By late October, the weather had become a little more bearable. We still hadn’t moved to our new apartments, but living in the hotel was hardly a punishment. We held a pizza party to celebrate Colton’s birthday, on the hotel roof, under the stars. Brent, as usual, was in the pool, swimming up and down, up and down. We ignored him. It was a perfect vantage point to enjoy the Manama cityscape. The lights of the elegant towers of the Financial District buildings twinkled against the dark sky. It was a world away from our mountains in Spain, but nevertheless, beautiful in a different way. The celebrations were fun, until Hali-Barry arrived uninvited and broke up the party.
Back in Spain, Sue and Juliet, the Gin Twins, arrived for their annual visit, determined to continue the tradition even though Joe and I were in Bahrain. How I envied them! I so wished I could be in El Hoyo, pouring the gins, slicing the bright, yellow lemons and listening to the latest gossip from England. Much later I got the full, unabridged version of their visit, but for now, I had to content myself with their emails.
“Did you get the keys okay?” I wrote. “And how are the chickens?”
“No problem with the keys,” came the reply. “And the chickens are fine, they’re looking really good, all six of them.”
“Good, but six chickens? Are you sure? We have eight chickens.”
“Nope, just sent Juliet out to count again. Definitely six chickens.”
Oh dear. So we’d lost two of our girls. How sad. Well, they were elderly and they couldn’t live forever.
Whenever the Gin Twins come to Spain, it’s a kind of tradition that they take over the kitchen and cook up a humungous curry, and this year was no exception, even though we weren’t there. It’s a pleasure to cook using all locally grown ingredients. Beautiful glossy green, red and yellow peppers, onions and tomatoes all succumb under the knife and are tossed into hot, fragrant olive oil. I can almost smell it as I write.
The Gin Twins
This year was no different, and the Gin Twins chopped, sliced and sang along to a 60’s CD at the top of their voices while the level on the gin bottle dropped at regular intervals.
“I think I’ll pop outside to take a few photos of the street,” said Juliet, during a lull in cooking duties.
She pointed her camera this way and that, capturing the window boxes, the little white houses and towering mountains. Then, through the viewfinder, two figures appeared. Oh good, she thought, some colourful locals in my picture, and carried on snapping. But the figures loomed larger.
“Hola,” said Juliet, which is about as far as her Spanish stretches.
Instead of passing, the two men halted. They clearly took her greeting as encouragement and rattled a reply in Spanish. Juliet was floundering. Having exhausted her minimal Spanish vocabulary, she was in need of assistance.
“Sue! Come out here! I need your help!”
In a mixture of Spanish, French and energetic hand-signals, the Gin Twins learned that the most insistent of the two, Luis, wasn’t a local at all. He was a relative of Marcia’s, from the shop, and just happened to be visiting. Luis’s eyes lit up in his pasty face and his lecherous grin revealed gold teeth that glinted when he realised that the Gin Twins were man-less, holidaying alone. The other introduced himself as Juan.
Somehow the Gin Twins were prevailed upon, chiefly by Luis, to halt their curry-cooking and were steered down the street to Juan’s cottage.
“They gave us wine and meaty things,” said Juliet, shuddering. Being vegetarian, she found the offerings particularly unappetising. “And then I made the big mistake of plonking myself down on the sofa.”
“I sat on that sofa, too,” recalled Sue.
“Well, Luis starts leaning in, getting all close, you know, touchy-feely... So up I leap up off the sofa and start wandering round the room, pretending I’m looking at Juan’s photos and stuff.”
I’m already laughing. “Did that stop Luis?”
“Sort of. He gives up on me and moves in on Sue. Instead of getting up, she stays rooted to the spot.”
“I did not!”
“You did! The trouble was, we were both extremely pickled and I think they knew it...”
“Then, the next day,” said Sue, “after we’d had some more gins, they turned up again and started banging on the door. They wouldn’t go away!”
“We refused to open it. We just pretended the music was turned up too loud to hear them knocking.”
“But then they started shouting from the street. So we sneaked upstairs and onto the roof terrace...” By now, both Juliet and Sue were creased up, laughing at the memory.
“Then we thought they might see us, so we dropped down on all-fours...”
“Haha! I can remember crawling round that terrace, giggling hysterically, wishing they would go away and leave us in peace!”
“I also remember that curry we cooked was one of the most awesome we ever made. And the accompanying singing was of the highest order!”
The Gin Twins had a good time, in spite of being pursued, and I was ridiculously jealous of them being in Spain, even for that short time. However, I was comforted by the fact that they’d already booked flights to Bahrain for February. I couldn’t wait to see them and show them around ASS, the island, and Bennigan’s.
ۺۺۺ
September, October, was it really November already? So much had happened, and yet we had no idea that events in other parts of the world were bubbling, poised to erupt, and would affect us hugely. Back then, we had never even heard of the Arab Spring, a term that was soon to become a household phrase.
16. The Tree of Life
‘Jake’s Dad’s Thanksgiving Sweet Potato Wonderful’
“dear Ms. vicky,
I wonder why you minimized the work and do not give a comperhension today like in Mr. Wayne’s class?
Fatima’s mother”
ۺۺۺ
Blissfully unaware of the imminent birth of the Arab Spring, we toiled on at school, day after day. I tried hard to make my lessons as interesting as possible but it was an uphill task trying to stimulate the imaginations of my ten and eleven-year-old students.
One day, I handed out sheets of word-puzzles that I’d bribed the photocopier man to reproduce.
“Okay,” I said, passing round the papers, “I’d like you to do this sheet, and then this sheet...”
“Mees...” asked Mustafa Kamel, looking puzzled. “Mees, eef you think it’s sheet, why you want us to do it?”
The kids made me laugh, but also exasperated me. At the start of every week I gave them a list of twenty vocabulary words to learn. Every day we’d practice those words, in sentences, making them familiar. Their homework, on Wednesday, was to revise the words in preparation for the Thursday quiz.
The quiz questions were always the same: ‘Make up your own sentence using the word ---.’ But grading those completed quizzes over the weekend was a trial. Of course, Fatima’s answers were flawless. Those from the boys, however, were disappointing. For example:
Fatima: There were various potted plants in the room.
Ahmed: My computer has a various.
Fatima: The seal was wet and sleek.
Cheeky Mohammed: My sister like to play hide and sleek.
Fatima: The little fairy waved her magic wand.
Mustafa Kamel: If you want to go acros the water jump on a fairy.
Joe was still battling with his own students, very few of whom ever did a stroke of work, and still treated his classes as social gatherings. Making his way to the classroom was his first hurdle, as he ran the gauntlet of passing boys in the corridor who insisted on shaking his hand. Then the first portion of the lesson was taken up with yet more hand-shaking. Every male student walked to the front to shake Joe’s hand, which was very time-consuming.
“Meester Joe, how are you?” Shake, shake.
“Good morning, Talal. I’m fine, thank you. And you?” Shake, shake.
“Good morning, Meester!” Shake, shake.
“Good morning, Mahmoud
.” Shake, shake.
“How are you, Meester?” Shake, shake.
“Fine, Isa, and you?” Shake, shake.
And Joe’s grade-book was laughable, empty rows of boxes showing absences both of students and assignments.
“Talal, where is your homework?”
“Oh, Meester! Sorry Meester! I forget to bring it.”
“Mohammed? Where’s your homework?”
“Meester, sorry, Meester. I’ll bring it tomorrow, I swear to God!”
“You kids are impossible! How do you think you’re going to pass your exams?”
Joe often growled at them, showing his teeth, but that only made them laugh. Thanks to their ubiquitous smartphones, his snarling was captured and within minutes appeared on Facebook and YouTube entitled something like, ‘My physics teacher growling’.
“Meester!” said Noor, knowing she was next to be asked for her homework. “Can I have a Hall Pass and go down to the school entrance? I’ve phoned my driver to bring in my homework.”
And if they could steer Joe away from quadratic equations or Newton’s Laws, they invariably did, (although I hardly blamed them). Aware of his passion for soccer and Formula 1, they’d deliberately initiate discussions.
“Which team you support, Meester?”
“My team is Liverpool,” Joe would say, “but I love seeing Arsenal play.”
“Meester, I can get you tickets for the Formula 1 in March.”
“Thank you, Talal! That would be great! How many of you have been to the Formula 1 races?” he asked the class.
Most of the boys shouted, “I have, Meester!” or, “Meester, I go every year!” while the girls shook their heads.
“You wouldn’t believe the noise those cars make!” said Joe. “They just scream round the track.” He proceeded to execute a pretty good imitation of engines roaring round the circuit. Yet again, his rendition was captured and broadcast on the Internet almost before he’d passed the finishing line.
Attendance at school was poor, but on one day it was practically nonexistent. Joe and I were concentrating on preparing lessons, in our hotel, when a text arrived from Jake.
“Have you looked out the window?”
We hadn’t, the heavy curtains being closed. We parted them to see fat raindrops hurling themselves against the glass, running down in zig-zags, collecting the desert sand as they coursed. Rain? Rain in Bahrain? It was the first rain we’d seen since leaving Spain.
Bahrain is rarely rained upon. I once asked my class if it ever rained in Bahrain, and they all yelled, “No, Mees!” So I should have been prepared for their reaction when it did. The rain fell all night and it was still raining when Jasim collected us with the school bus the next morning.
Bahrain is not built for rain. The roofs are flat and have no gutters. The roads have no slope, nor drains. Therefore it wasn’t long before many streets became impassable and were transformed into rivers of dirty, standing water. The water level soon reached the doors of parked cars.
None of this bothered Jasim, who happily sloshed his bus through the lakes, spraying plumes of filthy water at any unfortunate pedestrian, soaking him further still. When we reached ASS, the short walk from the bus to the administration block to clock in, drenched us. With hair plastered to my head and water running down my back, I entered the Middle School building.
Very few High School students had turned up, rain being an event big enough to warrant staying at home, whether the roads were passable or not. And my classes were also depleted. About two-thirds of my kids did actually appear, although I wished they hadn’t bothered. Any teacher will tell you that kids are affected by adverse weather. Normally good classes turn wild when the wind blows strongly, and naughty children become naughtier. That day, even Fatima couldn’t concentrate, and cheeky Mohammed, Ahmed, Mustafa Kamel and the others were practically swinging from the rafters.
The rain stopped during the day, and the sun came out again. Smokers’ Corner was ankle deep in water, but one of the Nepalese staff, responsible for cleaning and maintenance, had thoughtfully placed lumps of wood for us to use as stepping stones.
Young Mohammed was there, chain-smoking and tapping his pointed shoe nervously. I knew he was still in a world of pain, living with crazy Brent.
Rashida was also there, her ample derriere parked in a damp chair.
“What rain!” she said, slapping her knees. “I have no students!”
“My classes are awful,” I said. “They’re like a bunch of hyperactive chimps today.”
“And how are your chickens?”
“I’ve no idea. Our neighbour doesn’t give us updates.”
“You remember our chicken husband? The one that crowled all day? And the neighbours, they complain?”
“Yes, I remember. Your husband wanted to get rid of it, but your grandson cried. What happened? Does your husband still have it?”
Rashida swung round to young Mohammed and held out her hand. “Mohammed, give me cigarette.”
Obediently, Mohammed gave her a cigarette. Rashida lit up and inhaled deeply.
“No, he does not have it.” She exhaled and the smoke drifted lazily around her in the moist air. “My husband, he tell my grandson if he agree to let chicken husband go, he buy for him six new baby chicklets.”
“To keep on the balcony?” I remembered they occupied an apartment on the eighth floor.
“Yes,” Rashida nodded. “My husband say he sell eggs to the neighbours and security man. Then they not complain.” She flicked the ash away into the water, where it hissed briefly, and continued. “My grandson, he say ‘yes’ because he want the six baby chicklets. And my husband, he take chicken husband to the kill shop. How you call it?”
“I’m not sure, perhaps ‘slaughter shop’?” I was sure shops in Beirut were very different from the European ones I was familiar with.
“The slaughter shop man, he look at our chicken husband, and he say, ‘That is fine bird. That is very fine bird. I weigh your bird, and I give you another, exactly same weight, for your oven. I take your fine bird and put it in my farm. Your fine bird will be chicken husband in my farm and will make more fine birds.’ My grandson, he is very happy, because chicken husband does not die.” Rashida cackled so much at her own story that she sent herself into a coughing fit.
I’m sure the thirsty plants welcomed the rain much more than Joe and I did, particularly Bahrain’s famous Tree of Life. According to official websites, the Tree of Life is a miraculous mesquite, 400 years old and surviving in the desert without any apparent water supply. According to the same sites, it stands alone in the sand, majestic and mysterious. Local inhabitants believe it stands on the actual location of the Garden of Eden and possesses magical youth-giving properties. The Gulf News proclaims it to be ‘ranked fourth in the Official New Seven Wonders of Nature Campaign’.
To be honest, Bahrain is rather short of tourist attractions. I guess the malls and shopping are a big draw, and there is the fort, museum and the King’s camels. But as far as I knew, there were no nice beaches or historical sites to visit. Check any Bahraini tourist site, however, and you will read that The Tree of Life should not be missed.
Joe and I declined Colton and Jake’s kind invitation to see The Tree of Life. I was weighed down with mountains of grading and Joe felt his added bulk would prove too much with four others in the hired car. So Colton, Jake, Emily and Allison set off, eager to view this legend.
“Huh!” said Jake afterwards. “We set out late in the morning in the general direction of the Tree, and our first problem was the traffic congestion. You know what it’s like here in Manama. Traffic backing up, not moving, an accident, whatever.”
“Was the Tree signposted?” I asked.
Jake spluttered. “It was not! We drove for about thirty minutes until we finally saw a poor excuse for a sign pointing down this road. Great, we thought. Finally something that made sense. Directions to Bahrain’s most famous place of interest. What we didn’t know was
that the Tree was going to be an hour’s drive on unmarked paths. That one sign, at the beginning, was our only reference point. Following the best off-roading one can get in a compact car, we spent a good portion of the day searching and scanning the horizon for this great spectacle.”
“But you found it?”
“Yep. After four hours we arrived with pomp and circumstance at the location of Adam’s greatest sin. We also discovered one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding this ‘magic of nature’. It isn’t just one tree at all. The whole day we kept seeing a group of trees and shrubs in the distance, but we all wrote them off because we were looking for, I quote, ‘a single majestic tree standing alone in the desert’. It turned out that the group of trees we’d been staring at for the past four hours was actually where we needed to be. Sadly, we had been close to it all along.”
“What was it like?”
“Was this supposed to be The Tree of Life? What a crock of horseshit. It was a dead tree! The massive dead thing that it was, had a green iron fence surrounding the base of the trunk. But the branches reached so low you could easily climb up and walk along the entire tree. People had carved their names all over it. It was sad to see so many of the large branches broken off and lying nearby. And you should see the trash! It’s just not maintained.”
Jake, Allison and Colton on the Tree of Life
“Was it really dead?” asked Joe.
“No, but if they don’t start looking after it, it soon will be.”
“What a pity...”
“Yep, it was a sad sight. Not what we expected at all. And to make matters worse, we parked in a deep pile of sand and it took fifteen minutes, and a lot of pushing and coughing, to get the car out.”
“So you wouldn’t recommend a trip to see The Tree of Life?”
“No. Don’t bother. Seriously, don’t bother.”
ۺۺۺ
Apparently the day’s rain had delayed our move to the new apartments, but we were assured, yet again, that we’d be moving within a week. Of course, that didn’t happen. Six months had passed and we were still firmly ensconced in the hotel. The new apartment block was so close we could see it from our hotel room, but we were no closer to actually moving in. The six of us laid bets as to when we would move, each putting 500 fils into the pot, winner takes all.
Two Old Fools on a Camel: From Spain to Bahrain and Back Again Page 11