Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [82]
THINGS CONTINUE in the same vein after he returns from London. The very next issue, he e-mails me that he wants to write the editorial. So I save him that space. Luke and I finish every other page by seven thirty P.M. Al-Asaadi waltzes into the office at seven forty-five P.M. He hasn’t even started his editorial. It’s textbook sabotage.
I have been in a sunny mood all day, but now clouds are gathering. When he finally finishes his editorial, al-Asaadi decides to rearrange the entire front page and suggest additions to the Local page. I fight to keep my voice steady.
“I would have loved your feedback—at four P.M. this afternoon,” I say. “When we had plenty of time to rework things before deadline.”
“I can’t come in at four P.M.,” he says.
“Why not? Everyone else does. That’s our work hours.”
We are interrupted by his phone. Al-Asaadi has two mobile phones, both of which ring constantly. He chats for several minutes, his cheek bulging. While the entire rest of the staff has been hard at work, he has been at a qat chew with his friends.
Al-Asaadi seems to believe that holding the title of editor in chief entitles him to do less work than the rest of the staff. His time in prison has made him a bit of a celebrity. He’s Yemen’s poster boy for press freedom, and he milks this so much that Manel takes to calling him the “Boy Wonder” or the “Ghetto Superstar.” He loves to go out to embassy parties, to meet and greet dignitaries, but isn’t all that interested in the day-to-day sweat and toil of editing a paper. He spends no time training the staff to become better reporters, though they could use his help, and is impatient with their mistakes.
Luke and Manel and I confer about al-Asaadi’s obstructiveness after we finally flee at eleven P.M. Compared to our first two months, this is still an early close, and I have worked a mere fourteen hours instead of twenty. Luke, who worked for the paper for several months before I arrived, says that before I came there was no order at all and they were often there all night. “We were here until five or six in the morning,” he says. “You’ve done an amazing job.”
Luke offers to come with me to talk to Faris, to support my complaints about al-Asaadi. “He has blatantly sabotaged you for the last three issues,” he says. “All three issues would have closed at eight if not for him.”
Faris, as is too often the case, is out of town. So we wait.
The weird thing is that I know al-Asaadi likes me in spite of himself. And I like him. He brought me a pretty souvenir candy dish from London, and on days we are not closing an issue, we often talk and laugh together. But throughout the fall, the tension has escalated. When he is in the office, he entertains a constant stream of visitors, who sit a few feet from my desk talking loudly and slurping tea. The incessant racket is deleterious to both my patience and my editing. If al-Asaadi isn’t with a guest, he is shouting on the phone.
In Yemen, no one ever makes an appointment. People visit the editor of a paper when they feel like visiting, with no regard for the fact that she might be on deadline. Yet it is the height of rudeness to turn anyone away. I make this mistake one day, when a Yemeni reader drops in to talk with me about the paper just as I am editing several stories on a closing day. “Look, I’m really sorry, but I just don’t have time right now,” I tell him. “I am trying to close an issue. Could you please make an appointment next time?”
As soon as he leaves the office, al-Asaadi berates me. “You cannot do that,” he says. “You must always offer them a seat and at least a glass of tea. That is how things are done here.”
I feel terrible guilt for being so culturally insensitive. But I am also frustrated. If