by Theo Padnos
“I’ll do my best,” I told him.
Shortly before sunset, we happened across a sawmill. The supervisor there wanted to know how strong we were. “We’re very strong,” Ashraf said.
The supervisor pointed to a pile of stumps that had been dumped in front of a house-sized circular saw blade. “Can you lift a stump?” he asked.
Ashraf seized an enormous block of wood, hoisted it over his head like an Olympic champion, then beamed at the supervisor. The supervisor beamed back. He asked Ashraf where he was from.
“Syrian from Aleppo,” said Ashraf.
The supervisor gestured at me. “And him?” he asked Ashraf.
“Russian,” Ashraf replied. “But speaks Arabic.”
The supervisor cast a dubious look at me. He greeted me in Arabic. I replied in Arabic. His face brightened. He shook my hand. The workday would begin at 7:00 am, he said. “Twelve hours’ work. Okay?” We would be paid 50 Turkish liras—about $10—at the end of the day. Were we okay with these terms? “Very okay with them, yes,” said Ashraf.
“You’ll be here at seven?”
“Of course,” Ashraf said.
“Of course,” I said.
I’ll make use of this bit of luck, I told myself as Ashraf and I wound our way upward, through the alleyways that led to his room, because a compelling, sellable article about the precarious life of the Syrian refugee was to be found at the sawmill. Surely the Turks were subjecting Syrians to something unpleasant at the mill. Dangerous saw blades? Overwork? Perhaps the Syrian refugees employed in this place were organizing a government in exile amid the stumps. Perhaps they were shipping their pitiable salaries back to their friends in the Free Syrian Army? I would find out the details, then write an absorbing, participant-observer essay about the hardscrabble life of the Syrian refugee in Turkey.
I liked the idea when it came, but as we climbed the hillside alleyways, doubts trickled through my head, and by the time we opened the door on Ashraf’s windowless, furnitureless room, the story idea, which had shimmered for a moment in the afterglow of a genuine job offer—then caused me to try out opening lines in my head, to daydream about which of the magazines might bite, to see figures and feel cash—was falling in on itself. As we stood in the darkness, it dissolved into a puddle of dreck at my feet.
Had there been a single Syrian among the lumberyard laborers I might have tried to pump some life into it. Yet the material out of which I meant to build my swan-song report to the world consisted, as far as I could tell, of a fake Syrian, a fake Russian, a mighty circular saw blade, and some Turks. I asked myself: Even if, eventually, some Syrian woodmen turned up at the mill, would anyone in New York care if poor Syrians were becoming poorer slowly in Turkey? I wasn’t sure I much cared.
At six thirty the following morning, I declined to get out of bed. Ashraf disappeared. At ten thirty a violent banging and shrieking arose from the porch outside Ashraf’s room. I lifted the latch on the door. I poked a nose into the fresh air. A white-haired gentleman stood in the sunshine. His eyes were outraged. He held a heavy stick, almost as fat as a log, like a battering ram, in both hands. He advanced across the threshold, strode to the center of the room, then began to shout—partly in Arabic and partly in Turkish, it seemed, or was that Kurdish? As he remonstrated, I stepped backward, then squinted, and then his howling sorted itself into intelligible Arabic sound.
“Working!” he said. “Now. This instant. Go!” A stack of sacks containing cement powder was to be moved from one spot in the courtyard outside Ashraf’s room to a spot a few meters away. I was to perform this labor. “You get up. Now!”
I slipped on my sandals. In the courtyard, I picked up one bag, dragged it across the courtyard, then picked up another and another. A few minutes into this task, I noticed that the man was staring at me, mouth agape, as if he couldn’t make sense of the alien creature that had touched down in his courtyard.
“You’re not an Arab,” he observed.
“No,” I said.
“Where from?” he asked. “Germany?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Germany.”
His face softened. He glanced at the little tower of cement sacks I had made for him. “Thank you,” he said in Arabic. “You help me.”
“Of course,” I said.
When I had moved all the man’s cement sacks, he followed me into Ashraf’s room.
Ashraf had not paid the last month’s rent, he said. Neither had this month’s rent been paid. And where was Ashraf? I didn’t know where Ashraf was. The man stared at the blanket on which Ashraf had slept, then turned his eyes to me. “Well, this can’t go on,” he said. He eyed an open laptop next to the faux fur on which I had slept. Was I living in this room now, too?
“Yes,” I admitted. “I am Ashraf’s roommate.”
The man brandished his stick. “You get out,” he said. “This is no hotel.”
“Wait,” I said. “Please.” I reached for my backpack. “I have money.”
He lowered his stick.
Two months’ rent came to 400 Turkish liras—or $80. I counted out the money. I handed it to the visitor. He made a weak smile. He nodded. Holding his eyes on me, he took a step backward. “May God be with you,” he said softly. He paused, murmured to himself, reached through his mind for a phrase, and then with a confused but happy expression in his eyes produced it: “Guten Tag!” he said.
“Guten Tag,” I replied. He neglected to shut the door. I returned to my blanket on the floor.
During the preceding weeks, an essay about the deep, invisible causes of the war in Syria had been writing itself in my head. I judged its value as a commercial enterprise to be approximately zero dollars, which was why I hadn’t bothered to put it down on paper, but as I lay in the semidarkness, it occurred to me that this was the value of all my enterprises, in which case it made sense to write what I wanted to write.
I knew how the writing of this essay would make me feel: missing Damascus, frightened for the country, agog at the paradoxes of the place, and full of admiration for the rebellious crowds. There would be sadness in this essay, since totalitarian societies crushed the life out of a nation’s youth. I felt Syria’s coming generation was especially hope-filled, curious about the world, happy—though afraid to be so—and pullulating with undiscovered talent. There would be humorous bits to my essay, since Syrians loved to make fun: of the lisping president, the putative stupidity of the citizens of Homs, the Baath Party, the sorry state of the Syrian army’s equipment, and the feeblemindedness of the state’s bureaucrats. The writing would amble along in this lighthearted mood, since encounters in Syria, even the ominous ones, perhaps especially them, often began in courteous bonhommie.
Yet my essay would come to the point quickly: A sadistic cult of Assad lovers had cast a spell over the nation. Those in the grips of this delirium had so enthralled themselves, with what exactly I would reveal at the end of the essay, that they were willing to shoot their political opponents in the face, openly, on international television, week after week, without a twinge of regret. Perhaps the intoxicating substances at issue here were occult doctrines, arising from Zoroastrianism, fire worshiping, and hatred of Islam, which were now propagated by the president’s semisecret religious sect, the Alawites. So the opposition preachers intimated during their Friday-afternoon sermons. Perhaps the current president’s father, Hafez, now twelve years dead, had cast his own variety of fairy dust across the nation. So the chanting crowds (“Oh! Oh! May God curse your soul, O Hafez!”) seemed to feel. Anyway, that summer, the Assad partisans could be seen on Twitter videos, strolling in plazas littered with corpses. They pumped their Kalashnikovs into the night sky as they chanted: “We are your men, O Bashar, and we drink blood!” During the summer of 2012, the blood had flowed more thickly, in more places, than at any point in the war to date. During my earlier, botched trip to Damascus, in June, I had run across a Damascus journalist friend in a café. “It’s just that I don’t see any ending to this th
ing,” I told her. She stared at me. “Nor do we,” she replied. And then she burst into tears.
My working theory was that emotions driving the violence in Syria didn’t have a local habitation exactly, but I felt an attentive traveler could uncover the darkness beneath the placidity of everyday life by visiting the places in which the previous generation of Syrians had murdered one another. Of course, the traveler would have to listen carefully. Of course, he would have to find obliging strangers. Of course, they would dissemble. Of course, the phrases they uttered would mean one thing in a certain cast of light in the morning, then give way to richer, deeper meanings as the day’s shadows lengthened. If the traveler was willing to draw no conclusions, to keep his ear to the ground, to make friends, to read, and to watch, the ground, I felt, eventually, would speak.
My plan was to carry out this listening project in a line of villages that runs in the shadow of the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range, north from Homs to the Turkish border. Since this is the frontier along which the mountain people, most of whom are Alawites, give way to the desert tribesmen, all of whom are Sunni, I imagined that some conversation I encountered would be ruled, as it is along the Syrian coast, in the Alawite homeland, by love for President Bashar al-Assad. Other villages I felt would have given themselves to the passionate hatred I was seeing in demonstrations on YouTube. In other villages, I imagined, I would find a muddle.
My idea was to amble along this frontier for a few days and then return with my notebooks to Antakya. There, in the safety of Ashraf’s hovel, I would draw up my portrait of the nation. I knew the general feel of the picture: It would show a nation adrift, unsure of its identity, jealous of more eminent, richer rivals, wanting admiration, longing to prove its powers but unable to keep itself from being pulled into the darkness.
Since some secrets are hard to keep, and since I wasn’t much in the mood for concealment anyway, I meant to acknowledge that the reporter in the background of this essay had worked his life into a similar fix.
Such were my essay-writing plans. A month or so after they first came to me, I was kneeling on the floor of a cell in the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital. Teenage toughs were making me press my hands and face into the wall above the lice-ridden blanket on which I slept. They laughed as they flogged my back with their galvanized steel cables. I screamed for help. “Oh mi God!” they shouted at me in English. “He is need helb! Helb!”
During those moments, I was aware, on some level, that the idea that had brought me into Syria was a literary travelogue, a bit like Rebecca West in Yugoslavia, a bit like George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. This was the butterfly I had chased over the precipice.
In the minutes following these flogging sessions, when my torturers had left my cell, I would stare at the walls. What bubble of self-involvement had I been living in, I wondered, that I should have allowed my life to go floating away—correction, paid my last pennies to cause it to float—into his hell? If only I could wander backward in time to the hovel in which I resolved to pursue the idea, I thought, I would wring the would-be travel writer’s neck.
Such is the wisdom of hindsight. That morning in Antakya, as I listened to the landlord clomping about upstairs, I attached myself to my writing idea like someone who falls asleep while driving, nearly comes to grief, then directs a maniacal concentration on the road ahead. I would not be swayed. I refused to permit opposition. I cared about the details of the voyage and nothing else. How much cash should I take? What footwear would be appropriate for October in Aleppo? I resolved to take a pair of plastic sandals. In case I should have the opportunity for a jog, I brought a new pair of running shoes.
Ashraf liked to say that he knew every one of the ten thousand smugglers in Antakya as he knew his own brothers. He had been a café hanger about in the poorer, Arab-speaking quarter of the city for long enough, I judged, for the boast to be more than idle chatter.
Should I trust myself to his friends? I wondered. I didn’t much trust him anymore. His lot, I felt, were as likely to finagle my last dollars out of me, then leave me stranded on the windy plains north of Aleppo, by the side of a potato field, as they were to help me. But who in Antakya could I trust? No one, I decided. In which case it made sense to choose at random.
My two weeks of letter writing in Antakya had given me enough time to contemplate a random sampling of travelers. A cigarette dealer Ashraf and I sometimes saw in the evenings, as he rattled through the Antakya alleys on his moped, had a guileless, friendly demeanor. Apparently, he spent his days on jeep trails deep in the Syrian mountains. His customer base, soldiers in the Free Syrian Army, lived under the strafing of the attack helicopters, somewhere in the hills along the Syrian coast. If I traveled with this person, the ride would surely present dramatic scenery. It would cost me pennies, but the risk to life and limb, I felt, was incalculable. And therefore unacceptable. The traveling companion for the voyage I was writing in my head, in any case, was a raconteur, an amateur historian, a singer of songs, and a teller of dirty jokes. I judged the cigarette seller, who was in his twenties, too young and too focused on distributing cigarettes to be useful to me.
A band of young men Ashraf identified as Libyans sometimes lounged at the plastic tables on the sidewalk in front of my ex-boardinghouse. Their story, an obvious fiction to the resident café patrons, was that they had come to the area on a humanitarian mission. They were nurses. Or teachers. Or aid workers or something. One evening, shortly after Ashraf began his lumberyard job, he and I spotted a group of six of them huddling in front of the grocery store across the street from the Ercan. Ashraf rose from the café table, shook their hands, smiled, pointed at me, palavered for a moment, then watched in surprise as their faces darkened. One of them spit on the ground. No, they would not talk to a journalist, they told him, nor would they go anywhere with an American, nor did they have any plans to go anywhere near Syria. “God be with you,” they told Ashraf.
A day later, again after his workday was over, he and I wandered into the lobby of a boardinghouse above the Antakya suq in which every one of the twenty or so armchairs lining the perimeter of the room was occupied by a wounded rebel fighter. Some of their faces bore hideous gashes. Others had arms in slings and feet in casts. They grinned as they showed me cell phone photographs of more damaged, bloodier comrades-in-arms. In the photos, men lay on the floor of a sun-dappled forest. Their entrails spilled into the dirt. Some of those soldiers were not quite dead, it seemed, but clasping on to the thread of life, as the Arabic phrase has it. This was why the photographer had taken the picture, a soldier explained to me: to capture the instant in which the martyr’s soul entered paradise. Allegedly, the eyes, though lifeless, registered the happiness the soul experienced on seeing the face of God.
In this room, Ashraf declined to identify me as an American. I was a French reporter, he said, who wished to travel into Syria. A half-dozen soldiers interrupted their conversations to offer me a ride into the war. I took down the numbers of two of them, but I knew from the moment I saw the gaping, somehow unbandaged wounds in these men’s faces that I would never, under any circumstances, go to the places at which they had been injured. Those people had been in a war. Bullets had flown about. Stuff had blown up. A reporter interested in this sort of thing required a camera. He wore aviator glasses. He would want to write about bravery. Maybe he himself was brave. Maybe he was just reckless. He was not me.
As I said my good-byes to these invalids, I wished for God to send victories to the Free Syrian Army. “Ameen,” a dozen mumbling voices replied. I promised to stay in touch, as is proper after an exchange of phone numbers, but I walked down the boardinghouse stairway certain that those men would soon be killed, down to the last man, and supposing that that was what they wanted. What is it about death, I wondered, that young men in this part of the world wish to make friends with it, to carry it around in loving portraits on their mobile phones, and to return to it whenever their wounded bodies allow? I have
nothing in common with such people, I told myself, since the only thing I want to return to was a canny, true, colorful essay.
The next morning, a Friday, I made a visit to my old boardinghouse in order to chat with the two young Syrians with whom I had shared a bathroom on the top floor of the Hotel Ercan. Ten days earlier, we had spoken about the possibility of making an excursion together into Syria. They struck me as trustworthy—or anyway as trustworthy as strangers in a frontier town can be. I found Adnan and Gibriel in their room on the hotel’s fifth floor. During their three weeks in Antakya, they had roamed up and down the Turkish coast. They had interviewed fishing boat captains, fishmongers, and strollers on the beach. Their understanding had been that, in exchange for a small fee, some such person might drop them on a beach on the island of Cyprus.
Their research had established that the going rate for this crossing was $3,000 per person. They had come to Antakya with hundreds of dollars in their bags—but not thousands. It often happened, they learned, that the boat captains who demanded these absurd sums proved to be bandits who beat their passengers, robbed them, then abandoned them on a desolate stretch of the Turkish coast. So yes, said Adnan, he and his friend Gibriel were indeed planning to return to Damascus. In order to trace their way back to the troubled suburb of Sayyidah Zaynab, where their families lived, they would travel as they had come: by a tortuous concatenation of farm lanes and forest paths on which Syrian government officials never appeared. Some of this smugglers’ highway could be traveled by car. Other portions had to be negotiated on foot. The voyage would cost about $75. Because Adnan would be conscripted into the army if the government caught up with him, both friends planned to play it safe: They would never set foot within sight of a government checkpoint.