Woozily thanking God for fixing it for me to survive the day, I’d fallen asleep at last.
I was at a very low ebb. No longer the lion-hearted adventuress with a proud, if still obscure, destiny to fulfil, no longer a worthy fruit of Sir Harry’s loins, I was sick to death of acting the haughty memsahib. Video cameras and electric carving knives, that Brummie bully with his boy band good looks and, to cap it all, the indignity of ransoming myself for a can of baked beans and a tin of Colman’s mustard powder, had taken a grievous toll. All kinds of doubts and fears were assailing me. It strikes me now, as I write, that after so many daytime terrors I was suffering a dark night of the soul. This, at least as much as Mrs Rev’s misdemeanours, might account for the turn events began to take…
First things first though. A horribly bright electric light, like an SS officer’s interrogation lamp, was shining straight in my face.
‘Madam Roza!’
‘If that’s you Aziz,’ I hissed, squinting into the glare to make out a portly black form behind it, ‘switch that thing off immediately!’ Which woman who hasn’t been able to perform her nightly beauty routine and is feeling a little dehydrated needs a spotlight shone in her face?
‘Sssssh! Quick! Get up!’
Wide awake, on my feet, I was instantly, if irrelevantly, aware that my teeth needed a good scrub. My watch told me it was 2.30 in the morning. Since I’d had no more than a couple of hours of uncomfortable sleep after the most atrocious of days spent under his roof, I decided I wouldn’t be leaving Abu Abdul Wahhab a souvenir of my visit. I didn’t have the time to go rootling through my suitcase for it anyway; it wouldn’t kill the old goat to die without tasting another baked bean.
‘The camels are waiting,’ Aziz whispered, grabbing my suitcase with one hand and my right elbow with the other before frogmarching me fast to the exit.
‘Camels?’ Was I really awake? Yes. In the clear light of a half moon I could already make out the towering silhouette hulks of three humped beasts, two of them with riders. The fresh night air, the bright moonlight and a realistic prospect of some pampering at the Aden Sheraton in the near future had an instant tonic effect on my spirits. ‘Our getaway vehicles, Aziz?’ I whispered, unable to suppress a giggle, ‘You didn’t think of upgrading to a car?’
‘Certainly, Madame Roza,’ he whispered back with a nervous giggle, heaving my treasure chest up to the person seated on the third camel, ‘and we’d have woken the entire household with the noise of the engine. These people are gun merchants with a side-line in kidnapping and car-stealing, and some strong connections to al-Qaeda.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know!’ I shot back at him, ‘but that’s not the whole story -’
‘No time to chat! Here,’ he commanded, ‘as quickly as you can, put your foot here on my hands. Good! Up!’
Impelled from below by Aziz, I was being hauled from above by a more powerfully muscled male, and installed in a prime position at the front of the first camel. With those strong arms around me, things had suddenly taken a definite turn for the better. A delicate whiff of expensive aftershave, clearly discernible above the stink of hot camel, suggested that my elevation had been as much social as physical, as did the man’s well-modulated English tones.
‘Are you quite comfortable?’ he asked.
He couldn’t have guessed quite how comfortable I was suddenly feeling with his breath blowing warm as a hair dryer on a low setting at the nape of my neck, and his firm torso cradling my back like an ergonomically designed car seat. Behind us we could hear a volley of muttered curses from the inconveniently bulky Aziz as he struggled to straddle his camel with what sounded like ribald encouragement from the third camel-rider. But at last our mounts were all clicked and kicked into action, and the convoy moved off in the moonlight at a sedate walking pace.
‘Please do not think that Yemenis are so primitive that many of us rely on camels for transport,’ the stranger murmured in my ear, ‘- people generally like to have them as status symbols these days. Some are kept for their milk and many, like these ones, are trained for our famous camel races – oh no!..’
Our camel was just then being overtaken by Aziz’s animal, which just happened to be suffering an appalling attack of diarrhoea to judge by the look and stink of what its cyclically swishing tail was spattering me with as it raced ahead of its chums. Explaining that the beast must have been grazing on some lethal local weed called rak, my protector gallantly surrendered his head cloth, suggesting I swathe my face in it for protection. I used it to wipe off the worst of the ordure, but what did a light spray of faecal matter really matter when we were now facing an emergency? Our animal had begun protesting its foul treatment by Aziz’s madly competitive beast by emitting a long, loud retching noise that was alerting the inhabitants back at the mud castle to our departure.
Almost immediately muffled shouts and bangs were to be heard. The mud castle which was still only about a hundred yards away. First one of the brothers appeared at its entrance with his gun, then the others. All of them were soon shouting furiously and firing in our general direction, which caused all the camels to burp and retch in concerted terror and break into a shambolic racing gallop. This was where I scored; if the camel diarrhoea had hit me smack in the face, any bullet fired from behind would have first to pass through my companion before it reached me and anyway, we were back at the front of the convoy. I had rarely felt safer, especially as the exceptionally bumpy ride forced my human shield to clasp me more tightly than ever in his powerful arms. I was only a little concerned for my suitcase, hoping its guardian, who was directly in the line of fire, wouldn’t find himself absorbing a few bullets for it.
‘Oh no!’ breathed my protector.
‘Have you been hit?’
‘No, but it won’t be long now-’ the sound of car engine was unmistakable.
I felt one of his arms release me. With the one-armed skill of a professional polo player, he was managing to load, aim and fire his gun at our pursuers who, by then, had almost drawn alongside us. I glimpsed the Brummie at the wheel, and Saeed in the passenger seat firing out of the window. Standing in the open back of the pick-up were Abdul Wahhab and Haroun, both of them without their glasses (surely a lucky handicap) and shockingly balding, the moonlight playing on their shiny pates. I discovered that those tastefully coloured checked headcloths most Yemenis wear cover a multitude of sins.
‘Hah! we’ve shot out their tyres – that Mohammad at the back is a crack shot. Hah! – I’ve just shattered their windscreen,’ my defender yelled in my ear, ‘They’re losing speed and veering all over the place now…! Now we’ll only be in real trouble if they get one of the camels in al-asaab - ’
‘Sorry?’
‘I think in English you say fatlick.’
‘Do you mean fetlock?’
‘Yes, fetlock, and thank you for helping to improve my English – for us there is always the danger of mixing up vowel sounds – Arabic vowel sounds are not fixed you know,’ he panted hotly in my ear, while firing off another volley of shots.
‘What’s so vital about the fetlock?’ Making myself heard almost involved kissing him.
‘Every Arab knows that the fetlock is the Achilles heel of the camel,’ he murmured, his lips brushing my ear caused me to shiver with delight, ‘no camel will move if just one of its fetlocks is injured.’
‘Interesting! Another thing – I’ve always wondered, how long can they keep going on the contents of their hump? –‘
Some may question how my saviour and I managed to have such a long and informative exchange about our respective languages and the finer points of camel-care while we were fleeing at top camel speed, fighting for our lives and dodging bullets. The answer is, I don’t know; with the benefit of hindsight I can only suggest that the chemistry between us was so immediately active we just couldn’t help sparing the time and energy to get to know each other better, however dangerous our situation.
‘Look, we’ve lost them!…’ With th
e Brummie blinded by a shattered windscreen the old red pick-up had gone careering off crazily in the direction of a sheer stone hillside, with one surviving baldy in the back, screaming in lonely terror at the inevitable. On impact with that black stone wall, the vehicle burst into a large ball of fire in a billowing cloud of black smoke. I dared to peer behind us for the first time. How had our convoy fared in the affray? At a glance, in that dim dawn light, unexpectedly well. Aziz was liberally spattered in blood, but still upright on his mount and grinning with relief. Although I couldn’t make out what, if anything, had become of the third rider, I did catch a glimpse of silver in the moonlight: my wheelie case.
Chapter Eight
Half a mile away to our left, between the jagged summits of more black mountains, the sky was lightening like a fading bruise.
We stopped at a white-washed mini mosque furnished with a solitary tap and a battered tin cup on a chain. I gathered from my mysterious companion that it was the kind of place wealthy Yemenis of yore, frankincense traders for the most part, used to build for the salvation of their souls and the comfort of thirsty travellers. A nice idea of course, but a tad archaic if one was trying, as I assumed the Yemenis must be, to jump-start one’s economy. Automatic and coin-, or perhaps token-, operated dispensers of chilled water at regular intervals along every highway would do a better job of providing vital refreshment and badly needed employment, I thought. After all, they’d have to be maintained and kept topped up with fresh water and emptied of their earnings…
It was time to assess the damage done and rest the camels a while. It was also time I got a good look at the crack-shot in whose cosily cradling arms I’d been luxuriating for the past half hour or so. Without an adequate idea of what I can only call the grace of this man’s being, the remainder of my story will make little sense. With such an understanding, the received tabloid version of my sojourn in Yemen takes on a very different hue.
Tall, taller than me by more than half a foot and far taller than anyone else I’d seen in Yemen, he was broad of shoulder and mighty of neck. If I’m deliberately choosing to render this portrait in terms bordering on the mythical that’s because he was something of a colossus astride that camel. Cheekbones as high as an Aztec king’s flanked a nose as nobly hooked as any Saudi prince’s and all his features were moulded in the sort of caramel-tinted skin one finds in the East Indies. Shining black eyes the shape of liquorice drops would not have shamed a Javan princess. Matching shiny black hair cut en brosse and a pair of, frankly, embarrassingly kissable lips only enhanced the whole. And all the aforementioned was set off to perfection, of course, by a sober grey futa, an Egyptian cotton white shirt and a pair of simple, good quality Italian leather sandals.
South-east Asian crossed with desert Bedouin and then again with a lumberjack or ice-hockey player from somewhere in the northern hemisphere, it struck me that he was to the human race what fusion is to fashionable cuisine – sophisticated, intriguing and utterly surprising. Just one of his ingredients in the wrong place or quantity and the result could have been a repellent dog’s dinner. But who was he, and how and why had he come to involve himself in such a perilous operation to rescue a foreign stranger?
The time was not yet right for personal introductions. For a start, Aziz needed medical attention. Thanks to a passing bullet having shaved off most of his left nostril, the pretty pink shirt and futa he’d been wearing the day before were drenched in blood. And, although our borrowed camels had survived their ordeal with hardly a scratch - fetlocks and all - it was clear that the fourth member of our little party was missing in action, presumed dead. He had toppled off his mount leaving my case securely fastened to the pommel of his saddle by an elastic bungee cord.
Once I’d absorbed the ghastly shock that my rescue had cost a man his life, I supplied Aziz with a couple of L’Oreal wet-wipes from my case and began to explain to my companions how the baked bean deal I’d neatly struck with Abu Abdul Wahhab would actually have resulted in my being dropped off at the Aden Sheraton no later than lunchtime that day. The mysterious stranger’s admiring laughter at my action replay of the old stick insect reaching out to grab the can of beans and the tin of mustard gave me a surprisingly fine view of some golden molars though, by my reckoning, his sense of humour was a still more bankable asset. Who on earth could this man in many million be, I wondered, but it was still not the moment to enquire.
‘You may be interested to know Madam,’ he was saying, ‘that the person you refer to as ‘a stick insect’ is the old Sultan of the bin Husis. He was one of perhaps fifty little sultans who ruled the tribes around Aden with guidance and financial backing from the British until the end of British rule in 1967,’ he told me, filling and then offering me the battered tin cup to drink from. ‘The British sometimes sent people like him to school in England to turn them into competent administrators. But I’m surprised you were not forced to taste his bitterness against perfidious Albion for betraying the defence treaty they all signed with London in the 19th century, and for feeding them to the Marxist wolves in ‘67!’
‘No, no bitterness at all – quite the reverse I would say!’
‘Very, very interesting,’ he said, with a meaningful look at Aziz as he loosened the girth of one of the camels, ‘A wise man! Like most of us in the south he knows that we were better off under the British all those years ago than under own home-made Marxists, let alone this band of thieves in Sanaa…’
I was about to cut short any political diatribe by seizing the opportunity to ask him to identify himself and explain his presence when Aziz interrupted to say in a distinctly aggrieved tone, ‘Madam Roza, don’t you want to know how we tracked you down so quickly?’
He’d had a very hard night so could be forgiven some tetchiness, but I suspected that my friend was battling a powerful sexual jealousy, that his nose was not only butchered but seriously out of joint. Who could blame him for being in love with the stranger? ‘Of course I want to know how you found me, Aziz!’ I said, patiently. ‘I should have guessed you’d do your best to because, after what you told me about your father, I knew you’d have to get the car back. What a pity we couldn’t manage that, but I’m sure your father will understand when you tell him to the whole story, about how much danger we were in and how Mohammad died…’
‘But he will get the car back,’ interjected the stranger, ‘you must understand how things are in Yemen. One day soon, perhaps as early as next week, men from Mohammad’s tribe will go to the new sheikh of the bin Husi tribe – not the old sultan, you understand - and demand compensation for Mohammad’s death. They will ask for the usual 50 guns stipulated by tribal law, but the tribe will prefer to return the car but that will cost them nothing. So they will agree on that. Of course, Aziz who employed Mohammad to assist in your rescue will already have compensated Mohammad’s tribe, the Bani Walids, with an agreed number of guns – probably 25. You see how this way everyone wins? The bin Husis do not have to buy guns, your kidnappers are rightly punished for their infamy with a few deaths in the family, Mohammad’s tribe is properly compensated and Aziz’s father gets his car back!’
‘I see now!’ I breathed, dazzled by the speed and symmetry of his problem-solving. But Aziz was not: ‘Everyone’s a winner, as you say, except for Mohammed’s wives and twelve children and me, because guns don’t grow on trees and I’ll have to borrow to buy that many.’
Once again I sensed a touch of the green eye. The top note of bitterness in Aziz’s voice was sharp enough to stop me gazing up at our friend in frank and curious admiration. I offered to help foot the bill, ‘It’s the least I can do, Aziz, but there’s something else I don’t quite understand,’ I said, turning the full beam of my attention back to the stranger, ‘We must have killed at least three of those brothers in the fire-fight, so why won’t the sheikh of their tribe approach the sheikh of yours and demand even more compensation?’
I could tell by his smile that I’d asked an intelligent question and felt as
pleased as a schoolgirl who’d got all her sums right. I might even have blushed.
‘Why? Because that al-Amra clan of the bin Husi tribe was recently outlawed by the other clans in the tribe for dealing in faulty guns, claiming they were British-made and charging for that quality of merchandise when they were old Russian rubbish. The al-Amras will be very happy to ingratiate themselves with their sheikh again by handing over the car and will not make further trouble.’
‘Oh, I see!’ I said, giving him another lingering look. I was beginning to glimpse the depths of my ignorance about Yemen. If I was to have a chance of surviving, let alone, thriving there I could do with an interpreter. What was needed was what people like Sir Harry travelling in the Ottoman Empire in the mid 19th century would have called a ‘dragoman’ or what foreign reporters these days call a ‘fixer’; Aziz would do, but I was beginning to covet the stranger’s high-end range of services more than I could say. More curious than ever to know more of him, I nevertheless held back, knowing that Aziz would resume his none too subtle work of sabotage if I did not. ‘So how did you manage to find me so quickly?’I asked Aziz.
He launched into a tale about how a LandCruiser as expensive as his father’s, only six months old, was naturally fitted with a micro-chip that rendered it traceable anywhere in the world using GPS. Apparently, all the owner of a car as snazzy as that LandCruiser needed was a code for his laptop or his mobile phone which would link to that chip and show him an image of the car’s location. Unfortunately however, since Aziz’s politician of a father was the legal owner of the car, Aziz had been forced to call him in Sanaa, confess to the loss and then beg him for the requisite code.
‘Madam Roza, I swear to you that my father was more angry with me than ever before in my life. He threatened to cut off my manhood and feed it to dogs or hang it around my neck on a rope made with the sinews from my legs…’
‘Pervert!’ I exclaimed, disgusted.
A Foreign Affair Page 6