The two Iraqi women in black had, nestling in the folds of their cotton cloaks, about three Jordanian dinars between them. With that, they could have bought a sandwich each at any of the cafés I longed to stop at. At the Movenpick, which was the sort of place they had once been accustomed to, they might have shared one cup of tea.
An Oriental Garden
After a long walk and many stories of Moses, of Moabites, of Edomites and of Nabataeans, and then bumping into Mrs Amrin with their young son Qais, we had our coffee in a shaded park. Tall, thorny and mangled trees that the Arabs called sidr provided shade. Young men provided the coffee, tea and sandwiches in a green Pepsi-logo’d hut. Mr Amrin knew the owner, Bassam Abu Samhadana. Both were from Kerak. Mr Abu Samhadana would sit with us every few minutes between spells of overseeing his waiters. Most of the white plastic tables hosted large families. The mothers, fathers, grandparents and uncles talked. Children ran amok among the sidr trees. In a corner of the garden – itself a triangle of open land surrounded by city streets, restaurants and business buildings – was a lone table where three women smoked narghiles, sucking hard on the long tubes to make the water bubble and the smoke fly. Their laughter, their girth, their hair piled high in colours that might have come from tubs of ice cream, their skirts cut miles above plump knees, their jewels casting sunbeams through the sidrs’ shadows, their shoes tight and black, everything about them, said: we are not from here. They might have hung ‘For Rent’ signs around their necks. ‘Sharameet,’ Mr Amrin explained. Prostitutes. The picture cried out for Delacroix and the caption, ‘Hookers with hookahs’ or ‘Oodles of odalisques’. Mr Amrin admitted they were Jordanian, but they were not from Aqaba. They were most assuredly not, he said when I asked, from Kerak.
Was Mr Amrin a Bedouin? He was, but a few generations back. ‘You can say 99.99 per cent of the original Jordanians,’ by which he meant the half of Jordan’s population who were not refugees from Palestine, ‘are Bedouin.’ Most had settled in cities, towns and villages. ‘Bedouin are peaceful people. They are very straight. If they like you, they say they like you. If not …’
Was it, I wondered, a good idea for him to have left Kerak for tourism in Aqaba? In Kerak, he had been an army-trained electrical engineer. His wife had had a job there. She came from a prominent Jordanian family, the Mejallis, who had given the country politicians, lawyers and a prime minister. In Kerak, Mr Amrin had a house and a father, mother and siblings.
In Aqaba, he said, he had seen the president of the United States. It was in 1994. Israel’s prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, King Hussein and Bill Clinton were opening the border between Israel and Jordan. ‘They were crying,’ he said. ‘The newspapers said it was because of the treaty’ – the Israel – Jordan peace – ‘but it wasn’t. It was the dust.’ The royal family kept a palace in Aqaba, and he had often seen the young princes. He had met many foreigners. Aqaba showed him more than Kerak. On 11 September 2001, he was driving American tourists in Wadi Roum, the desert through which Lawrence had marched to Aqaba in 1917. ‘One guy’s mobile rang in the back seat. He woke up and jumped. “What? The World Trade Center is destroyed?” He was very upset. His brother was on the eighty-second floor, but he was worried about another man in the building who owed him money.’
Maybe it was just as well the Americans no longer visited Aqaba. Mr Amrin did not understand them. He said he was not a businessman. I could see that when he refused payment for my day’s tour of Aqaba, its ancient citadel, its souks and Bassam Abu Samhadana’s coffee garden.
Bassam Abu Samhadana poked in and out of our conversation, administered affairs in the café and gave us lunch he’d made himself at home. We feasted on a large pan of kafta, minced and spiced lamb in yoghurt, that we ate communally. Each of us grabbed bites from the flattened circle of meat with our silver spoons or pieces of Arabic bread and took billows of white rice from a bowl. While we ate and drank tea, Bassam Abu Samhadana told us Aqaba’s gossip in a manner so relaxed he might have been stretched on a divan smoking a narghile and musing on visions rising from its smoke. He motioned to me to eat more kafta, then said that England’s Prince Edward had once visited Kerak. Bassam, as royalist as his Kerak compatriot, had tracked down the youngest son of England’s queen to present him with a Persian carpet. Did Edward like it? Mr Abu Samhadana was not sure. He smiled to make me follow his eyes to the far table, where the three professional women were receiving a Saudi gentleman. A young Jordanian in a black leather jacket hovered behind.
Ahmed and Bassam, as they instructed me to address them, blamed the Saudis for attracting prostitutes to Aqaba. Saudi millionaires brought their money and sexual frustration a few miles over their border to a conservative Arab town that, compared to any city in their kingdom, was Gomorrah-on-Sea. Ahmed and Bassam did not rate the three Jordanian prostitutes. ‘The prettier ones are the gypsies,’ Bassam said. ‘And the high-class women come from Iraq.’ The Saudi gentleman, however corpulent he was under his dark cotton gown and whatever price he was then negotiating with the leather-jacketed procurer, gave the impression of a man on a budget. He and the jacket reached an agreement. The Saudi paid for the women’s narghiles and colourful cocktails and accompanied them across the street to a Lebanese restaurant, the Ali Baba. How, I wondered, would he manage three such well-proportioned women after a large lunch?
In the evening, I walked alone along the beach, read the newspapers, ate a Lebanese dinner at the Ali Baba and returned to Bassam’s outdoor café. The day’s heat had settled, leaving Bassam’s garden cool and silent. Long necklaces of fairy lights, every other one out like a blind eye, dangled among the branches. My first day in Aqaba: was it a success? A few hours earlier, I had watched children swim at Aqaba’s last free beach – a dirt shore where women coddled babies and let the sea brush the hems of their long dresses. Boys, no more than eight or nine years old, charged by on lithe and small Arab mares, plumes and spangled bridles ablaze in the sunset. Blankets and rugs hugged dry earth nearest the water, where men and women, not one of them immodest enough to strip down to a swimming costume, wrapped the remains of picnics and called their young in from the waves. Away from the shore, boys in jeans or shorts kicked footballs, while others bought ice cream and popcorn from a two-wheeled stall. Wet children wrapped themselves in large towels, crouched with their backs to the wind and shivered. The wind rose, from the north-west, like Lawrence’s Arabs, hurling desert sand and pebbles at the dying day.
When someone travels to write about a place, he looks for what makes it different from other places. That evening in Aqaba, I could have been anywhere. The beach, apart from the modesty of the adults, resembled the quiet sea at Brindisi or the Santa Monica sands in California where I had grown up. Aqaba’s particularity lay hidden in its history, those rare occasions when some emperor or general captured it and left mud-brick remains like the Nabataean – Ptolemaic harbour or the Mamluke citadel that the Turks surrendered to a young British officer and his few hundred Arab irregulars. If not for its past, Aqaba might not have been worth the visit.
Out of the darkness of the garden café, between my chair and the kiosk, where the staff prepared coffee and food, Bassam approached wearing a red-check keffiyeh around his neck. He unwound the fluffy headscarf and handed it to me. ‘My mother made this,’ he said. ‘It’s wool.’ Stretched out, it was a yard of white cotton into which his mother