The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor

by Salim Bachi

  WE LEFT DAMASCUS for Aleppo.

  The town was like a vast field of stones, rising from the rock and stretching towards the fortress built by Sayf al-Dawla. Standing on the ramparts of the Citadel, we amused ourselves by pointing out the souk, and the various khans we’d visited the night before which, in some cases, remained empty after being abandoned by the merchants and customers of past centuries. It was as if, after five thousand years of existence, the town were slowly turning into a fossil, keeping only its mineral shell, like those strange prehistoric molluscs of which all that remains is a solid imprint, the snapshot of a creature which died at the dawn of time.

  Other gaudier caravanserais could be discovered by the few tourists who strayed into the covered lanes of the old souk while walking beside the Umayyad Mosque, which was superficially similar to the one in Damascus but more human, intimate and alive. Built by the same caliph, it was also destroyed on numerous occasions, but history appeared to have no dominion over it. It too remained enclosed inside a gangue which had saved it from damage. It was just one more fossil visited by archaeologists of the faith who prostrated themselves before it five times a day, having performed their ablutions around a fountain that was the spitting image of the one in the mosque of Damascus but ochre in hue, the prevailing colour of the town, inspired by the immensity of the Mesopotamian desert.

  The town afforded some magnificent sights. I walked around as if in a dream, pretending to be Al-Mutanabbi, that arrogant courtier and poet, or Al-Farabi, the physician and illustrious citizen of the ancient city of Halab, the daughter of Abraham the shepherd. He preferred to milk his goats in solitude and their milk still flows over the marble of the great mosque, between the ochre and grey contours of the labyrinth, transformed into a place of hypnotic glory by the muezzin’s song, which was lovelier than the one in Damascus. This singing carried me towards unattainable spheres, so overwhelming my soul that I came down with a high fever and was confined to bed for several days in a nice hotel in the Christian district of Jdeideh. They even sent for a doctor who diagnosed a slight cough, probably brought on by exposing my simple, feminine soul to the complexity of a thousand-year-old city. When I’d recovered, I went back to exploring the narrow streets of the town.

  Thamara went everywhere with me in that city of soap bars. She stayed by my side and followed me to give me reassurance, as if holding a child’s hand on the way to school. She kissed me in Aleppo’s bazaar, under the mocking gaze of the merchants, who invited us into their shops, a ritual we willingly accepted before coming back out, slightly disenchanted, our bags crammed full of multi-coloured fabrics, the finest in the world, of course, and bars and bars of Aleppo soap, which surely needs no advertisement, enough of the stuff, in fact, to clean a whole regiment of brutish soldiers. As well as priceless trinkets that were not without value (indeed, noble Sinbad, as a man of taste, a fellow Arab, and a worthy descendant of Emir Abdelkader, you must appreciate the exquisite craftsmanship, the fine work of the artisan who sacrificed his sight and reason to it, a man whose wife ran off with his brother and who died of despair after creating this piece!) which, without a shadow of a doubt, would complement the dark, bewitching eyes of the houri accompanying a great lord like Sinbad, who would bring dishonour on himself if he left without giving one of these necklaces to his wife, or a silver bracelet to adorn the slim, aristocratic wrist of that gazelle, a silk scarf to cover that regal throat, a veil woven in Homs (before it was bombed!) by young girls with eyes as keen as birds of prey, who were dismissed from the job when they were of marriageable age, in other words, when they were twelve, or perhaps thirteen at the most, since, if you left it any longer, they would wither like flowers after dewfall and end up like elderly Fates, their clawlike fingers snagging on the warp as they spat out their chewing tobacco on the floor.

  BEFORE LEAVING ALEPPO, we had one last drink at the Baron. Agatha Christie and Lawrence of Arabia had once stayed at this hotel, founded in 1911. The latter had displayed a truly British sense of style by leaving without paying his bill. This was now a framed relic in one of the lounges, like Poe’s purloined letter, the only difference being that the thief himself had put his name to his crime and had then revelled in a life of compulsive lying by writing The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a farcical story about the Arab revolt led by a certain Faisal. I came down hard on Lawrence, who’d felt real affection for the Middle East and the Arab men he’d desired. He’d wanted to serve two masters, his desire and the British Empire; the Empire had won in the end and he’d ended up alone, swindled of his dreams, in England, where all he could do was build up his legend to avoid dying in vain.

  The barman was eager to please, since no one stayed there any more and the hotel was on the verge of collapse—the Baron seemed to have been deserted since the Second World War. He headed over to an enormous machine which looked like an old fridge and began trying to get it to work. The ancient piece of machinery was supposed to produce cool air. A loud throbbing sound filled the room and a little hot air brushed past our faces. When I remarked that the machine was producing more noise than comfort, the barman ducked down behind his counter and triumphantly re-emerged with a bucket of ice cubes. He disappeared behind the box of tricks, opened it and poured in the contents of the receptacle. We waited a few minutes for the magic to work, but nothing happened. We didn’t want to upset our host, so we exclaimed that the air flowing into the room was the coolest, nicest air we had ever felt. Looking more cheerful, the barman beamed: the Baron had lost none of its former glory.

  A very tall man came into the bar and headed over to us.

  “I’m your driver, Mr Sinbad. I was told you wanted to visit Palmyra. It’s very beautiful. Very beautiful. Good choice. And then Bosra, if I’ve got it right. Oh! the theatre in Bosra is such a wonderful…”

  “Robinson!”

  “Aha, I had you there, didn’t I?”

  “What are you doing in Syria?”

  “I prefer Ubu’s kingdom to Kaposi’s republic. That French walking-disaster… that caricature of a president.”

  “I agree: that windbag is extremely tiresome.”

  “I got my bundle and my hooded coat and decided to escape to Egypt. We’re the Jews of this century, Sinbad. From Egypt, I crossed borders and countries and here I am in Sham, where I’m working as a tour guide for lovers like you.”

  He took Thamara’s hand and kissed it in pure Louis XIV style. Dear Robinson was well bred and well educated. He was certified and vaccinated, no one could be more French. That Ostrogoth, cutpurse, punter of Phynance and crooked arms-dealer had got himself elected president of France by setting fire to the suburbs and by anathematizing foreigners and the poor. He was preparing to redefine the identity of that now obsolete country that was discovering its Texan and Bushist destiny, while America was electing a black man as president.

  “You should have tried America, Robinson. It’s an up-and-coming country, not like Kaposi’s republic.”

  “That villain is getting ready to collect our DNA to purify his racial pyramid. Whites at the top, then dogs and cats at the bottom. Negroes and dirty North-African Arabs like you and me are destined for the catacombs and solitary confinement. You know, I admire his discourse.”

  “Aha! The long-winded spiel about Africa and the Immobile Man. The return of the same, the eternal return. A little badly digested Nietzsche, a great deal of stupidity, the same stale old ideas and France is preparing to reach for glory in the twenty-first century. Hallelujah!”

  “I preferred Syria, it’s a more moderate country, after all.”

  “You’re not kidding, Robinson.”

  SLUMPED in battered armchairs, we drank Cokes with Robinson, who then drove us into the desert. Thamara’s parents gave her a nice little sum of money every year to help her complete her world tour, so she was a wealthy student. Being poor as Job, I went with her to defend her in case of attack by the Syrian forces, who were much feared in the area but lacked any real strength.


  The black Jeeps that drove up and down the country’s roads and the many barely concealed military zones strengthened the myth of a country governed by an iron fist in an oriental glove. The aim was to ensure that the population believed this, because it kept them under the yoke more effectively and allowed them to revel in their imaginary strength. You could tyrannize your own people, but you couldn’t strip them of their dignity. These pretences created by Arab countries, their senseless rivalries and imagined wars, served to maintain the illusion of past grandeur. Lawrence had realized that when he incited a few tribes to conquer the Ottoman Empire for the greater good of the British and the French. All those countries were colonial pawns, as feeble and agitated as defenceless old men.

  I didn’t give a damn about international politics. I was an anarchist of love, a student rebel from 1968 stranded in the middle of the twenty-first century, an unrepentant peace-lover. Another small detail: Thamara was Jewish and should never have set foot in Syria. However, an employee at the consulate gave her a visa because he thought, with a somewhat twisted logic, that if his nation’s authorities were prepared to torture prisoners for the Americans, who were their sworn enemies, he didn’t see why an honest girl, whether Jewish by faith or not, shouldn’t set foot in Syria which, in his view, was the best country in the world, and deserved to be seen by our cousins.

  The employee even instructed Thamara to visit the museum in Damascus, which had a third-century synagogue on display as evidence of the region’s rich heritage. And so the synagogue was visited by two Semites who could admire its frescos showing scenes from the Talmud. Endless depictions of patriarchs and their children extended across the walls adorned with dazzling paintings at variance with all the aesthetic canons in force in late antiquity: this was a kind of manifesto, a protest against the official art whose centre of power was moving further East, with its childish myths and a religion that mimicked theirs in tow. In one of the walls, the niche for the Holy Ark showed the direction of Jerusalem, the sacrifice of Abraham and the hand of God.

  XV

  THE PEOPLE OF CARTHAGO, happy to swallow yet another piece of nonsense, had been told that the war had ended in the early 1960s. In fact, it would never be over—even worse, it was reaching its tertiary phase and was in danger of paralysing the sufferers, leaving them aphasic and teetering on the brink of nothingness. The inhabitants of Carthago were like zombies anyway: their soul and consciousness had been amputated, they’d been tyrannized and terrorized like laboratory rats, and they’d been injected with highly noxious poisons on numerous occasions, and almost exterminated. The survivors had proliferated again, as if driven by a lust for life, refusing to give in, but immediately a new natural disaster or a new war annihilated the generation that had risen from the flames like sparks blown against the milky darkness of space, like stars about to shine brightly, a promise of happiness or rebirth. The sky immediately grew dark as a result of fresh fires that had taken hold, stoked by pyromaniac firemen, which might have amused a twisted mind, a God like the one who had created the Sleeper and his dog. But was it even the same deity?

  Maybe Thamara was right: a Demiurge was mocking humanity, causing mankind to perish in the flames of a bogus paradise, while the distant, infinite-creator God was helplessly watching this tangled mass of violence, murder and genocidal rage, twiddling his thumbs like an old man in his dotage.

  Now the old man had finally woken up and had decided to erase his lousy first draft.

  This was all very unsettling, and I opened my heart to Thamara, who tried her best to reassure me, modelling herself on Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife.

  But I was trembling with cold more than amazement and my beautiful Thamara covered me with her body, while the sun burned the stones as if a flameless fire still projected the bright, hot colours of the inferno: in the same way, the history of mankind projected images of its own past and recreated a present out of legends by gathering ancient glimmers of light, like dead stars shining on in the sky long after their death.

  I wasn’t easily influenced, yet I allowed myself to sink into a fearful lethargy that took hold of my mind and darkened my memory. The fever reclaimed me. During the night, Sinbad, my ancient double, came to me and the storyteller began his tale:

  “When I had returned to Baghdad, I indulged in sport, pleasure and delight, rejoicing greatly in my gains, profits and benefits, and forgot all I had experienced and suffered until I began to think again of travelling to see foreign countries and islands. Having made my resolve, I bought valuable merchandise suited to a sea voyage, packed up my bales, and journeyed from Baghdad to Basra. I walked along the shore and saw a large, tall, and goodly ship, newly fitted. It pleased me and I bought it. Then I hired a captain and crew, over whom I set some of my slaves and pages as superintendents, and loaded my bales on the ship. Then a group of merchants joined me, loaded their bales on the ship, and paid me the freight. We set out in all joy and cheerfulness, rejoicing in the prospect of a safe and prosperous voyage, and sailed from sea to sea and from island to island, landing to see the sights of the islands and towns and to sell and buy.

  “We continued in this fashion until one day we came to a large uninhabited island, waste and desolate, except for a vast white dome. The merchants landed to look at the dome, which was in reality a huge Rukh’s egg, but, not knowing what it was, they struck it with stones, and when they broke it, much fluid ran out of it, and the young Rukh appeared inside. They drew it out of the shell, slaughtered it, and took from it a great deal of meat. While this was going on, I was on the ship, uninformed and unaware of it until one of the passengers came to me and said, ‘Sir, go and look at that egg, which we thought to be a dome.’ I went to look at the egg and arrived just as the merchants were striking it. I cried out to them, ‘Don’t do this, for the Rukh will come, demolish our ship, and destroy us all.’ But they did not heed my words.

  “While they were thus engaged, the sun suddenly disappeared, and the day grew dark, as if a dark cloud was passing above us. We raised our heads to see what had veiled the sun and saw that it was the Rukh’s wings that had blocked the sunlight and made the day dark, for when the Rukh came and saw its egg broken, it cried out at us, and its mate came, and they circled above the ship, shrieking with voices louder than thunder. I called out to the captain and the sailors, saying, ‘Push off the ship, and let us escape before we perish.’ The captain hurried and, as soon as the merchants had embarked, unfastened the ship and sailed away from the island. When the Rukhs saw that we were on the open sea, they disappeared for a while.

  “We sailed, making speed, in the desire to leave their land behind and escape from them, but suddenly they caught up with us, each carrying in its talons a huge rock from a mountain. Then the male bird threw its rock on us, but the captain steered the ship aside, and the rock missed it by a little distance, and fell into the water with such force that we saw the bottom of the sea, and the ship went up and down, almost out of control. Then the female bird threw on us its rock, which was smaller than the first, but as it had been ordained, it fell on the stern of the ship, smashed it, sent the rudder flying in twenty pieces, and threw all the passengers into the sea.

  “I struggled for dear life to save myself until the Almighty God provided me with one of the wooden planks of the ship, to which I clung and, getting on it, began to paddle with my feet, while the wind and the waves helped me forward. The ship had sunk near an island in the middle of the sea, and fates cast me, according to God’s will, on that island, where I landed, like a dead man, on my last breath from extreme hardship and fatigue and hunger and thirst. I threw myself on the seashore and lay for a while until I began to recover myself and feel better. Then I walked in the island and found that it was like one of the gardens of Paradise. Its trees were laden with fruits, its streams flowing, and its birds singing the glory of the Omnipotent, Everlasting One. There was an abundance of trees, fruits and all kinds of flowers. So I ate of the fruits until I sati
sfied my hunger and drank of the streams until I quenched my thirst, and I thanked the Almighty God and praised Him.

  “I sat in the island until it was evening, and night approached, without seeing anyone or hearing any voice. I was still feeling almost dead from fatigue and fear; so I lay down and slept till the morning. Then I got up and walked among the trees until I came to a spring of running water, beside which sat a comely old man clad with a waistcloth made of tree leaves. I said to myself, ‘Perhaps the old man has landed on the island, being one of those who have been shipwrecked.’ I drew near to him and saluted him, and he returned my salutation with a sign but remained silent. I said to him, ‘Old man, why are you sitting here?’ He moved his head mournfully and motioned with his hand, meaning to say, ‘Carry me on your shoulders, and take me to the other side of the stream.’ I said to myself, ‘I will do this old man a favour and transport him to the other side of the stream, for God may reward me for it.’ I went to him, carried him on my shoulders, and took him to the place to which he had pointed. I said to him, ‘Get down at your ease,’ but he did not get off my shoulders. Instead, he wrapped his legs around my neck, and when I saw that their hide was as black and rough as that of a buffalo, I was frightened and tried to throw him off. But he pressed his legs around my neck and choked my throat until I blacked out and fell unconscious to the ground, like a dead man. He raised his legs and beat me on the back and shoulders, causing me intense pain. I got up, feeling tired from the burden, and he kept riding on my shoulders and motioning me with his hand to take him among the trees to the best of the fruits, and whenever I disobeyed him, he gave me, with his feet, blows more painful than the blows of the whip. He continued to direct me with his hand to any place he wished to go, and I continued to take him to it until we made our way among the trees to the middle of the island. Whenever I loitered or went leisurely, he beat me, for he held me like a captive. He never got off my shoulders, day or night, urinating and defecating on me, and whenever he wished to sleep, he would wrap his legs around my neck and sleep a little, then arise and beat me, and I would get up quickly, unable to disobey him because of the severity of the pain I suffered from him. I continued with him in this condition, suffering from extreme exhaustion and blaming myself for having taken pity on him and carried him on my shoulders. I said to myself, ‘I have done this person a good deed, and it has turned evil to myself. By God, I will never do good to anyone, as long as I live,’ and I began to beg, at every turn and every step, the Almighty God for death, because of the severity of my fatigue and distress.