Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Read online

  The road north from Khamir led through villages with names that sounded like dog barks: Huth, Hamra, Harf. Mohammed was right, grenades only on Fridays. But at Huth there were M-14 submachine guns smuggled from Afghanistan, on sale in the hardware section of a general store. At Harf, a man took me to his house to show off World War II–vintage artillery shells. At Hamra a man tried to peddle land mines from Ethiopia, though he said I had to order them a few days in advance. It seemed that weapons from every insurgency over the past fifty years had washed up in the mountains of Yemen, on special. Nor did anyone seem particularly curious about a Westerner rolling into town and asking where to buy a bandook (rifle), a genable (grenade) or even a dababat (tank).

  “One dababat in this region belongs to Sheik Salah Hindi,” said the mine merchant in Hamra. “He keeps it at home. Not for sale, I think.”

  The landscape north of Hamra was poorer and more threatening. At some roadblocks there were no soldiers at all, just ragged men in skirts and turbans, hunched over submachine guns in the rear of open trucks. The only other traffic was the occasional teenage goatherd, coaxing his flock across the road with tossed stones or the nudge of a rifle butt. One shepherd appeared to be no older than twelve, standing roughly the height of the assault rifle he dragged along the ground. As his goats blocked the road, I climbed out and tried to make chat in kindergarten Arabic.

  “Beautiful gun, very beautiful,” I said, giving my one Arabic adjective a workout. He looked at me strangely. Pale dude in beat-up car, grinning madly and mumbling something about guns. I offered him a Pepsi and he popped off the cap with the muzzle of his Kalashnikov.

  “Beautiful gun,” I said again. “It work?” Then, to make my point clearer, I pressed an imaginary trigger and went “Bang bang.” I was trying to establish if it was possible that a prepubescent goatherd was toting a loaded automatic weapon.

  The boy shrugged, raised the barrel and pumped several rounds into an abandoned roadside hut. Dried mud chipped off and scattered in the air. The goats skittered across the tar, clearing the highway. I skittered back to my car shouting “Beautiful gun, very beautiful” and shifted from first gear to fourth gear as quickly as I could.

  * * *

  It was dark by the time I reached the city of Saada, 150 miles north of the capital. A mud-walled settlement at the country’s northern frontier, it was known as the Dodge City of Yemen, a lawless place where tribal spats sent lead singing through the streets.

  “My first year here, there was gunfire all the time,” said a young man named Ali. We were sitting in a teahouse on Saada’s main street, talking about his decision to leave the capital for a government job in the north.

  “Have you seen anyone killed?” I asked him.

  “Only six. But many more injured.”

  The worst shootout he’d witnessed occurred one day after work, when he offered a colleague a ride home. A truck pulled alongside Ali’s car and two men began shooting rifles through the window. Ali’s passenger returned the fire. Before it was over, six people had died, three of them unarmed passersby.

  “I think this is too much,” said Ali, who, unlike his passenger, survived the exchange. “Now I give rides only to people I know well.”

  Ali said things were getting better. Tribesmen used to travel each weekend to an open-air weapons market in the nearby village of Al-Tuhl, also known for its handwoven baskets. There they could buy grenades by the kilo, like tomatoes, and also pre-order tanks and shoulder-held missile launchers. But the government had recently closed the souk. And tribesmen visiting Saada now had to check their bullet clips at roadblocks outside town, though they were permitted to carry empty rifles through the street.

  “It is a way of letting them keep their dignity while taking away their danger,” Ali explained. Even so, two hundred people had been gunned down or stabbed to death in the Saada region the previous year, a rather astonishing figure for an area with a total population of about ten thousand.

  After chatting with Ali, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hang around town and risk becoming innocent victim number 201. But driving back to Sanaa in the dark, with one headlight, seemed out of the question. So I asked Ali where I should stay for the night. He recommended Saada’s finest, the no-star Rahban Hotel. “It is more like a camping ground than a hotel,” he said. “But the other places, well . . .” He left it to my imagination.

  The Rahban was as advertised. I had a choice between a two-dollar room with a swampy communal toilet at the end of the hall, or a three-dollar room with a swamp en suite. I treated myself to the latter, which came at least with a toilet bowl and seat.

  The toilet didn’t flush, however, and judging from its contents, hadn’t for some time. I wandered out into the hall and found a sitting room with geological maps spread on the floor and a Yemeni bedded down on the couch. He spoke a little French and explained that foreigners with trucks and drills had left the maps there that morning. They were either Italian or German or English, he wasn’t sure. They were searching for either gold or silver or gas, or maybe something else. He went back to sleep.

  It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks. Oil had just begun flowing through pipelines farther south; now even distant Saada was awash with prospectors as well.

  * * *

  I awoke late the next morning to the sound of automatic gunfire. With the special sickness of the scoop-hungry journalist, I heard in the rat-a-tat the rhythm of a headline: SHOOTOUT IN SAADA. Rushing to the window, I located the gunslingers just below. A boy of about ten was tearing pages from a magazine and pinning them to the mud wall of the old city. Then he and a middle-aged man took turns pumping lead into the pages with a huge automatic pistol. It was a touching scene, in a Yemeni sort of way; father and son, on a bright Sunday morning, out for target practice in Saada. The father seemed particularly pleased with a series of head shots drilled into what looked like a photograph of the Yemeni president.

  Downstairs, I dug into flat bread and ful, the ubiquitous Arab breakfast of slow-cooked fava beans. Mashed and marinated with hot spices and lime, the ful tasted like a week-old burrito. “If your friend is as sweet as honey, don’t taste him all at once,” read the proverb heading the chapter on Saada in my Traveller’s Guide, which I perused over breakfast. The book didn’t mention that Yemen is home to thirty-four types of stomach parasite. Living dangerously, I washed down the ful with lukewarm tea that seemed not to have boiled, then pushed open the saloon-style doors leading into the street.

  By day, Dodge City was disappointing. Its straight and dusty main street looked the part. But at high noon the only dueling was between a pair of mangy dogs, humping in the road. A merchant paused to watch, then resumed scrubbing a stain of qat spittle from the sidewalk in front of his shop.

  The main road ended at the gate to the old city. At first it looked like a miniature Sanaa, with clay walls and fanciful mud towers topped in stained glass and gypsum. But most of the towers seemed to squat rather than soar. Urine trickled from holes in the upper floors, a primitive sewage system that relied on the hot sun to dry waste water as it dribbled down.

  From atop the ramparts there was still a glimpse of former glory. A cleft in the mountains marked the site of an ancient trade route, along which passed caravans of myrrh and frankincense on their way to the Mediterranean port of Gaza. Muslim pilgrims also followed the road north to visit Mecca, just over the mountains. Their gravestones, covered in calligraphy, massed outside Saada’s walls, facing the holy city.

  These days, thousands of Yemenis made the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia for worldlier gain. They went to do the kingdom’s dirty work, returning with enough petrodollars to buy a home, a wife, a higher grade of qat. The old city of Sanaa seemed resilient enough to survive the onslaught of modern ways. But here in Saada, the mud towers were neglected, the dirt streets littered with paper, polystyrene and crushed aluminum cans. From atop its eroded walls, Saada had the precarious feel of a city
that the next hard rain might wash away.

  Descending into the old city’s bazaar, I spotted men with skullcaps and ringlets of hair, hawking silver jewelry. They squatted at the fringes of the market, displaying their earrings in the dust. Other Jews labored in dark stalls, crafting scabbards for the daggers they were forbidden to wear. Yemeni Jews also had traditionally been barred from building their homes higher than Muslims’, or even from riding a camel, which might elevate them above their donkey-riding neighbors. “Jews are not permitted to ride astride animals,” declared another obscure statute, “but must keep their feet to one side.”

  Jews had nonetheless prospered in Yemen. As in other Arab countries, they were a protected minority called “people of the book,” a classification that referred to the Bible and included Christians as well (the Koran, Muslims believe, is an improvement on the two earlier religions, not a complete rejection of them). In Saada, local tribes protected the unarmed Jews and exploited their skills as silversmiths, weavers and embroiderers. This created an odd disjuncture, now that Yemen had joined its Arab brothers in opposing the Jewish state. While the government news I watched on the hotel television railed against “the Zionist entity” fifteen hundred miles away, the few hundred Jews of Saada went about their business crafting jambiyas and silver baubles for their Muslim protectors.

  The only sign of tension was the Jews’ reluctance to speak with me. Visiting Westerners had caused trouble by discussing migration to Israel, a touchy subject for the Yemeni government.

  So after a dozen abortive chats, I contented myself with camping outside the stall of a particularly able silversmith. Stooped in the dirt, he picked at tiny bits of silver with a pair of tweezers, and laid them between wire borders to form a finely wrought arabesque. He turned out one small square after another, spending about an hour on each. He’d pause, smoke a cigarette, add a few leaves to his qat cud, then résumé work on a design identical to the one he’d just finished.

  When I asked what the designs were for, he gestured at a sack in the corner and returned to his tweezers. Inside the bag were dozens of jambiyas, their decorative handles dented or peeling away. It was the Jew’s job to repair them.

  The silversmith worked through the afternoon while the other merchants lunched and chewed and chattered. He worked into the evening, laboring by lamplight. He was still picking at his silver early the next morning when I returned, shifting qat from right cheek to left cheek and fixing one dagger after another. There was something in his mute, unstinting labor, repairing weapons he himself couldn’t carry, which said all that needed to be said about centuries of silent submission.

  * * *

  On my way into town the previous day I’d seen a sign with the name of a hospital. I’d been struck by the irony of the hospital’s name: Al-Salaam, Arabic for “peace.” The hospital seemed like the logical place to continue my reporting on the least peaceful place in Yemen. Going to Al-Salaam at nightfall, and settling in for a frankfurter and sauerkraut at the hospital cafeteria, I got more than I’d bargained for: the distinguished Dr. Peter Drake.

  “I’m interested in gross pathology—in the fantastically gross things that happen here,” the English physician said, sinking his fork into lemon meringue. “Cancer of the placenta is common as dirt here. A gyno will go his whole career in the U.K. without seeing that.” He stabbed his dessert. I put down my hot dog. “Yesterday, I saw a bayonet in the throat,” he went on. “Day before, a bloke came in with beriberi. Beriberi—can you imagine? We see leprosy, snake bites, camel bites, rabies. The U.K., it’s an awful dull place compared to the Yemen.”

  The sixty-two-year-old doctor had left the dull U.K. in the 1950s, first to work with Britian’s colonial medical service in Nigeria (“gone to the dogs since we stopped ruling it”) and from there to Saudi Arabia (“they don’t wear veils between their legs, but they would if they could”). For the past eight years he’d been in “the Yemen,” surviving on smuggled brandy, three-week-old copies of the London Times, and the fantastically gross cases he saw every day at the hospital.

  “The other week, I had a real beauty,” he said, attacking a second piece of pie. “Bloke brings in his missus, says he married her that morning. She’s bleeding all over the place, half dead. Know what happened? She was too tight, he says. So he opened her up a bit with his jambiya.” He wiped lemon filling from his lip. “Can you imagine? Opening her up on their wedding night?”

  An Irish nurse joined the conversation from the other end of the table. “Today I go to take some blood from a woman,” she said, in a lilting accent, “and her arm is all covered with burns. Says the witch doctor did it to cure her. Then when I take her blood, she starts screaming. ‘Give that back to me! You’re going to sell it!’”

  Dr. Drake cackled, swallowed his coffee in one loud gulp and invited me to follow him on his evening rounds. We stopped first at his flat so he could put on a tie and tweed jacket—“keeping up standards”—then walked into a waiting room filled with veiled women and men in skirts and jackets. It was the first gathering of three or more Yemenis I’d seen that showed no evidence of either qat or jambiyas.

  “Qat’s forbidden and we make them check their weapons at the door,” the doctor explained. Sure enough, a nearby guard booth held a small arsenal of daggers and rifles, not unlike the collections I’d been pricing during my tour of the north.

  “My first year here, they brought in some fellow who’d been shot in a tribal punch-up,” Dr. Drake continued. “He must have killed someone first, because the other tribe decides to come get its revenge right here in the parking lot. So in the end we had four of them coming in the door, all dead as dodos. You can see the bullet marks on the wall outside. Can you imagine?”

  Listening to the doctor, and looking at the unarmed men in the waiting room, I was struck by the precariousness of Yemeni machismo. Until now, the north had seemed a threatening territory of heavily armed natives, made manic by qat. Suddenly, surrounded by tiny men with sparrowlike features, anxiously clutching sick children and spouses, I felt like a giant among munchkins. Stripped of their guns and denied the consoling powers of qat, the men looked as vulnerable as fathers and husbands in hospital waiting rooms anywhere in the world.

  The women also seemed changed, if only because some were too sick to cover their faces. They lined the corridor, many holding feverish babies and pleading with each passing doctor and nurse for attention.

  “Don’t think this one’s going to make it,” Dr. Drake said, lifting the eyelids of a jaundiced infant limp in the arms of its mother. Alongside sat a young girl with the rasping cough of a lifetime smoker. Stooping to press a stethoscope to her wasted chest, the doctor said to the girl’s mother, “She’d better pull through or I’m not going to speak to her again.” The woman, who obviously understood not a word, reached into the folds of her robe and offered the doctor a bag of raisins.

  At the end of the hall several nurses huddled around a bed surrounded by curtains. “If you want to give your coronary arteries a blow-through,” the doctor said, “look in there.” A woman lay on her back, blood streaming down her thigh as a female doctor put stitches between her legs. Catching my eye, the patient used her last ounce of strength to pull a veil across her face, even though the rest of her was fully exposed. Ashamed, I pulled the curtain shut.

  Dr. Drake checked her chart. The woman had spontaneously aborted after a six-hour trip down the mountains on the back of a donkey. “Husband can’t be found,” he said. “Off chewing qat somewhere.” He shook his head. “Qat makes them bloody daft, you know. One minute their heads are clear. Next moment it’s like London up there. Socked in completely.”

  His rounds finished, the doctor walked me to the parking lot. “Sorry we couldn’t arrange a gunshot for you, or at least a stabbing,” he said, sounding genuinely apologetic. “Got any plans for tomorrow?”

  “Bit of shopping. Then back to Sanaa.”

 
“Pity. Where are you staying?”

  “The Rahban.”

  He grimaced. “Don’t drink the water, don’t eat the food and be sure you don’t chew qat, here or anywhere.”

  “Too late,” I told him. “Done all of those already.”

  “Good God.” He chuckled to himself, no doubt thinking of something fantastically gross. “If you’re feeling off in the morning, you know where to find us.”

  I drove back through the silent streets. Rabid-looking dogs lurked in the vacant lots. A demented motorcyclist raced back and forth down the main drag. But there wasn’t another sound in the night, not even a car backfiring. The Rahban was also quiet, except for the toilet. I lay awake for a long while, reviewing the past days’ adventures and listening to the putrid water drip from toilet to tile to carpet, thinking what a bloody dull place the world is compared to the Yemen.

  * * *

  In the morning I made a last tour of the bazaar, this time inquiring about the availability of deadly weapons. I’d already gathered most of the information I needed on the drive from Sanaa, and the purchasing charade had become rather weary. “Andak bandook?” Do you have a gun? You do? An AK-47 with retractable clip? And grenades too? How much for the lot? And so on, until I’d talked my way out the door and slipped into an alley to scribble the details down in my notebook.

  “You like be strong?” a young man whispered, following me down a narrow lane. He was Jewish, about my own age, and rather biblical-looking with his dusty sandals, stringy beard and brown shift tied at the waist. “I see you look for something strong,” he said, tugging my arm. “Come with me. I find you finest jambiya in Saada.”

  He led me into a dark corner of the casbah where an older Jew sat perched atop a heavy carpet. The man glanced both ways, then unfurled the rug to reveal a dozen jambiyas. It occurred to me then that none of the Jews had proper shops, possibly because this too was forbidden. Instead, they operated portable stores, opening and folding up shop at a moment’s notice, like West African street hustlers in New York.