Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  Despite our success, our government is still facing difficulties. The technological capacity of some rogue elements in Yemen is keeping pace with the latest industrial innovations. We, as a government, must surpass this considerable rate of innovation. We have no choice but to move faster than our foes.

  When I got to ‘foes’, Faris stood up from his desk. He was a tall, well-groomed, good-looking former athlete. He put on his jacket and dropped his pistol into its holster. ‘What have you got for me? Read it to me.’

  I read him the note from beginning to end, without pausing or looking at him.

  ‘That’s perfect,’ he said. ‘Keep that.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Now what? We ask for the equipment?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Put it nicely.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I think we should be direct. Let’s just say what’s on our mind. No beating around the bush.’

  He nodded.

  ‘So we should write this: “Give us the goods now, you German assholes. Or the terrorists will kick you in the ass.” Okay?’

  He smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Settle down.’

  I did settle down. I finished writing the letter. This was my job.

  The chancellor was due at Sana’a airport within the half-hour. We printed out our letter, then piled into the boss’s Mercedes sedan. It had been a gift from President Saleh, a reward for loyalty.

  The airport was forty minutes away, so we were late. But this was normal. We were late for everything, every day. We dashed to the car, then tore through the streets, barely braking at the red lights, and nodding at the policemen as we flew by. In the straight stretches, we picked up so much speed that we couldn’t read the billboards, and when we hit the turns, they came at us like bends on a racetrack.

  As we got closer to the airport we had to slow to pick our way through traffic accidents and crowds milling at the entrances to mosques.

  Two miles from the airport tarmac, we had to stop altogether because an impromptu qat market had spilled into a part of the street normally used as a bus depot. Dozens of robed men swarmed around the qat sellers and the minibuses, pushing and yelling and raising their cash in the air. As they crowded around the qat booths, they tugged at one another’s headscarves, dropped them on to the pavement, laughed and picked up their fallen turbans, then piled them on their heads again like disorderly salads.

  Yemenis loved silliness. They loved pretending they were living in a wide rocky loony bin of zaniness. Zaniness, insouciance, roughhousing: this is what they had instead of a future.

  At one point two tribesmen wearing more dignified, tightly wrapped silken bandannas approached the car. The sight of such a new, gleaming, black Mercedes froze them in their tracks. They stared at it with their bloodshot eyes as if it might be a newfangled sort of animal, something they could devour later on, in the privacy of their huts. As they stared, an odour of freshly butchered sheep, urine and minibus exhaust filtered into the car.

  Faris nudged the car forward. A moment later, we came across the aftermath of a scuffle. Two men were clutching each other; each held a handful of robe. They yelled and spat at each other, their faces flushed, the fronts of their white gowns spattered with blood. The crowd itself was making a low, slightly ominous rumble.

  One of the combatants turned to us as we nudged forward. From his mouth he let loose a red bubble of blood and spit. It landed on the windshield of the Mercedes.

  Did he mean to do that? I wondered. Certainly not, I thought. Surely he could see from the licence plates, if not from the car itself, that we were government officials.

  ‘Yeah, look at this,’ Faris said, as the car idled, more to himself than to me. ‘Chaos. Mess. It’s because of the qat. They’re all addicted. They just want to chew. All day, every day. It’s not like we haven’t given them opportunities. The army, schools, universities. We’re a poor country, okay. But look.’

  Far away, across the road from the crowd, which was about a hundred strong now and growing, a sprinkling of black robes pushed at brooms. The women kept their distance – from the horde and from one another. They were wearing the full veil, and gowns so long the hems trailed in the dust. Of course they knew that no gowns and no veils would have protected them in an emergency. And they knew that any little thing – the passing whim of a passing addict, for instance – could put them in physical danger. That’s why they kept their distance.

  Finally the police did clear a lane for us. Within seconds, the Mercedes was back up to speed. It sailed past more billboards, more butchers’ shops, and roadside sentries standing in the setting sun like statues in a ruin. We rolled up the car windows. We checked our mobile phones for messages and fiddled with the stereo until it found a pop-music station. For the rest of the ride to the airport, we listened to Supertramp and Cat Stevens. Cat Stevens was singing a happy, mystico-Islamico 1970s song:

  Now I’ve been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come

  And I believe it could be. Something good has begun.

  At the airport, the generals and ministers milled about on the tarmac. A banana-republic military band assembled itself on a magenta carpet. I listened for a bit as they tooted into their instruments. The generals scanned the sky for Schröder’s plane.

  As I watched the apparatchiks chatting with one another, then gazing at the sky, then gazing at one another again, I realised that I probably did know the truth about the Schröder letter. I had known it for some time, but I had not wanted to confront the implications.

  In Yemen, governing is the art of dividing, then befuddling, then presiding over the low-level anarchy that results. Even in his own palace, in the security of his private suite, perhaps especially there, the president must be busy at this task. The reason is simple: the last three rulers of Yemen were assassinated in palace coups. Now, thirty years into the Saleh regime, the atmosphere among the ruling junta remains tense. The president would like his son to succeed him. Others feel the presidency should be put to a vote. Those who would like the vote are thought to dislike the son, but how deep their dislike is and what they are willing to do to advance their aims no one knows.

  Now the president trusted in military hardware. The Germans had invented special code-decrypting radios. If he could get hold of one of these, he and perhaps a few of his closest friends – those without loyal armies behind them (maybe Faris?) – could listen in on the generals who did control the armies. I doubted that the high tech sonic equipment would be put to use surveilling terrorists in the back-country hills. The terrorists were too primitive and too uninteresting to the ruling clique. It would have required too much effort to get to them, and there were better ways of approaching them, such as calling their imams on the telephone.

  Anyway, if the terrorists did do something, whatever they did wasn’t going to touch the president and his friends, who had excellent security. It would, however, prove to the West that Yemen really did need greater quantities of military equipment.

  Though we were not telling the Germans this, the high tech equipment, I guessed, was probably more for domestic, palace use. The innermost clique wished to have a high-resolution, computer-based system for monitoring the activities of the next most inner clique.

  The more my thoughts moved in this direction, the more working in the government didn’t seem like such an interesting idea. The government, such as it was, was a closed circle. It spent its days staring at its cynosure, the president, who was in reality a minor Wizard of Oz. His apparatchiks were puffed-up stagehands. Their job, which they didn’t do all that well, was to erect complicated stages on which Yemeni VIPS, visitors from Europe and Saudi Arabia, could strut. Why did I want to contribute to the success of such an enterprise? I didn’t.

  * * *

  I did know that beyond the set designers and their props an actual nation of believers, tribes and dwindling natural resources was working out its own purposes. I didn’t know much about those purposes but now, for the first time in
my life in Yemen, I wanted to.

  I undid my tie and deposited it on the tarmac. By the time Schröder and Saleh passed in their limousines, it had been trampled many times by running journalists and caught up in the wheels of a military jeep. I was happy to see it go.

  In theory, the Yemen Observer staff was meant to go back to the office after this airport reception. I had been asked to write an editorial about Yemen making common cause with Germany to defeat the two scourges of the Middle East: poverty and terrorism. Now it seemed to me that I was being paid $200 a month to write propaganda which few people read and fewer people believed. At that rate, I had to be in love with the work. I had to believe it was worth dedicating my life to. Now I felt it wasn’t worth even a twenty-minute detour to the office, so I went home, opened a bottle of black market Djibouti vodka, and watched the celebratory Yemen–Germany friendship fireworks sparkle over the city.

  14

  IN THE LATE afternoons, just before six, in the courtyard of the villa we used as an office, the staff would line up before a spouting garden hose. At that hour, the opening lines of the call to prayer were tumbling out of the sky. ‘Allahu akbar,’ the muezzin would call and then Allahu akbar,’ again. Then silence.

  After the Schröder visit, I felt there was nothing more for me to do at the newspaper. I came only in the evening to hang out with the reporters and to watch them go through the rituals of the sunset prayer.

  Sometimes someone would turn the garden hose on Obadi, the gatekeeper, who, at almost forty, was more desperate than anyone else to get married. He had a beautiful smile.

  For the most part, though, people carried themselves with dignity before the prayer. The reporters rolled their trousers up over their knees. They turned back their sleeves. They clamped the garden hose between their shins and filled their palms with water. It splashed down over shaved heads. It doused their faces and trickled through their toes.

  The newspaper owned a mat of imitation bamboo. Usually someone who was eager to get on with the prayer would roll the thing out across the polished marble of the courtyard. One or two reporters would step out on to the mat and perform two optional, extracurricular prostrations.

  I never knew this until I converted to Islam, but when the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, he’s meant to weave a note of sadness – in Arabic this note is called huzn - into the melody of the call. Huzn reminds the faithful of the vastness extending between humankind and God, and appeals to the conscience of the Believer: abstract yourself from workaday life for a moment. Return to the house of God. Come home. The local muezzin seemed to know that in this day and age, with all the fitna about, the Muslims of Sana’a were going to need a fair amount of huzn in order for the call to accomplish its magic. So he took long pauses between every line, and allowed the echo to roll through the streets. ‘Come to the flourishing,’ he sang. ‘Come to the flourishing,’ he sang again, and waited while the idea of flourishing on the Straight Path of Allah reached into the minds of the believers.

  The men on the mat concentrated their brows.

  After these words fell from the sky, sometimes right away, sometimes as much as a quarter of an hour later, the rest of the employees would line up on the plastic bamboo. Standing out there, barefoot, shoulder to shoulder, glistening in the last light of the day, they looked like a troop of Huck Finns, ready to alight on a current, ready to slip away into the river of life. One of them – it didn’t matter who – stood at the head of the raft. He was their pilot, their rough and ready seer. The doormen, the guards, the delivery drivers, the hangers-on and the reporters lined up in rows behind this temporary imam.

  You’re not supposed to stare at your work colleagues when they’re lowering their faces to God, but I did. I liked watching their routine: so brotherly, so out of synch with the world of computers and phoney news from which they had just withdrawn, so ancient.

  How strange, I thought, as I watched them.

  I hadn’t seen sincerity like that in six months inside the offices of the newspaper. But then maybe I hadn’t been looking in the right place.

  * * *

  Afterwards, when the last of the prostrations had been performed, my colleagues would roll off their haunches and lounge on the mat, and speak in quiet voices as darkness swept down out of the sky. Often, they would wave me over and urge me to learn to pray.

  These were friendly moments. They made me think that submitting to Islam might not be a huge deal, that it was another step into the culture, that I had already taken some and might as well take more. I would have more friends, learn the language more thoroughly and live in a world where words actually meant something. Here, in this domain, I would discover Arabia itself – how have the people lived these many centuries? What do they know? What do they love? What do they read and how? The artificial version of Yemen wasn’t bringing me news like that.

  At that time, when I was considering a submission to Islam, I had Huckleberry Finn in mind a lot: the way he committed himself to the wild, lovely, unfathomable current of the river. Anyone who admires such a person wouldn’t dream of sitting on the banks of the great gushing, ever-flowing spirit of the nation all his life. Not when it was so close, not when it had so much to teach, not when the people he liked most were urging him to take a little step forward, just enough to feel the power of the current.

  15

  MY GUIDE TO living, during those first few weeks of unemployment, was Charles Nicholl’s book, Somebody Else, about the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s experience in Yemen and Africa. As an adolescent, he had dazzled Parisian literary circles though he had been, at the time, a troubled teenager, driven by a powerful urge towards self-destruction. The longer he stayed in France, the more trouble he caused: there were fights, scenes, and there was the famous episode in which Verlaine, driven to distraction by his bratty lover, shot Rimbaud in the wrist.

  When Rimbaud turned up in Aden in 1880, at the age of twenty-six, he was a broken man. He had repudiated poetry as an occupation, had little money and had broken off communication with his former acquaintances in Parisian literary circles.

  To judge by the poetry he wrote as an adolescent, this was a consummation he had been wishing for for some time.

  The marine air will burn my lungs. Unknown climates will tan my skin. To swim, trample grass, and above all smoke, to drink liquors as strong as molten metal… I’ll have gold: be lazy and merciless.

  According to Charles Nicholl, he had been neither lazy nor merciless in Yemen but instead scholarly. He had learned Arabic. He had made money: by trading in coffee, then in guns, and perhaps, here and there, in African slaves. He translated the Koran into French. In Abyssinia, he married a local woman, and may have fathered a child. By 1883 he had taken a new name, Abdo [Abdullah] Rimbo. Local Muslims came to him when they wished to discuss abstruse matters of Islamic theology.

  Actually, this transformation into Abdo Rimbo, I learned, was the result of a programme Rimbaud had invented, as a teenager. What can you do to write something interesting? To outdo your peers? To bring something new to the table? ‘[The poet] must make himself a seer,’ he had written.

  He makes himself a seer by long, immense and systematic derangement of the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness. He searches himself, he drains down all the poisons so that only the quintessences are left.

  All right, I thought, when I read this passage, I can see how deranging the senses might be fun. So I experimented: chewing the local narcotic did not give me visions as the sellers promised but it did kill my appetite. Being without appetite made me wonder how much food I really needed per day. Maybe an egg in the morning? Yes, okay. And a bowl of watery rice at lunch? Quite enough, really. Sometimes, I added a slab of roasted chicken to the rice. The Yemeni chicken tended to make me sick. So I went home from the tin-plate restaurant in which I usually ate, vomited, then chewed qat leaves through the afternoon. I started to lose weight. I’d never really lost weight before. Now I could watch my b
ody change under the influence of a strange climate, strange diet and strange people.

  In the evening I couldn’t sleep because of the amphetamine in the qat, so I had to settle down with the Djibouti vodka. I woke in the early dawn, just when the morning call to prayer was ringing out over the city and streaks of blue sky were appearing on the horizon to the east. That was a beautiful hour in which to read: ‘My daytime is done; I am leaving Europe… . quick. Are there new lives?’ So Rimbaud had written at the age of seventeen.

  * * *

  After a few weeks of this routine, I noticed that I had stumbled across an incredibly cheap way to live. My rent was costing me $200 a month. My food was costing me about $2 a day, and the vodka and qat cost another $5. Since I had $30,000 in savings in the bank, I calculated that I was a minor Bill Gates, at least in relation to my neighbours and that I could probably live on this budget, barring boredom or a tropical disease, counting in a freelance newspaper article or two, until the Day of the Dead. But I had no intention of sticking around for even twelve more months and still less intention of counting out my pennies so I started to live like a king.

  I looked at the Yemeni currency which came out of the ATM machine smelling like so much pawed-over, foul, Third-World monopoly money, as a joke. No currency I’d ever seen left me this estranged from it, and this uninterested in its value as money.

  I paid much too much for my qat and for cab fares and told myself that I was evening out global injustice by doing so. But when I was honest with myself I knew I wasn’t accomplishing anything at all, and since giving away money wasn’t accomplishing anything, and holding on to it wasn’t accomplishing anything, I started to think that it just didn’t matter what I did with it.