Yemen #3: Dela Dela (Slowly Slowly)

She was not quite as stunning as I thought she would be. Her whole form was covered in a black balto, a long shiny black dress, and hijab. Quite pale skin actually, and her face was globe-like, as a baby’s. Half Kuwaiti, half Yemeni, you would think she’d have that olive color made by millennia of ancestors living under a harsh sun, but no. And no English either, even though our absent-minded landlord Husein said she speaks English better than any of us.

When she walked falteringly up the broad stone castle-like steps to our apartment, with a predatory-looking Husein behind her urging her on, I greeted her in casual English when she entered the room. She looked blankly at us: me, Tom Finn, and war correspondent Casey L. Coombs©, sitting at the kitchen table, and so I threw her another chunk of English. Nothing.

“bil 3arabi,” (“In Arabic”) Tom said, and I let my halting Yemeni dialect rip on her, and she responded to my dull questions with reservation. “What’s your name? Oh, Ghaida. Cool.” (I fudged it up. It’s Ghinē’.) “So, you’re from Kuwait? I heard you speak English really well. What, you don’t? But the Kuwaitis are like the British. I thought they all spoke English! What brings you here? Oh, you’re working at Yemenia Airlines, huh?”

I didn’t understand a whole lot of what she was saying because I’ve never been very good at understanding people, and because her Kuwaiti dialect is more different than I thought it would be. So ummi (“mother”) is coming out kind of like mmwi. Anyhow, she doesn’t look very present in the kitchen with us, and is not impressed with the plate of wilted spaghetti with sautéed vegetables that me and the boys placed in front of her. Black-toothed Husein, grinning and chuckling like a snake, squeezes lime all over her food, acting like sexual favors are imminent in return for his insincere courtesy. She picked through the spaghetti like a dissected frog in science class before letting the whole effort go.

Somehow, in the course of my friendly pestering, I found out that the parents of Ghinē’ separated, and it sounded like her mother is now living down in the city of Ibb, to the south. Not entirely sure if I got that right though. That, and the fact that she was on her own for the first time in the Arab world’s poorest country, coming from one of its richest, living in a house with a creeper of a landlord and a bunch of chatty Westerners, and about to start a job she seemed to have no interest in, appeared to be the things keeping her eyes low and her smile elusive.

Me, Tom, and war correspondent Casey L. Coombs© continued to talk amongst each other about Husein’s creepiness while Husein, with his huge belly and clammy brown skin, continued to chat up poor Ghinē’. A tossed a few other less-prying questions towards Ghinē’, she responded weakly, and it was not long before she was quietly moving out the door, her balto trailing after her, with Husein guiding her like a father does a small child.

We decided, with the evening’s first hint of seriousness, that we’d do what we could to help out this young lady, so out of place in our little castle of foreign folks. Then Tom, in his thin blondness, went up to his place to finish a piece for Reuters, abounding as he does in work after journalizing for nearly two years in Yemen. Casey retired to his room after his long ritual of applying skin-care products, and I got caught up in cleaning various parts of our new apartment, not completing any of the bits I set out to make tidy. It stayed up later than it should have, and I went to bed.

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BEEEEP. My alarm clock hit me like a hammer in the face. It was 6a.m., and I hadn’t gotten my full 8 hours of beauty sleep. Shards of orange light aplenty were already coming in my windows, and the walled-in agricultural plot/garden out my window was glowing green in the dawn light. Slow as a sloth, I headed to the bathroom downstairs which is not clogged as ours is, came back up, and breathed and meditated my stress away for an hour.

Out into the kitchen, where roommate Jacqueline had prepared a smattering of sliced vegetables and boiled eggs. I consumed them, and as she left, Jacqueline chided me for constantly talking about visiting other countries, about how excited I am to see my girlfriend again, about making plans for other times, and told me to take a deep breath, and be where I am. People have been telling me to do that my whole life, a key critique of one of the principle causes of discontent in my life. I grabbed my bag, snaked out the door and through a maze of crumbling stone alleys where tiny children played with deflated balls, and out to the screaming bus station where men in skirts yelled constantly for no reason at all, and we all packed into vans too small for our dignity.

As we sped along and I read Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, it was strange to think that I hadn’t left the city limits of Sana'a since the end of March, when I came back from a two-day trip in Thulaa', a friend's home city about 50km northwest of Sana'a. Almost 5 weeks now I have been shuttling to and fro' on foot and in taxis and minibuses, entirely within the cracked embrace of Yemen's capital city.

Strange, also, to think that between my return into the eternity embrace of Sana'a so long ago, I've found steady employment. These days the municipal mini-buses roll me to the office of Yemen Times newspaper every morning, 5 days a week, Saturday through Wednesday.

I hopped out along a hissing highway, scramble across the highway trying to avoid the violent rush of cars, and into the office. It’s almost empty these days, what with all the new pretty college grads off for reporter training in Egypt. Only Fatima the Ethiopian secretary at her desk, Bessam the translator at a desk next to mine, Ali the stick-like managing editor hunched over his computer, and a few other employees whose names I don’t yet know remain.

Thank god, the fluorescent lights were not yet on. Shards of light crept past the backs of ugly buildings outside, and around the partially drawn curtains. The Yemenis in the office get enough sun, I guess, and don’t want it invading their working hours. I muttered Șabāħ l Ķheir (“Good morning”) under my breath, but everyone caught it, as they always do, and muttered Șabāħ n nūr automatically back at me.

Sit down at the desk, turn on the computer, and yell to Ali’s desk across from me, “Good morning Ali. You got something for me?”

With heavily-rolled cat R’s, “Yes OK I have something for you in 10 minutes.”

And so on and so forth like this for hours, me editing grammar and asking the translators, bewildered, what some of their Arabic-like eternal run-on sentences (like mine, I suppose) mean. Long spans of time between some articles, me not fulfilling my creative duties of creating story ideas, reworking the submission deadlines, redesigning the page layout of the paper, nor sitting with the journalists to discuss their beats. I read articles about the old “socialist” republic of south Yemen on Wikipedia instead.

Lunchtime comes, and me and the fellas, Ali, Muaadh, and, well, no one else head down the highway to a little joint tucked in a tired side street serving roiling pots of feħsa. I talk English with Ali, and Arabic with Muaadh, the brown-skinned communist from the southern city of Ta’iz, yet long stretches of quiet break our conversation about stories and journalists and Muaadh’s incomprehensible jokes. Pull feħsa from the hot iron bowl with hunks of bread, wash hands with laundry detergent, and we’re out again on the empty street. Take a comfortable full-belly seat at the desk and begin copy editing with renewed vigor.

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Up in Asmir’s apartment, the high energy and always immaculately groomed student from Montenegro living a couple of levels above us. To commemorate Tom’s coming departure from Yemen, after what I call a damn successful stint of almost two years’ writing and reporting, Asmir spent all day cooking up heavy and deeply fried foods for us whose roots lay in his native eastern Europe. He said they’re all original recipes, but they've got more than a hint of Tito’s Yugoslavia to them. Fried liver, fried breaded chicken, fried breaded zucchini, and on and on.

I deeply enjoyed the massive hunks of chicken for the rare nutrition they gave in this country leeched of protein, and a couple of other Americans at the other end of the candle-lit table heartily talked up my roommate Jacquelyn about how much they love her home country of China. “Guong Jo. I loved that place. I taught at the experimental high school there. It was like, so cheap. Oh dude, it was niiiice,” or something similar, is what spiled from one Californian guy, who latched on approvingly to a few things I said about Chicanos, his people.

Tom and Casey’s eyes shifted to the ground behind me, and I turned to notice that Ghinē’ joined us, accompanied by a well-dressed old Yemeni in thawb, a long smooth white robe, his skin browned and leathery by years of Arabian UV. The guy sat next to me and uttered things in old-fashioned English. He told me that the parents of Ghinē’ divorced, and that she came here because her mother is in Yemen, if I heard him right.

The guy was a little humorless, and I remember him as quite a bore, though that might not be right on. Ghinē’ sat by his side in her hijab and black balto, looking dejected and unmoved as ever, her eyes far away from us. A few smiles cracked her face, and she made pale glances at people whose conversation drifted in her direction. Not much I could think of to say to the old fella, nor Ghinē’, so I turned back to the Californian, and Tom and Casey at the other end of the table, sipping Pepsi to make the heavy Balkan cooking settle in my stomach. In the middle of a conversation on freelancing and the how-to-dos of the whole thing, I was gripped by diarrheic spasms in my gut and jumped up straight as a scarecrow, frantically grabbed some tissues from the table, and tiptoed stiffly to the bathroom, Tom and Casey crying with laughter.

Back on the scene, at the dinner table, a woman in tight sweatpants and died hair with tremendously grown-out roots crept into my vision, joining a group of gringos at the table. Tom noticed how my eyes leapt wide when I realized it was Ghinē’, bare of balto and hijab. Voluptuous, dressed like a young woman from Orange County might in the fall, but still ill at ease. I kept glancing over at her while talking to others. It was so strange to see a woman, usually covered, uncovered among a bunch of people she didn’t know. I couldn’t really believe it. Dinner went on, folks started drinking alcohol smuggled in from Djibouti across the Red Sea, and a few of them tried their Arabic on Ghinē’, who would nod and speak with them like she was in an interview on the news. Then the power shut off, and we all applauded broken old Yemen in the dark dark dark.

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Climbing up the big stone steps in the dark, using a lighter with a flashlight on it to help me find my way, I could hear the hard clack of high heels on the steps a flight above me. Huffing and puffing, I slowed down. I could tell those high heels were Ghinē’s. It was only us in the stairwell, and it seemed like she was headed up to the roof like me. It was so quiet; it felt like a murder mystery. I didn’t want to catch up to her in the stairs because I was kind of scared of that, and so I stopped a few times to let gain a little distance. I was sure she knew I was behind her, but she didn’t seem to pay me any mind—just continued on deliberately.

Finally, the sound of the heels clacking disappeared onto the roof. I took my time going up the stairs. When I got out onto the roof white with moonlight, Ghinē’ was sitting on one end of it, facing the dark old city of Sana’a, dotted with light from generators in a few places. I took a look around on the other side of the roof, and looked out over the ancient brown and white building around me, and Casey appeared on the roof with me. Coming out to my end, he said “What’s going on with our lady over there?” said he.

“I don’t know man. But it felt like a scary movie coming up the stairs behind her. Ominous.”

We chatted for a while, making dumb jokes and inventing whole scenarios like little kids do just for laughs. But our energy, like the lights of the old city, died off, and we tired of looking out into the dark. We began to migrate back to the stairs, to head back down to Asmir’s apartment, from which we could hear the obnoxious drunken voices all the way up here. Before stepping into the stairs, Casey looked over at Ghinē’ still with her arms wrapped around her knees on the end of the roof, and asked me, “Can you say something to her in Arabic to help her out?”

“Me 3aterja3īš le nēzil tēkuli ħilwiyēt ma3na?” (“You’re not going to come downstairs and have desert with us?”)

She turned her head, big tears muddled with eyeliner rolling over her baby cheeks. “Le, šukran.” (“No, thanks.”)
The tears kept rolling, and she turned her head again to look out over the dark city.