Chapter Circle of Stones
Circle of Stones
Zahra Bayda had been quiet, and not even irritable, as sometimes happened; this version of silence seemed worse.
For a couple of weeks, she’d been wandering the house absently and gloomily, disengaged from the rest of the team.
She murmured old spells from her native land, under her breath: Whether praying or setting curses in motion, it was impossible to know.
There was no way of getting close to her.
She spent hours shut into herself, nobody could rescue her from it, least of all me.
It was troubling to see her that way. She who was always picking fights and talking up a storm in one of the several languages or dialects she knows.
Her silence had settled into the house like one more resident.
If before she worked eighteen hours a day, now she spent all twenty-four in a full frenzy.
She attended to the sick, went out on mission after mission, visited disaster zones, oversaw logistics, wrote reports.
But all in a cold, robotic way, as if the rest of us didn’t exist, or as if we were only slightly human.
“Stop!” I’d say. “Rest a moment, sit down, have a bite to eat. Do you know what happens to supernovas when they lose control and reverberate too wildly? It turns out, they devour themselves and turn into black holes.”
But she didn’t listen. Nothing could interest her less than supernovas and their dramas. Nothing except me. I interested her even less; in her eyes I was a black hole.
Black hole? Maybe that was it. Maybe Zahra Bayda had fallen back into the void of Barhout, that pit of Nothingness of which her Uncle Tammam had so often spoken.
“Let her be,” Pau advised me, on seeing my efforts to draw a reaction from her. “Leave her be, she’ll come out of it on her own . . . one day.”
“From that hole of Barhout? Is that where she is?”
“In that hole or some other one, not quite so deep . . . at least, I hope it’s not.”
Well, well, this Pau Cor d’Or knew Zahra Bayda far too well . . . Where had it gone, her contagious joy, her invincible optimism against all evidence?
“What her Uncle Tammam didn’t know,” I told him, “is that there are demons chained up in your own pit of Barhout . . .”
“A strange way of living,” he muttered, not looking at me. “Even when we reach the surface, we’re in the depths of something.”
Steamrolled by helplessness, that’s the state she was in.
And no wonder: The team really couldn’t keep up.
In addition to a recent increase in contagious disease, there were the ravages of war, the locusts, the drought, hunger, fanaticism, and the criminal interplay of powers.
And those other more ethereal faces of death, namely loneliness, fog, and forgetting.
Apocalypse, now. Because what’s happening in Yemen are the tremors of a broader apocalypse, even though the West is trying to close its eyes and ignore it on the pretext that it seems too far away.
They don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, that it’s in places like this where global life-and-death dilemmas are decided.
When it seemed things couldn’t get worse, they got worse. Coalition forces bombed the MSF hospital in Haydan as-Sham, with the pretext that Al Qaeda fighters were among the patients. I asked Zahra Bayda whether that last claim was or wasn’t true.
“What claim?” she barked.
“That there were Al Qaeda people in the hospital.”
“I don’t know, possibly not, but maybe so. When the wounded or sick need help, you don’t ask them which side they’re on.”
Her response troubled me, and I did some more investigating.
Pau had always said that, as a doctor, you have the moral and professional obligation to treat whoever needs it.
I sought him out for further explanation, and he gave me a pamphlet on international human rights, where I read that medical staff, patients, health outposts, hospitals, and ambulances must be protected in the midst of conflict, and under no circumstances may they be targets of war.
Even so, the hospital at Haydan as-Sham had been reduced to rubble.
We were already living in a climate of great instability and stress when we were informed of a massacre that had just taken place in the valley of Dhamar, two and a half hours away.
Cor d’Or and Zahra Bayda headed out there, along with two more doctors and some coordinating staff.
They didn’t take me due to lack of space in the SUVs.
I had to stay home, very much against my will.
Rumors reached me almost immediately. It seemed that a theft of canned food had devolved into violence.
Some months before, the United Nations had sent a supply of canned meat to a small temporary settlement of Ethiopian women and their children.
The recipients of those cans hadn’t dared touch them because the contents were haram (dirty) and not halal (clean): According to Muslim law, edible meat must come from livestock properly bled by a sheik.
But the war and epidemic had sharpened hunger, and those boxes of cans, piled high in a shed, had turned into precious goods.
A group of men armed with daggers, intent on seizing them, had descended on the settlement by night.
Along the way, they’d raped the women and girls, killed people, and burned their homes in a fit of unhinged violence.
Later it was discovered that, after the slaughter, they filled a jeep with cans and were already leaving with their plunder when they found a rubber ball in the wreckage and played soccer for a while, until they got tired and fell asleep in the carnage, elbow to elbow with their torn-apart victims.
There was no trace of the murderers several hours later, when Zahra Bayda and the others arrived. They found the corpses of nine women, five girls, and two boys scattered over a scene full of blood, devastation, and madness. Some of the women had been decapitated.
The team took on the task of verifying the victims’ identities, burying their bodies, and trying to find and notify their relatives.
That’s what they were doing when someone approached them to say that there were survivors.
At least three people had managed to escape, and found refuge in nearby ruins, but they were badly wounded, one in critical condition.
The MSF vans had arrived in time to attend to them.
There were three people, yes. But, unexpectedly, they turned out to be men. Pau confirmed an atrocious suspicion: Those wounded weren’t among the victims, but the victimizers.
The women of the settlement had injured them in their efforts of self-defense, and these men’s own companions had left them behind when they escaped with their plunder.
There they were, defenseless, in urgent need of help, those people who’d inflicted unimaginable doses of horror and pain for cans of food.
How can a pamphlet compare to reality? To attend to anyone who needs it: such were the instructions of the pamphlet on humanitarian rights.
And now the team would have to aid the perpetrators of these crimes against the women and children of Dhamar.
Where would they find the strength? Was it possible to feel compassion for men who stir disgust?
Belinda, an orthopedic surgeon who’d recently arrived from Europe to join the group, became nauseated and went away to vomit.
Did the lives of those murderers even deserve saving?
Pau said he didn’t want to force anyone, he’d leave each team member free to decide.
He and Zahra Bayda took to the task; the others confessed they felt physically and emotionally unable to do it.
The team returned home long after nightfall.
Zahra Bayda was altered, even more than before.
I didn’t find out what had happened from her; I had to ask the others.
Days passed, and she stayed entrenched in some corner of her own soul where no one could reach her, where perhaps she couldn’t even reach herself.
She not only didn’t talk, but also didn’t listen, staying shut into a frenzy of constant work.
The residents of Yemen’s various expat houses are friendly toward me, I have no beef with any of them, but my real connection to this country is Zahra Bayda; she’s the reason and justification for my stay.
Now, the stubbornness of her silence turns her into a stranger, and me into an interfering foreigner.
Pau protects her, apologizes on her behalf, gives explanations.
“It’s understandable, her pulling away,” he said over breakfast. “The tragedy of these women is already horror enough, and for Zahra Bayda it must connect with similar parts of her own past.”
He knows her well, this Pau, too well for me to not think there’s something between them. That suspicion makes things worse for me. Even so, I see that he’s right when he says Zahra Bayda must have gone through a visceral setback at having to aid men who had so much in common with her rapists.
How can a simple robbery turn into such an unspeakable killing spree? What could be behind such hate? Men like boys, playing ball over the bodies they’d just slaughtered, or boys like men, exhausted from all the murdering.
I was glad when Mirza Hussain appeared on his camel and asked me for a coffee; I’d finally have someone with whom to talk about what had happened. As usual, old Hussain was up to speed and had his own version of things.
“Those men weren’t canned food thieves,” he said. “They were Malencoii warriors, the Goat Heads.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because they used daggers and slaughtered in the Malencoii way. They didn’t go there to steal. The cans weren’t part of the plan, just something they happened to find and take advantage of.”
According to Mirza Hussain, those guys went there to settle old debts, so old they themselves may not have remembered what they were.