Yousif walked us to the office, two little rooms with the lights off, one with a phone (disconnected), the other with a bed. Our permits were given immediately with one caveat: the Interior Ministry could always call and reject them. We were told to leave our phones on.
STUBBORN AND NAUSEOUS, I hobbled with Neal through the Bab al-Yemen, an archway with so much character that the Yemeni Embassy in Abu Dhabi had borrowed its look. Castle walls thirty-feet high bound much of the city with colors to match the buildings, but the gate is a deeper brown with a trim of dark gray stones and four thin pillars under the entablature. The Yemen Gate has Yemen on both sides, separated by one archway and a thousand years.
In the knot of cabs outside the egress from the old city, one driver in an ancient yellow taxi cornered us with a good deal. He spoke in clearer tones than the old chainsmokers, with a higher voice that cut through the throng; he thronged best. We negotiated vehemently without knowing what reasonable was, and Abdulkhaliq, who began to call himself AK, never stopped grinning. His grins stuck with me as a Yemeni national treasure.
AK had the face of a twenty-five-year-old to match his even-younger-man’s voice, and he bubbled with the kind of excitement that felt trustworthy because it came fast.
We drove with him to the northwest, passing buildings with lost windows like black eyes. AK pointed to one skyscraper in red brick, the blast hole of an artillery shell high above us. These were the only indicators that less than two months ago, Yemenis were killing each other in the streets.
Bloody weeks into the uprising, the Yemeni government began to lose control. In a meeting with religious leaders in February, Saleh was reported to have said, “I’m ready to leave power but not through chaos. I’m fed up now after thirty-two years, but how to leave peacefully? You scholars should say how.”
On March 18, unidentified forces killed forty-five protestors with gunfire. In the continuing series of ministerial defections, President Saleh lost support from high-ranking generals. Then came the tribal leaders, among them Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, hereditary chief of the Hashids, the second largest tribal federation in Yemen. The president himself was a Hashid, but the federation didn’t act as a bloc. The third time Saleh balked at signing over his powers, in late May, Ahmar flexed. Tribal loyalists and government forces met in the capital, with guns. In the coming weeks, more than a hundred fighters were killed.
With tribes involved, loyalty tended to trump strategy. The International Crisis Group quoted a tribesman who explained the dangers of domestic combustion. “It will spark a cycle of revenge. Secondly, we are all armed. It will not be like Tunisia or Egypt, where only one side is armed and where people are only hitting each other or the security forces only use tear gas. . . . If we were to follow the Egyptian or Tunisian examples, it would be a disaster.” Nearly every home in Yemen has a gun. Amazingly, though, as so many Yemeni men were quick to tell me, unaffiliated civilians did not reach for their weapons when the violence erupted. The guns, they said, were not proof that Yemenis were violent people.
Northwest across the Red Sea, NATO was bombing Libya to help rebels in their full-fledged civil war. Yemen seemed on the brink of the same. On the southern coast, Islamist militants had taken advantage of the distracted government and attacked the medium-sized city of Zinjibar thirty-one miles from Aden—every inch of which locals were forced to flee by foot. Ansar al-Sharia took control of roads and towns in the south that were once safe to travel.
Sanaa locals saw war in the capital. On June 3, a bomb detonated in the mosque of the presidential compound. Saleh suffered second-degree burns and shrapnel wounds. The next day, Hadi was named acting president, Saleh left for treatment in Saudi Arabia, and a tentative cease-fire was brokered.
“There was tanks there!” AK pointed, on a street that didn’t look wide enough to hold a minivan. Stone walls were chipped and pockmarked.
It was purposefully irresponsible, the way I watched these city scars from the bench seat of an old cab. I was still desperate to find something I could wrap my eyes around that might make my life flash before me.
On September 23, Saleh returned. A hundred Yemenis died in renewed fighting. In November, he finally signed the Gulf Cooperation Council agreement to step down, as if he had intended to do so all along.
AK ran directly over a pothole, as he was wont to. I clenched against puking or shitting myself. The next day, the Yemeni parliament would grant Saleh total immunity.
IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, we were ready to show our papers at the first checkpoint. Children were streaming out of Friday prayers in Shibam dressed in formal thobes and blazers with curved daggers in sheaths, janbiya, on belts at the navel. A darker trio stayed apart from the rest in shirts too small, pants too big. The others eyed us curiously, smiled, jostled into line for pictures they demanded. The most precocious, with a bright teal scabbard tucked under a golden threaded belt, stuck his tongue out.
AK left the car to negotiate with the officers while the kids stole glances from behind their friends, dagger handles glinting. Something was slow. Our permit should have easily let us pass through to Shibam and to Kawkaban, the town perched on the mountain next door.
“He wants to come with us,” said AK of the officer. Neal and I were doubtful. We’d be under much tighter guard with the police following us. “He wants to have lunch.”
It became quickly clear that we weren’t moving an inch farther if we didn’t accept. Bilious and grumpy, I trudged into the restaurant the officer indicated, figuring lunch was just another form of bribery-for-passage. He appeared outside in a gaggle of seven soldiers in camouflage and fur-lined hats. We’d been had.
With no tact or class I told the commander how unfair it was to make us stop and pay for a battalion, that we would not be strong-armed while precious hours of the short day waned.
“No!” he pleaded, his big brown eyes lifting into his broad face. “Only me! I’ll pay for everything.” Officer Naji was crestfallen. He hadn’t wanted to have to say it. This was an invitation, not a demand. The whole world seemed to sharpen into clarity while my ego crumbled with that sad assumption. Oy, I thought, now I’m the asshole.
Shamed, we climbed the stairs to our private room, beautiful and empty, lined with cushions along the wall. A dozen dishes came in heavy metalware. Fahsa, a thick yellow lamb stew spiced with fenugreek—that pea relative often pulverized for curry powder; shafut, bread soaked in yogurt and coriander; plain rice and tomato rice; a brothy soup spiced with hawayij; flatbread fresh off the taboon, and another drizzled with honey for desert. The hawayij blend is also used for coffee, cardamom heavy with various additions to suit the region and the purpose. Yemeni Jews brought the mixture north to Israel, where coffee is now sweet with its gingery fragrance.
I could hardly convince Naji that I was still battling the last night’s cafeteria consequences, and so I picked at the boiling pots with a look of quiet despair. To Naji, that made me a rather dour, inscrutable sort. Neal ate like a man.
In the highest room upstairs with bright windows on the town, men were starting to chew gat—after 2 P.M., all of Yemen talks with its mouth full. The mafraj was overflowing with green leaves, stems tossed onto tables and the floor, sunlight streaming through the windows onto red couches. Daggers had been removed, laid quietly on the cushions next to handguns.
The word mafraj means “relief, relaxation.” The immortal Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic also offers “denouement” and “happy ending.” The same stem leads to words for “a state of happiness,” “removal (of grief or worry),” “opening wide,” and “observation.” The mafraj is often a room with a view where days go to untie themselves, and to end. Just after lunch, we began to pick the leaves with a man named Max and his friends, all in white robes under suit jackets, light keffiyehs on their heads or around their necks.
The World Health Organization does not classify any of Yemen’s four dozen gat species (or African varieties) as markedly addictive, but i
nsomnia and lethargy are common consequences and, as a doctor at the University of Sanaa said, “people who are genetically predisposed are extremely vulnerable to psychosis.”
Within a couple days off the branch, gat can lose much of its potency. Every hour counts. The quality and freshness of every leaf is examined by the buyer, savored for its uniqueness, and everyone is a connoisseur. It is like wine or weed or bourbon or theater tickets.
Chewers claim strength, stamina, clarity, while nonchewers report exactly the opposite. An old man might admit to being unable to get out of bed without a few leaves to nibble. A British minister of parliament lamented the quoted ten tons of gat imported and distributed weekly through the United Kingdom, where it was banned only in 2014. In Canada, possession is officially illegal, but a woman caught with seventy-five pounds at the airport was fully discharged. Ontario court justice Elliot Allen said, “I read everything I can get my hands on about it and I find it difficult to be persuaded of anything other than what I was told . . . when I had my first case, which was: ‘We think this is almost as dangerous as coffee.’ ”
In America, the Drug Enforcement Agency classifies cathinone (and any traces thereof) in the same category as heroine and cocaine; the FDA says the plant may be detained, not specifically as a drug, but by invoking the “Misbranding” section of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. This is marvelous: its labeling fails to bear “adequate directions for use.”
Naji gave Neal and me our first instructions. The stems were not to be eaten, I learned first, though the soft red joints of the leaves where they met the branch were fair game. It was important to chew up front, passing chopped leaves back to the pocket behind the teeth, but not too much, or the fine pulp would slip away down the throat. Or, as some experts did, whole leaves could be stuffed directly into the cheek, to be massaged as a ball slowly over time.
“Chew gat and you’ll see America from here!” Max grinned.
If gat was the national drug, and salta the national dish, this was the national joke. A gat scholar reported the very same in 1972, and I would watch so many others deliver that punch line again and again with the same expectancy. Were they awaiting kudos for originality, or was it just something you said to be pleasant, the gat-chewers’ “bon appétit”?
BY EARLY AFTERNOON, we were packed into Naji’s armed police truck with the seven soldiers and AK holding on outside in the truck bed, clustered around a massive armor-piercing machine gun.
Naji’s police forces were loyal to the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. He indicated his units along the road, men at checkpoints under his command. He pointed vaguely across yellow fields at the hills where the revolution had attacked.
“There is shooting, there are firefights,” Naji said. But, he explained insouciantly, his men would shoot back and Ahmar’s forces would disappear.
“Are there problems for you because of the revolution?”
“No. No! We are not in a revolution. We are in a crisis, a small crisis. The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh—in Yemen 80 percent are behind Saleh. Ali Abdullah Saleh is okay.”
The truck rattled up Mount Kawkaban, winding around vast gat plantations. Naji’s cheek was puffing. Ours were, too, as we dipped into gift bags of fresh leaves. Naji broke off twigs of his rubta when we were empty. We barreled through the entrance of the fortifications around Kawkaban, fifty miles an hour through the narrow, rocky town road. We missed children by inches. At a clearing, Naji roared up to a ledge that fell one thousand feet straight down to the valley floor. He eased the truck forward until the edge was hidden under the hood of the car.
When he spoke, it was in an Arabic accent unlike the city folk, never in English except for one special word, broken into his two favorite syllables, enunciated with every muscle in his face. He turned: a Cheshire grin with the truck five loose stones from death.
“ Waa-oww!”
From this vantage in the Haraz Mountains, Yemen is splayed out flat like a coloring book. Only the mountain and a pair of small clouds cast shadows on the mosaic of empty fields, copper, wheat, tan and camel browns. A spot of green. Naji smirked mischievously with a cigarette between his fingers, surveying Shibam from above. The blocky tan homes of a few thousand looked like stones that had overflowed the mountains, almost invisible if I forgot we’d come by their roads.
In Thula, an ancient walled city only miles away, a long ladder climbs to a stone staircase that switchbacks to a view of a similar sort. From the unconquerable fort in Thula, the fields along the plateau are Yemen’s most deliberate kind: terraced grassland stretches for miles. Brown for the winter, the terraces make long, geometric waves—wholly man-made, but entirely natural. If I didn’t look too closely, I wouldn’t see a single trace of mankind.
Of all places, Yemen was not where I expected to find hints of the far east, of Balinese rice paddies carved into verdant hillsides. Another distinction muddled and thrown away.
Down below, women descended into an open cistern. Their abayas were bright and colorful in the patterns of older traditions, and they carried buckets on their heads that they dipped into green water. On a stone street the shade of raw almonds, I bought a janbiya—said “jambiya” almost always—with a bone handle and a fraying belt, and a silver bracelet for Masha.
“Made by Jews,” the shopkeeper said. “Only they know how to make this silver.” When Israel was established, and they left, he said, Yemenis forgot how to make such delicate patterns.
A resident pointed out Stars of David, marked on the older houses in motifs of loosening brick.
ON THE WAY DOWN from Kawkaban I sat untethered in the back holding a machine gun while Naji slammed through town, driving as though he wanted to dismount his entire regiment. The scrawniest soldier sat near the back, holding my folded pages of Lonely Planet’s single Yemen chapter and sounding out the only Arabic words at the section headers. Thirty percent of Yemeni men are illiterate, twice that figure for women.
“Kaw-ka-ban!” he beamed.
The others often called him yehudi, “Jew,” as a joke. It meant “cunning,” sometimes, or that someone was being an idiot. Or it meant nothing.
Neal was keeping Naji company in the front. The only other Jew in the back was holding a Kalashnikov and feeding a mild amphetamine into his system.
“I’ve got the gun now,” I shouted through the wind. “You guys can feel safe.”
They laughed. The gunman standing at the trigger wore my aviator sunglasses. AK continued to take video on his cellphone, putting his arm around the soldier at his sides. I’d forgotten my bellyaches.
When we reached their checkpoint again, Shibam was getting dark, and Naji invited us into a small shed to continue chewing. We had stopped along the road to buy another rubta each. AK never partook.
We squeezed together against cement and cinder block walls. Guns relaxed on the green tarp floor. Balls of chewed leaves grew inside our cheeks. Despite the soldiers’ untroubled warnings not to eat the juices (Lonely Planet counsels: “Only Ethiopians swallow!”), I couldn’t keep the leaves from spilling over onto my tongue and down into my stomach to wreak whatever damage they would. (Not much, probably—a small-scale summer fad in Israel popularized gat juice lemonade at cafés and partygoers’ street stands.)
We talked, sipping water. Naji drank Mountain Dew from the bottle, as he always did, gulping it behind the pocketed mash in his cheek. “With Jack Daniels, even better!” he said. We discussed our plans, to head south with AK at the wheel for a few days if we could get the permits. We’d be in Aden just after the weekend, for seafood and a culture shock in the capital of the south. Naji said he would come. Big eyes bulging, he smiled from his cheeks. “Waa-oww!”
We sat until it was fully dark, waiting to buzz. The soldiers were quiet, entering a different phase of the afternoon pastime—they had been plucking leaves for eight hours. Most people will say the effects never really kick in until a chewer’s third or fourth sortie—perhaps for lack of effic
ient technique, or because the amphetamine-like chemicals haven’t built up a sufficient reserve in the bloodstream. All night after we stopped, I couldn’t stop clacking my teeth and chewing at air.
In the Sanaa mansion where Tal and his friends came down from their chew, Tal had explained something important. “There’s another thing that needs to be established,” he said: “Yemen is the slowest place on earth. Because we’re the slowest people on earth.” I nodded.
But could it have been the other way—that they were slow because the place was slow? Did the energy of the drug match the speed of a racing mind with little place else to run—and, in matching it, let it be still? Too fast in a too-low gear, the engine wails; sometimes gearing up is all it takes to calm down.
I kept nodding, as calm on those plush couches as I was lounging against the concrete.
“Yeah,” Tal said. “We’re chillin’.”
AT THAT TIME, the road into Sanaa was diced with competing checkpoints. Taftish. At one, forces loyal to the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. A few minutes later, another group of uniformed men, standing with guns in the near-dark.
“This is with Ali Mohsen,” AK said, greeting the soldiers politely at the window. General Mohsen had defected months earlier and urged the armed forces to follow suit, after serving as the president’s top military advisor for years. “Like Ali Abdullah Saleh! Same village!”
Jamal had explained very briefly the backgrounds of Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, and Saleh, and Sadiq al-Ahmar. “It’s true they all share the same last name and come basically from the same village and they all want the same thing”—Ali Mohsen and Sadiq al-Ahmar at least—“but I doubt any of them are big on sharing.”
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 25