Misadventure in the Middle East by Henry Hemming & Nicholas Brealey Publishing

Author:Henry Hemming & Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2007-01-15T11:18:25+00:00

Mashallah

“How about,” Al started, “a cover. So we can cover her up at night.”

“Like a giant abaya?”

“Yes! One of those big covers where all you can see are her tyres poking out at the bottom.”

We found a man in the outskirts of Muscat who made an abaya for Yasmine. It fitted perfectly. It was neither too tight, nor too baggy, the kind of thing a conservative mother would want for her daughter going unchaperoned to her first teenage party. Yasmine was now as well disguised as we could possibly make her.

We went to say goodbye to the Baluchi tailors who lived next door to our studio. Most evenings they played cricket outside their shop with a tennis ball, which sometimes they would hit onto our roof. The head tailor asked where we were going.

“Saudi.”

His face fell. He started to rifle through the contents of the cupboard behind him.

“Why? Is that bad?”

“Wait,” he said, still rummaging in the cupboard, before reappearing a little out of breath holding three shalwar kamises, shirts and wide-legged trousers: black for Stephen, peach for me, cream for Al.

“You must wear these in Saudi,” he said, handing them over. “It is important.” He continued to look anxious.

151

Beat of the Drum

“And tell no one you are British. OK?”

We nodded like three children being told off and went to say goodbye to Princess Susan and thank her for everything she had done for us. Which was a lot. After that we left Muscat.

“So far so good,” I mouthed to myself as Yasmine roared towards Dubai.

After one night in Dubai on the roof of the Majlis Gallery, Al and I said goodbye to Stephen. He would fly to Yemen before heading back to England several weeks later.

“Al, take care of yourself,” Stephen said, giving him a hug. “Henry.” He turned to hug me. “Take care of Al.”

And with that he was gone. Again we were two.

Night fell and Al and I crossed into Saudi Arabia. After a few kilometres I pulled off the road and we changed out of our jeans and collared shirts into the shalwar kamises we had been given. They felt wonderful. The crotch was down by your knee, the kamise was free flowing, and there was something about the feel of these clothes, in both their unfamiliar shape and their second-hand smell, that reminded you every few seconds like a gentle nudge in the ribs that you were somewhere you did not know.

I thought back to the Slovak border and began to wonder what the guards there would have thought if they could see us now. Obviously if we had turned up at the Slovak border wearing shalwar kamises in a truck with Mashallah on its side brandishing multiple translations of the Qur’an – there were now six copies of the Qur’an in Yasmine – we would have been turned away faster than a bull trying to talk its way into a china shop; and yet part of me wanted the Slovak guards to see us as we were now.

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