Wanderlust (10 page)

Faiza, sister of Ahmad, cooked and served our dinner. There were other family members present, a mother and another sister, but it was Faiza who toiled the most. She was fifteen years old and divorced. Ahmad granted, without further explanation, that this was unusual—not the marriage but the divorce. After we ate, Faiza returned to the
diwan
. “You came from Sanaa?” she asked us. Yes, I said, adding that we studied in Egypt. Everyone had some concept of Egypt—it was the source of Arab soap operas and movies. Faiza had never left the area around Manakha, Ahmad explained. As soon as he left she asked about our hair—Mona's was bumpy like hers but she found mine oddly straight, and wanted to touch it. She unwrapped her head gear to show us hers. We heard men coming up the stairs. In a blur of panicked movement, she retied her head scarf, an impressive task at high speed, involving an elaborate series of folds and knots. Later she showed us how to tie the black, slightly elastic rectangle that women used as the underscarf. When tied properly, the part of the underscarf that covered the face could be lowered without disentangling the rest, which simplified eating and speech. When women went out they added another layer on top of it, the face-covering
niqab
.

The next morning Faiza came to watch us again, this time dispensing with the charade of sweeping. I tried to think of something to say to her, but having already covered our marital status and hair, we were left with little common ground. I thought about the conversations I had with Mona, our classmates, and Graham, and realized that nearly every single one could be distilled down to a central theme: aspirations. What we wanted, what we planned, who we wanted to become, and how we were going to get there. Even in the
gossip and the cheap thrills—the who-slept-with-whom, the pursuit of alcohol and drugs and weekend adventures—we were always talking about our own wishes. The fundamental assumption of my own agency underlay everything I thought and did. It was difficult to get into a different frame of mind and to imagine what I would talk about once there. I couldn't even ask Faiza if she hoped to marry, for at fifteen she had already failed at that one permitted ambition.

“Do you like Manakha?” I finally asked, groping for a connection as she fluttered her fingers over a pink cotton sweater lying on a windowsill. My words immediately struck me as lame. It was like asking her if she liked life.

“I have to work a lot,” she said.

One day in Sanaa, Mona and I were in the front seat of a shared taxi, waiting to depart. Suddenly a man rapped on our window. He was compact, brown-skinned, and mustachioed, like most Yemeni men, but wore a Western suit, and spoke careful and correct English. He had the offbeat enunciation of someone who had studied the language, but hadn't heard it spoken very often by natives.

“Please, would you ride with my family member?” he asked. Behind him was a small figure draped all in black, complete with face-covering
niqab
. This didn't strike us as a strange request. We'd angled to share the crammed benches of intercity taxis with other women, or had paid extra to have a whole bench to ourselves, apart from the men. So we moved to the back bench, where I took up my seat next to the black-clad woman, while the man who had knocked on our window, whose name was Abu Bakr, sat in front. Our taxi left Sanaa for Taiz.

All I could see of her were dark almond-shaped eyes with long
lashes, set in unlined skin. Based on this I formed a picture of a great beauty. Abu Bakr's young wife, perhaps. My attempt at conversation went nowhere: I said hello, she said hello, then she looked out the window. I wondered if it was shyness or if she disdained me.

A half hour into our drive we could feel the sun beating on the windows. I felt sorry for our seatmate in the black layers. She took off her gloves and I looked at her hands. They were soft and pudgy, and I realized that she was a child. Mona and I pulled down the window screens, blocking out the sun and any prying eyes, and pushed our scarves back off our heads.

The child, Shafa, was Abu Bakr's niece. She was twelve, and Abu Bakr was taking her down to his home in Taiz to visit her cousins. Abu Bakr taught English and Arabic as a foreign language in Sanaa.

“Isn't that quite young to be wearing the veil?” I asked Abu Bakr.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “She did not want to wear it, but I made her. I will not let any member of my family go uncovered, because I am con-serv-a-tive.” He uttered the last word with effort, as though he wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it.

“Are you sisters?” he asked. Several Yemenis had asked us this, even though we didn't look alike. I wondered if the question was rooted in other people's hope, on our behalf, that however far from home we'd wandered, we must at least be kin.

By the time we arrived in the highland city of Taiz, we'd accepted Abu Bakr's invitation to stay. His home was a newish structure built in the old style, a multistory maze of rooms and staircases. He shared it with his wife, his mother, two brothers, the wife of one of the brothers, and an assortment of children. When Shafa arrived indoors, she tore off her veil, and revealed herself to be not
the ethereal and aristocratic beauty I'd first imagined, but a plump and round-faced preteen whose skin was just starting to break out. She embraced a cousin, who carried a set of plastic ponies with pink and blue hair. They ran away up some stairs.

Abu Bakr's wife, Ismat, was our age, twenty, and had been married six months. She was Djibouti-born, half-Egyptian and half-Yemeni, with gray eyes and high cheekbones and a cautious air. His sister-in-law, Hoda, was older, heavier, and more cheerful. They gave us our own large room with carpets on the floor and cushions lining the walls, and—a great luxury—our own bathroom with a shower and a flushing Turkish toilet. I had my first shower in five days. We laid out our sleeping bags in the middle of our room.

Accepting an offer of Arab hospitality is like committing to a first-class train ride. You'll be well-cosseted, but you can't get off in the middle, and so are stuck with your seatmates for the duration. Several women brought us breakfast in our room the next morning. Then Abu Bakr appeared and informed us that he was taking us sightseeing.

From 1948 until 1962, Yemen was ruled from Taiz by Imam Ahmad, the second to last in a line of hereditary kings, who lived in a hilltop palace. It still sits on the highest hill, with the town tumbling down around it. Imam Ahmad had been both a despot and a modern man. He'd updated the military, suppressed tribal revolts, and, up in his palace, collected modern curiosities like blenders, blow-dryers, and a phonograph. Despite a life of cutthroat court politics, he died peacefully in his bed, and the palace, now a museum, was preserved untouched. His curiosities were protected under glass in yellowed rooms, frozen in 1962.

The nation outside, with its strange architecture and costume, its missing technology, its profound apartheid of the sexes, also seemed to be trapped in time. That, though, was an illusion. Yemen
was already globalizing, but in ways I couldn't recognize, because I thought the direction of change was always toward Westernization. I thought modernization meant that for better or worse you ended up with a Pizza Hut. There was one in Cairo. We foreign students disdained it, but it was popular with upper-class Cairenes. Many of Yemen's outside influences, though, came from sources I couldn't identify, since they weren't the signatures of my own culture. After President Ali Abdullah Saleh lent support to Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, Yemen's wealthy neighbor Saudi Arabia retaliated by throwing out hundreds of thousands of Yemeni guest workers. They brought home new ideas about dress and worship. Veterans of the Afghan wars, who had gone to fight the Soviets with the
mujahedeen,
were also coming home, with new interpretations of jihad. By 1992 the Yemeni bell jar had long been broken. On the whole this was probably for the best. Most people don't benefit from remaining hidden and isolated, suspended in time, illiteracy and illness preserved along with their otherworldly beauty.

After visiting the palace we walked to a zoo on its grounds. Tiny cement enclosures with iron bars, some sunk into the ground, lined a small courtyard. The stench from the cages was acute, the animals thin. Mona drew her scarf across her face, feigning modesty, to block the smell and hide her expression. We dutifully toured the yard, trying not to look horrified. A mangy hyena prowled listlessly in a cage. Another contained a skunk. Two golden female lions had been granted the largest space. One paced back and forth while the other stood with her face pressed up against the bars, as though straining to push her head through. Why was it, I wondered, that I looked at these animals and saw them as suffering, while others—like members of a nearby family who were laughing and taking pictures—apparently did not? You could regard the creatures
as pleasurable spectacle only if it didn't occur to you that they were sentient. In the final cage a brown and white monkey stood clinging to a metal bar with a bright red erection on display. He screamed and screamed, making the sound of human rage.

We left the zoo with relief and followed Abu Bakr to a nearby promenade with a view of the city below. It was Friday, the day of rest, and more families had come up to take the air. As we strolled along, Abu Bakr told us that he planned to marry a second wife, and was looking for a foreigner who spoke English or French, perhaps a European or a Canadian. I took this in with exasperation. His education and interest in foreign ways, along with his possession of a young, beautiful, and recently acquired wife, hadn't suggested an aspiring polygamist. Now his hospitality seemed to have been a means of prospecting for number two, someone who could maybe even get him a foreign visa. “It might be difficult to get a European to wear the veil,” I said. She wouldn't have to, he replied, and I got the feeling he had mulled the question over. He saw himself as a reasonable man. “Do you think Ismat would mind if you married again?” I asked. He shrugged. “Maybe for a few months, but she would get used to it.” Abu Bakr said he wanted to study in North America. I told him he might find it difficult to live there. “But I am progressive,” he said.

He dropped us off at the busy marketplace and instructed us to be home by one thirty. “Okay, Dad,” Mona said after he was out of earshot, and we giggled like teenagers allowed to roam the mall. We were regressing from independence. We moved past vegetable sellers sitting on the cobblestones, up a street lined with stalls each dedicated to one product: fabrics, Qurans, silver jewelry, daggers. I wanted one of the finely knit black scarves like the one Faiza had shown us, that tucked around the head and face. The first fabric stall
we came to sold them, packaged in shiny plastic envelopes. Mona and I each bought one. At a jeweler's I bought a coin from the time of the Imamate, now useless, with a loop welded on so that I could wear it around my neck.

We arrived back fifteen minutes late and joined the menfolk in one of the
diwan
s; the women were still making lunch. As foreign women, we were a sort of third sex, allowed, like Ottoman eunuchs, to pass between two worlds. Ismat and Hoda emerged from the kitchen and served plates of rice and chicken on a long cloth laid out in the middle of the room, presenting Mona and I with forks, procured just for us. We thanked them but set the forks aside, wanting to prove our competence with our hands. After we had all had our first helpings, Ismat, Hoda, and Abu Bakr's mother, whom everyone called Ummi, sat down and joined us.

After lunch Abu Bakr said he was taking us on the family expedition to his home village, where his father lived with his other wife, along with several of his brothers and their families. Mona and I put on our head scarves and overcoats. Ismat and Hoda put on their long black cloaks and
niqab
s. Ismat wore an additional layer that hung over her eyes, sheer enough for her to see out but too opaque for anyone else to see through. Protected against the dangers of visibility, we piled into the car.