The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (12 page)

And then I showed them my notebooks. I had filled them front to back and then written on the back side of every page. “Reporters for daily papers go through one to three of these a day,” I told them. Their eyes widened. From what I could tell, they’d been using the same notebooks since I got there.

This led to a discussion of interviewing techniques. We talked about how I interviewed people at the conference and went over the interviewing handout I’d given them. Then came the fun part. I asked them to interview each other in pairs in front of the class. Zaid and Adel volunteered to go first. I asked the class to critique them. Which they enthusiastically did. Nothing got them more excited than criticizing each other.

I wanted to involve the women, who had been shyer about speaking up, so I asked Arwa and Zuhra to go next. Arwa was resistant but with a little encouragement agreed to interview Zuhra. She was a much better interviewer than the men—more focused and quicker with her questions. She also had the good fortune to be interviewing someone who answered every question with a torrent of words.

Faris rang me that afternoon as I was leaving my Arabic lesson and invited me out to dinner. At eight thirty
P.M
., he arrived promptly on my doorstep, beautifully dressed, in a dark pinstriped suit. Clouds of cologne wafted off of him. We climbed into his Mercedes and drove to Hadda, where we ate at an Americanesque Greek restaurant called Zorba’s. “It’s a five-star restaurant,” said Faris. “One of the best in Sana’a!”

This it most certainly wasn’t. The food was very basic: burgers and fries, salads, fish, spaghetti. But the place was packed with foreigners and the Yemeni elite and was one of the few places where women and men could be found in somewhat equal numbers. Faris knew the owner, who waved us to one of the front tables overlooking the street.

On the way, Faris had given me a flattering speech about how incredibly grateful he was to me for the work I had done. He asked if I would write up a few of my pithy pieces of advice for my students so he could frame my words and hang them around the newsroom to remind his reporters of what I had taught them.

“You mean, things like ‘This is a NEWSpaper, not an OLDSpaper; let’s put some news in it’?” I asked.

“Yes! I want that one. And as many others as you have.”

He also said he wanted me to see the countryside and promised to arrange a car to take me on a day trip to the villages of Kawkaban and Shibam on Friday. He would pay for me to eat at a restaurant there. Like so many of Faris’s promises, these turned out to be as insubstantial as the Sana’ani air.

Faris also said he wanted to have a dinner in my honor on one of my last nights and present me with some gifts. “Don’t buy any jewelry,” he said. “I have plenty for you.” The chances of me buying jewelry were slim to none, and slim just left town. I didn’t wear any jewelry, save Ginger’s wedding ring.

Then he offered me a job. “I will pay you one thousand dollars a month”—most journalists at the paper made $200 a month—“plane tickets back and forth to New York, and occasional three-day vacations in Beirut,” he said, “if you will come to run the
Yemen Observer.”

“To
run
it?” I thought he must have been joking. I had no management experience, almost no Arabic, and Faris had never even seen my résumé. Theo had hinted that Faris might offer me some kind of job, but I hadn’t expected to be handed the entire paper. Not one newspaper editor in the whole of the United States would have looked over my résumé and thought, “I want this woman to run my paper.”

“You would have total control,” Faris continued. I would? I wouldn’t have to write flattering pieces about the president? Was this possible?

“I’d be the editor?” I fleetingly imagined my name at the top of a masthead.

“We’d have to make you managing editor or something. The editor in chief must by law be Yemeni. But you would be in charge.” Hmmm. I wondered if the Yemeni staff would really let me be in charge if there was a Yemeni name above me on the masthead.

For a moment, I allowed myself to contemplate the heady thrill of being the boss. Then, almost reflexively, I declined. “I am still paying off American debts,” I said. “I don’t see how I could possibly live on that.” I was making $60,000 in New York and could hardly manage to scrape by.

“Think about it,” he said.

“I’ll think.”

“I could make it fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Do you know what I make in New York?”

“It will be cheaper to live here.”

I looked out the window at the darkness settling over the city’s scores of minarets, the slow brightening of the colored glass
qamarias
. I watched the women hurrying to beat the darkness home, laden with sacks of food, and the men, their cheeks fat with
qat
, striding past in long white robes. I thought about the gray New York office where I had spent the last five years.

“I’ll think,” I said.

FOUR
things to chew on

A few days before my departure, I woke up at six A.M. in a blind panic. Was it
possible I had so little time left? There was so much still to do! I hadn’t taught my reporters how to do research on the Internet. I hadn’t given them enough investigative skills. I hadn’t talked with them about follow-up stories. They often wrote a breaking news story about something—a new kind of irrigation being introduced, for example—but then never wrote about the effects of the project. The paper was full of the launchings of brilliant new projects, but my reporters never bothered to find out whether they met their goals. Given that a large percentage of development projects worldwide fail, I felt that it was the press’s job to monitor them and hold them accountable.

I also hadn’t finished writing my democracy story for
Arabia Felix
or my overall report on the paper. Then, in class that day, something happened that made me forget how much I
hadn’t
done.

On the dry-erase board, I wrote a list of facts: A murder was committed. Thabbit al-Saadyi, ninety-four, murdered Qasim al-Washari, forty-nine. (I let the students pick the names.) The murder happened in a casino. It was committed with an AK-47. On Saturday at three
A.M.
Qasim was found riddled with five bullet holes, with three thousand
riyals
in his pocket. Next to him were a bottle of vodka and two roses. (Again, details courtesy of my students.)

They then had fifteen minutes to write me a really good lead.

And—miracle of miracles—they did! Farouq read his lead first, and it was
perfect
. “Thabbit al-Saadyi, 94, killed Qasim al-Washari, 49, with an AK-47 at a casino Saturday at 3
A.M.”
He included the who, what, where, when, and how. He included a subject, verb, and object. And he used the correct style for the ages of the men! It may sound ridiculous, but I was so moved that my skin tingled and tears came to my eyes.

“That is so perfect,” I told Farouq. “That is just what I’ve been looking for.”

THERE WAS ALSO
so much of Yemen I had left to see. On Fridays, my days off, I immersed myself in Yemeni life—in what my life might be like if I lived there. Yemenis are quick with hospitable invitations, and a thin, professorial man I met one night at the National Museum, Dr. Mohammed Saleh al-Haj, immediately invited me to lunch with his family. This is how Yemenis are—they will invite you home to lunch five minutes after meeting you. And after you have gone once, they will then want you to have lunch with them
every
Friday.

We met in the morning and took a taxi together to the fish market to pick out lunch. A little nervous to be heading home with a complete stranger, but curious to get a glimpse of Yemeni home life, I wandered around taking photographs of children. I was fascinated by the little girls, the dirty little street princesses, their bright taffeta dresses streaked with grime.

Dr. al-Haj’s brother-in-law Khaled, sister Leila, and niece Chulud fetched us from the market in their car, and we drove to Dr. al-Haj’s home, a two-room apartment up a flight of stairs and across a rooftop. After we removed our shoes and stepped inside, Leila and Chulud immediately stripped off their
abayas
, emerging looking like two Western women. Chulud wore skintight blue jeans and a loose short-sleeved shirt over a black bra, like any American fifteen-year-old, while Leila wore a checked shirt over loose plaid pants. They took over the kitchen, while Dr. al-Haj settled me in the living room/dining area. The room was carpeted with oriental rugs and lined with sitting cushions. A TV hulked in the corner, blaring a Friday sermon. Khaled came in wearing his long white robe and switched the television to an American channel showing a swimsuit fashion show.
“Amreekee!”
he told me, smiling. I ought to have been grateful for some American television, so I smiled, though the reverse was true. I have never owned a television, I have no interest in fashion, and it made me uneasy to watch women in bathing suits in the company of Yemeni men. In fact, I’d become rather taken with this whole modesty thing. Why should I let a man who is not my lover see any part of me? I was getting used to hiding.

Dr. al-Haj disappeared for a moment and returned with a gift for me: a lovely woven bag stuffed with something soft. I opened it to find a long, silky
abaya
and matching scarf, with glittery flowers along the edges. I was overwhelmed by his generosity.

“So you will be safer,” he said, though I was already covered from tip to toe in loose black, so much so that when Dr. al-Haj saw me that morning, he had said, “Ah, so you are Yemeni now!”

“If you don’t like it you can throw it away,” he said. “And if it’s the wrong size I will buy you a new one.”

“I would never throw it away! I love it. Thank you.
Shukrahn.”

The neighbors heard that I was visiting and came by to take a look at me. First came a little girl, dressed up like royalty in a frothy green dress. She was shy at first, and then impish, stealing someone’s cell phone and playing with it. Then three boys came in. Each one solemnly took my hand and greeted me, and then the third boy kissed me on each cheek and then once on the top of my head. If I lived here for a year, would I ever cease to be a curiosity? Or would I simply adjust to being an object of study?

When lunch was ready, Chulud carried each of the dishes into the room. “This is
salatah,”
she said. “This is
roz
. This is
chobes
. This is
samak.”
I nodded approvingly and repeated the Arabic words after her.

Dr. al-Haj took me to the kitchen to wash my hands, and then we began to eat. Yemenis are lightning-fast eaters, so it was hard for me to keep up. We started with the yogurt-drenched spongy bread called
shafoot
, pouring chopped salad and chili sauce on our little corners of it and picking up clumps with our hands. Then there were roasted vegetables, potatoes, flaky white fish (the best pieces of which were flung in front of me, the guest of honor), and
bint al-sahn
—“the daughter of the dish.” This was my favorite. It resembled an enormous flaky pancake, made with flour and butter and drizzled with honey. I ate until I could eat no more, despite the urging of my hosts. All of this we washed down with tiny glass cups of gingery tea. I could live with eating meals like this one every week.

Now that our stomachs were lined with food—an important prerequisite to chewing bitter
qat
—Leila and Chulud took me to my first
qat
chew, a women-only session at a friend’s house, not far from where I was staying. I had been waiting eagerly for this, curious about the drug and the ritual so essential to Yemeni life. We walked through a ground-floor courtyard where children were playing to the
mafraj
in the back. There, I was introduced to the five women already sitting in identical postures on the cushions around the room. When Yemenis lounge in a
mafraj
, they customarily sit with the right knee bent so that it points skyward, the foot pulled close to the body, and the left knee dropped out to the side, with the foot tucked under the right leg. My left leg constantly falls asleep in this position, so I keep adjusting my posture, sometimes pulling both knees up to my chin, always keeping the soles of my feet hidden, as it is impolite in Arab cultures to show anyone the bottoms of your feet.

Women continued to stream into the room, each one circling to kiss the others several times on the cheek. Some of them had a rhythm: two quick kisses, a beat, then three quick kisses. Each seemed to have a signature way of kissing hello.

The women spoke to each other and over each other in rapid-fire Arabic. Without Dr. al-Haj, I had no one to translate for me; no one else in the group spoke English. Communication was accomplished with my few Arabic words and scores of hand gestures. If I were to stay, I thought, I’d learn Arabic quickly, out of sheer necessity. Leila told me they were discussing democracy. I should have liked to hear that, particularly because I’d been told that Yemeni women rarely talked about anything other than babies and other domestic matters. This did not seem to be true in our group.

When everyone had arrived, the group consisted of about twelve or thirteen women in various states of
abaya
. All had their veils pulled back from their faces, and many had taken them off entirely. I sat with Leila on my left and a faux-blond woman on my right. The blonde did most of the talking. She asked me if I were married, pointing to my ring and to hers. I told her (and all the other women, who stared at me the entire time I was there, as if I’d just landed from Pluto) that I was indeed.

“Babies?”

I shook my head. “Not yet.” Then, as an afterthought, I added,
“Insha’allah”
(“if God is willing). At that, everyone smiled and nodded, and seemed to relax a bit. I wasn’t so different then after all. Despite my uncertainty about children, it did occur to me that if I accepted Faris’s offer, I would be spending one of my last fertile years in a country where there was little chance I would find romance, let alone a partner with whom to raise a child. Should I decide I wanted one.

A large elderly woman, who I believe was our hostess, passed around a tray of cups of sweet tea before preparing the enormous water pipe standing in the corner by placing glowing-hot lumps of tobacco atop it. A three-inch-thick hose snaked from it across the floor, so that the mouthpiece would reach even the woman sitting farthest away. The mouthpiece was passed from woman to woman, each keeping it for the space of approximately ten inhalations.
“Khamsa wa khamsa,”
Leila said to me. “Five and five.” I was grateful that I had learned all of my numbers before I left New York.

When the water pipe came my way, Leila showed me how to smoke it—you don’t inhale all of the way, just slightly. I accidentally took in too much and began to cough. My eyes widened and I touched my hand to my heart, which was enough to make the women take it away from me. When I couldn’t stop coughing, the blonde whipped out a little vial of oil and rubbed some on the back of my hands. She and Leila both gestured that I should sniff it.

“Oxygen,” said Leila in English. I wasn’t sure why sniffing rose oil on my hands would increase my oxygen levels, but I wasn’t about to debate the issue.

An African-looking woman pulled tinfoil-wrapped pie shapes from her bag and began passing them around. I thought perhaps they were little tarts, but they were cakes of strong homemade incense. Many Yemeni women make these. She sold one to Leila (images of Avon parties flashed through my head), who broke off a piece and burned it in a small ceramic burner. She turned to me and held the incense under each one of my pinned-up braids, until the sweet smoke had suffused my hair. Then she made me stand and held the incense burner underneath my skirts. The smoke was hot on my bare legs. The blond woman picked up my head scarf from the cushion behind me and handed it to Leila, who scented that as well. I now smelled strongly of 1968.

Several women took out their bags of
qat
and began to place the little green leaves in their mouths. Leila placed a handful of her
qat
on my lap. The blond woman on my right added a sprig. We began to chew. The goal is to keep the leaves in the left cheek, between the gums and the cheek, while gnawing on them to release the juices. They were bitter, as if I were chewing something slightly poisonous.

My initial impression was that
qat
was a very mild drug—less of an immediate jolt to the body than coffee. I had been chewing for nearly an hour before I felt anything at all other than nausea. Then the curtains of my mind began to slide open. The fog of exhaustion dissipated, and I felt lucid and sharp. My thoughts rang like crystal. I suddenly felt like running a marathon, writing a novel, or swimming the English Channel. If American journalists were to ever get ahold of
qat
, I am sure they would promptly deplete the supply.