From Jester To King III
By Simon Barget
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The unlikely new holiday destination of choice – Qatar. When I arrived I didn’t exactly know where I was; and though I’d planned to go somewhere Middle East on my next stop, it hadn’t occurred to me that my ethnicity might be an issue. You see I’m Jewish on my mother’s side via a strange and circuitous Castilian route involving expulsion, Marranos, Moroccan tenacity and eventual settling in Sunderland well before Ben Israel drew up his petition to Cromwell. It came therefore as a surprise when the young man at the customs booth peered over the glass barrier, and when I made no movement or gesture in response, he proceeded to leer as if to convey my sheer wanton brazenness of trying to enter a country long-known to be inimical to the cause.
Not balked by my intransigence stands as a credit to him. Because he then proceeded to ask me if I’d been to Israel. I immediately understood that the mere fact of Jewishness could not be grounds for denying admission and if the device employed was to be the hackneyed Israel stamp on passport, i.e. whether or not you had one, since it would be impossible to prove or disprove Judaism otherwise and unlikely that they would try since you can’t exclude someone just because they look Jewish, (not that it ever crosses my mind for one second that I look Jewish when I’m back in Chiswick), if stamp was to be the hallmark, then I wasn’t about to fall foul since my passport was flawless.
Suffice it to mention at this stage that he spoke with the wolfish cadence common to middle easterners and the combination of this with the other officers devouring me with saturnine stares made me feel not just uneasy but more to the point hurt, as it had not crossed my mind that I shouldn’t not be here out of Jewishness, nor, as I say above did I exactly know where I was until I was set to standing before this reinforced glass window.
I wouldn’t have come had I known about this.
So I said no, though I’ve not only lived there (in Israel) but also have citizenship conferred on me as a point of political and diplomatic honour, and when met with the response the customs officer just happened to have my passport open at just the right (wrong) page, i.e. the page bearing the full-page stamp of my one-year Israel visa dating back to 2004 and pointed at it and paraded it not just to me but to all the assembled company in triumph.
I knew it was a fix because my current passport has no mention of Israel in, no stamps, nothing, and my old passport expired in 2007 and sits in my side table at home so he couldn’t have been holding it. The relish, nay the glee with which he just happened to have the page open in front of him, seconds after I’d said the no word was ugly and overdone, and when he proceeded to draw the attention of his remaining team members thereto, all in their own booths yet somehow brought in to the incident, draw them towards the blasphemous page, I felt scared threatened but above all covered in this horrible light-headedness that strikes when you really have no idea what will befall you in the soon-to-be elapsing moments and you’re not yet rotting in the jail with bubonic rats.
But it turns out that I had misinterpreted this show of defiance because I soon realised that this chest-beating was some sort of call for a second opinion, and far from denying me access to the country, the offending page was going to sway them towards the opposite decision. Everyone was to get together to make the call, the bureaucratic institution as a whole, and though it seemed like aeons, the call was made and the call was to be that I would be allowed to enter.
Whether a joke I am unable to say. But I was ushered through. And though relieved not to be arrested on the spot or even sent back -- I hated the prospect of going back on a plane to wherever I’d come from, speaking of failure and reversal as opposed to movement and progress -- I was understandably worried that they still had something in store for me, something horrific far beyond the privations of arrest or starvation or even death or torture, this something was to be dark and all-encompassingly humiliating, yes humiliation was what I feared most, to be publicly mocked in front of the condemning populace of Dawlat Qatar.
Anyway I passed through, and as soon as I had, I was met by a chaperone, set up instantaneously to cater for this precise scenario, and if it wasn’t for the fact that this girl was the exact petite buxomy-blonde type that I’d always gone for as a young man -- she bore some resemblance to my first ever girlfriend -- and not only that, flirtatious and sidling right up to me, speaking of an imminent consummation, then I’d have been very scared, but this fear seemed to recede as she took me by the hand to the hotel, all friendly and sweet, which hotel was, as it turned out, only walking distance from the airport.
I thought the room was going to be a dungeon, so when I found it to be ‘normal’, I was relieved. But when my chaperone made an exit and I inspected the room, and particularly the bathroom, I found it to be one of the most disgusting bathrooms I can remember laying eyes upon. I was set back again, set back from the relief I was starting to feel at not being imminently executed and not feeling there was a hidden agenda, and that I might have just been simply let in.
But this bathroom was larger than the main bedroom, and instead of a separate shower tray and cubicle per se, the whole room was the shower tray and it was a walk-in shower-cum-plunge-pool; and there were numerous plugholes dotted about, and in one of the plugholes, there it lay to my horror, the contents of the former room occupant’s putative bowel movement, two distinct tapered turds, of modest sizes, languishing in rivulets of water that were still flowing down upon it from an open tap somewhere in a part of the room I couldn’t make out in the half-light, trickles of water onto the slight incline of the floor from the top and into this plughole, and these pieces of organic material were like champagne corks on a calm sea, moving here and there in jerky increments, two capsized stow-aways sucked down by the whirlpool, fighting to surface but being pushed ever down, down through the spokes of this plughole away from the known towards the mystery from struggle to freedom, forever back into the void.
Why this person had failed to evacuate into the toilet was a mystery to me, as are many things in life, but far from calling up housekeeping or asking to move rooms with my status as law-breaker, I dared not upset the apple cart and set to work on tackling the poos myself with the extendable shower head and within not too long a period of time, I’d put paid not only to both but also to one or moister one that lay flat on the basin, plus a number of other ‘marks’, and it could now be said that the bathroom was relatively undisgusting and useable.
Understandably traumatised, I hadn’t thought about what lay beyond the bathroom, let alone ventured there. And when I did venture, I found a sliding glass door which opened up onto the most surprising scene; in lieu of sand and desert and dust and dune were lush grounds and palm trees -- it was like Florida -- and right outside these doors propped up almost by the glass were three ‘hot’ young girls and when I looked beyond three, all around were female figures spreadeagled on towels and from this sight I derived the notion that this was a leisure centre of sorts, and as if to confirm my suspicion I saw a web of water-slides and a crowd of young people such that you might have found in Majorca or Ibiza or Tenerife when I was a boy, all whooping and cheering and being lascivious, and although I was, and I state this openly, rather aroused by all the young women, I felt as if I might be in the wrong place, a fish out of water, and what was I to do now since I couldn’t just leave after the whole debacle at customs, -- I’d be a laughing stock -- and so I resolved in my mind regardless of the prevailing nubility that I would stick it out in Qatar at least for a few days before they forgot who I was, before I had the courage to leave and go somewhere else.
It happened though when I noticed the icons of our beloved western conveniences, conveniences brought over in spades to the other Emirates, conveniences that I thrived upon such as Starbucks, McDonalds and Dunkin’ Donuts, which made my heart settle and blood pressure fall, and when I heard some of the girls talking about mocha frappuccinos, though unimaginably expensive at 35 Riyal each, I felt this enormous sense of relief that I always feel when I see a big brand and it was at that precise moment that I resolved to enjoy myself, this is what happened, plus these girls were not oblivious to me, and they were easy and loose, and then there was always the buxom chaperone who wouldn’t be far from hand. And it struck me, god, Allah, I’ve actually made it into Qatar, no mean feat, I’m like my forefathers in the hayloft in Vigo, I’m really here as a Jew, an honorary Israeli. And I had an urge to open up my camera and snap a shot of the scene for my sister but there was no connection to be had, no 3G or 4G, no WiFi, the phone’s connection had gone dead like not seen before, so I just left it there and let myself drift.
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As a gay man, the '7 years in
As a gay man, the '7 years in prison, possibly the death penalty', has always put my off a holiday in this truly charming country, so thank you very much for taking me there.
Roll on the World Cup!
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Interestingly the population
Interestingly the population of Qatar is about 2.9 million. 90% of these are foreign workers. So that makes about 290,000 Qataris.
Soon they will have 9 World Cup football stadiums to go to.
As long as you're not gay.
Recently, a foreign worker found with another man was sent home.
At least he kept his head.
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