The Al-Rakib Hotel

Above: The Al-Rakib Hotel, Irbid, northwestern Jordan, close to the Syrian border.

The owner, Mr Ali, was a small, friendly, gnome of a man, about 60 years old, who spent most of his time juggling the needs of his guests, and that of his two wives and 12 children.

His wives lived upstairs, but this being ‘Arabi’, you never saw much of them, and when you did they were so well covered up in sheets as to be virtually unrecognisable. I never could tell them apart. The kids, the ones who were still at home, moved freely though the hotel, part of the furniture as much as the TV, only more entertaining.

There were four fans in the sitting room, one in each corner, and when they came on around midday, they rattled incessantly. It sounded like we were on the inside of large Russian propeller driven cargo plane, struggling to get over a mountain.

The TV played Syrian serials most nights, some of them soaps, but also some well made historical dramas, which I took an interest in. They were all in Arabic, of course, but you could follow the drift well enough, if not the details. The historical dramas seemed to feature, almost without exception, evil Turks and Frenchmen, in all of their devious complexity, Syria having been under both Ottoman and French rule at various times in recent history.

The shows out of Syria were interspersed with the occasional Arabic pop music presentation coming out of Lebanon, the most liberal of the Middle Eastern states. The racy female presenters wore off-the-shoulder gowns, painstakingly complex hairstyles and heavy eye and face makeup, displaying just enough cleavage to keep you hanging on.

Sitting in an armchair in conservative Jordan, where there is extremely little flesh on show, it was riveting stuff.

Late at night, when the family and most of the guests had gone to bed, Ali would sit up on the office computer and surf porn on the internet. ‘Mr Felix, please in English search for me’, he would ask, and I’d oblige.

It sometimes took a little while to work out just what Ali wanted me to search for. “Ah, who or what is it you want to see to be doing what to whom, or what, Ali?” I’d ask, seeking clarification. Thence would follow an insane pantomime of lewd gestures, and you had to wonder, with such a strong imagination and two wives, why Ali needed the internet at all.

Eventually I’d get the gist. ‘Ah, isn’t that illegal, Ali?’ I’d ask.‘No, no, no!’ Ali would say, excitedly.‘OK, whatever, man’, I’d say, and type the specifications into Google, hitting the return button, and leaving him to it, usually.

In the room next to mine lived Amir, a large, fat Libyan chap from Benghazi, He was about 35, his face was boyish, he had full, round lips, and he wore a loose fitting black suit, day in, day out, morning, noon and night. I never saw him out of it.

There was something wholly sensual about Amir – the languid way he moved, the delicate way he picked up his glass of tea and pursed his lips as he took a sip, rolling the tea around in his mouth, before he let the hot, sweet liquid roll down his throat, and I did wonder whether this was the quality that had brought about his undoing back in Libya.

“Mr Amir, he has big family problem at home,” Ali had whispered to me late one night, hinting darkly at something to do with ‘a woman’. Whatever the problem was, it seemed Amir couldn’t go home for sometime yet.

He didn’t speak a word of English, and sometimes we’d sit opposite each other in the old floral armchairs by the bay windows, in total silence. Amir would smile easily to himself, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular, as if enjoying a private delight, and then just as quickly his face would fall, betraying deep sorrow. I would watch his eyes slowly turn into black holes.

After a few moments, he would reach for a cigarette, light it up, blow smoke out in thick, soft clouds, and slowly return.

It was like watching a large cat albeit with its back leg in a snare, and you just hoped that the dogs didn't rip him apart.

Down the corridor lived Omar, a local Jordanian, replete with finely chiseled moustache and slicked back hair. He kept his striped shirts open to the chest, sported a large gold watch and wore pointy, black leather shoes.

Verging on middle age, Omar was not the kind of man you would trust with your wallet, nor your daughter. ‘You are my very good friend, Mr Fee-liks,’ he would tell me most days, conspiratorially, ‘perhaps my only true friend!’

He would then lean on me for a Dinar (about a dollar), and never pay it back.

This went on for two weeks, and about 10 Dinars, until I finally drew the line at ‘Please lend me 50 Dinar, Mr Fee-liks’. The look of hurt on Omar’s face when I refused him was almost real. He carried around a wounded expression for the next few days, and then one morning he was gone.

“Men come looking for Omar, he must leave,” said Ali. “He go to Syria.”

I almost felt sorry for him.

If I ever made it up to Damascus, I felt sure I'd run into my only true friend, Omar. There he would be, and there I would be, in some back alleyway, and it would be like old friends meeting.

I wished him well.