The Pillars of Hercules

I had arrived by road from rural Turkey and been plunged into Syria, the chaotic and friendly city of Aleppo. I liked it as soon as I arrived. But I was too tired to take in anything except the cult of Basil. I found a hotel and had a nap. I woke in the dark, then went back to sleep until the next day.

Aleppo was gritty, ramshackle, and not very big. It had busy dusty streets, dust everywhere, in this sprawling itching place that is everyone’s idea of a city in the Middle East, rotting and unthreatening, mysterious, filled with the smells of food and scorched oil and damp wool and decaying bricks. It was not like a city at all, but rather a large provincial town, with a mixed population of Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and even a community of Jews. It had landmarks—the park, the citadel, the bazaar, the mosque, the railway station. I took a bus to St. Simeon’s Basilica. Simeon Stylites, as he is sometimes known, sat on a tall pillar for thirty years to mortify his flesh, haranguing the faithful from the top of this column.

I am not a pilgrim—I dislike the word in fact, and as with other religious sites I detected no odor of sanctity at St. Simeon’s, only a slight whiff of piety—humility, not holiness, and the definite sense of theater that I had felt in Jerusalem. I had sensed this often in places reputed to be holy, not sanctity at all, but a turbulent suggestion of passion and conflict.

Back in the crooked streets of Aleppo I realized that what I liked best about the place was a liberating sense that everything in the city was reachable on foot. Also Syria had the worst telephone system I had so far seen in the Mediterranean, and so I was never tempted to use the phone or send a fax. This also freed me from worrying that I had anything urgent to attend to; communication with the outside world was impossible. It invigorated me to feel out of touch, and it concentrated my mind on where I was.

I had been anxious about my trip to the coast until I walked to the railway station—a funny little Frenchified station with the usual Assad hagiography in any number of ludicrous murals—and saw that there were three trains a day to Latakia. At the station I engaged three young men—medical students—in a conversation about the murals. They immediately clammed up and made eye signals and hand gestures and all sorts of nonverbal suggestions to change the subject. This was what Albania had been like under “Friend” Hoxha.

It was not fidgeting caution but real fear—of, I supposed, the mukhabarat. Until late in 1994 there were six thousand political prisoners. Assad released some old sick prisoners, to impress the United States and to make himself seem magnanimous. But it was clearly not a country in which there was any dissent.

The pride of Aleppo is its bazaar, a vast covered souk crisscrossed with narrow lanes and the usual demarcations—silver here, gold there, carpets somewhere else; small cramped neighborhoods selling shoes, or scarves, or fruit, or spices. Tinsmiths, weavers, glassblowers. It served much more than its city. Everyone in northern Syria used the bazaar at Aleppo.

“Meester—I have sold nothing today. You must buy something!”

Winter was colder in Syria than I had expected. The days started almost frostily; at noon it was warm, then the temperature dropped through the afternoon, and at night it was cold again, everyone in sweaters and jackets. I decided to buy a scarf in the bazaar, not a two-dollar polka-dot Palestinian keffieh to wrap around my head, but perhaps the sort of five-dollar wool keffieh that served the nomads.

One of the characteristics of a Middle Eastern bazaar is that thirty stalls sell exactly the same merchandise, but the hawkers differ in their sales pitch, which are thirty kinds of attitudes ranging from a silent glowering from a man squatting on his haunches at the rear of the shop, sulking because you are walking past, to the active nagging of the stall-holder chasing you and plucking your sleeve—“Meester!”

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?”