Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [117]
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?”
“Yes.”
“You brought me here to make the paper more professional, right? And to increase its credibility.”
He nods.
“The key to doing that is keeping a firm wall between advertising and editorial. If our readers see that we are writing about our advertisers, if they see that we write about people who give us money, they will think that every story we print we only write because someone paid us to run it. It destroys our credibility.”
Faris nods as if he might understand.
“I don’t want them using my reporters for that reason—it teaches them the wrong ideas about journalism.