A MONTH LATER, BACK home to pack up the house for the young family who were renting it, I needed to renew some prescriptions, and visited Gillian, my Scottish doctor. I hesitated before mentioning blood on my pillow that morning in Amman, as I’d heard she was having her own bad time. Gillian reacted immediately.
X-rays and mammograms, and I was rushed into surgery with all the urgency of private medicine. This would be another episode in a year of facing the music. Friends visited with jokes and tales of survival rates. At night, opiates kicking in, I was mesmerised by European soccer matches and an interview with Swiss football administrator Sepp Blatter. Blatter declared his ambition to arrange an international match for the Palestinian territories. The best players are in Gaza, he said, where they must traverse a no man’s land via an illegal tunnel into Egypt in order to train. Sometimes they don’t make it.
Then, late one afternoon, I was underground in the basement of the Mercy Hospital, in the nuclear medicine department, lined up with others against the wall in the passage. Human beings, but only just, in our gaping white gowns, our bare legs. No one spoke and the staff passed by in their protective clothes. It was very cold.
I was there for a lymphoscintigraphy, which I was told would allow the visualisation of the exact location of the sentinel node in my right armpit—or I think that was it. My notes and memories are blurred with terror and humiliation. But I know there was a radiologist called Joy, and an injecting doctor called Jeff. Joy showed me the machine, a long cream tunnel with a high table, a flat pillow and steps up to it. She explained the need for absolute stillness, but agreed that I could listen to music through headphones, and then told me that there would be a bit of a wait out in the passage until the injecting doctor arrived.
I was without my medical history. A kind volunteer had rushed me, in a wheelchair draped in a cotton blanket, down from the ward when the call came that they had a spot for me—my file left on the bed.
So, the injector, Dr Jeff, got off to a bad start by asking me what I’d had done. I had to tell him myself or I couldn’t be fitted in that day. I heard a harsh voice, mine, say, I’ve had a nipple off and two carcinomas out of my milk duct and a virulent small cancer removed from the breast tissue at the same time. Five days ago. Next thing—I am to have lymph node surgery. That is why I am here.
There was an appalled silence, or so I imagined. Joy was brisk. Jeff, I didn’t look at. This was the first time since my vigilant GP fast-tracked me into hospital that I had spoken to a medical man, or to any kind of man who wasn’t on the phone; or had bared my scar. My surgeon was a clever young Englishwoman, whose parade of glorious suits and shoes amazed my friends. She and the nurses had praised her work as beautiful. But it was not. My breast was mutilated, hideous, covered in bruises and stitches.
Miss B, the surgeon, had seen me daily since the first operation, and drawn me little pictures with black dots and arrows on them that I pretended to understand. She was diligent. She wanted me to know. When she told me more surgery was needed, but that first would come a long stint in the nuclear medicine department in the basement, she patted my shoulder, and suggested I take a music player and earplugs. I wouldn’t be able to move for the ninety minutes or more the procedure would take.
A child’s mobile dangled over the nuclear medicine machine, and there was a window out to the courtyard of the old hospital, where I could see new birch trees, and the shapes of other people staring out of other windows. Now it was Joy who patted my shaking arm and offered me a second blanket. I couldn’t stop shivering.
I conjured up my mother’s face for comfort and started making connections I hadn’t consciously made before. This was the hospital where I was born during World War II. I could see my mother lying flat and heavily anaesthetised, and me, red and wrinkled, being held aloft then handed to the sister in charge. I would be washed, and whisked off to a nursery behind glass. My mother would wake twenty-four hours later, to be told she had a healthy baby girl.
Now it was I who had to climb up, and lie flat and still, and hold my right arm rigid in positions that would be adjusted every fifteen minutes.
I gripped the iPod as the dark, rich voice of Maria Callas poured into my head, and my ears were full of tears I couldn’t reach. Then the Melos started playing Schubert’s last string quartets. Then Renata Tebaldi and Callas again. My iPod was a mishmash of music downloaded for travelling six months before, and I feared Billie Holiday would be next and unhinge me.
The next day, friends who had experienced similar horrors, including radiotherapy, rang with advice and good cheer. Still here after ten, five, three years. I want thirty. I want to see what happens next. There are books being written I want to read. Composers composing I want to hear. Children not yet born to my youngest son or to my stepdaughter. There’s a granddaughter I want to see grow up. There’s a husband who is now emptying out our old house by the sea, so he can rent it and head for the bush to write about his American journeys.
He called in at the hospital late that first night, with cheese and wine and not a lot to say, grimly going through the motions. It was hard for him. This must have felt like the final straw.
Already, the PA has advised me not to return to my exotic-sounding new job in Jordan until I am strong—and to be sure not to mention cancer. There is a lot of cancer in a country next to a war zone, and a great deal of untreated breast cancer in the old Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. The poor use Panadol when they can get it. The rich get their cancers dealt with in London, or in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The word cancer is tabu and carries much shame. I understood. I too was ashamed. I had somehow brought all this upon myself in the middle of the night.
After that was another round of emails to and from the PA, who told me firmly The Book could easily wait a few more months while I had the radiotherapy sessions. And also that Their Royal Highnesses would be in London and travelling for some of the summer—so it seemed that my timing was most fortunate. And better still, if I were to come back in September, it would be Ramadan, when there would be more time for interviews with Sidi Hassan.
Like a revelation, it occurred to me in the middle of the night in hospital that I didn’t have to return to Australia until the project in Jordan was finished. The deal included being flown back to where I came from. Which need not be Australia. It could be Italy, where I’d been before. My friend Carmen Callil rang from London, and offered to put the word out to friends who might have places in Italy to rent long term, outside the tourist season. This was where I thought I wanted to learn to live alone, with a spare room so friends could visit me; a place to which I could sometimes bring family over to stay. I had never in my life really lived alone, with no partner or husband or child to consider—a thought that shocks me.
During this time of waiting, radiotherapy and unreality, I sometimes had friends to dinner. I drank a good deal of wine but drunkenness eluded me. I watched many films late at night, and messaged back and forth with Carmen, whose North Kensington attic I’d soon be in again. Alone, I’d set the table and make an omelette, and find myself standing at the stove, eating a few mouthfuls from the pan. It was as if I did not know how to function, how to swallow, once a shared domestic life was no longer required. The cycle of preparing food and eating it was still coupled to a beloved husband, and to sociability, and to our children: my three, his one. His life was no longer coupled to me. This simple fact reduced me to ashes; my bones began to show.
When we were first lovers, I once visited unannounced and found him, an excellent cook, eating an osso bucco he had made for himself—a dish that takes careful preparation and long, slow cooking—with a gremolata of lemon zest, parsley and garlic. Something I would make only if it were to be shared. At the time, we joked about the ruthless single-mindedness of writers. He was working on his book about the massacres of the Kurnai people having been concealed and denied by Scots pastoralists and dairy farmers down through the generations. Together, we visited cemeteries throughout Gippsland and stayed in ugly motels, and his research became part of me.
Portents from more than twenty-four years rained down on me. But that is surely the nature of them—to be happening on the edge of happiness. There were also warnings from friends and family. Had I heeded them, I would have missed a good deal.
The night before I flew out of Melbourne to London, taxi booked for a dawn start, bags and laptop piled by the front door, I was taken out to a crowded local bar by a few friends who’d been keeping an eye on me. We sat at the back on stools and milk crates and ordered martinis, and I was quizzed about what I might be heading back into. I didn’t know myself, apart from a month in London in Carmen’s attic; then to Amman, to rework my draft chapters for the family’s approval; then to Italy, with Helen Wire, to check out houses and apartments to rent.
Communication with Jordan since I’d returned home had been patchy. I had undertaken to sound out publishers and agents I knew in London, to seek advice from them about possible publishers in Beirut, the centre of Arabic publishing. This would mean, of course, much talking about the project as it unfolded and, when the manuscript was almost completed, sending samples and outlines.
Someone in the little Fitzroy bar made a bad joke about exchanging war zones—but that wasn’t what I was doing. I had done what I was good at: had an idea in the middle of the night, swerved sidewards, distracted by a new plan; exhilarated, even. I was yet to find a way to think clearly about the failure of my marriage. Reassurances had been exchanged about salvaging something fine from the wreckage. The distance would surely help. A modest place to write in Italy would also. And a different life would be waiting for me at the end of the project, when I planned to return.
That I should live in the Northern Hemisphere for a few years suited Carmen very well, she said. I could stay in her pretty attic in London, as an occasional lodger, setting up a desk, checking out publishers and getting to the British Library without changing tubes, and forward her mail and water her garden when she was in France for the summer.
I needed somewhere for family and friends to visit in the Australian school holidays, somewhere with easy access to airports, where I could write without interruption, and where I could leave heavy coats and boots. The remainder of the year I would be in Amman, interviewing, researching and redrafting. Amman to Arezzo, a region I was familiar with, was a mere twelve hours door to door; Amman to Melbourne, a gruelling thirty-eight, if the connections worked.
Carmen was not a fan of Islam or of the Hashemites. Born and educated in Australia by nuns, she had left when she was in her early twenties. She returned often, following our politics and test cricket with a passion. A fierce republican and libertarian, she loathed the English class system, preferred France, and hated the hijab—fully approving the recent French burka ban, which we argued furiously about.
Carmen had changed the face of British publishing, with the Virago list and then heading Chatto, and was now writing her own books. She made it clear she thought I should be doing the same. When Carmen discovered that her friend Dame Helena Kennedy thought highly of Prince Hassan, she modified her criticism somewhat, and Kennedy’s brilliant book, Just Law: The Changing Face of Justice—and Why It Matters to Us All appeared in the pile by my bed one day. Kennedy’s analysis of how the boundaries between the state and the individual had eroded civil liberties was often quoted by Prince Hassan. Unsurprising now, but rather unexpected then, how the two worlds kept overlapping.
The evening I arrived from Melbourne to take up residence in Carmen’s attic, its walls lined with green-covered Virago paperbacks, I was given written instructions on how to work the house. She would be in France for a month. I would be alone, recuperating, although her gardener, another Hilary, would come occasionally, as would her ‘help’.
Delfina was definitely not a servant; nor her Cleaner, as we would say at home, giving it a capital letter, and sometimes adding a flattering adjective, splendid, hard-working, kind. Delfina went to Carmen’s often and had done so for years, with a handy husband who would climb ladders and check the spouting. Delfina loved Carmen and Carmen’s border terriers; and Carmen, I felt sure, loved Delfina, who was to keep coming during my month there if I needed her.
Carmen’s list had details about the heating, the windows, the wi-fi, the supplies of green food bags with their airtight seals, and of wine and the pasta, and the television on which I would be watching the selection of films and documentaries she had recorded for me. The next day, I was given directions to two classes of drycleaner, to a posh delicatessen and a Moroccan general store, a good bookshop and a chemist, as well as a London A–Z, and separate instructions for the washing machine and dryer. Everything was geared to minimising interruptions while my friend checked her footnotes in the original French for her forthcoming book, Bad Faith, and to ensuring I could look after the house, her car and myself when she left.
Unlike me, Carmen has lived alone for much of her adult life. Lovers have come and gone, or she has. She works to great effect all day in a house she has shaped to suit her life. Her study has the best equipment; not, like mine, the oldest. Her sheets are of fine linen from French markets. Her cups and plates are from journeys with friends in Brazil or from a beloved village in France. Her cupboards are stocked for the next few months. She shows me a spreadsheet she uses to keep track of her expenses. She has post office scales and a supply of stamps so she can sell books she doesn’t want. Her dogs love her and so do her friends. She knows how to live with herself. I did not know how to live with me.
I woke, fragile and horrified, after a dream of our dog being slaughtered in a great white butchery. I wept under the shower where I couldn’t be heard; and panicked in Sainsbury’s, confronted by rows of French wine labels without a man to select the reds for an ‘us’ that no longer existed. Carmen, who had driven me to the shopping centre so I’d know how to get there in her car by myself next time, didn’t notice. And I’d failed to tell her how I detest large shopping centres.
The next afternoon, having made my way to Oxford Street, I stood paralysed in a shop that sold warm clothes in rich autumn colours, unable to see myself in anything, needing nothing. I no longer knew what I looked like. My colour sense had deserted me.
The next time I entered Jordan from London without a visa, I was collected at Queen Alia airport by the PA. She exchanged greetings with the luggage handlers, and briskly arranged for my bags to be identified and fast-tracked unopened through customs.
This was a great relief, as one of them contained a brand-new ukulele in its baby-shaped case, which a friend had given me to cheer myself up with at nights. I’d been grateful but unconvinced—especially when she opened the case with a flourish, to reveal a glittering ukulele with mother-of-pearl inlay, and picks, spare strings, song books, and You Can Teach Yourself Uke by William May. She then sat cross-legged on my bed, to show me some of her cool strumming secrets. She sang some bars of ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, or maybe it was ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’? All I remember is that we were shrieking with laughter.
I had learned piano and recorder as a schoolgirl; my first husband had taught me to play a few pieces on his classical guitar when we lived in Greece; I’d gone along to mandolin classes with my youngest son, until he threw it in. I could read music but, in my fragile state, the chords and pick for the ukulele looked utterly daunting. And the thought of turning up for my fancy job at the Palace with a ukulele I couldn’t play filled me with dread. I could hear the beautiful sound of azans calling people to prayer five times a day from the minarets of the Al-Husseini mosque in Downtown. Was it even permitted to play ukuleles during Ramadan?
I’d considered leaving it behind under the bed; then, since I was heading into winter, left out some sandals and summer clothes, and squeezed the uke in its case into my over-stuffed suitcase. It was now being wheeled on a trolley by one of the PA’s baggage-handling mates, waved through customs and loaded unopened into her illegally parked old car. Salaam alaikum, Al-hummdulillah.
The PA then drove me to a small hotel overlooking a supermarket and a building site. The city of Amman that had been shown to me six months before was near the old quarter, Downtown, with its steep steps climbing up above the suq, between narrow roads and ancient terraces. Further on beyond the first, second and third circles, I’d been shown scenes of demolition and reconstruction, superhighways and overpasses—but I recognised nothing this time.
The hotel I was staying in was modest. The windows were dusty, the noise of jackhammers was constant, but I was here to work and it was enough for me that ‘Welcome’ was on everyone’s lips. A kind someone had filled my little sitting room with flowers and fruit, and put local yoghurt and Swiss muesli in the fridge. There was a reading light, and a neatly folded prayer rug, which I considered laying out for some yoga stretches—then squashed the thought as irreverent. Muslim prayer mats and yoga didn’t go together in my scheme of things. My arm was still tender and my next check-up, in Florence, was months off.
The PA had bought me a phone card and a computer plug, and conveyed to reception that a driver would collect me in the morning. I was shown a couple of public phones and a meals room off the foyer. There was a lot of laughter and greetings exchanged between her and the men at reception, who seemed to know that she worked at one of the Royal Palaces. But whether she indicated that I, too, would be working there, I couldn’t tell. My friend’s Arabic was animated and gestural, limited to salutations and cordial questions about families and health. We were clearly objects of great curiosity—men gathered around, listening to the only obvious foreigners and the only unaccompanied women.
My luggage was delivered to my 5th-floor room, an iron was arranged for me, and someone at reception wrote down an address in Arabic that I could show the driver the next morning. My friend assured me an itinerary would be waiting for me.
I had no idea where I was. The maps in the hotel foyer were from the tourist bureau, and didn’t name local streets or have directions in English. Certainly, the several Royal Palaces of Amman were marked nowhere that I could see.
Late on that first day, after trying to sleep, I looked up my Arabic phrase book, printed in Egypt, and practised saying kweis yom, mahaba and salaam alaikum, alaikum ma’salaama. Then I went across the road in search of whisky, having been uncertain what I could bring in during Ramadan. Except for a few bottles that were under lock and key, the supermarket seemed only to sell fruit and vegetables, meat and rows of cleaning products. But the word whisky worked. I was taken outside and shown a footpath through the rubble around one side of the building and up a steep slope to another small shopping strip, where an unpromising-looking liquor store stood on its own in a vacant lot.
I slid the front door open to a cavernous interior with shelves of Indian and German beers, European and Lebanese wines and champagnes, American ryes, and single malts from the Scottish Highlands, with prices quoted in US dollars and in dinars. There were no other customers. I procrastinated, or rather panicked, going up and down the aisles until I spotted a bottle of Talisker from the Isle of Skye—my ancestral home, a comforting thought. I emerged into the chilly early evening sunshine elated, feeling like a drunkard, with what I hoped was mild Drum, cigarette papers, and a large bottle of Scotch wrapped in newspaper, in exchange for so many dinars that I hadn’t the courage to convert them.
I checked emails in the computer booth downstairs; sent short messages home to family and friends, saying I’d arrived; then ordered a pizza in the restaurant, where a group of businessmen in dark suits and red and white kaffiyas were smoking and talking on their phones. I retreated to my room with Hazel Rowley’s Tête à Tête, poured a large whisky, and rolled a skinny cigarette, telling myself that I only smoked under extreme duress, and that this first evening surely qualified.
I slept badly and, at sunrise, went for a walk. It was early October, the morning very cold, my jacket inadequate, and the pavement cracked and uneven. Only stray cats were about, dozens of them raiding rubbish bins. A couple of taxis cruised slowly beside me, flashing their lights, hoping sense would prevail and I’d flag them. Instead, I tried walking briskly, determinedly noticing landmarks, waiting politely at streetlights for the occasional workman balancing tools and planks on bicycles, trying to memorise the way back to the hotel. There were three hours before I had to present myself at the office Majlis, to discuss the scope of the project, and get some idea of the Prince’s reaction to the five draft chapters I’d left behind in May.
As I was finishing a strong, sweet Turkish coffee, a car with a uniformed driver called for me at reception. He drove me fast through several huge roundabouts, and into the royal compound, where, at a couple of checkpoints, the car boot and its underbody were inspected, and my name read out from a list before we were waved through. I was deposited in the car park under the trees, clutching a handbag and with a computer bag over my shoulder, the gravel again crunching under my shoes, hoping to see a familiar face among the several people from the office who came out to greet me. Welcome, they said, explaining that my friend would be there soon to take me to where we would again be working. As a PA, she lived somewhere inside the compound, as did the English housekeeper and the head gardener, who was a New Zealander. Apart from the gardener, they all had been part of this royal household for many years.
That morning, sitting, with my bags, on the low wall in the autumn sunshine, I felt fortunate, yes—exhilarated, certainly—to have been invited back into the heart of a small country caught up in the war-mongering of the past three dreadful years. I’d been following the war as best I could from grabs on the nightly news, and from the BBC and CNN world service broadcasts some nights when I couldn’t sleep. The faint optimism of the initial few months of 2006, following the first elections in Iraq, had faded, the country descending into the chaos of civil war. When the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, Shia Islam’s holiest site, about 100 kilometres north of Baghdad, was destroyed, the reprisals were horrific. More than one thousand Sunni Iraqis were killed; then, in March, forty more bodies were found in Baghdad—Sunnis murdered by the Iraqi military.
Jordan was trapped by American foreign policy, as was Australia. It was now even more dependent on the US for security and subsidy, and on the UN and aid agencies for support for the Iraqi refugees, who every day were streaming over the western border crossing at Karameh, north of Amman, or heading first into Syria.
As I sat outside the Majlis in the compound, I knew I would have been thoroughly checked out again, vetted and scrutinised by the Jordanian embassy in Canberra. They might even now know I’d had cancer. They’d had me somewhere in their sights for almost two years, after all. But I knew that I could do what was required, make a book by interviewing and researching, observing and asking questions to flesh out the little I’d seen so far. The draft chapters I’d left behind read reasonably well but would need much more input from HRH so we could proceed to the rest of the story. I had commissioned and shaped many publications on the strength of small samples of tantalising content and the author’s determination to make a book. This was something I knew I could make happen. I felt not exactly anonymous, but surprisingly strong and invisible under a foreign sky.
Eventually the PA arrived, running from the office car park under the trees, clutching a pile of folders, full of apologies and breathless descriptions of how insanely busy she’d been the past few weeks, plus the information that the Boss, Sidi Hassan, was out of the country but should be back later that day or maybe the next. She loved this job, she loved her boss, she knew he couldn’t do his international and local work without her, and she was probably right, I was starting to think.
By now I knew that Sidi meant Sir all over the Middle East and everyone used it. Sitti meant princess or sometimes grandmother. I now knew quite a few Jordanian protocols; I needn’t cover my hair except in a conservative village, and only needed to wear full cover if my hosts, wherever I was, requested it. In the compound, in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses, as the PA always called them when speaking formally, and Sidi and Sitti the rest of the time, I should stand until I was invited to sit, and not cross my legs or show too much of them, or worse, the soles of my shoes. Her Royal Highness, Sitti Sarvath, liked the women in the office to wear high heels and jackets, the PA said. But that didn’t, of course, include ‘us’, as we worked together in the prefab under the trees in the garden, well away from the office. Smart casual, the PA said—jeans and Nikes only at weekends, and have something dressy always on hand in case you were asked to lunch.
That day, I changed hotels again for the next few weeks of Ramadan, before being invited to live, with other foreign nationals, in a spacious, airy Corbusier-like apartment in its own compound. Life in Jordan during Ramadan wasn’t a matter of slipping into a jacket and heels and being asked to lunch. It was more about sorting our own food and not eating in front of people who were eschewing worldly things and reflecting on their relationship with Allah. The PA seemed to know who prayed and who didn’t, who was suffering from lack of water and who was having severe nicotine withdrawals. If anything, her role became even more of a bridge between the house and the office.
In Ramadan, most people had a small meal before dawn, then fasted until dusk, when they ate a date, then drank water. About 7 p.m. there was an iftar, a large meal usually eaten at home, but sometimes in restaurants or in hotel dining rooms. The devout gave up water, cigarettes, alcohol and any form of food and drink between dawn and dusk, working slightly shorter hours, with, I was told, drastically diminished concentration as the day wore on.
There was an espresso machine in the prefab kitchen, and a refrigerator for the supplies and bottled water that those of us who worked there bought for lunch and for the evenings when we’d work late. Pitta bread, tahini, couscous salads and imported cheeses, from supermarkets in one of the many new shopping centres on the circles outside the compound, became our staples.
One Saturday in Ramadan when I was still staying in a hotel apartment, I needed cinnamon for my yoghurt and stewed apples, and managed to flag down a driver to take me to the suq in Downtown. I assured him I would make my own way back now I knew the address.
I joined the women and children taking their time to sniff and choose vegetables and fruit grown in the lush Jordan Valley. I bought a twist of cinnamon, another of cloves, some pale golden dates in a brown paper bag from stalls lining the square, and some tomatoes and a cucumber from the dozens of fragrant baskets lined up under cover.
On the floor above the market were the stores selling sports clothes, and highly coloured erotic underwear decorated with swansdown and sequins. Alongside them were perfume shops, where scent sellers offered to identify the fragrance perfect for Sitti, which would then be kept in a small glass phial with a gold stopper labelled just for Ilaria which I had to agree looked good in Arabic script. Would I prefer a copy of a famous brand name perfume made in Paris? None leaped to mind and my sense of what would smell good on my skin still seemed to have deserted me—but I promised to return soon.
Instead, from the racks downstairs of pirated films and DVDs, I bought a Palestinian documentary from 2002, Jenin, Jenin, and a CD of Umm Kulthum, Egypt’s most famous and beloved singer, who died in 1975. Later, I added her hours-long pulsating lamentations, with her troupe of cellists, ouds and percussions, to my iPod. Prince Hassan told me how Umm Kulthum’s voice on local radio inspired the troops during the Iran–Iraq war.
Most of my shopping was done with the PA, who drove us in her car; and when, during the last weeks of Ramadan, I was given an apartment in the compound, directly above hers, Jordanian supermarkets became a way of life. Cosmo was then the newest and flashest of the shopping complexes. It was next to the Porsche dealer, and flaunted an outdoor café, with umbrellas and cappuccinos and racks of glossy magazines. Inside the complex, I would immediately get lost, the logic impenetrable. No matter how often I went there, I couldn’t find the coffee seller, with his sacks of beans, near the spice store. Or the pharmacy counter, or the cavernous delicatessen that sold cheeses from France and Belgium, and many varieties of salty haloumi, pickled eggplant and local olives. The young men behind the counter, in white uniforms with smart caps, avoided my eye, preferring to serve the men who tasted and discussed the food knowledgeably. I eavesdropped as best I could. I recognised much of the food from having seen it in shops in Sydney Road in inner Melbourne but my Jordanian Arabic was gruesome. All I could do was point and smile and say ‘Is okay?’ or, overly grateful to have been given a taste or served at all, shukran jazeelan (thank you very much).
Everything I bought was then arranged on small plastic trays, wrapped tightly in plastic film, weighed, and put in a plastic bag, which was sealed with a price tag. A few weeks of doing my own cooking and already the cupboard under the sink was full of grey plastic bags. At the end of my time there, it would be a roomful. The greengrocery section had some pre-weighed stuff, but it was not as fresh as the mounds of zucchini, baby carrots, eggplant, fresh coriander, mint, dill, parsley, beans and peas from the Jordan Valley. The enormous juicy oranges and lemons seemed always to be in season, and were perfection.
The news from Iraq was worsening every day; skewed, no doubt, by CNN and BBC World News, which I was forced to depend on. The Diwan took a number of American and British journals and magazines, some of which were passed on to me, but mainly we relied on online news services, and Al Jazeera, in Doha, which started broadcasting in English at the end of 2006. The Jordan Radio and Television Corporation, or JRTV, was showing West Bank olive groves being bulldozed for more settlements, their owners roughly handled, family picnics disrupted, women wailing, young boys shouting insults and throwing stones.
The borders into Jordan were now closed to all except the very rich with suitcases of US dollars, so the stories went. Others who could make it across no man’s land paid 150,000 dinar (about 300,000 Australian dollars). More than 750,000 Iraqis had entered Jordan, adding 250,000 cars to the roads. The massive contracts for reconstruction and redevelopment by Iraqis buying their way into Jordan with US dollars for kickbacks had, even in just the six months since I was last there, meant more construction sites at every turn in the road. Vast mansions with high walls and turrets, security gates and triple garages were being erected on land with views out over the fertile Jordan Valley; by rich Iraqis, I was told. Stories we’d been hearing in Australia of money laundering inside the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program, implicating the Australian Wheat Board and its dealings with the Alia trucking company, sounded increasingly likely. I asked around intending to write something for The Monthly but no one I met in Amman had heard of the scandal.
The traffic was awash with new Mercedes and BMWs, and affluent young hoons in the new suburbs drove fancy convertibles and some sort of imitation luxury tank. Egyptians and Bangladeshis were the cheap labour on building sites, and maids from the Philippines were the nannies and house cleaners. Many of their employers regarded them as prostitutes, so gave them a minimum of days off—so I was told by some of their bosses, women in smart jackets and good shoes.
The American presence was invisible but tangible. Their embassy compound, straddling several blocks on a hillside, was surrounded by tanks and bristling with satellite dishes. But there were no American voices heard on the streets, no Americans shopping in the malls or in the international hotels, unless they were journalists propping up the bar at the InterContinental. Even the journalists were more likely to be Canadians or Brits or Germans. The Americans lived in their mightily defended compound, complete with gyms and spas, and a range of fast-food nosheries, gaming rooms and apartments. The Australian embassy, to which I was sometimes invited to hear a lecture on an archaeological site at Pella, or to celebrate Anzac Day, and where ‘displaced persons’ queued from dawn hoping for visas, was just down the hill in the same street, under the wing of the US tanks and the satellite dishes that silently turned and turned.
The building I was invited to move into with the other foreign nationals was in a comfortable 3-storey block of apartments, a compound within a compound, where the housekeeper’s elderly dog could be accommodated and walked by one of the guards if she was away. Other foreign inmates befriended skinny cats. I had a large sitting room with a white marble floor, a dining table I could use as a desk, and three long blue velvet sofas arranged around a square coffee table, a huge television and bookshelves. I pinned several of my daughter’s lovely prints on the sitting-room walls and above my bed. Another, small, room opened onto a deck where my washing could be dried on racks.
Outside there were tall steel gates and bars on the windows, a garden with trees and climbing roses. It was a short drive to the Palace and the office, or a 5-minute walk if you learned which gates opened to the short cuts and stone stairways between the compound’s buildings, most of which I never saw inside. Some might have been bunk houses for gardeners and people working with the polo horses; some were probably stores for feed and equipment. As my sense of the history of the place deepened with the stories I was being told, I set out to explore the whole compound, walking in the late afternoons down long avenues of trees, and the paths around the hill where I could see across to the grand mosque.
One day I found the entrance to an outside path with a steep rampart-like slope down to the road. There was a shop way below the Royal Palaces, covered in Arabic Nestlé and Coke logos. I walked down to it one afternoon, when most of the drivers were resting. A well-armed guard kept an eye on me from the gate-house. The shop was chaotic. The fruit outside was dusty, and, inside, huge tubs of tahini sat beside washing-up brushes, and a freezer full of grey salted fish was piled high with paper towels, plastic buckets, and bottles of water in heavy sixpacks. I pointed at paper towels, filled the bag I’d brought with oranges and lemons, paid and fled, watched all the time from the gatehouse. I didn’t know whether I should wave in a friendly fashion and call shukran.
Every now and then, an email would arrive from the writer friend who’d given me the ukelele, needing reassurance about a book she was wrestling with about a dying friend. I loved her story’s brute force and the risks she was taking on the border of fiction. I’d report which chord I was learning on the uke, and which song I was practising. I did try to teach myself—strumming along in the night on the deck of my spacious apartment, hoping not to be overheard by the housekeeper or Palace guards. But I never progressed much beyond the first chords of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, which made me feel a bit maudlin; and, anyway, hillbilly music sounded a bit off in the warm dark Jordanian nights, with the war only a border away.
But I really gave up the day I slid open a cupboard in the pavilion where I was working and found a complete set of videos of The Sopranos. The whole six seasons. Eighty-six episodes. The video player in my sitting room worked like a dream. I was gone.
Then, while the PA was travelling with her boss, I was sent to a Dead Sea resort, a kind of reward, perhaps, for having a difficult time during Ramadan—or, more probably, so I could see for myself what Prince Hassan had been describing to me: the dreadful dying of the Dead Sea, the sinkholes opening up, the aquifers disappearing, the near total depletion of Lower Jordan River. Further north, Israeli agriculture was flourishing.
The hotel I stayed in was new and rather grand, with only a few young honeymooning couples and overweight tourists wallowing in the bright blue pool overhanging the beach. There were small stone passageways full of ferns that opened on to rooms with window seats and cushions, and there was always the sound of running water. I’d been re-reading Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy, with its vast span of family history and revolution teeming with life and politics, people facing up to their true natures; a web of death and despair over everything. I was now reading Sugar Street, the last volume. I read and slept fitfully, had a massage scented with musk and slept again.
Very early the next morning, I went down to the shore, holding the rope railing and squelching in bare feet through the black mud, joining those who were being anointed from large amphorae-like jars near the water. The trouble was, I didn’t know what to do. Should I hire a masseuse? Do I rub mud all over myself, like children are doing a few yards away? Does the mud have some magical healing property I should have found out about? Could it cauterise a wound? An image floated into my mind, of lying on the sand and hacking at my broken heart with a sharp knife, then slapping on black mud to stop the bleeding.
A smiling woman in a headscarf called me over and offered to rub mud into my back and shoulders. Afterwards, I floated in the Dead Sea, with my head pointing towards Jericho.
My husband rang me sometimes but had trouble being put through from the switchboard in the evenings. He said that made him miserable for the rest of the day. So we emailed instead, and I sent him exotic glimpses of farming in the Jordan Valley, of the diminishing waterways and birdlife.
Despondent yet again about the progress of the book, and needing to discuss which publishers I might approach, I rang Carmen, my sounding board and confidante about so much; parallel lives in different hemispheres. She was in London, and about to leave for four days in New York promoting her book, Bad Faith, which was recently published in the UK. By burrowing deep into the French and Australian archives, she had brought to light the story of Louis Darquier, Commissioner of Jewish Affairs during the Vichy regime, responsible for the confiscation of property from the Jews and their despatch to the death camps. Darquier had married a Myrtle Jones of Tasmania, and they produced a daughter, Anne, whose tragic story and suicide Carmen had happened upon many years before.
All I seemed to be managing to write, I told her enviously, were emails, aside from juggling scraps of—what I liked to imagine were—the inner musings of a Jordanian Prince taken from old transcripts, and interviews done a couple of times a week if I was lucky, and transcribed spasmodically by the PA in her spare time. In comparison with Carmen’s, my task seemed puny—though the complexities and logistics were immense. Prince Hassan’s family framed so much of the history and politics of the region that the West had mauled over and over again.
Carmen sent me a devastating quote from Winston Churchill, who had dismissed the Arabs, American Indians and Aboriginal Australians as nomadic peoples with little interest in agriculture, unlike the Jews who had ‘changed desolate places into smiling orchards, and initiated progress instead of stagnation’. Churchill went on: ‘If I were an Arab I should not like it, but it is for the good of the world that the place should be cultivated and it never will by the Arabs … I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia … by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in to take their place.’*
Now, with the Iraq War worsening, and Jordan needing to find ways to accommodate damaged and displaced people, as well as those able to buy a new way of life across the border, the best of Islam needed again to find the strength and resources to come to the fore.
Prince Hassan’s despondency deepened. He stopped the taping sessions altogether, went to his library for a stack of books and began reading to me—Amartya Sen, on social reform of public health and education; and, one afternoon, C.P. Cavafy’s poetry and The Trial of Socrates. ‘Not that I think I am Socrates,’ said this honorable man, who must have felt himself to be on trial.
* Sir Martin Gilbert, companion volume 5/3 to the Official Biography quoting Evidence to the Palestine Royal Commission under Lord Peel on 12 March 1937.