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In Petra: A Bedouin Girl Leans In

In Petra: A Bedouin Girl Leans In

Last updated on: May 22, 2015 at 2:31 am by Max Lindenman

In Petra: A Bedouin Girl Leans In 2015-05-22T02:31:01-06:00 Max Lindenman

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She had a winning smile. As an 11-year-old who had years to go before growing into her adult teeth, she could hardly help that. But, at least in the beginning, she also had a winning sales strategy.

“A gift for you,” she said as she trotted alongside me on the dusty path through Petra. She handed me a booklet of postcards. What the heck, I thought, and handed her a dinar, the going rate for such a trinket.

“No,” she said, assuming an air of affronted generosity. “It is a gift.” Then, in roughly the time it takes for a curve ball to break over the plate, she held up an arm draped with necklaces. “Here,” she said. “Buy one for your wife.”

Over the millennia, Petra, glorious Petra, carved from the red sandstone rocks of a plunging canyon, has worn many hats, or rather, many crowns. In ancient times it was, in more or less this order, an Edomite stronghold, a stopping-point for the Hebrews as they wandered toward the Promised Land, and the capital of the Nabatean state. Since its re-discovery in 1812 by Johann Burckhardt, who made water color studies of the surviving tombs and temples, it has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Until recently, it was also home to the Bedool people, a tribe of Bedouin nomads who camped in the nearby caves. The Bedool claim to be the descendants of the Nabateans, the very people who chiseled out the monuments at Petra and conquered territories stretching through the modern-day countries of Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. After the Roman emperor Trajan annexed the remains of the Nabatean state, some inhabitants assimilated into Roman society. Others, including the Bedool, reverted to the pastoral ways of their remote ancestors.

Being a descendant of an original people can be less glamorous than it sounds. As any Pima or Navajo will tell you, you can’t eat bragging rights. In 1985, as the UN was preparing to proclaim Petra a World Heritage Site, the Jordanian government tried to bar the Bedool from Petra. The Bedool resisted. As Ra’ed, our tour guide, put it, “Things could have gotten messy if Queen Noor hadn’t intervened.” Noor, the American-born fourth wife of the late King Hussein, helped engineer a compromise. As long as the Bedool relocated to the surrounding hills, they could commute to Petra and sell souvenirs to tourists.

This girl was Bedool. That much was obvious from her tanned face, and from the proprietorial attitude she seemed to hold toward the ground we stood on. This land is mine, her body language declared. If you want to visit, that’s fine. But you’re going to have to deal with me.

Swelling with social responsibility, I fingered a necklace of beads with a pendant resembling a tooth from a small dinosaur. It looked both tasteful and cheap. “How much?” I asked.

“Fifty dinar,” she said. I quailed. Almost exactly equal to fifty dollars, that happened, at the moment, to account for half the cash in my pocket. “No, thanks,” I said, and hustled along the trail.

She stuck by me, skinny legs pumping. “Why, Mister, why?” She asked. “It’s good – camel bone. Okay, forty dinars for two.”

As a former mortgage loan officer, I knew a thing or two about salesmanship. As an ESOL instructor, I knew a thing or two about language learning and acquisition. The kid impressed me on both scores. Though her syntax and words were simple, she pronounced those words better than roughly 95% of my students. Far from striving to appear cute or pitiable, she was keeping her foot in the door, poking around for my sweet spot, in a thoroughly adult, professional way.

We were past the Treasury, the two-story, Corinthian-columned tomb that appears in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and well beyond the Siq, the claustrophobia-inducing gorge that leads there from the visitors’ center. The path had broadened into the Street of Facades – a gauntlet of monumental tombs with columns and pediments of their own. For the Bedool, this was the business district. On the left, they’d stocked tents with ceramics, jewelry, kohel – Arab eye makeup – and copies of a memoir titled Married to A Bedouin. They took a fairly laid-back approach to marketing. After shouting, “Two for one,” or “Happy hour prices,” they let tourists pass in peace.

But this girl was determined. No one, apparently, had explained to her that it’s all a numbers game, or that every no brings you one step closer to your next yes. She was going to close if it killed us both. After brushing aside my apologies and pleas of poverty for a good hundred yards, she said, “Okay, two for thirty.”

It never fails. Any vendor who slashes her prices dramatically will gain my ear, even if she’s hawking something of no use to me, like camel-bone necklaces or subscriptions to Popular Mechanics. Pausing, I glanced surreptitiously at my wad. Then I did something very foolish.

“Can you make change?” I asked, pulling out a fifty.

The girl’s eyebrows shot up. “Three for fifty!” She cried, holding up her wares again. “Here, pick one. Do you like turquoise?”

Thank God for Deacon Greg. He bailed me out by handing the girl three tens. Promising to pay him back, I snagged two camel-bone necklaces – the dominant beads were white in one, mottled brown and tan in the other – and speed-walked down the path.

Though momentarily outfoxed, the girl was not satisfied. After a few moments, I saw her striding alongside me again. “Mister,” she said. “Anything, from you, a gift.”

Relieved to be back in the realm of charity, I stopped again. What, I pondered, did I have in my pockets that I might offer this bright and ruthless young businesswoman as a token of respect and encouragement? My passport seemed a little extravagant, and the LA Fitness tab from my keychain was starting to fray. Settling for the symbolic, I fished in my wallet and pulled out an old Capital One Visa. Maxed out years ago, when I was in my financial doldrums, its balance had been the object of many collections calls.

“Here,” I said. “Keep selling like this, and one day, you’ll have a real one.”

The girl looked at me as though I’d offered her a used tissue. “Don’t you have anything else?”

Suspecting I’d misunderstood the words anything and gift, I handed her a dinar. She accepted it with a frown. As I resumed my march toward the theater and the Urn Tomb, I heard her pitching some of the people behind me.

“The Bedool make a pretty decent living here,” Ra’ed said later, when I told him the story. “They have a good life. You’d know that if you saw their cars.”

I hadn’t seen their cars, but I had seen them riding the horses and camels on which they led tired tourists for a reasonable fee. Flying up the trail at a full gallop, they made a sight to stir a romantic’s heart. But a romantic imagination can be terribly distracting, especially when it makes noble savages out of shrewd, rugged, adaptable people.

I wish now that the girl and I had had more words between us. I might have changed the course of history by telling her about casinos and tax-free cigarettes.

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