A little afternoon trip around my neighbourhood, in three actsKhaled, my landlord, was sitting in his car with the engine running when I left the house. I said hi and we shook hands through the window.
“Where are you going?” I asked him.
“Nowhere. I’m just sitting here.”
He smiled.
I walked down the road, took out my phone and dialled the number of the Israeli embassy. The man on the other side was very friendly and helpful, as he had been when I first met him about two months back. Our conversation was jovial, almost amicable and so very in opposition to my feelings for his country’s government; or to be more precise: its Interior Ministry. With my back leaning against a low brick wall down the road from my house in the late afternoon, I reminded him of who I was (he immediately remembered) and told him the story of what had happened last week. It was a short story – much less spectacular than the one I had told him and his boss (the Consul) in the embassy in September, but he was equally keen to listen and to express both his astonishment of and his apologies for the actions of his government. He advised me to directly contact the German Foreign Ministry since my own embassies both in Jordan and in Israel had not been able to help me. In the end he repeated – to my satisfaction – that neither he nor the Consul had ever encountered a case like mine before and that I should let him know of any news. I thanked him for his support and hung up.
- - - -
The wall I was leaning against, which hardly reached to my waist, marked the end of someone’s property and the beginning of one of those many “no-man’s land” areas, as I call them – empty, bulldozed-over, maybe an abandoned building project or a future housing site, filled with occasional piles of rubble, dirt and trash; car-tracks in the dust, a left shoe lying among sparsely growing shrubs, a bottle, a crushed cigarette pack and a few plastic bags passing through or held down by a stone or a piece of tile from someone’s former bathroom, rustling in the cold December breeze. These areas can stretch from anything like a dozen meters between two houses (like this one) to hundreds of metres, covering long slopes on the many hills of Amman, between two residential areas for example, like the one on the way from my house to the internet café in Tabarboor. During Ramadan I sometimes stopped there, in the middle of it, where a lonely, low olive tree stood in the abandoned emptiness and enjoyed the view over the surrounding areas as the sun was setting and the mosques began calling the fasting Moslems to prayer and to the end of their fast.
These areas have sadly come to symbolise Amman for me, or maybe even the whole of the Middle East. It was in July, when I first came here, and I was walking through one of these no-man’s lands on top of a hill near the university dormitory that it suddenly hit me and I really felt I was back in the Middle East.
Looking up towards the street I noticed in the distance – where the street meets a T-junction – the national flag. There are many Jordanian flags all around the country, but this one is something else – it is said to be the biggest flag in the world and stands on the grounds of King Abdallah’s palace, between the area where I live and the centre of town. Because of its magnificent size, it doesn’t flicker in the wind the way small flags do; it moves majestically, winding around the wind like in slow motion. The sun had already set and the sky behind the flag was beginning to turn orange, though it was still bright.
Behind the T-junction lies another one of these empty spaces, only this one isn’t exactly empty: a village of Bedouin tents is spread out over these few hectares of land between the newly built-up areas that seemed to be closing in on the Bedu settlement. Since I hadn’t planned to go anywhere specific, my tracks had taken me straight towards the flag and I ended up on a pile of large concrete pipes overlooking the tents. I got out my camera and attempted to remain unnoticed as I took a few shots of the tents in the foreground with a group of young men standing around a bonfire and the vastness of Amman spreading out behind them. But of course a blond boy in a beige corduroy jacket and a blue scarf standing on a pile of pipes will not go unnoticed for long and soon enough there was whistling and shouting and an older man came towards me. As he approached I was trying to figure out what to say if he asked me what I had been taking photos of (“the piles of old bread drying next to your tent look great in the evening light” or “I like your red pick-up truck”?).
I greeted him “Salaamu ‘aleikum” and he returned the greeting “wa ‘aleikum as-Salaam wa rahmatollahi wa barakaato”.
No questions.
In fact, he didn’t really know what to say after that.
“How are things” I asked, also short of anything to say.
“Al-hamdu lillah” he said, which means as much as “thanks be to God” and is all you will ever hear from a Muslim as an answer to this question, no matter how bad a state he is in.
“How long have you been living here?”
“Thirty years. And none of what you see now was around back then” he said, pointing at all the houses around.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine, thank you. Don’t you get cold in your tents?”
“Not at all. We have a stove. Look there!”
He pointed at the nearby tent, which seemed to be his. Through the open entrance I could see an unveiled woman sitting next to a small cast iron woodstove.
“That’s my woman” he said. “Come and have some tea with us.”
I refused three times and then accepted.
My eyes had to adjust to the near-total darkness inside the tent. Slowly the many simple rugs covering the floor and the mattresses stacked against the back ‘wall’ appeared, as well as the boxes with the family’s belongings and next to the stove: his wife, fixing her veil as she was preparing the tea.
After the usual question about what I was doing, where I was living and who with, whether I was a Muslim etc., they told me that another foreigner had been there about a year ago – a journalist – and taken photos, too, which seemed to make it completely ok and normal, that I was doing the same. A few men came in and started talking to the owner of the tent. I was glad that the conversation moved on to something not involving me and I could just observe.
Through the open entrance one could see Sobhy’s pick-up truck, a few other tents and behind them in the distance under the darkening sky the hundreds and hundreds of houses of the settled population.
Sobhy, the host, was an elderly man with a grey stubble beard and a white embroidered cap covering his hair. He wore a small, dirty jacket over his long, grey Jalabeya and was running the prayer beads through one hand, while the other was holding a small boy in his lap. His wife was wearing black, so all I could make out in the dim light were the hard, but gentle features of her face. She had a strong voice and was fully engaged in the loud conversation, which revolved around various money-related issues of how much someone had paid somebody else for some sheep or dried bread or a mobile phone that didn’t work. The discussion became increasingly heated and a man sitting on a water canister next to the entrance was REGELRECHT shouting at Sobhy’s wife over a story involving 20 Dinar worth of diesel. She shouted back (my presence seemed forgotten by this point or at any rate irrelevant), then she handed the guest a cup of tea. He thanked her in a low voice, only to resume shouting at her and the others a mere second later.
‘Funny’, I thought to myself and finished my glass.
Someone brought in bread and eggs.
“Stay for dinner” Sobhy offered.
I kindly refused and didn’t have to repeat my refusal this time – a clear sign that it was time to go.
“If you need anything” Sobhy’s wife said to me as I was leaving, “just come back. Since your mother is so far away, consider me as your mother or your sister here.”
I thanked them all, shook the men’s hands, picked up my shoes and left.
I had hardly turned around the corner (it was already quite dark outside), when I heard the loud guest saying “and the 400 Dinar I lent him for his wedding? Where are they?”
With a smile on my face I turned my back to the flag and walked home. I was happy. Ever since I had moved to this area of Amman three months ago, I had wanted to meet those Bedu, who lived not even a mile away from my street, and now the door was open.
- - - -
In a little shop on the side of the busy main road on my way home I bought some “100% veggie” Broccoli juice (!) made in Thailand (!), some Halloumi cheese, corn flakes and toilet paper. When I left the store, I noticed an old man on the ground on the other side of the road. His boots were standing next to him in the dust and there was some kind of carriage – the kind a trash-searcher collects his treasures in.
I crossed the road and in the flashing light of passing cars I saw him standing up – a slim man of remarkable height for his age, with noble features and the beard, dress and head-gear of a sheikh. It wasn’t till I saw the little carpet he was standing on, that I noticed he was praying. Right there only a few metres from the cars whizzing past, he prostrated and is forehead touched the ground, facing south-south-west to Mecca.
In the light from the street lamp I could see Khaled – still sitting in his car. The engine was off. I just sneaked through the gate and didn’t go to say hi.
