Baghdad Without a Map Page 2

  The view across the river was equally grim. Crumbling concrete buildings lined the opposite shore, topped with squiggles of neon Arabic that advertised Fiat, Sanyo, Seven-Up. I couldn't see the traffic in Medan Tahrir, but I could hear it. The dun-colored city seemed to stretch forever.

  Months later I returned to Tahrir to interview the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, upon his award of the Nobel Prize. Each dawn, Mahfouz hiked from his apartment on the river's west bank across a Nile bridge and through Tahrir to a coffeehouse named the Ali Baba. The café was drab and dusty, opening right onto the swirling traffic. The fumes of stalled cars mingled with the reek of Indian tobacco from the tall water pipe that Egyptians call a sheesha or “bubble bubble.”

  Mahfouz sat at a second-floor table, stirring the silt of his Turkish coffee. Rather deaf, he leaned close to hear my questions over the roar of the morning rush hour. Why, I asked him, did he come for inspiration each day to the least pleasant spot in Cairo, perhaps in the entire world?

  He smiled and cocked his head at the stalled tide of bodies, hooves, cars. “It is true Tahrir is not a pretty sight,” he said. “But I am a novelist, not a painter. You can see the whole world from right here.”

  I understood then what it was to love Cairo. To revel in the grit, the noise, the press of flesh and pavement. To snort and gulp the bracingly foul air. And I understood then that Cairo was a city I could never come to love.

  1—YEMEN—Confessions of a Qat-Eater

  A habit peculiar to the Yemenis is the chewing of a mildly narcotic leaf called gat, mainly throughout the afternoon. Parties are held at which much business may be settled, and a foreigner honoured with an invitation should accept. . . Addiction to the taste need not be feared.

  —The British Bank of the Middle East, Business Profile Series

  We had stripped and chewed an entire shrub before the qat took hold. From my bed of pillows, the hose of the water pipe looked roughly the length of the Amazon, only longer. It started in a cloud of tobacco smoke at the far end of the room, snaked through a jungle of qat leaves and Pepsi bottles and ended in the pile of cushions beside me. Somewhere in there was Mansour. He'd shrunk out of sight in the course of the afternoon.

  “Qat kwayes,” he said. Qat is good. A dragon's puff of smoke rose from the pillows and a hand reached out for another glossy sprig.

  Across the room, Mansour's uncle kept pointing at his head and flashing me a green-toothed grin. Like most Yemenis, he was small, dark and wiry, with a pinched face and furrowed brow. He looked like an old squirrel. I pointed at my head and returned his smile, unsure what the gesture signified. Then the qat shuddered through me again: whistling up my spine, ruffling the hair on the back of my neck and whooshing out both ears. Odd snatches of poetry wafted through my brain and I recited them aloud.

  “The fog crept in on little qat feet. . .

  “In the room the women come and go, chewing Michelangelo. . .”

  Qat juice dribbled down my chin. Mansour giggled. I giggled. The old man grinned and pointed at his turban again. This time I understood. “Qat very good for the head,” I said, breaking a fresh branch and offering him a leaf.

  Qat explained a lot about Yemen. The tourist literature did not.

  “He who blows into fire makes either flames or is covered by ash,” read the proverb on page one of my Traveller's Guide to Yemen. I was thirty thousand feet over the Red Sea, en route to the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. I studied the proverb for a moment, then moved to another. “A lasting little is better than an ending lot.”

  It was either the worst tour book ever written or the worst translation. After a cursory swing through Yemeni history, the publication wandered into lists of “Under Construction Roads” and “Non-Religious Holidays”—Mother's Day, Revolution Anniversary and Corrective Movement Day—before drifting to a photographic spread called “Views from Yemen.” Judging from the fuzzy box-camera snapshots, no tourist had viewed Yemen since 1937. And the proverbs became more obscure with each chapter.

  “You may stretch your feet only to the length of your mattress,” began a chapter titled “General Description of Yemen.” The guide ended with this bewildering message: “Don't teach the bear how to throw stones.”

  Nothing about the place made sense. Geraldine, as a staff correspondent, had an invitation to visit Yemen for the opening of the country's first oil pipeline. I didn't. But since Yemen rarely admits journalists, I decided to sneak in under the hem of her dress-for-success suit. Arabs often seemed baffled by our odd Western relationship, but they always understood a husband's desire to keep a close eye on a traveling wife. While officials squired her from palace to palace, I'd melt into the souk and find something else to write about. Or so I imagined.

  When I went to collect my visa in Cairo, an official at the Yemeni embassy said, very casually, “You did not answer the religion question.” This was true. North Yemen, like most Arab countries, wasn't enthusiastic about Jewish visitors. Rather than lie on my visa application I had simply left the religion question blank. Now, assuming my visa had been approved, I saw no harm in telling the truth. “I'm Jewish,” I said.

  “Your passport,” the man said. “It needs another stamp. Come back later.”

  Later, say, after I'd converted. “No Jews allowed in Yemen,” he said curtly on my return. I called the Yemeni embassy in Washington to complain and was told' that visas were left to the discretion of the local ambassador. Unfortunately, the Cairo envoy hadn't been seen for days. “Come back later,” my embassy friend said again, twelve hours preflight.

  I phoned the ambassador's residence and reached a man who spoke not a word of English. I had been speaking halting Arabic for all of three weeks. The conversation that followed strained my vocabulary to its meager limits.

  ME: I journalist. I Jew. Go Yemen. No visa. Passport me embassy of you.

  YEMENI: Never mind. Come to my office at eleven tomorrow.

  ME: No good. Plane go Yemen seven morning.

  YEMENI: Okay, come to the embassy tonight.

  ME: Time what?

  YEMENI: One o'clock.

  ME: One o'clock?

  YEMENI: Okay, two. As you wish.

  I hung up the phone convinced that neither of us had understood a word the other had said.

  Heading out on foot in the middle of the night, I tiptoed over my neighbors, sleeping beneath a bridge across the Nile, and into the diplomatic quarter. Soldiers slumped against submachine guns in guard boxes before each embassy. Then, around a corner, I encountered an elfish man in an overcoat and pajamas.

  “Embassy Yemen?” I asked.

  “Yes, good morning.” He smiled and handed me my passport and visa. “Have a nice trip.” Then he vanished into the night. It seemed we had followed normal procedures for the issuing of visas to Yemen.

  Later that day, stepping outside the airport in Sanaa, I was greeted by ten men in colorful turbans and knee-length skirts. A gaudy curved scabbard stretched from the belly button to the middle thigh of each man, with a dagger handle poking out the top. How picturesque, I thought. The Yemeni National Guard.

  Actually, I was at the taxi stand. These men were cabbies, clad in the Yemeni national dress. In the rest of the Arabian peninsula, conformity is the keynote: white robes, white headdresses, sandals, sand. The whole Persian Gulf can seem a monochromatic shimmer, camouflaged by sameness. Here, nothing matched. From the waist down, the men looked like fierce, dagger-toting tribesmen. From the waist up, they resembled Bowery bums, clad in cast-off shirts and cheap Western-style sports jackets. Nor did any man look quite like his neighbor. Each had his scabbard angled just so, his turban a tight-wound rosebud or a full-blown cauliflower, his qat bulging in right cheek instead of left.

  “How much to the city?” I asked the lead driver, assuming that taxi rides here, as in Cairo, were subject to lengthy negotiation.

  The man named a price roughly equal to the per capita income I'd seen listed in the tourist literature. I laughed and
offered one tenth as much. He rested his hand on the hilt of his dagger and gazed off at the mountains. I went to the next cabbie and had no better luck. Each man looked different, but the price of service was the same, set by tribal cartel. I finally paid the asking price.

  The cabbie drove to what he said was the center of Sanaa. It didn't look like any downtown I'd ever seen. Mud towers teetered all around, reaching eight and nine stories into the air. Each earthen skyscraper was crowned like iced cake with whitewashed extrusions; stars, zigzags, triangles, snatches of Arabic script praising Allah; whorls, swirls, waves and squiggles. Stained-glass windows swathed the upper floors in ribbons of red and blue. Lurching into the sky at odd angles, without a single plumb line, the whole city seemed tipsy.

  “Mister, what you want?” a voice called from the dark.

  “Is you English man?” called another.

  “Mister, come smell beautiful essence!”

  The peddlers stood just inside the city's thick mud walls, luring me toward a tangle of cobbled alleys. Each lane was devoted to tinkerers in trades long lost or forgotten in the West. Blacksmiths heated ore in hellish furnaces, then beat the metal on broad black anvils, their sledgehammers spraying sparks through the night. There were milliners, bookbinders, brass-beaters, veil-makers, Koran-sellers and spice merchants whose high baskets of cinammon and nutmeg crowded beneath my eyes and nose. In one narrow lane, men sat crosslegged, sharpening the curved blades, called jambiyas, which I'd seen at the airport. Nearby, carpenters crafted small wooden daggers—training jambiyas—for boys too young to carry real ones. I peered into a dark stall and saw a camel harnessed to a giant pestle, walking in a tight circle around a huge vat of seeds, crushing them into oil. The animal had a rag tied around its eyes. Without the blindfold, the camel's keeper said, whirling his eyes in pantomime, the camel would become dizzy from walking around and around. I felt like asking him to fit me with a blindfold as well.

  “Mister, this way!”

  “Habibi, my friend! I sell you fine silver!”

  “Mister, what your name?”

  I turned a corner and wandered into what seemed a Halloween party. Strange specters in head-to-toe sheets scurried between the stalls. When the veiled women stood still, the direction of their toes was the only way to tell back from front.

  “Mister, fine cloth,” an embroiderer said, holding aloft a dress as I stared at the phantoms before his shop. Indeed, the dress was very fine, and I asked him how much it cost.

  “For you, my friend, only one hundred riyals.” About ten dollars.

  I went through the bartering histrionics I'd learned since my first night's boat ride in Cairo: the eyebrows raised in mock surprise, the dismissive chuckle, the abrupt exit, the casual return.

  The merchant watched my theatrics and shrugged. “Man in next shop, he will charge the same,” he said. “You like dress, you pay.” It was the routine I'd encountered at the airport. So I paid. The embroiderer folded the dress and handed me a twig with glossy green leaves. “Chew this and you will not care that you just paid too much,” he said, returning to his needle and thread.

  Chew qat and you will stop caring about many things. One day, a millennium or so ago, a sleepy goatherd noticed that his flock became lively after grazing on a roadside shrub. The boy sampled a few sprigs himself and felt much the better for it—and qat has been the national dish of Yemen ever since. Or so the legend goes.

  Qat is the last of Yemen's bounty. It was here that the biblical Queen of Sheba loaded “a very great retinue, with camels bearing spice and very much gold” for the journey to King Solomon's court. Ten centuries later, the Romans imagined Yemen a land of such fabulous wealth that they dubbed it Arabia Felix, meaning happy or prosperous Arabia. The finest coffee in the world grew here, named for the Red Sea port of Mocha from which the beans were exported.

  It was to celebrate this good fortune, and to guard it against marauders, that the medieval merchants of Sanaa built their fanciful towers and ringed them with ramparts of mud.

  Yemen has stood almost still ever since. Slavery endured until the 1960s. Illiteracy stuck at ninety percent. Life expectancy still hovered at forty. Bedouin roamed through sand dunes spooned out by the wind where the Queen of Sheba built her Temple to the Moon God. And the fertile coffee fields had been resown with a spindly shrub that was without value beyond the borders of Yemen.

  “I quickly became accustomed to using qat,” confessed a nineteenth-century French traveler, “and ended up getting great pleasure from its gentle stimulation and the vivid dreams which followed.” Reading this at a teahouse in the old city, I wondered whether qat explained Sanaa's strange skyline and the odd behavior of every Yemeni I'd met.

  Across the café, a man was well into the stuff. Slumped against the wall, he crammed leaf after leaf into his mouth, working it into a dense green cud. Teeth stained, cheek bulging, he looked like a third-base coach on a last-place team in late September. Except that, like every other Yemeni male, the man carried a dagger that was broad and sharp enough to slice a man up like so much pita bread.

  I returned to my reading, looking for story ideas. I'd come to Yemen “on spec,” a polite term that editors use when they might want your stories but don't want to commit themselves in advance. Working on spec is the lowest form of journalistic life, a notch below stringer. No assignment means no expense budget, no letters of introduction and no worker's compensation for dagger wounds incurred in the line of duty. But so little had been written about Yemen that I figured it was worth gambling five hundred dollars or so to see what I could come up with. As I looked again at the qat-eater in the café, eyes glazed, dagger slung in his lap, the outline of a feature article suggested itself. Weed and weapons, mellowness and menace, the yin and yang of Yemeni society. A Traveller's Guide to Arms and Qat. Why not?

  “You must understand that my country is not like other Arab nations,” the young man said. “We want to be Yemen. We do not want to hurry up and be like the West.”

  It was two days after my arrival, in the waiting room of a government office, and I was chatting with an American-educated bureaucrat named Mansour.

  “We must get to know each other,” he said. “We must chew qat.”

  “When?”

  Mansour smiled. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, as you wish. All days in Yemen we chew qat.”

  “Today,” I said, scribbling down his address.

  After forty-eight hours in Yemen, I had picked up a thing or two about local customs. I knew, for instance, that qat is usually consumed after a heavy lunch, so as to buffer the stomach against the plant's acidic juices. I also knew that most qat chews are BYO affairs, so I headed off in search of an appropriate bush to bring with me to Mansour's.

  At Sanaa's qat market, several thousand men in extreme good humor wandered from one open pickup to another, each vehicle loaded with what looked like piles of yard clippings. Farther back sprawled a covered bazaar, also devoted to qat, and behind that, a tired-looking vegetable and animal market, dwarfed by the commerce in shrubs.

  I joined a jostling crowd at the most popular qat stall, figuring that eight hundred Yemenis couldn't all be wrong. After ten minutes of stiff-arms and toe-squashings, I reached the front and faced a towering pyramid of qat. Unnerved by the choice, and by the dagger hilts pressing against my spine, I quickly pointed at the closest bundle of boughs, about like your average suburban hedge. The seller wrapped the plant in pink cellophane and demanded eighty riyals, or eight dollars. Qat, like everything else in Yemen, wasn't subject to much haggling.

  During the previous two days, I had noticed another odd thing about Yemen: the natives treated foreigners with total indifference. In Cairo, complete strangers would often demand, “Where you from? Is this wife? Have you children?” or peer into your shopping bag on the street and ask, “Food?” In Yemen, apart from a few merchants and peddlers, most people were either too proud or too stoned to even look a visiting Westerner in the eye.

&nb
sp; But elbowing through the crowd at the qat stall, clutching my half-crushed bouquet, I felt everything had changed. Men pointed at me, laughed, raised their thumbs and nodded approvingly. Several came up to pat me on the back and fondle my qat, trying out their pidgin English.

  “Qat nice, mister?”

  “Chew with me?”

  “Like you qat?”

  They also wanted to assist me with another purchase, which made me suspect my sudden popularity carried the whiff of easy money. The crowd parted to let an old man with a cane hobble toward me. He was my chosen escort. I had joined the fraternity of qat-chewers, and the boys of Arabia Felix wanted to initiate me with the best stuff Sanaa had to offer.

  The old man inspected my bush and didn't seem impressed. “Good qat we find for America,” he said, leading me to a distant cranny of the qat market. He stopped at one stall and then another, inspecting the fullness and luster of the leaves. Finally, finding a shrub to his liking, he held up ten fingers. One hundred riyals. My limited budget was fast being exhausted to buy drugs.

  “We call it Yemen salad,” an onlooker said, sampling a sprig. “It gives you ideas all over the world.” I nodded, making a mental note of which bundle I'd put under my left arm and which under my right.

  Over a hot lunch, I digested some more history on the substance I was soon to abuse. As with everything in Yemen, the information was contradictory. “It makes you feel a devil of a dog as long as the feeling lasts,” exulted a former English administrator in Yemen. One of his countrymen, a physician, disagreed. The habitual user, he wrote, resembles “a wild-looking, dull-witted automaton.” Another doctor termed qat as nothing more than a “mild stimulant,” while a third thought it an addictive amphetamine that caused high blood pressure and left the user feeling “lazy and sick.”