A Foreign Affair

by Stella Russell

  It was 8.33 precisely when I glanced up for the hundredth time and recognised Sheikh Ahmad’s champagne coloured LandCruiser parked outside the hotel’s revolving door. Burying myself back in my Vogue, heart pounding, I affected not to notice his entrance, not to hear the jingle of his car keys in his hand or the firm slap of those Italian sandals of his on the marble floor, not even to have caught a whiff of his familiar scent.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, for waiting! – oh, you’re beautiful this morning! I can see how well you slept!’ was how he greeted me.

  In a freshly pressed blue and white striped shirt and navy futa, he seemed so genuinely thrilled to see me, so authentically impressed by my get-up – curls loosely held back by a green ribbon and trailing a few tendrils, fresh cream harem pants and a silk chiffon tunic by Max Mara, another E-bay bargain - that I found it hard to work up any real outrage against him and probably only succeeded in sounding like an abandoned child: ‘You were my guest last night, but you sneaked away. Why didn’t you say you had to go somewhere?’

  I was not having the desired effect. Retreating a step or two from me, he lowered himself gracefully onto another sofa, and gazed up at me with a quizzical look that barely masked his amusement. ‘I waited for you for precisely one hour and a half,’ he declared before belatedly noting my expression and shifting down to a more contrite gear with ‘Please accept my heartfelt apology for offending you, but there is something here I cannot quite understand: you must have been very disgustingly soiled by your adventures to require such a very long shower. Are you aware that we have a chronic water shortage here in Yemen, that our capital Sanaa may soon have to be evacuated for lack of water?’

  His gentle tease about wasting water hit home but I couldn’t help feeling flattered at the idea of him imagining me, ‘disgustingly soiled’, in the shower. I laughed and blushed and wondered; had I really spent an hour and a half tweezing? I do tend towards perfectionism in this area. If I had, I could hardly blame him for concluding that he’d been misreading my signals, rather than the other way around. I decided to draw a line under the incident and proceed with confidence, on the basis of Plan A, that he was sufficiently attracted to me to need me to pursue my destiny at his side.

  ‘You have packed and paid?’ he asked.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Please go and pack now.’

  ‘Why? We’re not leaving Aden, are we?

  ‘Are you so sure about that?’ he was laughing at me again.

  ‘I thought you said my destiny was here?’ I protested, but I couldn’t help laughing too. What I’d never quite appreciated about love is that its victims find themselves so highly over-sensitised to everything about their beloved, so helplessly delighted by the mere fact of being in their presence, that if they don’t let off steam by laughing they’ll collapse in tears. I’m tempted to compare the condition to being in my cups; the wild mood swings are certainly similar, but that fearfully tenderised sensation renders being in love infinitely more dangerous.

  ‘I said that I believe you will find the meaning of your life in South Yemen, not precisely in Aden,’ he said, gleeful as a schoolboy who’s outwitted his teacher.

  ‘Aha!’ I played along gamely.

  ‘In the manner of the authoritarian leaders who have tended to govern this part of the world since the1950s, I have therefore taken a unilateral decision that you will not be permitted to leave south Yemen until you have seen more than Aden, more than the inside of your kidnappers’ fortress and Silent Valley. I want to show you a region some two hundred miles to the east of here – my home, Britain’s old East Aden Protectorate, ancient Hadramaut.’

  ‘I see, so that’s your plan…’ I pretended to hesitate but there was nothing I could do to stop my eyes saying, ‘Perfect! When do we leave?’

  All my defences having proved as much use as the Maginot Line in 1940, my heart felt free to leap at his use of the first person plural pronoun ‘we’. The prospect of spending the foreseeable future in his company was having a dramatically mood-enhancing effect; suddenly overwhelmed by joyous hope, I felt like trotting around the lobby to an accompaniment of the Radetzky March.

  Bubbling over with happy anticipation, forgetful and nervously clumsy, I nevertheless managed to find the lift and my third floor room and hurl all my precious belongings into my suitcase, including the twice dented can of baked beans. Then, case locked and lip-gloss and a spritz of my favourite cologne applied, I descended to the lobby with my already maxed-out Barclaycard in hand, only to learn that Sheikh Ahmad had already settled the bill: ‘If I’m going to first abandon you, then imprison and finally kidnap you, I think the least I can do is pay the bills,’ he said with a chuckle, taking my elbow with one hand and briskly extending the handle of my case with the other, before steering us both through the revolving door. His brazen admission of serial wrong-doing surprised me but I couldn’t help thoroughly enjoying it.

  We had turned out onto the main road leading north-east, away from Aden and were bowling along a straight coast road with an empty white sandy beach and blue sea to our left, more sand and stone and low mountains to our left, and he was telling me about our destination when I interrupted, ‘- but you make it sound like a Shangri-la. What’s so wonderful about this Hadramaut place?’

  ‘Wait, Roza! Patience!’ he commanded me.

  He was still saying ‘wet’ where he meant ‘wait’ but odder still, although he’d begun calling me by my first name he was substituting a short ‘o’ sound where there should have been a long one. At first I thought he’d hit on the harmless shortening of my name Ralph always used, Rozzy, but I was mistaken; he was saying ‘Rozzer’, which anyone who keeps their ear as open as I happen to do for the colourful vicissitudes of London slang, will recognise as an affectionate term for the police, an East End Jewish corruption of the Hebrew word for ‘pig’.

  Gazing out of the window at the burning blue sky and the odd qat pick-up racing past us with its blue tarpaulin flapping in the wind, fighting a simultaneous urge to laugh and cry, and another to kiss him, I realised with a shock that was half pleasant and half terrifying that I didn’t care what he called me – ‘Rozzer’, ‘Pig’, ‘Fuzz’, ‘Old Bill’ or ‘Bobby’. Nor, for that matter, could I have cared less where we were headed or for how long, as long as we were together.

  Chapter Twelve

  If I didn’t really care whether or not he told me about Hadramaut, I did very much want to know more about him.

  A string of questions clamoured to be asked: Why do you speak such good English? What’s your relationship with Aziz all about? How did you get so rich? On a scale of one to ten how attractive do you find me? Why are you the only tall Yemeni I’ve seen so far? What do you think our children would look like? Granted, a more salient question than any of the above at this stage would have been ‘Are you married?’ but I’d deleted the idea before even formulating it. He didn’t behave like any married man I’d ever met, nor was he wearing a ring and if he was spoken for, why wasn’t the lucky lady on the mobile to him night and day checking on his whereabouts?

  A womanly intuition with regard to what I suspected must be a peculiarly Yemeni capacity for opacity warned me not to plunge in head first with my quiz. Any one of those questions might betray me as ignorant. With an uncharacteristic restraint born of my new-found love for him I decided to leave him to choose what he told me and how. So ‘I know nothing about Yemen and how Yemenis live,’ I began breezily. ‘Can you tell me about your life, for example?’

  ‘What about my life?’ He stopped to answer a call on his mobile with a volley of angry-sounding Arabic. I imagined he was tearing a strip off his accountant or perhaps his mechanic, but apparently not, ‘That was Aziz,’ he told me, ‘He says his nose is much better this morning, that the scabs are starting to form. He hopes we’ll both have a safe journey and that you are in a good mood. Are you in a good mood today, Rozzer?’

  ‘Yes, a very good mood,’ I smiled at him and was rewar
ded with another of his glorious grins, but I was not about to be side-tracked ‘You could start by telling me about your childhood…’

  ‘It’s a long story, Rozzer, and I prefer to look forward, not back,’ he replied, ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to listen to some music instead? I downloaded an album of one of our best singers for you last night.’

  ‘Actually no, I wouldn’t. I’m not a fan of Arab music, I’m afraid – far too much wailing.’ I was rudely overstating the case, probably because I was suddenly incandescent with fury at the idea of him wasting his night downloading music off the Internet when he could and should have been, so to speak, downloading into me.

  ‘All right, all right!’ he said, laughing, ‘But first I’ll have to explain some things about Hadramaut so that you can understand about my childhood -’

  ‘I’m all ears!’ I said, tightly crossing my arms and legs, still feeling ludicrously cheated of what might have been a first night of passion with him.

  ‘In the old days many people from the deep valleys, we call them wadis, of Hadramaut, had to travel very far to make money. In the wadi there are only bees for honey and some goats and vegetable and date palms. So, many men sailed away to India and East Africa and especially to the part of the East Indies that was ruled by the Dutch to earn a living. They were pious and educated Moslems, but also hard workers and clever traders. We Hadramis are still often called the Jews of the Arab world because we were proud and always thinking and talking about the Hadramaut, just like the Jews think about Jerusalem, and we usually got very rich.’

  That might just be the answer to my question about the source of his conspicuous wealth. ‘So you have family money?’

  ‘Yes, but there were many expenses,’ he replied, narrowly but completely missing my point, ‘Those Hadramis were in the habit of leaving their wives and children back at home in the wadi and of taking new wives in the East Indies and having more children.’

  That was surely the slanting eyes question answered! ‘You have some Indonesian blood?’

  ‘My great-grandmother was from Sumatra. My great-grandfather created a very successful real estate company in the north of Sumatra, in Aceh.’

  ‘You were brought up in Indonesia?’

  ‘No – it’s complicated Rozzer - you must be patient. What usually happened was that when a boy born in the East Indies was old enough, his father sent him back to the wadi. He wasn’t allowed to forget that he was really a Hadrami. Even if he was half-Sumatran, he knew that Hadramaut was his home. My grandfather came back to the wadi, married a local girl and had some children before leaving for Sumatra again and starting another family.’

  ‘Your grandmother was Indonesian too?’

  ‘Wait, Rozzer! I recently discovered that one of my grandfathers was a very tall Dutch colonial from Rotterdam.’ Ah ha! That would account for his strapping build, I thought, as he continued, ‘But what I’m seeking to explain to you is that everything changed after the British left here at the end of ’67. I was only just born - about two months old - and my father, who hadn’t joined the family business in Sumatra because he wanted to be an administrator under the British, could see that everything would be very bad when the Marxists took control.’

  ‘So you had to flee from Hadramaut to Sumatra?’

  ‘Rozzer, I will force you to listen to my music if you will not let me tell you my story as I want to.’

  ‘Sorry!’ I think I was anxious to move the story on a bit. There was so much more I wanted to know. He’d been narrating his tale at his own meandering pace for at least twenty minutes and he was still only two months old! At this rate, we’d be reaching the moon and he’d only be hitting puberty.

  ‘No, we couldn’t go to Sumatra at that time because Indonesia was also unstable, under military rule.’

  ‘Ok, so let me guess where you went.’ While he didn’t have a discernible north American accent, I’d noticed that he used the term ‘real estate’ instead of ‘property’ when speaking of his ancestor’s business in Sumatra. ‘Canada?’

  ‘No, to Saudi Arabia, to Jeddah.’

  ‘Just like the stick insect baked-bean addict!’

  ‘Precisely! That’s how I know so much about the family. In fact, there was a very large and close south Yemeni community of exiles there in Jeddah. It was fun; we children were in and out of each others’ houses all the time, playing games of British and Marxists – a version of Cowboys and Indians - while our parents sat around drinking whisky and cursing first the Brits for leaving them high and dry and then the Marxists for stealing their land and smashing their mosques, and then the Saudis, the filthy Bedouin, for granting them generous monthly stipends but treating them like beggars. Now I can understand how homesick and depressed they all were, mourning the old country…’

  ‘I get the picture, but wasn’t Jeddah where Osama bin Laden spent his childhood?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And am I right in thinking bin Laden’s father was a Yemeni rather than a Saudi?… Yes? I thought so! You see I’m not just a pretty face, am I?’ I think at this stage I wanted to move our relationship out of pupil-teacher dynamic by injecting it with a flirtier flavour.

  ‘Rozzer, no! How can you ask me such a question? I am insulted that you think I treat like you like a stupid doll! You have my respect, always!’

  ‘I know, I know! Calm down! It’s just another saying! Like “keep your hair on” and “don’t get your knickers in a twist,” I laughed, ‘We’ve got our wires a bit crossed, having a little clash of civilisations, nothing to worry about!’ So saying, I reached over the handbrake to reassure him with a pat on his futa-clad knee.

  ‘Oh, I see, all right,’ he said, correcting the slight swerve I’d caused with that sudden physical contact ‘Where were we? – yes, Mohammad bin Laden was a Hadrami, to be precise, and from the same wadi as my family, actually, although he emigrated before the British left, in about 1930 I think.’

  There was a curious nonchalance about the way Sheikh Ahmad delivered these words but I thought I also detected a new note of defensiveness in his voice. While I was sure there was a great deal more he could have told me about the bin Ladens I decided to drop the subject for the time being, pretending to lose all interest in his personal link to the world’s most famous criminal.

  ‘Did you learn your wonderful English at a school in Jeddah?’ I said, helping myself to a dried fig from his stash in the glove compartment and popping one in his mouth. Upping the intimacy ante by feeding the loved one a sweetmeat while his hands are otherwise occupied came to me naturally. I suppose there are techniques one can learn, but I was discovering that so much about seduction came naturally once the right feelings were in place.

  ‘Yes, I learned some English in Jeddah, but mostly I learned by attending that language school in Brighton each summer.’

  ‘Not short of a bob or two then,’ I muttered.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘ I mean your family must have had plenty of money to fly you to Britain every year!’

  ‘You could say so. We were exiles but my father had a very good job as a manager in the bin Laden corporation. People from the Wadi Duan have always looked after people from the Wadi Duan…’.

  Well, if he was willing to mention the BL words again, I didn’t see why I need be shy. ‘Did you play Brits and Marxists with little Osama then?’

  ‘No, we were at the same Al-Tagher school there in Jeddah but Osama was quite a lot older than me, about eight years I think, and had already left by the time I went. So I only heard about him from his younger brothers; I do remember them complaining that he was very annoying to them, always commanding them to learn the Koran off by heart.’

  ‘I know that sort of bore – like my sister-in-law…’ I observed, thinking of Fiona’s exasperating habit of reading from the Old Testament at supper on Sunday evenings.

  ‘But in fact, I got to know him quite well later, in Afghanistan, and he has never seemed to me like that. He has
a very good sense of humour, in fact - a bright, light heart …’

  I pretended I hadn’t heard him and changed the subject as casually as I could, grimacing out of the window to conceal the fact that I was in the grip of at least as great a terror as those boy-band butchers had subjected me to: ‘I imagine Afghanistan’s rather like Yemen to look at, is it? Poor with lots of mountains and dust? Were you there on business?’

  ‘Business? In Afghanistan? No!’ he laughed, ‘Like Osama bin Laden and a lot of other Yemenis I’d grown up with in Jeddah, I was there to fight the godless Russians. I went when I was 22, in 1989. We Saudi Yemenis were all fanatically anti-Russian because of what our parents had always said about how the Marxists took over our homeland, smashing our mosques and murdering our imams. And we were good fighters, much better than most of the Saudis. I fought in the Battle of Jalalabad.’

  The implications and ramifications of what I was hearing petrified me. In a nanosecond of laser understanding I’d joined all the dots to my complete satisfaction and grasped the extent of the danger I was in: Hadramaut: bin Laden’s ‘ancestral homeland’ – Indonesia: Hadrami traders and Bali night-club bombing – Saudi Arabia: home to most of 9/11 bombers – Afghanistan: bin Laden and Sheikh Ahmad – Wadi Duan: bin Ladens and al-Abralis. Like a broken code reconstituted, it all made perfect sense just as soon as one added the vital Hadramaut piece. Hadramaut was the hub and the nub of it all!

  What on earth did I think I was doing bowling around the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula with a brother in arms of bin Laden’s? My imagination began to run amok. My beloved didn’t like me, let alone love me. A black-hearted Islamist with nothing on his vile mind but murder and seventy virgins, he was removing me to his remote wadi mansion where he’d been hiding his old chum Osama for the past almost seven years. Together, the pair of them would plot an evening’s light entertainment involving forcing me into a balto before camcording my execution and rounding off the evening by uploading the footage onto a lap-top, transferring it onto a memory stick and distributing it to Al-Jazeerah and all the other networks.