Zahra Bayda has filled me in on this woman’s life. She came here from Ethiopia some years ago, fleeing misfortune and leaving behind her mother and five brothers. She brought her only son with her, a months-old baby who soon died of malnutrition.
“Say a prayer for me, Father,” Yameelah says.
No, I won’t recite some Christian prayer for this woman, won’t promise her that Heaven will give her the happiness denied here on earth. No. She deserves my respect. I won’t ask her to surrender meekly, to forget past sorrows and submit in her final hour. I will not do it.
We communicate through an interpreter who serves as a bridge. In place of prayer, I recite a Dylan Thomas poem for her, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” She croons in a low voice and the interpreter, whose name is Kia, accompanies her, clapping her hands. She explains that what they’re singing is a hymn from the Eastern Orthodox Church, to which they both belong. I ask her to translate the lyrics for me, and she says she can’t, she herself doesn’t understand them because they’re not in Amharic but in Geez, a language from biblical times.
Yameelah sits up with great effort and rests against her pillow. She takes a breath and a few sips of water, then confesses that she is carrying guilt and has a recurring dream in which she’s constantly being punished.
She says that, at night, a demon drags her into a tower with two floors and submits her to judgment there. On the first floor, he condemns her for the death of her child, and on the second floor he condemns her for abandoning her mother and brothers.
“Will you absolve me with your blessing, Father?”
“I’m not someone who can forgive you, Yameelah. You have to forgive yourself.”
“The demon won’t leave me in peace, Father, he returns every night.”
What can I say that won’t sound insipid? How to find words that could alleviate her guilt? The nurse enters to give her an injection and asks me to leave for a moment. I take advantage of the pause to think. Outside, the fresh twilight air invigorates me and slows the spinning in my mind.
“You’ve told me of the judgment to which you’re being subjected,” I tell Yameelah when I’m back at her side. “So let’s prepare your defense. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. Prepare my defense.”
“Here it is. Your defense against the demon’s accusations. Next time, you’ll explain to him that you came to Yemen to work and send money to your mother. No matter how hardheaded this demon is, he’s got to understand that you didn’t abandon your mother, nor your brothers, and that it wasn’t you who killed your son, but poverty and hunger. Speak firmly to this demon, make him see that you didn’t work against your family, but just the opposite, you tried to give them better lives, even though that possibility ended up not being in your hands.”
Yameelah Semela listens with a moving depth of attention, and then she grows drowsy without saying a word, spent by the emotional and physical effort. A pair of nurses enter, declare that’s enough for today, and take the cot back to its place inside the hospital.
Zahra Bayda lets me know I can spend the night in the mission, where she and three other doctors sleep. It’s a small house with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a patio, and a single bathroom. It has no more than the bare essentials, but that’s a lot compared to the general scarcity at hand. Beyond the house, the world burns, but here everyday life makes its nest, yoked to objects that speak of pastdays: sheets hung to dry on the patio; a pair of shoes at the door; a heavy old fridge that no longer works and that only serves for storing pasta, garbanzos, and canned food; a well-worn copy of Orwell’s1984.I take this as a sign that I’ve come to a good place.
They put me in a small room that lets out onto the patio. Despite the exhaustion, I can’t sleep; no matter how much I try to curl up, I don’t fit on this bed, I spill out lengthwise and sideways. In my insomnia, I distract myself by going over my recent notes and stop at the expressionpast days. Why did I writepast days? Are there even past days, or days to come? All the days seem to hold the same rhythm, each of them carrying its small Armageddon. The collapse is irreversible, but moves forward with great calm.
The thing is, I can’t sleep. The hours stretch out, but don’t pass by. I need to pee, and the bathroom is on the other side of the patio. I stall until I can’t hold it anymore. I get up without making a sound to keep from waking the others and cross the darkness on tiptoes. A timid moon shines into the patio.
It’s nice outside. Aromatic herbs grow in pots and I’m lulled by a scent, chamomile, peppermint? My mother would know it immediately, she too gardened in pots, thyme, rosemary, peppermint, basil... who would have thought that halfway across the world, beneath a pale Muslim moon, I’d find a patio like the one in my childhood? If only I could boil a tea from these leaves... but I’d have to turn on lights and the stove: impossible. Better to stay here as long as the cold will let me.
Through my headphones, I listen to an old Sephardic song, whose lyrics say, “Morenika, they call me, I was born white, and I became this way from the summer sun, morenika graciosika, that’s who I am...”
Morenika. That’s it. I’ve got you, Queen of Sheba. Morenika Graciosika, that’s what I’ll call you. None of this Lady of the Gate of Thula, nor Sovereign of the Desert of Ramlat, nor Mistress of the Palaces of Marib, nor who knows what else. None of that. It doesn’t matter that you won’t confess your name to me; I’ll callyou Morenika. How silent you are, and slippery. It’s not true that you accumulated countless treasures. You didn’t have, as Rubén Darío asserts, a palace of diamonds, a malachite pavilion, a hundred armed Black warriors, and four hundred elephants at the seashore. You were a small, wild queen, now lost in the great night of time. Oh, Graciosika, let me love you in my own way.
“Enough crowing about the Queen of Sheba, she didn’t exist and doesn’t exist,” Zahra Bayda said to me earlier, and I took it badly.
I stayed quiet when she said it, I didn’t reply, but I would have liked to say: Well, the boy I was believed in her, and I respect the beliefs of the boy I used to be. And yes, the Queen of Sheba exists, because those women we met on the road believe in her, and I respect their beliefs.
To hell with what Zahra Bayda says, I believe in you, Lady of Sheba. Graciosika, Goat Foot, or Sheba, whatever you’d like to be called. May I pray to your image, sing you psalms, and light candles for you? May I beg you to give Yameelah Semela a clean conscience and a peaceful death?
The temperature plummets. The moon wraps herself in icy mist and the air is so thin it cuts. I’d already been warned that, here, the daytime’s hundred degrees fall to thirty degrees at night. I came out barefoot and my feet are freezing. I can’t stop thinking about Yameelah Semela, who, at the hospital, must be fighting the demon that wants to break her.
The war reverberates in the distance, telling me there’s a darker night behind this night out on the patio. I bring my jacket and blanket from the room, drape myself in them, and stay awake outside until Venus disappears as an evening star and returns as star of morning. That means Aurora Consurgens is now here, Light of the Dawn, Regina Sabae.
With the first light of day, Leyla returns, a Yemeni woman who cleans the house; I met her yesterday. She brings some strawberries from her mother’s garden as a gift, for breakfast. Five for eachperson, five small miracles that Leyla’s mother scratched out of the drought with her fingernails. I keep mine to take them to the sick woman to whom I’m tending.
Yameelah Semela is already in the same place as yesterday, waiting for me. She’s asked to be wrapped in a white cotton blanket—a shamma, Kia tells me—to prepare for the end. She welcomes me with a smile and says her fever has eased a bit, but I notice her breathing is now forced and deep. Through Kia, Yameelah confesses that she would have wanted to live until Timkat, the day Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan, but she won’t make it. She wears a blue rosary around her neck.
“Are those lapis lazuli beads?” I ask.
“They’re not beads, they’re the mystery of the rosary. These five are joyful mysteries, and these other five are the glorious ones.”
I mention that the sorrowful ones are missing.
