Heaven and Vienna and a Cold Dry Wind

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 and 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 Bette Davis, or Miles Davis, or point out the brownstone flat where Jesus composes string quartets under the furrowed-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 tournaments? 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, hand 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 cold 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 busses, 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, 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 upon 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 chill 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? 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. 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 almost wordlessly, 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 hear 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. The waiters here are all old men in dark suits and ties. 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 we call home. Our driver is Turkish, but lived 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 were 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 insults. 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. Something sinister in 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! 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. But not here. The suffering was shown and reported daily, as daily suffering worsened, and resentment grew. Who knew what kinds of seeds for a bitter harvest were planted? 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 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 inexplicably 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 really 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 will not 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 that I tell people he possesses whether I believe this 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. She 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 then 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 can see. Then I realize I’m on the mountain's summit, and the man is gone.

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.

Near Eastern Summer Folding Closed

Why, I’m sitting at a table on a restaurant’s outdoor patio in a sun swept beach town on the coast of Turkey, sipping a cold pilsner, gazing upon the Mediterranean’s emerald and languid waters, resting up a bit after having spent a slice of an endless afternoon snorkeling around an island roughly three hundred yards offshore, upon which stands a remarkably well-preserved 13th century castle, hushed and soaking the soft October sun into its walls, the rays held deep in its pale stony breast like an old man clutching faded love letters, and—taking another sip of pilsner—remembering yesterday’s trip into the mountains of Turkey, ragged bluffs of gnarled limestone, pocked and weathered like weary clouds that hardened and drifted to earth, the car snaking along narrow roads like hallways through small villages, en route to the ruins of a Roman village with basilicas, a narrow Roman road winding past rock dwellings and emptied tombs, and a first century Zeus cult temple with broken tile mosaic floors, its tall, wind-scraped gray pillars still reaching to uphold the blue heavens, where nearby I dropped a pebble into a rock hewn well, listening to a deep, haunting splash, the same echo heard by pagans, Christians, Muslims and Turks, for thousands of years. And you? Oh yes, I’ve heard about the terrible financial times plaguing our good old home country. Firing the maid must have been draining, and then having to teach yourself—excuse me [“Yes, waiter, I’d like the eggplant and lamb kabob, and the lovely fresh tomato, cucumber and parsley salad. Baked the bread here? How grand. Oh why not: bring another pilsner. I’ll just have a brisk swim afterward before sprucing up for cocktails…”]—anyway, what were you saying? Oh yes, the downward spiral. Well, don’t fret. This is an old story. Remember the S&L rescue funding in the 1980's under Reagan? The meltdown stemming from, wouldn't you know it, loose regulation and sleepy oversight? So buck up! The government will have the taxpayers socialize the losses, that American-style socialism…. We’d come to the beach resort of Kizkalesi, Turkey, for a four-night vacation after Ramadan. Most of the teachers at school, like us, fled Aleppo for elsewhere. Some went to Istanbul; some went to the underground city of Cappadocia. We were a caravan of fifteen or so cars from either the school or the ICARDA research center in Tel Hadiya, husbands, wives, children. It had been raining hard a few days before we left, torrential downpours flooding streets. Ramadan lasts a month, charted by the lunar calendar (so the dates are different every year), and is marked by fasting from dawn (this includes children as young as Carrie’s 5th grade class), then eating continuously at night. There are men assigned to roam the neighborhoods banging a drum-like thing at around two in the morning, announcing it’s time to eat again. I’ve never seen these creatures, only heard them. It’s a strange syncopated rhythm they’re pounding out; awakened, I lay there naturally trying to figure the time signature. But every day the call to prayer sounds from the minarets around seven in the evening, breaking of the fast. Cigarettes are lit. The streets soon empty, as folks arrive at the homes of friends, family, relatives, carrying with them cellophane plates of food to share. The fast is over, the feasting commences. If you had sold your watch, say, to fill up your SUV’s gas tank, but find yourself suddenly stranded in a Middle Eastern city during Ramadan and don’t know the time, you could bet it’s around six-thirty, quarter to seven by noting the reckless driving and wild, maniacal bulging eyes of starving folks racing the streets to their first meal of the day. They will run you down and no one will care. These people are hungry. Plus, they haven’t smoked all day, and rattle in their bucket seats. Go ahead, squawk your case to the judge from your rickety wheelchair during Ramadan; chances are, the judge won’t hear you for the growling in his belly, and distracted with sniffing his cigarette stained fingertips. Then again, if you are on the streets after the fast is broken, you may witness one of the kinder, endearing rituals of Ramadan: the fasting each day is a remembering those less fortunate who have little to eat, living for a day how they live, and so you may see a small child flagging down a lone taxi who is still on the clock; the child leans into the window and hands the driver a plate of food. Or a young girl brings a bottle of water out to an old woman to drink. Walking through our neighborhood in the early evening, row after row of four-story apartment buildings, you hear very little, packs of birds gathered and chatting in trees, a distant horn, but through the quiet you will note very distinctly the sounds of forks tapping plates: everyone and their brother, literally, is eating. And they are going at it. Early evening is warm, the air damp and fresh from the rain, and all feast on wide balcony patios. Clink, tap-tap, clink clink, scrape tap clink clink clink tap clink echo down the darkening neighborhood canyons. When morning unfolded the next day, we were off to Turkey. … Geologically and geographically, Syria and Turkey share similar terrains at their borders. The slate gray hills rise gradually and stretch low, sucking the glaring sun. But it seems another world when driving into Turkey. For one, few women you see are veiled in black; in general, colors are drab in Syria (or maybe we haven’t been here long enough to detect variations of tone). Many wear scarves around their heads as tradition dictates, but the colors are lively and bright. The old men wear brown blazers and sport the Turkish caps you’d see keeping the heads of men dry in Scotland. The buildings in Turkey flash sunny blues and yellows. Our drive from Aleppo to our beach town was four to five hours as the crow flies, but another two hours tacked on just to get across the border (note to self: devote another blog entirely to that two-hour comedy of dull, trudging bureaucracy of customs staged at the border; refrain from attempts at parody, for the reality of that border crossing’s inefficiency will swamp your art). We drove past plowed fields, gently rolling hills. Whizzing down a six-lane superhighway, I gaze out upon hamlets nestled around a mountain. We pass Tarsus, and I look around at the rocks and trails, note shadow and the slant of light on the worn hills, and know that I’m seeing the same colors and contour the apostle Paul saw growing up before wandering the old road to Damascus. There are Roman ruins all over the land. We passed lush and rocky canyons cupping ruins of golden stone aqueducts. Peering south toward Lebanon and Jordan you’d cast a long look over land where the Canaanites roamed (called Phoenicians by Greeks) long ago. Five thousand years ago, along with the Israelites who migrated to Phoenicia, another Semitic people settled in western Syria, the Aramaeans. Aramaic, the language Christ spoke, is still part of the liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox Church, and is the lingua franca in Maalula, a village north of Damascus. In eastern Syria a thousand years earlier lived the Babylonians, and after them along the Tigris River trekked the Assyrians (where Syria gets its name). Alexander the Great turned the lands from a Persian into a Roman empire, and the eastern Roman Church, Byzantium, ruled until the strong Omayyad clan of Islam swept through. In the Levant, this whole region, you can take nearly any road, follow it a ways and come upon the haunts of dead cities, emptied, silent as rock, but present in the lone standing facade of an ancient church …. Hotel Hantur has small rooms, but the balconies look out on the sea. Days were spent reading and swimming. Early mornings I swam before breakfast, a ritual when waking near bodies of water (I remember the surprised delight a friend evinced when I went swimming after Carrie and I’d spent the night at her place on Stinson Beach; she’d never thought of doing a morning swim in the Pacific’s cold waters. Are you kidding? I thought: what better way than an ocean swim to sweep away the hangover cobwebs the gin demons spin). I dearly love the sharp chill of our Pacific Ocean. Lake George’s waters are refreshing and beautiful. Skinnydipping the rivers and crystal streams running through Idaho and Montana sketch beloved memories. But floating and flapping in the sea in Turkey I must offer as a sacred act. One quiet morning alone in the Mediterranean, the castle beyond, a few dogs playing on the beach, I nearly brined myself because I stayed swimming too long; I just couldn’t think of a sufficient reason to come in. Nothing came to mind. The water was salty and perfectly mild in temperature, cool and pleasant, easy to float. A quiet morning, I looked below and watched my feet slowly, delicately kick. After a glorious dip in the Mediterranean under these ancient skies, life could only go downhill from here. When you find my dead bloated remains bobbing off the rocky coast of Cyprus, soulless but smiling, eye sockets sucked clean, just pack, bottle and shove me on the shelf with the other pickled vegetables. But turn off the TV, pour an aged scotch, and light a candle for me if you hear someone playing a piano from a high windowed room at twilight. … During the evenings we would all gather on the roofed porch at the hotel for beers, gin and tonics, and wine. The highpoint of working overseas at an international school is gathering friendships with people from all over the world. Belgium, Canada, Netherlands, Scotland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Iraq, Jordan…and these folks who’ve been on the circuit for awhile have been everywhere. Conversations are often peppered with “Well, when I was in the Congo…” or “I remember one night in China” or “Yes, it was that way in Yemen also…” One of our favorites is a stoutly gentleman originally from Belgium, a man named Koen, who’s probably third up from the top at the ICARDA research center. He’s spent the last thirty years traveling the globe, speaks at least (what we’ve counted) five languages. High up at ICARDA, one of the most respected organizations in Syria, but he he’ll drop by your beach towel in the afternoon, “I haven’t seen you in a while, how are you anyway? Good I hope?” I’d driven back with him from the mountain town of Kasab a few weeks back, a weekend trip to the Syrian coast, with his son, Nick, and an ICARDA intern from Massachusetts, Greg. Unverified hypothesis lacking sufficient data: the higher up a man is at a company or organization, the faster he drives. Koen drove like a man possessed back to Aleppo from Kasab, streaming by apple orchards laden with fruit, tiny stone houses with grape vines strewn across trellises, the plumpest, firmest, and juiciest grapes I’ve ever eaten. Old women and children scatter as we barrel along. At one point his son, Nick, began muttering the f-word. “What is it?” Koen asked. Nick admits, “Oh, I think I left my trousers back at the hotel.” Koen looks straight ahead, then turns wildly toward his son and rages in Italian, hands flying in every direction. Nick turns away. “Come on, Dad, it happens.” Koen then looks over his shoulder at me. “I say to him, did you forget anything? He says, ‘No.’ You looked everywhere? ‘Yes’ And this is what I get.” Nick tries to call Mary, Koen’s secretary, an Armenian woman who’d traveled with her family to Kasab. “Maybe she hasn’t left yet,” Nick adds, punching numbers. He gets Mary, who agrees to look. Ten minutes later she calls Nick on his cell. “Oh thanks, Mary!” Nick sings. “Thank you so much. Yes, just bring them to the office tomorrow. Thanks again….” Koen’s got both hands on the steering wheel. “Great,” he remarks dryly. “Tomorrow morning my secretary’s going to walk in carrying my son’s trousers. What the hell are they going to think….” …. Sitting at breakfast, a family staying at the hotel opens the side doors to their van parked alongside. Turkish folk music begins pouring out. The father, a rotund man in a blue golf shirt, shorts and cap, rises and begins to dance as a soft breeze rolls through. His arms open and curl out toward the sky, as though he is Atlas shouldering the world. He steps lightly to the rhythm, bouncing a bit, and, slowing, turns, holding arms aloft. His daughter, or niece, joins him. She is a strikingly beautiful woman, bronze skin, dark eyebrows, and piercing brown eyes. You keep looking at her, wondering if you’ve stumbled upon a special race of unearthly beautiful people having emerged from some hidden mountain valley. Arms aloft in a crescent moon, she lightly moves across the porch. At one point she pauses, then begins turning ever so slowly, and at each beat she gently throws her hips out, then smiles, laughs, and spins around. Fingers twirl, the old music sings, she dances. Every red-blooded male at breakfast that morning had twenty-five years shaved off his life. For hours afterward I had trouble completing sentences. Walked into a parked car. As we watched, a weather-beaten, bent and peasant old women carrying baskets of figs creaked by on the street. She probably celebrated her 100th birthday back when I was assuring my Dad I’d try riding without training wheels. She had a lined, bulbous face, her dull eyes almost disappearing in the rubble of her flesh. She drifted closer as the music drifted, and suddenly was on the porch. Set her figs on a table. The dancing man welcomed her, and her eyes sparkled. She raised her arms in the shape of the crescent moon, one of the symbols (with a star) of the Turkish flag, and she danced, heavily but gracefully, almost imperceptibly moving through the steps. The hotel owner watched with glee. “This is Turkish music!” he announced proudly. “All music beautiful! American music, African music, Turkish, all beautiful!” He smiled and looked on as the morning opened like a flower. ….What could possibly constitute the highest honor bestowed upon me? The late Jeff Buckley’s mother handing me his Telecaster guitar he used when he made his fame at Sin-e in New York? No. John Updike begging me to help edit a new collection of his stories? Nah. The New Yorker magazine leaving messages on my cell hoping to serialize this blog? Hm. No, those things would of course be lovely. But the highest honor came when the husband of our upper school assistant principal, Roberto, asked me to help him prepare a dinner in celebration of his 50th birthday. Roberto is an Italian chef by trade, has worked restaurants and catering businesses, grew up in a small village by an Italian mountain lake. A herd of teachers were on a hike in Tel Hadiya, a hill in an agricultural region where the research center sits. From the hill this one early evening I was watching a lightning storm drift its way across western Syria. Roberto knelt down next to me and proposed: it would be Roberto and his wife, the head of the school and wife, and Carrie and me. I was to sous chef. A six-course meal, including roasted lamb with rosemary, simmered in a stock that had been cooking all afternoon, seafood risotto with lightly sautéed fresh fish, roasted potatoes, baked whole onion with balsamic vinegar, cheeses, chorizo from Spain, roasted red peppers doused with Italian olive oil. And the wine. Let’s get our bearings here: an Italian chef who loves food, loves wine, and it’s his 50th birthday celebration. Do you think the wine he’d chosen for the occasion might be phenomenal? Vintage Italian bottles (plural) that he’d been saving perhaps? We arrive at around 1:30 in the afternoon, Roberto shuffles me into the kitchen and tosses me an apron, hands me a knife, and we rock and roll. “Chefs must have good wine,” he announces. He opens a bottle, lets it breathe, and pours us a couple glasses to season our cooking spirit. The women in the living room hear the glorious cork pop. Suddenly they are hovering at our lair’s entrance. “We know there’s wine opened,” Roberto’s wife says. He pours the women glasses. We return to our preparations. Then Roberto, head chef, lunges for the bottle, and begins refilling our wine glasses full. “Quick,” he whispers, “before zey return!” Afternoon turned to twilight, to evening, folded closed like the heart of a dark flower. No one thought of leaving. Hours drift by, and we move to the balcony to wait for stars. Aleppo is quiet as Roberto pours icy homemade limoncello. I pick up my guitar and play.

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.

From Democracy to Dictatorship

Syria's current president and wife...

It's the old story of what you take for granted. All our lives we've lived--Carrie and I--under a democratic form of government. One often hears accounts of people fleeing dictatorships (escaping being the more apt term, I imagine) and rushing into the arms of democratic freedom. Not too often does one hear of folks of their own free will leaving a democracy to wander under the big tent of a dictatorship. Yes, yes, as Carrie often reminds me: Syria's is a "benign" dictatorship. Since 1963 Syria has been governed by the Ba'ath Party, and from 1970 to the present the head of the party has been one of the Assad family, first the father, Hafez al-Assad (from 1970 till his death in 2000), succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad, who is, as mentioned, Syria's current president. The Ba'ath Party actually began around 1940 in Damascus (Syria's capital) as a secular Arab nationalist movement to unify Arab peoples against foreign domination/Western colonialism. In Arabic, the term Ba'ath means "renaissance" or "resurrection", and the binding philosophy was a weaving of Arab socialism, nationalism, and Pan-Arabism. The other historically relevant Socialist Ba'ath Party in the region was, of course, Saddam's Iraq. So into this dictatorship we are rushing headlong. It will be interesting, in the coming months and years, to detect the subtle and less than subtle changes in our daily lives while living in Syria. Neither Carrie nor I have any anxiety about living there, but it will be different, very different, in ways we cannot even conceive at present. How could it not be? We are, as Americans, very comfortable in our freedom here. So much so that we can even, in less reflective moments, feel free enough to accuse our own government of tyranny, as though ours is simply another kind of dictatorship with the Bushes and Cheneys in power. Well, this is certainly not the case. We have tremendous freedom here where it matters: to speak and write freely, to organize, even to form radical parties. What excites the most, on this American Independence Day, is the thought of finally getting out of our cultural skin, to see the world from inside another country, day to day life as Syrians live it, and not be through the lens of our prejudices. For none can flatten the contours of cultural perspective from the comforts of home.

It will be the small things, I'm guessing, that will have biggest impacts. "What do you mean you don't have Sierra Nevada on tap? I'm not asking for a Rogue or a North Coast brew! You can get Sierra Nevada in Turlock for chrissake...." Well, first thing's first: I'll need to learn how to say this in Arabic. It will take awhile to get the lay of the land, politically, culturally, socially, but we'll report what we find.

Coming soon!

Beginning in, oh, early August 2008, my wife, Carrie, and I will be posting communiques on our life, travels, time, reflections in and of Aleppo, Syria (and beyond). To find out how we're doing, and to learn more about the culture and history of the Levant, go to this blogspot below. Be sure to post! We'd love to hear from you

http://timetravelsinsyria.blogspot.com/

Welcome to Syria and beyond!

Beginning in the near future, my wife, Carrie, and I will be posting communiques and photos and reflections and whatnot from this blog about our time and travels in Aleppo, Syria, and beyond