A souvenir stall on the corner is selling bottles filled with multicolored sand. Behind the counter stands a young shopkeeper in dark glasses. He is expertly pouring purple mountains, brown camels and orange clouds into a bottle.
My attention is immediately arrested by these mountains, camels, and clouds, and I can’t tear myself away.
“Hello!” The shopkeeper greets me loudly and cheerfully, in English, fully aware that he’s got me hooked. I can see myself reflected in his dark glasses: a potential customer.
“Where are you from?”
“Russia.”
“Oh! Russia, Moscow! You can put down your backpack, have a seat and you can watch.”
“No, no, I’ll be going, just for a second.” Naively making my apologies, I am still unable to tear my eyes away from the exquisite sand filling up the bottles.
“Are you alone?” Knowing he’s got me hooked, he reels me in easily with his casual but interested tone.
“Yes.”
“Come on, put down your backpack.”
I take off my backpack and sit by the little table, gazing wide-eyed at the Jordanian’s work. He is pleased by my attention, and continues to envelop me in a web of standard questions: where from, where to, how.
A minute, two, three, and now he, having taken off his glasses, is the one staring at me. I simply told him where I’m from, where I’m headed and, most importantly, how I’ve been traveling.
“I can’t believe it…Would you like some tea? My treat,” he adds. “My name is Ibrahim. What is your name?”
He calls an assistant and asks him to bring us some tea, then hurriedly turns his gaze back to me, and I see a completely different expression than before. He now speaks quietly and not as insistently as before, so I answer his questions more willingly.
“Why do you wear a headscarf?”
“Well, your women wear headscarves, so, out of respect for tradition…”
Judging by his reaction, Ibrahim has never yet encountered a foreign woman wearing a headscarf, nor such an explanation.
As invariably happens in Muslim countries, we end up talking about religion. Ibrahim believes in the absolute truth of Islam but when I ask if he prays the namaz he answers in an uncertain and unsteady voice:
“No.”
He can’t explain why. As we continue our conversation wholly engaged, a young Arab around twenty-seven comes up to Ibrahim’s table with a slow and arrogant gait, obviously going for the European look: blue jeans, black sweatshirt, blue baseball cap, sunglasses. A thick gold chain seems to gleam only in order to draw attention to his dark tanned neck. He gives me a nonchalant sideways glance and says hello to Ibrahim who enthusiastically starts telling this guy about me and our conversation.
The guy’s name is Khalil. Hearing that we’ve been talking about Islam, he sits down to join us. He has an excellent command of English and with unexpected openness begins talking about what religion means to him, about his studies of the Qu’uran and his thoughts about what is written — all this without a tinge of arrogance or condescension. He speaks without a break, looking at me and holding eye contact, seemingly afraid that if he loses eye contact I will disappear like a mirage in the desert before he gets a chance to have his say.
Like Ibrahim, Khalil is convinced as to the absolute truth of Islam, and in speaking about it he resembles a man who has just discovered a treasure and wants the world to share in the joy of his discovery.
“And what about you? Do you observe all the teachings of the Koran? Do you pray?” I ask, full of hope. On my second day in Jordan I’m already asking these questions with hope, rather than with the certainty of a positive answer as I had in Syria.
Echoing Ibrahim, Khalil answers:
“No.”
“Why?”
He drops his head, then suddenly raises his eyes as if I were the one expected to answer and not he.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I feel that the less I pray, the more I become alienated from God, but there is nothing I can do.”
Then he glanced back at me:
“I don’t understand why I’m telling you all this. It feels like we’ve known each other for a long time. I have never said this to anyone before.”
I feel my cheeks burning and look at Ibrahim as if he could offer me a way out, and suddenly I remember:
“I need to go to the visa office.”
“I have a car,” says Khalil.
“Ibrahim says it’s not far from here.”
“I have a car all the same.”
Shops, restaurants, hotels flicker past in the car window. At the office they tell me to come back tomorrow. I’ll spend the night in this city after alclass="underline" Khalil’s parents have left for England while his brothers and sister are at home.
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“There are ten of us all together.”
“Ten! And you all have the same mother?”
“Yes. My father married when he was thirty, and my mother gave birth to the last child when he turned forty.”
The brother
The large house was a mess of the sort only twenty and thirty-year-old sons can create when their parents are on vacation. One sister cannot cope with this chaos on her own, especially when she lives elsewhere and visits only in order to cook for her brothers. This is what she is doing when we arrive at Khalil’s — a girl around twenty, with beautiful facial features. She welcoms me very warmly and despite my insistent offers does not allow me to help.
We sit down to dinner. Khalil introduces me to his younger brother Sufiyan. Another one of Khalil’s brothers comes into the room. The first thing I notice about him are his huge arms with bulging muscles. Well, well! I wonder why he needs such muscles.
“This is Iyid, my brother,” Khalil introduces us.
Iyid carefully studies me and smiles with sad-looking eyes, or maybe I’m just imagining it.
“What’s your name?”
“Tatiana.”
“Wha-a-t?” He frowns uncertainly.
“Tatiana.”
Later he tells me he misheard my name as santyana which in Arabic means the part of a woman’s underwear worn on top, and he was confused.
“Where are you from, Tatiana, Germany?”
“No, from Russia.”
“A-a-ah!” He exclaims significantly.
I would find out about the meaning of this reaction only later, in Khalil’s office. He works as a tourist guide. When his boss heard I was from Russia he chuckled slyly:
“From Russia with love?”
I already have some idea what this implies, but I still ask:
“What do you mean?”
My slightly indignant tone change the atmosphere. The boss doesn’t answer. Although, of course, it isn’t really his fault that the majority of women working in the Aqaba nightclubs (not as waitresses) are from Russia.
Iyid’s scornful tone is most likely for the same reason, but it doesn’t last long. Khalil goes to fix his car and Iyid begins showing me photos on his laptop.
“This is my older brother, he lives in England. Our parents have gone to visit him. This is my second brother, he lives in France. And this is my crane. I work on a crane in the port.”
“You need such big arms to work on the crane?”
“No,” he smiles. “I work out. And this is me in Egypt. I really love Egypt.”
“Do you go there on vacation?”
“Yes. It’s warm there.”
“Like it’s cold here?”
“Now it’s cold here, it’s winter.”
One of the most entertaining things to do while travelling is to scare the locals with stories about Russia. To tell Austrians who can cross their country in five hours, for instance, that in order to get from Moscow to Vladivostok it takes six days by train. Or to tell a Lebanese person, who lives in a country of four million people, that in Moscow alone we have ten million.