The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (34 page)

“I mean, I just can’t imagine how it could be used sexually. Look, the battery has a serial number and an Apple logo. They can look it up online if they want. It’s a standard Apple battery.”

She nods and heads off again but is back a few minutes later.

“Sorry! But they want to know if the chewing gum is
sexual
chewing gum.”

I despair. “Zuhra! How on earth could chewing gum be sexual? Are these men completely out of their minds?”

“I don’t know!” Zuhra twists her hands together.

She looks extremely distressed to have to ask me these awkward questions. I feel sorry for having put her in this position.

“No,” I finally say. “The chewing gum is absolutely not sexual.”

I feel compelled to explain to her why the police are asking such interesting questions. Mortified, I say that my friend has included this one verboten item but that the rest of the package was completely innocent.

She listens calmly and goes back to the telephone. Moments later, she returns to tell me that customs has determined that everything in the package is sexual. They will not give it to Salem.

I nearly lose it. “Are these men
stupid?”
I say. “The battery is obviously a computer battery!” I am trembling, despite my dim awareness of the humor of the situation. I cannot believe that the customs officers are about to get away with stealing hundreds of dollars of things from me. No matter how offended they are by the vibrator, there is no reason they cannot deliver my medicine and computer parts.

I start to cry from sheer frustration but quickly dry my eyes when Faris comes in and hesitates in front of my desk. “Jennifer, if you want to receive things like this, you should tell me. I could have had it routed through the embassy. Salem almost got arrested at the airport. I just had to talk to the police to get them to release him.”

I want to dissolve into my carpet. I cannot remember ever feeling so completely humiliated.

“I didn’t know what he was sending,” I say. “All I want is the computer battery and the cord and the medicines that are in that package. I had no idea they would try to arrest Salem. I’m really sorry.”

He says he will try to get those things for me but chastises me for not talking to him earlier, so things could be done “a different way.”

Now everyone in the entire office knows what was in my package. I am ashamed to face them, but I have no choice but to brazen it out. I go about my work as normally as possible, and no one says a word. I don’t even catch anyone smirking. Zuhra comes in my office later that afternoon to tell me that her family supports me. “My sister says it’s unfair, that it’s personal and what they have done is wrong.”

I am embarrassed that she has told her sister but grateful for her compassion. I never would have expected such a response from a conservative Muslim, but my Yemeni reporters are always surprising me.

When I have calmed down a bit, I finish my refugee story. My staff is still being kind, particularly Hadi, who invites me outside to eat with him. He shares his pan of
ful
and his bread. I am not hungry but I eat anyway, thankful for his gesture of friendship.

A WEEK LATER,
I go to Faris to ask if he has made any progress in obtaining my package. He avoids looking me in the eyes, fiddling with a pen on his desk.

“You see,” he says, “the problem is that customs doesn’t have your package anymore.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No. Ah, security has it.”

“Security?”

“Well, apparently your package is now considered a national security threat. And, ah, they are testing the chewing gum.”

“They are
testing the chewing gum?
For what?”

“For, you know, Viagra or something. Like a sexual stimulant.”

What on earth would I do with a sexual stimulant in this country? I want to say. I am completely alone.

“Faris, it’s
Trident
. It’s a famous brand. They can look it up on the Web!”

“These are not educated men, Jennifer.”

“Apparently not.”

“They don’t know how to look anything up. They might not be able to read.”

I sit in silence for a moment. “I bet they took it all home,” I say. “I bet they just want it for themselves.”

Faris nods slowly. “They probably do.”

We sit in silence. “I guess I wouldn’t want it back now anyway then.” I look up at him.

He nods gravely. “You probably wouldn’t.”

SIXTEEN
the power of peanut butter cups

There are moments, even whole days, when everything falls into place
. Reporters give me coherent stories, photographs come in on time, and the men actually return from lunch at a decent hour. Progress is irrefutable. But just when I am feeling most hopeful, I run up against obstacles that it is not in my power to remove. I can edit poorly written stories. I can assist shoddy reporting. I can enforce deadlines. But some things, only Faris can remedy.

Staffing is one of these. Every time I feel I have enough reporters, somebody quits. They all leave for the same reasons: They are not paid enough, they receive no health insurance or other benefits, and the administration treats them shabbily.

My reporters are attractive to international employers, who constantly poach them, because they are educated and speak English. When the Red Cross offers Hassan a job with decent pay and benefits, he has no choice but to accept, though he loves being a reporter. He and his Yemeni wife have just had a baby, he’s having expensive medical problems, and he’s just taken a Canadian second wife. But he also leaves because of the Doctor. For months, the Doctor has been harassing Hassan, withholding his salary until I march into his office to remonstrate. This happens with monotonous regularity. The Doctor claims that Hassan isn’t working. I tell the Doctor that Hassan certainly
is
working, and that if he weren’t, I would be the first to know. Hassan has no idea why he is singled out for abuse, and the Doctor gives me no reason other than Hassan’s alleged laziness—which is laughable. He is one of my most reliable men.

I am heartbroken to lose Hassan. He is a passionate journalist, dedicated to improvement, and without a disagreeable bone in his body. Unlike the other men, he relishes criticism of his work so he can learn. But Faris refuses to invest in his staff. Every time I tell him how important this is, that without decent reporters the entire enterprise is worthless, he tells me he pays them a livable wage. While it may be true that $200 a month is relative riches in Sana’a, it is obviously not enough to support a family or to keep reporters from looking for other jobs.

“It takes me
months
to train a reporter,” I tell him. “When they quit I have to start all over again with someone new. The paper is constantly losing its most valuable people.”

Faris shrugs. “So you can feel you are doing some good in the world,” he says. “You train them so well they get other jobs and succeed.”

I didn’t come here to train journalists so that they could leave the profession, I say. “I came here to make this a better paper and to help the staff to become more professional. I cannot do this when everyone keeps quitting.”

NOT LONG AFTER HASSAN GOES,
Bashir gives notice. For once, his chubby face isn’t smiling. His wife is pregnant, and he has been offered a well-paid job with a telecommunications company. I’ve spent six months training him. Now all of my careful cultivation has been rendered meaningless. Again, Sisyphus springs to mind. I can’t help tearing up when he tells me. Bashir is sad too. “I don’t want to go,” he says. “But I have no choice. I don’t make enough here to support a family.”

Whenever I tell Faris that low wages and lack of benefits are losing us valuable employees, he reminds me that the paper isn’t making money. He seems to think that if only we wrote better stories, we’d all be rich. I remind him that it is not the mission of the editorial staff to make money; it is our mission to create a brilliant product. It is the job of marketing and advertising to
sell
that product. Faris has no idea what marketing means. I try to explain a few of the things that the marketing department of
The Week
did while I was there. It hosted lunches with famous speakers; it held film nights with celebrities; it gave copies of the magazine to colleges and schools. It did demographic surveys and sent direct mail to the likeliest readers. Not all of these are possible in Yemen, but they could be adapted.

Faris is reluctant to take the publisher’s responsibility for marketing and advertising problems. After all, he is working full-time for the president. So he wants me to find someone who can market. He’s already paying five men to do marketing, he says, but they have no impact. I have no idea where to start. I want to help him, because I want people to read the product I work so hard to edit. But I only stretch so thin. I cannot be both editor and marketer, even if that were ethical.

It’s clear that Faris’s loyalties are to the regime, not to reporting. And he mistakes public relations for journalism. In that case, why does he even have a paper? He has given me his reasons: to encourage tourism and development by writing about Yemen’s attractions. By writing about Yemen in English, he believes he can communicate Yemen’s charms to a broad international audience.

But this still fails to explain Faris’s lack of interest in quality. Even if he wants the
Yemen Observer
to be no more than a cheerleader for the country, I would expect him to care about how well it is written and reported. I would expect staff retention to
matter
.

Zuhra offers an explanation. “In Yemen there is no such thing as bad paper and good paper. The quality of journalism overall is bad.” Because all newspapers in Yemen—both Arabic and English—contain legions of mistakes, expectations are low. Quality doesn’t matter. Publishing a paper in English is prestigious enough, she says. Who’s going to complain about quality, other than me and a few ambassadors? And why should Faris invest in quality when he can expect such low returns for it?

Owning a paper also gives Faris power, she says. He can protect himself through media, using it to further his own goals. Publishing in English also allows him access to the international community. If the paper lands in trouble with the government, the case gets international attention.

Zuhra respects Faris, who has been generous and kind to her. But she thinks him too pragmatic to produce brilliant journalism. He cares more about selling ads than he does about printing stories that could change the country.

COME APRIL,
Faris is chronically absent. Even if he does manage to slip upstairs to his desk while I am in the building, he avoids me. Never once does he poke his head in to see how things are going. Never once does he tell me I am doing a good job. Or a bad job, for that matter. Sometimes I wonder if he remembers I am here.

This is not the relationship I’ve dreamed of having with my employer. After his effusive warmth during my first trip, I had hoped to be invited to dinner at his home, introduced to important Yemenis, confided in about national affairs. I had imagined us meeting over coffee or lunch to brainstorm new ideas for the paper and to discuss our progress. I had thought he would be someone I could turn to for guidance, or at the very least information about Yemen’s inner workings. It would have made all the difference.

These dreams have vaporized. Not only is Faris physically not present most of the time I am in the office, but when we do meet, our conversations average forty-five seconds. I can always sense his impatience to finish with me and get back to his Really Serious Work for the President. Talking with him makes me so anxious that I nearly always decide that several of the urgent matters I needed to discuss with him are not so urgent after all. Maybe Hassan can wait another week to get paid. Maybe I don’t need that plane ticket back to New York. Maybe I can do without a copy editor. I begin to come to him with a list. Otherwise, his snapping fingers and persistent “Next?” drive all of my carefully considered concerns from my head.

I’m busy editing one evening in April when Faris is spotted in the office and someone races to tell me. Back when Manel was around, he’d run to my office and say, “Porsche parked outside. World’s handsomest Yemeni spotted upstairs. Hurry.”

But tonight when I run upstairs to ask him for five minutes—just five minutes!—he tells me he must speak with Jelena of
Arabia Felix
first. He, Jelena, and al-Matari then have a screaming fight in his conference room for an hour. It seems unwise to interrupt. I’ve finished my work, but I loiter downstairs, waiting for my five minutes.

Because I’m in my office, I don’t see Faris slip out the front door. Only when I emerge to ask Enass if he’s free yet do I find out he has escaped once again.

In the hope that Yemenis understand Faris better than I do, I consult my reporters. They have no suggestions. To them, Faris is a godlike, mythic presence. Zuhra aside, most would never dare question anything he does. Even al-Asaadi is cowed by him. Ibrahim takes me out to dinner one night, and I spill my woes over fried fish, hummus, and chewy flatbread. He is mystified. “You’ve done
wonderful
things for the paper,” he says as I glumly tear off strips of the bread and stuff them into my mouth. “He should be grateful to you.”

“I’m not sure Faris ever
looks
at the paper,” I say. “And I definitely haven’t sensed any gratitude.”

On April 13 (oh, notable day!), for the first time in months, I spy Faris’s silver Porsche in the street. I toss my purse and books in my office and take the stairs two at a time. The door to Faris’s office is open, and when I peek in I can see him sitting in the yellow light of a lamp, staring meditatively at his computer screen.

“May I come in?”

He nods, without enthusiasm and without looking at me.

“Faris,” I say, perching on the edge of a chair opposite his desk, “I have been trying to get in touch with you for weeks. I am very concerned that you are not answering my phone calls or my e-mails. Did you read my e-mail?”

He glances at his screen. “Frankly? No.” He touches his mouse nervously, glances again at the computer screen, and shrugs. “It was too long.”

I look at him in disbelief. My e-mail was a paragraph long. A short paragraph.

“Just tell me what you want.”

This is hardly encouraging. “Well, first of all, I want a better relationship with you. It feels terrible when you ignore my calls and e-mails. I don’t like being avoided. I mean, I
am
running your newspaper. There are many things I would really like to discuss with you.”

“To tell you the truth, I have been avoiding you because it makes me feel bad to see you,” he says. “I cringe inside myself when I see you.”

His words are a dozen
jambiyas
hurled through the air and pinning me to my chair. Everything I’ve struggled for, and he hates me. “Why?” I look at him with helpless bewilderment. “What have I done?”

He pauses, fiddling with his pen. “You are doing an excellent job with the paper,” he says. This is the first positive feedback I have gotten since I arrived back. “But you don’t seem to want to work with the advertising and marketing guys. If they ask you to do something, I want you to help them. Not tell them, ‘Stay away from my reporters.’”

“But, Faris, I—”

“I want you to help them. The paper doesn’t make any money.”

That argument again. “Faris, may I explain something?”