Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [121]
Things are going much better overall, so why do I still have fits of temper? I think about my former editors. I remember Jim McGarvey at the Morris County Daily Record, who would scream that I was the most disastrous reporter on the planet one minute and then shower me with praise the next. Yet he was a brilliant editor. I think about all of the other editors I have known. Few of them were particularly stable, with the possible exception of my editor at The Week, but the pressures there were not the pressures of a daily. Maybe these fits of impatience on deadline simply come with the job.
Feeling better, I write the final captions and pack up my bags. At seven thirty, just as I am grabbing a bottle of French wine from my house and heading for dinner with a new neighbor, my phone rings. It’s a private number. Faris.
“Salaam aleikum,” I say.
“I need you to go back to the office,” he says. “Did you put something on the front page about the Huthis being behind the explosions at the armory?”
It takes me a minute to remember. My brain erases each issue from its data banks as soon as it’s put to bed. The Huthi rebels in the north of Yemen were rumored to have caused explosions in a cave near Sana’a.
“Yes,” I say. “But we quoted someone from the Ministry of the Interior.”
“The minister is denying it,” says Faris. “Get back to the office and change the front page or the paper will be closed down and we will be taken to court. And I want you to fire whoever wrote that story.”
“Farouq and Radia wrote it,” I say. I presume Farouq did the interview, because he is the one with the contacts.
“People have to double-check their facts,” says Faris. “Radia should have—”
“Don’t blame Radia for this!” I’m incensed. Why is Faris jumping to the conclusion that Radia is at fault? Didn’t I just say Farouq and Radia wrote it? “Farouq worked with her, and he was the one who gave me the story.” He also has several more years of experience as a reporter, I want to point out. He is the one responsible for overseeing Radia’s work.
Yemeni men immediately blame the women for anything that goes wrong. If the accountant makes a mistake, he blames Radia. If an administrator makes a mistake, he blames Enass. God forbid the men ever take responsibility for their own mistakes.
A male Yemeni friend explains the phenomenon to me this way: “They cannot admit a mistake because they are afraid of the punishment. We’re used to being punished every time we make a mistake.”
I am immediately abashed that this had not occurred to me; it makes sense in a culture in which children are beaten for not having the right answers. Plus, Yemen is a country in which the government crackdown on any misstep can be severe. No wonder they don’t want to admit mistakes.
But Faris is hell-bent on punishing someone. “Well, when I find out who wrote it … !” he says.
“Faris, I just told you who wrote it.” He doesn’t want to have to fire Farouq, I think. Farouq is a man and therefore less dispensable. “Anyway, have you told the designers to hold the paper?”
“I have.”
“How did the ministry know about the story?”
“Apparently Enass posted it online and someone saw it and called the ministry.”
Well, that was fast! We finished the story five minutes before I left the office.
“Is Luke still in the office? I was on my way to meet people …,” I say lamely, knowing there is no way I can get out of going back to work. Yet a dinner date is such a rarity that I hate to miss it.
“Jennifer, this is the news business and in the news business—”
“You don’t need to tell me about the news business. I’ve been in it for twelve years.” Which, I want to point out, is longer than the Yemen Observer has been in print. I am also tempted to point out that no real newspaper would let the people