A day without breakfast

(in three acts)

The spokesman

The spokesman of the Ministry – a man of healthy stature and little grey hair, residing behind a huge desk decorated with at least two phones, several stacks of papers, a few flags and some other memorabilia – was playing with his mobile phone and mumbled “hello guys, come in” without looking up, when we entered his office. His secretary asked us to take a seat on the many comfortable armchairs stood against the walls of his office. When he finally looked up, we introduced ourselves and one of our Jordanian colleagues started explaining the purpose of our visit to the Ministry’s spokesman, while I was curiously inspecting his room. Although I’d already spent over half a year in Amman studying water management, I had never managed to visit the Ministry of Water and Irrigation before. It was not far from what I expected: several floors of shared offices along rows of corridors, decorated at points of high visibility with nicely framed images of King Abdullah II and his father the late King Hussein, while the rest of the wallspace was scantily covered by dusty and yellowish aerial photographs, topographic maps and various posters of past projects or campaigns encouraging people to save water, showing graphs with shocking numbers meant to alarm people to the urgency of the situation. Also on the corridors, next to the toilets, were bulky column-like dispensers of drinking water, some with pipes lying disconnected on the floor.
The spokesman’s office was not unusually large and apart from his desk and a smaller desk for the computer screen as well as the many comfy chairs around a low table, there was only a glass cupboard filled with medals, framed awards, certificates and photos of the spokesman shaking hands or cutting ribbons with important people, a TV that was running on silent and a tall cardboard structure from another campaign in one corner, carrying a disorderly pile of electrical or mechanical devices. Maybe these were the famous ‘water saving devices’ (or simply WSDs in water slang) that were so ‘successfully’ installed in ‘all the Kingdom’s public institutions’ a few years back – strange that they were all but visible in the Ministry of Water and Irrigation’s bathrooms… I guess they get more exposure on a pile in the spokesman’s office.
As one also finds in most Jordanian households, or at least in their reception rooms, there was a number of decorative items of incredible kitsch value in the office – golden sphinx statues, plastic flower bouquets sprayed with glitter and elaborately over-ornamented, x-shaped holders of the Holy Qur’an. But my favourite was a plastic thermal flask on the low table – it had a red flower print on mauve background and under the heading “Flavenue” it read:
“Rose flowers, in any colour,
are thrillingly beautiful”

And just as the spokesman was talking about the importance of installing tanks for rainwater collection, especially in official and public buildings, it started to pour down with rain – not a drop of which was collected from the Ministry’s roof, of course. From his 5th floor office, we saw how the sky over Amman had darkened and how the blessing of rain came down in slanted strings, tightly packed despite the vastness of space. I watched the drops turning into little white crowns against the purple sky as their perfect, aerodynamic shape broke on the beige surface of a banister on the balcony behind the spokesman’s big leather chair.

The rain

Later, when we walked out of the Ministry, it was still raining and the ditches between sidewalk and street had turned into torrents that became considerable obstacles (beside the pouring rain itself) for anyone hoping to cross a road. Late October is early for rain here in Jordan, especially rains of such vigour and strength – December or January is more common. And maybe you can imagine that a town which only sees rain a handful of times a year, is never really prepared for it:
There wasn’t a single umbrella to be seen anywhere. People were holding newspapers or jumpers over their heads, though to little avail.
The streets turned into cocoa-coloured torrents of floodwater and at places of depression, lakes of hot chocolate started forming, totally overwhelming the drains. Pieces of the high sidewalks were falling into the torrents like calving glaciers and all the loose trash was being washed from the streets, causing crisp bags, empty bottles and bits of styrofoam to unite in a giant merry-go-round in the turbulent flood.

The Holocaust

Finally I found the right taxi stand with shared cabs (called ‘servees’) to where I wanted to go. Because of the heavy rains there was no long line and I could immediately get in the front of a ‘servees’ that pulled up, as the last one had just filled up and left.
“Salaamu aleikum” I greeted the driver as I closed the door. I stared straight ahead, not to appear like a tourist – it didn’t really help much, though: only a few seconds after the last person had gotten in the back and we pulled out of the stand, the driver looked at me and asked in a decent English accent:
“And where are you from, Sir?” I turned to face him and noticed above a kind smile his protruding and incredibly bright eyes. It was not the colour of his eyes but the look – so piercing and intense that I imagined he might well be able to read at night without a bedside lamp.
“From Germany”, I said in English after deciding to give in to being foreign for once – usually I keep up in Arabic for as long as I can, as if I my blond hair and blue-grey eyes weren’t enough of an indication of my clearly non-Arab descent.
“From Germany”, he repeated thoughtfully and paused. I was bracing myself for another Mercedes, BM (people here somehow miss out the W), Bayern München, Klinsmann, Matthäus etc. type of comment, which usually follows and quite frequently turns into an appraisal of all things German, especially German football, with detailed accounts of the last games of Bayer Leverkusen or Herta BSC, which regularly embarrasses my own knowledge of my nation’s most favourite pastime. But not today:
“Then you can tell me something about the Holocaust” he said calmly. I had to gasp for a breath of surprise as I remembered a scene several years back, where a group of Iranian students asked me about ‘rumours’ they had heard (and believed not to be true) that ‘thousands’ of Jews were burnt in furnaces in Germany during WWII and I ended up doing my duty of guilt as a German by solemnly telling the whole horrific story of the holocaust as best as I could, sitting on the banks of Zayanderood river in Esfahan.
“Maybe I can. What do you want to know?”
“How many people died in the Holocaust?”
“Six million.”
He briefly looked at me, shook his head and looked back at the street as we stopped at a red light.
“How do you know this? How can you be sure?”
I explained about the many documentary movies I had seen, the detailed records the Nazis had kept, the mass graves that were found, the mountains of buried ashes, the shoes, glasses, gold teeth, suitcases, instruments, gloves, coats, suits etc. that were taken from the Jews before entering the camps and collected in piles.
“No. This is not true. Not six million.”
He was of the opinion that the Allied forces and later the State of Israel had made up this number to force the Germans into large ‘guilt’ payments over the decades following WWII till today. I didn’t quite understand what he was after – he acknowledged the holocaust but refused to believe its extent; and it was clear that he was quite fixed in his opinion and there was no point in getting into this topic any deeper. While he was pulling his ‘servees’ up a steep hill, he elaborated further: Israel – created from the ashes of the concentration camps – was in fact doing something worse than the holocaust to the Palestinians, but by highlighting its own victim-nature at the hands of the Germans (and by highlighting the SIX MILLION), it tries to hide the terrible nature of its own deeds against the Palestinians.
It was clear that he was Palestinian and had once lived in what is now the state of Israel and that his piercing eyes spoke of the hell he had been through since then.

We arrived at the third circle – the final stop. People started getting out of the car. I shook his hand and said:
“In sha’allah there will be peace in this region soon.”
He looked at me for a while, holding on to my hand.
“Do you really think there will be? How can you forgive and live in ‘peace’ with people who took away your land, drove and beat you out of your houses and into other countries?”
I had nothing to reply to that and stared blankly into his face.
He continued calmly, though with deep sadness and burning fury pouring out of his glowing eyes:
“People who shot my daughter in front of my eyes and broke my legs? How do you expect me to live in ‘peace’ with them? No, my friend, I can’t.”

A heavy silence fell on both of us and I said goodbye.

Down the road, I bought a fresh fruit juice and a sandwich, thinking: All of that without breakfast!