Free Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves

lips. Where were we from? Yes, yes, Amreeka. George Bush bad. People good. The sort of split anyone could understand. Canada, I offered,
but got no flicker of recognition. Where would we stay. Did we need a place. We stopped answering, and they stopped asking. It didn’t feel rude. Later I would recognize this moment as the beginning of the glazed period. It occurs three-quarters of the way into any qat session. Quiet descends and everyone becomes philosophical.
    When we left, the night air was refreshing, the drizzle welcome. We ambled down a narrow alley. Little squares of stained glass in blue, red, and green dotted the walls, until we emerged into the modern part of the city, where we found a businessmen’s hotel on Ali Abd al-Mughni Street. Nothing we could afford ever had a private bathroom, but our room was clean and had a balcony. We slept the fulfilling sleep of the deeply tired. In the middle of the night I was awoken by a surreal wail. It was coming from outside. I sat up, confused. It sounded like a siren. “What the fuck is that?” Mona asked from her bed. I stumbled toward our balcony door. The city had turned off every light, so all I could see was pitch-black. I slid open our door, and the keening became louder. It was clear and pure on the night air, taking up the sky. I wondered why people weren’t coming out of their homes in alarm. I was half-asleep. And then the familiar words began to resolve themselves. God is great, God is great. My disorientation subsided.
    We knew about the call to prayer, had heard it for months. It crackled to life five times a day, part of the din of Cairo. It sounded different in a silent, dark city. Nothing competed for God’s attention. It was 5:00 AM. I went back to bed.

    After that first night we wore head scarves when we went out in public, something we never did in Cairo unless we were visiting a mosque. This didn’t make us look less foreign, because we still wore jeans and
long coats. Our head coverings were ad hoc, pulled from existing wardrobes. Mona wore a Palestinian kaffiyeh, and I wore an old Spanish scarf, black with roses. The local women were fully tented, with their faces and bodily outlines obscured. Almost every woman wore a multicolored sheet in the same radiating pattern, with the extra fabric clutched in front by an invisible hand. I wondered if the garish print was a trend, or if it had been around forever. Over their faces each one wore a piece of black, red, and white tie-dyed silk, which clashed aggressively with the other fabric. Occasionally we saw women who, rather than the kaleidoscopic garb, wore black from head to toe, which was the style in Saudi Arabia. All-black was seen as a sign of upward mobility—of a family that had money or had been abroad.
    We didn’t blend in. Our scarves made us less obvious, a little more ambiguous in our perceived origin. They made us more comfortable; the few times our hair was exposed we felt naked and vulnerable. I’ve met European women in conservative Muslim countries who’ve told me not to cover my hair, on the principle that I should act at all times as an ambassador of liberal values. But I regarded it practically. I hoped it might ease my passage through public space more effectively than anything did in Cairo. It also meant I didn’t have to think about my hair.

    We encountered our first masturbator in Sanaa. We were sitting on a low wall outside a mosque, looking at a map. He appeared in a doorway, maybe twenty yards away, exposing himself from between the folds of his skirt, staring at us and throttling his penis. I nudged Mona, and we jumped up and walked away. We looked back; he was following us. We sped up, and kept checking over our shoulders until we were sure we had lost him.

    We came across the second one in Sada, a northern Yemeni town on the fringe of the Empty Quarter, where we were walking around the high city wall. We came to a tall parapet,