The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  Jamal remembered the Cole bombing from his childhood. “I remember going to the TV, like, ‘Daddy daddy, Yemen’s on the TV for the first time in history!’ and he’s like, ‘Oh . . . that’s cool son.’ ”

  That introduction has colored much of the world’s relationship with Yemen ever since, however fairly or unfairly or oversimplified or cautious. I asked Jamal what came before all of this, before the students, before the violence.

  “Before it didn’t even exist,” he said.

  WE PICKED A GOOD TIME to go to Yemen, between the cease-fire and the elections. The warring factions of Yemen’s revolution were holding fast to a period of tense calm, a fuse curling out of the capital, waiting to be lit or doused on inauguration day. Entering its second year the Arab Spring had lowered flight fares to Sanaa, too. Mainly, though, we had visas, and we were Yemen bound even if the time was wrong.

  We flew Qatar Airways in the wrong direction, to Doha for a transfer, and then turned back to the south. In the Sanaa airport, they checked our papers as our bags were X-rayed and then sent us to a small room.

  “Tourists?” said the immigration officer in his sky-blue uniform and beret, incredulous. His eyes darted between papers on opposite sides of his desk. “We don’t have that.”

  He looked at our visas as if they were stickers from another universe.

  In these situations of broken promises and suspicion, sudden moves must be avoided. An argument would mean we had already lost. Recently, four American doctors had been denied the chance to return for a second trip to Yemen. The consul was convinced: They are FBI, he said. The officer was shocked and suspicious that we would come now, for our first visit to Yemen.

  And even worse, we were young—further proof of our espionage. The consul had passed this message to the doctors: “They should come back after they retire.”

  Our guard’s shaded eyes were glassy calm now, no longer straining to understand. “What are you doing here?” he said. His coolness was a sign of our lost ground. Men grow calm when they know they have all the power.

  “Siyaha,” I said. Tourism. His eyebrows twitched and I quickly added, “we’re visiting friends.” We were talking in Arabic now. It was a gamble. Certainly a spy would speak Arabic, but I was betting the country’s gatekeeper was warier of the naive than the crafty.

  A Japanese man entered the waiting room to stand by us, ushered by a guard.

  “There’s no tourism here,” the officer said to me and Neal, in English. “There’s harb”—war—“and it’s dangerous and you can’t go anywhere. We don’t have tourism.”

  “Yes, we know, but there are safe areas. Our friends know,” I said, meekly.

  Hope sank into my toenails. He was actually going to send us home. He flicked idly through the pages of our passports, hardly looking.

  He turned to the Japanese man who struggled to make himself understood in English. I helped translate between the two as best I could—yes! They would reward us for this service!—and listened as the situation deteriorated. I had made the right choice: the Japanese man denied all knowledge of instability, a genuine look in his eyes as he cited a trip to Yemen twenty-five years earlier. He asked to come in—the freshman outside the college bar—face full of indignation and entreaty.

  “No,” the Yemeni said. And turned to us.

  We got the tourist visa in Abu Dhabi and we came, I said. For our friends, I said. I was holding a sheet of paper with a few names and numbers from friends of friends of friends and from the Internet, a skeleton of an address book for our wanderings.

  A blue cotton arm reached over the metal desk and snatched it. The officer began calling the numbers on the list, under SANAA.

  First he called Anoud, a woman we had contacted on Couchsurfing. “Leave me a voice mail to tell me who u r to call back I don’t answer numbers I don’t know,” she had written me. But she did pick up, and they spoke for ages in rapid dialect. And when he asked for her address, she hung up.

  The man put the phone softly back in its holster. “She is not your friend.”

  My heart was squirming to find somewhere lower, considering breaking the way a business considers bankruptcy, pulling my face down so that it could hardly move. Yemen, I thought, wistful, as if I had already lost a lover.

  The Japanese man offered to change his flights to Socotra, the faraway Yemeni island a world apart from north or south Yemen, unique with wildlife, language, history. He stood, waiting for an answer. In a stroke of luck, as I remember it now, my hopeless face had frozen in an expression perfectly suited to the man I was pretending to be, the one in control, unworried. The officer moved—I flinched—and picked up the phone again. He dialed Tal, an Italian who had lived his entire life in Yemen, the friend of a Sana’ani I’d bumped into once or twice in Abu Dhabi. They spoke for a moment, before the phone was passed to me. Finally, a moment for collusion.

  “Yo man.”

  I’m certain the officer’s English was better than my Arabic, but he was unprepared for, or uninterested in, the slurry of mumbled slang and bakery fresh neologism. In Syria, Danny and I had practiced consulting each other in public-secret with a monotone of ahmnotlike trynnadothashitbranahmsayin, where “no” might’ve done. It was our Navajo. I handed the phone back.

  A click.

  The man reverted to Arabic, tapping our passports together on the metal. “Ruh,” he said. Go. “Be careful.”

  We ran without running, new energy surging through our legs as we stood and turned our backs. I passed through the door, praying he wouldn’t change his mind, power walking until we were safely out of earshot.

  WE BOUGHT SIM CARDS for pennies and charged them with a few Yemeni rial as we raced toward the city. Colorful clothing and white thobes, a cluster of roadside shops, tree-brown faces overgrown with stubble and highly decorative belts with a curved dagger tucked in front. Memories flashed as everything blurred by, a crowded street in Pakistan, the impoverished outskirts of Cairo. But then we were there, at the thousand-year-old gate to Sanaa’s old city, and all similarities ceased for good.

  Hilltop fortifications and central souqs, castles and mausoleums, ancient stone synagogues-turned-churches-turned-mosques, each with singular stories and nuanced architecture—the Middle East is ripe with Old Cities. Sanaa’s is made from wholly different ingredients. Crammed together on narrow streets, the six thousand houses in the old city are likened often to gingerbread houses of fired brick and rammed earth, reddish brown and iced with white gypsum bands between the floors. They climb as high as nine stories above the valley floor, with rooftop diwan—meeting spaces, qat-chewing rooms—looking out at the mountains and minaret tips all around.

  Sanaa is one of the world’s highest capitals. At ground level, the city is seventy-two hundred-feet high. As we navigated its winding streets looking for hotels that hadn’t closed for lack of business, the sun was setting, the light sliding up and off the tops of the sand castle buildings.

  Like Fez or Damascus, Sanaa’s old city is made to reconnoiter by foot. The first order of business: food. As we found out, Yemeni cuisine was as wonderful as it was hard to find. Whenever we least expected it, we were invite-demanded in for lunch, but when we were the hungriest, restaurants appeared a foreign concept. Even the hotel we finally found had few ideas.

  When we asked for recommendations, the doorman-concierge-groupie whispered the name of a famous chicken joint that exceeded his wildest fantasies for quality and elegance. He bent in close, as if he were forfeiting some coveted secret. “Have you heard of Kentucky?”

  Instead we wandered the dark signless streets off Shari‘a September 26, a thoroughfare that remembers the Yemen Arab Republic’s coup against the short-lived kingdom that ruled the north between 1918 and 1962. It was Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise in Egypt that sparked the antimonarchy revolution in Yemen. After a minute, we hit Gamal Street.

  At the intersection of the two wide roads, long green canvas tents stood in Midan Tahrir, “Liberation Square
.” Following the Egyptian model again, Yemenis camped in their Tahrir Square to call for thirty-three-year-ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh to leave, just as Cairenes had demanded the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. In both cases, protestors insisted power not be ceded to one of the president’s sons.

  Protestors in Yemen had never been extremely organized—Facebook and Twitter were far less accessible and active than they were in Egypt—and the square had often been flooded with government lackeys bought and fed “because they have nowhere to go.”

  “There was a very, like, motivated central group of students who were involved with the shit,” Tal would explain with Californian cadence, “but there was also people who would just come to voice very minimal and not politically oriented, you know, unhappiness.” These might have been paid disorganizers, plainclothes progovernment thugs trading in confusion for a moment, instead of their usual violence; or it might simply have been a by-product of the wildfire nature of the region’s revolutions: all encompassing, populist, vague.

  “They would just come by and be like, ‘I can’t fucking like get my car fixed because the guy at the car fixing store is charging too much. This is because the regime does this and this and this!’ ”

  Now the tents were empty. Two months earlier in November, Saleh had ceded all executive powers in return for immunity and the square fell quiet, a cease-fire holding between the government’s military and the armed rebellion. One month later, Yemen would unanimously elect the current vice president, Abdo Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi, to the presidency. Hadi would be the only candidate.

  In these interim months, life continued, it seemed, as usual. On the streets, vendors sold shoes and watches and loose ammunition, bullet casings glinting in the light of a laundromat, the photocopy shop, anything but a restaurant. Finally, a young boy made an offer for our salvation in a no-frills cafeteria with picnic bench seating wrapped in disposable plastic.

  “Biid?” He said: eggs. Yes, please. He brought onions and an omelet and a spicy tomato salsa known as sahawiq to put on everything. The other restaurant-goers looked and turned away. The boy watched us inhale ravenously before bringing a plate of something we didn’t think we’d ordered: the salsa was here, the Cokes, the bread, eggs . . . and then the fog of hunger lifted, and Arabic that mattered came back to me. As in Spanish, eggs may be other spheroids that hang low on many mammals, these, in particular, from the back of a goat. A faint taste of musty liver. Neal abstained. Sated, we began to see the city.

  WHEN WE FOUND TAL, he took us to a friend’s stately home on the other side of town where he and his friends were lazing after an afternoon of chewing qat. For almost all men and a less huge and more hidden set of women—in sessions generally separated by gender but not always, qat, said gat in north Yemen, was an afternoon drug. When we got there, the guys were leisurely sprinkling dark hash into rolling papers.

  We dropped into the couches that wrapped around the walls of the diwan. “Everyone has one of these rooms in their house. They’re basically just getting high rooms,” said Muhammad, a Yemeni university student with curly hair and a voice that was relaxed and righteous. (An estimated 80 percent of the population will chew on Fridays, 50 or 60 percent on other days. This includes every living human being in Yemen, up to one out of every five children under twelve.) This room was lit by one lamp plugged into a generator. These days in Sanaa, electricity came on for about three hours a day, one out of every six hours. When the crisis was worse, they said, the electricity shortage was less severe. Maybe that kept people in their homes.

  Adam had just arrived with a bottle of vodka. “But now that things are getting better,” he said, “the electricity is getting worse.”

  The beautiful thing about the gat chew, which usually begins after lunch around 1 P.M. and stretches into the night, is the conversation. Yemenis are deliriously social because of it, and with their hospitality, we could tap into the locals’ shared information, opinion, gossip and rumor. All of it out in the open.

  “After the revolution everything is chaos. They opened up U-turns in the middle of the highway . . .” I had seen piles of rubble cleared to make unmarked Michigan lefts, further allowing amateur traffic engineers to make rules on the fly.

  “It’s part of the government’s grand plan to show that without them everything is crazy . . .”

  “We don’t have water in Yemen, but we have 3G Internet . . .”

  “I heard they boil the beef with Panadol tablets and put weed in the salts to make people eat more. I think it makes the kids sleep better at night I don’t know. That might be a rumor I don’t know . . .”

  In a place where truth is hard to come by, collecting stories is the best first move. “Are there any agencies where you can get straight news?” I asked.

  Staggered noes from around the room.

  “The opposition and the government, it’s all exaggerated. Like none of it is real. It’s complete propaganda.” He passed the hash in foils to Tal. “The Internet—”

  “—on TV it’s bullshit,” said Tal.

  “Bullshit, man,” said Muhammad.

  “The biggest bullshit,” said Tal, looking back across the room. “Give me the papers, too, don’t be a whore.”

  Like this, on Neal’s birthday, we were introduced to Yemen. The territory safe to travel was receding, leaving a space rumors filled. The room knew less the farther south we talked, until we hit the bottom of the country, where electricity might have been stolen and held from the people on offshore ships, and where, Jebel had heard, you could hitch a ride to Somalia by boat.

  WE WOULD HEAR ECHOES of these complaints and speculation from every echelon. Unwaged revolutionaries and the unwound elite often sounded alike, trusting in a deep mistrust of power. Jamal had explained the hired mobs that clustered around Saleh’s meetings just when he was taking pen to his resignation papers. “He paid them to all carry signs that said, ‘Yo, we want you to stay.’ And then he doesn’t sign. He’s like, ‘Oh, they don’t want me to go.’ ”

  He didn’t even believe Saleh’s November handover was genuine either, in the wake of these last-minute reversals and the fighting that raged on city streets only months earlier. The Arab Spring had turned to summer, had turned to fall. “People have to be hopeful, because, you know, it’s been a year.”

  Tahrir was quiet now, and it would stay that way. “The protests are over,” said Muhammad, “like all the shit. The revolution is over.”

  Minutes later, appliances whirred to life as the lights came on.

  “Allahu akbar allahu akbar,” Muhammad cheered soberly. “Bring the TV, man, bring the TV! What do you want to watch?”

  Tal shrugged. “Whatever.”

  The future was coming fast whether or not anyone knew about it, but it made no promises of change. The lights would come on in Sanaa, at least. In a month, Hadi would be in charge—the vice president becoming president—and ruling oligarchs would shift their weight accordingly. Despite Hadi’s southern birth, Yemen’s southern movement boycotted his predetermined election; they preferred full secession, a return to the pre-1990 state of things: North Yemen and South Yemen. Tal mentioned something from the papers—that Hadi was selling electricity to Yemen from Africa.

  “You know what I read a while ago? That fucking Hadi—”

  Muhammad interrupted. “Who’s Hadi?”

  WHEN THE LIGHTS finally went off (after two unexpected hours) and the smoke was settling on the ceiling, we had forgotten our politics. Conversation drifted toward the other subject, ripe with rumor and detached cynicism, that locals know visitors are hungry for. It was the language they flirted with when they dressed up with daggers on Chatroulette—the video chatting site that pairs strangers at random—just to scare people. Danger. Acquaintances of acquaintances disappeared and reappeared in a puff of tribalism and statement making.

  Muhammad remembered when the Polish ambassador was visiting his grandfather’s house.

  “—like ten years ago right?”
r />   “—his daughter went to our school.”

  Kidnappers rushed him off to the countryside where he feasted, spoke with his wife, and gave chocolates to kids in the village. “They set a whole ram in front of him. The village was fucking with the government.”

  As it turned out, kidnapping was a form of politics: tribal leaders pressured the government with foreigners held in legendarily convivial custody. The government paid ransom to keep its foreign allies. As the friends saw it, these were problems outside the diwan and over the high walls, problems too ingrained or too intangible to engage with constantly. If something really mattered, it was probably too late to do anything about it.

  A very small number of kidnappings ever went wrong. Deaths of hostages were generally blamed on government mishandling.

  “There are tourists who come here to get kidnapped,” Tal said. “It’s a cultural experience, you know.”

  We laughed. He shrugged.

  I SPENT MUCH of the dawn hours in digestive mutiny in the dark bathroom of our seventeenth-century hotel, a sliver of light finding me withered and broken through a pane of red glass. Neal was separated from this fate only by goat balls. I argued with my guts as the sun rose, hoping to impart upon them some sense of urgency, of the value of time exploring Yemen as it compared with time spent clutching an antique toilet.

  On this first morning, we visited the still-functioning Tourist Police to request permits to leave the city limits. A permit application includes passport photocopies (painfully xeroxed from the shop outside Tahrir Square) and exact travel dates. If locations on the permit didn’t match the checkpoints we hit, there would be repercussions along the Disappointing-Troubling spectrum.

  I never knew if a well-placed bribe would substitute. This fell into the category of qabili. Jamal had offered only one simple rule of bribing etiquette: “You gotta be classy about it.”

  Our first encounter with the Tourist Police was an amicable one. Yousif, one of their agents, was eternally having tea in the courtyard of our hotel. He gave us his mobile number to call whenever. (I did, at ten in the evening, at 7 A.M.—and he almost always picked up and facilitated.)