Twigs

V- Amman cont.

Me and Nahar hit the bars last night. No, it isn’t all camels and burqas- girls in tight jeans with blonde highlights, muscle-bound tight-tee boytoys sipping cosmopolitans on the patios- sounds like somewhere I know..
Amman has this part. Like Bombay. The upper mids, the daddy’s Mercedes kids- I guess I should’ve expected it in a big city.

Me and Nahar share pitchers of local Amstel beer. He explains King Abdullah to me, the ruler of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, with his self-appointed advisors and “publicly” appointed puppet parliament. He tells me to hush when I exclaim, You guys are ruled by a f-ing King?? Hey, this is Jordan, man. And the royalty was originally appointed by the Brits, no less, to earn public support for the revolt against the Turks in the 20s. King Abdullah’s gigantic photos and banners are everywhere, public billboards and private shrines, and he lives in palaces and makes decrees. Decrees! He’s a king!

More beer, more chat, it’s good for that. Me and my new Jordanian friend getting drunk together, my mind getting educated through the haze. It’s a strange case of realities here. I ask Nahar if people date; Girls will go out with a guy more than a few times only if they’re seriously considering if he’s marryable. Will they have sex? No- they may make out, do other things- but virginity is a woman’s honour. Men in this society have many ways of being honourable, he says- their work, their piety.. Women have only one way, and it’s between their legs.
And men don’t have female friends. Nahar went to play squash at the University with a female European friend of his who’s living in Amman- they wouldn’t let them on the court. Then, a couple weeks ago Nahar found a comfortable two-bedroom apartment to move into, and his European friend suggested they become room-mates. When the landlord discovered this idea (the potential roomie came over to look at the place), he screamed the house down, accused them of filth and sin, ordered them out, and Nahar lost the apartment. It’s hard to imagine this surrounded by the university crowd here, laughing and smoking hookah. These traditions run deep. These twigs, these pine needles obscuring the tree-trunk of spirituality for humanity. These rules. Nothing but twigs.

Nahar’s a gentle guy. An articulate but soft-spoken guy. A guy who wore a camouflage uniform to every day of public high school in Syria, just like every other kid, and knew how to dismantle and reconstruct an assault rifle by the age of 16, just like every other kid. –Everyone in the Middle East keeps a gun in their house, he says. Nobody trusts the government. They could be toppled tomorrow and people want to be able to fend for themselves.
People laugh on the patio. The waitress is Filipino, local women don’t normally work after dark. There’s guns under the pillows. Guns under the pillows… We finish the pitcher.