The Pillars of Hercules

The young couple were Turks from Bulgaria. They sat, holding hands, looking nervous.

We passed through a pretty countryside, the road just wide enough for one vehicle, poplars and stone cottages and plowed fields, and soon the Syrian border—the no-man’s-land, fenced with barbed wire, the meadows filled with crimson poppies and leggy asphodels.

“That is a Kurdish village,” Yusof said, indicating a cluster of huts. How did he know that? Farther along the narrow road he said, “Mister, have you been to Israel?”

I hedged, and denied it, and Yusof smoked and told me a few more lies, and the bus broke down.

The problem was the fuel line. The driver yanked up the floorboards and played with some rubber tubes, blowing on them. An hour passed. I got out and marveled at the wildflowers, and then sat and scribbled some notes. Another hour passed. The sky was gray. Surely the border would be closed if we waited too long? I was pacing up and down the side of the road, though the others, fatalistic Muslims, simply sat and waited.

“Yusof, why don’t we flag down the next car that comes through and take it to the border?”

“Best thing, mister, is be very careful,” he said. And he pointed cautiously and became conspiratorial. “Over there is Syria. That is another country. You hear what I am saying? Another country. So we wait.”

The driver tried the engine. It farted and died. He kept trying, stamping on the accelerator, twisting the key. I reckoned that very soon the battery would be dead. But after some minutes he fired it up and we got aboard and jogged along to Turkish customs. That was simple enough, a rubber stamp, a farewell. But the Syrian border was an obstacle course.

Yusof said, “Be careful.”

Now I noticed how weirdly he was dressed, in a shiny shirt and flared pants and clopping high-heeled shoes and gold chains around his neck and dense sunglasses. In spite of this, he was doing his best to be inconspicuous.

A small number of people jostled for attention at a desk, where a bored and rather indifferent soldier ignored them. I thrust my passport over their heads and, as though amused by my insolence, he snatched it and said, “American!” and laughed. I did not see my passport again for about an hour.

In the meantime, I found Yusof lurking. He said he wanted to buy me a drink. We had coffee, while he held a chattering conversation with some Syrians. I noticed that there were large portraits of President Assad all over the frontier. He was a man with an odd profile—beaky nose, big chin, surmounted by the squarest head I had ever seen. His portrait at its most accurate was like a cartoon parody: misshapen and villainous, his combed-over hairdo varied from portrait to portrait. His suit was too tight, his neck too thin, his tie ridiculous, his smile insipid. As for his politics (to quote I Kings II), “He was an adversary to Israel … and he abhorred Israel, and reigned over Syria.”

But there was another portrait—a younger man, with a slim stubbly face and sunglasses and army fatigues.

“Who’s that, Yusof?”

“No,” he said, meaning, Don’t ask. He paddled with one hand in a cautioning gesture.

The delay at the border today was caused by a group of Syrians smuggling shirts and pants in large suitcases. The absurdity of it was that while these smugglers opened their cases, revealing stacks of shirts in plastic bags, huge trucks rumbled past. They were German, and they were loaded with crates of German machinery, from a firm called Mannesmann. The crates were stamped For the Ministry of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq. Six of these vast flatbed trucks. They were headed towards Iraq, through Syria—and they were waved through by Syrian soldiers. It seemed to make little difference to anyone that Iraq was subject to U.N. sanctions and such a shipment of German machine parts was illegal. In the meantime the shirt smugglers were bullied and denounced.

Yusof took me aside. He put his hand over his mouth and muttered, “That is Assad’s son. He died. Don’t talk.”

We were summoned to the office and handed our passports. And then we were on our way. Those men wearing dark glasses and sipping tea, Yusof said. They were not travelers. They were members of the mukhabarat—Syria’s secret police. All this in a whisper, Yusof’s hand over his mouth.

“Here I like,” Yusof said. We were in a rocky landscape, with wide stripes of green. “Aleppo is good. I drink. I eat. I disco. I fuck. But—” He leaned over. “I don’t talk.”