Disheartened, we left the fat man to pass my plea on to his superiors. It looked like for all of Bamadhaf’s inshallah-laden yesses, there were the noes where it counted. Private captains were unwilling to face commercial penalties, or delays in port where livestock begin to die in underventilated cages, and commercial agencies were wary enough not to break the law.
The legal injunctions sank in. And then, hand to the car handle, I forehead slappingly remembered my place in the scheme of things, my potential to be a slippery cog in a greasy machine. Benjamin Franklin winked from inside my backpack.
I returned to the office where Naima still sat in monochrome elegance. I’d be happy to bribe anyone of import, I said. Aha, she mused, and then gave me a friend.
Imad, Bamadhaf’s man Friday, was handling paperwork before Al Medina could set sail. Puzzled and smiling to meet me, he confidently disappeared with my passport to make whispered deals. Fearing the anxious quiet that comes with idle waiting, I called Joseph again in a desperate attempt to keep my foot in whatever doors were still open, and within twenty minutes, he had appeared at the door of the Boston Language Institute building.
Soft-spoken on the phone, Joseph George was anything but in person. He looked a young fifty, with a powerful jaw and straight white teeth that gleamed when he grinned. His skin was the darker shade of those who likely settled from parts of neighboring Africa decades or centuries earlier. He was in his every fiber a native Yemeni. There could be no one more Adeni than Joseph George.
Joseph introduced me to a friend he had spotted on the street, a government minister named Muhammad who, it just so happened, controlled the federal government’s Department of Inspections. If I’d still had my passport, Joseph said, I could have given it to Muhammad and he’d have it back within half an hour approved for anything I wanted. Civilian officers like the men at the port are “scared shitless of these guys,” he said.
In the meantime, while Imad pressed his luck with the brass, Joseph and I cruised the road around Aden in his massive white pickup truck, hoping to grab his friend the boat captain on the way to get a couple lunchtime beers.
Children heading home from school chased us, shouting, and Joseph bared his teeth. Seething, he slammed on the brakes so the kids would slam into the back of the truck. They never did. They jeered in their white uniforms.
“They eat, they drink, they fuck and die. And they leave their children in the street like a bag of bones.”
It had been a long morning at work, he said—at the unsurprisingly vague-sounding Transoceanic Projects & Development—and I summoned the nerve to ask, cautiously, what he did. “Logistics,” he said. The boat sticking out bottom up in the harbor—that had been captained by his drinking buddy, along with two other dhows that had sunk in the past year. He was a man in Joseph’s debt.
We found the boat captain at a famous spot past the Catholic cemetery at the edge of the tunnel out of town toward the Sheraton, where bottles are handed through the sliding grate of a metal shed a few yards off the road. A Heineken was five dollars.
Together, with another quiet man Joseph seemed to know and picked up along the way, we tried to relax, squinting at the sea from cliffs baking in the afternoon. Too hot, we drove lazily back through the tunnel, Joseph singing every word along to “No Woman, No Cry.” Everything’s gonna be alright . . . everything’s gonna be alright, now. I felt a little calmer, if only for escaping into a moment of the familiar.
He pointed out the repulsive cement President Dick obelisk. “We call it a very bad name in Arabic,” he said, smiling broadly. Joseph roared with laughter: “He wants to remind the South people that this is my dick, I’m fucking all of you!”
And then my phone rang with Bamadhaf’s number. Salma called me to return to the office: Imad had settled things—$100 for the ticket, $120 for the bribes, bargained quickly down as if we had returned again to legitimate dealings. Racing back with windows open under the reverberating call to prayer, Joseph took me back to be Bamadhaf’s first dead-weight customer, and Naima wrote out a ticket like she had done it many times before.
The ship was to sail after salat al-‘asr, the afternoon prayer. They were happy, too, as if we had overcome a great challenge together. Grabbing my bags, I promised I would e-mail if I could, unless, as their worst fears flashed, I drowned en voyage in a sea of warm chocolates.
Imad whisked me off to scarf chicken and rice; I spent my last rials on candy; I shook hands with the logistics man. Joseph played no direct role in this new plan, but he loaned me hope when I was running on empty. “To my American business partners, I never say inshallah,” he said. “I say, ‘I’ll do or die.’ ”
I STOOD VICTORIOUS on the cement patterns of the Port of Aden. In a flourishing series of fortunate events, my plans to find a boat to Somalia were paying off, and after a month of daydreaming, a week of coordination and a considerable dollop of palm grease I was closer than I had ever been.
Brown and sun baked with curly black hair, Imad was short and sinewy in jeans and a worn T-shirt. Twenty-one years old, he had accepted me into his care like a brother. It was his ninth year working for Bamadhaf. His cousin Muhammad was always with us, riding in the passenger seat and disembarking often to fetch something or copy something else or handle unnamed problems.
I cashed a crisp hundred-dollar bill into small Yemeni notes. Every single person from the entrance of the port to the ship’s rigging would get a cut. At the entrance, Imad presented a creased copy of my passport to a man out of uniform who made the universal gesture for What the fuck is this? An American? Imad leaned over his shoulder and placed one thousand rial (about $4.50) into the fold and pushed the paper closed with a rigid index finger: What American?
Everything ran smoothly from then on with Imad fielding every question and speaking so I wouldn’t have to. In the immigration shed, a burly man retrieved a new date stamp from a closet, marked my exit from Yemen, and added my passport to the pile entrusted to the captain. I followed Imad onto the pier and around to the benches where the crew of Al Medina were sitting on the ground, chewing gat, waiting for her to pull around the corner from the docks.
And then, with an impossibly gat-puffed cheek, he answered his cellphone for the thousandth time that afternoon and disappeared to check on the boat. “Maybe fifteen minutes late,” he said. “Mechanical problem,” he smiled.
A fat orange sun was sinking into the jagged mountaintops along the coast. I snapped a few pictures from a perch on the pier where boys were diving or making their friends dive, or giving me intimate compliments: “What a beautiful hat. And a beautiful scarf. And a beautiful coat.” Eccentricity, in a place where simply being foreign is enough to be eccentric, is excused by being foreign. It’s a delightfully logical double negative: foreigners who act normal, whispers say, are probably spies.
So when they inevitably took to the game of volunteering others for photos, giggling and stabbing at the others with a finger—Get him! Get him!—I was happy enough to oblige. Where taking pictures is suspect, where people hear a camera snap and cringe, clicking away is a little like pulling hair or pinching cheeks. They bubbled with the kind of excitement that makes one kid push another kid into water with all his clothes on. And pretty soon, the divers were mugging for my camcorder and braving backflips, thrilled to watch themselves on video over and over and over until the sun boiled away into the sea and they shivered too much to go on.
Many of the boys—ages in the teens-ish, thirteen-looking-ten, eleven-claiming-fifteen, seven, or unplaceable—asked me if I had Facebook. What had seemed like a unified group revealed itself as a collection of mostly curious strangers proving their status in a new system by virtue of their interaction, it seemed, with me. A small boy with black skin and African hair sang and danced and hugged me and climbed on the others. “He will steal from you,” said another, deadly serious in a gray dress shirt, greasily ingratiating himself as an advisor and confidant. There was Ahmed, the nephew of one Al Medina c
rewman, in a red sweatshirt with light peach fuzz on his upper lip, who became a quiet mediator. And there was a jester in a blue shirt who hovered near me and made jokes loud enough for the older boys and the divers’ friends to hear.
“Give us seven million dollars!” The kid in blue was all smiles. “Okay, give a million!” Suddenly, his whole face and spirit changed. He kissed my shoulder, a gesture typical of panhandlers in Middle Eastern cities, then my hand. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Give me something.
I told him I had spent all of my rials, which was true, as I was expecting to leave the country, which technically, with my passport stamped, I already had. He tapped the wallet in my pocket and made an eating gesture with his hand. “Check.”
Ahmed explained in pieces: the kid in the blue shirt was one of Yemen’s many neglected, known as the bidun—the “without”—those born and raised in Yemen but lacking passports or official identification and, therefore, denied access to any benefits of citizenship. The bidun live off the unfriendly land, in the backcountry of the UAE’s poorer emirates, on Hangam Island in Iran, in shantytowns or no towns at all. The kid in the blue shirt had relocated from the north when he was younger, and his passport was lost in the move. His father was dead. His mother, Ahmed explained, was an amnesiac who could no longer read or write. Without money or identification, her children had no access to school.
Ahmed delivered this passively. I held out a couple candy bars I had in a backpack pocket. Ahmed and the boy sat with me a little longer, looking out at the ships’ lights in port, waiting for the boat to come.
BUT AFTER THE DIVERS had gone home and the boy in the blue shirt left, Al Medina had yet to appear. There was an issue with the gearbox, someone reported, and it started to seem less and less likely that it could be fixed. Those first fifteen minutes, after fifteen minutes, grew into half an hour. After half an hour became an hour’s wait, then an hour and a half, then two. The longer we waited, the longer we had to wait. After six hours, Imad called to say the ETD was a “morning” that almost instantly became an afternoon. He and his cousin Muhammad came to fetch me from the port outcropping. I had no visa, no Yemeni currency, no way to change dollars and no way to get more. I had no phone credit. I was thinking about getting hungry. And with every inshallah, doubt grew and grew and howled.
I was without. Legally I had no right to be where I was, but I had even less right to go anywhere else. But I was not bidun—I was not without friends or without help. I was not abandoned: there were people willing to do more for me than I did for the boy in the blue shirt. The night immigration officer handed me a small, laminated orange card to issue me shore leave—CREW #75—and Imad collected my things and piled me back into the car, laughing a little and telling me not to worry. He pulled the brake up in a parking space in Mualla mostly free from bottles and flattened containers and gravel and Muhammad jumped out to bring me egg sandwiches and mango juice from a late-night cafeteria.
I begged them not to; I asked for boat updates and nothing else, but for Imad, this hospitality was automatic. He would sleep on the floor of the office tonight instead of returning home to his wife and baby daughter outside the city. He would buy us gat to chew in the double room of the hotel he paid for, just for me. “You’re a human being, I’m a human being. Correct?” he said. That was all. And, “Maybe one day I’ll be in America.”
On the top floor of the hotel, Imad and Muhammad sat quietly on one of the two queen beds pushing leaves into their mouths. We watched TV. The room was clean, white, with beds so hard it seemed like they had never been used, and it looked from the cousins’ eyes like they had never been in a room so proper in their lives. I sipped the thick mango juice from its Styrofoam cup.
Imad flicked through photos on my phone asking questions. “That’s my cousin in Israel,” I blurted. Soon, they left, and caffeinated out of my mind by our midnight gat chew, I would stay awake all night with my doubts. The mosque loudspeaker pointed upward from three floors below, and my window took the blunt force of the screaming azan at three o’clock and five-thirty. For a few minutes it was too loud to worry. Soon after it was light out, I called Imad. “Go back to sleep,” he said.
Past the time when he said he’d call, past the time the boat was scheduled to leave, there was no news. Calls and reluctance to call—was Imad mad about Israel? I let my anxieties coil themselves into a monster that reeled when I looked at it—Yes! it said when I asked if something was wrong. The gearbox can’t be fixed! Their magnanimity ends in Jerusalem! You’ve failed! I couldn’t stop chewing at air, an aftereffect of the gat, compounded by the fidgetiness of waiting.
All I wanted was that one meaningless hello to know I was still unforgotten. I just wanted to call Imad again and let him know I was still there, still waiting. I wanted to express my excitement and ask how he was feeling at the same time. I wanted to call just to say Waaaa-owwww!
I walked the mile or two to the Bamadhaf building and said a sad good morning to Naima and Salma. The boat would leave, they said. It had to—its permit was going to expire, and every day of delay was losing them money. We ate beans and drank tea.
Even when Imad came back for me, I couldn’t feel optimistic. I quivered when I overheard the words problem or tomorrow in phone conversations I mostly didn’t understand. “It’s going to leave. Three o’clock,” Imad said. “Inshallah.” But it was Groundhog Day as we circled Main Street, gathered photocopies, ate chicken and rice. His brother Sameer had returned that day from Bosaso on a boat carrying 645 cows and sat down to eat with us carrying with him in his thin sweatshirt the smells of every one.
We sat in the car together, moved it, moved it again, and parked it somewhere else. At three, we were still nowhere. Three guys in the backseat looked amused at how tense I was, how obsessed with time I was, how un-Yemeni. I asked to be deposited at the port where at least I could wish again to see the boat pulling in—something about that seemed like a place for a more tangible possibility. It was like squinting in prayer for a seven on a craps table and having that moment of calm, of suspended hope in opening your eyes, and by opening them forcing the Fates to deal their cards. Enough sitting, I thought, as more unoccupied brain cells twirled off to help dramatize and mix metaphors. I’m going crazy.
WHEN I WAS A KID, I learned a cool game.
Not a game, really, just: I’d stand on the threshold between rooms and hold my arms at my sides. Then, keeping them straight, I’d press them against the door frame. I’d push hard for a minute or two, or longer. The longer I held and the harder I pushed, the better the reward: when I stepped away my arms would rise, weightless. My whole body felt lighter. It was fun to invent new pressures just to feel the relief in lifting them.
If I could have held it for longer, I was sure, I would have been flying.
IT FELT SO URGENT NOW. This was what I needed to feel relieved and satisfied, I told myself, as I did before every visa application, every booked flight, every hassle made doubly desperate. This corner of Somalia was the next fix. I’ll feel fulfilled, I told myself, all the while knowing it wasn’t true, knowing I was feeding a lazy addiction and calling it bold. Just one more step higher on the ladder of Mother-Frightening Nations. . . .
In the port, I slumped onto the floor of an office to chew gat with the entirety of the port staff—clerks of some sort, immigrations officers, coordinators of something or other. And I hardly registered the fizzle of a radio and Imad’s bulletin that Al Medina was on the move. I chased my legs as they followed him back to the immigration shed to exit Yemen a second time.
There were no divers that day. And with the fat sun setting again, I dropped into the motorboat to taxi out to Al Medina. She was a Somali-made dhow, deep brown wood with a white stripe along the hull as if she wanted to race, not much longer than a hundred feet of mostly boxes covered with tarp. From the tiny deck painted robin’s-egg blue, the crew peered over the railing and I climbed the ladder up the side. A young Somali bowed and sang the azan out in
to the Gulf of Aden. Waving good-bye to Imad and the city, we chugged slowly through the harbor, passing the rusty carcass of something larger that had sunk, until, as the last light faded, we stopped. We were a few hundred yards from shore.
The engine wasn’t running properly—some gear or clamp was stripping a crankshaft. “We might be going back,” said the Kenyan engineer. I dangled my legs over the side. I’m not getting off this boat. If she did leave, I knew, it wouldn’t be because she was entirely seaworthy, it would be because the permit was going to expire and it was time to roll the dice and throw them into the sea. That was the captain’s choice, too.
We set sail at the end of a gray day, the wind dead, leaving bureaucratic and existential stresses under the piles of garbage on Mualla Main Street. Twenty-three, I thought, as if it were the biggest number I’d ever heard. It was my birthday. An Aquarius taking to the waveless alley. The ship yielded to the wine-dark sea, and we moved into that part of the Gulf where contemporary pirates were all too well-known. Yo ho.
ONBOARD, THERE WERE phone chargers and outlets for iPod speakers; a four-foot-tall kitchen where Atham the cook steamed the spiciest curry and taught me to roll roti; cushions and a flat spot between the cookie boxes on top of the cabin for the ten sailors to sleep in shifts. Late January in the Gulf of Aden, the night air is luxurious and perfect with one blanket.
Digestive responses to the curry were delivered from a man-sized plastic bucket with the bottom cut out that hung from the side of the boat. It was terrifying stepping in at first, what with the sea frothing past below and tales of sharks, but it got easier.
I knew what was coming: as per my seafaring traditions, I puked violently over the side of the boat after three hours. I closed my eyes and thought of whale-watching trips I went on as a boy, vomiting and trying to spot whale flukes and vomiting. Somehow, no one on Al Medina made fun of me, and as watchman shifts were rotating in the dark, someone unrolled a mattress on a bench and told me to go sleep. I obeyed without protest, having hurled myself to exhaustion. Just before dawn, we floated out of Asia and into Africa.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 29