Olives (8 page)

I stepped
back and he slashed at the air with the knife, snarling,
‘
Yalla.
’ Walking slowly backwards, I turned the corner
and waited for a second then turned and headed for home. I wasn’t
going to get into a knife fight. I felt a coward.

I couldn’t
make out any damage to the car in the dim light. I poured a scotch
and sat outside. My hands still trembled lighting up the cigarette,
which I hated and put out after a couple of puffs. Going to bed,
sleep evaded me for ages, the tobacco taste in my mouth. Thoughts
of knife-toting thieves and what I’d have done to him if I were a
braver man raced around in my mind.

*

The road from
Amman to the Dead Sea drops down from the city, twisting through
villages and farmhouses clinging in ones and twos to the steep
hillsides as the road descends to the lowest point on earth.
Driving, I found it hard to focus on the twisting road and the
scenery at the same time. We saw the sparkling expanse of water
slide into view below us, the misty blue shores of Palestine and
Israel framing the far side of the immobile expanse of water. The
road straightened out into the plains around the sea and we slowed
as we reached an army warthog, a temporary checkpoint, the soldiers
examining my passport and Aisha’s ID card. She chatted them up in
Arabic, laughing with them, her eyes flashing and
teasing.

We drove
along the coast of the Dead Sea.

‘
What was all
the checkpoint stuff about?’

‘
Security.
That’s Palestine over there across the water. And
Israel.’

‘
I thought
you were at peace with the Israelis.’

She looked
askance at me, an eyebrow raised. ‘Jordan is. Apparently there’s a
government event on at the Conference Centre. It’s up the road
here. That’s why security is tighter than usual.’

We passed a
tall, square metal tower overlooking the flat expanse of lifeless
water. I gestured toward it and asked, ‘Lifeguard?’

‘
Gun
position. They’re not usually manned these days, but when they are
they turn the guns away to face inland. So does the other side.
Peace, you see?’

She flicked
through my passport before handing it to me. ‘Cute picture. They’re
usually very bad. You’d want to look after a face like that rather
than being a hero and chasing robbers.’

My account of
the knifeman in the depths of the city’s stairways the night before
had broken the ice between us. Aisha had been astonished I had been
brave or mad enough to have given chase and had nagged me not to
try and take the law into my own hands like that again.

‘
You don’t
get it, Paul. The Eastern City is dangerous and it starts at the
bottom of the hill outside your house. Leave things be at night,
please.’

The whole
episode seemed as if it had taken place in a dream, particularly as
we drove along the coast in the sunshine, the Dead Sea shimmering
beside us.

I reached out
my hand to grab at Aisha’s ID card. ‘Let’s see yours
then.’

‘
No.’

‘
Come on,
give it over. You’ve seen mine, show me yours.’

She laughed
and pulled away from me, the light making her eyes sparkle. ‘Here,
then. You’re not to laugh.’

She handed
over her civil ID card and of course I did laugh, because the
picture was truly awful. ‘You look podgy.’

‘
I am never talking to you again,
ya
Brit.’

We reached
the dusty moonscape around the potash complex, laughing and teasing
each other, the angry silence of the night before a distant
irrelevance. We tracked Clive Saunders, Mr Potash, down to his
office.

He was
perhaps in his late fifties, silver-haired and florid, his
open-necked shirt exposing a little tuft of curly white hairs. He
came around the desk to meet us, his hand out and grinning a
welcome. He cleared a pile of magazines from one of the pair of
chairs in front of his desk and waved to us to sit.

‘
Good to see
you both. Here, take a seat. Not often we get visitors from the
press!’

An Egyptian
tea-boy brought
chai
suleimani,
black, sweet tea
served in little gold-rimmed custard glasses, and we settled down.
I took my voice recorder out.

‘
Okay if I
use this?’

‘
Go
ahead.’

I switched on
the recorder and Saunders sat forward, his hands clasped in front
of him as he considered my questions. We talked about
Petra-Jordanian’s bid for the potash extraction contracts, the uses
of potash, the benefits for Jordan and so on. Saunders made a big
fuss about how close to the Minister they were, how they all shared
common goals and a vision for the future of Jordan and I soon found
myself drifting away, looking around his untidy office. Books,
magazines and documents covered virtually every surface, from his
desktop to the low cabinets behind him. As he droned on about
sustainable resources, talking more to Aisha than to me, my gaze
wandered to a map of Jordan’s Rift Valley pinned up on the wall and
covered in coloured push-pins and lines. It was next to a
whiteboard marked up with co-ordinates and a table of
numbers.

Saunders
talked himself to a momentary halt and I pointed to the wall
display.

‘
What are
those all about? That doesn’t look like potash.’

Saunders
looked up to his left at the map, blinking owlishly as he adjusted
from droning about potash to answering my question.

‘
Oh, that’s
planning work for the water privatisation. We’re the lead member of
the Anglo-Jordanian Consortium. You’ve heard about the
privatisation, haven’t you?’

‘
The
Minister’s talked about it, but we hadn’t planned to cover it in
any great depth in the magazine.’

‘
Well, you
should. It’s important for Jordan. Right now, the country’s in a
state of drought. Water has to be taken into Amman by tankers,
there’s little piped water infrastructure and it’s mostly ancient.
Jordanian farmers are suffering from very severe restrictions
because there’s simply not enough water to go around. The Yarmouk
River’s being depleted left, right and centre, the Jordan River’s
going brackish and the Israelis are holding back on the volume
they’re meant to be providing from Lake Tiberias. The country’s
damn close to crisis and we believe we can help to manage those
resources effectively into the future.’

‘
Can I quote
you on that?’

‘
Okay, but
please don’t go into any technicalities. Our bid is complicated and
we’re using some pretty groundbreaking technologies and approaches
to water resourcing, management and distribution.’

I took notes
in shorthand to back up the tape, finishing the sentence before I
looked up into Saunders’ blue-eyed, frank stare. ‘What’s the scale
of the problem?’ I asked.

‘
Massive.
Jordan has one of the world’s lowest levels of water resources. The
country’s supply stands at less than a quarter of the accepted
global water poverty level. And a huge amount, something like
twenty-five per cent of that water, is currently coming from
over-pumping unsustainable resources. Experts are forecasting the
water supply will be a potential humanitarian disaster within
fifteen years or so. Personally, I think it’ll come
sooner.’

‘
What’s the
government doing?’

Saunders
reached behind him and pulled out a thick, spiral bound document.
‘This is the National Water Strategy. It was adopted in the late
nineties and outlined any number of approaches to the problem but
at the end of the day it didn’t result in concrete action. That’s
one of the reasons the Ministry of Natural Resources was formed, to
unify the government’s response. And that’s why they’re going into
this privatisation process. It’ll likely be the single largest
privatisation the country’s ever seen. It’s critical to Jordan’s
future.’

Saunders
paused and I sensed the inevitable spiel to come. I wasn’t
disappointed. He laid his hands flat on the desk and leaned
forwards, brows knit in intense sincerity. ‘And we at
Anglo-Jordanian believe we have the solutions Jordan
needs.’

Right, of
course you do.
I asked
because I had to, ‘What’s the privatisation worth?’

‘
No
comment.’

Saunders got
to his feet. The interview, it seemed, was over. I picked up the
tape and whipped out my camera for few snaps, making sure for the
last two that the map and whiteboard next to it were nice and clear
behind Saunders’ proud, out of focus, face.

As we were
leaving, he asked me for a copy of the text before it was published
and I smiled at him, my heart black, and assured him Aisha would
send it across to him. Anything as long as I didn’t have to do it
myself. I’d encountered this before working for Robin on a project
in Singapore – people in power who think they have the right to
demand to see interviews before they’re published. A real
journalist would tell them to get stuffed but I worked on contract
published titles and had already found out a refusal to comply
resulted in a complaint to Robin who would invariably uphold it on
behalf of the advertiser. Every time it happened, it reminded me of
the loss of my independence and self-respect as a journalist
resulting from my fall from grace.

We drove back
towards Amman, passing the cluster of Dead Sea spa and conference
hotels to the left of the road as it wound its blacktop course
through the rocky, arid landscape, twisting around the banks of the
flat expanse of torpid water. I counted the hotel buildings facing
the road, betting myself that if the total was an even number I
would get off the police charge. It was odd. We passed the Dead Sea
Conference Centre and I added it to the total even though it wasn’t
a hotel.

We neared the
head of the sea. Gnarled trees started to line the road and
occasional splashes of roadside colour against the sandy background
revealed themselves as men squatting by the roadside selling coffee
and knick-knacks. We reached the curve of the road as it left the
Dead Sea and snaked up to Amman. Aisha took the u-turn.

‘
There’s
something I want to show you.’

‘
The baptism
site.’

She looked
wide-eyed at me. ‘How did you know?’

‘
I read the
signpost.’

She arched an
eyebrow and tutted. ‘Clever,
ya
Brit. This is the
Bethany, the place where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. I thought
you’d be interested. The Dead Sea is rich in human history. The
whole Rift Valley is.’

We turned
right off the dual carriageway.
The road narrowed into barely more than a single track and
we stopped at the gate and waited for it to be opened for us before
we drove to a partly covered car park next to a cluster of low,
beige buildings. There were a couple of other cars
there.

‘
This is new,
they opened it a few years ago when the peace with Israel looked
like it would last,’ Aisha said. ‘It’s very busy in the
summer.’

Aisha changed
her smart patent leather shoes for a pair of flip-flops. We
crunched across the gravel together as a figure detached itself
from the shade of one of the buildings. He was dressed in Bedouin
fashion, his head covered with a wrapped black and white checked
scarf. Aisha exchanged greetings in Arabic.

‘
This is
Abdullah, he’s a guide here. He works part time for
Ibrahim.’

‘
Wasta
.’

She
nodded.

‘
Wasta
.’

I said hello
to Abdullah and we shook hands before he turned and led the way
through the buildings and down a stone-flagged pathway. I spotted a
city in the foothills across the valley on what must have been the
Israeli side of the border.

‘
What’s
that?’

‘
That’s
Jericho. It’s part of Palestine now.’

Jericho. I
remembered it from primary school – being forced to sing about
Joshua and his army, marching around parping away at trumpets to
break down the city walls. I screwed up my eyes against sun’s glare
and watched the far-away city walls, the buildings little more than
white dots in the shimmering air.

We struck
into the wilderness and were soon surrounded by bushes, delving
deeper along the path into the thick growth of twisted trunks and
dusty branches. Aisha was close behind me, chattering alternately
to Abdullah and I, a stream of Arabic and English that often
threatened to combine in a linguistic emulsion of oil and
water.

She reached
out a hand to brush against one of the pale green spiky-leafed
branches. ‘This is tamarisk. It thrives on the salty ground here.
This path was the one Jesus took.’

I was
surprised. ‘You believe in him?’

‘
We believe
he was a prophet. He’s revered in Islam. The Prophet Mohammed took
the last word of God from Gabriel, but we believe in the same one
God. Many of our names come from the Bible. Daoud is David, Issa is
Jesus, Sara is Sarah and so on.’