Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [71]
His wife, a rounded, wide-hipped, hook-nosed woman with an enormous smile, comes in and sits beside me. Their daughter sets a glass of lime juice in front of me and settles on the other side of her mother. She’s around twenty and rather plain. Both women, according to Mohammed, speak English but are too shy to speak it around me. Mohammed does most of the talking, telling me how much he loves America and Americans.
“Do you like Kenny Rogers?” says Mohammed. “I love Kenny Rogers.” He gets up and puts on a cassette. Somehow I failed to imagine that an Eid celebration would involve suffering through “Coward of the County.” Whenever his wife leaves the room, he turns it up. When she returns, she turns it back down. Eventually, when the first side of the cassette ends, she gets up and replaces it with a tape of Yemeni oud music.
“She likes this kind of music,” says Mohammed disapprovingly.
“It’s pretty,” I say. “I like the oud.”
They keep encouraging me to eat and ask me about my life. Mohammed hands me a large, illustrated book about Yemen and tells me all the places I have to visit.
“You must go to Soqotra,” he says. “Or you have only half lived.”
They ask if I have a husband and I lie. They ask if I have children and I tell the truth. “But maybe I would like some,” I say.
This sends Mohammed’s wife into fits of laughter. “Maybe!” she says. “Maybe!” I wonder if she simply thinks it is ridiculous for someone as old as I am—I’ve gotten so much more white hair since I got here—to consider children or if it is funny that I am not sure.
A similar scene repeats itself at Sami’s house later that day. Sweets are served, tea is poured, I am again forced to explain my childlessness, and my teeth ache with all of the sugar. But I am grateful. For the first time, I feel a sense of community. I belong to my neighborhood.
EID ALSO BRINGS ME the gift of Anne-Christine. A German woman about my age who has worked in Sana’a for several years in hospital management, Anne-Christine is living in a small flat under my house when I move in. But when its tenant returns from Denmark in October, she finds herself suddenly homeless. I discover her in tears one night on my stairs. Though I hardly know her, I invite her to live with me. I have so much space, and she is so distressed.
The arrangement works out marvelously for both of us. Anne-Christine is not only a vegetarian, and so shares my eating habits, but she is also a talented cook. She is happy to have someone to cook for, and I am ecstatic to eat something other than salad and bread, which is all I can ever muster the energy to throw together. For the entire two months she lives with me, Anne-Christine makes dinner every night. Even when she goes out to dinner with friends, she still cooks me an eggplant curry or stewed lentils and leaves the dish for me with a note. As if I couldn’t possibly manage to fend for myself.
On nights that I fail to come home for dinner or am late because of work, Anne-Christine is distraught. “Oh, I just wish I knew when you would be home!” she says to me one night. Feeling a bit like a 1950s husband, I start to leave work earlier, so as not to upset her.
Al-Asaadi finds this greatly amusing. “You have a wife!”
“Yeah,” I say, shutting down my computer. “She’s the best thing ever. I can see why you guys would want four of them.”
After she’s been living with me a few weeks, I cannot imagine how I ever survived before Anne-Christine. It makes such a difference to come home to someone. I’ve also begun to recognize that it is a matter of survival to have a few non-Yemeni friends to whom I can confess the whole of myself. This keeps me sane and keeps me from overconfiding in people who do not have the cultural context to understand some of the decisions I have made. I am still feeling my way toward the boundaries of what I can tell and what