It was on the last day of Eid. The bout of chocolates and coffee that had rampaged through the stomachs of Jordanians was all but over. The unwritten rule was that all houses are open at this time. No such silly things as calling before you went visiting. How rude! What an insult to the principle of hospitality! And besides, it is a time for visiting one’s elders, great-uncles, great-aunts, second-, third- etc. degree cousins, nephews nieces.. In a clan-minded Jordan , this is quite the event. If you do not find the ones you wish to visit, simply go to the nearest person you know in the neighbourhood.

Recently, there have been those who opt to excuse themselves from of the Great Feast by travelling abroad on package holidays. They travel to breathe away from “The Family”. Staying would mean getting up early every morning, dressing themselves in their best clothing, their children in brand-new attire from undies to shoes, preparing the house, filling it with the deep, rich scent of strong black Arabic coffee laced with cardamom all in the honour of the guests who shall knock upon their door to congratulate them on Eid, ask them of their health and their news, and give their own in return.

If the host family has made a sacrifice, they distribute the mutton to their neighbours. The main share goes to the poor. The whole idea is to re-enact the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham- in theory. In practice, the idea is to share what, at the time, was the most expensive food you could get. Still is. Mutton is more expensive than beef, even though the latter is imported.

So, it was on the last day of this atmosphere of caring and sharing that I drove one evening to my friends’. I now could see my friends because I had done my duty of seeing my elders first, on the first day. Priority goes as follows, at least in Turkey : First day, immediate family in the house, neighbours. Second day, first-degree relatives. Third day, second- degree relatives and onwards. Last day, friends. In Jordan the first two days are reversed. Again, the clan feeling has its role. The clan feeling has its role in practically everything. This was a given fact in Jordan . I had no idea how soon I would see an example of this that evening.

The most dangerous streets are those that are busy as well as fast. This particular street, with nice, smooth stretches of asphalt that invited one to speed, got congested every time its empty sides were interrupted by an eruption of commercial blocks. It was the drivers, taking their time in parking and entering the traffic any way they please, and not the buildings that were at fault.

In such a state, on one of the busiest evenings of the year, the traffic was somewhere between panicky and impatient. I was on the left lane. The car ahead on my right jerked to a sudden stop as two young teenage boys suddenly jumped in front of it to cross the street. Then they stopped in the middle of the road, rocking back and forth on their heels, ready to jump any second. I was terrified at the thought. That instant, they jumped in front of my car, crossing the street. I was going at 60 or 70 km/hr. Within the same instant, I glanced in my rearview mirror. I had two options: keep going and hit the boys, or hit the brakes and get hit from behind. The boys might be injured, or killed. I would not. I had a body of steel around me. They were exposed. And besides, I’d rather face an angry driver than the boys’ entire clan demanding that I not only pay medical damages, but feed and house the entire clan, with the option of meeting many, many unpleasant people and a presumable vendetta if one of the boys died.

I hit the brakes, slowing down as much as possible before coming to a halt in the short space between me and the boys. I felt a car bump mine from behind, which was not as strong as I expected. It was over. At least the first half of the accident. The boys were safe.

When I stopped, they had reached the island in the middle of the street, and carried on their kamikaze mission with barely a glance at the accident that they had caused. The pedestrian in Jordan is always right. This is because the streets cater only to cars. Pavements make good hiking exercise, and zebra crossings serve a decorative purpose only. So do pedestrian bridges, since it is more convenient not to climb stairs. Traffic lights ignore, most times, the fact that not all streams are stopped for a pedestrian to cross safely. Still, I felt like leaving my car and hitting those boys for all I was worth. They could have at least stopped and said one word: “Sorry”.

That violence carried through to the driver behind me, who came shouting all manner of things, among which I understood, “Why didn’t you carry on? Why did you stop?” without listening to my answers. Fluency had abandoned me, and I was all but a stupid foreign woman, an ajnabiyye who had probably been tricked into marriage by her Jordanian spouse when his father sent him abroad to study. Which is why, I suppose, everyone who knocked on my window for the first five minutes asked me if I was married, if I had a husband I could call. And I most certainly did not feel like calling my octogenarian grandfather and saying, “Oh, grandpa, I just had an accident.” Not on Eid. Later I understood that it was a chain accident. The man behind me tried to overtake, as he did so, the taxi tailgating him hit him, and he bumped me. The main damage was with the taxi and that car.

I had had three small accidents before. The first thing that I thought of was whether anyone was hurt. Once that question is cleared, the rest is taken care of by the police and the insurance. The police say who is right and who is not, the insurance of the person at fault pays the damages. But this man, short, puffy, in a pale suit with a prayer rosary dangling from the hand that was holding the cell phone he waved up and down as he swore at my family with an entirely new vocabulary, I was not going out of my car to talk to him. This was a fight. The law was on my side, because I was the one who got hit from behind. He knew this. He did not think I knew. What would a woman, especially a foreign woman, know? This is probably what the little congregation of helpful onlookers also thought, for I had fifteen minutes of:

(Knock on window)

“Are you married?” “Where is your husband?”

(Knock on window. Nicely dressed gentleman)

“Can you call your family?”

(Knock on window. Four teenage boys, older ones, who spoke Russian amongst themselves)

“Do you need a phone?” “Here is a phone, auntie.”

“Heck, I’m not that old!” I think. “Well, better a confused old aunt than a silly young girl.”

All this during my wait for the police, trying to plug the phone into the wobbly

charger while attempting calls to friends for advice. I couldn’t think straight with Mr. Short –and –Important calling my family all sorts of adjectives and epithets. Until:

(Knock on window. Fresh-faced boy. )

“Do you need anything?”

In confusion, instead of saying, “I want the number of the police!” I ask, “Whom

do I call?”

“Call the police.”

His calm gives me the awareness to remember the cell company’s free directory service. I call them, and get the holy number. It is 190. Free of charge. How nice of them. In France one pays extra to even see the numbers that are calling them.

(Knock on window. The same four boys.)

“Never mind, we are with you, auntie.”

I call the police, give the details, and hang up. Unsure of our system, I call again five minutes later. “We’ve already gotten that one, ma’am. We’re on our way.” I muster a little faith in them, and wait. Meanwhile, I really needed to have someone with me. A police station was a men’s zone, and not the best sort of men went there. I called my Adyghe cousin. Five times. No reply. My aunts’ husbands talk tough but would be pretty useless in an argument or a fight. Then, the taxi driver, who had hit Mr. Shorty, told me to change my story. At that point I flipped. I was afraid of doubting myself later. I needed a good negotiator who knew the law, had a car, probably had such an experience before. I called my Palestinian friend. He said he’d be there.

I hear shouting behind me. I ignore it. Turn once to see the silhouettes of men shouting against the background of the nearby shops’ lights. Glimpse the flying gestures, ignore it. “Barbarians,” I think. I wait in my shell of steel, a girl. Useless but knows how to keep safe. The police come. One of them asks me to pull over to the far right. I do so. Last time I did not wait for the police, it cost me a lot of money, and a lot of trouble. I followed procedure.

At the police station, I saw the fresh-faced boy sitting behind one of the officers’ tables. There was another young man with him. They also followed procedure, it seems. I didn’t think of why they were there. I did not look at them. All I had to do was give a statement, and take my licences home. Right? “Right, only tomorrow,” said the head officer, his Bedouin features contrasting with the disco ring-tone on his camera Nokia. I think it was by Scooter, forgot the original artist: “When I was young, I thought life was so wonderful.”

Ladies with black head-scarves, heavy make-up and high platform shoes, come on holiday, had come to report themselves innocent of a fire in their hotel room. There was a swarthy, greasy, slim man with them, laughing and joking. I wondered what hotel they were in. Probably downtown.

It is there that I overhear scraps of conversation. “A fight..hospital..Family name..”

A tall man came up to me, and spoke in Adyghe. Somewhat relieved to hear my mother tongue in the midst of a crisis, I smiled. I did not know he was Adyghe, nor that he was the father of the two stocky boys sitting in the corner behind the policemen’s tables, until that point. “I am their father,” he gestures at them. They nod and smile at me. I nod back. I learn that Mr. Shorty had overheard the boy when he told me to call the police, and started shouting at him : “Why did you tell her to call the police?” He meant “She’s a woman, a foreign woman, who does not know the law, that she is right. Why are you spoiling my chances of getting away with it? I could even cheat her into paying me!” Shorty swore at Open-face . This is a criminal offence in Jordan , if you bother taking the offender to court. Then there was a fight. I do not know who started hitting whom, but four men were upon one boy. The four men called their kinsmen, and the result was twenty against one.

O, the glory of clans! The boy’s brother, who was supposed to pick him up for an Eid visit, arrived to see his brother being beaten up in a fight. While trying to pull him out of the mess, the brave men attacked him as well.

As soon as the police arrived, the attackers, the first six, threw themselves into hospital to make themselves appear the victims. The boys followed procedure, made an official complaint at the police station. This was the stage of events when they stood up as a police officer came to them. I saw that Procedure had bedecked them with nice shiny handcuffs. My Palestinian friend, beside me, says that they have many fights in the refugee camp nearby his home, and it is almost a rule: If you get into a fight, and want to appear right in the eyes of the law, throw yourself into hospital, even if “ ‘Tis but a scratch” .

Hence, at eight-thirty the next morning, I was to give my statement in order to collect my licences. “ No statement, no licence, no car, no driving ” I could hear Procedure say. I gave a statement at the station, and at the court. My Palestinian friend, risking his boss’ temper at his office, came as well. He had to leave after an hour and a half of futile waiting. Around noon I was asked to come to court with the defendants, which was what Procedure had made of the boy who stood up for me and his brother who had tried to pull him out.

Court consisted of an office with a dreary grey carpet, windowless, with a high white ceiling. A bored secretary with a tight coloured headscarf and long, mascara-laden eyelashes sat at a table beside the judge’s table, typing everything into a computer. The judge had the neat, trim beard of a modern, religiously inclined scholar. He was slim in his dark judicial robe, and his forehead creased as he frowned at the papers in front of him.

The boys came in, along with a dark man, the taxi driver, his father, a lawyer, and his brother, a lawyer. We stood up. We put our right hand on the Holy Qur’an and made our vows to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I miss Hammurabi. I gave my statement, basically what I did, and what I saw. Hit the brake, saw nothing. I saved the taxi driver and all of them a lot of trouble by saying I have no charges against any of them.

The boys tell the details of how they got beaten up. The dark man, a 48-year old owner of a big chain of Hummus-and-Falafel restaurants in Amman , claims he was attacked by one of the boys first, the boy then tells how he was hit by a heavy object by the man, which the man had especially provided for the occasion. Shows the bruised wound on his head. I wonder at how a man little younger than my father can find it in himself to go to a fight. He is supposed to be an elder. A grownup. The court made all those involved look like idiots. While the other attackers hospitalized themselves, the boys were only allowed to be seen by the court clinic. Procedure, you see.

I was angry with everyone, with all of them. Both sides took me for a helpless female. Both thought I am weak enough to be fooled. One wanted to use me, the other to protect me. I needed neither. I knew and used the law. I thought I had saved two lives. Then comes Mr.Shorty, who, instead of being thankful for being whole and hearty, with the insurance to pay for his damage, causes a fight, earns himself an injury while dishing out a more generous helping himself. It seems that it is not the only thing he earned.

The boys’ aunt calls me a few days later, asking if I can testify in court –again. The judge refused a fine. The boys got a prison record, and ended up in jail. The jail’s name is synonymous with the worst of society. I call my father. He says I should testify, even before I told him the boys were Adyghe. “Do your duty,” he said.

After I agree, the boys’ father calls in a few days. The attackers had asked for a compensation of thirteen to fourteen thousand Jordanian Dinars. Enough for a decent car, I now reflect.

After that by a few weeks, I get a call from an ex- Adyghe MP. I tell him the tale as I knew it. He understood I saw nothing of the fight. He thanked me, and I did not hear a word on them for months.

After wondering and feeling guilty for their imprisonment, I call their father. The boys are out. They paid some money. Either a fine or a compensation. Either legal or clan procedure. I do not know the details.

“Is that a good thing?” I ask.

“Yes it is,” he replies with a slight laugh. “Everything is all right. God Bless you, Janset. Thanks for asking.”

Now I can rest my mind about the matter. Happy Eid, Happy Bayram, indeed!