I peered at displays of insects and wildlife, taxidermied animals and bits of rock. I found a table showing the chemical composition of the Dead Sea; it turned out it wasn’t just full of salt, it also contained 7800 times more cadmium than normal sea water and 94 times more bromine. When
I had licked my lips I had probably licked my way to a tumour.
I left the museum after an hour and a quarter and headed towards the car. I had a bottle of water in there and I suddenly had an urge to drink all of it. As I opened the passenger-side door and went to get in, Hana shook his head and pointed down in front of the complex.
‘You should see this,’ and he grinned for the first time that day. Obviously my timid first steps at standing up for myself had not caused the world to cave in.
We walked the short distance down a pathway and when we stopped, I instinctively shied back. To my left, the rocky cliffs rose sheer with nothing behind them but sea and sky. All I could see in front of me was the Dead Sea, the same travertine colour as the sky. A haze of either atmosphere or pollution lay over the whole area. It was breathtaking in its aridness: this looked like the entire world. It was a giant, blank canvas and yet it wasn’t. There was something hidden and ancient, prehistoric and mythological about it all at once. Even though I could not see one living thing, the whole area felt alive. Now I understood what all the fuss was about. Now I understood how beautiful nothing could be.
We drove back down the mountain, winding past the enormous rock faces that I hadn’t noticed on the drive up. After my little stand-off with Hana in the souvenir shop, I had been obsessing about how I behaved and what other people thought of me, both here and at home. Now, on the way back down, I was giving myself a crick in the neck from gaping out the car window. The rocks were oversized, the sky was oversized, the sea was oversized. Without vegetation there was nothing to look at but size.
It felt an awful lot like spirituality.
That night I sat and stared out the window of my hotel room and tried to make sense of how I felt. The landscape I had seen that afternoon had left me feeling uneasy in the same way that standing at great heights always does. It’s not so much that I am scared that I am going to fall, it’s that there’s an infinitesimal part of my brain that wants to know what it would feel like to jump. What terrifies me is that one day that tiny spark of curiosity will go mad and throw me over the edge. The landscape of today had filled me with that same terror; a part of me wanted to know what it would feel like to live in a place as empty as that all the time. I imagined my flat back in Australia completely empty. No more hoarding, no more stuff, nothing there but me. And I imagined myself, fearless in the face of regret, fearless in the face of what other people thought of me. I lay on the bed and listened to that little voice deep inside me as it whispered, ‘Go on, jump.’
Chapter Sixteen
Early the next morning I arrived at the Jordanian office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was there that I was to meet Dana, my UN contact. I was nervous. My only communication with her had been via email and even then, we had only written to each other twice. I was hoping she hadn’t forgotten I was coming. I was also hoping she was a real person. We hadn’t been in contact since I had arrived in Jordan.
The UNHCR was housed in a big square building dominating the end of a residential street. There were about fifty people lined up at a booth out the front, mostly men, but a few families as well. There were cement road blocks on either side of the street and half a dozen uniformed guards cradling rifles. On the other side of the road to the main building, a man holding a sign written in Arabic was silently protesting.
I had no idea how I was to get into the building, so I chose a guard who looked a little bit like Orlando Bloom and asked him for directions. He smiled handsomely and pointed me through the road blocks, past a security checkpoint, through a steel door, up a short flight of stairs, through an X-ray bag-check and then through a metal detector, which I again set off to nobody’s concern. Directly on the other side, as if the detector served as the doorway, was a small room, and at a desk that took up half the available space sat yet another guard. He gestured for me to show him my passport, then he took it from me and told me to take a seat. I sat down on the only other chair, squashed between the metal detector and a bookcase which held nothing but recharging cradles for walkie-talkies.
As I was making myself comfortable, the guard made a short phone call, then hung up again and looked at me, unsmiling.
‘Dana will come at ten o’clock, after her meeting.’
Surrounded by semi-automatic weapons, soldiers and refugees, I felt more relaxed than I had all trip; Dana existed.
I sat and waited. I wished that I had brought a book. I had nothing to do but stare and there wasn’t much to look at, just the guard as he did some paperwork. The door behind him was open but all I could see was the bare concrete of a courtyard and, beyond that, a set of double doors. I tried not to fidget. Eventually my guard left and was replaced by another one who, on his way into the room, threw a newspaper past me onto the bookshelf. He didn’t even make eye contact. I continued to sit there, invisible and unfazed. After three days, I was slowly becoming inured to the way some of the local men treated me. I’d even managed to accept that it wasn’t personal.
On the street below, I could hear a baby grizzling. I was very thirsty. I’d drunk a lot of tea that morning but no water and in this country two litres a day still wasn’t enough. It was hot and dry and the office reminded me of my father’s workshop when I was a little girl, smelling of grease and dust.
It was then I noticed that the newspaper the guard had dropped was written in English. I thought he was just dumping something he was finished with; instead he was dumping me a favour. I picked it up and was just about to start reading an article about Queen Noor when Dana walked into the room.
She was younger than me, petite with black curly hair. She greeted me with a curt nod and asked me to follow her. More stairs, more doors, more stairs, more doors and, finally, a modest office. Dana went to her desk and pulled an information folder from a pile and handed it to me.
‘Today, we will meet some Iraqi refugees at a school. This suits you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have any questions?’
I was feeling overwhelmed. I had managed to get this far—all the way from Australia—by saying that I was a researcher. Obviously Dana was expecting me to ask pertinent, journalistic-type questions. What I really wanted to ask was: ‘Did you know there’s a guard out there who looks exactly like Orlando Bloom?’
Instead, I asked her about the people I had seen lined up on the street. It turned out that this was where everyone came to register. Nearly all of them were from Iraq.
‘Jordan is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees and does not accept asylum seekers as citizens. But our king believes in the brotherhood of the Arab people so if they come, even though they can’t be citizens, they can stay. They cannot work, but they can use the schools and hospitals at the rate of a non-insured local. Our job is to assess the people that come here and determine if they are true refugees. If they are, we provide them with resources for many things.’
‘Wow, that’s generous.’
Dana raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s not like that in Australia?’
‘No, in Australia our government decides if you’re a refugee or not. We don’t let an independent umpire make the decision for us.’
‘And if they decide you are not?’
I looked at my hands, embarrassed. ‘They send you away again.’
‘Oh. I know that this year you are taking five hundred extra Iraqis, but how many people do you have asking for asylum in Australia?’
‘A few thousand. How many refugees do you have in Jordan?’
‘Half a million. And we have a population of five million.’
I thought of all those years of the Howard government, when our prime minister had carried on like
a housewife in a Looney Tunes cartoon, leaping up and down on a chair, clutching at his skirts and screaming as a couple of hundred malnourished refugees arrived in leaky boats. While he was doing that, Jordan was quietly letting half a million people across its borders. Even though it didn’t offer citizenship, at least Jordan didn’t turn them away or force them back into the middle of a war zone.
I asked Dana if there were many refugees still coming over the border.
‘Not as many as when the war first started but we are registering more and more.’
I was confused. ‘Why are they only registering now?’
‘Because their money ran out. When these people came here four or five years ago, they thought it was temporary. They believed they would be able to go home again. But as time has passed, all of their savings have disappeared. It is not legal for them to work in Jordan so now they are destitute.’ She paused. ‘I never thought how much simple things like my clothes meant to me until I started working here.’
We walked out of her office, through the door, down the stairs, through another door, down more stairs, out the double doors, across the courtyard and retrieved my passport from the security guard. Then we went back through the metal detector, past the X-ray machine, down some steps, through the steel doors, past the checkpoint, through the road block and into the back seat of our car. I looked out the window at the protestor, still standing silently where he’d been when I entered the building an hour and a half ago. As our driver started to move off, I asked Dana what his sign said.
‘He says that the UN will not help him find a safe place to live. He has been here in Jordan for many years and no one will find him a home. He doesn’t understand that the rest of the world will not take everyone. He thinks it is our fault.’
‘Does the UN have any figures on how many refugees there are at the moment?’
‘There are 11.4 million people registered as refugees.’
It was a staggering figure.
As the protestor with his homemade cardboard sign receded into the distance, the reality of his situation hit me properly: he was on his own in a foreign country with nothing. He was competing with millions and millions of faceless people, all trying to find somewhere safe to live, all in limbo, all slowly watching everything they had ever worked for disappear. And here was I, living in one of the richest countries on earth, with a roof over my head and a good job, gnashing my teeth because I didn’t want to throw out an old pair of leg warmers.
‘We are travelling to a school bus meeting point run by Save the Children. There are some volunteers there you can speak to.’ Dana was dialling a number on her phone and then she was talking to someone to tell them we were on our way.
‘The Jordanian government agreed a few years ago to allow the children of refugees to attend school. Refugee children can go to school in Australia?’
Again, I looked at my hands. ‘Some of them. Sort of.’
I didn’t want to tell her that we held many of our asylum seekers and their kids in jails on an island two and a half thousand kilometres off the coast of Western Australia. It would be like telling her we treated them like vermin.
‘Oh. Well, here they can go to school. But Jordan is not a rich country, so organisations like Save the Children cover the cost.’ We slowed to a stop and Dana turned to me and smiled.
‘Here we are.’
We stepped out of the car. In front of us was a large two-storey building with a verandah running around it. Children wearing backpacks were running around and being herded onto the bus as their parents waved goodbye.
Dana spoke to a woman who nodded and then walked off.
‘We will wait here,’ Dana said. ‘This woman is going to get some of the parents for you. There is a group that come here every day and hand out information about us to the other parents.’
‘Like volunteers?’
‘Yes. Because there are no organised refugee camps in Jordan, the Iraqis who have come across the border have dispersed into the wider population. They rent apartments in the cheaper suburbs. Many of them do not know that the UNHCR offers assistance with health, legal affairs, counselling and so on. Some parents come here each day to pass on that information.’
Dana and I joined two women and two men sitting in the shade on the edge of a concrete barrier protecting a little garden. I smiled awkwardly. They looked at me expectantly. So did Dana. Goodness knew what these people had seen in Iraq, goodness knew how much they had lost. I was feeling very Western and very privileged. I was waiting for someone to demand, ‘What the hell are you looking at, little white girl?’
A man to my right smiled at me. He was middle-aged and wearing a crisp, checked shirt and crease-free trousers. Even though his clothes were worn, they were immaculate.
‘Dana, can you ask this gentleman how long he has been in Jordan?’
I didn’t ask for his name; Dana had already explained that some of these people were still in danger and in hiding.
Dana asked my question in Arabic. He told her six years.
‘Umm . . . can you ask him how he came to be here?’
He answered me himself. He had been an officer in the Iraqi army during the war with Iran and, at that time, he was seen as a hero.
‘But when the war came from America, many people decided Iran was now our ally. Anyone who fought Iran was now an enemy. Militias hunted us because they thought we should pay for what we had done.’
I was confused. The war with Iran had ended twenty years ago—dredging it up now made no sense. Maybe this was more to do with the Sunni and Shi’ite tensions we kept hearing about in Australia.
‘Is this because of religion? There have always been problems with Sunnis and Shi’ites, haven’t there?’
Before the officer could answer, a young man with close-cropped hair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, said, ‘No, that is not the problem. I did not know I was a Sunni until all of this war with America happened. For most of us, this thing was not a problem. I went to the same mosque as the Shi’ites.’
In Australia, we were led to believe that fighting between the Sunni and the Shia populations had always existed and was widespread. These people were telling me that the Western invasion of their country had caused it. I looked back at the army officer.
‘So this problem of religion is new? How?’
‘My country has fallen apart. People need someone to blame.’
I wasn’t sure which made me feel worse: the arbitrary nature of hatred, or the calm way in which this man told me about it. I asked him if it had been hard to leave everything behind.
He replied, ‘I stayed after the first attempt on my life, but the second time they came right into my house. I don’t know if it was difficult to leave. You don’t think when people are shooting at you in your own home, you just run.’
Now, everyone was keen to tell their stories. A middle-aged woman with short brown hair told me her brother hated her because she had married a Sunni. ‘Before 2003 we all lived together. None of the children knew who was a Sunni and who was a Shi’ite. It didn’t matter to us. Now my own brother tells me that I am a disgrace.’ She shrugged. I couldn’t imagine telling anyone what she had just told me without bursting into tears.
Another young woman in a red headscarf and jeans told me that she had lived in a Shi’ite part of Iraq all her life, even though she was Sunni. ‘It never used to be a problem. Everybody lived side by side until the war. But now everyone hates each other. The militias tried to shoot my husband because he would not join the army.’
The army officer nodded. ‘It was compulsory for everyone to serve for one to three years in the army, even the women. The government would punish you or kill you if you did not. Now, the militias want to kill me because I served, they want to kill her husband because he did not.’ He paused and smiled at me again. ‘You know, I have a brother who lives in Australia. He was given asylum six years ago.’
‘Are you hoping to go there too?’ I asked.
<
br /> ‘I have tried. Three times. Your country says I cannot come.’
No one was blaming me but I felt responsible all the same.
I wanted to ask the group what they missed the most. I didn’t expect any of them to say ‘my clothes’ or ‘my jewellery’ or ‘my car’. I thought they would miss sentimental things: photographs, family heirlooms, their children’s baby clothes.
‘Out of everything you left behind, what are the things you miss the most?’
It caught me by surprise when they all answered the same way. The middle-aged woman spoke first.
‘Stability.’
The army officer and young man nodded and agreed. ‘Stability.’
‘Stability,’ said the woman in the red headscarf. ‘Of course! I had a future. My children had a future. Now I have this.’ She held out her empty palms to the sky. ‘When they shot at my husband, our son was watching. He was three. They shot at my husband and then they set fire to the house. They knew we were still inside it. My son is five now. He still draws pictures of rifles and fire.’
I didn’t know what to say.
These people had fled with almost nothing. There was no time to plan an exit strategy, there was no time to pack up crates of belongings and ship them to a nonexistent forwarding address; they arrived in Jordan with less than I had packed for a week-long journey. They’d arrived with nothing other than scars and nightmares and damaged children. They were lucky just to be alive. It put all of my fretting about old postcards and shoes, books and dead flowers into perspective. I felt like I’d finally had some sense knocked into me.
After a restless night’s sleep I again met Dana at her office at 10 a.m. This time we drove to a poorer suburb heavily populated by refugees. The closer we got to our destination, the more densely packed in were the buildings and the people. We were on our way to visit a clinic run by Caritas that gave free health checks, referrals and counselling to refugees and impoverished locals. Our driver dropped us by the side of the road and we entered a nondescript multi-storey building wedged between shops and apartments. There were a few people milling out the front. It was so quiet inside that I thought we must have arrived before opening time. We turned into the waiting room and saw the place was full, with standing room only. Everyone was waiting silently. No one took any notice as we moved past them.
Lessons in Letting Go Page 16