by Theo Padnos
Over the following months, I developed a new plan. I would send out letters to the world’s second-tier, lower-pay, low-prestige publications. Didn’t such magazines abound in the world? I didn’t know. I assumed they must. Meanwhile, there was news to report.
In October of 2012, the nation of Syria appeared to be wandering into a sea of blood. In many of the poorer urban districts, and in all of the rural ones, the government had collapsed. In some places, the government officials had defected to the rebel side. In other places, the police, the state security agents, and the military men had been driven away. Elsewhere, as more than a few YouTube videos attested, the representatives of the ancien régime had been lined up, made to kneel in the dirt, then shot through the back of the head.
“We are your men, O Bashar, and we drink blood!” So went the chants the pro-Assad militias made in the wake of their victories, recorded, then posted to the pro-government YouTube channels.
“To heaven! To heaven! To heaven we will go, martyred by the millions!” So went the chants the anti-Assad crowds made during their demonstrations.
In those days, my general feeling was that the revolutionaries were on the side of the angels. I felt that the Syrian Kurds, whose Iraqi brethren had learned to guide American smart bombs to their targets during the Iraq war, could work with Western air forces and democrats on the ground inside Syria to overthrow President Assad. After the air campaign, I thought, the time would come to storm the barricades. I assumed that the revolutionaries would find me charming. Seeing how admiringly I wrote of them and respecting the freedom of the press, they would, I thought, chauffer me from protest to internet café to village square. Because it would be hot and because the rebel brigades would be in possession of confiscated villas, the rebel commanders, I guessed, would allow me to write out my stories in the shade, by the side of the villa swimming pools.
The genius of my plan was that it required almost no money to launch. No money, in my opinion, would make the reporting better. My affection for Syria, my network of friends there, and my familiarity with the beautiful Arabic language—this, I told myself, was the start-up capital that counted. Penny-pinching would force me to sleep in mosques, to take the city bus, to hitchhike where locals hitchhiked, to eat in the houses of friends, and to learn the secrets of Middle Eastern travel austerity from the resident authorities: pilgrims, itinerant tradesmen, and students.
Most people in Syria are poor. Poverty, I told myself in Vermont, ought to be the sine qua non criterion by which editors judged the fitness of the reporter who wished to write about the Syrian people.
In the early summer of 2012, I nearly emptied my bank account—and so added to my eligibility as a reporter—by making a trip to Syria. A generous elderly, possibly out-of-the-loop consul in Houston gave me the visa through the mail. No editors in New York and none in London, it turned out, wished to publish the essays I proposed to them. That trip cost me $1,500. Later, in July, in Vermont, on a whim, I bought a Cannondale racing bike. That bill came to $1,800. Running low on cash, I sold a few things. I borrowed from my mother. At the end of the summer, I had enough cash for a new ticket to Turkey. In order to pay for expenses on the ground, I borrowed again from my mother.
I boarded the plane for Istanbul in early October. Assuming that in the fullness of time, when my reporting career was flourishing, I might hop over to the island of Cyprus for a few weeks of cycling, I brought the Cannondale. I spent my first night in Istanbul on the floor, in a room occupied by a friend I had made during my earlier, fruitless trip to Syria. I told this friend, Freddy, an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that I had some reporting work to undertake in Syria. Would he be willing to house my bike during the two weeks or so in which I would be away? Of course, he said.
Freddy, it turned out, objected to all ideas concerning Syria. “What do you want with those people?” he asked. As my host in Turkey, and an able Turkish speaker, he felt himself under an obligation to look out for me. During my twenty-four hours with him, I admitted to him that my American cell phone didn’t work in Turkey. It would have cost me $50 to unblock it. I didn’t want to pay. Freddy offered me his. I refused. He insisted. I tried to put him off. In the end, I took it because the mention of the word “Syria” caused him to shiver, because I knew he wanted to look after me, and because my taking it seemed important to him. If I needed to make a call in Syria, I tried to explain to Freddy, I would walk to one of the village shops in which the owner offered pirated international lines at cut rates. I would listen to the other phone conversations underway in the shops, make friends with the patrons, and, in this way, learn about the life of the nation. It wouldn’t occur to the proper, professional reporters to go about things this way. So much the better, I told Freddy. Freddy, a refugee in Turkey, couldn’t understand why I wished to make life more difficult for myself. “You make me afraid,” he told me.
I took the bus from Istanbul to Antakya, the city on the Syrian border in which the international press had established a sort of ersatz headquarters. On the bus, I counted up my cash. I had $200 in my American bank account, available to me through my ATM card. I was managing another $150 in liquid assets, in the form of dollar bills, stray Syrian notes, and Turkish coins. These deposits lived in plastic bags in the interior of my backpack.
So I wasn’t rich, at least not in American money, but neither would I be poor. In Antakya, life was considerably cheaper than it was in Istanbul. Accounting for the falloff in prices, technically speaking, I would probably be rich. At least I might feel that way. As for my budget: Many people in these regions, I knew, lived for six months on $350. A single publishing success would bring me, at the very least, $200. This would allow me to live—and write and hike and make new friends—in Antakya for at least six weeks. The first success will bring on the others, I told myself.
Right away, on my first day in Antakya, I began sending out my pitch letters. What about a story focusing on the music of the Syrian revolution? No one was interested. What about the mysterious-because-incommunicative young men from Libya, France, and Holland one stumbled into in front of the military supply shops in Antakya? “Fascinating,” said one editor, “but not for us.” Austin Tice, a sometime freelancer and full-time law student at Georgetown, had disappeared in Syria in August of that year. A story about Austin Tice? No one was interested. I had an idea about the zany press characters wars attract. What about an update of the 1973 campaign memoir The Boys on the Bus, in which the bus would be the Turkish bars where the next generation of war correspondents was coming of age? No one was interested.
I fell into the habit of waking up early, drinking a glass of orange juice in the restaurant next door to the boardinghouse in which I was staying, then scanning my emails.
Two weeks came and went. One Saturday morning, after I had sent out a blizzard of pitches—after they had yielded nothing at all—I sat by myself in the restaurant with my chin in my hands. I gazed through the restaurant’s plateglass windows. Every fifteen minutes or so, curious, nosing sheep, in troupes of three or four, ambled by. At a plastic table on the sidewalk, a circle of withered, motionless men sat smoking in the sunlight.
During my first hours of meditation, I allowed my thoughts to drift to the hotel, in the fancy Antakya neighborhood, in which the present generation of war correspondents would have been, just then, sipping the foam from their morning cappuccinos. I half-thought of offering myself to one of these properly employed journalists as a translator or a fixer. Perhaps if I hung out at their cappuccino bar for long enough, a crumb, in the form of an assignment, or an editor’s email address, would fall from their table. I would dash off a letter. The editor would bite. Cash would flow. I daydreamed in this way for a little while, then snapped to. Those adventurers were in love with the correspondent flak jacket and the telephoto lens. They knew everything about gadgets and who, in their correspondent bubble, was in love with whom. How could they help me with Syria? It’s beneath me
to speak to them at all, I told myself. It would make as much sense, I thought, to ask the sheep on the sidewalk for help. The shepherd, wherever he was, would inform me about the politics of the region. If I were to turn to my fellow café patrons—ancient, trembling men—they would share their wisdom about warfare with me.
Toward ten thirty, I decided that the time had come in my life for Plan B. Maybe I could retire to a youth hostel on the nearby island of Cyprus? If I could get there, I could certainly ride my bike. But then… I was pretty sure I didn’t have the money to get there. A panic seized me. Did I have enough change to pay the gentle, whispering white-bearded man who pressed his oranges in the back of the café? He had told me that he brought in his oranges from the orchards along the Mediterranean coast, to the south of Antakya, in Hatay Province. Those oranges had tasted like fruit from the heavens to me. I would have died of shame if I had not been able to give the orange juice man his money.
I tried to explain to myself how exactly my cash had dwindled away. During the previous ten years, I had angled and schemed and dreamed of turning myself into a Middle East correspondent. There had been Arabic-language academies in Yemen. There had been a period of study in a Koran school in Yemen and a not particularly successful book about what one learns in such a school. During the three years prior to the war, I had been a full-time resident of Damascus. During this period I had fallen in love, as most foreigners do, with the people, the language, and the culture of this place. My career, however, had foundered.
Naturally, I refused to give up. I dug in my heels. I declared my indifference to money. I don’t require rewards from the world of things, I told myself. Now, however, the economics of my career development program were pronouncing a verdict in figures. There wasn’t enough money in this business, it was too obvious and much too late for me to note, or if there was, it wasn’t for me. I would have to find another way.
For the time being, I required only enough to get myself to Cyprus. In order to come up with that cash, I decided that I would write one last essay. Perhaps the new editors of the New Republic would publish it. Perhaps someone else would. That essay would establish, in my own mind, if in no one else’s, that my essays were fun to read, revealing, cool, better than the others. There was no cash value in such essays? Fine. Once I had rung the Syria essay bell, I would cut my losses. I would trim my expectations, pack up, move on.
In order to solemnize this decision, I typed out an email to the person whose opinion mattered more to me than anyone else’s. She had rescued me from a thousand disappointments, not all of which had involved my being broke. Lately, however, a note of plaintiveness had been creeping into her communications.
“For heaven’s sake, sweetheart,” she had taken to saying, into the ether, when we talked over Skype. “You need a Plan B.”
“I know, Mom,” I would reply. “I’m working on it.”
“As they say in Georgia,” she wrote in an email I received the day before my Antakya restaurant reckoning, “ ‘tell me what you know good.’ ” This, I knew, was her way of saying, What in God’s name are you doing in Turkey? Please. Stop being an idiot.
I had been too embarrassed to reply to her question. Now, however, I tapped out a version of the message she wanted to hear:
I’m still trying with the editors. Nothing definite yet. I mean to get one more piece published. I’ll send that around, bargain, negotiate, and maybe this will lead to more steady work somehow. But maybe not. Anyway, I’m planning on writing one more piece. Then, I’m moving on. Okay? Okay?
I had friends in Odessa. There were English-teaching possibilities in Tbilisi, Georgia. Cyprus, however, was nearby. I mentioned these places, wrote a bit about the delicious Turkish oranges, the whispering of the orange juice presser (he spoke a formal old-fashioned variety of Arabic), then pressed “send.” Right away, as if from the phone itself, I heard the sound of my mother sighing in cheerful, exhausted relief.
Having thus committed myself, I turned to my current accounts. My room in the boardinghouse—officially, the Hotel Ercan (in Turkish: the Hotel of the Brave)—was costing me $17 a night. I was spending $10 during the days easily—on coffees in the morning, lunch, cell phone cards for Freddy’s phone, and cans of Efes beer in the evening. A taxi into Syria was going to cost me $20. I would need at least $40 for expenses inside Syria. My mini-audit told me that about $250 of my freelance journalism start-up capital remained. Under the circumstances, the right thing, I decided, would be to move to a cheaper, more decrepit boardinghouse. But the Ercan, I knew from previous visits, was the cheapest, most decrepit of the Antakya boardinghouses. What to do?
Happily, as if by an act of God, just as I was typing the last of my internal audit figures into my cell phone calculator, Ashraf al-Tunisi (Ashraf the Tunisian), whose musings on the Arab affection for warfare had entertained me during my first mornings in this restaurant, materialized in a patch of sunlight in front of the boardinghouse. I knew him to be the occupant of a room in a cheaper, more slovenly house, in the alleys above the old city of Antakya. I knew him to be in need of money.
I ordered a coffee for him. I stepped outside. Handing him the coffee, I greeted him as my Yemeni teachers used to greet me, high on the top floors of the Sanaa tower houses, when I met them for my first Arabic lessons.
“Morning of the light, Ashraf, my brother,” I said.
“Morning of the rose and the jasmine,” he replied. Did I happen to have a cigarette for him? He paused. “Never mind! God is generous.”
Ashraf had been a student of philology in the Syrian city of Aleppo before money troubles interrupted his studies. When the violence flared in Syria, the regime revoked his visa. He was forced to leave. Now, in Antakya, he disdained the young Syrians who made ends meet by selling vegetables from street corner barrows. They were slaves to the material world. Ashraf preferred to pass the days in contemplation. He read in the mosques. He admired the sunsets. In order to carry on, he sold the TV he had brought with him from Syria. Then he sold an extra pair of shoes, and, finally, his cell phone.
In Ashraf’s opinion, the war in Syria was a species of craziness into which Arab countries often tumbled. He thought my ambition to have a closer look at it was a species of American craziness. But if I was determined to go, he told me when I met him, during my first morning in Antakya, I should allow him to vet my traveling companions. Meanwhile, he said, if there was anything I should need in Antakya—a friend, an advisor, connections in Aleppo—I should address myself to him.
In the sunlight, in front of the Ercan, I gave him a minute to sip his coffee. He found a willing cigarette donor at a café table, lit his cigarette, then returned to me. He smiled into the sun.
“I have a question for you, Ashraf my brother,” I said. I asked him how much he paid to rent his room.
“Rent?” he said. It was nothing at all—a pittance. Did I not want to hear about the house itself? “Surely you want to improve your Arabic?” If so, his house would be the ideal venue, since it was filled with Syrians from every sect, party, and region. The house sat on the lip of an escarpment, with a view over the twists of the Orontes River, the spiraling Antakya suq, and on the horizon a Turkish alpine panorama. From the curb, he looked up into the warren of gimcrack shacks and mosque minarets that hung like a balcony over the southern half of the city. “By god, from my room, you feel yourself a thousand feet over this filthy city of whores. There are birds, my friend. There are clouds.”
“Every night in the Ercan, I spend seventeen dollars,” I told him.
“What?” he said, in genuine—or was it simulated?—shock. “Seventeen dollars for a dirty room in this whore of a hotel?” But this rate was exorbitant. It was haram to charge even half that amount for such a room. I agreed. His rent, he said, was not unreasonable: 200 Turkish liras a month—about $40. We kept quiet for a moment, and then I mooted my idea. I would bring a blanket and a pillow. I would sleep on the floor of his room. I would pay half the rent
.
He thought the matter over for a moment, furrowed his brow, and then a smile of the warmest welcome and shared purpose washed over his face. “Of course,” he said. “You are welcome. Welcome, my American friend!”
I checked out of my hotel. We ambled through the suq. From a stall operated by a friend of his, I bought a pink faux-fur blanket (50 Turkish liras) and a pillow (10 Turkish liras). On the far side of the suq, as we climbed through the alleyways, I gave in to the feeling of newfound friendship and serendipity that had hovered over every adventure I’d had in the Arab world to date. I bought each of us a can of beer (10 Turkish liras). He needed a haircut. Okay, I did, too. We went to his friend, a barber whose shop was around the corner from Ashraf’s house. “I’ll pay for us both,” I said (10 Turkish liras).
As we were getting our hair cut, we resolved to strike out, right away, in search of work. Any work at all would do. Did we not both need money? “ ‘Work is blessed,’ said the Prophet, peace and blessing upon him,” Ashraf observed.
“Ameen,” I agreed.
He felt Antakya was much busier with opportunities for people like us than we knew. Until recently, he had preferred not to search them out. He rather liked to think. “I know what you mean,” I said. Lately, however, a feeling had come to him that a little bit of money in his pocket would do him good. And the society of friends at a job site would buck him up. His larger ambition was to save for a ticket home to Tunisia. “May God make you prosperous,” I told him.
“May he give us both wealth,” he replied.
We spent the rest of the afternoon making inquiries at the construction sites on the outskirts of Antakya. Ashraf felt he would have better luck finding a job if he told the construction managers that he was a Syrian victim of the war, lately evicted from Aleppo, by the helicopter barrel bombs. He felt that I didn’t look enough like an Arab for this trick to be useful to me. “Don’t say you’re an American, whatever you do,” he said. He felt that no Turk would believe that an American required work at a construction site. They would assume I had come to spy. They would refuse us both. He thought I could pass for a Russian.
