Waled was born in Mocha above a coffee warehouse. At age eleven, his right arm was bitten by a dog, beaten with a pole and burned by oil and had to be amputated. His uncle bought him an arm carved from Boswellia sacra for his twelfth birthday. It was an extravagant and sweet-smelling gift but the arm was impractical and easily-gouged. At age thirteen he went to sea as ship’s boy aboard the Habb. On a brief leave at al Hudaydah he discovered the benefits of a missing arm.

A widow named Ma’isah saw him drinking coffee and beckoned him with her eyes. Above her brother-in-law’s chandlery she tenderly removed his arm and led him to the pile of old rugs that was her bed. He barely made it back aboard ship, arrived without his arm and had to make do with the fragment of oar he had grabbed off Ma’isah’s floor by mistake.

In Jeddah, he met a girl his own age under the Gate of Al-Magharibah. She took him under a lean-to against the city wall and kissed him on the mouth until he grew faint, then stole him a new arm of ivory and silver. The chunk of oar was carried off by dogs.

He lost the ivory arm in Sharm al Sheikh gambling with a sailor’s wife in a game he was happy to lose. On his long nights aboard ship he wove a new one out of strands of straw.

The straw arm caught fire in Hurgada under a torn fishnet with two village girls (but one always afterwards resented the other). What could he do but weave a replacement out of palm leaves?

In Sawakin he found himself alone and slowly and sadly made his way to the camel races. Standing next to him was a one-armed merchant named Aban. Aban left the race with Waled’s palm-leaf arm. Waled left the race with Aban’s articulated brass arm and his youngest wife Ablah.

Near Massawa Waled dived for sea urchins (which are haram but extremely delicious) with Lamya’, who, when naked, was so dark as to be essentially invisible. The brass arm sank beneath the waves and he hurriedly replaced it with a float of cork pulled from a fish trap.

The chief of police in Aseb (who suffered from delusions of grandeur) kept a harem in a five-sided building with heavily-guarded doors on all sides. The women within grew bored and invited the East-side guards inside, and they did not object when Waled came in too. Who could blame him for forgetting his cork? He left Aseb with an arm woven from khat stems left after all the leaves had been chewed.

The next port of call was Mocha, his birthplace. His second-cousin Afifah greeted him with an embrace that could scarcely be called chaste, and she took him to buy a simple leather-and-wood arm with the last of his wages. The next day he sailed again for al Hudaydah.

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