Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [42]
After our meeting, Zuhra walks me to the grocery store (I forgot that the bathrooms at the Observer never have toilet paper; Yemenis use water hoses to clean themselves, which means the bathroom floors are nearly always flooded with what my copy editor Luke often refers to as “poop juice”) and then to the Jordanian sandwich shop for one of the rolled-up spicy vegetable sandwiches I love so. I haven’t eaten anything all day, although Zuhra has fetched me several cups of sticky-sweet black tea. “You are the only one I would make tea for,” she says. “No one else.” Like me, Zuhra does not cook. Tea is one of the few things she knows how to make.
After lunch, she hands me a story by Talha. No other copy has yet been filed for the next issue. I spend nearly an hour going through his story, making edits. It has no coherent structure, no clear first sentence, and a dearth of sources. I sigh. I will have to teach him everything.
A second desk has been moved into al-Asaadi’s office for me, although I can’t use the drawers yet as they are locked. It’s a plain office, white walls, gray carpet, with no decoration save for a map of Jerusalem on the wall near the door. Light floods in from the windows along two walls of the office. Outside, stray cats yowl in the yard.
I seem to have gone numb. All the panic and fear and grief of those last few days in New York have fallen away, but nothing has moved in to take their place. I probably should be feeling stark terror about the challenges of this job, but for some reason I feel bizarrely level.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, after a swim, I am happy to find Qasim, whose irrepressible high spirits I’d enjoyed in June. He was the rascal always stealing people’s shoes and hiding them in the wastebaskets, the one making prank phone calls, the one most likely to be caught singing in the office. But he is in charge of advertising, not a reporter, and thus not really part of my staff.
I also find my copy editor Luke, the blond Californian surfer dude. I’ve no idea if he actually surfs, but he looks like he should. He’s not entirely sure what he’s doing in Yemen, he tells me. He and a friend are thinking about launching some sort of business. “Yemen is a great place to be because they have nothing,” he says. “Everything is new to them. You can do anything. And it’s easy to rise to the top here.”
Still, he complains that Yemen is destroying his health. He hasn’t exercised since he got here, and he smokes way too much.
“And drinking? Do you drink?”
“Not anymore!”
“Guess you picked the right country.”
“Actually, I didn’t come here to get away from alcohol,” he says. “I came here to get closer to the qat.”
I find Talha in the newsroom and pull him aside to go over his story on the hazards of buying prescription drugs in Yemen. Drugs sold in Yemen are often either contaminated with toxic substances or completely ineffective sugar pills. Talha is quiet, serious, and eager to hear my suggestions. I explain to him all about leads, and story structure, and why we never begin a sentence with an attribution!
Mohammed al-Asaadi gives me the last ten issues of the paper to read after work before handing me off to Salem, who drives me and Radia home after nine P.M. They insist I ride up front, while Radia perches on a stack of Yemen Observers in the back of the van. I offer her my seat, but she refuses.
As we near Radia’s house, she leans forward and touches my arm. “Come with me,” she says. “Come to my home.” I look at her. Does she mean now?
“Come to my house,” she says again. “Come sleep with me?”
This is not quite as provocative an invitation as it would