Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  A few moments later, at the entrance to a friendlier, unbarricaded village, Mohammed slowed so that I could examine a sign painted across a sheet of plywood that had been propped by the side of the road. A scrawl of white characters, in disorderly, childlike lettering, had been daubed against a black background. The letters read: “There is no god but God.” Beneath this legend, inside a white circle, smaller black letters spelled out the rest of the testament of faith: “Mohammed is the messenger of God.” The sign I was looking at then eventually became the emblem ISIS used on its flag and official documents. At the time, the feelings that gave rise to ISIS were present enough in this landscape but the group itself did not yet exist. Back then, I didn’t suppose that reading the feelings of a place was possible at all. In any case, I was inclined to take things at face value. The testament of faith on a board at the entrance to a town suggested to me that the region was reverting to some older, more reliable, better loved means of governing itself. Why has it taken so long? I felt like asking my traveling companions, but didn’t because they were, I was beginning to suspect, inclined to make up random answers—out of boredom, evidently. Mohammed gestured at the sign. “Can you read this?” he asked. I read the testament of faith out loud for him. He nodded. “Good,” he said. “Now you know all you need to know.”

  This village, it turned out, was in the midst of its evening routine. It was carrying on in the electricityless gloom that engulfed all the villages on the northern Syrian plains then. Men in robes were plodding home from the sunset prayer. Revolutionaries piled weapons into pickup beds. Children stared at us with attentive, wondering eyes. A shopkeeper was reopening his vegetable stand.

  What stoicism, I thought. The ideals to which these villagers dedicated their lives—piety, freedom—had no need of electricity. They knew this and so carried on with their routines as if electricity had been a fad that flourished for a time among city dwellers, then dwindled away. In this village, I thought to myself, there was moonlight. There were candles. The villagers guided themselves by an inner light.

  Such were my reflections at the time. If I had known then what I know now, the darkness of those villages would have worried me. Now I know that the men who have been bringing forth Islamic fiefdoms in Syria feel that the worse things are, the better. Hardship is meant to draw the nation closer to the Koran. It deepens the citizens’ reliance on one another. Electricitylessness weans the populace from the government’s menu of sexy evening soap operas. The builders of these fiefs feel the soap operas have been conceived to weaken the public love of Islam and to promote pastimes the West loves, like drug taking and wife swapping.

  A citizen in an Islamic state should nurture contempt for soap operas in his heart. He should renounce television in general, except the Saudi government television, which shows a live feed of the faithful circumambulating the Kaaba in Mecca. Anyone who’s lived in a proper Islamic state for more than a few weeks knows that it’s the revolution in consciousness that counts.

  When that revolution takes over a landscape, it will leave markers. How can it not? One of them is the destruction of the electric grid. The shops may well burn. Slabs of painted wood will appear at the entrances to the villages. The cars, the water mains, the schools—all such things aren’t likely to be maintained in the normal way, at least not for long, because a time of atonement has come, and detachment from the world of things.

  That night, some such psychology, it seems to me now, was falling over the landscape. It fell as the moonlight fell, across every house and alley, over the sheep and the abandoned Byzantine villages.

  It would have settled over the interior of our car, just as it settled over the hills. I saw it all. I read the signs, letter by letter, but as I had no notion of how to interpret them, they were merely scenic. I felt every sight to be curious and strange, like a field of hieroglyphics. Very intriguing indeed, I thought, as the sights and sounds—and the tingling in my hair at the back of my neck—whispered to me of my fate. I wondered what would come next.

  What came next was an hour and a half’s worth of driving through the darkness. As he drove, Mohammed fed himself bits of the warm, cheesy pastry—kanafeh—he had bought in Binnish. The pistachio bits on the surface of this spongy, sweet cake had sprinkled into his lap. He gestured at the cardboard box the baker in Binnish had prepared for him. “Eat,” he told me. “Be my guest.”

  We chewed in silence. I gazed at the other cars faltering through the darkness. Almost all drove without headlights. Was this in order to avoid attracting the attention of fighter planes? Or because the headlights no longer worked? Many cars bore license plates from Eastern Europe: Romania, Bulgaria, Poland. Others came from Aleppo, Damascus, and Idlib. Some bore no license plates at all. The revolution will have brought new life to the Eastern European stolen car industry, I thought to myself, and perhaps to car thieves everywhere in Syria. I noticed a pair of friends motoring along without a passenger door. Other cars lacked bumpers. Out with the old, in with the older—apparently the revolution had brought some such ethic to aficionados of highway driving in northern Syria. Or perhaps people were driving wrecks out of necessity, because spare parts were too costly. The wrecks rolled along rather well, I thought. Why fix it if it ain’t broken?

  As we drove, doubts about my conclusions crept into my head. With such an enthusiasm for wreck renovation abroad in the land, it probably wouldn’t be long until one of our fellow motorists turned his eyes to our wreck. Surely, useful things could be scavenged from the four of us? I cast worried looks at the cars that overtook us. When I noticed a car limping along behind us (some flashed their brights), I sank into the depths of my seat. I didn’t want to show my companions that I was afraid. On the other hand, I didn’t want a passing scavenger to empty his magazine into my head.

  Happily, the taxi wreck had too little power to delay the wrecks behind us for long. Our followers followed for a minute or so, pulled into the oncoming lane, then roared away.

  Late in the evening, the taxi slowed to weave through a pair of hairpin bends, marked out by stacks of boulders in the road. At the end of this obstacle course stood a bullet-ridden oil drum. Behind the drum sat a ring of empty plastic chairs. Two teenagers in civilian clothing emerged from the shadows. In his right hand, the taller boy held a rifle. Its strap trailed through the dirt. He motioned for Mohammed to lower his window.

  “Who are you with?” the teenager asked.

  “Ahrar al-Sham,” replied Mohammed, scarcely glancing at the soldier. Ahrar al-Sham was the largest, most famous militant group in the North.

  The soldier nodded. He stepped aside. “Off you go,” he said.

  Mohammed did not reply.

  This dialog occasioned no commentary in our car. So my companions were activist-journalists in Turkey. Inside Syria, they went about as Ahrar militants. Had they lied to me or to the checkpoint soldiers? In any case, they were liars. I let the matter slide.

  We drove for a few minutes, and then I brought up the other aspect of the checkpoint dialog that mystified me: What on earth was the point of a middle-of-nowhere inspection in which an anonymous sentry pretended to seek out the identities of travelers who weren’t required to use license plates or to present IDs?

  Mohammed shrugged. “Security,” he said.

  But what, I wanted to know, were the security men hoping to intercept? On whose behalf were they providing security? To man a checkpoint in this region of suicide car bombers and attack helicopter air strikes was to invite fatal attacks. Were not the security men compromising their own security?

  My mind chased such questions down dead-end alleys. I didn’t feel like badgering my companions any longer. I did, however, hope to hear a word or two about Ahrar al-Sham. How could four slackers in hoodies and soccer jerseys in a beat-up taxi be taken for rebel soldiers? Surely, the sentry might have posed a question or two about a brigade, a superior officer, orders, a base, identity papers? There had been no discussion in our car about any
thing remotely connected with soldiery. As Mohammed chewed the last of his kanafeh, I asked him if he was really with Ahrar al-Sham. He kept his eyes on the road. “Yes, I am,” he said.

  I turned to the passengers in the back seat. “You’re also Ahrar al-Sham?”

  “In the beginning of the war, yes,” Abu Osama said. “Now, no longer.” Abu Said said that he himself had always been a civilian.

  “And the teenagers at the checkpoint, also Ahrar al-Sham?” I asked.

  Mohammed shrugged. “Probably,” he said.

  But there had been no uniforms at the checkpoint, no flag, no badges—no identity markers of any kind. Twenty-four hours earlier, I had been keen on the idea of slipping away from one’s identity. Travel of this sort revealed the breadth of possibilities before us. It taught the fullness of the world. It transformed the self. So I liked the idea. Didn’t I? This Syrian version of identitylessness seemed extreme to me, as if whoever was in charge of the checkpoints meant to invite all travelers to be whoever they felt like being and to flip identities every few kilometers. Naturally, this checkpoint freedom would spread from a spot on the highway to a village nearby, and then through a chain of villages—and so on, across the landscape. Surely, this was the point. So this bit of Syrian landscape meant to experiment a bit with its identity. It wanted to invent, to drift away from itself, to try on something new. How curious, I thought. I hadn’t known landscapes might want to do such things.

  Another twenty minutes of twisty single-lane roads—excellent terrain for bicycling, I noted—led us to a village somewhere in a region Mohammed referred to as the Jebel al-Zawiya, or Corner Mountain. I knew it by its reputation: wild, unpoliceable hills, a smuggling-based economy, and an earlier religious rebellion (in 1982) against Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez.

  Mohammed slowed the car amid a cluster of single-story cinder-block farmhouses. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out windows or doors or chimneys. The village looked like a collection of shipping containers that had dug themselves in for the night in the lee of a hill.

  Mohammed inched the taxi upward, along a rock-strewn goat path. “So these houses belong to the families of your clan?” I asked him. Technically speaking, he was an adoptee in someone else’s clan. I knew this. I meant for him to elaborate on his new living arrangements.

  “Yes, my clan,” he said. He cut the engine in the front yard of a cinder-block hut. The four of us emerged from the car. The closing of the car doors was like a series of tiny explosions in that silence. The stars lit our way. Sheep bleated. No one spoke.

  Mohammed’s front door opened on a sitting room. Abu Said and Abu Osama picked through a stack of blankets that had been piled in a corner. “So this is your house?” I asked Mohammed.

  He thought about the matter for an instant. “Yes, it is,” he said.

  Did he own furniture? A kitchen? Live with anyone? He did not speak. He helped me push a foam-rubber mattress into a corner. He lit a pair of candles, then placed them on a chair in the middle of the room. He fetched a blanket for me, which I put around my shoulders. He announced that he meant to sit up during the night with friends. The friends lived in a neighboring house. He opened the front door. “Want anything else?” he asked. He slipped away.

  The brothers, Abu Osama and Abu Said, were busy shaking out a blanket. Some of the blankets had lice, Abu Osama warned. Too late now, I thought. The brothers spread a blanket over their laps. They opened a laptop, then lost themselves in a video game.

  In Antakya, I hadn’t been able to manage much enthusiasm for journaling. Now, however, I was embarked on a proper reporting voyage. It would have felt more professional if I had had a commission or a lead on a commission, but now that I had arrived in an actual war zone, the matter of who might publish what and for how much struck me as too trivial to worry about. The details would sort themselves out with the exchange of a few emails.

  I withdrew my reporter’s notebook from my backpack. I noted the time and the date. I related my discovery of a new way to cross an international border, the kindness of the shopkeeper in Binnish, and the stringy, gooey kanafeh Mohammed had offered me as we drove.

  I opened the can of Efes beer. Did beer drinking offend the scruples of my traveling companions? But they had offended me with their silences and their ridiculous ideas about ridding the countryside of shabiha. Their absorption in their video game offended me. I drank the beer without guilt.

  In my notebook, I noted the weather: bright moonlight, bright clouds, cold gusts. Winter, I told this diary, was on the march. I noted the living room décor: a single carpet, a mess of foam-rubber mattresses, a desk, a chair. There was new vocabulary to add to my war journal: qammleh, for which Abu Osama had scoured his blanket before he unfolded it across his lap, meant “louse.”

  I thought about how the other reporters meant to cover this war. Traveling about in bunches, whispering into satellite phones, dashing off bulletins for the wire, then retiring to the bar to reminisce about the halcyon days in Baghdad and Kabul. They waved at the countries they wrote about, interviewed their drivers, interviewed one another, mistook the lies they encountered for the truth, then went off to the TV studio to discuss how nearly they had escaped death that very morning and how heartbreaking the lives of the local children were. Probably templates in their computers produced these stories for them. They wouldn’t dream of altering their templates. Why should they? They were already at the summit of their crummy profession. I hated them. Phonies.

  In a distant valley, artillery boomed. I asked Abu Osama about this. A battle was underway for the highway that controlled access to a city about ten kilometers away called Marat al-Nouman. So said Abu Osama. He spoke quietly, scarcely looked at me, then returned to his video game. The computer bathed the brothers’ faces in soft blue light. They muttered to each other. Things were being blown up in the virtual world, too. Every few seconds, when something big exploded in their imaginary world, a hint of a smile appeared in their eyes. They did not take their eyes from the screen.

  How curious it is, I told my notebook, that my smuggler friends should be so entranced by their laptop game and so indifferent to the slaughter their fellow citizens were carrying out on one another in the valley next door. Was real-life war not worth a moment or two of discussion? No, their virtual world had it all over the real one. So the video game designers have conquered minds even here, where the barrel bombs fall and there’s scarcely an hour or two of electricity per day. If only the combatants over in Marat al-Nouman could so enthrall themselves, I told my notebook, they could resolve their differences by banging away on their keyboards.

  I did not bother to ask my roommates about their itinerary for the following day.

  I resolved to wake up, kibbitz as little as possible, listen and learn. We will take the taxi through the hills, I told myself. The car, I knew, was full of wares. Perhaps my fellow travelers would prove to be the Willy Lomans of the Syrian war, way out there in the blue, riding on smiles and shoeshines.

  Probably their customers would be local shopkeepers. Perhaps there would be rebel soldiers standing at an intersection somewhere, waiting for phone chargers or cigarettes or a magazine of bullets. Probably there would be a shady character or two wishing to buy handcuffs. Once my companions have brought me into their trade, I told myself, there won’t be a need for secrets anymore. Perhaps then, at last, we could be friends.

  It occurred to me that the following day was Sunday. The only thing I would insist on, therefore, was a visit to one of the phone-booth bodegas, which were common enough in Syria at the time, so that I could call my mom. Sunday mornings, her time, were my times to check in in Cambridge, to reassure her, to hear a bit about the weather at home, and, though I didn’t like to admit that Mom was wise in ways I was not, to listen.

  First, however, I would disclose. I would slip the bit about my being in Syria into the latter half of the conversation—after I had told her that I was making friends, that the weather was lo
vely, and that the longest extant stretch of Roman road in the Middle East lay just inside Syria, on a pretty hillside, under a line of juniper trees. Actually, I’m not more than a few kilometers from that place right now, I would say. Then I would assure her that I could hear birds chirping everywhere, that I was in a village as serene as the most idyllic Vermont hamlet, that I was keeping as far from the combat zones as was humanly possible, and that the essay I was going to produce about the whole thing—the voyage, the friends, the Syrian war—would probably, almost certainly—well, possibly—be published in the New Republic.

  I knew I could count on her not to ask about the nature of the commitment I had had from the editors there. She wouldn’t want to probe into the details, I knew, because she wouldn’t want to force me to admit that the New Republic editors had long since stopped replying to my emails. She certainly wouldn’t want to lead herself to the conclusion that I had tried to interest all the editors I knew everywhere, had gotten nowhere, had gone off anyway, and was now wandering around the high plains of Syria with no particular aim in view, in the company of people I did not know from Adam.

  A conclusion like this might well have provoked a family crisis. She would have been cordial enough on the phone, but after she had hung up she would have steadied herself, then called our wiser, more life-competent cousins. She would have beseeched them to beseech me to knock it off, to come back right away, at least to Turkey, and to breathe not a word of protest. The cousins would have swung into action. I wasn’t in a position to say no to a united family front. I would have tucked my tail between my legs, then hurried back to the hovel. From the hovel, I probably would have had to go home.

  In short, a single indiscreet question concerning my career might have brought the entire house of cards fluttering to the floor. My mother knew this. Her discretion—and her wish to assure me success—would prevent her from asking.

  Instead, she would ask me about the food I had been eating. “Delicious kanafeh,” I would tell her, and was she aware that I hadn’t come to Syria to practice up on restaurant criticism? I wasn’t out to tour the local farmers’ markets. “Um, Mom? There is like a war going on here. With bombs and stuff like that? Fighter jets?” I would clue her in thus. A moment of silence would open up on the phone line. She would sigh. “Well, for God’s sake, be sensible,” she would say, at last. I would say that I was pretty good when it came to sensibility if she thought about it at all and that I could probably win about ten blue ribbons in any sensibility contest she cared to mention. She would tell me not to be a smart aleck. There would be more silence. I would know that she was right to be worried and she would understand that I knew. She would sigh again.