White Baboon

He had helped us find a taxi from the bus station to our Damascus hotel. It took longer to find kind strangers in Syria, but all we could do was argue with belligerent overcharging taxi drivers until someone intervened.

A week later, we met Abdullah for dinner in the Arabic equivalent of Chili’s. Here, instead of Duncan Sheik, Egyptian music wavered through weak acoustics. Rather than green lamp shades and baseball, lights were bright and soap operas flickered with muted melo-drama. Fountains springing from marble replaced booths and sectional dividers. Busboys in bright cummerbunds, baggy trousers and red tassled top hats, the outfit, which thanks to slapstick American comedy, we’ve most often seen on monkeys, scurried from pipe to pipe, adjusting coals. Apple smoke and cologne mixed with our oxygen. On the table, hummus, fatoush and kebabs were predictably flavorful. Syrup-strewn dates and figs, along with a fruit plate belonging on a lady’s hat, arrived for dessert.

Earlier that evening, he’d taken us to Umuyyad Mosque, from which the souks of Damascus darted and diagonalled. Built in the 8th century, and allegedly containing the head of John the Baptiste, Umuyyad Mosque was originally revered for it’s fine mosaics depicting paradise. According to story, they so impressed Muhammad that he declined to enter, preferring to taste paradise in the afterlife. Umuyyad’s, courtyard, fresh from an afternoon rain and shining with the frost of a light-polluted, but indigo sky, was like a football field of pure marble peace. We’d visited mosques before—in Istanbul and Adana.

But tonight, we’d arrived during evening prayer and at this hour, in a rented hood and cape (looking a lot like a character from the Handmaid’s Tale), I was the only pretender in sight. The cold carpetland was nothing like a church. Men and women prayed in their own private, but invisibly-bordered space. An imam read the Koran aloud to a group of worshippers. Whispering wasn’t required.

Abdullah had walked us through Umuyyad with obvious pride, but he wasn’t a man of Allah and rarely attended mosque. An electrical engineer, he came from a family of professionals, owned real estate, and talked excitedly about the red-label whiskey in his studio flat. He seemed so very. . . .Western.

Yet at a one point, Abdullah refused to have his picture taken. He was nervous about my note-taking. Twice, he warned us not to give out his mobile number to anyone else at the hotel. And now, during what would turn out to be a three hour dinner, our conversation tooled through topics like Brittany Spears, Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzzeneger; couchsurfing, the Discovery Channel and European travel. We were fusing common bonds through pop culture and not much else, navigating through a safe and easy, Sunday-morning street kind of discussion.And our conversation would go no further than this.

Ever since we’d arrived inSyria, we’d felt it impossible to deny the slightly grim disposition of its human faces and cement facades. These people weren’t rude, but they didn’t smile a whole lot either. They were guarded. Unmistakably suspicious of strangers. People who felt the intangible squeeze of a socialist state. Assad was everyone’s big brother and the posters didn’t let anyone forget.

Consequently, as visitors, in our own tunnel between the surfaces of a socialist looking glass, even if followed or monitored, we faced no danger. If an issue erupted, it was Syrians who were called in for questioning. Syrians who would be penciled into a logbook. Syrians who would, from then on, save real conversation for behind closed curtains. This we knew.Yet we remained a novelty for Abdullah. He practically begged us to hit a bar in the Christian Quarter–an evening that would end around “4 or 5 AM”. He offered his extra studio flat to us for free during the summer months. He seemed hungry, stomach rumbling, for outside influence.I never, not once, thought we’d see the communist ghosts of Sofia directing thought traffic on the streets of Damascus. But that’s what happened. Talk about a complex world. And we hadn’t even reached Beirut.