Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [37]
EVERYTHING I DID during my last few days in Yemen was suffused with curiosity about what would happen if I actually accepted Faris’s job offer. What would I be like as an editor in chief? Could I keep up the exhausting pace Faris expected of me? And what if I gave up my life in New York to come here, made myself a home, and then failed? What if I couldn’t get my reporters to meet deadlines? What if I couldn’t actually get an entire issue organized and out in time twice a week?
FORTY-FIVE PEOPLE showed up at the farewell banquet Faris threw for me on my second-to-last night at Shaibani, a fish restaurant. No one had ever thrown me such an extravaganza! Almost everyone I invited showed up: Dr. al-Haj, Shaima, Sabri, the entire staff of the Yemen Observer, other friends, and even a jazz band from New York, scheduled to play at the American Embassy the following night. But I didn’t realize until we were all assembled that my women were missing. Where were Zuhra and Arwa and Radia and all the people I loved best? I was heartbroken. I had forgotten that they were not allowed out this late.
Faris stood up and gave a speech, saying how much I had changed the newspaper in just a few weeks, that his staff had demanded that I return, and that they all loved me. He showered me with gifts, which were stacked in a pyramid on the table in front of me: a whole set of silver jewelry in an enormous blue velvet box, two jambiyas with belts, seven baseball caps (one signed by the entire staff, telling me not to go), and five miniature Yemeni houses to bring home as gifts. He also handed me an envelope containing three crisp $100 bills.
Faris had hired two photographers to capture the event, and they took pictures of me nonstop throughout the dinner. I had paparazzi! I felt like Madonna. We ate Yemeni fish and bread and salsa and bananas with honey. The honey—for which Yemen is renowned—tasted of jasmine and God. It was that good.
I went home alone that night feeling weepy and confused, and lonely in that particular way one gets lonely when one is in between places, belonging nowhere. My heart sank at the prospect of going back to my New York routine. But could I possibly ever belong here?
On my last day in Yemen, I stopped once more at the office. My reporters threw themselves at me and begged me not to go. Zuhra pulled me aside in the hallway and pressed a purple alligator-skin wallet into my hands.
“It’s not new,” she apologized. “But it’s my favorite thing I own and I love it. I wanted to give you something I love.”
I was so moved by this I couldn’t speak. I just took both her small hands in mine and squeezed them. If I come back, I thought, this will be why.
FIVE
you’ll die over there!
The most dispiriting thing about returning to work at The Week after a holiday was that no one wanted to hear about it. I’d traveled quite a lot in my five years at the magazine, and it never failed to irk me that no one ever asked questions about my journeys beyond a polite “Nice vacation?” Perhaps this was understandable when I had been to well-trodden places such as Paris, Barcelona, and Dublin. But now I had been to Yemen! Few people in the office had even been able to place it on a map before I headed off there, and so I thought perhaps its exoticness would prompt some curiosity. After all, my colleagues were journalists, whose job it was to be professionally curious. They would surely be interested in the lands beyond the shores of Manhattan.
I was wrong. No one wanted to hear about the Yemen Observer, my students, or daily life in Arabia. A couple people asked what I wore while I was there, but that was the extent of their interest. This baffled and wounded me. I couldn’t help but take their lack of interest personally. I always spent my first few days back from holiday feeling irritated with the world.