The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

by Jennifer Steil

  “You are in the same situation!”

  “But Tim isn’t keeping his first wife,” I remind her. “And I can’t bear to spend one night apart from him.”

  But Zuhra is a stubborn little thing and will not be dissuaded. No one else will do, she says. You cannot control love. Again, she has to fight for her family’s permission and defend her decision to become a second wife. The experience gives her empathy for all minorities, she says. “People say, ‘Why you pick a married man?’ and I feel like I am a gay person, because people don’t understand me.” While it’s not uncommon in Yemen for a man to take several wives, many families don’t desire such a fate for their daughters. But ultimately, Zuhra’s family supports her decision and rejoices in her happiness.

  I give her my blessing as well, and attend her wedding in August 2008. She is at least choosing her own husband, which is a daring break with tradition. She is also choosing a man who will allow her the freedom to continue her career and to travel whenever she wishes. This is no small benefit. Nothing is as important to Zuhra as her career, and she reassures me she will not give it up. By June, she has sold major stories to both Stern magazine in Germany and the Sunday magazine of El País in Madrid. She has begun to surpass her teacher.

  I’m curious to hear about her married life. “How do you divide Kamil?” I say. “Is there a schedule?” There is. Zuhra gets Kamil every other night. “Do you make him shower when he comes over?” I ask, but she just laughs. Kamil’s children visit her often and call her Aunt Zuhra. She loves them but is not ready for her own children. Like me, she worries it will stifle her work. “I have enough to do getting used to a husband,” she says.

  Zuhra hasn’t given up her dream of running a paper of her own someday. She does some freelancing for the Yemen Times and hopes that once she has HOOD’s website in shape, she will again work as a journalist.

  As I write this, Zaid is still the editor of the Observer. He calls me every few weeks to ask why I don’t visit more often and to tell me he misses me. I’m impressed that he has stuck it out, but I can’t bring myself to say how devastated I am by what he’s done with the paper. My few remaining staff members are preparing to leave, mostly because they take issue with his management style. Before Adhara quits, she writes me a desperate e-mail telling me how much she and the others are suffering. Faris and Zaid don’t respect women, she says. The Yemen Times has offered her a job, but she is afraid to take it. “I am afraid Mr. Faris would do something to hurt me,” she says. I hope this fear is unfounded.

  I hate seeing my women treated poorly. I feel guilty and responsible.

  I invite Adhara as well as Zuhra, Radia, Enass, Najma, and Noor to lunch. I now live with Tim in the residence of the British ambassador, surrounded by ten bodyguards and a household staff of five. It’s a major adjustment. This morning I get up from my desk in my airy office overlooking our garden and stop short on my way downstairs to the kitchen to discuss the menu with our cook; I cannot believe this is my life.

  Over shrimp soup, we discuss the paper’s dramatic decline and wonder why Faris isn’t interested in doing anything about it. “Why does he keep Zaid, when he treats the staff so poorly and publishes such crap?” I ask. In perhaps not those exact words.

  “No one else will do it,” says Radia.

  “No one else is willing to run the paper?” I say.

  They all shake their heads.

  “But why? It’s so easy!”

  My women look shocked for a moment and then start to laugh.

  “I guess maybe I have to come back.”

  “If you go back, I will go back too,” says Zuhra.

  “Really?” I say. I think about it. There are at least two more years left in Tim’s posting. And then I remember that Faris will not have changed. He’ll still want my staff writing advertorials. He’ll still want us to avoid news that reflects poorly on Yemen. He may still want Zaid at the head of the masthead. In practice, he would almost certainly not be willing to rehire me, a fact that doesn’t seem to occur to my reporters. But I also think about my staff and what I could do with them with world enough and time. I’ve got two more years to kill, after all.

  I can’t believe I am even thinking about it.

  AFTERWORD

  It was the bodyguards racing across our lawn from the pool that first tipped me off. I was pacing from room to room upstairs, trying to lull my five-month-old daughter to sleep, when I looked out of a window to see two of them barreling toward the house.

  Curious, I headed downstairs with Theadora Celeste in my arms and walked out to the pool to investigate. Not seeing anything amiss, I stuck my toe in the water to test the temperature. But seconds later, the two bodyguards, now fully armed, appeared at my side.

  “Madam! You need to be in the house,” they said in Arabic, quickly shepherding us toward the entrance. They continued speaking so rapidly I only understood about half of it. “What is the problem?” I asked in Arabic. “Mafeesh mushkila,” they told me reassuringly. No problem. “But you need to be in the house.”

  Obviously, there was a mushkila.

  When we got inside, our housekeeper Negisti and cook Emebet were hovering near the door. “What’s going on?” I asked. They shook their heads. “They told us to shut the doors and stay inside,” said Negisti. “I close them, but I did not know you were outside with the baby!”

  “They didn’t say why?”

  They shook their heads again. “Maybe it is protests. The petrol prices are up again. Ten riyals more,” said Negisti.

  “Not just petrol. All prices,” added Emebet.

  “No taxis on the street. Girma he said no taxis.”

  “No dabaabs (buses),” said Emebet.

  Often we were advised to stay home when there were protests in the street, and it seemed entirely possible that Yemenis were out protesting the increased petrol prices. But I wanted to find out for sure. I rang Tim’s work phone but got no answer, so I tried Colin, the head of Tim’s bodyguards.

  He picked up and handed the phone immediately to Tim. “Hi sweetheart, I was just about to ring you.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “My car was attacked on the way to the embassy this morning.”

  “No!”

  “But I’m fine. The guys are fine. We’re not sure yet if it was a suicide bomber or a planted IED.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “I’m okay. Rather rude start to the morning, but I’m okay.”

  “Your team? And the car?” I didn’t care about the car itself, I wanted to gauge how bad the attack was.

  “They’re fine. Ali’s a bit shook up I think. There was a fair amount of blood on the windscreen. The car is not too bad. The car did its job.”

  “You’re okay?” I couldn’t ask this too many times.

  “I’m okay. I will ring you later when we know more.”

  I hung up and immediately realized I’d forgotten to tell him I loved him. How could I have forgotten at a time like this? I’d have rung back, but he’d said his phone was ringing off the hook.

  I went downstairs to tell the staff. Negisti’s kind, brown face creased with worry and even placid Emebet looked alarmed. It was about eight-thirty A.M. I was expecting Rahel, Theadora’s babysitter, to arrive at nine A.M. “Should I tell Rahel not to come?” I asked. If our house was suddenly more of a target than it usually was, I didn’t want to put Rahel in danger.

  “Yes, have her stay home,” they said.

  I rang Rahel, who was already on her way. She sounded confused and worried.

  My phone continued to ring—Yemeni friends and others from around the world, wanting to know if Tim was okay. An Omani friend was particularly incensed. “How could anyone do this? Tim is one of us!” he said. “He’s an Arabist! He loves the Arab world! He is one of us!”

  Tim rang me again to say it had definitely been a suicide bomber.

  “I won’t ask when you’re coming home, but I hope it’s not too long.” I
never know when Tim will arrive home because he cannot—for security reasons—tell me over the phone.

  “I hope so too.”

  I went numbly about my day, nursing Theadora, reading her books, checking the news online. I was grateful to have Theadora to care for, to force me into some semblance of normalcy. I didn’t eat or shower or go to the gym. Guards surrounded our house. There was one on the porch, shouting into his radio. One clattering up the stairs to the roof. One in the garden on his cell phone. We were not to leave the house. Not that we’d left the house much in recent months anyway. Since I’d moved in with Tim and become his official partner, I’d been unable to leave home without a bodyguard.

  Negisti came running upstairs to tell me that Tim was on Al Jazeera. “He looked okay, he was smiling.” I raced down, Theadora in my arms, and we waited for the bit about Tim to come back on. Theadora had never seen a television screen before and was mesmerized. There was no live shot, just an old photograph of him smiling at the camera. I wondered where it came from. It felt odd to see that photo in the context of the story.

  I kept busy. Nothing seemed to settle in me. I read the news stories streaming onto the Internet, trying to make it sink in. BRITISH AMBASSADOR SURVIVES SUICIDE ATTACK, said one. Survives. The word sent a shudder through me. Survives. Meaning, he might not have.

  Finally, I heard our gates clatter open at five minutes before five P.M. I slid sock-footed across the marble floor to the door. We waited until he was inside, away from the eyes of his Yemeni guards, before we embraced. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “But in five minutes the entire staff of the embassy is going to descend.”

  We ran upstairs. Tim took Theadora from me and cradled her in his arms. “Hello sweetheart,” he said. “Looks like you’re stuck with me awhile longer.” We’d exchanged only a few words before the doorbell rang. When Joanna, the head of the UK Department for International Development, arrived, she apologized. “I got here early but was waiting outside, so you and Tim could have some time together, but then I saw everyone else coming in… . Did you get any time with him?”

  “About a minute and a half?”

  The rest of the evening was a blur. There was the meeting, at which Tim told the staff what had happened and announced some changes in security. There were drinks afterward, people lingering over beers and Tim’s famously strong gin and tonics. There were concerned hands patting my bare arms and a whirl of voices. At 6:30 I went upstairs, fed Theadora, and put her to bed. For the first time in two months, she went to sleep without a murmur.

  Only hours later, when the last guests had left and the staff had gone home, were Tim and I at last alone together.

  THE NEXT MORNING I was about to get into the shower when I looked out our bedroom window to see one of our bodyguards and his AK-47 sitting on a bench right next to Rahel and the baby. Rahel was reading a story to Theadora, who lay kicking on her playmat. The sight of my tiny daughter waving her green rattle at the foot of a man so heavily armed shook me. Dear god, in what kind of place am I raising my daughter? I ran downstairs.

  When I got to the playmat I was suddenly unsure of what to say. “Please,” I said to Mohammed. “You are careful with the gun? I mean, I know you are. But I just want to make sure it wouldn’t go off accidentally? With the baby here? And Rahel?”

  “Aiwa (yes),” he reassured me, smiling and moving the gun to the side of the bench. “Careful.”

  “Okay.” I paused, feeling confused. I didn’t want to leave Theadora outside surrounded by men with guns. And I didn’t want to deprive her of fresh air and sunshine. And what if the house were attacked? I was trembling and nauseated. “Rahel? If the guards tell you to go inside, go inside, okay?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I will take care of her.”

  A few minutes later, the rains began, and Rahel gathered the baby up to rush her inside. Only then could I relax enough to finally get into the shower.

  Things had been getting worse for the last couple of years. Attacks on Westerners had escalated, and our movements around the country had become increasingly restricted. I was grateful I had done so much traveling on my own before I moved in with Tim and became subject to embassy regulations. Then in August 2009, when I was six-and-a-half months pregnant, I was held at gunpoint by eight Yemenis tribesmen while hiking with four other women. There’s nothing like having an AK-47 pointed at your head—a cocked AK-47—to make you re-evaluate your decision-making. I had been hiking all over Yemen for three years without incident. You don’t really think it can happen to you—until it does. We were fortunate to escape an extremely tense situation unharmed after swift intervention by the British Embassy and the minister of the interior.

  All of this had made the decision to return to Yemen with Theadora after giving birth to her in London a difficult one. I kept her in England for three months so that she could grow strong enough to travel and receive her first vaccinations.

  We hated being away from Tim, who hated being away from us. But trepidations about returning to Yemen remained. I was afraid of bathing Theadora in nondrinkable water. I was afraid of the diseases she could catch there. I was afraid of not getting her on a plane fast enough in an emergency.

  One night in London I dreamed I had plucked a bunch of pale green grapes from a grove hidden in a snowy winter forest of shivering pines. Cupping the icy fruit in my fingers, I painstakingly peeled away the skin, exposing a miniature of my daughter, about the size of my thumb. She was perfectly formed, pink and blue-eyed. I showed her to friends who had gathered around. I wanted them to say how beautiful she was, but they only gazed at her in horror, appalled that I had exposed her to the elements so tiny and vulnerable. I woke thinking, if I take my baby to Yemen, isn’t that how people will react?

  We debated whether Theadora and I should go instead to Vermont tostay with my parents. But after some reassuring conversations with our doctor and others in Yemen, we decided to stay together as a family. We had wanted Theadora because we loved each other and wished to raise her together. Not 7,000 miles apart. So, with a suitcase full of just-in-case, Western pharmaceuticals, I carried her back to Yemen.

  Theadora had been happy in Sana’a, playing outdoors every day in the garden, surrounded by people who doted on her. She had her own room and plenty of other rooms to explore. I took walks with her in the Old City, where I showed her my first Yemeni house and where passing women touched her round cheeks and fair hair and asked me if she were a doll.

  But since the attack on Tim, the decision whether to stay in Yemen was no longer ours—it was the Foreign Office’s.

  A couple of days and many security meetings later, it became clear that Theadora and I, along with the rest of the spouses and partners of the embassy staff, were going to have to be evacuated. Many would return to homes Britain, but we had nowhere to go. We had no other home.

  Tim hadn’t stopped working since the attack, maintaining energy and buoyancy I wouldn’t necessarily expect from someone who had just narrowly escaped an attempt on his life. But when he told me Theadora and I were to be sent away, he finally broke down. “Suicide bombers I can cope with,” he said, “But not losing you.”

  “You’re not losing me. You aren’t losing us. It’s only for a short while….” But it was hard to be consoling when I was crying too.

  “I thought Theadora was going to learn to walk in Yemen. I wanted her to see Soqotra. I wanted us to go camping together, to have pictures of her here. There is so much I wanted to do here with you.”

  “I wanted to take her to Shahara with us and walk over the bridge. I wanted her to meet Zuhra’s baby. I’ll never see Zuhra again,” I said. I hadn’t been able to see Zuhra since Theadora was born because she had typhoid. She was also pregnant, due in less than a month. Now she would never meet Theadora, and I would never meet her little boy.

  We also worried about our staff. Every morning when I carried Theadora downstairs, Negisti hurried to take her from me. Emebet, Rahel, and the
rest of the household staff also adored cheery little Theadora. The enormous, echoing residence felt cozier and more of a home with her in it.

  When Tim and I sat down with the residence staff to explain about the evacuation, Negisti pulled her apron over her face and wept. Emebet and Salaam were also in tears. We couldn’t think of anything to say to comfort them.

  On our last morning in our house, I gave photos of Theadora to each of the staff and taped more pictures to the refrigerator. We took only two suitcases. Everything else we had to leave behind: all of Theadora’s books and toys, her bed, her changing table, her room. I didn’t mind leaving my own things behind, but I hated leaving behind everything Theadora knew as home.

  When Tim came to take us to the car, the staff wouldn’t let go of us. I had to actually pry Theadora out of Rahel’s arms. Crying, I hurried to the armored car. And we were off, leaving behind the house that had been our home for three years, the only real home Theadora had ever known, and the country that had been my home for four.

  This wasn’t how I planned to go. I wasn’t ready. There was so much of the country still left to explore. We had so many friends. And I was finally making progress in my Arabic lessons.

  But I can’t say we didn’t make the most of our time. The years I spent living with Tim in Yemen were the happiest of my life. I moved in with him in the spring of 2008, though we had been spending every possible spare minute together for months before that. We were both working insanely hard at our respective careers, but we were both engaged in work we loved. I was writing this book and doing some freelance reporting, and Tim was working approximately eighteen hours a day as the British Ambassador to Yemen.

  Nearly every day, Tim rose at six A.M., and I got up with him so we could have breakfast together before he left for the office at seven-fifteen. Then I was free to swim, do yoga, and work for several hours before he reappeared in the evenings. As soon as I moved in, Tim created an office for me in the top floor of our house. I had a room of my own, a massive desk overlooking our garden and pool, and a mini-kitchen next door where I could make coffee and tea. Our upstairs refrigerator was fullof dried fruit, nuts, dark chocolate, champagne, and soy milk. It was paradise.