“Dageega!” (One minute!), I say. “Law samaht, ureedo dageega.” (Please, I need one minute.) I wave my hand at him, trying to send him away, but he just walks all the way in and looks over my shoulder at the three bottles of whiskey I have just rescued from certain ruin.
“Oh!” he says.
I curse my ineptitude. Qasim leaves my office, probably to go tell Faris I’m a mad dipsomaniac bent on destroying the remaining morals of my staff. First vibrating artificial men, now this!
I open all my windows and stash the other bottles under my desk, but my office still reeks like a tavern.
Luke strolls in, stares at my carpet, and sniffs the air. “Well,” he says. “There goes the rest of your reputation.”
“Hey,” I say with false cheer. “At least vodka doesn’t stain. My carpet has never been so sterile.”
Our stalwart receptionist, Enass, without saying a word, walks in and hands me a bottle of carpet cleaner.
I have another special delivery that day. Abdurahman, Ali’s dad, calls to say he’s bringing me a bag of organic avocados, which cannot be found in Sana’a. I am so ecstatic I briefly forget the vodka. That evening, in my taxi home, I stroke them, just to feel their firm roundness under my palms. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited to put something in my mouth. Anne and Florens come over to help me mash the avocados into a dip for the party. Which turns out to be a roaring success, in that few people can remember the details of it the next day. I’ve never had such a crowded house. My mafraj overflows with people, several of whom I’ve never met. Everyone from Kamaran is there, plus Marvin, Pearl, and Ginny. I wear a short, sleeveless dress and savor the feel of it sliding up my thighs as I raise my arms to dance. It’s springtime, and it feels like it.
After we’ve all been dancing for a while, Marvin requests cowboy music. I put on a country song and he and Pearl actually two-step around the room, knocking over several drinks as they swish around. It feels like a real party. (Yemenis of course have parties too, but they are always sex segregated and usually revolve around qat and sugary tea.) The only thing missing tonight, I think, is romance.
IT ISN’T LONG, HOWEVER, before this last void in my life is delightfully filled by a twenty-six-year-old German water researcher for the Dutch Embassy. Tobias is intelligent and attractive, tall, with oversized feet and hands, like a puppy that hasn’t quite grown into his extremities. His square Germanic face is softened by floppy dark hair, large blue eyes, and an infectious grin. I meet him through Kamaran Island friends, and when he moves into a house nearby he begins inviting me over to parties and qat chews. Our mutual attraction is increasingly obvious, but weeks pass before we admit it to each other.
It happens on a weeknight. I’m exhausted from work but when Tobias asks if he may come over, I perk up. It’s the first time we’ve been alone together. We make drinks and curl up in the mafraj. After a while, he suggests watching a movie. I put on Half Nelson, and we press close together in front of my twelve-inch computer screen. Tobias moves his arm around me and I slide into his embrace. I have no idea how Half Nelson ends. I’m not even sure if we turned it off or just left it running as we made love, first in the mafraj and again, moments later, in my bed.
He wakes me at dawn. After we say good morning properly, he sneaks home and I get ready for work, feeling more cheerful than I have since I got to this country.
I skip the gym and walk to work. The spring is back in my step, the kind of spring that makes men on the street pay twice as much attention to me as usual. I dare not meet anyone’s eyes, I feel so incandescent with sensuality. When Luke walks into my office, he says, “Okay, what happened to you? Why the Cheshire cat smile?”
I say nothing at all.
TOBIAS SPENDS ALMOST EVERY NIGHT with me that week, and on Friday, we don’t leave my house. We spend about twenty-one of twenty-four hours naked and entwined, until hunger drives us finally out of bed, and Tobias cooks us pasta, which we wash down with a bottle of wine in my mafraj. The muezzins keep calling out Friday prayers, the wail of the preachers prompting Tobias to cry out, “You people don’t know what you are missing!” But we are praying, in our own way, to our own decadent gods.
As the sun slides down over the rooftops around us, filling my mafraj with gold, Tobias falls asleep in my lap, looking angelic and terribly young. I stroke his hair and run my fingers over the decorative curl in his earlobes, his dark eyelashes, his flushed cheeks, his pale, flat stomach. I like him. The age gap between us and his return to Germany in a few months makes a future unlikely, but for the first time all year, a simple glow of well-being makes worry feel impossible.
I dream that night that I have a good fairy who has been watching out for me. She looks like a middle-aged housewife, plump, with short dark hair, and she seems slightly annoyed.
“Well, it looks like things are now going exceptionally well for you,” she says, a touch resentfully. “So I am going to go find someone else to help, someone with real problems.”
THERE ARE PEOPLE in this world who can go for years without being touched. I am not one of them. I can’t survive more than a month of physical loneliness without wanting to crawl out of my skin. Which means that I’ve been wanting to crawl out of my skin almost since I got to Yemen. I am deeply physically needy, and I refuse to be ashamed of this. So when one of my closest Yemeni friends, a virgin, confesses to me that she also thinks constantly about sex, I try to reassure her that she is not an immoral freak. Don’t you think Allah gave us these desires for a reason? I say. That he gave us these bodies for a reason? This does not shock my Yemeni friend. In fact, she seems quite heartened. “This is true,” she says happily. “Why would we be given bodies like this?”
Shaima, on the other hand, simply buries her desires. One night as she drives me home from dinner, we chat about men and relationships.
“I have never kissed a man, Jennifer,” she confesses.
“Never?” Shaima is over thirty years old. I kissed my first boy in fifth grade. No, wait—first grade! I still remember his name. Bobby Woodward. Audacious tyke.
“Never.”
“So how do you …” I want to say, how do you survive never being touched? How can you bear the loneliness? But I swallow the words.
“Jennifer, I just ignore my body,” she says in answer to my unasked question. “I try to forget it is there.”
MY RESEARCH for our next health page gives me a little more insight into Yemeni sexuality. While searching for interesting new studies, I stumble across a piece in New Scientist on how oral sex causes cancer. Apparently anyone who has had five or more partners is about a trillion times more likely to develop throat cancer. While I am spiraling into despair about this, Jabr comes into my office. He is my only reporter not working on something.
“Jabr,” I begin cautiously, “do you think we could get away with a story on oral sex?”
He looks at me blankly. “What is oral sex?” he says. From the awkward way he forms the words, it is clear that he has never heard the phrase.
I am shocked. Most of my male reporters (according to Luke) are surfing porn sites every time I turn my back, so I thought they had a pretty graphic image of what oral sex is.
I start to explain, but for the first time in my life, I find myself too embarrassed to describe a sex act.
“Don’t be shy,” says Jabr encouragingly.
My stomach twists. “I’m not! It’s just …” It’s just that I don’t want to accidentally excite you, I think to myself.
Instead, I pick up the dictionary from my desk and read him the definition. Neither of us cracks a smile.
“Um, so, what I am wondering is, are we going to get in trouble for writing about this? Is it okay according to Islam? Between married people, of course!”
“Let me check,” says Jabr gravely. “I will read the study.”
A half hour later, I stop in the newsroom to find Jabr reading through everything Google has turned up on oral sex. He has consulte
d with Noor and Najma, neither of whom has heard of oral sex. All three reporters are single, so perhaps this is not surprising.
Noor turns to me and says, “We don’t have such a thing in Yemen as oral sex.”
“You don’t?” This cannot be true.
“No,” Jabr agrees.
“We are a conservative country,” says Noor. “We don’t do this.”
“Not even married people?”
All three shake their heads.
“But it’s …” A thousand inappropriate explanations of why it’s healthy and necessary threaten to burst out of my mouth. I bite my tongue. “Let’s drop it then. We’ll run the iPod story instead.”
This is absurd, given that the iPod story is about the effect of iPods on pacemakers, and hardly any Yemenis own either gizmo. But at least it won’t scandalize anyone.
Curious to find out the truth, I report the conversation to Luke. “They claim there is no such thing as oral sex in Yemen.”
“Oh yes there is!” he says, laughing.
“I figured you would know.”
I guess the gay men have all the luck. Once you’re engaged in one illegal activity, you might as well go all out.
Later, married Yemeni women tell me that oral sex does exist but that many people consider it shameful. “Women are not honest with each other,” says one Yemeni woman. If a woman admits that her husband “kisses her vagina,” others disparage the act as disgusting. Some think that a man who performs oral sex is being too servile to his wife and unmanly. “It’s just how we are trained, to think our bodies are disgusting,” says my friend. “Some women don’t feel husbands should witness birth because they will be disgusted. Women think organs are a disgusting place. Women internalize these sexist ideas. In Islam, you should take a shower after sex.”
IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE to have Tobias waiting for me after work. Someone to whom I can pour out the frustrations of my day, someone to hand me a drink and sit with me looking out over the boxy brown houses of Old Sana’a glowing in the dark, holding my hand. Someone with interesting stories of his own. My reporters sense a new lightness in me. The women tell me I look pretty twice as much as usual, looking slightly suspicious. How do they get through their lives? I wonder. How can they bear sleeping alone every night? They must have passions of their own, but what do they do with them? Offer them to God? Perhaps that is it. Perhaps if I had God, I could be happier alone. I could be happier without fingers brushing against my skin, without a warm body curled around me. But I do not have God. All I have is a persistent and not necessarily wise openness to love, and a relentless desire to be loved in return.
Despite how well things are going, I’ve been looking forward to a break from my six-day week, from my twelve-hour days. But the thought of returning to a job in New York, the thought of once again climbing onto the endless treadmill of work and rent paying and rushing from place to place in anonymous crowds, fills me with dread.
I have no idea what I will do at the end of this year. I’ve scarcely had time to look up from my desk. But now that I have become human again and made room for joy and leisure in between manic workdays, my brain finds itself with time to look up at the horizon. There is nothing there.
TWENTY
the deluge
Just when I am at my happiest personally and most optimistic about my paper’s future, harbingers of doom appear. It takes less than a week for me to realize that Zaid’s English has failed to improve one iota during his ten months in London. How he managed this is beyond me, but I struggle to edit his stories and it becomes clear that he is not remotely capable of editing anyone else’s work. After fighting so hard to sell Faris on Zaid, now I am going to have to do some rethinking.
Zaid already seems to have lost his resolve to give up qat. The day after our lunch, I walk into the office to find him stuffing a leaf into his mouth. I raise an eyebrow.
“It was a gift!” he says. “I couldn’t refuse it! It would be rude!”
I have also begun to have trouble with Hadi, who has always been the most reliable and devoted of designers. He has been coming in later every day, sometimes not appearing until noon. This mystifies me. One morning, desperate to lay out a page, I collar Luke.
“Hadi hardly ever gets here on time anymore! What is going on?”
“Did you know he got a car?”
“He got a car?”
“So that’s why he’s been coming in late.”
I don’t get it. Shouldn’t a car get him here even earlier?
“He’s been working as a taxi driver in the mornings.”
Ah. This is not unusual. Many Yemenis string together several jobs to make ends meet. If Faris raised staff salaries, it might keep them from taking side jobs that distract them from their work. Even al-Asaadi worked for UNICEF while editor in chief of the paper. This not only took him away from the office too often but was entirely unethical, as the newspaper regularly covers UNICEF’s activities.
Some reporters make it difficult for me to agitate for higher pay. When the men want a raise, they begin doing less and less work, if they bother to show up at all. I try to explain to Hadi—who just asked for a raise—that if he wants to be paid more, he should prove that he is worth it. He should be showing up early and getting an exceptional amount of work done. That is what would make me want to help you get more money, I say. This baffles him.
The Missing Link does the same thing. A day after asking for a raise, Jabr doesn’t show up at work or even call in with an excuse. When I finally get him on the phone, he says he is napping.
“Jabr, if you’re hoping for a raise, it’s not terribly wise to start skipping work. You should be demonstrating how much you deserve it, not what a shirker you are.”
My frustration with Hadi builds until one morning in late June. Hadi, who was the happiest with our new schedule, has begun to drag our closes.
“You cannot keep coming in this late!” I say, accosting him as he walks in the door one closing day at noon.
“Do you have any pages?” he says belligerently.
“Yes, I have pages! But that isn’t the point. You are supposed to be here in the morning. You have a job!”
Things escalate until we are shouting at each other in the hallway. I ask Zaid for help, saying I have to get Hadi to the office earlier. He goes outside to talk with Hadi, and I retreat to my office.
A few minutes later, Zaid appears in my door.
“Hadi has a big problem,” he says.
“I know, he can’t get to work on time,” I say crossly.
“No, he has a big problem at home. He said he wants to sleep in the office and never go home. It has to be serious for him to say that. He was crying just now.”
I feel guilty for yelling at him. “If he has a reason he can’t get here on time, he should tell me.”
“I think you should talk with him.”
I go outside and find Hadi on the front steps, leaning against the building. I touch his arm.
“Hadi, I am sorry I yelled at you. I don’t like yelling at you. I love working with you, and I want things to be good between us,” I begin.
His anger is gone. He smiles at me, his long black lashes still damp with tears.
“If you have a problem, some reason you can’t come in, you can tell me,” I say. “You can talk to me.”
“Thank you,” he says, reaching out to pat my arm, an unusual gesture. “Thank you.” He’s short of money for things he needs at home, he says. He’s also been having bitter arguments with his wife. It’s unclear if the two problems are related. I promise to try to get him a little more money from Faris and he promises to try to get to work earlier.
ON JUNE 26, I must somehow sense what the day has in store, because I wake too depressed to eat and cry all the way to the gym. It all builds up, my worry about Zaid, my fear about leaving the paper, my anxiety over the future, and the floodgates open. Thank god I’m wearing dark glasses. I run five miles on the treadmill and
bike half an hour, as if I can somehow get away from myself. I head out afterward to find that none of the hotel taxi drivers will give me a ride, because they are all curled up in the trunks of their cars, green leaves sticking out of their mouths.
Irritated, I stride out to the main road and hail a cab. The driver argues about the price, but I get weary of fighting and climb in. I just want to get to work.
I am staring out the window for the first half of the ride, watching the storefronts and child salesmen and pyramids of tomatoes and watermelons spin by, so I don’t notice my driver’s activities. Then a frenzied movement in my peripheral vision arrests my attention. I look over to see that my driver has his grubby hand around his penis and is vigorously and quite openly jerking off.
At first I refuse to believe it. But then I look again. I am not imagining it.
In horror, I pull some riyals out of my purse and throw them at him, leaping from the car in the middle of a major intersection. “You disgust me!” I yell. Dodging cars, I run panting and nauseated across the street, my bags banging against my back. I cannot get over his complete lack of shame. Did he think he could get away with that, just because I was a foreigner? I wish I hadn’t paid him. I wish I had remembered the Arabic word for “shame.” I wish I had hit him. I stop and look around. I have no idea where I am. I am probably only halfway to work. But I have been on this route so many times, I figure if I just keep walking I will see something I recognize. It’s hot, and the sun and dust press down on me. Once again I am grateful for my dark sunglasses as I stumble crying down the street, trying to stifle my sobs as I pass groups of construction workers. I walk and weep all the way to the office. My women are gathered at the gate, as if expecting me. It is lunchtime, and the men are gone.
“Do you have a cold?” says Zuhra, looking anxious.
“No, I just …” I start crying again, and Zuhra and Radia follow me to my office. I tell them the whole story, but they don’t look impressed.
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky Page 31