As we head towards the mountain pass near Zahle, all the cars on the road are pulling over to put chains on their tires. I can’t believe this is the Middle East; we could be in Canada. The wet snow has been pelting the taxi all the way up the mountain, and now the slush is a foot deep and snow is still falling. The visibility is zero. Our taxi driver is a smiling Syrian who seems to be finding the whole caper as amusing as we do. The chains keep coming off, and we watch through the curtains in the back seat while he puts them on again and again. Blanketed in snow, Lebanon is otherworldly.
When we get to the border, the driver takes our passports and goes into the checkpoint. We stay in the car. He returns and beckons to Scott to follow him. I am nervous alone in the car, waiting. I think of the astonished reactions Canadians had when we said we were visiting Syria. When Scott comes back, he relates how the officials grilled him about my name and my father’s name, which you have to write on the entrance card. He was terrified that he would give the wrong answer, but finally he said that my grandfather was Syrian, and that our last name was Syrian. He didn’t know if that was the right answer or if he should have said that my father was Iraqi. But his answer pleased the guards immensely and they said “Welcome Syria” with broad smiles. For entrance to a police state, I found this all quite hospitable and rather slack, considering I didn’t actually see any border guards myself. Anyone could have been sitting in the car in my place. Once across the border, we descend quickly to the plains and the sun comes out, making the snow shine on the barren desert soil.
Said to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, Damascus feels ancient. A layer of dust covers everything, and the friendly people have a worldly sophistication that seems to say that they have seen everything pass through and cannot—will not—be surprised by anything. The Old City is one immense, labyrinthine souq with different areas selling sweets, bread, inlaid woodwork, narghile pipes, sponges, medicines, nuts, clothes. You enter by one of the great stone gates into one of the three quarters, Christian, Muslim or Jewish—one in ten Syrians is Christian and there are still four thousand Jews living there—and one can pass endless days wandering through tiny lanes overhung with the shuttered windows of houses almost blocking out the sky.
We start in the centre at the ancient Umayyad mosque, which is decorated in exquisite gold and green Byzantine mosaics depicting palaces, palm trees, gardens and fruit. Behind the mosque we stop in a small antique shop barely big enough for four people and start chatting to the owner, Samir. He orders his nephew to bring us tea from the café opposite where the last living hakawati or professional storyteller is practising his art reading stories animatedly from an old book. From the shop, we can see the packed café full of men drinking tea and smoking the narghile, listening intently. Meanwhile, Samir shows us gorgeous rich silk and cotton tablecloths, cushions, tapes-tries and old jewellery. He asks us about ourselves.
I tell him my father is Iraqi and my grandfather is Syrian. Since the Iraq War, he says, Iraqis have been arriving daily, driving up the prices. The wealthy who could afford to leave fled immediately, but now, two years later, more and more poorer refugees are arriving. He shows us some camel-hair scarves that are woven in Iraq.
“We call this cloth Najafi because it is made in the Iraqi city of Najaf,” he says. “It is hand-woven by the women there. We haven’t had this type of cloth in Syria for many many years. We can thank the war for this.” He laughs cynically. The fabric is coarse and has a faint animal smell, and it is coloured with natural dyes in earthy tones of pink, blue, green, yellow. “These scarves are very warm, even though they have all these holes.”
The cloth is loosely woven and looks rather delicate. I wrap the cloth around me and he is right, it is surprisingly warm. He tells us that the Christian quarter is not far away and that we can find an excellent hammam (Turkish bath) that has a woman’s hour. He also recommends a restaurant for us to eat in that night; he won’t elaborate but says that we should trust him, it will be like a dream.
We follow his directions and wander through the pedestrian lanes full of bustling shapes, women covered all in black, men in brown leather jackets and black scarves and hats. People almost brush up against each other but never touch. The houses along the lanes hang over the street, sometimes even connecting into a house-bridge from one side to another. It reminds me of photographs I have seen and descriptions I have read of Old Baghdad where my grandmother Victoria grew up. There are wooden porticos that probably open onto small courtyards with fountains and gardens. A discreet wooden sign with a carving of a crescent moon alerts us to a café; it is called Evening and Morning. We walk through a small door and enter a crowded dark room made of stone and wood with candles dripping on the tables.
Stylish young Syrians are hanging out with their friends drinking coffee and tea and listening to the wailing Arabic music and smoking the hubble-bubble pipes. We sit down and order tea and a pipe, and in a second an efficient waiter sets a water pipe on the floor beside us and lights the charcoal. Scott puts the pipe to his lips, and soon the cherry tobacco smoke surrounds us like incense. We sit speechless at the unexpectedly modern scene, feeling as if we had walked out of an ancient city into a modern bar, albeit an Eastern one. We watch the people conversing in mixed groups of men and women and wonder what they are discussing so intensely. If my North American friends could magically be transported here, they would not believe they were really in Syria.
Scott pulls a copy of the Guardian from his bag; it’s a couple of weeks old. I sit sipping tea and flipping through the paper. My eye catches a headline: “Months of War That Ruined Centuries of History.” In the article, Maev Kennedy describes the British Museum report by John Curtis on the ancient city of Babylon that has just been handed back to Iraqi authorities from US forces. I read in horror about the damage to the famous Ishtar Gate, about broken bricks inscribed with the name of Nebuchadnezzar lying in spoiled heaps, of the original brick surface of the great processional route through the gate crushed by military vehicles, about acres of the site levelled, covered with gravel and sprayed with chemicals that are seeping into unexcavated buried deposits, and of tons of archaeological material used to fill sandbags. The article continues: “The military camp was established by the American forces in April 2003, and damage was already visible when Dr. Curtis first visited part of the site that June. The same contractors, Kellogg, Brown and Root—a subsidiary of the American civil engineering corporation Halliburton, of which the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, is a former chief executive officer—were used to develop and maintain the site throughout, as it grew to a 150-hectare camp, housing 2,000 soldiers.”
I pass the paper to Scott angrily. “Read this. They are using ancient Babylon as a military base. Saddam Hussein was always criticized because he built a monstrous replica of the original on top of the remains. But this is worse; there is no recognition of the immense value to humanity of this place. Why would they choose it as a base? Ignorance or else something more vicious and deliberate?”
After an hour or so, we are starving and go out again through the brightly lit souq past men selling nuts and dried fruit out of huge sacks as they have for centuries and arrive at a nondescript wooden door lit by an Oriental lamp. I am completely unprepared for what we find inside; an opulent restaurant unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We’ve stepped into a renovated 650-year-old Ottoman villa, lavishly decorated in brilliant tiles. The courtyard is surrounded by open-air dining rooms on three levels, but because it is winter it is covered with a canopy. The walls are painted in typical Oriental style, bright colours, intricate foliage and stylized flowers. The floors comprise thick marble mosaics and huge chandeliers made of metal and coloured glass hang low over the whole scene. In the centre is a gushing fountain, and the waiters wear Ottoman-style costumes. The bustling restaurant is filled with long tables of Syrian families; the atmosphere isn’t restrained or snobbish, but warm and full of loud voices and laughter and children playing.
Rapidly moving waiters race to your table in response to a mere raised eyebrow or an overzealous hand gesture.
Beside us is a table of about twenty foreigners speaking English. After they have finished their meal, a middle-aged man rises and starts giving a speech. He is Iraqi, and it becomes clear that he has been working as an Iraq election monitor in Syria. His voice is full of passion as he describes what a pleasure it has been to work with the team who are from a mixture of European countries, America, Canada and of course Iraq.
“What a relief it has been,” he says, “to work with people who treat you as a fellow worker and human being instead of a slave.” He says how proud he is that he has been able to work on these elections for the good of his country. He gives out presents to everyone at the table, and they begin opening them as he speaks.
I feel conflicted about eavesdropping, although it is impossible not to listen as the group is right beside us speaking English in a buzz of Arabic. I listen to the gratitude the Iraqi feels to the international community, and I think that this is how a people would truly express being liberated from the tyranny of a ruthless dictator. And yet, the war has killed so many, destroyed so many lives and undermined the West in the eyes of so many Arabs. Damascus is full of Iraqis fleeing violence and terror. The idea of liberating a people and giving them freedom and democracy was so noble, and yet what was actually happening outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad bore no resemblance to the beautiful ideals being expressed at the next table. Iraqis deserved to live in freedom and democracy, and yet the very invasion that was done in their name was creating anarchy and fear in their society, every day moving it further away from the possibility of a peaceful future.
The next morning I go to the Bakri hammam. My aunts had told me how their house in Baghdad had contained a hammam-style bathroom where they bathed when they were children. By the seventies their parents had transformed it into a Western-style shower and bath. They always joke about how clean Middle Eastern people are and I’d never understood what they meant. Their grandmother, Samira, had likely gone to the public baths when she was a girl, but my father and aunts never did. I enter a large high-domed room with a fountain in the middle and raised platforms like balconies covered in carpets on three walls. Heavy ancient gilt-framed mirrors hang angled downward on each wall. I remove my watch, and it is put in a locked box and I am given the key.
I sit on one of the platforms and nervously undress, not knowing what to do next. There are three other women, one who has wet hair and has finished bathing and is wrapped in a towel and smoking a cigarette, and two others who have just arrived. The two girls chat quickly, laughing all the time, and receive three cell phone calls while they are undressing. I watch them and follow their lead. I wrap a thin cotton towel around me and wait for someone to show me what to do next. The girls notice me watching them and smile at me and then say something in Arabic. I shake my head, shrug and say “No Araby” and they smile and seem to ask where I am from, I say “Canada” and they point at themselves saying “Iraq.” They must be refugees. I say “Abu Iraqi,” which probably sounds funny to them, but I am trying to tell them my father is Iraqi. They seem to understand and start laughing and pointing. They point at themselves and say “Baghdad.” They put on wooden clogs from a platform on the wall and I copy them.
Suddenly, a rotund smiling middle-aged woman ushers me into the steam room. The steam obscures everything in a fog so thick that I can’t see more than two feet all around me and don’t know what is happening or where I am. Women emerge out of the steam like ghosts. Everything is tiled in black, white and red marble and I sit on a marble bench while the Iraqi girls giggle and chain-smoke even in the steam room. I become light-headed with the heat and then the bath woman approaches me. “Feenish?” I nod and she leads me into the abrasion room, a slightly less steamy marble room flowing with water, all the taps are on with water running into the sinks and then spilling onto the floor and being carried away by drains along the room’s edge. We sit on the cool wet floor and she scrubs my entire body with a black horsehair mitten. She is rough, but effective at sloughing off the dirt of my voyage. She shows me how dirty my arm is and when I look at it through her eyes, I agree. Then she brings a brass bowl and throws warm water over me again and again to rinse me. Then she leads me into a small alcove with a massage bed in it. She rubs me from head to toe with a ghee-like substance that feels very smooth. After this short massage she takes me back into the sink room. Rubbing olive oil soap onto a sponge that is made of straw, she mimes cleaning herself, and I know I am supposed to wash myself again. I scrub and rinse until I am polished clean. She steers me back into the steam room and I stay there until I warm up.
Finally, I return to the changing area and sit stunned and relaxed in my towel until I muster up the energy to change into my clothes and go and meet Scott. The Iraqi girls are still there, chattering as they get dressed. I long to speak to them.
Samir had told us that we had to find this special silk shop housed in an ancient madrassa (Islamic school) if we wanted to see the best-quality silk in Damascus. We are leaving in two days, but the next day, unbelievably, we find the store down a blind alley of the souq. The walls are made of striped black-and-white stone and one room contains a clattering wooden loom worked by one of the last silk weavers in Damascus. The dusty courtyard feels as if it has been untouched for the six hundred years it has been there and the arcades are covered in carpets and antiques. The walls are lined with bolts of dazzling silk in every colour imaginable.
A portly man who speaks impeccable English and French, and wears an old-fashioned suit and tie, approaches us. He tells us that, unlike much of the material for sale in the souq, his Damascene silk is hand-woven and introduces us to the man working the loom. His left leg is churning away as if he is riding a one-pedal bicycle and the wooden slats rattle across the silken threads. The intricate patterns are laid out by punch cards that had been created during the Industrial Revolution and remind us of old computer punch cards.
The supple silk is sold by the metre and is not cheap by Syrian standards. The owner explains that the sophisticated, intricate designs are made in two, three, four or five colours and become more and more iridescent and expensive the more colours they contain. He unfurls bolt after bolt of cloth of every different colour, and I covet them all. But I can’t imagine an occasion where I’d be able to wear such luxurious material. On a whim, I ask to see the white silk thinking that I haven’t found a wedding dress yet. The man throws down bolts of cloth, one on top of the other, plain white with a paisley pattern, white with gold thread, white with silver thread. None of them are quite right. He senses my hesitation and asks if I’d prefer ivory. Yes, I ask him if he has any plain ivory with no other colours. He throws down a beautiful creamy ivory silk which has the classic paisley design embroidered like a subtle watermark; the silk shines a pale golden sheen in different lights and I know this is the cloth that I want my wedding dress to be made of. I think of Khalil, born in Syria, and how right it is that I will wear Damascene silk on my wedding day. My eyes light on a bunch of brightly coloured ties and I ask to see them. I choose a golden tie for my father to give me away in.
A few days later, back in Vancouver, I unfold the paper covering the silk and wrap the material around my body. The smell of the shop lingers for a moment; I am back in the Middle East, enfolded in it. I am reminded of my grandmother Victoria, and I know if she’d still been alive, she would have insisted on making my wedding dress, as she once sewed my Iraqi costume for the parade.
LINA DRIVES THROUGH BAGHDAD WITH FARAH
PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Death of Lina
On the second anniversary of the Coalition invasion of Iraq, media-reported civilian deaths are approaching 20,000 and the death-rate is spiralling upwards. —Iraq Body Count Press Release, March 17, 2005
Once again I didn’t make it to Baghdad, even though I was in the Middle Ea
st, just as I hadn’t twelve years earlier on a previous trip to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Back then, it was for fear of Saddam Hussein and the mukharabat (secret police), and the upheaval that followed the Gulf War; this time, it is due to the mayhem of another invasion and war, another threat: I am afraid of American soldiers and the wanton violence of the resistance.
My mother and father are visiting me in Vancouver, and my mother and I go out together. My father wants to stay in my apartment and play bridge on his laptop rather than go out for coffee with us.
“He probably just wants to have a nap,” says my mum when we are out.
When we get back, my father is sitting on the sofa, staring into space, his laptop beside him.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asks.
“Lina is dead,” he blurts out. “I’ve just spoken to my sisters.”
Regret and rage fills me. Regret that I didn’t go to Baghdad, that I hadn’t ignored the warnings of the family. Rage that somehow the war has won, the war has kept us all from being with her for the last years of her life, the last relative from my grandmother’s generation. And then there is the pain, the hurt I feel because I wasn’t able to save her; we weren’t able to do anything for her but hope and pray.
I look at my father, my mother’s arm around his shoulders, and wonder what he is feeling. It is his aunt, he grew up with her. He is used to hearing about these deaths, I think, but at the same time I know it never gets any easier.
“Don’t worry about things you can’t do anything about,” is his refrain whenever I get upset, outraged or emotional at some injustice. “You can’t do anything about it. Why worry? Only worry about things that you have the power to change.”
The Orange Trees of Baghdad Page 17
