The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (41 page)

I am shocked. Most of my male reporters (according to Luke) are surfing porn sites every time I turn my back, so I thought they had a pretty graphic image of what oral sex is.

I start to explain, but for the first time in my life, I find myself too embarrassed to describe a sex act.

“Don’t be shy,” says Jabr encouragingly.

My stomach twists. “I’m not! It’s just …” It’s just that I don’t want to accidentally excite you, I think to myself.

Instead, I pick up the dictionary from my desk and read him the definition. Neither of us cracks a smile.

“Um, so, what I am wondering is, are we going to get in trouble for writing about this? Is it okay according to Islam? Between married people, of course!”

“Let me check,” says Jabr gravely. “I will read the study.”

A half hour later, I stop in the newsroom to find Jabr reading through everything Google has turned up on oral sex. He has consulted with Noor and Najma, neither of whom has heard of oral sex. All three reporters are single, so perhaps this is not surprising.

Noor turns to me and says, “We don’t have such a thing in Yemen as oral sex.”

“You don’t?” This cannot be true.

“No,” Jabr agrees.

“We are a conservative country,” says Noor. “We don’t do this.”

“Not even married people?”

All three shake their heads.

“But it’s …” A thousand inappropriate explanations of why it’s healthy and necessary threaten to burst out of my mouth. I bite my tongue. “Let’s drop it then. We’ll run the iPod story instead.”

This is absurd, given that the iPod story is about the effect of iPods on pacemakers, and hardly any Yemenis own either gizmo. But at least it won’t scandalize anyone.

Curious to find out the truth, I report the conversation to Luke. “They claim there is no such thing as oral sex in Yemen.”

“Oh yes there
is!”
he says, laughing.

“I figured you would know.”

I guess the gay men have all the luck. Once you’re engaged in one illegal activity, you might as well go all out.

Later, married Yemeni women tell me that oral sex
does
exist but that many people consider it shameful. “Women are not honest with each other,” says one Yemeni woman. If a woman admits that her husband “kisses her vagina,” others disparage the act as disgusting. Some think that a man who performs oral sex is being too servile to his wife and unmanly. “It’s just how we are trained, to think our bodies are disgusting,” says my friend. “Some women don’t feel husbands should witness birth because they will be disgusted. Women think organs are a disgusting place. Women internalize these sexist ideas. In Islam, you should take a shower after sex.”

IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
to have Tobias waiting for me after work. Someone to whom I can pour out the frustrations of my day, someone to hand me a drink and sit with me looking out over the boxy brown houses of Old Sana’a glowing in the dark, holding my hand. Someone with interesting stories of his own. My reporters sense a new lightness in me. The women tell me I look pretty twice as much as usual, looking slightly suspicious. How do they get through their lives? I wonder. How can they bear sleeping alone every night? They must have passions of their own, but what do they do with them? Offer them to God? Perhaps that is it. Perhaps if I had God, I could be happier alone. I could be happier without fingers brushing against my skin, without a warm body curled around me. But I do not have God. All I have is a persistent and not necessarily wise openness to love, and a relentless desire to be loved in return.

Despite how well things are going, I’ve been looking forward to a break from my six-day week, from my twelve-hour days. But the thought of returning to a job in New York, the thought of once again climbing onto the endless treadmill of work and rent paying and rushing from place to place in anonymous crowds, fills me with dread.

I have no idea what I will do at the end of this year. I’ve scarcely had time to look up from my desk. But now that I have become human again and made room for joy and leisure in between manic workdays, my brain finds itself with time to look up at the horizon. There is nothing there.

TWENTY
the deluge

Just when I am at my happiest personally and most optimistic about my paper’s
future, harbingers of doom appear. It takes less than a week for me to realize that Zaid’s English has failed to improve one iota during his ten months in London. How he managed this is beyond me, but I struggle to edit his stories and it becomes clear that he is not remotely capable of editing anyone else’s work. After fighting so hard to sell Faris on Zaid, now I am going to have to do some rethinking.

Zaid already seems to have lost his resolve to give up
qat
. The day after our lunch, I walk into the office to find him stuffing a leaf into his mouth. I raise an eyebrow.

“It was a gift!” he says. “I couldn’t refuse it! It would be rude!”

I have also begun to have trouble with Hadi, who has always been the most reliable and devoted of designers. He has been coming in later every day, sometimes not appearing until noon. This mystifies me. One morning, desperate to lay out a page, I collar Luke.

“Hadi hardly ever gets here on time anymore! What is going on?”

“Did you know he got a car?”

“He got a car?”

“So that’s why he’s been coming in late.”

I don’t get it. Shouldn’t a car get him here even earlier?

“He’s been working as a taxi driver in the mornings.”

Ah. This is not unusual. Many Yemenis string together several jobs to make ends meet. If Faris raised staff salaries, it might keep them from taking side jobs that distract them from their work. Even al-Asaadi worked for UNICEF while editor in chief of the paper. This not only took him away from the office too often but was entirely unethical, as the newspaper regularly covers UNICEF’s activities.

Some reporters make it difficult for me to agitate for higher pay. When the men want a raise, they begin doing less and less work, if they bother to show up at all. I try to explain to Hadi—who just asked for a raise—that if he wants to be paid more, he should prove that he is worth it. He should be showing up
early
and getting an exceptional amount of work done. That is what would make me want to help you get more money, I say. This baffles him.

The Missing Link does the same thing. A day after asking for a raise, Jabr doesn’t show up at work or even call in with an excuse. When I finally get him on the phone, he says he is napping.

“Jabr, if you’re hoping for a raise, it’s not terribly wise to start skipping work. You should be demonstrating how much you deserve it, not what a shirker you are.”

My frustration with Hadi builds until one morning in late June. Hadi, who was the happiest with our new schedule, has begun to drag our closes.

“You cannot keep coming in this late!” I say, accosting him as he walks in the door one closing day at noon.

“Do you have any pages?” he says belligerently.

“Yes, I have pages! But that isn’t the point. You are supposed to be here in the morning. You have a
job!”

Things escalate until we are shouting at each other in the hallway. I ask Zaid for help, saying I have to get Hadi to the office earlier. He goes outside to talk with Hadi, and I retreat to my office.

A few minutes later, Zaid appears in my door.

“Hadi has a big problem,” he says.

“I know, he can’t get to work on time,” I say crossly.

“No, he has a big problem at home. He said he wants to sleep in the office and never go home. It has to be serious for him to say that. He was crying just now.”

I feel guilty for yelling at him. “If he has a reason he can’t get here on time, he should tell me.”

“I think you should talk with him.”

I go outside and find Hadi on the front steps, leaning against the building. I touch his arm.

“Hadi, I am sorry I yelled at you. I don’t like yelling at you. I love working with you, and I want things to be good between us,” I begin.

His anger is gone. He smiles at me, his long black lashes still damp with tears.

“If you have a problem, some reason you can’t come in, you can tell me,” I say. “You can talk to me.”

“Thank you,” he says, reaching out to pat my arm, an unusual gesture. “Thank you.” He’s short of money for things he needs at home, he says. He’s also been having bitter arguments with his wife. It’s unclear if the two problems are related. I promise to try to get him a little more money from Faris and he promises to try to get to work earlier.

ON JUNE
26, I must somehow sense what the day has in store, because I wake too depressed to eat and cry all the way to the gym. It all builds up, my worry about Zaid, my fear about leaving the paper, my anxiety over the future, and the floodgates open. Thank god I’m wearing dark glasses. I run five miles on the treadmill and bike half an hour, as if I can somehow get away from myself. I head out afterward to find that none of the hotel taxi drivers will give me a ride, because they are all curled up in the trunks of their cars, green leaves sticking out of their mouths.

Irritated, I stride out to the main road and hail a cab. The driver argues about the price, but I get weary of fighting and climb in. I just want to get to work.

I am staring out the window for the first half of the ride, watching the storefronts and child salesmen and pyramids of tomatoes and watermelons spin by, so I don’t notice my driver’s activities. Then a frenzied movement in my peripheral vision arrests my attention. I look over to see that my driver has his grubby hand around his penis and is vigorously and quite openly jerking off.

At first I refuse to believe it. But then I look again. I am
not
imagining it.

In horror, I pull some
riyals
out of my purse and throw them at him, leaping from the car in the middle of a major intersection. “You
disgust
me!” I yell. Dodging cars, I run panting and nauseated across the street, my bags banging against my back. I cannot get over his complete lack of shame. Did he think he could get away with that, just because I was a foreigner? I wish I hadn’t paid him. I wish I had remembered the Arabic word for “shame.” I wish I had hit him. I stop and look around. I have no idea where I am. I am probably only halfway to work. But I have been on this route so many times, I figure if I just keep walking I will see something I recognize. It’s hot, and the sun and dust press down on me. Once again I am grateful for my dark sunglasses as I stumble crying down the street, trying to stifle my sobs as I pass groups of construction workers. I walk and weep all the way to the office. My women are gathered at the gate, as if expecting me. It is lunchtime, and the men are gone.

“Do you have a cold?” says Zuhra, looking anxious.

“No, I just …” I start crying again, and Zuhra and Radia follow me to my office. I tell them the whole story, but they don’t look impressed.

“This happens to all of us,” Zuhra says. “It is normal.”

Radia concurs. They are harassed constantly, both by taxi drivers and men on the streets. Even fully covered, fully disguised.

“One time a man even offered me money to go to a hotel with him,” says Radia. “But what can we do? This is what men are like.”

This is what men are like
.

“You should not be subjected to this!” I cry. “It is
not
normal. I can’t bear the fact that you think of this as normal! You should not have to suffer these horrible men.”

They concur. “But what can we do?”

AT THE END
of the month, the rains come with a vengeance. While the mornings are still sunny and clear, by the afternoons dark clouds have filled the sky. It’s unwise to start walking anywhere between lunch and dinner; that’s when the deep purple bellies of the clouds tear open, flooding the city.

It’s nearly rain time one closing day when al-Asaadi rings to tell me he has a front-page story. A group of Belgian tourists was barred by the Tourism Police from traveling to the picturesque village of Kawkaban and are outraged. They complained that they had read in our paper that Yemen was inviting and safe, and now the minister of tourism is holding them captive in Sana’a. Al-Asaadi wants the headline to be
GOVERNMENT KIDNAPPED US, SAYS TOURISTS
.

I politely suggest that the word “kidnapped” may be slightly loaded, and al-Asaadi concurs. We change it to
TOURISTS BLOCKED FROM TRAVEL
. I’m trying to explain how I want things laid out to Hadi, but both al-Asaadi and Zaid are hovering, blocking my way.

“Three editors in one place is two too many,” I say in frustration. “Could I please have some space to finish telling Hadi about this paragraph?” No one moves, and I throw the pages I’m editing to the floor. It’s a bit melodramatic, but experience has taught me that my reporters don’t respond to subtlety.

This jolts the men into action. Al-Asaadi slips back upstairs to his new office, and Zaid storms off in an adolescent funk.

“Do whatever you want with the paper. I’m leaving,” he flings at me before toddling huffily off down the road, despite the fact that I have invited him to chew
qat
at my house after work.

This is the first of several dozen times that Zaid will “quit.” He’ll tell me he’s done with the paper, storm off in a sulk, and then the next morning at the office he’ll be back in front of his customary computer. “Funny,” I’ll say, “I could have sworn you quit yesterday.” It gets so the day doesn’t feel quite complete if I haven’t driven Zaid to quit.

With Zaid gone, I quickly finish my edits and find Ali, who has come back from the United States to work for me again. Luke has been moved upstairs to edit
Arabia Felix
, so Ali temporarily fills his shoes. Rain spatters my hair as we walk to his antique powder-blue car. By the time we are on the road, the rain is coming down in blinding sheets. It’s the hardest rain I have ever seen here. Knowing the Sayilah—the moat-like road around the Old City—will be flooded, we turn off Zubairi Street to wind our way through the back alleys. But the windows have fogged so badly we cannot see out the back or side. I pull Kleenexes out of my purse and daub at the windshield, but it refogs as fast as I wipe. The streets are flooding with fast water, and I am genuinely afraid that we will be swept along into the Sayilah and go under the rushing muddy river. At last, unable to see and unable to find a passable street, Ali stops the car on a hill. We sit, waiting out the storm.

“Too bad we don’t have a flask,” I say, fiddling with the broken radio.

“I was just thinking that.”

While we are waiting, I get a text from Zaid.

“I thought u’ll show me more respect, but girls and Ibrahim are your favorite and me at the end of your list. U made me feel empty and nothing. Thanks and sorry can’t understand u anymore.”

What am I going to do with him? I myself am no model of comportment, but I can at least say with a clear conscience that I have never once threatened to walk out on my job. At least the girls never fling themselves out of the office in a funk or threaten to quit.

“Ali, help me,” I say. “Couldn’t
you
take over the paper?” He is half-Yemeni, after all. His English is flawless. He’s ideal.