Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [99]
My Arabic lessons are a source of entertainment for the entire office. On the day I learned negatives—“I am not your mother, you are not a baker, he is not the president”—I rushed into the newsroom to practice on my staff. “I am not bread!” I announced proudly. It was the first word that came to mind. My reporters dissolved into giggles.
But it’s not just Arabic they give me. They patiently explain to me bits of Yemeni history and culture, telling me about wedding rituals, Yemeni foods I haven’t tried, and tribal honor. They bring in cakes for me to taste, such as kubana, a crumbly cornbread. They introduce me to their families at weddings and other celebrations. It’s an enormous comfort to have such an enthusiastic pack of guides to help me navigate this multilayered world.
IT TAKES A LONG TIME for me to get to know Najma and Noor more personally. They are both shy and seem to find me intimidating despite my best efforts. My relationship with Zuhra may also be a barrier. She has a sense of ownership of me, and the other women thus defer to her and stay respectfully at a distance. (Whenever someone else makes me tea or helps me with something, Zuhra asks why I didn’t let her do it. “It’s just, I think of you as mine,” she tells me. “You’re my Jennifer.”)
By mid-January, I still haven’t seen Najma’s or Noor’s face, although Radia, Zuhra, and Enass all flip their veils back the second they cross my threshold. It takes another medical emergency for things to change.
It happens like this. One night we close the paper early. Manel and I are so pleased with ourselves that we head to his home in Hadda for a celebratory drink. Alex, Manel’s roommate, has just returned from England with a bottle of duty-free green-apple vodka. It is sweet and synthetic and awful. But this is Yemen, and you drink what is available.
I hadn’t thought I had had that much to drink, but I wake close to dawn feeling intensely nauseated. Thinking perhaps it hadn’t been a good idea to skip dinner, I go downstairs and eat a yogurt. Then I remember that I have little green pills from an earlier Yemeni illness. They had worked wonders on nausea! I rummage through my drawers, find the green pills, and take two.
Half an hour later I wake again feeling worse. I take two more pills and crawl downstairs to make coffee. But I am too sick to drink it. When Aisha arrives to clean my house, she finds me sitting at my kitchen table, staring mournfully at my full cup. “Hospital?” she says, looking concerned. I shake my head. I’m just hungover, I think. I will get better. Going to the pool will probably help. I take two Advil and two more green pills and go for a swim.
My first flip-turn nearly makes me vomit, and I wonder if I will have to get out. But lap by lap I begin to feel better. After forty-five minutes, I climb out, shivering, and head to the sauna to warm up. But I can’t seem to sweat; I just dry out and my fingers, oddly, stay cold.
The nausea worsens. I take two more green pills. After all, if I remember correctly, they can be taken every hour. I manage to keep from vomiting in the taxi and go home to collapse on my bed. I can’t eat. I can’t even get down water. I am exhausted but too ill to sleep. Zuhra calls me to find out why I’m not at work. She is worried.
“You should not be alone,” she says. “You need a hospital.”
“I’ll be okay. I just need to rest.”
I am still trying to sleep a half hour later when Noor rings me. “We are at your door,” she says. “We have come to take you to the hospital.”
Given my experiences with Yemeni hospitals, I’m not sure I want to go. But perhaps the doctors could give me some antinausea drugs, which might allow me to finally sleep.
I find Noor and Najma waiting at the bottom of my stairs. After removing their shoes, they stand to pull back their veils.
“This is the first time you have seen our faces,” says Noor.
“Yes!” I stare from one to the other. Noor is much as I imagined