Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (21 page)

And then, too, the truth is not really easy to admit or articulate. You can’t admit how dirty it made you feel, the thousand ways you were slighted and how flimsy your self-assurance turned out to be, how those little battles bit at you like acid. Men who refused to shake your hand; squatting on floors with men who refused to look at your face because you brimmed with sin, not one glance in an hour-long interview; the sneering underfed soldiers who hissed and talked about your ass when you walked past. You can’t admit it made you so bitter that, for a time, you looked at any woman who hadn’t been where you had been as if she were an ingenue who didn’t understand the world she occupied. She was blind to the dark, ruthless fraternity of men—all men, all around the globe—how luridly dangerous they were, how we had to keep pushing against them or we’d wind up where we began hundreds of years ago. You are not supposed to say any of that. It proves you were never really up to the game, that you might as well have stayed home. So you pretend it’s nothing, you tell everyone that you were lucky because you could talk to the women.

In the end, you can’t lose yourself. You can drape your body in black, you can smother your breasts and cover your face and drown yourself in expensive perfumes until your smells, too, are submerged. You can do all of that, but you will still be a woman, and you chose to be there. You can hide but you can’t disappear. Like America itself, you have done a calculation, you have accepted a condition, because you wanted something out of it. You can build walls, cower in the Green Zone, hire armed guards, and never, ever set foot outside the fortress, but you are still an American. You have still chosen to be there. What does it mean that your choice is between being isolated in your own place, and hiding in some other place?

“I left in mid-June and stayed out ’til school started this year. Because of the bombing,” Cora said wearily. “Now people say, ‘Why’d you leave last year and not this year?’”

She sighed.

“We’re putting our kids at risk. My husband and I feel like we’re old, we’ve lived, but they have life ahead of them. If we’re so greedy to stay here and put our kids at risk, what does that say about who we are?”

“Exactly,” said Tracy emphatically.

“To me, it’s not the money. It’s, if you knew for certain, you’d go,” said Amy. “But you’re pulling your kids out of school, and they have games, and they have ballet recitals. And you see all these terror warnings in the U.S., and nothing happens. So how can you know?”

“My daughter was crying because she did not want to go back to the States, it’s too dangerous,” Tracy said.

“The quality of life is incredible here,” Cora said.

“We are so spoiled here,” Tracy agreed.

“Here it’s real friendly,” Pamela said. “We have ballet, soccer, softball.”

No pork is allowed, and the drinkers are reduced to making moonshine with woodchips. But there were consolations: you could cruise the desert on a Harley or in a golf cart, then go home to mingle with like-minded international neighbors. They all underwent background checks and medical exams before arriving, the women said.

“You have to be perfect to be here,” Tracy told me. “It’s like Stepford—everybody’s healthy, smart, good-looking.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” Valerie interrupted. “Now it will be in the paper, the Stepford Wives of Aramco.”

“It’s true,” Tracy cried. “My mother came here and she was like, ‘This is kinda weird. It’s too perfect. It’s like the Stepford Wives.’”

But now the American embassy had issued a blunt warning to leave the country, and the women believed the bloodshed they’d already seen was just “the tip of the iceberg,” Valerie said.

“My husband isn’t ready to go yet, and I’m like, ‘When can we go?’” Tracy said. Her husband was urging her to take the kids out, she said, “but I didn’t sign up for this single mom thing.”

“I told him, ‘We can go back and you can flip burgers if that’s what you need to do, but we need to stay together.’ And then my daughter said, ‘If he’s here alone, maybe he’ll get a girlfriend like Mr. So-and-so.’”

“She did not!” the other women cried with one voice.

“She did!” Tracy said.

“She did,” another woman confirmed.

“There’s this tribal mind-set that more information is dangerous,” Pamela said. “They don’t know how to give information out. It’s not in their nature.”

“You’ve got people who say we need the expats gone, but then the whole country will really go down,” Cora said. “All of us have known for years there was a lot of civil unrest. If we all leave we just hurt ourselves.”

“Are people resigning?” I asked.

“They may not be resigning, but they’re job hunting,” said Amy.

“Everybody says, ‘I’m not leaving, but I’m looking,’” said Valerie.

Cora sighed again. “Every night, every mom, we say, ‘What’d your friends say at school? What’d they say on the bus?’ I was on the phone all day with people at the Oasis.”

Sitting there with these women, I could feel their reluctance. None of them would ever manage to duplicate their sumptuous lifestyles back in America, and they all knew it. In a sense, they were living out their own childhood dreams—they talked about the things they’d pined after as little girls, and finally found here. Valerie, who once dreamed of ponies, shared a horse with her daughter at nearby stables. Their children trooped off on field trips to Nepal and South Africa. They are so sophisticated and worldly, the women said of their broods, smiling immodestly.

“What do your kids think about leaving?” I asked.

“My son’s twelve and he’s not at all pleased about it,” Tracy said. “It’s a way of life for my kids and they feel safe here. We went to Switzerland on spring break. How many middle-class kids go to Switzerland? My kids have studied the Nile and been down the Nile.”

Tracy was bragging now, bare feet bouncing on the floor like a child gloating over a stash of sweets.

“They know how to sign their room numbers for drinks at the hotel bar,” Valerie said. “It’s unbelievable. They’re not going to Pinewood Whatever, Wherever.”

“Camping on vacation!” scoffed Cora.

“Commuting,” Tracy said. “Going to Grandma’s. I mean, we like Grandma’s, but we want to see New Zealand!”

Tracy had hoped to treat her nieces and nephews to overseas adventures, inviting them one by one to join the family on vacations. “I’m trying to hang on for that,” she said, as if she had not, five minutes earlier, said she was yearning to leave.

In Amy’s childhood, the greatest excitement of summer vacation
was putting coins into vibrating beds in roadside motels. The room erupted in laughter.

“My son is like, ‘Oh, Mom, do we have to go to Europe
again
?’” Tracy said. “And I’m like, ‘You little … ’” she flapped her hand in the air as if she were slapping her son.

The afternoon wore on. The women kept forgetting about the terrorism. Then they would remember again, and the room would grow quiet and they’d fidget uncomfortably.

But only for a minute.

I
went to Yemen looking for a revelation. I wanted to know what got traded, and at what cost, between American and Yemeni intelligence. In the untamed mountains and deserts clinging to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, I hoped to turn up stories of CIA renditions and the dirty work the cash-strapped government did for the United States.

I didn’t find those stories. Instead, in Sanaa, I found Faris. He loped through the hotel lobby, a glint in his eye, knowing everybody. A sharp little mustache peppered his lip, and white teeth flashed beneath changeless eyes. He was aide and friend to the president, the owner of an English-language newspaper, and the official who talked to CNN
on the rare occasions when international curiosity about Yemen’s motives coincided with Yemen’s willingness to explain itself. Faris had gone to college in America’s Midwest, and I’d heard he was the key to getting anything out of the government. “Promised a lot, didn’t deliver that much. But he can be helpful, if he wants to be.” That was the note I’d gotten from a colleague. Upon hearing the name of a large American newspaper, Faris was most obsequious.
Let’s talk about it, about what your stories are. I tell you what—you’ve never been here before. How about I pick you up, show you around, and you can tell me what you’re covering, what your objectives are. So you get a feel for Yemen.

“So much misinformation printed about Yemen in the American press,” he griped as his SUV groaned over the cobblestones. I stared out the window at crooked clusters of fairy-tale towers, stained glass ringed with gypsum, the cut of minarets against a darkening sky.

“It’s like they cannot mention Yemen without saying it’s the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden. Why? Okay, so some of his family lived here. Do you know what it’s like up there in the north? You can’t even see the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’d be interested to get up there,” I said.

“Oh no,” he barked. “You can’t go.”

“Why not? It’s impossible?”

“Well, not impossible,” he smiled a cat’s smile, eyes lingering on the road. “Not completely impossible. But, you know, you’re getting into the tribal areas—”

“And you don’t have control over the tribes.”

“We
do
have control. But these days we have this situation with the rebels up there. There’s a lot of fighting.”

“You mean Houthi.”

I’d been reading about the Houthi rebellion—at least, reading what few details managed to squeeze out of the government’s grasp. Hussein Houthi was a Zaydi Shiite cleric who’d led thousands of followers to wage a guerrilla war against the central government, angered by its ties to America and keen for Islamic rule. The government blamed the insurrection on “foreign sponsors,” whispering that the Houthi clan was backed by Iran. The fighting dragged on for months and the death toll swelled, but journalists couldn’t get to the Sa’ada region to investigate.
In the reporter-saturated Middle East, here was a rare wilderness still hidden from cameras. Only sketchy rumors of war rumbled down from the hills.

“Yes,” Faris said tensely, all of that hiddenness blackening his voice. “The Houthi.”

“I don’t mind. I wanted to write a story about the Houthi rebellion, anyway.”

“We can’t guarantee your safety.”

“It’s not your responsibility.”

He puffed his cheeks and laughed nervously. “Okay. It’s impossible.”

“Are you telling me I can’t go?”

“I don’t put it like that.”

“What if I go on my own?”

“You’ll never get up there.”

“Why? Because I’ll get kidnapped?”

“There are checkpoints everywhere. You can’t even get very far out of Sanaa unless you’re on a tour bus with a special permit. We’re very careful with the tourists. But, no, the kidnappings aren’t really happening these days.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, you know, people don’t really understand about Yemeni kidnappings.” His face muscles loosened; he had found his way back to more comfortable talking points. “It’s just what the tribes do if they want something from the government. They want a new water pump or a road. So they might kidnap a foreigner to try to get attention, to start negotiations. But it’s not a bad thing, to be kidnapped. Actually, under tribal tradition, you are a guest, so they treat you very well.”

“Except that you can’t leave.”

“Except that you can’t leave. But you may not want to. They prepare feasts, and everybody wants to meet you. You’re the guest of honor. There is a story, actually, about a tourist who was kidnapped by a tribe, and then the government finished negotiating with the tribe so they released him. But then the tribe got sad, you know, because they were planning a big feast for that night. So they went back out and kidnapped him again so he could come to the feast. Then afterward they released him again. That’s a true story!”

“Funny. Wow. Maybe I should get kidnapped.”

“One time—this is so funny—this guy came to Yemen and, you know, he really wanted to get kidnapped. He was wandering around all by himself on the roads, and nothing. He was so angry about it. He came down to the paper and said, ‘I’m trying to get kidnapped and nobody is picking me up! What does it take to get kidnapped around here?’ We wrote a story about him.”

Faris, armed with documents that made the checkpoint guards fall back respectfully, was a solicitous tour guide. We watched grooms prance to the rumble of drums on the craggy bluff traditionally visited by wedding parties, curved, phallic knives strapped to their bellies. At a rooftop café in the slumbering towers of Old Sanaa, we looked down at the spread of ancient walls, dark mountains rising on the horizon and stars smearing the sky. All the while, Faris dangled promises of exclusive interviews he was allegedly working to arrange. When pressed, he’d gloss into vagueness. “I have to call my friend,” he’d say.

“Why don’t you call him now?”

“Oh, I can’t right now because they have a meeting. Don’t worry. I’ll call him tonight.”

“You have to meet this woman,” he announced. It was Friday, my second day in town. “She’s incredible. Her family was poor so she started cooking for people, to support the men in her family. Now her place is famous. This one illiterate woman, and she started the most famous restaurant in Yemen. Can you imagine? Now the whole family works there.”

“That
is
interesting.”

“It’s a good story, don’t you think?” he said suggestively. “You should do a story. It’s interesting, how a woman can do that, even in a traditional society.”