That night we were going to celebrate Zahra Bayda’s birthday, and a few hours beforehand, around midafternoon, Zahra Bayda asked me to join her in the kitchen to make scones.
“Why scones?”
“Because I like them, and it’s my birthday.”
“How sophisticated, scones in Yemen. They’re a Scottish bread, right?”
“Danish. Or, at least, I learned to make them from a Dane.”
“Rather than scones, I’d prefer to make an apple pie.”
“You see apples anywhere around here?”
“No.”
“That’s because there aren’t any. If there were, we’d bake an apple pie. But there are none, right?” Zahra Bayda became brusque, as she sometimes did.
“Was it in Denmark that a Dane taught you how to make scones?”
“No, it was a Dane here.”
“A Dane who came to Yemen to make scones.”
“He came to Yemen to work with us for a while. A Danish doctor.”
“And you made scones with him.”
“And with you too,” she shot back smoothly.
A bolero song sprang to mind,Bésame, bésame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez... Kiss me, kiss me a lot, as if tonight were the last time...but it was Zahra Bayda who began to hum it. These things happen, with music, a kind of telepathy: One person recalls a song, another sings it.
“So you know that bolero, ‘Bésame Mucho,’” I said.
“Everybody knows it, it was very popular, I heard the Beatles sing it.”
“Which Beatles? The Beatles didn’t sing that.”
“I bet they did.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Ma’am? Only a kid like you would say ‘ma’am’ to a thirty-six-year-old woman like me.”
“That’s what you’re turning today? Thirty-six?”
“Thirty-seven, to tell you the truth.”
“Definitely a ma’am,” I said, and she gave me a little shove.
I’ve been calling Zahra Bayda ma’am since the moment I first saw her, when she came to pick me up at the airport. At first sight, she seemed a mature woman to me, and the address seemed right. I didn’t really take a close look at her appearance. Well, that’s not quite true; I did look, how could I not look when she burst on the scene like an earthquake, talking loudly and gesturing vigorously and wearing bright colors amid all those silent, black-clad women. That is to say, of course I looked, but not the way a man looks at a woman, more the way he might look at an approaching storm. In the airport, my overall impression was of an energetic, commanding woman who gave orders we obeyed, all of us, the officials, the soldiers, and I myself, as if our mother had just arrived to put everything in order. That’s what I saw, a possessive and nourishing mother ofhumanity, owner of the fiercest black eyes in the whole desert, the magnetic eyes of a shaman deep in a trance.
In the kitchen, hours before her birthday party, after touching on the subject of her age, I observed her more closely. She’s a tall woman, with a sturdy body that seems free and comfortable under an ample tunic with a green, brown, and black pattern that she calls an abaya and that gives her a more African than Arab look. Over that she wears the distinctive MSF vest, white with a red logo. She’s given me one too, with stern instructions not to leave the house without it: Though it’s just a simple cloth, it somehow functions as a kind of safety shield.
Wow, this Zahra Bayda. She’s truly seductive when she beams her Somali smile, honest and full of large teeth, and she’s truly frightening when angry: She’s moody, why deny it? She wears heavy earrings that stretch her earlobes. Her most sumptuous treasure is a wild, shining mane she keeps hidden beneath a cap or turban except when she’s at home. I tell her that her hair is only set loose at night, like ferocious dogs. Then there are her hands, which are enormous, she moves them gracefully as she gestures like some great queen or like a person who knows they have phenomenal hands. Everything about this woman is solid, and supreme.
“You’re an unassailable monument,” I told her.
“Have you tried to assail it?” she shot back. “Want to place bets?”
