by Theo Padnos
In the quiet of the olive groves, outside this village, as we crested a hill that permitted a view of the setting sun, it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure whose house we would sleep in that night. Would the house be in Aleppo or Idlib? Would we be staying with someone’s parents? I understood that prudent journalists did not sleep in schools or mosques, since the regime had been to known to air strike such places. What if their idea of a fitting sleeping arrangement didn’t mesh with mine?
Since no one was talking yet we were certainly going somewhere, I concluded that a destination had been decided on, and that neither Mohammed nor anyone else had communicated this fact to me. This, I thought, was discourteous. It occurred to me that if I announced that I wished to sleep, say, in Aleppo rather than in Idlib, my fellow travelers, who evidently had a plan but didn’t want to let me in on it, were likely to lie to me about their plan. I could express whatever wish I felt like expressing. They were going to sleep where they wished to sleep. This realization made me feel slightly less than free. It was just a feeling. I let it pass.
I stared at the darkness settling over the olive groves. I have nothing in common with Syrian smuggler-journalists, I decided. In agreeing to travel with sulky small-time criminals I had forfeited the opportunity travel affords to make valuable friendships. I regretted it.
So I have made a mistake, I told myself. Yes, a mistake. And then I thought, So what exactly is wrong with two-bit smugglers? Pretty much the entire point of traveling, I told myself, was to discover. Discoveries of personal character, particularly in Syria, did not always culminate in a glow of virtue. Was this news? Not to me it wasn’t. Anyway, voyages in which everyone lived on the same plane of middle-class morality happened to grandparents, were called senior cruises, and finished, every afternoon at the same time, with a glass of warm milk. Was that what I had had in mind?
My theory of travel, which I had developed in libraries in America during graduate school, was that travel allowed you to slip into lives you might have lived but hadn’t yet had the time. To give your old life the slip, you had to learn to eat as foreigners ate, to speak the languages they spoke, and to pray as they prayed. The more totally you gave yourself to them, the further you could see into the lives of others. Visions of this kind, I thought, were bound to produce interesting writing.
Asked about his philosophy of travel, a writer I admired, Jonathan Raban, advocated bold self-surrender: “You’ve got to go naked into the world,” he once told an interviewer, “and make yourself vulnerable.” In writing his Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi, in which he set out to discover the invisible currents along which the United States floated in the early eighties, his idea had been to deliver himself to the great moving power in the nation, the Mississippi River. He did it as Huckleberry Finn did—that is, by pushing himself into the flow, then watching the stars.
In Huckleberry Finn, this is an act of unaccountable disregard for society and personal safety. But in that book, the river is life. The little towns through which the river flows, the book makes clear, have fallen in love with death. They have fake religion. They kill. They scam. They “sivilize”—by which Mark Twain means to say that they turn life into waking death.
For its part, the river cannot be read. It seduces. It carries you away. It teaches courage, especially the moral kind. It represents the imponderable, inhuman powers that work their purpose out beneath the surface of things. Eventually, it brings the travelers in the story into something like harmony with the wild, turbulent, multitudinous nation that was just then coming to life.
My beat-up taxi that wasn’t a taxi—this I told myself as we rolled from the village of Atme—will do as a raft. My taciturn smuggler friends, the descending night, whoever else I might meet along the way, their religious feelings, the flows of refugees, their traffic jams, bicycles, donkey-drawn carts—the wide-open wilderness that was northern Syria in the absence of a government—this would do as a river.
I felt—or anyway, I tried to make myself feel—that over time my voyage would bring me an understanding of the invisible currents on which the nation was floating, as Mark Twain’s experience of the Mississippi had brought him understanding.
Some dangers on this voyage, I told myself—IEDs, enemy troops, air strikes—would be clear and present. Others would be like the whirlpools and sawyers in Huck’s river: to be felt more than seen. If I kept myself in the broad mainstream, where millions of locals were going about their lives, the crowds, I thought, would protect me. It was the cowboy reporters who insisted on tracking down al Qaeda chieftains or photographing the back-and-forth of the battle who got themselves in trouble. I, for one, had better things to do.
So I coached myself that evening. Accordingly, as it was occurring to me that I had surrendered myself—in the matter of sleeping arrangements—to my fellow travelers, I asked Mohammed to tell me where we would sleep exactly once. He pondered the question. “At my house,” he replied suddenly, with finality, as if he had made up his mind, then and there, to send out an order. He would command the gates of his compound to be opened. His men would prepare the sleeping quarters. The women would prepare the food. He nodded in silent approval of his decision. So we were retiring to his private domicile. The matter permitted no further discussion.
“You have a house?” I asked. I had been under the impression that he was a refugee from al Tal—an IDP (internally displaced person), in UN-speak—in Idlib Province.
“Of course I have a house,” he said. “Everyone here has a house.” He turned to his friends.
“I have a house,” said Abu Osama. “And my brother, also a house.” Abu Said nodded.
“We are with the revolution,” Mohammed said. “The Syrian people are with us. If we want a house, we have a house.”
This was an obvious lie. They were mocking me with the boldness of their fictions. We would soon be sleeping in someone’s parents’ living room, I assumed. Mohammed, who wanted to be taken for a grand personage, would tell me that it was his house. Fine, I thought. Eventually, the river of time would sort out who owned what. It would certainly reveal to me where we were going. It would answer all other pressing questions, too. Or perhaps the mysteries I felt settling over our voyage would deepen, in which case I would have involved myself in a proper detective story. What kind of work did my new friends do, really? To whom did they sell their goods? Time would tell.
I decided to leave my fellow travelers to their drama. I turned to gaze at the world. At a junction just south of Bab al-Hawa, along a stretch of highway on which the rebels in Syria had won a series of tide-turning battles that summer, Mohammed angled the taxi right, away from Aleppo. Pity, I thought. Aleppo was the more picturesque, more newsworthy city. In a field off to the left, a Syrian government tank that had evidently been blown from the surface of the highway lay on its side like a giant armadillo. A still more giant predator had pounced on it, then dragged it into the grass. A tangle of blue and red wiring had been pulled from the tank’s interior, then left to dangle from a hatch in the turret. What haunting, prehistoric scenery wars created, I thought, and what an unhappy fate would have befallen the soldiers within. The predator, I imagined, would have pulled out their entrails, too.
In a village a few kilometers farther on, we drove through a line of burned-over shops. Swatches of soot covered the white cinder blocks above a row of pull-down steel gates. The walls, however, were intact. It looked to me as though an arsonist had walked down the village high street with a torch, set fire to everything that would burn, then vanished into the night.
So had the destruction been the work of the government? The rebels? Vandals? Was this a necessary, rejuvenating kind of fire? Or was it mere anarchy? I didn’t have enough confidence in my fellow travelers to put my questions to them. I am living among unanswered questions, I told myself, as the people in the region who want nothing to do with this war have surely been doing from the start.
Twenty minutes of driving brought u
s to a village stronghold of the revolutionaries called Binnish. Binnish, my traveling friends had told me, was the only place on our route in which I could exchange the $50 I had in my pocket for Syrian liras. My kidnappers were good sports. Perhaps they didn’t want the $50 they were going to acquire once they had carried out their kidnapping scheme exchanged for Syrian liras? If so, they didn’t say a word. Mohammed pulled the car to the curb, across from a wall on which someone had scrawled, in spray paint: “To us, the blood of our martyrs is precious. To them, it is to be spilled by the barrel.”
In front of the grocery store in which I was to change my money, a gas-powered generator hammered and coughed. It seemed on the verge of blowing itself to bits. One of its lines fed a pastry shop, into which my companions disappeared. Another line fed into the grocery store.
Behind the groceryman’s counter, a flat-screen television was showing news scenes of the Syrian war. The groceryman converted my money in silence. I picked out a bottle of juice. I put it on the counter. The man stared at me as if he had seen me somewhere before, as if my appearance in his shop meant danger for him, or possibly for me. He seemed beset by strange apprehensions. I held my money out to him. “You are a journalist,” he observed.
“Yes,” I said.
He pressed a palmful of sweets into my hand. “Welcome,” he said. He declined to allow me to pay for the juice. He stared hard into my eyes. I wondered if he might be on the verge of tears.
“May God preserve you and strengthen you,” he said. “If you need anything under the sun, anything at all, you will come to me. Yes?”
“May he strengthen you and preserve your parents, the mother and the father,” I replied. I urged him again to take the coins. He refused.
Before the war, during my three years of life as a student and aspiring journalist, I had lived in a series of apartments in downtown Damascus. In those neighborhoods, the citizens to whom I introduced myself as a journalist had recoiled, as if struck by an electric shock. So the revolution has washed this terror away, I told myself. So strangers in this country would speak freely to me. At last! I thought. Personal narratives, jokes, obscenities, memories, dreams, diatribes—my notebooks would overflow. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” I thought. I would have stories for my grandchildren.
As I stepped outside into the generator din, it occurred to me that a few days in the company of my shopkeeper friend would bring me true, wise, revealing stories—without the deadening silences my smuggler friends imposed.
An idea popped into my head: I would make this village store my research headquarters. The storekeeper would introduce me to his customers. When they stopped in for cigarettes and chitchat, I would write down whatever tales they cared to relate. My essay would be called “What I Saw of the Revolution from the Binnish General Store.” In order to put the idea in motion, I required a place to stay the night. I gazed at the graffiti in front of the store for a moment, crossed the street, then turned down a side street in search of a hotel.
I walked for five seconds, then ten. “Whoa! Whoa! Where are you going?” Mohammed called out. His hand was on my shoulder. He put his arm through mine. “Where are you off to, friend? It’s not safe here,” he said. “Not after dark. Not on your own.”
Ten minutes later, when we were again rolling through the olive groves, I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that the two companions in the back seat were passing some small object back and forth between them. It made clicks and clacks, like a staple gun. It caused giggles to issue from the back seat.
I let it pass for it seemed a private joke. A few kilometers farther on, it occurred to me that a spider or bug of some kind was crawling through the hair on the nape of my neck. I shooed it away with a flick of the hand. A moment later, the insect was back. I clapped my hand over it, then inspected my hand. Nothing. The insect went away for a few moments, and then I felt it cavorting on the side of my head, where my hair overlapped my ear. I shooed it away, then turned to the back seat. My traveling companions gave me dour looks. They said nothing.
A few minutes later, when the twittering in the back seat returned, I turned my head again. My eye happened to fall on a shiny black gun Abu Osama was stuffing into the pocket of his winter jacket. It had a menacing-looking black barrel and a flap, under the handle, that would have been used to snap bullet cartridges into place. The brothers in the back seat made sheepish, guilty grins at me.
Abu Osama produced a bullet from a jacket pocket. He held it by the tips of his fingers, as if he were displaying a tiny, ingenious piece of gadgetry.
“Question, if you don’t mind,” he said. “What is the price of such a bullet in America?”
“By god, I don’t know,” I replied. He nodded at a pair of handcuffs, which, to my bewilderment, were sitting in his lap. “And the price of the cuffs?” he asked. I didn’t know.
About a day later, as I reviewed these moments in my mind, I knew that when I stared through the cracks in the taxi windshield Abu Osama and his brother were aiming their gun at the base of my skull. I would have turned my head now and then to inspect a bend in the road. Olive trees were casting curiously shaped shadows across the pavement. There were roadside shacks. The moon was rising. Abu Osama would have moved the gun as I moved my head. Naughtiness of that sort was just his thing. He would have nuzzled the gun’s sight into my hair. My inability to see or even to feel would have made him giggle. Abu Said would have blanched a bit. Perhaps he giggled. This would have encouraged Abu Osama. He would have clicked the magazine into place loudly, as if he wanted to be discovered at his game. In Arabic, when an assailant uses his weapon to caress a victim he is said to “kiss” him. So Abu Osama was carrying out this form of flirtation. He wanted to kiss me. He wanted me to feel and not to feel it. He wanted his friends to admire—and to keep quiet.
At the time, as I contemplated the presence of a gun, a bullet, and handcuffs in the back seat, I was indignant. I have fallen in with a carload of thugs, I told myself. They were lowlife bullet dealers. Probably they had spent their time in Antakya casing the new rash of military supply shops that had spread through the city. An unscrupulous dealer somewhere in the Antakya hills had sold them the gun. Probably it didn’t work. They would show it off to their friends in the Syrian sticks. Maybe they would use it to threaten people. Maybe they meant to rob actual Syrian citizens on the highways of this governmentless backcountry.
“And those handcuffs of yours,” I said. “Do you need them?” I addressed my question to the air, in a tone of conspiratorial curiosity, as if I liked the idea of banditry. I wanted to be let in on the secrets of the trade.
“You never know,” Mohammed said. He turned to glance at his friend Abu Osama, who shrugged. No one else spoke.
After a minute or so, Mohammed interrupted the quiet. Nowadays, he said, criminals were flooding into Idlib Province. Many of them had been sent by the regime to maraud and to spy. “I could come across a regime lackey of this kind tonight,” he said. His word for “lackey,” shabeeh, also meant “spirit” or “ghost.” The shabiha were regime irregulars in civilian clothing who fanned out across the countryside pillaging and shaking down and abusing all those they thought insufficiently loyal to President Assad. They often appeared in news reports. I wasn’t altogether sure they existed.
“The shabeeh, he might rob me,” said Mohammed. “He might try to kidnap me. We need the gun for protection,” he explained. “We need the cuffs to put him in jail.”
So in this governmentless part of Syria, there were jails?
“There are many jails,” he said. “Do you think we do not have jails? Why would you think that?”
“Of course you do,” I said. I didn’t mean to underestimate his justice system. I apologized. And then I shut up. I dislike Mohammed, I told myself. I disliked him intensely.
So these young men had appointed themselves sheriffs of the Binnish backcountry. They prowled the roads, profiteered from the war, and pretended they
were journalists risking their lives in the fight against tyranny. How cute, I thought. How Lone Ranger–ish of them. When I got back to Turkey, I decided, I would write an article about overgrown adolescents in Syria who imagined themselves vigilantes, gallivanted around in a decrepit taxi, had scarcely learned to drive, and anyway spent most of their time smoking cigarettes on hotel balconies in Turkey. Probably any self-respecting shabeeh, I thought to myself, would have overpowered these lightweights in an instant.
I sank my chin into my hands. I stared into my lap. Have they nothing better to do? I thought.
Another ten minutes or so of driving took us to an unmanned barricade—a scattering of stones, a blanket-sized scrap of tin roofing, a mess of tires strewn across the highway, then abandoned, as if by a naughty child. Whispers passed among my companions.
Mohammed turned to me. “In the village ahead,” he said. “They’re with the regime, Every last one of them.”
“Yes?” I said.
“All of them are Shia,” he said.
I had been aware of the existence of two tiny Shia atolls in the sea of Sunni Muslims that is the northwest corner of Syria. And then I had forgotten them. Now, somewhere ahead in the darkness, there it was: the divide in the Syrian psyche I meant to put at the center of my essay-to-be. Perhaps I should begin the narrative here, I thought, at this line of rubble in the night.
Mohammed turned the taxi left, then nosed it down a dirt road. “Why not visit the Shia?” I wondered.
“They’ll shoot us if we drive through,” he replied, as if relaying news too boring to discuss.
