Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [161]
IT IS A SUNNY WINTER DAY when Tim and I take our first Yemen outing together. Thus far, we’ve only spent time together in private, at his home when the domestic staff is gone for the day. But now that he has announced his separation from his wife and his relationship with me to the embassy, I am no longer a secret. The armored cars drop us off at Bait Bous, an ancient village on a cliff overlooking Sana’a, and we set off on a long walk. A few of his bodyguards scramble up the mountains ahead of us, and several others follow at a discreet distance.
At the top of a ridge, we stop to catch our breath. We’ve been talking the whole way up but fall silent as we turn to look down at the city of Sana’a sprawled beneath us. It looks like something I might have made out of sand as a child, with its fanciful minarets and gingerbread houses. No clouds mar the clear blue of the sky. Across from us, distant mountain peaks sharpen in the midday light. Tim takes my hand.
Nervously, I draw a breath. “I’ve been thinking about Sierra Leone….”
When I finish explaining to him the reasons I shouldn’t go, he smiles. “You’re absolutely right. Frankly, you’d be mad to try to write a book while working the kind of schedule you were working here. And you really need to be here to write this book, don’t you?”
“I just didn’t want you to feel that me staying means we have to move things any faster…. I am sure you need time, and I don’t want to interfere with your work—”
“Jenny,” he says, cutting me off. “Can I tell you something? I am so glad you aren’t going to Sierra Leone.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t think I could actually stand being apart from you that long.”
“I can stay with friends for a bit….”
“But I want you to live with me, as soon as it’s possible. Will you, Jenny? Will you come and live with me?”
I don’t need time to think, but for a minute I can’t speak. I look down at the city I love before turning back to the man I love even more. It seems too good to be true that I could have both of them.
“I don’t think I could be happy living anywhere else.”
EPILOGUE
Since we both left the Yemen Observer, Zuhra and I have become closer than ever. She visits me in New York, while on vacation from her fellowship program at Jackson State University in Mississippi, a state that she describes as “just like the Third World! Not so different from Yemen.”
It doesn’t take her long to adapt to American culture. She revels in her freedom, living on her own in a dormitory, mingling openly with peers, and peeling away her kheemaar. She is shocked, she writes, to discover that she is beautiful!
“A handsome man told me that i am so pretty. i was happy. many pple here told me so. and the best thing that i make lots of freinds here. pple here are so freindly, most of them are balcks. They have a good heart. i befreinded with an old police officers. i befreinded the women in the dorms. Aaah, i met the avengilicans, the invited me to the church to teach me English!!!!! i will go to do this.”
I get a flurry of excited e-mails during her first month in America. “I bought a jeans and short shirt,” she writes. “i look pretty. Jennifer, you won’t belive how many men praised me, and there is a handsome and old man said that if i am in 40s, he won’t hesitaite to marry me. I don’t realise that i am so attractive to this level. Really i mean it, i thought that i am not beatiful and have not attractive personality that people will be hit on.”
But for Zuhra there is also a dark side to being found beautiful. When men begin to flatter her, ask her out, and make declarations of love, she feels that she must have done something wrong to attract such attention. Am I still a good girl? she asks me in a million ways. Yes, I tell her. The best girl ever.
The first thing I notice when I finally meet her at her brother’s home in Brooklyn is that she is wearing purple. “You’re in color!” I say. I pick her up in my arms and spin her around. I’m wearing a sleeveless,