Deadline Yemen

by Peggy Hanson

  Occasionally, the morning sun would glint on a village waterhole, where precious rain was saved when it made its rare appearance. Up close, the water collection ponds were green and slimy with algae. Lithe brown children splashed in them, women washed clothes, men bathed. I shuddered to think of the bacteria being exchanged in the water. The same ponds were used for drinking. With so little fuel to burn, that water wouldn’t be boiled.

  No wonder the average life span in Yemen is so low!

  We’d been climbing, and now we reached a pass from where we could see the valley broadening below—fertile fields and scanty orchards surrounding the town of ’Amran.

  I took another look behind. A line of trucks struggled up the incline far behind us. In front of the trucks was the same khaki-colored Toyota we’d seen in Sana’a’s outskirts.

  As we descended toward ’Amran, we encountered one of the ubiquitous road-blocks. Tin shacks, Yemeni flags, uniformed men. Since we were only women, we stayed in the Land Rover while Yusuf climbed out to negotiate. He returned looking grim. “They say you have to have escort,” he announced.

  “Well, we don’t want an escort.” Becca and I spoke in unison. Becca put her hand on the door handle, as though she might get out of the car to discuss the issue, which would have been unwise.

  Yusuf gestured for Becca to stay in the car and returned to the soldiers. Finally, he came back to the car. “You may go on. Soldiers say be careful. Kidnappings around here.”

  We all breathed deeply.

  Yusuf was climbing into the driver’s seat when he deigned to share the rest of the news from the soldiers. “You are French for this part of trip,” he said. “You have to be French.”

  “Why?” Becca’s eyes narrowed.

  “Because French, they not give much money to guards,” he said. “Americans, British, Germans, they okay. Guards want to go with them.”

  We were put in our place nicely!

  I still thought, perhaps naively, we’d be safest of all with no guards, no one to draw attention to us. And the trip would be pleasanter on our own.

  Becca started to chuckle. By the time we were in the outskirts of ’Amran, our whole carload was roaring in laughter, including Yusuf.

  “That was the funniest reason in the world to become French!” gasped Becca. Yusuf tried to keep a dignified straight face, but he broke into a wide grin, which had to accommodate itself around a large wad of qat in his cheek.

  A few miles on, Becca insisted we stop in the old intact walled city of ’Amran—set apart from the bustling, industrialized modern town. “I need a few pictures of the smoothed mud they use here for building. And there are still a few original alabaster windows. But we’ll have to walk.”

  Yusuf let us off at the gate nearest the road, and we went through the stone-topped-with-mud opening into tiny lanes, too small for cars. Unlike the old part of Sana’a, walled ’Amran was relatively secure even from motorcycles. Blessed peace as we walked in the shadows of the multistoried mud houses, decorated less with white gypsum than in Sana’a; windows were covered with simple wooden screens or even scraps of tin pounded into appropriate shapes. There were, indeed, alabaster windows. And there were even some of the old cut-glass windows, traditionally made by Jewish craftsmen, their colors and designs infinitely more lovely than most being made today. Yemenis will tell you that the best artistic craftsmen from the past were Jewish.

  Having enjoyed a brief stroll through the ’Amran streets, Becca taking copious notes, me snapping photos, we started back toward the city wall and the gate where we’d originally entered.

  We needed a drink stop after walking around in the dry air, so we stepped into one of the tiny shops for something bottled and carbonated. A vivid splotch of red seemed to be bargaining at the little table. And then came a high, imperative voice: “But I demand a Coca Cola. You must have some out in back.” Alex Metzger, once more breaking my harmony.

  I took a shaky breath. “Hi,” I said.

  She whirled around. “Well, fancy meeting you here! I guess you really are going to Sa’da, then?” The ubiquitous cigarette was waving in her hand. The shopkeeper’s mouth gaped; he didn’t know what had hit him.

  “Yes, we are. I want to see the famous architecture there. And what about you? Are you en route to the north, too?”

  “Oh, I’m just out sightseeing, and checking the souq.” Breezily. “Can’t waste any of the precious time I have when I’m here. ’Amran’s nice, and there’s good jewelry.”

  “Yes. But I’m afraid we need to leave. And by the way, Alex, we have some Coke in the car, if you want it.”

  “Oh, no, no. Wouldn’t think of it. You run along. I know you’re in a hurry.” Was Alex trying to get rid of us? Did she think we’d hop into the first good silver shop and nab something she’d had her eye on?

  So much about Alex was mysterious. Was she really here on a jewelry search? Why didn’t she want us around?

  Was I being over-sensitive?

  And where had Alex been the night before, when Christine was shot? All acquaintances have to be considered as suspects.

  “By the way,” I said, “Christine Helmund was shot yesterday. I assume you knew about that. Awful thing.”

  Alex stopped in her tracks. Her face turned ashen under the makeup, creating grotesque splotches on her cheeks and around her eyes. “What? What did you say? Is she badly hurt? No. No.”

  Hard as it was for me to feel sympathy for this self-centered woman, why had I broken the news so roughly? She looked as though she might faint. I grabbed her arm gently and guided her to the nearest thing to sit on, a barrel of honey.

  The shopkeeper had disappeared, apparently to let this ferengi woman deal with this ferengi dilemma. Becca had stepped outside.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you had heard. She’s dead, I’m afraid.”

  Alex’s eyes stared straight ahead, expressionless. “I left for ’Amran early this morning,” she said. “I didn’t hear. What happened?” Her voice sounded choked, uncertain. None of the usual strident self-confidence.

  “Someone shot into the Caffe d’Italia. Christine was alive when they took her to the hospital, but she died during the night. I didn’t realize you knew her so well.”

  Alex didn’t answer for a while. “I didn’t know her well, no. But I wanted to know her.”

  The two of us were silent for a moment.

  Then Alex burst into tears. “You have to understand,” she sobbed. “Christine is my daughter.”

  CHAPTER 82

  “Oh, friend, be patient when things get bad. No, no.

  O time, the law of the good is always envied.”

  Yemeni poetry translated by Steven C. Caton in “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”

  Shocked, I patted Alex’s shoulder, even gave her a hug. Trying to make better what cannot be made better. “I’m sorry, Alex. I had no idea.”

  Alex grasped my arm, blindly. We all need comfort in moments of grief. I felt warmer toward this annoying woman than I ever had. She wasn’t as tough as she seemed. I had had no idea she even had a child.

  Her tears came now from way below the surface, and probably no longer had just to do with the shooting. The patted shoulder heaved. “I gave her up when she was two months old. A beautiful child. I wasn’t married to her father. I decided to send her to Sweden with expatriate friends from Cairo. Motherhood was not my thing.”

  “Well, well. Motherhood was not my thing, either.” I refrained from saying I wished it had been, that I’d almost been a mother. No. Push it down. Some memories must lie low, in the dark. Attention back to Alex: “Does, uh, did Christine know about the relationship? When did the two of you meet?”

  “She found out a few days ago. Michael Petrovich told her, I think.” Her look gave a clear idea of what Alex thought of Michael. “He got what he deserved.” Her tone dripped acid through her tears.

  “Why would Petrovich talk to her about that? I saw them having dinner, but they didn’t look
terribly close.”

  Alex was still crying. “No one was close to Michael,” she said. “No one.”

  It wasn’t the moment for an interrogation, but my mind was alive to possibilities. Alex and Michael? I felt sorry for Alex all over again. She may have lost two family members in the last week. Dysfunctional family, yes. But family.

  I asked Alex if she needed anything, but she was pulling back into her usual standoffish self. “No. I will go back to Sana’a.” Then, rather grudgingly, “Thanks. I know you were being kind.”

  “’Bye, then,” I said, and patted Alex’s shoulder. She shrugged, then touched my hand. I didn’t want to leave her alone. “Don’t you have a driver somewhere near? At least let me get him.”

  She waved me off decisively. Tragedy lay in the gesture. Not only would she suffer over long-held secrets. She would suffer alone.

  The khaki 4WD that I’d seen earlier sat in the dusty parking area. No one was in it, not even a driver. “Did you see who came in that jeep?” I asked Yusuf, our driver.

  “La, no.” Yusuf looked regretful.

  Oh, well. Maybe it had nothing to do with us, after all. Maybe it was the car Alex was traveling in.

  No, it couldn’t have been that. Alex had already been in ’Amran when we arrived. How many other people I knew might be on this well-traveled road? Was Alex being pursued? Were we? It was a small world. Small and increasingly claustrophobic.

  The rest of the trip to Sa’da was uneventful. We passed the town of Raydah, formerly a center for Yemen’s Jewish community and even now home to a few Jewish Yemenites who chose not to emigrate to Israel in ’49. It wasn’t Tuesday, Raydah’s market day, so we didn’t stop.

  As the sun neared its apex, the scraggy hills took on their least attractive aspect of the day: sharp contours dulled and made monotonous by white daylight. Becca and I nibbled more or less non-stop, offering Yusuf things he could hold and eat as he contested our way along the truck-ridden road.

  Checking behind us, I no longer saw the khaki Toyota. Good. I felt safer without that tail.

  At the last checkpoint, manned by armed tribesmen rather than uniformed soldiers, Yusuf returned to say we were giving a ride to someone. Becca moved to the back with me. A man got into the passenger seat, giving a curt nod to us in the back. We nodded back but didn’t open our mouths.

  CHAPTER 83

  “Verily, in that house there will be neither sheikh nor army captain.

  Verily, the wild lion is in the mountain, and the fox is in its lair.”

  Traditional poetry from Steven C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”

  Halima chewed the fingernails on her hennaed hands. Alone in the mufraj, her thoughts centered on Elizabeth. Her friend, Elizabeth. Her guest, in a way.

  No word in Arabic has quite the power of sadik, friend. By Arab tradition, the friend, the guest, has total claim on one’s loyalties. You offer the friend what you have. You protect the friend.

  Halima feared she had sent Elizabeth into danger by asking her to go to Sa’da. Had she put family ahead of friend?

  It was small comfort that she had once had the privilege of saving Elizabeth. That night a few years ago was etched in Halima’s brain. The late knock on the door. The servant’s steps up the stairs. A whisper from the maid at the mufraj door. “Your friend is held in jail!”

  The whisper had sent chills up Halima’s spine. “Why? Where?”

  When she learned Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Old City, near her house, Halima had known she had to act.

  Ali had been about fourteen at the time. Old enough to have a jambiya at his waist and the warrior courage required in a Yemeni tribal man. Old enough, in fact, to be married in Yemen, though not in this educated household.

  Halima had whispered the problem into his ear. Ali had nodded and they had left on the instant, taking their faithful servant Abdul as escort. They didn’t tell their father, the sheikh. He would be in far more danger from any confrontation than a woman and a boy.

  Ali had walked ahead while Halima had glided behind him, black from head to toe. No one noticed as they entered the building near the mosque where people were frequently detained.

  The police had tried to ignore them both, until Ali identified them as children of the respected Sheikh Abdullah. This was not a family who could be ignored.

  After consultations, the police had escorted Elizabeth out. She looked the worse for wear—hair untidy under a scarf, dusty, frightened. Not like the Elizabeth Halima had always known.

  “What did you do to her?” she asked the policemen icily. “She is my friend. She is a guest in our country.” Under her breath, as she, Ali, Abdul, and Elizabeth had walked out, she murmured, “Pigs. They are pigs.”

  All Halima could hope now was that Elizabeth would not run into any more pigs. And that Ali had not become one, in some sense of the word.

  To Halima, only pigs would hurt innocent people.

  CHAPTER 84

  Following the asphalt road, after one final hill you get to the Wadi Haf. Here the farms are almost hidden behind huge trees and hedges of tamarisk. However, after a few miles the valley widens, and the first modern buildings line both sides of the road. A row of shops, banks and hotels follows, until you reach an open gate in a mud brick city wall: Sa’dah.

  Insight Guides of Yemen

  I didn’t like leaving Alex in ’Amran but couldn’t think of anything to do, since she didn’t want assistance. I didn’t tell Becca about Christine’s secret. It seemed too personal.

  At last we drove into the plain, hills forming the backdrop for the walled and mysterious city of Sa’da.

  I caught my breath, even in the noontime glare. Clusters of neat, mud-layered houses, tapering slightly upward, rose like a mirage from a foreground of vineyards and sparse orchards. Each house had sharp tips on its corners that looked like two sets of horns.

  Even from a distance, we saw that every house was within call-to-prayer distance from at least one domed mosque with a white-laced minaret. I’d never seen a more overtly religious place—or an inhabited spot more endangered and deserving of preservation. Becca, with her love of architecture, looked around with a rapt expression.

  The man who’d joined us asked Yusuf some questions and then gave him directions. Our driver seemed a little nervous, but followed the commands.

  Our first stop in Sa’da was the small clinic run by a Dutch missionary doctor, tucked unobtrusively into an alley near the northern gate, the Bab al Najran. Becca said she had met Dr. Jan Kamp and his American wife, Susan, in Sana’a, and liked them.

  I was favorably impressed, too, when Susan, in a white nurse’s uniform, came to greet us in the parlor. Her servant had offered us a long drink of cold, presumably boiled, water.

  “Excuse me, please. I’m helping just now with a delivery in the clinic. But later Jan and I would love to chat. Won’t you stay the night?” A sweep of her hand included our driver, Yusuf, in the invitation. She didn’t wear makeup, and her lack of regional accent proclaimed her to be from farming country in the Midwest. For a moment, life felt refreshingly normal.

  Becca was quick to take advantage of the offer. “We’ve got a few things to do this afternoon, Susan,” she said, “but Elizabeth and I will talk about whether we can stay with you. Our plan was to find a funduq, a hotel. Are there any good ones around here?”

  Susan laughed. “Of course you’re going to stay with us! You don’t want bedbugs, do you?”

  No, we certainly didn’t want bedbugs. We already had a lot on our agenda. My heart almost failed me when I thought about the hazy, hazardous mission of finding Ali, trying to send him home. How was I going to do this?

  Given the fanaticism of the imam in Sa’da, Ali himself could be in danger—or, depending on how brainwashed he was, a danger to me. How could a young man brought up in an enlightened family like the al Shems be drawn into the cult-like shadows of terrorism and martyrdom? How could he put his family in jeopardy like this? Surely
under everything lay that sacred trust in all Arab countries, family loyalty.

  If I could just see Ali, talk with him. Halima had told me he spoke English. My first job would be to deliver the careful messages Halima and Zuheyla had sent.

  The servant came into the room to say I was requested at the door. The man who had joined us in the car stood uneasily at the threshold, though I gestured he was welcome. In a low voice, he asked me if I had anything from “the family.”

  “The al Shems?” He was the messenger? “Selim?” That was the name provided on the note I’d received.

  He nodded.

  I gave him the two pieces notes Halima had entrusted to me. He nodded again and left. I hoped I’d done the right thing.

  The Kamps’ house had that special missionary look: we’ve come to stay, and this is home. The furniture was spartan but Western-styled. The beds would be far better than any hotel’s.

  With the sun nearly straight overhead, there was no time to waste. It was Saturday, and the legendary Souq al-Talh, six miles north of Sa’da, was only held on Saturdays. That was a place I could logically go to sightsee. It was a suitable place from which to report back to Washington. And it might be my best bet at getting a line on Ali.

  Becca said she would do her professional tour around Sa’da while I took the jeep and Yusuf. The old city was small and she would walk, with an escort offered by the Kamps. “I’m staying within the walls.”

  Both of us respected Sa’da’s dangerous reputation.

  CHAPTER 85

  Long life to you, as great as what the airplane carries

  Of heavy bombs.

  Traditional Yemeni greeting translated by Steven C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”

  Richard Queens choked on dust and rued the circumstances that necessitated rough travel like this. I could have been a real businessman. I could have lived in five-star luxury.