Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  The traffic was awash with new Mercedes and BMWs, and affluent young hoons in the new suburbs drove fancy convertibles and some sort of imitation luxury tank. Egyptians and Bangladeshis were the cheap labour on building sites, and maids from the Philippines were the nannies and house cleaners. Many of their employers regarded them as prostitutes, so gave them a minimum of days off—so I was told by some of their bosses, women in smart jackets and good shoes.

  The American presence was invisible but tangible. Their embassy compound, straddling several blocks on a hillside, was surrounded by tanks and bristling with satellite dishes. But there were no American voices heard on the streets, no Americans shopping in the malls or in the international hotels, unless they were journalists propping up the bar at the InterContinental. Even the journalists were more likely to be Canadians or Brits or Germans. The Americans lived in their mightily defended compound, complete with gyms and spas, and a range of fast-food nosheries, gaming rooms and apartments. The Australian embassy, to which I was sometimes invited to hear a lecture on an archaeological site at Pella, or to celebrate Anzac Day, and where ‘displaced persons’ queued from dawn hoping for visas, was just down the hill in the same street, under the wing of the US tanks and the satellite dishes that silently turned and turned.

  The building I was invited to move into with the other foreign nationals was in a comfortable 3-storey block of apartments, a compound within a compound, where the housekeeper’s elderly dog could be accommodated and walked by one of the guards if she was away. Other foreign inmates befriended skinny cats. I had a large sitting room with a white marble floor, a dining table I could use as a desk, and three long blue velvet sofas arranged around a square coffee table, a huge television and bookshelves. I pinned several of my daughter’s lovely prints on the sitting-room walls and above my bed. Another, small, room opened onto a deck where my washing could be dried on racks.

  Outside there were tall steel gates and bars on the windows, a garden with trees and climbing roses. It was a short drive to the Palace and the office, or a 5-minute walk if you learned which gates opened to the short cuts and stone stairways between the compound’s buildings, most of which I never saw inside. Some might have been bunk houses for gardeners and people working with the polo horses; some were probably stores for feed and equipment. As my sense of the history of the place deepened with the stories I was being told, I set out to explore the whole compound, walking in the late afternoons down long avenues of trees, and the paths around the hill where I could see across to the grand mosque.

  One day I found the entrance to an outside path with a steep rampart-like slope down to the road. There was a shop way below the Royal Palaces, covered in Arabic Nestlé and Coke logos. I walked down to it one afternoon, when most of the drivers were resting. A well-armed guard kept an eye on me from the gate-house. The shop was chaotic. The fruit outside was dusty, and, inside, huge tubs of tahini sat beside washing-up brushes, and a freezer full of grey salted fish was piled high with paper towels, plastic buckets, and bottles of water in heavy sixpacks. I pointed at paper towels, filled the bag I’d brought with oranges and lemons, paid and fled, watched all the time from the gatehouse. I didn’t know whether I should wave in a friendly fashion and call shukran.

  Every now and then, an email would arrive from the writer friend who’d given me the ukelele, needing reassurance about a book she was wrestling with about a dying friend. I loved her story’s brute force and the risks she was taking on the border of fiction. I’d report which chord I was learning on the uke, and which song I was practising. I did try to teach myself—strumming along in the night on the deck of my spacious apartment, hoping not to be overheard by the housekeeper or Palace guards. But I never progressed much beyond the first chords of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, which made me feel a bit maudlin; and, anyway, hillbilly music sounded a bit off in the warm dark Jordanian nights, with the war only a border away.

  But I really gave up the day I slid open a cupboard in the pavilion where I was working and found a complete set of videos of The Sopranos. The whole six seasons. Eighty-six episodes. The video player in my sitting room worked like a dream. I was gone.

  Then, while the PA was travelling with her boss, I was sent to a Dead Sea resort, a kind of reward, perhaps, for having a difficult time during Ramadan—or, more probably, so I could see for myself what Prince Hassan had been describing to me: the dreadful dying of the Dead Sea, the sinkholes opening up, the aquifers disappearing, the near total depletion of Lower Jordan River. Further north, Israeli agriculture was flourishing.

  The hotel I stayed in was new and rather grand, with only a few young honeymooning couples and overweight tourists wallowing in the bright blue pool overhanging the beach. There were small stone passageways full of ferns that opened on to rooms with window seats and cushions, and there was always the sound of running water. I’d been re-reading Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy, with its vast span of family history and revolution teeming with life and politics, people facing up to their true natures; a web of death and despair over everything. I was now reading Sugar Street, the last volume. I read and slept fitfully, had a massage scented with musk and slept again.

  Very early the next morning, I went down to the shore, holding the rope railing and squelching in bare feet through the black mud, joining those who were being anointed from large amphorae-like jars near the water. The trouble was, I didn’t know what to do. Should I hire a masseuse? Do I rub mud all over myself, like children are doing a few yards away? Does the mud have some magical healing property I should have found out about? Could it cauterise a wound? An image floated into my mind, of lying on the sand and hacking at my broken heart with a sharp knife, then slapping on black mud to stop the bleeding.

  A smiling woman in a headscarf called me over and offered to rub mud into my back and shoulders. Afterwards, I floated in the Dead Sea, with my head pointing towards Jericho.

  My husband rang me sometimes but had trouble being put through from the switchboard in the evenings. He said that made him miserable for the rest of the day. So we emailed instead, and I sent him exotic glimpses of farming in the Jordan Valley, of the diminishing waterways and birdlife.

  Despondent yet again about the progress of the book, and needing to discuss which publishers I might approach, I rang Carmen, my sounding board and confidante about so much; parallel lives in different hemispheres. She was in London, and about to leave for four days in New York promoting her book, Bad Faith, which was recently published in the UK. By burrowing deep into the French and Australian archives, she had brought to light the story of Louis Darquier, Commissioner of Jewish Affairs during the Vichy regime, responsible for the confiscation of property from the Jews and their despatch to the death camps. Darquier had married a Myrtle Jones of Tasmania, and they produced a daughter, Anne, whose tragic story and suicide Carmen had happened upon many years before.

  All I seemed to be managing to write, I told her enviously, were emails, aside from juggling scraps of—what I liked to imagine were—the inner musings of a Jordanian Prince taken from old transcripts, and interviews done a couple of times a week if I was lucky, and transcribed spasmodically by the PA in her spare time. In comparison with Carmen’s, my task seemed puny—though the complexities and logistics were immense. Prince Hassan’s family framed so much of the history and politics of the region that the West had mauled over and over again.

  Carmen sent me a devastating quote from Winston Churchill, who had dismissed the Arabs, American Indians and Aboriginal Australians as nomadic peoples with little interest in agriculture, unlike the Jews who had ‘changed desolate places into smiling orchards, and initiated progress instead of stagnation’. Churchill went on: ‘If I were an Arab I should not like it, but it is for the good of the world that the place should be cultivated and it never will by the Arabs … I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia … by t
he fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in to take their place.’*

  Now, with the Iraq War worsening, and Jordan needing to find ways to accommodate damaged and displaced people, as well as those able to buy a new way of life across the border, the best of Islam needed again to find the strength and resources to come to the fore.

  Prince Hassan’s despondency deepened. He stopped the taping sessions altogether, went to his library for a stack of books and began reading to me—Amartya Sen, on social reform of public health and education; and, one afternoon, C.P. Cavafy’s poetry and The Trial of Socrates. ‘Not that I think I am Socrates,’ said this honorable man, who must have felt himself to be on trial.

  * Sir Martin Gilbert, companion volume 5/3 to the Official Biography quoting Evidence to the Palestine Royal Commission under Lord Peel on 12 March 1937.

  4

  Overlapping worlds

  I’D VISITED CORTONA in Tuscany, near the Umbrian border, before, in the northern autumn of 2001, and had not liked it much. Then I was part of a couple and with close friends. It was August, fiendishly hot, the ancient walled hill town packed with tourists like ourselves. The art museum was full of women with painted toenails in expensive sandals, and red-faced men in shorts, all elbowing to get a glimpse of the Roman sarcophagus, the Lorenzetti frescoes, the Fra Angelico Annunciation. The other important museum, Il Museo dell’Accademia Etrusca, with its renowned collection, ranging from classical archaeology of the region to modern art, was, aggravatingly, closed, for renovation or repairs.

  I had had no premonition that six years later I would be sitting in a restaurant above the Piazzale Garibaldi with Helen Wire, and Lyndall Passerini, a tall, handsome woman whose neck was in a brace. Lyndall had emailed me, in response to Carmen’s SOS, saying she had a small apartment in Cortona that she sometimes let to friends of friends and would I like to meet her in November?

  Helen was with me in Cortona to help me think straight and not just fall for the view. Also with us was Rennie Airth, a crime writer, who had lived, as Lyndall had, in Cortona for many years. All Carmen had told me about Lyndall was that she was the daughter of Antonia White, whose semi-autobiographical Frost in May was the first title in the Virago Modern Classics list. So, over lunch, I told Lyndall how much my mother, drawn to but eventually rejecting Roman Catholicism, had loved Antonia White’s book. My mother often quoted what she called the best first line in any novel—’Nanda was on her way to the convent of the Five Wounds.’

  We were all vetting each other, and exchanging news of a few London friends we had in common. Lyndall was curious about my Jordanian ‘writing project’, mentioning a friend in Oxford whose husband was writing a big biography of King Hussein. She thought he’d nearly finished; if they came to Cortona next summer as they often did, she’d introduce us.

  Neither Lyndall nor Rennie had been to Australia, or had ever wanted to. It was too far, its politics too ugly. The Howard government’s rough handling of the refugees taken aboard the Tampa had had wide coverage in Italy.

  Lyndall had spent time in southern Italy with Caroline Moorehead, helping her research her book, Human Cargo, which documented the refugee crisis Italy was attempting to deal with. With a coastline of 7000 kilometres, Italy was the first country of arrival for refugees fleeing North Africa by boat, or coming overland from Afghanistan through the former Yugoslavian border to the north. ‘More than 20,000 arrived last year,’ she told us. ‘Your Prime Minister Howard is as harsh as our Berlusconi.’ The Catholic Church was now the principal source of food and shelter for Afghanis, Iraqis and North Africans who could not return. Any leniency towards them had vanished with Berlusconi’s election in 2001. Migrants arriving in Italy could no longer seek work without a permit from consulates in their own country. And those arriving illegally were held in detention for up to sixty days, their applications processed according to the danger rating of their country of origin. Released into the community, unable to work and without a sponsor, most made their way north to the Scandinavian countries.

  The opposition to refugees was growing in Italy. Even in Cortona, Lyndall told us, a comune in the Arezzo province, young blackshirts had recently organised a pilgrimage by bus to Mussolini’s tomb in Predappio. She’d gone to the bus stop to identify them, so she could stop frequenting their parents’ shops, she said.

  ‘You’ll be staying for periods longer than three months,’ Lyndall told me, ‘so you, too, will have to present yourself to the questura in Arezzo for a permesso di soggiorne, a residential permit, then to the anagrafe of the comune for residency’—as if I had made a decision to stay. I had, but we still hadn’t discussed money and dates, and I was yet to climb the steep slope of Via Santa Margherita to see Lyndall’s little appartamento.

  When I did, I found that, like most of Cortona, it was in a 16th-century building facing south-east over the town wall, and the rooftop and bell tower of San Domenico. There was a sitting room, which, Lyndall told me, the sun entered in the early morning; a miniature kitchen and bathroom at one end; a bedroom with a curtained bed big enough for three; bookshelves and a desk by the window; and, under a black-beamed roof sloping deep into the side of the hill at the back, another two small bedrooms. The front windows opened to a view of skies and trees, and wild weather out over the Valdichiana plain towards Lake Trasimeno. I didn’t know how to make Lyndall an offer on the spot, and, in any case, Helen was there to help me make a calm decision, so we agreed to exchange emails.

  Before leaving Florence in our hire car, Helen and I had made a shortlist of three or four possible places for me in the vicinity of Arezzo in the Valdichiana. I wanted easy access by train to Rome and Florence; a place with a spare bedroom for visitors, so that, perhaps, my 15-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, clever at languages, could spend a January at a local high school. I needed a place where I could work in peace on the Hashemite book once the interviews were done, and where I could manage the rent and the weather. Two of the houses we looked at were too remote, and there was mention of snow ploughs and chains on wheels in the winter. Another was an exquisite farmhouse in an olive grove below Pienza, which was owned by the family of a teacher from the local school that I hoped would welcome Sophie. The dining table there was huge and inviting, and the view across the plains to the Apennines almost too beautiful.

  I sent emails to friends back home: I have to choose between a small characterful flat in ancient Cortona and an exquisite remote farmhouse near tiny Pienza. Reality check needed. And back came advice and glimpses of how they imagined my life would be—one suggesting bars on the windows for peace of mind at night, and reminding me about Extreme Loneliness when the holidays were over; another sensibly pointing out that what my visitors would most prize in a farmhouse in a picturesque olive grove, might be better served by me in a small flat, with guests staying in the groves or a hotel nearby. Helen Wire left the choice to me, saying she’d visit no matter which one I took. My youngest son and my stepdaughter, both working in London, said the same. Carmen simply emailed You will just know—which made me cross.

  This was exactly a year after my mother died and only then was I starting to feel her absence, no longer a responsibility, and my painful love for her started to surface. We drove to Monterchi, so Helen could see Piero della Francesca’s Pregnant Madonna, on behalf of her daughter, who was hoping for a child, and so I could revisit his great painting of The Resurrection in Sansepolcro. This was the most powerful spiritual image I had ever seen—the oblivion of the slumbering soldiers, the sheer force of the risen Christ. I lit a candle for the anniversary of my mother’s death, in Santa Maria dei Servi, a small and beautiful church nearby, with an altarpiece of Mary holding the pale, limp dead Christ across her lap. I am motherless, fatherless, husbandless, cracked wide open, my diary says. I felt something like wild joy beneath the pain.

  Later, back in London, I saw that Caroline Moorehead’s book Human Cargo w
as dedicated to Lyndall, and I realised she had, as she always would, downplayed her role and her generosity. Her injuries the day of our first meeting, I learned later, had been caused when she’d been teaching an Iraqi refugee, Ayad, to drive. She had given Ayad shelter in a high room in a stone tower connected to Il Palazzone where she lived outside Cortona, having agreed to act as his sponsor, so that he could get a permesso di soggiorne giving him the right to work in Italy. Occasionally, she managed to persuade some hard-nosed Cortonese to employ him in their restaurant or hotel. But most of the time, he was unemployed and she supported him.

  I saw Ayad at his most handsome and charming the following summer, when he was trying to date Ellie, my very gorgeous stepdaughter, who was visiting from London. At his worst, he refused to help Lyndall unload heavy shopping because Arab men don’t carry women’s bags, and only occasionally and, then resentfully, helped her in the garden, downing his spade long before the job was finished. Maybe some Arab men don’t help women, but she had walked over much rough ground for more than a decade because of her concern for Ayad and to honour an undertaking she had given his mother in Syria.

  Lyndall spoke briskly about how difficult the winters were in Cortona; how the town emptied out, and deep loneliness set in, and how her cats were the main reason she stayed. Ayad would not feed them for long, she said; he’s far too grand for that.

  She was trying to write Ayad’s story when I arrived. It was difficult, because of his reticence, and the interruptions from her many friends who came to stay with her in the summer.