Read the book: «Short Stories by Elena Suprema»

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1. The Gun

Ten years ago I was here for the first time. And for the first time I feared for my life.

The guy who was giving me a lift to the border suddenly pulled a gun from under the seat. I didn't know what he was going to do with it. I was scared. Instead of thoughts in my head, I began frantically searching for reasons why I couldn't die right here and right now. After all, I hadn't seen so much yet. And it seemed so unfair to me — that my Russian blood would be spilled here, in Jordan, of all places. And I hadn't yet seen Jerusalem, which was exactly where I was headed.

The guy showed the gun to the driver sitting beside him, said something in Arabic, then put it back under the seat.

That was it.

I was twenty-something years old, sitting in the back of a stranger's car somewhere between Amman and the Israeli border, trying to count up reasons to stay alive. The reasons felt thin. Not because life was bad — it wasn't — but because I hadn't thought about them before. You don't, until someone holds a gun in front of you and the question becomes suddenly, brutally real.

I found two: I hadn't seen Jerusalem. And it didn't seem fair that it would end here.

That was enough. The car moved on. The gun stayed under the seat. I arrived at the border and crossed on foot. And I didn't think about that moment again for ten years.

Until I came back.

2. Write Another Shantaram

In Wadi Rum I met an Italian journalist named David. Three earrings in one ear, a keffiyeh tied around his neck, and a kind of restless intelligence in his eyes that I recognised immediately — the kind that comes from having moved through too many countries to stay impressed by any single one.

He noticed I was reading Shantaram and sat down beside me.

We talked for several evenings in a row, sitting next to each other listening to Arabic music drifting from the camp. I told him I was confused about my future. That I felt like I was stuck in one episode of a series, rewatching it over and over.

— My life is like driving on the left side of the road and constantly apologising for it.

— What do you mean?

— Being out of place. Not knowing what to do next. You know what came before, but you can't imagine what comes after. Like something broke in the forward motion.

— You can create your own future. Just choose it. Don't think about it so much.

He was leaving a few days before me. On his last day he sat in the back of a pickup truck, waved, and called out: "Draw something or write while you're here. You have an unconventional life, you've travelled so much, seen so much. Maybe you'll write another Shantaram."

I nodded and smiled — part politeness, part vanity, part something else I didn't name.

A few years later I wrote this book.

I hope he reads it someday and leaves a review.

3. The Guard at the Gate

Eight years before I came to live in the Bedouin village, I visited Petra for the first time as a tourist. Three days, a side trip from Israel. I remember almost nothing of the logistics — only the feeling of the Treasury opening up at the end of the canyon. I sat opposite it for three hours and couldn't look away.

A Bedouin followed me around all day. I didn't ask him to. He showed me hidden paths up into the cliffs, a view of Al-Khazneh from above that most tourists never see. He was the first person I had ever met who couldn't read or write but spoke five languages fluently. Or so he said. Later I would hear that exact description from many Bedouins in Petra, as if they had all decided it sounded romantic.

By evening he wanted to take me to his village. I refused. He got angry. It had grown dark. He turned and walked back toward his village, and as I reached the main gate I noticed the security guard watching me. The guard drew a slow finger across his throat.

He didn't say a word. He didn't need to.

I thought about that gesture sometimes in the years that followed. The casual certainty of it. How he drew the line without drama, as if it were just a piece of information. Take it or leave it.

I left. I went back to Israel. I didn't think about that Bedouin again.

Until I ended up living in his village. That understanding came much later.

4. The Blue Cup

There was an argument. I don't remember what started it — something about the truth of what he had said, whether it could be trusted, whether anything in this place could be trusted.

In the middle of it, I lost my patience and said:

— I ask you what colour this cup is, and you tell me it's blue. — I pointed at a red mug.

— It's blue, he said.

He didn't flinch. He didn't smile. He just looked at me and said it was blue.

That was the moment I understood something I had been circling around for weeks. His manipulations were obvious. He told me exactly what he thought I wanted to hear, rather than what was true. He had been doing it all along, and somewhere in me I had known it — the way you know something you haven't yet decided to admit.

Black will never become white for me. When someone tries too hard to convince me of something, I resist on principle, because the judgment of truth becomes too subjective. I hold both images in my head — the real one, and the one they're selling — and I don't confuse them.

But I also know it's not enough to see the lie. You still have to decide what to do with that knowledge.

I kept looking at the red cup. He kept insisting it was blue. And I stayed there far longer than I should have.

5. The Shoes

Spring came to the desert in a thin layer of green that coats the yellow hills for a few weeks before the sun burns it off. The Bedouin family — several generations, everyone — piled into pickup trucks and drove out to Little Petra to celebrate the approach of Ramadan with a picnic.

Blankets were spread. The women unpacked food they had prepared. Children scattered immediately into the dunes, disappearing a hundred metres in every direction. Some of the women sat on the blankets. I stood.