You Think That's Bad (3 page)

I'd arranged for temporary lodging with the monk's spinster sister in Brummana, a little village on a series of ledges above Beirut's harbor. There I continued to study the Koran, since I knew of no better way to begin to know Arabs than through the stories they knew as children, the stories their parents and nurses told them. In the spring I took the slowest train imaginable through the orchards of the Beqaa Valley to Damascus, where the spinster sister had helped me find two rooms up a steep staircase that was opened to the roof. At night I left a column of empty cans on the steps to warn me of uninvited visitors. The ascent was through a canopy of garments and saucepans and old baskets but the rooms themselves were pleasant, if exposed: in all but one nook, the entire street could see me while I dressed. But there I learned that if I didn't mind about privacy, or for that matter about cleanliness, and made myself independent of other physical needs, I could move about with astonishing freedom for next to no cost. I arranged to attend a girls' school for Arabic grammar, but was forced to leave when a classmate reminded me too powerfully of Vera. I was dumbfounded by the parade of ethnicities and sects: Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Sabaeans, Yezidi, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews. The Sunni were persecuting the Shia and both detested the Druze, while all three loathed the Alawites as beggarly apostates. I was jolted by the visceral immediacy of their hatreds—for ancient slights!—and reminded that everyone was irrevocably marked by whatever misdeeds their predecessors had committed.

And yet on celebration days everything, from merchants' stalls to horses' tails, was overhung with bouquets of peacock-blue flowers, and petals of apricot blossoms rode the ripples in the water basins outside the shops. On my first trip alone out into the desert, I sat in the shade of a parasol until I was finally surrounded by camels, hundreds of them, their huge legs rising around me like spindly and crooked columns before the herd, in its browsing, eventually moved on.

The following year an even slower train finally brought me to Baghdad, though Scheherazade had neglected to report the seasonal temperatures of 105 degrees or the corpses of donkeys and sheep and even men alongside the river traffic on the Tigris. My mother sent aggrieved letters to the consulate which were dutifully held for me as I roamed the streets and alleys, beside myself, for Nineveh was just to the north, and the ruins of the Sumerians and Ur, with the birthplace of Abraham to the south. I'd arrived a few weeks before the stock-market crash, having expended a total of forty-five pounds on the trip, and still had ten remaining, for emergencies, in my saddlebag.

The sky at sunrise was clear, barring one pink cloud. We peered from our bedrolls at a radiant solitude and a horizon of mountain ranges. The only other sound as my companions began the breakfast fire was that of the wind on the sand, endless grains slipping into and bouncing out of equally endless hollows.

Ismail had spent his life between the Caspian passes and was to answer for my comfort and safety. For that I was paying the equivalent of three shillings per day. He'd kept a shop in Baghdad, could read and write, had completed his pilgrimage to the four Holy Cities, and projected an air of serene virtue unhindered by humility. His smile radiated benevolence until he was contradicted. He wore six bags over his white woolen tunic, including the goatskin that held the ancient cheese that made his face so trying at close quarters.

Aziz meanwhile sported for the morning chill a sheepskin cap that gave him a kind of Struwwelpeter appearance. Our lead mule allowed him to loop the water-skin over the saddle's pommel but then ceased to cooperate and, each time the muleteer approached murmuring reassurances, listened with a lack of conviction before rearing up to put the length of the halter rope between them.

I rolled my sleeping sack and tied it to my saddlebag, which carried a change of clothes and medicines on one side and my notebook and tea and sugar and Polo's
Travels
on the other. I kept a little sack of raisins tied to my saddlebow, like Dr. Johnson's lemons in the Hebrides. I thought I had little enough baggage but was still ashamed whenever I glimpsed my companions' kit.

In the distance, flocks of sheep in long processions were drawing toward a patch of green that Aziz had informed me was a renowned spring that welled up out of the stones in three pellucid streams. We were heading to its south, and now enjoyed the last good camp before a long stretch of desert. Ismail, when finally satisfied with the disposition of his bags, took the lead.

The plain opened out before us, dotted every so often with far-off low mounds that I assumed to be buried cities. For three full days we encountered no trace of human beings save the occasional heap of stones arranged days or decades ago. While we rode Ismail sang a Kurdish song whose chorus was “Because of my love / my liver is like a kabob” and whose refrain, to which Aziz joined in, was “Ai Ai Ai.”

On the fourth day we shared a folded piece of bread and two pomegranates beside a compact oasis of brackish water from which a pale yellow water snake darted its head at us. And then that precinct's fertility ceased with the suddenness peculiar to the East, and we were again traversing an expanse covered with black stone that featured fossil shells and fish. For six days more we plodded on toward the sleeping hills through the inhuman emptiness and silence. Every so often Ismail related legends of buried treasure somewhere off in regions to our left or right without turning his head for my response. No one goes a mile into the Near Eastern
hills without hearing such stories. I asked if some of those treasures might be burial sites and he answered, with the calm innocence of a Persian telling lies, that he'd never done anything so illegal as open a grave.

How many Europeans had ever seen this country? I knew only of Sir Henry Rawlinson, who'd led his Persian regiment across it some ninety years earlier, imagining as he rode the vanished nations that had preceded him.

The foothills when closer revealed themselves to be symmetrical rust-colored headlands akin to the upturned hulls of ships. The escarpments were long and narrow and end-on gave the impression of a fleet at anchor. The bases of the hills were white with salt and nothing, Ismail remarked, would grow on them.

I was cross-examined on the inexplicable problem of why I was not married. Where to begin, I thought later that night. With my game playing? The clumsiness of my flirtations? The continual revelations as to the scope of my ignorance? Only after four months did the young British officers in Baghdad disclose what they'd found so amusing about my blue hat with the sewn-on clock: its hands pointed to the hours of assignation—five and seven.

Aziz asked if there were any police in the area and Ismail told him that a year or so ago there had been two, and that they had been shot. He related the way robbery would work once we were in the mountains: we'd be approached and asked to allow ourselves to be looted. If we refused our interrogators would withdraw, and we would proceed until an ambush put an end to our obstinacy and to us. This region's local name, he added, translated as “the most advanced point from which one is captured.” He claimed to be looking forward to reaching that part of the country in which one was less frequently murdered. During a rest break, while I stretched, he peered over at me with a mild, untrustworthy expression. And Aziz, when helping me up onto my mount, informed me in a low voice that while our guide was a bad man he would see to it that I came to no harm. Yet as I rode I understood how exhilarating
it could be to climb into a country which was not considered safe.

At the gathering for my sixteenth birthday, my mother began her toast by noting that it seemed to take acquaintances about a month in my presence to overcome their first impression of my plainness. She said that she thought that it was perhaps because my face was more intelligent than pretty, though she had always held that my complexion was milky smooth. That night Vera reminded me that the only thing to do when something unpleasant happened was to pretend it hadn't, and in turn I reminded her of the fact that she was the beautiful daughter, a point to which, as always, she offered no rebuttal.

Our mother's parents had settled in Italy at the time of the Risorgimento, when Tuscany was attracting all varieties of expatriates. She liked to explain that they'd enjoyed such a thriving salon that as a little girl she had found herself at one affair accompanied on the piano by Franz Liszt. She'd had her portrait painted by Edwin Bale, and was widely admired for her winsomeness and flair. As opposed to our father, who was so reticent we might forget he was present. She described herself as more of an enthusiast for projects than for children, and would regale the room with the story of how, having brought me home from the hospital, she'd been dismayed to discover she'd made no provision for my food, my clothes, or my sleeping. By the time Vera was born, a year later, our parents had moved to the pretty hill town of Asolo, and my sister later remarked from her sickbed how much of our childhood had been spent watching adults pack or unpack great trunks. It had been only a small surprise, then, when our mother left us to join the Count di Roascio, in order, she said, to partner in his philanthropic enterprise of providing employment for the area encompassing his family's provincial seat. Later she'd had us join them in their home and, filled with happiness herself, had never noticed that our lives were heaped about in miniature ruins.

There followed a succession of Italian governesses, all erratically trained when it came to schooling, so much so that we quickly learned how to teach ourselves. We'd seen our father only when circumstances allowed. Alone in his emptied house, he gave the impression of being perpetually surrounded by seed catalogs, and as a means of conversing with him we turned ourselves into expert horticulturalists. On walks he taught us topography and geology. With animals he showed us how all of the feelings we couldn't put into words might be expressed through our hands, so that any dog or horse or child could understand, whatever our seeming reticence, how fiercely we cherished their affection. So that even today I'm still happiest just sitting and smoothing a donkey's ears in the sun.

The Assassins were a Persian sect, a branch of the Shia, and they seem to have entered history in 1071 when their founder and first Grand Master, Hassan-i Sabbah, experimented with systematic murder as a political tool, his innovation proving so successful that his ascendancy quickly spread from northern Persia all the way to the Mediterranean. Legends grew of a secret garden where he drugged and seduced his followers, and held forth on the uses of both assassination and the liberal arts, and it was the stumbling attempts of the Crusaders' chronicles to render the word for hashish users—the Hashishin—that gave the sect its name. They were the terror of their neighbors and at once inspired and intimidated the great Christian fighting orders, including the Templars, through the diabolical patience and subterfuge with which they operated. To their enemies they were ubiquitous; to their victims, invisible. Inexorably they extended their domain eastward to the Caspian, where they raised their central stronghold of Alamut, the fortress that symbolized their power until it fell to the Mongol armies some two hundred years later.

They'd become an obsession during Vera's first convalescence. In the dead of winter she had slipped out of the house and wandered
off into the hills, where a search party found her lying in the snow. She'd been distraught since having learned, four years after our arrival at the Count's house, of his plan to become her suitor. It was as if we'd both been struck with a lash. Our mother when asked had replied that she knew nothing of his intentions, and that what Vera did was her own affair; but when Vera in response had begged to be sent abroad to study sculpture, she'd been sharply reminded that neither her family nor the Count possessed the funds for that sort of adventure.

The pneumonia had almost destroyed her, and as she convalesced I read to her at her bedside. We'd worked through the Greek myths and Siegfried sagas of our childhood and our mother had begun ferrying in volumes from the Count's library as well. At first Vera forbade their use but after a week or so seemed too despairing even for that, and late one night after a particularly dispiriting relapse we both found ourselves horribly engrossed by William of Tyre's chronicle, in which Henry II, Count of Champagne, considering an alliance against the Abbasid, visited the Assassin stronghold of Al-Kahf, where in order to demonstrate his authority their Grand Master beckoned to two of his adherents, who immediately flung themselves over the ramparts to their deaths.

The map was from the Survey of India series, four miles to the inch, and manifested its inaccuracy even in the few features it cited. It offered no hint of the mountains squarely before us. Polo's account, however, had thus far been borne out, its verification expedited by our use of the same method of transport. I resolved to create my own map as I went along, calling a halt three times a day to mark salient features while Ismail dipped into his cheese with an expression that suggested he was still awaiting a lull in the general perversity of my behavior.

It was gratifying to register that we were not marked on any map. For another week we negotiated naked rock rounded by the weather and without vegetation. To the southeast began some desolate
and impressively dismaying salt marshes along a bitter stream that spooked the mules. For one stretch we had to unload their saddlebags and drag them by the halter ropes while Aziz shouted into their ears distressing facts about their parentage. We came upon great concentrations of Aghul and camelthorn, as well as bitter colocynth low to the ground. We saw a strange large hole whose bottom was lost to shadow. We rode in a dust storm lasting so long that after we stopped the next morning I discovered beside me two low mounds of reddish sand that revealed themselves in the gathering light to be the sleeping forms of my retainers.