NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “Put rubbish into it, and it magically disappears,” Jonathan said. “Water being the purifying element, you can’t pollute it—by definition.” Before the middle of the eighteenth century, “the sea was a socially invisible place; a space so bereft of respectable life that it was like a black hole. What you did in or on the sea simply didn’t count, which is partly why the seaside became known as a place of extraordinary license.” And he went on, “The sea wasn’t—isn’t—a place; it was undifferentiated space. It lay outside of society, outside of the world of good manners and social responsibilities. It was also famously the resort of filthy people—lowcaste types, like fishermen … It was a social lavatory, where the dregs landed up.”

  Nothing held me in Tartus. Wishing to see the great Crusader castle known variously as the Krac des Chevaliers and Qal’at al-Hisn, I made a deal with a taxi driver named Abdallah, who said he would take me there and then on to Homs, where I could get a bus or a train to Damascus.

  “Lebanon!” he cried out after twenty minutes or so, gesturing towards the dark hills to the south.

  And then he turned north off the road and headed for the heights of the mountain range that protected the interior of Syria, and commanded a view of the whole coast. At a strategic point, above the only valley that allowed access, was the most beautiful castle imaginable. After a childhood spent reading fairy tales, and believing in valiant deeds, and associating every act of love, chivalry, piety and valor—however specious they seemed in retrospect—it is impossible to belittle the Crusader castles of the Mediterranean, the scenes where such deeds were first defined for such a child as I was.

  The knight in armor, a sword in one hand, his crested flag in the other, is such a potent symbol of virtue that I never questioned it. I was inspired by the fantasy and the idea, not the historical truth of the Crusader Knights. To a great extent, Westerners derive their notions of self-sacrifice and morality and romantic love from the stories of Crusaders—and incidentally their prejudices against Muslims and Jews—and a sense of style, too, of jousting and armor and pennants and castles. The Krac was the epitome of that sort of dream castle, with ramparts and dungeons and symmetrical fortifications, and a chapel and stately watchtowers.

  “Neither a ruin nor a showplace,” T. E. Lawrence wrote of the Krac in his obscure book on Crusader castles. In 1936 Lawrence walked one thousand miles in the three hottest months, to do his survey of these magnificent structures. And he was not exaggerating when he called it the “best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world.”

  Leaving the castle, I said to Abdallah, “How far is it to Damascus?”

  Giving me the distance in kilometers, it seemed to be little more than a hundred miles. There were still a few hours of daylight. We made another deal. He would take me there for forty dollars.

  It was a rash move. I should have looked closer at his car. The road passed behind the mountains that border Lebanon, Al Jabal ash Sharqi. More important, the road passed along the edge of the Syrian desert.

  “Sahara!” Abdallah yelled at the wasteland out the window.

  Sheep cropped grass on the western side of the road. On the eastern side they would have starved. Camps of nomads, dark tents and flocks of animals were visible in the distance.

  Just before darkness fell the engine faltered and Abdallah cursed, and the car replied, coughing one-syllable complaints, and then we were stuck.

  “Okay, okay,” Abdallah said. To prove he was confident he took my picture and he screamed into the wind.

  His high spirits were unconvincing. It was an electrical fault, he said. He waved to a passing car and said he would be right back. Then he was sped into the failing light, and dusk fell. I sat in the car, tuning my shortwave radio—news of the Israelis shelling southern Lebanon and blockading the fishing ports. Every so often a large truck went by, and the thud of its slipstream hit Abdallah’s car and shook it, and me.

  Cold and unsettled at the edge of this desert, feeling thwarted, this enforced isolation filled my mind with memories of injustice—put-downs, misunderstandings, unresolved disputes, abusive remarks, rudeness, arguments I had lost, humiliations. Some of these instances went back many years. For a reason I could not explain, I thought of everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. I kept telling myself, “So what?” and “Never mind,” but it was no good. I could not stop the flow of unpleasant instances, and I was tormented.

  From time to time, I laughed to think I was so removed mentally from Syria, but then I concluded that being in the middle of this desert had something to do with it. It was pitch dark and silent except for when the occasional trucks thundered by. I supposed that I was fearful and disgusted; I disliked the desert, I had been abandoned by Abdallah in this howling wilderness, where there was darkness and no water.

  A pair of oncoming headlights wobbled off the road. Abdallah got out and approached the car laughing, carrying a gas can. Saying it was an electrical fault had been a face-saver.

  It was late. Returning his gas can to the town of Deir Atiyeh, he stopped the car and I told him I was bailing out. There ensued a great whinging argument, as he pleaded, berated, complained and demanded more money than we had agreed on. I bought you oranges! he howled. I thought: I hate this nagging man. Then I said: Do I care? I gave him what he wanted and swore at him, and afterwards realized that the whole incident irritated me because I had been planning to tip him the very amount he had demanded.

  In Deir Atiyeh, where I stayed the night, I had time to reflect on Assad’s personality cult. There was a large statue of the Father-Leader skating—perhaps on thin ice—in the center of Deir Atiyeh. There were also signs which a helpful citizen translated for me: “Smile! You Are In Deir Atiyeh!” “Be Happy—We Are Building the Country!” and “We in Deir Atiyeh Are All Soldiers of Hafez Assad.”

  I have to call my informant Aziz, which was not his name, or else he will be persecuted and thrown into prison—the Syrian cure for dissenters—when the Commander of the Nation reads what I have written. “Aziz” was defiant. He said Assad’s vanity was ridiculous. “He was saluted at school each morning,” he said, when the kiddies entered the classroom. They chanted, “Hafez Assad, our leader forever!” and another one that started, “With blood, with soul, we sacrifice ourselves to you!” And it was he who told me that his palace in Damascus, built at a cost of $120 million—and of course no one but the Commander was allowed to enter it—was called Kasr el Sharb, The People’s Palace.

  This glass and steel monstrosity, like a massive airline terminal, on a high bluff overlooking Damascus was almost the first thing I saw the next day when I reached the city. It can be seen from every part of the city; that is obviously one of its important features. The structure was as truculent and unreadable and unsmiling, as forbidding, as remote as the man himself. Vast and featureless, it could be a prison or a fortress, and in a sense it is. Assad has almost no contact with the people, and is seldom seen in public. He is all secrets, a solitary king-emperor. There are rumors that he is sick, that his son’s death was a shock, that he is in seclusion. Some days he is shown on the front page of the Syria Times sitting rather uncomfortably in a large chair, apparently nodding at a visiting dignitary.

  Beneath Assad’s palace, Damascus lay, biscuit-colored, the chill of morning still upon it, the new suburbs, the ancient city, the souk, the mosques and churches, the snarled traffic, the perambulating Damascenes. For reasons of religion and commerce—its shrines, its mosques, its churches—Damascus is heavily visited. It is an ancient city, so old it is mentioned in the Book of Genesis (14:15–16)—Jerusalem is not mentioned until the Book of Joshua (10:1–2). Unlike Jerusalem, which as an old walled city and bazaar it somewhat resembles, Damascus is the destination of few Western tourists; but it is dense with its neighbors from the desert and the shore. It is the souk and the shrine for the entire region. “Damascus is our souk,” a man in distant Latakia told me. It is everyone’s souk. And the great Omayyad Mosque
, built thirteen hundred years ago to a grandiose design, is the destination of many pilgrims. Beirut is only a short drive—two hours at most—and so there were Lebanese here too; and Iraqis, stifled by sanctions, shopping their hearts out; Nawar people, Gypsies from the desert, and the distinctly visible women with tattooed chins and velveteen gowns from the Jordanian border; gnomes in shawls, scowling Bedouins, and students, and mullahs with long beards, and young girls in blue jeans and hectoring touts in baseball hats.

  In one corner of the walled city was the house of Ananias, who in Acts 9: 1–20 had a vision which commanded him to go to the house of Judas to receive Paul.

  “Original house,” said a caretaker.

  Perhaps it was. Perhaps this was Straight Street. But I was dubious. It was true that this was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, but it had also been besieged and wrecked and pillaged and burned at various times. The shops in the souk, which was larger than Aleppo’s, and better lighted and airier, sold brassware and tiles, inlaid boxes and furniture, rugs, beads, huge swords, bad carvings, knickknacks, and Roman glassware.

  “Original glass,” the hawkers said.

  They were small mud-encrusted perfume bottles which had recently—so these stories went—been excavated. There were small terra-cotta figures, too, and pint-sized amphorae. For just a few dollars I could be the owner of a priceless collection of Roman artifacts.

  The head of John the Baptist is said to have been interred at the Omayyad Mosque. Anyway, there is a shrine to it in the interior of the mosque, which lies at one end of the covered bazaar. I walked there and saw a group of Iranian pilgrims squatting on the carpeted floor, all of them sobbing, as they were harangued by a blubbing mullah doing a good imitation of an American TV evangelist in a mea culpa mode, yelling, preaching, weeping, blowing his nose, wiping his eyes, while his flock honked like geese in their grief.

  Looking on were incredulous Syrians, secretly mocking, smiling at the exhibitionism and looking generally unsympathetic.

  “Are you religious?” I asked an Arab in the mosque.

  “Not at all,” he said. He had come to look at the renovation of the mosaics and pillars in the courtyard of the mosque. It was a horrible job the workmen were doing, he said—an act of vandalism, they were defacing it.

  “What is that man saying?” I asked, indicating the howling sobbing mullah. He was standing, stuttering and speechifying, and at his feet, the sixty or more people sat with tearstained faces, their shoulders shaking.

  “He is telling the story of Hussein.”

  Hussein, Ali’s son, was the grandson of Mohammed, and was beheaded in the year 680 by an army of the Omayyad caliphate at the Battle of Karbala in Iraq. It was a violent and dramatic story which involved Hussein witnessing the slaughter of his wife and children, surrounded by a hostile army, besieged, urging his horse onward, and at last apologizing to his horse as—helpless—Hussein is decapitated.

  “And those sweet lips, that the Prophet himself kissed—peace and blessings be upon him!—were then brutally kicked by the soldiers—”

  A great shout went up from the passionate pilgrims, and a tiny Smurf-like woman shrouded in black handed a wodge of tissues to the mullah. He blew his nose and continued.

  “They kicked Hussein’s head like a football—!”

  “Waaaa!”

  What startled me was the immediacy and power of the grief. It was more than pious people having a good cathartic cry. It was like a rehearsal for something more—great anger and bitterness and resentment, as though they had been harmed and were nerving themselves to exact revenge. The howls of their grieving Muslims had the snarl of a war cry.

  Assad was a dismal individual but, impartially intolerant, at least he could claim credit for keeping religious fanaticism in check. He had persecuted the religious extremists with the same grim brutality he had used in suppressing political dissent. It was perhaps his only real achievement, but he was characteristically ruthless, which was why the massacre at Hamah claimed so many lives. That was the trouble with dictators: they never knew when to stop.

  This subject came up at lunch the next day with some Syrians I had been introduced to. It was one of those midday meals of ten dishes—stuffed vegetables, salad, kebabs, hummus, filled bread, olives, nuts and dumplings—that lasted from one until four and broke the Syrian day in half. But one of the pleasures of Syria was its cuisine, and the simplest was among the best. Each morning in Damascus I left my hotel, walked three blocks and bought a large glass of freshly made carrot juice—twenty carrots, fifty cents.

  “Oh, yes, this is definitely a totalitarian state,” one man said. “But also people here are civilized. We are able to live our lives.”

  How was this so?

  “I cannot explain why,” another said. “There is no logic in it that you as a Westerner can see. But in the Arab world such contradictions are able to exist.”

  “We allow for them,” the first man said. “It is very strange. Perhaps you would not be happy here.”

  “Are you ever afraid?” I asked.

  “There are many police, many secret police. People are very afraid of them.”

  “Do people discuss Assad?”

  “No one talks about him. They do not say his name.”

  I said, “So what we’re doing now—this conversation—it’s not good, is it?”

  They all smiled and agreed. No, it was not a good idea. And, really, in a totalitarian state there is nothing to talk about except the obvious political impasse.

  “Do you think I should go to Beirut?” I asked.

  “You know the Israelis are shelling the south?”

  “How would that affect me?”

  “Many of the fundamentalists have retreated to Beirut. They associate Israel with America—after all, America allows this to happen. They might accuse you of being a spy. It is not a good time.”

  “What would they do to me?”

  “Kidnap or—” The man hesitated.

  “Shoot me?”

  Out of delicacy, they were not explicit, but I had the distinct feeling they were saying, “Don’t go.” They lived in Syria. They visited Beirut all the time—it was such a short distance to travel, no more than sixty miles, and of course the border formalities.

  “The last time I was in Beirut—just a few days ago,” one of them said, “Israeli jet planes were flying over the city, buzzing the rooftops, intimidating people, breaking the sound barrier—and windows.”

  I was losing my resolve. That made me linger in Damascus. One of the happiest experiences I had in Damascus was at the house of a man named Omer, the friend of a friend. Omer was a Sudanese cement expert who worked for the Arab Development Corporation. He lived with his attractive Sudanese wife and three children in an apartment block about a mile from the center of Damascus.

  We were drinking tea and eating sticky buns when he summoned his eight-year-old son, Ibrahim, to meet me. The boy did not speak English. He was tall for his age, wearing rumpled blue buttoned-up pajamas. He looked solemn, he said nothing, he stood and bowed slightly to show respect.

  Then, without a word, he went to a piano in the corner, and sat, and played “Theme With Variations” by Mozart. It was plangent and complex, and sitting upright on the stool, the boy played on, without a duff note. In that small cluttered apartment I experienced a distinct epiphany, feeling—with Nietzsche—that “without music life would be an error.”

  The fighting in southern Lebanon and the strafing of Beirut made me reconsider my jaunt along the Lebanese coast. I called the American Embassy in Damascus and asked for information. By way of response I received an invitation to a recital at the ambassador’s residence. On this particular Arabian night, the performance was given by a visiting American band, Mingo Saldivar and His Three Tremendous Swords. Saldivar, “The Dancing Cowboy,” played an accordion, Cajun and Zydeco music, jolly syncopated country-and-western polkas. At first the invited guests—about a hundred Syrians—were
startled. Then they were amused. Finally they were clapping.

  Afterwards, I found the ambassador talking animatedly in Arabic to a tall patrician-looking Syrian. I introduced myself and asked my question.

  “Don’t go to Beirut,” the ambassador replied. “Not now. Not with your face. Not with your passport.”

  The American Ambassador to Syria, Christopher Ross, a fluent Arabic speaker, is a highly regarded career diplomat, and an amiable and witty man. He is also a subtle negotiator in the delicate peace talks involving Israel and Syria. The sticking point was the Golan Heights. This large section of eastern Syria was captured by the Israelis in 1967 and has been occupied by them ever since—and partly settled—something that quite rightly maddens the Syrians. In this connection, Ambassador Ross saw a great deal of President Assad, had been to Assad’s bunker and would have been a fund of information for me, except that he skillfully deflected all my intrusive questions.

  “I think the ambassador is right—stay away from Lebanon at the moment,” the tall man said. He was Sadik Al-Azm, from an ancient Damascene family. His professorial appearance—tweed jacket, horn-rimmed glasses—was justified, for he was a professor at Damascus University. He was noted as the author of an outspoken defense of Salman Rushdie.

  “That seems rather a risky thing to have done in a Muslim country,” I said.

  “What do I care?” he said, and laughed out loud. “This is a republic, anyway. Even our president defended Rushdie!”