Supper was traditionally eaten around a sofrah, a large cloth spread out on the floor, which many Arab Muslims use instead of a table at mealtime. As soon as Omma had set down the piping-hot stewpot full of salta, a spicy ragout of beef or mutton in an aromatic fenugreek sauce, we would plunge in our hands to roll up little balls of rice and meat that swiftly vanished down our throats. By imitating our parents, we learned to eat straight from the serving dishes. No plates, no forks, no knives: that’s how we eat in the villages of Yemen.
Now and then Omma would take us to the market held every Saturday in the heart of the valley, and for us, this was a major excursion. We’d go there on donkeys to stock up on provisions. If the sun beat down too harshly, Omma would wear a straw hat over the black veil that covered a good part of her face. She looked like a sunflower!
We were living rather happily, to the rhythm of the sun. It was a simple life, but peaceful, without electricity or running water. Off behind a bush, the toilet was just a hole within low brick walls. Decorated modestly with a few cushions lying on the floor, the main room of our home turned into a bedroom at night. To go from one room to another, we had to cross the central courtyard, which became our living room in the summer, adapting itself to all our family’s needs. Omma would set up an outdoor kitchen there, simmering saltas on the wood fire while she nursed the youngest children. My brothers would study the alphabet out in the fresh air. We girls would take naps on a mattress of straw.
My father was not often at home. He usually rose at first light to take his animals out to graze. He had eighty sheep and four cows, which gave us enough milk to make butter, yogurt, and soft white cheese. Whenever he went to visit our next-door neighbors, he always wore a brown jacket over his zanna and a ceremonial dagger called a jambia at his belt. The men of my country all wear this sharp, hand-decorated dagger, which is said to be a symbol of authority, manhood, and prestige in Yemeni society. And it’s true that it gave our father a certain self-assurance, a noticeable dash of style. I was proud of my Aba. But as I understand it, these weapons are more than simple decoration, since everyone wants to be the one wearing the handsomest jambia. And their cost varies, depending on whether the handle is made of plastic, ivory, or real rhinoceros horn. According to the codes of our tribal culture, it is forbidden to use these daggers in self-defense or to attack an adversary during an argument. On the contrary: the jambia may be used to help resolve conflicts and is, above all, a symbol of tribal justice. My father would never have imagined he would ever need his, until that unlucky day when we were forced to flee our village within twenty-four hours.
I was between two and three years old when the scandal broke out. The circumstances were most unusual: Omma was in the capital, Sana’a, for health problems, and for reasons surely related to her absence-the details of which were unknown to me at the time-a violent dispute broke out between my father and the other villagers in Khardji. During the arguments, my sister Mona’s name kept coming up. It was then decided to resolve the conflict in the tribal manner, by placing jambias and bundles of rial notes between the protagonists, but the discussion degenerated and, in an exceptional breach of protocol, blades were drawn. The other villagers accused my family of having trampled the honor of Khardji and stained its reputation. My father was beside himself. He felt swindled, demeaned by those he had thought were his friends. All I knew was that Mona, the second daughter of our family and thirteen years old at most, had suddenly gotten married. What, exactly, had happened? I was too little to understand. One day, I would find out, but at the time I knew only that we had to leave right away-and leave everything behind: sheep, cows, chickens, bees, and our memories of what I had thought was a small corner of paradise.
Our arrival in Sana’a was quite a shock. The capital was a blur of dust and noise that was hard to get used to.
The contrast between the green Wadi La’a valley and the barrenness of the sprawling city was brutal, because outside the ancient heart of the city, with its lovely traditional adobe houses, their windows outlined in lacy white designs, the urban landscape becomes a vulgar confusion of dismal concrete buildings. Out in the street, I was exactly on a level with all the exhaust pipes belching diesel fumes, which made my throat sore. There were hardly any parks where we children could run and play, and you had to buy tickets to most of the amusement parks, so only rich people went there.
We moved into the ground floor of a slum building on a garbage-strewn alley in the neighborhood of Al-Qa. Aba was depressed. He hardly spoke. He had lost his appetite. How could a simple illiterate peasant without a diploma hope to support his family in this capital, already collapsing under its burden of unemployed people? Other villagers had already come to seek their fortunes here only to run into a wall of problems. Some men had been reduced to sending their wives and children to beg for coins in public squares. By knocking on doors, my father finally landed a job as a sweeper for the local sanitation authority, at a salary that barely paid our rent, and whenever we were late with that, our landlord would shout angrily at us. Omma would weep, and no one could sweeten her sadness.
When he was twelve years old, Fares, the fourth child in the family, began to want the things all boys long for at his age. Every day he’d demand money to go buy himself candies, stylish trousers, and new shoes like the ones we saw in billboard advertisements. Beautiful, brand-new shoes that would have cost our father more than a month’s salary! Jolly and rambunctious by nature, Fares kept demanding more and more, and even began to threaten my parents, telling them he would run away if they didn’t manage to satisfy his cravings. He was a show-off, true, but he was still my favorite brother. At least he didn’t hit me like Mohammad, my eldest brother, who acted like the head of the family. I admired Fares for his ambition, his energy, his way of standing up to everyone without worrying about their reactions. He made choices and stuck to them, even if he had to take on the entire family. One day, after an argument with our father, he left the house and did not come back.
For the first time in my life, I saw Aba cry. To drown his sorrow, he began going off for long hours to chew khat with some old acquaintances, and wound up losing his job. Omma started having bad dreams, and in the main room where we children slept by her side on little mattresses laid on the floor, I was awakened several times in the middle of the night by her sobbing. She was suffering, and it showed.
Fares had gone without leaving a trace, except for one tiny thing: an identity photo, in color, which Mohammad kept carefully in the deepest part of his wallet. No doubt about it-it was Fares in the snapshot: with head held high, a white turban planted on his curly brown hair (to make him look “grown-up,” no doubt), he stared right at the camera with a naughty, twinkling eye.
And then, two years after his flight, we received an unexpected phone call, the first sign of life.
“Saudi Arabia,” we heard at the other end of the line. “Everything’s fine… Shepherd, I’m working as a shepherd… Don’t worry about me…”
His voice had changed-he sounded more confident-but I recognized him right away. But the line, crackling with static, quickly went dead. How had Fares wound up so far away? What city was he actually in? Had he been lucky enough to take a plane, flying up into the clouds? And exactly where was Saudi Arabia, anyway? Was there any seashore where he was? I had so many questions. I overheard Aba, Omma, and Mohammad speculating that Fares had been the object of child trafficking, which is supposedly rather frequent in Yemen. Did that mean he had found some adoptive parents? Perhaps he was happy after all, and could finally buy himself the candy and blue jeans he wanted so much. As for me, I missed him terribly.