Pearl and I go outside to find Rasheed, a Soqotri man who works with them and drives their company car, a monstrous white SUV. Rasheed is slim and handsome, with sparkling black eyes and a rascal’s smile. With all the windows open, we cruise along a coast so spectacular I almost forget the heat. The ocean glitters in the morning sun to our left, and mountains rise precipitously to our right. The lower slopes are peppered with fat, fleshy trees topped with pink flowers—the Soqotri desert rose. The coastline scallops in and out, creating pretty little lagoons. It only takes about fifteen minutes to reach the wee village—excuse me, the hopping capital city—of Hadibo. At first I don’t recognize it as even a town. It looks more like the ruins of something. Low stone walls, which apparently are buildings, crawl across the dust everywhere. At least, they’re buildings according to the Soqotri definition of the word, which doesn’t necessarily include a roof. This is the most populous area of the eighty-mile island. No exact census exists, but the population is estimated to be between forty thousand and a hundred thousand.
As we rumble down what passes for the main street, Pearl points out the Soqotra Women’s Development Association, which sells local handicrafts and offers opportunities for female tourists to meet with local Soqotri women; the Soqotri honey store, run by a French man and Lebanese woman who have been training the Soqotris to manage hives; a tiny grocery store selling soft drinks, tinned beans, and candy; and plain, boxy hotels without signs.
On the other side of town (the foreigners’ area, the Soqotri version of Hadda), we come to the house Pearl and Marvin rent from Rasheed. A metal door painted with red and blue diamonds opens into a pebbled courtyard. On our left is a raised, tiled area about the size of a large room, with only three walls. Just past that is an enclosed room. Across the courtyard is a kitchen containing only a sink, and opposite is a small, pink-tiled Yemeni bathroom with a squat toilet and a cold-water shower. (Cold being relative; the water in Soqotra is never less than warm.)
Pearl and Marvin insist I take the one closed room and string up their mosquito net on the tiles. I drag my things into my room and cover the tiny, thin mattress with my sheet. The small bed, adrift in a desert of linoleum, depresses me, making me feel acutely single. I lie down for a nap. It is stifling, nearly too hot to sleep, but I manage to slip into a tropical torpor for a bit before waking around noon. We all take quick showers to cool off and walk into town for lunch. It’s so hot I have trouble making my legs move. The dusty main street is deserted. It feels like the American Wild West at high noon.
We find a restaurant at the other end of town. Lunch is cold slices of fish, rice, and tea. This is all there ever will be for lunch on Soqotra, unless you want meat, rice, and tea. There is almost no agriculture on the island, so fruits and vegetables don’t appear in restaurants. But as it is my first meal, I enjoy it. We sit and talk and swelter. Marvin tells me more about the livestock project.
After lunch, we walk (slowly, as the sun is still burning down) to the small souq, where we peer into the shops. Goats are everywhere. They are not happy or healthy goats. Their fur is matted, their bellies bloated, and their tails coated with excrement. In the souq, several are tied under tables, ready for slaughter. In one of the small shops, I buy a light cotton dress for $3; everything I brought feels too warm. I wash it as soon as we get home and hang it on a line in the courtyard. A half hour later, it is dry.
Desperate for a swim, we all pile into the SUV and head to a beach on a protected little peninsula with two pointed rocks at the end called Di Hamri. A few camping shelters have been set up here, with an open-air shower.
The men wander off, to preserve our modesty, and Pearl and I drop our things on a sheltered stretch of rocky beach. After waiting for the men to disappear from view, I strip to my swimsuit and hurl myself into the water. It’s crystal clear. I put my goggles on and am awestruck. Coral mushrooms up from the ocean floor, fanciful kinds of coral I could not have dreamed up—my previous encounters with coral being limited to jewelry shops. There is bloated round coral, branchlike coral, brain-shaped coral, and hundreds of kinds of fish. There are black-and-white-striped fish with yellow tails, black fish, long blue fish, and tiny little fish too small to eat. I have never been scuba diving or snorkeling and have never swum in water so clear. I am deliriously happy. I swim out and out, until men on the shore begin waving their kerchiefs at me to come back. But I can’t stop, luxuriating in my newfound floatiness.
The sun begins to set around the corner on the cliffs, and I stay in the water until it dissolves. When I emerge, I feel near-human. On the beach, I shower in a little palm-frond-shaded booth on the rocks and talk to Pearl while I comb out my hair and pin it back up with chopsticks. It seems that last year, a couple of tourists swam out a bit too far and were caught in a riptide. Their bodies washed up the next morning.
“That is why those men were waving you in,” she says.
The only thing missing from the afternoon is a stop at a roadside ice cream stand. In this climate, ice cream feels critical. But there is no ice cream on Soqotra. There is hardly any refrigeration, and what little exists is usually on only after dark, when the island’s few generators are turned on.
We drive back past tiny villages of stone walls and palm-thatched roofs. Once we’ve changed, we eat dinner at the same restaurant where we had lunch. None of the restaurants have names; even the Soqotri can’t tell you what they’re called. They simply say “the restaurant of the Taj Hotel” or “the restaurant across the street from the Taj.”
Dinner is ful and fasooleah with bread, and some sheep for the sheep eaters. Afterward, Pearl and I walk over to the Taj Hotel so she can show me where “all the cool people hang out.” Most of the expats and tourists eat at this one restaurant, though all of the restaurants serve exactly the same thing: beans for breakfast, meat and rice for lunch, and beans for dinner. There are no menus.
The next morning, I head out for a walk before the heat becomes insufferable. In my new cotton shift, I trek up into the shrub-covered mountains. From a distance, the area looks bare and unpopulated. But every few minutes, I am surprised to stumble upon a house that blends so closely into the rocks around it that I haven’t seen it. Every time I think I am alone, a child bursts from a bush and runs across my path.
I hurry back to shower because I’m going to a workshop conducted by U.S. veterinarians, here to teach Soqotri women how to care for their livestock. When we arrive at the training, held at the small, filthy local hospital, we are quizzed by Jennifer, a testy woman working for the U.S. embassy. She won’t let men into the training, because it’s full of Soqotri women, but says I may watch if I promise not to be disruptive.
In a small, airless room that reeks of feet, some thirty-five women, all in black abayas, hijabs, and niqabs, are gathered. A blond U.S. military veterinarian sits at her computer flipping through the slides of her PowerPoint presentation, while a male Soqotri veterinarian reads them out loud. They have been translated into Arabic. Occasionally there are English subtitles, such as “Disease History,” “Prophylaxis,” “Defecation,” “Urination,” “Gait,” and “Voice.”
“The goal is to teach women basic care, not to make them vets,” Jennifer says.
I ask why only women are being trained, and Jennifer explains that women do most of the work on the island, particularly the herding. The women come from villages all over the island, handpicked by their local councils for their ability to speak and read Arabic. Soqotris have their own language, the origin of which is still debated. The women are dressed in their fanciest abayas, with spangled sleeves and embroidered trim, their feet shod in high heels. It is difficult to imagine an outfit less suited to examining livestock. Their fingers are stained with henna and nagsh.
I struggle to breathe in the stale air, and sweat runs down my spine, soaking my cotton dress. The heat and the stench are overwhelming. The women flip through handouts of the presentation, without taking notes, while the Soqotri vet explains how to ex
amine animals for disease.
During breaks, the staff and I race outside for a breath of fresh air, but the Soqotri women do not leave the room. They are encouraged several times to go outside, but evidently neither the heat nor the funk bothers them.
By the end of the second lecture, I am drooping and in need of escape. I sneak out into the relentless midday glare, heading for the Tourist Information Office, as Pearl has suggested it might help me find things to do here.
At the office there are posters on the wall but nothing else, save a few DVDs locked in a display case. I ask the young man there—in Arabic, mime, and English—if he has any brochures. He shakes his head.
“We have no information.”
“No information?” I am incredulous.
“Mafeesh.” (Nothing.)
Well, if the Tourist Information Office is out of information, I doubt I will find it anywhere else, so I head home.
We lunch at the same little restaurant with the friendly French/Lebanese beekeepers. We laugh at the décor, as the walls are plastered with photos of luxury travel destinations, mostly featuring pools of deep blue water and palm trees—places landscaped within an inch of their lives that could not possibly be mistaken for wild Soqotra. Rasheed helps me draw up a list of things to do and see. He’s far more informative than the Tourist Information Office.
After lunch, he drives me in his pickup truck to Wadi Ayeft while Marvin and Pearl stay behind to work. The wadi (valley) is about a forty-minute ride away, and only the first quarter is on pavement. The rest is on rocky trails so bumpy that I get blisters on my back from bouncing against the seat. There is a handle on my side of the car (and no seat belt, natch), so I pull myself forward with that, clinging to the truck for dear life as we bounce our way up mountain trails.
Finally, we abandon the truck and continue on foot into the valley. Cliffs of red rock rise up on either side, and jagged peaks appear before us, including the tallest mountain on the island. We pick our way across rocky ground, Rasheed pointing out frankincense trees and all manner of other exotic and storybook-looking species. He shows me a plant whose pointy spines contain an antibacterial sap, and another with tiny yellow fruits that resemble cherries but taste woody, like mealy apple-apricots. He throws rocks at the tree until the fruits shower down, and we eat them. These are the first fruits I have seen here.
We pass some locals. The wadi dwellers herd goats up and down the cliffs, and many, including Rasheed’s uncle, live in caves.
I notice that Rasheed greets other men by touching noses with them once or twice and making hand gestures. I ask about this. He tells me that the number of nose touches is important: If Soqotri men have not seen each other in more than a week, they must touch noses three times. “Otherwise, there is trouble.” There are variations on the greeting for encounters with people one’s own age and with older people.
We continue along a dried-up riverbed for nearly half an hour before it opens into a pristine pool of freshwater, next to a small cascade that stretches across its far end. Tiny red crabs cling to the sides. Rasheed walks a few yards from me, keeping passing men away while I change and slip into the water. It is delicious to paddle around in its silky coolness. When I climb out, Rasheed joins me, and we sit on the rocks at the edge and talk.
There, a rare feeling of relaxation spreads through me. I am cool, I still have energy, and there is nowhere else I need to be. It is a whole, perfect moment and the first glimmer of pure happiness I’ve felt in weeks.
Rasheed tells me endless stories, first about his deep friendship with the French ambassador. On the ambassador’s first trip to Soqotra, Rasheed had welcomed him to Hadibo by joking, “Welcome to Paris.”
“Have you ever been to Paris?” the ambassador asked.
“No. Just the Paris of Soqotra.”
“Would you like to go?”
“You must be joking.”
But the ambassador wasn’t. A few weeks later, Rasheed had a visa, plane tickets, and hotel reservations in Paris. He was instructed to leave his Soqotri mahwaz behind and dress as Parisians do.
So Rasheed went to Paris. The girl who was to meet him there rang to ask what airport he was coming into. This was his first shock. “There is more than one?” As the girl tried to explain to him how enormous and overwhelming French airports are, Rasheed assured her that he had been to an international airport, as Soqotra had one. We both laugh when he says this.
In Paris, he was immediately confronted with confounding things, such as an escalator, which he had never seen. He told me he had been afraid to step onto it and had called back to the only other Yemeni on the plane to ask him if it was safe to get on.
Then the girl who met him at the airport had kissed him on both cheeks! He was mortified. “This made me very shy,” he said. “And she said to me, ‘You are in Paris now, you must leave your Soqotri self in Soqotra.’” She made him take her arm (another shock) as they left the airport. He had yet another jolt when they got on an elevator, which he had never seen. “What was that?” he said in alarm when it began to move.
The French girl instructed him how to use silverware. “And then after three days of practicing with silverware, she took me to a Chinese restaurant!”
“And you had to use chopsticks!”
“Yes!”
We collapse in giggles.
Rasheed’s stories get more personal as the sun slides down the sky. He is the sole male supporter of fourteen women. His wife and two children are currently in Sana’a. He doesn’t sound too fond of his wife. “There are problems,” he says. “But my family likes her.”
Rasheed has only ever truly loved one woman. They were childhood sweethearts, always competing with each other in school for first place in their class—so fiercely that she once stole his books right before an exam to try to keep him from studying. Before unification with the more conservative North, boys and girls went to school together, and girls didn’t cover their faces. When Rasheed was later sent to the mainland to study, he mourned this girl. Something was missing from his life, he tells me. He missed her so much he called his mother and said he was coming home. But his mother chastised him, reminding him of the money spent on his education. So he called another relative and came home.
He told the girl that he loved her and wanted to marry her. Neither family was happy. Soqotris are not supposed to choose whom they marry. But the girl said she would wait for him while he studied abroad for three years. He set off once more.
While abroad, he heard that her mother had married her off to a wealthy man from the United Arab Emirates. The girl had refused to marry the man, but her family had forced her. She is now living in the Emirates and has children, but it is obvious that Rasheed still loves her.
“I will not make trouble for her life,” he says. “But I hate people from Emirates now.”
I murmur sympathetic things and try to distract him from his evident sadness by asking him to describe local weddings. Soqotri mountain and coastal dwellers have very different ways of celebrating weddings. People on the coast, he says, have music and drums and dancing, because they are more African. But people in the mountains instead have fierce poetry contests, usually among five groups of people, each group reciting a poem. “It’s a very hard competition,” says Rasheed. “Until around four in the morning. They argue by poetry, one guy saying something like ‘You don’t have enough qat,’ or ‘You are not serving enough meat at your wedding.’”
Mountain weddings also apparently involve jumping contests, during which men leap up and down while the crowd makes “jumping noises” to accompany them.
The sun turns the cliffs above us red and darkens the palm trees around the pool of water into silhouettes. We continue to sit by the pool until the rocks become too sharp against our bottoms, and we have just a half hour of daylight left to get back.
Something about the air of camping and summer vacations and days at the beach here makes me feel nostalgic and melancholy. I find
myself dwelling on happy summers of my past, appreciating them anew. In the car on the way home, Rasheed and I both fall silent as we watch the sky darken.
“I like this time of night,” I say.
“It is the time when each person is alone with his thoughts, thinking about things,” he answers. Exactly so. Our silence is companionable after our long afternoon of talking. I drift off into memories of other vacations in wild lands—happy times bicycling through the mountains, climbing peaks, rock climbing, running through rain, eating meals of fresh corn and blackberry pie, drinking by campfires, and basking in warm companionship.
I don’t think I took these things for granted then, but they are even more precious to me now. Here on Soqotra, away from the distractions of work, my solitude feels acute. I feel a sudden longing for a lover, someone with whom I could share this. It occurs to me that this is the longest time I have been alone since I was a teenager; I have always been romantically involved with someone. I want to climb a mountain again with someone I adore, pick blueberries, tell each other stories as we clamber our way through rocks and trees before sunset. Though I have long avoided lifetime commitment, I now think that maybe it would be nice to stay with someone for a while. A long while.
Chances are I won’t find this person in Yemen. Not with my work schedule and the dearth of romantic prospects. I resign myself to months more of solitary nights and wonder if it would help if I made some more friends.
I’m jolted out of my reverie as Rasheed pulls the truck up by our house. He smiles at me. “I’ll come find you tomorrow.”
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky Page 24