A Foreign Affair

by Stella Russell

  But best of all, I’d found the sweetest of billets-doux from Sheikh Ahmad himself scribbled in the margins of the page of blurb in the pack of paracetamol the fake medic left me. Unfortunately it was utterly unreadable, not just badly spelt. This precious crumb of intercourse set me dreaming. Deliberately disregarding the obstacles on the path to a ‘lived happily ever after’ outcome for our relationship – his inscrutability and four wives, our current imprisonment and, of course, the wider geo-politics of the matter - I dared to start fantasizing a future for us. First came a soft-focus image of us cantering across a Marscape on a camel. Next, I pictured myself as a comely consort to the first ruler of a newly independent south Yemen; hadn’t the late King Hussein of Jordan married a statuesque British blond? Finally, footage of me seated on a brocade sofa flanked by a couple of toffee-coloured cherubs playing with a rope of pearls around my neck while laughing up at their fond father, flooded my mind; three pairs of liquorice black eyes and a single pair of blue ones – actually, might some of them be green in accordance with the genetic experiments that Austrian monk conducted on sweet peas? Well, whatever colour those eyes were, they’d all be shining with love. Oblivious to my surroundings, careless of my fate, I was in such a sweet, tender mood by the time Scotsman showed up with another Tesco bag filled with Tupperware at around 2pm that his puncturing opening gambit shocked me to tears.

  ‘I’ve got nothing but some food and bad news for you,’ was what he said. ‘I’ve come straight from a meeting with general al-Majid upstairs. Are you aware that with the single possible exception of the president himself he’s regarded as the most powerful – some would say dangerous - person in this country.’

  Sheikh Ahmad had said something of the sort, ‘Not a man to have as one’s enemy.’

  ‘Certainly not, and my meeting with him did not go well.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No. He appears to be of the very firm opinion that your unprovoked and abominably ill-timed physical attack on the vicar’s wife, Marigold, yesterday morning was aggressively homosexual in intention…’

  ‘What?’ I giggled in disbelief, as much at the fact that Mrs Rev’s first name should be Marigold as at the idea of my desiring her, but the ambassador wiped the smile off my face with: ‘It might interest you to know that the penalty for homosexual acts in Yemen is death.’

  ‘Thank you, actually I did know that.’ I recalled Aziz’s tragic letter to me, ‘But this is just too ridiculous! Tell that snaky al-Majid to get hold of Marigold. I’m sure she’ll be only too happy to set him straight on the matter. She can’t stand the sight of me!’

  ‘I gather that one of the guards called to the incident yesterday reported that Marigold thanked you for “the massage”. It seems that the general has often travelled to western capitals and sampled the wares of massage parlours…’

  ‘Rottten reptile!’ I blustered while the ambassador quietly administered a last lethal thrust by informing me that, in Yemen, the death penalty was usually carried out by laying a person on their back on the ground and firing a single bullet through their heart.

  I sat there in numbed silence, my thoughts racing hither and yon in search of a viable exit while my visitor quietly set about arranging various opened Tupperware containers on the filthy floor. Ravenous after eating only sunflower seeds all morning, I was soon distracted from contemplating my imminent and violent demise by the fabulous spread he was laying out on my mattress. There was hummus, a cucumber and parsley salad, some tinned tuna, a pair of boiled eggs, four fresh flatbreads, half a sponge cake and a handful of Quality Street. If this was my last meal in the land of the living, I wasn’t complaining.

  The food must have had the desired effect of concentrating my mind; I was half way through the second boiled egg and eyeing the tuna when I experienced a lightning bolt of inspiration: ‘This daft new sex charge is actually a blessing in disguise,’ I asserted, ‘Look, if the press are allowed to get a good bite at the story, the gay-in-distress angle is bound to swing public opinion behind me. The pink lobby – the likes of Peter Tatchell but maybe Mandelson and even Elton John – will be up in arms on my behalf the instant they learn I’m on death row on account of my sexual orientation. They’ll raise a hell of a hue and cry, I guarantee you! And Blair can’t afford to lose the mighty pink vote, can he? They’ll move heaven and earth to get me out of here!’

  A long silence was followed by a cautiously grudging: ‘I believe you may have a point here. There would be a frightful row about human rights and Washington’s gay lobby would back us up, which would certainly add clout. But you’ll still have a serious problem: the lack of any extradition treaty between the UK and Yemen. If the Yemenis feel like it, there’s nothing whatsoever to stop them hanging onto you, even hanging you for that matter, and frankly I am firmly of the opinion that General al-Majid has plans to do just that. He’s taken a real dislike to you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid I rather mishandled my meeting with him,’ I conceded glumly, scooping a last few crumbs of the sponge cake into my mouth, ‘but he’s a real baddy. I mean, he’s all tied up with the al-Qaeda lot himself, isn’t he?’

  ‘You’ve heard that, have you? Yes, but sadly it’s only a rumour, no one’s been able to prove it, though, believe me, there are plenty who’d like to…’ he said, sighing and helping himself to a purple Quality Street - my favourite.

  ‘But it’s obvious, even to me, and I’ll tell you how I know!’

  ‘I’m all ears, hen!’

  After painting the scene in that breeze-block carport where the boy-band brothers had sat and chewed qat while discussing my fate, I lightly sketched in the details of their preparations for my execution by electric carving-knife, before explaining how the whole event had been called off at the last moment, all thanks to a call from General al-Majid.

  ‘He called them? Not the other way round. Are you sure of that?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure of that! And of the name, because those boys kept repeating it until they were blue in the face, scurrying around like frightened mice, terrified of putting a foot wrong with the big boss. That’s what it sounded like. And just yesterday I ran into the one with the Birmingham accent – he’s in here too – so he can corroborate what I’m saying!’

  ‘This is more like it! Good lassie!’ he said, popping a toffee in his mouth, ‘I’m going straight to the president with this! He’ll be chuffed to buggery. He’s been telling me and my American counterpart for ages, at least a year, that he suspects General al-Majid of being hand-in-glove with the Islamists and plotting a coup against him, and there we were thinking it was just a wee ruse to get us to stay with the devil we knew and go on backing him, but it looks like he’s right on the money…’

  ‘But why hasn’t he just sacked him or had him bumped off? No, I’m sorry but I can’t let you have the other purple one,’ I protested, snatching it off the dwindling pile of sweets before his freckly paw could reach it. ‘I mean they don’t stand on ceremony in this part of the world, do they? A little car accident is easily arranged…’

  ‘You are getting the hang of the way the place works, aren’t you?’ he answered me, obligingly going for a strawberry cream instead. ‘But you haven’t factored in a crucial piece of the jigsaw: it just so happens that al-Majid’s standing among the special forces – the ones with all the best weapons – is reportedly extremely high.’

  ‘You’re saying al-Majid’s more powerful than the president? So how’s my information going to remedy anything? And can we be quite sure he’s the biggest baddy when, without his phone intervention on that occasion, I would have been a goner. If he’s such an Islamist why on earth d’you think he put a stop to my beheading? Perhaps I should be thanking rather than shafting him!’

  ‘Oh, don’t let any of that throw you off course! He probably thought he had more to gain by proving that Britain had neo-colonialist ambitions in south Yemen, and decided he’d give you enough rope to hang yourself with, which you duly did, in spad
es. But never mind about that now. The important point is that the president will be able to go public with this anti-al-Majid story and turn public opinion against the bugger. The vast majority of Yemenis can’t stand these bearded Islamists with their bombs and mayhem, especially since they’ve given the Americans a reason to start using their drones here. They’re livid at those bin Laden types for ruining the country’s tourist trade, every kind of trade, because no one dares insure any ships to dock at Aden anymore and they’ve got the Saudis on their backs…’

  The ambassador’s leisurely, discursive approach to the challenge of sparing me the misery of spending my seventh night in Yemen in jail was starting to grate, as much as the way he was still helping himself to my sweets, ‘Ok, Ok – so you’re sure this’ll do the trick?

  ‘No, I’m not at all sure but it’s the only card we’ve got so we’d better play it,’ he said, helping himself to a last mint-green triangle before heaving his cream-clad bulk off my mattress.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  ‘Nothing to eat?’

  ‘I thought you’d prefer something to read.’

  ‘Why would I want to read the memoirs of a woman who had a much better time travelling in these parts eighty years ago than I’ve had?’ I grumbled, shoving a dog-eared copy of Freya Stark’s The Southern Gates of Arabia straight back in the bag.

  ‘Are you sure about that? As I recall, she had to summon the RAF to airlift her out of the Wadi Hadramaut when she went down with the measles.’

  ‘So what? At least she wasn’t condemned to death on a trumped up charge of homosexuality. At least she left Yemen alive!’

  ‘A fair point.’

  The ambassador and I were having this tetchy exchange in the back of the embassy LandCruiser, while being driven at top speed in the direction of the president’s palace through the crowded, pot-holed streets of twilit central Sanaa. It was the height of qat downer time, when Yemeni drivers are at their most reckless and pedestrians their most clueless. Hurled from side to side, bumping our heads on the car’s ceiling, overheated and deafened by the hooting of horns and sirens, neither of us were at our best. The presence in the front passenger seat of the security guard I’d merrily instructed to go and fuck his niece at the Silent Valley memorial service a few days before, was further unnerving me. ‘I knew you were trouble, Flashman’ he’d muttered, as I’d climbed aboard.

  I was also in two minds about the excursion. On the one hand quitting CLIT’s foul-smelling basement had been a gigantic relief; the ambassador had assured me that the president’s special request for a first-hand account of General al-Majid’s telephonic high treason just might - if I was very, very lucky - win me a stay of execution. On the other hand, with every revolution of the LandCruiser’s wheels, I was travelling further and further away from Sheikh Ahmad, my pole star and raison d’etre.

  After skirting mile after mile of the presidential fortress’s high perimeter wall, passing some twenty evenly spaced watchtowers and swinging through the sort of grandiose gateway one might expect to find in a Legoland, the car came to a halt at last. A soldier dressed in fatigues so spanking new they were still shiny indicated that, while the ambassador and I were to follow him inside the fortress, the security guard must remain in the car.

  ‘Sorry! It’s a “Yemenis only” do by the look of it,’ I teased him.

  ‘Flasher!’ he retorted.

  ‘Loser!’ I shot back.

  Not a very adult start to an occasion of the deadliest importance: my meeting with a foreign head of state who happened to be in a position to decide whether I lived or died. But of course, I hadn’t begun to face up to that stark truth. Was it TS Eliot who noted something about humans not being able to bear much reality? And don’t the banal and trivial always truffle their way into events of solemn significance? A trouser seam splits as a man proposes marriage; a wig slips as a diva sings her last aria; a child projectile vomits from the prize-giving podium.

  We were ushered into a marbled atrium hallway furnished with a shallow plashing fountain that made me want to pee. In the mirrored walls of a corridor entered on the far side of it, I glimpsed myself looking very like Princess Di telling Martin Bashir she wanted to be queen of people’s hearts - all tragic, staring eyes and down-turned mouth. I noted some ghastly Louis XVI repro console tables and another of those giant portraits of the president in a lounge suit and sunglasses astride a fancily caparisoned horse before we arrived in a gloomy reception room the size of a couple of tennis courts, where another camouflage-clad soldier invited us to be seated on a gigantically elongated black velvet sofa. A third served us cans of coke and black tea in what looked like crystal double shot glasses.

  ‘If I were you, I’d sit down just as soon as you can once we’re in there,’ advised the Scot. ‘He’s short, can’t stand anyone towering over him. Washington’s just recalled my six-footer counterpart to replace him with a teeny Texan. Actually, I’ve got a theory about “vertically challenged” Yemeni rulers; if you read northern Yemeni history, you’ll see that it was all the shorties - Italians, Japs and Chinese - who got preferential treatment here…’

  ‘Fascinating!’

  I think he was trying to distract us both from our forthcoming ordeal. Fortunately, it was time to go in at last. A fifth soldier, accompanied by someone who turned out to be an official interpreter had appeared, the latter speaking into a mobile phone, to usher us through high double doors into the inner sanctum of a smaller reception room furnished with those floor level mattresses around the walls, bolster arm rests and cushions grandly covered in a thickly gold-threaded damask. Table lamps, the same fancy gilt kind Fiona had ordered from John Lewis before Christmas, cast a dim but warm glow over the face of the tiny dark figure lounging in the far corner of the room wearing a futa and half-moon spectacles and surrounded by paperwork and mobile phones. I had no trouble recognising the president from the dozens of posters, portrait photos and billboards I’d seen of him.

  ‘No, please, don’t get up!’ I told him, traversing the few yards of carpet in a flash. Confidently extending my hand to shake, I’d plonked myself straight down beside him before he could move a muscle. He looked a little startled, as if he might rise to his feet anyway to greet the ambassador, but the latter had clumsily followed my lead by scooting across the room in my wake and lowering himself heavily onto the cushions on the other side of me. I gave the president a chance to regain the initiative and take charge. He ordered a soldier to bring us refreshments and indicated to the interpreter that he would be superfluous to the occasion.

  ‘Ms Flashman,’ he began, pronouncing my name perfectly, ‘I am by no means a fluent speaker of the language of Shakespeare but I get a feeling about a person from the first moment I meet them. How else can I account for the fact that I’ve managed to keep dancing in the basket of snakes that is this country and all its conflicting factions for almost thirty-five years now? I am sensing that you and I will understand each other perfectly.’

  ‘How strange!’ I was kicking myself for failing to ask our Scot in Sanaa how to address Yemen’s president, ‘I had the very same feeling about you the instant I saw that gigantic billboard image of you, the one that greets any visitor to Yemen arriving by sea at Aden. Here’s a man I can do business with, is what I thought to myself…’

  He inclined his head graciously in return, ‘Yes, yes, you are most certainly a person I can do the business with. Please have a tea Ms. Flashman? Ambassador?’

  I let his unfortunate linguistic gaffe go without remark. For at least another ten minutes we continued to get the measure of each other, dancing around like a pair of fly-weight boxers, discovering we were ideally matched for the cut and thrust of elegant conversation, until at last it was time to tackle our ‘business’.

  ‘I understand that you have had a very interesting – perhaps too interesting! – week in my country. Please be so good as to tell me everything about your stay with the al-Amra family…’

  My
blow by blow account of my kidnapping and near-execution had him tut-tutting regretfully and jotting the odd note on a pad beside him, but for the entire duration of my account of al-Majid’s phone call to the Brummie, he watched me like a hawk, emitting the odd low growl of anger or barked instruction to one of the soldiers.

  I could tell that once he’d milked me of all the goods on his rival he lost all interest in my story, but I was determined that he should hear the tale of my heroically daring rescue by Aziz. Praising Aziz to the skies - emphasizing how dramatically his quick-thinking resolve in the matter of my escape contrasted with his abject terror of his father - would lead naturally on to a discussion of homosexuality and, from there, I hoped, to my own absurdly perilous situation.

  ‘My Moslem people here in Yemen are very, very shocked and disgusted by such unnatural practices, Ms Flashman,’ he observed testily after hearing me out in silence.

  ‘How interesting that you use the word “unnatural” to describe homosexuality! Perhaps you have heard of our greatest TV naturalist, David Attenborough? Well, you might like to get hold of some of his box sets. They’re quite an eye-opener. But if you’ll allow me, I’d like to make a serious point.’ Without pausing for his green light I proceeded to make one of my best speeches, perhaps because I wholeheartedly believed in every word I was saying:

  ‘…There are homosexual penguins, goats, dogs and zebra finches to name just a few species so, scientifically speaking, it’s quite wrong to describe homosexuality as unnatural, which means that it’s as gigantic and wicked an injustice to persecute a person who is homosexual as to punish one whose skin is black. Who are you, Mr President, or me, or His Excellency the ambassador here, or even your prophet Mohammad himself, to set about correcting or rejecting God’s handiwork? What does any one of us know about creating human beings in all their infinitely mysterious variety? Would you presume to instruct a Hadrami builder? Would I, an Englishwoman, tell a Yemeni how to wear his futa?’