Baghdad Without a Map

by Tony Horwitz

  Confused, I continued my research by quizzing the taxi driver, who noshed on a few sprigs as we drove to Man-sour's. I asked him if he thought qat affected health.

  “Oh yes!” he cried. “My uncle never used to chew, but then he got diabetes, so he started to chew every day. Now he is completely cured and works like ten men in the field.”

  And was qat addictive?

  “Oh no,” he said. “I have chewed every day since the age of fifteen and I am still not an addict.”

  The only acknowledged drawback of qat was the price. In one of the world's poorest countries, most males spent twenty dollars or more each day on the plant. And since alcohol was banned, they often spent as much again on bootleg scotch to knock themselves out after getting too wired on qat. “This is much money,” the cabbie conceded. “But I am never hungry after chewing qat. So I save much money on food.”

  The Yemen salad diet. Slimming, and economical, too. So what if it turns your teeth green?

  Mansour lived in the sprawl of run-down suburbs encircling the old city of Sanaa. At his office, he'd worn a suit and tie, but now he greeted me in a long white robe and slippers. “Qat clothes,” he said. He led me into the small home's finest chamber, a carpeted expanse with stained-glass windows, pillows lining the wall and a water pipe perched in one corner. “Qat room,” he said. Traditionally, Yemenis located their qat room or mafraj in the penthouses of Sanaa's odd mud towers so chewers could enjoy a panoramic view. Women held their own chews in separate, less luxurious quarters.

  We took off our shoes and waited for the other guests. Mansour inspected my stash, as the men had done at the market, casting an expert eye on the firmness and gloss of the leaves. “This one from Taiz, not very special,” he said, holding up my first purchase. Then, examining the other, he announced: “Shibam region, maybe farther north. Very fine qat.” He guessed the exact price I'd paid for each.

  I told Mansour about the fraternal embrace I'd felt that morning at the market. He said that he had once gone through the same experience—in reverse. During three years of studying computer science in America, he decided qat was a waste of time and vowed to abstain from chewing on his return to Yemen. But back in Sanaa, he felt as though “someone had taken my passport away. There was nothing to do, no one to talk to.” In a country still centered on the home and village, qat-chewing was an enforced sociability—what afternoon tea is to some British, or a pub crawl to Australians. It was also the accepted way of settling disputes and sealing business contracts. Even Yemen's president held regular chews with his ministers.

  Mansour, the son of a mystic Sufi healer, came back from America with another ill-fated notion. “I wanted to computerize my father's business,” he said. It was a simple program. F2 for cough, F3 for fever, and so on. “That way he could just punch in a key and the right amulet would come up on the screen.”

  The idea went over about as well as Mansour's attempt to kick qat. “The old man just laughed,” Mansour said. A year later, the father still dispensed herbs and prayers from memory, and his thirty-three-year-old son chewed qat every day after work.

  At three o'clock sharp, the other guests arrived. There was Mansour's brother, who wore a robe and dagger; an aged uncle, who seemed to have just hiked in from the fields, with dusty feet, a dirty shift, and a dagger; and a young cousin who sat in a far corner and remained rather distant, inspecting the blade of his dagger. Each man dropped a bundle of qat at his feet and reached over to fondle mine, guessing its price. Despite these repeated inspections, I still couldn't tell my two purchases apart.

  Mansour brought in bottles of Pepsi and several brass spittoons. He stirred the coals atop the water pipe and puffed it alight. Then, without so much as a prayer or a nod or a bon appetit, each man plucked the smallest leaves from his bunch and stuffed them into his mouth.

  Mimicking the others' motions, I stripped a branch and shoved one leaf at a time between my cheek and gum. The plant tasted bitter, making me gag and spit whenever a little juice began to flow. The others, meanwhile, seemed to have no trouble chewing, chatting, smoking and sipping Pepsi all at once, at high speed. I felt as though I were competing in some odd oral decathlon.

  Mansour offered the occasional translation of the party chatter. It was workaday stuff: the weather, the price and quality of this year's qat crop, the lopping-off of a thief s hand inSanaa's central square a few days before. Then, after about half an hour, the conversation became much more animated and the men addressed me in a mix of English and Arabic.

  “America good,” declared Mansour's brother, Abdul, apropos of nothing. A bulky and self-important man, he perched on a throne of pillows and sucked contentedly on the thirty-foot hose of the water pipe. His uncle, Mohammed, nodded and repeated the words in Arabic. “America kwayes.” Everyone laughed, as though he'd made a clever joke. Then they concentrated on their chewing. The old man had brought the smallest supply of qat, and the others made periodic contributions by tossing a sprig or two at his feet.

  Soon the pace of the babble quickened and Mansour's English deteriorated. I had some catching up to do. I crammed a dozen leaves in my cheek, sucked hard through my teeth and reached for the spittoon. As soon as I spit, the small wad in my cheek felt dry and stale, like used-up bubble gum. I stoked myself with fresh leaves. Meanwhile, the others worked effortlessly on the same gob they'd begun chewing an hour before.

  I was so busy chewing and hacking and spitting that I didn't notice at first that the carpet was massaging my toes. How long has this been going on? I stopped chewing for a moment, feeling a sudden urge to leap to my feet and stretch. But someone had glued my back to the cushions. When did that happen? I slumped back and closed my eyes. The tingling in my toes worked its way up my calves and along the back of my thighs and flooded into my spine. I noticed for the first time that Arab music was playing on a radio in the next room, mingling with the steady, soothing bubble of the water pipe. It sounded like a brook tumbling over smooth, small stones. Burble burble went the hubble bubble. Bubble hubble went the hurble burble. . .

  I opened my eyes and felt at once tipsy and hyperalert, as if I'd knocked back two good Irish coffees, or eight good Irish coffees. I wanted to blurt out something special to each person in the room—all at once. Either that or go ask Mansour's wife for a long and languorous massage.

  “I can see from the stupid smile on your face that you have discovered the wonders of qat.” It was Mansour, prone on the pillows to my right, with a rather stupid grin plastered on his face, too.

  “As a matter of—” I clamped my mouth shut as a torrent of green spittle gushed onto my shirt. Mansour handed me a spittoon. I reached for it and toppled a Pepsi bottle. The room erupted in laughter.

  “Actually, yes,” I resumed. “I feel like a million bucks and I want to know just exactly how you feel in your fingers and toes.” This gibberish was delivered in a rapid-fire burst, as though my tongue couldn't keep pace with the thoughts racing through my head. Fortunately, Mansour felt rather expansive as well and we vaulted right over small talk and straight into politics, religion, qat, culture, dreams, qat, fears, fantasies, qat. It was all I could do to let Mansour finish a sentence before launching into a fresh thought of my own.

  “I agree with you completely but there's a whole nother way to look at this issue,” I jabbered, convinced that I was about to deliver the most perceptive comment ever made on the topic. The topic, which was—what was it? Mansour smiled. We giggled and kept on chewing leaves, like a pair of dopey koalas.

  “I tell you a hidden truth about Yemen,” Mansour said conspiratorially. “Everything in the world, it comes first from here.” It was a typical flight of qat-fancy. Turkish steam baths were invented in Sanaa and stolen by the Ottomans, he said. The Santa Fe style of architecture originated with Sanaa's mud-brick skyscrapers, not New Mexico's adobe. (“My people travel a great deal,” Mansour hypothesized. “Maybe there was a Yemeni conquistador in America.”) Even the few thousand Jews of Y
emen were “the real ones” because they had fled Jerusalem in biblical times. “William Shakespeare came from here, too,” Mansour said, reaching the punch line. “His real name was Sheik Zubayre, very common in Yemen. The English changed it to Shakespeare.”

  I laughed and reached for the spittoon again. Mansour said his brother was an Islamic scholar, so I turned to Abdul and blurted out a question: how was it that Islam, which forbade alcohol, could aUow something as pleasant as qat to flourish? It was blunt and in rather poor taste, but under the circumstances perfectly okay; the sort of exchange, between Arab and Westerner, Muslim and Jew, that would have been difficult outside the collegia! cloud of qat.

  “Actually, Islam has two minds about qat,” Abdul said, puffing professorially at the water pipe. When qat first became popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he explained, Arab mystics claimed it was a visionary substance that brought the chewer closer to Allah. Traditionalists countered that qat was an intoxicant, like alcohol, and should be declared forbidden or baram. Scholars in Mecca were called on to mediate the dispute, and they ruled that qat-chewing should be permitted but not encouraged; they termed the plant a “doubtful substance.”

  “Doubt is okay,” Abdul said, picking the last few leaves from the bottom of his cellophane package. “Qat is not like marijuana. Now that is a drug.”

  When the conversation was relayed to Mohammed, the old man mumbled in Arabic and Mansour translated. “He says qat is not like alcohol because if you chew alone, nothing happens.” Other Yemenis had told me they felt no withdrawal symptoms when they traveled abroad. It seemed that the nation's addiction to qat wasn't so much physical as social; each time people chewed, they became part of the tribe again, part of Yemen.

  Still, something strong was unsettling my body chemistry, and I asked Mansour why he thought the drug hadn't ever caught on in the West.

  “I think Americans like drugs that hit fast and hard and then wear off, such as whiskey and cocaine,” he said. “They could never get used to something that makes you sit around all afternoon doing nothing.”

  For the moment, at least, I wasn't so sure he was right.

  After a few hours the loquacious, fidgety high ebbed away and a meditative glow flowed in to replace it. The room went quiet. Abdul puffed thoughtfully on his water pipe, studying the smoke rings curling out of his mouth. The old uncle gazed out the window at streaks of purple and orange forming on the mountain horizon. Mansour turned on the television news, without sound. The screen showed a Western woman standing with a pad and pen, interviewing Yemen's president. The image startled me. It looked just like Geraldine. Then I realized it was Geraldine, not a qat hallucination. I was glad to see she was getting on with her itinerary. Getting on with mine, I slumped deeper into the pillow and nibbled at a last green sprig of qat.

  When the qat was finally finished, Mansour's mafraj was a mess. Soda bottles lay on their side, ashes coated the carpet, and smoke hung thick in the air. Mansour turned on a lamp and the light bounced back, like high beams in fog.

  We sat there for another hour as dusk gathered outside, wrapped in our warm cocoons of silence. Then the magic melted away. For the first time in hours I wondered what time it was. I had to urinate. My stomach was telling me with a growl that it never wanted to eat anything, ever again.

  “Don't be surprised if you can't sleep tonight,” Mansour said. “You might want to have a whiskey at the hotel to relax you. Lots of Yemenis do.” Apparently, when it came to a qat hangover, a certain doubt about alcohol was okay as well.

  The qat chew ended as unceremoniously as it had begun. One by one, the guests gathered up their shoes and daggers, retied their turbans and headed into the night. The air tasted thin, the sky was starry and bright. And standing in the courtyard, gazing out at the ancient city with its mud walls and mud towers girdled round, everything real seemed unreal, and everything fantastic seemed, at least for the moment, worth seriously considering. Even the Yemeni bard, Sheik Zubayre.

  3—YEMEN—For You I Make a Special Deal

  Nothing but evil comes through here.

  —Governor of Sanaa, closing the city's northern gate in 1860

  I fell into a fitful sleep convinced that I would chew qat for the rest of my stay in Yemen, perhaps explore the prospects for overseas cultivation (one of the giddier notions Mansour had floated in the course of the afternoon). I awoke four hours later with a loose piston clanging away in my cerebellum. Someone had emptied an ashtray down my throat. My jaw ached from too much chewing. Focusing slowly through bloodshot eyes, I saw in the bathroom mirror the “wild-looking, dull-witted automaton” I'd read about in the medical literature.

  I needed either a day in bed or another round of qat to kill the pain, What I had scheduled instead was an eight-o'clock interview at a Western embassy to gather background for the rest of my Yemeni reporting, on weapons and mayhem. Creaking iato a chair opposite the defense analyst, I managed to string together enough monosyllables to form a question.

  “What arms are out there?”

  The diplomat doodled something on his notepad. “At a guess,” he said, “I'd say there are more weapons per capita in Yemen than in any other country on earth.” At a guess, he estimated two rifles and two daggers per adult male. “Slightly less for teenagers.” And that was just small arms. “You've got your submachine guns, your hand grenades, your mortars—maybe even your flamethrowers,” he said. Some tribal sheiks stocked big-ticket items as well: bazookas, tanks, surface-to-air missiles. I nodded dumbly. “Why?”

  “You've got to understand the basic instability of the place,” the diplomat said. “The last two presidents weren't too fortunate with their retirement programs.” Indeed. One was shot and killed during a coup. His successor lasted eight months before a man walked into his office with a briefcase that blew up and killed them both. The current president had survived several assassination attempts and now prudently packed a pistol beneath his business suit.

  The source of most of the violence was the mountainous north, where tribal sheiks still resented central government. Some of these outlaws even had mafia-style monikers, such as Sheik “Two Fingers” Hantash of Wadi Hadad, who earned his nickname after tossing a grenade a little too slowly at an enemy clan.

  In the old days—up until the early 1960s—swarming south and sacking the capital was the sheiks' favored means of political expression. These days, tribesmen contented themselves with killing each other, or the occasional Western oil worker. This was lucky for the government. One sheik commanded a private army of 30,000. Yemen's entire armed forces totaled a mere 37,000.

  In an effort to contain the killing, the government had launched an advertising campaign attacking the custom of kbarab wa-turab—the right to “lay waste” to an enemy who breaks the peace without paying blood money.

  “The campaign's called Revenge Awareness Week,” the diplomat said. “I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's unique to North Yemen.”

  To see the weaponry up close, the diplomat recommended that I travel through the mountains to a town called Saada, a day's drive north. Transportation, though, was a problem. What I needed was an armored personnel carrier. What I got was the only rental car in Yemen.

  “Car good, very good,” the rental agent said, tapping the hood rather gingerly. The dented sedan was so stripped down it was almost naked. I could do without a radio, heater, lighter and functioning gas gauge. But the car also lacked a turn signal, an inside light, back lights, one headlight, brake pads, a door handle, springs and second gear. The seat belt looked as though it had been hacked to pieces with a dull jambiya.

  “Horn works very good,” the agent said, giving the steering wheel a savage blow that produced one barely audible bleat. With that, he demanded a cash deposit of fifty dollars, enough to replace this flagship of his meager fleet.

  “Where you go?” he asked.

  “Up north. Through the mountains to Saada'.”

  He raised his eyes in
the Islamic equivalent of crossing oneself. “Go very slow,” he said, as if there were any choice in the car he'd just rented me. “Mountains bad. Road very bad. People too much bad.”

  Car more bad. Ten minutes from the rental office, third gear grinded and gave out. I had to race in first gear to twenty-five miles an hour, then jolt into fourth and putter along until I reached my maximum speed of forty. Sanaa at midday was a high-speed free-for-all, clouded in dust. When traffic slowed, cars scaled the median strip and sped down the oncoming lane until that side gridlocked as well. Parking consisted of finding a wedge of open street and abandoning one's car or donkey. There were screams, threats, the thud of bumpers and the braying of trapped beasts. It seemed only a matter of minutes before someone reached for his jambiya and ran amok, cutting a swath through the thicket of cars.

  In this sort of lunacy, questions such as “Can you turn right on red?” and “Is this a one-way street?” seem stunningly irrelevant. So I was astonished to find a policeman waving me over for one of a dozen traffic felonies I was committing along with every other driver in Sanaa.

  “Your papers,” he said, climbing into the backseat. I handed him my passport and international driver's license.

  “Where is Yemen license?”

  I pointed at my permit, which listed Yemen as one of the countries included.

  “No good,” he said. “You need Yemen license.”

  “Where do I get it?”

  “Here,” he said. “Three hundred riyals.”

  “What if I don't buy one?” I asked. I was weary of being hustled.

  “We go police station,” he said.

  “Good. Let's go.” I turned on the ignition.

  He grabbed my arm and twisted. “Two hundred riyals.”

  We settled at one hundred, about ten dollars. He scribbled something in Arabic and tossed it into my lap. Yemen license. In a feeble attempt at payback, I took out my notebook and asked for his name and badge number. Then I noticed he didn't have a badge.