would be superfluous to the occasion.

‘Ms Flashman,’ he began, pronouncing my name perfectly, ‘I am by no means a fluent speaker of the language of Shakespeare but I get a feeling about a person from the first moment I meet them. How else can I account for the fact that I’ve managed to keep dancing in the basket of snakes that is this country and all its conflicting factions for almost thirty-five years now? I am sensing that you and I will understand each other perfectly.’

‘How strange!’ I was kicking myself for failing to ask our Scot in Sanaa how to address Yemen’s president, ‘I had the very same feeling about you the instant I saw that gigantic billboard image of you, the one that greets any visitor to Yemen arriving by sea at Aden. Here’s a man I can do business with, is what I thought to myself...’

He inclined his head graciously in return, ‘Yes, yes, you are most certainly a person I can do the business with. Please have a tea Ms. Flashman? Ambassador?’

I let his unfortunate linguistic gaffe go without remark. For at least another ten minutes we continued to get the measure of each other, dancing around like a pair of fly-weight boxers, discovering we were ideally matched for the cut and thrust of elegant conversation, until at last it was time to tackle our ‘business’.

‘I understand that you have had a very interesting – perhaps too interesting! – week in my country. Please be so good as to tell me everything about your stay with the al-Amra family...’

My blow by blow account of my kidnapping and near-execution had him tut-tutting regretfully and jotting the odd note on a pad beside him, but for the entire duration of my account of al-Majid’s phone call to the Brummie, he watched me like a hawk, emitting the odd low growl of anger or barked instruction to one of the soldiers.

I could tell that once he’d milked me of all the goods on his rival he lost all interest in my story, but I was determined that he should hear the tale of my heroically daring rescue by Aziz. Praising Aziz to the skies - emphasizing how dramatically his quick-thinking resolve in the matter of my escape contrasted with his abject terror of his father - would lead naturally on to a discussion of homosexuality and, from there, I hoped, to my own absurdly perilous situation.

‘My Moslem people here in Yemen are very, very shocked and disgusted by such unnatural practices, Ms Flashman,’ he observed testily after hearing me out in silence.

‘How interesting that you use the word “unnatural” to describe homosexuality! Perhaps you have heard of our greatest TV naturalist, David Attenborough? Well, you might like to get hold of some of his box sets. They’re quite an eye-opener. But if you’ll allow me, I’d like to make a serious point.’ Without pausing for his green light I proceeded to make one of my best speeches, perhaps because I wholeheartedly believed in every word I was saying:

‘...There are homosexual penguins, goats, dogs and zebra finches to name just a few species so, scientifically speaking, it’s quite wrong to describe homosexuality as unnatural, which means that it’s as gigantic and wicked an injustice to persecute a person who is homosexual as to punish one whose skin is black. Who are you, Mr President, or me, or His Excellency the ambassador here, or even your prophet Mohammad himself, to set about correcting or rejecting God’s handiwork? What does any one of us know about creating human beings in all their infinitely mysterious variety? Would you presume to instruct a Hadrami builder? Would I, an Englishwoman, tell a Yemeni how to wear his
futa
?’

‘You have a golden tongue, Ms Flashman!’ he remarked drily. He’d begun stretching and sighing in a manner that suggested I should be winding up my oration. I imagine he deemed homosexuality an indecent topic for a woman to be tackling. Undeterred, I ploughed straight on however because I’d barely started: ‘To outlaw a practice that is natural is plain dangerous, Mr President. In what way “dangerous”? I hear you ask...’

‘I have asked nothing, Ms Flashman.’

Ignoring this mild protest too, I proceeded to an account of precisely how Aziz’s homosexuality had rendered him susceptible to blackmail by his father and led to his betrayal of his best friend and the cause he believed in. ‘Can you see now, Mr President, how having to deny his true nature forced him down a dishonourable, dishonest and despicable path towards damnation? Do you really want a part of your population to be condemned to a life of cheating, lying and double-crossing? These men will be frightened and weak and miserable, and I won’t begin to tell you how their wives will suffer...’

‘Are you homosexual, Ms Flashman? You take a very passionate interest in the subject..’

‘I am very, very far from being homosexual, Mr. President, ‘I answered him, summoning up one of my throatiest giggles and a flirty flutter of my eyelids, ‘But it may have escaped your notice, that the twelfth and final charge against me on a list compiled by General al-Majid is an entirely false one of homosexuality.’

Clearly relieved to be spared another chapter of my lecture, he listened attentively to my version of my prison cell encounter with Mrs Rev, his eyes widening with surprise at my mention of my ancestor’s binoculars and Mrs Rev’s bullying effort to re-baptise me in the Lord, and then with sympathetic amusement at my vivid re-enactment of the pounding I’d given her.

‘Have no fear, Ms Flashman! I will give you a medal, not a bullet on your chest for resisting such wickedness!’ he declared with a chuckle. ‘Furthermore, your enemy will not be permitted to leave Yemen with your ancestral binoculars. It will be my great pleasure to see to this matter personally!’

‘Thank you! I knew you would understand!’ I gushed.

‘Are we to understand that Ms Flashman no longer faces the death penalty, sir,’ asked the anxious ambassador. ‘I know my government, but also the White House, will be sincerely pleased to receive this news. As you may be aware, Ms Flashman’s plight is already exciting a great deal of negative interest in both Britain and the United States...’

‘Yes, yes! Am I an evil tyrant? How could I see this beautiful woman put to death for a crime she obviously never contemplated committing? However,’ and he paused briefly for a shrewd, sharp look at us – the sort of look a trader in a market might employ to assess a customer’s means before naming his price - ‘I see here,’ he plucked a familiar sheaf of multi-coloured papers from the drift of documents that surrounded him, ‘that Ms Flashman has also been charged with spying, inciting dissent and separatism, causing a disturbance, attacking a state official, and so on. These are all serious infringements of our laws, but there is worse. She provoked a riot which led to many casualties. Are the lives of twelve of my people and all the widows and the 82 orphans she has created, to count for nothing in the scales of justice? Tell me, is this just?’

For this I had no answer. I could only hang my head in sincere penitence. Fortunately, our Scot on the spot was better prepared to counter this assault. He kicked off by conveying not only our regrets but those of the entire Blair government and even the British nation for the devastating tragedy that had taken place in Seiyun, in a country so importantly and closely allied to our own. ‘I know I speak for all Britons everywhere when I say that our thoughts and prayers are with those widows and orphans...’

‘You describe what happened as a “tragedy” ambassador,’ snapped the president, ‘but every schoolboy knows that a tragedy is something unavoidable. No one can call this a tragedy. No one! As a simple visitor to Yemen – you have reassured me, Your Excellency, that she is not a spy or employee of your foreign department - it was perfectly possible for a woman as mature and intelligent as Ms Flashman to resist an impulse to, as I believe you say ‘poke her nose’, into our private political business! For this stupid error my people will expect her to pay the ultimate price! Do you understand me?’