Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

They had landed. They were safe.

They had booked three nights in Amman, and that was one night too long. After the ferocious scale of Istanbul and then Cairo, the compactness of the Jordanian capital was pleasing. But after a visit to the Roman ruins, a half-day getting lost in the labyrinth of the ugly, congested downtown area, and another half-day wandering the national museum, there was nothing much left for them to do. It was not impossible to buy alcohol but the cafés and restaurants they found themselves in did not serve any, and the nightlife — at least that which was visible to tourists — was not the kind to attract two middle-aged women.

It did not help that on the second day Daniela developed a stomach bug. Amanda thought she should stay in the room and rest, but Daniela would not hear of it. She was determined to see the ancient amphitheatre of Philadelphia.

‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,’ she said, but she wasn’t bloody fine. She followed Amanda around with a pained expression, putting on a stoical smile whenever her lover glanced back at her. It nearly drove Amanda mad. That smile oozed martyrdom.

The stone steps of the amphitheatre were steep, and the desert sun was already broiling by mid-morning. Daniela looked sullen when Amanda announced that she wanted to climb to the top.

‘It looks slippery.’

‘It looks perfectly manageable.’

‘Can’t we head back to the hotel? I don’t feel well.’

‘Then you should have stayed in the room.’ And with that, Amanda started to climb, not once looking back. When she reached the summit, sweat was running down her neck and back. There were only a few other tourists wandering the ruins below. She spotted Daniela sitting on a large slab of stone shaded by the eastern wall. Her frustration and annoyance vanished at once. A stomach bug was a miserable thing on a holiday; it was bad enough when it happened at home. She took one last look at the miniscule world below, the jumble of concrete and power lines, the narrow streets and laneways of the city.

She carefully walked back to earth and sat down beside Daniela. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel. I want to escape this bloody sun. I’ll write postcards and you can rest.’

‘Are you sure?’ Daniela’s tone was timid. Amanda nodded vigorously. Daniela’s answering smile was grateful and relieved.

•

‘Your driver is waiting for you, madam.’

The young clerk at the desk spoke English with a faint American accent. He was spindly thin, with a neatly trimmed black goatee, which he would stroke gently when faced with a request or a question. On their first afternoon there, the women had returned to the hotel to change for dinner and had found him praying on a small mat next to the desk. They had waited for him to finish before asking for the key and he had bowed to them and thanked them profusely. Amanda wondered what he thought of them, these two women sharing a room, no wedding rings on their fingers, no sign of husbands. But if he thought it at all unsavoury, his manner did not show it. He had been charming and polite from the beginning.

‘ Shukrun , Ahmed,’ she said as she handed him back the key. ‘It was a wonderful stay.’

Their driver, Hassan, was a large stout man in an olive-coloured ironed shirt and white linen trousers. He picked up both their bags as though they weighed nothing at all, and grinned cheerfully as he opened the rear door of the car for them.

‘Would you mind if I sat in the front seat?’ Amanda asked.

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.’