Nazeeh and Me

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In Jordan, perhaps because my pace was slower and my impressions more personal than they had been in Egypt, I began to learn about the political situation in the Middle East. Its reality appalled me as did the extent of my ignorance about the Palestinians, their predicament and their struggle.

I expected to be met at the Amman Airport, assigned to a tour group and loaded onto a bus. Instead, an ingratiating young man named Maher picked up my suitcase and introduced me to Nazeeh, the driver of a private car he indicated I should enter.

Panic descended. I couldn’t afford the luxury of a private car and driver! Would I be presented with a huge bill a week hence and then jailed because I couldn’t pay it? Or was this another of Bashir’s manipulations and I’d be expected to provide payment of another more carnal sort? Did I mention that the humiliation never ended?

I grabbed Maher by the arm and dragged him aside. “Where is the group?” I asked. “I am on a group tour.”

“No group,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“People afraid. No group.”

Great! Had a war started during the last fortnight? One I hadn’t heard about? Just as in China, we didn’t receive ‘hard’ news in the UAE and I didn’t imagine Egypt was big on it either.

I decided the only thing I could do was be totally honest. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I said. “I should be in a group. I can’t afford a private car and driver.”

Maher gave me such a withering glance I almost patted the top of my head to see if I’d sprouted horns.

“You already pay,” he said.

Nazeeh, meanwhile, stood stolidly to one side, face expressionless. He told me later he’d been overcome with a “very bad feeling” and dreaded the week to come. As did I, still uncertain there wasn’t a catch somewhere that I’d missed.

We drove in silence to my hotel and woodenly arranged to meet in the lobby the next morning at 9:00 a.m. This unpropitious beginning was followed by one of the most amazing weeks I’ve ever lived through. That evening, however, the enchantment had not begun. Before falling into troubled sleep, I scrawled, “No face cloths and no women employees in Jordan.”

After a breakfast of tomatoes, cheese, hard-boiled egg, Tang and coffee, Nazeeh appeared promptly, seeming a little more relaxed than the previous evening. Tendrils of communication and friendship – of understanding – started to hesitantly close the distance between us and bind us together.

My first surprise, as Nazeeh announced we were heading for Mount Nebo, was the swift realisation that Jordan, too, is the Holy Land. Barren hills, caves, sheep, shepherds and olive groves dominated the landscape interspersed with the black oblongs of Bedouin tents, difficult to spot against the dark rock walls beneath which they sheltered.

“They refuse to live in one place,” said Nazeeh.

We drove the King’s Highway, a formal route designed so the King could travel in safety and relative comfort. In reality it was torturously winding and constantly assaulted by high winds. No wonder the ancients called out, “Make straight the way of the Lord;” a vain command, I thought.

Nazeeh let me off in an empty parking lot. I climbed to the mountain top and gazed across the desolation on the other side. Just beyond the farthest hills lay Jerusalem. One God, One Father, Over All read the stone markers left by the Pope in 2000, along with a refurbishment of Moses’ grave.

I ran into a group of school children, the only other visitors of any kind I encountered throughout the week. They obligingly took my picture in front of a twisted cross – seemingly fashioned of barbed wire – perched on the edge of the precipice.

“People is frightened,” explained Nazeeh. “Bad war in Iraq. They think Jordan dangerous. But we are not at war. Even so, we suffer. Jordan is very poor country. We do not have oil. When no tourists come, we suffer. Get more poor.”

It occurred to me for the first time that a war has more victims than I’d known. Not just the innocents shedding their life’s blood in Iraq, but also the innocents in Jordan losing the life blood of tourist dollars.

Karak Castle, bastion of the Crusaders, stood high on a hill. We stumbled upward through a series of dark draughty tunnels to reach the top, where a gale nearly knocked me down again. The cold breath of God scouring the hatred – it’s not quite gone, I think – there’s still a mournful sound to the wind – the ramparts forming a dreadful Aeolian harp, harsh frets strummed by the chill bony fingers of the ceaseless wind.

Suddenly I saw a soldier on a step beneath me. Was that the glint of armour and a helmet? The thrust of a spear? Yes! I averted my eyes to dispel the glare. When I looked back, the soldier was gone. A ghost? An after image of the eternal warrior? Whichever, it’s a brief picture only, no spirit remains.

I turn to Nazeeh. “Did you see a soldier down there?”

Nazeeh shrugs. “No soldier. No man. Just a shadow from long ago.”

After lunching on traditional milky goat stew in a deserted restaurant, we set off on the long drive to Petra, the tendrils of friendship growing stronger and more confident of survival.

Nazeeh has six children, aged 19 years to 6 months, two boys aged 19 and 18, two girls aged 15 and 8 and a baby boy. The baby is a delight, he says, but the teenagers refuse to listen to him when he tells them hard work and adherence to Islam are the only ways to get ahead. They defy him! They hurt his heart! He hopes they don’t ruin their lives as there are no second chances in Jordan.

I remark on the natural caves yawning from the bare hills we pass as well as the stone cairns dotted here and there. I ask if people live in the caves as they do in the Troglodyte caves of France.

“Not any more,” replies Nazeeh. “Only sheep and goats stay there now. Good, safe place for animals.”

The cairns are property markers, he explains, which makes me think of the Inuit people who used stones to mark their travel routes. We’re ingenious creatures, we humans, making adroit use of whatever’s ready to hand.

The little town of Petra appeared as we rounded a corner, clinging to a series of steep stony promontories. Spinning past the Cleopetra Hotel, I looked up into a glorious sunset that pulled a vast palette of subtle colours – orange, ochre, sienna, yellow, mustard, coral, moss, purple – from the rocks and sand.

“Look! How lovely!” I breathed.

“Your eyes are beautiful,” Nazeeh said solemnly.

“What??”

“Your eyes have beauty so you can see beauty. No have beauty behind eyes, no see beauty in sky.”

We’d come a long way from the airport.