CHAPTER

7

HAFEZ SAT IN THE BACKSEAT, hunched against the window. They drove along the open vistas leading toward the private college: the land stretched wide into striated bands of sage and bone. He was brooding about the knife, again, his thoughts soft and unguarded. He needed to be more careful. Besides Carole—perhaps more than Carole—Samir was the one Hafez confided in, revealing how he suffered and waited. Probably he said too much. Sometimes he forgot what he was talking about and where they were going. Sometimes he wanted to tell Samir, Keep going, boy. Don’t turn back. If they kept driving, perhaps he would become the sort of person who could leave things behind, let the house fall down, let the phone ring. He was not the right sort of person, he knew that. Why did he think he could help broker a peace treaty? What hubris. Who was he? These days, hesitations and remembrances seemed to pop up in his brain like tiny traps; for example, now: the way the Dead Sea Highway opened into golden bends, making him think of the long, stony path he, his brother, and his father had once taken. But why was he thinking of that? Ever since Gabe and Amani had arrived, he kept feeling an unexpected prickle, something like remorse. He had always prided himself on never feeling remorse, which was a destructive force, which only held one back.

Still, thinking of Amani lifted him—the idea of a legacy—continuation of the narrative. He thought of the Hamdan name written in cursive across the cover of her book. She was his true intellectual heir.

BEFORE HAFEZ had left the house that morning, Carole told him that his niece had dropped by.

“Very good.” Hafez watched himself knot his tie in the mirrored armoire. “She could stand some guidance. I get the feeling that our Amani is a bit adrift right now. Look what happened with her and that young fellow she married. Didn’t I tell you that wouldn’t work?”

“She hadn’t come to see me.” Carole sat on the bedside.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.” Carole pulled her cardigan a little closer. She was always chilled these days, Hafez noticed, as if her body had dried down onto its bones. And there was a vagueness to her character, an irritable detachment that he believed to be the result of unemployment. After a stint teaching nursery school, she hadn’t worked at all, not for forty-plus years. No job. And no babies—which he wondered if Carole had deliberately arranged. She’d said on several occasions she didn’t see herself as a mother. She wouldn’t go to a regular tabeeb, but was always taking various medicaments and decoctions, consulting with the old witch selling teas and herbs on the corner.

“She was already here when I got home. I’d been out shopping. She said she’d come to return my dresses, but she was sitting in the dining room with Mrs. Ward. She practically ran out the door when she saw me come in.”

Hafez touched the knot of his tie, adjusted it carefully with one hand. “She was sitting with Mrs. Ward? What on earth were they talking about?”

“I have no idea.”

He lowered his hand and frowned at his face. “Are you sure they were actually talking?”

“Well. No. But it was just the two of them there.”

“Probably she was waiting for you.” Hafez finally turned toward her. “How long had she been there?”

“Sadia said it was maybe a few minutes, but she has no concept of time, believe me.”

Hafez didn’t say anything. Unsettled, he pulled on his suit jacket and touched the top of his hair, smoothing it back. He checked himself in the mirror one more time. “Let’s have them over here soon.”

STEERING, Samir offered a cigarette over his shoulder, which Hafez accepted gratefully. Strictly forbidden by his doctor. But neither his tabeeb nor Carole nor Mrs. Bosa were there to give them the evil eye. He cracked the window and exhaled directly into the fresh air.

Tonight’s talk was for the Soroptimist Club at Al Zaytoonah College. Their charter, apparently, was to improve women’s lives through education: the Soroptimist name, it was explained, meant the best for women. “We hoped you might say something about sustainability issues and water—like the environmental impact of the valley settlements on the Yarmouk and Jordan Rivers,” the chapter director, Um-Leila, had said. “Our members are very much interested in the implications the peace treaty may have for local ecosystems.”

Call it what they liked, his talk was always sixty minutes of the State of Jordan Entering the New Millennium. He would mention tonight’s event to Amani—he could offer to make introductions and sponsor her membership in the club. He’d started to think it might be better if she stayed on in Amman a bit longer. There was so much opportunity for her here.

Hafez understood the female persuasion. Several of his fellow cabinet ministers wouldn’t even deign to speak to the women’s groups. Frustrated housewives, the finance minister, Tolal Morami, said. Let them take up a hobby. Frustrated perhaps, but Hafez saw the chip, chip, chip they made in things. After he’d returned to Jordan with his several degrees and new wife, he was delighted to encounter a new generation of Arab feminists. They might cover their heads, but they were also outspoken and educated and active. Two of the women in this group were doctors. There was a judge. An architect. A city planner. One had written a bill to outlaw the plastic grocery bags clogging the sides of the road, blowing like tumbleweeds over Mount Nebo and down into the Jordan valley.

At the university, Hafez lifted the women’s hands on his curved knuckles, planted a kiss on each. The Soroptimists filed in, greeting one another, pencil skirts and red lips. A voice filled with silver lights said, “Oh, Hafez, it’s you.” Mrs. Waleeda, with her devastating smile-that-was-not-a-smile, stood there, sizing him up, one hand on her hip. “You’re the special speaker tonight.”

He obtained her hand and had barely bent over before she took it away. “I hope you’ll say something about the water-conservation initiative,” she said.

“I didn’t know you were one of the optimistic sorority.”

She sniffed lightly and turned toward the windows. “I’m not.” They were in a seminar room near the cafeteria, where student workers ferried in trays of hot coffees and tea.

“Aha—you sought me out? Came here special?” He recalled the night, a few months earlier, when he and Mrs. Waleeda had sneaked away from the nonsmokers (his wife, for example, and Mr. Waleeda, for example) outside the Intiman Royal Centre for the Arts, and found themselves in such a private, moonlit corner of an open field, they couldn’t resist putting down their glasses of Lebanese red and sneaking a few kisses. Oh, her tongue between his lips! Heaven. “Where did you learn to kiss like that, madame?” he’d asked.

“From my husband,” she’d said, amused, and flicked her fingers through his hair. And, like that, intermission was over, and he sat, dazzled and elsewhere, through the second half of Coriolanus.

They hadn’t talked since then. Stolen kisses were horrendously dangerous; The Jordan Times had a regular report on that week’s honor killings and whose brother or son had executed his female family member over a rumor and then been released from prison in a matter of days. Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code: He who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives with another in an adulterous situation, and kills, wounds, or injures one or both of them, is exempt from penalty. As a child, Hafez had once seen some neighbors celebrating over the body of a young girl. She had just been strangled in front of their house by her brother for looking “suggestively” at another man. The mother had stood over the body and ululated, voice pealing, lifting her palms, extolling her son for restoring the family’s compromised honor. And within this, Hafez heard the woman’s disguised, piercing grief. The girl’s veil had fallen aside and she lay still and open-eyed, hair spread in a glossy fan on the ground. Watching from the side of the road, Hafez felt his heart lurch in involuntary appreciation of her beauty.

And now here was Mrs. Waleeda again, looking at him with her laughing, ravishing face. He bent toward her tenderly and murmured, “I’ve thought about you.”

“And I think of you, dear Hafez. Just the other day, in fact.” She smirked. “I see you’ve filed a petition. With the church.”

Hafez tipped his head, his smile faintly guilty. Mrs. Waleeda was assistant to the archbishop: she was lovely by any measure, but certain connections now enhanced her beauty. “How is His Holiness?” he asked.

“His Holiness sends his love.”

“He does? To me?”

She lifted her chin. “His Holiness always sends his love.”

Father Jacob was the head of the Christian Orthodox Church in Jordan, a small and disproportionately powerful minority. They ran their own schools, had their own monuments, celebrations, and system of justice—one of the few in Jordan that could stand up to Shariah law—or tribal justice. “Funny, I was just wondering—” Hafez hesitated.

“Your petition? There’s about a hundred in line ahead of you.”

He sucked the insides of his cheeks then blew out.

Of the three brothers, Hafez was the sole churchgoer: Farouq never attended mass and Gabe had converted to Islam—another of his youngest brother’s whims. Irritating at the time, with its shades of family rejection, now this conversion seemed fortuitous to Hafez. He and Carole donated to the Church and had hosted fundraising events: His Holiness was frequently an honored guest at their home. Hafez had even nudged aside Mrs. Ward and cooked for him with his own hands—Father Jacob’s favorite: wild bitter greens and wild mushrooms with a hint of salty broth. Nothing more. Not a speck of bread or meat. Luckily, Hafez was a good cook: he sprinkled a smidgen of sugar over the greens and at dinner Jacob asked for seconds then finished the pot. Over the past year especially, Hafez and Carole had started attending services, cultivating their souls. Carole fidgeted and played with her gloves, but Hafez always closed his eyes: was he truly alone with his thoughts in there? God? Hello? If you’re really there, Father, he thought, and his chest rose and fell with fire, save us.

But now this creature was showing him the dimple in her right cheek and saying something about bumping him up in line. He caught her hand and kissed it. He continued to peek at her throughout his talk as he covered his talking points:

• Jordan, new nation/ancient past.

• Crossroads, blah, blah. Turkoman trade route. Blah, blah.

• Big city/small-town heart.

• Size doubled by Palestinian influx. Tripled now?

• Joke about Arafat and Saddam. Risky?

• The importance of strong mothers and wives.

The last bit was his add-on for the Soroptimists. He gave these talks in honor of that last remaining scrap of his soul that clung to his mother. To women. (He thought of his niece showing up like that to their house. How odd. Most likely she’d come looking for him. He would ask Mrs. Ward directly. He would ask and he would watch her eyes. What the mouth said didn’t matter as much as what the eyes said.)

He glanced at Mrs. Waleeda. She smiled.

After the talk, Hafez helped Mrs. Ali carry an unused slide projector back to her car before he ambled, hands in pockets, over to the maroon BMW still parked in the far corner of the lot, alone. Only nine o’clock and the college was closed up tight.

Mrs. Waleeda had pried off her high heels and placed them arch to arch on her passenger seat. She leaned against her car in a pair of shibshibs; her bare toes sweetly curved, nails painted red. The moon glimmered, a white goblet over her left shoulder. Off somewhere in the darkness came the bleating of a goat, a tinkling of bells, the murmur of their shepherd. Hafez was sixty-nine and three-quarters, filled with his powers. As she lifted her smile, he felt like a desert stallion. What did the Bedu call them? Drinkers of the wind. That was Hafez. He slipped his fingers into the dark dimensions of Mrs. Waleeda’s hair. He closed his eyes to kiss her.

She tented her fingers on his chest, gave the barest push.

“No?” he said piteously.

The shadow of her dimple appeared. There were just a few sodium lights around the lot, their amber glow dimmer than the stars. What did the old Bedu say? If the moon is with you, don’t worry about the stars. He thought she was smiling: he could still see the well of that dimple. A well to fall into. She traced the outline of his face with the tops of her index and middle fingers, gently, evaluatively. “Listen, Hafez—my brother, Hassan, he’s had some troubles with the Mukhabarat. He needs, desperately, a visa to the U.S.”

“I see,” Hafez murmured. The Mukhabarat were the meddlesome, not-so-secret-police. The word filtered through his emotional haze.

“Hassan Salhab,” Mrs. Waleeda said. “He wrote that column? What would happen if the King should die. About the order of succession.”

That guy. Hafez cleared his throat again. “That was short-sighted. Does he have any idea how many assassination attempts His Majesty has survived? Just mentioning the idea of his death . . . It’s provocative.” A journalist. He recalled Salhab’s sulking presence at the diwan, the close way he questioned participants in treaty discussions, twisting their words, accusing this one or that of being too Jordanian, or worse, Israel-friendly, saying that they had swept aside the Palestinians’ concerns in their eagerness for peace. Hafez still remembered Salhab’s op-ed: They have blinded themselves to the ongoing assault upon the rights and the lives of the Palestinians. How can there be peace without justice? How can we forgive and forget when the Occupation keeps Palestinians in an ongoing state of siege? How can there be security when they fear for their lives, and those of their children, on a daily basis?

Now a coolness flowed between himself and Mrs. Waleeda. He felt it in the fingers that she pressed against his chest. “A year now in prison. For the crime of suggesting the King might be mortal? And for pointing out that the people might actually be involved in the transition to a new regime. I thought ‘democracy’ was King H.’s favorite word.”

Hafez softened his voice. Dip your arrow in honey. “Your brother is a fine journalist. Very good. I’m certain he’ll be released soon.”

“Once he gets out, no one will hire him,” she said coldly. “He’ll be an outcast. If he gets out.”

“I have friends,” he murmured. “At the American embassy. And other helpful places. There are ways for him to begin again.”

“And I have access to the petitions on the archbishop’s desk.” The dimple was gone now, her face smooth as an almond. “His Holiness considers me a particular confidante—did you know? A word from me and—I do have some influence.” She lifted a delicate brow.

He closed his eyes. He could drink her essence from a bowl. He reached for her, but she slipped into the car. From the west, the athan crackled to life from a minaret. He watched the silhouette of her arm extend from the window as she drove away. Hafez retreated to his own BMW. Slumped in the backseat, he studied the lights glowing along the entrance to campus, the low phantom buildings, the scarcity of trees. The Turks had chopped them down to build their damned Hejazi railroad, for rail ties, bridges, and worker camps. The subsequent soil erosion destroyed habitat, emptying the land of bird life, leaving the Bedouin without twigs to cook on, a scar slicing from Damascus to al-Medina. Yet not far from that parking lot, about 1,378,000 dunams of brilliantly fertile land glimmered in the valley. Each dunam roughly equivalent to a quarter acre. These were the subject of his petition to the archbishop.

THE LAND HAD belonged to Amer Amer—a second cousin on their mother’s side, recently deceased. Amer had lived with, then outlived, his mother, in a small stone house, spending nothing, casually buying land in the Jordan valley. In ’48, Palestinians started flooding into Jordan and everyone wanted a patch of dirt. Meanwhile, Amer’s holdings grew dunum by dunum. He lived in such a miserable little hut, no one but Hafez guessed that he’d grown wealthy—not even Farouq had sniffed him out. But Amer’s mother was a simple soul who trusted in Hafez’s prominence and status: not long before her death, she’d confided to him that she was worried about her son’s obsession with collecting property, afraid that the government might confiscate it. The Crown paid close attention to all land deals near the border with Israel.

Hafez learned that Amer’s holdings were valued in the hundreds of millions. He privately suspected Amer collected land because he’d seen his childhood home invaded by soldiers and their property seized. On the few occasions Hafez attempted—discreetly!—to ask what Amer’s plans for the land were, he’d say only, in that dogged way: I don’t believe in plans. He collected earth, Hafez thought, like someone who planned never to die.

Apart from Hafez, Gabe, Farouq, and a few cousins, Amer had no other immediate relatives or close friends. Even as a young boy, Hafez recalled, Amer was solitary and off-putting. Feeble. Weepy. A tattletale. Always with his head on Mommy’s lap. His nose whistled.

Gabe, Farouq, and Hafez had played with Amer when they were children. Amer was wonderfully easy to torment: Hafez discovered one afternoon that he could flick tiny stones at the back of his cousin’s head and the child couldn’t work out where they were coming from. He had continued this game for years. When Hafez learned, about a year ago, that Amer had the sugar sickness—diabetes—and then a “minor” preliminary heart attack, for some reason he’d thought of the tiny stones game first. Then he’d wondered: And who will get all that property?

There was a second heart attack and Amer died intestate, Hafez and his siblings his nearest kin. If the inheritance was apportioned out Shariah-style, the brothers would each get a share, as well as their cousins Taiyal, Adel, Boulos, and their dead cousin Matrouk’s wife, Tamim, and their children. But if it were divided according to the interpretation of the Orthodox Church, then the only ones to inherit would be the living, Christian next-of-kin.

And if the Church were to support his petition, it would follow the custom of their father’s clan, in which case it would all go to the firstborn son.

He felt no compunctions over this: Hafez had been cheated once already—his father had said his eldest son would inherit his possessions—which turned out to be some clothes, guns, maps, a few musical instruments. But somehow, the most precious, the knife—somehow that had gone to Gabe. Hafez wanted what he was owed. He was the child of a Palestinian refugee, like Amer, terrible as it was to admit, and property—especially that which contained the long, unbroken line of the past—was the only thing that would make the dispossessed whole again.

FOR A MOMENT, it seemed to Hafez that wisps of zaatar, piss, and lavender—the scent of Amer’s old house—rose in twists around his head. He jumped nearly out of his body at a knock on the window, a burst of Arabic, “Boss? You awake?”

Samir got behind the wheel and started the car. There was a lit cigarette on his lip, a fresh cigarette behind one ear and a soft pack inside the pocket of his T-shirt.

Hafez considered asking for another one. Instead, he folded his arms and said, “Those are going to kill you,” inhaling deeply as he gazed out the passenger window. “And me.”

“Akeed,” Samir nodded. Sure. They pulled out of the parking lot.

Hafez watched the nod in his peripheral vision, then turned to his driver. “Would you ever consider taking more than one wife? I mean, if you were married to begin with. You’re a good Muslim, right? Have you thought about it?”

Samir’s brows lifted halfway up his forehead. He took the cigarette from his lip and knocked it off on the open window. “If you’re thinking of converting, ya ustaz, there are some things . . .”

“No, no, no.” Hafez rubbed three fingers across his jaw. “I’ve just wondered. How would one manage? Two wives? You can have up to four, correct? Ya’Allah, how does one function?”

Samir smiled around the cigarette. “Apparently, one manages.”

“One manages, one manages,” Hafez said dolefully. “So, in other words, four is no better than one, and possibly worse.”

“Very possible.”

Hafez felt for his worry beads at the bottom of his right pocket. He’d bought them rather impulsively from a souq merchant who swore they were excavated from the area of Djenné and Gao, dated to the eighth century: heavy, jet beads with one blue stone to ward off the covetous evil eye. They had a reassuring quality in his hand. Still, he tried to never let anyone glimpse them—they were so rustic, so Muslim. He slid the beads between his fingers and tried to imagine introducing Carole to her new sister. He could see Mrs. Waleeda in his bed, but not in his living room fighting for the remote.

“It’s a bad business.” Samir turned for a moment so Hafez could see his driver’s profile, the slightly squashed nose, sensitive mouth, his cigarette the brightest thing in the car. “Wanting. The Qu’ran says four, yes. But only if each is treated equally. You can’t do that. No one can do that. Maybe with money. But not . . .” Samir tapped his palm flat against the center of his chest. “You get to have only the idea of it.”

Hafez’s lips curved in the darkness. “So, you’re tempted by the possibility, but can’t ever have it in reality.” Absurd religion. As were they all.

The driver clicked his tongue. “The hope is worse than no hope.”

“I’m not interested in hope.” Hafez threaded his fingers through the beads, their click nearly inaudible. “I’ve wasted too much time on hope.”

In the rearview mirror, Samir’s eyes wrinkled with a smile. “You don’t need hope, boss, you have power.”

Hafez lowered his window. He felt that power hovering just beyond his grasp. How to reclaim it? He’d been robbed. To ask for power destroyed the power; to steal it destroyed it. It had to be conferred, bestowed. Born into. Or legislated. He lowered the window all the way, a relief to feel the air rushing with cold moonlight, nets of it caught in the tree branches lining Hamra Street. The sky bowed overhead, clear all the way to outer space. What should he care about knives, brothers, women when it seemed at such moments he owned the whole city? But then he thought of those tribal chieftains, the Bedouin sheikhs he was descended from, just like the King himself. They were the true nobility of Jordan—quiet arbiters of power. He could see their shrewd faces, how they would gossip over the coffeepots, under the blowing tents. None of them would respect his ownership of the land—not really—as long as they knew he didn’t own Il Saif—the soul of their family.

This was his fundamentally rooted understanding—ingrained by his father and the males of the village: that land, money, and inheritance were power. That without such power, he wouldn’t be able to hang on much longer to his position as the adjudicator of peace. His influence was slipping: His Majesty had blamed the Oslo debacle on him—though the King had never said anything explicitly, Hafez knew it! Hafez should have had his ear to the ground. He should have been the one to observe the Palestinians jetting off to Norway—instead of that old war horse, Yasir Arafat.

He sighed and Samir glanced in the mirror. Dusty, crowded Amman sped by as they made their way at last back to the Embassy District, traffic slowing to a crawl, the trees retracting into green lace. He tented his fingers. They turned onto Khanzeer Street, which everyone called Spanish Embassy Street, the sidewalks broad in places, impassable in others where someone had decided to carve out chunks of cement and plant the spindly new trees. “Samir—your people are from—”

“I’m Beni-Sakhr tribe,” he said, fist knocking the front of his shoulder. “True Jordanian.”

“True Jordanian indeed.” That’s what Hafez’s father, Munif, had always called himself. Pointing to his fields, tossing his red checked keffiyeh over one shoulder, his knife under his robes. True Jordanian. Hafez huffed a laugh and closed his window. “Well, aren’t we all?”