“This happens to all of us,” Zuhra says. “It is normal.”
Radia concurs. They are harassed constantly, both by taxi drivers and men on the streets. Even fully covered, fully disguised.
“One time a man even offered me money to go to a hotel with him,” says Radia. “But what can we do? This is what men are like.”
This is what men are like.
“You should not be subjected to this!” I cry. “It is not normal. I can’t bear the fact that you think of this as normal! You should not have to suffer these horrible men.”
They concur. “But what can we do?”
AT THE END of the month, the rains come with a vengeance. While the mornings are still sunny and clear, by the afternoons dark clouds have filled the sky. It’s unwise to start walking anywhere between lunch and dinner; that’s when the deep purple bellies of the clouds tear open, flooding the city.
It’s nearly rain time one closing day when al-Asaadi rings to tell me he has a front-page story. A group of Belgian tourists was barred by the Tourism Police from traveling to the picturesque village of Kawkaban and are outraged. They complained that they had read in our paper that Yemen was inviting and safe, and now the minister of tourism is holding them captive in Sana’a. Al-Asaadi wants the headline to be GOVERNMENT KIDNAPPED US, SAYS TOURISTS.
I politely suggest that the word “kidnapped” may be slightly loaded, and al-Asaadi concurs. We change it to TOURISTS BLOCKED FROM TRAVEL. I’m trying to explain how I want things laid out to Hadi, but both al-Asaadi and Zaid are hovering, blocking my way.
“Three editors in one place is two too many,” I say in frustration. “Could I please have some space to finish telling Hadi about this paragraph?” No one moves, and I throw the pages I’m editing to the floor. It’s a bit melodramatic, but experience has taught me that my reporters don’t respond to subtlety.
This jolts the men into action. Al-Asaadi slips back upstairs to his new office, and Zaid storms off in an adolescent funk.
“Do whatever you want with the paper. I’m leaving,” he flings at me before toddling huffily off down the road, despite the fact that I have invited him to chew qat at my house after work.
This is the first of several dozen times that Zaid will “quit.” He’ll tell me he’s done with the paper, storm off in a sulk, and then the next morning at the office he’ll be back in front of his customary computer. “Funny,” I’ll say, “I could have sworn you quit yesterday.” It gets so the day doesn’t feel quite complete if I haven’t driven Zaid to quit.
With Zaid gone, I quickly finish my edits and find Ali, who has come back from the United States to work for me again. Luke has been moved upstairs to edit Arabia Felix, so Ali temporarily fills his shoes. Rain spatters my hair as we walk to his antique powder-blue car. By the time we are on the road, the rain is coming down in blinding sheets. It’s the hardest rain I have ever seen here. Knowing the Sayilah—the moat-like road around the Old City—will be flooded, we turn off Zubairi Street to wind our way through the back alleys. But the windows have fogged so badly we cannot see out the back or side. I pull Kleenexes out of my purse and daub at the windshield, but it refogs as fast as I wipe. The streets are flooding with fast water, and I am genuinely afraid that we will be swept along into the Sayilah and go under the rushing muddy river. At last, unable to see and unable to find a passable street, Ali stops the car on a hill. We sit, waiting out the storm.
“Too bad we don’t have a flask,” I say, fiddling with the broken radio.
“I was just thinking that.”
While we are waiting, I get a text from Zaid.
“I thought u’ll show me more respect, but girls and Ibrahim are your favorite and me at the end of your list. U made me feel empty and nothing. Thanks and sorry can’t understand u anymore.”
What am I going to do with him? I myself am no model of comportment, but I can at least say with a clear conscience that I have never once threatened to walk out on my job. At least the girls never fling themselves out of the office in a funk or threaten to quit.
“Ali, help me,” I say. “Couldn’t you take over the paper?” He is half-Yemeni, after all. His English is flawless. He’s ideal.
“No way,” he says without pausing for reflection. “I just don’t care about it enough—not like you do.”
Maybe I care about it too much. I want to control what happens to it after I leave; I want to shape Zaid into a model editor; I want my reforms to be immortal. I want better conditions for my reporters and a better reputation for the paper. I want the Observer to be effective, to influence public thought. But I’m starting to realize that no matter how hard I work, no matter what kind of plans I make, these things are beyond me. I cannot single-handedly save this paper. I’m still pondering this when Carolyn rings. “Now don’t panic,” she says. “But I thought I should warn you….”
As if it had absorbed the full weight of my hopes and dreams for the Observer, a large chunk of the roof of my 350-year-old gingerbread house has collapsed. A massive pile of ceiling, dirt, and rubble has tumbled to the hallway of our top floor, just outside the room where a houseguest was sleeping. And the rain is pouring in.
I panic, picturing a massive river of water cascading down my stairs, sweeping away our shoes from the landings. “I should get home,” I tell Ali.
The rain has eased a bit, so Ali and I park and pick our way through ankle-deep water to my ruined home. Outside, crowds line the flooded Sayilah and its series of bridges. A carnival atmosphere prevails, adults as excited as the children to see the sudden river circling the city. I’ve never seen the water so high; it must be more than ten feet deep. Children slither down the stone embankments and splash into the muddy brew. A taxi floats by. A large truck is semisubmerged under the bridge. Forgetting my roof for a moment, I pull out my camera and begin snapping photos. Men walk by with their white thobes pulled up, revealing their undershorts. When they do this, they wrap their robes around their jambiyas, so it looks like they are all walking around with enormous erections. Sometimes men even hold on to each other’s jambiyas as they walk, with no apparent thought for the overt eroticism of the gesture.
Fifty photos later, we tear ourselves away from the spectacle and splash down the street to my house. When I unlock the gate, Ali and I race to the top floor. An avalanche of mud, straw, plaster and rock litters the last staircase. I stop short of the landing, because there is nowhere left to stand. A waist-high pile of roof fills the hallway. A few drops of water hit my hair and I look up. Sure enough, above us is only a jagged chunk of Arabian sky.
My home, the paper, this city—always falling apart, always needing to be rebuilt. This is the ride I am on.
TWENTY-ONE
bombs, breakups, and bastille day
On the first Monday in July, an unlikely event restores my faith in my staff—a bombing. That afternoon, I put the paper to bed early and go home to try to nap. Sleep refuses the invitation, and I get up to check my e-mail, to find messages from Fox News, CBS, and Global Radio Network asking if I am still in Yemen and if I have any more information about the terrorist bombing in Ma’rib, a city a hundred miles east of Sana’a that is popular with tourists for its spectacular dam and ancient ruins. Why hasn’t anyone on my staff called me?
I’m dialing the office before I even finish reading the e-mails. Al-Asaadi is still there, al-hamdulillah, working on Yemen Today.
“Don’t let them send the paper to the printer!” I say. “We have to add the Ma’rib story.” Al-Asaadi has only just heard the news himself. This is, I think, as close to a “Stop the presses!” moment as I am ever likely to have. In a flurry of excitement, I ring Farouq and Ibrahim and ask them to report the story pronto and file it directly to me. I can edit it from home and send it to Zaid at the office for layout.
While waiting for them, I ring the spokesmen at the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Information. I don’t get anywhere. They just keep giving me each other’s phon
e number and don’t seem to know anything. If I were in the United States, I think, I would just get in a car and go to the scene of the bombing. But this kind of on-the-ground reporting is nearly impossible here. Getting to Ma’rib would mean not only finding a car, but crossing some thirty military checkpoints. For non-Yemenis, getting through those requires a sheaf of travel permissions: sheets of paper containing the name of the traveler’s organization, vehicle number, and dates of travel, authorized by the Tourism Police. Who has time for that on deadline?
If you are one of the rare foreigners who track Yemeni news, you notice after a while that there are almost never witnesses to newsworthy events. You never get the story from the guy who lives near the site of the car bomb, who heard it go off and watched the car go up in flames while bystanders raced for shelter. This is partly because journalists are rarely allowed anywhere near a crime scene and partly because witnesses would never speak to a journalist. They’re too afraid of getting into trouble. Of course, it also doesn’t often occur to Yemeni reporters to interview anyone but official sources. When I ask my reporters to find out what regular people on the street think of a proposed law, for example, their typical response is, “Who cares about regular people?”
The dearth of eyewitnesses and other nonofficial sources makes for dull and often misleading stories. I don’t trust the Ministry of the Interior to feed me anything but fraudulent pap, the aim of which is to make the government look good and anyone in conflict with them look bad.
I hound Ibrahim and Farouq until they e-mail me their stories, and I weave them together. Nine people are believed dead, seven Spanish tourists and two Yemeni drivers. They were ambushed by a suicide bomber who drove a truck full of explosives through their convoy at the site of the Ba’ran Temple, also called Arsh Bilqis (the Queen of Sheba’s Throne) in Ma’rib.
I e-mail the finished story to Zaid, tell him which photo to use, and send a copy to al-Asaadi to put on the Web. It’s a little exciting. Despite the tragedy, and the sorrow and fear it evokes, I can’t help but feel that familiar guilty journalistic thrill at a major news story breaking.
The story requires weeks of follow-up. This has never been the paper’s strong suit, but my reporters amaze me. They interview a surviving Yemeni driver who still has shrapnel in his right eye and left ear. They write about the financial hardship facing the families of the two dead and two injured Yemenis, who have no way to support themselves now that their sons and cars are gone. They write about the decline in tourism.
The bombing, we report, has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack. Yet some sources suggest that it is the work of a new al-Qaeda cell, not of the veterans who trained in Afghanistan. Zaid writes a piece exploring the differences between the old and new al-Qaeda and why young men might be drawn to careers in terrorism.
Yemen is a fertile breeding ground for terrorists for many reasons. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a corrupt government. This corruption results in major inequities between rich and poor, fostering a strong sense of injustice. Despite significant oil revenues over the past thirty years, the government has failed to provide effective education and health services, sustainable water supplies, and reliable power to its people. The regime gives land and commercial contracts to its supporters while neglecting areas controlled by its opponents. Rumors abound that the president’s cronies profit from smuggling of arms, oil, and drugs; after all, little effort has been made to stop such smuggling. Exacerbating matters, a corrupt and incompetent judiciary makes it difficult to address grievances. No wonder people feel angry and impotent.
A weak government, poor intelligence services, and lax immigration procedures also mean that terrorists can operate more freely in Yemen than they can in stronger neighboring countries, such as Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has attacked terrorism with will, determination, and resources not found in Yemen and made it very difficult for terrorists to operate there—so many have moved to Yemen.
My staff reports all of this. I am bursting with pride in my reporters for continuing to generate story after story in the wake of the attack. It’s a huge reminder of how far we have all come.
NOW THAT ALI has taken over as copy editor, we fly through pages. Closing is faster than it was with Luke, who was rather Yemeni in his approach to closing times. Ali doesn’t loiter in the qat shed shooting the breeze with the guys, doesn’t vanish for four hours at lunchtime, and doesn’t chew at work. He even helps my other reporters with their writing, and they help him to conduct interviews in Arabic (which Ali speaks, but not confidently enough to interview government officials).
With the notable exception of Zaid, progress is all around. Sure, I still see atrocious stories. Editing itself doesn’t get that much easier. But there’s no denying the changes in every single one of my journalists. And that matters.
My grand delusion that I can spread democracy in the Arab world by loosening the stays of the Yemeni press has dwindled, as have my illusions that any story we write could have the smallest impact on government policy. But in the place of these lofty dreams are smaller, more stably built achievements. My reporters almost always use more than one source per story. They can integrate statistics into trend pieces. They’ve got a rudimentary grasp of ethics and journalistic integrity. Some of them even occasionally write a good lead. These modest achievements will outlive me. That is something.
Sometimes, when I look at my work at the newspaper and squint in just the right way, I can even see it as a microcosm of democracy itself. After all, every staff member participates in the creation of each issue. I solicit their ideas. I value the contributions of women and minorities. Of course, I wasn’t democratically elected, but what newspaper chief ever was?
ONLY AFTER THE ADRENALINE of writing about the bombing has worn off do I turn my thoughts to my own safety. Throughout all of my months in Yemen, all of my late-night walks through the Old City, never once have I felt in danger. Yes, men harass me constantly and everyone stares, but I haven’t felt threatened with violence. The Ma’rib bombing suggests that perhaps I’ve become too complacent. Just a couple weeks before, Koosje and Tobias had traveled to Ma’rib, to the same temple where the Spanish tourists and Yemeni drivers were killed. It could have been them. For a few weeks, my friends and others in the expat community seem a bit edgier than usual, but eventually we all go back to worrying about our work and love lives. It is impossible to live on full alert all the time. I wonder why the bombing doesn’t make me feel like fleeing the country, but then I think, September 11 didn’t make me feel like fleeing New York, did it? There’s danger everywhere, and attempts to predict the terrorists’ actions in an effort to dodge it are a fool’s game.
NOW THAT I’M BACK to worrying about more personal things, my thoughts turn to Tobias. He will leave soon, before I do. We’ve only been together a couple of months, but we’re about to be forced into some decisions. Either we go our separate ways and call this a summer fling, or we try to keep going. Staying together would involve either a long-distance relationship (which I don’t want) or one of us moving. Tobias is heading back to graduate school, to work on a doctorate. And I am—well, I don’t know yet. I guess I’m flexible. The truth is, neither of us is sure what we want. I genuinely adore Tobias. He’s smart, he’s sexy, and he makes me laugh. But I have no idea if we’d be a good match in the longer term. We’re at different places in our lives; my student days are long past and his are not yet over.
During Tobias’s last few weeks, we don’t have time to see much of each other, which makes our parting less dramatic. Still, resigned though I am to the logical end of our romance, I’m sad to see him go. Maybe he isn’t the perfect life partner for me, but a small part of me wishes we’d at least had time to let things run their natural course, whatever that might be. I never have an easy time saying good-bye. We set all of our concerns aside to spend one last night lying under my stained glass windows, in each other’s arms. Then he is gone. A group of us wal
k him to the taxi, and I am the last to hug him. In full view of my neighbors, the driver, and our friends, I stand on my toes and kiss him. “You’ll get in trouble,” he whispers. “I don’t care,” I say. And I turn away, before anyone can see my tears.
In the morning, I listen to the new Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky. The first song reminds me of an empty summer day in a small New England town. The kind of day on which I had a lemonade stand to raise money to buy a water pistol, but no one passed by, and the air was still and quiet except for the occasional drone of a plane overhead or a passing fly. That feeling … like a pause in the middle of life, after which anything could happen.
I ESCAPE LONELINESS by burying myself in work, spending even more time with my staff as our time together shortens. Zaid can’t seem to make up his mind how he feels about me. One moment he’s telling me that I taught him everything he knows and that he reveres me, and the next he’s quitting again because I haven’t been respectful. But I’m still trying with him, still hoping that somehow he will manage when I am gone.
One mid-July closing day, he’s already quit once, so I’m surprised when he approaches me as Ali and I are finishing photo captions. “Are you going to the Bastille Day reception at the French ambassador’s house Saturday night?” he asks. I want to go, but I don’t have an invitation. Because I cannot legally be listed as the editor in chief on the masthead, all invitations now go to Zaid. Before he arrived, when they were still addressed to al-Asaadi, Enass passed everything to me.
“I have an invitation,” Zaid says. “Wanna be my date?”
“Okay, I’ll be your date.” It’s my peace offering. It is also a decision that will change the course of my entire life.
ON BASTILLE DAY, the day of the French ambassador’s party, I have an unusually productive day. I edit all three health stories, including Adhara’s piece on the danger of listening to headphones in a lightning storm. She mistakes thunder for lightning, however, and keeps referring to “thunder strikes.” I also edit Jabr’s surprisingly adequate report on the harassment of women by taxi drivers. Near and dear to my heart.
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky Page 32