Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [108]
He told the girl that he loved her and wanted to marry her. Neither family was happy. Soqotris are not supposed to choose whom they marry. But the girl said she would wait for him while he studied abroad for three years. He set off once more.
While abroad, he heard that her mother had married her off to a wealthy man from the United Arab Emirates. The girl had refused to marry the man, but her family had forced her. She is now living in the Emirates and has children, but it is obvious that Rasheed still loves her.
“I will not make trouble for her life,” he says. “But I hate people from Emirates now.”
I murmur sympathetic things and try to distract him from his evident sadness by asking him to describe local weddings. Soqotri mountain and coastal dwellers have very different ways of celebrating weddings. People on the coast, he says, have music and drums and dancing, because they are more African. But people in the mountains instead have fierce poetry contests, usually among five groups of people, each group reciting a poem. “It’s a very hard competition,” says Rasheed. “Until around four in the morning. They argue by poetry, one guy saying something like ‘You don’t have enough qat,’ or ‘You are not serving enough meat at your wedding.’”
Mountain weddings also apparently involve jumping contests, during which men leap up and down while the crowd makes “jumping noises” to accompany them.
The sun turns the cliffs above us red and darkens the palm trees around the pool of water into silhouettes. We continue to sit by the pool until the rocks become too sharp against our bottoms, and we have just a half hour of daylight left to get back.
Something about the air of camping and summer vacations and days at the beach here makes me feel nostalgic and melancholy. I find myself dwelling on happy summers of my past, appreciating them anew. In the car on the way home, Rasheed and I both fall silent as we watch the sky darken.
“I like this time of night,” I say.
“It is the time when each person is alone with his thoughts, thinking about things,” he answers. Exactly so. Our silence is companionable after our long afternoon of talking. I drift off into memories of other vacations in wild lands—happy times bicycling through the mountains, climbing peaks, rock climbing, running through rain, eating meals of fresh corn and blackberry pie, drinking by campfires, and basking in warm companionship.
I don’t think I took these things for granted then, but they are even more precious to me now. Here on Soqotra, away from the distractions of work, my solitude feels acute. I feel a sudden longing for a lover, someone with whom I could share this. It occurs to me that this is the longest time I have been alone since I was a teenager; I have always been romantically involved with someone. I want to climb a mountain again with someone I adore, pick blueberries, tell each other stories as we clamber our way through rocks and trees before sunset. Though I have long avoided lifetime commitment, I now think that maybe it would be nice to stay with someone for a while. A long while.
Chances are I won’t find this person in Yemen. Not with my work schedule and the dearth of romantic prospects. I resign myself to months more of solitary nights and wonder if it would help if I made some more friends.
I’m jolted out of my reverie as Rasheed pulls the truck up by our house. He smiles at me. “I’ll come find you tomorrow.”
FOR THE REST OF MY WEEK on Soqotra,