The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (31 page)

Half an hour later I wake again feeling worse. I take two more pills and crawl downstairs to make coffee. But I am too sick to drink it. When Aisha arrives to clean my house, she finds me sitting at my kitchen table, staring mournfully at my full cup. “Hospital?” she says, looking concerned. I shake my head. I’m just hungover, I think. I will get better. Going to the pool will probably help. I take two Advil and two more green pills and go for a swim.

My first flip-turn nearly makes me vomit, and I wonder if I will have to get out. But lap by lap I begin to feel better. After forty-five minutes, I climb out, shivering, and head to the sauna to warm up. But I can’t seem to sweat; I just dry out and my fingers, oddly, stay cold.

The nausea worsens. I take two more green pills. After all, if I remember correctly, they can be taken every hour. I manage to keep from vomiting in the taxi and go home to collapse on my bed. I can’t eat. I can’t even get down water. I am exhausted but too ill to sleep. Zuhra calls me to find out why I’m not at work. She is worried.

“You should not be alone,” she says. “You need a hospital.”

“I’ll be okay. I just need to rest.”

I am still trying to sleep a half hour later when Noor rings me. “We are at your door,” she says. “We have come to take you to the hospital.”

Given my experiences with Yemeni hospitals, I’m not sure I want to go. But perhaps the doctors could give me some antinausea drugs, which might allow me to finally sleep.

I find Noor and Najma waiting at the bottom of my stairs. After removing their shoes, they stand to pull back their veils.

“This is the first time you have seen our faces,” says Noor.

“Yes!” I stare from one to the other. Noor is much as I imagined her, very pretty, though with a rounder face and smaller chin than I had expected. Najma is also pretty, with a sparkly smile, despite crooked bottom teeth that bend inward.

“It is very sweet of you to come,” I say. It is difficult for me to speak through the nausea.

They’ve been looking around my house curiously. “You don’t live here
alone
, do you?” says Noor.

I nod. “Yes. It’s just me.”

They look at each other and then back at me.

“That is
terrible,”
says Najma. “You have no one?”

“We don’t think you should be here alone,” says Noor. “Not when you are sick.”

“I’m okay.”

They look deeply skeptical.

Outside, Salem is waiting in the van. I dread the ride, nauseated as I am, but Salem is as good a driver as there is in Sana’a. We head for the Yemeni-German Hospital, because it is the closest. This is the same hospital where I had the incompetent X-rays, but I don’t know where else to go.

Najma and Noor tell the clerk at the front desk what kind of doctor I want, and he gives me a file. I pay him several thousand
riyals
and take the file to a main waiting room.

Several doors open off of the main waiting room, each for a different specialist. We wait for at least a half hour to see the internist, sitting mostly in silence, as I am too ill to talk. Men with their arms in casts come out of the orthopedist’s office. Old women in
setarrhs
, traditional Sana’ani dresses of red and blue cloth, limp from the internist’s office. Men sitting next to me cough and spit. I begin to wish I hadn’t come, feeling that I am more likely to pick up an illness here than to cure one.

Finally, we see the doctor. He speaks English, so I tell Najma and Noor they can leave me. I explain to him the problem and say I hope he can give me something to ease the nausea. Then I show him the packet of little green pills I have been taking.

He pales. “Stop taking these immediately,” he says. “These are for pain! Not for nausea.”

I immediately realize my mistake. I have been taking the prescription painkillers I was given for my ribs, which are to be taken once every twenty-four hours, rather than the nausea pills, which are to be taken two every hour. Frantically, I try to remember how many I have taken. Six. Maybe eight. Will I be okay? Oh god, and I took two Advils!

The doctor assures me I will live, though I probably won’t feel much better for twenty-four hours. I don’t think I can survive feeling like this for that long and am grateful when he writes me a prescription for antinausea medication.

At the pharmacy, though, I am given an enormous bag of liquid, a needle, and a packet of powders. “To inject,” he says. I stare at him in horror. He actually seems to expect me to mix up the powders with the liquid and inject the solution into myself. After what I have seen of the hygiene of Yemeni hospitals, I refuse to allow another needle into my arm.

We return to the doctor to argue about this. He says that I need the injection. I reiterate that I don’t. Finally, clearly annoyed, he writes me a prescription for antinausea pills, which cost the rest of the
riyals
I have.

At home, I ring a friend in New York, who looks up the specific painkiller on the Internet to double-check whether I will die from the overdose. He also checks to make sure the antinausea medication they gave me is actually antinausea medication. It is,
al-hamdulillah
. But the list of warning signs he reads off to me about the painkiller makes me feel panicky.

“If you throw up something that looks like coffee grounds—”

“I don’t have that.”

“Or have pain and nausea in your stomach—”

“I have that!”

“Or you lose feeling in one side—”

“Nope.”

“Headache—”

“Yes.” My head is in searing pain.

He makes me promise that if I feel worse at all I will ring Nabeel and get someone at the embassy to help me.

In my journal, I make a list of lessons learned:

1. Never, ever, drink vodka selected by a twenty-four-year-old.
   

2. Never drink flavored alcohol, particularly green apple.
   

3. Never let a British person refill your glass while you aren’t watching.
   

4. When you wake up nauseated three hours before your alarm, do not take little green pills for nausea without reading the packaging.
   

5. When you continue to feel nauseated, do not continue to take little green pills without reading the packaging.
   

6. When you purchase little green pills, try to make sure the packaging insert is in English.
   

7. Remember that lots of different kinds of drugs come in little green pills.
   

Seeing me weak and helpless has made me less imposing to Noor and Najma. They invite me to their relatives’ weddings and talk to me about things outside of work. My illness has humanized me.

In February, Noor invites me to my first Yemeni wedding. She ducks into my office one day, aflutter with excitement, and shyly presents me with a beribboned card. I’m flattered to be asked and dying of curiosity about the ritual.

I have no idea what to wear. Everyone has told me that Yemeni women wear scandalously little to weddings, where there are no men to ogle them. All weddings are sex segregated. While the bride and groom do meet earlier in the day (or even earlier in the month) to sign the marriage contract, it astonishes me that the celebration of their union does not involve any actual union.

The men have big lunches followed by long
qat
chews, with music and maybe dancing, whereas women gather in wedding halls to sip tea, dance, and admire each other’s outfits. Some more modern families allow the groom to pick the bride up at the end of the wedding, when almost all of the guests are gone, but this is not common.

While I’ve been told that it doesn’t matter how much flesh I show at a wedding, I cannot bring myself to dress provocatively in this environment. I settle on a knee-length, blue silk dress with a fitted waist and spaghetti straps and wrap myself up in an
abaya
.

In the corridors of the wedding hall, swarms of women are shedding
abayas
to reveal spangled, candy-colored dresses and heavily made-up faces. The dresses resemble the most shameless of prom gowns or things a stripper might wear for the first thirty seconds of her act. There are women in see-through lace, women in black rubber miniskirts, women with trains ten feet long. It is impossible to overdress (or underdress) for a Yemeni wedding. Yards and yards of black hair, painstakingly straightened or curled, are sprayed into sticky towers or hang loose down girlish backs, a few strands tucked into a glittering butterfly barrette. In Yemen, my waist-length hair is merely average. The women’s faces are painted with thick black eyeliner and colorful eye shadow, regardless of age. It looks as though they are all wearing masks by the same designer.

The married women wear small, round decorative caps and sit on cushions around the edge of the room, smoking
shisha
and chewing
qat
.

Feeling conspicuously modest and plain in my simple dress and bare face (save for lipstick), I wander down an aisle searching for familiar faces. Zuhra finds me first. She is encased in floor-length pink polyester with a sequined camisole top. Her thick black hair hangs in loose curls to her waist, and she wears tiny pink feathers as earrings. She looks
gorgeous
. She twirls in front of me, smiling, showing off a little. “Come,” she says, taking my arm and leading me to a table near the front.

We sit and talk while Somali women circle the room with trays of milky sweet tea. Clad in a short, spangled dress, Noor hurries to greet me and introduce me to a dozen other cousins. Her mother comes over to introduce herself. “You are all Noor talks about,” she says. “It’s Jennifer
tammam
, Jennifer
tammam!”
(“Jennifer good!”) I am enormously grateful. I had never been sure what Noor thinks of me.

Then the dancing begins. The whole outing is totally worth it just to see little Zuhra dance. One of the first to take the stage, she lifts her thin arms, gray from lack of sun, her hair swirling about her waist, lips curved into a sly smile, eyes downcast, hips a-shimmy. No Western woman in a disco could be more sultry a temptress than this candied mermaid, Zuhra, brushing back long strands of hair from her dark eyes and laughing.

Soon a flock of women converge upon the dance floor, a field of undulating butterflies. No two are wearing the same color. One fat woman has even squeezed herself into something that looks like a Hefty bag or an S and M outfit. Women form a circle on the stage, taking turns dancing in the middle to whoops of appreciation.

The dance is mostly in the hips. The upper body is still, arms carving slow arcs through the air. But what surprises me more than anything is the slackness and abundance of flesh. I had thought Yemeni women were all tiny, thin little things, but the fifteen hundred women on display are anything but. Their flesh is loose from lack of exercise, their backs utterly without tone, their arms jiggling when they wave. The physical consequences of their confinement. Their skin is mottled and pale, the result of being denied even a glimpse of sunlight through their
abayas
. When Zuhra returns, I look at my arm next to hers on the table and notice mine is browner.

When the bride finally arrives, she proceeds slowly down the raised stage running through the center of the room. Cameras flash and a black rayon wave ripples across the room as the women cover themselves with scarves to keep from getting caught on film. Only professionals take photographs; the rest of us had to leave our cameras at the door.

The bride is petite and dressed in a mass of Princess Diana—style white satin. I suspect her face is pretty, but it is obscured by thick layers of foundation, blush, eyeliner, and lipstick. I try to guess how she feels about her impending wedding night from her smile. It looks forced; she is posing for the cameras. But she doesn’t look unhappy. She gazes down at the crowd with a sort of haughty triumph, as if lording her union over the poor, unfortunate spinsters around her.

“Tell me she is marrying someone nice,” I whisper to Noor.

She nods. “She is,” she assures me.

While I am pleased finally to experience a Yemeni wedding, the festivities ultimately make me restless. The music is so loud that we cannot talk, we can only dance or watch. After a while, women perch on the edge of the stage, dangling their feet and looking suffused with ennui.

So as soon as the bride is safely down the aisle and surrounded by women ululating and cheering her, I slip out with Zuhra. There is not much left of the ceremony, Zuhra tells me. The bride will hold court for a while and dance with the women. Eventually, she will either meet her groom at their new home later that night or return to her home and wait to meet him the next morning, when they are both fresh.

In the hallway, we pull on our long robes before heading out into the night. The streets are full of loitering men waiting for their painted women to emerge, once more swathed in anonymous black.

FOURTEEN
tropical depression

One day, the usually gentlemanly al-Matari marches into my office midmorn
ing and announces, without preamble, “Then I will quit!”

“What?”
I say, looking up from my computer.

“They have not given me my whole pay, so I will quit.”

“Why didn’t they give you your whole pay?”

“I don’t know.”

I march upstairs to the accountant’s office with him. It turns out that al-Matari has forgotten that he recently borrowed money from work to buy a blender. Once he realizes where the money has gone, al-Matari tells me everything is okay and goes back to work. I hope it’s a good blender.

Then when the accountants dole out my own February salary, they give me only $50. “That’s all we have now,” they say.
Right
. Still, this is plenty for the moment, and it is more important that the rest of my staff gets paid, which they haven’t been this month. It’s several days after payday, and they lack the various safety nets I have in times of crisis, like credit cards (which exist in Yemen but are not widely used).

My reporters don’t just live month-to-month, they live in the future. They spend every paycheck before it arrives, so delays are always harrowing. A week before the end of the month, everyone starts coming to me to borrow money for dinner or
qat
or their aunt’s hospital bill, which quickly drains my own pockets. By the second day of the month, every one of us—myself included—is flat broke.

I’ve been lending the little I have quite a bit. Now that my debts are paid off and my lifestyle costs very little, I have a few dollars to play with. I’ve loaned Zuhra $200 this week, though she has already paid me back. And I had to buy Samir dinner last night because he hadn’t eaten. This is the first time in my life I have been able to do this, and it makes me happy. In New York, I could never buy anyone dinner.

I ask the Doctor to pay my whole staff, especially Manel, because he is leaving for Senegal, as well as my phone bill. I’ve made several international calls to report a story for
Arabia Felix
, and my phone bill is an unprecedented YR30,000 ($150). The Doctor refuses.

“But I only use this phone for work,” I say. “I made those long-distance calls for
Arabia Felix
, which didn’t pay me a single
riyal
for that feature story. If I have to fork out for the reporting that I did, you are essentially asking me to
pay
for the privilege of writing for
Arabia Felix.”

The Doctor is unpersuadable. He tells me that the paper hasn’t been making money (of course it hasn’t—it hasn’t turned a profit since it launched, according to Faris) and thus there is no money to pay my staff. Manel will have to wait for his salary. Which is a whopping $300.

“Manel is leaving the country
tomorrow,”
I say. “You will pay him
today!”

The Doctor tells me that I should stay out of financial matters, because they are none of my business.

“When my staff threatens to quit because they have not been paid, it
is
my business,” I say. “I do not expect anyone to work for free.”

Desperate to get Manel paid before he gets on a plane, I finally ring Faris.

Within minutes, he e-mails me back with one word: “Done.” Which is generally what he says when I ask him for something he thinks is reasonable. Sometimes this means he will immediately do what I want, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it means he just wants me to shut up.

But ten minutes later, Mas comes in to tell me my phone bill has been settled. An hour later, Manel has been paid. I guess the Doctor found some money. Now all I have to worry about is editing a paper.

I AM WEARY.
I’m still not sleeping enough, and I wish that getting even basic things done around the paper didn’t require a full-scale battle. I’m also lonely. I’m without a roommate again and my nonstop schedule hasn’t allowed many social excursions. So when the cowboy Marvin (who had first stopped by my office months ago and has since become a friend) and his wife, Pearl, invite me to join them for a week in Soqotra later in the month, I accept immediately. It will still be work; Marvin wants me to write about his livestock program, and I imagine Soqotra will have other stories to offer. But I will get a break from Sana’a.

“Just make sure you arrange for everything to run smoothly while you are gone,” Faris says. Right. Like that has
ever
happened.

Jabr and Bashir try to hug me good-bye, but I won’t let them.
“Why?”
they complain.

“Because you’re Yemeni. And it’s not the sort of thing Yemenis ought to do.”

Really, it’s that Yemeni men interpret casual physical contact much differently than Western men do. Western men don’t think twice about being embraced by a woman, but a Yemeni man might immediately assume my morals were coming loose and that he could take advantage of this. I also refuse to hug my male reporters because I am scrupulous about leaving no room for misinterpretation of my relationship with them. Nothing is more important to me than maintaining this boundary and being taken seriously as a boss and a woman. I cannot bear the thought of them thinking of me sexually.

It already makes me uncomfortable that Jabr constantly proposes articles related to sex. He writes me reports on the increasing use of Viagra and other sexual stimulants, the rising popularity of pornography, the sexual side effects of Red Bull, and how young men and women are beginning to hook up via Bluetooth technology, which leads to all sorts of
haram
behavior. Though the tone of these articles is always condemning, a little too much glee goes into the writing of them.

When I hug Luke good-bye, the Yemeni men protest the inequity. “He’s Californian!” I say. “It’s an essential part of his culture.”

I HAVE A FIT
of anxiety about leaving the paper and fuss at Luke and Zuhra, leaving them lists and making sure they know which pages are due when.

“Just go,” says Luke. “We’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Just remember the Health page should be done the first day of the cycle. And try to keep on schedule.” I pick up my suitcase. “Oh! I feel like a mother leaving her child with a babysitter for the first time.”

“Yalla,”
says Luke. “We’ll try to keep the kid alive.”

MARVIN, PEARL, AND I
catch the Yemenia flight to Soqotra, leaving in the middle of the night. None of us sleeps on the plane. Despite my exhaustion and anxiety over abandoning the office for a week, I am excited. I remember my neighbor Mohammed telling me that people who haven’t seen Soqotra have only lived half a life. Yemenis speak rapturously about the tropical desert island, as one might speak of paradise. Even those who have never been there extol its charms. I prepare myself to enter a fairytale world.

We arrive at eight
A.M.
and emerge into oppressive heat—the kind difficult to imagine until it flattens you. The Soqotra “international airport” is one tiny building, thronged with people. Herds of foreigners from our plane mingle with crowds of Soqotri people hoping to get some work. The first thing I notice about Soqotris is their teeth. On the mainland, I am constantly confronted with rotting brown teeth. But Soqotris must not chew as much
qat
or smoke as much tobacco. Or perhaps they have been blessed with good genes. Their teeth are beautiful and white, dramatically so against their dark skin. A mix of Asian and African, Soqotris have very black skin and sculpted faces. I find them
gorgeous
.

Pearl and I go outside to find Rasheed, a Soqotri man who works with them and drives their company car, a monstrous white SUV. Rasheed is slim and handsome, with sparkling black eyes and a rascal’s smile. With all the windows open, we cruise along a coast so spectacular I almost forget the heat. The ocean glitters in the morning sun to our left, and mountains rise precipitously to our right. The lower slopes are peppered with fat, fleshy trees topped with pink flowers—the Soqotri desert rose. The coastline scallops in and out, creating pretty little lagoons. It only takes about fifteen minutes to reach the wee village—excuse me, the hopping capital city—of Hadibo. At first I don’t recognize it as even a town. It looks more like the ruins of something. Low stone walls, which apparently are buildings, crawl across the dust everywhere. At least, they’re buildings according to the Soqotri definition of the word, which doesn’t necessarily include a roof. This is the most populous area of the eighty-mile island. No exact census exists, but the population is estimated to be between forty thousand and a hundred thousand.

As we rumble down what passes for the main street, Pearl points out the Soqotra Women’s Development Association, which sells local handicrafts and offers opportunities for female tourists to meet with local Soqotri women; the Soqotri honey store, run by a French man and Lebanese woman who have been training the Soqotris to manage hives; a tiny grocery store selling soft drinks, tinned beans, and candy; and plain, boxy hotels without signs.

On the other side of town (the foreigners’ area, the Soqotri version of Hadda), we come to the house Pearl and Marvin rent from Rasheed. A metal door painted with red and blue diamonds opens into a pebbled courtyard. On our left is a raised, tiled area about the size of a large room, with only three walls. Just past that is an enclosed room. Across the courtyard is a kitchen containing only a sink, and opposite is a small, pink-tiled Yemeni bathroom with a squat toilet and a cold-water shower. (Cold being relative; the water in Soqotra is never less than warm.)

Pearl and Marvin insist I take the one closed room and string up their mosquito net on the tiles. I drag my things into my room and cover the tiny, thin mattress with my sheet. The small bed, adrift in a desert of linoleum, depresses me, making me feel acutely single. I lie down for a nap. It is stifling, nearly too hot to sleep, but I manage to slip into a tropical torpor for a bit before waking around noon. We all take quick showers to cool off and walk into town for lunch. It’s so hot I have trouble making my legs move. The dusty main street is deserted. It feels like the American Wild West at high noon.