A Foreign Affair

by Stella Russell

  ‘Does reminding you where we were count as an interjection?’ I flirted, withholding the fruit until I received the right answer.

  ‘I will permit you this,’ he laughed.

  ‘You were cracking jokes with bin Laden, in Afghanistan, fighting against the Soviets.’

  ‘ Oh, yes…’

  I’m going to cut a very long story – a couple of hours’ worth - a little bit short because there’s nothing so dull as a monologue. Edited salient highlights are all that’s required here, I think.

  The first point the sheikh rammed home was this: there could be nothing remotely suspect from a western point of view about either him or Osama fighting the Russkies in Afghanistan, simply because Cold War America was arming them to do precisely that at the time. It hadn’t occurred to him that I was not aware of this fact and he found my ignorance both surprising and worrying, he said.

  After fighting in Afghanistan for a year, a rite of passage that fulfilled the same function for wealthy young Yemeni Saudis of that era as a gap year abroad does for our privately-educated school leavers, he returned to Jeddah to start work. However, at precisely that moment the government of his ancestral homeland - the Marxists in Aden, in other words - declared they were not only ditching Marx but also the national border in order to merge with the north of the country. Those southern Yemeni Marxists were the canary in the eastern bloc’s mine, he reminded me; this was only 1990. He noted that the two Germanies didn’t amalgamate for another almost two months and the old Soviet Union wouldn’t be messing with its borders for another year or more.

  The demise of Marxism on the peninsula tempted Sheikh Ahmad to decamp immediately, home to the Wadi Duan, but he’d ended up wisely biding his time to see how north-south Yemeni unity would shape up in practice. Could the gang of northern tribesmen who now lorded it over a single Yemen be trusted to treat Adenis and Hadramis and other southerners right? On hot summer nights in the Hadrami neighbourhoods of Jeddah, he told me, you could almost hear the case being heatedly argued back and forth. But a surly gloom settled over the disputants in July 1994 when united Yemen erupted in a fortnight of civil war. Pointless deaths and costly destruction and a northern tightening of screws on the south were the only results. Sheikh Ahmad had felt every whisper of bad news from Aden ‘like a camel-whip on my own behind’, he claimed, although I noted that no amount of whipping had impeded his meteoric rise, from a menial job in the bin Laden corporation to ownership of some highly lucrative Saudi franchises: Procter & Gamble (which explains why he’d so easily grasped what I’d meant by ‘items of feminine hygiene’) and Hewlett Packard, to name only two.

  After fifteen years, by 2005, he’d stashed more than enough cash to do what all go-getting Hadrami émigrés have apparently always done: amaze and impress the old neighbours back in the wadi by returning there to build a family palace. But was the time right? On the face of it, from a western point of view, certainly not. Since 2000 – a whole year before 9/11 – when the American warship, the USS Cole, had put into Aden for re-fuelling and been blown up by terrorists with the loss of seventeen lives, Yemen had been on an international black list. The discovery that it had operated as a communications centre for other al-Qaeda types plotting similar attacks, had not improved its standing in the world, and nor had the news that a portion of the Yemeni security service had been aiding and abetting the wickedness.

  From Sheikh Ahmad’s point of view however, the time was right, indeed, almost over-ripe because another fabulously wealthy Saudi-based émigré from the Wadi Duan – a person he neither liked nor trusted - was rumoured to be planning an homage to the Twin Towers in the next village along the wadi from his. Natural light being at something of a premium in the deep, steep-sided wadi, the sheikh wanted to make absolutely sure that neither of his rival’s twin skyscrapers would be obstructing any of the light available to his own creation, which would be ‘an homage to the Brighton Pavilion’ he’d grown to love on his annual language school visits.

  I wasn’t quite sure if I’d heard him right or, if I had, whether to believe him or not, but I was not about to risk blotting my copy-book again by asking searching questions about the project. I didn’t even hazard a ‘Wow!’

  Anyway, the point appeared to be that Sheikh Ahmad’s Regency repro had had to be built, furnished and inhabited before his rival’s Twin Towers were even off the drawing board. Thanks to the ready availability of the mud bricks that are the traditional building material of the Hadramaut, and a labour force blessed with the native Hadrami talent for construction, it had duly gone up in a matter of only months. At this point, Sheikh Ahmad took the trouble to point out that the monstrous charges I’d levelled at him in Mukalla airport were the more insulting in view of the fact that he’d done more than his bit to soak up the surplus of idle youth in Yemen – precisely the demographic most susceptible to bin Laden’s blarney, of course – by setting no fewer than eight hundred and fifty of them to honest work, 24/7 on his mansion.

  Delighted as he was with his new home however, Sheikh Ahmad had been dismayed by the general conditions prevailing in Yemen in the mid-noughties. The bull-necked northerner tribesman who ruled from Sanaa was growing old and slack and making a fearful mess of running the show. South Yemenis were suffering untold miseries from northerners stealing their land, from northerners demanding to be bribed, from northerners bagging the best jobs, from northerners flouting every law ever written, from northerners failing even to abide by the traffic rules in Aden – ‘you see them all the time, parking and picnicking on the roundabouts!’ said the sheikh. In his view, Yemeni unity had been a ghastly mistake, ‘a criminal catastrophe’.

  But ‘a criminal catastrophe’ that could be reversed, he felt… At that moment, just when I’d intuited from his change of tone that I might, at last, be coming within spitting distance of some useful information about the man I loved, we plunged off the jol, down a series of precipitous hair pin bends, into the Wadi Duan.

  I’ve never seen anything as spectacular as that Wadi. If the producers of 007 movies haven’t already used it as a backdrop for one Bond’s stunts, they most certainly should. What made it so astonishing was not only its secret exclusivity and glamour, its almost vertical sides and its verdant floor that was no more than a kilometre wide, but the style of some of the buildings that clung to the edges of that floor with their backs hard against the wadi walls. The first we passed indicated that I had, after all, heard the sheikh right. There was no reason why, if someone had elected to construct a ten-storey approximation of Buckingham Palace with a facade brightly painted in blocks of every colour of the rainbow, Sheikh Ahmad shouldn’t have planned a quasi Brighton Pavilion, and his rival another World Trade Centre. A cluster of what Sheikh Ahmad termed ‘Indonesian baroque palaces’ – like wedding cakes with their fanciful whirligigs and pretty pastel floral detailing – followed, the status symbols of people like Sheikh Ahmad’s great grandfather who’d made their fortunes in Sumatra, and then a Bauhaus box the size of the Titanic. Without any landscaping around any of them, with nothing but dust and stones and date palms and a few goats for a setting, they would always be as surreal a sight as Dr Who’s Tardis. But when you came to think about it, so what?

  For a while we bumped on down the track along the wadi. The occasional sighting of a female goatherd, dressed in black from head to toe – socks, gloves and face-apron included – with a tall conical straw hat on her head and a long stick in her hand, surprised me. I noticed that one or two of them wore their enveloping uniforms with considerable grace; one – whom, irritatingly, Sheikh Ahmad refused to honk at or overtake – was swinging her lusciously child-bearing haunches in an immodest fashion as she herded her animals along the track ahead of us. In order to distract the sheikh from this view, I finally risked a businesslike ‘You were speaking about reversing the ‘criminal catastrophe’?’

  ‘Quite right, so I was. In order to save our people from the crimes of these northern barbarians I believe
that we must separate again from the north. So, I know now that my destiny, the goal of my life, is not anything like al-Qaeda’s megalomaniac plan to build a global Islamic caliphate, you see. It is modest by comparison, only to work to see the rebirth of a secular and prosperous south Yemen that draws on the enlightened traditions of Great Britain and…’

  The Brighton Pavilion of the Wadi Duan, its silver domes shining in the last rays of the setting sun to reach the wadi floor, was now visible.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On the final approach to his pleasure palace Sheikh Ahmad cast aside his freedom-fighter’s mantle to turn tour-guide, complete with what sounded to me like a good grasp of the architectural canon.

  ‘… the style of my home is Indo-Saracenic, a style which, by the way, is also known as Indo-Gothic or Mughal-Gothic. This blend of English Gothic and local Indian is absolutely appropriate to the Hadramaut because Hadramaut has had close links with both India and Britain for so many centuries…’

  ‘But what made you go for that extraordinary shade of red?’ I asked, thinking how unpleasantly the edifice’s ox-blood red facade recalled the Farrow & Ball shade Fiona had selected for the gunroom at Widderton.

  ‘My wife Arwa picked it out – she’s the one with taste…’

  ‘Excuse me, your what?’

  ‘My wife, Arwa. You will meet her very soon and you will like her I think because you are both serious women with beautiful hearts; I called her from Mukalla to ask her and the others to prepare things for you.’

  ‘The others? How many wives have you got, Sheikh Ahmad?’ His guff about ‘beautiful hearts’ made me want to throw up. I abruptly switched to using his name again. Assuming that the relationship has already progressed to the level of deliberately omitting the loved one’s name, there is nothing so instantly distancing as resuming its overuse.

  ‘I have the Islamically permitted four wives, Rozzer,’ he answered me coolly.

  ‘Let me guess, Sheikh Ahmad; the youngest hasn’t started her periods yet,’ I muttered frostily.

  ‘You say some strange things sometimes,’ he replied coldly, ‘My youngest wife, Bushara, is twenty-five years old.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Sheikh Ahmad. If I’m a little surprised, it’s because there’s been no mention of any wife, let alone four of them, in the life story I’ve been listening to,’ I retorted icily.

  For the second time in forty-eight hours I was finding myself at a dangerous disadvantage on account of another’s multiple identities. Just because Sheikh Ahmad had attended a Brighton language school, spoke good English and espoused the political ideals of a Whig aristocrat, he was not, of course, obliged to have jettisoned his Hadrami futas, let alone his cultural norms. But how on earth was one to know where one stood, where someone of his ilk drew any lines? In his terms, I supposed, there was no reason why he shouldn’t have his four cakes and eat them all too, all the while letting me think I was his favourite little flapjack.

  I supposed it was my look-out if I wasn’t alert to all the nuances, a case of caveat emptor if ever there was one and the best argument ever for stuffily sticking with one’s own nationality and culture. But how could I feel so utterly safe and right with him one instant and in mortal danger of murder or, at the very least, heart-break the next? Why did I feel as dazzling as a hundred watt light-bulb when I was with Sheikh Ahmad and like one of those dismal, dim energy-savers without him?

  ‘Rozzer,’ he was explaining gently, ‘this is not the West, you are among Arabs, where it is not the custom to talk publicly about one’s private life. Imagine, it is as if you were to tell me precisely how and where you prefer to cut your toenails. Good taste and manners traditionally forbid Arabs to speak about the women in our families. I have not been trying to hide anything from you.’

  ‘But you made no allowance for the fact that I know nothing about Arab manners,’ I protested, ‘and you may not have noticed, Sheikh Ahmad, but there’s a difference between an animate human being – even if she is only female – and a toenail!’

  Desperately striving to claw back some control of the situation, I locked my passenger door and announced, ‘I need some transparency, Sheikh Ahmad. We need to proceed, if at all, on the basis of mutual trust. I’m not moving from this car seat until you’ve given me straight answers to two questions: first, why did risk your life to help Aziz to rescue me the other night? Second, why are you so anxious that I should not leave south Yemen? Got that? Now, SHOOT!’

  A couple of man-servants in futas and flip-flops had skipped down the marble front steps of the pavilion, presumably to open car doors and attend to luggage, but I ignored them: ‘SHOOT!’ I repeated.

  ‘Rozzer, we both need a long, cold drink – an iced fresh lemon juice, perhaps - and a rest after our long journey. Arwa will have prepared everything.’

  If he’d suggested a large gin & tonic or even a pint of iced lager, he could not have deflected me from my purpose at that juncture.

  ‘SHOOT!’ I repeated for a third time.

  ‘All right. I will answer your questions with one single explanation.’

  ‘Get on with it then!’ I wanted to scream at him, but I didn’t because I strongly suspected that he could be at least as adept at finding his anger as I am, and I’d already tested him once that day.

  ‘Shoot!’ I commanded, but more calmly this time.

  ‘OK. When he realised you’d been kidnapped, Aziz came to me in despair, weeping, begging me for help. Why? Because I am the leader of a political movement he belongs to. It is a southern Yemeni movement fighting to restore independence for the area that was British and then Communist, and some pride and hope for the future too, with Britain’s support and help we hope. It’s known by the name it was given by the two farmers who set it up two years ago after their land was stolen by northern barbarians. In English it would be something like the Party to Avenge the Rape of Property.’

  ‘P-A-R-P!’ I couldn’t help giggling, ‘But I don’t see what my kidnapping has to do with this PARP of yours. Why didn’t Aziz just ring the police and the British ambassador in Sanaa?’

  ‘Rozzer, he came to me because, having corrected all my spelling mistakes in my letter to the Daily Register, he knew that I would be very, very interested to learn that an Englishwoman who may have been in south Yemen on British secret government business because she’d disembarked alone and without any apparent goal, had disappeared, along with an expensive LandCruiser.’

  One should always be careful what one wishes for; I’d demanded straight-talking from him and got it.

  ‘That’s it, Rozzer,’ he sighed deeply, ‘Now you have the answers to your questions, but it’s a great sorrow to me that it had to happen like this. I wanted you to spend the week here in comfort while I explained everything to you. I wanted to help you to fall in love with our land, so that it could become dear to you, before interesting you, and through you the British government, in our liberation struggle. Then I wanted to show you Hadramaut and after that the tribal areas surrounding Aden, and invite you to speak to thousands of our supporters. As soon as I met you, and when I listened to you talk to those people at Silent Valley yesterday, I was very sure you could encourage and inspire my people, that you – maybe only you - could be the face and voice of the Britain we were so proud to be part of, that we loved and trusted for over a hundred years in spite of everything, until we stupidly became corrupted by Nasser’s evil promises…’

  I listened and understood and calmed down, adjusting my focus all over again. I reminded myself that love isn’t all about raging appetites and uncontrollable desires. Love, I’d always been led to believe, was also about sharing and supporting one’s beloved and I began to think I should do precisely that, not least because the life’s work of the beloved in question consisted of a struggle against oppression and injustice and a partial righting of ancient imperial wrongs. Who could ask for more in the way of a noble destiny? WWFHD in my shoes? My ancestor might have permitted h
imself some sneering and scoffing at my idealism but I think he would have wanted me to do the decent thing.

  However, I freely admit that my motives were not all unselfish. I was finding the idea of addressing and moving crowds of southern Yemeni youths with the power of my rhetoric decidedly appealing. If I’d managed to move a few crusty old servicemen to tears with my off-the-cuff speechifying in Silent Valley, there was no saying what mesmerising magic I could work on tens of thousands of hot-blooded young Yemenis. Better still, each performance would surely have the added value of rendering me ever more irresistible in the eyes of the man I loved.

  ‘I need some time to think this over carefully,’ I told Sheikh Ahmad, at last releasing the safety lock on my door. ‘I’ll need to be sure it’s within my remit.’

  With this mention of a ‘remit’ I was deliberately reinforcing any suspicion he might still have had that I’d arrived in his country on some hush-hush British business. However wedded to his life’s work I already felt inclined to be, I wasn’t so foolish as to surrender all my cards at once; I had no intention of becoming his creature, at least not until he showed himself more willing to become mine. Much depended on what his wives were like. Were they all on board with his life’s work? Were any of them working with him towards his goal? Was even one of them actually in love with him? I sincerely hoped that the answer to all these questions was negative.

  Far from forcing me to retreat in miserable disarray, the shocking news of Sheikh Ahmad’s harem was having a galvanising effect. One wife, a pity; two wives, a nuisance; three wives, a distinct downer; but four wives? BRING IT ON! as the Americans say. That was how I was feeling at this jucnture. I was David facing Goliath, Jack confronting the Giant, Harry and Hermione squaring up to Voldemort. I was also a chip off the old block, I suppose; my grandmother Roza Flashman the First, lady-in-waiting to the wife of Franz Ferdinand, would only set her cap at married men who were keeping a mistress or two, ‘Where’s the fun in a one-horse race?’ she used to declare. I agreed with my favourite female forebear but I wasn’t prepared to share the trophy forever. Sooner or later I expected to emerge from this wildly unequal contest the clear winner: Sheikh Ahmad’s sole bedmate, workmate and soulmate.