The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  This staff made copies of my passport and visas for Yemen and Somaliland, found no issue with my American citizenship, and said they would call when they knew if there was a boat. Cargo ships didn’t come and go every day, and took a few days to load and unload, but they seemed confident that one would come soon. Inshallah, they said. “God willing.”

  Inshallah is one of the phrases in Arabic a foreigner can understand literally and semantically and culturally, but cannot grasp for lack of belief. For all of my uses of “God willing” as a secular English expression—“God willing pizza still has cheese on it when we get home” and the like—the god is a passive one. The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs notes: “[This is] an expression indicating that there is a high certainty that something will happen, so high that only God could prevent it.”

  The American “prove me wrong or else” mentality is distinct: innocent until proven guilty, free until locked up. Inshallah gives mortal defendants different odds. “God willing” here accompanies every mention of an event or a plan for the future from “See you tomorrow” to “I promise I will win the lottery”; at its most frustrating, it can appear to qualify the past: Has the authorization been confirmed? Inshallah. But . . . has it? Inshallah.

  Implying more than one plausible option, it seems to translate to “hopefully.” English speakers tend to run with that toward the unlikely side of “maybe.” Really though, inshallah carries no judgment of probability. It is weighted only toward what you believe: if you have doubts, it will strengthen them; if you are confident, you’ll remain so. The way you feel in the moment between inshallah and conscious thought—that is your default setting on the spectrum from optimism to despair.

  When Naima checked her books and told me inshallah the boat will arrive, she said so like a newscaster delivering the unadorned truth. And because I doubted, I heard have reason to doubt.

  AFTER TWO LONG DAYS on the road, AK and Naji were planning to go straight back to Sanaa, though AK wanted to go to the beach. Without us, it was clear the poor taxi driver was fettered by the efindim’s whims. We said our good-byes, but I answered my phone several times over the next few days to hear Naji’s voice. Always he asked for Neal. Ten feet away from the phone I could still make out his message, as clear and meaningless as ever.

  “Waa-oww!”

  Feeling their absence, Neal and I took in the balmy January evening air on a block-partying main drag in Crater. The neighborhood that is Aden’s nighttime hub is settled in the hollow of the ancient explosion of an eighteen hundred-foot-high volcano, millions of years extinct, with rugged cliffs at its back and an oceanfront view. Now Crater earns that moniker in a different way: the word crater comes from Greek for “mixing bowl.” In Crater nights, people mix.

  Aden is a storybook trader’s city that absorbs pastimes and recipes and sundry itinerants. Outside near the Aden Gulf Hotel there are billiards tables and ping-pong, and a line of Somali women and children sleeping on single-layer mats of cardboard. Refugees were fleeing to Yemen at ten thousand per month, and the city did its best to ignore them.

  There is a stand for muttabaq, “folded,” like a savory crepe that would have made phenomenal drunk food if we only knew where to get a drink. There is a stand for betel nut, called fofal in Arabic and paan in South Asia, to wrap in leaves and squirrel away like chewing tobacco. In the thousand-year-old Hitopadesha collection of Sanskrit fables, a king narrates:

  Betel-nut is bitter, hot, sweet, spicy, binding, alkaline—

  A demulcent—an astringent—foe to evils intestine;

  Giving to the breath a fragrance—to the lips a crimson red;

  A detergent, and a kindler of Love’s flame that lieth dead.

  Praise the gods for the good Betel!

  All around Aden, its red spit is burned into cobblestones and curbs like blood stains.

  “Hey Obama. This is Black Label,” said a happy chewer. And Neal and I bought two leaf pouches, because when in Aden, and because it was new to us.

  The ping-pong table sat on a slight incline, and a ten-year-old smoked me with his Chinese penhold grip while the neighborhood watched. And there, outside a popular sandwich joint, we spotted Judith and Boudweijn, Anoud’s friends from the pizza place in Sanaa. For expats at least, the Dutch couple said, Yemen was a small town. Before the next year was up, they would be kidnapped and held ransom under credible threat of execution. Their captors leaked a terrifying, seemingly hopeless video. Judith was crying. They had ten days to live. The Dutch government swore they never pay ransom, but in six months they were free. The tears were fake, Judith says—that’s just how they made her play along.

  That night in Aden, Boudweijn told us to call him Bo and we made plans for dinner like a sweet double date.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, we met them at Ching Sing, Yemen’s most famous Chinese restaurant. Fluorescent lighting and a few red Chinese lanterns lit line drawings and Eastern landscapes on the walls. Ching Sing is one of the few spots left in town still serving alcohol unabashedly, albeit in a basement, and our newish Dutch friends ordered a round of Amstels. Bo was struggling to attract Yemenis to the idea of insurance brokerage with his new firm, and Judith the reporter was planning to interview the owner, the founder’s son.

  The restaurant’s founder was a Chinese sailor stranded by war in Aden in the 1940s. Ching Sing had remained ever since on Mualla’s ghoulish Main Street, despite encroaching conservatism and tightening restrictions on purveyors of alcohol. “You should blow on the top,” said Judith of our Amstel cans. They’re smuggled in by sea, she said, and buried in the sand for someone else to collect. Luckily, beer has a shelf life of some months.

  But not wanting to bury myself in Aden’s sand—muddy on most free beaches and unfairly priced at the Sheraton Hotel—I was still looking for seafaring options to skip town. Next to our piles of dumplings and squid soup and stir-fried beef was a table of pale and boisterous Russian men and a Yemeni associate who let slip that they had access to boats making international trips. They wouldn’t say more. Another bottle of vodka came from behind the bar. Happily convinced that they were arms dealers, we watched them climb out of Ching Sing and said good night.

  It wasn’t our luck that night to get bubble wrapped onto a freighter hauling Kalashnikovs to Somalia, but our Dutch friends—whom we knew only as friends of Anoud, who we had only known from a website for traveling strangers—had met a man named Joseph. Along with Naima and Salma, Joseph was our other last hope.

  He was like Aden’s Godot, a man we never saw but counted on for our salvation. Bo described him in all uncertain terms: a fixer, a highly connected man, a usual at expat parties, someone who behaved like a local but was really from . . . Bo couldn’t tell. He thought that if we showed up at a particular bar before 1 A.M., we’d find him. We went, and didn’t.

  “Joseph would know,” Bo said several times above a Heineken at the empty bar where Joseph wasn’t. “Joseph can help you,” said Judith.

  I REMEMBER A GREAT DEAL of waiting in the days Joseph didn’t appear. Except for the Sira Fortress high on a conical hill dangling from the city by a narrow causeway, and the fish market below where a hammerhead shark bled recumbent on wet tile, and the north Yemeni monument locals had taken to calling “The President’s Dick,” Aden was not a city rife with sights to see. There were the cisterns, an engineering marvel explained by a plaque from 1899 on its restored staircases. The title reads simply, THESE TANKS. It begins the story of their accidental discovery like this: “Regarding the original construction of these tanks of which nothing is accurately known. . . .” Later, folks in town would tell me their guesses that ranged from the sixth to the sixteenth century.

  I laughed when I read it. Not a laugh of mirth or mockery, but a puff of relief at the sign that signified nothing at all. I saw myself in it, of course, as if Aden was telling me I was allowed to be unsure, too.

  We ate more grilled fish and bread with sahawiq and relaxed. But in our
hyperactive curiosity, we itched again to leave Paradise.

  And then at a café in Crater, I read an e-mail from a kindly bank agent that my entire debit account had been siphoned away for a shopping spree in Vietnam. Back in Abu Dhabi, the Sama Tower ATM next to the new Baskin-Robbins had been hacked. I responded in the only way I knew how—Help?—and clicked Send in the corner of one frantic e-mail to the bank. And then because it was an unthinkable problem, I did everything I could not to think about it. I held what little money I still had, felt especially grateful for Neal’s company, and returned to running away.

  For the Yemeni tourist, there was one El Dorado, called Shibam, just like Naji’s hometown outside of Sanaa, whose old city boasted five hundred mud brick houses up to eight stories tall. Its nickname was the ultimate draw: “The Manhattan of the Desert.” It was to be our only foray into Hadhramaut, a part of Yemen the professor Brittany and every other returning traveler rhapsodized about like a mythical kingdom. Its name, according to one theory, comes from a simple sentence in Arabic: Death has come.

  We scrounged for cash to pay a travel agent to reserve a ticket to nearby Seiyun. My rial were dwindling fast, as was the small stash of just-in-case dollars zipped deep in a backpack pocket. Hours later we sat in the airport. We bought a package of butter biscuits and tea to dip them in. Minutes passed. A man hustled over to our bench.

  “Seiyun?” he asked.

  We nodded.

  “The flight is canceled.”

  “Happy” Airways, in all its unhappy consistency, was back on strike.

  Buses were another option—the sixty-minute flight would take about ten hours by road, but it was worth it, and we hailed a giant van cab to investigate at the depot.

  We had no permits, but we made our case to the company manager from the doorway of a coach. He was incredulous, and unflinching.

  “Al-Qaeda will come on the bus and see you and kill you,” he said.

  There were checkpoints along the way, territory ceded to Islamists during the last year’s Battle of Zinjabar and throughout the uprising, and militants had been known to kill travelers, even Yemenis.

  “We could cover our heads,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  Earlier, army guards had been murdered on the roads. Things were getting worse in the south.

  We lounged defeated along the bench seats. The driver and his almost Jheri-curled friend Adam in the front passenger seat consoled us. And as I always did automatically when I met an Adam, I asked myself, What if that were me? What if, in the great prenatal vending machine of Adams, I’d tumbled out for life in that seat and those slick curls?

  Out of ideas, we drove together to the Adeni permit office and sat for hours, discussing and rejecting the possibilities. I was amazed at how vastly more humane the Tourist Police were here than in Sanaa. They sat, placid, on cardboard mats outside their office, chewing gat and drinking Mountain Dew. They wanted to help.

  But their chief Yousif wouldn’t make a permit. He was learning how dangerous the roads were himself, calling for updates, listening to Adam and his friend. Our driving duo was on our side—they really wanted us to get to see Shibam, our frustration was their sadness—but they also didn’t want to send us off to die. They would have regretted that terribly, they said.

  Through their connections to connections, we found a driver, a private car willing to take us by a different road he knew, free from Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. We returned to Yousif and told him. And just when our efforts were making good, the chauffeur called. The car’s owner said no. Al-Qaeda controlled that road now, too. They controlled all of the roads east of Aden.

  At that moment, despite my inbred stubbornness and an inability to let go of even the slightest whiff of the merest fragment of a long-shot possibility, I remembered that earlier lesson, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran: some things truly are impossible. And the relief that came with letting go.

  I had been pulled here for selfish reasons; I was not a Marine, I was not a doctor without borders, not a journalist. Without a greater cause, the me in these unknown places was freer, and freer still because the few things I really was—an American, a Jew—were like clothing I felt encouraged to wear differently at different occasions. Without a greater cause, danger suggested that I be flexible—but even more that I attend to life as it was lived moment to moment, and that I keep my head close to the ground. Danger gave me freedom without disorientation.

  It was nice to know I could actually take no for an answer.

  STILL HOPING FOR NEWS of a boat, and itching to move somewhere after spending a circling day in a van, we took off at dawn the next morning. A bus took us in the only direction we could still go and hadn’t been, west to the coast, and then back north along the Tihama plains. It was Kerouacking in the most blatant way: “Now there was nowhere to go but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one.”

  We had no plan. We were pushing so hard against the stifling weight of travel restrictions that when they lifted, when we pushed against a direction that didn’t push back, we shot off like the hammer of a mousetrap. North—we could only go north. We couldn’t stop. We landed in Zabid, a UNESCO darling—a mosque built in the eighth year of the Islamic calendar with Stars of David etched into the vaulted ceilings, old houses with stained glass windows on rainbow-lit rooms to rival Notre Dame—and kept going. We hit Hudaydah at night, searching for food on the backs of teenage motorbikers who hustled for inflated “taxi” fares. We took off after dark in a Peugeot, climbing six hours into the mountains back to Sanaa, the only place we thought we knew.

  The trip that had taken three days southward took one long day to return.

  I sat in the front, Neal and a young, legal arms dealer in the back. Seven of us and the driver pushed through the dark. Whenever I fell asleep and the keffiyeh slipped off my head, we were stopped at a checkpoint. We had no permits. But no one cared enough to fuss, and there was no Naji to force them to touch paperwork. When I stayed covered, we passed through with a wave.

  It was in the wee hours of the morning when we made it to Tal’s friend’s place in Sanaa. As soon as the electricity came back on, I started looking for flights to Aden. And while Neal was hanging with the boys, I was e-mailing him notes he’d never respond to from nearer the router:

  so i just checked the yemenia website and it came up with almost 15000 riyals for a one way and i was like, shit, thats a bunch of riyals. but nah. it’s like seventy bucks.

  There was no reason why any of this should have been important. To me, at least. It became an obsession just to make landfall on the shores of Somaliland. Nothing and no one depended on this. I was practically sick of traveling, slowed even more by the heaviness of light pockets. I was ready to sit still. Yet I stoked fixation with daydreams about the seafarers’ way across the Gulf of Aden, and with pictures of the pristine cave paintings just north of Hargeisa.

  I had seventy bucks, and so did Neal, and Tal brought us to a travel agent so we could buy our cash tickets straight back south. We flew out immediately.

  (I could hear Masha’s voice, saying what she often said: “You’re being a crazy.”)

  NEAL WAS SMART ENOUGH to see the circles we were spinning. Work called from Abu Dhabi, and though work was flexible, he saw an easy escape from the dizziness and took it, leaving me with Brittany’s thick books for the Somalilander with no address. The hotel room was too wide and dark, I noticed, and silent.

  I reached Joseph by phone from the Aden Gulf Hotel.

  “Yes my dear,” he said often, “I will let you know.” He spoke in clear English with an accent from somewhere in a voice that was on the dainty side of high-pitched. He always seemed delighted to talk even though he never called back. He would speak to captains of dhows taking sheep and cows across the Gulf. He was going drinking with some of them, he said one day. And if they said no? “My guys can push them a little.”

  But before Joseph could tell me that no captain was wil
ling to take an American onboard for a fear of legal problems that made a little ticket money an unsound gamble, Naima called to tell me yes. Bamadhaf Shipping had a boat in port named Al Medina, and it was stocked with its thirty thousand-dollar load of biscuits, chocolate and soap and ready to sail on Saturday. I needed only the approval of the port general. “He cannot say no,” said Naima. “He has no right to.”

  She put me in an old car with a company man to get the stamp. The general received us with an officer at his side in a bright, windowed room on the highest floor of the Port Authority building that looked like the bridge of a British schooner. He wore the complete naval uniform, all white with golden buttons, and, with all the authority of the surprised and cautious, proved he had every right to say no.

  “No,” he said.

  Six weeks earlier, an overloaded Somali-made dhow capsized and sunk just out of port. Since the Yemeni government still valued U.S. aid and alliance, it would be no good to have an American go down with the cows. My weak shipping company liaison could accept the impossibilities of only sailing legitimate channels.

  The general dismissed us to a separate agency, one that might assume liability and issue me clearance. I was losing hope. In a hot room by the docks a fat man wheezed, wedged into a wooden desk chair behind a table piled high with paperwork that fluttered against a fan. It was illegal for foreigners to travel by boat from Aden, he said. He never moved. I proposed that I write an affidavit absolving anyone of any accountability if the boat sank. Tongue jutting into his bottom lip, he struggled to find a pen with meaty fingers, not because he thought it was a valid suggestion, but because he was willing to have us tell him what his job was. Papers whiffled and blew off the desk.