Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [58]
Rows of riot police stomped up a side street, gripping shields and clubs for beating. The demonstrators marched toward them, screaming their chants.
I put my hand on Nora’s back. “We’re in the wrong place,” I had to yell. “We’re going to get stuck in between them.”
“I think it’s okay,” she said. “So far it’s calm.”
“It won’t stay calm. Watch.”
The crowd had thickened by then, swollen and scraping against the shuttered market stalls, too big for the cramped stone streets. The police sticks pointed skyward, and the afternoon collapsed in running. Shoes slammed on hard streets. Every shop was a blank eyelid, screwed tight. There was nowhere to escape and so we ran with the demonstrators, riot police at our backs, swinging their clubs, thwacking at any limb, any spine. These were not hardened activists; these were middle-aged Arab men whose resolve vanished at the first smack of club on skin. Their hands thumped against our shoulders, shoved us aside. Panic turned to stampede and we raced through bodies slamming blindly into bodies, bone on bone and muscle on muscle, ragged breath, and clothes snagging on the sides of buildings.
Somebody was shouting and we turned to see a shopkeeper holding a demonstrator by the collar, punching him in the face, over and over. “Get out of my store!” he yelled hysterically, thrusting the man into the stampede. Somebody had found an open door and we jammed ourselves through, ran up one flight of wobbling stairs after the next, hunting for a window. Sweating, shaking, laughing. Nora was silent. Her enormous brown eyes flickered.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “This is great.”
I worked my cell phone out of my jeans pocket. I had a message from Nour: Are you here? I stared at it, frowning.
“Wait,” I said to Nora. “So you’re not Nour.”
“I’m Nora.”
“You don’t work for the Los Angeles Times.”
“No.”
“And we didn’t talk on the phone this morning.”
“No,” she said, and a laugh spread across her face.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. You must have thought I was crazy. I thought you were somebody else. I never met our fixer here, I don’t know what she looks like.”
“Megan,” she cut me off. “It’s no problem.”
She started giggling. I started giggling.
“Hey,” I said, “we can’t really see anything from here. You want to go back out?”
She did.
It took police half an hour to haul the last diehard protestors into paddy wagons. When they finished, the shopkeepers unlocked the metal screens and threw open their dens. Clumsy racks sprouting feather dusters and baseball caps resurrected themselves from the bed of concrete. The men hauled out old chairs, lit coals for their water pipes, and sat smoking, eyes fixed over the street as if nothing had passed.
Nora packed us into her car and whisked us off to a café. Here the Jordanians were young and lithe with designer eyeglasses, tight jeans, and flirty glances. Pop music bounced off walls the color of watermelon. It felt insane to be here, insane that this was the same country as the sweaty, tumultuous warrens of downtown an hour earlier. Do these kids even know about the demonstration? Nora shrugged. They are not interested, she said.
One of the journalists in our group is talking about the men who follow him from his hotel.
Nora frowns. “Shhhhhhh.”
“It’s not safe to talk here?”
“It’s not safe to talk anywhere.”
We fall quiet. Then Nora says, “Here’s what we do, guys, okay? My friends and I have a system we use so we can talk. It’s like a code. Like, we say ‘flower’—what do you think that means?”
The queen? Somebody guesses.
“Her husband.”
Flower means “king.”
Mouse means “intelligence agent.”
These days, Jordan is full of mice. Everybody is afraid of them. They have never been so prevalent, or so powerful. Why? Because flower is scared. He