by John Sweeney
The road ran through small towns dominated by minarets, and passed vineyards and Crusader forts and monasteries and more minarets and then, it felt, the temperature dropped ten degrees or so as they encountered a long line of black flags with Arabic script scribbled on them.
‘ISIS?’ Humfrey asked the taxi driver. His name was George, and he had a black beard the size of a bush and was taciturn to the point of hostility.
‘ISIS?’ Humfrey repeated. George made no reply. Humfrey pressed him on who owned the black flags with a moronic insistence, pointing at them as the car whizzed by: ‘ISIS? ISIS? ISIS?’
‘La.’ No.
‘If not ISIS – what?’
‘Hezbollah.’ And then George hid behind his beard.
Joe told Humfrey that Hezbollah was the Shia militia and, these days, a gallant ally of President Zarif – and, in an embarrassing kind of way, the West – in the war against ISIS. The West didn’t like Zarif because he was a tyrant and tyrants were bad, but not as bad as ISIS, who preferred the seventh century to the twenty-first. Hezbollah hated the West, but ISIS were Sunni fanatics so extreme they thought the Shia were heretics and so they, the Shia, had little choice but to fight or die, and so they hated the West less than ISIS. Hezbollah soldiers were the grunts of the war in Syria and now, Joe explained, kind of the goodies – or, if not the goodies, no longer the baddest of the baddies. It wasn’t the most sophisticated analysis of the current ebbs and flows of power in the Middle East, but it would do.
‘You Hezbollah?’ asked Humfrey.
‘La,’ said George.
‘You Druze?’
‘La.’
‘Shia?’
‘La.’
‘So you’re . . . ?’
‘Sunni.’
‘Why the big beard?’
George didn’t answer the question.
They passed through a small town dominated by posters of a ferocious-looking cleric in dismal brown garb.
‘Who’s the dude in brown?’ asked Humfrey.
‘Sheikh Nasrallah,’ said George.
‘Who is he?’
‘Hezbollah.’
Up towards the mountains ahead of them was a slurry of shacks, with tin roofs and plastic sheeting for walls: not-so-luxury accommodation for the refugees from the war on the other side of the border. After a spell, George slowed and they were at the frontier, situated on a lump of bare rock, Lebanon and the sea to the west, Syria to the east. Flags flapped in the stiffening breeze and, to the south, a murky red cloud boiled up a chunk of the sky.
Frontiers eat time. Border officials moved like sloths while Lebanese soldiers in American-style combat uniforms – with added Gallic shrugs – practised their nonchalance. They were good at that. On the other side of the razor wire, Syrian troops, in shades and Soviet battle fatigues, looked meaner. Joe and Humfrey chewed up an hour, and then another, standing on concrete waiting for stamps in passports, and then, after a meticulous search, they were in Syria.
The very first thing across the line was a roundabout: on it were two concrete plinths bearing posters of the two Zarifs, the old thug and the beanpole son, boasting his signature smudge moustache and giraffe neck in dark sunglasses and military fatigues. The colours had faded from too much sunlight, but the travellers got the point, that they were now locked inside and owed fealty to a colossal narcissism, one so monotonous and inelastic it could not change or evolve. It could only be broken, smashed to pieces by political violence; if that did not succeed, it would break anyone and everyone who questioned its right to rule.
Just down the flank of the hill, invisible from the Lebanese side, two tanks pointed their long snouts back towards the homeland.
The enemy was within.
The tanks weren’t just for show. The grease on the soldiers’ uniforms, the deep-black oil stains from the engine exhausts on the chassis, spoke to the fact that these tractors of war had been in battles and then some.
Hardly anyone had been trying to get into Syria. Tens of thousands, queuing patiently in the heat, were trying to get out. Twin photos of Team Zarif, father and son, were everywhere, but if the border queue was anything to go by, people were voting with their exit visas.
George switched on the car radio and a long torrent of Arabic splurged out, followed by the rhythmic chanting of the crowd: ‘JayDee! JayDee! JayDee!’ The American election campaign was news, everywhere.
‘Switch that off,’ said Joe, and the taxi driver did so. Humfrey had brought along some CDs, and he urged George to indulge him by slotting one into the Merc’s audio system. So they took the road to Damascus to the soundtrack of The Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls’.
The land here was dying. Joe was reminded of the Californian desert on the track to Fort Hargood: parched scrub, yellow earth, grey-green stones under a relentless blue sky.
‘Drought?’ Joe asked George.
He nodded.
‘Before the war?’
He nodded again.
‘One year of drought?’
He shook his head and held up four fingers. So Syria, before the rebellion against Zarif broke out, had suffered four straight years of drought. A drought that long would have led to a whole army of peasant farmers being out of work, and armies never rest easy. The countryside didn’t amount to much, apart from burnt scrub and boulders, populated by the odd flock of brown goats tended by Bedouin shepherds. George accelerated towards one such huddle that had drifted onto the road. The animals skittered out of the way just in time, but the Bedouin waved his crook at the Merc’s exhaust and cursed them. A bad omen, Joe thought.
Every now and then they drove through hamlets of a few concrete houses, the Syrian flag prominent. Not being patriotic wasn’t an option.
They learnt to read the subliminal signs of life in a war zone. Kids out on the street, lots of government flags, official checkpoints, buses and minibuses coming their way; traffic, people, busyness: the regime was strong.
Halfway to Damascus, George picked up speed to drive through a small town. There were no people about, no children on the streets. They hit a bump in the road, causing Humfrey to bang his head on the roof of the Mercedes.
‘Hey, man, shway-shway,’ said Humfrey, telling him to slow down.
‘I didn’t know you had some Arabic,’ said Joe.
‘I picked some up in Santa Barbara,’ Humfrey replied delphically.
George didn’t just ignore him, he sped up. Joe whispered to Humfrey, ‘I guess this isn’t a government strongpoint.’
The closer they got to Damascus, the more checkpoints they had to pass through. The soldiers registered surprise when they clocked George’s passengers: a hippie drumming his fingers to ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, and a big European guy trying to ignore him. None of it was nasty, none of it quick. The soldiers checked their passports, chatted with George, opened the boot, walked around the Merc, then let them go, and they were off again, until the next checkpoint three or four klicks on. After one particularly painfully time-consuming check, Joe clocked George giving Humfrey the evil eye in his mirror. But nothing was said. It might have been Humfrey’s choice of music.
Damascus stank of war. In a time of life and death, the ordinary things cities do in peace – picking up the garbage, cleaning the streets, sweeping the grit off the big roads, unblocking bunged-up drains – become unnecessary luxuries, the gilt of civilisation. So the city begins to rot, from within, from below. Piles of rubbish had banked up in the nooks and crannies of Damascus. Foul-smelling water seeped upwards from the sewers, the stink made worse by the pant of exhaust fumes in the afternoon heat.
George stopped to get his bearings. They got out of the Merc, stretched their legs, as a heavy-lift military helicopter clattered over the rooftops. Joe stared up and saw the side loading door was fully open, and made eye contact with the machine-gunner, hawk-nosed, brown-faced, boasting a long blue-black beard, who was staring down at him along the barrel of his weapon, as if to say: Welcome to Damascus.<
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The backwash of the chopper created a dust storm, scented with kerosene, forcing them into the taxi. George drove on, past a mural stencilled onto the side of a block of flats showing Zarif with stubble, staring out at the world from behind his shades. Joe hated PR men but he almost felt a pang of sympathy for whoever was spinning for the government of Syria. The iconic symbol of the regime? A giraffe in dark glasses.
War damage was surprisingly rare. Joe reflected that you wouldn’t expect to see many ruins on the road from Beirut to Damascus, it being the main blood pump of the Zarif regime. Choke the road and the government would be dead. But it was grim enough: a shopfront blown in, on the road outside an axle, twisted, gnarled and red with rust, the memory of a truck bomb, nestling in a hole three feet deep, from which two boys, crazed with energy, took pretend potshots at the taxi with bits of wood carved to resemble Kalashnikovs. Shell splatters had left their telltale fans of shrapnel pitting on the road, on pavements, on the walls of buildings; windows were broken, patched up with wood or thick plastic but not replaced.
When they got to the hotel, they paid George. Joe gave him a bit more than the agreed price and then Humfrey chipped in with an extra fifty-dollar bill, thanking him for the ‘interesting conversation’. George turned around in his seat and threw the bill back at Humfrey. ‘Listen, you talk to foreigner, you talk to American, you must report it to Mukhabarat, secret police. So no one talks to foreigners.’ And then he swore in English, very clearly, before Joe and Humfrey got out and the Merc left, tyres squealing.
The hotel was in the centre of town and upmarket. You could deduce that from the number of anti-truck-bomb concrete cubes dotted around its entrance. Within, it was rather fancy, or rather it had been fancy in 1983. It boasted pot plants that needed pruning, a water fountain supervised by an evil-looking cherub who had lost the will to trickle, a host of cheapskate Russian wheeler-dealers, none of whom looked as though they were engaged in selling anything to benefit the public good, a sprinkling of Arab businessmen and a blonde harpist tinkling her strings with an unforced melancholy.
The clerk on reception took an age to process their passports and hand out room keys. His brain appeared to be moving so slowly it was as if he was on benzos. When Joe finally got a key, it came with a piece of card entitling him to a free breakfast that had someone else’s name on it. Joe was about to snap at the clerk when he looked closely at him. He had the eyes of a man who hadn’t slept soundly in months. However fancy the hotel, the staff would never be that well paid, and some of them would be living on the east side of town, where the war was serious.
Joe said nothing and pocketed key and card. He turned around and his mind focused on something that he had been vaguely aware of earlier but hadn’t quite registered. In the far corner of the hotel’s atrium sat a fat little Buddha of a man, toying with a mint tea, holding a cell phone into his ear, staring into space.
The space he was staring into was occupied by Humfrey and Joe. But by the time they had dumped their bags and returned to the lobby, he’d gone.
The black tin sky creaked. Holed by a thousand stars, capturing Milky Ways of dust twisting and turning inside tunnels of saffron light, the roof of the Grand Souk fell quiet as the wind died. Joe swallowed his sticky tea and sucked once more on the apple-flavoured hubble-bubble pipe. The smoke was sweet-sour, harsh to the throat but somehow soothing.
In the souk, the war seemed so very far away. To Joe, it seemed he was in the oldest shopping mall on the planet. The tin roof had been added in the 1870s, but down the bazaar’s narrow byways, choked with sacks of cinnamon, cedar, nutmeg, cardamom and turmeric, traders had been haggling with foreigners and getting the better end of the deal since before the time of Jesus. To the mix, these days, were added scimitars ‘handmade’ in factories in Guangzhou, and ‘Persian’ rugs woven in Shanghai. Prices were down because mass tourism had vanished with the war, but the knack for a commercial kill, that hadn’t disappeared. Humfrey had gone off to explore the tat on sale, in search of a bargain. He had no chance against the home team, but it left Joe to zone out over tea and a hubble-bubble pipe, which was fine by him.
Joe let his eyes drift through a guidebook he’d picked up for a few dollars. Not far away was a museum of medicine, which told the story of Ibn al-Nafis, a thirteenth-century Arab physician who discovered the circulation of blood around the body three centuries before the Europeans did. Joe considered giving the museum a try, but knew he wouldn’t. He liked knowing that there was culture to be had if he fancied it, but he seldom did.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The tin roof rattled and reams of dust, a century old, more, feathered down onto the floor of the Grand Souk. Two middle-aged European men in United Nations whites, who had been enjoying a hubble-bubble between them, jumped up and handed over their large-denomination Syrian pound notes to the tea shop owner. On their uniforms in small letters was stencilled OPCW, an international body tasked with a job from hell, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Comedy fez on his head, the tea shop guy faffed around, trying, but failing, to find the correct change, judging his procrastination would in the end prove to his profit, which it did. As they fled from the souk, Joe caught him smile. He nodded at Joe, and Joe nodded back.
The exit of the two OPCW men had the effect of making visible someone who had been tucked out of sight, partly obscured by a hefty stone column: the squat little Buddha from the lobby, toying with a mint tea again, on his phone, again, and spending most of his time staring into space. But the space he was staring into just happened to be where Joe was sitting.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The war was getting closer. Joe had lived through bigger, closer bangs in Belfast at the age of five, and he knew in his bones that, terrifying though the noise might be, it was two or three miles off. Figuring out incoming artillery is like riding a bike. You don’t forget the knack.
Humfrey hadn’t been brought up under the blue skies of Ulster during the Troubles, and so he hurried back and sat down, assembling and reassembling his limbs in the uncoordinated fashion of a freshly slaughtered lobster.
Humfrey’s reaction to his very first experience of hearing shellfire was, to be fair to him, entirely in character: ‘Got some hash, got some E.’
‘Mickey Mouse will be so pleased his money is being spent on the best designer drugs in Damascus.’
Every now and then, Humfrey studied Joe with an expression of hurt. He did so now.
‘Naughty Paddy-dude. We’ve got to print some stills from Jammy’s video.’
‘Why should we do that?’ Joe asked sourly.
‘We’ve been invited to a party tonight. We show the people the stills, they could tell us where they were filmed. We can block out the faces so that no one gets to see that it’s Jammy and her boy.’
This seemed like a good idea but Joe couldn’t bear to tell him so.
‘Who invited us? Your dealer?’
Humfrey pulled a face, then started to laugh. ‘Clever Paddy-dude.’
They returned to the hotel, used the business centre to print out two screengrabs of Jameela: one at Avalon; one in suicide vest, with Ham likewise attired, standing in front of the black flag of ISIS and the seven gunmen. Joe borrowed a thick pen and scrubbed out her face and Ham’s.
At dusk, the streets of Damascus echoed with the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, but mixed up in the sound was a lone church bell, tolling news of a different God. As night thickened, the streets became emptier, the traffic thinned. In the quietening, the soft thuds and gentle booms of distant artillery fire became more noticeable, less easy to dismiss.
The venue for the party was in a side alley off Straight Street, which gets a namecheck in the New Testament. The directions from the hotel concierge were simple enough: three hundred yards to Straight Street, then third on the right, then second left. It seemed pointless to hail a taxi, but a very good reason for doing so became obvious when, one hundred yards out, a power cut kille
d all electric lights and the city plunged into darkness. Every shadow became tinted with menace. Ahead of them, a silhouette lit a cigarette and Joe saw a man’s face, fluttering in the sallow light of the match in his hand. He had a big emerald ring on the middle finger of his right hand, pitted skin, and cold, hooded eyes set deep in his skull. He studied Joe with contempt, then the match died and the gloom swallowed him up.
Petrol-fuelled generators fired up and soon the street was half-lit from shop-lights here and there, shadows dancing to and fro.
‘Spooky,’ said Humfrey.
Despondency for most Damascenes, but not for the in-crowd. Porsches, Mercs and SUVs lined the street on either side of the party venue, and from within came the melody of an Arabic soul singer, punched out through a sound system at a deafening volume. A side door opened onto a grand courtyard, with flaming torches illuminating a central fountain and palm trees disappearing up into the night sky. Waiters in tuxedos handed out flutes of champagne, while Bedouin in dishdashas stood guard, holding scimitars upright.
In Damascus, in LA, the same people flock to parties: the beautiful, the calculating, the drunk and the drunk-to-be. Humfrey was very much in the last camp. Joe was trying to sip – not gulp – a glass of champagne, when a shell thumped, dangerously near and terrifyingly loud. There were a few screams, then someone giggled, and that was picked up and soon waves of contemptuous laughter rippled out. These people had an urge to party, come what may.
Up above – three, four storeys high – people moved in shadow, their faces hidden by arches, looking down on the throng. A phosphorus shell arced across the sky, turning the night into brilliant day, penetrating the thick shadow of a second-storey archway overlooking Joe, and there was the squat little Buddha, on his phone, staring into space, Joe’s space. The umbrella of light cast by the shell started to tighten as it fell to earth, and as it did so Joe glimpsed – or thought he did – two more figures standing in the darkest recess of the gloomy archway, that of a young woman and a boy.