Lessons in Letting Go (19 page)

Another man wearing a
shmagh mhadab
—the red and white headscarf—took me up to my room and pointed out every item in there, naming them as he went. He named the stove, the shower, the toilet, the pillows, the light fittings—maybe he was practising his English. I was barely able to stand straight from exhaustion and when he had finished, I smiled politely, showed him the door and lay down on the bed, thankful for the sparseness of the room. If he had been showing me around my own place, we would have been up all night.

At dawn I was woken by the sounds of the nearest muezzin calling out the
adhãn—
the Muslim call to prayer. The air was so still and so quiet that the singing sounded like it was right outside my window. Even though I had only been asleep for two hours, I slid out of bed, padded over to the window and pulled back the curtain. I have no idea what I expected to see, since it was just before dawn and still dark. There were no cars on the streets, no people walking around. Apart from the streetlamps reflecting off the conifers in front of me I couldn’t see any other lights. People must have been awake in most of the buildings, including the hotel rooms on either side of me, and yet there was no indication of them. I sat there and listened to the prayer and I could almost see it gently dropping over the whole city. Each phrase spread out and dissipated and dissolved back into silence before the next line started. It was easy to see the beauty in a faith that started each day with such reverence. I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling; I had never been anywhere this foreign. I was too excited to sleep.

That morning I helped myself to the breakfast buffet of hard-boiled eggs, hummus and flatbread. As I ate, I scoured my guidebook for something to do. I had not made lists in advance, but with only two days until I met up with my UN contact, I wanted to make the most of my free time. Today, I had decided to take a taxi to the National Archaeological Museum. It sat upon the highest point in Amman and held a collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The opportunity to see them felt unbelievable, like someone had told me I could go the North Pole and visit Santa. I’d always been fascinated by the Dead Sea Scrolls. It wasn’t just their antiquity; it was the influence they’d had on the world that tickled my imagination. And also, if I was honest with myself, a small part of me wanted to believe that if they were worth holding on to, then perhaps everything else was as well. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t a hoarder after all; maybe I was the custodian of future priceless artefacts.

The guidebook I had brought with me had a long chapter on Middle Eastern etiquette and I read it worriedly as I chewed on the last of my flatbread. There was a lot to remember, including that I should only ever use my right hand to pass and receive things. This was going to be a problem. I am left-handed. Having to use my right side for anything was going to leave me looking like a stroke victim. There were also an inordinate number of things that women couldn’t do. I knew that I should dress modestly and not cuss like a sailor but I hadn’t realised that I would not be allowed to enter many of the cafés and restaurants in town because I was unaccompanied by a man. I huffed with exasperation, then immediately chastised myself. I was in another country and I had chosen to come here of my own accord; I should let go of my prejudices and try to embrace this new culture without judgement. Or, at the very least, I should save my whingeing for when I got back home.

A tall moustachioed man at reception rang me a taxi and I passed through the metal detector—setting it off once again—and out onto the street to await its arrival. I could have sat inside but all the lounges were occupied by men and my guidebook said that custom forbade me from sharing a seat with anyone of the opposite sex. If I had wanted to sit down I would have had to stare expectantly at one of the males until he stood up. Considering that I was only in this country because I hadn’t been game to say ‘no’ on the telephone, the chance of me squaring my shoulders and staring down a bunch of local men was about as likely as Steven Seagal winning an Academy Award.

When my driver turned up he gave me a broad smile. I instinctively wanted to shake his hand in greeting but at the last moment—thanks once again to my guidebook—I held back. I was in a country where consensual sex between an unmarried couple could lead to three years in prison. If I was going to go around trying to shake hands with men, I may as well dress up like Dolly Parton in
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
and randomly ask strangers to slap my behind.

We wound back down the confusing array of residential streets, past white apartment block after white apartment block, and out onto the major freeways. Amman was what I had expected a Middle Eastern city to look like: almost monochromatic and lacking vegetation. Still, the lack of any grass whatsoever—even on empty blocks of land—was a shock to my dainty little Western eyes.

The taxi could not take me up to the museum entrance, so instead my driver dropped me at the entrance gate a few hundred metres away from it. I got out and started the hot trek uphill. I wished I had remembered to bring a bottle of water with me. Even early in the morning, the sun was scorching and the air was dry. The scarf I had loosely wrapped over my head to conceal my hair was already starting to irritate me and I could feel perspiration beading on the back of my neck. I was also wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt in an effort to appear modest. I hoped the museum would be air-conditioned.

I had expected that the view at the top of the hill would give me an idea of how Amman was laid out. It didn’t. Stretching away as far as I could see were these unadorned, white cement buildings, piled on top of each other, climbing the sides of the barren hills and jumbled in what used to be valleys below. Occasionally, where the land was too steep to build, there was a patch of gritty beige-coloured earth. It looked like a construction site more than a city. There was no colour anywhere apart from the very occasional conifer. It went on and on like this, up and down the mountains to the horizon. There were a couple of straggly trees at the top of the hill I was standing on and I spent twenty minutes fiddling around with my camera, trying to frame up something vaguely picturesque.

I entered the museum. It was small, about the size of a two-bedroom Australian house. The display cases looked like the ones normally found in shops or libraries, not museums. There didn’t seem to be an alarm system and some of the artefacts were simply resting on plinths, with not even a rope around them to stop people getting too close. A cat slunk past me and curled itself around the leg of a table. I stepped back, wondering if it was the kind that ate tarantulas.

I walked up to the first exhibit—a collection of sculptures—and read the perfunctory little piece of cardboard that described them. It turned out I was looking at some of the world’s oldest sculptures. Six and a half thousand years ago, someone had made these doll-like, square-bodied, two-headed men and women. Somehow they had survived through the millennia and now they were here, in front of me. I couldn’t fathom it.

I wandered past jewellery, bowls, carvings, all of them from a time that seemed implausible. Even though I was in the wrong country, I half expected to see accompanying photos of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of
Cleopatra
using these objects as props. It was all so old and so delicate and so precious;
this
was the kind of stuff worth hanging on to. I wondered doubtfully if my stuff would become that valuable if it survived a few thousand years. I looked again at the collection in front of me. Nothing in it seemed to be the ancient equivalent of half a dozen novelty erasers and a legless Smurf figurine.

I ventured into a little room at the back of the museum, and there, right in front of me, were the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was like being in the presence of royalty. Perhaps it was because I was the only person in there, but the room felt like it had a presence of some sort. In fact, apart from one other man and his guide, I had the whole museum to myself. I could act as giddy and stupid as I liked. I took lots of photos; there were no signs to say that I couldn’t. Along the right-hand side of the room were broken bits of what looked like a stone tablet. I stepped closer to read the explanation. Surprisingly, they were the stone benches on which the scrolls were written. How did they know that? There was nothing to explain further, the sign said simply ‘Tables and benches on which the scrolls were written’. There were no ropes in front of them, no warnings not to touch. I looked around and then reached out and put my hand on the place where another person had sat over two thousand years before to etch out some of the most controversial and famous documents in existence. I stood very still, appreciating the moment. It put my belongings into perspective. Even if everything I owned survived two thousand years, I didn’t own one thing that would come close to the objects in this room.

I passed back through the museum, taking a final look at everything before I left. All of these documents, artefacts, sculptures and jewels were laid out so modestly. There were no gaudy signs and flashing lights, no audio guides or velveteen ropes to let people know they were looking at Something Important. I was reminded of the city view I had seen outside—I was in a part of the world where people didn’t tart things up. Instead, they simply laid out everything and let it tell its own story. My collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle memorabilia, carefully arranged along the tops of my bookshelves and linked together with an old bit of tinsel, started to seem a little tacky.

I lay in bed that night staring at the ceiling. Thanks to jet lag I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that I had just drifted off when the dawn
adhãn
woke me again. I flicked on the bedside lamp, pulled out my trusty guidebook and skimmed through the places I was going to visit that day. I had splurged the night before and booked a car and driver. In a few hours’ time I was going to travel down to the Dead Sea for a swim and then I was going to take in some other sights near the King’s Highway, a road so ancient it was mentioned in the Bible. Like the day before, it all seemed too extraordinary to be real.

My driver, Hana, arrived promptly at 10 a.m. in his shiny black car with cream leather seats. I climbed in the back, luxuriating in the air-conditioning. He didn’t smile when I greeted him like my last driver had, he just shut the car door on me, climbed in the front and started driving. I sat in the back, feeling like I was in trouble for something. I flicked through my guidebook. Had I used my left hand? Had I greeted him inappropriately? Had I sat in such a way that I was showing him the sole of my shoe? I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. I decided to stay still and keep my mouth shut.

Cruising through an upmarket residential area, I spied a middle-aged man herding some goats. There were no fields, sheds or farms anywhere near us, just houses and roads. My resolve to keep quiet disappeared; this was too strange not to query. I summoned up my courage and called out to Hana: ‘Excuse me, why does that man have goats?’

Did he sell them door-to-door perhaps?

‘The goats are for the beautiful.’

‘Pardon?’

Hana said it again like I was an idiot.

‘The beautiful! The
goats
are for the
beautiful
.’

I wasn’t game to ask again, and considering my Arabic consisted of nothing more than the word for ‘thank you’, I didn’t expect I would be able to get a better answer. ‘
Shukran
,’ I said meekly. Hana did not seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy miming out the word for measles. I preferred my theory anyway; that the goatherd was selling his animals door-to-door, like a meaty version of the Avon lady.

As we drew closer to the Dead Sea we passed a few luxury hotels built on what used to be the edge of the water but which were now a few metres back from it. Hana told me that, thanks to heavy irrigation along its tributaries, the sea was shrinking and in forty years it was expected to disappear altogether. These posh hotels, with their palm-tree gardens and expensive European cars lined up out the front, were resting on the edges of murky, eroded banks with nothing around them at all. It looked a little like a movie version of the aftermath of a nuclear war.

After about an hour’s drive, Hana pulled into a car park and brusquely led me through a shaded archway where I paid for our tickets. Then we passed into the bright sunshine of the resort. There was a large swimming pool, surrounded by flat stone pavers and one solitary palm tree. To both my left and right were rocky hills, covered in dirt and not much else. The pool was built up a couple of metres from the beach and on the other side of it the stone paving dropped away abruptly. I could see the Dead Sea and, beyond, a barren mountain range. Even though I was standing at the lowest point on earth, I felt like I was about to go swimming on the moon.

I found the change rooms—full of pale European women—and changed into my swimmers. I didn’t bother with sunscreen; the heaviness of the atmosphere, combined with the haze evaporating off the surface of the water, was supposed to provide a natural UV barrier. I pulled at my two-piece swimming costume, trying to get it to cover the little bit of belly that was sticking out between the top and bottom halves. After the last couple of days of wearing long-sleeved shirts, long pants and a scarf over my head, it felt weird to be so exposed. Outside I passed a gift shop that sold Muslim swimming costumes, all-in-one suits that reached from neck to ankle with a little frill around the waist. I rearranged my sarong to cover as much of me as I could and pitter-pattered past the swimming pool and concession stand to the steps leading down to the water’s edge.

The beach was very rocky and the sea was the same steel-grey colour as the sky. A replica Bedouin tent was set up on the far side of the complex, and on the other side was some wire, separating us from the desert. On the boundary closest to me stood a donkey tethered under a lean-to. It had its back to everyone and was staring resolutely at the stone wall in front of it, as if it wanted nothing to do with the tomfoolery going on behind it.