Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  Sometime after midnight, I was woken by the hotel desk attendant reading me an email from Amman that my tickets would now be released if I presented myself at 10 a.m. to the Royal Jordanian agents near the subway. And this I did, leaving a cab waiting outside. The tickets were handed over with offers of coffee and pastries, formal handshakes and many Christmas greetings.

  Forty-eight hours later, I was in Jordan.

  Instead of reading Queen Noor’s life story, I had spent the long wait in the first-class lounge for the connection north from Dubai engrossed in Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples, published by Faber in 1991. Born in Manchester to immigrant parents from South Lebanon, Hourani is still credited with training more Middle East historians at Magdalen and St Antony’s College, Oxford, than has any other historian at the university. The book’s maps, twelve of them, were badly printed in my paperback edition but oozed a serious erudition that added to my anxiety. The expansion of the Islamic Empire from Spain to the Sudan and Ethiopia, and north to the shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian, from the seventh century; the eleventh-century Umayyad caliphate; the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century, to the Mandates after World War I, culminating in the partitioning of Palestine from 1937—the Arab world was like some vast mosaic I would never grasp.

  I knew no Arabic and my phrase book from Daunt’s was printed in Egypt, where, I now gathered, the words and pronunciation were very different from the Arabic of the Palestinians, Chechens, Armenians, Circassians and Bedouins who inhabited Jordan. The situation in Iraq and Syria was different again. There was classical Arabic and there were the regional dialects.

  Hourani ended his book with tables showing the Family of the Prophet, the Shi’i Imans, the Caliphs, the Ruling Families and, finally, the three branches of the Hashemites, beginning with Hussein, King of Hizaz, the Jordanian and the Iraqi branches. Hizaz was somewhere below the plane in the vast wadis of Saudi Arabia. In Jordan, would I be interviewed by his great-grandson? More probably, by one of his underlings. There were no details from anyone of the kind of meeting that awaited me—only the implication from the posh HRH personal assistant in London that it might be slightly disorganised and not very British.

  At Queen Alia airport, I was the only passenger to be separated from the queues of foreign workers and European tourists heading for Petra and the Wadi Rum. I was ushered onto a blue-and-gold carpet through a gate labelled ‘Crowne Classe’, into a VIP lounge with deep ashtrays, smoking stands, velvet sofas, glasses of mint tea and a faintly seedy air of luxury. I discovered later that Crowne Classe meant I was ‘a guest of the Royal Household’. Without a visa, my luggage and I were given a version of diplomatic immunity—which I would later find out meant that people who behaved ‘inappropriately’ or otherwise blotted their copybooks would be fast-tracked out of the kingdom and onto a plane back to where they came from. Literally.

  Then, in a speedy and heated car, I was driven on a freeway through a dazzlingly white desert landscape, while the driver explained carefully that security would be very tight at the hotel in the middle of Amman where I was to stay. This was because of the suicide bombings by Al-Qaeda at three luxury international hotels in the same precinct just six weeks before. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had planned the attack, was a Jordanian militant Islamist from Zarqa, a few miles outside Amman. Fifty-seven people died, and 115 were injured, most of them local families attending a wedding reception. This was Jordan’s first terrorist attack, and huge street demonstrations condemning the violence had followed. At the Le Méridien hotel, body scans and thorough luggage and handbag checks would be mandatory throughout my three-day stay.

  A strikingly beautiful young woman in casual western winter clothes was waiting for me at reception. She introduced herself as Adiba Mango, Prince Hassan’s ‘research assistant who had been transcribing the tapes’. She took me up to an enormous suite on the top floor, with a vast marble bathroom with a spa, and several bedrooms. I should rest now, and she would collect me midafternoon, to meet some of the family and to be briefed by them about the project. She wasn’t sure who I would be meeting, but made it clear that the questions in my notebook would have to wait.

  Why an autobiography by interview? Whose idea was it? The handful of speeches I’d been given to read in London, and the books I’d skimmed in the British Library, now seemed to me to be less-than-useful to draw on for a discussion—assuming, of course, there would be a discussion. Maybe I would be issued instructions, sent away to consider them. My small notebook of questions now looked absurd. Were there models that were drawn on when the project was first envisaged? Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Donald Rumsfeld had all recently produced powerful, or simply self-serving, books about the parlous state of the world and their visions for sorting it out. The phrase ‘to offer insights’ had leaped out at me from one of El Hassan’s BBC ‘Dialogues’. His involvement in ‘interfaith and intercultural dialogue’ was frequently mentioned—catch-alls I didn’t hear in smug Australia, where the benefit of multiculturalism was yet again being contested. I had failed to come up with an Australian version of a memoir as an example. The demand for political memoirs would only really grow strong after Howard lost office to Kevin Rudd in 2007.

  The researcher called for me at 3.30, and we drove fast through heavy traffic to the gates of a compound where the Royal Palaces had been built on a hill overlooking what she called Old Downtown. She explained that King Abdullah, Prince Hassan’s nephew, lived in a much more modern compound, in one of the newest circles of rapidly growing Amman.

  The soldiers in the several gatehouses obviously knew her, and waved the car through. She drove slowly along the streets of the large, tree-lined compound, pointing out the institutional buildings and old palaces—all with bars on the windows, and no one in sight except for a man sweeping leaves. We reached a gate where the researcher rang the office on her car phone and was told to go to the guest house, where some of the family would join us. She took me into a small sitting room, where an open fire was reflected in the polished parquet floors, and there were silver-framed signed portraits of various members of royalty, most of whom I didn’t recognise.

  While we waited, she told me that her parents were close friends of Prince Hassan and his wife, Princess Sarvath, that her mother was Swedish, and her father’s family Circassian. She had recently married, and had been a research assistant for a biography of King Hussein. She had read history at Oxford, and the task of transcribing the Prince’s interviews had fluctuated, depending on his availability and her own. She spoke of the Prince with great respect and affection, and confirmed that ‘the book project’ had been in the pipeline for several years. My hockey-playing school friend was mentioned, as sharing the transcribing load, between managing schedules and travelling with the Prince.

  Why me? I did not ask.

  The first member of the family to arrive at the guest house introduced herself as Badiya. She was the youngest in the family, a stylish young lawyer in high-heeled boots, with a swirling tweed skirt and small talk, who lived in London. I was obviously being vetted before being introduced to her parents. Then her extremely beautiful black-haired mother, in a long camel coat and boots, burst into the room, welcomed me, clasped my hand and told me to ask her husband anything I wished when he joined us. He must do this book, he needs to do it, she said. He calls it his ditty and makes himself available when he can, she went on, but he has to be pinned down. At this point, I think, I said I needed to see a lot more of the transcripts than the ten pages that had been sent to me in England before I could decide. She agreed.

  Why me? I did not ask.

  Then a short, round man eased his way into the room behind his wife, and I stood—or maybe I didn’t, I can’t recall. Prince Hassan was in his mid fifties, grey haired, moustachioed, grey suited, courteous. His air of deep melancholy struck me. He was introduced by his wife, who now left briskly with the two young women, so we could ‘talk’. I to
ld him I had seen ten pages of transcript only and described my preliminary reading in the British Library. This project, which had been ‘in research’ for a while, I gathered, would require a good deal more than that.

  I asked my questions about the progress of the Iraq War, and the refugees Jordan was caring for—the more than 600,000 who had crossed the border since the war had started, now housed in camps in Amman and near the Syrian border, which were full to overflowing. I told him that a book along the lines of his latest publication, To Be a Muslim: Islam, Peace, and Democracy, explaining Islam and Muslims for the lay reader, was badly needed in my country as well, as attested by the recent Cronulla riots, which had been all over Al Jazeera and CNN. Australia’s decision to join the coalition of the willing had been no surprise, Prince Hassan said. Australian politicians regularly came through Amman ‘for meetings’, and Alexander Downer and Gareth Evans were mentioned. Prince Hassan’s only visit to Australia had been to Melbourne during the Gough Whitlam era. He remembered riding around the Tan Track on a lively police horse supplied to Government House.

  His wife had made it rather clear that he was a reluctant starter for a memoir, so I asked about the kind of book he was prepared to do. Was it to be published in English and in Arabic? Both, he said.

  I was interested in his point of view of Jordan as a concept rather than a nation. His grandfather had conceived it as ‘a pluralist haven’, which, again, I had picked up from some of the things I’d read, and I wanted to understand what this meant in modern Jordan. I didn’t question him about what he was prepared to disclose regarding the turmoil of the succession change, since I assumed the transcribed interviews would make this clear. I asked what the function was of the wonderfully named (in English) Arab Thought Forum, which had been mentioned often in some of the speeches I’d read. He did not question me at all about myself—but I was used to this from people immersed in their own work.

  We spoke for about half an hour, then walked to the office, the Diwan, where an assistant had been instructed to give me a fat envelope containing 100 pages, to read overnight. I was to return in the morning with ‘my impressions for the Prince of its strengths and weaknesses’. Management speak had a grip here too.

  Back at the hotel, I ordered a whisky, had a deep spa bath, and contemplated telephoning my family, but it was the middle of the night in Melbourne, and my husband was somewhere in Chicago and not answering his phone. Then, over a meal in the hotel’s bistro, I started reading the pages, trying to get my tired traveller’s mind around their potential, badly wanting them to be wonderful.

  And they were—sort of. Like most first rough drafts, especially those done through interview, it took a while to get going. But there was powerful and important stuff in the context of this latest terrible war, which was happening less than a thousand kilometres east of where I was. People were queuing at the borders of Syria and Jordan to get away from Baghdad and Mosul, paying 150 Jordanian dinars (about eighty Australian dollars) for a visa, and using more cash for bribes and as evidence they could pay their way, precipitating the latest in the refugee crisis Jordan had been struggling with since 2003.

  Lines leaped out of the transcript at me. ‘The distance between the head and the heart’—the necessity of the heart being kept in check, in order to construct a policy, to fulfil the role of Crown Prince. What was a Crown Prince? There was a strong sense of the role being a duty and a privilege but also a great burden.

  At some point, the Prince’s transcript quoted Margaret Thatcher’s remark that Arabs and the British see things differently. My working life had been defined by a strong sense that Australians and the British saw things differently as well. ‘Powerful élites’ were mentioned critically several times in the transcript, and the Hashemites described as ‘a political school of thought’, not as a bloodline or a dynasty. Bridge-building in the Middle East seemed to be an overarching mission. The predicament of the modern Arab state, with no cultural consensus about sources of legitimacy, had been made all the more delicate by the events of 9/11.

  That evening in the hotel, I took notes. There was so much even in just those pages. The transcript petered out in the 1980s, but before that there were glimpses of a lonely childhood in Amman in the early 1950s, with a strong and adored mother; an ailing father, King Talal; and a Miss Cheesman, a beloved nanny who was part of the household before the boy was sent away to boarding school in England. Would PH, as I was calling him in my notebook, be prepared to elucidate all this so that a portrait of his life and times could emerge? The British writers I read, and had sometimes worked with, were often unbearably reticent. Were Arab princes also? That was a question I left as a reminder in my notebook for the morning.

  The next day, I was shown into a large, but not opulent, office, not unlike a prime minister’s back home. The black-white-and-greenstriped flag of Jordan, with its big red triangle and single star, was prominent, and the room had photos of family and eminent visitors, a large desk, and an area with a low table where coffee was waiting and I was invited to sit. With my publisher’s hat on, I said my piece about the transcript’s strengths and weaknesses, and what I thought a book emerging from this part of the world at this particular time could be. When I mentioned my great interest in Prince Hassan’s early life—Miss Cheesman and his parents, his schooling, a portrait of Amman as it was in the 1950s—Prince Hassan made a few notes with a fat Montblanc pen on a yellow writing pad.

  This time, I asked more firmly about the process involved and the support staff such a project would require if it were to be completed in eighteen months or so, which had been the time frame mentioned the day before—a deadline that was almost certainly unrealistic. I was assured this was the business of his daughter and the researcher, who had it in hand. We could discuss all this over lunch, if I would join them in the house. So, at midday, we crunched across the gravel to another building, a large, lovely old house surrounded by flowering camellias and japonicas. Lunch was laid out on a side table in a formal dining room, where Princess Sarvath, Princess Badiya and the researcher were waiting to hear what I’d made of ‘the ditty’ and, presumably, what the singer of the ditty had made of me. The talk was wide-ranging and informal, with plenty of jokes and frankness about the stopping and starting of The Book in the past, and how it now needed to get going again.

  I reiterated that the kind of international readership I imagined for such an autobiographical account would be intrigued by the details of Prince Hassan’s childhood, schooling and education, leading up to when his brother invited him to serve as Crown Prince at the age of eighteen, just as he was about to go up to Oxford from Harrow. After that, his relationship with his much older brother, King Hussein, who had entrusted him with the building of modern institutions, would be the core of the book.

  Also frankly discussed at lunch was the drama of the succession change in 1999: the announcement on television, the army’s surveillance of the house from the air, the loyalty of the staff who stayed. Prince Hassan had refused to talk to the western media about the death of his beloved brother; about the role of his American wife, Queen Noor. My overnight notion of a book that told of his life and times in the context of his nation-building work, rather than focusing on a complex injustice he did not wish to speak of, was, evidently, the right note to strike. I seemed to have reassured the family that such a story warranted a real book in his own words, not the kind of tell-all sensational articles he’d avoided.

  We talked for several hours at lunch and, according to my diary, I was questioned only about my response to the transcript. Information about my life and work in Australia had presumably been conveyed by my hockey-playing school friend, who was visiting her family for Christmas, or by whoever in the office had decided to approach me. I was then asked if I would like a tour of Old Amman, where Prince Hassan had lived as a child. Of course, I would. I was shown into a lovely little sitting room with an open fire, and rugs on gleaming parquet, a pile of coffee-table books, a
nd more framed photos of the family in exotic locations, to wait while phone calls were made and Prince Hassan got a coat.

  And so, I found myself ushered into an enormous armoured SUV, the first car in a military convoy, with Prince Hassan, now in khaki and a padded jacket, driving. I was told to sit up front beside him, so he could describe where he was heading and what he wanted me to see. Several other armoured jeeps joined our rapid exodus from the compound into the main thoroughfare, where they kept coming up alongside the Prince’s car—which he muttered to me that he hated—as if to provide a buffer zone in the event of an attack. The Prince then turned into the crowded, narrow streets of Old Amman around the suq, joking that he had thwarted them, there was now no room for the armoured jeeps.

  Pedestrians, old and young, climbing the steep streets, recognised him and waved, some tapping on the glass to catch his attention and grinning. Several times, Prince Hassan stopped the car and lowered the window to speak to people he knew by name. Keif sa’hat al usrah? he said, explaining to me he was asking after their families.

  Obviously, I was being given an orchestrated glimpse of a man much loved by ordinary people, people he’d grown up among.

  He drove down the street where he was born, the convoy following, indicating his mother’s house, where the midwife had delivered him in 1947, before the Italian hospital was built; the garden gate, where the baker would call each day, trying to persuade his mother to buy many more loaves than she needed. I later wrote these stories down, wanting more.

  At the very top of the hill, towering over the city, was the Roman citadel with its Temple of Hercules, a huge Umayyad palace and a Byzantine church. Officials, who had obviously been contacted beforehand, were waiting there to welcome the Prince and to show me over parts of the site, answering my rudimentary questions about the archaeological work that was well underway. Below, in the distance, I could see a vast Roman Amphitheatre, which I was told was still in use for music festivals. Then I was shown the slender minarets of the Al-Husseini mosque, built in 1924 by the first King Abdullah on the site of an ancient mosque built in 640AD by the second caliph of Islam.