Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves

prying eyes, and pushed our scarves back off our heads.
    The child, Shafa, was Abu Bakr’s niece. She was twelve, and Abu Bakr was taking her down to his home in Taiz to visit her cousins. Abu Bakr taught English and Arabic as a foreign language in Sanaa.
    â€œIsn’t that quite young to be wearing the veil?” I asked Abu Bakr.
    â€œYes, it is,” he said. “She did not want to wear it, but I made her. I will not let any member of my family go uncovered, because I am con-serv-a-tive.” He uttered the last word with effort, as though he wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce it.
    â€œAre you sisters?” he asked. Several Yemenis had asked us this, even though we didn’t look alike. I wondered if the question was rooted in other people’s hope, on our behalf, that however far from home we’d wandered, we must at least be kin.

    By the time we arrived in the highland city of Taiz, we’d accepted Abu Bakr’s invitation to stay. His home was a newish structure built in the old style, a multistory maze of rooms and staircases. He shared it with his wife, his mother, two brothers, the wife of one of the brothers, and an assortment of children. When Shafa arrived indoors, she tore off her veil, and revealed herself to be not
the ethereal and aristocratic beauty I’d first imagined, but a plump and round-faced preteen whose skin was just starting to break out. She embraced a cousin, who carried a set of plastic ponies with pink and blue hair. They ran away up some stairs.
    Abu Bakr’s wife, Ismat, was our age, twenty, and had been married six months. She was Djibouti-born, half-Egyptian and half-Yemeni, with gray eyes and high cheekbones and a cautious air. His sister-in-law, Hoda, was older, heavier, and more cheerful. They gave us our own large room with carpets on the floor and cushions lining the walls, and—a great luxury—our own bathroom with a shower and a flushing Turkish toilet. I had my first shower in five days. We laid out our sleeping bags in the middle of our room.
    Accepting an offer of Arab hospitality is like committing to a first-class train ride. You’ll be well-cosseted, but you can’t get off in the middle, and so are stuck with your seatmates for the duration. Several women brought us breakfast in our room the next morning. Then Abu Bakr appeared and informed us that he was taking us sightseeing.
    From 1948 until 1962, Yemen was ruled from Taiz by Imam Ahmad, the second to last in a line of hereditary kings, who lived in a hilltop palace. It still sits on the highest hill, with the town tumbling down around it. Imam Ahmad had been both a despot and a modern man. He’d updated the military, suppressed tribal revolts, and, up in his palace, collected modern curiosities like blenders, blow-dryers, and a phonograph. Despite a life of cutthroat court politics, he died peacefully in his bed, and the palace, now a museum, was preserved untouched. His curiosities were protected under glass in yellowed rooms, frozen in 1962.
    The nation outside, with its strange architecture and costume, its missing technology, its profound apartheid of the sexes, also seemed to be trapped in time. That, though, was an illusion. Yemen
was already globalizing, but in ways I couldn’t recognize, because I thought the direction of change was always toward Westernization. I thought modernization meant that for better or worse you ended up with a Pizza Hut. There was one in Cairo. We foreign students disdained it, but it was popular with upper-class Cairenes. Many of Yemen’s outside influences, though, came from sources I couldn’t identify, since they weren’t the signatures of my own culture. After President Ali Abdullah Saleh lent support to Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, Yemen’s wealthy neighbor Saudi Arabia retaliated by throwing out hundreds of thousands of Yemeni guest workers. They brought home new ideas about dress and worship. Veterans