The Hills of Amman Are Alive...
Act I: The Mother Superior’s Strategic Pivot
In 1935, Maria is not singing on Austrian mountaintops. She is instead sitting in a drafty convent hallway, singing a little too enthusiastically and asking theological questions that begin with “But suppose one were…”
The Mother Superior — serene, pragmatic, faintly geopolitical — recognizes a pattern.
“Maria,” she says gently, “when the Lord closes a cloister, He opens a mandate.”
The convent has received a request. A British educational initiative in the Emirate of Transjordan seeks teachers. English must be spread. Civilization, properly vowel-balanced, must proceed.
Maria is dispatched — not as a governess, but as a missionary of irregular verbs.
Act II: Arrival in Jordan
Amman in 1935 is dust, limestone, British officers in shorts, and children who would rather be anywhere else than conjugating verbs.
Maria enters the modest schoolhouse full of energy and movable-do solfège.
But she is not alone.
At the opposite end of the corridor stands a gaunt, luminous, intense young woman with piercing eyes and a stack of Pascal under her arm:
Simone Weil.
Simone teaches French.
Simone does not sing.
Simone does not approve of singing.
Act III: The Battle of the Subjunctive
The conflict begins politely.
Maria introduces:
“In English we say, ‘If I were…’”
Simone interrupts:
“In French, the conditionnel carries metaphysical gravity. English is… optimistic.”
Soon the schoolyard is divided.
On one side:
Cheerful chanting of “The rain in Spain…”
Improvised percussion using chalk boxes
Maria inventing educational dances about gerunds
On the other:
Children reciting Racine with existential fatigue
Simone lecturing on affliction while correcting pronunciation of être
A blackboard that reads: La vérité est exigeante.
Maria tries charm.
Simone tries rigor.
Neither can resist the other.
Act IV: The Friendship
The rivalry softens into fascination.
In the evenings they walk along the limestone hills above Amman.
Maria speaks of Salzburg, music, uncertainty, and vocation.
Simone speaks of factory work, suffering, grace, and the hunger strike she may someday undertake.
Maria teaches Simone to harmonize.
Simone teaches Maria that attention is the purest form of prayer.
One evening, under Levantine stars, they sing softly — not hymns, not anthems — but a fragile hybrid of Austrian folk melody and French mystical poetry.
Something shifts.
It is never spoken. It is never consummated. But it hums beneath the surface like a low sustained organ note.
Act V: The Almost
The British headmaster, oblivious to metaphysics, reports rising enrollment. English and French both flourish. The children now argue about Voltaire in imperfect English.
Maria feels steadier. Less impulsive.
Simone, unexpectedly, laughs.
There is a sense that a new path might unfold — two women building a school of radical attention and grammar in the desert.
But then a letter arrives from Austria.
The convent calls her back.
“Discernment,” writes the Mother Superior.
Maria trembles. Simone does not plead.
Instead Simone says:
“Obedience is a kind of gravity. But gravity does not eliminate freedom.”
Maria returns to Austria.
Simone remains in Jordan briefly before continuing her strange, ascetic trajectory through history.
Epilogue
Years later, somewhere in wartime Europe, Maria remembers the hills of Amman when she hears distant artillery.
Simone, in exile and decline, remembers a clear soprano voice rising over limestone.
They never meet again.
But for a brief season in 1935, English and French were not rival empires — they were parallel prayers.
