Читать книгу Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria - Charles Glass, Charles Glass - Страница 15
ОглавлениеAt Bab al-Hawa, the Gate of Winds, all was confusion. The Syrian side of the border was dirtier and more run-down than the Turkish border post, and much more relaxed. It resembled nothing so much as a desert petrol station, where north- and south-bound cars stopped under an open concrete cover for a kind of servicing. All arriving foreigners had to change money, $100, at the official rate at the government exchange office to the right of the carport. Inside, German tourists grappled with exchange rates, wondering how many German marks they would need to buy $100 worth of Syrian pounds. The clerks filling out forms and changing money on the other side of a long table in the dark grey room were little help. I handed them $100, and they gave me, after much writing in triplicate, 975 Syrian Pounds (SL) and a form to prove I had changed the money at the official rate of 9.75 SL to the dollar, rather than the “tourist” rate of 22 SL from the banks inside Syria or the 40 SL available on the black market. I walked across the carport to the police post for an entry stamp. Ancient electric lamps hanging from the ceiling did not work, and the windows were too small to brighten the grey, concrete walls. More than a dozen people, Syrians, Turks and foreigners, stood in the filthy room awaiting entry and exit stamps, but no officials appeared behind the open counter.
The only decoration on the wall above the empty desks was a portrait I would see as often as I had seen Atatürk’s in Turkey. The smiling, benign countenance of a man with parted dark hair and trimmed moustache turned up on desks, walls and windows in offices, hotels, restaurants and shops. It was pinned to sandbags at guard posts. It was imprinted on flags, drawn by hand on buildings and spray-painted through stencils on bridges and fences. In schools, children would draw the face in crayon and paste it up in their classrooms. The same face, though in profile, had appeared for a time on Syrian one-pound coins, withdrawn from circulation when devout Muslims complained that Islam forbade reproducing the human form. The same face sat on the shoulders of a hundred statues throughout the land, in town squares, at the side of the highways, in front of government buildings and army depots. In some pictures, the man wore a dark business suit, and his head was bare. In others, he had on a military uniform, his chest ablaze with medals and an air force general’s cap on his head. The picture in the border post had been taken many years earlier in black and white, but in other pictures, in more important offices, the man aged through generations of likenesses, the quality of the photography and painting improved, the pictures grew in size, acquired electric backlighting and lavish gold frames. The face would appear as well every morning in the newspapers and every evening on the television news. In the Syrian Arab Republic, only the blind did not know the features of the air force general who had made himself president in 1970, Hafez al-Assad.
Waiting as I so often would for Syrian government officials to come to work or keep appointments, I studied Assad’s picture. He seemed more like a trusted uncle than Big Brother. The thin, smiling face did not convey the ruthlessness he had shown his enemies on the occasions when his rule had been threatened. He had held power longer than any Syrian leader since the French army sailed home in 1946. From the time of its first military coup d’état in 1949, Syria had had eleven heads of state until Assad ended a terrible period of turmoil that saw thousands of people killed and taken into prisons. Yet not even he, who had ruled so long and maintained an army that spent most of his government’s budget, could make border officials appear at their posts.
There was nowhere to sit on the public side of the counter, and those who wanted to leave or enter Syria stood patiently waiting for the border police, for the immigration cards, for the stamps in their passports that would let them in or out. After about fifteen minutes, two men in border police uniforms came in and sat at their desks. One picked up a telephone, and the other said to the crowd, “Na’am,” Yes. Several people began to shout in Arabic, asking for immigration cards to fill in. He threw a stack of cards on the counter, and we all grabbed at them, trying to fill them in as quickly as possible to be first in for a visa.
Two Americans trying to leave the country handed the policeman their passports and immigration cards. He handed the documents back and told them to see someone upstairs. Meanwhile, he laboriously wrote the passport details of each person in a large ledger, having some difficulty with the passports not in Arabic. After ten minutes, the two Americans returned, saying there was no one upstairs. I began translating for them. The policeman said they would have to wait. “For what?” I asked. “They just want to leave.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, putting the other passports to one side and processing their papers on the spot.
When my turn came, I was surprised to discover that the Ministry of Information’s telex authorising my visa, a formality required for all writers and journalists, had actually arrived. In years past, entering Syria at Jdaideh from Lebanon and at Deraa from Jordan, I had had to wait hours, even overnight, sending messages to the Ministry by taxi, bribing officials for the use of a telephone to track down an official at home, all for a telex that had been promised before my departure. That the Ministry’s message had reached Bab al-Hawa, a border post farther from Damascus than either Jdaideh or Deraa, was nothing short of miraculous. I thought, rather naïvely, that this boded well for the rest of the journey. More forms, more details taken down, payment of 24 SL for the visa, and I was stamped in.
I left to show my suitcases to the Customs officer, who spoke English. I showed him my American passport, and he asked what I had in my bags. I told him clothes, books and a typewriter. He said, fine. Unusually, he did not bother to open the bags and waved a cordial good-bye.
I walked about a hundred yards across a barren wasteland, near a row of freight company sheds, to the exit gate. A few taxis, painted yellow as all taxis in Syria had been by government decree a few years earlier, were parked beyond the barrier. I asked the driver of an old Mercedes to take me to Latakia. We discussed the fare, and he asked a policeman to raise the barrier so he could pick up my bags from Customs. Unlike in Turkey, the Syrian police had no objection. With the bags safely in the back seat, we started our drive south. A few miles down the road, the driver explained that Latakia was a long way, and he wanted to be back in his village near Bab al-Hawa before dark. I asked whether he would prefer to take me to Aleppo. We discussed this for some time, deciding to go to the Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo. I believed the Baron’s would be full for the Easter weekend, but I could have a cup of tea and a wash there, before taking another taxi to Latakia.
The driver took me through miles of open countryside, over treeless hills, past villages whose mud houses were shaped like beehives, past other villages made of cinder blocks, past fields now green in spring, past women in long, black dresses cutting grass by hand to feed their animals. Along the roadside, there were occasional ad hoc customs checks, armed, plain-clothes men in Land Rovers parked at intervals, stopping cars at random to make quick searches. Anyone with contraband cooking oil, soap powder or fruit that he had managed to smuggle in from Turkey was liable to a summary beating and to have his goods confiscated.
In less than an hour, we reached the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city that had grown well beyond its historic boundaries over the previous thirty years. Tall stone apartment blocks surrounded the old city. Deforming a skyline of minarets and domes was a large, new, empty cube of a hotel. It had been rushed to completion for the Mediterranean Games due to take place there that September. According to the driver, it was the new Méridien, an opinion contradicted later by Aleppins who told me it was the new Intercontinental. When it finally opened, it was neither a Meridien nor an Intercontinental, but a Pullman.
We drove through the suburbs from the east towards the city centre, to an area called Bab al-Farraj, where a large statue of President Hafez al-Assad stood in the middle of a large plaza under construction. From the plaza, we turned right up Rue Baron to the Baron’s Hotel. When it was built in 1909, the Baron’s was on the outskirts of the city facing open countryside. Now, it was miles inside Aleppo, and the only trees nearby were in its own grounds. The Baron’s was a pleasant change from the Atahan in Antioch. The Atahan, built in the 1950s, was part of a dull structure of shops and offices along a narrow shopping street. The Baron’s had been built in the last, perhaps only, great age of Levantine hotels. When it opened, it had only one floor, with reception rooms at the front and bedrooms at the back. In 1911, a second floor was added, and some time later, a third. Made of large, finely cut stones, with Oriental designs carved into the stonework, it had gracefully arched windows and a wide terrace all around. The Baron’s remained an old-fashioned hotel, with sitting-rooms for people to entertain guests, a dark lobby which was little more than an entryway to the bar, salons, dining-room and the large stone staircase up to the rooms. It was rather like a men’s club, but for the occasional presence of women. “Everybody seems to have stayed at the Baron’s,” James Morris joked in his Market of Seleucia about his stay there in 1956, “from T. E. Lawrence to the Queen of Sheba, and it has some of the subdued self-assurance of one of the really great hotels.”
Because of the Easter holiday, the hotel was fuller and livelier than I had ever seen it. The receptionist, an Armenian named Alishan, told me, much to my surprise, there was a room. “Only one room,” he said. “Everyone is here from Damascus for the holiday.”
Ahmed, the Baron’s tall and amusing major-domo, carried my bags to a room at the back on the first floor. In the corner, the bedroom had windows on two sides, affording a fine view of two of the seediest night clubs in Aleppo, if not the world. “You stay long time, Mr Charles?” Ahmed asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll find some girls,” he laughed, “then you stay.”
Downstairs, I sat in the salon to the right of the front door. The room, last decorated forty or more years before, belonged to an earlier era. I would not have been surprised to see Noël Coward sitting at the upright piano against the wall. Thick curtains surrounded the high windows over the front terrace. Inside the wall opposite the windows, a glass case displayed mementos of the Baron’s early days: photographs of the new hotel in 1911 with a horse and carriage in front, a copy of the bill for an English archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence, and a book of Lawrence’s letters turned to a page with his return address as “Hotel Baron, Aleppo.” On each wall hung a large French print in a flowery gold frame. Beneath the prints were captions like, “Gentil Bernard Lisant Son Poème: L’Art d’Aimer” and “Cresset Composant Son Poème: Ververt.” Each print portrayed an idealised scene of French men and women frozen in time, their clothes, posture and composition speaking of another age, just as the well-dressed Syrians on sofas below the pictures belonged to an earlier era. If I had drawn a picture of the salon itself, I would have given it the caption, “Des Families Chrétiennes Chez Eux: L’Hôtel Baron.”
Two Christian families, apparently from Damascus, were receiving their Aleppo relations on sofas and chairs at opposite ends of the salon. Adults and children alike were speaking French. I sat reading A Tale of Two Cities, surreptitiously listening to one family say how lovely Jerusalem was when the older people had last seen it in 1966. That was before its conquest by Israel and its consequent inaccessibility to them. In the other family, one man was talking about Camille Chamoun, who had been president of Lebanon from 1952 to 1958, and how well he looked for his age. The adults drank tea and the children orange juice. Only the peeling paint, itself a symbol of faded grandeur, and a television, mercifully turned off, revealed the age in which we lived. The Baron’s belle époque was over, locked inside the glass case in the wall.
When the families left, apparently to make their Good Friday visit to church, I put away my book and went outside for a walk. Arriving in Aleppo from Antioch on a Friday, the only official day off in Syria, was like entering another world. Antioch’s streets were nearly empty, while Aleppo’s on Fridays were so filled with humanity, mostly but not all male, that it was impossible to take a step without bumping into someone. Old mountain peasants in sharwals, peasants from the plain in abaya, poor workers in dirty, stained trousers, clerical workers in suits or wool trousers and sweaters, a few old city men wearing red tarbooshes on their heads and leaning heavily on their walking sticks. People made their way slowly, not through, but with, the crowd – pushing and bumping into one another without apology or offence as they went. Everywhere there were barrows with street vendors selling small items: sweets, lighters, matches, key-chains, worry beads, postcards, mostly useless but colourful bric à brac. The quiet dullness of Antioch gave way in Aleppo to the busy and bustling chaos of metropolitan life. Unlike Antioch, Aleppo had soldiers everywhere – off duty, in uniform, milling among the crowd, many of the conscript country boys looking for excitement in the city, going into the cinemas playing Italian Westerns, Indian adventure films and Egyptian melodramas. Each cinema pasted scores of photographs from its weekly offering on billboards outside, each exposing as much womanly flesh as possible.
I walked past a large, open square with an Ottoman clock tower at its bottom, and up a road to the left. When I turned right into a cul-de-sac of Armenian gold shops on both sides, I found thousands of Christians making visits to the three churches – Armenian Orthodox, Maronite Catholic and Greek Catholic – at the end. The Maronite church was in the middle. To its right were the cloisters and courtyard of the Melkite, or Greek, church. The Armenian church lay down a covered passageway to the left. It was the custom in Aleppo on Good Friday for Christians to visit churches of all sects, an ecumenical gesture unknown in Jerusalem, where the competing claimants to Christ’s sceptre were openly hostile to one another. This was one of the rare years on which the Catholic and Orthodox Easters fell on the same Sunday. I found myself caught in a mass of young and old men in suits and girls in frilly, Sunday dresses. All I could do was surrender myself to one of the currents in the stream of humanity, which, as it happened, was moving slowly towards the Maronite church. Around me, people of all ages were talking in Arabic or Armenian. The procession went through a door and up the right-hand aisle. We walked along the route of the Stations of the Cross, past pews filled with worshippers of all ages, under the bright lights of electric chandeliers overhead and hundreds of candles all around.
As we approached the main altar, I saw women behind the rail pick up pieces of cotton wool, dip them in warm oil and hand one to each person coming past. Most people handed the women a Syrian pound coin in return. Old women who received the cotton ball made a sign of the cross with it, rubbing the oil from the cotton into their foreheads. Some people would stop at a picture or statue of our Lord, or our Lady, or some saint, to say a short prayer. Many talked to friends they passed in the pews. We turned down the central aisle towards the main door, in front of which was a large table with priests and laymen who must have been elders of Aleppo’s Maronite community. On the table was a small fortune in Syrian pounds, donations collected that day from the passing faithful. The men counted the notes before putting them in neat stacks. I recognised one of them as Anthony Akras, the bespectacled British consul. He introduced me to his teenage son and invited me to tea later at his house.
I eased my way back out into the crowd, into another current moving through the centre of the square towards the Melkite church. We walked into a lovely, almost Norman courtyard, whose spring flowers were in bloom. Through stone vaults and arches, columns and trees, the procession took me into its bosom and across the threshold of a church even more ornate than the Maronite. The scene was similar, thousands of people slowly winding their way past the Stations of the Cross and up to the altar. Here young and old women were again dipping cotton into the oil, but they wrapped each ball in a fresh green leaf before exchanging it for a pound coin from the faithful. As in the Maronite church, women blessed themselves with the sacramental cotton. In the Melkite church, priests were hearing confession in open boxes along the aisles. Contrite Greek Catholics knelt in supplication, seeking penance and forgiveness, while the priest sat inside, in full view of us all, behind the iron bars of the confessional door, looking strangely like an automatic fortune-teller in a cage at a penny arcade.
Outside, another current in the great river of Christianity took me along tiny cobbled streets, first in the open air, then under arches between the buildings on either side, and into cavern-like tunnels. The crowd was all around in the darkness. I was trapped, but there was nothing to fear. Some of the women never stopped talking, and I could see over the heads of most of the people so that, unlike the children half my height, I knew where we were headed. The route took us to the end of the tunnel into the heart of this Christian quarter with its sturdy, stone buildings and its closed Armenian shops. We entered the Armenian church. Again, there was the same close, crowded feel as in the other two churches, the same bright lights and candles, the same women at the altar dipping and handing out bits of holy cotton wool, the same priests and elders at the table collecting money. Like all Orthodox churches, this one was filled with ikons. People would touch them as though reaching for grace. An old woman in black stroked a portrait of St Theresa. She slowly pulled her hand back from the wood and kissed her fingertips where they had touched the portrait. Other old women were lighting candles and making the Orthodox sign of the Cross, right shoulder to left, and kneeling to pray.
The ritual visits to the different churches, enacted every Good Friday in Aleppo, were as much social as religious. Outside in the courtyard of the Maronite church, young men and women stood in clusters, slyly eyeing one another. Their parents were laughing and talking about the decorations, the flowers, the candles and the other people in the churches. Some of them agreed to meet on Easter Sunday. Above us on balconies on both sides of the street, over the jewellers’ shops, young and old Armenian women gazed at the crowd below.
This was not the solemn Good Friday I was accustomed to in the West, or that I had seen in years past in Lebanon and Jerusalem. There was no formal church service after the visiting began at three o’clock. Nearly a quarter of Aleppo’s million inhabitants were Christian, and most of them were Armenian. The large Christian minority gave Aleppo a cosmopolitan character lacking in other Syrian cities, even Damascus, with its larger population, its diplomatic corps and international business community. Because of their long history and minority status, the Christians of Aleppo tended to ignore sectarian differences, the only significant division among them being more national than religious, between the Armenians and the Arab Christians. That division was more social than political, based on the fact that most Armenians were twentieth-century refugees from Turkey, people whose Arabic was at best a second, and often a third or fourth, language. On Good Friday, even this distinction dissolved, as Catholic and Orthodox Arabs and Armenians went to one another’s holy places to remember the Crucifixion, their Lord’s sacrifice for them all.
Back at the Baron’s Hotel, the manager, Armen Mazloumian, invited me to come on Easter Sunday for lunch with his family. Armen was the son of the hotel’s owner, Krikor Mazloumian, and had spent his life working there. He survived by complaining, about the staff, about the clientele, about the handicaps the government imposed on hoteliers, about bureaucratic inefficiency, about the traffic, and about just about everything that came his way. Half-Armenian, half-English, he spoke both languages, and Arabic, perfectly. He was in his mid-thirties, had a brush moustache and usually wore woollen trousers and an open shirt, often with a bandanna tied around his neck. Besides the hotel, he had one passion in life: exploring the hundreds of Roman and Byzantine towns, the so-called Dead Cities, in the open country around Aleppo, the ancient Syrian civilisation that had flourished in the Orontes River Valley from Roman times until the Arab conquest.
That evening, Armen and I had dinner together in the empty hotel dining-room under an old photograph of President Assad, while a young Kurdish waiter named Jemal carried each course silently from the kitchen. “I thought the hotel was full,” I said. “Where is everyone? “
“They all go out to dinner, with their families or to restaurants,” Armen complained. “They don’t spend their money here.” Later, he said he would take me to see the Dead Cities, whenever I had time. “When are you going?” I asked him.
“I’m always going, at least three days a week.”
After a meatless Good Friday dinner, Armen invited me to enjoy the first of many glasses of “Ararat, 6-Star Armenian Brandy”. It went well with the Turkish coffee, and I would eventually come to agree with his father’s pronouncement, “This is the finest brandy in the world.”
In the morning, as I was going into the dining-room for breakfast, Alishan called me from the reception desk. “Do you need any other books to read?” he asked me. He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a dozen old paperbacks in English and French. I looked through them and took a worn copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. He would not take any money, so I gave him A Tale of Two Cities, which I had just finished. He did accept money, however, for the old postcards of Aleppo he kept in another desk drawer.
In the dining-room, a European diplomat who was visiting from Turkey invited me to join him for breakfast. I asked him if he knew about the people living in the “No-Man’s-Land.” “They are the lucky ones,” he said. “In the last six months, Turkey has sent at least five hundred Iranian refugees back to Iran. Some of them had already been guaranteed refugee status in Canada and Sweden. The Turks just sent back two Iranian pilots and the plane they escaped in two months ago. Now, the pilots will surely be executed and probably the others as well.”
“What can you do about it?”
“I sent a report to my government. And I tell journalists like you.”
“In other words, nothing.”
“Nothing,” he said. “That’s the worst part. Your country gives money and arms to the Turks. Maybe America should do something. You should do something.”
A tall building of the same stone as the hotel, the Mazloumian family’s three-storey house lay just behind the hotel’s rear terrace. The ground floor was nearly empty, a few old prints hanging on the walls and unused, covered furniture on the floor. On the first floor, Armen showed me what his father called the “antiquities room,” its walls nearly hidden by the large photographs Armen had taken of the Dead Cities, wonderful pictures of the old churches, the tombs, the villas and summer houses of the last Romans to dwell in Syria. Over the years, he had created what was probably the largest photographic collection on earth of the ruins, of the same churches from different angles, dozens of villages at different times of the day, monasteries in all seasons.
We walked up to his parents’ apartment on the second floor. He unlocked the front door, and suddenly I was back in England. We went through the foyer into the drawing-room of an English country house that might have belonged to a soldier or a diplomat, retired from a life’s service in the East. Below a carved wood mantelpiece at the far end of the room, flames were devouring dry wood in the fireplace. Above the mantel hung an oil painting of a black spaniel. The wall to the left was a bookcase, containing hundreds of old volumes, many on the Levant, including early editions of Russell’s 1756 The Natural History of Aleppo; an 1810 edition of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter, 1697; Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation; and The Travels of Ibn Jubayr. There were also the six volumes of Blackwell’s edition of Churchill’s memoirs, Burkes Landed Gentry 1952 and bound editions of Punch from the 1930s. Facing the shelves was a large, upholstered couch, and stuffed chairs circled the fire. On tables and walls were family photographs of prosperous Armenian burghers in early twentieth-century Aleppo. There was one of the young Krikor Mazloumian and his English wife, Sally, a nurse at the Altounyan Hospital in Aleppo when they met in 1947. A pretty blonde, she looked like an actress playing a nurse in a World War Two movie. I saw how easily Armen’s father must have fallen in love. There were pictures of their three daughters, who had married and left Syria, and of Armen as a boy. The long wall behind the couch had a large picture window, carved in dark wood as in an Elizabethan manor. Once it had presented a fine view of gardens, trees and the old city. All it revealed now was an ugly urban landscape of unfinished, bare concrete at the rear of new office blocks.
Armen led me past a baby grand piano, on which there were more family photographs, asked me to sit by the fire, and went to tell his mother and father we were there. Comfortably settled, listening to the crackle of the burning wood, I looked out of the window and tried to imagine the view before the new buildings had been erected. Again and again, while in Aleppo, I tended to see the city not as it was while I was there, but as it must have been before I was born, as Krikor Mazloumian and the other aged citizens of the city remembered it and painted it for me. I took The Travels of Ibn Jubayr from the shelf and looked up Aleppo in the index. On June 14, 1184, the Muslim year 580 AH, the Arab traveller wrote:
Aleppo is a town of eminent consequence, and in all ages its fame has flown high. The kings who have sought its hand in marriage are many, and its place in our souls is dear. How many battles has it provoked, and how many white blades have been drawn against it? Its fortress is renowned for its impregnability and, from far distance seen for its great height, is without like or match among castles. Because of its great strength, an assailant who wills it or feels he can seize it must turn aside. It is a massy pile, like a round table rising from the ground, with sides of hewn stone and erected with true and symmetrical proportions. Glory to Him who planned its design and arrangement, and conceived its shape and outline.
The town is as old as eternity, yet new although it has never ceased to be. Its days and years have been long, and the leaders and the commons have said their last farewell. These are the homes and abodes; but where are their ancient dwellers and those that came to them? Those are the palaces and courts, but where are the Hamdanid princes and their poets? All have passed away, but the time of this city is not yet. Oh city of wonder! It stays, but its kings depart; they perish, but its ruin is not yet decreed.
But for the intrusion of the new office blocks, I could have seen the citadel on the hill. The fortress was the most impressive in the Levant, one of few the Crusaders neither built nor conquered.
Ibn Jubayr believed in the legendary origins of the city’s name, from a story of the Biblical prophet Abraham’s stay there: “We say that amongst the honours of this castle is that, as we were told, it was in early days a hill whither Abraham the Friend (of God) – may God’s blessings and protection enfold him and our Prophet – was wont to repair with some flocks he had, and there milk them and dispense the milk as alms. The place was therefore called Halab.” The translator explained that the Arabic word halab meant “milk” and that Aleppo was a Europeanised version of Halab. Aleppo, like its southern rival Damascus, claimed the title of the “oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.”
An aged, bald man walked slowly into the room. Wearing a green twill suit, leather waistcoat, checked shirt and striped tie, he looked like the lord of a Somerset manor on a Sunday stroll. “Looking at Ibn Jubayr, eh?” he asked. “What will you drink? Brandy?”
Krikor Mazloumian was in his eighties and had gone blind in one eye. The other eye, Armen had told me, was under severe inter-ocular pressure, causing him constant pain. His voice was as rich and deep as any younger, healthier man’s. In English, he sounded British; Austrian friends told me his German was so fluent they took him for a Bavarian, and he was equally at home in French, Armenian, Arabic and Turkish. He poured tumblers full of Armenian brandy for both of us and sat down in the large chair that was obviously reserved for him. Although his style, the furnishings of his house and his manner of speech were English, his real passion was Armenia. “You Americans,” he said, dismissively, “are so blind about ideology that you won’t understand Armenia. All we want is a place for our culture and our national life to breathe.”
“Is it breathing in the Soviet Union?” I asked him. (This was before the riots in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian earthquake.)
“As never before. It is thriving. The churches are full. The music and language are flourishing.”
Sally Mazloumian came into the room with Armen. A robust woman in late middle age, younger than her husband, she had developed along the lines set in that photograph from the 1940s: her bobbed blonde hair was greying and longer; her fresh, healthy face had grown warm and friendly, the ingenuousness had become maternal with the years. She introduced herself and asked me to call her Sally, which I did, and her husband Koko, which I could not. She put some pistachios, called fistu halabi or “Aleppo nuts” in Arabic, on a table for us and told us to sit down. When her husband was talking, she would occasionally, without a word, put some drops in his eye. She was still, forty years on, the devoted nurse Krikor Mazloumian had married the year after the French army left Syria.
The Mazloumian family were comparatively recent arrivals in Syria, though they preceded most of Aleppo’s other Armenians. “My grandfather came to Aleppo in 1882, to settle here. Before that, he had been through Aleppo on his way to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Because of persecutions in our own village in Turkish Armenia, he decided to move to this … developing metropolis of the Ottoman Empire. Trade was very good, because Aleppo supplied the whole of south-eastern Anatolia with goods. So my grandfather decided to come and settle in Aleppo.”
“What was his business?”
“He opened the very first hotel in Aleppo. He called it the Hotel Ararat. It was in the bazaars. Until then, travellers had been lodged in bare rooms in the upper floor of the khans – caravanserais – where they threw their own mattresses onto the floor, slept and cooked in the same room, and washed around the well in the courtyard. In my grandfather’s hotel, there was a proper bed, an iron bedstead, and a bedside table, candlestick, washbasin, all the sort of elementary ‘mod cons’ of those days, and a restaurant, which was also patronised by rich merchants of the town. My father and my uncle grew up in that very cosmopolitan atmosphere, because all the guests in my grandfather’s hotel were foreigners. When they reached maturity, each one with the help of their father opened hotels with rather pompous names in the modern quarters of the town. One was called the Azizieh Palace Hotel. The other was the Aleppo Palace Hotel. They had about a dozen or so rooms each and a restaurant. They did well. They charged one gold sovereign a day. Everything was so cheap. They then decided to get together and build a very modern hotel for those days, on the outskirts of the town.”
“Why did they call it Baron’s?” I had met Krikor Mazloumian on previous trips to Aleppo, but this was the first chance I had ever had to ask him about his family and the hotel they had run for eighty years.
“Because they had been addressed by the Armenian staff of the hotel as Baron,” he said, pronouncing “Baron” in the French manner, the accent on the second syllable, “which in Armenian means Sir or Mister. My father’s guests were intrigued, and they started calling my father and my uncle, Mr Baron or plain Baron. When the two brothers decided to build this hotel, they called it Baron’s Hotel in the possessive, because by that time the name Baron had sort of stuck. It was quite a success from the very day of opening. The hotel flourished from 1911 to 1914.”
From then, the hotel’s story was linked to the fate of Syria and the Mazloumian family. “When the war was declared in 1914, the hotel was populated by either German generals, heads of German military missions like Leiman von Sanders, or commanders-in-chief like Jemal Pasha of Turkey. For all intents and purposes, it became part of the Turkish Army, although it was run along the lines of a hotel. We were exiled for a year and a half. And shortly after our return, the war ended. Our last guest in the hotel, for the last three months, was Moustafa Kemal Pasha, later known as Atatürk. He was the last man to leave the hotel when the Turks were retreating and the British were advancing. After the occupation of Aleppo, we had the visit of General Allenby for a day or two. I think the British occupation lasted six months or so. It was followed by King Feisal of Syria, whose tenure didn’t even last that long. Very shortly afterwards, he was ousted by the French. The French army which occupied Syria kept it until 1946.
“In the 1930s, we had a period of calm and a period when tourism really flourished. We had famous guests in the hotel in the thirties, a lot of airmen, record-breakers, and what-have-you. Almost daily, we had private aeroplanes flying through Aleppo, eastbound, westbound. It was a period which in the history of the hotel is something you can look back upon with nostalgia. During the Second World War, we had the British occupation. Quite a number of very famous soldiers stayed with us: Auchinleck was one, Général Catroux. De Gaulle did not stay with us, but he had several meals in the hotel and addressed the crowds from our terrace. After that we had Syrian independence. Our last illustrious guest was our president, Hafez al-Assad.” With that, history seemed to end, leaving only memory and the attempt to survive.
“The Baron’s used to be on the Grand Tour. Everyone wrote about it. When did what you might call fashionable travellers stop coming to Syria?” I asked.
“It all stopped with World War Two. After the war, we had very few of those glamorous personalities – Gene Tunney, or the Lindberghs, or the Roosevelts, or royalty, quite a few royal families, the Swedish, the Danish, the British. Now the fashion has turned into mass tourism. It’s groups coming in in hordes, and going out in hordes. It’s no longer interesting from an innkeeper’s point of view. It has none of the charm and attraction.”
“Were there any interesting regulars?”
“We had one famous German archaeologist, Baron Max von Oppenheim. He spoke beautiful Parisian French. He was short and stocky. In the old days, it was the hallmark of archaeology to wear the sun-helmet. He’d been digging even before the First World War. In the thirties, old Baron Max used to come here in the middle of winter, even when it was snowing, and he wore his sun-helmet. He had a massive stick, which he moved around in the air to emphasise what he was saying. It was quite a menace if you happened to be in the way. Last time he was here, he was ninety-two. He got ill, and we went to see him in the Armenian hospital. When he came back, I heard the nurses complaining that every time they went near his bed, he pinched their bottoms. Oh, we also had a very courtly Armenian gentleman who used to come to our night club, when we had one. He had perfect manners, always impeccably dressed. He once admitted to me he was so polite that when he was about to make love to a young lady, he would ask, ’Madamemoiselle, permittez que je vous monte?’” At this, he laughed.
“Did I hear the British used the hotel as their headquarters after the war?”
“After the First World War, yes.”
“And they never paid their bill?”
He whispered his answer, as though he were embarrassed, “No, they did not. Anyway …”
“How was it during the Second World War?”
“Everything was hush-hush. There was a poster behind the bar of a large ear. In the middle of the ear was a swastika. Everyone was supposed to be careful. I remember we had a young woman staying with a man she said was her brother. She gave her name as Christine Granville, but she was Polish. He was an officer in Prince Victor’s Own Regiment, whose motto was, ‘From Kabul to Kandahar.’ This was the regiment that dethroned his great-grandfather, the King of Afghanistan. He had a ring from Queen Victoria which said, ‘From enemy to enemy, from friend to friend.’ We used to go shooting great bustards, what you’d call wild turkeys, on the Raqqa road. Some time later, I had a letter from her asking me to send a Red Cross parcel to Hissam, this great grandson of the King of Afghanistan. He’d been made a prisoner of war in Italy. By the time I sent the Red Cross parcel, he’d already escaped. But he was recaptured.”
“What happened to Christine Granville?”
“Years later, I read in The Times she’d been murdered by an Irishman. Then the story came out. She had run away from Poland to Hungary. She was to all intents and purposes a British agent in Hungary. She spent some time here, she went down to Palestine, she came back here, she went to Algeria. She was dropped in France, where she did great things, saving quite a few lives. Incidentally, she saved Xan Fielding’s life.” Xan Fielding, a legendary British irregular in the Second World War, had also stayed at the Baron’s. “She refused jobs, like Lawrence of Arabia before, offered on the basis of her wartime work. Her last job was as stewardess on a cruise liner. She befriended an Irishman on board. He fell in love with her. She was not in love with him. He shot her dead in a hotel in London.”
Krikor Mazloumian turned the logs with a metal poker, reviving the fire. “I remember another night when a British officer here received an order to pick up a general from the Turkish border, put him up in the hotel for the night and take him down to Jerusalem. The officer met the general, who was in civilian clothes in accord with Turkish neutrality laws during the war, and brought him to the hotel. As he turned to leave, the officer told the general, ‘The car will be ready at 8 tomorrow morning.’ The general asked him,
‘You mean, you’re going to leave me alone tonight?’
‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’
‘Do you customarily leave Wehrmacht generals who are defecting to your side unguarded?’ The officer then posted two sergeants outside his room until morning. That was what made the work interesting.”
“Does it still have some moments?”
“No,” Mazloumian said. He looked miserable. Reliving those happier years was the only relief from the pain in his eyes and the decay of the hotel.
As I left him, sitting by the fireplace, Sally was putting the drops into his eyes. As they dripped down his strong, weathered face, they looked almost like tears.
Although Krikor Mazloumian regretted the passing of his hotel’s golden age, the Baron’s still attracted its share of unusual characters. One evening, a man I met in the hotel bar told me proudly he was an Aleppo Jew, and said he often came to the hotel for a drink. He asked me, as so many Syrians did, that if I should mention him in my book, not to use his name. He thought there were less than a thousand Jews left in Aleppo, about five hundred fewer than the Jewish medieval traveller Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela had counted in 1165 AD, and a far smaller community than had lived in Aleppo before Israel came into being in 1948. “There are many more Jews in Damascus than here,” I said.
“Yes, but we are much better.”
“Is it difficult for Jews here, with the restrictions?”
“There are hardly any restrictions any more, but we Jews can’t win, you know,” he said. “The US Embassy gives us multiple-entry visas for America, easily, just because we’re Jews. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”
“Better than being a Lebanese Shiite applying for an American visa,” I said.
“But then, I get to JFK in New York. You know what the immigration officer said? He said I had to go back. He wouldn’t let me in, because Syrians were undesirable.”
At 10 a.m. on Easter Sunday, I returned to the cul-de-sac of the three churches. The square was nearly empty, much quieter than on Good Friday. At the Melkite Mass, a white marble chancel screen divided the altar from the small congregation. Cherubs’ heads, flowers and religious symbols carved into the marble cast their shadows, outlining them sharply against the white. Above the altar partition, along its length from one wall to the other, was a row of ikons. Above each ikon was a white dove, and hanging from the beak of each dove was a white stone ball, like an egg, symbol this and every Easter of rebirth. Hanging from each ball was a brass sanctuary lamp, lit again now that Christ had left his tomb. Many of the ikons in the church represented St George, a favourite with Greek Catholics. Through an opening in the middle of the screen, the altar was visible, canopied and elaborate. The priest, as in the old Latin mass, faced the altar, his back to the people, singing the Mass, with old men near the altar singing the responses. They sang the liturgy like Latin Gregorian chants, a capella, and it was beautiful. When Mass ended, the bearded priest turned to bless us, and we filed out quietly.
At 11 a.m., the Maronite Mass nextdoor was a stark contrast: the building was much darker and larger. It had none of the painted columns and blue ornate mouldings of the more rococo Greeks. The congregation was larger, and no partition separated them from the altar. There was a canopy over the altar, but simpler than the Melkite, without the Greek’s ornaments, in dark yellow stone like the church building itself. There were similarities as well: the priest faced the altar, and he sang without music. Most of the people received communion, kneeling at the altar rails as Catholics in the West used to. Everyone departed quietly, stopping to speak in low voices on the church steps outside.
The day’s major liturgical event had been the 7 a.m. Mass at the Greek Orthodox cathedral. I had missed it, beginning as it did before my breakfast. One Catholic who went said the ceremony took three hours and was attended by hundreds of Orthodox and a few Catholics.
After the Maronite Mass, I went to the Mazloumians’ house for an Easter Sunday drink. Just after I sat down with a small Armenian brandy in my hand, the real Easter Sunday visiting began. An old man who sold pianos was the first to arrive. Sally spoke to him in Armenian, offered him a chair and gave him a glass of brandy. She then left the room and returned with more visitors, a couple and their three beautiful daughters. The middle girl, a strikingly beautiful, dark haired child, was named Sevan after a lake in Armenia. The seven-year-old was nicknamed Mauke, Armenian for mouse, and she was surprisingly mouselike. Her response to every question was to put her hand over her mouth, giggle and hide behind one of her sisters. The girls’ parents and the Mazloumians talked about their many trips to Armenia, friends they had in the capital, Erevan, and changes they had noticed there over the years.
Sally could not have been kinder to any of us, pouring brandy, bringing more nuts from the kitchen, speaking English to me, Armenian to her other guests, and making certain her husband had his eyedrops. Somehow, though, she seemed aloof and somewhat lonely. All the foreigners who were her friends in 1947 had left Aleppo, as had her daughters. It seemed that most of the other Englishwomen in Aleppo were married to Syrian Muslims, and they did not socialise outside their own houses and families.
Armen said the Armenians were the craftsmen of Aleppo. “There is an old saying in Aleppo,” he said. “The Armenian makes, and the Muslim sells.” He said an Aleppo Jew once told him, “God created the Jew with a head, the Armenian with hands and the Muslim with a prick.” To Aleppo’s Jews, he insisted, goy referred to Muslims, while Christians were Ar-ririm, “uncircumcised Gentiles.” The Jews of Aleppo had another saying, “Don’t trust the goy, even if he’s in his grave.” Armen considered himself an authority on all Aleppo’s communities, the Jews, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, Arab Sunnis, Alawis, and he probably was. He met them all every day in his hotel.
As the afternoon wore on, the other guests left, and Krikor poured the three of us more brandy. He put a record of an Armenian Gregorian Mass on his phonograph, sat down and closed his aching eyes for a moment to listen. We talked about Aleppo, the Armenians who lived there and some of those who left. Krikor mentioned the book In Aleppo Once, by a mutual friend in London named Taqui Altounyan, about her illustrious family. Her grandfather was a physician who owned the hospital where Sally had come to work as a nurse after the Second World War. There had been terrible divisions in this talented family, because, as they said, the grandfather had left the grandmother for a younger woman. Ernest Altounyan, the son, who was also a doctor, never spoke to his father again. Ernest had served in the British army and had been a close friend of T. E. Lawrence. The Altounyans’ hospital had closed by the 1950s, and no Altounyans remained in Aleppo.
Sally showed me the wedding gift the Altounyans had given her forty years before. It was a book, bound and painted by hand, with flowers drawn on many of the pages. In it were the names of forty years of guests of the family, rather than the hotel, for which there was another book. She asked me to sign, and I put my name there after pages on which I saw Patrick Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding, David and Ruth Holden, Freya Stark and my old friend, Michael Adams. Almost every signature I mentioned, leafing through the book, brought a story from Krikor or Sally: the marriage at the British Consulate in Aleppo of Robert Stephens and Taqui Altounyan, the second marriage and scandal of the old Dr Altounyan, the murder of David Holden in Cairo.
“Who do you think did it, Charles?” Sally asked me. David Holden was the Sunday Times Middle East correspondent, who was murdered after taking a taxi from Cairo airport in 1977. The Sunday Times, when Lord Thomson owned it and Harold Evans was the editor, devoted its then considerable journalistic resources to an investigation, but the murder had yet to be solved. “We were told the journalists were ordered to stop their research, just as they were getting near the truth.”
Two other prominent Levant hoteliers, Horatio and Valerie Vester of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, had also signed. “We haven’t been able to visit them since 1967,” Sally said. Israel conquered East Jerusalem in 1967, and since then no Syrian could legally go there.
“How is Michael Adams?” Krikor asked.
“He’s fine. He lives in Devon and teaches at Exeter University,” I said. “His sons have become journalists.”
“I remember the night he showed up here from Beirut. He was the Manchester Guardian’s man there. It must have been twenty years ago, no, more. He was with two other journalists. They came up here. We had some brandy, and they were up all night.”
Aleppo was a city of memories, where past and present mingled in the air like cigarette and pipe smoke over Armenian brandy in the fading afternoon light. It was never an imperial capital, and it suffered no sudden changes. It had decayed slowly and become like a beautiful actress, wearing her old jewels and hiding her wrinkles with make-up. Youth had gone, but the grandeur and dignity were unmistakable and indestructible.
Sally asked me to accompany her to the Anglican Easter service that evening. I said I had already been to Mass twice. “Oh, please,” she said. “It will be very nice. It is about the only chance all the English wives here have to see one another.”
“I’m a Catholic,” I told her. “I’ve never been to a Protestant Easter service. I doubt they’d have me.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “You would be very welcome. Anyway, it’s in a Catholic chapel. It belongs to the Jesuits. I promise you’ll like it.” There was no Protestant church in Aleppo, but the Jesuits lent theirs to the Anglicans at Christmas and Easter when their vicar came up from Damascus.
In the evening, Armen drove his mother, his fiancée, whose name was Rubina, and me in his white 1958 Chevy Nomad station-wagon, more a tank than a car, to the Jesuit chapel for the Anglican service. Armen grunted when, as he dropped us off, I asked him whether he was coming in. “I’ll pick you up when it’s over,” he said. Sally raised an eyebrow at her son and said to me, “Armen doesn’t go to church.” Armen drove off in the Aleppo traffic, and Sally led Rubina and me up the steps.
Inside the tiny modern chapel were about twenty women, most of them formidable English matrons, made more English and more formidable by long years in the East. The room was quiet, and the mood seemed solemn, though some of the women had come only for this rare occasion when they were able to see one another.
We sat in the back. I did not know what to expect. Behind me I saw Anthony Akras, a Catholic like myself, but here in his capacity as British Consul. He handed everyone a hymnal. The hymns would play an important part in the service to come.
The priest walked up to the altar. He was not the sort of Anglican vicar I had seen in England, with starched collar and National Health spectacles. He looked more like one of the “with-it” Catholic priests I had known in California twenty years earlier: bearded, thin, dressed in a long white designer cassock wrapped tightly at the waist. When he spoke, his words came out less as sermon than as a breathless rendition of “Listen with Mother.”
“Today,” he said, in an excited whisper, “we are going to sing these hymns. So, listen carefully. This is a very special day, as I’m sure you all know.”
The matrons had no idea how special it was and were exchanging worried glances. The vicar began the service, which had some of the same formulae as the new Catholic vernacular Mass. He would interrupt the proceedings every few minutes to explain to the ladies what he was doing. Perhaps he assumed they had not been to church before. The service proceeded up to the Gospel, which he read from the Good News Bible with great enthusiasm, as though he were reading a children’s story, a magical tale about a stone and a sepulchre that we had never heard before. The sermon or homily that followed was better still. He talked about birth, rebirth, love, life, children and lions. He went on about C. S. Lewis. Suddenly, he asked his wife, a thin young woman, to stand and read from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This took about fifteen minutes, and the matrons were stunned. When his wife sat down again, the vicar beamed benevolently at her, like the host of a television talk show. When he pointed his open hand at her, I was afraid for a moment we would have to applaud. He then repeated the story in outline and slowly explained its message. I thought perhaps the repetition of the story of Asian the lion was for the benefit of a four-year-old girl across the aisle from us, but she was falling asleep. The vicar’s intonation never lost its sense of anticipation, as though he were perpetually on the verge of cutting a birthday cake.
“Now,” he surprised us, “we are going to have a special treat. This is a precious gift which our community in Damascus has come to know and love very much.” He paused. What could it be? Sally Mazloumian closed her eyes, as though she were trying to imagine herself somewhere else, probably at home by her warm fire. “We have,” the vicar continued, “two young men from our Damascus community here with us tonight, and they are going to sing for us.” He paused again. The women froze in panic. This was not the sort of Easter to which they had been accustomed in Scotland, Yorkshire or even the Home Counties.
Two well-dressed black men in their early twenties, who had earlier acted as ushers, walked from the back pew to the altar. “These two,” the vicar, who may have missed his calling as a television impresario, “are James and Kwachie.” The matrons around me increased the pace of their eyebrow-raising as the vicar, or “president,” as the new prayer book called him, presented James and Kwachie. “They are from Africa, from Zambia. Isn’t that right, James?” The young man on the right nodded. “And they are going to sing a special song they learned in their native land, at their church in Africa.” His emphasis on the word implied that it was a strange and exotic fairyland inhabited only by monsters, princesses and vicars. “And this is a special song for Easter.”
Without organ music, or music of any other kind, James and Kwachie began to swoon and sing on the altar step. The chorus of the song was, “There is a certain man, and Jesus is his name.” The song was pleasant, and James and Kwachie swayed to the tune. On the second singing of the chorus, the two men clapped their hands with the rhythm. The vicar stepped into the aisle and called out, “Let’s all clap.” He began clapping his hands and stamping his feet, motioning to the matrons to do the same. The four-year-old girl woke up and buried her head in her mother’s lap. Most of the women sat absolutely still. Too embarrassed to do anything else, a few women gently tapped their hands together.
When the service was over, and a bemused Anthony Akras had collected the hymn books, Sally whispered to me, “I promise I’ll never force you to a Protestant service again.”
A Lebanese “businessman” was staying in the hotel to rest from his work in Beirut. One evening on the terrace, he told me he owned a few illegal gambling shops in Hamra, a fashionable quarter of the Muslim, western half of Beirut. “I was a concert pianist,” he told me, “but I could not make any money. So I opened a little place with pinball machines. When the war started, I added slot machines.”
“Don’t you have problems with the militias demanding extortion?” All the militias in west Beirut demanded “protection money” from businesses, particularly from bars and casinos.
“We pay. We pay Amal. We pay Hizballah. We pay the Druze, so no one bothers us much.”
“I hear things are a bit quieter now that the Syrian army is back in west Beirut.”
“It’s much better now. Last year it was terrible. You couldn’t do anything. Even the gangsters were afraid to go out at night. I know: I’m a gangster.”
Early one evening, I returned to the hotel from a bookshop. Among the books I had bought was The Golden Reign: The Story of my Friendship with Lawrence of Arabia by Clare Sydney Smith, a woman who had known Lawrence when he was serving under her husband in the RAF. I went into Mr Mazloumian’s tiny office, under the stairs and behind the switchboard, and sat down. I showed him the book.
“I’ve known most of his friends,” Mr Mazloumian said. “I saw him here when I was a little boy. He was just a young archaeologist pacing on the terrace. His friends were Stirling, Ernest Altounyan … Now everyone claims to have known him. Do you know William Saroyan?”
“I know his books. I come from California.”
“William Saroyan used to stay here when he visited Aleppo. He told me I should write my memoirs.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I can’t be bothered. Saroyan was a marvellous man. He loved Aleppo, and he stayed here a long time. Later, he came by ship to Latakieh. He met an Armenian there, who invited him home. Saroyan left a few hours later, and the Armenian then wrote a book about their friendship.”
“You think it was like that for Lawrence.”
“Obviously,” he said. “Everyone wrote books about Lawrence. How many of them really knew him?”
“Did you know anything about him?”
“From all his real friends, it seems he was completely above board. He was an ascetic. He was an idealist. He was a bloody fool.” Mazloumian was emphatic on the last point.
“Why a bloody fool?”
“He refused all honours, all awards,” he said. “The more important thing was, he refused to play any role here after the war, because he was afraid the Arabs would think he had gone into the revolt for personal motives.”
I wondered whether it would have made any difference, whether Lawrence could have used the prestige of his war exploits to plead for justice in Syria. The French and British had ignored both their promises to their Arab allies and the wishes of the American President Woodrow Wilson in their post-war haste to carve Syria between themselves. They could afford to ignore a young officer who had gone native.
Mr Mazloumian invited me back to the house for a drink. We sat by the fire, sipping Armenian brandy and recalling the spirits of Aleppo. Armen came in with a Swedish television crew, who had an appointment to interview his father for a film on Aleppo. I offered to leave, knowing how little most journalists and film-makers liked having their colleagues around while they conducted interviews. The Swedes kindly asked me to stay, so I moved out of their way and listened. I had already heard most of the stories Mr Mazloumian was telling the Swedes, but they managed to elicit one I had missed. It was about his childhood in the First World War.
“Our family fled to Zahle, a beautiful village in the Bekaa Valley, rather than be taken to Mosul. At that time, Mosul meant certain death for all the Armenians moved there by the Turks. In Zahle, I became very ill with typhus. I had a high fever. The one who stayed by my bedside was my grandmother. I remember hearing her pray to God for the life of this little boy. She offered her own life if I lived. And that is exactly what happened.”
