NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

“I like men,” Akkad said. “So does he. And he. And you see this man there”—another young man had paused in the lane of the bazaar to mutter to Lateef—“he was my boyfriend once. You see how he is ignoring me?”

  “I agree with Moustafa,” I said. “I prefer women.”

  “Women smell like omelets,” Akkad said.

  “Do you like omelets?”

  “No,” he said. “I like men. They smell like watermelons.”

  “‘A woman for duty. A boy for pleasure. A melon for ecstasy.’ Isn’t that an Arab proverb?” I said.

  “I have never heard it,” Akkad said. “I don’t understand.”

  Moustafa cupped his hands at his chest to suggest breasts and said, “I like these melons on a woman!”

  “I don’t like them,” Akkad said. “How old are you?”

  I told him.

  “No,” he said. “But if you are that old you must be happy. Very happy.”

  “Yes, he is happy,” Moustafa said.

  “I am happy,” I said. And thought: Yes, drinking tea in this bazaar on a chilly evening in Aleppo, in the farthest corner of the Mediterranean, listening to their silly talk, sensing a welcome in it, the hospitality of casual conversation, feeling I could ask them almost anything and get an answer; I am happy.

  “Why did you come here?” Akkad said.

  “To buy a scarf,” I said.

  “I will not sell you a scarf now. Moustafa and Ahmed will not sell you a scarf. You know why? Because we want you to come back here tomorrow to talk with us.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  Later I went to a restaurant and had hot bread and hummus, baba ghanouj and eggplant, salad and spicy fish chunks. I was joined by a student, Ahmed Haj’Abdo, who was studying medicine at the Aleppo medical college. He said he wanted to get high marks, so that he could study abroad and specialize. I introduced the topic of Assad, hoping to get more colorful information about the cult of Basil. Mr. Haj’Abdo got flustered and searched the restaurant desperately with his agitated eyes.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He just smiled and then we talked about the weather.

  The next day, my last in Aleppo, I went back to Akkad and bought a head scarf and asked him the best way to Latakia. There were so many ways—buses, “pullman,” minivans, taxis, shared cars, the train.

  Akkad said, “The best way. You mean quickest? Safest? Most comfortable? Cheapest? What?”

  “What does ‘safest’ mean?”

  “The road is dangerous. It winds around the mountains. Sometimes the cars and buses go off the road and into the valleys. People die.”

  “Train is safest and best,” Moustafa said.

  “That’s what I always say.”

  My first-class ticket to Latakia on the early train the next morning was two dollars.

  There were a hundred or more Syrians in the waiting room of the railway station the following morning. In cold countries that are poor there is often a sartorial strangeness, people dressed differently and weirdly, abandoning fashion for warmth. Syria this winter morning was that way. There were women in black drapes, their faces covered, looking like dark Shmoos, and others like nuns, and still more in old-fashioned dresses and old fur-trimmed coats. Men wore gowns and women wore quilted coats and many people wore leather jackets and odd hats. There were Gypsies in brightly colored dresses, with thick skirts, and there were soldiers. The well-dressed and watchful secret police looked very secure and went about in pairs.

  There was no such thing as a Syrian face. There were many faces, of a sort that was common in Europe and America—pale skin, red hair, blue eyes, as well as nose-heavy profiles and dark eyes and swarthy skin. Some could have been Spanish or French or even English. There was a Syrian Huck Finn face with freckles, and tousled hair. There was a Semitic face—nagging auntie with a mustache. There were people who looked like me. I was sure of this, because every so often I was approached and asked questions in Arabic, and the questioner was puzzled and abashed when I replied in English.

  It was a cold sunny day in Aleppo, six in the morning, hardly anyone on the street, and so the rats were bold, foraging in the gutters as I kicked along noisily to keep them away. I wore a sweater and a jacket and a scarf. The rats ran ahead of me, nibbling garbage. One scampered on, glancing back at me at intervals, and panting, like an overexcited pet.

  The 7:20 Express to Latakia was a beat-up train, with terrible coaches in second class and passable ones in first. But all the windows were so dirty it was hard to see out, and many were cracked, the sort of dense spider web of cracks that prevented anything from being clearly visible.

  With my notebook on my lap, I wrote about the fellows in the bazaar and then, because I was short of books, reread The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the chapter on “street neurology,” thinking how resourceful Oliver Sacks was in walking the streets of New York City, diagnosing the ills of the people raving or chattering. In another place he quoted Nietzsche: “I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them … And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit.”

  The ticket collector wore a dark suit and well-shined shoes and he smoked a cigarette. In his entourage were two soldiers and two flunkies. He snapped his fingers at each passenger and under the gaze of the soldiers—who were fat older men, straight out of Sergeant Bilko’s motor pool—he directed one of his flunkies to retrieve the ticket. Without touching it he examined it, and the second flunky tore it and returned it to the passenger. Five men, each with a particular role: a miniature bureaucracy in the aisle of the railway train.

  Many offices I had seen in Syria were like that: several people doing one job, consulting, discussing, sharing the problem; or just being social, drinking tea, smoking, taking no responsibility.

  Showing through the cracked windows of the train the suburbs of Aleppo had a fragmented and cubist quality, a wall of tenements as assorted puzzle pieces. We were soon in the countryside, the Syrian countryside where the mountains that rise parallel to the west coast, the Jabel an Nusayriyah, are among the loveliest in the Mediterranean. Eastern and southern Syria is desert, but this was a landscape of green cozy valleys and stone cottages—gardens, shepherds, wheat fields, olive groves and fruit trees. I had not expected such a fertile and friendly-looking land. Later, when I saw the desert, I realized that my stereotype was that—what the Syrians called the sahara, limitless waste.

  But here it was peaceful, meadows of sheep nibbling flowers. I had expected gun emplacements and artillery men glowering through binoculars, not these stolid rustics clopping along on donkeys, and the lovely white villages of small domed houses; each settlement, surrounded by plowed fields, had a well and market and a mosque.

  A man strode through my railway car, climbed onto a seat, removed a lightbulb from a ceiling fixture, and plugged in a tape deck. For the rest of the trip he fed tapes of screechy music into this machine.

  The meadows in the distance were like crushed velvet, and closer they were scattered with wildflowers and banked by stands of sturdy blue-green pines. Even that loud music could not distract me from admiring a landscape I had never seen or heard about, and the thrill was that it was ancient, biblical-looking, the land of conquering, slaughtering David and the Valley of Salt. At Jisr ash Shughur on the Orontes River there were flowers everywhere and the town itself lay on the crest of a distant hill, as white as the white stone ridge it was built upon. We were hardly any distance from the Turkish border, and passing alongside it, but these villages were not at all like Turkish ones, either in the design of their houses or the way the people were dressed.

  We penetrated the big green mountain range on our way to the shore, and circled the slopes of these peculiarly Middle Eastern-looking heights—so old were they, having been mountains for so long, so tame and rounded, they seemed domesticated by the people who had been trampling them and letting their g
oats and sheep canter over them, nibbling them since the beginning of the world. They were gentle slopes, with soft cliffs and unthreatening gullies and no peaks, green all over, with pine woods and villages in their valleys. They were not at all like the fierce mountains in the wilderness, with their sharp peaks and sheer cliffs and their raw and serrated ridges and their cliff faces gleaming like the metal of a knife blade.

  That was something that I had learned about the Mediterranean. There was not a single point anywhere on the whole irregular shore that had not known human footprints. Every inch of it had been charted and named—most places had two or three names, some had half a dozen, an overlay of nomenclature, especially here in the tendentious and rivalrous republics of the Levant, that could be very confusing.

  Three and a half hours after leaving Aleppo (Halab, El Haleb) we were speeding across a flat sunny plain of date palms and orange and olive trees, towards Latakia. It had been a long inland detour, but I was back on the shore of the Mediterranean.

  I walked from the station to the center of town and found a hotel. After lunch, I walked to the port. I was followed and pestered by curb-crawling taxis in which young men sat and honked their horns. The only way to discourage them was to hire one—and anyway, I wanted to go north of Latakia, to see the ruins of Ugarit.

  That was how I met Riaz, an unreliable man with an unreliable car. He spoke a little English. Yes, he knew Ugarit. Yes, we would go there. But first he had a few errands to run. This allowed me to see the whole of Latakia in a short time. It was not an attractive place. The only beach was some miles outside of the city at the laughably named Côte d’Azur, where on an empty road, a deserted hotel, the Meridien, sat on a muddy shore. That area had the melancholy of all bad architectural ideas exposed to the full glare of the sun.

  “Who is that?” I asked Riaz as we passed statues of Assad. There were many statues of Father-Leader here.

  Riaz laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. It was not a joking matter to stare at the statues, however silly they seemed. One statue in Latakia showed Assad hailing a taxi—his hand raised. In another he was beckoning—“I have a bone to pick with you, sonny!”—and in yet another he looked, with both arms out, like a deranged man about to take a dive into a pool, fully clothed. “I will crush you like this!” could have been inscribed on the plinth of a statue which depicted Assad clasping his hands rather violently, and a statue at the abandoned sports complex at Latakia showed the Commander of the Nation with his arm up, palm forward, in a traffic cop’s gesture of “Stop!”

  Any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country which is headed for trouble. Leaving aside the fact that nature had not endowed this spindle-shanked and wispy-haired man in his tight suit to be cast in bronze, the unflattering statues still seemed provocative and irritating. In a hard-up place how could anyone be indifferent or willingly justify such expenditure? Syria was another country, like those of Mao and Stalin and Hoxha, of silly semaphoring statues of the same foolish old man, and in time to come they too would end up being bulldozed onto a scrap heap.

  “What is his name?” I asked Riaz.

  Riaz said, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” and looked wildly around in the traffic.

  Two or three miles north of the city was Ras Shamrah. It had been an unimportant village until, in 1928, a farmer plowing on a nearby hill bumped his plow blade against the top edge of a symmetrical wall, buried in the ground. Further digging revealed it to be the wall of a large building, a palace in fact, and in time the foundations of an entire city were uncovered, thirty-six hectares of a royal town which was dug up in stages throughout the 1930s. That sort of discovery—even the detail of the plow blade—had happened many times before in the Middle East (and it was also a poor farmer in China who—with a hoe—found the terra-cotta warriors at Xian); peasant plowmen were probably the world’s first archaeologists. But Ugarit yielded a real treasure in the form of small beadlike clay tablets on which was inscribed the precursor of the alphabet I am using now. (Guidebook: “The writing on the tablets is widely accepted as being the earliest known alphabet. It was adapted by the Greeks, then the Romans, and it is from this script that all alphabets are derived.”) There were trinkets, too, bracelets and beads and spear points and knives; but the implications of the tablets the shape and size of a child’s finger bone were that this might be the earliest examples of human jotting.

  Ali the caretaker apologized before charging me four dollars in Syrian piastres—it was almost his week’s pay—to look at the ruins. And he followed me, pointing to the crumbled walls and weedy plots, saying, “Palace … Library … Well … Aqueduct … Flight of stairs … House … Archway … Stables … Mausoleum …”

  It was no more than a mute ground plan, spread over several hills, where with their narrow hooves balanced on the flinty walls goats cropped grass and pretty poppies grew wild. Having been excavated, it had been so neglected it was becoming overgrown, with rubble obscuring many of the walls; no pathways, no signs, no indication at all of what had been what. Ugarit (“once the greatest city in the entire Mediterranean”) was turning back into a buried city. It had been looted of all its trinkets and artifacts—they were on display in the Damascus Museum.

  I liked being here alone, and felt it was all a throwback to an earlier time on the Mediterranean shore, when a traveler might stumble upon an ancient site and be shown around by a simple soul who lived nearby. The temples and villas of rural Italy, and Carthage and Pompeii and the ancient marble structures of Greece, had once been treated like this—just crumbling curiosities, where goats and sheep sheltered. Every so often a peasant would raid them for building blocks or marble slabs. That was definitely a feature of the Mediterranean—the temples turned into churches, the churches into ruins, the ruins buried until they became quarries for anyone who wanted to build a hut. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—we have the evidence of splendid engravings—Greece and Italy looked just like Ugarit did today, the ruins were novelties, broken cellars and fallen walls and stairs leading nowhere and tombs robbed of their artifacts and bones.

  Sitting on a wall to admire it—the sun on the flowers and the grass that grew higher than the ruins—I was approached by Ali again.

  “Alphabet there!” he said.

  He pointed to a small enclosure, where in a shady muddy corner in a clump of weeds, the tablets had been found. It was as though it was sacred ground. In a sense it had been hallowed, by printed words, some of the first in this hemisphere. Five thousand years had passed since then. And here, in Syria, the very place that had given the world this elegant script, half the people were still illiterate.

  On the way back to town, I asked Riaz, “Are there any ships that go from here to Cyprus?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  “So can I get a ship to Cyprus from Latakia?”

  “I think.”

  “You think yes?”

  “I think no.”

  He was right—no ferries ran anymore, though there were plenty of container ships in the port. The town was small and tidy and sunny, and with vaguely European architecture, unlike cold, dusty and oriental Aleppo. It seemed to me amazing that in the space of a single morning I had passed from one climate to another; and not only the weather here, but aspects of the atmosphere, were identical to a hundred other places I had seen on the Mediterranean shore. Latakia was another example of a town that had much more in common with a port in Greece or Albania or Sardinia than any of its own inland towns, the sunny Mediterranean culture of the languor, the bougainvillea and palms and stucco house, the seaside promenade.

  “You want to see Lateen?”

  He meant a Christian church, a Latin. (Christians in Syria are called Masihi for their belief in the Messiah.) There was one in Latakia, a Frenchified two-steeple cathedral dating perhaps from the 1930s. (The French had controlled Syria from 1926 until independence in 1946.) There was a sense of li
fe in Latakia that was self-contained; the town was seldom visited by any foreigners—foreigners hardly came to Syria and when they did they kept to Damascus and avoided the rather stagnant and vandalized coast. Better than any bricks and mortar were the tangerines and oranges of Latakia. I paid off Riaz, and bought some fruit, and walked the streets, and went to bed early.

  Sixty miles down the coast, two hours on the slow bus, was Tartus, a new town enclosing an ancient walled city. I walked around it and thought: How has it changed? The people still lived among goat turds and foul garbage piles and they scrubbed their laundry in washtubs and hung it from their windows, where the sun struck through the archways. The children played in the narrow lanes where open drains bore foul water to the sewers. Rats darted between bricks and in the ruined nave of a church there was more laundry. There were old and new parts of the walled city, but it was hard to tell them apart. People had extended the old houses, added rooms and stairways and vaulted ceilings and cubicles. Old men still sat under the arches of the city gate. I imagined that people here on the Syrian coast had more or less always lived like this, apparently higgledy-piggledy, but actually with great coherence, using all the available space, protected by the city walls and the privacy of their solid stone houses, in this honeycomb of an old town.

  There was an island just off shore called Arwad. I wanted to look at it, but I could not find any boatman willing to take me there. So I walked along the beach. Tartus had the filthiest beach I had seen anywhere in the entire Mediterranean: it was mud and litter and sewage and oil slick. Perhaps that too was just as it had always been, the disorder and filth and carelessness. Swimming as a recreation and the craze for a suntan were recent novelties. In terms of its being regarded as an enormous sewer by the people who lived on its shore, the Mediterranean was perhaps no different from any other sea in the world.

  “The sea in Western culture represents space, vacancy, primordial chaos,” Jonathan Raban wrote to me when I asked him why every sea on earth is treated like a toilet. Jonathan, one of my oldest friends, was the editor of The Oxford Book of the Sea. The biblical “waters” implying emptiness and chaos is specifically the Mediterranean. Jonathan indicated a passage in The Enchafed Flood in which Auden warmed to this theme of the disorderly sea: “The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelation notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that ‘there was no more sea’.”