The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (43 page)

I ESCAPE LONELINESS
by burying myself in work, spending even more time with my staff as our time together shortens. Zaid can’t seem to make up his mind how he feels about me. One moment he’s telling me that I taught him everything he knows and that he reveres me, and the next he’s quitting again because I haven’t been respectful. But I’m still trying with him, still hoping that somehow he will manage when I am gone.

One mid-July closing day, he’s already quit once, so I’m surprised when he approaches me as Ali and I are finishing photo captions. “Are you going to the Bastille Day reception at the French ambassador’s house Saturday night?” he asks. I want to go, but I don’t have an invitation. Because I cannot legally be listed as the editor in chief on the masthead, all invitations now go to Zaid. Before he arrived, when they were still addressed to al-Asaadi, Enass passed everything to me.

“I have an invitation,” Zaid says. “Wanna be my date?”

“Okay, I’ll be your date.” It’s my peace offering. It is also a decision that will change the course of my entire life.

ON BASTILLE DAY,
the day of the French ambassador’s party, I have an unusually productive day. I edit all three health stories, including Adhara’s piece on the danger of listening to headphones in a lightning storm. She mistakes thunder for lightning, however, and keeps referring to “thunder strikes.” I also edit Jabr’s surprisingly adequate report on the harassment of women by taxi drivers. Near and dear to my heart.

My male reporters are terribly excited about the French party (the women of course are not allowed to go) and arrive at the office decked out in smart Western suits, their hair neatly combed or slicked back. I feel slightly less spectacular in plain black pants and a long royal-blue embroidered Turkish tunic. Nothing to be done. Useless to worry about fashion in Yemen. I put on exceptionally bright red lipstick and hope that will spruce me up.

Zaid, Jabr, Bashir (who still drops by to help us on closing days), and I all pile into photographer Mohammed al-Sharabi’s battered car, and away we go. Zaid makes me sit in the front, and the three men squish together in the backseat. Zaid rings someone on his cell.
“Feyn ant?”
he says. Where are you? Yemeni men begin every phone conversation like this. They cannot possibly talk to someone if they don’t know exactly where that person is.

“Do you know what that means?” asks Bashir.

“Of course,” I say, mildly insulted. “That’s baby Arabic!”

“No one speak Arabic!” says Bashir. “She can understand us now!”

We arrive early at French Ambassador Gilles Gauthier’s house and loiter outside the gates with a few other overeager invitees. At last, we are all admitted to the front garden, where we are subjected to a very thorough security check. My laptop, gym bag, and purse are taken away, and I am marched through a metal detector. In the wake of the Ma’rib bombing, everyone has tightened security.

A path of fairy lights leads us past a gauntlet of solemn French officials, who shake our hands and murmur,
“Bonsoir.”
Beyond them, rows of bushes open into a large backyard sheltered by tents. At least a dozen banquet-sized tables are covered with food, and the bar stretches about a city block long. Waiters circulate with platters of juices, wine, and shrimp. I take a glass of wine and look around. No wonder security is so tight; the place is teeming with ambassadors. Just then, the new Deputy British Ambassador Chris Shute, who arrived recently and has become a friend, catches my elbow. “Come,” he says. “I’ll introduce you to the new British ambassador.” I’m eager to meet him, since former Ambassador Gifford had been so helpful to me.

Chris leads me through the growing crowds to a tall, dark-haired man in a pinstriped suit, with the sparkliest blue eyes I have ever seen. I offer him my hand. “I’m Jennifer Steil, editor of the
Yemen Observer.”

“Tim Torlot,” he says, twinkling at me.

My heart trips over itself.
This is the man I want to marry
. The thought flashes through my mind only seconds after our hands meet. It’s completely irrational. He’s a stranger. Marriage is not on my agenda. But suddenly I’m more wide awake than I have been since I got to this country. I’m awash in joy and sorrow all at once. Steady now, Steil. Ambassadors are all married. I want to check his left hand, but I can’t look away from his eyes. I wonder how old he is. There’s no white in his hair, and his body is straight and slender.

Pulling myself together, I ask him how long he’s been here and what he’s seen of Yemen. He’s only been here three days.

“Where were you posted before Yemen?”

“Iraq, most recently. Shorter stints in Afghanistan, Chad, and the Central African Republic …”

“So really this is the safest country you’ve been to in years.”

“Yes. I’m beginning to wonder if the Foreign Office hasn’t been trying to tell me something,” he says, smiling. His eyelashes are curly and tipped with gold. Focus, Steil!

He asks how long I’ve been in Yemen.

“About a year. I’m leaving in a month and a half,” I say. “My contract is up at the end of August.”

He looks disappointed. Or am I projecting? I don’t want to leave Yemen, I realize. I desperately do not want to leave Yemen.

“Everyone I meet seems to be about to leave.”

“Yes,” I say. “High turnover rate, I’m afraid.”

We make small talk. What about the press in Yemen? he asks. Is it free? Which subjects are taboo? I talk about the
Observer
while he listens attentively. It must be something they teach diplomats: Never look away from the face of the person you are addressing.

Neither of us looks away, until I begin to worry I am monopolizing him. The line of dignitaries waiting to meet him has grown to unwieldy proportions.

“I’d love to talk longer,” he whispers. “But I am supposed to be meeting all these people.”

“Right. Sorry! I’ll leave you to it then. I’ve got a few people to meet myself.”

“I’m ever so pleased to meet you. Here—I’ve even got my cards already.” He hands me one.

“How efficient. It took me three months to get mine. And now I’m out. But it’s terrific to meet you.” He takes my hand one last time, and I reluctantly release him to the queue.

Feeling slightly dizzy, I head to the bar. It takes forever to get there. Every person I have ever met in Yemen is at this party. There are close to a thousand guests. I feel like I end up talking to most of them.

But there is only one conversation I record in my journal.

TWENTY-TWO
pomegranate season

Zuhra comes flapping into my office one late spring day at twice her normal
speed. “I got it!” she says, her smile so big I can see it through her
niqab
. “They gave it to me!”

“What?” I say. “Who gave what to you?”

“The embassy! The fellowship!”

“Which one?” Ever since Zuhra was rejected by Columbia, she has been madly applying for every fellowship that might take her out of the country.

“Your
embassy!” Zuhra says. “They are sending me to America!”

“They are?” I hug her. She’s too excited to stand still and is bouncing on her toes as if her grubby sneakers have grown springs. “Zuhra, that’s fantastic news! Tell me about the program.”

The Near East and South Asia Undergraduate Exchange Program is offering Zuhra full tuition and living expenses at an American university for one semester. Zuhra already has an undergraduate degree, but this does not disqualify her. Besides, given what I know of the Yemeni education system, a bonus semester couldn’t hurt. The embassy won’t tell her the exact dates of travel or where she will be placed until later.

I’m thrilled, and relieved that I will not be leaving her behind when I go. How could I walk out of the
Yemen Observer
while she was still there? How could I leave her in the hands of Zaid, whose inability to fill my editorial shoes grows more apparent every day? We cross our fingers and hope she gets sent to New York, where I think I will be in autumn and where her oldest brother, Fahmi, lives. A friend of a friend has offered me a free apartment in Manhattan for two and a half months, which at least gives me somewhere to land and sort out my future. Zuhra and I talk about what she will need to take with her. “I need some long skirts and shirts!” she said. “Modest things.”

I laugh, because the things Zuhra ends up buying to go to the United States are the same things that I bought to come here. Because Yemeni women wear
abayas
over their outfits every day, many hardly own any modest clothing. Underneath those polyester sacks are usually tight T-shirts and jeans, nothing they would want men to see.

Packing up to go is easier now that I know Zuhra will also be leaving. Not that I’ve done much packing—I’m still working the same schedule and haven’t had time. Nothing about these last couple of months feels final. There is no gradual decline of workload, no slowing of pace. I work flat out until the day I walk out the door. Is there any other way to do it with a newspaper? Issues still have to be closed, on the same deadlines. There is little time for reflection and no easing of pressure. I feel a desperate need to experience as much as possible before I go.

Thus, when my friend Phil Boyle calls from the British Embassy to offer me an interview with Shahid Malik, parliamentary undersecretary of state for international development and Britain’s first Muslim minister, I jump at the chance. Malik is in town for just a couple of days, and Phil is offering interviews to only the
Yemen Observer
and an Arabic paper. “I’ll do it myself,” I say. I suppose by now I should trust my staff to interview ministers, but I want this one. Editors shouldn’t get too far away from reporting, I rationalize. I don’t want to forget how to do it.

So a little before six
P.M
. one Wednesday afternoon in early August, I appear at the gates of the stately British ambassador’s residence. I’m riding a wave of euphoria, happy with work, happy to see the guards who swing open the vast metal doors to admit me, and, I can’t deny, excited to see the man whom all of this is arranged to protect.

Only a minute after I’m inside, standing between the vast lawn and the house, the gates swing open again and a forest-green Land Cruiser whips around the corner and into the driveway beside us. Several men with machine guns leap out and begin searching nearby rooftops with their eyes. Just behind them is Ambassador Tim Torlot, who springs from the backseat with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old released from school.

“It’s terrific to see you!” he says, having landed practically at my feet. “But I presume you’re here for work and not pleasure?” He’s all a-twinkle.

“Well, I don’t believe I’ve been invited for
pleasure
yet.” I can’t believe I just said that out loud. Am I
flirting
with the ambassador?

But he laughs and flushes. “I’m afraid we haven’t had time to organize a single event for pleasure yet.”

We stand there talking for so long that he nearly makes me late for my appointment with the minister. At last, he ushers me into the house and parks me in his study while he goes to track down the minister. I examine the bookcases lined up against the wall. Books in English! Hundreds of them! It’s been so long since I saw this many books in one place. I run my fingers along their spines with undisguised lust. Isabel Allende, Shakespeare, A. S. Byatt, Iain Banks, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Freya Stark, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, W. Somerset Maugham, a host of
reference
books! Every book on the shelf is something that I have either already read or am longing to read. I wonder whose books these are, Tim’s or his wife’s. (He is, of course, married.) Who is the reader? I want to ask Tim, but he has vanished.

A man from the embassy comes to fetch me. I have only fifteen minutes, so I get right to my questions. What does the minister see as the most pressing issue facing Yemen? (Population growth.) What are the most important aspects of the ten-year development plan the UK is signing with Yemen? (Population, education, water, the usual.) How does the UK plan to help Yemen integrate economically into the Gulf Cooperation Council? This one throws him. He stammers and gives me something vague. Phil commends me for that one as he ushers me out of the room. As usual, I’ve used up more than my allotted time. I’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to get him to say something that fizzed a bit, something not quite on script. When I walk out of the house, Tim comes bounding from the porch to meet me. I ask what he has done so far with Malik, and he tells me about various development projects they have visited. I’m facing the long rectangle of lawn, gazing at it longingly. “Do you have a croquet set?” I ask.

“Not here.”

“You’ve got a good lawn for it.”

“But I don’t. It’s all this weird spongy stuff. Here—come see.” He touches my arm and we walk onto the grass. Our feet sink into the springy loam with every step.

“I see what you mean.”

“We’ll have to do something about it.”

We stand there idly talking as the sun slips down over the mountains and the air cools. “I should go,” I say. “I have my roommate’s farewell dinner.

“And I had better be getting back inside.”

But neither of us moves. I suddenly have an overwhelming desire to kiss him. He’s almost close enough and sparking away at me like a firefly in the dusk. The thought flusters me, and I tear myself away.

The guards let me out the gate, and I walk down the street in a daze, practically vibrating with joie de vivre. I could gallop the entire way home. But I would be late for Koosje’s last night. I turn the corner and keep going, heading to the main street to find a cab. At home, I run all the way up my seven or so staircases and fling myself into the kitchen, where Carolyn is waiting.

“I’m in
love
with the new British ambassador,” I say, throwing myself into one of our plastic chairs.

Carolyn looks at me with calm skepticism. “There’s a new ambassador?”

“Yes, oh yes. And he’s the loveliest man on the planet.”

“Isn’t he married?”

I sag. “Yes,” I say. “I’m not going to run off with him or anything. I just
love
him.”

Fortunately for Carolyn, I get too distracted by preparations for Koosje’s last supper to keep obsessing about Tim. We’re always saying good-bye to someone. Our usual crowd meets at the Arabia Felix hotel, where we have the usual curry and
shisha
blowout bash. Afterward, the whole gang of us escorts Koosje to a taxi and runs waving after her.
“Ma’a salaama!
Safe journeys to the First World!”

Koosje’s departure is the beginning of the end of our home. She and Carolyn have become my family, and I miss Koosje like a sister. I’m terribly glad Carolyn has decided to stay.

Later that month, Carolyn and I go to a quiz night at the British Club. Our team does quite well, and I can’t help beaming often and inappropriately at Tim, who is also here, standing across the room at the bar. His wife and their visiting daughter, a vivacious seventeen-year-old, are here too, but in another part of the room. It takes me a while to figure out who they are. I don’t speak to Tim, but we smile at each other an awful lot.

“Incorrigible flirt,” Carolyn says accusingly before heading over to Tim to introduce herself. “He’s
my
ambassador, after all,” she says. They talk for ages, and when she returns to our table, she looks at me significantly and says, “I see what you mean.”

LOCUST SEASON, WEDDING SEASON,
and pomegranate season arrive simultaneously; in August, Sana’a is taken over by bugs, brides, and wheelbarrows spilling over with round yellow-green fruit. On my way to work, I see small boys chase fist-sized locusts, catching them with dusty palms and stuffing them into plastic bottles. They carry these bottles home, where the bugs are roasted and eaten.

The locust infestation inspires my hands-down favorite editorial. One Thursday, we finish the paper by four
P.M
., and I am closing down my computer when Ali pops his head back into my office, looking alarmed.

“Editorial?”

I look up at him. “Oh
no
. I totally forgot!”

“So did I.”

I switch my computer back on and open the folder of front-page stories for this issue. Nothing inspires me. Then Jabr’s piece catches my eye. He’s done a marvelous locust story, including the fact that people in the streets are rejoicing in the bounty and eating them. It sports one of my all-time favorite headlines:
LOCUSTS INVADE SANA’A, BECOME SNACKFOOD
.

“Ali,” I say, “can you get on the Internet and find me locust recipes?”

“Yeah,” he says, laughing. “Let’s do that.”

A few minutes later, he sends me a list of recipes from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s website, and I write a brief editorial on why we should eat the critters.

HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR LOCAL LOCUSTS

Swarms of hopping, soaring locusts have begun encroaching on our territory. These pests are a plague to farmers whose crops they threaten. But in the cities, many of us are rejoicing at the ubiquity of one of our favorite snacks. And why not treat yourself to a handful of locusts? They’re cheap, tasty, and readily available. Besides, you’ll be doing your bit to help protect crops from their deadly munching. So, with a little bit of help from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, here are a few recipes to help you make your locusts even tastier. After all, given that these critters are so intent on eating our food supply, it’s only right that we bite back.

Try these at home:

  
Tinjiya (Tswana recipe)

Remove the wings and hind legs of the locusts, and boil in a little water until soft. Add salt, if desired, and a little fat and fry until brown. Serve with cooked, dried mealies (corn).

  
Sikonyane (Swazi recipe)

Prepare embers and roast the whole locust on the embers. Remove head, wings, and legs … and the rest set on the coals to roast. The roasted locusts are ground on a grinding stone to a fine powder. This powder can be kept for long periods of time and can be taken along on a journey. Dried locusts are also prepared for the winter months. The legs, when dried, are especially relished for their pleasant taste.

  
Cambodia