The Mansions of Limbo (42 page)

On the way back to the city, I drove in the jeep with the queen. High on a mountaintop in the distance was a beautiful sprawling estate looking down on the Dead Sea. It was the country house of Prince Muhammad, a brother of the king. “My husband and I were given land up there as
a wedding present, but we never built,” she said. “Maybe someday, something simple, a place to get away.”

The king and queen maintain a large house in London as well as an estate in the English countryside, grand enough to have been lent to the Duke and Duchess of York to live in while their own country house was being built. But their main home is Al Nadwa, the cream-colored royal palace in Amman. As palaces go, Al Nadwa is more like a rich man’s mansion than a monarch’s royal residence. If all twelve of the king’s children were home at the same time—an unlikely event—it would probably be a tight squeeze. A large estate set in the middle of the city, it is in a well-guarded compound with staff offices, guest residences, barracks, and several other palaces, one of which, the old palace of King Abdullah, the king’s grandfather, is used by Queen Noor for her foundation and offices.

We sat in the English-looking garden under a white marquee, looking out over a lush green lawn. The marquee seemed to have permanent status in the garden, since the poles were covered with ivy. The lunch table was set for two. A butler wearing English butler clothes—dark jacket, striped trousers—carried the food on trays from the palace down a poplar-lined walkway to where we were sitting.

“This is my favorite room in the house,” said the queen. “The garden is a recent thing. I put all this in. Gardening is something new for me. I wish I’d done it long before. It established an equilibrium with nature, putting my hands in the dirt, planting.”

She looks as though she might have played field hockey in boarding school, but she complained about not getting enough exercise. “I do aerobics with a friend who comes here, and play tennis. We don’t have a swimming pool.”
Plans were drawn up for one several years ago, but for security reasons it was never built. She likes to dispel the image of luxury living behind the palace walls. “I like being able to say, ‘We don’t have a pool.’ ”

“Have there been difficulties between you and other women in the royal family?” I had heard there was a chilly relationship with a sister-in-law and a former sister-in-law.

She shrugged. “I suppose it is the same in every family,” she answered.

“Do you see Queen Zein?” The king’s mother, Queen Zein, lives in a large, well-guarded house on Jubaiha, the road in Amman where most of the embassies are located. For years Queen Zein was the central figure in the royal family. After King Abdullah’s assassination, she was a powerful influence on her son when he became king.

“If there is a family wedding, part of the celebration will always take place at her house,” replied the queen carefully. “She came to see me in the hospital each time one of the children was born.”

Ever since her marriage, the queen has been gossiped about. She has been accused of extravagance in clothes and jewels. She has also been accused of having had plastic surgery on her face, but her friends insist that clothes and jewels are not where her interests lie. “She is passionately interested in what’s going on,” says Marietta Tree. While I was in Jordan, a report was printed in an American newspaper that said she had recently purchased an estate in Palm Beach, Florida. When I asked her about it, she just smiled and shook her head in exasperation. “I am becoming inured to criticism. When you’re in my position, people are always going to talk about you.” She told me of a story that went around about her several years ago in which she was accused of purchasing a ring of extraordinary value. “Everyone knew someone who had seen the bill of sale, but
it could never be found. It happened to Raisa Gorbachev too. I work with a wide variety of people from all segments of life. I’ll never be approved of by everybody.”

In all the time that I spent with her, there was never once when I felt I could have crossed the boundaries into the verbal intimacies of Americans meeting abroad. Her guard is never relaxed. Her conversation is without levity. It is not that she is humorless; it is simply that her sky is so darkened with the winds of war and its consequences that there is no time for laughter in her life. She is always addressed as Your Majesty. As an American, I found it difficult to call another American Your Majesty, but there is no other form of address. There are those in the court who address the king as Sidi, an affectionate term meaning “sir” or “My Lord,” and address the queen as Sitti, meaning “My Lady,” but I never did.

“How many assassination attempts have there been on the king?” I asked. I had been told there had been twenty-seven during his thirty-eight-year reign.

She waved her hands in front of her face as if to dispel my question. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. My husband has learned from experience to be wise and prescient. He gives each moment of his life a maximum energy for good use. If we sealed ourselves off in a protective bubble, we wouldn’t be able to reach out and touch and feel what people need. I feel they should be able to touch us. I’m willing to take the risk of being stampeded upon if it gives them hope. It runs against any security advice he has been given over the years. They feel he is not just a figurehead, or head of state in his office. He is there as a father to the people.”

“Would you discuss the succession?” I asked her.

“At the moment, Prince Hassan, the king’s brother, is the crown prince, so he is the king’s successor. In this
country, the succession has always been modified to accommodate. The monarchy should always be able to serve as a constructive and unifying force. The most important thing is that it serves the people of the country. For me, it’s entirely in harmony with all I was raised to believe the role of the leader should be. It should not seek to protect its existence for its own sake.”

When Prince Abdullah, the older son of Princess Muna, was born, in 1962, King Hussein named him as the crown prince, but since the country was in a constantly turbulent state, Hussein realized that a small child was not a reasonable successor. The king has two brothers. Prince Muhammad and Prince Hassan. Muhammad, who was next in line after the child Abdullah, was married to, and later divorced from, the international social figure Princess Firyal, who subsequently had a highly publicized liaison with the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. After much consideration, the king bypassed Muhammad in favor of his younger brother, Prince Hassan, who is twelve years younger than the king. Oxford-educated and a brilliant public speaker, Hassan is considered the intellectual of the family. His wife, Princess Sarvath, is the daughter of a distinguished Pakistani leader and ambassador. Since the ratification of Hassan, the king has bypassed his two sons by the English Princess Muna and has named Prince Ali, his son by the Jordanian Queen Alia, as next in line after Prince Hassan. Prince Ali, now fifteen, attends Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

“I have heard it said that, because you are an American, you are becoming a liability to the king. Is that correct?”

She seemed surprised. “I haven’t felt that. I have never felt it. I was born into an Arab-American family. My name, Halaby, is Arabic. I have returned to the Arab world. I am not aware that my Americanism is a liability.”

Although most people in Amman dress in Western fashion, there is a growing group of Muslim fundamentalist women who have eschewed modern dress as a form of protest. “It has come out of the frustrations of the people,” Sima Bahous had told me the day before. “Everybody wants an identity. It is more than a religious movement. If they unite behind a front, their voice will be heard.”

“Do you feel threatened by the fundamentalists?” I asked the queen.

“I personally don’t feel threatened, but I know that my work and what I have achieved could be threatened by them. Extremism will only feed off the economic inequalities. Traditionally, women in this area, even my mother-in-law, Queen Zein, wore their hair covered. It is part of the cultural tradition. As religious extremism started to develop, there came a form of dress that was devoid of color, that covered the body from head to toe. Over it is worn a headdress that is restrictive, an uglifying fashion psychologically, to defeminize, to desex, to make women totally unappealing, to negate their femininity. It is a symbol of submission. There is pressure brought to women to dress like that. I don’t dress for the conservatives in society. At the same time, I don’t dress the way Western women do, which would be immodest in this country.”

“If war comes, do you fear losing your throne?”

“In the first place, I don’t consider myself as having a throne. The only thing I would ever fear is if the peace and stability that the monarchy has offered to this country were destroyed, if all my husband struggled for, and what I have struggled for by his side, were lost. That is what I fear for. My happiness, satisfaction, and security do not come from the throne or the monarchy or having been privileged to carry the title of Queen of Jordan.”

Her older son, Prince Hamzah, arrived from school and
crossed the lawn to greet his mother. Dressed in a black T-shirt and light trousers, he looked like any American boy of ten arriving home from school, ready for playtime. In a garage on the opposite side of the palace, there were miniature Volkswagens and jeeps for the royal children, the kind that run on gasoline. Hamzah was joined by the princes’ young American tutor. After greeting his mother and talking about the events of his school day, Hamzah pointed to the far end of the garden and asked, “Can we make some noise down there?”

The queen smiled and nodded to her son, and then resumed the conversation. “People are beginning to realize that we in Jordan don’t conform to the worst stereotypes of the oil rich, or the worst stereotypes of the terrorists. Each Arab society is different from the others. For many in the Arab world, Saddam is a patriot. He represents someone who has stood up to the overwhelming forces of the West for what he believes in. He is against Western interference in Arab affairs. For many Arabs, whose history has been marked by Western interference over many decades, his tough stand is deemed to be courageous. Whatever happens, we shall follow King Hussein. For thirty-eight years, his humanity, experience, and wisdom have been what the people identify with.”

In the background Prince Hamzah appeared from behind a tree, carrying a very realistic toy assault rifle. The tutor could be seen hiding behind another tree. The queen watched for a minute, shrugged, and said, “I guess he plays war with the boys.”

It had turned dark. “Will you turn on the garden lights?” she called out to Prince Hamzah. Then her youngest child, Princess Raiyah, age four, arrived back at the palace from a children’s music class. Dressed in pink jeans
and a pink T-shirt, she raced to her mother. For several minutes they discussed the music class.

There was the beginning of a chill in the air. “The weather’s going to change,” she said. “This will be the last time I have lunch in the garden. It will soon be too cold to sit out like this. Sometimes there’s even snow.” She stood up. “Would you like to see the children’s zoo?” she asked.

“If war comes, what will happen to Jordan?” I asked Sima Bahous.

“Some people think Jordan will suffer the most,” she replied. “If it comes, the people in the streets will not be quiet. The youth of the country will not accept war without having a say in what will come about.”

“Will the king survive?”

“War means change,” she said. “Everything will be in danger. Not the king, who is popular, but the institution of monarchy.”

On the night before I left Amman, the king and queen asked a small group of American journalists to dinner at the palace. On arriving there, each guest was given a seating plan showing where his or her place would be at the table. Thirty-five minutes after we had assembled and been served nonalcoholic drinks, the king and queen arrived in the reception room and, as a couple, moved around the room, greeting each guest. That night the queen wore tight black trousers and a loose-fitting black evening sweater. The king was wearing a dark business suit.

They did not sit at the head and foot of the long, narrow, elaborately set table. Instead, they sat opposite each other at the center of the table, so that during general conversation they were able to converse together. While we were served food passed by a staff of waiters, the king’s
plate was brought to him with food already on it. He ate almost nothing. Speaking in quiet tones, he held the attention of the entire table as he explained his role in trying to keep peace in the Middle East since August 2, when he had been awakened by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia at six o’clock in the morning to be told that the invasion of Kuwait had taken place. In the first forty-eight hours, he had gone off to mediate at the request of President Bush, President Mubarak, and King Fahd. He had been given assurances that there would be no condemnation of President Hussein, nothing to put him on the defensive. His efforts at peacekeeping, however, had been misunderstood, mistrusted, or rebuffed by former allies and friends. He seemed mired in personal melancholy, smoking cigarette after cigarette during the meal. Taking a cue from the king, a journalist seated to the left of the queen also lit up a cigarette. The queen mildly chastised the journalist for smoking, a chastisement clearly meant for the king.

Rising at the end of the dinner, the male reporters made a beeline for the queen, surrounding her to ask questions. From the sidelines, the king watched his wife at the center of the group of reporters and smiled proudly and affectionately. Lisa Halaby, Queen Noor al Hussein, had clearly come into her moment in time.

January 1991

D
OMINICK
D
UNNE
is the author of
The Winners, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, Fatal Charms, People Like Us
, and
An Inconvenient Woman
. He produced the films
The Panic in Needle Park, Ash Wednesday, Play It As It Lays
, and
The Boys in the Band.
A contributing editor of
Vanity Fair
, he lives in New York City.