Behind the Veils of Yemen by Audra Grace Shelby Page B

said nothing.
    We quietly took our leave as the women sat down to chat on Fatima’s bed. We glanced at the empty crib, declining protests to stay and celebrate.
    Two days later Kevin and I loaded the children into an agency van to drive to the home of Shirley and Johnny Higdon, colleagues with children near the ages of ours. They lived near the public hospital where Fatima’s baby had been transferred. We pulled out of our graveled yard and into the street. When Kevin got out of the car to close our wide iron gates, I heard a child screaming. I craned my neck to locate the screams but could not see anything.
    “It’s the neighbor’s little girl,” Madison said, pointing outside her window.
    “Yeah, her brothers are hurting her,” added Jaden.
    I looked where they were pointing. In front of their father’s baqala [grocery store], a laughing boy of about ten gripped both arms of his screaming sister, who was around five. I gasped as their teenaged brother swung the youngest boy, a toddler, hard and fast at his captive sister so that his feet kicked her full force in her upper thighs. The boys laughed outright as the little girl screamed and writhed from each blow. The wailing child wriggled and pulled, ripping her rose-colored dress in an attempt to escape their iron grasp.
    I hammered the window with my fist as I rolled it down. “Lah [No]!” I shouted at them. “Harram! Hatha mosh tamam! [Forbidden! This is not good!]” The boys sneered scornfully at me and continued to torment their sister.
    “Kevin!” I yelled through the window, pointing at the boys. “Do something! They won’t listen to me.”
    When Kevin saw where I was pointing, he strode his six-foot, two-hundred-pound bulk angrily toward the boys. He was twice the size of the average Yemeni man. When the boys saw him coming, they stopped their laughing and relinquished their hold on the sobbing little girl, who quickly darted for their backyard.
    Sputtering with anger, Kevin scolded the boys as well as he could in Arabic. The boys only shrugged, snickering and nudging each other, impatient for Kevin to finish. When he had, they hurried into the backyard after their sister.
    Kevin was furious. He stalked up the stairs to the baqala and stuck his head through the door. But he did not go in. Instead he turned abruptly and stalked back down the stairs toward the car. He was shaking, his teeth clenched tight.
    “What happened?” I asked as he got into the car. He ground the gear into first, ripping the cuff of his sleeve on the gearshift.
    “Their father and two other men were chewing qat right by the window.” He spat out the words with disgust. “They saw the whole thing. They just did not care.”
    My head hit the headrest as Kevin jerked the car into the street. I strained my neck to see the neighbor’s backyard as we passed. I could not see if the boys had recaptured their sister.
    “Thank the Lord Fatima’s baby is a boy,” I whispered. Kevin nodded his silent agreement.
    We deposited our children in the Higdons’ courtyard. Leaving the fathers to talk projects over coffee and contemporary Christian music, Shirley and I made our way to the public hospital.
    Inside a narrow door, infants and mothers roomed together in a long ward crowded with iron cots and small wooden incubators. Shirley and I wove our way between them, murmuring polite greetings to each new mother and grandmother we passed. Each wore a balto and tried to keep her hejab wrapped as she leaned against the iron rails of her headboard or sat swinging her feet off the side of her bed.
    The women gestured as we passed, wanting us to see the babies bound in blanket cocoons inside the glass boxes. One infant had a cleft palate. Another had a malformed hand. The mothers patted spaces on their beds for us to sit, moving aside plastic bags of clothing. There were no televisions, only a large, black-rimmed clock that ticked hours on a peeling, white wall.
    One woman held out a section