Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Read online

  For the moment, at least, I wasn’t so sure he was right.

  * * *

  After a few hours the loquacious, fidgety high ebbed away and a meditative glow flowed in to replace it. The room went quiet. Abdul puffed thoughtfully on his water pipe, studying the smoke rings curling out of his mouth. The old uncle gazed out the window at streaks of purple and orange forming on the mountain horizon. Mansour turned on the television news, without sound. The screen showed a Western woman standing with a pad and pen, interviewing Yemen’s president. The image startled me. It looked just like Geraldine. Then I realized it was Geraldine, not a qat hallucination. I was glad to see she was getting on with her itinerary. Getting on with mine, I slumped deeper into the pillow and nibbled at a last green sprig of qat.

  When the qat was finally finished, Mansour’s mafraj was a mess. Soda bottles lay on their side, ashes coated the carpet, and smoke hung thick in the air. Mansour turned on a lamp and the light bounced back, like high beams in fog.

  We sat there for another hour as dusk gathered outside, wrapped in our warm cocoons of silence. Then the magic melted away. For the first time in hours I wondered what time it was. I had to urinate. My stomach was telling me with a growl that it never wanted to eat anything, ever again.

  “Don’t be surprised if you can’t sleep tonight,” Mansour said. “You might want to have a whiskey at the hotel to relax you. Lots of Yemenis do.” Apparently, when it came to a qat hangover, a certain doubt about alcohol was okay as well.

  The qat chew ended as unceremoniously as it had begun. One by one, the guests gathered up their shoes and daggers, retied their turbans and headed into the night. The air tasted thin, the sky was starry and bright. And standing in the courtyard, gazing out at the ancient city with its mud walls and mud towers girdled round, everything real seemed unreal, and everything fantastic seemed, at least for the moment, worth seriously considering. Even the Yemeni bard, Sheik Zubayre.

  3

  YEMEN

  For You I Make a Special Deal

  Nothing but evil comes through here.

  —Governor of Sanaa, closing the city’s northern gate in 1860

  I fell into a fitful sleep convinced that I would chew qat for the rest of my stay in Yemen, perhaps explore the prospects for overseas cultivation (one of the giddier notions Mansour had floated in the course of the afternoon). I awoke four hours later with a loose piston clanging away in my cerebellum. Someone had emptied an ashtray down my throat. My jaw ached from too much chewing. Focusing slowly through bloodshot eyes, I saw in the bathroom mirror the “wild-looking, dull-witted automaton” I’d read about in the medical literature.

  I needed either a day in bed or another round of qat to kill the pain. What I had scheduled instead was an eight-o’clock interview at a Western embassy to gather background for the rest of my Yemeni reporting, on weapons and mayhem. Creaking into a chair opposite the defense analyst, I managed to string together enough monosyllables to form a question.

  “What arms are out there?”

  The diplomat doodled something on his notepad. “At a guess,” he said, “I’d say there are more weapons per capita in Yemen than in any other country on earth.” At a guess, he estimated two rifles and two daggers per adult male. “Slightly less for teenagers.” And that was just small arms. “You’ve got your submachine guns, your hand grenades, your mortars—maybe even your flamethrowers,” he said. Some tribal sheiks stocked big-ticket items as well: bazookas, tanks, surface-to-air missiles.

  I nodded dumbly. “Why?”

  “You’ve got to understand the basic instability of the place,” the diplomat said. “The last two presidents weren’t too fortunate with their retirement programs.” Indeed. One was shot and killed during a coup. His successor lasted eight months before a man walked into his office with a briefcase that blew up and killed them both. The current president had survived several assassination attempts and now prudently packed a pistol beneath his business suit.

  The source of most of the violence was the mountainous north, where tribal sheiks still resented central government. Some of these outlaws even had mafia-style monikers, such as Sheik “Two Fingers” Hantash of Wadi Hadad, who earned his nickname after tossing a grenade a little too slowly at an enemy clan.

  In the old days—up until the early 1960s—swarming south and sacking the capital was the sheiks’ favored means of political expression. These days, tribesmen contented themselves with killing each other, or the occasional Western oil worker. This was lucky for the government. One sheik commanded a private army of 30,000. Yemen’s entire armed forces totaled a mere 37,000.

  In an effort to contain the killing, the government had launched an advertising campaign attacking the custom of kharab wa-turab—the right to “lay waste” to an enemy who breaks the peace without paying blood money.

  “The campaign’s called Revenge Awareness Week,” the diplomat said. “I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it’s unique to North Yemen.”

  To see the weaponry up close, the diplomat recommended that I travel through the mountains to a town called Saada, a day’s drive north. Transportation, though, was a problem. What I needed was an armored personnel carrier. What I got was the only rental car in Yemen.

  “Car good, very good,” the rental agent said, tapping the hood rather gingerly. The dented sedan was so stripped down it was almost naked. I could do without a radio, heater, lighter and functioning gas gauge. But the car also lacked a turn signal, an inside light, back lights, one headlight, brake pads, a door handle, springs and second gear. The seat belt looked as though it had been hacked to pieces with a dull jambiya.

  “Horn works very good,” the agent said, giving the steering wheel a savage blow that produced one barely audible bleat. With that, he demanded a cash deposit of fifty dollars, enough to replace this flagship of his meager fleet.

  “Where you go?” he asked.

  “Up north. Through the mountains to Saada.”

  He raised his eyes in the Islamic equivalent of crossing oneself. “Go very slow,” he said, as if there were any choice in the car he’d just rented me. “Mountains bad. Road very bad. People too much bad.”

  Car more bad. Ten minutes from the rental office, third gear grinded and gave out. I had to race in first gear to twenty-five miles an hour, then jolt into fourth and putter along until I reached my maximum speed of forty. Sanaa at midday was a high-speed free-for-all, clouded in dust. When traffic slowed, cars scaled the median strip and sped down the oncoming lane until that side gridlocked as well. Parking consisted of finding a wedge of open street and abandoning one’s car or donkey. There were screams, threats, the thud of bumpers and the braying of trapped beasts. It seemed only a matter of minutes before someone reached for his jambiya and ran amok, cutting a swath through the thicket of cars.

  In this sort of lunacy, questions such as “Can you turn right on red?” and “Is this a one-way street?” seem stunningly irrelevant. So I was astonished to find a policeman waving me over for one of a dozen traffic felonies I was committing along with every other driver in Sanaa.

  “Your papers,” he said, climbing into the backseat. I handed him my passport and international driver’s license.

  “Where is Yemen license?”

  I pointed at my permit, which listed Yemen as one of the countries included.

  “No good,” he said. “You need Yemen license.”

  “Where do I get it?”

  “Here,” he said. “Three hundred riyals.”

  “What if I don’t buy one?” I asked. I was weary of being hustled.

  “We go police station,” he said.

  “Good. Let’s go.” I turned on the ignition.

  He grabbed my arm and twisted. “Two hundred riyals.”

  We settled at one hundred, about ten dollars. He scribbled something in Arabic and tossed it into my lap. Yemen license. In a feeble attempt at pa
yback, I took out my notebook and asked for his name and badge number. Then I noticed he didn’t have a badge.

  “I am Ahmed Mohammed,” he said, giving me the name of perhaps a quarter of the male population of Yemen. Then he reached through the window, opened the door from the outside and vanished into the traffic.

  * * *

  The scenery at least, improved at the edge of town. Sanaa sits in a mile-high plateau, ringed by terraced peaks that climb in broad green stairs to twelve thousand feet or more. High above the road, on fields cut like shelves into the hillside, peasants nudged wooden plows across narrow fields of qat. Deep green and wreathed in mist, the mountains had the sharp, rugged beauty of the Andes.

  Half an hour out of Sanaa, I reached the first military roadblock: four bullet-riddled oil cans guarded by the tallest Yemeni I’d yet seen. Standing seven feet at least, immobile in his helmet and fatigues, the soldier was cut from cardboard. The real soldiers were laid out in a roadside booth, chewing qat. One of them raised his head and lazily waved me through.

  Soon after, just outside the town of Raydah, I hit another traffic jam: a long line of donkeys, their riders perched on saddles of qat. They were headed in to sell their produce at a bustling street market, which also offered slabs of liver, bunches of grapes and huge leaves of cured tobacco. I parked and walked through the bazaar, trying to avoid the evil green shrub.

  “Best qat in Yemen—it grows near here.” There was a teenager at my elbow, following me through the bazaar. “You like buy?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You like tour Raydah?”

  Abdul was seventeen and anxious to practice his English. I was anxious to practice mine, and to get away from the qat. So we headed off through the village.

  “This Raydah main street,” he said proudly. We stood before a jerry-built slum of mud brick and concrete, with metal sheets and odd bits of wood tacked this way and that. It looked raw and unfinished, on the way to being old and unfinished.

  A black woman with nose rings and neck rings walked a camel down the middle of the road, balancing a basket on her head. Abdul said she was a Tihama, from the Red Sea coast where the Arab world meets the African. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face—one of the few exposed females I’d seen in Yemen. Then I spotted another unveiled woman and two others with half-veils.

  “Village not like city,” Abdul explained. “Every person know every person. Why need hide?”

  The men, at least, wore the usual accessories: turban, jambiya and cow’s cud of qat. Mindful of my mission, I asked Abdul why everyone carried a dagger.

  “Yemen not safe,” he said. “And Yemen is very proud history, we learn always in school.” From the vantage of Raydah’s main street, with its tumbledown buildings and qat-wasted fields, things didn’t look so proud. But Arabs have long memories. Yemen was one of the few pockets of Arabia that was never fully conquered or colonized. The Romans came, saw and left. The Ottoman Turks managed a beachhead, as did the British, and they divided the country into North and South Yemen before being driven out. Only qat had successfully subdued the population.

  The jambiya was a symbol of that defiance. Why, I asked Abdul, didn’t he wear one?

  “It is at my home,” he said, blushing. He’d taken it off that morning before school, where weapons are forbidden. “Also not allowed at courts and hospitals,” he said. On airplanes the weapons had to be checked in before takeoff. Everywhere else, Yemenis carried daggers the way Western men carry wallets.

  Abdul had one other sight to show me. We hiked down a dusty lane to a mud house at the edge of the village. Two men sat in front, banging small tacks into the soles of leather sandals. They wore skullcaps rather than turbans and tight ringlets of hair drooped down around their ears. Like Abdul, they didn’t wear jambiyas.

  “This is Ezra and this is Ibrahim,” Abdul said, introducing me. “They are Yahoodim of Raydah.”

  I had read that there were still a few thousand Jews in Yemen but I hadn’t expected to find them here, on the muddy back lane of a highland village. Nor had I expected them to look as they did. Except for their headdress, these dark-skinned, Arabic-speaking, qat-chewing cobblers in grubby shifts and sandals were indistinguishable from their Muslim neighbors.

  I didn’t fit their image of a Jew, either, despite my repeated statements that this was so. The two men stared at this fair-skinned stranger in khakis. “Yahood? Mish mumkin.” Jew? Not possible.

  I tried to sketch some Hebrew letters in the dust. Ezra studied the crude dust doodles and shook his head. “Mabiki-lemshee ingleesie,” he said. I don’t speak English.

  One of Ezra’s boys went inside and returned with a thick tattered book. Inside it were pages of Hebrew prayers and the address of a congregation in Brooklyn. Ezra said it had been sent to a Jew in Sanaa some years before. When I began reading aloud in Hebrew, his eyes opened wide. “Katnen,” he said. Again. I read another verse, and a third. Women in odd veils that covered only their mouths were called out of the house to bear witness.

  “Hoa Yahood!” one of the young boys cried. He is a Jew.

  Ezra spit qat juice in the dust. “Mumkin,” he said. It is possible.

  I asked the brothers if they wanted to go to Israel. They stared at the ground, uneasy. Going to Israel wasn’t mumkin. The government forbade it. I learned later that several thousand Jews were held behind when Operation Flying Carpet airlifted fifty thousand others from Yemen to Israel in 1950. Yemen wanted them for their skills as craftsmen, and also as a bargaining chip with the fledgling Jewish state.

  After fifteen minutes, we’d exhausted our common stock of Arabic and Hebrew and reached the limits of Abdul’s talents as a translator. I took a photograph of the children. The children took my pens. And Ezra handed me a few sprigs of qat, insisting that I come celebrate the Sabbath with his family next time I happened to be passing through Raydah.

  * * *

  North of Raydah, the road climbed steeply between sawtooth crags topped with turrets of mud. Crude huts with tiny windows clung to the mountainside. They looked like small family garrisons, built for defense rather than for comfort. The road also appeared battle-worn. Cracked and thin, the tar wound up and around the ridges without even a metal rail between the road and the thousand-foot plunge into an adjoining ravine. Qat-addled drivers screamed past on blind hairpin curves, kicking up hails of gravel and dust. Pulling off the road to let a few pass, I peered over the cliff edge and saw heaps of twisted metal lying at regular intervals along the floor of the ravine. Tiny at this height, the ruined cars looked like so many crushed beer cans tossed from the windows of passing trucks.

  By the time I reached the next village, Khamir, it was clear that I’d left the semicivilized plateau and entered the uncivilized mountains of the “people too much bad” the car agent had warned about. At a roadblock just outside Khamir, there were two men in uniform and six others out of uniform, all well armed. The six were apparently local tribesmen, sharing watch with the army for unwelcome visits by enemy clans.

  The village itself seemed outside the orbit of central government. Few cars and trucks had license plates, and there was no arms control at all. In addition to carrying jambiyas, most men had assault rifles slung over their shoulders, pistols jammed in their belts and bandoliers slung across their chests.

  Nor was it hard to locate the source of all this firepower. Sidling up behind a dozen men window-shopping on the main street, I gazed through the glass at a display of Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles. Curiously, the sign above the shop advertised it as a money changer’s; weapons were either a sideline or the money changing was a very transparent fig leaf for the brisk trade in arms.

  Inside, a man sprawled languidly across several burlap sacks, smoking a water pipe and grinning, like a fat Cheshire cat. Behind him on the wall was a poster of an alluring woman with faraway eyes, her veil pulled completely away from her face. Yemeni pinup.
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  The merchant addressed me in German, then, when I looked at him blankly, in English. “I am Mohammed, at your service,” he said, straightening his turban. “You want change money? You want sugar?” He paused. “You want bayonet?”

  I smiled noncommittally. His question provided a structure for my reporting. Posing as a shopper, I would tease out information without actually buying anything.

  “Something big, maybe?” Mohammed asked. He opened a cabinet to reveal a small arsenal of automatic weapons. “One thousand two hundred riyals,” he said, gesturing at a Belgian FN rifle. Then he reached under the counter for a Turkish musket that looked as though it had done service in the Siege of Constantinople. It weighed roughly a hundred pounds. “This one very cheap, only three hundred riyals.”

  “Very nice.” I gave Mohammed the gun and another noncommittal smile.

  He nodded knowingly and opened a drawer. “These just in from Iran,” he said, dropping a plump green grenade in my hand. “For you I make a special deal.”

  Mohammed’s prices did seem rather special. Only $20 for the grenade, $5 for a bayonet and $120 for an assault rifle. A man could play Rambo for less money than he paid for a week’s worth of qat.

  I asked Mohammed where all the weapons came from.

  “Libya, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran—we like all country. It go bang, it go boom, we buy.” He flashed me another Cheshire-cat grin. “You like grenade. What is two hundred riyals to a rich man?”

  I still had the explosive in my hand, afraid even to hand it back to him. “Maybe another day,” I said.

  Mohammed shrugged and plucked the grenade from my palm. “Other villages, you find grenades only at Friday market. At Mohammed’s, every day.”

  At this point I half expected him to hand me a promotional flier. Free Bayonet with Every Sack of Sugar! Grenades Every Day! These Just in from Iran! I changed twenty dollars at a favorable rate, climbed back in the car and headed deeper into the hills.