Read Online Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves - Free Book Online Page A

school, and now was fearless about roving around Cairo. She was fearless about speaking Arabic too, even though she wasn’t very good. She was dogged about learning it, but the reasons for her obsessive study emerged only slowly. Like most girls I’d met in college, I didn’t believe that I had any important stories to share, though I hoped one day to acquire some. Mona believed that she did have important stories, ones that went beyond boys kissed and majors chosen, but she held on to them until she thought you could appreciate their significance.
    Mona demanded regard. But she also gave it, believing that her friends didn’t just happen to be special to her, but that they were people who really mattered. She liked my confidence too. We both aspired to be steely, and sensed that we could push and prod each other in that direction.
    We moved on from the kushary restaurant to a backgammon establishment. A whiskered and weathered man, balancing a tray of steaming glasses, dramatically gestured us to an open table, calling “over here, over here.” He whooshed a few other patrons out of the way, who, politely and nodding, removed themselves. The dominant sound of a Cairo teahouse is the slap of hard plastic pieces on playing boards, a clackety-clack that rises above the conversation and exclamations and televised soccer. We ordered tea and a water pipe with apple-flavored tobacco. I’d been a nicotine virgin before Cairo, and
so the first few hits always went to my head. We played the version of backgammon we knew, the one Americans learn, which begins with all the checkers on the board. If an opponent’s piece lands on yours, you have to take it off. You then roll the dice until you can get the piece back on, and when you do, you begin the journey again at the farthest point from home.
    Several customers closely watched our game. A bony neighbor with a finely tooled brown face issued a general challenge; Mona immediately accepted. His friends gathered around to watch. He beat her once, then again, and again—but by the third time she was playing a respectable game, holding her own and eliciting impressed mutterings of “aiwaaaa,” an elongated “yes.”
    â€œDo you know how to play another style?” her opponent asked. And he proceeded to show us. You start with all of your pieces off the board rather than on it, and move them on with each roll of the dice to start their horseshoe journey. The other key difference is that instead of being sent back to the beginning when your opponent lands a checker on your own, you stay in place, paralyzed, until the enemy piece moves on. This version of the game opens up new questions of strategy. Being immobilized halfway around the board can be even worse than being sent back to the beginning, where the possibility of movement at least presents itself at every turn.

    Yemen, as Mona and I perceived it from Cairo, was far away, isolated, poor, traditional, religious, possibly violent, a boondocks even by the lights of its own neighborhood. It was farther, and that was where we wanted to go.
    The books also showed a unique and surpassingly beautiful architecture of sand-colored minarets and towers frosted in white.
They showed stair-step terraced green fields of a kind that, like the architecture, didn’t exist anywhere else. The Romans called the region “Arabia Felix,” happy Arabia, for its agricultural riches. Yemen was a land beyond the mountains, the home of the Queen of Sheba.
    Scooping from our metal bowls of kushary one afternoon, and talking about the upcoming winter break, one of us said, “Let’s go to Yemen,” and the other said yes. There was a dare in this discussion, an I-will-if-you-will aspect. But there wasn’t a voice of caution between us. Once the possibility was admitted out loud, we had to go.
    To our fellow American year-abroad students, our decision required no explanation. Their eyes