The Pillars of Hercules

“Why are there so many caves in Ma’aloula, Father?” All over the mountainside and in the passages and corners of the cliffs there were carved holes and shelves and caverns.

“The peoples were troglodeeties!”

“They lived in them?”

“Yes! And they had necropoleese and antik toombis!” He laughed at my ignorance and hurried away to help another visitor.

We went to Saydnaya. Saydnaya had two sides. One was a political prison, the other a church and convent. The prison, another bunker, was built on a hill but was mostly underground and surrounded by three perimeter fences of barbed wire. It had watchtowers but it hardly needed them, for the prison was absolutely escape-proof, but more than that, its dampness and its windowless cells shortened the prisoners’ lives by causing pneumonia and arthritis. There were said to be thousands of political prisoners at Saydnaya. A Syrian political prisoner was simply an enemy of Assad—sorry, Friend Assad.

The cathedral of Saydnaya was some distance from the prison, at the top of the hillside village. It was a happier place. It contained a convent and an orphanage—smiling nuns doing laundry, yelling children scampering in the back precincts. The nuns dressed like Muslim women in black draped gowns and black headdresses.

The history of the church was given in a set of old paintings, which could be read like a strip cartoon. A malik—king—out hunting, saw a gazelle. He drew his bow, but before he could shoot it, the creature turned into the Virgin. The king prayed. Afterwards, the king won a great battle. He returned to the spot where he had seen the Virgin and built this church.

I was about to enter a chapel when a friendly but firm little man insisted I take my shoes off. Surely that was done in mosques and temples but not in Christian churches? No, he said, I should read Exodus 3:5, the injunction “Put off thy shoes.”

This was Mr. Nicholas Fakouri, from Beirut, who had come with his wife, Rose, to bring a sacrifice.

“What sort of sacrifice?”

“A sheep.”

Munif’s daughter Azza translated my specific questions. The Fakouris had come by road from Beirut and had stopped in the bazaar in Damascus and bought a hundred-pound sheep for the equivalent of about ninety dollars. They had taken it here and presented it to the nuns at the church.

“They will kill it and eat it at Easter.”

“That is a present, not a sacrifice.”

“It is a sacrifice,” he insisted, using the Arabic word.

Rose Fakouri said, “I was very sick. I prayed to the Virgin. When I got better, I came here with my husband to give thanks.”

Driving out of Saydnaya, we passed the prison again, and I imagined all the men in those dungeons who had been locked up for their beliefs. Munif said that they allowed some of them out, but only after they had been physically wrecked by their imprisonment. He said, “They are sick, they are finished, they are ready to die.”

“Writing is difficult in a police state.”

He laughed and shouted, “Living is difficult!”

We returned to Damascus. He asked me to wait while he removed something from the trunk of his car. It was a large flat parcel, one of the limited-edition prints that I had admired in his apartment the first day we had met.

Standing at the juice stall, drinking my last glass of Damascus carrot juice, I realized that I liked this dusty, lively, rotting, uncertain, lovely-ugly place, and that I was sorry to leave, especially sorry that I was not heading the sixty miles to Beirut, but instead through the desert, the back way, through Jordan to Israel again. That was my fallback position—a ship that was leaving Haifa in a few days. Like a surrealistic farewell, a bus went by while I sipped the carrot juice, and on its side was lettered HAPPY JERNY!

16

The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece

            Down Moussallam Baroudy Road, past the blue To Beirut arrow and the lovely semi-derelict Hejaz Railway Station to Choukri Kouwatli Avenue and following the arrow To Jordan. Instead of the short trip to Lebanon I had to take a much longer one, around its back, south into Jordan and hang a right into Israel, and keep on going to the coast and the waiting Sea Harmony that was sailing in a few days. It sounds like an epic, but in fact if I had made an early start, I could have had breakfast in Damascus (Syria), lunch in Amman (Jordan), tea in Jerusalem (Palestine; disputed) and dinner in Haifa (Israel).