Olives

by Alexander McNabb

  He was perhaps in his late fifties, silver-haired and florid, his open-necked shirt exposing a little tuft of curly white hairs. He came around the desk to meet us, his hand out and grinning a welcome. He cleared a pile of magazines from one of the pair of chairs in front of his desk and waved to us to sit.

  ‘Good to see you both. Here, take a seat. Not often we get visitors from the press!’

  An Egyptian tea-boy brought chai suleimani, black, sweet tea served in little gold-rimmed custard glasses, and we settled down. I took my voice recorder out.

  ‘Okay if I use this?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  I switched on the recorder and Saunders sat forward, his hands clasped in front of him as he considered my questions. We talked about Petra-Jordanian’s bid for the potash extraction contracts, the uses of potash, the benefits for Jordan and so on. Saunders made a big fuss about how close to the Minister they were, how they all shared common goals and a vision for the future of Jordan and I soon found myself drifting away, looking around his untidy office. Books, magazines and documents covered virtually every surface, from his desktop to the low cabinets behind him. As he droned on about sustainable resources, talking more to Aisha than to me, my gaze wandered to a map of Jordan’s Rift Valley pinned up on the wall and covered in coloured push-pins and lines. It was next to a whiteboard marked up with co-ordinates and a table of numbers.

  Saunders talked himself to a momentary halt and I pointed to the wall display.

  ‘What are those all about? That doesn’t look like potash.’

  Saunders looked up to his left at the map, blinking owlishly as he adjusted from droning about potash to answering my question.

  ‘Oh, that’s planning work for the water privatisation. We’re the lead member of the Anglo-Jordanian Consortium. You’ve heard about the privatisation, haven’t you?’

  ‘The Minister’s talked about it, but we hadn’t planned to cover it in any great depth in the magazine.’

  ‘Well, you should. It’s important for Jordan. Right now, the country’s in a state of drought. Water has to be taken into Amman by tankers, there’s little piped water infrastructure and it’s mostly ancient. Jordanian farmers are suffering from very severe restrictions because there’s simply not enough water to go around. The Yarmouk River’s being depleted left, right and centre, the Jordan River’s going brackish and the Israelis are holding back on the volume they’re meant to be providing from Lake Tiberias. The country’s damn close to crisis and we believe we can help to manage those resources effectively into the future.’

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’

  ‘Okay, but please don’t go into any technicalities. Our bid is complicated and we’re using some pretty groundbreaking technologies and approaches to water resourcing, management and distribution.’

  I took notes in shorthand to back up the tape, finishing the sentence before I looked up into Saunders’ blue-eyed, frank stare. ‘What’s the scale of the problem?’ I asked.

  ‘Massive. Jordan has one of the world’s lowest levels of water resources. The country’s supply stands at less than a quarter of the accepted global water poverty level. And a huge amount, something like twenty-five per cent of that water, is currently coming from over-pumping unsustainable resources. Experts are forecasting the water supply will be a potential humanitarian disaster within fifteen years or so. Personally, I think it’ll come sooner.’

  ‘What’s the government doing?’

  Saunders reached behind him and pulled out a thick, spiral bound document. ‘This is the National Water Strategy. It was adopted in the late nineties and outlined any number of approaches to the problem but at the end of the day it didn’t result in concrete action. That’s one of the reasons the Ministry of Natural Resources was formed, to unify the government’s response. And that’s why they’re going into this privatisation process. It’ll likely be the single largest privatisation the country’s ever seen. It’s critical to Jordan’s future.’

  Saunders paused and I sensed the inevitable spiel to come. I wasn’t disappointed. He laid his hands flat on the desk and leaned forwards, brows knit in intense sincerity. ‘And we at Anglo-Jordanian believe we have the solutions Jordan needs.’

  Right, of course you do. I asked because I had to, ‘What’s the privatisation worth?’

  ‘No comment.’

  Saunders got to his feet. The interview, it seemed, was over. I picked up the tape and whipped out my camera for few snaps, making sure for the last two that the map and whiteboard next to it were nice and clear behind Saunders’ proud, out of focus, face.

  As we were leaving, he asked me for a copy of the text before it was published and I smiled at him, my heart black, and assured him Aisha would send it across to him. Anything as long as I didn’t have to do it myself. I’d encountered this before working for Robin on a project in Singapore – people in power who think they have the right to demand to see interviews before they’re published. A real journalist would tell them to get stuffed but I worked on contract published titles and had already found out a refusal to comply resulted in a complaint to Robin who would invariably uphold it on behalf of the advertiser. Every time it happened, it reminded me of the loss of my independence and self-respect as a journalist resulting from my fall from grace.

  We drove back towards Amman, passing the cluster of Dead Sea spa and conference hotels to the left of the road as it wound its blacktop course through the rocky, arid landscape, twisting around the banks of the flat expanse of torpid water. I counted the hotel buildings facing the road, betting myself that if the total was an even number I would get off the police charge. It was odd. We passed the Dead Sea Conference Centre and I added it to the total even though it wasn’t a hotel.

  We neared the head of the sea. Gnarled trees started to line the road and occasional splashes of roadside colour against the sandy background revealed themselves as men squatting by the roadside selling coffee and knick-knacks. We reached the curve of the road as it left the Dead Sea and snaked up to Amman. Aisha took the u-turn.

  ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

  ‘The baptism site.’

  She looked wide-eyed at me. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I read the signpost.’

  She arched an eyebrow and tutted. ‘Clever, ya Brit. This is the Bethany, the place where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. I thought you’d be interested. The Dead Sea is rich in human history. The whole Rift Valley is.’

  We turned right off the dual carriageway. The road narrowed into barely more than a single track and we stopped at the gate and waited for it to be opened for us before we drove to a partly covered car park next to a cluster of low, beige buildings. There were a couple of other cars there.

  ‘This is new, they opened it a few years ago when the peace with Israel looked like it would last,’ Aisha said. ‘It’s very busy in the summer.’

  Aisha changed her smart patent leather shoes for a pair of flip-flops. We crunched across the gravel together as a figure detached itself from the shade of one of the buildings. He was dressed in Bedouin fashion, his head covered with a wrapped black and white checked scarf. Aisha exchanged greetings in Arabic.

  ‘This is Abdullah, he’s a guide here. He works part time for Ibrahim.’

  ‘Wasta.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Wasta.’

  I said hello to Abdullah and we shook hands before he turned and led the way through the buildings and down a stone-flagged pathway. I spotted a city in the foothills across the valley on what must have been the Israeli side of the border.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s Jericho. It’s part of Palestine now.’

  Jericho. I remembered it from primary school – being forced to sing about Joshua and his army, marching around parping away at trumpets to break down the city walls. I screwed up my eyes against sun’s glare and watched the far-away city walls, the buildings little more than white dots in the shimmering
air.

  We struck into the wilderness and were soon surrounded by bushes, delving deeper along the path into the thick growth of twisted trunks and dusty branches. Aisha was close behind me, chattering alternately to Abdullah and I, a stream of Arabic and English that often threatened to combine in a linguistic emulsion of oil and water.

  She reached out a hand to brush against one of the pale green spiky-leafed branches. ‘This is tamarisk. It thrives on the salty ground here. This path was the one Jesus took.’

  I was surprised. ‘You believe in him?’

  ‘We believe he was a prophet. He’s revered in Islam. The Prophet Mohammed took the last word of God from Gabriel, but we believe in the same one God. Many of our names come from the Bible. Daoud is David, Issa is Jesus, Sara is Sarah and so on.’

  ‘What’s Aisha?’

  She grinned at me. ‘It means healthy and alive. It was the name of the wife of the Prophet Mohammed. His favourite wife. Aisha bint Abu Bakr.’

  We walked along the pathway, the tamarisks binding together to form a shady bower. We came out into the open by the bank of a river. There was a stone church to our left and decking that stepped down to the river.

  ‘This,’ said Aisha, dramatically, ‘is the River Jordan.’

  I’d expected something big and Cecil B. DeMille, but the river was narrow and a dull green, slow-moving and lifeless. A white building on the opposite bank impressed me more than the small wooden structure we were standing in. Decorated with crosses, the white complex had stone steps running down its side to the far bank of the river.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s the Israeli side and the old Christian baptism place. This is the new one.’

  I dipped my hand into the font, the cool water bringing goose bumps to my forearm. I dried it on my jeans, reflecting how typical it was that the Israeli side was so much more impressive than the Jordanian.

  ‘We built the other side, of course,’ Aisha said, ‘but the Israelis took it over in 1967. It hasn’t been used much since then.’

  I looked again, more closely, and saw the gun emplacements on the hills behind the building and noticed that the stone was breaking down, that the steps were covered in debris. She had a point. It looked like a wreck, while the Jordanian side was obviously being used a lot.

  ‘Why don’t the Israelis use it?’

  ‘They don’t like Christians any more than they like us.’

  I’d never had much time for religion, let alone the intolerance and bigotry that invariably comes with it.

  ‘That’s playground politics, Aisha. Nothing’s that simple.’

  She turned away from me with a ‘tut,’ the sound the Arab World uses to denote all shades of denial.

  I noticed Abdullah wasn’t with us. ‘Where’s Abdullah?’

  ‘Abdullah? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he’s gone to see if the church is open. Come on, let’s go up there.’

  We strode up from the river towards the little stone church, but the door was closed. We waited in the shade of the door for our guide to reappear. A couple of minutes later, he arrived, walking purposefully from behind the building and spoke to Aisha, who turned to me and laughed nervously.

  ‘A call of nature, you say?’

  ‘We say.’

  We wandered back silently through the tamarisks and said our goodbyes to Abdullah. I wanted to give him some money, but Aisha would have none of it. We drove back out and through the checkpoint, then up towards Amman. The sun sulked low on the horizon and a slow orange light filled the hills with a luxuriant play of contrasts and long shadows. I stopped at the top of the climb and got out to take some pictures looking back over the Dead Sea. I sat in the car and saw the empty back seat.

  ‘Your bag. Your bag’s gone.’

  Aisha looked worried for a second before relaxing. ‘It’s okay, I’ve got my mobile with me and there were just a few books in it. I’ll call Ibrahim. Some of the guides are, how do you say, opportunists. Abdullah will get it back.’

  I was surprised at how cool she was about it. I remembered locking the car.

  ‘They must have picked the lock.’

  She laughed. ‘And got a couple of books on potash and a few rough sketches for their troubles. Don’t worry Paul, I’ll get the bag back.’

  She called Ibrahim and was still talking to him when we joined the Amman highway to go home. It was clear something was wrong, the tone of Aisha’s voice changing from chatty light to what seemed to be confusion and shock. She ended the call and I waited for her to explain, but she kept her eyes fixed on the road.

  ‘What is it, Aish?’

  I watched the tension in her neck, her lips pressed tight. She didn’t look at me. ‘Ibrahim has heard from the colonel in the police he has been talking to. The policeman is insisting you injured him. They’re not going to drop the charges against you. There’s nothing more Ibrahim can do with the police. It will go to court.’

  I slumped back against my seat. An overwhelming sense of my impotence quickly turned to intense sadness. The game was up. I had no choice but to start the process of confession that would end my life in Jordan.

  I found my voice, but it felt like someone else’s mouth shaped the words. ‘Well, if you could thank him for me anyway, that’d be great. I’m sure he’s done everything he can.’

  ‘They have set the court date, Paul. You will appear before the judge in October. Ibrahim is still trying to fix this. He has powerful friends in the Ministry of Justice.’ Aisha reached across and squeezed my hand. ‘It’s a setback. But don’t worry. ‘brahim hasn’t given up and neither should you.’

  ‘And what do I say to people now?’

  ‘Say nothing. There’s still hope he can get you out of this.’

  To my horror, my eyes started to prickle. Turning away from Aisha so she wouldn’t see, the dusty hillsides stretching out beyond the roadside planted with olives and cypresses blurred with the tears I tried to blink away.

  ‘I didn’t hit him.’

  ‘I know, Paul.

  We passed a faded green water lorry jangling with battered metal decorations and I wiped my eyes. I now had little choice but to meet Gerald Lynch of the British Embassy, a meeting I had sworn to myself wouldn’t take place. Being beholden to the Dajanis is one thing; being in Lynch’s debt was quite another. Something about the man told me his help would come at a high price, but I already knew I would have to pay it.

  SEVEN

  I arrived home from a long, lonely day at the Ministry spent brooding over my impending court case. Aisha hadn’t returned my calls. The warm day was cooling fast and I stood looking out over the uniform pale stone of the city below me, watching it darken from umber to aubergine and wondering how I’d get through a trial in an Arab court.

  I went inside, switched on the TV and undressed to take a shower. I came out of the steamy bathroom wearing two white towels, like a pilgrim to Mecca. I caught the image on the TV screen, frozen for a moment before it played out in real time before me, water dripping on the stone floor.

  Glass, blood, sirens. A man’s hand poking out from the debris, its fingers curled, the forefinger pointing, an oddly Raphaelesque gesture. Women crying, dust and desperate screams of loss. Palestinians. The skeleton of a bombed out jeep, the torn wreckage of a checkpoint behind it. Men in uniforms, guns and a distorted commentary over a videophone, the journalist’s voice breathless and over-excited. It wasn’t the news of a bombing that stilled me, or the fact four Israeli soldiers had been killed in the attack on a military checkpoint.

  It was the name flashing across the bottom of the screen, white on red.

  Jericho.

  I remembered the whitewashed buildings nestling across the Jordan when I had stood next to Aisha looking at the city over the muddy green river. Joshua marching around the walls with his army tooting away on their trumpets. Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat.

  I went to the kitchen and poured a whisky then sat down in my towels to watc
h the news again, hopping between channels to catch each brief mention of the Jericho bombing, snippets sandwiched between the smaller concerns of the world at large.

  Aisha wasn’t there when I turned up at the Ministry the next morning and her mobile remained switched off. I sat at my desk looking blankly at the news on the screen and sipping at the chai suleimani the tea boy brought to each new morning arrival. Someone laughed across the room from me, a girl carrying too many bags, bustling and bitching about the traffic.

  Something nagged at me about Aisha’s stolen bag. The news about my trial had pushed it out of my mind, but now it seemed increasingly odd. The man by my car the other night, Abdullah the guide disappearing for no reason and coming back from a ‘call of nature’ out of breath. I cursed my overactive imagination, always making connections that weren’t there, the product of a lonely childhood spent pretending trees are tanks and sheds are submarines. It had left me with some funny habits, including one of predicting outcomes through random events. If the red car lets me cross the road then I’ll get off with Sonia Smith. That kind of thing. Besides, the bag wasn’t big enough for a bomb. How big was a bomb?

  Real time searches for Jericho were pulling up small snippets of information and loads of chatter, twittering and the like. I found precious little insight but then the news had already moved on to a political scandal in Germany and soon the chatter had turned purely local, mostly in Arabic.

  Someone walked past my desk and I caught a whiff of stale cigarette and aftershave, a pat on my shoulder and a good morning, ‘Sabah al khair,’ that I returned, a new habit, ‘Sabah al noor,’ a copy of The Jordan Times dropped on my desk. I reached out for the paper. The report added nothing to the online stories, didn’t say how big the bomb was, only that it was ‘big.’ Two Palestinians died, one instantly and one in hospital. Four Israeli soldiers dead, two seriously wounded.

  How big is big? Big enough for a knapsack? As big as a lawyer’s suitcase?

  Aisha called me back as I finished my tea.

  ‘Hi. Sorry I didn’t call earlier.’