Olives (9 page)

‘
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 watch 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.’

‘
Hi. Are you
okay?’ I asked.

Her voice
sounded uneven. ‘Umm, I’ve been better. You saw the news about
Jericho?’

‘
Yes.’
I’m wondering
whether you helped to do it, actually, Aish.
‘Yes, I did.’

She took a
deep breath before the words tumbled out of her. ‘I’ve taken today
off. My cousin was killed in the bomb. He died in hospital this
morning. I’ve known him all my life. I went to school with him.
They tried to save him but he was terribly wounded. They said he
screamed all through the night. Nancy’s gone there.’

My voice came
to me as if it were someone else’s as my hand tightened on the
handset. ‘Nancy? He was Ibrahim’s son?’

Aisha
stammered. ‘No, no. Nancy’s nephew. He worked for Ibrahim. His name
was Rashid. Look, Paul, I’m not too good right now. Could we maybe
talk later?’

‘
Yes, sure.
I’m sorry, Aish. Please tell them I’m sorry.’ I didn’t have the
words to deal with the situation and hated that a platitude came so
readily to my rescue. ‘I’ll call you later on.’

‘
Okay.’ She
drew a deep breath. ‘Thanks.’

Leaning
against the warm window frame and looking out over the rooftops, I
felt like a shit for letting my imagination run away with me, for
thinking she could help to do something like that. Growing up, I
had always wanted to be there, to be one of the men standing by the
carnage and flames, reporting back to the world. I had made heroes
of the ‘greats,’ the Simpsons and Adies, the Woodwards and
Bernsteins. Now events were closer to home, I began to realise how
deep the wounds cut – not just there and then, not just at the
event itself, but into the people around who have to live without
those they have lost.

I tried to do
some work, but eventually I left the Ministry building early,
saying I had an interview. I didn’t drive straight home, but parked
up near the market, the old town area of East Amman, walking down
through the streets and losing myself in the choking traffic and
the flows of people in the grimy streets. I leaned against a rough
stone wall and watched the groups of men selling tired-looking
birds in plastic cages. For the first time since I’d moved in to my
own home, I felt like an utter stranger in this ancient oriental
city, remembering the sick feeling of alienation that gripped me as
I first looked out of my hotel window across Amman, the morning
after Aisha and Ibrahim had got me out of jail.

Aisha’s news
about her cousin made Jericho real in a way news reports somehow
never were, forcing me to confront a new relevance, a new immediacy
where I would normally have been cushioned by the distance between
the viewer and the events being broadcast around the world. Now I
was, literally, in the picture, an actor in the tragedy, one of the
constant stream that flickers past us, our screens refreshing fifty
times a second and touching, yet never actually embracing, each new
unfolding event.

A balding man
selling canaries called out to me, ‘
Salaam
y
’
sidi
.’