Esteemed Sir,
The Queen of Sheba is not who you seek; Queen of Sheba is no more than the name you have given to everything you seek.
She sends this along with a small yet valuable gift: an ebony box containing incense tears, coagulated into a white resin.
The message and the little box take eternities to cross the vast spaces of Rub‘ al-Khali and reach their destination, and during this delay, Solomon has also felt mixed emotions. With so many wives and concubines already, it doesn’t seem quite relevant to seek another; as it stands, he doesn’t have enough time or strength to attend to them all. And as far as this Princess of Sheba, he’s heard rumors that make him lean toward disillusionment, this thing and the other, that she’s vulgar and rebellious, domineering and bad-tempered, with an intimidating personality that inspires both attraction and fear. Of course, it also doesn’t escape him that she, owner of the precious frankincense as well as a vast perfume industry, might be the most powerful woman in the world. Enough of a reason, Solomon muses, to keep his proposal in the air. And yet... the rumors describe a fickle female who quickly falls into hysterics if she’s not obeyed or her desires aren’t fulfilled. A bad thing, thinks Suleiman, also called Solomon. His harem of wives and concubines is a nest of gossip,envy, and jealousy, and bringing another woman in could disrupt and whip up the hive.
When that messenger with the presents and flax-written note finally arrives from the far-off kingdom of Sheba, the king with the curved eyelashes and florid beard reads the script with pleasure. He sees himself reflected, wholly embodied as if in a mirror, in those two lines of fine perception that Goat Foot sent him through the seven climates and eight deserts. So it’s not the Queen of Sheba I seek, Suleiman reflects, but rather Queen of Sheba is the name I’ve put on everything I’m searching for? That strikes a chord, yes, that’s me, truth be told, I recognize myself. She’s got sharp insight, that Sheba girl, she’s no fool. No. Not a fool at all, that’s for sure. As her reputation claimed, she’s too smart, and nothing seduces him like flights of intelligence. What had to happen has just happened to him, and there’s no longer any cure: The queen’s kiss has pricked him on the forehead, like a thorn. Forehead red, heart bleeding. His hour of falling in love has arrived, he, Solomon, already a man ofcoeur blessé, a soul that’s wounded and prone to relapses of feeling. The young woman’s intelligence has conquered him, and he wastes no time in sending, to Sheba, as a sign of matrimonial commitment, a heavy gold seal that inside its ring bears the brief inscription:TO DESTINY.
On the other side of the world, Goat Foot receives Solomon’s seal and is perplexed by the words engraved in the ring. “To destiny”? What does that mean? Could this wedding really be the destiny that awaits her? She doesn’t want to reply yes, but can’t say no; she can neither dismiss the matter, nor endorse it. Clever as a fox, she invents a ruse to stall and prolong the impasse, sure that the eyelash-batting faraway king will fall for her trick. She’s heard it murmured that Solomon is like a crab, mysterious yet dumb. So she thinks for a while and comes up with this response:
I, Princess Goat Foot, Star of the South and Light of the Dawn, owner of incense and military chief of a thousandand two hundred caravans, send you word—oh, great Solomon!—that I’ll agree to be your wife, as long as you make me a perfume more subtle, seductive, and aromatic than the one I myself create and distribute in my name.
Goat Foot is convinced that Suleiman will fall right into her trap and put his court’s sages and scientists to work with essences and aromas, trying everything, pouring months and years into the effort with nothing to show for it, because to be a true perfumer it’s essential to have experience like her own.
Is Solomon like the crab, mysterious yet dumb? This assumption is correct, but only halfway, because Solomon is indeed mysterious but there’s no dumb in him, not even a drop. He sees right through the ruse, and is surprised and amused; he accepts the challenge immediately. He’ll join the game and win the bet. He laughs, enjoying himself. He knows he can’t make a perfume of that caliber; he couldn’t do it even if he crushed all the black roses from his garden. And, in the face of the trap set for him, he develops a counter-trap: If he can’t fulfill it, nor will she. Given his fame as a poet, as well as a sage, he sends the know-it-all of Sheba a retinue bearing sumptuous silks, along with this reply:
Esteemed Lady of the Nascent Sun, Favorite of the Southern Wind, and Mistress of the People of the Dawn,
Your powerful and enchanting person shall receive the perfume you request, as long as you send me a poem devised by your own mind and written by your own hand, and it must be more beautiful and sonorous than any I’ve composed and that are attributed to my name.
Circle of Stones
Zahra Bayda had been quiet, and not even irritable, as sometimes happened; this version of silence seemed worse. For a couple of weeks, she’d been wandering the house absently and gloomily, disengaged from the rest of the team. She murmured old spells from her native land, under her breath: Whether praying or setting curses in motion, it was impossible to know. There was no way of getting close to her. She spent hours shut into herself, nobody could rescue her from it, least of all me. It was troubling to see her that way. She who was always picking fights and talking up a storm in one of the several languages or dialects she knows. Her silence had settled into the house like one more resident. If before she worked eighteen hours a day, now she spent all twenty-four in a full frenzy. She attended to the sick, went out on mission after mission, visited disaster zones, oversaw logistics, wrote reports. But all in a cold, robotic way, as if the rest of us didn’t exist, or as if we were only slightly human.
“Stop!” I’d say. “Rest a moment, sit down, have a bite to eat. Do you know what happens to supernovas when they lose control and reverberate too wildly? It turns out, they devour themselves and turn into black holes.”
But she didn’t listen. Nothing could interest her less than supernovas and their dramas. Nothing except me. I interested her even less; in her eyes I was a black hole.
Black hole? Maybe that was it. Maybe Zahra Bayda had fallen back into the void of Barhout, that pit of Nothingness of which her Uncle Tammam had so often spoken.
“Let her be,” Pau advised me, on seeing my efforts to draw a reaction from her. “Leave her be, she’ll come out of it on her own... one day.”
“From that hole of Barhout? Is that where she is?”
“In that hole or some other one, not quite so deep... at least, I hope it’s not.”
Well, well, this Pau Cor d’Or knew Zahra Bayda far too well... Where had it gone, her contagious joy, her invincible optimism against all evidence?
“What her Uncle Tammam didn’t know,” I told him, “is that there are demons chained up in your own pit of Barhout...”
“A strange way of living,” he muttered, not looking at me. “Even when we reach the surface, we’re in the depths of something.”
Steamrolled by helplessness, that’s the state she was in. And no wonder: The team really couldn’t keep up. In addition to a recent increase in contagious disease, there were the ravages of war, the locusts, the drought, hunger, fanaticism, and the criminal interplay of powers. And those other more ethereal faces of death, namely loneliness, fog, and forgetting. Apocalypse, now. Because what’s happening in Yemen are the tremors of a broader apocalypse, even though the West is trying to close its eyes and ignore it on the pretext that it seems too far away. They don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, that it’s in places like this where global life-and-death dilemmas are decided.
When it seemed things couldn’t get worse, they got worse. Coalition forces bombed the MSF hospital in Haydan as-Sham, with the pretext that Al Qaeda fighters were among the patients. I asked Zahra Bayda whether that last claim was or wasn’t true.
“What claim?” she barked.
“That there were Al Qaeda people in the hospital.”
“I don’t know, possibly not, but maybe so. When the wounded or sick need help, you don’t ask them which side they’re on.”
Her response troubled me, and I did some more investigating. Pau had always said that, as a doctor, you have the moral and professional obligation to treat whoever needs it. I sought him out for further explanation, and he gave me a pamphlet on international human rights, where I read that medical staff, patients, health outposts, hospitals, and ambulances must be protected in the midst of conflict, and under no circumstances may they be targets of war. Even so, the hospital at Haydan as-Sham had been reduced to rubble.
We were already living in a climate of great instability and stress when we were informed of a massacre that had just taken place in the valley of Dhamar, two and a half hours away. Cor d’Or and Zahra Bayda headed out there, along with two more doctors and some coordinating staff. They didn’t take me due to lack of space in the SUVs. I had to stay home, very much against my will.
Rumors reached me almost immediately. It seemed that a theft of canned food had devolved into violence. Some months before, the United Nations had sent a supply of canned meat to a small temporary settlement of Ethiopian women and their children. The recipients of those cans hadn’t dared touch them because the contents were haram (dirty) and not halal (clean): According to Muslim law, edible meat must come from livestock properly bled by a sheik. But the war and epidemic had sharpened hunger, and those boxes of cans, piled high in a shed, had turned into precious goods. A group of men armed with daggers, intent on seizing them, had descended on the settlement by night.
