Lessons in Letting Go (20 page)

I gingerly picked my way across the beach and walked into the sea. All around me people were squealing and laughing as they lifted their feet from the sea floor and flipped unexpectedly onto their backs. There was so much salt in the water that it was impossible to sink. One young Muslim girl walked into the water fully clothed. She didn’t even take off her belt. I wondered how much fun she was having trying to swim in denim jeans.

I walked in until I was chest-high in the water. I didn’t feel light, as I had expected, so I lifted my feet from the ground. Instantly, I flipped onto my back like everyone else, with my knees sticking out of the water in front of me. I gasped. Without having to try to stay afloat at all, I flipped myself over onto my stomach and half swam, half dragged myself out a little further so I could stand upright in the water with my feet not touching the ground. I hung there, bobbing like a cork. Whenever I caught someone else’s eye, we grinned at each other like idiots. I was an astronaut of the sea. I bobbed around for a while, being careful not to get the water in my eyes as I had read that it stung like crazy. I couldn’t resist licking my lips though. I wanted to know how intense thirty per cent salt water tasted. I stuck out my tongue and pulled a face. It didn’t taste like salt, it tasted bitter and chemically.

I floated back to shore. There were buckets of black mud dotted along the beach and people were digging in and covering themselves in the stuff. It was supposed to be very good for the skin. I went up to a bucket and started slopping it on. And then I got yelled at.

‘Three dinar! Three dinar!’

I scampered off to get my handbag, followed all the way by the angry yelling man. I kept my head down and ignored him until I found my wallet and carefully pulled out the notes. I went back and continued covering myself in the mud as if nothing had happened. Then an old bloke came up to me, stuck his hand in the bucket and egged on by his male friends, slapped it on my back. They all giggled and I frowned at him. This was not appropriate behaviour at all. Before I had left Australia, a friend who spoke Arabic had taught me the word
haraam
, which roughly translates as ‘a thing that the Koran does not allow’. Apparently you would instantly shame the person you said it to but even now, as this old fellow accosted me, I wasn’t prepared to go that far. I let myself be groped first on the back and then, bizarrely, in my armpit because I didn’t want to appear like a rude Westerner. Instead I waggled my finger at him and told him that was enough.

I sat in the sun until the mud dried on my body, pondering the fact that I had chosen political correctness over stopping someone from molesting me. Then I thought about it: was it political correctness, or was I chicken? I had thought that I was just scared to throw my stuff out but maybe I was scared of everything: scared of offending people, scared of appearing rude or stupid, or insulting. That old bloke wasn’t the idiot, I was. It was about time I grew a backbone.

I went back into the water and washed off the mud. Hana was waiting for me and, when I was dried and dressed, he loudly insisted I visit the souvenir shop. I guessed that he probably got a commission if I bought anything. I walked in the door and stood there without looking at a thing and instead, stared at him. ‘Bugger it,’ I thought. ‘If he’s going to act like a bully, I’ll act like a bully back.’ Eventually he got the idea and we walked back out. Even though my behaviour was completely passive-aggressive, it was a start. I gave myself an imaginary pat on the back.

We drove up the mountain to a geological museum called the Dead Sea Panorama. Hana told me I had one hour. I told him I might be longer and walked off before he could argue. I giggled to myself when I knew he wasn’t looking. I felt like a naughty schoolgirl.

Inside was an elaborate exhibition. There were glass display cases, electronic displays with little lights on them, a diorama of the area and a video display. I perused everything slowly, reading about the history of the land and how the Dead Sea had formed in a fault in the earth’s crust millions of years before. Beneath the Dead Sea, two massive tectonic plates met and, much like the inhabitants living on top of them, they were grating against each other. On the Jordanian side the plate was moving north, on the Israeli side it was going south. Never let it be said that the Middle Eastern conflict is only on the surface; it goes right down to the centre of the earth.

I peered at displays of insects and wildlife, taxidermied animals and bits of rock. I found a table showing the chemical composition of the Dead Sea; it turned out it wasn’t just full of salt, it also contained 7800 times more cadmium than normal sea water and 94 times more bromine. When

I had licked my lips I had probably licked my way to a tumour.

I left the museum after an hour and a quarter and headed towards the car. I had a bottle of water in there and I suddenly had an urge to drink all of it. As I opened the passenger-side door and went to get in, Hana shook his head and pointed down in front of the complex.

‘You should see this,’ and he grinned for the first time that day. Obviously my timid first steps at standing up for myself had not caused the world to cave in.

We walked the short distance down a pathway and when we stopped, I instinctively shied back. To my left, the rocky cliffs rose sheer with nothing behind them but sea and sky. All I could see in front of me was the Dead Sea, the same travertine colour as the sky. A haze of either atmosphere or pollution lay over the whole area. It was breathtaking in its aridness: this looked like the entire world. It was a giant, blank canvas and yet it wasn’t. There was something hidden and ancient, prehistoric and mythological about it all at once. Even though I could not see one living thing, the whole area felt alive. Now I understood what all the fuss was about. Now I understood how beautiful nothing could be.

We drove back down the mountain, winding past the enormous rock faces that I hadn’t noticed on the drive up. After my little stand-off with Hana in the souvenir shop, I had been obsessing about how I behaved and what other people thought of me, both here and at home. Now, on the way back down, I was giving myself a crick in the neck from gaping out the car window. The rocks were oversized, the sky was oversized, the sea was oversized. Without vegetation there was nothing to look at
but
size.

It felt an awful lot like spirituality.

That night I sat and stared out the window of my hotel room and tried to make sense of how I felt. The landscape I had seen that afternoon had left me feeling uneasy in the same way that standing at great heights always does. It’s not so much that I am scared that I am going to fall, it’s that there’s an infinitesimal part of my brain that wants to know what it would feel like to jump. What terrifies me is that one day that tiny spark of curiosity will go mad and throw me over the edge. The landscape of today had filled me with that same terror; a part of me wanted to know what it would feel like to live in a place as empty as that all the time. I imagined my flat back in Australia completely empty. No more hoarding, no more stuff, nothing there but me. And I imagined myself, fearless in the face of regret, fearless in the face of what other people thought of me. I lay on the bed and listened to that little voice deep inside me as it whispered, ‘Go on, jump.’

Chapter Sixteen

Early the next morning I arrived at the Jordanian office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was there that I was to meet Dana, my UN contact. I was nervous. My only communication with her had been via email and even then, we had only written to each other twice. I was hoping she hadn’t forgotten I was coming. I was also hoping she was a real person. We hadn’t been in contact since I had arrived in Jordan.

The UNHCR was housed in a big square building dominating the end of a residential street. There were about fifty people lined up at a booth out the front, mostly men, but a few families as well. There were cement road blocks on either side of the street and half a dozen uniformed guards cradling rifles. On the other side of the road to the main building, a man holding a sign written in Arabic was silently protesting.

I had no idea how I was to get into the building, so I chose a guard who looked a little bit like Orlando Bloom and asked him for directions. He smiled handsomely and pointed me through the road blocks, past a security checkpoint, through a steel door, up a short flight of stairs, through an X-ray bag-check and then through a metal detector, which I again set off to nobody’s concern. Directly on the other side, as if the detector served as the doorway, was a small room, and at a desk that took up half the available space sat yet another guard. He gestured for me to show him my passport, then he took it from me and told me to take a seat. I sat down on the only other chair, squashed between the metal detector and a bookcase which held nothing but recharging cradles for walkie-talkies.

As I was making myself comfortable, the guard made a short phone call, then hung up again and looked at me, unsmiling.

‘Dana will come at ten o’clock, after her meeting.’

Surrounded by semi-automatic weapons, soldiers and refugees, I felt more relaxed than I had all trip; Dana existed.

I sat and waited. I wished that I had brought a book. I had nothing to do but stare and there wasn’t much to look at, just the guard as he did some paperwork. The door behind him was open but all I could see was the bare concrete of a courtyard and, beyond that, a set of double doors. I tried not to fidget. Eventually my guard left and was replaced by another one who, on his way into the room, threw a newspaper past me onto the bookshelf. He didn’t even make eye contact. I continued to sit there, invisible and unfazed. After three days, I was slowly becoming inured to the way some of the local men treated me. I’d even managed to accept that it wasn’t personal.

On the street below, I could hear a baby grizzling. I was very thirsty. I’d drunk a lot of tea that morning but no water and in this country two litres a day still wasn’t enough. It was hot and dry and the office reminded me of my father’s workshop when I was a little girl, smelling of grease and dust.

It was then I noticed that the newspaper the guard had dropped was written in English. I thought he was just dumping something he was finished with; instead he was dumping me a favour. I picked it up and was just about to start reading an article about Queen Noor when Dana walked into the room.

She was younger than me, petite with black curly hair. She greeted me with a curt nod and asked me to follow her. More stairs, more doors, more stairs, more doors and, finally, a modest office. Dana went to her desk and pulled an information folder from a pile and handed it to me.

‘Today, we will meet some Iraqi refugees at a school. This suits you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have any questions?’

I was feeling overwhelmed. I had managed to get this far—all the way from Australia—by saying that I was a researcher. Obviously Dana was expecting me to ask pertinent, journalistic-type questions. What I really wanted to ask was: ‘Did you know there’s a guard out there who looks
exactly
like Orlando Bloom?’

Instead, I asked her about the people I had seen lined up on the street. It turned out that this was where everyone came to register. Nearly all of them were from Iraq.

‘Jordan is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees and does not accept asylum seekers as citizens. But our king believes in the brotherhood of the Arab people so if they come, even though they can’t be citizens, they can stay. They cannot work, but they can use the schools and hospitals at the rate of a non-insured local. Our job is to assess the people that come here and determine if they are true refugees. If they are, we provide them with resources for many things.’

‘Wow, that’s generous.’

Dana raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s not like that in Australia?’

‘No, in Australia our government decides if you’re a refugee or not. We don’t let an independent umpire make the decision for us.’

‘And if they decide you are not?’

I looked at my hands, embarrassed. ‘They send you away again.’

‘Oh. I know that this year you are taking five hundred extra Iraqis, but how many people do you have asking for asylum in Australia?’

‘A few thousand. How many refugees do you have in Jordan?’

‘Half a million. And we have a population of five million.’

I thought of all those years of the Howard government, when our prime minister had carried on like a housewife in a Looney Tunes cartoon, leaping up and down on a chair, clutching at his skirts and screaming as a couple of hundred malnourished refugees arrived in leaky boats. While he was doing that, Jordan was quietly letting half a million people across its borders. Even though it didn’t offer citizenship, at least Jordan didn’t turn them away or force them back into the middle of a war zone.

I asked Dana if there were many refugees still coming over the border.

‘Not as many as when the war first started but we are registering more and more.’

I was confused. ‘Why are they only registering now?’

‘Because their money ran out. When these people came here four or five years ago, they thought it was temporary. They believed they would be able to go home again. But as time has passed, all of their savings have disappeared. It is not legal for them to work in Jordan so now they are destitute.’ She paused. ‘I never thought how much simple things like my clothes meant to me until I started working here.’

We walked out of her office, through the door, down the stairs, through another door, down more stairs, out the double doors, across the courtyard and retrieved my passport from the security guard. Then we went back through the metal detector, past the X-ray machine, down some steps, through the steel doors, past the checkpoint, through the road block and into the back seat of our car. I looked out the window at the protestor, still standing silently where he’d been when I entered the building an hour and a half ago. As our driver started to move off, I asked Dana what his sign said.