Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  The contract for the proposed book was not waiting when I arrived to start work but I was assured it was being drawn up in London and that a draft would be ready soon. The need for a confidentiality clause was obvious but its scope still unclarified. The air of secrecy gave me some idea of the need for discretion. This was a place where foreign journalists visited often. Requests came through all the time for interviews, profiles, opinion pieces. Hashemite princes do not email or write letters, or talk on mobile phones. They make notes in the margins of schedules and sign letters in black ink from fat pens. Or they did then—maybe now it is different.

  The PA kept emphasising I must never mention The Book to anyone, but everyone I was introduced to, within the Palace compound and outside, was curious about why I was there. Why was I in Jordan, working at the Palace? I was asked wherever I went.

  My response, my friend advised, should be that I was there ‘to work in the archives’, ‘to help with HRH’s papers’, ‘to examine the official photographs in the Palace library’—all transparently absurd. The archives were in Arabic, and stored in battered boxes piled high in a storeroom in the office, and accessed by those wanting to rewrite history, to cover their tracks, I was told with a laugh by an office worker who unlocked the door for me one day. It became so farcical, that the PA would grin and answer for me in an official voice, We are working on a very special project for Sidi Hassan. Which, of course, made speculation inevitable. She, as a powerful foreigner, was resented, and she knew it. Presumably, I soon would be also.

  I was reminded often about surveillance, and keeping the tapes of the interviews under lock and key. We used USB sticks to transfer drafts and transcripts between computers, and worked on our own laptops, which we had to keep locked when we were away from them. The office computers were insecure, I was told, but soon it became apparent that mine was too. Emails mentioning the book needed to be in code, I was told. Files sometimes disappeared from my desktop, only to reappear in another location. Someone Somewhere was reading Something, and making of it what they could.

  Whenever, over the first few weeks, I mentioned to the PA my doubts about the absent contract, the scope of the task and the tight time frame, she laughed and said it would be all right. It’s always like this. The daily and weekly schedules, the meetings, the speeches, the official visits, the sudden calls on HRH’s time; a ‘project’ to cheer him up, as this clearly was construed, had to be fitted in where it could. It was impossible to get a long session with the Prince, who was often suddenly, or so it seemed to me, called away to Islamabad or Morocco or London. The PA’s focus on scheduling and transcribing the interviews wavered whenever HRH’s busy agenda had to be rearranged. I was beginning to understand the transcript’s scrappy interviews, the recycled speeches, and the lack of a detailed chronology, which I now started compiling for myself.

  And, more worryingly, the kind of dignified but readable book we discussed initially was rather different from, what I was starting to gather, the family expected. My confidence faltered, with my talk of trying to arrange publication in London in eighteen months already sounding wildly unrealistic.

  Perhaps to make me feel better, my friend the PA showed me the sights of modern Amman. Some evenings, my phone rang and it would be her, suggesting she collect me from the hotel, as there were places she wanted to show me. She drove like a rural Australian, with her elbow on the window frame. She’d been driving in Jordan for years in her old car through the terrifying traffic, speeding around the seven or eight circles of ever-expanding Amman. This meant she was not constrained by having to request drivers after hours, and by the fact that bringing taxis into the compound was discouraged. I tried to imagine driving myself one day and was relieved to be told it wouldn’t be permitted.

  One evening, we went with the newly appointed head gardener to a café with dancing. The PA was greeted warmly, and ushered to a prominent table, where we ordered pizza and nagillas. Women, arriving separately, sat apart from the men but when the live music of ouds, woodwind and bagpipes started and the men began to dance, a few women, in stilettos and jeans and sparkling tops, joined them, dancing with erotic wit. We sat and clapped as the music got louder, our table a little enclave of foreignness. At some point, a young soldier, whom the PA knew from the Palace guards, joined us. He was probably our escort for the night. The head gardener, like me, newly arrived in Jordan, was looking around and grinning like a tourist. We drank bottled water and smoked our apple-flavoured nagillas, and I was amazed to be there.

  Another evening, with the moon rising and the lights coming on in the houses across the valley, we went to a cool, crowded rooftop place called books@café in Rainbow Street, Jabal Amman, overlooking Downtown, and where eating wood-fired pizzas on the terrace was recommended. The bookshop was a good one, full of British and American bestsellers, literary fiction, and classics arranged by author. There were lots of foreigners and students, and some people the PA knew, who asked to join our table. Again, we fielded questions. Why was I here? What was my work?

  I’d been at work on the book for a few weeks when the contract arrived from London. In the meantime, I’d been reading widely; thinking hard; reviewing all the old transcripts, supplementing them whenever possible with new interviews. The contract described the process as ‘providing editorial expertise’ for His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal, who ‘is currently writing a book’.

  Already I knew this was wishful thinking; ‘avoiding interview sessions for a book he was reluctant to have compiled and written for him’ was more accurate. His wife and daughter often offered themselves for interview, to tell me about the subjects they wanted included. I was starting to understand these were, doubtless, the subjects they knew the Prince would avoid. The succession change had been brutal but Prince Hassan did not want to talk about it.

  I was uneasy about the contract not reflecting the reality, but then, how could it? It was drawn up in London, subject to Jordanian law. Modern Sunni, I was assured. The PA was sanguine. HRH The Princess Sarvath was appreciative of everything the PA and I were managing to make happen, and was full of suggestions for questions her husband must be asked, to set the record straight. It was not so hard to guess that was the main anxiety, and perhaps why a book was wanted in the first place. The response to the reworked chapters I intended to leave behind when I returned to Australia in June would give me some sense of how to proceed with the rest of the project.

  By now, I was concerned not only about the lack of support for the book, but how doing it by interviews, reworking old material, visiting archives that were in Arabic and looking at undated photographs in the Diwan library could ever be kept ‘confidential’. Writing a magazine article by means of an interview done over a few days is not the same as doing a book. But each time I mentioned my doubts to the PA, she laughed and said it would be all right.

  My role felt more like that of a traditional scribe. I should have asked the Prince what he thought, but I am fairly certain he would have said, ‘Ask my wife, it was her idea.’ Princess Badiya, the youngest daughter, who had drawn up the contract, was not around to discuss it. Adiba, the clever Middle East researcher, was helpful when she had time, and certainly brought her expertise to bear on my initial ignorance. My knowledge of Middle Eastern politics and recent history was limited to the anguish of Jewish friends appalled by the brutality of the Israeli Defense Forces and the colonisation policies of the Likud, and to what I learned from the English-language media coverage of the past few decades, and the ghastly point of no return that was 9/11.

  The confidentiality clause was in fairly standard legalistic gobbledegook. ‘The Second Party [me] agrees to keep confidential all information obtained by her or of which she becomes aware regarding the First Party in the course of performing the services or otherwise, save for such information as is already in or becomes part of the public domain otherwise than by breach of the Second Party.’ I ought to have queried what kind of breach they meant. The
project was, of course, speculated upon by everyone there, and certainly by my family and friends at home, and in London, where the two worlds overlapped. It was necessary, surely, that they trust me to make a fine book happen somehow. I must have been vetted and selected accordingly. Surely.

  One night, the power went off in my little set of rooms on the fifth floor of the hotel. Silence and total darkness. The phone line to reception was dead. I waited for a while for something to happen, then felt my way down five flights of stairs to the lobby, where Iraqi men and their covered wives were peacefully playing cards by candlelight. ‘Please not to be perturbed, Miss Hilary,’ said the manager as he handed me a candle, explaining there was a big fire next door. I sat in the lobby for a while, watching the card players, half hoping they’d invite me to join them, then felt my way back upstairs.

  But, staring into the darkness at 3 a.m., I heard the whoosh of my computer on the desk opposite the bed. The power was back on, and an email had come from someone wide awake, like me, on the other side of the world. It was unlikely to be one of the family, they’d be at work or at school. It would be a friend, maybe; several had been keeping me up to date with gossip, and their optimistic angles on Kevin Rudd’s ascendency as leader of the opposition. I couldn’t resist getting out of bed and opening the laptop, to find Psalm 46 meticulously typed into an email to comfort me, from a Christian friend who guessed I might be struggling.

  God is our hope and strength: a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be moved: and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea.

  I mouthed it to myself in the dark, having learned it as a schoolgirl. O come hither, and behold the works of the Lord: what desolation he hath made in the earth. The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

  The imagery of the Old Testament resounded in this rocky place of springs and olive trees where the psalms have their roots. And I was comforted.

  The next day, a small blood stain on the pillow I’d been clutching was somehow unsurprising. Clichés abounded. Tears of blood. Broken heart. I forgot about it, and kept slogging through the old interviews and thinking of new questions to ask.

  Soon after, I went to the Palace clinic near the stables for a flu injection. The social worker who accompanied me was in charge of the welfare of everyone in the compound, including their families outside it—‘even including you’, she laughed. I asked her about her work, which she said was most difficult—some very poor families, many kinds of trouble, many orphans, some people very sick indeed. Her job was to guide them through the Jordanian bureaucracy, which was often, she said, cumbersome and sometimes corrupt.

  She took me to a concrete building, where a smiling doctor greeted me at the door: ‘Welcome, Miss Hilary. We are very happy to have you with us.’ I was very happy to be there too. I was offered coffee in a tiny cup and introduced around. The offices each had a large photo of young King Abdullah, lying on a hospital bed, giving blood. He looked pale and none too happy, but it surely said something about him being a monarch who was prepared to suffer for his people. In the room I was taken to, a portrait of the King was woven into a hanging rug.

  My injection ‘of the very best’ was painless and everyone in the room was pleased. More coffee was passed around, and other injections against hepatitis, dengue fever, plague were offered. The doctor said he didn’t have them himself unless he was travelling to Africa or Afghanistan, so I declined, but remembered to ask for some sleeping tablets.

  The waiting room as I left was full of young soldiers who had been encouraged to have flu injections. They laughed when the doctor informed them I’d just had one and that I’d told him it didn’t hurt a bit.

  More excursions were dreamed up during this first month. There was a spectacular family picnic in orange groves near the Golan Heights; occasional evening outings to meet artists and writers, where I was introduced vaguely as a head of Australian arts. Before I’d left home, and on the advice of the PA, I had a business card printed with my qualifications and credentials, but I couldn’t see myself ever handing one out.

  The PA arranged frequent sightseeing on Fridays, the holy day, outside Amman and north through the Jordan Valley, to the old Ottoman capital of Salt; or to Um Queis; or down south to Kerak, where we scrambled over the ruins, usually with no one else in sight. The tourist buses were lined up at Jerash and Madaba.

  The contract was signed on a Thursday and, that afternoon, I had been allotted a driver called Muhammad to take me south to Petra for two days’ sightseeing. I would be delivered to a hotel and collected by the same driver, who was returning to his family for Friday and Saturday.

  I packed skirts and shawls for the evening; bathers, in case there was a women’s pool or spa; climbing boots and a hat; and loose shirts and trousers, for avoiding sunburn. Plus Robert Fisk’s enormous, clever opus, The Great War for Civilisation; notebooks; and my iPod, loaded up before I left home with classical works and singers that were filling my head with music at night, when the alternative was CNN and Al Jazeera, with news of Iraq and Palestine.

  The road out of Amman was choked with tankers and lorries; diesel fumes erupted out of vans crowded with veiled women and small children, the men in the front. Then the road headed south towards the Saudi border, Petra, and the Wadi Musa, the Valley of Moses. We were in stony country, where young boys with sticks watched over small herds of sheep and goats. Women in long, dark coats and white hijabs, small children on their hips, walked in groups on the road towards clusters of shops. Boxes of fruit and cans of Pepsi were piled high in neighbourhoods specialising in car repairs, building materials, electronics.

  It was chilly for early May, and Muhammad put the heater on full blast. He had as much English as I had Arabic but we laughed a lot. He asked if he could pick up a friend in Shubak, where the desert ends and the olive groves begin.

  His friend told me he was with the UN in East Timor and had been to Darwin. I liked the way they talked together in the front seat, with an easy intimacy men don’t often show back home, making eye contact with each other, asking questions about each other’s families and sometimes translating for me. These courteous men insisted on finding me a cold orange juice, which took three attempts at roadside stalls where the power to the refrigerators was turned off. When the ring-pull on the can broke, one of them gouged it open for me with a key.

  By the time we got to Petra, a lovely small town sweeping around a hillside, the evening light was fading to the palest pink, and the men accompanied me into the foyer to ensure I was on the accommodation list for the next two days. I heard them mention the Diwan of El Hassan bin Talal. They both shook my hand and drove off, promising to collect me very early on Sunday morning.

  My room was huge, full of silken cushions, indoor ferns and a sunken spa bath, plus instructions about times to arrive at meeting points for tours to the Nabatean Treasury tomb and Monastery that are carved into rose-pink rock. The many buses lined up in the car park were ominous. Petra is one of Jordan’s main tourist attractions and a UNESCO world heritage site, and has an ancient history of which not much is known. But the dining room was half empty when I went down. There were only a few tables of men playing backgammon—called shish-bish, I was told—and what was probably the end of a wedding party: a young couple seated by the window, surrounded by flowers, honey cakes and attentive waiters. I had a whisky, ordered falafel and rice, and started reading Marguerite van Geldermalsen’s Married to a Bedouin.

  The next morning, determined to beat the tourists, having forgotten I was one too, I woke before dawn, had a scratch breakfast of yoghurt, fruit and coffee, and set out, with several bottles of water, to see the sunrise on the pink walls of the Treasury. I was first at the dusty ticket booth, where the donkeys and horses were lined up, then had the kilometre of towering walls in the deep shade of the Siq all to myself before the rose-red Treasury started to glow. It was not unlike when I woke before dawn after a night in a sw
ag in Uluru, and followed the red glow on the Rock long before the sun came up over the horizon. The colours, the light, the solitude; the sense of walking into the heart of a mystery that would never reveal itself.

  I saw a rough path heading up behind the Amphitheatre, away from the long trail of tourists on donkeys and horses, and clambered up until I found a small cave. My mobile had a signal and, elated, I texted my husband. Wish you were here—from a cave high above Petra. It would be afternoon at home. He’d be working. And miss the irony. I deleted it.

  A young Bedouin girl in jeans and a kurta, her headscarf topped by a khaki army hat, came springing towards me across the rocks, and insisted I was heading the wrong way and should follow her. And that’s what I did, holding onto the bushes growing out of the rocks and trying not to slip.

  Ruda, who said she was sixteen, stuck with me from then on. She was full of cheek and guidebook patter. ‘See this pool? It’s full of the tears of Moses.’ ‘This Garden Temple is where the ghosts of all the camels lie.’ With her mobile phone clapped to her ear, she raced ahead of me across the boulders, no doubt announcing she had a customer for the seed and clove necklaces, the miniature oil lamps and bunches of herbs laid out on mats beside the track.

  When I caught up, I was introduced to aunties, sisters, cousins, who offered me bottled water, rooms in caves overnight, and glasses of sweet Bedu tea made on little fires, and told me over and over what a good guide Ruda was, how lucky I was that she found me, and how she alone could get me to the Monastery and then to the Place of Sacrifice.