The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (4 page)

VIEWING SANA’A
from above is a wholly different (and much quieter) experience from living it on the ground. After we climbed down from the roof, Sabri announced that he wanted to prepare a special lunch to welcome me, and we set out on a shopping expedition. We couldn’t head for the markets before two
P.M.
, he said, or people would ask him why he wasn’t at mosque on a Friday. So, just after two
P.M
., we went downstairs and stood in front of his black Mercedes as the two skinny boys who guarded the house opened the car doors. Inside, Sabri placed his thumb on the gearshift and the car thrummed to life.

As Sabri maneuvered through the crowded, labyrinthine streets toward the
souqs
(Arabian markets), I clung to my door handle. Yemenis are worse drivers than Bostonians. It doesn’t seem to matter what side of the street one drives on, and traffic lights are mere suggestions. No one wears seat belts (except me, on the rare occasions they’re available), although Sabri finally put his on when his car wouldn’t stop beeping to remind him.

The honking was incessant. Yemenis, I noted, drive with one hand on the horn and the other on the wheel. In New York, drivers honk to warn of danger. In Vermont, they honk as a friendly greeting. In Yemen, people honk simply because they are driving.

The majority of the white-and-yellow taxis and other cars passing us appeared to be held together with duct tape and a prayer, belching clouds of black smoke. The absence of any semblance of emissions testing in Yemen has turned Sana’a’s air into a soup of particulate matter.

The streets teemed with people, mostly men in white robes, hurrying home for the afternoon meal. Many carried long bunches of shiny green leaves tucked under their arms, which Sabri told me was
qat
, a plant whose stimulating leaves Yemenis chew for hours every day. I’d read about
qat
and was eager to try it, despite the fact that drugs don’t usually interest me. But most of Yemen’s social and political life revolves around ritualistic
qat
chews, and so if I were really going to learn about Yemeni culture, a chew was de rigueur.

As we hurtled on, I tried to decipher the Arabic writing scrawled on storefronts and mosques. I had taught myself the alphabet and a few phrases, and it was rather thrilling to see the graceful Arabic letters everywhere. On every sign! On every restaurant! I desperately desired to learn how to decode them. So far, I only recognized the occasional S sound and an article meaning “the.”

We drove first to the fish markets in the old Jewish quarter, where rows of one-story buildings crowded around small squares packed with men pushing wheelbarrows of prickly palm fruits or cucumbers. Peddlers swiftly pared the skin away from their wares so that their customers could eat them right on the spot, dripping juice into the wheelbarrow. Men waiting at the fish stalls jostled and pushed each other to get to the front. There was no discernible line. Stepping over pools of water and fish blood, Sabri and I walked up two steps into a tiny, grimy storefront, where heaps of bloodied fish lay on the stone counter. A wall of smells accosted me: brine and decay and
fishiness
. My empty stomach began to seize, and I backed out into the street to wait for Sabri. Passing men turned to stare at me, wide-eyed. “Welcome to Yemen!” some said. How did they know I had just arrived? I wondered. (More than a year later, men would
still
be welcoming me to Yemen. While it was nice to feel wanted, the greeting irritated me. I
live
here, I wanted to say. I’ve been here
forever
.)

Sabri rejected all the fish in the first shop, and we moved on to the second. A man in a bloodied apron held up a medium-size
hammour
and opened the gills for Sabri’s inspection. This fish passed muster and was placed in a plastic bag and handed over.

The next stop was a small, foul-smelling fish restaurant. We stepped through the doorway and Sabri handed our catch through a window to the kitchen, where it was split open, painted with red-orange spices, and shoved down into a deep, cylindrical oven. Men in stained aprons rushed platters back and forth to the small dining room, where tables of scrawny men (obesity was obviously not one of Yemen’s problems) were tearing off strips of bread and fish with their hands and stuffing them into their mouths. In the kitchen, other men stirred chunks of fish into orange sauces or kneaded bread into large disks to be roasted. In the back room, Sabri directed a worker in the preparation of a salsa (called
zahawek)
for the fish. Garlic, tomatoes, peppers, and a slab of white cheese were pushed through what looked like a hamburger grinder, and the resulting sauce was poured into a plastic bag. I stood in a corner, watching, trying to stay out of everyone’s way.

The white-clad, dagger-sporting men eating lunch stared at me, despite the fact that I was draped in black from head to toe, my hair covered. Their eyes made me feel like I had accidentally left the house in a sequined bikini. I had never felt quite so conspicuous. “Welcome to Yemen,” each said when he first caught sight of my pale blue eyes. “Where are you from?”

One bearded man told me he had lived in New York for two years, but he left because there were too many drugs on the street. Another man told me he was a neighbor of Sabri’s. A third man asked me if I had children and if I was married. They were so curious and excited to see me that you’d think Julia Roberts had walked in. Only these men probably had no idea who she was.

I said that I was married, and the men insisted that I have children. I promised to try. (Not only was I unmarried, but the thought of it terrified me. And at thirty-seven, I was still ambivalent about children.) Not a man in the place took his eyes off me until I turned to walk away. Maybe not even then.

Our fish at last was cooked, and Sabri collected it, along with bread and sauce. We headed out to a chorus of good-byes.
“Ma’a salaama!”
the men cried. “Welcome to our country!” Their attentions were flattering and sociable, but I was relieved to escape. There are no compunctions about staring in Yemen; none of the men are the least bit self-conscious about it. But for a woman to stare back was (I had read) ill-advised. This would be one of my greatest challenges. I am the kind of person who makes eye contact with strangers on the subway, flirts with men I meet on planes, and gives my phone number to random bus drivers. I can’t
help
it. But now I would have to help it. Being too social a butterfly was likely to get my wings singed.

BACK IN THE CAR,
Sabri cranked up the air-conditioning although it didn’t feel very hot. Sana’a is so high and dry that the heat never really gets unbearable. The car filled with the scents of cumin, roasted fish, and bread. We headed to the fruit market, where we picked out mangoes, skinny Yemeni apples, oranges, and cigar-sized bananas. Sabri split open a fresh fig and offered it to me. It tasted refreshingly like grass.

I was beguiled by the mounds of pomegranates, which didn’t look anything like the small, red pomegranates I knew. These were enormous, yellow-green, and grapefruit sized, with just the faintest pink blush. I wanted to ask Sabri to get some but was afraid of looking greedy. Besides, pomegranates are terribly difficult to eat. The thought of peeling off all that tough skin and prying loose each little juicy seed was, at that particular moment, exhausting.

We stopped once more to pick up spiced saffron rice and headed home. I was relieved to return to the security of his First World quarters, where I could catch my breath and let all of the new sights and smells settle. We were setting the table when Theo arrived. Theo, my high school sweetheart and the reason I landed in Yemen, had already been living in Sana’a for nearly two years, doing research for a book and occasional work for the
Yemen Observer
. Frustrated with the chaos and lack of standards at the newspaper, he had summoned me to come instill a few basics in the heads of its reporters. He had no journalism training himself. I still wasn’t sure why he had chosen me. Surely he knew other journalists. I couldn’t help wondering if it could be, at least partly, a faint hope of rekindling our long-expired romance. It had been probably seventeen years since we’d been together, but I still felt naked in his presence—the kind of vulnerability only a first love can inflict. We still mattered a little too much to each other to be at ease. But I hadn’t come here for romance. I came for the adventure of spreading the journalistic gospel in an utterly alien culture.

We had a massive amount of food. Sabri even broke out one of his best bottles of white wine, which we drank warm. Wine was a precious resource in this dry country, where it was illegal to sell alcohol or to drink it in public. Non-Muslims caught drinking in public could be sentenced to up to six months in prison, while Muslims faced a year behind bars, plus (in theory) eighty lashes with a whip. So I was fortunate to be staying with one of the very few Yemenis with a wine cellar. Theo was impressed with Sabri’s largesse and told me that I was being spoiled. “Don’t get used to this,” he said with a hint of warning.

We ate everything with our fingers from communal platters, ripping off pieces of chewy flatbread, using it to pull chunks off the blackened fish, and then dipping the bundles in the
zahawek
. It tasted of garlic and cumin. I loved it. The fish was sweet and tender, falling off the bones. All of the new foods preoccupied me, while Theo and Sabri talked about Faris, the mysterious founder and publisher of the
Yemen Observer
, whom I was to meet the next day.

I had examined several issues of the
Observer
online before my arrival and now listened carefully as Sabri and Theo enumerated the myriad faults of the paper. The biggest problem was management, said Theo. There wasn’t any. Nothing seemed to come in on any real deadlines, and there were no procedures for getting story ideas approved. When I wrote for newspapers, things generally worked like this: Reporters ran around town talking to sources and coming up with ideas for stories. They pitched these ideas to their editor. The editor either approved, refined, or killed the ideas. The reporters then reported, wrote, and sent their stories to their editor. That editor checked the reporting and basic structure and sent it along to a copy editor, who checked solely for grammar and style. And then it was published. The
Yemen Observer
did none of this. According to Theo, people wrote what they wanted to write, and it went into the paper as is. Quality checks on either the reporting or the prose were nonexistent.

This bit didn’t bother me too much. It wasn’t my problem. After all, I was there for only three weeks, to help the journalists hone their skills. I certainly wasn’t going to muck about in management and I didn’t have time for a revolution.

“And no one has any training,” Theo said. “The whole staff is made up of English majors who have no background in journalism. They have no idea how to structure a story. Or how to report it. Oh—and you will have to convince them that it is wrong to plagiarize from the Internet.”

I paused, a handful of fish midway to my mouth. “They
plagiarize?”

“All the time.”

“What about copyright law?”

“There is no copyright law in Yemen. Intellectual property rights don’t really exist.” He took a sip of wine.

“Oh.”

“And they also write about advertisers all the time. Faris has them write about his friends and such.”

“But that’s unethical!” I protested. “You can’t write stories about advertisers. It destroys credibility.”

Theo shrugged. “Explain that to Faris.”

Sabri, a friend of Faris’s, smiled knowingly. “I’ve also noticed some mistakes in the reporting,” he said.

“Some
mistakes?” said Theo. “Anyway, that’s why Jennifer is here.” He turned to me. “And could you teach them how to do Internet research? And how to know which sources are valid? And, you know, they sometimes refuse to put bylines on stories. You should get them to do that.”

I tried not to dissolve into a puddle of terror.

I’d been a journalist for more than ten years, but I had never taught a journalism course before, let alone in the Arab world. I was jellied with nerves. “You’ll need to show them you are in command right away,” said Theo. “You will have to find some way to make them show up on time every day. Oh—and you will need to tell them you are married. No woman your age here is unmarried, and if they find out that you are single they will assume something is terribly wrong with you. You don’t want to give them any reason to look for something wrong with you.”

He had said this to me before I left New York, which is why I was wearing my divorced friend Ginger’s wedding ring on my left hand. I don’t normally wear jewelry, and it felt tight and uncomfortable on my finger.

Sabri was westernized enough to be able to handle the knowledge that I was unmarried. Earlier that morning, when he found out I was vegetarian (except for fish, a recent addition to my diet) he said, “Well! You would make someone a very cheap wife!”