It was his first trip back to North Yemen in thirty years. His brother had been killed in a car accident the previous week and had already been buried. The man had lived in the Warrington area of England, working in a cable factory. Qat, the narcotic weed consumed ubiquitously in Yemen – in mafraj’s (parlours), behind shop counters, on roadside watches, in modern hotel lounges, the green of a piece of qat forever being revealed in a grin or a scowl – was exported to the north-west of England where many Yemenis live, to fulfil an expatriate Yemeni addiction. The plane descended on a landscape of clefts, hillocks, billowy mountains, an outcast, lunar landscape. The man’s tough, leaping curls were stubbed in ash. He wore a black suit, white open-necked shirt. He might not return to England, he said, abandoning his English wife and two children, remaining with his mother.
A day later I passed a funeral outside Sana’a, a body urgently carried on a bier, covered by a jade-green Coswat Al-Kaaba, a party of mirthful children scurrying after the body. Warda, the Egyptian girl singer, keened on the car radio. Most girl singers to be heard in North Yemen are Egyptian. The pin-ups in the windows of drink kiosks beside Bab Al Yaman, the gate to the old city, are of Egyptian girls. Men sit at the tables around the kiosks, drinking lemonade from chipped glasses. Some people claim they saw two men publicly executed by Bab Al Yaman early this year. Others claim that public executions stopped years ago. Some people say they saw two women being lashed for adultery in Taharir Square in January. Others laugh and say this is impossible. Some people inform you in a semi-whisper that a group of blue-movie makers are lying in a dungeon in Sana’a. Others affirm that the blue-movie-making group were never busier, albeit in secret.
In this city of counter-claims, of overlapping realities, one thing that is certain is the power of the jambia, the dagger symbol of Yemeni manhood, colourfully swathed over the crotch. The only time I saw people being relieved of it was outside a cinema near Bab Al Yaman where young men were queuing to see Bruce Lee in New Guinea, first purchasing a ticket through a tiny porthole from a girl in a yashmak and then raising their arms while a soldier with a scarlet beret on his head scanned their bodies for this piece of Yemeni culture which might not have been so obvious as it usually was. In the square near the queue a goat ate a plastic bag.
‘Allah says that drink and girls are bad,’ a young man in Pizzeria Carthage on Ali Abdolmoghni Street told me one night. On the street outside there were no girls. A three-legged dog passed. Lights were being ravelled through the trees to prepare for the celebration of Independence Day on 26 September. Some of the lights were already on in this street where the fingers of a few walking pairs of men twitched in a modest grasp. The only public signs of the erotic on this, the main city boulevard, at this time of night are poster collages of famous muscle men, Kevin Von Erich, Tony Atlas, Mil Mascaras. The word habiba (sweetheart) was shocking in this atmosphere coming from a gap-toothed Somali boy with a turban on his head. ‘Girl or boy?’ He crossed the fourth finger of each hand. Then he ran away. There are Somali, Ethiopian, Egyptian prostitutes in this city. In early evening Somali girls walk the streets, often in orange or peach dresses, their heads uncovered, luxuriating in, basking in the sensuality of their bodies and in the foreign notion of female physicality. There is a Rastafarian Ethiopian girl who will get you a prostitute I was told. But late at night the only possible human contact was three boys gaping at a piece of cardboard burning under a tree lit up for the revolution celebrations.
To one side-incline of the city of Old Marib, in the desert east of Sana’a, is a tank abandoned since the civil war (1962–8) when the thousand-year-old Zaidi Imamate, which in its last fifty years blocked North Yemen off from foreigners, was overthrown. The city, city of the Queen of Sheba, spectacularly rises on an elevation above a pale desert, city of mud skyscrapers, ruins locked into one another. Legend is that it began its decline after a deluge engulfed it in the fifth century AD. Now Bedouins live among the ruins. At evening the air is sporadically bitter with the smell of boiling camel’s milk. Young men play caahesh in the squares of the Sabean city, a game in which wooden sticks are used on a wooden ball. Firelight in the streets, in the houses. Outside the city the evening I visited it three small boys in garments which threatened to consume them sold oranges and biscuits in a crib, an electric light bulb hanging from the ceiling, cards you get in cheese packets in North Yemen around the sides of the crib, cards depicting the Tasmania devil, the Black Buck, the squirrel monkey. Near by is the temple of the Moon Goddess, eight pillars in the sand, remainder of a religion which worshipped sun, moon and evening star. The Three Wise Men would have passed this city, on the Gold and Frankincense Route, following another star. A party of male tourists had come that day from Sana’a to view the temple, crowded into the back of an open truck. Taalb, a little Bedouin boy, had climbed the pillars to impress them. Later I met him among the ruins of Marib, with its occasional awesome Sabean inscriptions, where he lived.
Back in Sana’a that night I sat in the Golden Peacock Restaurant of the Taj Sheba hotel listening to Lebanese songs sung by two Egyptian girls, two Lebanese girls, with hair extravagantly gathered above their heads, in elaborate poodle dresses, dancing. ‘Pharmacist, O Pharmacist, give me a medicine for her heart and mine.’ A few boys from the Arab Emirates Republic, in sequined jeans, danced on a separate part of the floor, one of them waving a shal, the Arab male headdress. The evening ended with a Lebanese song, ‘Let’s get married.’ No one danced to that. The two men at a table near by belonged to National Security.
National Security men stop girls at gunpoint whom they consider improperly dressed. They follow young men taking Indian girls for a drive because the Indian girls might be Yemeni girls. They ask young couples taking a stroll for a marriage certificate. Foreigners living in the city think they are being followed through the market of the old city, among the red of piled-up tamarind, the black of piled-up cloves, between the yellow and brown nine-storey houses with limewash around the windows and joyous patterns of white on them, through the parks littered with debris, past mosque windows through which you can see huge gatherings of men bow over and over again, right down to the underground hamams – Turkish baths – where little boys scrupulously scrape the bodies of old men with black, coarse mittens. National Security men are a joke, a conversation point, an excuse for an argument in the head.
In Kawkaban, a village outside Sana’a on a mountaintop, I met a foreigner who was not paranoid and who seemed totally at home with this society. An Egyptian primary school teacher in a dun thoab, the long Arab shirt. Was he lonely here, I asked. No. A child walked by on stilts made from cans, strings coming out of the cans into his hands. In the local hotel a tiny girl in a black yashmak served Pepsi Cola. Cairo, city of gurkies, of sagpipes, of riverside wedding groups, was a long way away. The village water tank had an inscription on it from the Qur’an. ‘Everything was created from water.’ But I felt this place was arid and wanted to get away from it.
In my time in Sana’a more and more lights went up, pending the revolution celebrations. During the days I visited far-flung regions, towns, villages. In Djibla, home of the most unbiddable of Muslem queens, Queen Arwa, I sat in a boy’s bedroom, leaning on a makrat – a cushion – playing kiram, the black and white television showing a Kuwaiti soap opera, as the wedding of the boy’s sister was being celebrated upstairs. I couldn’t go and look because it was just women who were celebrating today. A girl went up and reported back. The bride sat silently in a room with her mother, blue, black, pink make-up on her, a gold band through her hair with nasturtiums hanging out of it, a blue veil running around the back of her head. In a room further up, women, their faces exposed, inhaled from a hubble-bubble, sipped blackberry juice. The following day the men would celebrate in the man’s house, chewing qat. The bride would repair to the man’s house that evening but wouldn’t meet him and go to bed with him until the evening after that, again because qat chewing, once begun, takes a long time. Immediately after the first night the bride and groom, accompanied by a party of men, would journey to a stream in this countryside of illuminated sugar-cane terraces while the women made cakes at home for the ultimate celebration where women and men joined up. At no stage would there have been an actual wedding ceremony. The joining together was a kind of innuendo from these celebrations.
North of Sana’a are the Haraz mountains, very much like the Himalayas, and Indian Muslim settlers, the Bhoras, have made their home here, building mosques on mountaintops. Sunlight creeps over the red carpets in mosques. Young men race along mountain ledges on motorbikes. The countryside swims here. It is peaceful, hopeful. Old men kneel on hilltops and say they are praying to Allah in the skies. In one of the highest mountaintop villages, Al-Hajara, a little boy took me by the hand and dashed with me to the elevated centre of the village, had me climb to the top of a nine-storey house to meet his mother. She was bent over the haar – Yemeni stove – making bread. She was without her yashmak. Her face was ravaged, bony, but her eyes, like his, were a startling blue. She quickly seized her yashmak, put it on, took it off again, put it on again, then eventually took it off for the last time during my visit and stood on the balcony, against the green herbs lining the balcony wall, her lemon head veil and her blue dress blowing dramatically.
In Street Number Nine off Taharir Square in Sana’a there was a woman, who ran a small grocery store, who always wore the smallest of yashmaks but who still always managed to have an elaborately patterned crimson or gold dress on, in contrast to the generally uniform black which muffles women in this city. People said she’d been wild in her youth but now had reformed and had four children. Only one evening she wasn’t merry and flashing radiance in her eyes, slumped over her counter. ‘I was drunk,’ she laughed the next night. Most women in North Yemen wear the yashmak, lathmah, hejab as it is variously called. Women from the Tihama district near the sea don’t and these, dark-skinned women in dusty black with shining lines of gold in it, were the only ones I saw begging, in a village outside Sana’a, making a joke of it, exchanging sly grins to one another during their exhortations for money. Some boys began throwing stones at them and they vigorously threw stones back.
On Street Number Nine I would eat fenugreek and egg at a table outside the café of Mr Mohammed Al-Reemi. Then I’d repair to the café of Mr Mhub Coffe where I’d have a drink of hot milk and a slice of flat sponge cake, the milk boiled in a huge well-worn saucepan over a gas flame. At eleven o’clock each night a troupe of young men would come in for hot milk and sponge cake, sitting decorously and quietly around a table. In a country which bans alcohol their order is equivalent to the last round.
All the lights were up for the revolution celebrations at the end of my visit, tangled through trees, threaded on the front of buildings. The Yemeni colours, oblong black, white, scarlet with a black star in the middle, were sported on the front of motor bikes. The moustached face of the President, Mr Abdullah As Sallal, was on every second car, in every second shop window. The woman in the grocery store on Street Number Nine was wearing a vermilion dress. Otherwise women had long disappeared from view in Sana’a. In this night of coloured lights, of social expectancy, she looked at me keenly and reproached me.
‘Thaa baad al sokar vi ainac.’
‘Put some sugar in your eyes.’