Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [13]
Emerging from a series of twisting alleys, I found myself in a wide plaza in front of a mosque. To the left was a tiny storefront restaurant with outside tables, where several men sat drinking tea from glass cups. Across from the mosque was a pharmacy, busy with both male and female customers. To the right were more gingerbread houses. A herd of mangy-looking goats trotted by me, followed by a boy with a stick and the faint scent of garbage. Children pushed wheelbarrows piled so high with produce they could not see where they were going.
I wasn’t sure which way to turn, but a steady stream of people seemed to be heading down a street to the right, so I joined the flow.
Several men called out to me, “Sadeeqa! Sadeeqa! I love you!” But the women did not speak. They just followed me with their dark eyes, the only exposed part of their bodies.
At several points in my journey, I attracted a retinue of children, most of whom seemed to be completely unattended by adults. The girls were still in their fancy dresses, although many of them were smeared with dirt, while the boys wore suit jackets over their thobes and curved Yemeni daggers called jambiyas. They trotted after me, asking my name and where I came from, crying, “Soma! Soura!” I didn’t learn until days later that soura was Arabic for “photograph.” They wanted me to take their picture.
At last, I entered the maze of shops that made up the souqs. There are several different kinds of souq, arranged by type of merchandise. Handmade jewelry is sold in the streets of the Silver Souq; cloves, cardamom, and cumin are found in the Spice Souq; and jambiyas are found in the—you guessed it—Jambiya Souq. There are also sections devoted entirely to woven shawls (mostly from Kashmir), livestock, qat, and coffee.
The shops were mostly tiny storefronts, with shelves behind the counters where men reclined on cushions with cheekfuls of qat. Some called out to me, gesturing to their wares, while others just chewed and stared. I didn’t stop. This was reconnaissance work, not shopping.
The scents of cardamom and coriander overwhelmed the spice market. Piles of orange and yellow powder were teased into perfect pyramids that sat on tarps spread on the ground. How is it that they could make these perfectly uniform towers of spices, yet not create an even set of stairs? Another Yemeni mystery.
Raisins in an astonishing array of sizes and colors—green, yellow, black, blue, chartreuse—were also arranged in careful pyramids, next to bins of red pistachios, almonds, and cashews. Entire stalls were devoted to dates. Big, gluey, warm globs of dates under heating lamps. I’d never seen so many dates, or such sticky ones.
I walked on, past rows and rows of jambiyas. There were tiny jambiyas the length of my hand and giant ones as long as my thigh. They were made from silver, steel, wood, and rhinoceros horn. (It is officially illegal to sell rhinoceros-horn jambiyas, but that doesn’t stop the traders in Old Sana’a.) The jambiya sellers were particularly keen to get my attention, waving me over to their stalls. I smiled but kept walking.
From a distance, even in the urban areas, it appeared as though everyone was dressed alike. The women were draped in black from head to toe, and the men in white. This was a world before color, before fashion, before the rise of the individual. Before God was declared deceased. The homogeneity of dress obscured the devastating poverty of most of Yemen’s people. You could not tell a person’s class or income bracket until you got close enough to see the embroidery along the wrists and collar of a woman’s black abaya or the engraving on the jambiya dangling from a man’s embroidered belt. Yemenis, of course, can size each other up in an instant, discerning by a few telling details a person’s tribe, class, and level of devoutness. There are ways to tie a head scarf, for example, that indicate an especially pious nature, and a man demonstrates