Читать книгу Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria - Charles Glass, Charles Glass - Страница 16

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHERE ARMIES FAILED

At a desolate crossroads about five miles north of Aleppo, Armen Mazloumian and I visited a stone monument known as Qabr Inglizieh, the English Tomb. Armen had put me in the Chevy Nomad, fought the Aleppo traffic, damned everyone who got in his way, and taken me to the site of the final battle in the Levant of the First World War. The encounter between British and Ottoman imperial troops was more of a skirmish, but Britain had left there a three-sided pillar, twelve feet high, to commemorate the event. There was no mention of this battle in Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, nor in the memoirs of other British officers who fought in the Syrian campaign. It was not clear who, if anyone, won. Atatürk’s retreat, with his forces intact for the defence of Turkey, succeeded. The British army conquered Syria. In that sense, both sides won. The only losers were the Syrians, from Alexandretta to Aqaba, who passed from the subjugation of one empire to two.

“Well, this is it,” Armen said. “You wanted to see it.” I paced around the memorial, looking at each of its three faces in turn. One surface was bare stone, but the other two had English inscriptions.

“ON THIS SITE WAS FOUGHT on October 26th 1918 between 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade 5th Cavalry Division, Egyptian Expeditionary Forces and THE TURKISH FORCES the last engagement in the Middle East of THE GREAT WAR 1914–1918.”

From top to bottom on the other face were the words: “ROLL OF THOSE WHO FELL IN THIS ENGAGEMENT OR THOSE WHO DIED OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN IT.”

There followed the names of four British officers and seventeen Indian soldiers, both Hindu and Muslim, of the Jodhpur and Kashmir Lancers. Around the monument, a low fence of barbed wire had twisted and fallen into decay. Within the wire, the English Tomb rose straight from the dust. There was no marble plaza to accommodate the visitors who never came. There were no flowers to commemorate the dead, and no one maintained the site. Weeds grew all around, and trucks drove past without slowing. A steady wind blew the sand into our faces, a wind that over centuries would wear the stone away, until first the words become illegible and then the stone itself eroded to formless rock to be taken to a museum and preserved under glass as a “monumental ornament, c. 1800–2000 AD.” Yet the stone marked the location where the war which promised Syria its freedom came to an end. It marked the last spot where Mustafa Kemal, who would soon be called Atatürk, covered the retreat of his forces into what would become the Republic of Turkey. This was the site of the battle that sealed Syria’s fate, placed borders across its hills, separated families one from the other and resulted in the wars, dispersals of peoples and tyrannies which have marked its twentieth-century history. This was where an empire, an empire four centuries old, had made its final stand. It was not an empire for which Armen, an Armenian whose kin had been murdered in the death-rattle of that empire, was likely to shed a tear.

One afternoon, we got into Armen’s Chevy Nomad, which was always parked in a garage under the terrace in back of the hotel. He reversed, as he always did, down the drive and through the stone gateway that led to the busy street in front of the hotel, Rue Baron. There could not have been more than a millimetre of space between the car and the pillars on either side, but Armen never bothered to look and never scratched the car. As we backed into the traffic on the one-way street, a man who looked like a beggar approached Armen’s side of the car. He put a grimy hand through the window, but Armen ignored him and continued to pull away. The man stayed with the car as Armen shifted into drive and moved forward with the traffic. We stopped at a red light with the other cars, and the man was still with us. Armen turned his head, regarded the man carefully and uttered a sound that was something between a bark and a growl. “Urrrghhaaaa,” he roared at the man, who backed away, startled. The light changed, and we drove off. “That guy’s always bothering me,” Armen explained. “I keep throwing him out of the hotel, and he keeps coming back.”

Armen took me around the low hills on Aleppo’s edge, hills which had become suburbs. All the building was in stone, taken from nearby quarries. The stone architecture made Aleppo one of the prettiest cities in the Levant and one of the few whose twentieth-century houses and offices did not offend the eye. They blended with the older buildings, developing themes which had always been used by Muslim designers, the dome, the arch and the tower. Many had graceful terraces and balconies, and even the larger, fanciful houses under construction had charm.

“This is Aleppo University,” Armen said, pointing out a rare complex of square, mostly glass structures. “It’s not as good as Damascus University.”

“Is Damascus University pretty good?”

“It’s pretty bad.”

Around the university were new stone villas in the Shahba and Omran Quarters, more of the gradual growth of Aleppo. We went on to Aleppo College, which was until 1967 an American high school. After the Arab–Israeli War in June of that year, and Syria’s breaking of diplomatic relations with the United States, the school closed. The local Protestant community reopened it. We saw boys playing soccer on the football field, their parents watching from the sidelines as we parked nearby. All the former staff cottages were empty and derelict. “I’ve been in all these houses,” Armen said. “I know all the teachers and missionaries who lived in them. It would break their hearts if they could see them now.” As we walked past each bungalow, Armen named its former occupants. “This is where the Millers lived,” he said. “Mr Miller was the last American head teacher.” Armen seemed melancholy at the sight of the school falling into disrepair. In a way, it was symbolic of the old Aleppo into which he had been born, always declining, always decaying. The new additions, the quality of the new buildings, did not seem to compensate for the loss of the old way of life.

We drove to the modern Chahba Oasis Hotel, nothing more than a collection of mobile homes, each caravan white with orange trim. Even the so-called reception was a small, prefabricated hut. “This,” said Armen, who was dissatisfied with the three-star rating the Tourism Ministry had awarded the grand old Baron’s Hotel, “is the four-star hotel.” The fourth star meant the Chahba could charge more, and the three stars kept the Baron’s just poor enough to deprive it of money to reinvest in improvements. We drove past what looked like a large apartment building. “In the sixties,” Armen said “that was the Montana Cabaret.”

“What is it now?”

“A mosque.”

Saad Qawakbi’s family had prospered under the Ottomans, and fought on both sides during the First World War. Qawakbi, now in his early sixties, had served as President of Syria’s Court of Appeals. As he drove me back to the hotel one evening after tea with his family, I mentioned how much lovelier Aleppo seemed to be than Damascus, because all its houses were of stone. “In Damascus, there is no stone. In Aleppo, we build with it, because it is available, not because people thought it was beautiful.”

Further on, he pointed out his law offices in an imposing building near the public gardens. I asked him, “You use the French legal system here?”

“It’s like France, but we don’t have trial by jury.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not good. In Europe, the majority is against the jury system. It all began with the case of the chevalier français. He was killed by his wife. The jury set her free. The majority of the jury were women. There are many such stories. If you amass a jury, one soldier, one farmer, they don’t know the law.”

Law had played an important part in the life of Syria from the earliest times, when the Mesopotamians brought the Code of Hammurabi, the Romans later imposed the Lex Romana and the Arabs introduced the Shariah Law of Islam. Different schools of legal philosophy inhabited different quarters of the great Muslim cities, and legal debates took place in the mosques. A teacher of Islamic philosophy had once told me a story, that he said was true, of a Muslim judge or qadi presiding at a trial. After hearing all the evidence, the qadi was considering his verdict. He noticed the defendant was laughing. “Why are you laughing” the qadi asked him, “when it is my soul that hangs in the balance?”

A lawyer I met later in Damascus told me the government had begun dismissing high court judges who decided against it. There were no juries. Who could trust a soldier or a farmer to deliver a fair decision when souls hung in the balance and lawyers appointed by politicians were so much more reliable? And when even the judges appointed by the president himself to the highest court failed to bring in the required verdict, what was a government to do?

That evening Armen took me to a little sandwich shop near the hotel. It looked like an empty pharmacy, but Armen assured me it had the best sandwiches in Aleppo. Armen had ordered the sandwiches in advance by telephone, telling me the man took a long time preparing his food. When we arrived a half hour after the call, the sandwiches were just being toasted. The man wrapped the sandwiches, small French loaves with meat and spices inside, in paper and handed several to us. “Do you want a Maria or a Toschka?” Armen asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Here,” he said, “try the Toschka. There is a story that goes with these sandwiches.” Without waiting to hear whether or not I wanted to hear the story, Armen told it. “There were two girls here who fled from Hungary during the 1956 revolution. One was named Toschka, and the other was Maria. They got jobs as dancers in the cabarets, you know, exotic dancers.” His voice dropped an octave as he said the word “exotic.” “Every night, after their show, they would go to Waness’s restaurant for a snack. Toschka missed Hungary and told Waness that she wished she could have something to eat to remind her of Hungary. He promised her, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll have something special for you.’ Okay, so, Toschka and Maria finished their cabaret act the next night and went to Waness for their snack. Waness gave her a sandwich of sojok, melted cheese and spices.”

Sojok was a dark, hot Turkish sausage, which some Armenians said was Armenian. I was eating the Toschka as he spoke, and it was delicious.

“Toschka said the sandwich wasn’t really like in Hungary, but she liked it. She asked him what he called it. Waness thought for a second and said, ‘Toschka, for you.’ Maria said she wanted a sandwich too, the same as Toschka’s, but without cheese. This explains why, in every sandwich shop in Aleppo, you can order a Toschka and a Maria.”

Armen bit into his Maria, chewing on the bread and sojok. “Not many people,” he said, “know the true story. And if you write about it, don’t get it wrong, like your friend from the Chicago Tribune.”

Armen insisted he had told the same story to a correspondent from the Chicago Tribune. He assumed all journalists knew one another, so I was held at least partly responsible for the fact that readers in Chicago were under the mistaken impression that a Maria had cheese and a Toschka didn’t.

Aleppo has the best and most extensive souqs in the Levant. They run for miles along cobbled walks, under the domes of stone roofs. Their only natural light comes from grilles overhead. They look like tunnels that had been excavated, not the man-made structure that had expanded west over the centuries from the Citadel to the Antioch Gate of the old city walls. Too narrow for cars, they seem to have remained unchanged, except for their roofs, from the time Ibn Jubayr saw them in the twelfth century:

As for the town, it is massively built and wonderfully disposed, and of rare beauty, with large markets arranged in long adjacent rows so that you pass from one row of shops of one craft into that of another until you have gone through all the urban industries. These markets are all roofed with wood, so that their occupants enjoy an ample shade, and all hold the gaze from their beauty, and halt in wonder those who who are hurrying by.

When Ibn Batuta came to Aleppo from his native Morocco in the fourteenth century, he found the bazaar “unique for its beauty and grandeur.” Six centuries on, the Aleppo souq had far more peasants, gypsies and bedouin, more Kurds, Turks and Armenians, a greater variety of peoples, than the bazaars I knew in Damascus, Jerusalem or Beirut. It remained more Ottoman, more a piece of a vast empire of diverse peoples, languages and religions, than a piece of a nation-state, limited officially to one people, one language, one faith. It breathed variety, heterodoxy, life.

Each of the thousands of shops inside the souq specialised in making or selling something, and similar shops were usually grouped in the same quarter: there would be a row of ropemakers along one corridor, goldsmiths in another, silversmiths, spice sellers, rug-merchants, carpenters, butchers, candlemakers. Each turn in the winding alleys brought with it new sights, new smells. Spices were on display in large, open burlap sacks: hundreds of pounds of fresh thyme, sesame, mint, crushed pepper, cardamom and cumin, ready to be scooped up with small shovels and weighed in brown paper bags. Carpenters made chairs, tables, desks and cabinets to order, and their souq was a constant whir of lathes and electric saws, the floors all around covered in sawdust. Some shops specialised in soap, often made of olive oil, shaped like bricks and sliced like bread, some varieties scented with lemon or thyme. Children crowded into the sweet shops, where fresh chocolates, sugar-coated nuts and coloured bonbons lay on open trays. The patisseries specialised in a variety of Arabic pastries, made of honey, flour and pistachios, some in layers, others wrapped in strings of dough as fine as vermicelli.

In the gold souqs, windows were ablaze with row upon row of bracelets, necklaces and rings, many in a finely woven mesh known as Aleppo gold. In the mornings, bedouin families would flock to the gold shops to buy jewellery for the women and girls. They would sit on stools in the shops, men, women and children, examining each piece carefully, trying gold rings on babies’ fingers, putting necklaces on the wives. As secure wealth, gold had been better to the bedouin than the always devaluing Syrian pound. In the early evenings, I would see old bedouin women, perhaps widowed, coming to sell the necklaces, rings and earrings that their fathers or husbands had given them years before.

In one corner of the souq, not far from the Citadel, an old man sat in front of his shop. On his head he wore a red tarboosh, or fez, the traditional hat of Syria’s urban middle and upper class. A tarboosh maker, he seemed to do just enough business to keep alive. He said he was the last of a trade that used to employ hundreds of people. He made all his tarbooshes to order, measuring each customer’s head and fashioning a wood or metal mould to exactly the right size. With his mould stored in the shop, as he would leave his suit measurements with a tailor, the customer could order as many tarbooshes as he liked as they wore out over the years. Unlike suits, which might expand with age, a man’s tarboosh never changed.

Traditionally, the tarboosh had permitted the urban male of the Ottoman Empire to cover his head, but remain free to press his forehead to the floor in prayer. Its disappearance began in Turkey, where Atatürk banned it as part of his campaign to turn Turks into Europeans. Sir Steven Runciman had told me when I went to his house in Scotland before my journey to Syria, “I first arrived in Constantinople in 1924, but at that time women still wore veils. You still saw tarbooshes on every head, and camels crossing the bridge over the Gold Horn. I went back next in 1928. The veils had gone. The men were all wearing cloth caps instead of tarbooshes. And the camels were forbidden.”

An amusing, irreverent American travel writer, Harry A. Franck, also noted in 1928, “The red tarboosh has as completely disappeared from Turkey as the dinosaur.” Franck noticed that the Turks found it impossible to go bareheaded and difficult to wear European caps. “Even today, after two years of practice, something like six Turks out of ten, at least on the Asiatic and less sophisticated side of the Bosphorus, will be found with the vizor of the cap on the side of the head, or protecting the nape of the neck. Not entirely from ignorance, either: when a man has worn a fez for many generations, an awning over hitherto unshaded eyes may be annoying.” He went on, “It is easy to imagine what the thousands of fez-makers in Turkey thought of the Head-dress by Decree. Most of them have gone to Syria, Palestine, Egypt, for few were adaptable enough to change their trade …” With the demise of the tarboosh south of Turkey, the fez-makers had nowhere to go – except possibly to America to work for the Shriners. The tarboosh and its craftsmen were going the way of the camel caravan, dying with the last generation born under the Ottomans.

Along most of the passageways of the Aleppo souqs, there were khans. These old caravanserais, or inns, were places for commercial travellers of centuries gone by to put up for the night with their escorts and their animals, where they would do their own cooking and sleep in their own blankets on the stone floor. In the hotel age, the khans had become warehouses and workshops. Near most of them were mosques, where I saw men washing before prayer.

Ritual washing was an important part of Islam, and keeping the body clean was a Syrian tradition predating the Romans. Before private plumbing put most of them out of business, Aleppo had hundreds of public baths. Only a few remained. One was the Hammam Yughul opposite the Citadel, an elaborate octagonal building in finely cut yellow stone where tourists were welcome, but where I found it impossible to enjoy a Turkish bath. It was afternoon, and the bath-keepers had turned off the steam. They let me undress and told me to wait in the bath for the water to heat up. I waited for about half an hour and gave up. I walked down to the Hammam Nahaseen, just opposite the old Venetian consulate in the Khan Nahaseen. The Hammam Nahaseen did not have the Tourism Ministry seal of approval that the Yughul proudly exhibited, but it had the advantage of working. From the souq above, I walked through an open door down stone steps to the large foyer. Around the green walls were divans, for resting after the baths, and in the centre of the room was a fountain with the soothing sound of running water. I left my clothes on a divan, and an old attendant led me into the baths. He turned a valve, and steam hissed out of pipes near the floor. Stone basins against the walls had taps for cold water. The main steam room was surrounded by small alcoves, like cloisters in a monastery. In one alcove, an old man with a short beard, and one closed eyelid where his eye used to be, waited to wash me. He told me to lie down, then scrubbed my skin raw with a glove that would take the grease off a frying pan. Then he washed the newly exposed layer of skin with a soft, hairy cloth. I went back into the steam room, sitting on a stone bench and sweating out all the Armenian brandy the Mazloumians had given me since I came to Aleppo. The masseur was away that day, they told me, so I could not have a massage. I rinsed myself with cold water from one of the basins, scooping it up with a tin bowl and pouring it over myself. I had been there nearly an hour, sweating and washing, before another old man wrapped me in towels and led me back to the divan in the foyer. He took the towels off me, and wrapped me again in fresh cloths.

I lay on the divan, resting, and a boy brought me tea. From the divan, I could see the feet of people treading the cobbles of the souqs above. When the muezzin called from a mosque nearby, several of the bath attendants set out their prayer rugs and prayed. I dressed, paid 55 SL and, feeling cleaner and far better than I had before, resumed my exploration of the souqs.

I went back through the covered souqs and out again to the fresh air at the western end of the markets. There I found the souq of the tomb-makers. In one yard, an old man and a young boy were working with hammers and chisels, carving names, epitaphs and verses from the Koran into marble and stone. Each one sat, quiet and intent, pounding rhythmically, tapping the words, letter by letter, by which we would know the dead. This was where the life of the souq ended, at its western edge, near the gate in the city walls that had long since come down.

Walking around the souqs to the wide road on the east side, facing the Citadel, I found a café and sat at one of several tables outside. A minute later, a young man sat down at another table. He was a study in white, white Wrangler jeans, white open shirt, white zip jacket, white tennis shoes; but from the neck up, he was dark: dark glasses, black hair slicked back and a dark stubble. When he turned to call a waiter, his jacket lifted a little to reveal a 9mm. pistol tucked into his belt. I took out my notebook and began to write about the souq. I included something about the man in white, who undoubtedly worked for one of Syria’s many security bureaux. If he was following me, he would not be the last man in Syria to do so.

I looked for the waiter to order coffee when I noticed someone else and wrote in my notebook, “Strange, as I sit here writing, I turn around to look for the waiter to order coffee. What do I see at a table behind me? Another Western, middle-aged man writing. Perhaps he is writing the great Levantine travel book of the twentieth century. Who knows?” I wondered whether he saw the parade in front of the Citadel and jotted, as I did, “Four women, one very old. All with faces covered, three holding parcels wrapped in cloth on their heads. A man with his son perched on a bicycle. Yellow taxis rushing round the Citadel like traffic around L’Etoile in Paris. Men in suits or sweaters walking. Two teenage girls coming home from school: one with a white headscarf, the other with a dress over her school uniform and her face covered. Students wear military-style uniforms at school. Tiny children in brown smocks on their way home from school.”

The ancient stone battlements of the Citadel, so well reinforced by the Ayyoubid prince Nur Ed-Din in the twelfth century, were giving way to earth and weeds. The moat was dry. The fortress that was Aleppo’s refuge and defence for centuries had become a tourist attraction, closed on Tuesdays, where the Tourism Ministry was reconstructing what it called an “authentic Turkish bath.” If I had been a medieval invader, I could not have taken it with ten thousand men. Its walls were too high to scale and too thick to penetrate with catapults. No wonder Ibn Jubayr had written at the height of its glory that “an assailant who wills it or feels he can seize it must turn aside.” Like Aleppo herself, the Citadel had not adapted well to modern times. Aleppo had lost much of its purpose with the demise of the caravan, and the Citadel had become a mere decoration in the age of modern warfare.

On its parapet in electric lights, most of them broken, were the Arabic words, “Unity, Progress, Socialism.” The Baath Party slogan rang hollow in Syrian ears that had heard them too often. Below the battlements, I watched a flock of goats, sure-footed on the stones, as they wandered up the great walls eating weeds. Where a hundred armies had failed, goats were succeeding.