The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (33 page)

“It is the time when each person is alone with his thoughts, thinking about things,” he answers. Exactly so. Our silence is companionable after our long afternoon of talking. I drift off into memories of other vacations in wild lands—happy times bicycling through the mountains, climbing peaks, rock climbing, running through rain, eating meals of fresh corn and blackberry pie, drinking by campfires, and basking in warm companionship.

I don’t think I took these things for granted then, but they are even more precious to me now. Here on Soqotra, away from the distractions of work, my solitude feels acute. I feel a sudden longing for a lover, someone with whom I could share this. It occurs to me that this is the longest time I have been alone since I was a teenager; I have always been romantically involved with someone. I want to climb a mountain again with someone I adore, pick blueberries, tell each other stories as we clamber our way through rocks and trees before sunset. Though I have long avoided lifetime commitment, I now think that maybe it would be nice to stay with someone for a while. A long while.

Chances are I won’t find this person in Yemen. Not with my work schedule and the dearth of romantic prospects. I resign myself to months more of solitary nights and wonder if it would help if I made some more friends.

I’m jolted out of my reverie as Rasheed pulls the truck up by our house. He smiles at me. “I’ll come find you tomorrow.”

FOR THE REST OF MY WEEK
on Soqotra, I rise at five
A.M
., when the rooster goes off. This is the only time the heat is bearable. Still, when I climb the hills near town, there is no cover, no shade, no relief from the sun. When I return from a two-hour walk my second or third morning, I am dizzy and on the verge of vomiting. Pearl is anxious that I have sunstroke. I strip and get into the shower. I soak my hair in the hopes that it will keep me cool.

Pearl disappears and comes back with a straw hat for me. “Are you going to make it?” she asks. “There’s a plane out on Monday.”

I am appalled that my discomfort is so apparent.

“I’ll be okay,” I reassure Pearl. I’m determined to stick this out.

In the late afternoon, Rasheed comes to fetch me for another adventure. Our second trip is to Diksam, a cooler, mountainous region in the center of the island. The mountains are barer than I had expected, save for the fantastical dragon’s blood trees, which look like giant stalks of broccoli standing on end. Rasheed shows me the red resin in the trunk that Soqotri women use for makeup.

On our way up into the mountains, we pick up several men, including one of his uncles. There are always men on the road needing a ride, and Rasheed always picks them up. They stand in the back of the truck or crouch low. Occasionally, one shouts at Rasheed to slow down. Because Soqotra has had a road for only a few years, every driver on the island is a novice.

When we reach the top of one mountain, we pull over next to two tiny stone huts, to have tea at Rasheed’s uncle’s home. The inside of the house is cool and welcoming. We sit on the floor, which is covered with thin woven mats and uncluttered by any furnishings. A woman brings us sweet tea made with goat milk and fresh flatbread that we dip into our mugs. Children, dirty and half-dressed, with enormous brown eyes, gather around me to stare.

The women question me, wanting to know (of course) if I am married and have children. In my lonely, travel-weary state, it makes me sadder to have to lie about having a husband and to tell the truth about the absence of a child. A young woman, in her early twenties and newly married, is the most interested in me and aggressive in her questioning. She wants me to stay the night. But we peel ourselves away close to sunset and drive home mostly in silence, picking up men along the way.

I LOOK FORWARD MOST
to my afternoons with Rasheed. It is fun to travel with him, to listen to his stories and not have to talk. The next afternoon, he drives me to a protected lagoon near Qalansiyah. It takes an hour or so to get there. As we approach the rocky cliffs above the sea, he slows down and tells me to close my eyes. The truck lurches forward.

“Now open.”

Framed between two walls of rock is a vast expanse of pristine white sand and a lagoon of clear, aquamarine water, sparkling in the sun.

“Jamil,”
I say.
Beautiful
.

Our last and best adventure is the Hoq cave. I’ve been dying to see it, but Rasheed initially resists, saying that it is too late to set out. “It’s an hour-and-a-half hike,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I am feeling lazy about hiking.”

Well, I am not feeling lazy about hiking, so I put my foot down. We drive along the northeastern shore until we come to the fishing village closest to the cave. Soqotri law holds that cave visitors must take a guide, so that locals benefit from the tourism. We pick up a man who says he is afraid to go into the cave himself, but he can show us the way. He doesn’t have a flashlight but assures us that a group has gone up before us and that they will have one.

The three of us set off up the mountain. It is a steep, difficult climb, and our guide sets a breakneck pace, which is all the more impressive given that he does it in purple plastic flip-flops. Still, I manage to keep up. I am happy to be getting some real exercise. I even have to prod Rasheed along at one point. “I’m stepping on your heels,” I tease him. “Pick up the pace.”

We make our way past dozens of the pulpy fat-trunked desert rose trees. They are so adorable that every time we pass a good one, I cry aloud, “Fat tree!” and throw my arms around it. Rasheed finds this so entertaining he begins pointing them out. “There’s one over there,” he says. “Hug that one too!”

Our guide becomes noticeably nervous as we near the top and falls behind. You can’t see the black maw of the cave until you are right upon it. Then it opens before you, a wide dark gash in the mountain’s side. I pause, panting, and turn to look down at the sea below. The mountainside falls away dramatically, and the sky is just turning pink over the water. Rasheed catches up with me and we stand gazing down.

“I’ll wait outside,” the guide says in Soqotri. “There are
jinn
.

Jinn
are mentioned in the Qur’an. As my friend and Arabic teacher Hamoudi explains: “Before the God made humans, he had only angels and
jinn
. Iblees was the king of the
jinn
, who were all made of fire. God made the
jinn
of fire and the angels of light. The God then said, ‘I will make a human, Adam, from mud, and everyone should pray to him, just once.’

“Iblees, the king
jinni
, was the first person to say no to the God. He said, ‘No, I will not worship humans, because they are mud and we are fire. We are better!’

“God said, ‘Go away.’

“The
jinn
said to God, ‘Then we will make humans do bad things.’ … God said, ‘Go, and try to make humans do bad things. But if they do, you and they will both be in hell.’”

Muslims believe the
jinn
can enter a person’s blood and force him to commit terrible crimes. A human can either follow the
jinn
to hell or choose a higher path. A human possessed by a
jinni
often requires an exorcism, which involves an imam reading the Qur’an over the afflicted.

Not all
jinn
are evil, however. There are Muslim
jinn
, who have been convinced of the righteous way. But these are apparently not what our guide is worried about encountering in the cave.

There is no sign of any other tourists, and we have no flashlight. I fish around in my purse and find a lighter with a tiny bulb at the end. Rasheed and I step into the cave.

“Here,
jinni jinni!”
he calls, to torment the guide.

We pick our way across the uneven rock floor, skirting pools of water. “Look up,” says Rasheed.

Stalagmites of astonishing length hang everywhere, like Stone Age chandeliers. A thousand dripping daggers of stone hang over my head. I’ve never seen anything like them. Around us crowd accidental statues and gargoyles in a Gothic sculpture garden. Pools of water form in bizarrely symmetrical basins. Cathedral ceilings stretch away into blackness. It is the Notre Dame of caves. It catches up all of my breath. Silently, Rasheed and I pick our way as deep into the cave as is possible with our tiny light.

When I stop again to gaze up at the magnificent stalagmites, Rasheed whispers, “Turn out the light.”

We stand in the total darkness, listening to the drip of the water and the silence in between and our breathing and the rustle of—bats?

I want to go all the way to the back of the cave, but we do not have enough light or time. It is nearly dusk, and we still have a long climb down the mountain. “I promise, the next time you come, we will go to every cave on Soqotra,” says Rasheed. “We will do the all-cave tour.”

Our guide is pacing anxiously outside. We join him and hustle down the path. I take the lead, full of renewed vigor. We race the sun down the mountain and emerge from the scrub at the bottom just as the sky turns deep blue and the first few stars wink on.

After dropping our guide at his village, we stop to visit a friend of Rasheed’s mother’s. The sky is heavily salted with stars when we arrive at the little stone hut by the sea. A woman comes out to greet us and ushers us into a small courtyard. As we settle ourselves on mats laid on the ground, the family gathers around us, friendly and inquisitive. A pot of a reddish fish stew is set before us, and we dig in. It is delicious, the fish falling apart in our fingers. It must have been caught just hours before. We follow this with fresh flatbread and the usual milky sweet tea. Afterward, I am offered a bowl of sour milk. I expect it to resemble yogurt, but it tastes like rotten milk. I gag and pass it to Rasheed. I politely decline the dates fermented in goat skin.

As we sit there, eating and talking with the family, a wave of tranquility washes over me. For a moment, I feel a second flash of pure happiness, to be outside on a cool, starry night, with warmhearted friends, and eating simple food. I could sit there for hours.

Travel is always like this, I remind myself. Uneven, with stretches of loneliness and anxiety followed by unparalleled moments of bliss and discovery. In the droughts, I have to learn to trust that the joy will come.

FIFTEEN
the artificial man

Six months into my tenure, the paper is on a regular schedule, I’m sleeping
more, and I’ve started to do some of my own reporting. Most significant is a whirlwind trip to the Kharaz refugee camp, home to some ten thousand refugees, mostly Somali. I go with officials from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. We fly to Riyan in the South and drive west along the coast to Shabwa and the Maifa’a Reception Center, where the Somalis who wash up on Yemen’s shores are processed—if they survive the journey. My cleaning woman Aisha probably landed here.

It’s much hotter than in Sana’a, and our driver blasts the air-conditioning. Red cliffs that remind me of the Grand Canyon rise on our right. To our left, the sea is dotted with colorful fishing boats. I’m squished in the backseat next to a Yemeni UNHCR official and Amal, a tiny woman reporter for the
Yemen Times
.

No matter where they come ashore, Somalis either find their way to the Maifa’a Reception Center, or villagers who see the refugees on the beach alert UNHCR, which sends transport, says Aouad Baobaid, a field specialist who travels with us.

“When we can’t get to people—we can’t find everyone—the villagers take care of them,” he says. “They feed them and put them up for the night, women with women, and men with men. They even bury the dead.”

There are plenty of dead. In 2006, UNHCR reported that some twenty-seven thousand people made the perilous voyage, with three hundred and thirty dying on the way and another three hundred still missing.

Maifa’a, a cluster of whitewashed cinder-block shelters baking in the southern sun, was established in 1996 to register the refugees. They are asked when they left Somalia, how their journey was, why they fled, and where they arrived. We wander around, asking questions, examining food stores, and interviewing workers. Afterward, we visit several other spots along the coast where refugees often wash ashore.

In the morning, we fly to Aden and drive two and a half hours inland to the camp. Kharaz sprawls on an isolated expanse of steaming-hot desert, many miles from towns, roads, water, and work. It was the only land on offer, say the UNHCR officials leading us around. There are no walls around the vast complex of look-alike cinder-block shelters mingled with a cluster of tents for new arrivals, and refugees come and go as they wish.

Only about 5 percent of refugees stay at the camp. The rest head for urban areas, where they hope to find jobs washing cars, cleaning houses, or doing other sorts of menial labor. The lives of camp refugees consist primarily of waiting—waiting for Somalia to calm down enough so that they can return, waiting for job opportunities, waiting for better food, better shelter, better health care, waiting for something miraculous to lift them out of their misery.

For this reason, any visitor to the camp is instantly surrounded by scores of anxious Somalis who hope that this person is the miracle they have awaited, that help has arrived at last. Many carry handwritten or mimeographed letters that they press into the hands of visitors. Most are addressed to the UNHCR and request all manner of aid.

A woman named Asli Abdullahi Hasson hands me a letter describing the bombing of her home in 1991, the death of her relatives, and her flight from Somalia. On her way to Yemen, men “tried to rape [her] in front of [her] husband,” she writes. “He defended me unfortunately he was fired bullets. He was not dead but had a bad wound.” She ends her tale with a simple plea. “Please,” she writes. “Assist me to look for a better future.” There are countless stories like hers, and as many letters.

In February, the air already feels stifling, and my clothing is quickly drenched in sweat. By summer, the heat grows deadly, and many refugees fall ill, says Dr. Fawzia Abdul Naji, the gynecologist/obstetrician in residence at the camp. She is one of three doctors working full-time at Kharaz.

We visit refugees in the cinder-block homes and the cluster of tents. In one of the homemade tents lives Khadija Mohammed Farah, who shares three tiny rooms with six people. Inside, the air reeks of excrement, and flies coat every surface. A woman lies motionless on a thin mattress. “She is very ill,” says Khadija. In another room is a rudimentary kitchen with a camp stove and kerosene lamp. Khadija has been at the camp for two years and is still awaiting a more permanent shelter. Her four children cling to her while she complains about the conditions. Twenty-five or so Somalis crowd around us to add their own laments.

“Many journalists come here, and nothing ever changes,” cries one.

Khadija says that she wants to return to Somalia, when it is safe. But until then, she feels trapped.

“Look,” she says, pulling down the front of her colorful dress. “I was burned horribly.”

Her entire chest is a mass of scar tissue, caused when a lamp accidentally ignited a fire in the camp.

A man pushes to the front of a crowd. “Won’t you help me!” he cries, pulling down the front of his own shirt to reveal a crater-shaped scar. “Help me, I am all alone with four kids.”

The psychological scars many bear from witnessing unthinkable brutality are even worse. Issa Sultan, fifty, originally of Mogadishu, tells me he was forced to flee to Yemen with his wife and three children in 1995 because of the terror of the wars between Somali clans.

I interview scores of Somalis, scribbling furiously in my notebook. Working keeps me from becoming overwhelmed by the sheer misery of the place. I cannot get my mind around desolation on such a mass scale. I will never complain about my life again.

By the end of the day we are exhausted, overheated, emotionally drained. Yet we are lucky. We have the luxury of climbing back into our refrigerated Land Cruiser and driving away. So much of what I see in Yemen is a constant reminder of my good fortune. Every day I witness scenes of poverty and deprivation, yet my American passport allows me to walk away at any time. After living here, I can never again take any of my privileges for granted.

I AM WORKING
on the Somali story at my desk in Sana’a the next day when I get a phone call from customs.

“You have a package,” the man says.

“Great.” I am expecting a box with a replacement battery for my computer, a power cord, chewing gum, and medicine from a friend in New York. It’s been taking ages to arrive. But I can’t imagine why this man is calling me; usually packages are delivered without preamble. “Well, bring it on over then.”

There is a silence on the line. Then, “Ah … Well, you see, there’s a problem. It contains something offensive to the Muslim faith.”

“What?”
I stop looking at my computer screen and turn my attention to the call. “What is it?”

“Ah …” The man clears his throat. “It’s … It’s some sort of …” The customs officer stumbles over his words. “It’s—an
artificial man!”

Suddenly I know what it is. A friend in Manhattan has joked about sending me a vibrator to keep me company in this lonely place. Oh dear.

“I’m not sure I know what you are talking about,” I say carefully. “Could you describe it to me?”

“It’s—!” The man is deeply uncomfortable. “It’s—! It’s
purple!”

I suppress a wave of hysterical laughter. “I see.” I twist the phone cord around my finger and wonder how much trouble I am in. “A purple artificial man.”

“Yes!”

I don’t know what I am supposed to say. “Well, I don’t think I know what you are talking about,” I tell him. “But if it’s offensive to you, why don’t you just throw it out and bring me the rest of the package?”

“It will be destroyed.”

“Great, destroy it! That’s fine. But you can bring me the rest of the things, right? All the rest of it is legal? Because I am expecting some very important computer parts and medicine.” I am desperate for the rest of that package. My battery has been recalled, and Luke and I have been sharing a power cord for weeks.

“I don’t know,” says the customs man.

“Look, there is no reason why you can’t bring me things it is legal for me to receive. I want the rest of that package, okay?”

The man mumbles something and I hang up. I have a story to write after all, and I am on deadline. I push aside the unsettling conversation and go back to work.

Haleema Mohammed, 45, of Galkayo realized that staying in Somalia was no longer an option one unforgettable night in 1991, when she was forced to watch as her brothers were slaughtered in front of her eyes.

“Forty people were killed that night in Galkayo,” she said. “Five were my brothers.”

Mohammed, sitting in a tent at the al-Kharaz refugee camp in Yemen’s Lahej Governorate, speaks with calm stoicism, her gaze defiant and unwavering. Her eyes, which she says were black in Somalia, are now blue. They were bleached by Yemen’s merciless desert sun, she says….

I am deeply engrossed in my writing when Radia comes into my office and hands me a DHL slip. “Where is the package?” I say.

“No package.”

“No package?”

“No. At customs.”

Now I’m worried. Why would they drop off a package slip but no package? What are the customs agents planning to do with my things? What am I supposed to do?

“Radia,” I say, “I have to find that package.” I explain to her that something that was in the package offended the customs agents and that I told them to throw out that item and bring me the rest of it. I cannot see why this would be a problem.

“I will send a driver,” says Radia. “Salem can get it for you.”

But a few minutes later she is back in my office. “The Doctor won’t let us have a driver,” she says. “He says you should go.”

“I can’t go! I’m on deadline!” Not only do I have to finish writing my refugee story, I still have to edit the rest of the paper. Work on my story has already slowed me down.

Radia shrugs. “He says you have to go.”

The Doctor has been sulky and resentful ever since I forced him to pay my employees, which I must say I don’t think was an unreasonable request. “It’s a closing day! Tell him that if I have to go to the airport myself, the paper will close four hours later.” The Doctor hates it when we close late.

She disappears again.

When she leaves another reporter comes in to tell me that my phone bill is overdue. Sabafon has changed the amount of my bill four times in the past month, by wildly varying amounts. I have no idea how to tell which total is accurate.

I’m stewing over this when a series of reporters come into my office asking for my camera, which we use for almost every story now because the photographers rarely can be bothered to work. But I can’t give it to them, because I have two hundred photos of refugees in my camera. I can’t download them because my computer has no memory or battery left. “Go tell one of the photographers to do his job,” I say crossly.

Zuhra comes into my office, anxious to help, but I am so distraught I am almost inconsolable. “You need someone to do things for you,” she says. “Faris should hire someone just for you, so you don’t have to cope with all of these things.”

I manage a weak smile. “That is unlikely,” I say. “I can’t even get him to pay for business cards for my staff; forget an extra employee.”

Still, I run upstairs to ask Faris for help. I explain to him why I need a driver to go to the airport and fetch this package, which contains computer parts we need for work. The entire paper runs on my computer, after all. I don’t mention the vibrator. Faris promptly sends Salem off to the airport.

An hour later, Zuhra comes into my office looking anxious. “Salem is calling from customs. They need to know, the power cord that is in your package, is it a … a
sexual
power cord?”

I stare at her. “No,” I say. “It is the power cord that goes to this computer.” I tap my Apple.

“Oh. Okay.” She hurries out of the room.

A few minutes later, she is back. “Um, they have to know, is the battery in the package, is it a
sexual
battery?”

“Zuhra. It’s
square.”

She looks at me quizzically.