Doctors Without Borders wants to set up a health care outpost in this part of the city. We walk the dilapidated urban landscape until we arrive in the neighborhood of Safia, where we ascend to the fifth floor of an abandoned building on decaying stairs. In a bare, unlit room, Zahra Bayda finds the people she’s come to talk to. I can’tquite see what’s between these damp walls. As my eyes grow accustomed to the dark, the outlines of a group of women emerge. They’re all standing. They talk among themselves and wave their arms with quick, nervous gestures, like birds. There are fifteen of them. I still can’t distinguish their features, but I catch their scent, so dense it’s almost palpable: bodies wrapped in smoke and cardamom, incense and sweat. When they see us come in, they go silent and sit on their heels, forming a semicircle. They’re draped in colored cloths, head to toe. Not their faces; as Somali women, they keep their faces bare. Zahra Bayda settles onto the floor with them, and I squat like a soccer player posing for a photo. I whisper in Zahra Bayda’s ear to ask whether my male presence among so many women might make them uncomfortable, and she says no. It occurs to me that we Westerners live up off the ground, only using it to walk and step. Here, in the absence of furniture, life unfolds at earth level.
“They’re Somali refugees. They survive here, in the capital, by cleaning houses by day. Each of them looks for work on her own, but at night they gather in a group, them and their children, in a room like this one.”
Zahra Bayda asks them questions, they reply, and I don’t understand a word. One of them has her face covered; the others gesture toward her; they’re clearly talking about her. They encourage her to unveil her face, and she finally does it. She’s so disfigured that it’s as if she has no face. A faceless face.
“This woman is called Hasanana,” Zahra Bayda tells me. “She tried to kill herself by dousing herself with gasoline and lighting a match.”
That’s the traditional form of suicide for women in this part of the world. Hasanana is alive because the others found out and managed to put out the fire with blankets. They all berate her for having done such a thing, you’re crazy, they say, crazy or desperate, you were going to turn your eight children into orphans! She defends herself, saying that she did it because she had no way of feeding them. So what are you going to do now, Hasanana, as poor as ever and nowblind on top of that? What’s going to become of your children, if they can’t even bear to look you in the face?
They all speak to Zahra Bayda at once, and she stops translating for me to focus on the commotion. My head spins. My thoughts are shattered. I imagine the Queen of Sheba the way Flaubert describes her: riding an elephant toward me, with a red parasol lined with silver bells, breathing heavily in her tight bejeweled corset. Her splendor shines so brightly that dazzled crowds prostrate themselves as she passes. But what kind of hallucination possessed you, Flaubert, when you wrote such nonsense? What I’m seeing here is something else entirely. I see fifteen ragged Queens of Safia, of indeterminate age, long and thin from hunger, with jutting cheekbones and bony hands and the most incredible eyes, intimidating, black, and round. Nobody’s prostrating themselves before them; they dazzle no one. They wear no bejeweled corset nor carry parasols with little silver bells.
Zahra Bayda translates for me again, saying that they’re used to enduring “Go to hell” when they knock on doors to offer their cleaning services.
“People are wary of us,” one of them says. “They call us dirty thieves.”
“I complained to one woman,” another says. “Careful with your husband, I warned her, he wants to rape me. The woman replied, So what’s the problem, give him what he wants, aren’t we paying you in this house?”
Every day the women get back to their room past 9 p.m., after making their rounds through the city. It’s not easy to return at that hour, as there are no other women on the street because Yemeni women withdraw into their homes at around five in the afternoon.
“To the men, women who are out after dark are lowly whores. They take advantage, they uncover their privates and show them to you, they say, ‘Look, look, you know you like it.’ They fondle you. They rape you if they’re bold enough or if you’re in a deserted place.”
“The owner of a home where I worked offered me a ride to Safia when he got home. It takes me an hour and a half to get back to my children by bus, and when I arrive they’re dying of hunger. That’s why I accepted. He told me we’d be with a friend of his, and they both raped me and left me lying on a street. There were no more buses and I had to come back on foot. I didn’t get home until one in the morning.”
“We get arrested frequently. They seize us if something goes missing in the neighborhood, thinking we must have it. Sometimes we’re detained for up to fifteen days, even when they don’t find anything.”
“In general, in the houses, we only get paid with leftover food. You accept it so you’ll have something to bring the children.”
Zahra Bayda translated for me: These women’s great aspiration is to get a bed and a TV. And why not? I think, the days they have, who wouldn’t want to lie in bed and zone out in front of a screen. But no, that’s not it. Zahra Bayda explains: The bed is for tying down the children. They’re forced to leave them alone all day and anything could happen to them if they wander out to the street. The only solution is to leave them tied to the leg of a bed. When they get home at night, they have to bathe their kids because they’re covered in urine and shit, crying loudly. They’ve fought among themselves. They’ve gone all day without food. The TV would entertain them while they’re waiting for their mothers to come home.
“Say goodbye,” Zahra Bayda orders. “We’ll take the highway. We’re heading east, two hours past Marib.”
“Marib!” My heart races. “Marib! The legendary archaeological site of the ancient kingdom of Sheba!”
“But we’re not going to Marib. We’re going to a camp a couple of hours past it.”
“Couldn’t we stop in Marib? To get to know it a little—”
“No, we can’t.”
I quickly see that begging would be useless. I’d have to pass by Marib, heart in my throat. Marib, early paradise, according to theKoran. Place of infinite riches as the center of the incense trade; deliciously fertile thanks to the dam that irrigates its surroundings; forever cool beneath the shade of its thousand palms... and now, a dusty town in the middle of nowhere. Even so, what I wouldn’t give to explore it... who knows, maybe on the way back.
For now, submissiveness. Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am, whatever you say. Zahra Bayda acts like a bossy, protective mother; maybe she’s seen my rootlessness, like a leaf in the wind, and decided to adopt me. As if hypnotized by her incredible, kohl-lined eyes, I allow myself to be adopted. And why not, given how in my abandonment she appeared, shamanic protector, angel of salvation. Agreed, ma’am, we won’t go to Marib but to some place two hours farther away. Whatever you say, ma’am.
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
Suddenly I’m crushed by fatigue and bewilderment, as if I’ve just taken a strong blow and can’t quite get my bearings back. I’m dizzied by the horde of recent images flashing through my mind. Sanaa appears to me, unfolded like a Janus, god of two faces: on the one hand, a city of inconceivable beauty, dazzling as the Queen of Sheba; on the other, a city of extreme misery, with the same inhuman features as Hasanana, the living torch, disfigured by fire.
I pinch myself to break the daze. I’ve got to stay in the here and now. I’m in an SUV with a doctor by the name of Zahra Bayda, whom I met just a few hours ago. She says we’re headed to a camp past Marib. I’m in Yemen now, still scrambled by sleeplessness and jet lag, but I’m finally here. I don’t know where Marib is, the truth is that I don’t know where anything is, but I let myself be carried along.
“It’s pretty, the place we’re going to,” Zahra Bayda says to console me. “The ruins of Sultan Muhafazat’s palace are there.”
“Ah, good. And who was Muhafazat?”
“A sultan.”
“Obviously.”
As a tour guide, Zahra Bayda is on the sparing side.
