I CAME BACK DOWN to the patio outside the hotel, where I’d finished breakfast and forgotten a jacket and where a man in a dark suit and purple tie sat at the table under an umbrella, very quietly smoking a cigarette. He had thick silver hair, smoothed back to the nape. Like everyone in eyeshot he worked at the hotel, and I replied appreciatively to his concerns about my stay; the newly promoted director of food and beverages looked very tired. “Sleep well?” he asked.
Turkish coffee came and we chatted in the shade until it seemed the right time to leave.
“Room one-one-one, yes?”
I nodded. I knew there weren’t many guests to keep track of. “I’m Adam,” I said.
His eyes might have twinkled, the corners of his mouth tapering into little peaks: “I know.”
There is a person for every fact to be known in Syria, or there is someone who tries to know it. They are gathered under the umbrella of the Mukhabarat, the Intellegencia, that offers monthly compensation and little rewards for constant reporting on the neighborhood, especially on al-ajaanib, us foreigners.
It’s hard to look like you’re staying out of trouble when there are so many good ways to seem suspicious. Wandering up and over the windy walls that surround the old city, I found myself inexplicably inside a police compound. I slunk out through the main entrance, past an officer in a plastic chair caressing the magazine of his old wooden Kalashnikov.
In the park named Public Park in the west of downtown Aleppo, a man watched Danny and me walk. There were no qualms about staring here, and no one ever averted their eyes when I stared back at them. Heads swiveled after us. A camera unsheathed was like a streetlamp for gnats.
We labeled suspect spies with clock face directions: mukhabarat—five o’clock, twelve o’clock.
“Check your six-thirty,” Danny said.
There’s almost nothing to ever be afraid of: if they flicked their hand and waved us over, we’d go; if they asked to see documents, we’d show a copy of a passport. The panic was in the uncertainty.
In a wrinkled blue shirt, a gangly man with dark eyes lurked on the bridge over the inches-deep Quweiq River. We crossed and he followed behind. We turned right and he turned his head, deadly serious, one hand shoved deep in his pocket. We sat down on a park bench (nine o’clock, one-thirty) and he picked one to sit on at a distance, staring at the backs of our heads. Every time I looked he was staring, unblinking. Anxiety boiled. Say something! Do something! Or stop!
Maybe he did have the power to arrest us. Maybe, in this country where American diplomacy would have a hard time springing us from jail, he’d be able to make me disappear. But I could make myself deaf to all that. I told myself that anything was worth it just to know where the limits were.
The standstill was too infuriating. So I made up a little game: Danny and I would stand and walk in opposite directions, then turn around, and hand off a scrap of paper with nonsense codes scribbled on it. Like bad spies, we’d stick our hands into each other’s pockets without eye contact.
A different man made two passes back and forth in front of us. A third sat on a bench at two o’clock, flicking through prayer beads, slowly taking drags. He might not have been police. He might have been the only one.
At ten paces, Danny and I hit our marks, spun, passed each other. We made the exchange—a torn scrap of city map with the message NX844b1G in blue pen—and wheeled toward the exit. At our six o’clock, Blue Shirt followed far behind. We stood on the street looking for a taxi to make a quick escape.
It was all storm chasing. How close could I get to danger?
Blue Shirt moved nearer, sneaking into the leafy shadows by the bus stand.
If I didn’t get arrested and tortured as a foreign spy, I might find some calm in that relief . . . ten meters . . . and if I did, well, then at least I’d know where a real boundary was.
Finally, he motioned: Come. His eyes shifted for the first time, no longer blank but not commanding either like the others had been. Imploring, maybe.
He was almost completely hidden in the darkest corner of the street, leaning out from behind the bus stand posters. He motioned again as if maybe I hadn’t seen. But here police had no need to hide, plainclothes or otherwise, and Blue Shirt was acting far too bashful. He flicked his hand again, Come here! and touched his hand to his chest. A button unbuttoned.
Of course.
I had to understand the face I was wearing, the fear, the expectant energy. To anyone looking me in the eye, my love of the Middle East may have looked like lust, and it might have been.
He watched as we scurried into a cab: this wasn’t one of the million mukhabarat—this was just a man in a park trying to have sex with another man in a park. As for the others—five o’clock, twelve o’clock, six-thirty—we wouldn’t give them the time to tell.
I was an alcoholic who chugged a magnum of wine only to discover that it was grape juice. But my heart was racing, and that took the blood from my head, and I spent a brief moment at peace with my addiction that was far easier to feed than to fight.
THURSDAY NIGHT FROM the ramparts of the Citadel, we had watched lightning strike at the fringes of this city, shooting between clouds, lunging at steeples and minarets and smokestacks. The Citadel hill in the center of the old city has seen rulers rise and fall for millennia: Ottomans ousted Mongols and Mamluks who expelled Crusaders who deposed Muslim invaders who booted Byzantines who sacked Romans who bagged the Greeks who, at the sword of Alexander the Great, wrested Aleppo from whoever was there before and who likely did the same to those who came before them, all the way back to Abraham, who is said to have milked sheep on that very hill. (The city’s Arabic name, Halab, has roots older than the language, but halab also has another meaning in Arabic: “to milk.”)
But as with sheep, sometimes it is easier to go up than to come back down. Friday afternoon, cries came from within the empire, shouting for new and better leadership from among their own. Now that Aleppo was more than just one hill, and the country much more than one city, these were not cries an army could answer.
Demonstrations were christened anew every week: “Homeland Protector” for the national army, “Friday of Freedom” to honor Syrian Kurds, “Great Friday” when Good Friday wasn’t good enough. Twenty-five miles west or forty miles south, it was the Friday of Silks. This week, the government had for the first time promised not to shoot protestors—something they’d never done before anyway and who told you that.
In Syria, protests began late in the day by the new model: typically near one-thirty, after the congregational Friday prayer. Until Assad had passed a law three weeks earlier, lifting forty-eight years of emergency rule in a calculated nod to his opposition, prayer time was the only occasion when more than five Syrians were legally allowed to congregate without a government supervisor. We bought fresh juice from Yahiya and Ghazi at a stand near the Armenian quarter at one o’clock. Like alarm bells, the skies opened up: zero to wrath-of-God-hailstones and torrential rains in an instant. The overflow of men praying outside a nearby mosque ran for cover, or ran into the rain, or anywhere. For twenty minutes this was the chaos in Aleppo. Afterward, there was only news.
By late afternoon, Al Jazeera began to report the day’s first casualties. Cellphone videos showed chanting and organized protest in the streets of Hama, Homs, Qamishli far in the east and the Damascus suburbs. Anchors narrated the information they had, barely polishing eyewitness accounts and Tweets and YouTube clips.
We watched from our room in the Carlton with windows on the silent Citadel. On Syria News, under the “LIVE” banner, videos cycled through looping clips of major cities to prove that life was the same as it ever was, denying the protests and the dead and injured until the next day’s paper could blame terrorist activity. The Syrian state coverage was intriguing, provocative, artful. The art, of course, is deception: in Idleb, where protests were getting started, a few affable bakers were tossing pitas from the oven. In Homs, people looked like they might be ga
thering, but only very, very far away, down an empty street. “Live” from Aleppo, it was pouring rain. I pulled the curtains back just to make sure: sunshine and more sunshine.
Every city had passersby eager to crowd around the camera to tell it what it wanted to hear. Every Friday the interviews were the same, the faces hardly different: “Praise God, everything is fine. Nothing is happening.” Cut to a flock of tiny six-year-olds, spearheaded by the largest girl among them, vigorously declaring, “There is no better country!”
The success was undeniable: cab drivers, young men in the street or on TV, Antonia in the café in Maaloula—they all said the same thing: “Ma fi shi.” There is nothing. They sat and soaked up Syria News, perhaps because their TVs didn’t get other channels, or because they didn’t trust other channels, or because the news on other channels was too unsettling to believe.
Meanwhile, their fellow citizens took to the streets. These were people who knew the meaning of freedom because they were willing to die for it, not storm chasers who flirted with danger to test their own limits.
DANNY TOOK THE TRAIN back down to Damascus, and I was left alone for a last day in Aleppo.
The narrow streets of the old city smell like soap or raw meat or wet stone—every hundred meters shops shift in their inventory: spice markets, then tailors, then piles and piles of green and brown soaps. Shop owners dispatch their young kids to relay or fetch or give directions, but only when approached. For that composure, Aleppo is different from a tourist-heavy old city like Fez or Jerusalem, where outdoor displays breathe and squeeze in from the walls of narrow streets. Aleppo is always dim in the channels between old buildings, just wide enough for a pickup to honk its way past, just the same every day of the week. In this oldest of Old Cities, a dozen odd shops sell the same selection of keffiyehs, the same shoe inventory, the same pots and pans. There is always the question: How does anyone get by?
Early morning at the Hammam Al-Nahassin, downhill from the Citadel toward the Great Mosque, a few guys sat around not really waiting for customers. At twelve dollars, it was an expensive bathhouse by Syrian standards, but this was The Place for tourists and locals alike, with its own proud directive arrow at the end of the street. Down through the unassuming door to the vaulted wooden chamber hidden from the world, I spent the day washing and steaming and lounging and getting scrubbed to the bone, commanding shisha or coffee or kebabs, reclining on pillows set up in separate boxes along the wall. What I saw departed not at all from a long-baked fantasy of the Orient, and I slipped into it the way you would a bath that neither chills nor burns. The hamaam men replaced my wet robes with drying robes, and soon with lounging robes and a cloth tied around my head. And with that, they served tea.
Within a short hour’s commute, cities were tallying the damage of the Friday of Silks. In every Saturday paper, the government would report how many were killed by militant groups, which terrorists confessed to attacking civilians, how the weather was still hot in Damascus. Even in the airport there was no news, and no place past the taxi stand to spend Syrian money.
The purple-trimmed Qatar airbus taxied onto the runway. My iPod shuffled to “Trav’lin’ Light.” The man to my left was enormous in all directions, and we crossed our arms tightly and took turns uncrossing them because there wasn’t space for both. In accordance with an unspoken charter, silently keeping time and heeding the other’s discomfort, we crossed, uncrossed; crossed, uncrossed.
FROM: MASHA
SUBJECT: DANGER
SAT AT 9:46 PM
So I’ve been thinking a lot about your whole everything is risky, how can you possibly draw a line idea. OK well today, in the library, i was reaching to plug in my computer and my chair tilted over to the left and I came very very close to hitting my head on the chair next to me. I could have died! I mean, probably not . . . but if the library isnt safe then WHAT IS?
I think if you want to live an average, nice, kind of but not terribly meaningful life then there are definitely lines that define what dangers are necessary to live that kind of life and that’s why people will cross the street every day but won’t go to Afghanistan. You want a different kind of life. I respect that in you and in lots of ways wish I were more like that, but you know I’m a fearful person. I’m working on it.
yours,
Masha
CHAPTER 7
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AFGHANISTAN
WALL SAVE BUTTS
I sometimes felt—almost as though they were doing it to reassure themselves of their own freedom. My perplexity, of course, undoubtedly came from my unfamiliarity with American customs.
—TAKEO DOI, The Anatomy of Dependence
BACK IN ABU DHABI, it went like this in my head: they said I’d die, or worse, and I didn’t, and better.
Neurons twitched with all new possibilities: Where else was open now? Maybe the places authorities had warned against were exactly the places I needed to go. I had a lingering invitation from Iman to visit her in Pakistan that I’d always thought was bonkers. Now I could tell her yes. It was summer and she was bored and delighted.
This was the clever trick of 9/11—or of America’s reply, as I heard it, when I was supposed to be forming my own identity: It made me think the outside’s inhospitality was what made my home welcome. But if anything: they always felt more hospitable, not less.
Where else? Now I read names on the map like the names of old friends.
ONE MORNING I STOPPED BY the Afghan Embassy with a two-page form and a few photos of myself. At 2 P.M., my visa was ready with a free travel brochure.
GETTING INTO AFGHANISTAN would be easy—flights leave daily from Dubai and Sharjah before dawn. Getting out would be easy, too, I was sure, on a quick flight from Kabul to Islamabad. But simply being in Afghanistan, or in Pakistan, was something I couldn’t quite imagine. It was uncharted territory for me, for a lot of tourists, and I had no conception of what walking would feel like, what the streets would look like, what people’s eyes would feel like when they landed on me.
Luckily, the style of the plurality in the Emirates is shalwar kameez (“pants shirt”), the chameleon skin of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Next to the mosque just behind my high-rise was a string of a dozen tailor shops run by Pashtuns from northern Pakistan, mostly near Peshawar or Waziristan. These guys knew Pakistan. They had opinions about Afghanistan. “Don’t go,” they would say sometimes about both places. “Go,” they’d say at other times.
It was Thursday, eight days before my flight to Kabul, and Muhammed Amir took my measurements to stitch a white shalwar kameez with a low, Afghan-style collar. He spoke only Pashto and Urdu. His cousin Khan Zaman spoke a fair amount of English. Their cousin Mumtaaz owned the shop. We spoke in Arabic.
“First, you should learn Pashto,” Mumtaaz said. “Ten days, you come to the shop, every day little, little.” I had eight, and that seemed enough for a fair try. Every afternoon until I left I sat with them for three or four hours in their shop, learning disconnected words in Pashto, translated to me through whatever language was convenient. Serlatsum Afghanistan-la, “I am visiting Afghanistan.” I swapped English words in return—thread, needle, scissors—and endured the tepid Mountain Dew they poured for me so graciously.
In the Abu Dhabi evening, shop people hang out in shops. Friends and random passersby came to sit—some knew the cousins, some didn’t. Some wanted tea and Mountain Dew, some didn’t. Some have a reason to be in the shop—others didn’t at all. No one ever looked at the small TV in the corner droning the news from Pakistan. Almost everyone old enough to grow a beard had one. At times when a customer or serious-looking man entered, Mumtaaz warned me with his eyes to keep silent. Having an American in the shop might rub some people the wrong way, he explained later. He made a cuckoo hand gesture. “Their minds are rotten,” he said.
It took three days for Muhammed Amir to finish my costume, and on the fourth I sat among them, greeting customers with �
��Tsanga yei, chai ski?” (“How are you? Drink tea?”) and silently nodding and pretending to understand when the bigger beards walked in. When the call to prayer, the azan, rang out from the nearby mosque’s speakers, the men gently stood and left.
Sometimes I wondered why I was putting all this effort into Pashto, spoken mainly in the south of Afghanistan, when Dari (Afghan Persian) is much more widely spoken, especially in the central areas I was hoping to visit. Persian overlaps some with Arabic, but everything in Pashto was new. And this was the Pakistani dialect, sprinkled with bits of Urdu and English, not Afghan Pashto. On the other hand, it is the native language of most Taliban fighters, and I wondered how many minutes I’d buy if I asked them “Drink tea?” in their mother tongue.
But I wasn’t really sitting with the tailors to learn the language. After eight days, I wouldn’t remember many words anyway, but I would remember body language: how to wear the shalwar correctly, to shake everyone’s hand when entering a room, to listen for the azan and know when it was time to go.
One evening, a bomb blast killed scores in the north of Pakistan, and the men turned to the corner television. The tailors listened and looked away; Mumtaaz shook his head in unsurprised disappointment. A man leaned into the shop to ask about relatives back home.
This was the sound of the “-Stans,” as I knew them from reputation. These hot zones in the American theater of conflict were familiar to me in ways Kuwait and Oman had never been, and I saw their populations through that geopolitical filter. They saw me, too, the American. It was as if I had been sleepwalking in their neighborhood for ten years. And I went as if it were morning, to ask what I had been up to, and to understand how my reputation had formed. If I could find human connections there, I thought, maybe each side could have a bro or two freed in some way from hardened preconceptions.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 10