You may have ideas of heaven, and however vague they float like wispy clouds in your mind, they probably coalesce to paint a happy destination of general good will and relaxed anxiety. Popular western notions concerning this utopia will, if tapped, include an endless expanse of puffy cloud upon which one reclines and catches up with friends and loved ones who’ve arrived earlier in the season. So it’ll be like Fort Lauderdale, Florida with your aunt, uncle and stray cousins. If your imagination never developed much past early childhood—or if you cherish as literal fact the vast painted representations adorning the world’s great galleries—you’ll visualize ducking the heavy swooping wings of angels, refraining from admonishing the cherubs about caloric intake, and participating in mandatory harp circles sans campfire.
I once read a fundamentalist Christian tract that invoked the glorious rewards of the afterlife by insisting that true believers will invest their time praising God and judging angels, which to me veers frighteningly close to sucking up to the boss and burying yourself in endless clerical work. Imagine spending the afterlife at the DMV. If you’re of the jihadist hue and are, for better or worse, martyred in a holy war, heaven awaiting you will include seventy or so…well, here’s where meanings muddy up in translation. The fashionable reading in western mainstream media has Islamic martyrs encountering virgins. Young, unmarried women, flowers intact. As I like taunting my students, unless footnotes offer specifics, a recently martyred sauntering through heaven’s pearly gates could very well stumble upon seventy spinsters pitching back in forth in a chorus line of rocking chairs vying to darn his socks and knit him a sweater. Actually, my 12th graders will occasionally get into arguments over interpretations of Muslim culture and Koranic scripture; it’s all wonderfully entertaining, as there exist different ideas of exact wording, and you can tell when the arguments gets overheated when their exchange retreats from English into a fiery Arabic. One of my brightest 11th graders, a devout Muslim, claims—quite astutely—that the Arabic or Koranic word we take as “virgin” has no exact translation. The closest he offers is “one who gives pleasure.” So if you arrive unexpectedly in Paradise, and didn’t pack a sweater, a gray-haired and hunched spinster with an impish grin twirling sewing needles might be heaven indeed.
Whatever our dreams of heaven, we rarely lay scrutiny to the implications of our assumptions. If we think heaven at all, we usually imagine ourselves somehow there, in a place, not quite believing that all will forever be well but trembling in our heart at the joyous approach of a loved one running toward us, a welcoming and familiar smile, tears in the eyes sparkling off celestial light, a hand reaching for ours, reunion at last. And your first words will be: “Why, you haven’t aged a bit.” The problem with this pastoral is time. As in a long time. As in a windy, heaving bellow of eternity. Imagine, if you will, living another hundred years upon this airy glorious landscape (I’m granting all readers a healthy and happy longevity). You’ll catch up each other with family goings-on. You’ll have to deal with omniscient loved ones long deceased who’ve been watching and waiting all these years, and all under heaven will be known. “I distinctly remember telling you before I died not to sell granny’s china. And what do you do? I’m not in the ground two days before granny’s china appears on Ebay....” Your grandfather—somehow looking exactly how you last saw him—escorts you to meet John F. Kennedy, or Genghis Khan, or Queen Elizabeth, or Rasputin, or John the Baptist, or John the barber, or Bette Davis, or Miles Davis, or point out the brownstone flat where Jesus composes string quartets under the furrow-browed eyes of Beethoven, or even meet commoners who never made the front page but can regale with tales of toga parties in ancient Greece, and are damn good listeners to boot. Meeting and greeting the luminaries could soak up a good hundred years easy. Then what? You can spend many hours ironing out thorny metaphysical problems once and for all, as answers should most likely be forthcoming; if the answers don’t dissolve the questions, then I don’t know what you’re going to do. If you’ve been martyred, your troubles are far from over. Besides the obvious, what else are you going to do with seventy virgins? Set up Scrabble tournament leagues?
Furthermore, whatever you do in life, either here or the hereafter, it’ll eventually get boring. So let’s imagine: another lifetime passes in heaven. Let’s ramp it up. A thousand years roll by. How about another thousand? By this time you’ve discussed every topic under the sun with everyone in the peaceful region. You’ve come to grips with the unpleasant reality that death does not, as assumed, exempt you from taxes. You can’t bear to hear another rendition of Handel’s “Messiah,” and, having written forty-seven incredibly intricate symphonies yourself, mastered every musical instrument, learned Dutch, French, Armenian, Persian, Greek, Latin and various Inuit dialects, and can recite lengthy passages from the Koran, Shakespeare, and Homer in your sleep, your passions are long fulfilled, your cup runneth over. Well, buck up, as a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years await you…ten million years is a drop in the sloshing bucket of eternity. You’ve still a long, long way to go, longer than you can imagine. It is taking this thought into your gut, the squishy marrow of bone, your dark and icy soul, that you’ll understand the necessity of death. Paradoxically, you need to know the journey will end, for life pulses with meaning only when death towers over the shimmering horizon. Better, then, to cast off notions of heaven with its looming eternity, let the dead bury the dead; instead, scoop up a handful of clear mountain stream and drink, smile at a glowering stranger, pick up a guitar and play, give that homeless guy a twenty, read your Shakespeare, and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.
For me, heaven is a small, fleeting affair. Heaven occurred on a cold night in Vienna, Austria, around Christmas Eve. Carrie and I had wandered out of the stony gray, weathered and soaring Romanesque St. Stephan’s Cathedral, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1137. The old cobbled streets were teeming with tourists and shoppers and families and friends bundled in heavy coats, wrapped in thick wool scarves, gloved hands tucked in pockets, puffing icy breath and leaning into the cold. Sparkling lights were strewn festively between buildings. Performers played the violin in mittens. Vendors stood behind steaming grills of sausage, chestnuts and salty thick wedges of fried potatoes. We’d spent the day walking, having rented an apartment a few blocks from the Danube for the two weeks over Christmas break, a week after that in Salzburg. We awake, fix breakfast, sip coffee and check the park beyond the windows of our forth story flat for snow on the rooftops and grass and hoods of parked cars. Then we’d wander the glorious, refined and clean Vienna.
This particular evening found us at one of the Christmas markets that seasonally bloom in Germany and Austria. Temporary dark small buildings, like shacks, similar to the hamlets set up for Renaissance fairs, where you can buy crafts for presents, glass ornaments, dried meats and cheeses, gigantic pretzels, more pork sausages…I bought a dapper hat for my nappy head. Christmas lights glowed and glittered in the trees, songs wafted between buildings. Heaven, for me, came in a ceramic mug. One of our dear friends here in Aleppo, Andrea, is from Germany and works for the ICARDA research center at Tel Hadiya, twenty minutes outside of the city toward Damascus, “the farm” as it’s called. She told us about gluvien, the hot spiced wine that appears during the holiday season. So here we were. We shuffle up to the stall, order a gluvien, the vendor warms blue ceramic mugs then dispenses the elixir from a steel canister, steam billows as the dark liquid fills the holy vessel, we throw down euros and take our mugs in both hands to where a high table stands empty. The coral reef spires of distant cathedrals silently watch over the city, the celebration of Christmas tingles in the frosty air, proud horse-drawn carriages amble down the avenues as of old amidst the cars and buses, the folks around you smile and laugh, Vienna sings with the memories of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and we huddle close and feel the warmth of the gluvien soak through our gloves into our hands, and then drink. Hot wine against the chill, the spice of winter life. That’s my idea of heaven, let’s hear yours….
One of the famous market streets in Vienna is on a narrow island between two busy streets, Naschemarkt. Long booths and vendor stands line the strip, and shuffling down the center you are assailed with aromas of strong cheeses, fresh vegetables, meats, gluvien, breads, chocolates, sweetly soaked barrels of wine, salty fish, roasting nuts, spices, kebabs, samosas, sauerkraut, fruits. Passing by a shack—probably half the size of an average bedroom—we saw four people huddled and standing around a small round table out front, their faces sheltered and hidden under an awning. On the table was a large platter of sliced meats and cheeses, like a sample tray. Through a small window a proprietor was standing in shadow. A small door stood on one side. It was rather spooky, and daunting, as though a portal to another sinister dimension. Brave, Carrie and I opened and entered. Warmth breathed on our chilled bones. On our right stood a narrow counter six feet long, and inside was what amounted to a foyer, large enough to hold five people standing close. Six people huddled in the small space, and we made two more. Behind the counter, a father and two twenty-something sons, all looked healthy and strong like woodsmen. Behind them, before them, all around them, were meats and cheeses, dried, smoked, cured, the works. Aromas were heavy, spicy, damp, sour, sweet, oily, salty, dark, severe, and delicious. A few standing patrons shared a platter of meats and cheeses. One of the sons spotted us, offered a wide happy smile, and asked if we’d like to share a plate. He’d slice off a sampling of faire. We agreed. Then he spoke the most beautiful words one can hear on an early afternoon coming out of the winter into a warm room: “How about a couple glasses of wine?” A minute later Austrian wine drifted into our hands. The woodsman sliced and shaved and soon a platter arrived on the counter to linger over. We turned, but there was nowhere to go, a packed house. “That’s fine,” he said, “just stay there, no problem. Enjoy!”….
What has become of the traditional café? I remember a café in downtown Sacramento when I was in college, can’t remember the name, 20th between H and I streets, my Sacto friends? A small faded red brick building with an alley alongside. Late afternoon, rain lightly splattering the sidewalk and dancing off the huge trees, but inside faint, diffused light poured through the front glass and illuminated the quiet space, light that seemed to have soaked through a dusty curtain in the sky. The tables and chairs were thin and rickety. I remember the guy behind the counter, elderly with shaggy wild gray beard, sitting on a stool, head bowed scanning a newspaper. From behind him came lilting strings from a classical station on his small radio. Coffee was strong, real mugs and saucers, plain, simple lines along the ceiling and modest black and white photographs on the walls. It was a clean, quiet café, and glancing up now and again from your book to see the rain haze the afternoon into blue evening, the room preserved a kind of sanctuary for the soul. Weatherstones, that was the name. My favorite café, and I’ve never found another like it. Walk into cafes now, and everyone sports a laptop, bulwarks standing ready to rebuff unwanted social encounters like guards before a citadel. Or, laptops as drawbridges perpetually drawn up, over which fire deadly sharp glares if you happen to approach and cross into the owner’s protected realm. Leave your cramped, dark, isolated apartment to isolate yourself and glower at petty emails. A book can start conversations. I had a friend who told me how he met a woman he dated for awhile. He was in the Pig & Whistle Irish pub off Geary and Masonic in San Francisco. He had a pint of Guinness, and the woman watching him was intrigued by the sight of this guy laughing out loud reading passages from Joyce’s Ulysses. Can you imagine siding up to someone and saying “So, what email are you reading?” A philosophy professor once told us about being a student in France, sitting with his friends at the feet of Sartre and Camus as they held forth in cafes of Paris. And now? Cafes have become antisocial. Where once they were places to enjoin conversations and share ideas, cafes have become shiny, soulless boutiques. And why do the young people behind the counter think their blaring repetitive house electronica creates an appropriate mood? I hereby declare that only jazz or classical shall be at quiet volumes allowed in cafes. And don’t get me started on sweet flavored seasonal crappacinos and the like. Lord have mercy, folks, grow up. All good things must end, ‘tis true. But good cafes are few, and it’s hard to witness their vanishing.
We found one in Vienna. There are restaurants, there are cafes, and often mixing the two invites disaster. Not so at Café Westend. High ceilings fading an elegant, soft turquoise, inlaid wood of vines and branches. Dull white curtains hung in the window. We took a booth in the center and ordered goulash and bratwurst and a couple of tall dark beers. At one table a large laughing family shared a late lunch. Over my shoulder in a booth sat a young man with shaved head in a leather brown jacket, accompanied by two young women in short skirts and heels who seemed bored, sitting gracefully rigid, proud of their cleavage. The young man was talking quietly, but emphatically, hands on the table, in an earnest soliloquy, glancing up at the women occasionally as though fishing for admiration of his accomplishments. The women shot glances at one another, delicate quick smiles, mildly entertained at the young man’s self-absorbed charm. I couldn’t figure out their deal. Were they prostitutes from Eastern Europe getting the scoop on their employer’s competitive healthcare plan? Fans overhead swung slowly, gallantly. The light had the hue of pale golden sand, and the presence of a good waiter: rarely glimpsed but essentially present. The waiters here are all old men in dark suits and ties. Near the windows at a corner table, two young people were chatting, leaning toward one another in the easy thrall of early love. Comfortable and trusting, they’d inch closer to whisper, and then exchange kisses. The kisses were not wet and passionate, but seemed to serve as punctuation marks in their conversation. Next booth over was an old man’s head hunching out of a dark plaid jacket, wisps of gray hair spraying in a riot from his oval, blemished skull. A pipe veered into view every few minutes as he turned to scan the right side of his newspaper, while snowy blue smoke rose in splashes around his sagging face. Somewhere, music, a waltz begins. A woman at a table alone looks through the window and lingers on the day. She pulls her hair back and binds it with a rubber band, her blond strands dangling loosely on a Sunday in Vienna. ….
Darkness had fallen when our driver picked us up at the small airport in Gazientap just across the Turkish border for our drive to what is home. Our driver is Turkish, but lives in Aleppo and spoke Arabic as well, so for a fee we were driven to and from the airport and had his assistance getting through the border crossings, a bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka. The roads were dark. From the back seat we watch the oncoming cars and listened to Turkish music on the radio. I kept noticing the oncoming cars turning on their brights as they approached. Nearly every car! I couldn’t understand it, and immediately felt disdain for the drivers. Was that how Syrians drove, finding different ways to annoy? Already their weaving in and out of traffic and trying to squeeze between our Volvo and a large truck earned my middle finger a few times, although the offenders probably interpreted it as wishing Syria the best in next year’s World Cup. But how completely asinine was it to shoot your brights at us! Immediately I deemed them culturally inferior. We knew the right way to drive. We’d gone another five or so miles when I realized that our driver had his brights on, and of course the other cars were warning him, to which he paid no attention. It was a good lesson learned: how quickly we assume our view is the correct one, that how we see things is exactly how they are, in other words, reality. But in truth, we first and foremost have perspectives; we see and interpret events through a lens crafted by and for our own culture. So one could hear me sneer and complain about the trash I witness daily on Aleppo’s streets, comparing life here with clean California. But though litter piles in gutters here, people don’t, human litter, the tragedy of the homeless men, women and children in the world’s richest empire. What’s worse, more appalling to my sight? I’m reminded too of how far away Iraq seemed when living in the States. I think I’ll not be accused of hyperbole when estimating that when the United States invaded Iraq (for the first time) in 1991, only a tiny percentage of my fellow citizens, myself included, could point to Iraq on a map. There's something sinister about that. How far away does 1991 seem today, and ironic that now I’m in a country that borders that troubled land. Both Syria and Iraq share the same vast desert. And never could I have imagined walking with my wife to school, and as we begin parting toward our respective classrooms have Carrie say over her shoulder, “Oh and remember, I’m going to the Euphrates River today, class field trip….” The Euphrates! And for five days in March, a holiday, the Prophet's birthday, we'll visit Beirut and hike the Bekka Valley in Lebanon. But here we are, and though we’ve only been here a little over five months, we are becoming aware that there are other perspectives to unfolding events, and of history. People here are very much aware of the double standards that seem to apply: Iraq refusing to abide by U.N resolutions and getting bombed by the west; Israel refusing to abide by U.N. resolutions (specifically 242) and getting bombers from the west, as well as financial aid and political support. The people living here are Arab, as the people of Iraq are Arab. So the people I see daily here in Syria could very well resemble the people in the villages, towns and cities of Iraq. By 1996 an estimated half a million Iraqi children died as the result of U.S. supported and imposed sanctions, but I was still so far away, and the sanctions failed to get the sexy press coverage; it became old news there. Not here. The suffering was shown and reported, and resentment simmered. On the weekends, if I’m not hunched over papers to grade or readings to prep, I sometimes take a walk, a pure walk, without any planned destination in mind, just some neighborhood in Aleppo.
I wander around and watch people living their lives, going about their business. I see teenage girls sitting side-by-side on a bench laughing. I see men opening up their shutters of their shops. I see families in dilapidated playgrounds, children running for the slide as children everywhere do. I see young men in shiny shirts and slicked black hair spitting nut shells into the gutter. I see a rambling bus spewing dark exhaust, and in the windows bounce students going to school. I see old men and young men ambling into a mosque for prayer. Today on my walk something extraordinary happened. On a dark mountain far in the distance I saw the silhouette of man, his face glimmering in and out of shadow. I was once friends with him and supported him with money and other items, but now I didn’t like him, and wanted him off the mountain. So I wandered into a neighborhood and found families coming out of their houses. I dropped sanctions on them, and immediately they fell to the ground. Others tried to help them, but I had made the necessary medicines disappear, because the man on the mountain could perhaps find a way to use the medicines for other evil purposes. Some women were crying and pleading with me to stop what I was doing, but I explained I wanted that man to get off the mountain. It seemed obvious, but maybe they didn’t understand English. I then found other families and distributed depleted uranium shells at their feet. Cancer rates soared, and young people were dying at higher rates all over the region. Again I explained I wanted that man off the mountain. My walk found me approaching the little liquor store in the Armenian quarter where we buy our booze. A tall handsome young man, George, works there, and we greet each other warmly (shows how often we visit). Inside, too, was the boy, probably eight years old, who smiles and waves happily when he sees us, enjoys helping us out with our heavy sacks of wine and beer, and refuses to let me carry one of the bags (he’s thin, but somehow quite strong). I purchase a few bottles, then order a Tomahawk cruise missile into the neighborhood, because I suspect someone lives there that is helping the man on the mountain. Pieces of George and the little boy—who is not smiling anymore—scatter in the blast. I explain the same thing to the people who’ve gathered, that I’m trying to get that man off the mountain. I point to the summit, but the man has retreated into his shadowy palace. I see the four laughing teenage girls in a bus coming back from a wedding. A cluster bomb splinters the windows and slices the girls and drops them on the hot asphalt. I apologize to the gathered crowd (who are now murmuring revenge), and explain that I didn’t intend to hurt them, but it’s the man on the mountain I was after, and anyway, why didn’t the bus see the guarded checkpoint I installed? If you invaded my country and put up a guarded checkpoint, I told them, I’d happily oblige and stop. I walk up one street to destroy a water treatment plant. That way, women and children cannot drink clean water, and disease will spread. But I want that man off that mountain, I don’t care at what cost. For one thing, that man used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, and I want him gone (he used the same weapons on his own people when he was my friend, but that was different). In the evening I am walking home when a white pigeon like a winged angel swoops down and perches on my shoulder. I feed her sunflower seeds from my flak-jacket pocket, and mention the weapons of mass destruction the man on the mountain possesses, or I believe possesses, or tell people he possesses whether I believe it or not, that worry me. What if he uses them against me? The pigeon ponders this, and then asks if I am Christian. I say, well, yes, I suppose so, if she insists on labels. I wait for her point, but she doesn’t respond, perhaps because I’m fresh out of seeds. We walk awhile in silence. The pigeon then tells me to turn around. I do, and see a valley littered with countless tiny slips of paper. I cringe at the trash. The pigeon tells me on each piece of paper, written in Arabic, are the names of each of the 500,000 children who died because of my sanctions. She asks me if that’s the weapons of mass destruction I was referring to. I turn around to reply, but she has flown away, leaving me alone. A cold dry wind rises from the darkening valley. In the shadowy distance people are fighting, and more explosions, more death. It’s amazing how far I could see. Then I realize I’m on top of the mountain, and the man is gone.
I once read a fundamentalist Christian tract that invoked the glorious rewards of the afterlife by insisting that true believers will invest their time praising God and judging angels, which to me veers frighteningly close to sucking up to the boss and burying yourself in endless clerical work. Imagine spending the afterlife at the DMV. If you’re of the jihadist hue and are, for better or worse, martyred in a holy war, heaven awaiting you will include seventy or so…well, here’s where meanings muddy up in translation. The fashionable reading in western mainstream media has Islamic martyrs encountering virgins. Young, unmarried women, flowers intact. As I like taunting my students, unless footnotes offer specifics, a recently martyred sauntering through heaven’s pearly gates could very well stumble upon seventy spinsters pitching back in forth in a chorus line of rocking chairs vying to darn his socks and knit him a sweater. Actually, my 12th graders will occasionally get into arguments over interpretations of Muslim culture and Koranic scripture; it’s all wonderfully entertaining, as there exist different ideas of exact wording, and you can tell when the arguments gets overheated when their exchange retreats from English into a fiery Arabic. One of my brightest 11th graders, a devout Muslim, claims—quite astutely—that the Arabic or Koranic word we take as “virgin” has no exact translation. The closest he offers is “one who gives pleasure.” So if you arrive unexpectedly in Paradise, and didn’t pack a sweater, a gray-haired and hunched spinster with an impish grin twirling sewing needles might be heaven indeed.
Whatever our dreams of heaven, we rarely lay scrutiny to the implications of our assumptions. If we think heaven at all, we usually imagine ourselves somehow there, in a place, not quite believing that all will forever be well but trembling in our heart at the joyous approach of a loved one running toward us, a welcoming and familiar smile, tears in the eyes sparkling off celestial light, a hand reaching for ours, reunion at last. And your first words will be: “Why, you haven’t aged a bit.” The problem with this pastoral is time. As in a long time. As in a windy, heaving bellow of eternity. Imagine, if you will, living another hundred years upon this airy glorious landscape (I’m granting all readers a healthy and happy longevity). You’ll catch up each other with family goings-on. You’ll have to deal with omniscient loved ones long deceased who’ve been watching and waiting all these years, and all under heaven will be known. “I distinctly remember telling you before I died not to sell granny’s china. And what do you do? I’m not in the ground two days before granny’s china appears on Ebay....” Your grandfather—somehow looking exactly how you last saw him—escorts you to meet John F. Kennedy, or Genghis Khan, or Queen Elizabeth, or Rasputin, or John the Baptist, or John the barber, or Bette Davis, or Miles Davis, or point out the brownstone flat where Jesus composes string quartets under the furrow-browed eyes of Beethoven, or even meet commoners who never made the front page but can regale with tales of toga parties in ancient Greece, and are damn good listeners to boot. Meeting and greeting the luminaries could soak up a good hundred years easy. Then what? You can spend many hours ironing out thorny metaphysical problems once and for all, as answers should most likely be forthcoming; if the answers don’t dissolve the questions, then I don’t know what you’re going to do. If you’ve been martyred, your troubles are far from over. Besides the obvious, what else are you going to do with seventy virgins? Set up Scrabble tournament leagues?
Furthermore, whatever you do in life, either here or the hereafter, it’ll eventually get boring. So let’s imagine: another lifetime passes in heaven. Let’s ramp it up. A thousand years roll by. How about another thousand? By this time you’ve discussed every topic under the sun with everyone in the peaceful region. You’ve come to grips with the unpleasant reality that death does not, as assumed, exempt you from taxes. You can’t bear to hear another rendition of Handel’s “Messiah,” and, having written forty-seven incredibly intricate symphonies yourself, mastered every musical instrument, learned Dutch, French, Armenian, Persian, Greek, Latin and various Inuit dialects, and can recite lengthy passages from the Koran, Shakespeare, and Homer in your sleep, your passions are long fulfilled, your cup runneth over. Well, buck up, as a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years await you…ten million years is a drop in the sloshing bucket of eternity. You’ve still a long, long way to go, longer than you can imagine. It is taking this thought into your gut, the squishy marrow of bone, your dark and icy soul, that you’ll understand the necessity of death. Paradoxically, you need to know the journey will end, for life pulses with meaning only when death towers over the shimmering horizon. Better, then, to cast off notions of heaven with its looming eternity, let the dead bury the dead; instead, scoop up a handful of clear mountain stream and drink, smile at a glowering stranger, pick up a guitar and play, give that homeless guy a twenty, read your Shakespeare, and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.
For me, heaven is a small, fleeting affair. Heaven occurred on a cold night in Vienna, Austria, around Christmas Eve. Carrie and I had wandered out of the stony gray, weathered and soaring Romanesque St. Stephan’s Cathedral, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1137. The old cobbled streets were teeming with tourists and shoppers and families and friends bundled in heavy coats, wrapped in thick wool scarves, gloved hands tucked in pockets, puffing icy breath and leaning into the cold. Sparkling lights were strewn festively between buildings. Performers played the violin in mittens. Vendors stood behind steaming grills of sausage, chestnuts and salty thick wedges of fried potatoes. We’d spent the day walking, having rented an apartment a few blocks from the Danube for the two weeks over Christmas break, a week after that in Salzburg. We awake, fix breakfast, sip coffee and check the park beyond the windows of our forth story flat for snow on the rooftops and grass and hoods of parked cars. Then we’d wander the glorious, refined and clean Vienna.
This particular evening found us at one of the Christmas markets that seasonally bloom in Germany and Austria. Temporary dark small buildings, like shacks, similar to the hamlets set up for Renaissance fairs, where you can buy crafts for presents, glass ornaments, dried meats and cheeses, gigantic pretzels, more pork sausages…I bought a dapper hat for my nappy head. Christmas lights glowed and glittered in the trees, songs wafted between buildings. Heaven, for me, came in a ceramic mug. One of our dear friends here in Aleppo, Andrea, is from Germany and works for the ICARDA research center at Tel Hadiya, twenty minutes outside of the city toward Damascus, “the farm” as it’s called. She told us about gluvien, the hot spiced wine that appears during the holiday season. So here we were. We shuffle up to the stall, order a gluvien, the vendor warms blue ceramic mugs then dispenses the elixir from a steel canister, steam billows as the dark liquid fills the holy vessel, we throw down euros and take our mugs in both hands to where a high table stands empty. The coral reef spires of distant cathedrals silently watch over the city, the celebration of Christmas tingles in the frosty air, proud horse-drawn carriages amble down the avenues as of old amidst the cars and buses, the folks around you smile and laugh, Vienna sings with the memories of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and we huddle close and feel the warmth of the gluvien soak through our gloves into our hands, and then drink. Hot wine against the chill, the spice of winter life. That’s my idea of heaven, let’s hear yours….
One of the famous market streets in Vienna is on a narrow island between two busy streets, Naschemarkt. Long booths and vendor stands line the strip, and shuffling down the center you are assailed with aromas of strong cheeses, fresh vegetables, meats, gluvien, breads, chocolates, sweetly soaked barrels of wine, salty fish, roasting nuts, spices, kebabs, samosas, sauerkraut, fruits. Passing by a shack—probably half the size of an average bedroom—we saw four people huddled and standing around a small round table out front, their faces sheltered and hidden under an awning. On the table was a large platter of sliced meats and cheeses, like a sample tray. Through a small window a proprietor was standing in shadow. A small door stood on one side. It was rather spooky, and daunting, as though a portal to another sinister dimension. Brave, Carrie and I opened and entered. Warmth breathed on our chilled bones. On our right stood a narrow counter six feet long, and inside was what amounted to a foyer, large enough to hold five people standing close. Six people huddled in the small space, and we made two more. Behind the counter, a father and two twenty-something sons, all looked healthy and strong like woodsmen. Behind them, before them, all around them, were meats and cheeses, dried, smoked, cured, the works. Aromas were heavy, spicy, damp, sour, sweet, oily, salty, dark, severe, and delicious. A few standing patrons shared a platter of meats and cheeses. One of the sons spotted us, offered a wide happy smile, and asked if we’d like to share a plate. He’d slice off a sampling of faire. We agreed. Then he spoke the most beautiful words one can hear on an early afternoon coming out of the winter into a warm room: “How about a couple glasses of wine?” A minute later Austrian wine drifted into our hands. The woodsman sliced and shaved and soon a platter arrived on the counter to linger over. We turned, but there was nowhere to go, a packed house. “That’s fine,” he said, “just stay there, no problem. Enjoy!”….
What has become of the traditional café? I remember a café in downtown Sacramento when I was in college, can’t remember the name, 20th between H and I streets, my Sacto friends? A small faded red brick building with an alley alongside. Late afternoon, rain lightly splattering the sidewalk and dancing off the huge trees, but inside faint, diffused light poured through the front glass and illuminated the quiet space, light that seemed to have soaked through a dusty curtain in the sky. The tables and chairs were thin and rickety. I remember the guy behind the counter, elderly with shaggy wild gray beard, sitting on a stool, head bowed scanning a newspaper. From behind him came lilting strings from a classical station on his small radio. Coffee was strong, real mugs and saucers, plain, simple lines along the ceiling and modest black and white photographs on the walls. It was a clean, quiet café, and glancing up now and again from your book to see the rain haze the afternoon into blue evening, the room preserved a kind of sanctuary for the soul. Weatherstones, that was the name. My favorite café, and I’ve never found another like it. Walk into cafes now, and everyone sports a laptop, bulwarks standing ready to rebuff unwanted social encounters like guards before a citadel. Or, laptops as drawbridges perpetually drawn up, over which fire deadly sharp glares if you happen to approach and cross into the owner’s protected realm. Leave your cramped, dark, isolated apartment to isolate yourself and glower at petty emails. A book can start conversations. I had a friend who told me how he met a woman he dated for awhile. He was in the Pig & Whistle Irish pub off Geary and Masonic in San Francisco. He had a pint of Guinness, and the woman watching him was intrigued by the sight of this guy laughing out loud reading passages from Joyce’s Ulysses. Can you imagine siding up to someone and saying “So, what email are you reading?” A philosophy professor once told us about being a student in France, sitting with his friends at the feet of Sartre and Camus as they held forth in cafes of Paris. And now? Cafes have become antisocial. Where once they were places to enjoin conversations and share ideas, cafes have become shiny, soulless boutiques. And why do the young people behind the counter think their blaring repetitive house electronica creates an appropriate mood? I hereby declare that only jazz or classical shall be at quiet volumes allowed in cafes. And don’t get me started on sweet flavored seasonal crappacinos and the like. Lord have mercy, folks, grow up. All good things must end, ‘tis true. But good cafes are few, and it’s hard to witness their vanishing.
We found one in Vienna. There are restaurants, there are cafes, and often mixing the two invites disaster. Not so at Café Westend. High ceilings fading an elegant, soft turquoise, inlaid wood of vines and branches. Dull white curtains hung in the window. We took a booth in the center and ordered goulash and bratwurst and a couple of tall dark beers. At one table a large laughing family shared a late lunch. Over my shoulder in a booth sat a young man with shaved head in a leather brown jacket, accompanied by two young women in short skirts and heels who seemed bored, sitting gracefully rigid, proud of their cleavage. The young man was talking quietly, but emphatically, hands on the table, in an earnest soliloquy, glancing up at the women occasionally as though fishing for admiration of his accomplishments. The women shot glances at one another, delicate quick smiles, mildly entertained at the young man’s self-absorbed charm. I couldn’t figure out their deal. Were they prostitutes from Eastern Europe getting the scoop on their employer’s competitive healthcare plan? Fans overhead swung slowly, gallantly. The light had the hue of pale golden sand, and the presence of a good waiter: rarely glimpsed but essentially present. The waiters here are all old men in dark suits and ties. Near the windows at a corner table, two young people were chatting, leaning toward one another in the easy thrall of early love. Comfortable and trusting, they’d inch closer to whisper, and then exchange kisses. The kisses were not wet and passionate, but seemed to serve as punctuation marks in their conversation. Next booth over was an old man’s head hunching out of a dark plaid jacket, wisps of gray hair spraying in a riot from his oval, blemished skull. A pipe veered into view every few minutes as he turned to scan the right side of his newspaper, while snowy blue smoke rose in splashes around his sagging face. Somewhere, music, a waltz begins. A woman at a table alone looks through the window and lingers on the day. She pulls her hair back and binds it with a rubber band, her blond strands dangling loosely on a Sunday in Vienna. ….
Darkness had fallen when our driver picked us up at the small airport in Gazientap just across the Turkish border for our drive to what is home. Our driver is Turkish, but lives in Aleppo and spoke Arabic as well, so for a fee we were driven to and from the airport and had his assistance getting through the border crossings, a bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka. The roads were dark. From the back seat we watch the oncoming cars and listened to Turkish music on the radio. I kept noticing the oncoming cars turning on their brights as they approached. Nearly every car! I couldn’t understand it, and immediately felt disdain for the drivers. Was that how Syrians drove, finding different ways to annoy? Already their weaving in and out of traffic and trying to squeeze between our Volvo and a large truck earned my middle finger a few times, although the offenders probably interpreted it as wishing Syria the best in next year’s World Cup. But how completely asinine was it to shoot your brights at us! Immediately I deemed them culturally inferior. We knew the right way to drive. We’d gone another five or so miles when I realized that our driver had his brights on, and of course the other cars were warning him, to which he paid no attention. It was a good lesson learned: how quickly we assume our view is the correct one, that how we see things is exactly how they are, in other words, reality. But in truth, we first and foremost have perspectives; we see and interpret events through a lens crafted by and for our own culture. So one could hear me sneer and complain about the trash I witness daily on Aleppo’s streets, comparing life here with clean California. But though litter piles in gutters here, people don’t, human litter, the tragedy of the homeless men, women and children in the world’s richest empire. What’s worse, more appalling to my sight? I’m reminded too of how far away Iraq seemed when living in the States. I think I’ll not be accused of hyperbole when estimating that when the United States invaded Iraq (for the first time) in 1991, only a tiny percentage of my fellow citizens, myself included, could point to Iraq on a map. There's something sinister about that. How far away does 1991 seem today, and ironic that now I’m in a country that borders that troubled land. Both Syria and Iraq share the same vast desert. And never could I have imagined walking with my wife to school, and as we begin parting toward our respective classrooms have Carrie say over her shoulder, “Oh and remember, I’m going to the Euphrates River today, class field trip….” The Euphrates! And for five days in March, a holiday, the Prophet's birthday, we'll visit Beirut and hike the Bekka Valley in Lebanon. But here we are, and though we’ve only been here a little over five months, we are becoming aware that there are other perspectives to unfolding events, and of history. People here are very much aware of the double standards that seem to apply: Iraq refusing to abide by U.N resolutions and getting bombed by the west; Israel refusing to abide by U.N. resolutions (specifically 242) and getting bombers from the west, as well as financial aid and political support. The people living here are Arab, as the people of Iraq are Arab. So the people I see daily here in Syria could very well resemble the people in the villages, towns and cities of Iraq. By 1996 an estimated half a million Iraqi children died as the result of U.S. supported and imposed sanctions, but I was still so far away, and the sanctions failed to get the sexy press coverage; it became old news there. Not here. The suffering was shown and reported, and resentment simmered. On the weekends, if I’m not hunched over papers to grade or readings to prep, I sometimes take a walk, a pure walk, without any planned destination in mind, just some neighborhood in Aleppo.
I wander around and watch people living their lives, going about their business. I see teenage girls sitting side-by-side on a bench laughing. I see men opening up their shutters of their shops. I see families in dilapidated playgrounds, children running for the slide as children everywhere do. I see young men in shiny shirts and slicked black hair spitting nut shells into the gutter. I see a rambling bus spewing dark exhaust, and in the windows bounce students going to school. I see old men and young men ambling into a mosque for prayer. Today on my walk something extraordinary happened. On a dark mountain far in the distance I saw the silhouette of man, his face glimmering in and out of shadow. I was once friends with him and supported him with money and other items, but now I didn’t like him, and wanted him off the mountain. So I wandered into a neighborhood and found families coming out of their houses. I dropped sanctions on them, and immediately they fell to the ground. Others tried to help them, but I had made the necessary medicines disappear, because the man on the mountain could perhaps find a way to use the medicines for other evil purposes. Some women were crying and pleading with me to stop what I was doing, but I explained I wanted that man to get off the mountain. It seemed obvious, but maybe they didn’t understand English. I then found other families and distributed depleted uranium shells at their feet. Cancer rates soared, and young people were dying at higher rates all over the region. Again I explained I wanted that man off the mountain. My walk found me approaching the little liquor store in the Armenian quarter where we buy our booze. A tall handsome young man, George, works there, and we greet each other warmly (shows how often we visit). Inside, too, was the boy, probably eight years old, who smiles and waves happily when he sees us, enjoys helping us out with our heavy sacks of wine and beer, and refuses to let me carry one of the bags (he’s thin, but somehow quite strong). I purchase a few bottles, then order a Tomahawk cruise missile into the neighborhood, because I suspect someone lives there that is helping the man on the mountain. Pieces of George and the little boy—who is not smiling anymore—scatter in the blast. I explain the same thing to the people who’ve gathered, that I’m trying to get that man off the mountain. I point to the summit, but the man has retreated into his shadowy palace. I see the four laughing teenage girls in a bus coming back from a wedding. A cluster bomb splinters the windows and slices the girls and drops them on the hot asphalt. I apologize to the gathered crowd (who are now murmuring revenge), and explain that I didn’t intend to hurt them, but it’s the man on the mountain I was after, and anyway, why didn’t the bus see the guarded checkpoint I installed? If you invaded my country and put up a guarded checkpoint, I told them, I’d happily oblige and stop. I walk up one street to destroy a water treatment plant. That way, women and children cannot drink clean water, and disease will spread. But I want that man off that mountain, I don’t care at what cost. For one thing, that man used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, and I want him gone (he used the same weapons on his own people when he was my friend, but that was different). In the evening I am walking home when a white pigeon like a winged angel swoops down and perches on my shoulder. I feed her sunflower seeds from my flak-jacket pocket, and mention the weapons of mass destruction the man on the mountain possesses, or I believe possesses, or tell people he possesses whether I believe it or not, that worry me. What if he uses them against me? The pigeon ponders this, and then asks if I am Christian. I say, well, yes, I suppose so, if she insists on labels. I wait for her point, but she doesn’t respond, perhaps because I’m fresh out of seeds. We walk awhile in silence. The pigeon then tells me to turn around. I do, and see a valley littered with countless tiny slips of paper. I cringe at the trash. The pigeon tells me on each piece of paper, written in Arabic, are the names of each of the 500,000 children who died because of my sanctions. She asks me if that’s the weapons of mass destruction I was referring to. I turn around to reply, but she has flown away, leaving me alone. A cold dry wind rises from the darkening valley. In the shadowy distance people are fighting, and more explosions, more death. It’s amazing how far I could see. Then I realize I’m on top of the mountain, and the man is gone.
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