Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  Unlike me, Carmen has lived alone for much of her adult life. Lovers have come and gone, or she has. She works to great effect all day in a house she has shaped to suit her life. Her study has the best equipment; not, like mine, the oldest. Her sheets are of fine linen from French markets. Her cups and plates are from journeys with friends in Brazil or from a beloved village in France. Her cupboards are stocked for the next few months. She shows me a spreadsheet she uses to keep track of her expenses. She has post office scales and a supply of stamps so she can sell books she doesn’t want. Her dogs love her and so do her friends. She knows how to live with herself. I did not know how to live with me.

  I woke, fragile and horrified, after a dream of our dog being slaughtered in a great white butchery. I wept under the shower where I couldn’t be heard; and panicked in Sainsbury’s, confronted by rows of French wine labels without a man to select the reds for an ‘us’ that no longer existed. Carmen, who had driven me to the shopping centre so I’d know how to get there in her car by myself next time, didn’t notice. And I’d failed to tell her how I detest large shopping centres.

  The next afternoon, having made my way to Oxford Street, I stood paralysed in a shop that sold warm clothes in rich autumn colours, unable to see myself in anything, needing nothing. I no longer knew what I looked like. My colour sense had deserted me.

  The next time I entered Jordan from London without a visa, I was collected at Queen Alia airport by the PA. She exchanged greetings with the luggage handlers, and briskly arranged for my bags to be identified and fast-tracked unopened through customs.

  This was a great relief, as one of them contained a brand-new ukulele in its baby-shaped case, which a friend had given me to cheer myself up with at nights. I’d been grateful but unconvinced—especially when she opened the case with a flourish, to reveal a glittering ukulele with mother-of-pearl inlay, and picks, spare strings, song books, and You Can Teach Yourself Uke by William May. She then sat cross-legged on my bed, to show me some of her cool strumming secrets. She sang some bars of ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, or maybe it was ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’? All I remember is that we were shrieking with laughter.

  I had learned piano and recorder as a schoolgirl; my first husband had taught me to play a few pieces on his classical guitar when we lived in Greece; I’d gone along to mandolin classes with my youngest son, until he threw it in. I could read music but, in my fragile state, the chords and pick for the ukulele looked utterly daunting. And the thought of turning up for my fancy job at the Palace with a ukulele I couldn’t play filled me with dread. I could hear the beautiful sound of azans calling people to prayer five times a day from the minarets of the Al-Husseini mosque in Downtown. Was it even permitted to play ukuleles during Ramadan?

  I’d considered leaving it behind under the bed; then, since I was heading into winter, left out some sandals and summer clothes, and squeezed the uke in its case into my over-stuffed suitcase. It was now being wheeled on a trolley by one of the PA’s baggage-handling mates, waved through customs and loaded unopened into her illegally parked old car. Salaam alaikum, Al-hummdulillah.

  The PA then drove me to a small hotel overlooking a supermarket and a building site. The city of Amman that had been shown to me six months before was near the old quarter, Downtown, with its steep steps climbing up above the suq, between narrow roads and ancient terraces. Further on beyond the first, second and third circles, I’d been shown scenes of demolition and reconstruction, superhighways and overpasses—but I recognised nothing this time.

  The hotel I was staying in was modest. The windows were dusty, the noise of jackhammers was constant, but I was here to work and it was enough for me that ‘Welcome’ was on everyone’s lips. A kind someone had filled my little sitting room with flowers and fruit, and put local yoghurt and Swiss muesli in the fridge. There was a reading light, and a neatly folded prayer rug, which I considered laying out for some yoga stretches—then squashed the thought as irreverent. Muslim prayer mats and yoga didn’t go together in my scheme of things. My arm was still tender and my next check-up, in Florence, was months off.

  The PA had bought me a phone card and a computer plug, and conveyed to reception that a driver would collect me in the morning. I was shown a couple of public phones and a meals room off the foyer. There was a lot of laughter and greetings exchanged between her and the men at reception, who seemed to know that she worked at one of the Royal Palaces. But whether she indicated that I, too, would be working there, I couldn’t tell. My friend’s Arabic was animated and gestural, limited to salutations and cordial questions about families and health. We were clearly objects of great curiosity—men gathered around, listening to the only obvious foreigners and the only unaccompanied women.

  My luggage was delivered to my 5th-floor room, an iron was arranged for me, and someone at reception wrote down an address in Arabic that I could show the driver the next morning. My friend assured me an itinerary would be waiting for me.

  I had no idea where I was. The maps in the hotel foyer were from the tourist bureau, and didn’t name local streets or have directions in English. Certainly, the several Royal Palaces of Amman were marked nowhere that I could see.

  Late on that first day, after trying to sleep, I looked up my Arabic phrase book, printed in Egypt, and practised saying kweis yom, mahaba and salaam alaikum, alaikum ma’salaama. Then I went across the road in search of whisky, having been uncertain what I could bring in during Ramadan. Except for a few bottles that were under lock and key, the supermarket seemed only to sell fruit and vegetables, meat and rows of cleaning products. But the word whisky worked. I was taken outside and shown a footpath through the rubble around one side of the building and up a steep slope to another small shopping strip, where an unpromising-looking liquor store stood on its own in a vacant lot.

  I slid the front door open to a cavernous interior with shelves of Indian and German beers, European and Lebanese wines and champagnes, American ryes, and single malts from the Scottish Highlands, with prices quoted in US dollars and in dinars. There were no other customers. I procrastinated, or rather panicked, going up and down the aisles until I spotted a bottle of Talisker from the Isle of Skye—my ancestral home, a comforting thought. I emerged into the chilly early evening sunshine elated, feeling like a drunkard, with what I hoped was mild Drum, cigarette papers, and a large bottle of Scotch wrapped in newspaper, in exchange for so many dinars that I hadn’t the courage to convert them.

  I checked emails in the computer booth downstairs; sent short messages home to family and friends, saying I’d arrived; then ordered a pizza in the restaurant, where a group of businessmen in dark suits and red and white kaffiyas were smoking and talking on their phones. I retreated to my room with Hazel Rowley’s Tête à Tête, poured a large whisky, and rolled a skinny cigarette, telling myself that I only smoked under extreme duress, and that this first evening surely qualified.

  I slept badly and, at sunrise, went for a walk. It was early October, the morning very cold, my jacket inadequate, and the pavement cracked and uneven. Only stray cats were about, dozens of them raiding rubbish bins. A couple of taxis cruised slowly beside me, flashing their lights, hoping sense would prevail and I’d flag them. Instead, I tried walking briskly, determinedly noticing landmarks, waiting politely at streetlights for the occasional workman balancing tools and planks on bicycles, trying to memorise the way back to the hotel. There were three hours before I had to present myself at the office Majlis, to discuss the scope of the project, and get some idea of the Prince’s reaction to the five draft chapters I’d left behind in May.

  As I was finishing a strong, sweet Turkish coffee, a car with a uniformed driver called for me at reception. He drove me fast through several huge roundabouts, and into the royal compound, where, at a couple of checkpoints, the car boot and its underbody were inspected, and my name read out from a list before we were waved through. I was deposited in the car park under the trees, clutching a handbag
and with a computer bag over my shoulder, the gravel again crunching under my shoes, hoping to see a familiar face among the several people from the office who came out to greet me. Welcome, they said, explaining that my friend would be there soon to take me to where we would again be working. As a PA, she lived somewhere inside the compound, as did the English housekeeper and the head gardener, who was a New Zealander. Apart from the gardener, they all had been part of this royal household for many years.

  That morning, sitting, with my bags, on the low wall in the autumn sunshine, I felt fortunate, yes—exhilarated, certainly—to have been invited back into the heart of a small country caught up in the war-mongering of the past three dreadful years. I’d been following the war as best I could from grabs on the nightly news, and from the BBC and CNN world service broadcasts some nights when I couldn’t sleep. The faint optimism of the initial few months of 2006, following the first elections in Iraq, had faded, the country descending into the chaos of civil war. When the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, Shia Islam’s holiest site, about 100 kilometres north of Baghdad, was destroyed, the reprisals were horrific. More than one thousand Sunni Iraqis were killed; then, in March, forty more bodies were found in Baghdad—Sunnis murdered by the Iraqi military.

  Jordan was trapped by American foreign policy, as was Australia. It was now even more dependent on the US for security and subsidy, and on the UN and aid agencies for support for the Iraqi refugees, who every day were streaming over the western border crossing at Karameh, north of Amman, or heading first into Syria.

  As I sat outside the Majlis in the compound, I knew I would have been thoroughly checked out again, vetted and scrutinised by the Jordanian embassy in Canberra. They might even now know I’d had cancer. They’d had me somewhere in their sights for almost two years, after all. But I knew that I could do what was required, make a book by interviewing and researching, observing and asking questions to flesh out the little I’d seen so far. The draft chapters I’d left behind read reasonably well but would need much more input from HRH so we could proceed to the rest of the story. I had commissioned and shaped many publications on the strength of small samples of tantalising content and the author’s determination to make a book. This was something I knew I could make happen. I felt not exactly anonymous, but surprisingly strong and invisible under a foreign sky.

  Eventually the PA arrived, running from the office car park under the trees, clutching a pile of folders, full of apologies and breathless descriptions of how insanely busy she’d been the past few weeks, plus the information that the Boss, Sidi Hassan, was out of the country but should be back later that day or maybe the next. She loved this job, she loved her boss, she knew he couldn’t do his international and local work without her, and she was probably right, I was starting to think.

  By now I knew that Sidi meant Sir all over the Middle East and everyone used it. Sitti meant princess or sometimes grandmother. I now knew quite a few Jordanian protocols; I needn’t cover my hair except in a conservative village, and only needed to wear full cover if my hosts, wherever I was, requested it. In the compound, in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses, as the PA always called them when speaking formally, and Sidi and Sitti the rest of the time, I should stand until I was invited to sit, and not cross my legs or show too much of them, or worse, the soles of my shoes. Her Royal Highness, Sitti Sarvath, liked the women in the office to wear high heels and jackets, the PA said. But that didn’t, of course, include ‘us’, as we worked together in the prefab under the trees in the garden, well away from the office. Smart casual, the PA said—jeans and Nikes only at weekends, and have something dressy always on hand in case you were asked to lunch.

  That day, I changed hotels again for the next few weeks of Ramadan, before being invited to live, with other foreign nationals, in a spacious, airy Corbusier-like apartment in its own compound. Life in Jordan during Ramadan wasn’t a matter of slipping into a jacket and heels and being asked to lunch. It was more about sorting our own food and not eating in front of people who were eschewing worldly things and reflecting on their relationship with Allah. The PA seemed to know who prayed and who didn’t, who was suffering from lack of water and who was having severe nicotine withdrawals. If anything, her role became even more of a bridge between the house and the office.

  In Ramadan, most people had a small meal before dawn, then fasted until dusk, when they ate a date, then drank water. About 7 p.m. there was an iftar, a large meal usually eaten at home, but sometimes in restaurants or in hotel dining rooms. The devout gave up water, cigarettes, alcohol and any form of food and drink between dawn and dusk, working slightly shorter hours, with, I was told, drastically diminished concentration as the day wore on.

  There was an espresso machine in the prefab kitchen, and a refrigerator for the supplies and bottled water that those of us who worked there bought for lunch and for the evenings when we’d work late. Pitta bread, tahini, couscous salads and imported cheeses, from supermarkets in one of the many new shopping centres on the circles outside the compound, became our staples.

  One Saturday in Ramadan when I was still staying in a hotel apartment, I needed cinnamon for my yoghurt and stewed apples, and managed to flag down a driver to take me to the suq in Downtown. I assured him I would make my own way back now I knew the address.

  I joined the women and children taking their time to sniff and choose vegetables and fruit grown in the lush Jordan Valley. I bought a twist of cinnamon, another of cloves, some pale golden dates in a brown paper bag from stalls lining the square, and some tomatoes and a cucumber from the dozens of fragrant baskets lined up under cover.

  On the floor above the market were the stores selling sports clothes, and highly coloured erotic underwear decorated with swansdown and sequins. Alongside them were perfume shops, where scent sellers offered to identify the fragrance perfect for Sitti, which would then be kept in a small glass phial with a gold stopper labelled just for Ilaria which I had to agree looked good in Arabic script. Would I prefer a copy of a famous brand name perfume made in Paris? None leaped to mind and my sense of what would smell good on my skin still seemed to have deserted me—but I promised to return soon.

  Instead, from the racks downstairs of pirated films and DVDs, I bought a Palestinian documentary from 2002, Jenin, Jenin, and a CD of Umm Kulthum, Egypt’s most famous and beloved singer, who died in 1975. Later, I added her hours-long pulsating lamentations, with her troupe of cellists, ouds and percussions, to my iPod. Prince Hassan told me how Umm Kulthum’s voice on local radio inspired the troops during the Iran–Iraq war.

  Most of my shopping was done with the PA, who drove us in her car; and when, during the last weeks of Ramadan, I was given an apartment in the compound, directly above hers, Jordanian supermarkets became a way of life. Cosmo was then the newest and flashest of the shopping complexes. It was next to the Porsche dealer, and flaunted an outdoor café, with umbrellas and cappuccinos and racks of glossy magazines. Inside the complex, I would immediately get lost, the logic impenetrable. No matter how often I went there, I couldn’t find the coffee seller, with his sacks of beans, near the spice store. Or the pharmacy counter, or the cavernous delicatessen that sold cheeses from France and Belgium, and many varieties of salty haloumi, pickled eggplant and local olives. The young men behind the counter, in white uniforms with smart caps, avoided my eye, preferring to serve the men who tasted and discussed the food knowledgeably. I eavesdropped as best I could. I recognised much of the food from having seen it in shops in Sydney Road in inner Melbourne but my Jordanian Arabic was gruesome. All I could do was point and smile and say ‘Is okay?’ or, overly grateful to have been given a taste or served at all, shukran jazeelan (thank you very much).

  Everything I bought was then arranged on small plastic trays, wrapped tightly in plastic film, weighed, and put in a plastic bag, which was sealed with a price tag. A few weeks of doing my own cooking and already the cupboard under the sink was full of grey plastic bags. At the end of
my time there, it would be a roomful. The greengrocery section had some pre-weighed stuff, but it was not as fresh as the mounds of zucchini, baby carrots, eggplant, fresh coriander, mint, dill, parsley, beans and peas from the Jordan Valley. The enormous juicy oranges and lemons seemed always to be in season, and were perfection.

  The news from Iraq was worsening every day; skewed, no doubt, by CNN and BBC World News, which I was forced to depend on. The Diwan took a number of American and British journals and magazines, some of which were passed on to me, but mainly we relied on online news services, and Al Jazeera, in Doha, which started broadcasting in English at the end of 2006. The Jordan Radio and Television Corporation, or JRTV, was showing West Bank olive groves being bulldozed for more settlements, their owners roughly handled, family picnics disrupted, women wailing, young boys shouting insults and throwing stones.

  The borders into Jordan were now closed to all except the very rich with suitcases of US dollars, so the stories went. Others who could make it across no man’s land paid 150,000 dinar (about 300,000 Australian dollars). More than 750,000 Iraqis had entered Jordan, adding 250,000 cars to the roads. The massive contracts for reconstruction and redevelopment by Iraqis buying their way into Jordan with US dollars for kickbacks had, even in just the six months since I was last there, meant more construction sites at every turn in the road. Vast mansions with high walls and turrets, security gates and triple garages were being erected on land with views out over the fertile Jordan Valley; by rich Iraqis, I was told. Stories we’d been hearing in Australia of money laundering inside the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program, implicating the Australian Wheat Board and its dealings with the Alia trucking company, sounded increasingly likely. I asked around intending to write something for The Monthly but no one I met in Amman had heard of the scandal.