Well, I finally know now how it feels for a girl to be stalked by a boy who won’t leave her alone, won't let her breathe, and is following her around, all out of pure love. I had 7 missed calls yesterday (because I was moody) and ten today (because I was under the water most of the time). Let’s say his name is Ahmad. He called ten minutes ago and said he was coming to Aqaba tomorrow!? I sent him an SMS, saying that I wouldn't be able to come to Wadi Rum tomorrow so he decided to pay me a visit. Tomorrow I also intend to spend most of the time in the water and alongside of it – by the way, the water is EXCELLENT! 23°C! – So I tried to tell him not to come. And he understood. But still he was a little sad.
Let's go back to the beginning of the story. Last week I had my colleague Nastja here to keep me company for a couple of days, because she has no guests currently in Sharm ash Sheikhso she came to Aqaba to relax. In the port there are buses with signs reading "Baghdad-Amman” to take the passengers from the ferry to the terminal. Since they're a Sanos product (from the former Yugoslavia), I suspect they were Iraqi and they “forgot” to give them back after the “saving” of Iraq started. Luckily Nastja already knew Jordan so I didn't have to take her around, but I also couldn't get her to go under the water, because the weather was lousy (there were clouds and wind). She just skin-dove onceto the whereabouts of a Fulda tyre, something that used to be a Moulinex appliance and the final resting place of five sardines and a third of a litre of coca cola and then decided she wasn't going to waste her money to rent the gear and buy the airin this sort of neighbourhood. She picked the wrong place to dive. Today my experience was completely different. We were chasing around with jet-skis (hey, you can slide with those as well) and then came the fateful decision. Wadi Rum with the bike, but in a completely amateurish and childish way, I can hardly believe it myself. Since I didn't have a second helmet, I rode without one myself as well, with sun glasses and wind in my hair. I gave a glance at the fuel tank and estimated it should do and before we knew it we were in the sand. Of course we said we'd only go for a short ride, so nobody gets hurt, slowly, like tourists there and back. You all know that full gas takes you to the end in the sand, while “slowly like tourists” makes you drop over your head. Still, it was okay, until the Austrian got thirsty. The light was flashing and we were in the middle of nowhere. Very mature and responsible (I know I said before that I was never going in the desert without a spare container of water and fuel – yeah, right!). Luckily, I'm pretty familiar to those parts and the GPS confirmed my speculations, so we took a shortcut. We made it to the road, but about two kilometres before we reached the petrol station, the bike went out of breath and just went “clonk”. I was pushing the bike and the woman was walking beside me! I imagine nobody stopped out of despise for the human dirt, thehenpecked sorry excuse for a Man.
And this is where Ahmad comes in the picture. A nice smiling boy of about twenty years, Bedouin of origin, who walks into the scene from a Kia minibus, standing on the left.
“How much?” he asks and points to the machine.
“Two litres,” I answer, but the amazement in his eyes immediately makes me realize I should have told him the amount in dinars. That's what he was asking about.
We let the woman stand watch, while me and Ahmad sat in the Kia and headed to the station. I suspected the tank was going to be full by the time we get back since the woman (tall, skinny, uncovered) stayed alone on the road. But it wasn't so. The only ones stopping were truckers who had nothing to offer to her besides their love. As for myself, I gave Ahmad my phone number (aha!) and we said we'd go for a ride in the desert one of those days. He didn't ask for anything in return for the ride to the station and back. He even lent me the jug. Very, very friendly. People are very friendly and willing to help here in general.
So I paid him a visit and we intended to hit the sand, each in our own vehicle, him in his Toyota, year 1985 and me on the KTM. But the Toyota wasn't home so – of course I plunged into the desert with a fellow passenger. He offered to be the photographer, but in most of the “action” pictures I either escaped out of the frame of the photo,was about 7 pix big along with the bike on a photo of 4 Mpix of total size, or he took a lovely shot of my back. But let's leave that, he could really get a laugh if I tried to milk his camel!
Of course he was jumping like a monkey in the back, he almost fell off once out of fright (but luckily, there was no time, he could only scream) and when I had enough of him, I used both my hands to pull him to my back (oops!) and said:
“Your body and my body is one body!” And then he finally clasped tightly to me.
He showed me the SMS messages of “his girlfriend”. She's French. She wrote in English and he asked me to translate it to him:
"I will send you a card from France, but not love." She came as a tourist with a group and he took her and five other passengers for a ride around in the sand one morning.
Mohammed from the camp where I'm staying (by the way, he's a great guy) told me that for a couple of days three Slovenian girls were staying there and he said one of them was his girlfriend. If she's reading this, this will probably upset her. I know it's going to be hard, but life is tough and we shouldn't run away from problems, we have to face them and get through them. That's what makes us strong. Well, my dear girlfriend of Mohammed, you're no longer the girlfriend of Mohammed. He met a Hungarian girl and you've been replaced. He met her snorkelling, she went back home two days ago. My condolences. Clench your teeth, hold in there, keep smiling and move on courageously. He wasn't the only Man in the world.Anyway, girls, if you give your phone number, your address, e-mail of whatever information to a guy so you can keep in touch, be sure he'll pre-modify your name by a first person feminine possessive pronoun. Until a Hungarian girl comes along and makes the memory of you in their rear mirror fade away.
Alya plays Memory. I went to listen to her for the first time. The girl is good! I'll refresh your memory: the Ukrainian who's tenderly touching the strings of a fortepiano in the Mövenpick hotel in the Piano bar from six to nine in the evening. Nobody applauds, neither do I. The atmosphere is pretty grave here, the waiters come almost immediately if they catch your eye, and if you avoid looking at them and stare at the screen of your laptop, they leave you alone! (0.2 litres of orange juice in total with taxes and serving fee amounts to a three-day food budget!) Serious older people are sitting around me, and also not-so-old couples, ladies in their night gowns with perfect hair-styles – one of them is just now arguing with the waiter about which kind of tequila he's going to pour in the potion that she's ordered and what the temperature of the thing should be – and gentlemen in sleek jackets and a lock of hair, polished impeccably over the glimmering bald spot. When the last chord echoes out their eyebrows twitch and that's it as far as praise of the artist is concerned.
The basement after nine in the evening is a different story. I even dare applaud there, but I'm often the only one doing so. The company is different there. Men, the writer excluded, come there to stare at whatever is poking from under the mini skirts of the singers, while women, the ones who haven't been brought there by men, whose aim is to watch the above mentioned pieces of flesh, come there to watch men, who are watching the above mentioned. And the ones who know that the singers are spoken for, quickly shift over to the tables of the mentioned women, who come there to watch those exact men. And everybody is happy in the end. (Yours truly goes there to listen to Katia's excellent voice and joke around with her witty husband – just to make it clear)
You're asking about my Arabic? It's slowly coming along. I love it when people who speak English don't want to speak it with me. I met the owner of an auto material store today (tell me, KTM owners, is your tail light constantly burning out as well?) and when I ran out of Arabic I found out he spricht Deutsch, “hat gearbeitet in Deutschland und kennt Slowenien, ist in Ljubljana, Piran, Portorož und Postojna gewesen. More than once. Great country, great people.” That was twenty years ago.
The clock is nearing nine, Alya has finished and is going to grab a bite and I’m left here alone in silence. They're probably already plugging the Yamaha to the JBC downstairs, I'll have to shift to Katia's voice. And there goes another evening.
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