Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

by Jacki Lyden

  "Will you marry me?" he says half jokingly. He leans forward on the balls of his feet, as if peering out over a ledge. "I want to get out of here." He is not joking. Outside my room is a parking lot where the Shortat al-Najda riot police line up to drill each morning. It's no accident that they drill where we journalists can see them, raising dervishes of dust. No accident that the world's gone crazy, and real craziness is no crazier than this. I think of all the people who want to get out of there, who don't want to live in the presence of craziness. Five little words. Get me out of here. Tal'eeni rrin hal jaheem. Get me out of hell, the people I meet plead. I wrote those words in "My Famous Book," but I didn't call it hell. I called it home, just as they do. Amir is not getting out, either. I listen to the megalomaniac telling his Evil Account. I put on a dress and interview the British hostages, driving with them as far as the edge of a city, where, on pain of death, they remain inside the boundaries of the lunatic. We're in it together. I sit in their darkened parked cars, listening to John Coltrane on a tape player with the lights of Baghdad behind us, staring at the destiny out beyond the city's periphery.

  "Good thoughts are an impervious armor," my mother wrote, quoting Mary Baker Eddy in her "Evil Account." "Clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort. And not only yourselves are safe but all whom your thoughts rest upon are thereby benefited."

  What if the opposite is true, I thought, reading her pages. What if you wished harm on someone and just by wishing it you could make it happen? Surely your thought would in some karmic way be the agent of your own destruction. "Evil and Slut," my mother wrote,

  implicated Kate in parties and blowouts, they would get blown up with air in the garages, I found the tire pumps, and then blown out at parties exhibiting hatred and hostility by my neighbors to the South. Did Kate have a tripod machine gun aimed at me? Sarah had a Magnum, Jacki's finger stirred the wine and my doctor slipped her an extra vial of cyanide. There was a Red Circle Inn, a pool of blood on the burial grounds. Evil gave her pills and injections and the "final shot" as he called it. Later the man remarried a woman who "turned" into a man. They were pursuing me and then I was pursuing them. They kept changing places; I couldn't tell which sex they were. They said it was germ warfare. I said "What?" He said, "You know what that is Dolores, don't you?" "Of course," I said, "but how does that fit into conversation?" "Well, you know, just suppose someone came in here and released millions of germs and vermin, that would be germ warfare, right?" I was covered with zillions of little bumps all over, as he went on to say there was a black widow spider in the room but instead he got the spider bites and we all watched as he got smaller and smaller and horns grew where he had been standing.

  Once I phoned my fiancé in New York from Cairo, the magazine editor who'd been present when my mother had last become ill. I had seen him in Egypt only the week before but wanted to say hello. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The sweat was pouring off me. I'd just spent hours at a Cairo police station talking my way out of my third detention in as many days, explaining why I was talking to clamoring, rag-wrapped workers whose brethren were coming home from Iraq as stiff as sticks rattling in pine boxes. I talked until I got back my tape and tape recorder. President Bush was in Cairo, alliances were being formed, proclamations were being made. I was supposed to file, I needed a quick break. I phoned New York. A woman's voice answered. A voice I knew. It was ten A.M. on a Sunday at the fanciest hotel in Manhattan. You got the wrong room, he insisted for days, but I didn't have the wrong room and he knew I knew it. You're crazy, he said. The front desk told me I wasn't in pointed tones of look-lady-we-can't-come-out-with-it-but-who-you-gonna-believe-him-or-your-own-ears? I felt that I loved evil, loved nothing but illusion and never would. I felt stunned and as thick as a flightless bird wandering the Nile mud. Like my mother when she is being swept away into insanity, betrayed by the loss of power. The world as we know it shuts down as lights wink off, one by one, the world waits, a loss of power you can almost feel draining from the very pores of your skin. Waiting for missiles. That's when Sheba comes.

  After I hung up, I sat carefully on the bed and counted how many nubby dots were in one square inch of the material: 168. Four hours to file. I called the foreign editor and said I couldn't do it. They said I could, I must, we know, we've been there, just do it and fall apart later. I listened to my own breath exhale and inhale, making the sound of human life, mingling with the car horns and urine-scented dust and cardamom and sweat and fear and gas exhaust and the crying in the streets over lottery tickets and the knowledge that the Sphinx and the pyramids were out there in the shrouded distance. Flesh glimmered in my brain and there was a woman bound in bedsheets. Crush a dream to see what's inside of it, grind it down to its various silicates and trample it under the feet of all who've passed through your life. Call it crazy. Without destruction, who is moved to act? Without destruction, who is moved to conquer?

  "President Bush," I spoke into my tape recorder, "said today that Egypt ... and Syria ... and Jordan ... stand against..." and then I stopped to think of the point of all this and what it had to do with my life. I'm sure I looked as though I was trying to find the point all that afternoon. The call of the muezzin said, This is another world, one hallowed five times a day in incomprehensible sentences. I wrote and spoke my story and cut my tape and made my deadline, but of course what I wrote was an illusion.

  THE EVIL ACCOUNT CONTINUES

  I want this continued harassment stopped. Elvin D, my neighbor, is a weak, wimpy ex-serviceman who always seems to do his wife's bidding. They both love driving stakes into my heart. Evil told me they both "blow up" in the garage. I didn't know what that meant until I found 4-5 tire pumps etc. Elvin was trained to use the submachine guns for the arsenal. My other neighbor could use all the artillery and practiced martial arts. My house is between them. On April 30th, Elvin trained a submachine gun on my dinner table where I was getting ready for a party. I saw it and I saw him move. I moved first, right out of his range.

  In the acid-yellow heat of August 1991 in Baghdad, the war is over, a memory dipped in the very real blood of those who'd been betrayed by the Americans. "You left us with this butcher," says a doctor at Mostashfa al-Kadhmiyaa Hospital, holding up what looks like a bound cat in swaddling but is, in fact, a dead baby. At Najaf in the shrines of Ali and Karbala, in the shrines of Hussein and Abbas, there are still bloodstains where the avenging Shiites were murdered after their U.S.-encouraged uprising. The holy shrines were where they took shelter from Saddam's bombs, where they were drawn and quartered and hung in the bab al sahan, the courtyards of the shrines. The bab al sahan ran with their blood, were littered with their smashed bodies. "We don't know how many dead are there," the soldiers tell the translators who tell us. "They are dogs, not people." The dead clogged the streets. At Basra we watch while the Tikriti governor, Latif Mahal, having murdered his dissident predecessor, places a feast of quzi lamb before us and talks of the coming famine, which Iraq's own government will ensure. The governor is dressed in military fatigues, striped shirt, a pistol on his hip. His eight-year-old son is dressed in exactly the same khakis and stripes and pistol. The governor claps his hands and his platter of half-eaten food, his qus'a, is removed to the floor. He claps again. His soldiers dive like dogs for the qus'a. You didn't come for us, the voices say. We were waiting. We took up arms, swords and pistols, and we died ungodly deaths, butchered stiff and grotesque in the iron-colored dust. You stood by and watched and never came. Can'tcha come up, Jack, can'tcha come up? T'gder tjih'na,Amrika, t'gder tji h'na?

  One day to my driver, Quasm, I say, "Let's play tempt-the-odds. Don't know when I'll be in El-Iraq in the near future. Going home to get married, so I believe. I want to photograph all the illegal things, all the statues of Saddam and the paintings of him, from resolute marsh Arab to resolute Kurdish mountaineer to resolute businessman in Italian suit to field marshal attire. God is everywhere, brother, and he sees what we are
doing. And the phony family tree at the Saddam Art Gallery with Nebuchadnezzar at the head and Saddam his descendant and all the bridges and statues and bombed facilities. I want to break every rule. If they stop me, you tell them I'm the Queen of Sheba!"

  Quasm laughs. He thinks I'm out of my mind. Majnun, crazy. He says it all the time. You're majnun, sahafiya. "The Queen of Sheba! Yes, sir! Whatever you want, sir!"

  And so we go. Another journalist, Walter, new here for one of the wires, says he wants to come along for he too is leaving Baghdad after this, his maiden voyage. I photograph the Standing Battle of a Million Men, the M'arakat al-Milyoon, where the statue of Saddam has his finger pointed toward the poisoned marshes of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. Defeating the Iranians. The human waves, the mustard gas used by the Iraqis in the war. I snap the camera openly, snap away. For Quasm it is an afternoon of adventure and mild hectoring, small bribes to each guard at each site. "If the Americans can take pictures of us from the sky, brother, then what do we care if this schoolteacher snaps her photos?" he jokes in Arabic, referring to me. I am photographing the Fourteenth of July Bridge, the major Baghdad bridge named for the Ba'ath revolution, bombed early in the war. It is strictly off-limits and I know it; there's a military installation on the other side. When I see the Republican Guard coming I walk slowly back to the car. Never hurry. The Republican Guard. You can tell them by the red triangles on their olive drab. They're not stupid, not from the provinces. They went to school. One of my colleagues interviewed one of their victims in an internment camp, a man who tattooed his own name on his arm so his family could identify him after death. Quasm smiles nervously, but Walter melts down in the front seat of the car. I slide like a lady without a care in the world into the rear seat of the car, as if we're at Saks Fifth Avenue. There may be trouble. There may not be. "Stay cool," I say to Walter.

  "E'teeni 7 kaamira," says the guard, outside the window as his partner unslings his rifle, points it at the car, but lazily.

  "A'ilati," I say. "Suwar 'a a'ilati." I make it clear that these are pictures of my family, and clutch the camera to my chest.

  Quasm is silent. The guard is pointing a rifle at him, ordering him out of the car. It is he, as I well know, who will suffer the most.

  "Atfaali," I say, as the soldier gestures again for the film, all but stuffing it down my shirt. I've learned a little Arabic, just enough to get by. "My children." He looks like a bored brooder. I can't tell how it'll go, it doesn't seem that urgent. Quasm is smiling as if he's been doing it since the day he was born.

  A scream unwinds like a curl of paper in a party blower. "Aaaaaaaaaaaaah! Give him the goddamn film! Give him the goddamn film!" It's Walter, twisting around in the front seat, waggling with fear, and the guard and Quasm and I are all mesmerized by the fact that he's losing it. The hot car is dirty and stuffy. Walter's rage packs us in tight. His meltdown is more dangerous than anything, and I'm suddenly anxious, but my hands are moving. I am rewinding film as surreptitiously as I can in the back seat under my long skirt, thinking Walter's tantrum is a perfect cover, but rather risky. Maybe he's trying to help me. The attention's on him. But Walter reaches back and grabs my arm and tears the camera from my hand, knocking open the back and partly exposing the film as I try to bang the light guard shut. We exchange looks of malevolence as he waves the camera over my head and gives it triumphantly to the astonished guard.

  The Republican Guard looks at me, then looks at Walter. He looks at Quasm, who is giving him the smile of a man stuck on a skewer. The guard's face isn't bored anymore, it is alive and complex, frittering with animation. He holds up the camera to the light and squints at us all again. I sputter with little jets of womanly indignation. "My family, a'ilati," I say again, thumping the air dramatically, impossibly ridiculous. "My little daughter. Binti el sagheera." The guard knows perfectly well that I'm a journalist and have about as many children as a nun. He knows perfectly well that I know that the Fourteenth of July Bridge is off-limits because everyone in Baghdad knows there's a military installation right behind it. Every journalist in Baghdad knows that the Iraqis hanged a guy who worked for the London Observer. They said he was a spy, but that guy was born in Iran. Well, just don't fool around. But we all fool around. The guard looks dead at Walter. He lifts his chin as if a speck of paper were stuck on his Adam's apple, he brushes his hand under his arched throat and simultaneously clicks his tongue against his teeth. The a'fta, the ultimate Arab gesture of disdain. The guard palms the camera back to me as though there might be something hot inside it. In Arabic he says, "Mo zawjha," "He's not her husband, is he?" waving us on. I see him shrug his shoulders. Quasm crawls back into the car offering the guard necessary sycophantic apologies, practically embroidering them into the man's chest. Black silence from Walter in the front seat.

  "Thanks, man," I say. "Without you, he probably would have kept the friggin' camera and all my film."

  "You're crazy," he says.

  "But I'm not gutless," I say.

  "Majnun," says Quasm, whose safety I've risked. In his case I feel like a jerk. He will have to go in and make a report.

  "You didn't tell him I was the Queen of Sheba," I say to Quasm.

  'Malikat Sab'a, Balqees!"

  Later in Jordan when I developed the film, the partially exposed pictures had starbursts in them, phantoms in acetate, dappled as if with missile lights.

  MAY 2, 1988

  1:30 A.M.

  LAKE PUCKAWASAY, WISCONSIN

  Dear Judge MacGill:

  I have reviewed my sworn testimony given yesterday and reiterate its truth—even as I go on, being interrupted only by my husband's phone call and my own safe return from serving our government. In which case, I know that may again be temporary, for I could not keep His Light from shining throughout the world. I have traveled through so many lands and spoken in so many voices.

  Today, being my own Good News day, I will also remember the death of my mother, Mabel, who died on this day several years ago. As I wrote a former attorney of mine on Good Friday, "Only one time in my life did anyone earnestly tell me they were proud of me." Today it brought a tear and a smile. That woman was my mother, a tormented woman. She was holding my arm as I took her to the wake of my father, a mafioso gentleman named Frank, and it was slippery and I slipped a little on the ice myself and she clutched my arm to keep me from falling, and said, "Oh, Dolores, I am so proud of › you.

  I was bewildered, of course, and thought she meant because I didn't fall on my ass in those high heels. So I said, "Why?" Her reply was "Just because of what you are!"

  That compliment I give back to as many as have heard the Good News through Alfred, but especially to Him, and him, and all of you.

  Love,

  Dolores Gimbels

  3:30 A.M.

  This is the Second Day of May, for you Dolores have heard my Word and listened as I have warned, but the false ones, the

  Doctor and the———, have heard Me not and there is much to fear.

  Wipe out the face of evil on the earth. I saw you tremble last night in fear. I am talking to you. Are you listening to me or goofing around out there? Fear is the beginning of knowledge. Change no mistake on this page. Save all the others for future generations. This is the New Testament of Truth in which good overcomes Evil. Rise early and avenge me on the scum of the earth.

  You may also make some disparaging remarks about the Kangaroo Court.

  Dolores Gimbels. Time, 5:30 A.M.

  The Queen of Sheba

  SHEBA, ALONE in her bungalow, rises and hovers, flits through the past. Dolores is some stupid post, like a cenotaph. Sheba hates her. Sheba gathers each memory, the good ones, the persecutory, and constructs for herself her Book of the Dead. She draws the faces, gets it down on the page. Utters the speech, looks down on the testaments of the world spread out before her. There are blood signs on the pages that only she can see. There are maps and dioramas—an evil eye, an ant's progress of buried wonders. She dresses with he
r unguents and lotions, her perfumes and diamonds and rubies (some might call them old buttons). She adjusts the queenly tiara around her head (some might call it an old belt) and flattens herself against the wall to see if she can make herself into a shadow. Yes, the answer is that she can. Others have died in this house—the woman Mabel, the fisherman Louie, the Good Samaritan Eddie James Guenther, and Mrs. Dolores Milquetoast. You may know her by several names, she was rather bovine, actually. Numerous animals have been slaughtered here; people who were meek and stood around waiting to inherit the earth. They got screwed instead. Sheba is as powerful and distant as the moon, and like a lunar entity she waxes and wanes. She can make herself as solid as fire-breathing Chimera in a nightmare or she can dissolve to translucence, growing so large that she is the light that Distorts other people's Eyes and Blinds them to the Truth.

  Sheba gets in her car and drives to the-hospital and clinic in Menomenee. She passes Wagner's Hospice. She knew someone once who was dragged off there, a poorly understood young woman with a keen intelligence and several lovely children, shackled to an ogre who had dressed in the garments of a king. She enters the hospital, smells the vestigial ether, remembers that one of her daughters was born there, and asks for him by name. He comes out to meet her, so tall and white and changing shape all the time. Wouldn't you just know you couldn't even trust him to hold still, retain the same shape while she did what she had to do. Sheba would do what she had to do to this white demon thing that would not listen.

  "There," she cries. "Take that, and that!"

  In each hand she poises a piece of soft red chalk, a candle-sized knob that children use to draw hopscotch squares. She drives the pieces into her ex-husband's white smock, right in front of the nurses and all the patients, crying, "There!" and "There!" and streaking his smock with long drools, like rusty blood veins in a piece of polished sandstone. It's her revenge. She has made the mark of an incision before the surgeon decides where to cut. "I could have killed you," Sheba cries to her ex-husband the Doctor, "but I, God, have let you live so you can repent." There he stands in the fatal world, his belly as large as the curve of a pregnant woman, marked over with red chalk. See how he likes it. Conception and delivery. Sheba glides like a shadow from the hospital and speeds her car through the S curves, sticks her tongue out at the flakes of the past, at Wagner's, at the great blue heron that shadows her onward, trumpeter for the regiments who will swell to her side.