Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

by Megan K. Stack

  I sipped Nescafé. I chewed on a sweet roll. I was in the oil-rich eastern provinces, in a stuffy hotel breakfast lounge with big glass windows and the flat sprawl of desert below. My eyes flickered down through the article. I swallowed, and the bread stuck in my throat.

  The mother and the father divorced a long time ago after she suffered physical abuse at his hands. She kept custody of the girl under Islamic law until the girl turned seven … The father won custody last year …

  When the mother did get an opportunity to see or speak to her daughter, she noticed signs of abuse. When she reported this abuse to authorities, she was ignored …

  After stabbing his daughter and realizing that she might have died, he and his wife washed her blood with Clorox and took her to the hospital where he told the emergency personnel that he doesn’t [sic] know what is wrong with her. When they examined her, they found she was already dead and that she had suffered multiple fractures and stabs …

  A few days before the incident, the biological mother had sent a letter to the Mecca municipality begging the governor to intervene before the father killed the girl …

  The rights of the parents are granted priority over the rights of the child. The father, who is more often the perpetrator of domestic abuse, is also favored under the current system in accordance with social norms …

  Police do not have the authority to enter homes and bring abused children under public protection … according to law, wives cannot report domestic abuse by husbands to the police …

  According to Islamic law, a father who kills his child is not eligible for the death penalty …

  The father is likely to serve a jail sentence of a number of years if he’s found guilty. The mother may receive monetary compensation for the death of her daughter.

  I looked up from the page. All around me sat men—men from America and men from Great Britain and men from France, men eating their breakfasts and preparing for business meetings. Men who’d already begun their meetings, hunched with jovial, berobed Saudi men over platters of scrambled eggs. Men meeting for oil in this land of invisible women.

  Pundits like to talk about Saudi reform. About how maybe women will be allowed to vote, or to drive. But after years in the Middle East, the word reform signified, to me, the tangled, unholy alliance between America and the Arab dictators who grant and revoke press laws, women’s rights, and political party laws on a whim. The flaw in the notion of Arab reform is the idea that people who lord over their land in autocratic splendor will voluntarily relinquish power. In truth, progress is doled out and taken back at the king’s pleasure. Rulers take one step forward and holler about it, wait until the world is busy elsewhere, and slide back to where they started. Generations of diplomats and journalists talk about reform, and in the meantime the stories pile up:

  Fatima and her children have been languishing in prison for the past three and a half months. Her crime: She wanted to live with Mansour, her husband and father of her two children.

  A Saudi court had forcefully separated them. Fatima is free to leave jail if she is ready to return to her family, and not her now ex-husband.

  It was her brothers who initiated a lawsuit demanding the couple’s marriage be nullified on the grounds that they were incompatible on tribal grounds.

  Fatima refuses to leave the prison or go to a shelter home for fear of retaliation from her brothers, who are her legal guardians since their father’s death.

  Or:

  According to the allegations, the daughter, now 22, has been a victim of her father’s deviant sexual behavior since she was three. She claims her father raped her when she was 13 …

  There is no specific sentence for sexual assault, so it is up to the judge’s discretion and opinion … There are no laws in place that automatically revoke a father’s custody of children—even if the father turns out to be an incestuous rapist.

  The word woman is not popular in Saudi Arabia. The going term is lady. I heard a lot about ladies from Saudi officials. They talked themselves into knots, trying to depict a moderate, misunderstood kingdom, bemoaning stereotypes in the Western press: Women banned from driving? Well, they don’t want to drive anyway. They all have drivers, and why would a lady want to mess with parking? The religious police who stalk the streets and shopping centers, beating “Islamic values” into the populace? Oh, Saudi officials scoff, they aren’t strict or powerful. You hear stories to the contrary? Sensationalistic exaggerations, perpetuated by outsiders who don’t understand Saudi Arabia.

  On a morning when glaring sun blotted everything to white and hot spring winds raced off the desert, I stood outside a Riyadh bank, waiting for a friend. The sidewalk was simmering and I sweated in my black cloak, but I couldn’t enter the men’s section of the bank to fetch him. Traffic screamed past on a nearby highway, and I wobbled when wind spread my polyester robe like the wings of a kite.

  The door clattered open and I looked up hopefully. No, just a security guard—stomping my way and yelling in Arabic. He didn’t want me standing there, I gathered. I took off my sunglasses, stared blankly, and finally turned my face away.

  He retreated, only to reemerge with another security guard. This second guard looked like a pit bull—short, stocky, and all flashing teeth as he barked: “Go! Go! You can’t stand here! The men can see! The men can see!”

  “Where do you want me to go? I have to wait for my friend. He’s inside.” But he held his ground, arms akimbo, snarling and flashing those teeth.

  “Not here. NOT HERE! The men can see you!”

  I lost my temper.

  “I’m just standing here!” I growled. “Leave me alone!” This was a slip. In a land ruled by male ego, yelling at a man only deepens a crisis.

  The pit bull advanced, lips curled, pushing the air with little shooing motions. Involuntarily, I stepped back and found myself in prickly shrubbery. In the bushes, I was out of view of the window; the virtue of all those innocent male bankers was unbesmirched. Satisfied, the pit bull climbed back onto the sidewalk and stood guard over me. I glared at him. He showed his teeth. Finally, my friend reemerged.

  A liberal, U.S.-educated professor at King Saud University, he was sure to share my outrage, I thought. Maybe he’d even call up the bank—his friend was the manager—and get the pit bull into trouble. I spilled my story, words hot as the pavement.

  He hardly blinked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Oh.” He put the car in reverse, and off we drove.

  People asked, always: What’s it like, being a woman there?

  You are supposed to say that it doesn’t matter a bit. Gender? I never give it a second thought! You are supposed to say that you navigate as a third sex, the Undaunted Western Reporter, clomping around in trousers and ponytails and clumsy head scarves slipping perpetually over your eyes. You are supposed to say that you were privileged, because you had a pass to the secret world of local sisterhood, to a place where faces showed and words were honest, where there was no husband to interrupt and bully. You are supposed to say, in an almost mystical voice, “I could write about the women.” And then you should pause and add, smugly: “Which the male correspondents could never do.” You leave the mythology intact lest you admit weakness and undermine the other women in the field.

  And then, too, the truth is not really easy to admit or articulate. You can’t admit how dirty it made you feel, the thousand ways you were slighted and how flimsy your self-assurance turned out to be, how those little battles bit at you like acid. Men who refused to shake your hand; squatting on floors with men who refused to look at your face because you brimmed with sin, not one glance in an hour-long interview; the sneering underfed soldiers who hissed and talked about your ass when you walked past. You can’t admit it made you so bitter that, for a time, you looked at any woman who hadn’t been where you had been as if she were an ingenue who didn’t understand the world she occupied. She was blind to the dark, ruthless fraternity of men—all men, all around the globe—how l
uridly dangerous they were, how we had to keep pushing against them or we’d wind up where we began hundreds of years ago. You are not supposed to say any of that. It proves you were never really up to the game, that you might as well have stayed home. So you pretend it’s nothing, you tell everyone that you were lucky because you could talk to the women.

  In the end, you can’t lose yourself. You can drape your body in black, you can smother your breasts and cover your face and drown yourself in expensive perfumes until your smells, too, are submerged. You can do all of that, but you will still be a woman, and you chose to be there. You can hide but you can’t disappear. Like America itself, you have done a calculation, you have accepted a condition, because you wanted something out of it. You can build walls, cower in the Green Zone, hire armed guards, and never, ever set foot outside the fortress, but you are still an American. You have still chosen to be there. What does it mean that your choice is between being isolated in your own place, and hiding in some other place?

  “I left in mid-June and stayed out ’til school started this year. Because of the bombing,” Cora said wearily. “Now people say, ‘Why’d you leave last year and not this year?’”

  She sighed.

  “We’re putting our kids at risk. My husband and I feel like we’re old, we’ve lived, but they have life ahead of them. If we’re so greedy to stay here and put our kids at risk, what does that say about who we are?”

  “Exactly,” said Tracy emphatically.

  “To me, it’s not the money. It’s, if you knew for certain, you’d go,” said Amy. “But you’re pulling your kids out of school, and they have games, and they have ballet recitals. And you see all these terror warnings in the U.S., and nothing happens. So how can you know?”

  “My daughter was crying because she did not want to go back to the States, it’s too dangerous,” Tracy said.

  “The quality of life is incredible here,” Cora said.

  “We are so spoiled here,” Tracy agreed.

  “Here it’s real friendly,” Pamela said. “We have ballet, soccer, softball.”

  No pork is allowed, and the drinkers are reduced to making moonshine with woodchips. But there were consolations: you could cruise the desert on a Harley or in a golf cart, then go home to mingle with like-minded international neighbors. They all underwent background checks and medical exams before arriving, the women said.

  “You have to be perfect to be here,” Tracy told me. “It’s like Stepford—everybody’s healthy, smart, good-looking.”

  “Oh, don’t say that!” Valerie interrupted. “Now it will be in the paper, the Stepford Wives of Aramco.”

  “It’s true,” Tracy cried. “My mother came here and she was like, ‘This is kinda weird. It’s too perfect. It’s like the Stepford Wives.’”

  But now the American embassy had issued a blunt warning to leave the country, and the women believed the bloodshed they’d already seen was just “the tip of the iceberg,” Valerie said.

  “My husband isn’t ready to go yet, and I’m like, ‘When can we go?’” Tracy said. Her husband was urging her to take the kids out, she said, “but I didn’t sign up for this single mom thing.”

  “I told him, ‘We can go back and you can flip burgers if that’s what you need to do, but we need to stay together.’ And then my daughter said, ‘If he’s here alone, maybe he’ll get a girlfriend like Mr. So-and-so.’”

  “She did not!” the other women cried with one voice.

  “She did!” Tracy said.

  “She did,” another woman confirmed.

  “There’s this tribal mind-set that more information is dangerous,” Pamela said. “They don’t know how to give information out. It’s not in their nature.”

  “You’ve got people who say we need the expats gone, but then the whole country will really go down,” Cora said. “All of us have known for years there was a lot of civil unrest. If we all leave we just hurt ourselves.”

  “Are people resigning?” I asked.

  “They may not be resigning, but they’re job hunting,” said Amy.

  “Everybody says, ‘I’m not leaving, but I’m looking,’” said Valerie.

  Cora sighed again. “Every night, every mom, we say, ‘What’d your friends say at school? What’d they say on the bus?’ I was on the phone all day with people at the Oasis.”

  Sitting there with these women, I could feel their reluctance. None of them would ever manage to duplicate their sumptuous lifestyles back in America, and they all knew it. In a sense, they were living out their own childhood dreams—they talked about the things they’d pined after as little girls, and finally found here. Valerie, who once dreamed of ponies, shared a horse with her daughter at nearby stables. Their children trooped off on field trips to Nepal and South Africa. They are so sophisticated and worldly, the women said of their broods, smiling immodestly.

  “What do your kids think about leaving?” I asked.

  “My son’s twelve and he’s not at all pleased about it,” Tracy said. “It’s a way of life for my kids and they feel safe here. We went to Switzerland on spring break. How many middle-class kids go to Switzerland? My kids have studied the Nile and been down the Nile.”

  Tracy was bragging now, bare feet bouncing on the floor like a child gloating over a stash of sweets.

  “They know how to sign their room numbers for drinks at the hotel bar,” Valerie said. “It’s unbelievable. They’re not going to Pinewood Whatever, Wherever.”

  “Camping on vacation!” scoffed Cora.

  “Commuting,” Tracy said. “Going to Grandma’s. I mean, we like Grandma’s, but we want to see New Zealand!”

  Tracy had hoped to treat her nieces and nephews to overseas adventures, inviting them one by one to join the family on vacations. “I’m trying to hang on for that,” she said, as if she had not, five minutes earlier, said she was yearning to leave.

  In Amy’s childhood, the greatest excitement of summer vacation was putting coins into vibrating beds in roadside motels. The room erupted in laughter.

  “My son is like, ‘Oh, Mom, do we have to go to Europe again?’” Tracy said. “And I’m like, ‘You little … ’” she flapped her hand in the air as if she were slapping her son.

  The afternoon wore on. The women kept forgetting about the terrorism. Then they would remember again, and the room would grow quiet and they’d fidget uncomfortably.

  But only for a minute.

  ELEVEN

  LODDI DODDI, WE LIKES TO PARTY

  There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns. It sounds like a riddle. It isn’t a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter.

  —U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, June 6, 2002

  I went to Yemen looking for a revelation. I wanted to know what got traded, and at what cost, between American and Yemeni intelligence. In the untamed mountains and deserts clinging to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, I hoped to turn up stories of CIA renditions and the dirty work the cash-strapped government did for the United States.

  I didn’t find those stories. Instead, in Sanaa, I found Faris. He loped through the hotel lobby, a glint in his eye, knowing everybody. A sharp little mustache peppered his lip, and white teeth flashed beneath changeless eyes. He was aide and friend to the president, the owner of an English-language newspaper, and the official who talked to CNN on the rare occasions when international curiosity about Yemen’s motives coincided with Yemen’s willingness to explain itself. Faris had gone to college in America’s Midwest, and I’d heard he was the key to getting anything out of the government. “Promised a lot, didn’t deliver that much. But he can be helpful,
if he wants to be.” That was the note I’d gotten from a colleague. Upon hearing the name of a large American newspaper, Faris was most obsequious. Let’s talk about it, about what your stories are. I tell you what—you’ve never been here before. How about I pick you up, show you around, and you can tell me what you’re covering, what your objectives are. So you get a feel for Yemen.

  “So much misinformation printed about Yemen in the American press,” he griped as his SUV groaned over the cobblestones. I stared out the window at crooked clusters of fairy-tale towers, stained glass ringed with gypsum, the cut of minarets against a darkening sky.

  “It’s like they cannot mention Yemen without saying it’s the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden. Why? Okay, so some of his family lived here. Do you know what it’s like up there in the north? You can’t even see the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I’d be interested to get up there,” I said.

  “Oh no,” he barked. “You can’t go.”

  “Why not? It’s impossible?”

  “Well, not impossible,” he smiled a cat’s smile, eyes lingering on the road. “Not completely impossible. But, you know, you’re getting into the tribal areas—”

  “And you don’t have control over the tribes.”

  “We do have control. But these days we have this situation with the rebels up there. There’s a lot of fighting.”

  “You mean Houthi.”

  I’d been reading about the Houthi rebellion—at least, reading what few details managed to squeeze out of the government’s grasp. Hussein Houthi was a Zaydi Shiite cleric who’d led thousands of followers to wage a guerrilla war against the central government, angered by its ties to America and keen for Islamic rule. The government blamed the insurrection on “foreign sponsors,” whispering that the Houthi clan was backed by Iran. The fighting dragged on for months and the death toll swelled, but journalists couldn’t get to the Sa’ada region to investigate. In the reporter-saturated Middle East, here was a rare wilderness still hidden from cameras. Only sketchy rumors of war rumbled down from the hills.