A Foreign Affair (18 page)

Good
luck
my
dear
friend
!
Inshallah
we
will
meet
again
in
this
world
,
or
the
next
!

Aziz

I could feel nothing but pity for my first Yemeni friend who, I imagined, might well – without any prompting from his monstrous parent - go and hang himself from Aden’s Big Ben by his own testicles. There in that ladies lavatory in Marib I turned to the only friend to hand –
Stolichnaya
.

Chapter Twenty-four

Hand-cuffed and in the ‘deepest, darkest do-do’ I’d ever known but also in a pleasantly sozzled state, I couldn’t help but be delighted by everything about ‘the land of the barbarians’. On that pearly, early morning the drive into Sanaa was thrilling.

I grant you, the Shangri-la wadis of Hadramaut had had much to recommend them but, Sheikh Ahmad aside, nothing else about southern Yemen had impressed me much – not Aden, not the environs or the inhabitants of the bin Husis’ mud castle, not Silent Valley nor the Sheraton. By comparison, the north’s attractions were obvious and vastly superior. How can I convey the qualitative gulf separating Yemen’s twin capitals? If Aden’s a Ford Fiesta, Sanaa’s a horse and carriage; if Aden’s a used Kleenex, Sanaa’s a fine lawn hankie; if Aden’s an IKEA flat-pack, Sanaa’s a Regency
secretaire
. The coarsening effects of over a century of British rule followed by twenty-five years of Marxism had left the southern city as badly scarred as a victim of adolescent acne while Sanaa’s complexion was as unblemished as a pretty girl’s.

Of course Sanaa was more backward than Aden but what did that matter when, high up there on its clear-aired plateau, it was so extraordinarily picturesque? At that hour of the morning I was being treated to the unearthly moaning of a hundred muezzins from the chubby stubs of a hundred homely minarets, echoing around the city and ricocheting off the ring of blue-pink mountains all around. I was admiring ancient brick high-rise after ancient brick high-rise, clustered close as trees in a forest or sky-scrapers in Manhattan. I was glimpsing hidden gardens behind high brick walls. I was noticing posses of small boys with shaven heads in pea-green school uniforms dawdling towards their schools, and hundreds of white-veiled school girls in pine-green baltos making for theirs. There were old women veiled in tie-dyed silk veils and cloaks like patterned Indian tablecloths, rapping at their neighbours’ wooden doors, shrieking greetings, receiving answering shouts. Along narrow city streets we inched past men on donkeys, a man leading a camel by a rope, youths on motorbikes with caged chickens as passengers, boys trundling wheel-barrows laden with onions or potatoes, or barrows stacked high with fresh flatbreads or outsize sesame pretzels, and boiled potatoes. I spotted grandfathers returning from the mosque, or from the Turkish baths with striped towels slung over their shoulders.

Let me say something else about Sanaa. The northern Yemeni male must be the Italian of that region. Neatly put together, elegantly proportioned, vivid and lively; all of these things, but also blessed with the boldest sense of style. Over either an elegantly patterned
futa
or one of those elongated shirts he often sports a wide gold brocade belt to which he has affixed a broad curved dagger – a
jambiyah
– sheathed in an Islam green scabbard. This vouch of his virility he teams with a frequently ill-fitting but always toning tweed jacket which parades its brand on a label attached to one of its sleeves. As I’ve already noted with reference to my bin Husi kidnappers, the Yemeni male easily circumvents the misery of mid-life hair loss by means of the ubiquitous head-cloth. These cotton squares, of the same design as the black and white checked keffiyehs worn by Palestinians or the red and white ones the Gulf Arabs favour, are as astonishingly coloured in Sanaa as Italian
gelati
in their twin cornettos; shades of strawberry and pistachio, of coffee and vanilla, of blueberry and liquorice and lemon and coconut...

Some of you will ask how I was able to appreciate those
gelati
hues when the windows of the LandCruiser were blacked out; for your information, my friendly heavy had asked me to open my window because he was feeling a little carsick. If you’re also wondering why I have nothing to say on the subject of the female northern Yemeni, allow me to point out that they are more covered even than most of their southern Yemeni sisters; only their eyes show above those little face aprons, though they dispense with the gloves and thick socks those Hadrami witches affected. I dare say that in their own way they are all as elegantly proportioned and attractive as their men-folk, but I had no way of knowing for sure and, naturally enough, no great interest in finding out.

The point I’m seeking to make here, is that Yemen is at least as much about fashion and flair as it is about bin Baddies, and I was impressed to see that its handsome pint-sized president was leading from the front. Billboard after billboard, poster in shop window after poster in shop window showed him in a variety of elegant ensembles: grey-haired and avuncular in a tweed sports jacket and half-moon spectacles, fiercely romantic in head cloth, brocade belt and
jambiyah
etc., stern as a statue in a military uniform hung with medals, businesslike in suit, white shirt and silver tie, and so on.

We came to a halt at last in a wide street that was doubling up as a market place to judge by the small army of young men busily spreading their wares on their tarpaulin pitches. I saw floral displays of padded bras, beside a heap of hairbrushes, a hill of potatoes and leaning towers of tin cooking pots. If it hadn’t been quite so forbiddingly shiny and black, the building we parked in front of could have passed for a luxury hotel or some provincial German town’s
Rathaus
; it had boxes of pink and red geraniums and elegantly chained bollards to section it off from the rest of the street. A pair of sleepy young guards in blue camouflage, with guns slung over their shoulders, flanked its revolving smoked glass entranceway.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

‘This, Madam, is our brand new Centre for Logistics against International Terror in Yemen. The Americans who paid for it to be set up after 9/11 call it CLIT for short.’

I didn’t even try suppressing a giggle but then sobered up fast, with a start: ‘Why have you brought me here, for heaven’s sake? No one thinks I’ve got up to anything with bin Laden’s lot, do they?’

‘It is not for me to say, Madam,’ said my heavy, helping me out of the LandCruiser, handling my pink Puma bag for me as carefully as Bush’s minder would the nuclear briefcase, ‘but it’s possible. It might interest you to know that the Americans think most of our “terrorists” come from the south of the country so they believe that any movement to separate south from north again must be part of an al-Qaeda strategy to take control of south Yemen.’

My high spirits nosedived. I now gathered that I was under arrest on suspicion of plotting Islamist terror as well as fomenting south Yemeni secessionism and trashing a luxury car. I dropped a little kiss on my St Serafim of Sarov icon and sent up a silent prayer: ‘Please, St Serafim, If you could just see your way to exploding Aziz’s father’s vehicle on his commute to work this morning...’

My friendly minder escorted me past the sleepy guards, through the revolving glass door and into a high atrium hallway in which a twice life-size oil painting of the president mounted on a richly caparisoned chestnut steed occupied an entire wall. Grateful for any relief from contemplating the danger I was in, I relished the chance of a closer view gained from the glass box of a lift that was whisking us up and past it, on our way to the top floor. The mighty leader’s riding costume consisted of a navy-blue lounge suit, tie, aviator sunglasses and cowboy boots.

In a third floor office, a squat and sturdy secretary draped in a black
balto
, with only her spectacled eyes on show, rose from behind a desk on which there was nothing but a tea glass and a computer screen, no keyboard. Smiling - I could only be sure she was smiling because creases had appeared at the sides of her eyes - she invited me to be seated in a squashy leatherette armchair, before turning to converse with my companion in Arabic.

‘I must leave you here now,’ he told me when they’d finished. Carefully stowing my precious bag beside me, he briefed me: ‘The chief is already at his desk and will see you in a few minutes. I have asked Nur here to look after you.’

Damn you, St Serafim! I panicked suddenly, Just one little drone would have done the trick! Hampered as I was by my handcuffs, I nevertheless made a clumsy grab for the hem of my friendly heavy’s
futa
, tumbling out of my armchair onto the floor in the process, banging an elbow against a lamp-stand. ‘I desperately need the loo,’ I pleaded, ‘and can’t I have a coffee? So much for Yemeni hospitality!’

‘Madam, I regret to have to remind you that you are not a guest in our country. You are a suspected criminal and under arrest,’ he said, gently but firmly prising his
futa
from my grip. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I could swear the area around the Ninja’s eyes sprouted a fresh crop of cruelly sadistic creases. ‘You must try to understand that your position is not a comfortable one,’ he continued, ‘if I were you...’

It had taken me a while – those cheerful boxes of geraniums out front had misled me - but at last I sensed that CLIT’s prevailing atmosphere was grim, bordering on the sinister. Cattle prods, electrodes, instruments of water torture, pliers, interrogation lamps, began inching across the front of my mind like prizes on The Generation Game’s conveyor belt. I could now easily imagine that the basement of that shiny fortress contained political prisoners, each in dank, airless solitary confinement, and that its strip-lit corridors regularly echoed with the strangled screams and groans of prisoners having information extracted from them. My erstwhile friend was still speaking:

‘...and he is not a man to disrespect so do not talk too much and do not try to argue with him. I must go now.’

‘But I’ll start screaming if you won’t let me apply some lipstick!’ I wailed, ‘In the name of your Allah the Merciful take off these handcuffs for a minute, only a minute! Please!’

With Nur’s assistance and the heavy’s translation the pink Puma bag was opened, rifled through, and the right lipstick – my favourite, Dior’s
Rose
Shocking
– extracted. My heavy cautiously escorted me over to the mirror behind Nur’s desk before daring to undo my handcuffs. No sooner had he done so than I seized my chance. Like a woman possessed I swivelled 180 degrees away from the mirror and kneed him in the groin. Crumpling, he slumped to the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head. A wide and lightning swing of my right fist – containing
Rose
Shocking’s
lethal metal bullet-casing, of course - took care of Nur, her glasses and her face apron. In my last glimpse of her she was sprawled across her empty desk, her face apron awry, her bared face jammed up hard against that computer screen. As I yanked open the door into the corridor, I heard footsteps approaching on the other side of the door leading into the chief’s office. Not a second to lose!

No time to wait for the lift. I resorted to an old skill I’d kept honed since childhood thanks to Widderton Hall’s grand Queen Anne staircase. As fast as an Olympic bob-sleigher, I slid down three floors’ worth of banister, thanking St Serafim for the fact that the banister was an ideally smooth plastic. I went like the wind, as fast as I would have done on polished oak. My spectacular schoolgirl stunt so surprised and delighted the uniformed guards on the ground floor, they laughed and shouted
Yella
!
Yella
! instead of raising their rifles and taking aim. ‘
Ma
salaama
! Bye-bye!’ I shouted back, racing towards the revolving door, a dancing sunbeam in my primrose yellow kaftan. The revolving door would slow me down but so what? None of those laughing boys was about to cut short my escape by shooting me in the back. Thanks a million, St Serafim! But I’d prayed too soon. I was still in the revolving door when I noticed that its other half contained Sheikh Ahmad, handcuffed, dishevelled, and escorted by four armed guards.

My need to be with the man I loved was as reflex and urgent an imperative as a desire to vomit or hiccough. It was as if all my entrails - bladder, uterus, oesophagus and stomach - had suddenly traded places with the contents of my head. What dangerous nonsense the Ancients and Romantics preach about love! Love doesn’t conquer all. Love marvellously, magically, muddles all. In helpless thrall to it, I turned my back on my only slim chance of freedom by performing another 180 degree turn in that revolving door to arrive back in the lobby.

‘Oh Rozzer,’ said my sheikh, that familiar old expression of amused surprise in his liquorice drop eyes, as he sweetly tucked a stray tendril of hair back behind my ear. ‘It has happened as I warned you it might. I’m very, very sorry – but why have you come back?’

This was no time for beating about the bush: ‘Why do you think? Because I love you, of course!’ I blurted.

Shaking his head and widening his eyes, he looked as if he didn’t believe what his ears had relayed to him, ‘Dear Rozzer, you have timing,’ he said. He proffered a corner of his head cloth to mop up my tears and, seeing me make such a clumsy job of it, performed the task himself in the same manner as that in which he’d arranged my headscarf for me in the car park at Mukalla airport. I cried some more but giggled too, as delighted as ever just to be with him.

All around us, in a circle, the dozen or so guards had assumed the fondly foolish expressions of guests at a wedding, but I only had time to inhale his inimitable aroma while planting a kiss on his cheek before this heart-warming scene was interrupted by a shout from on high. Leaning over the third floor banister, a slight, dark-faced person – Aziz’s appalling parent, I was soon to discover  – wiped the goofy grins off those boys’ faces by galvanising them into violent action.