3
Flight
Damascus, South Lebanon, Beirut 1960-1970
Images of events from decades ago flickered across Salman's mind like a well-preserved documentary. He remembered just how the moment of his escape from Syria tasted, how he breathed a sigh of relief as the shared taxi passed through the checkpoint on the Syrian-Lebanese border. The taxi driver assured the Syrian border policeman that everything was in order and handed over the passports of his four passengers. In the front, a corpulent lady sat wreathed in silence and a bad mood. She wore sunglasses and stared through the windshield, unmoving like a plaster statue, for the entire two-hour drive, without saying a word to either the taxi driver or her fellow passengers. Salman sat in the back by the right-hand window, next to a little old man who fell into a deep sleep as soon as people stopped talking to him. When the man woke up, he would curse the weakness of his advancing years and promptly fall asleep again. A dark-skinned, serious-looking Palestinian sat behind the driver.
Salman could hardly breathe. His heart raced. Although his passport was a skillful forgery, he was still afraid because he knew that—although there was no way of checking passports electronically at the time—border police had their own effective methods for identifying forged passports. But his worries proved unfounded. The policeman was friends with the taxi driver and took care of things himself without handing in the passports to the checkpoint in the building. In Syria, arbitrariness and a low sense of duty—even if they didn't often couple—could make all the difference when they did.
The policeman was dark-haired and stocky. Salman's heart pounded as he observed him—a Bedouin, he thought when he recognized the three blue dots on the man's chin, nose, and cheek. It was a primitive tattoo worn especially by all Bedouins. Bored, the man leafed through the passports, looking repeatedly inside the car and whispering the names to himself as he did so. Then he returned the passports to the driver and asked, “And what's for dessert?”
“Mandur—the best chocolate!” the driver replied slickly.
“Good, but God help you if you forget it!” the policeman said, waving the next car in the queue toward him. The taxi driver accelerated away, and when he was at a safe distance he commented, “Since he stopped smoking he's been addicted to chocolate. Before, a carton of American cigarettes used to cost me three dollars at the Beirut docks. Now a box of Mandur chocolates costs ten Lebanese lira—that's three dollars, too! That lousy Bedouin only likes Lebanese chocolates.” Then he added, “Didn't I promise you folks you'd have a smooth ride with me? Sometimes passengers complain that I charge two lira more, but isn't that better than sweltering for an hour in the sun while they examine your passports inside?” With these words he waved at the Lebanese border police and drove on past them into Lebanon.
Salman looked back as the Syrian border guard slowly receded from view. He would have loved to shout out, “You're not gonna get me, you sons of bitches!” but he thought of the old man next to him who appeared to have fallen asleep again and didn't want to startle him. The woman hadn't spoken a word either during the whole passport control. The grim Palestinian now revealed himself to be a ladies' hairdresser. He told a long-winded tale about how he wanted to get a visa for Canada because ladies' hairdressers were much in demand there. He had paid two hundred dollars for this information, and the head of the hairdressers' guild had even given him a letter of recommendation.
Even the fool is thought wise as long as he keeps quiet, thought Salman as the taxi driver laughed and said with a sneer, “Sure, because it's so cold in Canada that all the ladies' hair stands on end.” Salman forgot his own worries and had to laugh at the Palestinian's naivete. “Boy oh boy,” the taxi driver said to himself. “If you'd thrown two hundred one-dollar bills out the window, you might just have made a hundred kids happy.” The young Palestinian fell prey once again to his gnawing doubts and put the mask of his bad mood back on. The taxi driver retreated into his own thoughts, smoked out the window, and gave Salman a searching glance every now and then in his rearview mirror. Salman closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, taking refuge in his memories.
~
Flight is like a fate, an omen, a constant companion in Arab culture. Jews begin their calendar with the creation of the world, according to rabbinical tradition in the year 3761 BC. Christians begin their calendar with the birth of Christ. But in Islam, the calendar is connected to the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, which saved both his life and his mission. No attempt to reset the Muslim calendar to either the Prophet's birth or death has ever succeeded.
“Flight is beginning again. Flight is hope,” Salman thought. “Flight is wisdom, and wisdom is often mistaken for cowardice.” Now this same flight had helped him to cheat death.
So far, his life had been a chain of emigrations and separations. His mother had told him how he was born in 1945 on Baghdad Street, where she and his father, Yusuf, had been living. Three weeks later, his family had to flee Damascus because Musa Bandar, a gang boss, had threatened Salman's father that his goldsmith's shop would be raided and he would be killed if he didn't pay “protection” money.
So they fled to Aleppo where Yusuf was able to quickly open a new goldsmith's shop, with the help of his relatives. The well-to-do Baladis had been goldsmiths or merchants for centuries, and Yusuf worked there successfully for four years. They only returned to Damascus with their son after the criminal Musa Bandar was shot and killed by the police. For the next six years they lived in a little house in the modern al-Salihiya district. There Salman attended a Catholic school that he liked, and where his charm won over friends and hearts. But then his father bought the big patrician house on Misk Street in the Old City, near the exclusive Lazarist school, so that ten-year-old Salman had to start again as a complete stranger.
The French Order of Lazarists was founded in Paris in 1625 to help the poor, but in Damascus it was one of four exclusive schools for the sons of the wealthy.
Since the 1950s, the school had been run by Josef Ata—a Lebanese priest, a well-known theologian, and a strict but just man. From teachers and pupils alike he insisted on the same respect that he accorded them. Father Josef did not shrink from owning up to his errors and asking for forgiveness before his assembled pupils and teachers. In Arab culture it was considered tantamount to a miracle when anyone in power admitted to errors. As early as the 1960s, he had managed to attract to the school the best teachers in the country, and one of these was Father Michel Kosma. He taught ethics and rhetoric, and he had studied theater and philosophy in Paris in his youth. After falling hopelessly and catastrophically in love with a young actress, Kosma retreated forever into a theological shell. In 1956, he joined the Order of Lazarists in Paris and became a priest. Shortly afterward, he returned home to Damascus.
Father Michel was a gifted producer and director, and soon the senior students were putting on world-class plays that delighted audiences. Salman brought passion and enthusiasm to his acting. He learned to speak clearly and confidently, and to use facial expression and gesture. Father Michel treated him as he would his own brother. He called him mon petit cousin. At first Salman thought it was a nice joke, but later his father told him that their greatgrandfathers had been brothers. Father Michel recruited senior students from the Sacré Coeur girls' school to play the female roles. He warned his pubescent students to treat the girls with consideration at all times. “Because they're being brave and also because they're your guests,” he would repeat time and time again. But the boys' hormone-fueled brains saw only willing objects of their desires in the ripening young females, so that erotic romances kept blossoming, until the catastrophe of 1963.
One year prior to Salman's graduation, Father Michel suffered a bitter defeat. A pale female student from a powerful Christian family fell prey to the blind lust of a horny boy who would almost have raped her, had an attendant not come to her rescue at the very last minute. Maximus IV, then the patriarch of the Catholic Church, immediately banned theater at the Lazarist school, without granting the priest a hearing. Kosma was severely reprimanded and suspended from all his duties for a year. Salman often visited him in his room, a Spartan cell with a cot and a small shabby table. Father Michel cried like an abandoned child.
After his cousin's punishment and suffering, Salman lost any inclination to be at the Lazarist school, but another teacher came to his rescue. He was a young French priest named François Semeux, and he taught physics. He would visit Father Michel every day and was the only one who could make him laugh.
He started to look after Salman as if he had been ordered to do so by Father Michel himself. Unlike Salman's cousin, Father François was a left-wing radical. He supplied Salman with French books and discussed films and novels with him. Physics was his passion, but he was widely read and well versed in world literature.
Salman's friendship with the young Father François was sealed with a book of plays by Jean Genet. The two started meeting more often, went for long walks, and talked about everything under the sun. Just like Genet, Semeux was on the side of the weak. He confided to Salman that he had entered religious life so as not to have to carry a weapon. At the time, it was impossible to avoid military service in France, and any attempt to do so carried a prison sentence. Just like Genet, Semeux was also in favor of independence for the colonies, especially for Algeria.
Semeux lent Salman books on socialism and debated with him at length. They would read the writings of Saint-Simon, Camus, Sartre, and the great classics of the Enlightenment. Salman lapped it all up and felt deeply indignant at the injustices in the world, but he could not yet imagine doing anything about it himself.
One night, on his way home, Salman saw a man sitting next to a trash bin outside a villa, eating food scraps that he had salvaged. Salman could not believe his eyes. He went up to the man and found out that in two days' begging he had received nothing and so he had been unable to eat. He was a farmer who had fled to the city to escape his debt. Salman gave him all the money that he had in his pocket and hurried away. That Sunday, his parents were entertaining business guests at home, with champagne, wine, and dishes of the finest delicacies. For the first time ever, Salman felt a deep aversion toward his father and his well-to-do family. He couldn't sleep that night.
~
In March 1963, after barely eighteen months of democracy, the Syrian army took power in a coup and declared a state of emergency. Among those involved were several factions fighting for the upper hand. Gradually, an unassuming air-force officer named Hafiz al-Assad emerged from the shadows to become the sinister new leader of the country. He could boast neither charm nor eloquence, but he was secretive, brutal, and a master conspirator.
In his heart of hearts, Salman became a socialist, but he wanted nothing to do with the Syrian Communist party. He believed it answered to Moscow, was corrupt, and just like the government, was led by a clan. The Communist party gradually became the Bakdash family's private enterprise. It was subject to both the Syrian regime and to Moscow at once. But along with his friends, Salman believed that selfless fighters were needed to topple the Syrian dictatorship by force.
At the university Salman studied mathematics and physics, but he also attended philosophy and history lectures. He studied in order to avoid the compulsory, brutal two-year national service. As long as he was in school, he was exempt. Also, he needed time to decide what he wanted to do with his life.
At the end of June 1967, shortly after the devastating defeat of the Arab states by Israel, Salman joined the armed underground movement with four friends and his cousin Elias, who had just turned seventeen. The purpose was to overthrow the Syrian regime. The overwhelming majority of Arabs believed that their defeat had been caused less by the strength of Israel than by the incompetence of the Arab governments, which had specialized in humiliating their own peoples. However, few members of the opposition were ready to sacrifice their lives to oust these regimes. Salman was one of the minority who was willing to be a martyr, if it came to that. From that moment on he was officially at arms and on the run.
The taxi driver honked his horn at a colleague driving past in the opposite direction. Salman opened his eyes and looked out of the window. His glance wandered over the green hills, where the apple trees were in full bloom. He breathed in their scent and thought that freedom smelled like apple blossoms. And for a moment he forgot all about exile and being on the run.
Lebanon was still at peace that spring. The civil war would not start for another five years, in 1975, and then rage for fifteen more. This little country on the Mediterranean was called “the Switzerland of the Middle East” for its banks and snow-capped mountains, its free European lifestyle, and its neutrality in political conflicts. This description was popular, but inaccurate. It was a slogan, invented for helpless people groping for the first available signpost to safety. Lebanon was nothing like Switzerland in either its attractions or flaws. And Beirut, the great beating heart of that little country, bore no resemblance to any Swiss city. Compared to Beirut, Zurich was a neat little family hotel with a bank, a boutique, and a restaurant on the ground floor. Beirut was a planet with its own laws—or no laws at all. The city extended its generous hospitality to all: the innocent and the guilty, beggars and billionaires, pacifists and weapons dealers and drug barons alike. No other city in the Arab world printed as many books as Beirut. Most of them were meant for other Arab countries and made their way to their destinations legally or illegally, with the help of courageous tourists, dealers, taxi drivers, and passengers.
At that time, the opposition parties from every Arab country were active in Beirut. They agitated against the dictators in their respective countries and were more often than not financed by other dictators. Here people could live well under the radar, provided they studiously avoided treading on the toes of any of the more than twenty secret services operating in Beirut. The CIA, KGB, Mossad, and agents from Arab secret services were long-term guests in the city, which also played host to over ten armed Palestinian organizations.
Salman's own knowledge of Lebanon came from an illegal visit to a guerrilla training camp three years earlier. Germans and Japanese also trained there, alongside Palestinians and other Arabs.
At the time, Salman had gone to the Palestinians with a small group of Syrian men and women—for weapons training and to learn how to live and operate as an underground movement; in short, how to move “like a fish in water” among the “popular masses,” as Mao had put it. Most of the fighters were former students who had read Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara, and wanted to imitate these revolutionaries.
At that time, Salman had lived quietly under an assumed name in a Palestinian camp in southern Lebanon. In the camp there was an atmosphere of cold mistrust among the various groups, and contact with strangers was strictly forbidden. The trainers were brutal, primitive sadists. The whole thing was more like a prison camp than a place where the idealistic project of a free future was being forged.
And now, several years later, here he was back in Lebanon, with false papers again—this time not to learn how use weapons and explosives, but simply to survive. This time he would be able to live at his Aunt Amalia's place. His mother, Sophia, had contacted him by roundabout means and informed him that if he got out of Syria alive, Aunt Amalia would gladly take him in. This surprised him because, while Aunt Amalia liked his mother, she was not at all on good terms with her brother, Salman's father.
The root cause for the hostilities lay more than thirty years in the past. Amalia had married the man she loved, not the man deemed suitable by her mother, her father, and her two brothers—Salman's father, Yusuf, and Uncle Anton, Elias' father. She had met Said Bustani at the university. Both had been studying literature and philosophy. He was Lebanese, highly gifted but from a poor family, and—as if that wasn't enough—an Evangelical. Salman's father never used this word. He used to say “Protestant” with his lips pressed together, as if to indicate that such people were poor ignorant Arab Christians who had been led astray by American and German missionaries. And although Amalia was a few years older than her brothers Yusuf and Anton, their opinions carried more weight than her own.
Sophia always used to say that Amalia embodied three revolutions. A woman who studied in the 1940s and who also smoked and drank was one revolution; then when she went and married the man that she—and not her family—wanted, that was the second revolution; and when this man was not even a Syrian Catholic but a Jew, a Muslim or, even worse, a Protestant, well, that was the third revolution.
Amalia's well-to-do Baladi family was ashamed of her. Honor killing never crossed their minds, but they treated their disloyal daughter as if she simply did not exist. This was even more humiliating than killing her, since her death as a martyr to love would have elevated her to a shining legend and caused much mourning in wealthy, enlightened Christian circles. But the Baladis would then have been regarded as heartless, primitive criminals. The clan was at pains to deny this triumph to their rebel. The family's ultimate disdain was, however, their refusal to even acknowledge their daughter's existence. One week after eloping with Said, Amalia was cast out from her family, dispossessed, and forgotten. Nobody was allowed to talk about her, or to name any daughter after her.
Amalia was unimpressed with all this. She loved her Said. He was a fine man. He became a professor at the American University in Beirut and wrote several books on philosophy, causing a sensation each time. Once he was even charged with blasphemy, but in liberal Lebanon he was acquitted. The accusation itself was the best possible advertising for the book, which ran to twenty editions over three years. When Salman read the book, he found the dedication very moving: For Amalia, the woman from a worthy future.
Aunt Amalia herself became an English teacher. Her only heartache was that she and her husband had had no children, although she loved them. The Baladi family in Damascus noted this with glee—superstitious as they were, they ascribed Amalia's childlessness to the curse that her mother had uttered while donating candles and incense to the Virgin Mary, so that she might cause her daughter's ovaries to wither and become unfruitful. Sophia laughed at that. “As if the Virgin hasn't anything better to do than cause ovaries to wither!” she cried.
When Aunt Amalia came to Damascus, she would stay with the family of friends. Salman's mother would invite her out to restaurants, but never to her home. That was forbidden. Amalia knew her brother, and she could understand her sister-in-law's attitude. However, when Salman and his mother came to Beirut, Amalia always wanted to welcome them into her home, but such visits were few and far between. It was only later that Salman learned both his mother and several other women in the family had tried in vain to convince Amalia's parents to reconcile with her. Even after George Baladi died in 1944, his irascible widow still refused to forgive her daughter. “No wonder,” Aunt Amalia recalled, “that she suffocated on her own mucus during a fit of anger.”
Later Amalia's husband came into money through an inheritance and bought the roomy apartment on Pasteur Street, in the middle of the beautiful Old City, the liveliest quarter of Beirut.
He died suddenly in January 1965, after a short illness. Amalia mourned the loss of her husband all her life, but she locked her grief away in her heart and lived alone as a widow in her spacious apartment. She had a generous widow's pension and resigned from her job. Free of all obligations, she was finally able to do what she had always dreamed of: reading, painting, and traveling. She always wore black. It kept away flies and lustful rats, she would explain ironically.
But Amalia had stipulated in her will that she was to be laid out in her coffin wearing a white wedding dress, as it was her wish to marry Said again in the hereafter.
Salman climbed out of the shared Syrian taxi in central Castle Square, took his suitcase, and waved down another cab. “Eleven Pasteur Street,” he told the driver. He was curious to meet Aunt Amalia, whom he had not seen for years. He had no idea that his life would undergo a radical turnaround at his widowed aunt's home.