Early Days in Aleppo

Christian Quarter, Aleppo...

I open my eyes. Outside the bedroom window, dawn shimmers pale blue like sapphire sprayed through a sandstorm, and my eyes slowly drag dull memory into our first day in Aleppo. Here I am, suddenly awake in the Syria. Outside I hear faint voices calling, songs, or perhaps chants; they have drawn me from sleep: the deep, rich baritone chant of the muezzin (“the caller of prayer”) from the mosque a few streets over rings through the neighborhood. Mosques often are only a few blocks apart, and stand throughout Aleppo, bright green lights shining atop their minarets. Around the top of the minarets are loudspeakers, and five times a day the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer through a microphone. “Allah!” is the first word you hear, a long, sustained call that soars through the dusty air. The chant contains these: Allah is the greatest God, I believe God is the greatest God, Mohammed is God's final prophet, come to the mosque and receive this holy blessing!
Carrie is awake now, and we listen. The call to prayer lasts five to ten minutes, rising and falling notes woven into drawn out phrases (we find out later that each muezzin sings in his own style, varying the vocal line according to the callings of his heart, so to speak). Gregorian chant comes close to describing what you hear, ancient, haunting, powerful, and after an exhausting previous twenty-four hours, we find our local muezzin soothing our lagging souls.
We’d left Lake George, New York, mid-afternoon Wednesday for our 10pm flight from JFK to Amman, Jordan’s airport. Our bodies and minds, cramped, denied sleep (a cadre of crying infants maliciously tag-teamed), arrived at dawn, only to find dawn had fled west without us, and instead was dusting the dune grasses of Cape Cod, unveiling the Manhattan skyline, and feathering the hard eyes of surfers waxing their boards in Florida. We de-board to find a Jordan moving slowly through a hot, late afternoon. Night will come soon.
To pass the four hour layover in Amman’s airport, Carrie plays Sudoku, I stroll through the duty-free shops, Johnny Walker, cigarettes, Oprah Book Club picks, then pick up my guitar and play (I’d carried my beloved Martin acoustic with me, holding it close like a son). Children wander up to listen. Women pass by, some in modern dress, others wearing traditional black veil varying in what they choose to reveal—full face showing, eyes and nose showing, only the eyes, or fully veiled in black.
An elderly man from Saudi Arabia, in full regalia, kneels near me and hushes his children when I play. I finish, and he smiles wide, shakes my hand, and asks in English where I’m from. I tell him and smiles again and offers Carrie and me warm welcome.
Darkness has bled into our day when we leave Jordan for Aleppo’s airport. On the shuttle bus from the plane to the airport a man in three-piece suit and briefcase comes up to me and says “We very much enjoyed your beautiful, romantic and quiet playing!” We chatted for a while, and I find out he is Dr. Mohammad Ramdan, a professor of Economics and Finance at the United Arab Emirates University. When I tell him we are teachers, he gives me his card, and assures me that if I need anything at all while in Syria, anything at all, just call or write. He is Syrian, and assures us the people of his country are very friendly.
The night in Syria is muggy. Going through customs seems a parody of a cartoon bureaucracy: Multiple soldiers appear to make a show of officially examining our passports. Each confers with the other. Finally, we pay for our visas, then are escorted back to the small wooden desk of an official we passed not ten minutes before. He proceeds not to pound visa stamps in our booklets but to tear off actual stamps, lick them, and paste them in. Each stamp curls at the edges, so he dampens them again with a finger applied to a dirty sponge. We are free to go into Aleppo.
From the airport our driver is pointing out pods of families huddled on curbs in darkness, on the meridian in road as we speed by in a ragged, old Volvo. Women are still covered in black. Coming around a corner at night, they emerge from the darkness softly like ghosts. Children scamper everywhere. Our driver explains that these people live in small apartments, during the day it is hot, so when night falls they emerge to visit, to play.
During our first few days we are escorted around Aleppo by one of the ICARDA buses. Nearly all of the buildings here are the color of old dusty gold as if sandblasted with time. Few are taller than four or five stories. Balconies jut out like square chins. But the dry tawny color whirls by and defies lasting impressions. Taxis and other small cars and trucks also whirl by and in front and around you. Need to make a quick left turn, but you’re in the right lane and have to cross three unmarked “lanes” of traffic? No problem. Go for it. What could happen? What happens is that the other cars pause—you veer left and drive on. The movement of traffic here, so seemingly random and chaotic, reminds me instead of schools of fish or flights of birds. You simply move with your pack, give and take when required, and keep driving. You become more aware of the vehicles around you, how they move, what their drivers intend. When Syrians get behind the wheel, a notorious selfishness transforms them. They will run red lights. Into the smallest wedge between you and the car in front of you waiting at the light, behind which you have followed fair and square, drivers will angle their car. They will cut in front of you, then honk annoyed because congestion has developed. When they emerge from their cars, the possession leaves them like the devil releasing Linda Blair. They become kind, hospitable. When you smile and wave and greet them, they reply “Welcome to Aleppo! Welcome!”
We often thought of ourselves, Carrie and I, as taking on the role of good ambassadors, thinking that perhaps the people here would have skewed views of who Americans were and how we behaved or what we believed. We'd set good examples of good Americans. But this idea we found unnecessary. The people here had no skewed views of us. They were pleased when they found out we were from America. They were able—and perhaps this is where our own views were skewed—to understand the difference between a people a country and its government. The one's views aren't necessarily those of the other. Syrians have no problem differentiating. If pushed, they will admit kindly, smiling, that they don't really approve of the present U.S. government. Surprise, surprise. The majority of Americans agree with you...
Interesting: we discover there is virtually no petty crime anywhere in Aleppo, a city of some 2-3 million people. You can walk anywhere at any time of night and will remain safe. No murder, no rape, car jacking, nothing...
You begin to get familiar with landmarks to mark your way in these streets. Traffic pours into circles, in the middle of which may be a fountain, or a large coffee urn (sic), or a statue of Asad on horseback leaping forward. With these you orient yourself, because the streets in Aleppo spread through the city like tangles of yarn after a cat has finished attacking. Driving, you consult a map, confer with your passenger, and you get lost. Where the bank was said to be on the map, on this very street, absolutely doesn’t exist. Piles of trash. Huge boulders, rubble, small shops, but no bank. The secret is: keep driving. Inshallah (God willing) the place you’re looking for will appear just around the corner. And it always does.
Oh the trash. Greening has not descended on Syria. Huge bins stand at odd angles on side streets, but garbage with be left in bags alongside, or just in the gutter. Garbage pickup is spotty at best. Stray cats prey on the bundles, which then are torn open and the rotting contents and plastic debris strewn across the gutter. Flies hover and feast. A hot gust scoops up the lighter trash and sends it fluttering on the wind. Parks that appear pale olive on a map are in fact dry and brown and littered with trash. But look around you: this is desert, rock and scrub and burned under the sun, and Aleppo is concrete and brown and dusty. Word has it that Bashar, the current president, is in fact an environmentalist. Unfortunately, beneath him is the old guard, the power base of manufacturers and military and finance, so change will drip slowly here like a drying spring.
We lunched early afternoon with the other new teachers in a traditional Syrian restaurant in the Christian quarter, what used to be an old house. Al-Jdediah is incredibly old, and runs small narrow streets throughout like a labyrinth. Early Armenian churches, Greek Orthodox, open plazas that remind one of Paris. In the restaurant the ceilings in the main room were very high. Open stone windows from other chambers hung below the roof, and pale green vines snaked from these dark inner windows. Long tables were set up to sit everyone. Hummus, tahini, flatbread, fresh cucumber, mint and tomato salad, grilled lamb kabobs, chicken kabobs, beef sausages, baba ganoush which I obviously can’t spell, garlic and olive oil whipped to a creamy froth for dipping, other dips I’ve lost track of, ground raw spiced meats, sweet deep-fried delicate falafel balls with spiced raisin and lamb and pine nuts within, stuffed grape leaves feathered with olive oil, and the olives. Oh the olives! Finish with sweet orange-fleshed Persian melons, juicy red watermelon, fresh figs. All washed down with tall cans of Efes, a Turkish pilsner. The hookah pipes were then escorted for the daring (I was not one of them). Hot coals of the tobacco were placed on a tray, and the long hookah hose was drawn to the mouth. Each puffer had his or her own plastic tip. The smoke drifting was sweet, flowery, and not unpleasant. Peach and mint. At one point, Roberto, husband to the new assistant Middle School principle and who is by trade and love an Italian chef from a village in the Alps bordering Switzerland, alerted the laughing and festive table to their son, Alex, who is fifteen. “Hey, look at Alex!” he cried delightedly, feigning the admonishing father. With calm concentration, young Alex was puffing away on the hookah.
This first meal of Syrian cuisine will stand as one of the finest I’ve ever experienced anywhere.
Into the bus we go for our trip back to our apartments. Raghad, the principal’s secretary at our school, lags behind for a few minutes. She is ever-kind, patient, and will attend to you as though you are her first priority. Finally, she finally boards the bus, offering us a napkin spread across both hands, and on the napkin lay rows of prickly pear fruit, pocked and orange, trimmed and ready to eat. On the drive back she talks about Aleppo. Casually she mentions that most of the Iraqi refugees who have crossed over to escape the neighboring war are quite wealthy. They are all renting the good apartments here and therefore driving the rents up.
Evening comes again as the bus drops us and as we walk back to our apartment. We’re only in a few minutes when I hear the muzzein’s call to prayer. I step out onto the sidewalk to listen. Our neighborhood mosque is across a park and along Damascus highway, the same route Paul walked thousands of years ago when the flash of light knocked him down and burned into his heart. A full moon proud at twilight lingers behind the bright green lights atop the minaret, and the crescent moon symbol stands upon the domed roof below. The faithful in white are streaming through the doors. Our landlord, Faroud, is a few doors down, sees me and walks over. He has a small round loaf of bread cupped in his hands, traditional light sweet bread had on Fridays, he later explained. “Is there a problem?” he asks, ever concerned that we are comfortable and at home in his building. No, no, I say, even though we’d had trouble with the water shutting off, the power shutting off—alas. But I tell him truthfully, “I just came out to listen,” and nod toward the mosque. The ancient songs rise from across the city to fill the air, a litany of blessings reaching over the whole world. Faroud smiles. “Do you like?” I tell him the call to prayer is beautiful, “even though,” I add, then pull out the crucifix tucked under my shirt and dangle it for him, “I’m not Muslim.” I’d thought to wear it in the Syria for quite a few reasons, one of which is just side with the minority here, give symbolic voice in remembrance to the many good people of all faiths, and to try to regain those few strands in Christian history that resisted the call to irrationality, fundamentalism, violence, and shallow superiority, to be counted among them, as I count conversations with true Christians some of the most fruitful I've had. Faroud sees the crucifix, smiles, then takes the small loaf of bread and tears it in two. He then turns both hands and rubs his thumbs together gently, gliding one along the other, then back. “Muslims and Christians,” he says, “we worship the same God.” With one hand holding his share of bread he points up into the blue night sky. “One God," he repeats. He then offers me my broken share. I raise the bread to my mouth and eat.