In Xanadu (9 page)

'I didn't realize. I thought he fought with the Greeks.'

'Mr William, I tell you only the truth. Obviously you are not knowing much about your English literature.'

That evening I almost crawled my way back into favour by reading some Hardy poems into Nizar's precious tape recorder, but I don't think he ever took me seriously again. After supper he and Laura discussed the great literature of the English peoples while I sat next door and wrote up my logbook.

Attempts to leave Masyaf early the following morning met with only limited success. Arabs delight in long and emotional farewells, and as a result by one o'clock we had only got as far as Jisr esh-Shughur a couple of miles away at the top of the al-Garb. With our phrasebook Arabic we were unable to establish whether we had missed the bus to Aleppo, or whether it was about to come. After a two-hour wait it became clear that we had just missed it, and we decided to hitch. Our first lift - in the back of trailer with two fat Arabs and a pile of watermelons -took us only three miles, at a speed which never exceeded walking pace. We then waited beside the road for a further hour before a yellow taxi drew up. The passenger leant out and offered to take us to Aleppo.

'You're English, aren't you? I can tell you're English.'

'How do you know?'

He looked at Laura's feet.

Only the English wear socks under their sandals. Come on, get in.'

He had a flatfish forehead, thick, curly, black hair and a magnificent loo-brush moustache which threatened to engulf the whole bottom half of his face. Krikor Bekarion looked pleased to see us. He was a Christian Armenian, he told us, whose family had fled from Erzurum in 1917 during the massacres, and had managed to get to Beirut where they had set up a shoe-making firm. Then in 1976 they had been driven out of Beirut and had moved to Aleppo where they started all over again. But Krikor did not like Syria ('too much politics, not enough profit'), and so had moved to Germany where he ran a shady-sounding 'import/export' business. Finally he had ended up in Athens where he now possessed a restaurant, a nightclub, two girlfriends (one Greek, one English - it was she who wore socks under her sandals) and a Mercedes. He was coming to Aleppo only briefly, he said, to visit his brother, and was pleased to have us for company. He liked the English, and thought the people of Aleppo both dull and difficult - 'always they make problems'.

'It is too late to cross the border,' he said. Tonight you will stay in Aleppo and we will go dancing.'

'there are nightclubs in Aleppo?"

'My cousin has nightclub. Nice place. Much drink, many girls.'

'I didn't realize there was a nightlife in Syria. I thought Muslims disapproved of that sort of thing.'

They do. This nightclub is a Christian nightclub. No Muslims. Lots of fun.'

Krikor took out a cassette from his bag, and told the driver to put it on.

'Michael Jackson,' he said. 'Music for Christians.'

He showed us the cross hanging around his neck and winked conspiratorially.

The country around Jisr had been particularly lovely, rolling hills like the Cotswolds, clothed in fields of cotton, maize and tobacco, and broken by clusters of olive trees in the manner of a Tuscan painting. The villages were raised up on tells, small groups of beehive huts surrounded by belts of orchards, and as we sat by the roadside peasant farmers had ridden past on donkeys, saddlebags bulging with peaches and apples and cherries. But as we drove, the landscape flattened out and the cotton fields gave way, first to withered sunflowers then to tufts of coarse, black scrub-grass. Aleppo Meson the edge of the Badiet-esh-Sham between the desert and the arable land of the littoral; it is a trading post linking farmland and sea trade with desert caravan.

The town is small and compact. There are no suburbs, just a series of police checkpoints, then the town and, looming above it, the great earthen dome of its citadel. We dropped off our rucksacks at Krikor's brother's house (in the curiously named Sulenaniye Hawaii Telephone Street) then headed for the Bekerion shoe factory in the Aleppo souk.

The souk was straight out of
Sheherazade.
We followed Krikor into the vaulted half-light squeezing past donkeys, beggars and wooden-wheeled barrows. The only illumination came from portholes cut into the roof, and from these shafts of light streamed down, illuminating some stall holders like prima donnas, and leaving their neighbours in near darkness. On either side, sitting cross-legged in arcaded booths, vendors shrieked at us to stop and look and buy. As in a mediaeval European market, each trade was organized into a distinct area, and we would pass lines of Arabs slowly stirring sinister-looking vats of liquid soap then turn a comer and find ourselves amid the spice vendors, and the air heavy with cumin and tumeric, cardamoms and peppers, saffron and aniseed. I paused by one shop and sniffed in the sacks. Krikor stopped and hissed at me: These men are Muslims.'

'I know, but what's this?' I said, pointing to a sack of white powder.

Krikor frowned and asked the spice seller. 'It is camomile.' 'And this?'

Krikor again asked the merchant, then translated:

'Rosehip.'

And this?'

I pointed at a jar of grey-brown crystals, with the same consistency as Floris bath salts.

'It is the ground testicle of Jacob's sheep. The Muslims think it helps them please their women.'

Passing through the silk and linen merchants, the carpet sellers and butchers we arrived at the Armenian area of the souk - the Streets of the Jewellers, the Ironmongers, and the Cobblers. Suddenly everyone knew Krikor. Men rushed out from stalls gabbling in Armenian - a language that makes German sound soft and cadent - and, hugging him to their breasts, gave him the Armenian kiss, a peck on each cheek followed by three more on the lips.

'These people love me,' said Krikor modestly. 'All are glad to see me.'

It did appear to be true. A large, loud, jostling, gossiping crowd gathered around us trying alternately to fete us down the cobbles, load us with presents (I was given a fez of bright pillar-box red), and drag us into booths to ply us with thick, sweet cups of Turkish coffee.

But we were soon brought back to earth. Never have I seen a place like the Bekarion shoe factory outside textbook pictures of sweat-shops in the Industrial Revolution. It lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the Street of the Cobblers; we left our escort at ground level and descended into the hot, hammering depths. Krikor's brother - older, fatter and more corrupt-looking than Krikor - sat like a Mogul on a raised dais at one end of the room, while all around him machines whirled and lasts clattered. The floor was littered with old pieces of cut leather, and half-made or discarded shoes cluttered the bench tops. Around the debris buzzed a workforce of ragged children. Apart from Krikor's brother and a pockmarked foreman with a cadaverous grin, none of the factory's staff had yet reached puberty. I asked Krikor who the children were.

They are the children of Muslims.' Why aren't they at school?' Because my brother has bought them.' Bought them?'

Yes. Their parents are poor and they want money for
raki.
So they lease their children to my brother for one year.' And does your brother pay them?'

Don't be stupid. If he paid them there would be no profit.'

But that's slavery.'

Krikor shrugged his shoulders.

They like it here. My brother feeds them, and they enjoy themselves. Look they are all happy.'

A little boy came up with two cups of Turkish coffee and a saucer full of salted melon seeds. He looked absolutely miserable.

It's disgraceful,' said Laura. It's profit,' said Krikor.

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We left Krikor and agreed to meet in Sulemaniye Hawaii Telephone Street later that evening. Wandering back through the souk it seemed as if Krikor's remarks were a key to understanding Aleppo. Profit; the previous year in Damascus I had heard the Aleppans described as bourgeois merchantmen; a Damascus funeral was said to be more fun than an Aleppo wedding. Now, compared with the busy, teeming streets of Damascus, the rows of smart merchants' houses did seem somehow stuffy and respectable.

The monumental architecture of the town seemed to reflect this. The Ummayad mosque and the citadel were two of the finest buildings that we saw in the East, but there was a utilitarian spirit about them that distinguished them from the run of Islamic buildings. There was none of the luxuriant frivolity of Damascus, none of the foppish gaiety and colour of Isfahan.

Superficially the Ummayad mosque does resemble that in Damascus. Both were built in the eighth century, and they share the same open-court plan, like a Cambridge college; the same prayer-hall with a nave and two transepts and a square minaret that is really a church tower. All this is an inheritance from the pre-Islamic tradition of Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture, except that the mihrab is in the south wall, so that prayers face the long side of the rectangle, not the narrow. Yet the Aleppo mosque is a much more stern building than that in Damascus. There are no mosaics, no arabesque fantasies, no kufic inscriptions. The only decoration is a simple inlay pattern in black marble in the courtyard floor - something St Bernard allowed even in his Cistercian monasteries. But where Cistercian simplicity was born of austerity, one suspects that in Aleppo it was born of economy. 'Why should we have mosaics?' one can hear the merchants ask. 'How much do they cost?' I don't think we can afford Corinthian capitals.' So it is. There are no mosaics; the capitals are plain. Even the carpets look cheap.

The citadel is also puritanical in spirit, but here the restraint is informed not so much by meanness as by a strict functionalism. It is a vast, totalitarian mass of mustard-coloured masonry, with totalitarian qualities - simplicity, scale and symmetry - like the Fascist architecture of Italy, or the Stalinist architecture of Soviet Russia. It is the building of a megalomaniac, awesome and unassailable, all towers and walls, with a mountain for its glacis and a pair of fortresses as its gates.

Less threatening but equally disturbing is a tomb in the gatehouse. Passing through a maze of dog-leg turns, gates and portcullises you come to a gloomy hall with a large wasps' nest in the vaulting. There, raised on a dais, covered with flowers and offerings and swamped by layer upon layer of rustling, kufic-encrusted silk, lies one of the two reputed bodies of the patron saint of England (the other is at Ramleh near Jerusalem). Quite what St George is doing in either place I have been unable to discover.