Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [67]
Sami weaves through the clusters of men as I hurry in his wake, breathing in a soup of male sweat, cumin, and exhaust. I am struggling to catch up when, a few blocks from the gate, a man grabs me hard, squeezing my left side and breast. My scream carries. Some 150 people turn around to look. Sami whips around and takes a step toward the man, intending to hit him.
But the man is clearly crazy. He is half-dressed, in what looks like a large white diaper, with no shirt. His arms and legs are bent and wiry; his shoulder-length hair is dirty and wild, sticking out from his head in all directions; and his grin is toothless. Madness glazes his eyes. When Sami realizes this, he lowers his arm.
“I would hit him,” he says. “Only it wouldn’t do any good because he is insane.”
I concur, but the attack has shocked me into tears. Sami tries to find something comforting to say but is obviously unequipped to do this. Realizing how uncomfortable I am making him, I pull myself together. By the time we get to the mattress store, my eyes are dry. We pick out my bed things, and Sami negotiates the price. Finally, I have a place to lie down.
SAMI HELPS ME furnish my house, fixes electrical and plumbing problems, and runs errands. Both he and Shaima are constantly trying to feed me. One night I enjoy a massive iftar at Sami’s house, and the next day I am invited to Shaima’s.
Shaima and her sister Nada live in Hadda, the fancy part of town, in a large, two-story home with vast carpeted rooms and a kitchen big enough for a sit-down dinner for twelve. A froth of flowers surrounds the house.
Shaima’s father, currently away in Germany receiving treatment for lymphoma, was a diplomat. When he was posted to Algeria, he fell in love with an Algerian woman, taking her as a second wife, much to the distress of Shaima’s mother, who stopped talking to him for a couple of years. Shaima’s stepmother (whom she despises) has children by Shaima’s father, but she has not been told about his lymphoma.
Nada is married to an Italian man, Desi, who has also fallen in love with another woman. When he told Nada he wanted to make this woman his second wife, she was grief-stricken. This is why she is now living with Shaima. Desi comes to visit his daughters Ola and Mumina but doesn’t want to give up the other woman. It all sounds horrible and painful. Shaima says that if he were her husband, she would have drawn and quartered him by now. Throughout the year, I hear many more stories like this one. These multiple wives cause immense pain. Yemeni men seem to be about as faithless as American men—only instead of keeping their mistresses secret, they marry them. Islam permits up to four wives, as long as the man commits to treating them all equally. But this is impossible. Even the most perfect of humans cannot love four women equally. And in reality, this is rarely how it seems to work out. The women always suffer.
Shaima herself was once briefly engaged to a man with a first wife in Aden. But she backed out of the deal after three days. “I am just too jealous to deal with another wife,” she tells me.
When she was at university in Jordan, Shaima received several marriage proposals, which she turned down because she thought she wanted to marry a Yemeni. But when she returned to Yemen, she found Yemeni men not up to her standards. “They are not polite to women,” she said. “They do not hold doors, they do