Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [138]
This is absurd, given that the iPod story is about the effect of iPods on pacemakers, and hardly any Yemenis own either gizmo. But at least it won’t scandalize anyone.
Curious to find out the truth, I report the conversation to Luke. “They claim there is no such thing as oral sex in Yemen.”
“Oh yes there is!” he says, laughing.
“I figured you would know.”
I guess the gay men have all the luck. Once you’re engaged in one illegal activity, you might as well go all out.
Later, married Yemeni women tell me that oral sex does exist but that many people consider it shameful. “Women are not honest with each other,” says one Yemeni woman. If a woman admits that her husband “kisses her vagina,” others disparage the act as disgusting. Some think that a man who performs oral sex is being too servile to his wife and unmanly. “It’s just how we are trained, to think our bodies are disgusting,” says my friend. “Some women don’t feel husbands should witness birth because they will be disgusted. Women think organs are a disgusting place. Women internalize these sexist ideas. In Islam, you should take a shower after sex.”
IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE to have Tobias waiting for me after work. Someone to whom I can pour out the frustrations of my day, someone to hand me a drink and sit with me looking out over the boxy brown houses of Old Sana’a glowing in the dark, holding my hand. Someone with interesting stories of his own. My reporters sense a new lightness in me. The women tell me I look pretty twice as much as usual, looking slightly suspicious. How do they get through their lives? I wonder. How can they bear sleeping alone every night? They must have passions of their own, but what do they do with them? Offer them to God? Perhaps that is it. Perhaps if I had God, I could be happier alone. I could be happier without fingers brushing against my skin, without a warm body curled around me. But I do not have God. All I have is a persistent and not necessarily wise openness to love, and a relentless desire to be loved in return.
Despite how well things are going, I’ve been looking forward to a break from my six-day week, from my twelve-hour days. But the thought of returning to a job in New York, the thought of once again climbing onto the endless treadmill of work and rent paying and rushing from place to place in anonymous crowds, fills me with dread.
I have no idea what I will do at the end of this year. I’ve scarcely had time to look up from my desk. But now that I have become human again and made room for joy and leisure in between manic workdays, my brain finds itself with time to look up at the horizon. There is nothing there.
TWENTY
the deluge
Just when I am at my happiest personally and most optimistic about my paper’s future, harbingers of doom appear. It takes less than a week for me to realize that Zaid’s English has failed to improve one iota during his ten months in London. How he managed this is beyond me, but I struggle to edit his stories and it becomes clear that he is not remotely capable of editing anyone else’s work. After fighting so hard to sell Faris on Zaid, now I am going to have to do some rethinking.
Zaid already seems to have lost his resolve to give up qat. The day after our lunch, I walk into the office to find him stuffing a leaf into his mouth. I raise an eyebrow.
“It was a gift!” he says. “I couldn’t refuse it! It would be rude!”
I have also begun to have trouble with Hadi, who has always been the most reliable and devoted of designers. He has been coming in later every day, sometimes not appearing until noon. This mystifies me. One morning, desperate to lay out a page, I collar Luke.
“Hadi hardly ever gets here on time anymore! What is going on?”
“Did you know he got a car?”
“He got a car?”
“So that’s why he’s been coming in late.”
I don’t get it. Shouldn’t a car get him here even earlier?
“He’s been working as