Is That Mint Or Is That Garbage?

Title spoken by our friend, neighbor, and fellow teacher from Colorado, Jennifer Polizos, as we walked to school one day. *…* Our backyard patio is a dull yellow walled enclosure. Stray cats often perch in the sun atop the 12-foot stone, doves promenade. There isn’t much space in back, gazing up as I do from my desk through the windows here in the…what is this room? An extra bedroom for guests, closets, a TV. Although we lack the spacious light and air that blessed our backyard in California—vegetable and herb garden, apricot and apple trees—our Aleppo patio offers a narrow raised stone soil bed lining the wall’s base. Long ago planted and thriving are two orange trees, a lemon, mandarin, and—just a minute, there’s this weird mystery fruit tree at patio’s end that on some days looks like pomegranate, other days appears as angry puffed grapefruit; I’m going to investigate once and for all…well, the mystery thickens: it’s neither pomegranate nor grapefruit, but something resembling a soft-skinned apple crossed haphazardly with cherimoya. And no I’m not going to try it. I did, however, discover another lemon tree cowering alongside. Fruit is plentiful on these trees, and delicious. Eating an orange right off the tree each morning; this is how our days begin. At lunch we nibble juicy mandarins; they hang scattered like deeply rich orange stars in a leafy heaven. The morning sun has just scaled our eastern wall and softly dusts the lemon’s branches. Small birds dart across the rays. We don’t often enough notice these quiet gifts, for we’re both out the door by 7:15 walking to school. Days are cooler now, but autumn lingers long here in Syria, and the weather is quite beautiful. We’ve just begun the first stage of our winter break, a week-off religious holiday prior to our three weeks off over Christmas. The present holiday goes by the name Eid al Adha, and lambs, goats, and sheep are slaughtered, often right on the street, to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son in obedience to God (satisfied, He intervened and substituted a lamb instead). A third of the fresh kill you keep, a third goes to friends and family (Muslim or non-Muslim), a third to the poor in the community. Eid occurs the day after the end of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca undertaken by Muslims worldwide. After this break, back to school for a week then the Christmas holiday, three weeks off. What will we do over the winter holiday? Well, since you asked: we’re renting an apartment for two weeks in Vienna, Austria, then a week in Salzburg. Christmas in Vienna. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Snow, perhaps. Sparkling lights. Hot spiced wine. Mozart. Cozy afternoons sipping coffee in a café. Ah, the expat life. In Syria, however, teaching is pretty much our life. I’m in my classroom by 7:30 and often don’t leave until 6 pm. Besides the regular teaching, we have Arabic lessons on Monday afternoons, I offer an after-school Writer’s Craft class on Tuesdays, and Thursdays I’ve started teaching guitar to two twenty-something Armenian women, Rasha and Engi, who are assistants in the elementary school, and one of my high school students, Suma, a bright, unabashedly outspoken girl from Romania. Lessons to plan, papers to grade, and readings to survey: I tell you, life isn’t really that different from life in the States, outside of the fact that the country we’re living in borders Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel. That and the unpleasant reality that you can’t get any beer besides pilsners and lagers. What I wouldn’t give for a Rogue Dead Guy Ale! *…* A few days ago we drove out to Palmyra in the Syrian desert, roughly four or five hours east toward Iraq, which holds some of the most extensive and impressive Roman ruins in the Middle East. Palmyra is the must-see in Syria, guidebooks declare. The desert here is vast, and after a morning visit to the ruins of Rasafa, we got lost driving roads which forked off in two directions with no signs to guide us (our map had a single road; we encountered many unmarked roads, and each looked promising). Our two cars, six adults and a four year-old, had been lost for about an hour, trying to navigate by the sun, when one in our party, Barbara, 4th grade teacher, broke the tense silence by brightly announcing, “Well, we’ve got beer, wine, and scotch….” Initially we were using compasses, but soon realized the metal of the car threw us off track. Added to this, we saw a single truck pass us in the two and a half hours wandering the desert, and one Bedouin on motorcycle. Ideas of prompt rescue dimmed. Finally, we prevailed, thanks be to Allah or Whomever was on Duty. Palmyra is mentioned in records found at Mari near the Euphrates dating from 1800 BC, noting a desert fort near the Efqa spring, or oasis. You drive cross an endless desert expanse to suddenly come upon a few square miles of palm and date trees lushly green. Trade routes from ancient Antioch—then seat of Roman power—and the mighty kingdom of Parthia east of the Euphrates sliced through Palmyra. Silk and ebony, slaves and dried fruit, spices and herbs floated by like winds for centuries. The present ruins date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Nero incorporated the Roman province of Syria into his reign (54-68 AD) and so established Palmyra as a garrison town. But trade made the merchants of Palmyra wealthy enough to covet independence. But the Sasanians, who in 224 AD replaced the Parthians in Persia, demanded more territory, challenging Rome. So Palmyra was an embattled oasis. One of the city’s rulers, Odenathus, was assassinated in 267, and so his wife, Queen Zenobia, took the reins. She was reputed to be both beautiful and brave, dark eyes, courageously leading armies fighting Rome’s expansion in the East. She rocked! Rome took off after her, and caught her as she was crossing the Euphrates, to be taken to Rome and paraded through the streets in chains, dying in custody. Our first night in Palmyra, we toasted to the Queen. Long live the spirit of Zenobia. We walked the ruins the morning after our arrival. The Temple of Bel (Babylonian for Baal, meaning “master”) was the site for sacrificial offerings and supplications to the god of the Palmyrenes, Bel, equal to the Greek Zeus. Worn stone steps lead up to the enclosed, high-walled temple. Fortifications and rebuilding have gone on for centuries, for the present temple was built in 32 AD upon a site previously home to a Hellenistic temple, itself replacing a sacred tel (“hill”) dating back to 2200 BC. From the temple you wander west to the great colonnade, a three-city block road lined with tall pillars the whole way in varying states of disrepair (see photo in email). The road itself was never paved, so the camels carrying trade would have soft earth under their burdened feet. There is an ancient Greek-looking theater, an agora (walled vast courtyard for political discussion and commercial business), the Baths of Diocletian, and at the bottom of one bath I noted smooth tiles of dusty blue uncovered from the foot-high sands of ages deposited by the winds over time, and far in the distance the towering conical tomb monuments (see photo). Opposite the tombs stands a mountain with caves dug out of its heart. Inside, one of our party said she’d found age-dusted human bones (I’d found the same in a cave near a lonesome empty road en route to a dead city weeks ago; a Syrian farmer, a Byzantine monk living the solitary life of contemplation, a Roman soldier coming in out of the rain and falling mortally ill? Who knows...). She thought about picking it up for closer inspection, but let the dead alone, wisely, I think. Near sunset we drove up with bottles of Lebonese wine to the Arab fortress on the mountain peering down on the ruins of Palmyra. From here you survey the swath of date and palm trees set off against that endless desert. Turn around and the barren and dry hills undulate into a dust-misted distance, cupping a long valley that seems scraped from the earth. As the last light bled into the horizon, I pulled from my backpack and read passages from Psalms, of “rock” and “temple” and the “dust of death” and “bones” and “crying in the wilderness” and here I was beholding the regions where these words were spoken and written and contemplated. As simple as water bubbles up into a spring to relieve the heat of the day, so sacred scripture (any scripture) is suddenly pulsating with life when read near its place of origin, as my humble, untried, data-deficient hypothesis has it. Speaking of ancient nomadic peoples, that night we arranged to have dinner with the Bedouin, arranged by a local camel rider we met at the ruins. We drove miles out of the city to the large, windy tents of these nomadic people who haven’t altered their lives and work for thousands of years. For a fee they served us local fare, chicken and saffron and cinnamon-tinged rice, peas, tabouli, beer and flower tea, and sang traditional chants while we sat on pillows, cozy in the warm tent. Six or seven camels rested and dreamed outside. The Bedouin had a disarming, genuine demeanor, eminently trusting, and smile at you with the sparkling eyes of a child. We departed under a near-full moon lighting up the desert, a barren land enchanting. We plan to return, Carrie and I, for a longer stay in the spring. Maybe a trek through the arid wilderness. I crave silence. *…* Many of our weekends have been spent driving hither and yon in search of dead cities and ruins. Serjilla, Ebla, Al Bara. In one regard many of these ruins are piles of rock strewn across a landscape of weeds. But others have inelegant buildings roughly intact: churches missing roofs but sustaining weathered stone archways, the familiar Byzantine cross symbol etched deeply in gray rock; small dwellings with shelves and firepits carved in the walls; taverns and baths. In the recently uncovered Bronze Age ruins of Ebla on a scorched arid plain around 45 kilometers southwest of Aleppo, we wandered up a stone stairway once traversed by priests, pharaohs and queens who made sacrifices to the goddess Ishtar perhaps five thousand years ago. Found in the library and records room in this small kingdom were thousands of cuneiform clay tablets recording civil and administrative activities of this once thriving city-state, some of the earliest known writing in history (some of the tablets are displayed in a museum in a nearby town, Idleb). From the top of Ebla’s stone rooms you look far across and note what appear to be small rounded hills surrounding the ruins in a long vast square. The rounded hills were once walls around the city, centuries of blown dust and settled earth obscuring the stone ramparts. If you didn’t know it, you’d swear they were just rounded hills, but eras have come and gone. Our guide points to the gaps in all four corners where the hill abruptly falls away. One is Damascus Gate, for through it the road from Ebla to Damascus beckoned. Another is Aleppo Gate leading to the souks. Euphrates Gate directs your horses, camels and sandals beneath your dry and dusty feet to the great winding river far across the desert. We linger, drive on. Other ruins we visit simply abide like patient ghosts alongside thriving villages. Take a right where the locals are pointing when they see pale faces and a beaten up Volvo cautiously approach the city center (for what else would these folks be doing here in Al Bara besides inspecting the ruins?) and a long winding road deposits our sputtering Volvo in the midst of olive orchards. The trees are thick and laden with sea-green fruit. We take a narrow dirt path toward toppled buildings and huge stones. The groves are peaceful. Following us are two young children out herding their six or seven long brown-haired goats up to graze. One boy looks to be eight years old, his younger brother four. Dirty faces. The sky overhead is sunny and blue. The boys smile and wave. As we amble over a rock wall toward the dwellings, they follow. We take their picture, and in our broken Arabic we learn they live in the village we passed through. They smile again, and appear delighted when we tell them we’re from America. They know no English other than “Hi”. However, at a lull in the conversation the older boy turns to us and gives a thumbs-up and, nodding, exclaims “Obama!” The goats scramble up a stone pile and busily munch bushy leaves. *…* One of our favorite discoveries is the sprawling Roman ruins of Serjilla. Miles from the present town, this village is a cluster of taverns, churches, government buildings, baths, and houses all connected by narrow lanes snaking through and around. The long hills as far as you can see are choppy gray dry rock. Dark black billowing clouds roll in, and the sun breaking through casts keen and crystal yellow light upon the old stone pillars and dusty tombs. We stop to chat with three young people, two beautiful girls flashing sunglasses as though they’d just returned from a quick shopping spree on Rodeo Drive, and a thin snappily dressed young man just happy to stand in their shadow. They are friendly students from Homs, a city halfway between Aleppo and Damascus, and speak decent English. We exchange small but lively talk, tell each other we’re glad we’ve met, then wander off in different directions. A few moments later one of the girls comes running up to Carrie (I’ve pulled ahead and am inspecting what looks to be a bathhouse; there are rounded and rectangle deep pits, and troughs crossing the floor). I walk back and hear the girls say that they don’t meet many foreigners, especially Americans, and nice ones at that. So they give us their phone numbers and tell us to please visit Homs anytime and they would happily show us around. We also meet two other students an hour later who are attending the university in Aleppo. One of the young men is from a nearby village, and warmly invites us to lunch at his house, as in right now. We kindly decline, but leave them cherishing the offer. *…* As mentioned, Aleppo is home to Muslim, Armenian, Christian, Kurdish, Iraqi, many others, but notice how I’ve listed the range of peoples: a mixing of region, nationality, and religion. I’ve not heard reference to hyphenated identities here, your Irish-American or African-American or Chinese-American. People will tell you they are Kurdish. Or Armenian. Or Syrian. Or they will tell you they are Kurdish, and are from Syria. The cultural traditions which form their beliefs and histories and languages and experiences reach deep in time and across specific contours of land. One isn’t asked to give up ones traditions when coming to live in Syria, for instance. You are Syrian, yes. But you are also Armenian. And your cultural heritage defines you, as it is where you’ve come from, who you are. As citizens of America, our political and cultural experiment affords the opportunity for mixing, overlapping, diverse weavings. Songs from deep in the hills of Appalachia have their roots in English and Irish ballads. Jazz originates from African slaves. Our Declaration has its philosophical underpinnings in the writings of an Englishman, John Locke. But to return. When recommending a restaurant to us, one of the secretaries at school, Raghad, remarked that we should go early, as “the Christians arrive around 8pm.” It was funny to hear, as you wouldn’t have an opportunity to say that in the States. She didn’t mean that there were designated times for peoples of differing beliefs to frequent restaurants, only that those sharing a faith constituted a community of people here, and tended to flock together. “The Muslims show up late,” she would add. Early on when searching a local supermarket for beer, we were told by a teenager with a big smile on his face that “You have to go to the Christian quarter.” Regarding your beliefs and heritage, you cannot be nothing here. You are Muslim, or Christian, or Jew for that matter. I suppose you could fancy yourself Buddhist, but that would seem odd. For religion here is earth and blood and light and air and bone and flesh and struggle and history. “Ingrained” seems to describe a conscious indoctrinating of tenets and beliefs, but that doesn’t speak to faith as lived in the dust and rock and salt for generations upon generations of forefathers and foremothers in the Levant. I prefer the sense of in-grained as speaking to planting, sowing, husbandry, grains watered and harvested from the land. One’s beliefs aren’t chosen as you would a summer-to-fall wardrobe. Indeed, the legitimacy of faith seems little questioned (which is not to say it isn’t discussed and studied). Nobody asks “Do you believe in God?” They will more likely glance your way, and query “You are Christian?” It has the same weight as saying “You’re English?” You don’t just up and “choose” your beliefs one fine day. That would seem a frightfully naïve undertaking, or arrogance, as though you had the power to reduce your spiritual choices to items in a supermarket aisle. Perhaps designing a soft-eyed peaceful hobby for times squeezed in between trips to the gym. I remember hearing variations back home from kindly, well-meaning liberal folks, something to the effect of: “Oh, I’m not religious, but I’m a very spiritual person.” Which means: “I’m very open-minded and don’t hold to any strict belief system or dogma [almost everyone I’ve run across who has used “dogma” in a conversation misunderstands completely its meaning], but if I’m at a party I will gladly hold forth with a glass of wine in hand and talk about myself entertaining vague and shallow notions I’ve not really studied at length or any degree of depth, having no intention of changing my self-absorbed life one iota, but flatter myself that at least at this party in front of this audience I can come across as interesting, and I hope you think so too.” Vanity, saith the sage of Ecclesiastes, all is vanity. It’s as though one wants to strike a bold stance for tolerance by refusing to have but the vaguest idea of what constitutes religion; perhaps one was raised in a “strict” household that believed religion to be obeying rules and delineating proper behavior, but that is only a religion drained of life. Our current culture simply doesn’t possess the patience to sit and study scripture, any scripture, with rigor and contemplation. If one would spend an honest hour with the book of Job, for instance, vast worlds will open on the horizon, and one soon learns how small one’s patch of dirt really is, or, as Hamlet noted, to fancy oneself "bounded in a nut-shell and count myself king of infinite space” (Shakespeare, our secular Bible). And that's only one byblos out of the whole Hebrew and "New" Testament! Actually, after half an hour most of us would quickly tire and flee to email. This has nothing to do with “believing” or “not believing” or any easy oversimplifications. Culturally, we simply haven’t progressed beyond the kind of pale thinking we dully smoked ourselves with through high school. We’re so open-minded it echoes inside like an empty cistern (fundamentalists, whether Judaic, Muslim, or Christian, fall prey to the same simplifications, but of the closed-minded sort, nihilistic and convinced). But here I don’t come across the same intellectual self-deception. These are Biblical lands, Muslim lands, of Jews and Gentiles and Crusaders. History shudders in the blood and dung, feathers the dust and lights upon Jordan’s waters. Let me tell you about a night a few weeks ago. Carrie’s classroom assistant, Tulare (pronounced Tool-Are), invited us to her place for a small birthday celebration, her twenty-third. Tulare is Armenian, a warm and long-giggling laugh, deep almond eyes and a kind way. She had a few friends over, also Armenian. Tulare’s father is a collector of antiques, and the living room brimmed with religious icons, mosaic carpets on the walls, chests and boxes. One of Tulare’s friends, Alig, works in the high school, and has helped me many a time search for books I need for class. Alig loves wine, has a round, expressive and lovely face, and rich dark hair that falls in plumes down the front of her shoulders. High school boys tend to hover round her. I was sitting across her that evening, and as she put her wine glass down with one hand she picked up an antique sheathed knife with the other. The handle ended with an ivory-carved head, expressionless, and the long grey blade was long dulled (how, I wondered; how many tendons and sinews had it torn through?). She examined the knife expertly, as though with an archeological eye determining its time and regional origins. Turning it this way and that, she finally reached a conclusion. “No, this isn’t a Christian knife….” *…* One morning not long ago we walked to school in a distant white mist. The whiteness didn’t sing and billow like cool fog, didn’t drift, but hung dryly in an unquiet sky. We had no idea what it was, but it smelled faintly dirty. When my students arrived they remarked it was from a dust storm that probably blew in from the desert, or from Iraq. “It will rain tonight, it always does after this,” they said. The entire city, every table and chair and window and leaf was covered in a fine patina of powder. Our lungs were coated. But the white air morning was symbolic, too. Before the bell, one of the teachers asked if I’d heard from Bobbi. I hadn’t. The teacher said nobody had heard from her since Saturday morning, and she’s not answering her phone. Bobbi Richards was the dynamic art teacher. She was the lively one in any function, always laughing, quick to ask after you. I remember a squad of teachers heading to the Baron Hotel bar one evening, an elegant dive and a landmark in Aleppo. Agatha Christie wrote part of “Murder on the Orient Express” here. Lawrence of Arabia frequented the bar during lulls in his adventures. Feeling out of sorts, I went out on the balcony, as it was too smoky in the bar. Suddenly, I notice Bobbi had softly wandered up next to me, and was gazing out on the same busy street. That’s how she was, never interrupting, just sharing the view. She’d been over for cocktails a few days before. My memory of that night is a snapshot: six or seven of us doubled over in laughter, dinner plans long derailed in favor of another drink, tears streaming down our faces at one of Bobbi’s stories, and she is trying to choke out the last part while her hand is resting on my back for balance. She was supposed to go shopping the next afternoon. Instead, sometime on Saturday Bobbi sat down on her sofa and died. Early fifties. Heart failure. She had been busy cleaning the house, as her husband, Geoff, a photographer, was to arrive in two days; he’d delayed coming to finish up a documentary he was doing for the Discovery Channel in Nova Scotia. He came anyway, with their two sons, one in his early twenties, the other, late teens. Bobbi loved Dylan, and one night I played and sang "I Shall Be Released" for them. So now the white sky and hushed day whispered another tune. Students who only met Bobbi months before sat in my classroom crying. I looked out my window and imagined the sky a vast empty canvas, which she would have appreciated. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is how the world will end, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but eminently less dramatic. God will simply tire and lose inspiration, His paintbrush held aloft crookedly, and the canvas of creation will fall away into an empty white spray, a long unfinished morning trembling in heavenly peace.