He frowned, just for an instant, and then immediately his warm smile returned. ‘Of course not.’
He had been recommended to them by their friends Archie and Colm, who had visited Petra two years earlier. Amanda had rung the mobile number they had given her from Cairo, not sure if the number would still work or whether he would still be working as a driver, but it had been picked up on the second ring. A male voice had answered, ‘Salaam’ and then ‘Hello’. Flustered, she had attempted a polite greeting in Arabic but then quickly asked, ‘You speak English?’ She thought she heard the hint of a laugh in the man’s quick response, ‘But of course.’
His English was indeed excellent. The car sped down a dusty highway and then slowed as it neared a small caravan by the side of the road. ‘Would you like a coffee?’
Daniela was still concerned about her stomach, and refused, but Amanda willingly agreed. She went to unclasp her purse but Hassan motioned with a quick lift of his head as his tongue hit the roof of his mouth — that gesture and sound that throughout the Middle East seemed to indicate, No, I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.
Within a very short time they had reached the outskirts of Amman and were ascending the last hilltop. The narrow streets were cluttered with squat concrete cabins, lopsided electrical and telephone poles, precarious apartment blocks and the occasional villa. Then, the car accelerating, they dropped and were speeding along a straight motorway; on either side there was only the endless sea of burnished desert sand.
Hassan asked if they wished to listen to music and when Amanda nodded he put in a cassette of old disco. Daniela leaned forward in her seat and asked if he had any Arabic music. Pleased, he inserted another cassette. A male voice sang a deep, plaintive lament, its strangeness exhilarating and uncanny to Amanda’s ear, but the music beneath was chintzy and slick, little different to the monotonous beat of the disco it had replaced. But Hassan was nodding his head to it as he drove; in the back seat Daniela too was gently swaying, her eyes hidden behind the thick lenses of her prescription sunglasses, gazing out to the unrelenting desert that surrounded them. At one point Hassan sang along to a chorus and Amanda wished she could turn off the stereo and just listen to the man sing. His was a rich baritone, and though not always faithful to the tune, it seemed to her an apt accompaniment to the sparse, brutal landscape. He was a handsome man, overweight, no doubt because of the sedentary life of driving — and also, Amanda supposed, from his wife’s rich cooking — but he was naturally thick-bellied, with a broad chest, and the heft suited him. His face was as slate, strong lines, a jutting jaw and elongated cheekbones. She could well understand why Archie and Colm had been so taken with him. Silly old poofs, she chuckled to herself, they would have fallen in love with him.
Thinking of her old friends, a wave of homesickness overtook her. This desert earth seemed cleansed of scent. The first thing she would do when they returned to their home in Sydney would be to push open the small attic window of her study and take in the perfume of the jacaranda tree.
As they drove they passed groups of men crouched wearily in long lines at the side of the road. They were all startlingly thin. As the car approached, the first man in the line would jump to his feet, waving his arms in the air as if he were dancing. As the car zoomed past he would return to sitting back despondently on his haunches.
‘They are Egyptians,’ Hassan explained. ‘Looking for work.’
Again, the incredible propinquity of the Old World: the road ahead could lead them into Saudi Arabia or Egypt; to turn back would take them through Syria and Lebanon. If they turned right there would be Israel, or left they would be in Iraq. There is a war on, she reminded herself; to the east of this desert, a civilisation has been destroyed by war.
Earlier, Hassan had talked about his family, his two sons and two daughters, his pride in them all. He spoke of his love for his mother and father, of his brother’s studies for the civil service, of his sister married in Damascus. ‘You must miss her,’ Amanda had said, and Hassan replied with a laugh, ‘Damascus is two hours from Amman in the car.’
No wonder the family was a bedrock in this part of the world, she thought. If Australia was defined by the tyranny of distance, here was determined by its subjugation to proximity.
At a crossroad leading to the Dead Sea in one direction and the River Jordan in the other, their passports were examined by a dark-skinned youth who was smoking a cigarette in his sentry box. He spent an age glancing at the three passports, looking at one face, then another, at one point asking Daniela to remove her glasses. Finally, as if reluctant to do so, his eyes still flicking from face to face, he returned their papers.
As soon as Hassan had driven away, he let out a stream of Arabic that hinted at the sour fury of an expletive or a curse.
‘Are you okay, Hassan?’
‘He is a Bedouin. He doesn’t know how to read.’
Amanda wondered if that could be true. He had seemed such a child, no more than Eric’s age. She tried to imagine her son in a military uniform. She couldn’t bear such a thought.
When they arrived at the Dead Sea, Daniela annoyed her by asking her in the women’s changing room whether it was appropriate for them to be swimming. She was concerned that Hassan would be offended by the sight of them in bathing suits. Amanda snorted, kept on disrobing and did not dignify the question with a response. Hassan had asked them whether they wanted to swim, he had taken them to the small resort beach, had organised chairs for them, and had suggested a restaurant in which to have lunch. This was the man’s living, taking tourists and travellers from one end of his country to the other. He was not some fundamentalist warlord who recoiled at the thought of a woman’s bare flesh. He was an urbane, intelligent man who spoke at least two languages. He was certainly not wealthy, not of that Old World class at all, but he was working hard to support his family. Amanda and Daniela were probably the same age as his mother. It was absurd to think that their ageing bodies would have any effect on the man at all.
Once in the water, Daniela’s reservations disappeared. The two of them floated in a state of surrender on that strange soup of sea, the brutal glare of the sun off the barren hilltops and motionless water affirming that they had indeed returned to an antediluvian world. A French family were swimming near them, the mother repeatedly warning the children to be careful of their eyes. There were not many in the water, but they all seemed to be European. The only Arabs were the assorted drivers and waiters watching from the shore. Amanda spotted Hassan. She fought back a childish urge to wave at him. Instead, she lay on the warm, viscous water and looked up at the sky. Even that looked seared by the intensity of the sun, the blue washed out to a near white.
She had never been particularly religious, but being there she could not help but think of the stories from the Bible. It was no wonder this land gave birth to prophets. The earth here was forbidding, the very air ascetic. She thought of the verdant foliage of home, of the emerald harbour, the dense kingdom of forest that spread south from the edges of their city all the way down to Wollongong.
She swam over to Daniela and they brushed shoulders. ‘I think God was lying when He said that this shithole was the Promised Land.’
Daniela, who had experienced a fierce longing to have faith as a devout Catholic schoolgirl, could not stop laughing.
On the beach they showered off the salt, then lay back on the lounge chairs. Amanda asked if Hassan wanted a seat, but he declined, indicating he was just as happy to sit behind them on the sand. She had just closed her eyes when two whiplash booms thundered through the valley. Hassan sprang to his feet, staring at the opposite shore. The Europeans glanced nervously at one another, as did Amanda and Daniela. The Arabs stood still, guarded, waiting, but there was the faintest of echoes and then the return to arid silence. Hassan sat back down.