Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [22]
When I arrived back at the Observer, revivified and still damp (it wasn’t until nearly a year later that a Yemeni friend informed me that going about with wet hair was frowned upon, as it suggested one had just emerged from a bedroom romp—Yemenis shower after sex), I met with Faris and a new reporter named Hakim, a Detroit-born Yemeni. Hakim had joined us from the rival Yemen Times, where he and the editor had mutually decided to part ways. Faris had great hopes for him, as his English was better than that of most of our reporters and he had a modicum of journalism training. They peppered me with questions about the paper’s format, and I told them exactly what I thought should be on every single page. After slaving away for other people for ten years, I was filled with the heady satisfaction of being treated like an authority. I was surprised by the things I knew and by how certain I felt that my suggestions were right.
By eight P.M., I thought I might swoon from exhaustion. But just when I feared I would be there all night, Faris invited me to dinner with him and three Tunisian models for Arabia Felix. So, at nearly eight thirty, after more than twelve hours of work, we headed out of the office.
Faris escorted us to a Chinese restaurant, where he ordered for all of us. Thirty dishes must have arrived, heaped with vegetables and fish and meats and rice and spring rolls. As soon as we were seated, the three stunning Tunisian women leaned back in their chairs and lighted their cigarettes in unison. They smoked through most of the meal. The chubbiest girl (still devastatingly beautiful) ate nothing but a few grains of rice, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Refusing an offer of food from a Yemeni is a major slight, so I ate twice as much to make up for her rudeness. But Faris was rude right back to her.
“You are not eating much but you are a big girl,” he said. “Will you go eat when we are not watching?”
The girls spent most of the meal complaining about Yemen in various tongues. They had so much fun in Tunisia. In Tunisia, women don’t have to cover their bodies. In Tunisia, the food is much better than Chinese food. Yet their contracts as flight attendants with Yemenia Airways would keep them in Yemen for the next three years. God help the Yemenis.
“Tunisia is a dictatorship,” Faris told me. “But the dictator is liberal—he had all of the women remove their hijabs, and now they are free. But if Tunisia were to become a democracy, the Islamists would win an election in a landslide, and women would be sent back centuries.” This fascinated me. “In Algeria, this happened,” said Faris. “It used to be fairly liberal until it became a democracy, and the Islamists swept elections. They are still fighting there.”
I wondered if the same could happen here. Yemen was moving toward democracy. Would that result in an even more conservative and restrictive culture? Faris didn’t seem to think so. Saleh was almost guaranteed reelection, and Yemen was already an Islamic country.
When we left the restaurant at around ten P.M., Faris invited me to watch the World Cup with him and his friend Jalal, who had joined us, but I begged off. “If I don’t get to bed I will be useless to you tomorrow!”
So Faris had Salem drive me home. I was asleep three seconds after I crawled into bed, although I woke briefly at three thirty to hear “Allaaaaahhhu Akbar!” wail through loudspeakers across the city. A sound that would become as familiar to me as the rumble and blare of Manhattan traffic.
IF I HAD THOUGHT that things would slow down after that marathon first day, I was seriously mistaken. Every day I accumulated new students, every day more of my reporters dragged me off after class to edit their stories, every day Faris would think up some new thing he wanted from me. In addition, I began studying Arabic for an hour a day with a tutor. I almost never slept.
But while I had never worked so hard in my life, I had never