Sabri rejected all the fish in the first shop, and we moved on to the second. A man in a bloodied apron held up a medium-size hammour and opened the gills for Sabri’s inspection. This fish passed muster and was placed in a plastic bag and handed over.
The next stop was a small, foul-smelling fish restaurant. We stepped through the doorway and Sabri handed our catch through a window to the kitchen, where it was split open, painted with red-orange spices, and shoved down into a deep, cylindrical oven. Men in stained aprons rushed platters back and forth to the small dining room, where tables of scrawny men (obesity was obviously not one of Yemen’s problems) were tearing off strips of bread and fish with their hands and stuffing them into their mouths. In the kitchen, other men stirred chunks of fish into orange sauces or kneaded bread into large disks to be roasted. In the back room, Sabri directed a worker in the preparation of a salsa (called zahawek) for the fish. Garlic, tomatoes, peppers, and a slab of white cheese were pushed through what looked like a hamburger grinder, and the resulting sauce was poured into a plastic bag. I stood in a corner, watching, trying to stay out of everyone’s way.
The white-clad, dagger-sporting men eating lunch stared at me, despite the fact that I was draped in black from head to toe, my hair covered. Their eyes made me feel like I had accidentally left the house in a sequined bikini. I had never felt quite so conspicuous. “Welcome to Yemen,” each said when he first caught sight of my pale blue eyes. “Where are you from?”
One bearded man told me he had lived in New York for two years, but he left because there were too many drugs on the street. Another man told me he was a neighbor of Sabri’s. A third man asked me if I had children and if I was married. They were so curious and excited to see me that you’d think Julia Roberts had walked in. Only these men probably had no idea who she was.
I said that I was married, and the men insisted that I have children. I promised to try. (Not only was I unmarried, but the thought of it terrified me. And at thirty-seven, I was still ambivalent about children.) Not a man in the place took his eyes off me until I turned to walk away. Maybe not even then.
Our fish at last was cooked, and Sabri collected it, along with bread and sauce. We headed out to a chorus of good-byes. “Ma’a salaama!” the men cried. “Welcome to our country!” Their attentions were flattering and sociable, but I was relieved to escape. There are no compunctions about staring in Yemen; none of the men are the least bit self-conscious about it. But for a woman to stare back was (I had read) ill-advised. This would be one of my greatest challenges. I am the kind of person who makes eye contact with strangers on the subway, flirts with men I meet on planes, and gives my phone number to random bus drivers. I can’t help it. But now I would have to help it. Being too social a butterfly was likely to get my wings singed.
BACK IN THE CAR, Sabri cranked up the air-conditioning although it didn’t feel very hot. Sana’a is so high and dry that the heat never really gets unbearable. The car filled with the scents of cumin, roasted fish, and bread. We headed to the fruit market, where we picked out mangoes, skinny Yemeni apples, oranges, and cigar-sized bananas. Sabri split open a fresh fig and offered it to me. It tasted refreshingly like grass.
I was beguiled by the mounds of pomegranates, which didn’t look anything like the small, red pomegranates I knew. These were enormous, yellow-green, and grapefruit sized, with just the faintest pink blush. I wanted to ask Sabri to get some but was afraid of looking greedy. Besides, pomegranates are terribly difficult to eat. The thought of peeling off all that tough skin and prying loose each little juicy seed was, at that particular moment, exhausting.
We stopped once more to pick up spiced saffron rice and headed home. I was relieved to return to the security of his First World quarters, where I could catch my breath and let all of the new sights and smells settle. We were setting the table when Theo arrived. Theo, my high school sweetheart and the reason I landed in Yemen, had already been living in Sana’a for nearly two years, doing research for a book and occasional work for the Yemen Observer. Frustrated with the chaos and lack of standards at the newspaper, he had summoned me to come instill a few basics in the heads of its reporters. He had no journalism training himself. I still wasn’t sure why he had chosen me. Surely he knew other journalists. I couldn’t help wondering if it could be, at least partly, a faint hope of rekindling our long-expired romance. It had been probably seventeen years since we’d been together, but I still felt naked in his presence—the kind of vulnerability only a first love can inflict. We still mattered a little too much to each other to be at ease. But I hadn’t come here for romance. I came for the adventure of spreading the journalistic gospel in an utterly alien culture.
We had a massive amount of food. Sabri even broke out one of his best bottles of white wine, which we drank warm. Wine was a precious resource in this dry country, where it was illegal to sell alcohol or to drink it in public. Non-Muslims caught drinking in public could be sentenced to up to six months in prison, while Muslims faced a year behind bars, plus (in theory) eighty lashes with a whip. So I was fortunate to be staying with one of the very few Yemenis with a wine cellar. Theo was impressed with Sabri’s largesse and told me that I was being spoiled. “Don’t get used to this,” he said with a hint of warning.
We ate everything with our fingers from communal platters, ripping off pieces of chewy flatbread, using it to pull chunks off the blackened fish, and then dipping the bundles in the zahawek. It tasted of garlic and cumin. I loved it. The fish was sweet and tender, falling off the bones. All of the new foods preoccupied me, while Theo and Sabri talked about Faris, the mysterious founder and publisher of the Yemen Observer, whom I was to meet the next day.
I had examined several issues of the Observer online before my arrival and now listened carefully as Sabri and Theo enumerated the myriad faults of the paper. The biggest problem was management, said Theo. There wasn’t any. Nothing seemed to come in on any real deadlines, and there were no procedures for getting story ideas approved. When I wrote for newspapers, things generally worked like this: Reporters ran around town talking to sources and coming up with ideas for stories. They pitched these ideas to their editor. The editor either approved, refined, or killed the ideas. The reporters then reported, wrote, and sent their stories to their editor. That editor checked the reporting and basic structure and sent it along to a copy editor, who checked solely for grammar and style. And then it was published. The Yemen Observer did none of this. According to Theo, people wrote what they wanted to write, and it went into the paper as is. Quality checks on either the reporting or the prose were nonexistent.
This bit didn’t bother me too much. It wasn’t my problem. After all, I was there for only three weeks, to help the journalists hone their skills. I certainly wasn’t going to muck about in management and I didn’t have time for a revolution.
“And no one has any training,” Theo said. “The whole staff is made up of English majors who have no background in journalism. They have no idea how to structure a story. Or how to report it. Oh—and you will have to convince them that it is wrong to plagiarize from the Internet.”
I paused, a handful of fish midway to my mouth. “They plagiarize?”
“All the time.”
“What about copyright law?”
“There is no copyright law in Yemen. Intellectual property rights don’t really exist.” He took a sip of wine.
“Oh.”
“And they also write about advertisers all the time. Faris has them write about his friends and such.”
“But that’s unethical!” I protested. “You can’t write stories about advertisers. It destroys credibility.”
Theo shrugged. “Explain that to Faris.”
Sabri, a friend of Faris’s, smiled knowingly. “I’ve also noticed some mistakes in the reporting,” he said.
“Some mistakes?” said Theo. “Anyway, that’s why Jennifer is here.” He turned to me. “And could you teach them how to do Internet rese
arch? And how to know which sources are valid? And, you know, they sometimes refuse to put bylines on stories. You should get them to do that.”
I tried not to dissolve into a puddle of terror.
I’d been a journalist for more than ten years, but I had never taught a journalism course before, let alone in the Arab world. I was jellied with nerves. “You’ll need to show them you are in command right away,” said Theo. “You will have to find some way to make them show up on time every day. Oh—and you will need to tell them you are married. No woman your age here is unmarried, and if they find out that you are single they will assume something is terribly wrong with you. You don’t want to give them any reason to look for something wrong with you.”
He had said this to me before I left New York, which is why I was wearing my divorced friend Ginger’s wedding ring on my left hand. I don’t normally wear jewelry, and it felt tight and uncomfortable on my finger.
Sabri was westernized enough to be able to handle the knowledge that I was unmarried. Earlier that morning, when he found out I was vegetarian (except for fish, a recent addition to my diet) he said, “Well! You would make someone a very cheap wife!”
Still, to be careful, I told him I had a boyfriend in the States, as a kind of insurance policy against any possible advances. It wasn’t a lie; I did leave behind a romance. But it was complicated, like everything in New York.
AFTER LUNCH, Theo and I left Sabri to his work and walked through Tahrir Square, the large plaza at the heart of Sana’a, to the walled Old City, weaving our way to his apartment.
As we walked, emaciated cats and children darted across our path. The streets were so narrow that if I stretched out my arms I could touch rough stone on either side. An earthy, damp smell wafted up from the ground. We passed men asleep in wheelbarrows, their legs dangling over the sides.
I was overwhelmed by the city’s architectural beauty. I never could have dreamed up the edible-looking buildings. I wanted to take a bite out of their walls. It is almost impossible to see into the boxy tower houses; they have few windows on the lower floors, to keep men from spying the women within. The upper floors are adorned with elaborate stained glass windows often referred to as qamaria (although I was later informed that the word qamaria originally referred only to alabaster windows, which were used to soften the sun’s rays and keep the interiors cool). I had never seen a lovelier city.
I quickly realized that a map would be utterly useless. Even as I followed Theo to his house, I knew I would not be able to find my way back easily. He had told me that there were no addresses in Yemen, and he was serious. The Old City is a labyrinth of seemingly unnamed streets and addressless buildings. While each neighborhood does have a name, I would eventually learn that even Sana’anis could rarely locate streets outside of their own neighborhood.
Tiny boys wearing tiny daggers in their belts ran after us as we passed, calling out, “Hello! I love you!” Theo spoke to a few of them in Arabic, and they laughed and scattered. A man in a white robe passed us carrying an enormous television on his shoulder.
Little girls were running around in pink satin princess dresses with puffy short sleeves. When I asked Theo if they were dressed this way for the holy day, he said, “They are dressed that way because they are princesses of the dust.”
Theo’s apartment, located at the top of a gingerbread building, was magnificent. We walked up a dozen flights of uneven stone steps—there is not a uniform set of stairs in the entire country—to a large metal door with three locks. Inside was a warren of rooms, including a large, airy mafraj filled with cushions and illuminated by a half dozen qamaria. The word mafraj literally means “a room with a view” and is usually the top floor of a Yemeni house. I was interested to learn that the word comes from the same root as an Arabic word for “vagina.” In this room nearly all social activity takes place, from meals to qat chews. Theo had the top floor of his building and thus the only apartment with a true mafraj.
We settled there, on deep blue cushions, to talk about my class and finalize the plan for my first day. This had the effect of making me feel simultaneously more at ease and more apprehensive. “They will love you,” he’d say. “Don’t worry.” And then a moment later he would add, “But you cannot show them any weakness. You cannot show them a flaw, or they will become completely disillusioned and lose faith in you.”
After a few cups of tea, we climbed to his roof so I could take photographs before dark. The roofs around us were draped with carpets airing in the sun. I leaned over the walls, trying fruitlessly to see in the windows of other buildings. I was hoping to spot that elusive species, womankind. Already I missed them so much.
As evening fell, the stained glass windows in these buildings lighted up like gems, glowing from lamplight within and splashing color into the night. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. I felt as though I had caught sight of an extraordinary woman and was spellbound by the details of her face.
“Allaaaaaaahu Akbar!” a male voice suddenly blared through the speakers, which sounded as if they were set in Theo’s windowsills. The sound jolted me, although I’d heard the call to prayer at least once before, that afternoon. And then Theo tossed me out of the nest.
“You haven’t truly arrived until you’ve gotten lost in the Old City,” Theo said. “So go, get lost.”
Now, as independent a traveler as I am—I have nearly always traveled alone, usually without any concrete plans—I came very close to begging him to come with me. I had no idea how to find my way around this medieval city. It was getting dark. I was tired. I didn’t speak Arabic. I was a little frightened. But hadn’t I battled scorpions in the wilds of Costa Rica and prevailed? Hadn’t I survived fainting in a San José brothel? Hadn’t I driven a van full of theater sets over mountain passes in Montana during a blizzard? Hadn’t I once arrived in Ireland with only $10 in my pocket and made it last two weeks? Surely I could handle a walk through an unfamiliar town. So I took a breath, tightened the black scarf around my hair, and headed out to take my first solitary steps through Sana’a.
I remained apprehensive as I headed up the alley toward the souq, having no idea where I was going. A clutch of black ghosts drifted by, their curious eyes following me. I imagined I could hear them whispering, “Who is that?”
“I don’t know, but she obviously doesn’t belong here. Her hijab is tied all wrong!”
As they brushed past me, I caught a whiff of musky incense rising off of their clothing. A man hurried by carrying a plastic bag of tomatoes and dragging a boy by the hand. Though I kept my eyes cast toward the ground, everyone I passed stared at me as though I were an escaped zoo animal. A Western, bare-faced, blue-eyed ocelot.
As soon as I had turned a corner, a small girl called out to me in English, “Hello, Bostonian!” and I laughed, feeling a little insulted. I may have been born in Boston, but I am a New Yorker to my bones. The laughter loosened the knot of fear in my chest. Another little girl in a tattered green taffeta dress followed me, saying, “What’s yer name, what’s yer name?” But when I finally answered her, she turned mute and ran away.
I quickened my pace, wanting to find the markets before it got too dark. But I was distracted by a flash of green on my right. I stopped and retraced my steps. A window was cut into the stone wall on the right side of the street. I stood on tiptoe to look through, into—a secret garden! Behind the wall was a lush oasis of palm trees and unidentifiable green crops that filled an area the size of several city blocks. Green! Bright, shiny green! Elated by the sight of something photosynthesizing in the midst of all of the urban brown, I carried on.
Emerging from a series of twisting alleys, I found myself in a wide plaza in front of a mosque. To the left was a tiny storefront restaurant with outside tables, where several men sat drinking tea from glass cups. Across from the mosque was a pharmacy, busy with both male and female customers. To the right were more gingerbread houses. A herd of mangy-looking goats trotted by me, followed by a boy with a
stick and the faint scent of garbage. Children pushed wheelbarrows piled so high with produce they could not see where they were going.
I wasn’t sure which way to turn, but a steady stream of people seemed to be heading down a street to the right, so I joined the flow.
Several men called out to me, “Sadeeqa! Sadeeqa! I love you!” But the women did not speak. They just followed me with their dark eyes, the only exposed part of their bodies.
At several points in my journey, I attracted a retinue of children, most of whom seemed to be completely unattended by adults. The girls were still in their fancy dresses, although many of them were smeared with dirt, while the boys wore suit jackets over their thobes and curved Yemeni daggers called jambiyas. They trotted after me, asking my name and where I came from, crying, “Soma! Soura!” I didn’t learn until days later that soura was Arabic for “photograph.” They wanted me to take their picture.
At last, I entered the maze of shops that made up the souqs. There are several different kinds of souq, arranged by type of merchandise. Handmade jewelry is sold in the streets of the Silver Souq; cloves, cardamom, and cumin are found in the Spice Souq; and jambiyas are found in the—you guessed it—Jambiya Souq. There are also sections devoted entirely to woven shawls (mostly from Kashmir), livestock, qat, and coffee.
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky Page 3