NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (68 page)

On my way to Ma’aloula, a village in the mountains north of Damascus, I saw picked out on a hillside in white boulders a motto in Arabic.

“What does that say?”

“ ‘Hail to Our Glorious Leader.’
Meaning Assad,” said Abdelrahman Munif, and shrugged and puffed his pipe.

Munif is the author of a dozen novels. His
Cities of Salt
trilogy—
Cities of Salt, The Trench
, and
Variations on Night and Day
—had been translated into English, to great praise, by my younger brother, Peter Theroux, who suggested I meet Munif when I passed through Damascus. Munif showed me a limited edition of the first book. It was a deluxe large format with loose pages, boxed, with signed and numbered wood block prints by a famous artist, Dia al-Azzawi. I marveled at the prints. Munif smiled. Yes, he said—he had recently finished writing a volume of art criticism—they were very good.

He was born in Amman of a mixed Saudi-Iraqi parentage, and was raised in Saudi Arabia. Vocally out of sympathy with the Saudi leadership, who have banned his books and revoked his citizenship, Munif has lived in many places in the Middle East—as well as Paris—in his sixty-odd years and has held eight different passports-of-convenience, including Yemeni and Omani. Munif is an exile of a sort that hardly exists anymore in the Western world but is fairly common—at least as far as intellectuals are concerned—in the Middle East. He is essentially stateless, but remains unbending. In his last communication with the Saudi government he was told
that he could have his citizenship back but he had to promise to stop writing and publishing.

“No conditions. I will not accept a passport with conditions,” Munif said, and that was the end of the discussion.

I liked him from the first. He was laconic, kindly, generous, hospitable. If there was anything I wished to see or do, he was at my disposal. Was there anything I wanted to buy? I had no desire to buy anything, I said. Did I wish him to drive me to Beirut? I said I had been told it might be dangerous. But what suggestions did he have?

“Ma’aloula,” he said. “Saydnaya. These are lovely and very historic places you should see before you leave Syria.”

One of the curious features of Ma’aloula was that Aramaic was still spoken there by three-quarters of the population, who are Christians. Jesus spoke Aramaic. When he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” it was in Aramaic. When he said, “God is love,” it was in Aramaic. In the Bible, Jesus’ cry on the cross,
“Eloi Eloi, lama sabacthani,”
is Aramaic.

It was hard to find a person in Ma’aloula who spoke English, but Father Faez Freijate spoke it well. He was a plump cheery soul with tiny eyes and a white tufty beard and side-whiskers, like a comical old Chaucerian friar. He wore a brown robe and carried a staff. His face was pink-cheeked and English-looking, but he roared with laughter when I mentioned that to him. “I am Arab and my family is Arab for three thousand years!” He was from Hauran, in south Syria, and was the pastor of the Ma’aloula church of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, soldiers in the Roman army who had been martyred in
A.D.
300. The church was built in 320.

“Do you speak Aramaic?” I asked.

“Yes, listen.
Abounah
—” He clasped his hands and began muttering very fast. At the end he blessed himself with the sign of the cross and said, “That was the Lord’s Prayer.”

“How do you say, ‘God is love,’ in Aramaic?”

“I do not know.”

I wanted very much to hear Christ’s words as they were originally spoken. I said, “How about, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her.’ ”

“I do not know.”

“‘I am the light of the world.’ ”

“I just know a few prayers. Ask someone in town,” Father Freijate said with an air of exasperation. Then he said, “Have you seen the altar?”

Small and horseshoe-shaped, it looked like a shallow sink from which the drain has been omitted. It was the proudest ornament of the church, though it looked to me unprepossessing, until the priest explained it.

It was made of marble that had been quarried in Antioch. Its design had been adapted from the pagan altars of the animistic desert faiths—worshipers of bulls and cats and snakes. Such altars had been used for animal sacrifices, which was why their sides were necessary; and the pagan altars had a hole in the center for draining away the animal’s blood. This altar was made before the year 325, Father Freijate said, because that was the year that the Council of Nicea said that all altars had to be flat. It was unique. There was not another one to be seen anywhere else in Christendom.

“Why are there so many caves in Ma’aloula, Father?” All over the mountainside and in the passages and corners of the cliffs there were carved holes and shelves and caverns.

“The peoples were troglodeeties!”

“They lived in them?”

“Yes! And they had necropoleese and antik toombis!” He laughed at my ignorance and hurried away to help another visitor.

We went to Saydnaya. Saydnaya had two sides. One was a political prison, the other a church and convent. The prison, another bunker, was built on a hill but was mostly underground and surrounded by three perimeter fences of barbed wire. It had watchtowers but it hardly needed them, for the prison was absolutely escape-proof, but more than that, its dampness and its windowless cells shortened the prisoners’ lives by causing pneumonia and arthritis. There were said to be thousands of political prisoners at Saydnaya. A Syrian political prisoner was simply an enemy of Assad—sorry, Friend Assad.

The cathedral of Saydnaya was some distance from the prison, at the top of the hillside village. It was a happier place. It contained a convent and an orphanage—smiling nuns doing laundry, yelling children scampering in the back precincts. The nuns dressed like Muslim women in black draped gowns and black headdresses.

The history of the church was given in a set of old paintings, which could be read like a strip cartoon. A malik—king—out hunting, saw a gazelle. He drew his bow, but before he could shoot it, the creature turned into the Virgin. The king prayed. Afterwards, the king won a great battle. He returned to the spot where he had seen the Virgin and built this church.

I was about to enter a chapel when a friendly but firm little man insisted I take my shoes off. Surely that was done in mosques and temples but not in Christian churches? No, he said, I should read Exodus 3:5, the injunction “Put off thy shoes.”

This was Mr. Nicholas Fakouri, from Beirut, who had come with his wife, Rose, to bring a sacrifice.

“What sort of sacrifice?”

“A sheep.”

Munif’s daughter Azza translated my specific questions. The Fakouris had come by road from Beirut and had stopped in the bazaar in Damascus and bought a hundred-pound sheep for the equivalent of about ninety dollars. They had taken it here and presented it to the nuns at the church.

“They will kill it and eat it at Easter.”

“That is a present, not a sacrifice.”

“It is a sacrifice,” he insisted, using the Arabic word.

Rose Fakouri said, “I was very sick. I prayed to the Virgin. When I got better, I came here with my husband to give thanks.”

Driving out of Saydnaya, we passed the prison again, and I imagined all the men in those dungeons who had been locked up for their beliefs. Munif said that they allowed some of them out, but only after they had been physically wrecked by their imprisonment. He said, “They are sick, they are finished, they are ready to die.”

“Writing is difficult in a police state.”

He laughed and shouted, “Living is difficult!”

We returned to Damascus. He asked me to wait while he removed something from the trunk of his car. It was a large flat parcel, one of the limited-edition prints that I had admired in his apartment the first day we had met.

Standing at the juice stall, drinking my last glass of Damascus carrot juice, I realized that I liked this dusty, lively, rotting, uncertain, lovely-ugly
place, and that I was sorry to leave, especially sorry that I was not heading the sixty miles to Beirut, but instead through the desert, the back way, through Jordan to Israel again. That was my fallback position—a ship that was leaving Haifa in a few days. Like a surrealistic farewell, a bus went by while I sipped the carrot juice, and on its side was lettered HAPPY JERNY!

            
D
own Moussallam Baroudy Road, past the blue
To Beirut
arrow and the lovely semi-derelict Hejaz Railway Station to Choukri Kouwatli Avenue and following the arrow
To Jordan.
Instead of the short trip to Lebanon I had to take a much longer one, around its back, south into Jordan and hang a right into Israel, and keep on going to the coast and the waiting
Sea Harmony
that was sailing in a few days. It sounds like an epic, but in fact if I had made an early start, I could have had breakfast in Damascus (Syria), lunch in Amman (Jordan), tea in Jerusalem (Palestine; disputed) and dinner in Haifa (Israel).

These countries were so small! One of the more marvelous atrocities of our time was the way in which the self-created problems of these countries, and their arrogant way of dealing with them, made them seem larger, like an angry child standing on its tiptoes. They were expensive to operate, too: they had vast armies; they indulged in loud and ridiculously long-winded denunciations of their neighbors. All this contributed to the illusion that they were massive. But, no, they were tiny, irritating, shameless and vindictive; and they occupied the world’s attention way out of proportion to their size or their importance. They had been magnified by lobbyists and busybody groups. Inflation was the theme here, and it was just another tactic for these quarrelsome people to avoid making peace.

Lovely roads, though. That was how I managed to cover so much
ground. I was thinking: Why isn’t Route 6 as good as this—why can’t I get to Provincetown this fast? And then I reflected: We paid for those roads and bridges from Jordan to Jerusalem and on to Tel Aviv, and they are a hell of a lot better than ours!

After the last shrine to Basil, a triumphal arch at Der’a (where T. E. Lawrence was captured, fondled by a Turkish commander and then abused and whipped—one of the great chapters of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, ending “in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost”), and Syrian customs, I was held up by a car of Arab smugglers. Cartons of Marlboros, about fifty of them, had been crammed into the car’s chassis, and they were being removed and stacked at Jordanian customs, under the eyes of the suspects. Then, the green hills of Jordan, the queer Taco Bell architecture of the repulsively spick-and-span city of Amman and—since Jordan does not have a Mediterranean coast—a ten-dollar taxi ride from there to the Jordanian-Israeli frontier at the Allenby Bridge (thirty feet from end to end, another bit of Middle Eastern magnification) into the West Bank, real desert under brooding mountains and Israeli fortresses and gun emplacements; a bus to the Israeli checkpoint, and another ten-dollar taxi to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem.

All the way from Syria through Jordan and well into Israel, the truth of this expensive farce was evident in the sight of the tent camps of Palestinians—shepherds with their animals, displaced, hardly tolerated, snotty-nosed children and their ragged elders, despised by Jordanians and Israelis alike, who roar past them in Jeeps and buses, sending up clouds of dust, making a vivid frontispiece for the diabolical next edition of the Bad News Bible.

I stayed in Arab East Jerusalem and made a circuit of the old city again. It was another average day in Zion. Israeli police were in the process of arresting three Arabs near the entrance to the Damascus Gate, and a Jewish protester was being dragged away for holding a “pray-in” at the Temple Mount. At the sacred sites people assumed all the odd postures of piety, on their knees, in their stocking feet, bowing, sobbing, and—at the Western Wall—hundreds, carefully segregated by sex, men here, women there, separated by a steel crowd-barrier, gabbled over their paraphernalia of
scrolls and books, men wearing shawls on their heads like the Haurani crones of south Syria, and others had paper yarmulkes, like squashed Chinese take-away cartons, on their heads.

On a blocked back lane an hysterical Lubavitcher in a black hat and black frock coat and billowing black pants hoisted his orange mountain bike in order to squeeze past a van and, struggling through the narrow gap, knocked over an Arab’s stack of cabbages. The men began a futile argument in different languages.

On the Via Dolorosa, near the Flagellation Chapel, I heard a man say to a woman, “So now we do everything you say and you make all the decisions!”

And around the Fifth Station, where the Via Dolorosa ascends steeply to Golgotha, a woman was saying to a man, “Are you sure it’s this way? You’re not sure, are you? You’re just too embarrassed to ask someone directions.”

And farther down the Via Dolorosa, a child screaming, “But you said I could have one!”