The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (47 page)

I share these worries with him. I also tell him about every past lover, every mistake I have ever made. If anything is going to scare him away, I want to know now. But Tim doesn’t scare easily. Every revelation only brings a new declaration of love from him. Every time I hit send, I worry I will never hear from him again, but every time I check my in-box, he is there.

Tim tells me about his large, close-knit family; his years living in New Zealand, Chile, Austria, and France; that his daughter has been his greatest joy. He tells me about the women he has loved. And finally, he tells me about his wife. There have been problems for years. They don’t share the same values or enjoy doing the same things. He would not have embarked on this relationship had he been happy in his marriage.

Someone once told me that women leave a bad marriage because it is a bad marriage, but that men never leave until they find someone else. Perhaps that’s true. I think Tim felt that he couldn’t leave unless he had a really good reason—his unhappiness alone wasn’t enough to justify hurting someone else.

When I am out with friends in New York, I find myself rushing home as if Tim were actually there waiting for me and writing to him for hours. It scares me how completely I love him. I have made it clear that I cannot continue this, I cannot keep falling in love with him, if there is no chance of a future together. This is what makes him different from other men I’ve loved—I actually
want
a future with him. I ask to have him all to myself.

“I need to see you,” he says. “We need to see each other, to be sure.” We worry aloud that maybe we’re creating a fantasy relationship and that reality will disillusion us. Tim warns me that he snores. I warn him that I grind my teeth at night. We agree to meet in London.

By then, I have accepted the job training journalists in Sierra Leone. I agonize over the decision, calling my parents, my new agent (the lunch went well!), my friends, and Tim. My parents are not enthusiastic about me heading off somewhere possibly more dangerous than Yemen, but they know better than to try to change my mind. My agent encourages me, reminding me that we haven’t yet sold the book I’m writing. It might be good to have a backup plan. Tim withholds his opinion, telling me to follow my heart. He will wait for me, he says. While I have dreams of staying in Yemen to be close to him, I am not making any decisions in my life contingent on a married man.

I take the job. After meeting Tim in December, I will fly to Yemen with him and stay with friends for two months. The Sierra Leone job starts in February. I figure that even if I do sell my book, I’ll have two months to get cracking on it before I head to Africa.

DECEMBER
7
IS THE BEST DAY
of my whole life. It begins before dawn in New York, when a friend drives me to JFK. I’ve spent the week meeting editors but still don’t know the fate of my book. The flight to London is empty. I lie down across empty seats but am unable to sleep. My heartbeat is too loud. Customs detains me at Heathrow, so I am the last person to emerge. And there he is, waiting for me. His face is utterly familiar, as if I’ve been meeting him at airports all of my life.
“Jenny,”
he says.

He whisks me to a hotel, where I find the room filled with all of my favorite foods. He’s memorized them from my e-mails. There are peppered cashews and blueberry muffins and grilled shrimp. A bottle of champagne waits on ice. I get teary at the sight of it all. But before I get comfortable, I have to call my agent. “You have a publisher!” she says without preamble. I promptly begin to faint and have to lie down on the bed to continue the conversation. Tim is as ecstatic as I am and uncorks the champagne.

We drink champagne at every meal that week. We go to the theater, the ballet, and the movies. We ice-skate in front of Somerset House. We wander through art galleries. We walk absolutely everywhere. On our penultimate night, we are eating dinner at a dimly lighted French café when Tim says he wants to talk about us. “I have met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with,” he says. “And it’s you. And I need to know how you feel before I go about disrupting a lot of lives.”

Oddly, I don’t need time to think about it. In thirty-eight years, I’ve never felt this way about anyone. It’s funny that I will remember exactly what he said but not my own words. I am crying with wonder and relief and love. But somehow, I get my answer across.

Tim had planned to wait until after the holidays to leave his wife, but it doesn’t work out that way. By Christmas Eve, he’s told her everything, and by January, she is gone. It’s messy, complicated, and horrifically painful for his wife and daughter. It’s excruciating for me to know I am hurting people I have no desire to harm. But not once has either of us had a nanosecond of doubt that we are doing the right thing. The most inexplicable thing is that we have been so sure, right from the start.

For a few weeks, I hardly see him. I stay with friends while he sorts out his separation and is busy working. The wait is agonizing. I can’t bear to be apart from him and keep worrying that he will change his mind. Fortunately, now that I have sold my book, I have plenty of work. I keep distracted with a strict writing schedule and with frequent visits from Zuhra, who returns to Yemen from Mississippi the same time I return from New York.

I’ve been wrestling with what to do about Sierra Leone. Tim has told me he will wait for me and that he wants me to move in with him as soon as I finish the eight-month assignment. But it has become clear that I will struggle to balance writing my first book with training Sierra Leonean journalists. And every time I think about leaving Yemen, I burst into tears. While I’ve all but concluded I should turn down the job, I am afraid to tell Tim. I don’t want him to feel I am rushing things or putting any pressure on him by staying in Yemen.

Zuhra is dead set against me leaving, worried that she will be replaced in my affections.

“You’ll find a new Zuhra there!” she says. “An African Zuhra!”

I tell her about Tim, whom she thinks I would be crazy to desert for eight months. “You would be in huge torture apart from him,” she says. “You don’t need to go. You deserve to stay with the person you love.”

IT IS A SUNNY WINTER DAY
when Tim and I take our first Yemen outing together. Thus far, we’ve only spent time together in private, at his home when the domestic staff is gone for the day. But now that he has announced his separation from his wife and his relationship with me to the embassy, I am no longer a secret. The armored cars drop us off at Bait Bous, an ancient village on a cliff overlooking Sana’a, and we set off on a long walk. A few of his bodyguards scramble up the mountains ahead of us, and several others follow at a discreet distance.

At the top of a ridge, we stop to catch our breath. We’ve been talking the whole way up but fall silent as we turn to look down at the city of Sana’a sprawled beneath us. It looks like something I might have made out of sand as a child, with its fanciful minarets and gingerbread houses. No clouds mar the clear blue of the sky. Across from us, distant mountain peaks sharpen in the midday light. Tim takes my hand.

Nervously, I draw a breath. “I’ve been thinking about Sierra Leone….”

When I finish explaining to him the reasons I shouldn’t go, he smiles. “You’re absolutely right. Frankly, you’d be mad to try to write a book while working the kind of schedule you were working here. And you really need to be
here
to write this book, don’t you?”

“I just didn’t want you to feel that me staying means we have to move things any faster…. I am sure you need time, and I don’t want to interfere with your work—”

“Jenny,” he says, cutting me off. “Can I tell you something? I am
so
glad you aren’t going to Sierra Leone.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t think I could actually stand being apart from you that long.”

“I can stay with friends for a bit….”

“But I want you to live with me, as soon as it’s possible. Will you, Jenny? Will you come and live with me?”

I don’t need time to think, but for a minute I can’t speak. I look down at the city I love before turning back to the man I love even more. It seems too good to be true that I could have both of them.

“I don’t think I could be happy living anywhere else.”

EPILOGUE

Since we both left the
Yemen Observer,
Zuhra and I have become closer than
ever. She visits me in New York, while on vacation from her fellowship program at Jackson State University in Mississippi, a state that she describes as “just like the Third World! Not so different from Yemen.”

It doesn’t take her long to adapt to American culture. She revels in her freedom, living on her own in a dormitory, mingling openly with peers, and peeling away her
kheemaar
. She is shocked, she writes, to discover that she is beautiful!

“A handsome man told me that i am so pretty. i was happy. many pple here told me so. and the best thing that i make lots of freinds here. pple here are so freindly, most of them are balcks. They have a good heart. i befreinded with an old police officers. i befreinded the women in the dorms. Aaah, i met the avengilicans, the invited me to the church to teach me English!!!!! i will go to do this.”

I get a flurry of excited e-mails during her first month in America. “I bought a jeans and short shirt,” she writes. “i look pretty. Jennifer, you won’t belive how many men praised me, and there is a handsome and old man said that if i am in 40s, he won’t hesitaite to marry me. I don’t realise that i am so attractive to this level. Really i mean it, i thought that i am not beatiful and have not attractive personality that people will be hit on.”

But for Zuhra there is also a dark side to being found beautiful. When men begin to flatter her, ask her out, and make declarations of love, she feels that she must have done something wrong to attract such attention.
Am I still a good girl?
she asks me in a million ways. Yes, I tell her. The best girl ever.

The first thing I notice when I finally meet her at her brother’s home in Brooklyn is that she is wearing purple. “You’re in color!” I say. I pick her up in my arms and spin her around. I’m wearing a sleeveless, knee-length dress. I had asked if I should dress modestly, but Zuhra reminded me that we were in
my
country and I should dress however I want. We can’t stop talking, sharing one chair in the living room, until her brother Fahmi jokes that he is starting to worry about our relationship.

For Zuhra, returning to Yemen is a much harder adjustment than leaving it. She begins to fret even before she leaves the United States. How can she go back to a life of restriction with the taste of freedom lingering on her tongue? Zuhra knows what awaits her in Yemen, and—Kamil aside—she dreads it.

I arrive back in Yemen a few days before her, and we cling to each other in a time of major upheaval. I am staying with a series of friends and struggling to write while Tim is sorting out his separation. Zuhra is debating a return to the
Yemen Observer
and readjusting to a sheltered life. Ultimately, she decides to take a job with Kamil’s human rights organization HOOD, writing and reporting for their website. “I can’t go back to the
Observer
without you,” she says. “They wouldn’t let me report the truth.”

It saddens me that so many of my reforms die after I leave. My women, without exception, loathe Zaid, who they say runs the newsroom like a tyrant and is too much a pawn of Faris. Ali, who was keeping things relatively on track, quits in protest when Faris tries to force him to report something he knows is untrue. Noor leaves to work on a newsletter for the German development agency GTZ. “I’m still a journalist!” she reassures me. Radia stops writing entirely, refusing to work for Zaid, and goes back to being a secretary. A few months later, after Qasim quits to start his own business, she is promoted to his position. She’s brilliant at the job, says Zuhra, and has received a huge raise.

Farouq, Jabr, Hadi, Ibrahim, al-Matari, and Najma continue to work at the
Yemen Observer
, where they are now among the most senior staff members. Najma’s Health and Science page is the best page of the paper. So there’s that.

I visit the paper as often as I can and spend time with my reporters, the women in particular. Adhara finishes university in May 2008, and I attend her graduation with Radia, Enass, and Najma. I tell them about Tim, and they are thrilled. No one is more excited than Zuhra, who is the first person Tim and I invite for tea at the residence. The two of them get on so well I don’t get a word in edgewise the entire evening. And when I climb into a taxi to escort Zuhra home afterward, she turns to me and says, “I love him at first sight.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know the feeling.”

Adhara stays at the paper for another year, before her frustrations with Zaid drive her to take a job at an organization working on food security. When her new employer asks her to serve as interpreter at their meetings, she shows up on my doorstep in a panic, terrified at the prospect of talking in front of people. I am pleased that she has come to me and help her deal with her anxieties. When I call a week later, she says her job has gotten easier, and she is much happier.

Not long after we are both back in Yemen, Zuhra finally confesses her own secret love. I am pleased that he turns out to be someone I know and respect. “Now I know why you quoted him so much last year!” I tease.

The only drawback is that Kamil already has a wife. I would not have chosen the life of a second wife for Zuhra, and we spend entire afternoons discussing the implications of this decision. Are you sure you want to share your love with another woman? I say. Is it fair that you are giving him all of you, and he is giving you only half of him? Have you thought about how his first wife must feel?

“You are in the same situation!”

“But Tim isn’t
keeping
his first wife,” I remind her. “And I can’t bear to spend one night apart from him.”

But Zuhra is a stubborn little thing and will not be dissuaded. No one else will do, she says. You cannot control love. Again, she has to fight for her family’s permission and defend her decision to become a second wife. The experience gives her empathy for all minorities, she says. “People say, ‘Why you pick a married man?’ and I feel like I am a gay person, because people don’t understand me.” While it’s not uncommon in Yemen for a man to take several wives, many families don’t desire such a fate for their daughters. But ultimately, Zuhra’s family supports her decision and rejoices in her happiness.

I give her my blessing as well, and attend her wedding in August 2008. She is at least choosing her own husband, which is a daring break with tradition. She is also choosing a man who will allow her the freedom to continue her career and to travel whenever she wishes. This is no small benefit. Nothing is as important to Zuhra as her career, and she reassures me she will not give it up. By June, she has sold major stories to both
Stern
magazine in Germany and the Sunday magazine of
El País
in Madrid. She has begun to surpass her teacher.

I’m curious to hear about her married life. “How do you divide Kamil?” I say. “Is there a schedule?” There is. Zuhra gets Kamil every other night. “Do you make him shower when he comes over?” I ask, but she just laughs. Kamil’s children visit her often and call her Aunt Zuhra. She loves them but is not ready for her own children. Like me, she worries it will stifle her work. “I have enough to do getting used to a husband,” she says.

Zuhra hasn’t given up her dream of running a paper of her own someday. She does some freelancing for the
Yemen Times
and hopes that once she has HOOD’s website in shape, she will again work as a journalist.

As I write this, Zaid is still the editor of the
Observer
. He calls me every few weeks to ask why I don’t visit more often and to tell me he misses me. I’m impressed that he has stuck it out, but I can’t bring myself to say how devastated I am by what he’s done with the paper. My few remaining staff members are preparing to leave, mostly because they take issue with his management style. Before Adhara quits, she writes me a desperate e-mail telling me how much she and the others are suffering. Faris and Zaid don’t respect women, she says. The
Yemen Times
has offered her a job, but she is afraid to take it. “I am afraid Mr. Faris would do something to hurt me,” she says. I hope this fear is unfounded.

I hate seeing my women treated poorly. I feel guilty and responsible.

I invite Adhara as well as Zuhra, Radia, Enass, Najma, and Noor to lunch. I now live with Tim in the residence of the British ambassador, surrounded by ten bodyguards and a household staff of five. It’s a major adjustment. This morning I get up from my desk in my airy office overlooking our garden and stop short on my way downstairs to the kitchen to discuss the menu with our cook; I cannot believe this is my
life
.

Over shrimp soup, we discuss the paper’s dramatic decline and wonder why Faris isn’t interested in doing anything about it. “Why does he keep Zaid, when he treats the staff so poorly and publishes such crap?” I ask. In perhaps not those exact words.

“No one else will do it,” says Radia.

“No one else is willing to run the paper?” I say.

They all shake their heads.

“But why? It’s so easy!”

My women look shocked for a moment and then start to laugh.

“I guess maybe I have to come back.”

“If you go back, I will go back too,” says Zuhra.

“Really?” I say. I think about it. There are at least two more years left in Tim’s posting. And then I remember that Faris will not have changed. He’ll still want my staff writing advertorials. He’ll still want us to avoid news that reflects poorly on Yemen. He may still want Zaid at the head of the masthead. In practice, he would almost certainly not be willing to rehire me, a fact that doesn’t seem to occur to my reporters. But I also think about my staff and what I could do with them with world enough and time. I’ve got two more years to kill, after all.

I can’t believe I am even thinking about it.