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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 ru
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 za
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 ma
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 barre
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.