The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

by Jennifer Steil

  I feel a bit like Chairman Mao. At least I know I haven’t been totally forgotten.

  I’d overslept my alarm this morning at Sabri’s house, where I was temporarily housed in student quarters, and woke in a panic. I couldn’t be late on my first day as the boss! I skipped coffee, skipped my planned walk to work, and dashed through a quick shower and into a cab, breathless. To find that I apparently have not been missed.

  But wait! There are noises in a back office. The door opens, and a tiny pillar of black rayon launches herself across the front foyer and into my arms. “I cannot believe I have you before me!” Zuhra says, stepping back to look at me, keeping hold of my hands. Her dark eyes sparkle. “I have waited so long for this day. I love you so much! And now, we are for the first time going to have a woman in charge. I am so very happy!”

  “I am so happy too!” I say, though perhaps with less confidence. “Where is everybody?”

  She tells me that Faris is indeed with the president, that al-Asaadi rarely appears this early, and that Farouq is out because his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter has just died of a mysterious illness. He hasn’t been able to work, she says. He is overwhelmed with grief. I cannot imagine. I have no idea how anyone recovers from the death of a child. “And Arwa has quit,” Zuhra goes on. “She went to find a different job. And Zaid of course just left for London. Hassan and Adel are both working for the EU observers until the election is over.” Theo, who is still in Yemen, has left the paper, apparently burning some bridges behind him. I fell out with him myself after he sent me a series of bizarrely discouraging e-mails about my return. I think he rather resented the invasion of what he saw as his turf.

  “Do we have anyone left?” I am beginning to panic. How can I transform a paper with no staff?

  “Radia is here! And we have some new ones,” she says. “Come, meet them.”

  Radia, who is officially Faris’s receptionist and not a reporter, emerges from the back room, where the women have been breakfasting, to tell me how much she missed me and how pleased she is that I am back.

  They take me to the newsroom, where we find two women and two men hunched over computers. Zuhra tugs me over by the hand.

  “This is Noor. She is doing the culture page.” Noor has thick, long eyelashes and eyes that crinkle when she smiles. Like Zuhra, she wears glasses, but unlike Zuhra, she ties her hijab in the back of her head. I make a mental note of this so I can identify her later.

  Najma, Zuhra tells me, has been writing the health page. Najma shyly takes my hand and tells me how glad she is to meet me. Her eyes are wider and more frightened than Noor’s.

  The men, a tall, bespectacled man named Talha and a stouter, boyishly attractive man named Bashir, are equally polite and welcoming.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask them. They hadn’t been hired when I left Yemen two months ago.

  “A month or so.”

  All four of the new hires are recent graduates of university. None has any journalism experience. I am dismayed. So many of the people I had already begun to train are gone. I will have to start all over again.

  ZUHRA SHOWS ME to al-Asaadi’s office in the back of the first floor, where I sit and take notes on recent issues of the paper until al-Asaadi arrives, close to noon. I’ve forgotten how tiny he is; just a bit taller than my shoulders (and I am only 5’6”). He’s handsome, with doll-like features and Bambi eyelashes. I would guess he weighs something approaching ninety pounds. He wears a suit jacket and slacks.

  “Ahlan wa sahlan!” (Welcome!) he says, taking my hand and smiling warmly.

  “Ahlan wa sahlan! I am sorry for invading your office. I wasn’t sure where to go.”

  “My office is your office.”

  Theo had warned me, when I was last in Yemen, that al-Asaadi would prove my biggest challenge. He won’t want to give up control, he said. He is used to being in charge.

  So I am cautious. I don’t want to wound his pride and jeopardize our relationship by throwing my weight around and acting like an Ugly, Imperialist American. I tell him how much I look forward to learning from him and how much I hope we can work as partners.

  “It is I who will learn from you,” he says. “Faris feels—and I feel the same way—that you are to be the captain of this paper. You are to run the entire show.”

  My knees begin to tremble. “Shukrahn,” I say. “But perhaps you could help me begin? Can you walk me through how things work now, what your deadlines are?” I have no idea where to start.

  “Of course.”

  He and I sit down with Zuhra in the front conference room to come up with a tentative game plan. Al-Asaadi explains all of the deadlines (which he concedes are generally missed), and Zuhra gives me a printed sheet detailing which reporters write which pages. I tell them I would like to hold editorial meetings at the beginning of each publishing cycle, one at nine A.M. on Sunday, and one at nine A.M. on Wednesday, so that each reporter can tell me what stories they are reporting, who their sources are, and when they will be handing them in. My goal is to somehow streamline the copy flow so that all the pages aren’t coming in to edit at the last minute. This will clearly take a miracle.

  After our meeting, Zuhra walks me to the grocery store (I forgot that the bathrooms at the Observer never have toilet paper; Yemenis use water hoses to clean themselves, which means the bathroom floors are nearly always flooded with what my copy editor Luke often refers to as “poop juice”) and then to the Jordanian sandwich shop for one of the rolled-up spicy vegetable sandwiches I love so. I haven’t eaten anything all day, although Zuhra has fetched me several cups of sticky-sweet black tea. “You are the only one I would make tea for,” she says. “No one else.” Like me, Zuhra does not cook. Tea is one of the few things she knows how to make.

  After lunch, she hands me a story by Talha. No other copy has yet been filed for the next issue. I spend nearly an hour going through his story, making edits. It has no coherent structure, no clear first sentence, and a dearth of sources. I sigh. I will have to teach him everything.

  A second desk has been moved into al-Asaadi’s office for me, although I can’t use the drawers yet as they are locked. It’s a plain office, white walls, gray carpet, with no decoration save for a map of Jerusalem on the wall near the door. Light floods in from the windows along two walls of the office. Outside, stray cats yowl in the yard.

  I seem to have gone numb. All the panic and fear and grief of those last few days in New York have fallen away, but nothing has moved in to take their place. I probably should be feeling stark terror about the challenges of this job, but for some reason I feel bizarrely level.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, after a swim, I am happy to find Qasim, whose irrepressible high spirits I’d enjoyed in June. He was the rascal always stealing people’s shoes and hiding them in the wastebaskets, the one making prank phone calls, the one most likely to be caught singing in the office. But he is in charge of advertising, not a reporter, and thus not really part of my staff.

  I also find my copy editor Luke, the blond Californian surfer dude. I’ve no idea if he actually surfs, but he looks like he should. He’s not entirely sure what he’s doing in Yemen, he tells me. He and a friend are thinking about launching some sort of business. “Yemen is a great place to be because they have nothing,” he says. “Everything is new to them. You can do anything. And it’s easy to rise to the top here.”

  Still, he complains that Yemen is destroying his health. He hasn’t exercised since he got here, and he smokes way too much.

  “And drinking? Do you drink?”

  “Not anymore!”

  “Guess you picked the right country.”

  “Actually, I didn’t come here to get away from alcohol,” he says. “I came here to get closer to the qat.”

  I find Talha in the newsroom and pull him aside to go over his story on the hazards of buying prescription drugs in Yemen. Drugs sold in Yemen are often either contaminated with toxic substances or completely ineffective sug
ar pills. Talha is quiet, serious, and eager to hear my suggestions. I explain to him all about leads, and story structure, and why we never begin a sentence with an attribution!

  Mohammed al-Asaadi gives me the last ten issues of the paper to read after work before handing me off to Salem, who drives me and Radia home after nine P.M. They insist I ride up front, while Radia perches on a stack of Yemen Observers in the back of the van. I offer her my seat, but she refuses.

  As we near Radia’s house, she leans forward and touches my arm. “Come with me,” she says. “Come to my home.” I look at her. Does she mean now?

  “Come to my house,” she says again. “Come sleep with me?”

  This is not quite as provocative an invitation as it would be in New York. I learned on my previous trip that girls often invite new friends to sleep at their homes. Still, it catches me off guard.

  “Why, I would love to!” I say. “But not tonight. I have things I need to get from home. Books and things. Presents to take to the office tomorrow.”

  She nods. But when she gets out she asks again. “But you will come, another time?”

  “I will.”

  Salem teaches me several new Arabic words on the way home. I am famished by the time I arrive, close to ten P.M., and polish off a yogurt and a peanut butter and raisin sandwich. Did I mention I don’t cook? I read a few issues of the Observer, try not to despair, and slip into sleep.

  IT IS A HUGE RELIEF finally to begin working. The anticipation and anxiety that have been building up since I accepted this job were harder to bear than the work itself. I don’t do well with leisure time or stillness. I had arrived in Sana’a just a day and a half before my first day of work, and that was more than enough downtime. I’m not type A, I’m type A-plus.

  On my second day of work, I arrive hours before my staff. (I have a staff! Okay, I am a little excited.) Only Qasim is there, so I give him one of the Jacques Torres chocolate bars I brought as gifts (it is impossible to find good chocolate in Yemen) and three Hershey bars for his three kids (who aren’t yet picky about chocolate). When Radia and Zuhra arrive, I give them embroidered silk Chinese purses, stuffed with soap and chocolate and hand-woven change purses. Accessories are important in Yemen, where the basic outfit doesn’t alter much from day to day. Radia is shyly pleased, while Zuhra announces her gift to everyone in sight.

  I hold my first staff meeting that morning. Everyone tells me which stories they are writing and when they will get them to me. It is difficult to pin down exact deadlines, because when I ask, for example, if Bashir can get me a story by one P.M., the answer is “Insha’allah.” If God is willing. Never, in my entire year, would I be able to get a reporter to say to me, “Yes, I will finish the story by one P.M.” In Yemen, nothing happens unless Allah wills it. And as it turns out, Allah is no great respecter of newspaper deadlines.

  “Insha’allah” is also murmured reflexively after almost anything stated in the future tense. It makes Yemenis nervous when you leave it out. If I were to say to a Yemeni man, for example, “I am traveling to France next week but will return to Yemen Thursday,” he would automatically add “insha’allah.”

  Ibrahim, who writes front-page stories for each issue from his home office, joins us, expressing great joy over my arrival. He invites me to a qat chew, which surprises me because I didn’t know that women could go to qat chews with men. But apparently Western women are treated as a third sex in Yemen and thus can wander back and forth from male to female worlds. Western men, on the other hand, do not have this advantage.

  This explains why my male staff members offer me immediate deference. To them I am not really a woman; I am a giraffe. Something alien and thus unclassifiable in the familiar male/female cubbyholes. Were a Yemeni woman to take over the paper, most of the men would quit in protest. They do not treat their female colleagues with anything like the respect with which they treat me, and they’d rather die on the spot than ask a Yemeni woman for help or advice on a story. But oddly, they rarely mind deferring to me.

  Al-Asaadi is the exception. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out that he does mind deferring to me, though he makes an initial effort to disguise his resentment. He is always smiling and polite, but he never shows up at the office on time in the mornings, when all of the other reporters arrive. He often ignores my deadlines, filing his stories when he feels like filing them. These things tell me that I may be filling his shoes, but he is still his own boss. Thankfully, though, he does show up to the editorial meeting on my second day and is helpful in suggesting which reporters should work on which articles.

  After I send everyone off to pursue their stories, I spend the bulk of the morning editing a health story Najma has written about the psychological impact of eating various foods. There isn’t a single source in the entire piece. When I go to the newsroom to ask her to come talk with me about the story, her eyes widen in terror.

  “This won’t be painful!” I say, trying not to laugh. “I am just going to help you.”

  Zuhra rushes over to reassure her. “Do not be afraid,” she says as I lead Najma toward the conference room. “There is no one more supportive.”

  I explain to the trembling Najma that we need to know where the information in her story comes from, so that our readers can judge its legitimacy. If we are to contend that Brazil nuts can elevate a person’s mood, then we need to be able to quote a specific study from a university or a hospital that proves such a thing.

  This is all new to her. It seems she had thought that the mere fact that the words would appear in newsprint would give them authority. This was a common mind-set. One of the greatest challenges I would have working with Yemeni journalists is that they are too trusting, too willing to believe whatever they are told. In a deeply religious society such as this one, children are raised to take everything on faith, unquestioningly. The flip side is that they often do not feel they have to prove their contentions. I have to undo years of conditioning.

  I spend the rest of the day editing other health stories and election briefs, and fretting about the dearth of stories we have for the front page. Farouq is still out, and he’s our main political reporter. There is no one to replace him. The new guys have none of his political contacts and no idea whom to call for story ideas or quotes, and the women are busy with culture and health.

  Only late that evening, after running out through a rainstorm to cover a batik exhibit at the nearby German House, do I finally find Faris for the first time. I am happy, as I have a long list of requests for him, including reimbursement for my plane fare. I give him the dental floss he had requested from the States, and he is happy too. He gives me a warm little speech about how he now considers me family and that if I need anything at all, money or anything else, I am to come to him. He has VIP passes for me to cover election events, as well as hotel rooms, he says, which I hope means I will be traveling to cover the polls. (None of which comes to pass.) He also has a phone for me, but it is still charging, and no one is sure of the number, so I will get it from the office tomorrow. Insha’allah.

  I GO BACK TO WORK after this meeting to edit an unreadable story of Hassan’s. Despite the fact that Hassan was in my original class, every single paragraph of his story begins with an attribution. I call him on Luke’s phone to tell him that this is no longer acceptable. “Before you hand in anything else, please make sure you are not starting all of your sentences with ‘according to’ or ‘he said.’” Hassan, being the sweet and deferential man he is, thanks me enormously and says he hopes we can talk more about this problem of his.

  My day began at eight A.M., and I don’t leave the office until nearly eleven P.M. that night. Salem drives me home, where I finish editing a few more stories in my small suite in Sabri’s dormitory over some carrots and hummus, the first real meal I’ve had all day. I’ve stumbled upon a foolproof diet plan: Take over a newspaper in a poor, semiliterate Islamic country, and watch the pounds just fall away.

  THE NEXT DAY, my t
hird day at work, we close my first issue. It takes nineteen hours. Yet I am not unhappy, even with the overwhelming amount of work to do. The thing about being at the top of the masthead is there is never any question of leaving early or leaving anything undone. I find something very comforting about succumbing to this total commitment; it eliminates all other choices. I’m going to make this a better paper or die trying. I have nothing else to distract me. I am free of an intimate relationship, having just ended a turbulent on-again, off-again romance in New York; I haven’t time to socialize outside of work; and I have no other deadlines. I can give the paper everything. I will have to.

  I wake at six A.M. and walk to work. Men stare at me as I pass—it’s unusual to see a woman walking alone, particularly one with blue eyes and uncovered hair—but their comments are mostly benign. Everywhere I go, I am showered with “Welcome to Yemen!”s and “I love you!”s. I stopped covering my hair after I realized it made no difference in the amount of attention I attracted and because Yemenis kept asking me, “Why do you cover your hair? You’re a westerner!” The morning is deliriously cool and crisp. Sana’anis are not early risers, so the streets don’t get busy until close to eleven A.M.

  When the women get in, I consult with Zuhra, who is fast becoming my right-hand woman, and send Najma and Noor to cover a Japanese flower-arranging demonstration. Hardly real news, but it’s a nice easy way to break them in and get them used to reporting outside of the office. I have to send them together, so that neither has to travel alone in a car with a man. It can damage a woman’s reputation to be seen alone in a taxi with a male driver. There is no Yemen Observer driver available, so I have to wheedle the taxi fare out of the Doctor, who vigorously resists all attempts to draw down his allotment of riyals.

  The Doctor. Everyone lives in terror of this tall, bespectacled man, who is not actually a doctor but the person in charge of administration and finance. He doles out salaries, takes attendance each morning, and serves as Faris’s iron fist of enforcement. The Doctor never speaks; he shouts. He shouts at Enass the secretary, he shouts at my reporters, and, inevitably, he shouts at me. Shouting in the newsroom does not always suggest displeasure, however. Many of the men shout as a matter of course. Often I run out of my office thinking I am overhearing a fierce argument, when really the men are saying to each other: “FANTASTIC NEW CAR YOU HAVE! WHERE DID YOU GET IT? HEY, DO YOU WANT SOME OF THIS QAT? IT’S DELICIOUS.” But when the Doctor shouts, it generally means trouble.