The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (13 page)

But this is just the first phase of the drug. During this phase, chewers customarily banter with each other, trading barbs. In the second phase, the conversation becomes more focused, zeroing in on a topic. After that is Solomon’s Hour, named for the Prophet Solomon, rumored to be fond of meditation. During this time, everyone slips into thoughtful trances and cannot be bothered to talk.

I didn’t stay long enough at this chew to get to that stage.

By the time Dr. al-Haj called to check on me, I was ready to go. I couldn’t sit
still
any longer. What I found most mysterious about
qat
chews is how people were able to sit for so long while ingesting a stimulant.

Dr. al-Haj walked me home, where I was hugely relieved to be alone again. It wasn’t until I was standing in my room that I realized the monumental effort it had cost me to be someone other than myself for the hours of lunch and the chew. It was obviously easy to make Yemeni friends, but for how long could I pretend to be a virtuous married woman who had never had a lover? It seemed impossible that I could ever manage this feat on a daily basis for as long as a year. Concealing so much of myself made me lonely. It also felt dishonest. This is what made spending time with Yemeni people so exhausting—all the parts of me I had to hold back. Restraint has never been my strong suit.

Not that I was thinking about staying. Was I?

BACK AT WORK,
I finished my piece on Arab democracy for
Arabia Felix
, which I titled “Cultivating the Desert.” (Faris subsequently lifted this title for a coffee-table book on the elections he published later that year.) My students claimed the rest of my time as I crammed as much as I could into my final lessons. For a class on Internet research, I herded my reporters to the computers. We began by examining a site that collects tax forms of international nonprofits; a site that gives profiles of every domain; and snopes.com, an urban legend—debunking site, which everyone loved. They wanted to look up all kinds of urban legends. I found it intriguing that the men wanted to look up urban legends about marriage, whereas the women wanted to look up stories about Hurricane Katrina and war. So much for gender stereotypes. I bet if Yemen had a Cosmo-like magazine, the men would devour it at least as enthusiastically as the women.

The point of this exercise was to show my students how to figure out which sites were reliable sources of information and which were sources of unfounded rumor. They had a remarkable inability to tell the two apart. They believed
everything
they read on the Web, which made for some interesting assertions in their stories. They did not question what they were told. If I could teach them just one thing, I decided, it would be skepticism.

EVERYTHING I DID
during my last few days in Yemen was suffused with curiosity about what would happen if I actually accepted Faris’s job offer. What would I be like as an editor in chief? Could I keep up the exhausting pace Faris expected of me? And what if I gave up my life in New York to come here, made myself a home, and then failed? What if I couldn’t get my reporters to meet deadlines? What if I couldn’t actually get an entire issue organized and out in time twice a week?

FORTY-FIVE PEOPLE
showed up at the farewell banquet Faris threw for me on my second-to-last night at Shaibani, a fish restaurant. No one had ever thrown me such an extravaganza! Almost everyone I invited showed up: Dr. al-Haj, Shaima, Sabri, the entire staff of the
Yemen Observer
, other friends, and even a jazz band from New York, scheduled to play at the American Embassy the following night. But I didn’t realize until we were all assembled that my women were missing. Where were Zuhra and Arwa and Radia and all the people I loved best? I was heartbroken. I had forgotten that they were not allowed out this late.

Faris stood up and gave a speech, saying how much I had changed the newspaper in just a few weeks, that his staff had demanded that I return, and that they all loved me. He showered me with gifts, which were stacked in a pyramid on the table in front of me: a whole set of silver jewelry in an enormous blue velvet box, two
jambiyas
with belts, seven baseball caps (one signed by the entire staff, telling me not to go), and five miniature Yemeni houses to bring home as gifts. He also handed me an envelope containing three crisp $100 bills.

Faris had hired two photographers to capture the event, and they took pictures of me nonstop throughout the dinner. I had paparazzi! I felt like Madonna. We ate Yemeni fish and bread and salsa and bananas with honey. The honey—for which Yemen is renowned—tasted of jasmine and God. It was that good.

I went home alone that night feeling weepy and confused, and lonely in that particular way one gets lonely when one is in between places, belonging nowhere. My heart sank at the prospect of going back to my New York routine. But could I possibly ever belong here?

On my last day in Yemen, I stopped once more at the office. My reporters threw themselves at me and begged me not to go. Zuhra pulled me aside in the hallway and pressed a purple alligator-skin wallet into my hands.

“It’s not new,” she apologized. “But it’s my favorite thing I own and I love it. I wanted to give you something I love.”

I was so moved by this I couldn’t speak. I just took both her small hands in mine and squeezed them. If I come back, I thought, this will be why.

FIVE
you’ll die over there!

The most dispiriting thing about returning to work at
The Week
after a holiday
was that no one wanted to hear about it. I’d traveled quite a lot in my five years at the magazine, and it never failed to irk me that no one ever asked questions about my journeys beyond a polite “Nice vacation?” Perhaps this was understandable when I had been to well-trodden places such as Paris, Barcelona, and Dublin. But now I had been to Yemen! Few people in the office had even been able to place it on a map before I headed off there, and so I thought perhaps its exoticness would prompt some curiosity. After all, my colleagues were journalists, whose job it was to be professionally curious. They would surely be interested in the lands beyond the shores of Manhattan.

I was wrong. No one wanted to hear about the
Yemen Observer
, my students, or daily life in Arabia. A couple people asked what I wore while I was there, but that was the extent of their interest. This baffled and wounded me. I couldn’t help but take their lack of interest personally. I always spent my first few days back from holiday feeling irritated with the world. I wanted to share my experiences with the people with whom I spent eight hours a day. I wanted to be found interesting. Instead, I stared at my gray computer screen and began, with dread, the return to my tired routine.

After less than a week back in New York, I found I was tired of pretty much everything. I was tired of my morning rituals, tired of running in the same parks, tired of swimming in the same pools, tired of spending eight hours of every day in a drab midtown office, tired of the United States and our embarrassment of a president. I was tired of feeling underestimated by my boss and underutilized at the magazine. I was tired of the bleak cynicism of my coworkers. I was tired of media cocktail parties. I was even tired of my favorite fruit stand on Fortieth Street and Broadway, where the Afghan fruit seller who measured out my cherries and grapes took more of an interest in my Yemeni adventures than anyone in my office.

In New York I was always maniacally social and spent most of my evenings at art openings, parties, the theater, the opera, book readings, or simply drinking with friends. But now I found myself growing increasingly restless and malcontent. I craved novelty and the chance to spend my energy on something more personally meaningful than
The Week
. I had loved working for
The Week
for many years. I was one of the magazine’s first hires and had started there as an associate editor before its launch. It had been thrilling to see it through from conception to adolescence.

Still, five and a half years was longer than I had ever spent at any job, and my work at
The Week
sapped my energy for other projects I wanted to finish—some short stories, a novel, my stalled acting career.

Back in New York, I felt the years dwindling away, with little to show for them other than a few weekly magazine pages. Something had to be done, and before I got a day older. There had never been a better time. I was single, child free, and almost rid of my student loan debts from my two graduate degrees. If it took a year in Yemen to launch me out of the predictable routine of my life, so be it.

It was this combination of panic and thirst for novelty that prompted me finally to take Faris up on his offer. This was my chance to take a place on the front lines of the struggle for democracy in the Arab world! After all, democracy cannot take root without a free press. Perhaps I could help to make Yemen’s freer, just a bit, by loosening the tethers restraining my timid reporters.

My life would certainly feel more meaningful if I were helping my Yemeni journalists learn what they so ached to learn. I imagined revolutionizing the newspaper, breaking stories exposing government corruption, election fraud, and human rights abuses. I imagined writing pieces that would trigger policy changes, reduce terrorism, and alter the role of women in society. I imagined polishing the staff of the
Yemen Observer
into a well-oiled machine that scarcely needed interference or line editing from me. Oppressed peoples all over the world would beg me to come and transform their own press! (It’s difficult to write this now, years later, without dissolving into hysterical laughter at my naïveté.) I also imagined Zuhra, waiting for me to return.

THE FIRST PERSON
to tell was Bill, my editor at
The Week
. The entire morning of July 13, 2006, I was a nervous wreck, waiting to talk to him. I’d never worked anywhere for as long as I had worked at
The Week
, and I had never walked away from a job for as uncertain a future. I was giving up the highest salary I’d ever earned. I was kissing fantastic health insurance good-bye. I was turning my back on stability.

“So, what’s on your mind, Nif?” said Bill, tipping back in his chair. He was the only one in the office who used that particular nickname, which was reserved for my closest friends.

I took a breath. “I’ve just accepted another job.”

The front legs of his chair hit the ground with a bang. For once, I had thrown him. “What are you going to do? Run off and work at a newspaper in Yemen?” he joked.

“Actually … yes. I am going to be the editor of the
Yemen Observer
. I’ve been offered a year’s contract.”

His response could hardly have been more satisfying.
“Holy fucking shit
, are you
kidding
me? Are you out of your fucking mind? You’re
crazy
! You’ll die over there! I can’t believe you are seriously doing this! Why?”

This was a much more exciting reaction than I had expected. I had never seen Bill lose his cool like this. He ranted for a while about my questionable sanity, but when I finally calmed him down and explained what I was doing, he seemed to understand. He told me that it had been a swell five years and that the magazine would miss me. “We’ll hire someone to do your job,” he said. “But we’ll never replace you.”

The rest of the staff of
The Week
and most of my friends were just as surprised, although they expressed this in a slightly less dramatic fashion. Several people promptly sent me names of companies that provide kidnapping insurance. My parents, who know me fairly well, just said resignedly, “We thought something like this might happen.” One friend, a journalist for the
Wall Street Journal
, forwarded me a cautionary note from a woman who worked for the Foreign Service.

Yemen’s not too bad (beautiful country), as long as one stays in Sanaa. I wouldn’t recommend traveling outside of town, as people will take pot shots at you (generally just small arms fire) in some parts of the country. Also, Yemenis tend to kidnap foreigners for ransom—the most recent was only a few months ago, so one has to be incredibly vigilant. Lots of unsavory characters have been known to move through there on their way to other places.

On the other hand, it is gorgeous, and it has the largest open air arms market in the world, which is pretty cool. And the history is absolutely amazing … [But] why Yemen? There are lots of English language newspapers in the world that need editors.

While this was less than encouraging, around this time I found the following article on the website of the Yemen Observer, which I had failed to notice before.

Professional Journalist Raises Yemen Observer’s Standards

By Zuhra al-Ammari

Jul. 4, 2006

The American journalist who has been teaching at the Yemen Observe, Jennifer Steil, was presented with Jambia, necklace and various gifts at a farewell dinner on Sunday night in Al-Shaibani restaurant.

“We are paying farewell to a friend and to a teacher,” said Faris Sanabani, the publisher of the
Yemen Observer
as he presented Ms. Steil with the jambia. He thanked her for making a change in the newspaper in term of technical writing, and appearence,” he said.

Jennifer, “This is my first time in Yemen and the Middle, it has just been remarkable, you are the most open-hearted and friendly people ever, I love you guys and I hope to come back and can be with you again. Thank for you again” Everyone feel satisfied to the noticeable progress in their performance.

However, they feel sad too to say “farewell” to her and hope that she comes back. Adel, a journalist, said “I like this teacher for her spirit of volunteerism; she has been a patient teacher. I benefited a lot from her experience. I learned how to better my writing. She is really a queen.” Hassan, a journalist, said “Really, she is a smart journalist. It is enough for me to listen to her experience in field of journalism. She taught us modern principles of editing news and how one could do his or her news professionally.”

Arwa, a journalist, said “It was the first training course for me in English. I benefited by learning how to write. She is one of the best journalists I have seen. I make sure to attend all her classes. I benefited tremendously.” Radia, a secretary, said “She is a perfect woman. She is like the candle, she burns to give light to the others. I benefited a lot from her” Jennifer Steil has come from U.S.A to teach the Yemen Observer’s journalists some of the press skills.

She was observing the progress of every journalist. She gave them the advices for which they upgrade heir profession.

Copyright © 2004–2005
Yemen Observer Newspaper

The funny thing is, Zuhra was not allowed to attend my farewell dinner. Yet she managed to somehow get an accurate account of the evening and even a fairly accurate quote from me. Did she hire a stringer to take notes for her? Naturally, I would have been even happier if the story were grammatical, but that was one reason for going back, after all.

Knowing I was about to leave, I fell in love with my city all over again. I fell in love with my book-crammed apartment, with my belly-dancing neighbor downstairs, with my local pub, the Piper’s Kilt. I fell in love with the A train, the Harlem YMCA, Inwood Hill Park. I fell in love with each of my friends and went out almost every night that wasn’t spent packing to soak them all up. I went to art galleries and the theater. I went to one last ecstatic baseball game at Yankee Stadium, where I euphorically inhaled beer, popcorn, Cracker Jacks, peanuts, and everything else they had for sale, because I didn’t know when I could do it again. The Yankees graciously made the night perfect by winning.

The last Sunday I was in town, my friends in the neighborhood gathered at the Piper’s Kilt, which was holding its first karaoke night. My friend Tommy was bartending and shook his head at me.
“Yemen,”
he said, setting a gin in front of me and moving down the bar. “The next time I see you will be in a kidnap video.”

I wore a tiny red dress and red lipstick. Who knew when I could dress like that again? What I remember most from that night (other than standing on the bar barefoot singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane”) is that when I told Tommy I was heading home, he told me to wait a moment and came out from behind the bar. Tommy had
never
come out from behind the bar to say good-bye to me before any of my other trips abroad. He hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. “My god,” I said, looking at his mournful face as I stepped out of his arms. “You really don’t think I’m coming back, do you?”

My last morning, I went for a run through Inwood Hill and Fort Tryon parks in a torrential rainstorm. After five minutes, my shorts and shirt were plastered to my body, and my braids had glued themselves to my arms. I plunged on. A montage of memories of the countless mornings I’ve spent trotting past these lilies, these dripping trees, this gray river, accosted me. Jennifer Steil, I thought, this is your life. This
was
your life.