The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (25 page)

“Thank you.”

I find Zuhra and try to take her to the van, but she keeps spotting new sources to tackle. We are about to make it out of the gate when she sees one of the men who want us dead.

“There’s one of the fanatics!” she cries, recognizing a man she met in court before. “I have to get a quote!” I watch her flap away, bursting with pride.

Finally, we all pile into the van to go back to the paper. Zuhra and I decide that it will be fastest to write the story together. She has all of the quotes from the judge and other sources, and I have descriptions of the proceedings and quotes from al-Asaadi. We run to my office, and Zuhra pulls a chair up to my desk. We send someone out for tea.

“Have you had breakfast?” I said.

“No.”

“Eat this. We can’t have you falling over before deadline.” I hand her an energy bar, a package of peanuts, and a parcel of toast from my secret food drawer.

We are a good team, working fast and efficiently, me typing, Zuhra reading and translating her notes for me. Our story is online within an hour—and we are the first to break the news, beating Reuters, Agence-France Presse, and the BBC.

I am very pleased and flushed with manic energy. Zuhra and I high-five each other and toast ourselves with sugary tea.

Ibrahim calls in the afternoon to congratulate me. “It was so brilliant, so professional, and you even got a quote from a fanatic!” he says.

“That’s all Zuhra,” I say. “She did all the real reporting.”

“I called al-Asaadi to tell him what a wonderful job you did.”

“You did?”

“I said, ‘She even mentioned your tie!’”

“Well, it was a very nice tie!”

Al-Asaadi sends me a text later to thank me for my support and the story. I glow with happiness.

OF COURSE,
our busy morning means that we fall behind with the rest of the paper. So, feeling quite like Sisyphus, I put my shoulder to the stone and begin, slowly, to roll it back up the hill.

TWELVE
tug-of-war

Unfortunately, the solidarity al-Asaadi and I experience during our day in
court is short-lived. Now that we have been reprieved, we resume our slowly escalating power struggle. I’ve tried my utmost to avoid conflict, but it’s hard when al-Asaadi refuses to acknowledge deadlines. By now, I’ve realized that the first thing I need to achieve is a proper schedule. Not until I get the paper moving in an orderly way, with pages coming in at predictable times and issues closing on time, will I be able to turn my attention to the development of my staff’s journalistic skills.

By December, the only thing standing between me and a regular schedule is al-Asaadi. The rest of my reporters now turn in their pieces on time, so we
could
close every issue by eight
P.M
. But al-Asaadi purposely withholds his stories until the last minute and drags out our closes for hours. To make a point, Luke and I finish absolutely every page, send everyone else home, and ring al-Asaadi to tell him we are just twiddling our thumbs waiting for his story, which is the last thing we need in order to close. This has little effect. Al-Asaadi still refuses to come to the office before eight
P.M
. on a closing day. He doesn’t seem to care that he is holding us all hostage. Thursdays are particularly bad, because he spends all afternoon chewing
qat
with his friends and is reluctant to come to the office at all. When he gets there, he is so wired that he is perfectly happy to stay up all night—and keep us up with him—closing the paper.

Things come to a head during the Consultative Group for Yemen’s donors’ conference in London, held to encourage foreign aid to Yemen. Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East, but it receives surprisingly low levels of development assistance. Now Western and Arab countries are meeting to discuss Yemen’s development challenges and to pledge financial support. This is intended to help Yemen develop its economy, improve its infrastructure, and battle poverty and illiteracy. The money comes with strings attached, however. Donors insist that Yemen forge ahead with anticorruption reforms, bolster democratic institutions, create a more independent judiciary, and increase government transparency. Yemen has vowed its dedication to these reforms, but whether it will be able to fully realize them remains a great unknown.

Al-Asaadi has traveled to England with Faris to attend the conference and has promised us a front-page story. The biggest news, that a total of $4.7 billion has been pledged, breaks on a closing day. This is a major increase over amounts pledged at previous donors’ conferences. Yemeni officials (and Faris) are euphoric.

But we hear nothing from al-Asaadi. All day, I edit the rest of the issue and wait for his news. We cannot run the issue without it; the donors’ conference is the biggest story in the country. By seven
P.M.
, we have edited everything else. I grow anxious. Just in case, I tell al-Matari to start putting a story together from the wires and calling local officials for comment.

We are still waiting when Luke begins vomiting. He thinks it’s the pesticides on his
qat
. Pesticides illegal everywhere else in the world have a way of sneaking across Yemen’s borders and ending up on
qat
plants. Luke chews Yemeni quantities of
qat
and by deadline can hardly speak, his cheek is so packed with greenery. “He’s more Yemeni than most Yemenis,” Zuhra says.

I send him home. Manel, a twenty-four-year-old Senegalese-American I recently hired to share the copyediting, stays to help me. Manel speaks fluent Arabic, French, and English and brims with infectious good humor. His copyediting is patchier than Luke’s, but he has such a sunny attitude that his mere presence in the office inspires all of us. Handsome, with a lean wiry body and neatly cornrowed hair, Manel is particularly inspiring to the women in the office. But
everyone
loves Manel, who wouldn’t even know how to go about getting stressed out. I’m hoping some of his Zen will wear off on me.

I have already written several e-mails to al-Asaadi, asking him how the conference is going and when I will receive his copy. No reply. When the rest of the issue is done, I write again to tell him that if I don’t hear from him in the next half hour, I will have to run a wire story.

He rings me in response. “Zaid and I will have the story to you in a couple of hours,” he says.

“A couple of hours? Al-Asaadi, the rest of the issue is completely done! Please get it to me in the next hour.”

Our conversation is cut off just after that, and I get an e-mail from him that says, “I am the editor in chief, and if I tell you to hold the paper until I send you the story then you have to hold the paper. I don’t have to answer to you.”

Actually
, I want to say, you
do
have to answer to me. It is in my
contract
that I am to have
complete editorial control
over this paper. Thus far, I have purposely avoided saying such a thing. I have never pulled rank on him, in an effort to preserve his dignity and our diplomatic relations.

Even Faris has warned me about al-Asaadi. “He doesn’t like it when anyone else gets too good,” he told me. The reason al-Asaadi has been sabotaging every issue, Faris believes, is that he can’t stand to see me get the paper on a schedule. To see me succeed where he failed.

I do not respond to his e-mail. I sit and stew, while Manel holds my hand and tries to keep me from erupting into flames. As it becomes clear why we are stuck in the office so late, my staff also grow impatient. It’s midnight by the time we get the story and photos from al-Asaadi. He fails to send me photo credits and doesn’t respond when I ask for them by e-mail. I am forced to run the photos without credit and send everyone home. I’ve been at work for twenty hours.

I indulge in revenge fantasies all the way home. I imagine calling al-Asaadi and saying, “Why do you think they hired me? Because you were running the paper perfectly?” But I do no such thing. I go to bed with an aching stomach and dream that al-Asaadi is livid with me for not waiting in the office all night for him to send me photo credits.

THINGS CONTINUE
in the same vein after he returns from London. The very next issue, he e-mails me that he wants to write the editorial. So I save him that space. Luke and I finish every other page by seven thirty
P.M
. Al-Asaadi waltzes into the office at seven forty-five
P.M
. He hasn’t even started his editorial. It’s
textbook
sabotage.

I have been in a sunny mood all day, but now clouds are gathering. When he finally finishes his editorial, al-Asaadi decides to rearrange the entire front page and suggest additions to the Local page. I fight to keep my voice steady.

“I would have loved your feedback—
at four
P.M.
this afternoon,”
I say. “When we had plenty of time to rework things before deadline.”

“I can’t come in at four
P.M
.,” he says.

“Why not? Everyone else does. That’s our work hours.”

We are interrupted by his phone. Al-Asaadi has two mobile phones, both of which ring constantly. He chats for several minutes, his cheek bulging. While the entire rest of the staff has been hard at work, he has been at a
qat
chew with his friends.

Al-Asaadi seems to believe that holding the title of editor in chief entitles him to do less work than the rest of the staff. His time in prison has made him a bit of a celebrity. He’s Yemen’s poster boy for press freedom, and he milks this so much that Manel takes to calling him the “Boy Wonder” or the “Ghetto Superstar.” He loves to go out to embassy parties, to meet and greet dignitaries, but isn’t all that interested in the day-to-day sweat and toil of editing a paper. He spends no time training the staff to become better reporters, though they could use his help, and is impatient with their mistakes.

Luke and Manel and I confer about al-Asaadi’s obstructiveness after we finally flee at eleven
P.M
. Compared to our first two months, this is still an early close, and I have worked a mere fourteen hours instead of twenty. Luke, who worked for the paper for several months before I arrived, says that before I came there was no order at all and they were often there all night. “We were here until five or six in the morning,” he says. “You’ve done an amazing job.”

Luke offers to come with me to talk to Faris, to support my complaints about al-Asaadi. “He has blatantly sabotaged you for the last three issues,” he says. “All three issues would have closed at eight if not for him.”

Faris, as is too often the case, is out of town. So we wait.

The weird thing is that I know al-Asaadi likes me in spite of himself. And I like him. He brought me a pretty souvenir candy dish from London, and on days we are not closing an issue, we often talk and laugh together. But throughout the fall, the tension has escalated. When he is in the office, he entertains a constant stream of visitors, who sit a few feet from my desk talking loudly and slurping tea. The incessant racket is deleterious to both my patience and my editing. If al-Asaadi isn’t with a guest, he is shouting on the phone.

In Yemen, no one ever makes an appointment. People visit the editor of a paper when they feel like visiting, with no regard for the fact that she might be on deadline. Yet it is the height of rudeness to turn anyone away. I make this mistake one day, when a Yemeni reader drops in to talk with me about the paper just as I am editing several stories on a closing day. “Look, I’m really sorry, but I just don’t have time right now,” I tell him. “I am trying to close an issue. Could you please make an appointment next time?”

As soon as he leaves the office, al-Asaadi berates me. “You cannot
do
that,” he says. “You must
always
offer them a seat and at least a glass of tea. That is how things are done here.”

I feel terrible guilt for being so culturally insensitive. But I am also frustrated. If I am required to entertain endless visitors, as al-Asaadi does, how am I ever going to get my work done?

Yet sometimes, my visitors delight me. I am busy editing one afternoon when a tall, blue-eyed cowboy walks into my office. A real cowboy. From Arizona. This is Marvin. He steps hesitantly across my threshold, looking as though he’s just been peeled off a Marlboro billboard. His gray hair is cropped short, and he sports a big mustache, jeans, and bowlegs.

I’d heard of Marvin. He is running a livestock program on Soqotra and splits his time between the island and Sana’a. Thinking that I could get an interesting story, I invite him to sit.

Goats run loose across the pristine island of Soqotra, he tells me, and they are slowly destroying its unique and delicate ecosystem. Marvin’s plan, yet to be put into action, would help the local people learn how to keep their animals healthy, manage foraging, open a sanitary
halal
slaughterhouse, and sell meat to the mainland.

We commiserate about the difficulty of getting anything done here, the malingering of our workers, and the disorder of the country. Marvin tells me that one of his workers refused to come in one day because he’d skipped breakfast and his stomach hurt, while another didn’t show up because his left pinkie finger had a paper cut.

“You know the Spanish word
‘mañana’?”
says Marvin.

“Of course,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t really mean ‘tomorrow,’” he says. “It means ‘definitely not today.’”

I could see where this was going.

“And here, it’s the same thing with
‘insha’allah’.”

“I know! It’s the universal excuse for everything. If my reporters don’t get a story done on time, well, it just wasn’t
meant
to be done on time.” This absence of personal responsibility bothers me. The general attitude of my male reporters seems to be “Why should I worry about it, when I can just leave it to God?” While my women will work themselves to exhaustion, refusing even to eat until a story is done, my men spend the bulk of their time justifying their minimal efforts. This is the result of privileging one half of society over another, I think. The men feel the world owes them a living and work only to get more money for
qat
, whereas the women work three times as hard in an effort to prove that they can do what everyone tells them they cannot.