NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (65 page)

I was looking for a warm scarf, but I was also looking for English speakers. I soon found five of them sitting among bolts of silk.

“Come here, Meester! Hello! Good evening, and how are you?”

This man introduced himself as Alla-Aldin—“Aladdin”—Akkad, and his friends and colleagues as Moustafa, Mohammed, Ahmed and Lateef. They were all young and insolent looking, yapping at each other.

“You are a French?”

“American,” I said.

“You are a Yank,” Akkad said. “That is what people call you. Please sit down. Drink some tea.”

I intended to buy a scarf and therefore accepted the invitation. I would have been more careful in a carpet shop. I sat with them and we talked about the cold weather, how damp it was in the bazaar, my travels in Turkey, my impressions of Syria, and so forth.

Moustafa said, “Do you mind if we call you a Yank?”

“Not at all. But what do people call you?”

“They call us donkeys,” Akkad said. “Because of the donkeys wandering around the bazaar. We don’t care. Donkeys are good animals. And we wander too.”

“What do you call Turkish people?”

“‘Mustache,’ ” Mohammed said. And to his friends, “Yes?”

Akkad explained, “Because they all have mustaches.”

“What about Egyptians?”

“We call them ‘Take-Your-Watch,’ because they are thieves.”

“Jordanians?”

“‘They-Only-See-Themselves,’ ” Moustafa said. “They are selfish, they think about themselves all the time.”

“What about Israelis?” I asked.

“Worse than Jordanians,” Akkad said.

“‘The sun shines out of their arseholes,’ we say. It is an Arabic expression for snobbish,” Moustafa said. “They think it, you see. So we call them ‘arseholes’ for short.”

“I don’t like to say this word,” Akkad muttered. “But it’s true they are very snobbish. They think they are better than everyone.”

“Are you married?” Moustafa asked me.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I am married and so is he,” Akkad said, indicating Moustafa. He pointed to Lateef, who apparently did not speak English—he smiled but said nothing. “He is a horse’s hoof.”

“Not a donkey?” I said.

“And I am a ginger beer,” Akkad said. “Although I am married.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It is slang,” Akkad said, and took out a book. He wagged it at me and said, “This Yank does not understand!”

The book was titled
Australian Slang
, and it was inscribed to Akkad from Ray, an Australian, in big affectionate blue loopy handwriting.

“My old boyfriend,” Akkad said. He batted his eyelashes at me. “He was a traveler like you.”

I leafed through the book of slang.
Horse’s hoof—poof. Ginger beer—queer.
Over a year paddling in the Happy Isles and I get a lesson in Aussie slang from a Syrian in Aleppo?

“I get it,” I said. “But didn’t you say you were married?”

“Yes. I just found out I am a homosexual one month ago, after five years of married life.”

“Isn’t that a little inconvenient?” I asked.

“Only for my wife,” Akkad said.

“But I like women,” Moustafa said.

“I like men,” Akkad said. “So does he. And he. And you see this man there”—another young man had paused in the lane of the bazaar to mutter to Lateef—“he was my boyfriend once. You see how he is ignoring me?”

“I agree with Moustafa,” I said. “I prefer women.”

“Women smell like omelets,” Akkad said.

“Do you like omelets?”

“No,” he said. “I like men. They smell like watermelons.”

“‘A woman for duty. A boy for pleasure. A melon for ecstasy.’ Isn’t that an Arab proverb?” I said.

“I have never heard it,” Akkad said. “I don’t understand.”

Moustafa cupped his hands at his chest to suggest breasts and said, “I like these melons on a woman!”

“I don’t like them,” Akkad said. “How old are you?”

I told him.

“No,” he said. “But if you are that old you must be happy. Very happy.”

“Yes, he is happy,” Moustafa said.

“I am happy,” I said. And thought: Yes, drinking tea in this bazaar on a chilly evening in Aleppo, in the farthest corner of the Mediterranean, listening to their silly talk, sensing a welcome in it, the hospitality of casual conversation, feeling I could ask them almost anything and get an answer; I am happy.

“Why did you come here?” Akkad said.

“To buy a scarf,” I said.

“I will not sell you a scarf now. Moustafa and Ahmed will not sell you
a scarf. You know why? Because we want you to come back here tomorrow to talk with us.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Later I went to a restaurant and had hot bread and hummus, baba ghanouj and eggplant, salad and spicy fish chunks. I was joined by a student, Ahmed Haj’Abdo, who was studying medicine at the Aleppo medical college. He said he wanted to get high marks, so that he could study abroad and specialize. I introduced the topic of Assad, hoping to get more colorful information about the cult of Basil. Mr. Haj’Abdo got flustered and searched the restaurant desperately with his agitated eyes.

“Sorry,” I said.

He just smiled and then we talked about the weather.

The next day, my last in Aleppo, I went back to Akkad and bought a head scarf and asked him the best way to Latakia. There were so many ways—buses, “pullman,” minivans, taxis, shared cars, the train.

Akkad said, “The best way. You mean quickest? Safest? Most comfortable? Cheapest? What?”

“What does ‘safest’ mean?”

“The road is dangerous. It winds around the mountains. Sometimes the cars and buses go off the road and into the valleys. People die.”

“Train is safest and best,” Moustafa said.

“That’s what I always say.”

My first-class ticket to Latakia on the early train the next morning was two dollars.

There were a hundred or more Syrians in the waiting room of the railway station the following morning. In cold countries that are poor there is often a sartorial strangeness, people dressed differently and weirdly, abandoning fashion for warmth. Syria this winter morning was that way. There were women in black drapes, their faces covered, looking like dark Shmoos, and others like nuns, and still more in old-fashioned dresses and old fur-trimmed coats. Men wore gowns and women wore quilted coats and many people wore leather jackets and odd hats. There were Gypsies in brightly colored dresses, with thick skirts, and there were soldiers. The well-dressed and watchful secret police looked very secure and went about in pairs.

There was no such thing as a Syrian face. There were many faces, of
a sort that was common in Europe and America—pale skin, red hair, blue eyes, as well as nose-heavy profiles and dark eyes and swarthy skin. Some could have been Spanish or French or even English. There was a Syrian Huck Finn face with freckles, and tousled hair. There was a Semitic face—nagging auntie with a mustache. There were people who looked like me. I was sure of this, because every so often I was approached and asked questions in Arabic, and the questioner was puzzled and abashed when I replied in English.

It was a cold sunny day in Aleppo, six in the morning, hardly anyone on the street, and so the rats were bold, foraging in the gutters as I kicked along noisily to keep them away. I wore a sweater and a jacket and a scarf. The rats ran ahead of me, nibbling garbage. One scampered on, glancing back at me at intervals, and panting, like an overexcited pet.

The 7:20 Express to Latakia was a beat-up train, with terrible coaches in second class and passable ones in first. But all the windows were so dirty it was hard to see out, and many were cracked, the sort of dense spider web of cracks that prevented anything from being clearly visible.

With my notebook on my lap, I wrote about the fellows in the bazaar and then, because I was short of books, reread
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
, the chapter on “street neurology,” thinking how resourceful Oliver Sacks was in walking the streets of New York City, diagnosing the ills of the people raving or chattering. In another place he quoted Nietzsche: “I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them … And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit.”

The ticket collector wore a dark suit and well-shined shoes and he smoked a cigarette. In his entourage were two soldiers and two flunkies. He snapped his fingers at each passenger and under the gaze of the soldiers—who were fat older men, straight out of Sergeant Bilko’s motor pool—he directed one of his flunkies to retrieve the ticket. Without touching it he examined it, and the second flunky tore it and returned it to the passenger. Five men, each with a particular role: a miniature bureaucracy in the aisle of the railway train.

Many offices I had seen in Syria were like that: several people doing one job, consulting, discussing, sharing the problem; or just being social, drinking tea, smoking, taking no responsibility.

Showing through the cracked windows of the train the suburbs of Aleppo had a fragmented and cubist quality, a wall of tenements as assorted puzzle pieces. We were soon in the countryside, the Syrian countryside where the mountains that rise parallel to the west coast, the Jabel an Nusayriyah, are among the loveliest in the Mediterranean. Eastern and southern Syria is desert, but this was a landscape of green cozy valleys and stone cottages—gardens, shepherds, wheat fields, olive groves and fruit trees. I had not expected such a fertile and friendly-looking land. Later, when I saw the desert, I realized that my stereotype was that—what the Syrians called the
sahara
, limitless waste.

But here it was peaceful, meadows of sheep nibbling flowers. I had expected gun emplacements and artillery men glowering through binoculars, not these stolid rustics clopping along on donkeys, and the lovely white villages of small domed houses; each settlement, surrounded by plowed fields, had a well and market and a mosque.

A man strode through my railway car, climbed onto a seat, removed a lightbulb from a ceiling fixture, and plugged in a tape deck. For the rest of the trip he fed tapes of screechy music into this machine.

The meadows in the distance were like crushed velvet, and closer they were scattered with wildflowers and banked by stands of sturdy blue-green pines. Even that loud music could not distract me from admiring a landscape I had never seen or heard about, and the thrill was that it was ancient, biblical-looking, the land of conquering, slaughtering David and the Valley of Salt. At Jisr ash Shughur on the Orontes River there were flowers everywhere and the town itself lay on the crest of a distant hill, as white as the white stone ridge it was built upon. We were hardly any distance from the Turkish border, and passing alongside it, but these villages were not at all like Turkish ones, either in the design of their houses or the way the people were dressed.

We penetrated the big green mountain range on our way to the shore, and circled the slopes of these peculiarly Middle Eastern-looking heights—so old were they, having been mountains for so long, so tame and rounded, they seemed domesticated by the people who had been trampling them and letting their goats and sheep canter over them, nibbling them since the beginning of the world. They were gentle slopes, with soft cliffs and unthreatening gullies and no peaks, green all over, with pine woods and
villages in their valleys. They were not at all like the fierce mountains in the wilderness, with their sharp peaks and sheer cliffs and their raw and serrated ridges and their cliff faces gleaming like the metal of a knife blade.

That was something that I had learned about the Mediterranean. There was not a single point anywhere on the whole irregular shore that had not known human footprints. Every inch of it had been charted and named—most places had two or three names, some had half a dozen, an overlay of nomenclature, especially here in the tendentious and rivalrous republics of the Levant, that could be very confusing.

Three and a half hours after leaving Aleppo (Halab, El Haleb) we were speeding across a flat sunny plain of date palms and orange and olive trees, towards Latakia. It had been a long inland detour, but I was back on the shore of the Mediterranean.

I walked from the station to the center of town and found a hotel. After lunch, I walked to the port. I was followed and pestered by curb-crawling taxis in which young men sat and honked their horns. The only way to discourage them was to hire one—and anyway, I wanted to go north of Latakia, to see the ruins of Ugarit.

That was how I met Riaz, an unreliable man with an unreliable car. He spoke a little English. Yes, he knew Ugarit. Yes, we would go there. But first he had a few errands to run. This allowed me to see the whole of Latakia in a short time. It was not an attractive place. The only beach was some miles outside of the city at the laughably named Côte d’Azur, where on an empty road, a deserted hotel, the Meridien, sat on a muddy shore. That area had the melancholy of all bad architectural ideas exposed to the full glare of the sun.

“Who is that?” I asked Riaz as we passed statues of Assad. There were many statues of Father-Leader here.

Riaz laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. It was not a joking matter to stare at the statues, however silly they seemed. One statue in Latakia showed Assad hailing a taxi—his hand raised. In another he was beckoning—“I have a bone to pick with you, sonny!”—and in yet another he looked, with both arms out, like a deranged man about to take a dive into a pool, fully clothed. “I will crush you like this!” could have been inscribed on the plinth of a statue which depicted Assad clasping his hands rather violently, and a statue at the abandoned sports complex at Latakia showed
the Commander of the Nation with his arm up, palm forward, in a traffic cop’s gesture of “Stop!”

Any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country which is headed for trouble. Leaving aside the fact that nature had not endowed this spindle-shanked and wispy-haired man in his tight suit to be cast in bronze, the unflattering statues still seemed provocative and irritating. In a hard-up place how could anyone be indifferent or willingly justify such expenditure? Syria was another country, like those of Mao and Stalin and Hoxha, of silly semaphoring statues of the same foolish old man, and in time to come they too would end up being bulldozed onto a scrap heap.