I felt them sniffing at me. They were damp shadows, crawling, licking my feet. I invoked some distant god: Help the dead women lose their fear, I begged, and the god advised me to light a fire. I did it, and the dead women came nearer, seeking warmth. That’s when I understood that what was terrifying wasn’t them, but their pain.
I was wearing a white shirt (something had told me it should be white) and I started to repeat, like a mantra or prayer, the names of the women sacrificed there, Mahader, Maraki, Abigail, Anisa, Haset... the slow, rhythmic repetition crystallized the ritual, Zenha, Barhane, Meseret... the intensity grew, the moment was approaching. Anisa, Haset, Nigist, Barhane, Meseret. Nothing wouldhappen to me as long as I kept repeating Abigail, Anisa, Mahader, Haset...
The light of the moon let me find what I was looking for: small things. Minor abandoned belongings, objects that would have helped make those women and children’s days bearable. Not the Queen of Sheba’s mythical riches of gold and incense, but little treasures, invisible, ordinary, like a wooden spoon I picked up and put in my backpack, or a frayed blanket that had still kept its color. I also put away a comb missing a few teeth. Some kitchen utensils, a plastic toy, a couple of bottles, the remains of paper flowers, an embroidered pillow, a bundle of cards, unclassifiable refuse, clothes turned to rags.
And, of course, shoes. Several of them lay scattered without their counterparts, of different shapes and sizes. It’s known there’s something about shoes, because they always show up after accidents, fires, massacres, and brawls. No crime scene goes without at least one abandoned shoe. Victims lose them as they run, maybe that’s the explanation. All I know for sure is that there’s a trail of shoes here, in Dhamar, testifying to the tragedy.
I gathered those objects and put them away carefully, because they were unique, blessed, pulsing like hearts. Then I headed toward the grave where the bodies lay.
At the center of that terrain bathed in moonlight, a large rusty red car part marked the place of burial. Had our team put it there, as a kind of tombstone or sign? The big piece of scrap metal was shaped like a disjointed flamingo, or perhaps a scorpion, and suddenly I saw it not as scrap metal at all but as one of Calder’s metal sculptures, half buried in the sand and worn by time. As a funereal monument, that totem fulfilled its role well.
Bufalino says that death is a smoke screen between the living and the others, and that it’s enough to reach your hands into it for those on the other side to reach back toward you. Maybe that’s why I devoted myself to the task of bringing over large stones. Gradually,I arranged them around the red sculpture, counting the paces between stones, until I’d enclosed the grave in a circumference. It was exhausting work, a heavy load even for a man my size. My back ached, but I managed to finish the job before dawn, while the moon was still dancing with the wind. Once encircled by the stones, the graveyard was contained.
There, inside, I buried the familiar objects I’d gathered from the debris, so they’d preserve the memory of lived lives. They’d serve as company and solace; they’d represent, for the dead women and their children, the protection of an abode.
Finally I sat down to rest. That cemetery was no longer a nothing in the middle of nowhere; it had become a place, with an entrance and exit. A home. A lair surrounded by a protective ring. A corral of stones for a flock of human remains. A lasting marker that can let it be said: Here they lie.Hic sunt.A terrain of their own where the dead women can reconcile with their own death, free now of all horrors. Here they’ll rest in peace under the sheltering night.
I sat there for a long time. The silence was white, and the calm too. I was about to leave when I saw her appear. It was her again: the Queen of Sheba. She wore a diamond scorpion between her breasts. Her hair shone silver in the moonlight and rippled in the wind. She breathed open-mouthed, as if gasping for air, and she wept for those women. Then she disappeared as gently as she’d arrived.
“May the peace of today speak for yesterday’s pain,” I said aloud, and I left too.
When I got home, I had wounds on my hands and sand in my boots, hair, and ears. But I felt a kind of relief; finally, I had the right to weep. The dead of these lands were no longer so unconnected to me; from now on, they’d be mine too. And what if that ceremony was carried out in dreams, not in actual fact? And what if I only described it, writing it down in my notebook? It didn’t matter, I thought. In the end, dreaming is my way of being, and writing is my way of doing. Facts, dreams, writing, burials,weeping, farewells: All of these are rituals, and all ritual is in itself a kind of embodiment.
Also, the dead don’t find out. They don’t opine. They don’t join the funeral rites held in their honor; their presence is no more than a longing, or ghostly breath. The dead don’t see us, but rather dream us, though for them dreaming and seeing are the same. Mahader, Maraki, Abigail, Nigist, Anisa, Haset, Zenha, Barhane, Meseret...
I wanted to take a good shower before going to bed. The expat house’s bathroom was primitive: The shower consisted of a row of four buckets of water strung high, each with a cord you pulled to make the bucket tip and pour the water on your head. Since the nights were so cold, by dawn the water in the buckets was freezing.
I’d already gathered my flip-flops, soap, and towel when Zahra Bayda appeared, walked past me, and took over the bathroom. I didn’t appreciate that she cut ahead of me like that, but I said nothing, what for, since she wasn’t going to answer. I hovered near the door, annoyed, waiting my turn for the shower, when I heard the first bucket’s pour followed by Zahra Bayda’s scream; it seemed she hadn’t anticipated how icy the water would be at that hour. It made me laugh. At least she screams, that wordless woman, I thought, the mice haven’t eaten her tongue, maybe that freezing shock can open her throat.
I wasn’t wrong. Two days later, Zahra Bayda sought me out in the storeroom, where I was unpacking medical supplies.
“Would you like a coffee?” she asked.
It wasn’t just any invitation, nor one I’d let pass, because Zahra Bayda made coffee in the traditional Ethiopian way: a complicated ceremony that took time, patience, and artfulness. She started by washing the green coffee beans, and then, squatting before the brazier, she toasted them on a pewter plate. Once they were toasted, she ground them by hand with mortar and pestle, mixed them with boiling water in a special coffeepot called a jebena, and added clove and ginger.
I watched her movements as she focused on the task without uttering a word or looking my way, but with that tilted smile of hers from better times. She put a ceramic plate of popcorn between us, along with a smaller one bearing cardamom seeds. She served me a first cup of strong coffee, then a second milder cup, and as if nothing had happened, she started listing out tasks waiting to be done. Her voice made life, which had been on pause, resume its rhythm.
The Passion of the Stag
Olibanum, with its touch of pain, is the first of four secret ingredients that make Goat Foot’s perfumes beyond compare, impossible to recreate to this day. The second, which contributes that note of passion, is obtained by Goat Foot from the musk gland of a red stag.
A mystical animal, the subject of kabbalistic psalms and obsessive dreams, the red stag, like the unicorn, succumbs before a maiden’s charms.
At the hour of twilight, Princess Goat Foot goes out to await its appearance. She senses its presence. She approaches the magnificent creature, hides in the mist, moves stealthily, the high crosses of antlers visible through the foliage. At last the stag reveals itself, gazing around majestically. He bellows with thirst and love, filling the air with a fertile broth of pheromones that attract and captivate, and his call is deep as distant thunder or the low notes of a cello.
Only a maiden can hunt the stag; it’s not the kingdom’s archers but Goat Foot herself who pierces him with an arrow. The Great Perfumer of Hadhramaut and his fellow alchemists extract the gland, put it on a hot stone to dry, and then distill it until they achieve adense balsam, the color of tea, oily to the touch and bitter of taste. It’s what is known today as musk.
Goat Foot, as clever a craftsperson as the god Hermes, has made a discovery. By sacrificing the stag, she can capture its spirit and pour it into small flasks, drop by drop. The stag cedes its powers and reveals the crux of itsars armonia: Its fieriness illuminates the perfume. But Goat Foot will have to pay the price. The difference between today’s simple musk and the erogenous oil of those times is in the willingness the maiden shows to wound and be wounded: The stag gives her a stigma of lost love. The essence of that wound is trapped in the perfume, a potent aphrodisiac.
The third secret component is black rose. Black Baccara, an esoteric and Solomonic rose, utterly evasive, so impossible to find and unique among roses that most people don’t even believe it exists, and only the King of Jerusalem has succeeded in taming it. Goat Foot doesn’t crush it in a mortar, but rather presses it in her own hand until it releases its nectar, which isn’t harmless, not the kind that brings to mind loving vows or flying doves; instead, it’s a deceptive nectar, sinful, you could even say it’s somewhat poisonous, and with it Goat Foot gives her essences a sad, Gothic aura.
Still, something is missing. The Perfumer of Sheba is not altogether satisfied. Her fine nose tells her that, despite the magic of the three ingredients she already has, a fourth is still needed, the definitive one, which will complete the formula and make it unparalleled. The revelation comes to her after several sleepless nights. With great care, so as to keep the fourth element contained, the Princess of Sheba goes down to the laboratories, approaches the stills, and drops in a freshly cut piece of one of her fingernails, a tip of her hair, a drop of her bodily fluids or flakes from her skin: tiny dead particles of herself. She’s discovered that atoms of decomposing flesh instill great spirit. A speck of death infuses life into things, like yeast in bread.
Just like yeast, petroleum, antibiotics, asphalt, and cortisone,Goat Foot’s perfumes contain a touch of cadaverous impurity, without which they’d be decipherable and could be copied. The sweet hint of bacterial decomposition brings its liminal drama, its bold, adventurous quality, its role as a portal. There’s no true perfume if the perfumer who makes it doesn’t leave skin inside it.
To finish things off, as if for sport, the way a chef completes a stew with a final dash of salt and pepper, Goat Foot adds notes of wine and laudanum to her masterpiece. She’s finally achieved what she sought: an epically layered and poetic perfume that speaks of desperate love affairs and ancient bloody battles.
A pinch of sensuality and another of rot, a drop of sweetness and another of perversion: This is the formula the world’s great perfume houses still seek to this day. Their panacea is that it would be enough to apply their product behind the ear, in armpits, on wrists, between legs, or on other intimate parts of the body for the person who uses it to feel—when their skin’s heat wakes the perfume’s soul—that they’ve acquired a special power.
