The word for “line” in Arabic is something like, “khat.” The verb, to line, also means to draw or to plan. Interestingly, the nounal form can also mean “mistake.” Line, plan or mistake. Given the ambidextrous nature of that word, it’s astounding that, in my meager travels of the Middle East, I’ve scarcely seen any number of people forming a line, standing in line, or acknowledging the presence of a line, if one were to miraculously occur, a lone prophet in a lineless world. I’ve seen plenty of situations in which a line might be beneficial, like when large crowds of people must wait to be helped, one by one. Middle Easterners though, and sure I’m generalizing, don’t seem to form lines, they don’t get into lines, and if you believe in lines, you will find your “line etiquette” mangled, trampled underfoot by fasting muslims in line for food at Iftar.
In Egypt, I got in line once to buy a Metro ticket only to be cut, shamelessly, by an elderly woman who, by all line-forming protocol, should’ve been in line after me. I didn’t know how to respond, there was no way that she just hadn’t seen me standing there. I regressed. The last time my position in line had been challenged with such bold-faced diffidence, there had been chicken nuggets, snow cones, and a line monitor to play sentinel over such obstructions. There was no line monitor in the Metro station. The woman pushed her money through a hole in the plexiglass while another man, rightfully ahead of me, finished up his transaction.
It’s the crowd and grab strategy, omnipresent, and there is no method or justice to it, no hierarchy. You have no choice but to unlearn line courtesy and dive in. With that resolve, there is no resentment, only gladiators clambering over each other to a reach a falafel torch.
As I sit in a tiny retractable desk-seat at the Syria-Jordan border, I find that my experiences with lines continues to serve me. Here they have those gold-post, velvet rope things, a valiant effort to carve line-shaped blobs out of the madness. Does it work? I have no idea, it’s about eight in the morning and they’re aren’t enough people for a focus group. My guess is no. Mostly little kids seem to be using them to swing from, and revel in the metallic clanging that fills the hall as a result. Lucky for those kids they’re not American, they’ll be out of here before the boredom sets in.
The ruthless, excruciating boredom.
We’ve been here for two hours, eight minutes and seventeen seconds. At two hours and thirty minutes, we MIGHT be half-way. There’s really no telling. We got up before dawn, (I was the last of three, rousing finally while one of my roommates stood over me, wide-eyed, with Bugs Bunny-ish enthusiasm.) The sun had not even begun to rise, there was only a cool, purplish-yellow bruise on the horizon. Suddenly light flooded in from the hallway, my roommate’s silhouette shielding the merciless light bulb. Still, her aura of enthusiasm and anticipation was blinding. I knew that if I didn’t get up right then, there’d be shitstorm over my pillow.
And now here we are, in a hypothetical line to cross a hypothetical line into a country that doesn’t even WANT us, into a country that someone very literally drew on a piece of paper, probably only seventy-five years ago. We are in the middle of nowhere, but at the very edge of something and between two very important somethings, despite the intangibility of whatever lines hold them in, keeping them separated. We are surrounded by desert. As we drove away from Amman toward the border the sun was about half-risen, still warming up, reddening like the coil on an electric stove. Tufts of resilient brush clung in the dirt–one of the only features other than the orange sun–that differentiates the landscape from the cragged surface of the moon.
Update: After almost nine hours of waiting, and also some listless perusing of the duty-free store, we were finally cleared by the Syrian government to cross into Syria.
