A House in Damascus - Before the Fall

by Brian Stoddart

  He might just have been the most polite lost luggage man in the world.

  We said our goodbyes and I set off back into the city, now with an over-supply of clothes but some warm thoughts, which all returned in mid-2012 when came news that the airport had been shelled during the struggles. I wondered how he and his colleagues had fared.

  Man of La Kemba

  ~

  After a magnificent and memorable dinner provided one night by the Affable Interpreter's parents, we walked back to the Iman Mosque and its traffic circle in search of a taxi. There were few about and we looked aimless. One came along, slowed, flicked its lights, stopped, and we asked for Bab Touma. Setting off, the amiable driver asked the inevitable question of whence we came, the pickup location not belying our foreign origins. Australia, we said.

  "Australia!! I love Australia. I have been to Australia. Where do you live?"

  Melbourne.

  "Melbourne! I love Melbourne. I went there for five days. It is a beautiful city. It is cultured, and seems English. You live in a beautiful place."

  By now he was beaming as he retrieved memories of a trip obviously well treasured. He had tight, brushed back hair in the Arab style, greying a little. His face was square with a thick but beautifully manicured moustache, and eyes that sparkled as in his mind he returned to Australia.

  "Why are you in Syria?"

  "I am fortunate enough to be working here, and my wife is visiting. We love Damascus."

  "You are welcome always in Syria. Australians are always especially welcome in Syria. Which hotel you stay in Bab Touma?"

  "I have a house in the Old City."

  "An Arab house?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you are most especially welcome in Syria."

  By now, mention of the house had changed the attitudes of several inquirers in the souks and elsewhere from warm to radiant. In their minds, it somehow transformed me from visitor to enthusiast, and that spurred them to introduce me to others. Upon discovering the house factor, for example, my Aramaic friend in the souk immediately introduced me to his perfume merchant friend. I had somehow become a better person.

  Our Aussiephile taxi driver was no different.

  "My friend lives in Sydney now, twenty years, I went to visit him after Melbourne. Do you like Sydney?"

  Not much.

  "Me either, after Melbourne. Sydney is like America."

  Many visitors to Australia who see only the Sydney waterfront suburbs make that observation, then reach Melbourne to find a totally different milieu, and say so. That helps fuel the Sydney-Melbourne divide, debate and rivalry. A Damascene taxi driver knew that.

  "My Sydney friend lives in an area, I cannot remember. I went there and stayed with him. There are a lot of Arabs there."

  Would that be Lakemba?

  "Lakemba! Yes, Lakemba. Lakemba. A lot of Arabs, my friend introduced me."

  In recent years Lakemba, one of Sydney's sprawling Western suburbs, has emerged as an epicentre of growing rumbles about immigration. Western Sydney is a multicultural melting pot with Cabramatta, for example, a centre for Asian communities and especially Vietnamese ones. It produced Australia's first political assassination when a Vietnamese local council member-turned state Member of Parliament was shot in his home. Lakemba quickly became the centre of the national debate about Islam and Muslims, its residents building Australia's largest mosque. Most famously, it had a radical Lebanese cleric called locally Sheikh Halili (Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly), controversial for a series of incendiary incidents that included him describing skimpily dressed western women as "uncovered meat on a plate" on offer to local cats, and later being cleared of having links with Hezbollah. His "uncovered meat" comment came hard on the heels of an infamous and sensational series of gang rapes in the area, for which several young Lebanese Muslim men were charged and convicted. For many Australians, Lakemba was a no-go zone, a symbol of all that is wrong with immigration policy, and a means of justifying their hardening Islamophobia and racist antagonism.

  "What did you think of Lakemba?" I asked.

  "My friend and his friends love it there. Very good place. They work hard and do well, and they enjoy themselves. I was there for four weeks and enjoyed it, but it is not as nice as Melbourne".

  "What did you do there?"

  "My friend and his friends? They barbecue! They barbecue all the time. Barbecue, barbecue, barbecue. All the time barbecue. Australia has very good meat to barbecue Arab-style."

  We all laughed at the incongruity of travelling almost 20 hours in a plane to spend days on end doing BBQs. In one sense it was like a bad Paul Hogan tourism ad that stereotyped Australia in the way much of the Arab world, and especially Syria has been stereotyped. At another level, though, it revealed the essentials of the human condition. Our taxi driver's friend and his friends love Lakemba because it gives them a lifestyle they enjoy and it provides their essential pleasures, maintaining food styles being a connection to home from what otherwise is an utterly different place. Sadly, their Australian critics do not understand that, seeing only strange and incomprehensible people speaking Arabic in public and attending a controversial mosque. They do not see people who share many of the same interests, like the BBQ.

  We were travelling through the suburbs towards Bab Touma, the driver negotiating traffic and the one-way system while we all chatted, laughed and enjoyed shared experiences.

  "Why do you not stay in a hotel? All foreigners stay in a hotel."

  That is not true, of course, because Damascus had a sizeable foreign population made up of diplomats and development workers, for the most part, many of whom lived in the upper scale suburbs of Shalaan and Abou Roumaneh that lay behind us as we drove towards the Old City.

  "I am working here for a while, and coming to Damascus I wanted to live in the Old City."

  "You are very welcome."

  We pulled into Bab Touma, reluctantly to end a marvellous conversation that was in itself a perfect conclusion to a wonderful evening. But it was not quite finished. Always carrying money in my shirt pocket, I reached to pay our new friend.

  "No, no my friend", he said.

  I became confused.

  "This is on me. You are from Australia. I love Australia. You are welcome in Syria. This is my pleasure."

  And he would take no payment.

  We got out, humbled.

  He grinned, waved, and drove away.

  We looked at each other and grinned, too. What a great city.

  An Antique Seller

  ~

  A string of tiny antique shops line the Jabri House lane that leads to the steps up to the house. They are joined by a sandals seller, an industrial tape merchant and an outside fruit vendor selling from a cart, as well as all the restaurants. The area is cleaned meticulously by an orange boiler-suited man who starts work every morning about 5.30 am. He sweeps the alley and those nearby, retrieving the rubbish we all deposit in the lane in plastic bags, the bane of modern living—any drive out of Damascus east, west, north or south is marked by a proliferation of these bags blown hither and thither across the landscape. The few Bedouin encampments now are besieged by these things, something they did not have to cope with in earlier times.

  Even in the Old City, rubbish can sometimes cause strife. One night, outside a restaurant across from Jabri, an aggrieved German dragged an employee outside, pointing to some rubbish bags lying in the alley awaiting collection. "I liff here too", he shouted at the waiter who looked incomprehensibly confused. It was not clear where the man "liffed", but he cannot have been in town long enough to catch up on local practice, because the bags were awaiting the arrival of the meticulous man in the orange boiler suit.

  The laneway is normally scrupulously clean, not least because the shop owners, as elsewhere in Damascus, wash down the front of their shop areas at least twice a day. One of these owners runs a tiny shop right at the bottom of my steps, and we met very early on as I looked in to see what he had.

/>   "Are you living here? I have seen you go up the steps."

  Yes, I am in the house about half way up.

  "An American man used to live there, too. Very nice, he was interested in Middle East politics."

  Now, it is unclear when this might have been or whether it was even the same house. The house was empty for months beforehand and when asked later, the agent professed to be unaware of any "American". However, a neighbouring house did have an American connection.

  One afternoon, a fire broke out in the souk and Sandi climbed up the ladder to have a look. Of course, the souk and the Umayyad Mosque have a long and terrible history of destruction by fire, as do various parts of the Old City and its adjoining suburbs like Sarouja and Midan, so any outbreak still produces high excitement and anxiety. An Englishman on the roof of the house at the back pointed this latest eruption out to Sandi, at which point an American woman's voice inquired as to why the man had spoken to her. The man replied to the hidden voice that he had simply responded and not initiated the conversation. This was not the normal warm Arabic inquiry or exchange, but it might just have been the source of the prior American connection.

  After our initial exchange, the small antique shop became a regular stopping point for endless cups of tea (with sugar), food, and lots of discussion. My new friend's business partner was a French-speaker, and the shop was always full of foreigners of some kind, along with local friends, business associates and even family members—it turned out my new friend's father-in-law owned one of the shops further up the lane.

  The antique seller defied all the stereotypes. He was certainly a practising Muslim, and the shop shutter would go down regularly at prayer times, especially in evening. And like all Muslim men, he could often be seen conducting his own prayers in the shop as the opportunity arose. In addition, he sometimes led the prayers at his local mosque.

  But he was also a great fan of American movies, and American English.

  "I think American English is best, don't you? The language of the movies."

  Well, no, my friend, I prefer English English, but tell me more.

  "American movies show a different life. People are free to do things for themselves and make a better life for their families."

  But Arabs have a much better commitment to family, surely? One of the many things I admire is that family is so important. I go to restaurants and see family groups eating, playing cards, shouting, laughing, and you all look out for each other.

  "Ah yes, that is true. But America gives opportunity. I would like to go to America."

  Many Syrians did, and had a hard time getting there. One American consultant on the project was twice detained for twelve hours by immigration upon arrival in Damascus and that, naturally, sparked considerable discussion. One of our local colleagues remarked coolly that we would all do well to experience arriving in America as a Syrian and see just how difficult things could be. Despite such tough receptions, though, for many Syrians America remained a goal because it was thought to be a land where opportunity abounds, and that view persisted even in wake of the 2008 Wall Street crash, the housing and unemployment disasters that followed, and America's clearly waning world authority.

  My antique man himself knew some of that, and thought he experienced it daily in his business. His constant comment and a recurring theme for discussion was that while more and more tourists arrived, they left less and less cash behind them. He had stories of Europeans and Americans coming in to say they had only Euros 10 or $US 20 to spend, whereas most of the stock in his shop started above that. One day, three European women walking past spied some lovely scarves he had on display as a sideline to the antiques and collectibles.

  "Very nice. How much?"

  "Three dollars."

  There was a furious discussion among the three and it was obvious they liked the scarves. My friend was at his rock bottom price because the scarves cost him $2.50.

  "How much for 3 scarves?"

  "$9."

  "Too expensive."

  They walked off.

  He constantly put that sort of response down to the "world economical crisis", and said he experienced it every day. Moreover, he said, his colleagues along the lane and further afield in the Old City reported the same patterns: business was tough even though tourism was rising. The complication was that business was also concentrating more and more in the main souk where property prices were escalating. He said his father-in-law had really opened the nearby small shop as a hobby, having sold his Hamidiyeh property for a fortune—it was easier to sell and take a good profit than to keep running a business that faced increasingly tough competition. That, clearly, was one of the reasons the main Hamidiyeh arcade was becoming so homogenised: the lowest common denominator was the level at which sales and income might be maintained. No one could afford to have stock sitting unsold.

  America remained the goal, because the antique seller thought he might be the last of his line to maintain the shop that had been in family hands for at least four generations, and had itself shifted physically to this cheaper location only recently. In darker moments, he speculated about perhaps getting a regular job with a steady income. But those were hard to find with pay levels sufficient to maintain his family. He loved his avocation but his family more, so the decision weighed heavily.

  Every day, he travelled by microbus to and from his outer suburban home, anything up to an hour each way. This was in one of the outer areas of the city that came under pressure during 2011 and 2012. He was there because, like an increasing number of younger generation Syrians, he wished to have his own family space rather than share the traditional extended family one. His family had owned an Old Damascus city property now sold, but had he moved there after marriage he would have lived in just one room and been part of a wider drama.

  Times had changed, he thought. The older extended family times had been subject to fewer pressures, and relied heavily on an acceptance of the older ways. People now still maintained their traditions but also wanted newer things, like their own space.

  He relayed an old Syrian saying: a mother-in-law will never fully approve of a daughter-in-law. While such a pattern might not necessarily be unique to Syria or even the Arab world, it is easy to speculate that an extended family home would help sharpen the sentiment. Hence the beginnings of change as women's education and training extended and, along with that, an increased sense of self-esteem and ambition. Add to that economic shift, changing patterns of life, and changes in aspirations and ambitions, and the social outlook began to alter substantially.

  All that was faced daily by my friend in the alley trying to make a living through economically straitened times by selling "Orientals". Throughout 2011 and 2012 I would call him to see how he was—okay, thanks, but times are hard. Those Orientals were now even harder to find. There were fabulous things to be found in many of these shops, but difficult to spot and more expensive to buy.

  Like many others, my real estate agent also had such a shop for a while. His prize piece was a nineteenth century collective portrait made up of enamelled depictions of Ottoman Empire provincial governors. It was beautiful, but he refused to sell because he dreamed of doing reproductions from it—it was rare, so he might make more profit that way.

  In all these shops could be found glass, old watches and cameras, old prints, some paintings, old rugs that might perhaps be the real thing from "Persia", Roman coins and artefacts, some old woodwork along with the renowned mosaic tiles that are now almost all "distressed" new ones, Ottoman ornaments, and maybe some rare silver. All that mixed with newer tourist items like boxes, scarves and jewellery. At the upper end, there might be modern versions of the swords that once made Damascus so famous, old and reproduction firearms, fine iron work in the form of birdcages and lamps, and the lovely copper work that was well worth buying. The good pieces were expensive, rightly, especially in more central locations near the Azem Palace.

  Can these all survive? Well, perhaps not eas
ily. That was why my antique seller still watched American movies and talked to people like me, to improve his English. That might just give him another avenue towards the future, in addition to the pleasure of conducting a global discussion over tea from his tiny haven on the lane along from Jabri.

  Another Home at Brokar

  ~

  Of all the restaurants near the house, Brokar probably announces itself the least. Its nameplate is almost missable, it has no menu in the obligatory window box outside, it has neutral colour walls framing the small and subdued doorway. Yet it became a second home, beginning on my very first morning in the house, a Friday and, so, a holiday. Jabri and the others nearby looked either closed or somehow uninviting—late mornings are not the best times at which to judge these places—and there was a guy stationed outside the Brokar, so they were at least anticipating business. "Free Internet" was also on offer, and that I was in serious need of because there was no provision in the house. By this stage, though, there was scarcely a serious restaurant in the area that did not have "free" wifi, it was now a prerequisite for business.

  Brokar does not have the closed, tight alleyway entrance of most restaurants and houses. Instead, the door opens into a small landing with some perfunctory decorations, and a stand bearing mostly outdated information on Damascus. It is dark, done out at this level with deep toned wood and muted glass. That area leads to a small set of stairs that go up one level to tables and seating, as well as a small standby drinks and snacks service area. Off the entrance landing, another set of stairs heads down to another mirror image of tables and chairs. Down further, there is a small alcove done in Bedouin style. Even further down, the ground floor is partly under cover of the upper two floors, partly under the "private piece of sky" in the warm weather, or the retractable roof in the cold. It sounds large and in some respects it is, but it is not cavernous like many of the more popular restaurants. At any one time, full, it might hold perhaps one hundred people or a few more.