Nine Parts of Desire (Korean Edition)

by Geraldine Brooks

  Between the lines, what had happened was clear. The queen’s Western values had been at war with Zaid Rifai’s authoritarianism. The riots had proved the queen right and Rifai wrong. Rifai was gone; the queen wasn’t going anywhere.

  Later that year the king’s democratic initiative bore fruit in an election that left Islamic hard-liners dominating the Parliament. Just before the election, a delegation of liberal-minded Jordanians had come to the palace to brief him on the persecution of Toujan Faisal, a candidate whose campaign for greater women’s rights had made her a target of extremist threats and harassment. The night before the vote, Hussein went on television and warned against religious extremism. The division of his country along religious lines, he warned, would never be tolerated while he lived. The extremists seemed to get the message and stopped short of violence against Toujan or her supporters.

  Until August 1990, Jordan ticked along, the fundamentalist parliamentarians making a proposal, such as the banning of male hairdressers for women, and the rest of the community panning the idea and carrying on much as it always had. Free speech was exposing the fundamentalists’ agenda to a healthy airing, and most people, it seemed, weren’t buying it. One initiative that cost the Islamic bloc credibility, even with very religious Jordanians, was a proposal to ban fathers attending their daughters’ school sports days. “Are they saying I’m so dirty-minded that I can’t even be trusted to watch my daughter play basketball?” fumed one intensely religious father who had previously been in sympathy with the Islamic bloc.

  Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the United States sent troops to Saudi Arabia, and Jordan erupted in an outpouring of support for Iraq. I went to a sermon at one of Amman’s largest mosques and heard the preacher whip the overflow crowd into an anti-American frenzy, warning the U. S. Government that “your pigs will only come back to you in coffins, God willing.”

  It was the queen’s moment. Suddenly, she could serve her adopted country in a way that no Arab-born consort could have. When Washington snubbed the king, sending Secretary of State James Baker and other officials to every other country in the region but Jordan, she got on a plane and went to her old hometown, lobbying senators and congressmen, asking them to understand the king’s quest for a negotiated settlement. It was interesting to compare the press coverage she gleaned on these trips with the articles that had appeared on her first visit to Washington after her marriage. “I’d Be Delighted to Have His Child” cooed the headline on a 1978 People magazine article, full of her thoughts on sport and shopping. This time she spoke at the Brookings Institution and appeared on “Night-line,” no longer asked about hairstyles and child rearing, but required to field hard questions about Jordan’s foreign policy. She did it well, with poise and clarity.

  Back home in Amman, she encouraged the king to brief reporters hurrying to and from Baghdad through Jordan, the only gateway to Iraq that U.N. sanctions had left open. She arranged small dinners in a salon at her office for ten or twelve reporters at a time to meet the king and hear his version of events.

  I saw a lot of her as I passed back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Baghdad. Sometimes she invited me to the palace for supper. It was damage control, done with the lightest touch. And it worked. It was impossible to sit with the two of them for hours on end and not emerge with a better understanding of the king’s delicate balancing act between Iraq and the hard place of American disapproval.

  There was a guilty pleasure in these visits. My hotel room in Jordan was littered with packs of dried food, jerry cans for petrol and a pallet of bottled water: the gear I needed for trips to the front in Saudi Arabia or to the ruins of Iraq. Hanging in the closet were my khaki pants, marbled with baked-bean stains from my last stint with the United States marines, when we’d crouched on the sand, eating our slops from makeshift plates of torn-up cardboard.

  Nadwa palace was the non sequitur in my wartime travels. When Noor excused herself to “see about dinner,” what usually followed was a battery of servants carrying in a choice of two soups, three middle courses and four main dishes—always including the light, healthy things she liked, such as seaweed soup, grilled fish or spiced lentils with yogurt. The king rarely ate any of what he jokingly disparaged as Noor’s health food. Every evening he picked at the same meal: a skewer of grilled lamb on a bed of rice. As soon as etiquette allowed, he pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. Noor, anxious for his health, would furrow her brow if he lit more than one. “When people say, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I always say, ‘I mind for you,’ “ she said. “I hate to think of people doing that to their bodies.” Her oldest son, ten-year-old Hamzah, was an ally, berating his father in sotto voce Arabic.

  The dinners, even the least formal ones around the circular cane table in the family room, were always lit with little candles in glass bowls edged with feathery greenery. The conversation was both a journalist’s dream and worst nightmare. For once, here was a source who actually knew what was going on and was prepared to talk about it. On the other hand, most of what was said was off the record. Listening to talk like that is dangerous when it induces a sense of having the truth, when all one might actually have is self-serving spin.

  Still, the king had known every United States president since Truman and been friends with most of them. He could be witty, and sometimes scathing, about Arab leaders. But he didn’t dominate the conversation. Unlike many husbands, he seemed genuinely interested in what Noor had to say. Even Hamzah wasn’t excluded. Although the boy’s command of English was perfect, he preferred to speak Arabic, and would force his father to act as translator.

  One day I flew with the queen to the border camps, where a flood of Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Sudanese and Bangladeshis were pouring out of Iraq, leaving behind their jobs and the fruits of years of hard work. It was a pathetic scene: rows and rows of tents packed with despairing people. Noor would wander through the hospital tent, talking to anyone who spoke Arabic or English, pulling a tissue from her pocket to comfort a crying Sri Lankan woman, feeling the forehead of a child to check for fever. With the camp administrators, she would pore over the plans for the tent camps, figuring better layouts for services such as water and food distribution points. Back in her office in the palace grounds, she would work the phones, calling Richard Branson, the head of Virgin airlines, to ask for extra planes to ferry the people home; asking other wealthy connections to help pay for a mountain of blankets. Suddenly, her star-studded Rolodex was a national asset.

  She would arrive home late and collapse, rumpled and exhausted, into the cotton-covered cane sofas of the palace’s upstairs family rooms. Across Jordan, a dozen years of her work was unraveling. Jordan had made a good living as the transit point for trade with Iraq, but the U.N. boycott had left ports idle and drivers unemployed. “We’re seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families’ incomes are falling and girls’ schooling is the first place they economize,” she sighed. The first signs of malnutrition were showing up at child health centers. “People are cutting down on the protein in their diet and it’s starting to affect the children’s development.” Often the palace phone rang as aid workers, her friends, called her at home to ask for her help to cut through red tape.

  Sometimes we would watch the war news on CNN, sipping our seaweed soup from mugs. If Hamzah was still up, he sat by us on the couch, hunched over his Gameboy, fighting imaginary enemies as CNN showed footage of the preparations for a real war just across the border. Sometimes the king would borrow the Gameboy, to ease his nerves. There were stacks of videos piled up by the TV—Clint Eastwood Westerns for the king; romantic dramas for the queen. And there were videos they’d taped themselves during the crisis, including a Ross Perot appearance with Larry King, in which Perot, then a little-known Texan businessman, eviscerated Bush’s Gulf policy.

  Hussein played the Perot tape for me and laughed out loud at the Texan’s account of the mysterious workings of Arab diplomacy. Much of what Perot was sayi
ng wasn’t very flattering. In his folksy drawl, Perot was telling Larry King that the Arabs, left alone, would go inside some tent, rearrange the sand and come out with some deal Americans would never understand. It was an odd scene: the king, a master diplomat facing the negotiating challenge of his career, laughing his head off as Perot boiled down his life-and-death dilemmas to a series of quips.

  A few days later Hussein received word of the first bombing of Baghdad in a predawn phone call. Noor, lying in bed beside him, felt his body go rigid as he held the receiver and listened to the bad news. He got up, put on his fatigues and went to visit his troops.

  Since that morning the king had visibly relaxed. It was as if he’d tried everything to avert the war, done his best, and now was willing to leave it to fate. I visited the palace two nights after he’d gone on Jordan TV and made a speech that had enraged the Bush White House. Hussein had accused the United States and its allies of trying “to destroy Iraq,” and had praised the bravery of the Iraqi people in the face of the onslaught. That night at the palace the king, watching CNN, learned that the United States was considering cutting Jordan’s $50 million aid package. He shrugged and flipped off the remote control. “The noose is tightening,” he said. “But I’m not prepared to subject every word I say to censorship or criticism from any source.” In fact, he knew he didn’t have to: the Americans needed the king to keep Jordan stable, and despite hard words on Capitol Hill, they kept up a clandestine flow of assistance.

  Downstairs, in the formal sitting room, I’d been keeping my eye on a side table full of silver-framed pictures of world leaders. Since the start of the Gulf crisis, the pictures had been in constant motion. Saddam Hussein had slipped from the front row after his invasion of Kuwait. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak had disappeared altogether, while George Bush had been pushed behind a lamp. That night George Bush had reemerged, positioned cheek by jowl with Saddam, as if to send the message that Jordan was, after all, a neutral party in the conflict. In front was a picture I’d never seen before: Pope John Paul II, who had just called for an immediate end to the war.

  Upstairs, Noor, wearing blue jeans, was on the phone to friends in the States, offering to fax them copies of the king’s speech, so that they could read his remarks in context. On the street in Jordan, her efforts were winning praise in the salons and the mosques. Even the fundamentalists thought she was doing a good job of putting Jordan’s case to a hostile outside world. It was the first time I’d heard the mosque crowd praise any woman for taking an active role.

  Without the Gulf crisis, it was impossible to know whether she would have been able to live down gossip and criticism. But the war had won her a measure of popularity unimaginable a year earlier. One young taxi driver I rode with had a picture of her tucked into his sun visor. She was wearing military fatigues, as if she were about to literally do battle with America. Did he know, I asked him, that she was American? “She is Arab,” he replied fiercely. “She is one of us.”

  But just a year after the war the rumor mills were grinding again with whispers of divorce. This time most Jordanians were hoping it wasn’t true. The king, the rumors claimed, had fallen in love with a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian journalist and had promised to marry her. The young woman had worked for CNN during the war and had recently been tapped as the king’s press secretary as part of an effort to get some younger staffers into the royal court. “If you put young people in the palace, and some of them are women, and one of them is beautiful, then you are bound to get these kinds of rumors,” said one Amman journalist.

  A cynical Arab businessman had a different view. “All the king’s marriages have been state marriages,” he said. “When he needed to be close to Nasser, he married an Egyptian. When he needed England, he married an English rose. When he needed to mend fences with the Palestinians, he chose a woman from a West Bank family. The 1980s were the American decade, so the marriage for the eighties was with an American.” In the 1990s, the businessman said, the king might sense the need for a different alliance.

  But most Jordanians seemed to discount the story. They reasoned that, even if Hussein were infatuated with a younger woman, a divorce at his age would seem frivolous. What’s accepted, even expected, for a man in his twenties is unseemly for a man of fifty-seven, even if he is a king. Some put the talk of divorce down to professional rivalry from men who had had their eyes on the press secretary’s job. A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.

  Noor was now forty-one years old, had been married to the king for fifteen years, and was much better understood and respected in Jordan because of her role during the war. Her sons had been seen on TV on religious holidays, reading the Koran in flawless classical Arabic. Some Jordanians had even started to murmur about the succession, saying that if the king lived long enough to raise these boys to adulthood there was no reason why one of them shouldn’t be considered for the crown. Fifteen years living alongside the Middle East’s great survivor had taught Noor a thing or two about securing her own position.

  Still, the rumors proved unusually durable, and when press reports of an impending divorce made the papers in the United States and Britain, the Jordanian embassies took the unprecedented step of issuing denials. In Washington a friend who saw Noor at a small reception in her honor found her nervous and brittle, her usual composure and charm completely deserting her.

  A few weeks later another explanation for her nerves emerged. The king had been rushed into hospital in the States to be operated on for cancer. The disease had attacked his urinary tract, and while the surgery was said to be successful, his condition would require regular monitoring.

  In Jordan the mood was somber and uncertain. When the king arrived back after his surgery, the crowd that thronged the road to the palace was the biggest in the country’s history. Their cries of “Aish Hussein [Long Live Hussein]” had a desperate intensity. It was hard to imagine another country in the Middle East where the outpouring of support for a leader would be as spontaneous or as sincere.

  There would be no more gossip. No one now, not even the extremists, would risk a whisper of criticism of the king, even indirectly through attacks on the queen. For however long her husband had left to live, Queen Noor seemed certain to be secure on her throne.

  If there had been a marital rift, it wasn’t obvious when the couple came to the United States in 1994. After a checkup at the Mayo clinic at which the king got a clean bill of health, the couple were spotted in Washington, shopping for Harley-Davidson and BMW motorbikes. Together, they picked out three new bikes to be shipped back to Jordan, and took away about $2,000 in matching motorcycle clothes. The spending spree would help them reprise their courtship bike rides around the hills of Amman.

  The king’s recovery from life-threatening illness also seemed to reinforce the risk-taker in him. Perhaps he sensed that time was short. In 1993, just after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their sudden and controversial peace accords in Washington, Hussein allowed Jordan’s scheduled elections to go ahead as planned. Foreign diplomats and most of his own government ministers had warned against it, fearing that a political campaign would become a front for agitation by Islamic extremists and hard-line Palestinians who didn’t want peace with Israel. Jordan, they said, would be destabilized.

  Instead, the elections went off without a hitch. Behind the king’s resolve, I was sure I saw the queen’s quiet influence at work, and his world view gradually becoming identical with hers. Not long after the elections, in the winter of 1994, a satirical revue lampooning the pomposity of Arab leaders opened in Amman. Some of Jordan’s neighbors were not amused, and tried to have the revue shut down. The king stood up to the pressure and said the show must go on, including the skit that skewered his own sometimes ponderous rhetorical style.

  Jordan was one of the first countries I’d visited when I moved to the Middle East in 1987. In six years I saw it transform itself from a t
ense police state to the most promising cradle of political freedom in the region. The fundamentalists were still there, but so were the feminists. No group’s rights had been trampled for the sake of another’s. The struggle went on, but it went on in the open. And the weapons were words, not bombs or gunshots or mass arrests.

  To me, it was clear that much of the credit for that transformation belonged to a woman.