Into the Green

Ever since the bombing, travel has become incredibly difficult. Sami tries to get me travel permissions to drive to Taiz with my Jordanian friend Saleh, and the Tourist Police refuse to grant them. “No Americans can travel outside of Sana’a without going with a travel agency and a police escort,” they tell him. This makes no sense, given that it is pretty much exclusively the convoys of tourists traveling under the auspices of a tourism agency and with a police escort who get blown up. You never hear of a traveler getting blown up while driving around the country in a single, unexceptional car. Convoys seem to only help the terrorists figure out where their targets are.

“Fine, then you’ll travel as my wife,” says Saleh.

“Are you sure we’ll get through?” I am doubtful. I don’t look all that Jordanian.

“Wear an abaya and hijab,” he says. “Bring sunglasses. We’ll get through.”

I wear Anne-Christine’s abaya, Carolyn’s headscarf, Ginger’s wedding ring, and Ali’s sunglasses. “Wear lipstick,” a friend has advised. “Jordanian women wear lipstick.”

My staff find my outfit incredibly entertaining. “Antee Yemenia!” they say.

“La, Jordania!” I say. “See? Lipstick.”

Work is in chaos when I leave. I have finished editing everything by 2 p.m. But just as I am about to go, I find that Eshtar has locked the cord for my camera in her desk and left for lunch. Hani needs photos from my camera; I can’t leave until I give them to him. I have been bubbling with goodwill, until this little incident, but I am in such a state of high tension and excitement that I rant a bit and make everyone try to break into Eshtar’s desk. No one else has a key. The men all stand around looking useless and giggling, while the women try to help.

Finally, someone manages to break into her drawer, Hani downloads the photos he needs from my camera and gives me back the cord, and I am off!

I can barely keep up conversation with Saleh on our way to the first checkpoint, I am so afraid we will be turned back. Yasmin warned me that morning that she had had to have a police escort to Taiz, and that they would never let an American travel without one.

At the first checkpoint, Saleh rolls down his window.        “Salaam aleikum,” he says.

“What nationality?” the officer asks, leaning in the window.

“Jordanian.”

“Who is she?”

“My wife.”

“What nationality?”

“Irish.” We have decided we shouldn’t say I am Jordanian, just in case they try to question me in Arabic.
The guard waves us through! We sit very still and quiet until we turn the bend past the checkpoint, and then start laughing with glee. He high-fives me. “We made it!”

That was the hardest checkpoint, he said. They hadn’t even asked for his passport!

“That’s it, I am always traveling with Jordanians,” I say.

At the next checkpoint I am less nervous.

“You are Iraqis?” says the officer, peering in our window. I twist my hands in my lap and tried not to laugh. How many Americans have been mistaken for Iraqis? I look demurely down at my hands.

“No. We are Jordanian,” Saleh says.

The man says something to me in Arabic.

“Are you trying to talk to my wife?” says Saleh.

“La, la, asif!” the guard backs away. Wives are sacred territory.
Again we are waved through.

It gets more and more fun. At one of the next checkpoints, a man runs at the car, pointing a finger at me and wagging it, as if he has discovered a criminal featured on a WANTED poster. “What is that? What is that? Is she a tourist?” he asks Saleh.

“No, she is my wife!” says Saleh, managing to sound indignant.

“Oh! I am very sorry,” says the officer, waving us onward.

One of the last police officers we pass asks my nationality again and Saleh tells him I am Irish. The guard doesn’t understand. He has never heard of Ireland. “Aish? Aish?” he says.

“Fine, then she’s Jordanian,” Saleh sighs. We get through!

As we move away from Sana’a, the land alongside the road becomes greener and greener. It is lush in the flat valley between Sana’a and Dhamar. We pass patches of corn and fields of qat, covered with multicolored tarps to protect the crop from the sun’s direct rays.

But this is nothing compared to how staggeringly green it is between Dhamar and Ibb and Taiz! The car climbs winding mountain roads, and the land around us grows thick with vegetation: trees, grass, shrubs of every kind. I stop talking, it takes so much of me to absorb it all. Saleh is silent too, focusing on the treacherous turns. God, have I missed green. I am a thirsty person taking her first drink of water in nine months. The sides of the mountains are carved into agricultural terraces, emerald slices stacked on the steep slopes. It rains a bit, mists rolling in and then vanishing. Ibb is sprawled across these green slopes, square stone houses tucked into the mountainsides. I wish we could stop, but we want to reach Taiz before nightfall. It is raining in Ibb. According to my Yemeni friends from the area, it is always raining in Ibb.

It is just after 7 p.m. and raining again when we at last arrive in Taiz. “Do you see that?” says Saleh, pointing to a blurred smattering of lights atop a small peak. “That’s the Sofitel.”

We are greeted at the door by obsequious doormen, who take our bags, and escort us across the marble floor to a sofa, where we are served glasses of sweet, red karkadeh juice, brewed from hibiscus flowers.

My room is on the second floor, and Saleh’s right above me on the third. We take a glass elevator up to our respective rooms to wash up and settle in, and then meet in Saleh’s room for a drink before dinner. He has brought a large bottle of Absolut vodka, al haamdulillah. I’ve always had a bit of a hotel fetish, and am overjoyed to be, however ephemerally, in the lap of luxury. I examine the hotel stationery, check out the minibar (no alcohol), and read the room service menu. I am delighted by it all, particularly by the vast expanse of my bed, which has starched white sheets and a fluffy comforter.

Saleh calls room service for tonic and ice before I even get to his room, and we kick back and talk for a while about Arab-western relations. He tells me that he was in Petra, his hometown, on September 11, and that everyone was weeping. The hotels went from being completely overbooked to empty for the entire next year. People not even connected to September 11 suffered from it horribly, he says.

Eventually, we get hungry enough to head down to the Ali Baba Cave, in a separate building. To enter we squeeze through a hole in a rock, emerging into a vast, airy room, with mile-high vaulted stone ceilings. Tables are spread with red-and-white checked tablecloths, the kind you find in New York Italian restaurants. Walls are hung with Yemeni textiles and straw hats. While we wait for our food, we wander out to the garden. The night is warm and moist, but far cooler than the summer nights in Manhattan.  We climb up the side of the building to stand on the roof and look at the lights of Taiz twinkling across the valley around us. You can tell where the towering Jabl Sabr is by the lights climbing into the sky.

Back inside, where we are the only diners, we dig into plates of tabouleh, hummus, baba ghanouj, and green salad, followed by Yemeni fish, split open, smeared with spices, roasted in a tandoori-style oven, and served with zahawek, the spicy Yemeni salsa I adore. The fish is tender and flaky and fresh. We eat it with piles of chewy flatbread that we tear into strips and dip in our food. It is impossible to stop eating that bread, and we stuff ourselves to the point of groaning.

I drink a pot of black tea with fresh mint floating in it, and Saleh and I stagger up to his room to finish off the vodka. I find a Harry Potter movie on cable, and begin explaining the entire plot to Saleh, who has never heard of Harry Potter. “Those are Dementors,” I say, pointing at the black-robed figures on the screen. “They suck the will to live out of people. And if they kiss you, if they soul-kiss you, they steal your soul.”

Saleh tolerates this, and even affects disappointment when I head to my room at 2 a.m. It’s just one floor away, but I take the elevator anyway, just because it’s there, and it’s glass. I go up and down for a while.

I try to sleep late the next morning, but sleeping late is just not one of my talents. I give up and order a pot of coffee from room service, which I drink while writing. As soon as I turn on the computer, I see something on my screen that I haven’t seen since I left New York. In fact, it takes me a few minutes to recognize it. It’s a full wireless signal. In Yemen. I cannot get over my luck. I am never leaving this hotel. This is the best hotel in the entire world. I check my email and find a letter from Ginger! Which is a coincidence, as I am wearing her wedding ring for this journey and have been thinking of her. She must have sent the email about the time I was slipping that ring on my finger. When the coffee is gone, I change into my gym clothes and head to the gym, an abaya over my tank top and shorts. I have to knock to be let into the women’s gym, as it is locked. A female attendant lets me in and gives me a couple of blue-and-white-striped towels. I hop on the treadmill and run four miles, feeling fast and strong. It’s so easy here! Must be the drop in altitude, or simply the joy of a day of vacation. After the run I slip into my swimsuit. My shoulder is still killing me, but I cannot resist a chance to take a dip in the outdoor pool overlooking the city. The sun is delicious on my skin as I paddle a slow twenty laps.

When I am showered and dressed, Saleh rings to say he is downstairs. It’s noon and he has just gotten up. I meet him in the lobby, and we head up Jabl Sabr, the mountain looming over the city, in his little car. At a hotel midway to the summit, we stop for lunch. Attendants hurry to scrub the brown vinyl cloth on our table. We sit on long cherry benches that make me feel we are picnicking. Despite the grey mists hovering around us, we can see the dramatic fall of the mountainside just beyond our railing, and the castle-like fort off in the distance. We eat fool, shakshoukah, hummus, and salads, as well as a massive pot of saltah for Saleh. Children run about, their faces smeared with ice cream. I have the bizarre feeling we are eating on a boardwalk in Coney Island.

Satiated once again, we head further up Jabl Sabr. An endless series of hairpin turns takes us past children scattered across the road, holding up dense, purple-red-orange-yellow bouquets of flowers wrapped in fig leaves and tied with twine. They are some of the most gorgeous bouquets I have ever seen, but we resist until a solemn-faced girl steals our hearts. She stands tiny and unsmiling in the road, clutching one vibrant bouquet. Saleh rolls down his window and hands her 100 riyals. She permits a hasty photograph, before turning and racing up the hillside, the money clutched tight in her little fist.

Other children try to sell us plastic bags of qat or cones of fresh figs wrapped in leaves. The mist lifts a little as we near the top of the mountain. It is chilly there, and windy. We get out and stroll around taking photographs. A couple of shacks stand in the lot at the peak, where grown men sell candy and little boys sell qat.

I take even more photographs on the way down, of women, men, children, flowers, greenness. So I can drink it later. I feel free to act like a tourist in Taiz in a way that I cannot in Sana’a. Sana’a is my home.

It is almost 4 p.m. when we get down. We drive to the old city to stroll through the markets, entering through Baab Mousa. I am not impressed. The entire first street is filled with the awful sequined polyester and nylon dresses the women wear to weddings. We pass a few jambiya stalls, and a street full of men and children hawking seeds and fruit from wheelbarrows. But what can compare to the souks of Sana’a?

I feel different walking around this market than I do walking around the markets of Sana’a. Only as we exit does it occur to me why.

“I’m with you,” I say to Saleh. “Which means no one is harassing me! It is so wonderfully refreshing.” In Sana’a I am almost always walking alone. I have forgotten what it is like to walk a street unmolested.

The next stop is the zoo, where we gaze upon all manner of beleaguered imprisoned creatures and despair. I loathe zoos, but was curious to see a Yemeni incarnation. Which is perhaps the most miserable, cramped zoo I’ve ever seen. The lions are so depressed they cannot even bring themselves to lift their heads to look at their visitors. Who can blame them? They are trapped in narrow cement cells. The monkeys at least had a bit of pep, amusing themselves by stealing plastic bags from each other. We pass incarcerated bunnies and birds and leopards and swans and goats and ostriches. The whole thing is disheartening, and when I see small boys throwing rocks into the lions’ cages, and trying to poke them with sticks, I fly into a rage. This time I remember the Arabic word for shame. “Eeb!” I roar at them. “Halas! You are unkind.”

The boys are so surprised to see a white woman yelling at them in Arabic that they all drop their sticks and stare at me. I stand still, hands on my hips, until at last they slink away. This fails to cheer me. Won’t more of them come back, every hour, of every day?

By the time we return to the hotel, we are filthy. A cloud of dust rises into the air when I run a brush through my hair. I climb into the shower to shed the animal scents. If only the shame of witnessing their plight came off as easily. I tuck a flower from our bouquet into my hair, and join Saleh for a drink before dinner. Koosje texted me earlier to say that she, Corinne, Craig, and Dan have just arrived in Taiz, and Saleh invites them all to join us for dinner.

We take the crowd to the cave, where we eat the same salads and fish and bread as the night before, and it is just as tasty. Yemeni food is repetitive, but reliably good. We joke and story-tell our way through the meal, and head for the pool terrace for dessert. We keep talking as the sky darkens and the mosquitoes become increasingly bloodthirsty. It’s our last full day of vacation, and no one wants to go to bed.

I wake the next morning anxious and upset. I am so unequal to consciousness that I order coffee from room service before I even sit up in bed. I write before doing sit-ups and showering but can’t shake the blues. The getting-up-off-of-the-lap-of-luxury blues. Saleh and I meet for breakfast around 8:30. It’s a brief, quiet affair. Then the gang is in the lobby to fetch me, and off we go, piled into a Land Rover with Sami’s friend Sharif at the wheel. Saleh is staying in Taiz for work and then driving on to Aden, so he can’t take me back to Sana’a. I am cranky to be stuffed in the cramped back of a car. I don’t seem to be in a group kind of mood. The others are none too cheerful either; they hadn’t made it all the way to the top of the mountain in the morning. The driver, for mysterious reasons, had balked.

The scenery distracts us, and for the first couple of hours, we are consumed with the mountains and greenery. It’s a different route from the one I took with Saleh. Our guide pulls off the road at an unscheduled mosque, busy with visitors and Indian pilgrims. An aggressive man demands that we come in, and then tells us what to look at. “Chouf, chouf!” he says, prodding us. “Ya, Hollanda!” Most of us are Dutch, except for Craig. I am posing as French.

The mosque is a large, whitewashed structure, with a vast rectangular interior courtyard. Tucked away in its corners are classes of small girls and boys, repeating the Arabic words of their teachers.

I stop in the bathroom around the corner from the mosque, which is a revolting trough next to a row of spigots, across from a bunch of small closets with holes in the floor, coated with dirt and shit and grime. Both men and women swarm in and out, and when I enter, a man is squatting in the trough and lifting his thobe to wash his crotch. I suddenly feel a deep attachment to gender segregation.

Back in the car, we zoom north toward Dhamar, and veer off of the main road toward Rada’. The checkpoints get more frequent and more troublesome. Before we get to town, we are given a police escort.

Rada’ is a dirty, smelly, litter-strewn town. We are all tired and hungry and cranky. The driver pulls up to a filthy little cafeteria serving nothing but meat and rice. Dismayed, I run outside to try to find a more Jennifer-friendly snack. Three police officers follow me, sticking to my tail as I buy yogurt and then walk several blocks to buy fruit from fly-covered stalls. I find my entourage slightly unnerving. Do they really think I am in that much danger, or are they worried I am going to start stealing fruit?

Back at the restaurant, I eat bananas and yogurt and a bit of leftover bread and feel greatly unsatisfied. We gather our things and climb back in the car to head to the mosque that Carolyn always raves about, stopping on the way to photograph a 1,700-year-old fort, hovering rather grandly above the vile little city.

The Amiriyya Mosque Complex is enclosed in a small, white building, more modest than I have anticipated. A guardian shows us first to the basement rooms that include one of the world’s oldest hammams, and which used to house a school. Enlarged colored photographs depict the restoration of the complex. Finally, the guard uses a giant key to unlock the mosque. Now, I’m no particular fan of mosques, churches, or other religious buildings, but this is one does briefly take my breath away. It’s painted with intricate geometric designs, and covered with lacy stucco filigree. The walls are not so large or numerous, but they are the kind of walls it takes a long time to look at, because there is so much there, writ so small.

But I confess, mosques and churches are not the kind of travel experiences that change my life. I’m the kind of traveler interested in things with blood in their veins. So while I admire the artwork, ultimately it’s all just so much pretty math. There are no people, no figures, nothing living. If you want to learn about Yemenis, I think, far better to go to a qat chew than an empty mosque.

Tobias returns from Germany at the end of the month. I have written him a letter, which I gave to one of his flatmates to leave on his pillow. We’d had a silly argument the night before he’d left on holiday, and I don’t like to leave arguments unresolved. I wanted to apologize for the things I regretted saying. I detach myself from the outcome of this letter; I have simply said what I wanted to say. If we end up together again, at least until he leaves a month later, so be it. If we don’t, well, at least I will have left nothing unsaid.

He calls me his first day home, and asks if I can come over after work. From the way he looks at me when he answers the door, I have a feeling the evening will go well. I am relaxed, having given up any desire to try to control things. Another new roommate, Dan, is there, so our heart-to-heart has to wait. But it isn’t an issue. Tobias opens a bottle of German rose, and the three of us drink it in the kitchen nook while he tells us about his trip. We ask how his grandmother’s birthday party went, and get the update on his doctoral program. After some further study in Germany, Tobias will work in Vietnam, Thailand, and perhaps return briefly to Yemen. Dan then amuses us with stories about the time the Dutch Embassy (where he is an intern) sent him to give a lecture to the zookeepers in Sana’a about how to run a zoo.

“What do you know about zookeeping?” I say.

“Nothing!”

“Still, it wouldn’t take much to improve the conditions here.”

The Sanaani zookeeper explained to Dan that he was desperate to acquire a leopard.

“But you have 24 leopards already,” Dan said.

“No, no, a leopard,” he said, showing Dan a photo.

“That’s a tiger,” said Dan. “It has stripes, not spots. It’s a tiger you want. But why do you need a tiger?”

The conversation takes a serious turn when Dan tells us that a friend of his has recently died in Afghanistan. He was 24. It was a roadside bomb. Dan seems remarkably matter-of-fact about it.

“When one Dutch soldier dies, it’s a big deal in Holland,” says Dan. “But Americans are going home in boxes every day.”

We nod. “I don’t know how George Bush sleeps at night,” I say. “I don’t know how any of those guys sleep at night.”

“It’s pretty risky of them to sleep at all,” said Tobias.

At last, Dan retires to his room, and we turn to each other.

“It was nice to come home and find your letter,” he says. “I had wondered how we would come back together again.”

“I guess things went wrong partly because I began to worry about the future,” he says. “I am at a time in my life where I am trying to be a little more serious. So I wondered what would happen when we both left here. But then, you can pretty much be anywhere you want next year…”

“Yes, I can.” My plans for the future have failed to take any shape at all.

“…and my schedule is somewhat flexible, so I have decided not to worry too much about that.”

“Oh good.”

“Your thoughts?”

“I think I covered my thoughts in my letter!” I say, laughing. “But I guess I’m not overly worried about the future. I have a constitutional inability to think ahead, but I guess I wouldn’t mind just seeing how things go.”

We’re sitting close together by the window, our legs entwined. Our bodies have apparently jumped ahead in the conversation. After we feel we have said enough, he carefully moves glasses and plates out of his way, and kisses me. It feels a bit like a first kiss, hesitant and tender. Holding hands, we walk to his room, where he carefully removes my clothing, struggling with a tie on my shirt. “How does this work?” he says.

“I thought Germans were good at engineering.”

“We’re good at putting things together,” he says. “Not taking them apart.”

The Faculty of High Heels

The biggest pain in my ass is Hakim. A tubby, arrogant young Yemeni man raised in Detroit, Hakim fancies himself a hotshot. He doesn’t work in the office, but is responsible for turning in two in-depth investigative stories for our Reports page each week. While he usually turns these pieces in on time, or close to it, they are almost always completely unusable. Hakim doesn’t feel the need to source anything. The fact that he has said it is true should be enough for any reader. His sentences often begin “it is commonly known” or “everyone knows that.” He is not acquainted with statistics or facts, and sees no reason to become intimate with them.

At first, I write Hakim epic notes on his stories, explaining to him where he needs statistics to back up his contentions, which contentions are not provable, and which sources he needs. One of his first pieces concerns the scandalous proliferation of nightclubs in Aden, dens of sin packed with prostitutes and drunkards. Hakim makes no secret of how he feels about these establishments. Yet he fails to include the name of a single nightclub, and neglects to get comment from a single nightclub owner on why they’ve opened the clubs, why they are so popular, or what their impact is on the economy and community. I refuse to run the story without any names or statistics on, say, the number of nightclubs now versus the number of nightclubs five years ago. We don’t even have proof that the nightclubs are, in fact, proliferating.

Hakim has a habit of saying, “I agree with you 100 percent,” and then going on to disagree with me. He seems to suggest that because it is so hard to get statistics in Yemen – there are no official crime figures, no police willing to talk with the press, and very few national health statistics – we should just give up trying to find them.

“Look,” I say. “My journalism professor used to tell us that reporters need to treat the word ‘No’ as ‘Hello.’ Everyone is going to say no to us. And yes, it will take us forty phone calls sometimes to get someone to talk. But that’s the nature of the job.”

Phone calls cost money, says Hakim. So does travel to Aden to report on nightclubs. This is a valid point. Most of my reporters cannot afford to pay for transportation or to make calls on their own phones. Some cannot even afford to own a phone.

“Okay, so come in here and make your calls from the office,” I say. “I will talk to Faris about transportation expenses.”

This is fruitless. I am never able to convince Faris to pay for our reporters to travel outside of the city, which makes it fairly difficult to report on the rest of the country. Luke and I joke that the paper should be called the Sana’a Observer, since we never get to see the rest of Yemen.

Just when I think Hakim might be grasping the idea of real reporting, he sends me his second story, “The Faculty of high heels!!” Again, it is essentially a collage of unsupported rumors. Women who attend the school of the arts at Sana’a University, says Hakim, only do so to show off their high heels and new fashions. “It has been commonly known that women who enter this faculty are most likely to be unserious about their future, therefore waste time, mingle, and joke with men from the faculty,” he writes.

Scandalous behavior, such as the wearing of makeup and clothing that hint at the shape of the body, are most common in the French and English departments. According to Hakim’s scrupulous research.

“According to university students, this faculty has been a key to the changing of cultural values of students. In Yemen, most women are left to stay at home, while they desire to leave the house. In these cases when a chance is given to them to leave home and enter a university more freedom is there for them to do as they please. When in university, doing what they couldn’t do at home is always first priority for many female students.” Letting women do as they please, naturally, always leads to trouble.

While most of Hakim’s sources are unnamed or nonexistent, he does include quotations from three students. “According Fawzi Ahmad, 24, a graduate from the faculty, tens of female students who get dropped off by their family at the faculty eventually skip school and drive away with male students to unknown destinations.”

I stare at my screen and take a few deep breaths. They don’t help. I need to calm down a little before I write Hakim a critique of this one, which I refuse to publish. Women outperform men in almost every subject in almost every university in the developed world.

When I read Hakim’s story to Luke, he tells me that even President Saleh recently publicly stated that women do much better in school than men. “I guess the president isn’t in touch with what is ‘commonly known.’”

He and Zuhra support my decision to hold both of Hakim’s stories, despite our utter desperation for copy. “No one has ever done that before,” says Zuhra. “We’ve always just run every story Hakim gave us. No one has ever been selective.”

Well, I say, I refuse to fill my paper with irresponsible innuendo.

I finally write Hakim a long email explaining why his story could not be run. “If you are going to claim that women are worse students than men, you need to prove it to me,” I say. “Find out what the average grade is for women, and the average grade for men, and then get back to me. If women do dramatically underperform men, then maybe you have a story. Maybe. But frankly, I doubt you will find this to be true. Women outperform men in just about every academic institution in the developed world. They do better in grade school, in high school, and in colleges, and there have been a slew of recent studies on this very topic. In fact, news magazines have run cover stories asking why boys are doing so poorly in school overall. Many universities say they are unable to find enough qualified men to fill out their classes, so that their student bodies are becoming more and more female dominated, with women making up at least 60 percent of most incoming classes. More than 65 percent of my graduate program at Columbia University was made up of women, and more women received honors…”

Hakim does not deign to reply to this email. Instead, he sends me a usable (haamdulillah!) article about the dearth of libraries in Yemen. There are hardly any! This should not surprise me, but it does. Libraries are something I have always taken for granted. It has not occurred to me that there are countries where most of the population has no access to books.

The library story, regretfully, is a fluke. For the rest of the year, about 87 percent of the stories Hakim sends me are unprintable. Despite the detailed feedback I send him on every piece, he never improves. Not even a little. Luke and I take to calling him The Man Who Would Not Learn. Because he won’t. Even the Missing Link has a willingness to learn. Yet it is impossible to fire Hakim. It is impossible to fire anyone. As would soon be made clear to me.

Hassan’s second wife

One afternoon, in an empty newsroom, while everyone else is out eating lunch or buying qat, Hassan tells me that he wants to move to Alberta, because he has a friend there. He hopes to go in a year or so, and get Canadian citizenship. Given that a person has to live in Canada for three years to gain citizenship, I suggest he simply marry a Canadian woman. It turns out that he already has! Just last week, he tells me.

“How does your Yemeni wife feel about this new wife?”

“She still thinks I am joking.”

Luke has come in from the qat shed during this conversation, and is immediately fascinated.

“She thinks you are joking?”

“Yes. I told her I was going to marry this Canadian woman, and she just laughed and said I was joking.”

His new wife, he says, is older, perhaps 38. Hassan is 27.

“Didn’t your Yemeni wife ask where you were last week when you were with your Canadian wife?”
“Yes. I told her, but she doesn’t believe me.”

“Do you love both of them?”
“Yes. I am in love with each of them. It’s not strange. You know I can have up to four.”

“I know.”

“Why are you laughing?” Luke and I cannot keep straight faces, trying to picture dear little Hassan juggling two wives.

“I’m not laughing,” I say. “I just find this very interesting. I am thinking of taking several more husbands myself, actually.”

“Why not?” Hassan laughs, as of course it is preposterous that a woman could want more than one man.

“Men can easily love more than once,” Hassan explains to me. “But women, they remain focused on just one man.”

“Oh?” I raise an eyebrow. I love it when men explain women to me. “Just about every woman I know has loved several men in her lifetime.”

“But all at once?” says Luke.

“Maybe not all at once,” I concede.

“That’s the difference.”

“But I say if you want four husbands, then why not?” says Hassan.

I give this some thought. “Never mind. I think maybe I might rather have four wives,” I say. “They sound ever so much more useful.”