CHAPTER 6		|	SYRIA
		MA FI SHI

THE CLOSEST I CAME to gunfire was just after I crossed the border into Syria. If it came, I thought it would come from the cities, from the police, from around the crowds, and not on the road that cut up from Beirut through the mountains and back down again toward Damascus.

I passed through each country’s checkpoint without issue, accepted into Syria without knowing my destination, with nothing but a visa and my tempered American smiles. It had only been months since the beginning of the uprising that would be deemed a civil war the following summer. Leaving Lebanon at Masna’a, we barreled toward the first Syrian town, Haloua, whose name means “sweet.”

I sat in the back of the taxi. Just me and the driver’s fat friend in the passenger seat. They gained interest in me with the altitude, but lost it quickly when I told them that I wasn’t at all Lebanese. We entered into Syria and the fat friend lent me his phone, or rather rented it, fidgeting angrily when I had spent too long trying to make out my friend’s directions to a meeting point. Tension mounted as he demanded eight thousand lira, almost six dollars, for a five-minute call. The scruffy driver took his friend’s side.

I didn’t even have that much left—with my ATM card gone and a hundred grand lost to the mosquito inn, I’d spent nearly my last lira before the taxi left Beirut. I couldn’t give more than five thousand, I said, groping for a liter-and-a-half bottle of water that was on the floor. My mouth was dry. Someone grumbled. Outside there was no one, nothing but empty green and brown hillside one thousand meters above the Mediterranean. And then: a low thunk—something shot fast through the air—and I tensed as it struck me square in the forehead. A moment of shock . . . broken by the fat friend’s laughter. I was laughing with him: the blue plastic bottle cap rolled on the seat.

The air pressure was lower—that was all. We were nearly in Damascus. And the driver kept driving, smiling, on the threshold of the town whose name means “sweet.”

Just outside the city there is a parking lot where out-of-Beirut cabs meet the into-Damacus cabs. The new driver lifted my bags into the car.

“You’re not afraid?” he asked. (Everyone asked.)

“Should I be?”

He dropped me by the Saudi Arabia Embassy, at the bottom of the street by the fried chicken shop. I waited for Danny with the affable cabbie who had charged me seven times the going fare. Good thing it was all so cheap. “Alhamdulilah,” the driver said, Praise to God. He wiped his face with a soiled sleeve, answering the questions I didn’t have to ask about the state of things. “Ma fi shi,” there is nothing.

He believed it, and he may have been right to. But it was certainly wrong: There was something. Just not today, not there.

THIS WAS WHERE THE WORLD was looking. In Syria, during the week of May 8, 2011, there were murders. There were protests against the police state and those who suckled upon it, and there was gunfire to keep criticism at bay. In Damascus and Aleppo, Sham and Halab, the ancient city centers and modern downtowns were as quiet as they’d ever been—empty of their tourists, but carrying on with life at its most usual.

Damascus was gorgeous. Wide roads led into the city, where posh residential neighborhoods oozed with cafés and fresh-squeezed fruit smoothies for a dollar. My first sight was Jabal Qasioun, a mountain one thousand meters high and many miles wide that looms as the city’s inescapable backdrop; towns climb impossibly up the steep sides. It is said this is where Cain killed Abel.

In town, the streets are tight and welcoming. People passed with little glances and questions in their faces.

Danny had been living in Damascus for nine months studying Arabic. He played soccer with other international students, and still did with the ones who hadn’t left. Except for momentary sulks he had always had the most easygoing disposition I knew.

We walked toward the old city with five smoothies between us, into the Umayyad Mosque by the door meant for believers. Before its 1,300 years as a mosque, the site was first a temple, then a church. I copied the exact movements of the veiled women who took off their shoes and stepped over the threshold.

Inside, the mosque stretches a city block underneath wooden arches; the four arcaded walls around the immense white marble courtyard are themselves in and of the city: visible through the archways past the qibla wall are the dim stone alleys of souks around the mosque, colorful neon advertising things. According to one of the best-respected collections of hadith, this is where Jesus will return just before the end of days “wearing two garments lightly dyed with saffron.”

Crowds still pushed through the huge Al-Hamidiya souk, but we could pass through without shoving much or getting shoved. “That’s different,” Danny said. “That’s really weird.”

It was far, far quieter than it had ever been, everyone said. All of the foreigners were gone, many evacuated without wanting to leave. Still, even with reports of clashes in the suburbs, Damascus couldn’t have seemed farther away from everything. A few older guys threw dice onto a backgammon board; tables of Syrians hung out with us by the mosque at an outdoor café pulling on argileh. “You’re not scared?” a woman asked, smiling, sitting with her husband and her two sons.

They say Damascus is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and there is indeed proof it makes the very short list (competitors are all nearby: Byblos in Lebanon, Aleppo to the north, Jericho in the West Bank). For perhaps as many as ten millennia, through the Aramaean and Assyrian and Babylonian and Roman rules, Damascus has hosted tourists. Now, there were travel warnings from the U.S. Department of State, and travelers took them seriously. Demonstrations can take place anytime and anywhere, said the last alert. It went on:

Syrian efforts to attribute the current civil unrest to external influences may lead to an increase in anti-foreigner sentiment. Detained U.S. citizens may find themselves subject to allegations of incitement or espionage.

We hopped into a service, a shared taxi with eighty-cent seats for fourteen passengers, and waited for it to fill up. I noticed how exponentially more impatient I was than the driver, content to wait, smoke, wait.

In Maaloula, children still learn Aramaic as their first language. It is home to a convent carved from nature—a tree grows inside a cave, where doors shaped in the stone walls lead to separate shrines. All of Maaloula is like this in the shadow of high cliffs: the convent deep and tucked up high, only the outskirts spilling out toward the plains.

This old town in the Anti-Lebanon mountains is also famous for its wine. For four dollars at the convenience store at the foot of the convent, we took our pick from the local juice, bottled in whatever-was-on-hand. It’s as if the ground is so holy the wine comes out sacramental—sweet and brand new, with enough sediment to guess whose house it came from. And brown bag or no, open container laws are far less strict than in San Francisco.

We took a repurposed vodka bottle and sat outside the Blue Café in the very center of town. Empty. The owner described everything on her menu, looking relieved but a little weary. She would have to run to the restaurant next door to borrow ingredients. “It’s been one month since there were tourists at the Blue Café,” she said.

So we kept ordering—every time she offered something else, we wanted to make her happy. Antonia had moved back from Miami to open the restaurant less than a half-year earlier, just to watch the tourist industry collapse. “One month ago, you couldn’t find parking.” Except for one van and a car or two, the whole town square was empty. Her place was a good one. She taught us words in Aramaic. I downed lentil soup like biblical comfort food.

I suggested that maybe things would get better now—it seemed calm. “Yes,” she said. “Now that they know it was terrorists killing people—spies from Lebanon and from Jordan and from Israel and from Egypt.”

“Um,” I nodded. Part of me thought it was heartening to know Israel had moved up to the status of Other Scheming Arab Country in the eyes of some Syrians. But she believed beyond a doubt the state-run news: that the deaths of protesters (killed by army soldiers) and of army soldiers (killed by other army soldiers) were casualties of terrorist attacks, and not of her own government. Her Christian pocket in the Syrian population was nervous about any potential advances by the Sunni Muslim majority. They put their collective faith in Bashar al-Assad’s Alawi government, fellow minorities and defenders of the current state of affairs. Antonia had swallowed every morsel the news fed to her.

But Danny knew better than to take this entire interaction literally. These words weren’t a confession of Antonia’s true feelings, at least not necessarily. Why on earth would she have trusted me as a confessor? I could have been an American spy, or a government goon, or a boy with a big mouth.

If I didn’t know how to filter what I heard, what was I ever going to learn that was solid? Performers to other performers, that’s all we were. I was devouring the place with my eyes, but my ears were netting nothing of substance, and my mouth was dry.

We poured the last drops of wine from the lees of the vodka bottle. And then we had to leave, the last tourists in Maaloula for a long while.

WE WEREN’T LOOKING to vulture tour the protests, but what else was real here? Maybe if we moved around enough, we’d absorb something worth absorbing. Danny wanted to go to Aleppo—it was still quiet there, and all the foreigners who had been seemed to like it, and I was glad to keep moving.

The windows of the train cars were fractured with ripples of broken glass, but the ten-of-seven A.M. was still busy with travelers heading north out of Damascus. The man next to me took turns thumbing through a wooden misbaha of prayer beads and napping; the older woman across the aisle looked out the window for all six hours. Looks like violence, Eeyore might have said as a foreign correspondent. The next afternoon there would be clashes, as there had been for the past two months of bloody Fridays. That’s why we left for Aleppo on a Thursday, the week’s last ticket out of town.

As the train neared the station at Homs, the city stared back with the empty eyes of black and deserted windows, overgrown gray-green grass, and isolation—a military operation known as the “Seige of Homs” began one week earlier on May 6. The tracks passed through a tunnel in a tiny hill, on top of which sat a big Syrian tank camouflaged in brown and green. Another tank idled on a patch of grass under a bridge. The entire crew was sprawled out on the turf, leaning against the treads, watching the train go by.

Opposite the station platform, a small cluster of men milled about on the street. In the distance, I saw a soldier patrolling with a long rifle slung from his shoulder, gesturing to passersby. Two men boarded our car. No one got off.

And that’s where the train turned around, pulling backward out of Homs toward everything we had come from. Danny told me that two days earlier a train had been sent three hours from here back to Damascus. The other riders gave away nothing in their faces. Maybe they did this every day: hopped on the train and hoped it would make it to Aleppo. Maybe the train itself was the destination, a vacation from the daily grind—four American dollars for a first-class ticket to wherever-you-got-on.

Still, their quiet was a comfort, and I waited for the train to switch tracks, or to make a wide looping doubleback. The train never changed course. Hours later, we cruised into the outskirts of Aleppo. I was very, very confused and it was raining. But there we were, in ancient Halab, looking for a place to sleep.

AS THE ONLY NON-SYRIANS with suitcases in the entire city, we were looking for a deal. For a firm ten dollars there was the Jawahir Hotel, cozy and fine—tea and Internet and black humor about the demonstrations—but I felt the need to haggle, if only to feel a kind of momentary traction. I was pulling Danny along now. He was apathetic in the extreme about our bedding for the night, but we headed for the new, utterly empty four-star hotel in the heart of the old city.

We entered the gleaming lobby of the Carlton Citadel Hotel and approached the desk. The receptionist flicked her eyes at the door, firing a nearly inaudible “Mahmoud!” at the bellhop. Mahmoud scrambled to compromise jogging and elegance.

After ninety minutes of diplomatic discussions with two receptionists and the general manager, and three tours around the hotel, they offered their third best room for the price of the very cheapest. (It would have broken their hearts to forfeit the whirlpool bathtub of the Ambassador Suite.) And the cost of one night, we suggested, should be enough for two. The receptionist whispered this to her colleague, flushed and totally incredulous. Still, she would never say “impossible.”

The Carlton is housed in what was once the National Hospital, a stone mansion built by the Ottomans centuries ago. In three years, an underground bomb would destroy the hotel. Now, the room service was impeccable.

I was vulturing the spoils of an abandoned palace.

We were only miles from the roaring crowds that would be heard worldwide on the next day’s news. The old city swept out around the Citadel, which perches on a hill that long ago held all of Aleppo inside its stone walls. The thick souks below would be burned and bombed within the year, but now the shops still marketed comfort: the famous olive and bay leaf soap, hamaam, where skin is scrubbed soft; cafés for endless tea and shisha, as always. With a forkful of room service spaghetti Bolognese, I admonished myself for calling coziness counterfeit and for trusting only danger as real. I had no defense yet for those who would say, You hid from the protests—you didn’t really go to Syria! It was late. I consulted an iPhone Arabic dictionary and called down to the front desk: two pillows, please—room 111.

I CAME BACK DOWN to the patio outside the hotel, where I’d finished breakfast and forgotten a jacket and where a man in a dark suit and purple tie sat at the table under an umbrella, very quietly smoking a cigarette. He had thick silver hair, smoothed back to the nape. Like everyone in eyeshot he worked at the hotel, and I replied appreciatively to his concerns about my stay; the newly promoted director of food and beverages looked very tired. “Sleep well?” he asked.

Turkish coffee came and we chatted in the shade until it seemed the right time to leave.

“Room one-one-one, yes?”

I nodded. I knew there weren’t many guests to keep track of. “I’m Adam,” I said.

His eyes might have twinkled, the corners of his mouth tapering into little peaks: “I know.”

There is a person for every fact to be known in Syria, or there is someone who tries to know it. They are gathered under the umbrella of the Mukhabarat, the Intellegencia, that offers monthly compensation and little rewards for constant reporting on the neighborhood, especially on al-ajaanib, us foreigners.

It’s hard to look like you’re staying out of trouble when there are so many good ways to seem suspicious. Wandering up and over the windy walls that surround the old city, I found myself inexplicably inside a police compound. I slunk out through the main entrance, past an officer in a plastic chair caressing the magazine of his old wooden Kalashnikov.

In the park named Public Park in the west of downtown Aleppo, a man watched Danny and me walk. There were no qualms about staring here, and no one ever averted their eyes when I stared back at them. Heads swiveled after us. A camera unsheathed was like a streetlamp for gnats.

We labeled suspect spies with clock face directions: mukhabarat—five o’clock, twelve o’clock.

“Check your six-thirty,” Danny said.

There’s almost nothing to ever be afraid of: if they flicked their hand and waved us over, we’d go; if they asked to see documents, we’d show a copy of a passport. The panic was in the uncertainty.

In a wrinkled blue shirt, a gangly man with dark eyes lurked on the bridge over the inches-deep Quweiq River. We crossed and he followed behind. We turned right and he turned his head, deadly serious, one hand shoved deep in his pocket. We sat down on a park bench (nine o’clock, one-thirty) and he picked one to sit on at a distance, staring at the backs of our heads. Every time I looked he was staring, unblinking. Anxiety boiled. Say something! Do something! Or stop!

Maybe he did have the power to arrest us. Maybe, in this country where American diplomacy would have a hard time springing us from jail, he’d be able to make me disappear. But I could make myself deaf to all that. I told myself that anything was worth it just to know where the limits were.

The standstill was too infuriating. So I made up a little game: Danny and I would stand and walk in opposite directions, then turn around, and hand off a scrap of paper with nonsense codes scribbled on it. Like bad spies, we’d stick our hands into each other’s pockets without eye contact.

A different man made two passes back and forth in front of us. A third sat on a bench at two o’clock, flicking through prayer beads, slowly taking drags. He might not have been police. He might have been the only one.

At ten paces, Danny and I hit our marks, spun, passed each other. We made the exchange—a torn scrap of city map with the message NX844b1G in blue pen—and wheeled toward the exit. At our six o’clock, Blue Shirt followed far behind. We stood on the street looking for a taxi to make a quick escape.

It was all storm chasing. How close could I get to danger?

Blue Shirt moved nearer, sneaking into the leafy shadows by the bus stand.

If I didn’t get arrested and tortured as a foreign spy, I might find some calm in that relief . . . ten meters . . . and if I did, well, then at least I’d know where a real boundary was.

Finally, he motioned: Come. His eyes shifted for the first time, no longer blank but not commanding either like the others had been. Imploring, maybe.

He was almost completely hidden in the darkest corner of the street, leaning out from behind the bus stand posters. He motioned again as if maybe I hadn’t seen. But here police had no need to hide, plainclothes or otherwise, and Blue Shirt was acting far too bashful. He flicked his hand again, Come here! and touched his hand to his chest. A button unbuttoned.

Of course.

I had to understand the face I was wearing, the fear, the expectant energy. To anyone looking me in the eye, my love of the Middle East may have looked like lust, and it might have been.

He watched as we scurried into a cab: this wasn’t one of the million mukhabarat—this was just a man in a park trying to have sex with another man in a park. As for the others—five o’clock, twelve o’clock, six-thirty—we wouldn’t give them the time to tell.

I was an alcoholic who chugged a magnum of wine only to discover that it was grape juice. But my heart was racing, and that took the blood from my head, and I spent a brief moment at peace with my addiction that was far easier to feed than to fight.

THURSDAY NIGHT FROM the ramparts of the Citadel, we had watched lightning strike at the fringes of this city, shooting between clouds, lunging at steeples and minarets and smokestacks. The Citadel hill in the center of the old city has seen rulers rise and fall for millennia: Ottomans ousted Mongols and Mamluks who expelled Crusaders who deposed Muslim invaders who booted Byzantines who sacked Romans who bagged the Greeks who, at the sword of Alexander the Great, wrested Aleppo from whoever was there before and who likely did the same to those who came before them, all the way back to Abraham, who is said to have milked sheep on that very hill. (The city’s Arabic name, Halab, has roots older than the language, but halab also has another meaning in Arabic: “to milk.”)

But as with sheep, sometimes it is easier to go up than to come back down. Friday afternoon, cries came from within the empire, shouting for new and better leadership from among their own. Now that Aleppo was more than just one hill, and the country much more than one city, these were not cries an army could answer.

Demonstrations were christened anew every week: “Homeland Protector” for the national army, “Friday of Freedom” to honor Syrian Kurds, “Great Friday” when Good Friday wasn’t good enough. Twenty-five miles west or forty miles south, it was the Friday of Silks. This week, the government had for the first time promised not to shoot protestors—something they’d never done before anyway and who told you that.

In Syria, protests began late in the day by the new model: typically near one-thirty, after the congregational Friday prayer. Until Assad had passed a law three weeks earlier, lifting forty-eight years of emergency rule in a calculated nod to his opposition, prayer time was the only occasion when more than five Syrians were legally allowed to congregate without a government supervisor. We bought fresh juice from Yahiya and Ghazi at a stand near the Armenian quarter at one o’clock. Like alarm bells, the skies opened up: zero to wrath-of-God-hailstones and torrential rains in an instant. The overflow of men praying outside a nearby mosque ran for cover, or ran into the rain, or anywhere. For twenty minutes this was the chaos in Aleppo. Afterward, there was only news.

By late afternoon, Al Jazeera began to report the day’s first casualties. Cellphone videos showed chanting and organized protest in the streets of Hama, Homs, Qamishli far in the east and the Damascus suburbs. Anchors narrated the information they had, barely polishing eyewitness accounts and Tweets and YouTube clips.

We watched from our room in the Carlton with windows on the silent Citadel. On Syria News, under the “LIVE” banner, videos cycled through looping clips of major cities to prove that life was the same as it ever was, denying the protests and the dead and injured until the next day’s paper could blame terrorist activity. The Syrian state coverage was intriguing, provocative, artful. The art, of course, is deception: in Idleb, where protests were getting started, a few affable bakers were tossing pitas from the oven. In Homs, people looked like they might be gathering, but only very, very far away, down an empty street. “Live” from Aleppo, it was pouring rain. I pulled the curtains back just to make sure: sunshine and more sunshine.

Every city had passersby eager to crowd around the camera to tell it what it wanted to hear. Every Friday the interviews were the same, the faces hardly different: “Praise God, everything is fine. Nothing is happening.” Cut to a flock of tiny six-year-olds, spearheaded by the largest girl among them, vigorously declaring, “There is no better country!”

The success was undeniable: cab drivers, young men in the street or on TV, Antonia in the café in Maaloula—they all said the same thing: “Ma fi shi.” There is nothing. They sat and soaked up Syria News, perhaps because their TVs didn’t get other channels, or because they didn’t trust other channels, or because the news on other channels was too unsettling to believe.

Meanwhile, their fellow citizens took to the streets. These were people who knew the meaning of freedom because they were willing to die for it, not storm chasers who flirted with danger to test their own limits.

DANNY TOOK THE TRAIN back down to Damascus, and I was left alone for a last day in Aleppo.

The narrow streets of the old city smell like soap or raw meat or wet stone—every hundred meters shops shift in their inventory: spice markets, then tailors, then piles and piles of green and brown soaps. Shop owners dispatch their young kids to relay or fetch or give directions, but only when approached. For that composure, Aleppo is different from a tourist-heavy old city like Fez or Jerusalem, where outdoor displays breathe and squeeze in from the walls of narrow streets. Aleppo is always dim in the channels between old buildings, just wide enough for a pickup to honk its way past, just the same every day of the week. In this oldest of Old Cities, a dozen odd shops sell the same selection of keffiyehs, the same shoe inventory, the same pots and pans. There is always the question: How does anyone get by?

Early morning at the Hammam Al-Nahassin, downhill from the Citadel toward the Great Mosque, a few guys sat around not really waiting for customers. At twelve dollars, it was an expensive bathhouse by Syrian standards, but this was The Place for tourists and locals alike, with its own proud directive arrow at the end of the street. Down through the unassuming door to the vaulted wooden chamber hidden from the world, I spent the day washing and steaming and lounging and getting scrubbed to the bone, commanding shisha or coffee or kebabs, reclining on pillows set up in separate boxes along the wall. What I saw departed not at all from a long-baked fantasy of the Orient, and I slipped into it the way you would a bath that neither chills nor burns. The hamaam men replaced my wet robes with drying robes, and soon with lounging robes and a cloth tied around my head. And with that, they served tea.

Within a short hour’s commute, cities were tallying the damage of the Friday of Silks. In every Saturday paper, the government would report how many were killed by militant groups, which terrorists confessed to attacking civilians, how the weather was still hot in Damascus. Even in the airport there was no news, and no place past the taxi stand to spend Syrian money.

The purple-trimmed Qatar airbus taxied onto the runway. My iPod shuffled to “Trav’lin’ Light.” The man to my left was enormous in all directions, and we crossed our arms tightly and took turns uncrossing them because there wasn’t space for both. In accordance with an unspoken charter, silently keeping time and heeding the other’s discomfort, we crossed, uncrossed; crossed, uncrossed.

FROM: MASHA <MASHA.•••••••@•••••.COM>

SUBJECT: DANGER

SAT AT 9:46 PM

So I’ve been thinking a lot about your whole everything is risky, how can you possibly draw a line idea. OK well today, in the library, i was reaching to plug in my computer and my chair tilted over to the left and I came very very close to hitting my head on the chair next to me. I could have died! I mean, probably not . . . but if the library isnt safe then WHAT IS?

I think if you want to live an average, nice, kind of but not terribly meaningful life then there are definitely lines that define what dangers are necessary to live that kind of life and that’s why people will cross the street every day but won’t go to Afghanistan. You want a different kind of life. I respect that in you and in lots of ways wish I were more like that, but you know I’m a fearful person. I’m working on it.

yours,
Masha