The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (46 page)

ZUHRA CAME INTO MY OFFICE
the day before and stood uncommonly still in front of my desk. “I am going to say good-bye now.”

I stopped slicing the skin of the pomegranate on my desk and put down the knife on an old copy of the paper. Pomegranates were taking over my life. I couldn’t go a day without them. I thought about Persephone and how eating six pomegranate seeds in Hades consigned her to spending six months of each year in hell. One month per seed. If I were to spend a month in Yemen for every seed that I have eaten, I could never leave.

I was not ready to say good-bye to Zuhra. Someone is
there
every day of your life for a year, and then she isn’t. There is no transition. Wait, I wanted to say. I need time.

She came around the side of my desk and I hugged her tightly, my little bundle of rayon, like holding a Christmas present with all of its wrapping still on it.

I couldn’t say anything. There were no significant last words, no best wishes, no declarations of love. I could not talk. She didn’t say anything either. We just looked at each other.

Then she was gone.

Feeling numb and slightly queasy, I sat back down at my desk. I picked up the pomegranate.

When I emerged from my office to throw away the peels, Zuhra was still standing by Enass’s desk, gathering a cluster of plastic bags full of her possessions.

“If you stay any longer I am putting you back to work,” I said.

Zuhra smiled. Or I imagined she did, from the way her eyes glinted for a moment. “How many times have I said good-bye?” she asked Enass. And she walked by me to the door. “I’ll see you in New York.”

I nod.

She hurried across the courtyard, and I turned to follow her. I couldn’t help it. She didn’t see me. I walked out of the office to stand at the top of our three marble steps. She walked quickly, a bustle of black skirts and plastic bags, with her fringed, brown leather purse banging against her side. I watched her until she stepped out of the gate and was gone. She did not look back.

I WAS AT MY COMPUTER
half an hour later when my phone beeped. It was a text from Zuhra, her last before getting on the plane: “I LOVE U.”

TWENTY-FOUR
reasons to return

During my worst months in Yemen, when I fantasized only about sleep
, broccoli, two-day weekends, and having access to cheese, a friend asked me how my love life was going. “You must be joking,” I said. “Even if I had time, everyone in Yemen is married, Muslim, or twenty-three. But knowing my luck, I’ll fall in love with someone my very last day and get stuck here.”

This, it turns out, is exactly what happens.

During my three-week trip in September to see friends in Jordan, Lebanon, and Ethiopia—my victory lap of the region to celebrate surviving the past year—I find myself horribly homesick, for Yemen. I miss my gingerbread house. I miss the Old City at dusk. I miss my reporters. I miss Carolyn and Koosje. I find myself eager to get back to Sana’a, although I will have only three days there before flying to New York.

I’m obviously not ready to leave. But there’s no question of changing my ticket. I now have a meeting with an agent in New York; I have a free apartment and a large orange cat waiting for me to take care of them; and my family would kill me if I didn’t return. But I’ve started to think of the upcoming months in New York as a visit rather than a permanent move.

Going back to
The Week
does not even cross my mind. To return to that office would be to resume being someone I no longer am. What new challenges would there be for me there? The things I want to learn can’t be learned doing a comfy job in a comfy First World country. I need new cultures, new people, new languages. I couldn’t go back to a predictable work life. Having survived the hardest year of my life, I am suffused with a new sense of confidence. Got a difficult job in a chaotic country?
Bring it on
.

The Sierra Leone job looks good, if they decide to offer it to me. I haven’t spent much time in Africa, but I
know
I could handle the work. In fact, despite the myriad challenges of the
Observer
, the idea of training a whole new staff at a whole new newspaper is thrilling. It’s particularly alluring because I wouldn’t also have to be editor in chief. I could focus
just
on training. It sounds positively
cushy
.

I decide to give up my Manhattan apartment, which I’ve been subletting. While I have no idea where I’ll end up living, I know I am not done traveling. If I sell my book proposal, I’ll have to come back to Yemen anyway, at least for a few months to do research. How much fun it would be to live in Yemen while not running a newspaper! I’d get to travel more around the country, spend time with friends, and focus on Arabic. Most important, I’d have time to
write
.

Of course, I don’t have to decide just yet. These three weeks I spend traveling are supposed to be pure pleasure, pure respite, before plunging back into New York life and the decisions that await me there. But it’s tough to keep my brain from dwelling on these thoughts. It keeps trying to figure out how I could stay in Yemen a bit longer and how I could earn enough money to support myself while writing a book.

And then there’s Tim.

DURING MY TRIP,
I strike up an unexpected correspondence with Tim. I first write to him from a dingy little Internet café in Amman, to thank him for attending my party and to tell him a bit about my visit to the spectacular ruins of Petra, where I spent three happy days climbing around ancient temples with
bedouins
. He writes back immediately and at length. Thus begins near-daily communication that continues the entire time I am gone.

Every night before I go to sleep in another strange bed, I write him about my day, and just about every night, I dream about him. Vivid, passionate dreams. I don’t understand it. I’ve never dreamed so much and so intensely about someone I hardly know. I dream that I go to his house. I have a piece of paper with notes on it, which I show him. We talk about these notes with great excitement. He is happy to see me. Then his wife comes in. At first she is kind and then sees right through me and realizes that I am in love with her husband. She looks at the notes I have written and she knows. Her face darkens. She begins to yell at me and at Tim, saying cruel things.

I expect Tim to rush to reassure her, but he does not. She leaves, and he turns to me. “I don’t love her,” he says. “It’s terrible to say. But I don’t. This won’t last much longer, and I adore you. And we can be together. We could marry.”

When I wake, my head whirls. It has never occurred to me he could actually leave his wife. I reassess how much I am enamored. Do I really want him on a permanent, long-term basis? I
must
love him that much if he is to sacrifice his marriage for me. To my surprise, I feel simply joyful, without a shred of doubt, at the prospect of a life with him. Of course, in
real
life, this is not exactly on offer.

By the time I arrive in Addis Ababa for Ethiopian New Year, I can hardly think of anything but Tim. What is happening to me? All this from a flurry of e-mails from a married man?

I RETURN TO SANA’A
on September 16, 2007, the day before Tim’s birthday. As my plane descends into Arabia, the sight of the cookie-colored cubes below brings tears to my eyes. I’m practically soggy with love for this city, this country, these familiar streets. If I didn’t have a lunch scheduled with a literary agent in New York, I don’t think I would leave at all. As the plane taxies down the runway and the Yemenis begin leaping out of their seats, I switch on my phone. Tim has texted to welcome me home. Sami is waiting for me at the airport and takes me to my beloved house, where I want to hug everything. Carolyn has left for China, but there is too much to do to wallow in lonesomeness. I have to pack up a year of my life in less than three days. The first two I spend stuffing all I can into two suitcases, giving away the rest, and seeing friends.

The third and last day I have saved for Tim, who has asked if I have time to see him before I go.

That morning, I am awakened by a telephone call from one of his bodyguards. They’d like to come check out the house, if that would be convenient. Still groggy, I agree. Tim texts me, apologizing for the invasion. An hour later, a very polite Yemeni in a crisp white shirt comes to my gate and asks if this is where the ambassador will be coming later. I say it is indeed and promise to keep him safe from all harm.

By the time Tim rings to say the ambassadorial procession is under way from the embassy, I am completely organized. My two overloaded suitcases sit waiting for their trip to the airport; my house is spotless; Sami has taken the last of my DVDs and books; and my refrigerator is empty except for a bottle of champagne, a Marlborough white wine, and a yogurt. Two pomegranates sit in my kitchen waiting for breakfast tomorrow. In my
mafraj
, I light the candles and sit reading until Tim rings me from the gate.

He slips in, smiling like a schoolboy playing hooky, and kisses me on the lips, right in front of the two Yemeni bodyguards who follow him into my courtyard. But the kiss is chaste enough simply to be a friendly greeting; I shouldn’t read anything into it. Flustered, I start to lock the gate, but Tim reminds me that with two armed men parked at my door, this is hardly necessary. I lead him upstairs, heart hammering, all the way to the roof, shedding my
abaya
on the way. I want to show him my city. Most of the dirt from the roof has been carried away, and the ceiling has finally been repaired, albeit not with the traditional materials UNESCO guidelines require. Tim has to duck through the low doorway to the roof, and then we are standing under the Sana’ani stars. Leaning our elbows on the dusty parapet around my roof, we admire the glowing
qamaria
and watch children playing under clotheslines before turning to look at each other. A crescent moon plays in his eyes, and I can’t stop smiling. In a striped shirt and jeans, Tim looks all of seventeen and profoundly unambassadorial. This is one of the perfect moments of my life. We stand there until a little girl on a nearby roof spots us and begins waving and calling. Having promised to protect him, I hurry Tim back down to the
mafraj
and fetch the bottle of champagne.

Never has my
mafraj
witnessed such an enchanted evening. We talk for so long—about his work in Iraq, Chad, and the Central African Republic, about my uncertain future—that I almost worry that I have misread him. But when we finish the champagne and he opens the wine, I know. We’ve barely tasted it when he slides a hand under my hair to cup my neck, says, “We probably shouldn’t do this,” and kisses me.

Something wild takes hold of me, something that immediately eclipses every passion I’ve ever felt. It is a vertiginous, irresistible fall. How could I have believed I loved anyone before this? How could I ever have been with anyone else when there is a Tim in this world? I can feel, vividly
feel
, my heart leave my body. I’d think this mere romantic fantasy if not for everything that follows.

As we tilt back into the cushions, he stops for a minute and takes my head between his hands.

“Promise me,” he says. “Promise me it won’t be the last time.”

“Promise
me.”

“I promise you. I promise.”

“Then I promise,” I whisper.

Even after we’ve made love, he doesn’t loosen his grip but wraps me closer in his arms. We stay like that until long past a reasonable hour.

“Why are you leaving?” he says in a pained voice, his arms bruising my rib cage. “Don’t go.”

“It’s a good thing I’m leaving.” I’m trying to talk myself into it. “If I stayed, I would be in terrible danger of falling in love with you.”

“It’s too late,” he says, his fingers digging into my shoulders. “Don’t you know it’s too late?”

I DO LEAVE YEMEN,
but not Tim. During my three months in New York, we write every day, unfolding our entire lives. Everything that happened between us in Sana’a happened so fast that I had hardly any time to think about the repercussions. But now, I worry. I worry about feeling so strongly about a man who isn’t mine. I worry that he is toying with me and will never leave his wife. I worry about the pain it will cause his family if he does leave his wife.