Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [163]
I give her my blessing as well, and attend her wedding in August 2008. She is at least choosing her own husband, which is a daring break with tradition. She is also choosing a man who will allow her the freedom to continue her career and to travel whenever she wishes. This is no small benefit. Nothing is as important to Zuhra as her career, and she reassures me she will not give it up. By June, she has sold major stories to both Stern magazine in Germany and the Sunday magazine of El País in Madrid. She has begun to surpass her teacher.
I’m curious to hear about her married life. “How do you divide Kamil?” I say. “Is there a schedule?” There is. Zuhra gets Kamil every other night. “Do you make him shower when he comes over?” I ask, but she just laughs. Kamil’s children visit her often and call her Aunt Zuhra. She loves them but is not ready for her own children. Like me, she worries it will stifle her work. “I have enough to do getting used to a husband,” she says.
Zuhra hasn’t given up her dream of running a paper of her own someday. She does some freelancing for the Yemen Times and hopes that once she has HOOD’s website in shape, she will again work as a journalist.
As I write this, Zaid is still the editor of the Observer. He calls me every few weeks to ask why I don’t visit more often and to tell me he misses me. I’m impressed that he has stuck it out, but I can’t bring myself to say how devastated I am by what he’s done with the paper. My few remaining staff members are preparing to leave, mostly because they take issue with his management style. Before Adhara quits, she writes me a desperate e-mail telling me how much she and the others are suffering. Faris and Zaid don’t respect women, she says. The Yemen Times has offered her a job, but she is afraid to take it. “I am afraid Mr. Faris would do something to hurt me,” she says. I hope this fear is unfounded.
I hate seeing my women treated poorly. I feel guilty and responsible.
I invite Adhara as well as Zuhra, Radia, Enass, Najma, and Noor to lunch. I now live with Tim in the residence of the British ambassador, surrounded by ten bodyguards and a household staff of five. It’s a major adjustment. This morning I get up from my desk in my airy office overlooking our garden and stop short on my way downstairs to the kitchen to discuss the menu with our cook; I cannot believe this is my life.
Over shrimp soup, we discuss the paper’s dramatic decline and wonder why Faris isn’t interested in doing anything about it. “Why does he keep Zaid, when he treats the staff so poorly and publishes such crap?” I ask. In perhaps not those exact words.
“No one else will do it,” says Radia.
“No one else is willing to run the paper?” I say.
They all shake their heads.
“But why? It’s so easy!”
My women look shocked for a moment and then start to laugh.
“I guess maybe I have to come back.”
“If you go back, I will go back too,” says Zuhra.
“Really?” I say. I think about it. There are at least two more years left in Tim’s posting. And then I remember that Faris will not have changed. He’ll still want my staff writing advertorials. He’ll still want us to avoid news that reflects poorly on Yemen. He may still want Zaid at the head of the masthead. In practice, he would almost certainly not be willing to rehire me, a fact that doesn’t seem to occur to my reporters. But I also think about my staff and what I could do with them with world enough and time. I’ve got two more years to kill, after all.
I can’t believe I am even thinking about it.
AFTERWORD
It was the bodyguards racing across our lawn from the pool that first tipped me off. I was pacing from room to room upstairs, trying to lull my five-month-old daughter to sleep,