Travel by DAR

Middle East: A Jew In Jordan

Reactions were mixed, when I informed people this Jew was heading to Jordan.

"Update your will," said my lawyer.

"Give me power of attorney," said my stockbroker.

"See a psychiatrist," said my girlfriend.

Which, by coincidence, I did. About 300 of them, in fact, who gave me the most telling reaction of all at a psychiatric soiree I found myself crashing two and a half hours before my flight. It was a champagne reception at the Waldorf Astoria, where I had dropped in for a drink; knowing no one, but somehow comforted by the presence of so many gray eminences, Old World Freudian-Zionists gnawing on chicken liver rumaki, a pretty cozy beanfest except for the Baroque harpsichord, playing over and over. And over ...

"What, you don't like Vivaldi?" One of the big-shouldered psychiatric wives, with Star of David earrings and ambitious perfume, peered at me with concern.

"He's fine," I said. "But does it ever occur to you, madam, that in our lives we have heard more Vivaldi, than Vivaldi did, himself?"

She fixed me with a look, waiting to hear the context for my anti-social outburst. "Sorry," I said. "I'm not ordinarily maladjusted; it's just that I'm leaving in six minutes," I explained, "for Jordan."

"Jordan Jordan?" asked another wife, taking stock of me with that classic mix of admiration and pity the psychiatric community reserves for interesting self-destructives. What in this instance could be called the pre-hostage gaze, visualizing how I'd look with four years of facial growth.

Word of my imminent departure swept like a geologic fault through the ballroom. One of the wives with a part-time job in the State Department unburdened herself of the news that there was a Traveler's Advisory against Jordan. "Oops, that's Lebanon," she corrected herself, champagne glass akimbo. "But in the Muddle East," she added in an elegant Sigmundian slip, "you just never know."

Meantime the doctors themselves clustered round me, waxing poetic about the Holy Land. "In my youth, I walked around the Dead Sea in 7 days," bragged one old gent, bow-tied and pink-cheeked. "I camped on a raft in the Sea of Tiberias," boasted another. And in a minute they couldn't find enough wonderful things to say, one-upping each other with a vengeance as they extolled the whole region, fiercely free associating about how wondrous Jordan must be to see with one's own eyes. "Egypt without the urchins." "Incomparable food." "One of the top ten travel destinations in the world." "And wait till you get a look at Petra, the ancient capital ..."

"Ah, Petra." The most senior scholar there, an impeccable figure in sun-burst tweeds and crumbly shoes, lifted himself to his full frail height. "My big regret in life, is never to have gotten to Petra ..."

I had just enough champagne in me to pose the obvious question. "What do you mean 'never?'" I asked. "Why don't you just go?"

Horror reigned, as everyone sucked in their breath. Vivaldi scratched to a stop. Silence mounted, formalized, took on overtones of grandeur; such silence as had never before been heard at a psychiatric fishfry in the great Waldorf Astoria. "Go to Jordan? You're nuts!" he declaimed, a diagnosis that was echoed throughout the ballroom by all the medical experts present, and their wives. "Certifiably nuts!"

"Turn the radio up," I said, falling into the cab at the corner.

"Ooo. Ahh," said Khan Hassan, my Pakistani driver, hack license number 430501, whisking me to the airport. He jammed the Arab crooner higher. Beyond the bridge cables, Manhattan flickered to the anti-melodic wailing, losing and regaining the beat like a palsied glitterbug.

"I understand their concern," I told Khan from the backseat. "Though the peace treaty was signed nearly five years ago and Jordan’s considered a perfectly safe destination, lots of Jews are unwilling to visit an old enemy who’s fought four [check] wars with Israel. But it’s become almost commonplace for busloads of black-hatted Israelis to visit. Relations between the two nations are warmer than with any other neighbor. King Hussein even helped break the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians back in October. I mean, I’m as paranoid as the next Jew, but there’s no reason to be nervous, is there? American Jews should feel free to investigate Jordan for ourselves, shouldn't we, Khan? Don't you agree?"

"Ooo. Ahh," said Khan Hassan as we sped past Jewel Avenue in Queens. Traffic was backed up the other way but we were flying free as I projected shamelessly onto the blank screen of his back -- better than any shrink-and-couch situation I'd ever had.

"Besides, I've got my trusty Arabic-English dictionary with me, in case I need to talk my way out of a hostage situation ..." I thumbed through the archaic constructions in its pages. "I would like to purchase a horse to cross the desert./ Ye zounds! This is not the horse you showed me yesterday./ I can not stay here and partake of such meagre hospitality./ I am unused to sleeping on the floor; I am afraid of fleas./ Boy, get the camels ready at once!"

"Well, anyway," I confided, stuffing the book deep inside my bag, "I'm an official guest of the Jordanian government. They don't have a clue I'm Jewish. And I'm not about to blow my cover. I could be Catholic, or Shinto, or Zen Buddhist, for all they're going to know ..."

"Ahh: Your destiny, sire."

I think he meant destination. But never mind. We were at the Royal Jordanian Airlines terminal -- filled with burly security types packing automatic weapons. "I should be alright," I told myself in a private farewell. Undergoing three full-body friskings as I approached the plane, I did not add: "But in the Muddle East, you just never know."

15 hours later, I was nudged awake by the armed guard sitting next to me, pointing his chin out the window. One word: "Desert."

And desert it was: I never knew sand could be so breathtaking. Beautiful taupes: beige, tan, a palette of flat toast-colored shades that gave new meaning to the word "arid." Surprisingly, the flatness had dimension; what at first looked like so much patty-cake beach sand revealed itself, as we came lower, to be a ridge of low dunes like the vertebrae of a buried dinosaur. In the middle distance, an ochre dust hung in the air. This was desert smog, not a people-made pollution that shortened one's vision but a natural one that, in the mysterious manner of sand polishing a glass lens, sharpened it. The time was 6:30 p.m. and already the sun was going down behind the control tower that looked like a minaret. There were few Westerners in the airport as I walked in a twilight fluorescence of a most unusual tint: green. Carpets, walls, chairs, all bore witness to the fact that in a country that was 80% desert, the interior decorator was plainly starved for green. Even the terminal displays showing flights from Jeddah, Abu Dhabi, Baghdad, Dharan, and Riyadh all basked in a verdant glow, as if wishful thinking could produce perpetual spring.

But those strange sounds over the intercom. Was someone clearing his throat or warbling erotic? Unctuous, guttural, by turns seductive enough to charm a snake and harsh enough to kill it, Arabic was clearly a tongue made up of equal parts air and sand, as though you were hearing it half buried to your eardrums in desert taupes. It was also, I understood at once, the perfect airport language. Disoriented by space and time, everything sounds like Arabic anyway when you're jet lagging, so it may as well be the real thing: insinuating, limpid, and as twisted as a Weird Al track played backwards.

At the customs gate my agent was in the process of riffling through my passport when a soldier rushed up to me in crisp olives. "Welcome to Jordan!" he saluted, delivering me my official government guide.

Lily was shy. We drove in silence through the desert, long stretches of dry nothingness punctuated by little felafel stands with green neon squiggles. At last Amman, the capital, began emerging moist-like from the distance with a thousand beckoning lights. Despite being all stone, Amman somehow maintains the cryptic air of a Bedouin oasis: ordered but temporary, a scattered off-white encampment that feels not so much under siege but peacefully alert, twinkling extra-sharp in the clean desert air as though you're seeing it through too-strong prescription lenses or you're sipping over-potent coffee.

Which I was soon doing. In the lobby of the Amman Plaza, featuring a sparkling wet fountain of cool white marble, my guide wordlessly offered a nightcap of Arabic coffee sweetened with cardamom seeds while I marveled at the company I kept. Dark enigmatic women from Yemen and Qatar, their chins tattooed black, beamed coy painted smiles behind silk Christian Dior veils. Heavy commanding men from Bahrain and Kuwait, their dignity almost palpable, strode to the Coke machine in long flowing robes that were elegant and forceful at the same time. If ever I saw a mirage, I thought, it would be peopled with figures like these: calm, measured, keeping to themselves but exuding a quiet hospitality.

And maybe it was the sense of being in a mirage, or all that coffee on top of jet lag, but the hotel lobby soon came to look uncannily like the ballroom of the Waldorf. Men and women with the same proud bearing, the same grasping intelligence steeped in human frailty. Yes, there was definitely a family resemblance operating here. Disregarding the Turkish blood from years of Ottoman rule, a lot of these Arabs looked exactly like my uncle Max. Why, even Lily herself, my petite guide taking her leave for the night, looked just like my cousin Leah, so ladylike, so pretty and demure. If they're all like her, I thought as she took her leave for the night, this place is about as hazardous as apple pie ...

Wakened at 5 by prayers through loudspeakers outside, then the sound of military jets scorching the sky, I was ready-set for a day of Muddle-East dichotomies. So where was I? At the breakfast table I consulted an old airline map to get my bearings. "Jordan is bordered by Syria on the north, Iraq and Saudi Arabia on the east, Saudi Arabia on the south, and the occupied West Bank on the west." There it was then in black and white, or rather, there it wasn't: The name Israel nowhere to be seen, officially blank, a nonentity among geographical givens. A sense of unreality hit me: The "I word" was simply not written, uttered, thought about. And that was only five years ago. Was everything really hunky dory now that Israel was officially “recognized?”

The unreality sharpened as I walked about and noted how pleasant everything was. Alert graceful children trotting along the sidewalk shouted "Welcome!" -- the first English word they learn in school. A toothless old man in an immaculate white dishdasheh stopped me with an iron hand on my arm. "Welcome to Jordan!" he bellowed, sending me on my way with a fatherly clap on my back. In daylight, downtown Amman was not the place of mystery I felt last night, but a bustling metropolis of asphalt and Astroturf teeming with polite traffic, a modern city with a buttoned-down feel dominated by ubiquitous pictures of the king -- and what a conundrum he is! A benign looking man battling lymphatic cancer, Hussein has the somber charisma of a movie star with a cute chipmunk smile, an air of athletic restraint and even a blond American-born wife who towers over him endearingly (though the height differential is downplayed -- newspapers tend to show her bending to children or bowing to dignitaries so the top of her crown comes to his chin).

How lovable, I was thinking -- and ran into a roadblock with soldiers at each corner, weapons drawn. Hussein himself flashed by with the King of Sweden. I understood the buttoned-down feeling: the kingdom has been under martial law since 1957. [check]

I had a sudden urge to leave the city. One hour away was the Dead Sea; Lily and I drove there in silence, descending to strange, unhealthy feeling ions. At the bottom, a clammy quiet prevailed in the 110 degree heat. A lone Ferris wheel sat unused, the most unfestive-looking Ferris wheel in the world, 1300 feet below sea level. The changing rooms were also surreal in their silence, as a trio of extremely modest men in head dress maneuvered to disrobe without exposing themselves. "Jesus, it's hot," I muttered to myself -- to the rising of six Arab eyebrows.

I tiptoed to the deserted shore across a beach that felt like baked bug wings, crackling under the toes. Simon & Garfunkel were harmonizing softly from a tape deck owned by a Jordanian border guard in a Mets baseball cap taking a dip near me, the two of us bobbing in the acrid water like corks in a greasy sea, thinking our respective thoughts. The water was oleaginous, as if a convoy of army trucks had dumped tons of jello to dissolve in it; bitterly buoyant water you couldn't get a hold of, slipping through your fingers to leave you dryer-feeling than before.

“What’s over there?” I put to the guard, lifting a finger to point.

"Over there is ... over there."

There was that feeling of unreality again. This guy didn't really eschew the "I word," did he, not when it loomed right there in the haze one mile across the water?

"But what is over there?"

"Over there is ... The Other Side!"

Patiently, he put mud on his forehead, a mudpack good for the skin. You're not supposed to burn at this depth, the atmosphere naturally filtering out ultraviolet rays. But I felt I was getting red. I decided to pursue him sideways. "Are there any Jews in Jordan?" I asked.

"No!" But he allowed that there are some Jews in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. As a matter of fact, just to show how even-handed Jordan is, two Jews from Yemen recently took sick and on humanitarian grounds were admitted to King Hussein Hospital in Amman. "Our quarrel," he stressed, "has never been with Jews in general, but with Jews who settled in Palestine, and those American Jews who support them."

He paddled greasy water for a closer look at my face. "Lot of Jews in New York," he noted.

"Yes," I agreed. "I like Simon & Garfunkel, too."

I emerged heavy from the water, feeling the problems of the Mud-East will never be resolved. Not with pockets of resistance like him around, they wouldn’t. There in the motionless heat, in the uncanny quiet with the phantom of Israel looming over the dry water, I felt drained, recalling a line of Saul Bellow to the effect that "You come to the region looking for clarity; you leave infected with disorder."

That night in the hotel bar I confessed to an Irishman that I was Jewish.

We were witnessing a bizarre Arab wedding party weaving snake-like through the lobby, complete with bagpipes, flaming sabers, and a singer blaring a megaphone into the face of bride and groom, both rouged to a tee.

"Ah, you all look the same to me," he retorted.

I was taken aback, for at that moment I was feeling the opposite of kinship with these people. I was feeling a paranoia straight out of Jack London: a fur trader in the grip of a hostile Eskimo tribe.

"It's like the Prods and the Catholics where I come from," he went on, taking a last swig of his whiskey. "We've got to ask politely first, which kind are you," he said, "before we know whether or not to blow their fucking heads off."

I retired for the night. The TV was just what I needed: comically awful. Most channels showed overweight news anchors from Syria declaiming the headlines from pages clutched in their fists, 50's style. Only one channel was hip: fast cuts, lean rockers, up-to-date editions of "MTV." I lay in bed watching for some minutes before it dawned on me that the subtitles were in Hebrew. I called down to the front desk to ask what station this was. "Foreign," came the reluctant reply. "But from where?" I pursued. And in this most polite four star hotel, in this most polite country where hospitality is prized above all else, I was gently hung up on.

Over the next several days I made an interesting discovery. The headdress.

I went everywhere with it. To Mount Nebo -- the mountain where Moses was given a glimpse of the Promised Land that he was forbidden to enter, and upon whose summit two modern-day Germans were having a picnic, tossing breadcrumbs at the chittering birds. To the spring of Moses -- the very one he bashed his rod against to produce water that is still gushing today, while Arabs genuflect before it.

("Why are you bowing to Moses?" I asked one of the supplicants. "He is a great prophet," came the reply. "Is he not a prophet of the Jews?" I asked in surprise. "We share the same ancestry," he explained patiently, "Arabs descend from the second wife of Abraham, Jews descend from the first." "Oh," I said, taking this in slowly, "so does that make Arabs and Jews related?" "No!" he gasped, and avoided my eyes thereafter.)

What I discovered about the headdress was this. Not only does it keep you cool in such situations, protecting you from a cloudless sky and functioning as a portable tent that catches any passing wisps of breeze (especially useful to a population that believes in drinking scalding hot tea all day in order to maintain an internal bodily temperature equal to the outside).

But the headdress has another effect. It squeezes your worldview. I wouldn't have known it from wearing it ten minutes, but after two days my eyes found themselves developing tunnel vision. Similar in principle to a horse's blinders, the headdress focuses attention on the straight ahead at the expense of the great contextual wealth of peripheral vision, without which little takes true focus. Flesh and blood objects lose solidity, real life distractions fade away, complex 3D issues flatten out. When you see only what's directly in front of you, your eyes can play tricks; they may even convince you that their way of looking at things is the only way there is. Like a monk's cowl, I supposed. But it's one thing when a few isolated monks wear it. It's vastly another when it's worn by an entire race of people located in the world's most politically sensitive tinderbox.

While I was thus immersed in my thoughts, my guide Lily suddenly clutched my arm. "We're about to be taken!" she said. My heart lurched. My throat filled with the oaths I'd memorized from my dictionary. "Touch not the neutral journalist!" "Unhand the scribe or face a thousand curses!" Spinning around, I was ready to blue the air with a dozen medieval maledictions and all-purpose whammies designed to stun the most desperate hostage-taking fanatic.

"We're about to be fleeced," Lily went on quietly, indicating a line of souvenir sellers hawking holy water from the Jordan River. VISA or Mastercard accepted. And Special! Reduced Price! on wooden models of Palestine with the pre-Partition borders, suitable for framing.

Special, my ass, I thought, breathing a sigh of relief. As I purchased two wooden Palestines, gift wrapped, I realized that if I'd been wearing a headdress these past five decades, I'd still think in terms of the old borders, too.

Giving me a lift back to Amman, a cabdriver began humming along to Peter, Paul & Mary on his cassette deck.

"Very nice group," he reflected. "The singer with the low voice, Peter, you are familiar? -- he came to Jordan some time ago. He was received by the Crown Prince, interviewed on television --"

"But he is Jewish!" I blurted.

The cabby brushed aside his headdress and cast a mischievous glance in the rearview mirror. "This means he has not a nice voice?" he asked.

"No, but --"

"You have heard of the old capital, Petra?" he asked. "Then perhaps you are aware that this was the location for the film 'The Last Crusade.' You are familiar? So tell me: how do you think the Jew Steven Spielberg made this movie here?"

I confessed I hadn't thought about it.

He chuckled. "Spielberg, he is not only a Jew, he is a Zionist. You understand? He believes in expanding the Jewish state. Naturally, he was scared to come to Jordan.

He wanted the whole hotel to himself, he brought his own security ... Do you know what happened? Nobody bothered with him! After a few days, his security was so bored stiff they started hanging out in the kitchen while he went off on his own!"

I was starting to like this cab driver almost as much as old Khan Hassan, back in New York.

"What we pass, out the window: you know what is?"

I did not. It was a cloodge of tiny cement block huts as far as the eye could see, interspersed with alleys wide enough for two bicycles. Cinder blocks sat on top the huts to hold down the corrugated tin roofs. The whole warren was overhung with electric lines and television wires but it did not feel squalid. Somehow it managed to give off a sense of cleanliness. A mother squatted on the street calmly selling pomegranates.

"It is Palestinian camp," my cabby told me. "4000 Palestinians live there. Forty percent of Jordanians are Palestinians. Me, too -- you see my headdress? Black with white cross-hatchings. Like Arafat's -- you have seen him in newspapers but, in black and white photos, you perhaps thought all headdresses were the same. Now you see one up close. It is very nice. Perhaps you also thought we were crazed madmen, all wild-eyed hotheads, but you see up close, I am very nice. We are not an unhappy people. We do very well here. You know the Bank of Jordan? Owned by Palestinians. Even so, Palestinians pray every day to God that we can go back."

"If you do so well, why do you want to go back?"

He shrugged. "It is ours."

From the backseat, I shrugged, too. What my pals back at the Waldorf might call two non-negotiable shrugs.

"My brother," he continued, "he still lives in Palestine. One day he is picked up by the Zionists. They say he is throwing stones at the soldiers. The judge ask him, 'Did you throw the stones?' 'No, I did not throw not one," he tells the judge. 'Who threw the stones, then?' the judge ask. And my brother, he answer:

"'God, He threw the stones.'"

It was such a good line, and my cabby looked so proud delivering it, I felt awkward asking what I had to ask. Nevertheless, one question demanded a yes or no answer.

"Did your brother, though? Throw the stones?"

It was time to adjust his headdress again. In the rearview mirror, he shot me a look usually reserved for large rodents. Then he burst out in an angry giggle.

"Of course he threw the stones!"

I was let off at the Antiquity Museum which was anything but antique: each item under glass felt hot off the press. Here were bricks from the walls of Jericho, the very ones that came tumbling down under Joshua's trumpets and whose counterparts are still under dispute today. Dishes from the Amman of 3800 years ago were identical to the ones on which I had my breakfast hummus that morning. Dead Sea Scrolls dating from the first century were inscribed with flecks and markings that I had seen only once before in my week here: on MTV. How odd, I thought, that the two times I'd seen Hebrew was on these Old Testament scrolls and for the subtitles to a Smashing Pumpkins song.

When I came outside, it was dusk. Down the hill, the roofs of Amman were spread before me with TV antennas cemented inside 50 gallon drums. It was like being given an intimate glimpse of the city whose ancient secrets I had just witnessed in the museum. Who else in Amman today might be collecting their private tears in fragile glass bottles to last another 2000 years? Who else living here now might love their children enough to bury their bones under the living room to keep them within the family circle forever? The city lights were coming on, igniting the dusk with impossible clarity. Green neon inflamed the tops of a million minarets as evening prayers echoed in the air all around, merging with the car horns of rush hour traffic. Crossing a busy street, a father grasped the hand of his daughter who looked just like my little niece Sarah. I felt sad.

When I stumbled into bed a few hours later it was in time to see the TV stations sign-off. The Palestinian station showed a chorus of young people singing a national anthem. The Israeli station showed a chorus of young people singing a national anthem. Above them, two flags flapped in two stiff breezes. Flicking the remote back and forth between the two channels, there was no difference between the groups: both smart, crisp, clean, loyal -- both blacking out at the same instant. I was left with the afterimage: Two prides, side by side. Equal ...

Next morning, I was reading the moderate English newspaper, "The Jordan Times," on a dawn flight to Aqaba. On my left, a Bedouin dressed head to toe in sable was engaged in lighter reading: an article in Arabic on Dustin Hoffman. Right to left, went his eyes. Right to left. On my other side, by the window, a Jordanian air force colonel was peering down into the "I" nation whose air space was only a few hundred yards away, staring east to west, east to west.

I stared down, too. What was it that so engaged our attention? Prime Iowa farmland? Oil-rich diamond fields? Hardly: a more droughty, barren, inhospitable stretch of dust would be hard to imagine. Moreover, from 15,000 feet, there was no perceptible difference on either side of the fence that ran up the middle, dividing two sovereign nations. How could so junky a piece of real estate be held in such vicious dispute all these millennia? From this height, the only explanation was force of habit: Once upon a time, hawk-like desert tribes got into a routine of brawling over these rocks and still, thousands of years later, they haven't broken it. From across the aisle, bashful Lily sent me a serene smile. My ears clicked painfully with the change in air pressure.

We circled lower. Jordan's port city of Aqaba was on one side, Israel's port city of Eilat on the other. I remembered being in Eilat when I was 15, looking over into Jordan and thinking how mysterious it was. Now from this side it was Israel that looked mysterious. Opulent. Tough. Coming in for landing, my seatmate and I strained to see as much as we could. We could see two indistinguishable peoples swimming on separate coral beaches in the Red Sea among the 600 varieties of fish. We could see King Hussein's country residence smack up against the border, so close to Israel that he could, if he chose, go into his backyard and sail a paper airplane into alien territory. I wondered if the Air Force colonel was thinking about sailing a plane there himself. Did he secretly harbor a hope one day to fly there, dropping bombs, strafing schoolchildren, striving to push my people into the sea?

The colonel noticed the discomfort from my clicking ears. He reached into his artillery bag and brought out a single small red wrapper.

"Would you care for a sweet?"

That night was my last in Jordan. I went to a health club. It felt odd to sit in a Jacuzzi with people who once vowed to annihilate my kinsmen from the region, handing me my washcloth with a smile. Even odder was putting myself in the hands of a Mister Arafat for a full body massage. For an hour I entrusted my muscles to his care under the Barry Manilow musak while I thought about the age-old Arab tradition of hospitality whereby a visitor is hosted for three and a half days without asking where he hails from. I had tested that hospitality nearly three times over. And as Arafat worked my muscles in silence, I realized I had been made to feel more than comfortable by these people. "Welcome to Jordan!" I had been made to feel safe.

Lily and I decided to celebrate my send-off at a nightclub. It was a Las Vegas type disco, family style, where Jordanian yuppies took their in-laws for a night on the town. Lily had outdone herself tonight, delineating her scarlet red lipstick in black, wearing doll-like high heels. I told her she looked ravishing.

"Thank you," she said. She lowered her eyes. Fiddling timorously with the salt and pepper shakers that looked like Arabs in long white robes, she took a breath and faltered. "But tell me, please," she said at last. "To be 'ravishing,' it is not the verb from 'rubbish?'"

"Trust me on this one, kid," I told her. "It is quite the opposite."

She drank her arak. She drank quite a lot of arak. I fingered my headdress. Together we listened to the Arabic music that was at least as insinuating as the Arabic language. More insinuating; it had snakes and daggers in it. And the dancing was its counterpart. The men danced with their shoulders, the women with their hips, loose but controlled; they had an amazing way of not holding themselves. The dance was flowing but formal, unctuous and fitful, both, and before I knew it, Lily had hoisted me to my feet, weaving slightly as she tottered on high heels to the beady little strobelights of the dance floor.

There she was in her element. Holding one foot aloft, she slid along the parquet as though she were shuffling down a desert sand dune. She slithered her neck as though she were floating through a hot air mirage. Then a slow Barbra Streisand song came on and she suddenly yanked me close.

"We knew you were Jewish," she whispered in my ear.

"What?" I said. I didn't think I'd heard her right.

"We knew you were Jewish all along," she said.

I pulled away to watch her mouth say these words, but she snapped me back with a strength startling in one so small.

"We checked you out before you came," she said. "We know you have two small children. You live in an old farmhouse with a pond for ducks. You are partial to talk to cabdrivers, perhaps because you used to be a cab driver yourself, after college. You do not call your mama, she is worried about you --"

"How did you find out this stuff?"

Lily ignored me, swallowing a dainty hiccup. "We do research," she said. "We investigate all about you. It does not matter who or how. What matters is that I tell you something, now, that you must know about me. I would kill. If war were to break out tonight, I would volunteer to be in the front line. Gladly I would kill: babies, old people, it would be no problem. I will not be satisfied until all of Palestine is back. Maybe for the short term, we will make a treaty, but if war breaks out, I will make the bloodbath, happily I will kill for my country ..."

The Barbra Streisand song ended, a Bette Midler song began, and still her tiny biceps hugged me hard. I had no dictionary to convey my astonishment so I held my enemy in my arms, looking her over close.

"Lily --?"

"Yes, it is Lily," she said. "Quiet, mouse-like Lily who says these things. But there is one more thing to say. If war breaks out, of course I would kill -- it is only normal. But also I would protect you. Even if you are Zionist, I protect you. I want you to know. Friendship, you see, friendship is stronger than politics ..."

The nightclub seemed to glitter with espionage, Arab eyes shining in the dark. Loving couples glided past on every side: women with chin tattoos, men reeking sweetly of cardamom. In the strobes, silver jewelry flashed on a dozen sinuous limbs like electrified scorpions. The odd thing was, I felt no danger. I felt no more treachery here than among the Waldorf psychiatrists, no more whiplashed by spying and counter-spying than there. At least here it was clear-cut: we were once and future foes, and we liked each other. At least there was no Vivaldi ...

Lily walked me to the parking lot where my cab was waiting to take me to the airport. In the clear dry air overlooking the Red Sea, the lights of Aqaba twinkled extra strong, extra sharp, full of deceptive muddle-Eastern clarity; the city lights trickled forth into the night like tendrils of glistening protoplasm to merge with the protoplasm of Eilat in the near distance -- two sets of living lights separated by only a short stretch of darkness.

We were at my cab. Lili stood up very straight, not to totter for our farewell. "I kiss you once because you are a friend," she said. "And a second time because you are a man." Both these kisses were on the cheek. She hesitated, then hazarded to come forward and boldly kiss me on my lips.

"And a final time, because you are a Jew!"

She turned to walk away.

"Wait," I said. My head was swimming with a million questions to ask her, to ask my cabby, to ask someone who might know what never is known. "Just answer me one thing. Who told you I was Jewish? How did they find out? I hardly even know it myself. What, am I in some book somewhere with a 'J' before my name? How could you possibly know?"

Lily looked at me with an opaque expression. "What did you think, Daniel, we are dumb?"

"No, Lily," I said, taking off my headdress so I could hear her better, so I could see her better, so my last view of her was in all her glorious 3D. "That, I never thought for a second."