The third and last day I have saved for Tim, who has asked if I have time to see him before I go.
That morning, I am awakened by a telephone call from one of his bodyguards. They’d like to come check out the house, if that would be convenient. Still groggy, I agree. Tim texts me, apologizing for the invasion. An hour later, a very polite Yemeni in a crisp white shirt comes to my gate and asks if this is where the ambassador will be coming later. I say it is indeed and promise to keep him safe from all harm.
By the time Tim rings to say the ambassadorial procession is under way from the embassy, I am completely organized. My two overloaded suitcases sit waiting for their trip to the airport; my house is spotless; Sami has taken the last of my DVDs and books; and my refrigerator is empty except for a bottle of champagne, a Marlborough white wine, and a yogurt. Two pomegranates sit in my kitchen waiting for breakfast tomorrow. In my mafraj, I light the candles and sit reading until Tim rings me from the gate.
He slips in, smiling like a schoolboy playing hooky, and kisses me on the lips, right in front of the two Yemeni bodyguards who follow him into my courtyard. But the kiss is chaste enough simply to be a friendly greeting; I shouldn’t read anything into it. Flustered, I start to lock the gate, but Tim reminds me that with two armed men parked at my door, this is hardly necessary. I lead him upstairs, heart hammering, all the way to the roof, shedding my abaya on the way. I want to show him my city. Most of the dirt from the roof has been carried away, and the ceiling has finally been repaired, albeit not with the traditional materials UNESCO guidelines require. Tim has to duck through the low doorway to the roof, and then we are standing under the Sana’ani stars. Leaning our elbows on the dusty parapet around my roof, we admire the glowing qamaria and watch children playing under clotheslines before turning to look at each other. A crescent moon plays in his eyes, and I can’t stop smiling. In a striped shirt and jeans, Tim looks all of seventeen and profoundly unambassadorial. This is one of the perfect moments of my life. We stand there until a little girl on a nearby roof spots us and begins waving and calling. Having promised to protect him, I hurry Tim back down to the mafraj and fetch the bottle of champagne.
Never has my mafraj witnessed such an enchanted evening. We talk for so long—about his work in Iraq, Chad, and the Central African Republic, about my uncertain future—that I almost worry that I have misread him. But when we finish the champagne and he opens the wine, I know. We’ve barely tasted it when he slides a hand under my hair to cup my neck, says, “We probably shouldn’t do this,” and kisses me.
Something wild takes hold of me, something that immediately eclipses every passion I’ve ever felt. It is a vertiginous, irresistible fall. How could I have believed I loved anyone before this? How could I ever have been with anyone else when there is a Tim in this world? I can feel, vividly feel, my heart leave my body. I’d think this mere romantic fantasy if not for everything that follows.
As we tilt back into the cushions, he stops for a minute and takes my head between his hands.
“Promise me,” he says. “Promise me it won’t be the last time.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise you. I promise.”
“Then I promise,” I whisper.
Even after we’ve made love, he doesn’t loosen his grip but wraps me closer in his arms. We stay like that until long past a reasonable hour.
“Why are you leaving?” he says in a pained voice, his arms bruising my rib cage. “Don’t go.”
“It’s a good thing I’m leaving.” I’m trying to talk myself into it. “If I stayed, I would be in terrible danger of falling in love with you.”
“It’s too late,” he says, his fingers digging into my shoulders. “Don’t you know it’s too late?”
I DO LEAVE YEMEN, but not Tim. During my three months in New York, we write every day, unfolding our entire lives. Everything that happened between us in Sana’a happened so fast that I had hardly any time to think about the repercussions. But now, I worry. I worry about feeling so strongly about a man who isn’t mine. I worry that he is toying with me and will never leave his wife. I worry about the pain it will cause his family if he does leave his wife.
I share these worries with him. I also tell him about every past lover, every mistake I have ever made. If anything is going to scare him away, I want to know now. But Tim doesn’t scare easily. Every revelation only brings a new declaration of love from him. Every time I hit send, I worry I will never hear from him again, but every time I check my in-box, he is there.
Tim tells me about his large, close-knit family; his years living in New Zealand, Chile, Austria, and France; that his daughter has been his greatest joy. He tells me about the women he has loved. And finally, he tells me about his wife. There have been problems for years. They don’t share the same values or enjoy doing the same things. He would not have embarked on this relationship had he been happy in his marriage.
Someone once told me that women leave a bad marriage because it is a bad marriage, but that men never leave until they find someone else. Perhaps that’s true. I think Tim felt that he couldn’t leave unless he had a really good reason—his unhappiness alone wasn’t enough to justify hurting someone else.
When I am out with friends in New York, I find myself rushing home as if Tim were actually there waiting for me and writing to him for hours. It scares me how completely I love him. I have made it clear that I cannot continue this, I cannot keep falling in love with him, if there is no chance of a future together. This is what makes him different from other men I’ve loved—I actually want a future with him. I ask to have him all to myself.
“I need to see you,” he says. “We need to see each other, to be sure.” We worry aloud that maybe we’re creating a fantasy relationship and that reality will disillusion us. Tim warns me that he snores. I warn him that I grind my teeth at night. We agree to meet in London.
By then, I have accepted the job training journalists in Sierra Leone. I agonize over the decision, calling my parents, my new agent (the lunch went well!), my friends, and Tim. My parents are not enthusiastic about me heading off somewhere possibly more dangerous than Yemen, but they know better than to try to change my mind. My agent encourages me, reminding me that we haven’t yet sold the book I’m writing. It might be good to have a backup plan. Tim withholds his opinion, telling me to follow my heart. He will wait for me, he says. While I have dreams of staying in Yemen to be close to him, I am not making any decisions in my life contingent on a married man.
I take the job. After meeting Tim in December, I will fly to Yemen with him and stay with friends for two months. The Sierra Leone job starts in February. I figure that even if I do sell my book, I’ll have two months to get cracking on it before I head to Africa.
DECEMBER 7 IS THE BEST DAY of my whole life. It begins before dawn in New York, when a friend drives me to JFK. I’ve spent the week meeting editors but still don’t know the fate of my book. The flight to London is empty. I lie down across empty seats but am unable to sleep. My heartbeat is too loud. Customs detains me at Heathrow, so I am the last person to emerge. And there he is, waiting for me. His face is utterly familiar, as if I’ve been meeting him at airports all of my life. “Jenny,” he says.
He whisks me to a hotel, where I find the room filled with all of my favorite foods. He’s memorized them from my e-mails. There are peppered cashews and blueberry muffins and grilled shrimp. A bottle of champagne waits on ice. I get teary at the sight of it all. But before I get comfortable, I have to call my agent. “You have a publisher!” she says without preamble. I promptly begin to faint and have to lie down on the bed to continue the conversation. Tim is as ecstatic as I am and uncorks the champagne.
We drink champagne at every meal that week. We go to the theater, the ballet, and the movies. We ice-skate in front of Somerset House. We wander through art galleries. We walk absolutely everywhere. On our penultimate night, we are eating dinner at a dimly lighted French café when Ti
m says he wants to talk about us. “I have met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with,” he says. “And it’s you. And I need to know how you feel before I go about disrupting a lot of lives.”
Oddly, I don’t need time to think about it. In thirty-eight years, I’ve never felt this way about anyone. It’s funny that I will remember exactly what he said but not my own words. I am crying with wonder and relief and love. But somehow, I get my answer across.
Tim had planned to wait until after the holidays to leave his wife, but it doesn’t work out that way. By Christmas Eve, he’s told her everything, and by January, she is gone. It’s messy, complicated, and horrifically painful for his wife and daughter. It’s excruciating for me to know I am hurting people I have no desire to harm. But not once has either of us had a nanosecond of doubt that we are doing the right thing. The most inexplicable thing is that we have been so sure, right from the start.
For a few weeks, I hardly see him. I stay with friends while he sorts out his separation and is busy working. The wait is agonizing. I can’t bear to be apart from him and keep worrying that he will change his mind. Fortunately, now that I have sold my book, I have plenty of work. I keep distracted with a strict writing schedule and with frequent visits from Zuhra, who returns to Yemen from Mississippi the same time I return from New York.
I’ve been wrestling with what to do about Sierra Leone. Tim has told me he will wait for me and that he wants me to move in with him as soon as I finish the eight-month assignment. But it has become clear that I will struggle to balance writing my first book with training Sierra Leonean journalists. And every time I think about leaving Yemen, I burst into tears. While I’ve all but concluded I should turn down the job, I am afraid to tell Tim. I don’t want him to feel I am rushing things or putting any pressure on him by staying in Yemen.
Zuhra is dead set against me leaving, worried that she will be replaced in my affections.
“You’ll find a new Zuhra there!” she says. “An African Zuhra!”
I tell her about Tim, whom she thinks I would be crazy to desert for eight months. “You would be in huge torture apart from him,” she says. “You don’t need to go. You deserve to stay with the person you love.”
IT IS A SUNNY WINTER DAY when Tim and I take our first Yemen outing together. Thus far, we’ve only spent time together in private, at his home when the domestic staff is gone for the day. But now that he has announced his separation from his wife and his relationship with me to the embassy, I am no longer a secret. The armored cars drop us off at Bait Bous, an ancient village on a cliff overlooking Sana’a, and we set off on a long walk. A few of his bodyguards scramble up the mountains ahead of us, and several others follow at a discreet distance.
At the top of a ridge, we stop to catch our breath. We’ve been talking the whole way up but fall silent as we turn to look down at the city of Sana’a sprawled beneath us. It looks like something I might have made out of sand as a child, with its fanciful minarets and gingerbread houses. No clouds mar the clear blue of the sky. Across from us, distant mountain peaks sharpen in the midday light. Tim takes my hand.
Nervously, I draw a breath. “I’ve been thinking about Sierra Leone….”
When I finish explaining to him the reasons I shouldn’t go, he smiles. “You’re absolutely right. Frankly, you’d be mad to try to write a book while working the kind of schedule you were working here. And you really need to be here to write this book, don’t you?”
“I just didn’t want you to feel that me staying means we have to move things any faster…. I am sure you need time, and I don’t want to interfere with your work—”
“Jenny,” he says, cutting me off. “Can I tell you something? I am so glad you aren’t going to Sierra Leone.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t think I could actually stand being apart from you that long.”
“I can stay with friends for a bit….”
“But I want you to live with me, as soon as it’s possible. Will you, Jenny? Will you come and live with me?”
I don’t need time to think, but for a minute I can’t speak. I look down at the city I love before turning back to the man I love even more. It seems too good to be true that I could have both of them.
“I don’t think I could be happy living anywhere else.”
EPILOGUE
Since we both left the Yemen Observer, Zuhra and I have become closer than ever. She visits me in New York, while on vacation from her fellowship program at Jackson State University in Mississippi, a state that she describes as “just like the Third World! Not so different from Yemen.”
It doesn’t take her long to adapt to American culture. She revels in her freedom, living on her own in a dormitory, mingling openly with peers, and peeling away her kheemaar. She is shocked, she writes, to discover that she is beautiful!
“A handsome man told me that i am so pretty. i was happy. many pple here told me so. and the best thing that i make lots of freinds here. pple here are so freindly, most of them are balcks. They have a good heart. i befreinded with an old police officers. i befreinded the women in the dorms. Aaah, i met the avengilicans, the invited me to the church to teach me English!!!!! i will go to do this.”
I get a flurry of excited e-mails during her first month in America. “I bought a jeans and short shirt,” she writes. “i look pretty. Jennifer, you won’t belive how many men praised me, and there is a handsome and old man said that if i am in 40s, he won’t hesitaite to marry me. I don’t realise that i am so attractive to this level. Really i mean it, i thought that i am not beatiful and have not attractive personality that people will be hit on.”
But for Zuhra there is also a dark side to being found beautiful. When men begin to flatter her, ask her out, and make declarations of love, she feels that she must have done something wrong to attract such attention. Am I still a good girl? she asks me in a million ways. Yes, I tell her. The best girl ever.
The first thing I notice when I finally meet her at her brother’s home in Brooklyn is that she is wearing purple. “You’re in color!” I say. I pick her up in my arms and spin her around. I’m wearing a sleeveless, knee-length dress. I had asked if I should dress modestly, but Zuhra reminded me that we were in my country and I should dress however I want. We can’t stop talking, sharing one chair in the living room, until her brother Fahmi jokes that he is starting to worry about our relationship.
For Zuhra, returning to Yemen is a much harder adjustment than leaving it. She begins to fret even before she leaves the United States. How can she go back to a life of restriction with the taste of freedom lingering on her tongue? Zuhra knows what awaits her in Yemen, and—Kamil aside—she dreads it.
I arrive back in Yemen a few days before her, and we cling to each other in a time of major upheaval. I am staying with a series of friends and struggling to write while Tim is sorting out his separation. Zuhra is debating a return to the Yemen Observer and readjusting to a sheltered life. Ultimately, she decides to take a job with Kamil’s human rights organization HOOD, writing and reporting for their website. “I can’t go back to the Observer without you,” she says. “They wouldn’t let me report the truth.”
It saddens me that so many of my reforms die after I leave. My women, without exception, loathe Zaid, who they say runs the newsroom like a tyrant and is too much a pawn of Faris. Ali, who was keeping things relatively on track, quits in protest when Faris tries to force him to report something he knows is untrue. Noor leaves to work on a newsletter for the German development agency GTZ. “I’m still a journalist!” she reassures me. Radia stops writing entirely, refusing to work for Zaid, and goes back to being a secretary. A few months later, after Qasim quits to start his own business, she is promoted to his position. She’s brilliant at the job, says Zuhra, and has received a huge raise.
Farouq, Jabr, Hadi, Ibrahim, al-Matari, and Najma continue to work at the Yemen Observer, where they are now among the most senior staff members. Najma’s
Health and Science page is the best page of the paper. So there’s that.
I visit the paper as often as I can and spend time with my reporters, the women in particular. Adhara finishes university in May 2008, and I attend her graduation with Radia, Enass, and Najma. I tell them about Tim, and they are thrilled. No one is more excited than Zuhra, who is the first person Tim and I invite for tea at the residence. The two of them get on so well I don’t get a word in edgewise the entire evening. And when I climb into a taxi to escort Zuhra home afterward, she turns to me and says, “I love him at first sight.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know the feeling.”
Adhara stays at the paper for another year, before her frustrations with Zaid drive her to take a job at an organization working on food security. When her new employer asks her to serve as interpreter at their meetings, she shows up on my doorstep in a panic, terrified at the prospect of talking in front of people. I am pleased that she has come to me and help her deal with her anxieties. When I call a week later, she says her job has gotten easier, and she is much happier.
Not long after we are both back in Yemen, Zuhra finally confesses her own secret love. I am pleased that he turns out to be someone I know and respect. “Now I know why you quoted him so much last year!” I tease.
The only drawback is that Kamil already has a wife. I would not have chosen the life of a second wife for Zuhra, and we spend entire afternoons discussing the implications of this decision. Are you sure you want to share your love with another woman? I say. Is it fair that you are giving him all of you, and he is giving you only half of him? Have you thought about how his first wife must feel?
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky Page 36