Nine Parts of Desire (19 page)

The Bedouin was troubled by a familiar bundle of Middle Eastern bogeys: America in general and the CIA in particular; Jews, or if not Jews, then Christians; women’s sexuality—both the fear of a “past” and the dread of present emancipation signaled by the absence of a veil.

It was hard to take his ranting seriously. Yet, in Iran and Egypt, rulers’ wives had served as lightning rods for dissent, or at least criticism of them had been a barometer of troubles to come. The shah’s empress Farah and Sadat’s wife Jehan both had been aggressively modern, high-profile women who had fought for reform. What was Queen Noor doing to earn so much opprobrium?

At fifty-four, her husband, King Hussein, was the Middle East’s great survivor. At thirteen, he’d narrowly missed being killed in the hail of assassin’s bullets that murdered his grandfather. In 1951, at fifteen years old, he’d inherited a wobbly throne, survived the loss of the West Bank—half his kingdom—to Israel in 1967, put down an armed insurrection by Palestinian refugees in 1970 and, by 1989, had
ruled for thirty-eight years. “He’s been to the funerals of all of those who said he wouldn’t last a week,” said Dan Shifton, an Israeli analyst of Jordanian affairs. Within days of the riots, the survivor in the king did what was necessary: he sacked the prime minister, Zaid Rifai, and promised his restless subjects their first general election in twenty-two years. I wondered if his marriage to Noor, his fourth and longest, would also have to be jettisoned in the interests of his survival.

When riots broke out, the king and queen were in Washington, dining at the White House. Pictures of Noor, resplendent in a navy-blue chiffon gown, and word that her sister had attended the dinner on the arm of the film producer George Lucas, only fed the angry talk about her American values and extravagance.

I had a standing request at the palace for an interview with the king. Not really expecting a reply, I fired off a new telex asking to see the queen as well, to talk about the way she’d become a target of the rioters. To my surprise, I got an answer back almost immediately: both Their Majesties had agreed to see me, and a car from the palace would collect me from my hotel.

Along with my chador, I always traveled with what I called my “king suit”—one decent Italian outfit in pin-striped silk that wadded up into a corner of a carry-on bag and emerged respectable after a quick press in a hotel laundry. I put the suit on, along with a pair of high heels that I hadn’t worn since my wedding, and went down to meet a pistol-packing soldier at the wheel of a silver-gray Mercedes.

The royal palace sits on a hilltop near the center of old Amman, the town whose Roman name was Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love. The royal court does its business behind tall iron gates designed to protect those inside against brotherly hate. I had been inside the palace compound before, but only as far as the king’s offices, the Diwan, where Circassian soldiers in high fur hats stand guard and obsequious courtiers wait for the royal summons. I expected that our meeting would take place in the king’s book-lined office. But the car swished past the grand stairway of the Diwan and deposited me under the thudding rotors of a Black Hawk helicopter. The king was already
in the pilot’s seat. “Hop aboard,” he cried, beckoning me into the seat behind him.

The king pushed the control stick forward and we heaved off the ground, hovering low over the palace and Amman’s dense honeycomb of flat-roofed houses. Within seconds, the city was gone. We skimmed groves of ancient olive trees and ribs of bleached white stone. In Amman, fast-food joints named New York New York Pizza and giant supermarkets with bagels in the deep freeze gave Jordan a familiar, Western facade. But the modern layer was thin as a crust of sand. Beneath was an ancient, biblical landscape peopled by tribesmen who lived by their goats, their olives and their blood alliances just as they always had.

Winston Churchill used to boast that he’d created Jordan on a Sunday afternoon with the stroke of a pen. At a meeting in Cairo in 1921, Churchill and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) doodled the amoeba-shaped state of Transjordan onto the map of the Arabian Peninsula to provide a throne for their ally, Abdullah, who had helped Lawrence fight the Turks in World War I. Abdullah’s father, Sherif Hussein, the thirty-fifth-generation direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, had ruled Mecca and the Hijaz region until the al-Sauds swept down from the Nejd desert in the North and pushed him aside.

A Palestinian assassinated Abdullah in 1951. His son, Talal, was mentally ill and abdicated two years later. The teenaged Hussein inherited the throne of a state in which the desert Arabians like himself were quickly becoming outnumbered by Palestinian refugees, pouring across the border after each war with Israel. Jordan, alone among Arab states, gave citizenship to the Palestinian refugees from the West Bank. But in the “Black September” of 1970, Hussein felt the Palestinians were trying to take control of his kingdom. He crushed them, with many casualties.

I stared at the king’s crash helmet, which had “Hussein I” stenciled on the back. In the West, it was easy enough to see the king simply as a smooth-talking, Harrow-and Sandhurst-educated diplomat. But out here he was something much more potent: the avatar of his ancestor the prophet Muhammad, prayer leader, warlord and father of the tribes. Such a leader has to be seen by his people—and not just on TV, talking the dry argot of diplomacy with foreigners. Hussein,
busy with foreign policy, had lost touch with his people. He was on his way to mend the rift.

The United States never seemed to lose its ability to be amazed when one of its foreign-leader buddies was overthrown. Partly, I thought, it was because we only saw these men as they appeared in their dealings with the West. We had no sense of them as they seemed to their own people: that giant constituency to which even the greatest despots are eventually accountable.

As Hussein landed the helicopter on the outskirts of a desert town, the chant of the waiting crowd defeated even the thump of the rotors.
“Bil rub, bil damm
… [With our soul and with our blood… we sacrifice for you, O Hussein!]” Through the swirling dust, the faces straining toward the king were twisted, almost pained. Bodies surged forward, held back by cordons of soldiers who cracked skulls and thumped shoulders as though they were dealing with the nation’s mortal enemies. The king, usually a grave, gray figure, beamed as he tossed off his crash helmet and threw a red and white kaffiyeh atop his balding head. He plunged into the crowd.

I climbed out of the helicopter in his wake and was instantly swept away from him and his tight capsule of bodyguards. The crowd, moving like a single, demented entity, had closed ranks behind the king and carried him forward. I felt myself being dragged in the other direction. I heard the bat squeak of ripping silk as the jacket of my king-suit caught on the hilt of a Bedouin’s dagger. Tottering on the unfamiliar high heels, I tried to keep upright. One of the burly soldiers of the king’s bodyguard spotted me. Cursing and swatting a path through the press of bodies, he grabbed me in one hand and, continuing to rain blows on everyone around us with the other, propelled me back toward the relatively calm eye of the storm that his colleagues were maintaining around the king.

The surge was carrying us toward an array of tents. As we approached, a gurgling moan rose above the chants. Just in front of the king, a camel stumbled to its knees and then, like an inflatable toy losing its air, slowly collapsed forward, thudding with a tiny splash into a glossy pool of its own blood. Across the curve of the animal’s long neck the butcher’s ritual dagger had inscribed a parody of a smile. As tradition demanded, the king strode through the welcoming
sacrificial blood and the bodyguards propelled me after him. Days later, when I unpacked shoes, I imagined I could still see the rusty tidemark, halfway up the heel.

As we reached the shade of a black goat-hair tent, a white-robed tribesman with shaky hands poured coffee from a long-spouted pot into a tiny handleless cup. Trembling violently, he raised the cup to his mouth and downed the contents, to prove it wasn’t poisoned. Then, still shaking, he poured a second cup for his king.

That whole long, scorching day passed in a blur of tableaux from
The Arabian Nights:
a barefoot poet, chanting his verses in praise of the king; an old Bedouin Woman swathed in black veils and marked on the face with blue tattoos, pressing a petition into the king’s palm; the king at lunch, plunging a hand into a platter of steaming lambs’ heads set atop piles of rice; tribesmen, old enough to be his father, kissing him reverently upon shoulders and nose, but addressing him, in their egalitarian desert way, by his
kunya
Abu Abdullah.

I lost count of how many settlements we visited, flitting between them by helicopter, the king’s grave countenance losing more of its grayness as the day wore on. By late afternoon I was almost surprised to find the helicopter easing down once more in Amman, and the king’s soft voice asking me to join him at al-Nadwa, his pink stone palace. “Noor is waiting for us,” he said.

Inside the grand doorway he discreetly pointed me toward a bathroom, then bounded away, over the Persian carpets, past the display cases of antique guns and swords, up the grand staircase, taking the steps two at a time like a boy.

I splashed my face with the hot water that gushed from gold faucets and attacked my wind-knotted, dust-crusted hair with a gold-backed brush set out on the gleaming marble bureau. When I emerged, the queen was drifting down the stairs in a long, Palestinian-style dress with panels of silk in plum and dull gold. Her hair, a brighter gold, fell in loose tresses down her back. She was a striking woman, slender and very tall—at least five inches taller than her husband. In official portraits she was always posed to look shorter than he. I wondered whether he perched on a box or she stood in a hole.

She smiled and held out her hand for a firm, American-style
shake. “I asked His Majesty how you were, and he said, ‘Well, she’s a bit dusty.ߣ ” she said. “But you don’t look dusty to me. Let’s talk in the garden. It’s the best room in the house. In 1970 they had to put bulletproof glass in all the upstairs windows. I think it makes the inside claustrophobic.”

She swished through french doors onto a terrace giving way to lawns and flower beds. The afternoon light fell in solid golden shafts. We wandered over to a group of chairs near a tangle of fragrant jasmine. I perched my notebook on my knee. “You need a table,” she said. Spying a piece of cast-iron garden furniture across the lawn, she strode over and hefted it herself, waving away the dismayed-looking servant who rushed to help her. She had always been athletic: a cheerleader and a member of the hockey team in the first coed class at Princeton in 1969 and an avid skier during a semester spent waitressing at Aspen. Now, she rode, played tennis and did aerobics two or three times a week.

A waiter brought me fresh orange juice in a gold-rimmed glass. The queen took a sip of an astringent-smelling herbal tea, trained her green eyes straight on me and, simply and frankly, unfolded her thoughts on the riots, their meaning and their aftermath. “We flew straight home from Washington when it happened,” she said. “And, as soon as I got home, one of my friends sat me down and told me what had been going on—the absolute
rubbish
in the air about me.” The friend was Leila Sharaf, Jordan’s only woman senator and one of the queen’s confidantes. “Some of it was so preposterous that you have to meet it with a sense of humor, otherwise it crushes you. I mean, someone in my position will always be talked about, whatever I do.”

It was no secret that wealthy Amman wished the king had married one of its own daughters instead of an outsider. His first wife had been Dina Abdul Hamid, a university-educated intellectual with Egyptian roots, seven years his senior. After eighteen months and the birth of a daughter, there had been a sudden divorce. Dina, holidaying in Egypt when she received news of the split, later said that she had been allowed to see her daughter only once during the next six years. The king’s next choice was Toni Gardiner, nineteen years old and the daughter of a British military officer. The king met her at a dance and
ignored all warnings about the possible pitfalls of the match. He renamed her Muna al-Hussein—Arabic for “Hussein’s wish.” They had two sons and twin daughters, but when his wishes changed, in 1972, he divorced her to marry a Jordanian of Palestinian roots named Alia Toucan.

Alia was the first of his wives on whom he bestowed the title queen. She was the perfect choice to heal the scars of Black September and unite the kingdom in the time-honored tribal way. Her son, Prince Ali, born in 1975, vaulted over Hussein’s older sons by Princess Muna to take second place in the succession after Hussein’s brother, the crown prince Hassan. Alia also had a daughter and fostered a baby whose mother was killed in an airline crash. Alia suffered her share of malicious gossip while she lived, but her sudden death in a helicopter crash in February 1977 made her certain to be remembered as the king’s great love and the country’s perfect queen.

So twenty-six-year-old Lisa Halaby had a hard act to follow when the king married her just sixteen months later. There was little in her background to prepare her. She had grown up in a wealthy and influential Washington family. Her mother, the daughter of an immigrant from Sweden, married and later divorced Najeeb Halaby, the son of a Syrian immigrant. Najeeb was a success story of the American melting pot who grew up speaking only English and rose to the top in both business and government service. He became chief executive of Pan Am and directed the Federal Aviation Authority under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His interest was domestic politics, not foreign policy, and his daughter could barely remember a discussion of Middle East issues at home. Still, she claimed a stubborn attachment to her Arabic heritage. “The fifties were all about conformity, and I suppose I rebelled against that,” she said. “When everybody wanted to be the same, I clung to the things that made me different.” For a while she even tried to persuade her bemused fellow pupils at the Washington’s Cathedral School to call her Lisa Man-of-Halab, since that was the literal translation of her Arabic surname.