The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

by Jennifer Steil

  “That’s okay,” I said. “There’s an awful lot I need to know.”

  THREE

  an invitation

  Faris summoned me to his office a few days later. He had given me a copy of a long, dull, and confusing interview he did with a man from USAID and wanted me to critique it. I hardly knew where to begin; there was so little clarity or interest in the piece. I would never have let it run.

  I dragged my feet up the stairs. Sleep deprivation and information overload were sapping my strength. Little pieces of cultural knowledge and news and Arabic were continually escaping from my head and scattering about me on the ground. I was exhausted from constantly trying to pick them all up and stuff them back in. It’s only three weeks, I told myself. It’s not forever.

  I staggered into Faris’s office, where he welcomed me with a broad smile, waving me to a chair. “Tell me,” he said without preamble. “Tell me what you think of this interview.”

  I perched on the edge of my chair and pressed my palms against his desktop. “Now, it’s okay for me to be totally honest with you?” Exhaustion tends to vaporize my ability to speak anything but the naked truth. I didn’t have the energy to coddle him.

  He spread out his arms again. “Totally honest. This is what I want.”

  I took a breath. Why was I scared? It wasn’t like he was really my boss or anything. He wasn’t even paying me! “Your lead …” I pointed it out on the paper spread between us. “It says nothing.” And we went on from there. I had nearly twenty pages of notes and took his story apart piece by piece and told him how to make it better. To his credit, he never got defensive and expressed deep gratitude for my help, so I relaxed as we carried on.

  The interview really contained several stories, so we talked about how the information could be better reported and organized. He nodded and said he understood. But every time I explained anything to my students, they would say the same thing, regardless of whether they truly got it. But I was grateful for the chance to spend time with Faris so that he could get an idea of the kinds of things I was telling his staff and perhaps help to carry on my ideas after I left.

  Looking back, it’s incredible that I was ever that naïve.

  THEO RESCUED ME from work that night and took me to the British Club, a bar next door to the British ambassador’s residence in the upscale Hadda neighborhood, where most diplomats live. I’d hardly been anywhere outside of the Yemen Observer offices, and the mere prospect of encountering a pint glass and perhaps a native English speaker filled me with wild euphoria. We caught a cab down a long dusty road past neon-lighted supermarkets, travel agencies, furniture stores, spice markets, and bright windows displaying pyramids of honey jars.

  The taxi turned left at an anomalous Baskin-Robbins creamery and dropped us off at a black-and-yellow-striped concrete barrier. Men in blue army fatigues clutching AK-47s stood around on street corners and at the gates of walled mansions along the street. Just beyond the British Club, I could see the Union Jack flying over a massive green building. As we approached the large black gates on our left, a small window flew open and a Yemeni man peered out. Theo flashed his membership card and the gate swung open to admit us to—a miracle!—a bar.

  The warm scent of stale beer and fried food greeted me as we walked in, and I inhaled deeply. I love bars, everything about them. Though I am not a big drinker, I love the community, the chance for unexpected encounters, the eclectic mix of people. In New York, I spent nearly every Sunday night at my local Irish pub, doing the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle and talking with Tommy, my favorite bartender in the world. For the first time since I arrived in this ancient city, I was completely at ease, in a place I recognized.

  Operated by the British Embassy, the British Club draws an assortment of expats—diplomats, oil workers, development workers, teachers, and the odd journalist—desirous of escaping Yemeni prohibitions. It was relatively empty when we arrived. The World Cup was playing on television screens at either end of the room, and a scattering of Brits sat at the small tables with pints of forbidden beer. Beyond a long porch out back was a tennis court and a pool hidden by a row of shrubs.

  Theo introduced me to the bartender, a slim, smiling Yemeni-Vietnamese man named Abdullah. My first—and likely only—Yemeni bartender! Theo ordered us a couple of Carlsbergs, which we had only just tasted when his French friends Sebastian and Alain arrived. Theo promptly abandoned me to go play tennis with them.

  I didn’t care. I was just happy to sip my beer and amuse myself with strangers. The beer made me tipsy nearly immediately—a combination of the altitude and the fact that I hadn’t had time to eat. There were two men next to me at the bar, so I turned and asked them what they were doing in Yemen—thrilled to be able to talk to strange men without the risk of being thought a shameless harlot. Well, with slightly less of a risk of being thought a shameless harlot.

  “Construction,” the man next to me said. “Embassy specialists.”

  The two of them told me about the British embassies they’d built all over the world. We traded stories about our travels and love affairs. One man wore a wedding ring but was not married. The other was married but not wearing a ring. The ring wearer explained to me that a long time ago his Norwegian girlfriend gave him a wedding ring as a gift. When he left her and moved to Amsterdam, his jealous Dutch girlfriend bought him a second ring. And when he moved back to Britain, his British girlfriend bought him a third. He lost that one, so she bought a replacement ring, the one he still wore although he’d just broken up with her and sent her back to England. This is why I love bars. Maybe living here wouldn’t be so difficult after all, if there were oases like this one.

  After a second beer, I joined Theo and his friends. The night was delicious, cool and breezy. Stars flickered on over the tennis courts. We ordered another round of beers and some fish curry. As we talked, it occurred to me that the last time Theo and I had spoken French together was in 1986, in a small classroom on the top of a hill in Vermont. And that if I had not been on that Vermont hilltop in 1986, I would not have been in Yemen some twenty years later. Interesting where one teenage romance can lead. Eventually the Frenchmen left, and I sat talking with Theo until long after dark.

  I was surprised by Theo’s unabashed enthusiasm for my class. “They love you, you know,” he said. “Zaid told me, ‘Jennifer is the best American in the world.’”

  “Really?”

  “I was interviewing him for the article I wrote about you, and I wanted to move on to another subject, but he said, ‘No! I want to talk more about Jennifer!’ He asked me if he could marry you.”

  “Isn’t Zaid already married?”

  “Yes, but he wants to marry you too.”

  “I don’t think I could get around the teeth.” Zaid’s teeth, like those of most Yemeni men I met, are stained dark brown with qat and tea and tobacco. Many Yemenis do not brush their teeth at all, though some chew on a stick called miswaak to clean their teeth. As a dental hygiene fetishist, I was horrified by the crumbling, putrid teeth and rotting mouths.

  “Well, he loves you. They all love you. And it’s funny how the girls have taken you in. You’re like their leader now.”

  “I love them, too.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy they are with your work, how happy I am with what you are doing. I don’t know what I am going to do when you leave.”

  This was a historic first. Theo had never, to my recollection, praised anything I had done, and certainly never with this kind of passion. I glowed with a sense of accomplishment that dimmed anything I had ever felt writing my science pages at The Week. Maybe I really could make a difference here after all.

  THE NEXT MORNING I met yet another new student. Shaima worked for the World Bank and had called Faris looking for a place to improve her writing. Faris recommended my class.

  Shaima smiled. She was very pretty, with a narrow face, long doe-like eyelashes, and full lips. She wore a balto and hijab but left her face bar
e. It was a terrific relief to speak face-to-face with a Yemeni woman for more than a few fleeting seconds. We sat down in the conference room, and I ran through everything we had covered so far. She asked what else she could do to improve her writing, and I told her to read something in English every day. “It doesn’t matter what—read something you enjoy. But make sure it’s written by a native English speaker.” I wrote her a list of newspapers and websites.

  Shaima had had an unusually privileged life for a Yemeni. She received a full scholarship to the American University in Cairo, although her mother forced her to turn it down because she was too worried that Shaima would come into contact with drugs and alcohol. But Shaima did manage to go to university and then graduate school—in Jordan. Though she was thirty, she still lived with her parents, in the upscale neighborhood of Hadda. “We are stuck to our families until we are married,” she told me.

  I enjoyed talking with her and sensed that she could become a real friend. Worldlier and more independent than my reporters, she could move about with greater freedom. She also was the only Yemeni woman I knew who owned a car—a Mercedes.

  When I was through with Shaima, the women took me to one of the back offices, where they had spread out newspapers on the floor. They locked the door and lifted their veils, smiling at me.

  “You don’t think it’s wrong?” Enass asked me. “To sit on newspapers, since that is your work?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “We line gerbil cages with them.”

  Three of the four girls hiked their black abayas up to their waists in order to sit comfortably. All were wearing blue jeans.

  They handed me a rolled Jordanian sandwich of pickles and falafel and watched closely as I took a bite. “Do you find it delicious?” Arwa asked anxiously. I assured her that I did.

  Zuhra then launched into one of her high-speed monologues, telling me about her seven brothers and sisters, her hopes for her future, and her criteria for a husband.

  “I expect never to marry,” she told me. “I expect that. Because I will never compromise my career. And I will only marry a man who will support my career. But he must also be religious. There are very few Yemeni men like this.”

  Zuhra and I were the last to finish our sandwiches. “Because you never stop talking!” said one of the other girls.

  A PILE OF WORK awaited me the next morning. Faris had asked me to go over the most recent issue in detail and critique it for the whole staff. I spread out the paper on Sabri’s dining room table and, for three solid hours, read and took notes on every page, every story, every line. I was becoming obsessed with my students’ stories. I thought about them when I was lying in bed. I mentally corrected them while riding in cabs. I found myself thinking of a crucial prepositional phrase that would make Zuhra’s beauty parlor story perfect as I swam laps at the Sheraton.

  By the time I finished writing my critique and covering the paper with circles, cross-outs, and blue ballpoint scrawl, I was zinging with energy. It was Thursday, which most Yemenis have off, as Thursday and Friday are the weekend. The Yemen Observer staff, however, worked every day except Friday.

  I arrived at the office early, anxious to speak with Hakim before class. Faris seemed to have special hopes for him, thinking he could help revolutionize the paper. But so far he had done little to distinguish himself, other than to argue with me in class, rarely in constructive ways. He claimed that we didn’t need to use the word “said” in attributions, because Time magazine doesn’t. This was not only untrue but considerably unhelpful when I was trying to teach my reporters plain, straightforward language. They were hopelessly dependent on the words “affirmed” and “confirmed,” which they generally used when quoting someone who didn’t have the authority to affirm or confirm anything. They needed the word “said.” I wanted to explain to Hakim, as diplomatically as possible, how helpful it would be to everyone if he supported my authority and followed the same rules as everyone else.

  Hakim was late, however, so I had no chance to speak to him. Instead, I cornered editor in chief Mohammed al-Asaadi, who had only made it to one previous class, and asked him sweetly if he wouldn’t mind joining us for an hour. He was the person I most needed to reach, but Theo had told me he felt threatened by my presence. Apparently he didn’t believe his journalism skills needed improving, which was disappointing. I wanted him to be able to reinforce what I was teaching and carry on some of this work after I left.

  Once Hakim and al-Asaadi were both settled amidst my other reporters, I launched into my critique. To my delight, both al-Asaadi and Hakim (and the rest of the class) were quite receptive. I got through everything I wanted to say with minimal disruption. I began with praise, saying how much I liked the layout of the front page, some of the front headlines, and most of the story ideas. Baiting the hook.

  I especially praised Adel, the paper’s health reporter, because his was one of the better pages. “Poor Adel,” Theo often said. “He is the lowest-caste person on staff, and the rest of them treat him like an animal, even though he is one of the best journalists they have.” Yemen is divided into several social strata, including bedouin (desert nomads), fellahin (villagers), hadarrin (townspeople), and akhdam (literally “servants”), which include Adel’s family. So I told everyone what wonderful stories Adel had picked for his page, in the probably vain hope of boosting his status.

  Then I reviewed some things that needed to be done more consistently. Every story should have a byline, I told them. (Often, the stories just said “Observer staff.”)

  “You all work hard on these stories,” I said. “You deserve credit for them. I want you to be proud of your work. Putting your name on your story tells your readers that you stand behind your reporting. It enhances your credibility. And it keeps you accountable. If you are ashamed to put your name on a piece of work, it does not belong in the paper.”

  Theo raised his hand. “What if you are writing a story that could get you killed? So if you put your name on it, someone will come after you?”

  “Well, in that case, we can make an exception. I don’t want to get any of you killed. If you are quite sure that someone will come after you with a gun or any other weapon for a story you are writing, you have my permission to withhold your byline. However, every single one of the stories in this issue should be able to safely have a byline without getting anyone killed.”

  Next, we talked about the importance of spelling. “The word ‘conference’ is misspelled in a front-page headline,” I said. “As a reader, I see this and say, ‘If they make mistakes about things as small as spelling, what other kinds of mistakes are they making?’ You increase your credibility when your grammar and spelling are perfect. And you erode it when they are not.”

  They nodded and scribbled.

  A new fellow joined us for the critique, a blond, blue-eyed Californian named Luke, who had been hired to help with the copyediting. He radiated goodwill, and I was happy to have someone else there to reinforce the proper use of the English language.

  When everyone had finally dispersed, Theo looked at me. I was crumpled against the blackboard. “Worn out?”

  “I feel like I’ve just run a marathon. My diaphragm hurts.” I get so enthusiastic when I am talking that I wave my arms a lot and lunge back and forth from the dry-erase board to the table. My calisthenics seemed to worry my students, who kept offering me a chair. But they often had just as much trouble sitting still.

  “I’ve only just realized this since you’ve come here,” said Theo a few days later. “But this entire nation has ADD. This is their central problem; this is why nothing gets done.”

  THE NEXT DAY’S CLASS focused just on leads. I needed to do something small and focused with them; it was too difficult to fix entire stories. If they could get just that first sentence of the story right, the rest would follow—I hoped. We went over everyone’s leads, critiquing and rewriting them until they were perfect. Or at least printable. I gave them the last fifteen minutes of class to intervi
ew me and told them their assignment was to write a lead and three paragraphs based on their interview. They’d been very curious about me and were thrilled to have permission to quiz me. They asked me where I lived, whether I was married, where I had worked before Yemen, what I thought of them, what I thought of Yemen, and who was the best student (this from Zaid). I warned them that I might lie and said that they should investigate me on the Internet, to make sure I really am who I say I am and have done the things I say I have done.

  They proved a little too good at this. That night, as I was halfway through dinner, Theo texted me. Apparently my students had discovered (via Google’s image search) scores of photos of me in cocktail dresses at New York media parties. It had not occurred to me that they might find things I would rather keep concealed. I immediately panicked, worried they would think less of me after having seen me in lipstick and a low-cut cocktail dress, holding a glass of wine. I rang Theo immediately after dinner, and he assured me that they still loved me.

  “For my brains?” I asked fretfully.

  “Of course for your brains,” he said. “What else could they love?”

  WHEN I WALKED into the newsroom the next morning, Zaid was sitting there gazing at a photo of me that he had installed as his desktop. In it, I had an arm draped around my photographer friend David, and I was smiling through my hair, which was loose and tumbling down to my waist. I was relieved, however, to see that only David was holding a beer. I immediately apologized for my scanty outfit and the fact that I had an arm around a man, but Zaid said, “Jennifer, I lived with an American family for three years! You don’t need to explain these things to me. We understand.”

  “I just don’t want you to get a poor impression of me,” I said.

  “Never! We love you! We just think you are beautiful, these are beautiful,” he said, gesturing to the photos.

  The women, Zuhra and Arwa, said the same thing. I relaxed slightly.