by Tony Horwitz
Yemeni Jews also had traditionally been barred from build- 1 ing their homes higher than Muslims', or even from riding a camel, which might elevate them above their donkey-riding neighbors. “Jews are not permitted to ride astride animals,” declared another obscure statute, “but must keep their feet to one side.”
Jews had nonetheless prospered in Yemen. As in other Arab countries, they were a protected minority called “people of the book,” a classification that referred to the Bible and included Christians as well (the Koran, Muslims believe, is, an improvement on the two earlier religions, not a complete rejection of them). In Saada, local tribes protected the unarmed Jews and exploited their skills as silversmiths, weavers and embroiderers. This created an odd disjuncture, now that Yemen had joined its Arab brothers in opposing the Jewish state. While the government news I watched on the hotel television railed against “the Zionist entity” fifteen hundred miles away, the few hundred Jews of Saada went about their business Grafting jambiyas and silver baubles for their Muslim protectors.
The only sign of tension was the Jews' reluctance to speak with me. Visiting Westerners had caused trouble by discussing migration to Israel, a touchy subject for the Yemeni government.
So after a dozen abortive chats, I contented myself with camping outside the stall of a particularly able silversmith. Stooped in the dirt, he picked at tiny bits of silver with a pair of tweezers, and laid them between wire borders to form a finely wrought arabesque. He turned out one small square after another, spending about an hour on each. He'd pause, smoke a cigarette, add a few leaves to his qat cud, then resume work on a design identical to the one he'd just finished.
When I asked what the designs were for, he gestured at a sack in the corner and returned to his tweezers. Inside the bag were dozens of jambiyas, their decorative handles dented or peeling away. It was the Jew's job to repair them.
The silversmith worked through the afternoon while the other merchants lunched and chewed and chattered. He worked into the evening, laboring by lamplight. He was still picking at his silver early the next morning when I returned, shifting qat from right cheek to left cheek and fixing one dagger after another. There was something in his mute, unstinting labor, repairing weapons he himself couldn't carry, which said all that needed to be said about centuries of silent submission.
On my way into town the previous day I'd seen a sign with the name of a hospital. I'd been struck by the irony of the hospital's name: Al-Salaam, Arabic for “peace.” The hospital seemed like the logical place to continue my reporting on the least peaceful place in Yemen. Going to Al-Salaam at nightfall, and settling in for a frankfurter and sauerkraut at the hospital cafeteria, I got more than I'd bargained for: the distinguished Dr. Peter Drake.
“I'm interested in gross pathology—in the fantastically gross things that happen her?,” the English physician said, sinking his fork into lemon meringue. “Cancer of the placenta is common as dirt here. A gyno will go his whole career in the U.K. without seeing that.” He stabbed his dessert. I put down my hot dog. “Yesterday, I saw a bayonet in the throat,” he went on. “Day before, a bloke came in with beriberi. Beriberi—can you imagine? We see leprosy, snake bites, camel bites, rabies. The U.K., it's an awful dull place compared to the Yemen.”
The sixty-two-year-old doctor had left the dull U.K. in the 1950s, first to work with Britian's colonial medical service in Nigeria (“gone to the dogs since we stopped ruling it”) and from there to Saudi Arabia (“they don't wear veils between their legs, but they would if they could”). For the past eight years he'd been in “the Yemen,” surviving on smuggled brandy, three-week-old copies of the London Times, and the fantastically gross cases he saw every day at the hospital.
“The other week, I had a real beauty,” he said, attacking a second piece of pie. “Bloke brings in his missus, says he married her that morning. She's bleeding all over the place, half dead. Know what happened? She was too tight, he says. So he opened her up a bit with his jambiya.” He wiped lemon filling from his lip. “Can you imagine? Opening her up on their wedding night?”
An Irish nurse joined the conversation from the other end of the table. “Today I go to take some blood from a woman,” she said, in a lilting accent, “and her arm is all covered with burns. Says the witch doctor did it to cure her. Then when I take her blood, she starts screaming. 'Give that back to me! You're going to sell it!' ”
Dr. Drake cackled, swallowed his coffee in one loud gulp and invited me to follow him on his evening rounds. We stopped first at his flat so he could put on a tie and tweed jacket—“keeping up standards”—then walked into a waiting room filled with veiled women and men in skirts and jackets. It was the first gathering of three or more Yemenis I'd seen that showed no evidence of either qat or jambiyas.
“Qat's forbidden and we make them check their weapons at the door,” the doctor explained. Sure enough, a nearby guard booth held a small arsenal of daggers and rifles, not unlike the collections I'd been pricing during my tour of the north.
“My first year here, they brought in some fellow who'd been shot in a tribal punch-up,” Dr. Drake continued. “He must have killed someone first, because the other tribe decides to come get its revenge right here in the parking lot. So in the end we had four of them coming in the door, all dead as dodos. You can see the bullet marks on the wall outside. Can you imagine?”
Listening to the doctor, and looking at the unarmed men in the waiting room, I was struck by the precariousness of Yemeni machismo. Until now, the north had seemed a threatening territory of heavily armed natives, made manic by qat. Suddenly, surrounded by tiny men with sparrowlike features, anxiously clutching sick children and spouses, I felt like a giant among munchkins. Stripped of their guns and denied the consoling powers of qat, the men looked as vulnerable as fathers and husbands in hospital waiting rooms anywhere in the world.
The women also seemed changed, if only because some were too sick to cover their faces. They lined the corridor, many holding feverish babies and pleading with each passing doctor and nurse for attention.
“Don't think this one's going to make it,” Dr. Drake said, lifting the eyelids of a jaundiced infant limp in the arms of its mother. Alongside sat a young girl with the rasping cough of a lifetime smoker. Stooping to press a stethoscope to her wasted chest, the doctor said to the girl's mother, “She'd better pull through or I'm not going to speak to her again.” The woman, who obviously understood not a word, reached into the folds of her robe and offered the doctor a bag of raisins.
At the end of the hall several nurses huddled around a bed surrounded by curtains. “If you want to give your coronary arteries a blow-through,” the doctor said, “look in there.” A woman lay on her back, blood streaming down her thigh as a female doctor put stitches between her legs. Catching my eye, the patient used her last ounce of strength to pull a veil across her face, even though the rest of her was fully exposed. Ashamed, I pulled the curtain shut.
Dr. Drake checked her chart. The woman had spontaneously aborted after a six-hour trip down the mountains on the back of a donkey. “Husband can't be found,” he said. “Off chewing qat somewhere.” He shook his head. “Qat makes them bloody daft, you know. One minute their heads are clear. Next moment it's like London up there. Socked in completely.”
His rounds finished, the doctor walked me to the parking lot. “Sorry we couldn't arrange a gunshot for you, or at least a stabbing,” he said, sounding genuinely apologetic. “Got any plans for tomorrow?”
“Bit of shopping. Then back to Sanaa.”
“Pity. Where are you staying?”
“The Rahban.”
He grimaced. “Don't drink the water, don't eat the food and be sure you don't chew qat, here or anywhere.”
“Too late,” I told him. “Done all of those already.”
“Good God.” He chuckled to himself, no doubt thinking of something fantastically gross. “If you're feeling off in the morning, you know where to find us.”
>
I drove back through the silent streets. Rabid-looking dogs lurked in the vacant lots. A demented motorcyclist raced back and forth down the main drag. But there wasn't another sound in the night, not even a car backfiring. The Rahban was also quiet, except for the toilet. I lay awake for a long while, reviewing the past days' adventures and listening to the putrid water drip from toilet to tile to carpet, thinking what a bloody dull place the world is compared to the Yemen.
In the morning I made a last tour of the bazaar, this time inquiring about the availability of deadly weapons. I'd already gathered most of the information I needed on the drive from Sanaa, and the purchasing charade had become rather weary. “Andak bandook?” Do you have a gun? You do? An AK-47 with retractable clip? And grenades too? How much for the lot? And so on, until I'd talked my way out the door and slipped into an alley to scribble the details down in my notebook.
“You like be strong?” a young man whispered, following me down a narrow lane. He was Jewish, about my own age, and rather biblical-looking with his dusty sandals, stringy beard and brown shift tied at the waist. “I see you look for something strong,” he said, tugging my arm. “Come with me. I find you finest jambiya in Saada.”
He led me into a dark corner of the casbah where an older Jew sat perched atop a heavy carpet. The man glanced both ways, then unfurled the rug to reveal a dozen jambiyas. It occurred to me then that none of the Jews had proper shops, possibly because this too was forbidden. Instead, they operated portable stores, opening and folding up shop at a moment's notice, like West African street hustlers in New York.
The man held up a stunning dagger, inlaid with minute bits of silver, much like the weapons I'd watched the Jewish silversmith laboring over. For the first time in three days of mock shopping, I was tempted to make a purchase.
The younger Jew—now self-appointed translator and middleman—leaped up and strapped the dagger around my waist. “You now very strong soldier,” he said. A crowd of boys, some Jews, some not, nodded in agreement. It seemed the whole crowd was working on commission.
I put the dagger down and feigned interest in several others. Then I glanced again at the first dagger and asked in an offhand manner what it cost. The two men consulted in Arabic and the younger one said, “Two thousand riyals.” About two hundred dollars.
“Two thousand?” I got up to leave. There was another whisper of Arabic, and the young man grasped my sleeve. “Make my friend an offer,” he said. “Perhaps today he is in need to sell.” It was the first time I had heard bargaining words from a Yemeni merchant. It was also the first time I had felt some common blood flowing between me and these mocha-colored men with their beanies and ringlets.
I picked up a stick and scribbled “500” in the dust. The old man began rolling up his carpet. I handed him the stick. He wrote “1500.” I got up to leave again. He held my arm, then wiped out the dust with his sandal and wrote “1000.” I scribbled “500” again. He turned away, as if to catch the eye of a passing shopper..
“You have dollars?” our go-between asked. After all, dollars were worth one thing to me and quite another to them, traded on the black market. I laid a fifty-dollar bill in the dust, which equaled five hundred riyals at the official rate and perhaps seven hundred at the unofficial. The young man held it up to the sun and made some quick calculations. “It is good money but need more,” he declared. I emptied my pockets: a ten-dollar bill, one hundred riyals, a return plane ticket to Cairo and a few lint-covered Egyptian stamps. I draped the riyals and the stamps across the dagger's handle. The old man considered the offer for a moment. Then he reached into a corner of his carpet and dug out two enormous worn coins like some I'd seen at a museum in Sanaa. They were Maria Theresa dollars, Austrian coins once used by the Ottoman Turks and apparently still legal tender in Yemen. He tossed them atop the dagger, then pointed at the ten dollars I was still clutching.
I added the bill to the loot and the man nodded his consent. He pocketed the dollars, riyals and stamps. I scooped up thejambiya and Maria Theresa coins. The young man helped strap the dagger around my waist.
“You make very big bargain,” he said, standing back. This seemed dubious. “You look like very big sheik,” he continued. This seemed even more dubious. But marching out of the market, past the silversmith and down the dusty main drag, my hand resting calmly on the hilt of the fine jambiya, I thought it likely that I was the first armed Jew to parade through the streets of Saada.
4—PERSIAN GULF—The Strait of Hoummos
If one goes into Arabia, he should carry his shroud under his arm.
—A friend's advice to Arabian explorer Charles Doughty
Late one Friday night in Cairo, I was watching a scratched videotape of Dr. No, dubbed into Arabic, when the call came through from New York.
“Tony? Jack.”
“Jack!” I switched off the video. Jack was a former classmate and one of a dozen or so magazine editors I'd written to before moving to Cairo, in the hopes they'd throw an assignment my way. None had yet called.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” he asked.
“No, just finishing off a story.”
“Look,” he said, “there's been some great TV footage over here on the tanker war in the Persian Gulf.” He paused. “We'd like you to get out on the water and put the story into words.”
I'd seen the same footage earlier that night, on the English-language news. Iraqi warplanes and Iranian gunboats, drilling oil tankers with Exocet missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Flaming hulks skidding across the TV screen. Half-charred sailors leaping overboard, into shark-infested waters.
“Sounds great, Jack.” After weeks of stringing, it was good to be tossed some rope, however frayed. “What's my budget?”
“A thou for expenses, three thou for the finished piece, and a thou kill fee.” He chuckled. “That's if the piece gets killed, not you.” He had another call waiting; he wished me luck and rang off.
There was one other Westerner on board the flight to the United Arab Emirates, the best jumping-off point for coverage of the Persian Gulf war. He was slumped in a window seat across the aisle, reading the Emirates News.
“Reporter?” he asked. I nodded. “Gulf-warring it?” I nodded again. “Me too,” he continued. “Bloody dull business.” He glanced out at the twilit sky as we banked over the Persian Gulf for the plane's first stop, at Qatar. “If there's any heat tonight you'll see it out the left side of the aircraft.” With that, he handed me his newspaper, yawned, and drifted off to sleep.
I devoured every inch of newsprint. In Cairo, the only English-language daily was the Egyptian Gazette, a six-page chronicle filled with out-of-date AP stories, grainy photos of East German factories (available to the Gazette for free) and newsy nuggets on the domestic scene, such as “President Mubarak yesterday received a cable of thanks from Sultan Qaboos of Oman in reply to the President's greetings cable marking the 17th anniversary of the Sultanate's National Day.”
The Emirates paper was encyclopedic by comparison, and crammed with curious glimpses of the society I was about to enter. The daily “prayer timings” were prominently displayed, alongside the arrival and departure schedule at the Emirates' four international airports—this in a nation with the population and habitable land mass of Rhode Island. Two of the airports were only ten miles apart. An advertisement on the opposite page offered “brief but intense shopping sprees in London” and “slimming vacations in West Germany.”
At the airport in the Emirates' capital, Abu Dhabi, I climbed into a Mercedes taxi and tore down an empty six-lane causeway, past cloverleafs, shopping centers and lush strips of green pasted neatly onto the desert. Gleaming skyscrapers rose on both sides. The whole city looked like an architect's model, a toy town, still under glass.
In Cairo I'd been surprised to hear Egyptians speak disparagingly of Persian Gulf Arabs, to whom they gave the diminutive nickname “Gulfies.” The Gulfies had oil but they didn't have a civilization to rival tha
t of the Egyptians, who were tossing up pyramids five thousand years before the Gulfies moved out of goat-hair tents. “When the chips are down, there is only one real place in the entire area—Egypt,” a Cairo diplomat once declared. “All the rest—forgive me—are tribes with flags.”
There was a kernel of truth underlying this arrogance.* There was also a great deal of envy. Egypt had a per capita income of $560 a year. In the Emirates the figure was $24,000. At the height of the oil boom, the tiny nation had been the richest in the world.
But a traditional culture could still be glimpsed through the shimmer. At the Abu Dhabi Sheraton, there was a room-service menu offering fresh lobster flown in from Canada, and the in-house movie schedule rivaled that of a suburban cineplex. But kisses and cuddles were edited out of the films, to avoid offending Muslim guests. There was a notice by the bed that prayer rugs were available at reception. A decal on the night table pointed the way to Mecca.
Opting for the hotel bar, I found myself seated beside a Fort Worth oilman named Larry. “Change those Arab dishrags for ten-gallon hats and this place could be Dallas,” he said, sipping Budweiser. He was watching the Texas Longhorns play the Arkansas Razorbacks, live via satellite on a twenty-two-inch television screen. “Biggest, tallest, richest, they love that shit.” He lowered his voice. “If you've got it, flaunt it. And let me tell you, son, they've got it.”
By day, Abu Dhabi was blinding. White sky. White buildings. White-robed men in white Mercedeses, calling each other on car phones. Imported laborers provided the only color: red-turbaned Sikhs, laying green turf on the median strips. Staggering through the sunstruck streets, I took refuge in Abu Dhabi's only historical edifice: a mud-and-coral fortress that had, until the 1960s, dwarfed the huts of what was then a pearling and fishing backwater. The fortress was now a pygmy amid thirty-story towers of steel and glass.
