In Xanadu (4 page)

In the queue for the bus to Acre I talked to a young Jewish soldier and his girlfriend. They were both tall, brown, well-built and good-looking; the boy ate a packet of crisps, the girl wrapped herself around the boy. Had it not been for the machine guns that both were holding it might have been a homely scene. They were friendly; both were highly educated and at first seemed liberal and thoroughly reasonable. But when the conversation turned to Israeli affairs their replies were chilling. When I asked the boy whether he minded policing the West Bank and enforcing the illegal occupation of Jordanian territory he said that it was not a duty so much as a right, a privilege. The girl agreed. She complained that in the Israeli army women were trained to use rifles and even shown how to drive tanks, but then only given clerical jobs. She said: 'What's the use of being taught to use a gun if you're then not allowed to shoot with it?'

For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world. Sacred to three religions, the city has witnessed the worst intolerance and self-righteousness of all of them.

Israeli buses are the fastest, most comfortable and efficient in Asia. They are the only ones in which you can write a diary and read the results afterwards. But the view from their windows is invariably depressing: you read much about how the Israelis have made the desert flower, but little about the cost. The dual carriageway from Jerusalem winds past not a land of milk and honey, but a scape of scarred hillsides, rubbish, dumps, telegraph wires, pylons, concrete, dirt and dust. The towns are charmless and ugly; there is barbed wire everywhere. Perhaps inspired by the view, an American
kibbutznik
began a long lamentation behind me. She talked without pausing for an hour and a half:

'. . . my cousin speaks better Hebrew than I do it's kinda intimidating he went on a kibbutz and worked with chickens . . . there are six major cities I gotta see my interests are very diverse. . . look Burger Ranch well fancy that burgers in Israel . ., home is a big air force base East Coast absolutely gorgeous my boyfriend Rob he's graduating in statistics wants me to get a lot out of this ... I guess I could do it but I'd prefer not to enough problems I have allergies neuroses I'm a vegetarian I could really use a sterile environment my analyst childhood problems some long name for it cruise long holiday . . . Rob and I difficult time this girl in the statistics department we will work it out. . . I'm very curious links Zen Buddhism Jewish mysticism
kibbutznik
philosophy.. . .'

It grew worse as we left the hills. Outside all was shoddy and new: a sprawl of supermarkets, warehouses, drive-in cinemas, factories and military installations - all imposed over the old Palestinian villages, bulldozed after their inhabitants were evicted in 1948. On the coast between Haifa and Acre we passed a line of luxury concrete hotels hung with fairy lights and giving onto private beaches occupied by fun fairs and nightclubs. The Israeli woman next to me pointed it out proudly. 'Look,' she said. 'We have everything!' Not wishing to give offence I nodded. But I thought: No. You've taken the oldest country in the world, one of the great centres of civilization, a kind of paradise - and you've turned it into suburbia.

New Acre confirmed my prejudices. It has the decaying, unloved look of a provincial Californian town of the late fifties - all parking lots and spurious palm trees. But its building has at least spared Old Acre from the horrors of Israelification. Old Acre has survived as an Arab ghetto. It is run-down and the old weathered stone is crumbling, yet to come to it from New Acre is like chancing upon an unexpected oasis in the desert. It is still essentially a mediaeval town and there are few buildings which post-date the Ottoman period. Marco Polo could probably still find his way around without too much trouble. The
funduq
of the Italian communes have been rebuilt as Mameluke
han,
the churches turned into mosques and the mole in the harbour topped with new stone to shelter the fishing boats - but all these occupy the same sites and preserve the same dimensions as the crusader originals.

Mediaeval opinion was divided about Acre. Many thought the safety of its harbour, the cosmopolitan population and the fortunes that could be made there all compensated for its failings, namely 'diseases, evil smells and corruption of the air'. Others were less sure. The priggish Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr was a particularly fierce critic. 'Its roads are choked by the press of men, so it is hard to put foot to ground,' he wrote. 'Unbelief and unpiousness there bum fiercely, and Pigs [Christians] and crosses abound. It stinks and is filthy, being full of refuse and excrement.'

Nor was it just Muslims who were aware of Acre's failings. As the thirteenth century progressed, the place became increasingly unruly so that by the middle of the century it was suffering from a chronic crime problem. By the time Polo came here, it resembled, in the words of James de Vitry, one its bishops'. . . a monster of nine heads, each of which is fighting the other. Nightly men are murdered within the city, men are strangled, women poison their husbands, whores and drug vendors are prepared to pay high rents for rooms, so that even priests lease houses to them.. , .'

Surprisingly little has changed. We were still sitting at our cafe in the Old Town when we were approached by a tall suntanned Arab boy. He wore Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt which read TURBOSURF SENIOR WINDSURFER, There was an air of corruption and decadence about him, but he offered us a room for a pittance and we accepted: I had only £600 to see me through to Peking, twelve thousand miles away. This was not going to be a deluxe holiday, whatever else it might promise. As he led us to his house through a maze of back alleys, Hamoudi told us of all the different narcotics he would be prepared to part with, for only a small consideration, should we so wish. After he had finished I congratulated him on his English.

'Where did you learn it?' I asked. 'In jail,' he replied.

He led us up a flight of stairs, under a line of drying nappies, into one of the filthiest houses I have ever seen. From down the end of the corridor came the wail of a screaming baby. In another room, whose door was open, we saw what I took to be his father, an enormously fat Arab gentleman who was sprawled toad-like on a bed. He had button-black eyes, wore
a
dirty shift and in his mouth was lodged the brass filter of an out-sized hubble-bubble. In the following twelve hours we passed the door of that room several times, yet Hamoudi's father never seemed to move. He never blinked, never scratched himself, never left his station to eat or to wash. He certainly never spoke. The only indication that the man was alive were the aquarium-like sucking noises that emerged from his
nargile.

Hamoudi led us into an empty room at the end of the corridor. The paint was peeling, a naked light bulb dangled from the ceiling and the whole place smelt strongly of livestock. Hamoudi went out into the corridor and pulled two stained mattresses into the room. While Laura washed, Hamoudi fetched two cups of Turkish coffee and, as a present for me, a pile of Arab soft porn. 'Gearls,' he explained, displaying a set of black jagged teeth. He sat on the bed, flicked through his magazines and treated me to an anecdotal history of his sex life. Hamoudi's existence seemed a fairly comprehensive passage through the different vices. There was little he had not bought, sold, smoked, sniffed or made love to. In particular he had had many gearls, he told me: Swedish, French, Italian, Israeli - but, he confided, the Bulgarians were undoubtedly the best. I should try one sometime. Hamoudi rambled on until Laura returned from her shower and evicted him.

When we emerged it was late evening, and the light was beginning to fade. We wandered through the bazaars as the fishmongers were beginning to shut up shop, and the old Arabs who had been sitting outside, leaning on their sticks began to hobble off home. We visited the Palace of the Hospitallers, buried since the fall of Acre in 1291 and recently excavated by Israeli archaeologists. The refectory is one of the finest crusader buildings to survive anywhere. It has magnificent vaulting held up with three monolithic round pillars, as huge and heavy as those in Durham Cathedral, only simpler, with no chevron work or decorated capitals. The Hospitallers' refectory at Krak, built in happier times, is as elaborate and refined as anything to survive from the Middle Ages in Europe. This was very different: dating from the very end of the crusader period, it is sombre, defensive architecture, utilitarian and practical with no unnecessary details or distractions. It is the architecture of a people with their back against a wall.

From the Hospitallers' Palace we passed through the old Genoese quarter and arrived in what had once been the quarter of the Venetians. The Italian communes had claimed these areas in the early twelfth century as a condition for helping with their original conquest and had since zealously guarded their privileges and rights within the walls. Here they mixed with their own people, spoke their own language, and were disciplined by their own laws. There was a commune bath and a commune bakery to cater for particular tastes and habits, a commune church to bless and bury in a familiar tongue, among compatriots. To these quarters the Italians carried the feuds and rivalries that proliferated in mediaeval Italy. The vendettas of the family, the factions of Guelph and Ghibelline, the rivalries of Genoa and Venice, all these were brought to the Holy Land to add to the divisions that already complicated expatriate life there. Yet while the Italians dominated the commerce of the Crusader Kingdom they tried wherever possible to keep to themselves, preferring to live with a little Italy of their own creation, disdaining the ways and habits of the other Franks. It may just have been my imagination, but I thought that Acre still had a slightly Italian feel to it. Its coarse mediaeval stonework, the peeling stucco, the play of light and shade in the piazzas, the smell of baking bread, the horseshoe are of the sea walls - all this brought back memories of Italian sea potts.

One hundred yards in from the sea front was the Khan al-Alfranj. The
han
was a fourteenth-century Mameluke structure, but stands on the site (and incorporates much of the masonry) of the Venetian
funduq,
the caravanserai where the Polos would almost certainly have lodged during their visits to Ac e. During the months of
the passagium,
between Easter and late-autumn, the
han
would have been full of sea captains, merchants and sailors. Here they would wake and sleep, eat and drink, buy and sell, free from the laws and customs of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is a quiet place now. You enter the compound under a narrow arch of red and white polychrome keystones, past a pair of old metal-reinforced gates still hanging from their original rusty hinges. The windows are covered with white-painted shutters, there is washing hung up from the balconies. There is a faint sound of hammering from a coppersmith's shop. Along three sides of the
han
are lines of blocked-up, eliptical arches, left open on the fourth side to provide shelter for upturned dinghies, tangles of netting, lobster pots, and a single ancient car, now pillaged of its seats, headlights, windshield, and driving wheel.

When the Polos came here for the last time in November I27|, the months of the
passagium
were past and the
han
must have been almost deserted, just as it was now. Sitting down in a last pool of evening light to write up the logbook I wondered what Marco must have felt the night before he was due to set off from the relatively familiar world of the westernized Crusader Kingdom, into the unknown Orient. He was about the same age as I and presumably of similar inclination. Nor was the world we lived in so very different. There was a remarkable similarity, for example, between the Crusader Kingdom and the State of Israel. They had similar boundaries, boih were ruled from Jerusalem, and both were effectively supported by the West. Taking advantage of Arab disunity, they were both established by force and maintained by violence. They faced the same problems: Arab aggression outside, insufficient numbers within. In both, Arab and newcomer tended not to mix or intermarry: religion and culture divide the two now as it did then.