The Exquisitely Old #4
The SUV is blocked by the throng, we can’t go forward, the Horn of Africa seems to be rising up whole, migrant, roving, on a pilgrimage.
The crowd of women has just crossed the Gulf of Aden on one of the riskiest and most inhuman journeys imaginable.
They placed their destinies in God’s hands, or in Allah’s, begging in ancient cities ravaged or soon to be ravaged by disease.
They’re fleeing from the four faces of death: war, hate, the snakes of madness, the furious bitches of Hunger. 3
They’re thin and tall, you could even say they look down on us. Though they don’t have shoes, there’s an imperial air about them. They’re besieged by hunger and thirst, but they keep going with military discipline and a battalion’s courage.
We get out of the SUV. Zahra Bayda asks them questions and translates for me. They say they’re headed to Saudi Arabia and, from there, to Europe, because they want to study.
“Study?” I’m surprised by this. Before food or shelter, they want education?
“Study, learn, work, see and experience things, that’s what they all dream of.”
They’re devoted to knowledge, just like their ancestor the Queen of Sheba, who crossed this desert and others to test King Solomon’s wisdom.
I’m amazed to hear them insist on their descendancy from Sheba; this poetic certainty about their origins strikes me as extraordinary.
But Zahra Bayda warns me that you have to know how to interpret it.
“Careful,” she says, “watch out, it’s a double-edged blade.”
On the one hand, it holds the dignity of dispossessed and exiled women, the vindication of who they are, a testament to female power in the face of all adversity.
But on the other, there lurks a historical background of bloody hierarchies and ancestral hatred among noble tribes and enslaved ones.
In a cruel and tangled power structure, those who can claim a direct line to the Queen of Sheba are considered of superior caste.
“Do not underestimate these people’s pride,” Zahra Bayda tells me.
“When they throw the Queen of Sheba in your face, they’re indirectly challenging you, you who have everything, but who are nothing, while they who have nothing are royal, with a queen’s blood in their veins.
‘I’m a descendant of the Queen of Sheba’: If they use that line on you, don’t take it lightly, it’s more than folklore.
Deep down, it means, ‘Today I’ve got to beg and you see me in squalor, but I come from a thousand-year dynasty and my tradition will endure when yours is reduced to ash. ’”
It could be, Zahra Bayda must be right, and yet at the same time, no.
It can’t only be that. All those myths about the Queen of Sheba must be a sign to these women, an epic dimension, a reason to exist, to be rooted in a glorious past that gives them strength to confront their bleak future.
Compensation for the sadness and fatigue of a life and struggle that otherwise would have no reason or purpose.
Half suspicious, half hopeful, the migrants approach and hand me pieces of paper with handwriting on them.
There’s something solemn and ritualistic in the gesture.
Zahra Bayda explains that this is a common practice among the displaced, to pass out pieces of paper asking for help.
They copy them several times and hang them around their necks in plastic bags to protect them from the elements.
One of them shows me a small object in her hand.
She wants me to touch it; I sense that she’d like to sell it to me.
“Malikat Sheba,” she says to me, “Malikat Sheba.” It’s a small, simple figurine made from near-black clay.
It’s wearing some sort of headdress, a tiara perhaps, and it has no arms or legs.
Still the face’s features are well defined, especially the eyes—two small holes in the middle of white circles lined in black—that seem to meet your gaze.
“Malikat Sheba,” the woman insists, more urgently.
“Queen of Sheba?” I ask. “This one? Is the Queen of Sheba?”
The statue could be a thousand-year-old relic or a trinket someone just made.
It could be the Queen of Sheba or any old doll; it’s not even clear whether it’s male or female, as it hints at no gender.
I imagine Zahra Bayda will scold me if she sees me buy it, so I start haggling with the woman on the sly.
I feel guilty, as if I were scoring cocaine in Washington Square.
I think of Malraux stealing artifacts from the temples of Angkor and grow hot with shame.
Even so, I take a few euros from my pocket and give them to the woman in exchange for the figurine, which, after all, has its mystery and charms. But Zahra Bayda has seen me; I should have foreseen it, nothing escapes her.
“Throw that away,” she says. “Those idols are bad luck.”
I pay her no mind and put it in my pocket.
We’ll see whether it brings me bad fortune, or good.
For now, I have another possible reading: The Queen of Sheba is just one more tourist attraction, a hook for exploiting naive travelers like me.
Who knows. Maybe the little doll I’m carrying in my pocket is a valuable treasure.
It saddens me to think that these women come to me seeking help—me or anyone who seems to be from or connected to the world abroad; I have no way to tell them what a fallacy it is, that world abroad from which they want a salvation that won’t come.
Even so, they’ll arrive. Where, how, or when, there’s no way to know, even they don’t know, but I can tell that nobody can stop them. Many will fall, others will press on. They’ll cross barbed wire borders and defy armies, raids, customs. There are thousands of them, and they’ll make it.
Little by little, the cloud of women vanishes into the desert, the way they came. Having emerged out of the void, they return to it like a mirage or trick of the imagination.
As proof that they were here, they’ve left my hands full of pieces of paper, as must happen to all foreigners who come through this barren land.
I go over them one by one as the SUV drives on.
They’re written in several dialects and translated into English, French, or Italian, languages of colonizers that the colonized knew to absorb.
Each of these messages is addressed to everyone, or to no one, or to anyone: whoever will listen, a hypothetical person who can help.
Some are brief biographies, a couple of paragraphs long.
Others describe what the writer is looking for: I’m looking for a son lost in war, I’m looking for a husband who emigrated and shows no signs of life.
There are requests, for a medicine for a brother with liver trouble, or for a grandmother who suffers from anxiety.
Others report a rape in such-and-such neighborhood, or a murder in such-and-such town.
The shortest ones are barely a vague reference, a date or place: I’m so-and-so’s daughter, I was born in such-and-such place, and today I’m here.
They’re hope-filled declarations of life, like the message a shipwreck survivor throws to the sea in a bottle.
Smoke signals sent up at midnight, an imperceptible call, an improbable act of faith, like the Somebody was here that a disappeared person might scratch with his bare fingernails into the wall of a secret cell.
It occurs to me that each missive is a small fragment of what I’m so urgently pursuing.
Some include a scrawled map, or a date, or a signature I can’t decipher and that could say Abisinia or Asmara, Fatima or Fantomas, Magala or Marimorena, Mereke or Mekele, Bilkis or Beatrice, Nikaule or Nicolasa, Sheba or Saba: names, all of them female and unsettling, that I say one after the other, surrendering to the spell of repetition.
Each of those messages is intimate and personal, each different from the others, but every single one of them could be headed by the same line: “I’m a widow facing misfortune, wandering without end. ”
I’m seized by the thought of putting these letters together like a puzzle, as if deciphering an enigma.
One more enigma, like everything related to her, the Queen of Sheba, or better said, to them, the woman who is one and many, she of many faces and no name, or many names and no face.
De Quincey would say that, to find her, I should put my ear to the earth and listen for her footsteps, merged into the countless footsteps of the great exodus.
Farther on, we reach a small group of women who’ve gotten lost and separated from the rest. They hit the SUV’s roof with their palms, begging for water.
Zahra Bayda gives them a full, large bottle and asks where they’ll sleep.
They say in Arabiyah as-Sudiyah, Saudi Arabia.
They don’t know that’s hostile territory, and far away, past deserts and mountains, thousands of days’ travel from here.
They have no compass nor guide, their strength is flagging, they don’t realize they’ve been walking in the wrong direction.