The Pillars of Hercules

Across the low hills some miles farther were minarets and a citadel on a bluff, and squat buildings: Aleppo. After all the small towns and villages of Turkish Hatay, this was like my myopic mirage, the distant vision which blurs and produces a sort of Middle East capriccio, blending beautiful rotting buildings with ugly new ones, the whole of it sifted and sprinkled with dust. Many places in the eastern Mediterranean looked that way to me, a hodgepodge of building styles surmounted by earthen-colored domes and the slender pencils of minarets.

“Come with me,” Yusof said. “I know this place.”

“I’m busy,” I said.

We were standing by the roadside, among honking taxis and buses, and within sight of twelve billboard-sized portraits of President Hafez al-Assad, Father of the Nation. But they were not as odd as the smaller but far more numerous portraits of his son. They were pasted to walls and to poles, they were airbrushed and stenciled onto masonry, they were stuck in every shop window; and every car in Aleppo displayed the young man’s picture, many of them gilt-framed, on a rear window shrine.

“You’re busy?” Yusof looked very puzzled, which was my intention.

It’s that man again, I thought, and asked Yusof his name.

He gave me a pained smile, and I realized that I did not need a ruse to drive him away. All I had to do was ask him my usual questions.

Yusof covered his mouth, and on the pretext of drawing on a cigarette, he muttered, “His son.” Yusof, although not Syrian, had the superstitious Syrian horror of speaking Assad’s name. He glanced around and added, “His name is Basil.”

“Basil?”

A wild look distorted Yusof’s features. I had said it too loud. He compressed his face in a furtive frown for a moment and then hurried away.

The cult of Basil had taken possession of Syria. Though it was a touchy matter, and politically suspect, I looked into it a bit. It was not easy. Syrians were voluble about everything except matters pertaining to their president. They hung pictures of Assad everywhere, they looked at Assad’s face constantly—that square head, that mustache, that insincere smile of fake benevolence, that hairpiece. A Syrian was never away from the gaze of this man. Assad had been staring at them for twenty-five years. He was as big as life and twice as ugly. But they rarely spoke about him, they almost never uttered his name.

“Big Brother is watching you,” a witty young Arab woman said to me later in Damascus. His titles are “Father-Leader” (El Ab el Khaad), and also Comrade, Struggler, General Secretary, President, Commander of the Nation.

“Or you just put ‘First’ in front of a word and that is a title,” a rebellious Syrian said to me in a low voice. “For example, First Teacher, First General, First Commander.”

Like many torturers, dictators, monomaniacs and tyrants, the most sinister and popular of Assad’s titles was “Friend.” Recently he had given himself a new honorific: Abu Basil—“Father of Basil.”

I asked Syrians to translate the inscriptions under Basil’s portrait. Basil the Martyr! was very common. But they also said, Staff Sergeant! Martyr! Cadet! Parachutist! Comrade! Beloved! Son! Knight!

Martyr—Shaheed—was an interesting word to use for dead Basil. The term was full of Koranic implications, usually describing a warrior who is sacrificed to the faith, going smiling to his glorious reward in Allah’s heaven. Palestinian suicide bombers are martyrs. Any victim of the Israeli secret police, the Mossad, is a martyr. The young man who knifed Naguib Mahfouz was described by his fanatic friends as a martyr after he was hanged in Cairo.

Basil’s martyrdom took place in January 1994, on the road to Damascus airport as the young man, habitually driving fast, sped to catch a plane for Frankfurt where he was embarking on a skiing holiday in the Alps. He reached the speed of 150 miles per hour (the figure 240 kilometers per hour was part of the mythology of Basil’s death) and he lost control of his car, and was killed instantly when it crashed. He was thirty-two and was known as someone who liked fast cars. After forty days of mourning, an enormous statue was erected to him in his father’s home village of Qardaha. The statue depicted the young man being propelled upward on a beam of light, his father (“Father-Leader”) standing at the bottom of the beam, and the son (“Martyr,” “Cadet, “Parachutist”) taking flight.

A younger son, Bashar, twenty-nine, took Basil’s place as his father’s successor. He had been studying quietly in London. He was summoned home, and is now next in line to the throne of his dynastic-minded father. Meanwhile, Assad’s rambunctious brother Rifaat (who, asserting the secularism of Syria, killed twenty thousand of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982 in Hamah) also has ambitions but keeps to himself in a villa on a hill outside Damascus. Rifaat’s portrait is not to be seen anywhere.