Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves Page A

of the Afghan wars, who had gone to fight the Soviets with the mujahedeen, were also coming home, with new interpretations of jihad. By 1992 the Yemeni bell jar had long been broken. On the whole this was probably for the best. Most people don’t benefit from remaining hidden and isolated, suspended in time, illiteracy and illness preserved along with their otherworldly beauty.
    After visiting the palace we walked to a zoo on its grounds. Tiny cement enclosures with iron bars, some sunk into the ground, lined a small courtyard. The stench from the cages was acute, the animals thin. Mona drew her scarf across her face, feigning modesty, to block the smell and hide her expression. We dutifully toured the yard, trying not to look horrified. A mangy hyena prowled listlessly in a cage. Another contained a skunk. Two golden female lions had been granted the largest space. One paced back and forth while the other stood with her face pressed up against the bars, as though straining to push her head through. Why was it, I wondered, that I looked at these animals and saw them as suffering, while others—like members of a nearby family who were laughing and taking pictures—apparently did not? You could regard the creatures
as pleasurable spectacle only if it didn’t occur to you that they were sentient. In the final cage a brown and white monkey stood clinging to a metal bar with a bright red erection on display. He screamed and screamed, making the sound of human rage.
    We left the zoo with relief and followed Abu Bakr to a nearby promenade with a view of the city below. It was Friday, the day of rest, and more families had come up to take the air. As we strolled along, Abu Bakr told us that he planned to marry a second wife, and was looking for a foreigner who spoke English or French, perhaps a European or a Canadian. I took this in with exasperation. His education and interest in foreign ways, along with his possession of a young, beautiful, and recently acquired wife, hadn’t suggested an aspiring polygamist. Now his hospitality seemed to have been a means of prospecting for number two, someone who could maybe even get him a foreign visa. “It might be difficult to get a European to wear the veil,” I said. She wouldn’t have to, he replied, and I got the feeling he had mulled the question over. He saw himself as a reasonable man. “Do you think Ismat would mind if you married again?” I asked. He shrugged. “Maybe for a few months, but she would get used to it.” Abu Bakr said he wanted to study in North America. I told him he might find it difficult to live there. “But I am progressive,” he said.
    He dropped us off at the busy marketplace and instructed us to be home by one thirty. “Okay, Dad,” Mona said after he was out of earshot, and we giggled like teenagers allowed to roam the mall. We were regressing from independence. We moved past vegetable sellers sitting on the cobblestones, up a street lined with stalls each dedicated to one product: fabrics, Qurans, silver jewelry, daggers. I wanted one of the finely knit black scarves like the one Faiza had shown us, that tucked around the head and face. The first fabric stall
we came to sold them, packaged in shiny plastic envelopes. Mona and I each bought one. At a jeweler’s I bought a coin from the time of the Imamate, now useless, with a loop welded on so that I could wear it around my neck.
    We arrived back fifteen minutes late and joined the menfolk in one of the diwan s; the women were still making lunch. As foreign women, we were a sort of third sex, allowed, like Ottoman eunuchs, to pass between two worlds. Ismat and Hoda emerged from the kitchen and served plates of rice and chicken on a long cloth laid out in the middle of the room, presenting Mona and I with forks, procured just for us. We thanked them but set the forks aside, wanting to prove our competence with our hands. After we had all had our