NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  In this remote place people came up to me, and it was either a shaven-headed boy or else a hobbling old man, and they greeted me in Turkish, asking “Saat kach?”—What time is it?—because I was wearing a wrist-watch. I was perversely gratified because they had asked in Turkish, which proved that my long bus trip had had the effect of making me seem somewhat Turquoise, as rumpled and muddy as the rest of them. So I went about feeling anonymous and happy. The disciples of Jesus spent a year in Antioch preaching and it was in Antioch (Acts 11: 26) that, perhaps in answer to a puzzled question, “What sort of Jews are you?” they first began to call themselves “Christians.”

  Looking for another bus to the Syrian coast, I was told that the western border was closed and that I would have to enter Syria by the Bab el Hawa—the Gate of the Wind—and proceed to Aleppo, before heading for Latakia, on the coast. It was hundreds of miles out of my way, but it was all right with me. I had heard that Aleppo was a pleasant place with a famous bazaar. And there was a railway train from there through the mountains to the Mediterranean.

  There were only four of us on the Aleppo bus. Turks are not welcome in Syria, and not many Syrians ever get across the border. I sat with Yusof, a talkative and untruthful-seeming Tunisian who gave me several conflicting reasons for going to Syria.

  “See this? Tunisian passport,” he said, shuffling the thing. “And this is an Iraqi passport. Why? Ha! You have so many questions.”

  But even when I stopped asking questions he volunteered some strange information.

  “I have a U.S. visa. I have lived in Verona. You speak Italian? Buon giorno! I sell gold—no, not always.”

  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.”

  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 picture
s 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.

  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?”

  “They call us donkeys,” Akkad said. “Because of the donkeys wandering around the bazaar. We don’t care. Donkeys are good animals. And we wander too.”

  “What do you call Turkish people?”

  “‘Mustache,’ ” Mohammed said. And to his friends, “Yes?”

  Akkad explained, “Because they all have mustaches.”

  “What about Egyptians?”

  “We call them ‘Take-Your-Watch,’ because they are thieves.”

  “Jordanians?”

  “‘They-O
nly-See-Themselves,’ ” Moustafa said. “They are selfish, they think about themselves all the time.”

  “What about Israelis?” I asked.

  “Worse than Jordanians,” Akkad said.

  “‘The sun shines out of their arseholes,’ we say. It is an Arabic expression for snobbish,” Moustafa said. “They think it, you see. So we call them ‘arseholes’ for short.”

  “I don’t like to say this word,” Akkad muttered. “But it’s true they are very snobbish. They think they are better than everyone.”

  “Are you married?” Moustafa asked me.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “I am married and so is he,” Akkad said, indicating Moustafa. He pointed to Lateef, who apparently did not speak English—he smiled but said nothing. “He is a horse’s hoof.”

  “Not a donkey?” I said.

  “And I am a ginger beer,” Akkad said. “Although I am married.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It is slang,” Akkad said, and took out a book. He wagged it at me and said, “This Yank does not understand!”

  The book was titled Australian Slang, and it was inscribed to Akkad from Ray, an Australian, in big affectionate blue loopy handwriting.

  “My old boyfriend,” Akkad said. He batted his eyelashes at me. “He was a traveler like you.”

  I leafed through the book of slang. Horse’s hoof—poof. Ginger beer—queer. Over a year paddling in the Happy Isles and I get a lesson in Aussie slang from a Syrian in Aleppo?

  “I get it,” I said. “But didn’t you say you were married?”

  “Yes. I just found out I am a homosexual one month ago, after five years of married life.”

  “Isn’t that a little inconvenient?” I asked.

  “Only for my wife,” Akkad said.

  “But I like women,” Moustafa said.