Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  Living conditions at the front line were desperately harsh. The troops, slight and undernourished from years of drought-reduced rations, lived on a porridge of lentils scooped up in spongy bread. Their World War I-style trench system burrowed for miles across high mountain ridges. Supplies had to be hauled by hand up the near-vertical rock face, work that the women shared equally with the men. Everyone slept on the ground.

  The guerrillas came from a wide range of backgrounds. Some, like the university-educated idealists who returned from exile to enlist, found it natural that women and men should fight together. Others, simple villagers, had difficulty adjusting to the idea.

  Ismail Idriss, a twenty-three-year-old goatherd and a devout Muslim, had never spoken to a woman from outside his family when he suddenly found himself taking orders from one. “Women fighters I knew about from the beginning; even when I was wandering with my goats I’d seen them,” Ismail explained, sunning himself on a rocky ledge during a rare break in the fighting. “But I never believed a woman could give orders to a man.” Ismail’s company commander was a stocky, taciturn woman of his own age named Hewit Moges, a thirteen-year veteran of front-line fighting who came from a Christian background. “Now I have seen it in practice I have had to start to accept it,” he said, in a voice that still sounded hesitant about the idea. “When it’s a hard climb she runs up the mountain, when it’s a battle she’s in front of the troops, and when someone is wounded she’s the one who carries him from the field.” He spread his palms and raised his shoulders in a wide shrug. “What can I say against it when I have seen such things?”

  A few nights later the war took a rare break for a wedding. Fighters always married in large groups; a single couple couldn’t afford the traditional feast of goat meat. A young dancer dressed in a costume made of grain sacks marked “Gift of the Federal Republic of Germany” leaped and twirled across the sand, followed by 120 brides and grooms, all clad alike in the same shabby khakis they’d worn into battle shortly before. The couples paired up and held hands, waiting for their division commander to read out their names and declare them husband and wife. Each couple received a wedding certificate, produced in the fighters’ underground printshop, carrying a quote from the 1977 Marriage Law stating that the union was “the free will of the two partners based on love.”

  I sat on the sand listening to the long list of names. Nura Hus-seini was marrying Haile Gabremichael. Abdullah Doud was wedding Ababa Mariam. Muslims and Christians were marrying each other by the dozen. “It’s possible that these people come from parents who were taught that you starve before you share food from the plate of someone of a different faith,” said Chuchu, sitting on sand beside me. But in the trenches of this long war these young men and women had shared much more: fear, and victories, and belief in a cause. In the dark I could just make out Chuchu’s profile. A sad half smile played across her face. “Not everything that comes from war is bad,” she whispered.

  And unfortunately, not everything that comes with peace is good. In 1994 I returned to Eritrea, which by then had been an independent country for almost a year. The capital, Asmara, had fallen to the guerrillas without a struggle. Unscathed by the fighting that had reduced so much of the country to rubble, its Italianate buildings glowed in a gentle wintry light, their terra-cotta walls splashed with sudden tumbles of scarlet bougainvillea. The streets were clean and safe to walk, even late at night. During the war, even schoolteachers had carried AK-47s. Now, no one was armed, even at the airport or entrances to government buildings. One of the world’s most militarized populations had put away its guns.

  For once, a guerrilla movement had come to power and not been instantly corrupted by it. The movement’s leaders still wore the cheap plastic sandals they’d fought in, and none of them, including the president, drew a salary. Like the other fighters, they donated their labor to the rebuilding effort.

  But, for the women fighters, peace had brought some unexpected disappointments. The new government offered women political participation and new legal rights, such as the right to own and inherit land. It also banned genital mutilation in hospitals, and sponsored a radio series in which both the Muslim mufti and the Christian bishop stated clearly that such practices weren’t religious obligations.

  Still, the traditions of the wider society outweighed the culture that had developed at the front. Suddenly, fighters had come back home to families who had spent the war under occupation by Ethiopian forces. Often, the guerrillas’ progressive mores were at odds with the deeply conservative values of their parents. “Most of them respect us—they understand we lived a different way,” said Rosa Kiflemariam, a thirty-three-year-old who spent eight years at the front. “But others say to us, That was then—this is now, and now you have to live our way.’”

  In 1989, Rosa had married a fellow guerrilla in one of the frontline wedding ceremonies. The couple, serving at different fronts, had spent only one month together before peace came. Now she and her husband were trying to get to know each other in the midst of enormous family pressure. Rosa’s mother-in-law didn’t approve of her son’s wife going out to work and wanted her to give up her job as a financial officer in the Eritrean Women’s Union. “Every time she sees me she starts saying, ‘Why don’t you have children? Why don’t you stay at home?’”

  In the villages, particularly, families found it difficult to accept the tough young women who were used to absolute equality, or even positions of command in military units. In those cases, families urged divorce, offering their sons young, tractable village girls as alternative wives prepared to wait on them hand and foot. Such tensions were exacerbated if the husband and wife were from different religious backgrounds.

  For a young, unmarried woman fighter, the future was problematic. On the one hand, she was a heroine, but that didn’t necessarily make her marriageable in villages that still valued modesty and certain virginity.

  To Rosa and many other women, a new struggle had just begun. “We have to fight now to make them understand that everyone has the right to live freely. It’s another war, I think.”

  Chapter 7

  A QUEEN

  “I found a woman to reign over them, who is provided with everything requisite for a prince, and hath a magnificent throne.”

  THE KORAN

  THE CHAPTER OF THE ANT

  The ancient trade routes of Arabia are potholed highways now. The groaning strings of camels that Muhammad led for Khadija from coastal port to inland fortress are gone as well. Instead, trucks thud and grind from Aqaba to Mecca through a miasma of diesel and dust. What passes for an oasis these days is a gray concrete truck stop, innocent of a palm tree or even a blade of grass.

  In the spring of 1989,1 went to cover a riot in one of these places—a dismal shanty town named Maan in the middle of the Jordanian desert. The Jordanian prime minister had raised the price of gas, and Maan’s truck drivers had poured into the streets to protest. The riots spread from there all over the country, troubling the stability of King Hussein, the Middle East’s longest-reigning monarch. It was a story I’d written a half dozen times: a poor country needs aid, the International Monetary Fund comes in and demands economic reform, its terms are too tough, the people revolt.

  But this time, as I perched on what was left of a chair in the burned-out ruins of a Maan bank, the story took a sudden lurch away from what I expected to hear. Sitting opposite me on the upturned drawer of a filing cabinet, an edgy Bedouin in a grimy robe played with the fringes of his kaffiyeh. He had been with the mob as it rampaged through the town a week earlier. “The demonstrators want lower prices, yes. They are poor already, and the increase will take the food from their children’s mouths. But that wasn’t all they were shouting for.” He looked around, to make sure no one was listening. “They were shouting for the king to divorce the queen.”

  Like most Middle East correspondents, I knew vaguely that King Hussein had married an American, but I’d thought of her as photogenic fodder
for the social pages, not as someone likely to emerge as a slogan in a price riot.

  “People here have many questions about the queen,” the Bedouin said, letting go of his kaffiyeh and reaching into the pockets of his robe for worry beads. As the beads traveled through his grease-stained fingers he listed the questions one by one: “Was she a virgin when she married the king? Is she really Muslim? If so, why doesn’t she cover her hair? Is it true she supports Christian causes? Her family is from Halab [the Arabic name for the town of Aleppo, in Syria, where her grandfather was born before moving to Lebanon]. Halab has many Jews. How do we know she doesn’t have Jewish blood? We have heard that she is from the CIA, sent to poison the king.”

  The Bedouin was troubled by a familiar bundle of Middle Eastern bogeys: America in general and the CIA in particular; Jews, or if not Jews, then Christians; women’s sexuality—both the fear of a “past” and the dread of present emancipation signaled by the absence of a veil.

  It was hard to take his ranting seriously. Yet, in Iran and Egypt, rulers’ wives had served as lightning rods for dissent, or at least criticism of them had been a barometer of troubles to come. The shah’s empress Farah and Sadat’s wife Jehan both had been aggressively modern, high-profile women who had fought for reform. What was Queen Noor doing to earn so much opprobrium?

  At fifty-four, her husband, King Hussein, was the Middle East’s great survivor. At thirteen, he’d narrowly missed being killed in the hail of assassin’s bullets that murdered his grandfather. In 1951, at fifteen years old, he’d inherited a wobbly throne, survived the loss of the West Bank—half his kingdom—to Israel in 1967, put down an armed insurrection by Palestinian refugees in 1970 and, by 1989, had ruled for thirty-eight years. “He’s been to the funerals of all of those who said he wouldn’t last a week,” said Dan Shifton, an Israeli analyst of Jordanian affairs. Within days of the riots, the survivor in the king did what was necessary: he sacked the prime minister, Zaid Rifai, and promised his restless subjects their first general election in twenty-two years. I wondered if his marriage to Noor, his fourth and longest, would also have to be jettisoned in the interests of his survival.

  When riots broke out, the king and queen were in Washington, dining at the White House. Pictures of Noor, resplendent in a navy-blue chiffon gown, and word that her sister had attended the dinner on the arm of the film producer George Lucas, only fed the angry talk about her American values and extravagance.

  I had a standing request at the palace for an interview with the king. Not really expecting a reply, I fired off a new telex asking to see the queen as well, to talk about the way she’d become a target of the rioters. To my surprise, I got an answer back almost immediately: both Their Majesties had agreed to see me, and a car from the palace would collect me from my hotel.

  Along with my chador, I always traveled with what I called my “king suit”—one decent Italian outfit in pin-striped silk that wadded up into a corner of a carry-on bag and emerged respectable after a quick press in a hotel laundry. I put the suit on, along with a pair of high heels that I hadn’t worn since my wedding, and went down to meet a pistol-packing soldier at the wheel of a silver-gray Mercedes.

  The royal palace sits on a hilltop near the center of old Amman, the town whose Roman name was Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love. The royal court does its business behind tall iron gates designed to protect those inside against brotherly hate. I had been inside the palace compound before, but only as far as the king’s offices, the Diwan, where Circassian soldiers in high fur hats stand guard and obsequious courtiers wait for the royal summons. I expected that our meeting would take place in the king’s book-lined office. But the car swished past the grand stairway of the Diwan and deposited me under the thudding rotors of a Black Hawk helicopter. The king was already in the pilot’s seat. “Hop aboard,” he cried, beckoning me into the seat behind him.

  The king pushed the control stick forward and we heaved off the ground, hovering low over the palace and Amman’s dense honeycomb of flat-roofed houses. Within seconds, the city was gone. We skimmed groves of ancient olive trees and ribs of bleached white stone. In Amman, fast-food joints named New York New York Pizza and giant supermarkets with bagels in the deep freeze gave Jordan a familiar, Western facade. But the modern layer was thin as a crust of sand. Beneath was an ancient, biblical landscape peopled by tribesmen who lived by their goats, their olives and their blood alliances just as they always had.

  Winston Churchill used to boast that he’d created Jordan on a Sunday afternoon with the stroke of a pen. At a meeting in Cairo in 1921, Churchill and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) doodled the amoeba-shaped state of Transjordan onto the map of the Arabian Peninsula to provide a throne for their ally, Abdullah, who had helped Lawrence fight the Turks in World War I. Abdullah’s father, Sherif Hussein, the thirty-fifth-generation direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, had ruled Mecca and the Hijaz region until the al-Sauds swept down from the Nejd desert in the North and pushed him aside.

  A Palestinian assassinated Abdullah in 1951. His son, Talal, was mentally ill and abdicated two years later. The teenaged Hussein inherited the throne of a state in which the desert Arabians like himself were quickly becoming outnumbered by Palestinian refugees, pouring across the border after each war with Israel. Jordan, alone among Arab states, gave citizenship to the Palestinian refugees from the West Bank. But in the “Black September” of 1970, Hussein felt the Palestinians were trying to take control of his kingdom. He crushed them, with many casualties.

  I stared at the king’s crash helmet, which had “Hussein I” stenciled on the back. In the West, it was easy enough to see the king simply as a smooth-talking, Harrow-and Sandhurst-educated diplomat. But out here he was something much more potent: the avatar of his ancestor the prophet Muhammad, prayer leader, warlord and father of the tribes. Such a leader has to be seen by his people—and not just on TV, talking the dry argot of diplomacy with foreigners. Hussein, busy with foreign policy, had lost touch with his people. He was on his way to mend the rift.

  The United States never seemed to lose its ability to be amazed when one of its foreign-leader buddies was overthrown. Partly, I thought, it was because we only saw these men as they appeared in their dealings with the West. We had no sense of them as they seemed to their own people: that giant constituency to which even the greatest despots are eventually accountable.

  As Hussein landed the helicopter on the outskirts of a desert town, the chant of the waiting crowd defeated even the thump of the rotors. “Bil rub, bil damm… [With our soul and with our blood… we sacrifice for you, O Hussein!]” Through the swirling dust, the faces straining toward the king were twisted, almost pained. Bodies surged forward, held back by cordons of soldiers who cracked skulls and thumped shoulders as though they were dealing with the nation’s mortal enemies. The king, usually a grave, gray figure, beamed as he tossed off his crash helmet and threw a red and white kaffiyeh atop his balding head. He plunged into the crowd.

  I climbed out of the helicopter in his wake and was instantly swept away from him and his tight capsule of bodyguards. The crowd, moving like a single, demented entity, had closed ranks behind the king and carried him forward. I felt myself being dragged in the other direction. I heard the bat squeak of ripping silk as the jacket of my king-suit caught on the hilt of a Bedouin’s dagger. Tottering on the unfamiliar high heels, I tried to keep upright. One of the burly soldiers of the king’s bodyguard spotted me. Cursing and swatting a path through the press of bodies, he grabbed me in one hand and, continuing to rain blows on everyone around us with the other, propelled me back toward the relatively calm eye of the storm that his colleagues were maintaining around the king.

  The surge was carrying us toward an array of tents. As we approached, a gurgling moan rose above the chants. Just in front of the king, a camel stumbled to its knees and then, like an inflatable toy losing its air, slowly collapsed forward, thudding with a tiny splash into a glossy pool of
its own blood. Across the curve of the animal’s long neck the butcher’s ritual dagger had inscribed a parody of a smile. As tradition demanded, the king strode through the welcoming sacrificial blood and the bodyguards propelled me after him. Days later, when I unpacked shoes, I imagined I could still see the rusty tidemark, halfway up the heel.

  As we reached the shade of a black goat-hair tent, a white-robed tribesman with shaky hands poured coffee from a long-spouted pot into a tiny handleless cup. Trembling violently, he raised the cup to his mouth and downed the contents, to prove it wasn’t poisoned. Then, still shaking, he poured a second cup for his king.

  That whole long, scorching day passed in a blur of tableaux from The Arabian Nights: a barefoot poet, chanting his verses in praise of the king; an old Bedouin Woman swathed in black veils and marked on the face with blue tattoos, pressing a petition into the king’s palm; the king at lunch, plunging a hand into a platter of steaming lambs’ heads set atop piles of rice; tribesmen, old enough to be his father, kissing him reverently upon shoulders and nose, but addressing him, in their egalitarian desert way, by his kunya Abu Abdullah.

  I lost count of how many settlements we visited, flitting between them by helicopter, the king’s grave countenance losing more of its grayness as the day wore on. By late afternoon I was almost surprised to find the helicopter easing down once more in Amman, and the king’s soft voice asking me to join him at al-Nadwa, his pink stone palace. “Noor is waiting for us,” he said.

  Inside the grand doorway he discreetly pointed me toward a bathroom, then bounded away, over the Persian carpets, past the display cases of antique guns and swords, up the grand staircase, taking the steps two at a time like a boy.