Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [72]
Anne-Christine is so integrated into the fabric of Yemen that she has a Yemeni lover, Yahya. I cannot hide my astonishment when she confesses that he is married. I wonder if she is risking her life with this relationship in a culture where adultery can be punishable by death. The night I meet Yahya for the first time, he’s terribly shy and worried that I will think poorly of him, though Anne-Christine reassures him that in Germany and the United States, it is perfectly normal for a man to visit a woman in her home. When he rings to say that he is on his way, she becomes giddy as a schoolgirl, running around the house fixing her hair and changing her dress. I’ve never seen down-to-earth Anne-Christine like this. Her face has flushed crimson, and she looks pretty and all of sixteen.
Yahya is tall for a Yemeni, attractive, and very soft-spoken. He speaks English, though slowly. I speak too quickly for him, and Anne-Christine tells me to slow down. He seems kind and not at all the sort of man to take the risks he is taking. But people here, I am learning, are rarely what they seem.
NOT ONLY DO I now have someone cooking for me and a few friends in whom I can confide, I also have what I consider the ultimate luxury: a cleaning woman. I’ve never had one before. No one but me has ever scrubbed my bathroom or washed my dishes. In New York, it was so expensive to hire someone to clean that I didn’t even know anyone who had a cleaning woman. But Shaima has insisted that I have someone. “I don’t know what we’d do without a housemaid,” she says. She sends me Aisha, a Somali woman desperate for work.
Yemen is home to some 150,000 Somalis, most of whom have fled to Yemen to escape violence in their homeland. They are granted automatic refugee status in Yemen—as long as they can reach the country alive. Thousands of Somalis save their money to buy passage on tiny, overcrowded smugglers’ boats across the Gulf of Aden. Many don’t survive the journey. They are often victims of violence on the boat, and many of the smugglers transporting the Somalis dump them so far from Yemen’s shores that they drown. But Aisha has survived. She doesn’t speak a word of English, so I uncover her story gradually, as my Arabic improves. She lives in Sana’a with five children and a husband. A tall, heavy woman, Aisha wears a hijab but doesn’t cover her face. When she smiles, she reveals a mouthful of enormous teeth. At first I ask Aisha to come just once a week—I don’t make much of a mess given that I am rarely home. But she is so desperate for work that I relent and have her come twice a week. I pay her $10 per visit, which Shaima tells me is the going rate. This seems staggeringly little to me, but Aisha accepts it without complaint. She leaves my house gleaming, with the smell of bleach wafting up from my stone floors.
After the first couple of weeks, I start to give her things to take home, usually food. I give her whole cakes, boxes of cookies, chocolates, and even some jewelry and clothes, mostly gifts I have received for which I have no need. A few weeks later, I give her the keys to my house. I trust her.
DESPITE THE REST and nutritious meals, my ribs refuse to heal. I still cannot laugh without agony, so finally our photographer Mas takes me to the hospital for X-rays. I don’t know quite what the point is, because if they are cracked there is nothing I can do but rest. But it couldn’t hurt to see a doctor.
We walk into an office in the emergency pavilion of the Yemeni-German Hospital, where three men sit idly shuffling papers. The one in the middle is apparently the doctor. I explain my problem, and he gives us a written order for an X-ray. We then find our way to Radiology, up and down stairs and through doorways. The technician ushers us right in and has me change into a hospital gown (even more modest than ours). I change in private, but during the actual X-ray, he allows Mas to stay in the room. Does the technician not know that he is exposing Mas to radiation? Or does he just not care? No one even asks me if I am