From Souk to Souk (4 page)

‘Make very nice gift!' said the storekeeper, emerging from his small shop and unknowingly chasing away the ghosts of my past. A carefully trimmed moustache rested on a face that had spent many years in the sun, but his close-set eyes still had a youthful glint to them. ‘How much would you like?' Before I had time to think, he produced a brown paper bag and, taking a small aluminium scoop, began filling it.

‘How much is it?'

‘Is not expensive, my friend,' he smiled, exposing more gaps than teeth. The bag was already brimming with roses. He folded it closed and Sellotaped the flap. ‘Four hundred,' he said, holding out the package.

A fait accompli, but a fair price, I thought, handing over my crumpled Syrian pounds. I knew they would make an ideal gift as pot-pourri for a friend, even if in Syria they are often used for culinary purposes. As I returned my wallet to my trouser pocket, instinct made its presence felt and whispered to me that I was being watched. I looked up to see a clean-shaven man in jeans and a navy polo top standing in front of a shop a short distance away, dark eyes observing me. He was partially silhouetted against the daylight at the entrance of the souk, but I felt he had a familiar air. He turned and, picking up something from the display of goods, began talking to the bearded shopkeeper approaching him. I tried to remember if I had seen him elsewhere since arriving in the country: terrible at recalling names, I rarely forget a face, yet I could not bring to mind why this one appeared so familiar.

Continuing in the direction of the Great Mosque that lay just beyond the souk, I paused to look at the items on show outside a couple of traditional pharmacies. Many would not have looked out of place in a Chinese medicine shop: fox pelts and snake skins, dried puffer fish and rabbits' feet dangled above pumice stones and loofahs. I tried to convince myself that some of the more exotic articles were only for decoration and not evidence of a thriving trade in rare animal parts. At a flapping of wings I looked up to see a couple of pigeons vying for space on the sills of one of the windows that ran along the first floor of the long buildings either side of the souk. The rooms behind the dusty panes seemed abandoned and lifeless: the centre of this ancient city was at once busy and bustling, yet so many of the buildings were run-down and empty.

Just beyond the end of the spice souk was the outer wall of the famous eighth-century Great Mosque, built when Damascus was the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, at the time the largest empire the world had seen, stretching all the way from Portugal to Transoxiana in Central Asia. At the centre of the Old City, it is a powerful symbol of the layers of human history here and the importance of Damascus over the last four thousand years. Today, Syria's pivotal position in the Middle East makes its capital once more a focus of attention, sadly for all the wrong reasons, but it no longer enjoys the commercial or cultural status it once did. I turned and followed the crowd along the lane, the high wall of the mosque towering above me like the bulwark of some forbidden palace. The street soon opened out into a large space in front of the main entrance of the mosque where sellers of Korans, sweets and souvenirs mingled with shoppers, tourists and police. I stopped to look at the Great Mosque, its solid wall of light beige stone contrasting with the peaceful azure sky above. Here, in front of me, stood the fourth-holiest place in Islam, built on top of a Christian basilica reputed to have housed the head of John the Baptist, the relic now having its own shrine within the mosque. The basilica was itself constructed over the largest Roman temple in Syria, dedicated to the god of thunder, Jupiter. This, in turn, had been erected on the site of a temple devoted to the Aramaean cult god of thunderstorms and rain, Hadad, referred to in the Bible as Rimmon. It was the Aramaeans who, entering the city in the eleventh century BC, first made Dimashqu, as they called it, into an important trading centre. And it was their language, Aramaic, that Jesus spoke.

I walked over to the ticket office at the side of the mosque, a few paces from where the tomb of Saladin stood. Nemesis of the Crusaders whom he drove from the Holy Land in the twelfth century, the man had been laid to rest in the city where he had died. I bought a ticket and then walked over to the mosque entrance specially reserved for tourists, where, having taken off my shoes and placed them on the racks with all the others, I entered the main courtyard. It felt strange walking across the smooth floor, my stockinged feet making no sound on the polished limestone, uneven with age. A couple of small groups of Westerners, the women looking rather like monks in the grey, hooded cloaks provided by the mosque authorities, listened to their guides slowly and deliberately explaining the history and features of the elegant building. A few locals wandered around, some taking photographs, others sitting on the warm floor and engaging in small-talk or simply relaxing in the sunshine. The clean lines of the arches and the plain roof somehow managed to blend perfectly with the more ornate architectural elements – Corinthian columns, ceramic tiling and beautiful eighth-century mosaics. The vast courtyard with its long arcades was a haven of calm compared to the bustle of the city outside. In the main prayer hall, I stopped to look at the elaborate marble shrine said to contain the head once delivered on a plate to Salome, the reliquary's green dome giving it the aspect of a gaudy miniature cathedral.

Like so many places in the region, in Damascus historic facts are interwoven with tales born of belief. As I strolled around the mosque, I reflected on how John the Baptist probably did exist, but no-one knew if the head alleged to be in the shrine was really his. According to the New Testament, the saints Paul and Thomas both lived in this city. Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, was a Pharisee who zealously persecuted Christians. It was on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus that Jesus is said to have appeared to him in a blinding vision. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, a dialect then the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The vagaries of Koine vocabulary and grammar mean the description of what happened to Saul that day is open to interpretation when translated: it is not clear if he heard a voice or just a sound, or whether his travelling companions could not hear what he heard or simply could not understand it. The implications for what Saul actually experienced are intriguing: did he really have an encounter with the resurrected Christ, or did he merely suffer from sunstroke or a seizure, the latter causing his temporary blindness? It was not until three days later that Ananias, a disciple of Jesus living in Damascus and following instructions supposedly received from his Lord in a vision, found Saul in a house on the ‘Street called Straight' and apparently cured him of his blindness. Once healed, however, Saul saw the light, as it were, converted to Christianity and became the Apostle Paul. One may question the origin or authenticity of Paul's experience, but that he existed as a person does not seem to be in doubt. The city's Jews were angered by his Damascene conversion and he was forced to make a hasty escape in a basket lowered from a window in the city wall. Yet, before taking flight, Paul would have walked along Straight Street, just as I had done earlier that day. Fellow saint, Thomas, even gave his name to one of the city gates and a Christian neighbourhood of old Damascus, Bab Tuma. As I stood in the mosque contemplating the fluid border between fact and belief, I considered how the finer points of linguistics could affect both and, with them, history.

Back outside in the cobbled plaza in front of the mosque, looking at the people, residents of this ancient city as well as visitors, milling around and going about their business, it was strange to think that the scene before me was probably not so different from the one that would have been played out here time and time again over the centuries. In the time of Paul and Thomas, the Temple of Jupiter would have been the main place of Roman worship. Today, the impressive ruins of its western gate with its high arches and the remaining corner of the pediment supported by three towering columns stand between the Great Mosque and the entrance of the Al-Hamidiyah Souk, a reminder of the ephemeral nature of even the greatest empires.

Turning to go into the bazaar, I caught my breath as I thought I recognised the man from the spice souk. A moment later, the figure had melted into the crowd. I wondered if I really was being followed, or if it was just my subconscious playing tricks on me. Certainly, there was no reason for me to arouse anyone's suspicion. Slowly making my way up the broad paved steps towards the souk, I could feel my pulse quickening. I paused at one of the stands selling Korans and, as casually as I could, looked back towards the mosque, half expecting to see cold, dark eyes staring at me, but instead there was just a melee of shoppers and a couple of pale, silver-haired tourists studying an open guide book. Even so, a feeling of unease had begun to ferment in my stomach.

Continuing into the souk, I was surprised to find myself in a seemingly endless nineteenth-century arcade which, with its two-storey colonnaded walls, rows of rectangular windows and arched cast-iron roof, would not have looked out of place in Europe. Like the other souks, rays of daylight fell through windows in the roof high above. The structure itself could have been in Paris, but the brightly lit shops were filled with an assortment of traditional Arab wear ranging from the ubiquitous sombre black
abayas
to glitzy sequined dresses in the gaudiest of colours that could have been lifted from a bad operetta about Marie-Antoinette. Yet it was the number of shop windows openly displaying skimpy and erotic women's underwear that was surprising: Damascus, it seemed, was the lingerie capital of the Middle East.

‘You want water, mister?'

I turned to see a young boy in an embroidered waistcoat, baggy trousers and a scarlet fez that had seen better days. On his back hung a large brass samovar almost as big as he was. With rough fingers, he pulled a plastic cup from a stack that was attached to his belt, along with a row of little brass tumblers.

‘You want water?' he repeated. A moustache was trying hard to form above his open lips. He looked at me hopefully with grey eyes, but I think he saw the answer already in mine. I sensed that he asked again, this time silently, but the most I was willing to give was a smile. He drifted away, his dishevelled black slippers making no noise on the paving stones.

A little further on, I saw a small crowd gathered outside a wooden-fronted shop selling ice cream. I strained my neck to watch as the staff, in white T-shirts and side caps and wearing surgical gloves, pushed handfuls of the sticky, elastic mixture into cornets. They then rolled them in chopped pistachio nuts before handing them to the waiting clients, who began eagerly devouring their oversized ices. In the background, as if engaged in some tribal ritual, a row of men was rhythmically thrusting long wooden pestles into open-topped churns set into the counter and filled with the coveted white mixture. The
clack-clack
noise of wood on metal sounded like strange experimental music. Above the door, the sign indicated it was the Bakdash ice cream parlour, famous for its
Booza
, a frozen dessert made by pounding a mixture of mastic and sahlab, a flour made from orchid tubers. When my turn came, I pointed to the stack of cornets and moments later took possession of a weighty delight, handed to me by a man with a pointed nose and painter's-brush moustache.

I moved away from the crowd pressing at the counter and looked around at the shoppers, some sauntering, others rushing. Then, a short distance away, I spotted him trying to attract the attention of passers-by. Feeling like a salmon swimming upstream, I made my way through the throng of people, protectively clutching the ice cream close to my chest. When I reached the young water seller, I held out the short cornet with its nut-covered snowball. He looked surprised and reached for a plastic goblet.

‘
La
,' I said, ‘no water. It's for you.'

For an instant, he looked at me and the ice cream suspiciously before gingerly reaching for it and, after a brief inspection, taking a large, hungry bite. He seemed surprised it was cold and for a moment I thought he was going to spit it out right in front of me, but a second later he began wolfing it down.

I smiled goodbye and continued to amble through the gallery, feeling I was the only person there without an ice cream. The shops were uninspiring, but the ever-growing number of people more than compensated in terms of visual interest. Men, mostly in Western clothes, bustled past, while women in more conservative and distinctly Arabic dress shuffled along, often laden with shopping bags and followed by gaggles of children. Many faces had film-star looks, but others seemed to have been doled out startling combinations of features – elongated faces, horse-like teeth, and bulging eyes – as if the least desirable genes from past invasions had by some misfortune all come together at once. As in most high streets, the multitude was a mix of shoppers and people just walking around, looking, talking, and laughing with their friends and family. The scene was at once familiar and exotic; the ambience was relaxed, yet my thoughts kept returning to the man I suspected was following me. I had done nothing untoward, but perhaps my worst fears were being confirmed.

After a while, I began to bore of the endless shops selling clothes I would never buy and decided to head back. I turned and retraced my steps past the Great Mosque and through to the spice souk, keeping a discreet eye out among the myriad faces for the dark eyes I had seen earlier. In the shadows of the covered market, I began to feel people were observing me: curious glances from shopkeepers, enquiring looks from passers-by, the occasional stare and furtive whisper. Was I imagining it, or were people deliberately bumping into me as I tried to fight my way through the crowds? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement in one of the murky first-floor rooms, a figure slipping out of view behind the dusty glass as I looked up. I told myself it was probably just somebody working in a storeroom, but, in the subdued lighting of the souk, I could feel my pulse quickening as reason struggled to stay its ground. When, a short while later, I once again emerged on to Straight Street, away from the mass of people and the thick, scented air of the spice market, it seemed as if I had been granted a reprieve from the darker recesses of my own imagination.