He got out. I found short refuge in the moment before he returned.
“Come on, get your stuff.”
My insides collapsed, but I was still too baffled and dispirited to yell. He had taken money from me and donated it to a soulless hellhole that, we would discover soon, was home to the world’s thirstiest mosquitoes. He lived mere kilometers away. We had long since grown painfully tired of each other’s company—Why do you want to do this?—and still we jiggled the room’s door handle open. The beds were bare but for one thin sheet, a strange and unnecessary “kitchen” flaunted its one metal countertop and a fridge fringed by mildew and rust, and the ceiling dripped gently onto the floor.
Strangers were good, I told myself. Hospitality, curiosity, and kindness of heart—that’s what I’d find in the Middle East. Not assholes, no—who undermined my every effort. But the conflict was irrepressible now: the trust I knew I’d find was made to face the doubt I knew I felt.
And then a drop hit me from the ceiling and I burst. No more silent seething: riding the waves of a year’s anxiety, I erupted with the litany of every bad feeling I’d had all day, in a deluge of English when my Arabic burst under the pressure, with rapid-fire sentences I knew he couldn’t understand fully but that I still needed to speak.
“I know,” Marwan said to everything—to why he spent all the money I had left, to why he was content to sleep in the Lebanese Bates Motel. He was sitting slumped on the blanketless bed. “I thought you needed the rest.”
I drifted outside to the balcony, staring at nothing, lending my flesh to the night’s first mosquitoes. The sea was black, and I turned back inside. If only I could stop asking why, I’d escape with nothing but the memory of a weird day.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You know, if any Lebanese yelled like that . . . I’d kick you.” He paused. “But you’re my friend, and I hate to see my friends unhappy.”
I was the asshole. For whatever reason, he had used my money because he thought deep down that that was what I wanted. He drove in circles until he found answers that worked for everyone. This was a man pure of heart and magnanimous in his intentions—I was the one who didn’t understand. He didn’t understand how to relax doing nothing on a beach, and I couldn’t convince myself that time spent getting to know someone good and different was dearer than anything else.
Or . . . was it all manipulation? A bored American to hang out with (how exotic!), who had a car and an open wallet. I wasn’t the asshole, maybe. No: I was. I really wasn’t. I definitely was.
For a moment, we both seemed at ease with each other’s foreign existence. I wandered into the open room next door to take a shower, bags of chips and tobacco strewn on the floor and countertops by those who had escaped in the morning. When I came back, Marwan was dressed and gelled.
“We need to go,” he said. “Right now.”
The police had seen him in the car with me, and they wanted to see me in the station for taking pictures (of the sunset) in town. The police chief had called Marwan personally.
Marwan told me to take all of my things.
I thought back to my questioning by the Beirut synagogue. He stared straight ahead at the empty dark road; I hid memory cards in pockets. I pictured movie chases, throwing the car in reverse, spitting up gravel and gunning it out of town. I planned how I’d flee as he led me into the station.
But that was never his intention. “Go to Beirut, go to Syria,” he said, pulling up short of what might have been a police station. And with that, he hopped out of the car forever.
No police had ever called, I realized. It was a melancholy relief: Marwan had found himself trapped with nothing left to give, or—and this struck me only years later—with someone too dense to see how much sex he wanted to have. I’d dismissed that thought before I’d ever had it. It still rings untrue, because Lebanese hair gel and friendship are not American hair gel and friendship. For so many reasons, though, a boy or girl never wants to believe a new friend’s attention is for just one thing.
With a clever but decidedly diplomatic move he took his leave. It was the first thing he did that I ever understood.
I sat in the passenger seat for a few minutes, blocking one lane onto a bridge. And then I slid over to the steering wheel and headed back slowly to surrender to the insects at the Mina Beach Hotel. I mummified every inch of my head and body in the six-dollar keffiyeh and the hotel blanket I swore I wouldn’t touch. By 4 A.M. the mosquitoes had me beaten and broken in the room haunted by Marwan’s disappointment, and I left for Beirut to sleep in the car by the bus station.
In the morning I returned the hatchback to Graziella at National Car Rental, and hailed a taxi for Damascus.
CHAPTER 6
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SYRIA
MA FI SHI
THE CLOSEST I CAME to gunfire was just after I crossed the border into Syria. If it came, I thought it would come from the cities, from the police, from around the crowds, and not on the road that cut up from Beirut through the mountains and back down again toward Damascus.
I passed through each country’s checkpoint without issue, accepted into Syria without knowing my destination, with nothing but a visa and my tempered American smiles. It had only been months since the beginning of the uprising that would be deemed a civil war the following summer. Leaving Lebanon at Masna’a, we barreled toward the first Syrian town, Haloua, whose name means “sweet.”
I sat in the back of the taxi. Just me and the driver’s fat friend in the passenger seat. They gained interest in me with the altitude, but lost it quickly when I told them that I wasn’t at all Lebanese. We entered into Syria and the fat friend lent me his phone, or rather rented it, fidgeting angrily when I had spent too long trying to make out my friend’s directions to a meeting point. Tension mounted as he demanded eight thousand lira, almost six dollars, for a five-minute call. The scruffy driver took his friend’s side.
I didn’t even have that much left—with my ATM card gone and a hundred grand lost to the mosquito inn, I’d spent nearly my last lira before the taxi left Beirut. I couldn’t give more than five thousand, I said, groping for a liter-and-a-half bottle of water that was on the floor. My mouth was dry. Someone grumbled. Outside there was no one, nothing but empty green and brown hillside one thousand meters above the Mediterranean. And then: a low thunk—something shot fast through the air—and I tensed as it struck me square in the forehead. A moment of shock . . . broken by the fat friend’s laughter. I was laughing with him: the blue plastic bottle cap rolled on the seat.
The air pressure was lower—that was all. We were nearly in Damascus. And the driver kept driving, smiling, on the threshold of the town whose name means “sweet.”
Just outside the city there is a parking lot where out-of-Beirut cabs meet the into-Damacus cabs. The new driver lifted my bags into the car.
“You’re not afraid?” he asked. (Everyone asked.)
“Should I be?”
He dropped me by the Saudi Arabia Embassy, at the bottom of the street by the fried chicken shop. I waited for Danny with the affable cabbie who had charged me seven times the going fare. Good thing it was all so cheap. “Alhamdulilah,” the driver said, Praise to God. He wiped his face with a soiled sleeve, answering the questions I didn’t have to ask about the state of things. “Ma fi shi,” there is nothing.
He believed it, and he may have been right to. But it was certainly wrong: There was something. Just not today, not there.
THIS WAS WHERE THE WORLD was looking. In Syria, during the week of May 8, 2011, there were murders. There were protests against the police state and those who suckled upon it, and there was gunfire to keep criticism at bay. In Damascus and Aleppo, Sham and Halab, the ancient city centers and modern downtowns were as quiet as they’d ever been—empty of their tourists, but carrying on with life at its most usual.
Damascus was gorgeous. Wide roads led into the city, where posh residential neighborhoods oozed with cafés and fresh-squee
zed fruit smoothies for a dollar. My first sight was Jabal Qasioun, a mountain one thousand meters high and many miles wide that looms as the city’s inescapable backdrop; towns climb impossibly up the steep sides. It is said this is where Cain killed Abel.
In town, the streets are tight and welcoming. People passed with little glances and questions in their faces.
Danny had been living in Damascus for nine months studying Arabic. He played soccer with other international students, and still did with the ones who hadn’t left. Except for momentary sulks he had always had the most easygoing disposition I knew.
We walked toward the old city with five smoothies between us, into the Umayyad Mosque by the door meant for believers. Before its 1,300 years as a mosque, the site was first a temple, then a church. I copied the exact movements of the veiled women who took off their shoes and stepped over the threshold.
Inside, the mosque stretches a city block underneath wooden arches; the four arcaded walls around the immense white marble courtyard are themselves in and of the city: visible through the archways past the qibla wall are the dim stone alleys of souks around the mosque, colorful neon advertising things. According to one of the best-respected collections of hadith, this is where Jesus will return just before the end of days “wearing two garments lightly dyed with saffron.”
Crowds still pushed through the huge Al-Hamidiya souk, but we could pass through without shoving much or getting shoved. “That’s different,” Danny said. “That’s really weird.”
It was far, far quieter than it had ever been, everyone said. All of the foreigners were gone, many evacuated without wanting to leave. Still, even with reports of clashes in the suburbs, Damascus couldn’t have seemed farther away from everything. A few older guys threw dice onto a backgammon board; tables of Syrians hung out with us by the mosque at an outdoor café pulling on argileh. “You’re not scared?” a woman asked, smiling, sitting with her husband and her two sons.
They say Damascus is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and there is indeed proof it makes the very short list (competitors are all nearby: Byblos in Lebanon, Aleppo to the north, Jericho in the West Bank). For perhaps as many as ten millennia, through the Aramaean and Assyrian and Babylonian and Roman rules, Damascus has hosted tourists. Now, there were travel warnings from the U.S. Department of State, and travelers took them seriously. Demonstrations can take place anytime and anywhere, said the last alert. It went on:
Syrian efforts to attribute the current civil unrest to external influences may lead to an increase in anti-foreigner sentiment. Detained U.S. citizens may find themselves subject to allegations of incitement or espionage.
We hopped into a service, a shared taxi with eighty-cent seats for fourteen passengers, and waited for it to fill up. I noticed how exponentially more impatient I was than the driver, content to wait, smoke, wait.
In Maaloula, children still learn Aramaic as their first language. It is home to a convent carved from nature—a tree grows inside a cave, where doors shaped in the stone walls lead to separate shrines. All of Maaloula is like this in the shadow of high cliffs: the convent deep and tucked up high, only the outskirts spilling out toward the plains.
This old town in the Anti-Lebanon mountains is also famous for its wine. For four dollars at the convenience store at the foot of the convent, we took our pick from the local juice, bottled in whatever-was-on-hand. It’s as if the ground is so holy the wine comes out sacramental—sweet and brand new, with enough sediment to guess whose house it came from. And brown bag or no, open container laws are far less strict than in San Francisco.
We took a repurposed vodka bottle and sat outside the Blue Café in the very center of town. Empty. The owner described everything on her menu, looking relieved but a little weary. She would have to run to the restaurant next door to borrow ingredients. “It’s been one month since there were tourists at the Blue Café,” she said.
So we kept ordering—every time she offered something else, we wanted to make her happy. Antonia had moved back from Miami to open the restaurant less than a half-year earlier, just to watch the tourist industry collapse. “One month ago, you couldn’t find parking.” Except for one van and a car or two, the whole town square was empty. Her place was a good one. She taught us words in Aramaic. I downed lentil soup like biblical comfort food.
I suggested that maybe things would get better now—it seemed calm. “Yes,” she said. “Now that they know it was terrorists killing people—spies from Lebanon and from Jordan and from Israel and from Egypt.”
“Um,” I nodded. Part of me thought it was heartening to know Israel had moved up to the status of Other Scheming Arab Country in the eyes of some Syrians. But she believed beyond a doubt the state-run news: that the deaths of protesters (killed by army soldiers) and of army soldiers (killed by other army soldiers) were casualties of terrorist attacks, and not of her own government. Her Christian pocket in the Syrian population was nervous about any potential advances by the Sunni Muslim majority. They put their collective faith in Bashar al-Assad’s Alawi government, fellow minorities and defenders of the current state of affairs. Antonia had swallowed every morsel the news fed to her.
But Danny knew better than to take this entire interaction literally. These words weren’t a confession of Antonia’s true feelings, at least not necessarily. Why on earth would she have trusted me as a confessor? I could have been an American spy, or a government goon, or a boy with a big mouth.
If I didn’t know how to filter what I heard, what was I ever going to learn that was solid? Performers to other performers, that’s all we were. I was devouring the place with my eyes, but my ears were netting nothing of substance, and my mouth was dry.
We poured the last drops of wine from the lees of the vodka bottle. And then we had to leave, the last tourists in Maaloula for a long while.
WE WEREN’T LOOKING to vulture tour the protests, but what else was real here? Maybe if we moved around enough, we’d absorb something worth absorbing. Danny wanted to go to Aleppo—it was still quiet there, and all the foreigners who had been seemed to like it, and I was glad to keep moving.
The windows of the train cars were fractured with ripples of broken glass, but the ten-of-seven A.M. was still busy with travelers heading north out of Damascus. The man next to me took turns thumbing through a wooden misbaha of prayer beads and napping; the older woman across the aisle looked out the window for all six hours. Looks like violence, Eeyore might have said as a foreign correspondent. The next afternoon there would be clashes, as there had been for the past two months of bloody Fridays. That’s why we left for Aleppo on a Thursday, the week’s last ticket out of town.
As the train neared the station at Homs, the city stared back with the empty eyes of black and deserted windows, overgrown gray-green grass, and isolation—a military operation known as the “Seige of Homs” began one week earlier on May 6. The tracks passed through a tunnel in a tiny hill, on top of which sat a big Syrian tank camouflaged in brown and green. Another tank idled on a patch of grass under a bridge. The entire crew was sprawled out on the turf, leaning against the treads, watching the train go by.
Opposite the station platform, a small cluster of men milled about on the street. In the distance, I saw a soldier patrolling with a long rifle slung from his shoulder, gesturing to passersby. Two men boarded our car. No one got off.
And that’s where the train turned around, pulling backward out of Homs toward everything we had come from. Danny told me that two days earlier a train had been sent three hours from here back to Damascus. The other riders gave away nothing in their faces. Maybe they did this every day: hopped on the train and hoped it would make it to Aleppo. Maybe the train itself was the destination, a vacation from the daily grind—four American dollars for a first-class ticket to wherever-you-got-on.
Still, their quiet was a comfort, and I waited for the train to switch tracks, or to make a wide looping doubleback. The train never changed course.
Hours later, we cruised into the outskirts of Aleppo. I was very, very confused and it was raining. But there we were, in ancient Halab, looking for a place to sleep.
AS THE ONLY NON-SYRIANS with suitcases in the entire city, we were looking for a deal. For a firm ten dollars there was the Jawahir Hotel, cozy and fine—tea and Internet and black humor about the demonstrations—but I felt the need to haggle, if only to feel a kind of momentary traction. I was pulling Danny along now. He was apathetic in the extreme about our bedding for the night, but we headed for the new, utterly empty four-star hotel in the heart of the old city.
We entered the gleaming lobby of the Carlton Citadel Hotel and approached the desk. The receptionist flicked her eyes at the door, firing a nearly inaudible “Mahmoud!” at the bellhop. Mahmoud scrambled to compromise jogging and elegance.
After ninety minutes of diplomatic discussions with two receptionists and the general manager, and three tours around the hotel, they offered their third best room for the price of the very cheapest. (It would have broken their hearts to forfeit the whirlpool bathtub of the Ambassador Suite.) And the cost of one night, we suggested, should be enough for two. The receptionist whispered this to her colleague, flushed and totally incredulous. Still, she would never say “impossible.”
The Carlton is housed in what was once the National Hospital, a stone mansion built by the Ottomans centuries ago. In three years, an underground bomb would destroy the hotel. Now, the room service was impeccable.
I was vulturing the spoils of an abandoned palace.
We were only miles from the roaring crowds that would be heard worldwide on the next day’s news. The old city swept out around the Citadel, which perches on a hill that long ago held all of Aleppo inside its stone walls. The thick souks below would be burned and bombed within the year, but now the shops still marketed comfort: the famous olive and bay leaf soap, hamaam, where skin is scrubbed soft; cafés for endless tea and shisha, as always. With a forkful of room service spaghetti Bolognese, I admonished myself for calling coziness counterfeit and for trusting only danger as real. I had no defense yet for those who would say, You hid from the protests—you didn’t really go to Syria! It was late. I consulted an iPhone Arabic dictionary and called down to the front desk: two pillows, please—room 111.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 9