The braying of vendors and the incessant leaning on car horns were the gentle serenade to which I awoke. Ammar's window looks out onto what passes for a major junction in the Old City. A large restaurant is directly downstairs and the corner is one of the few large enough for two cars to pass each other. Syrians are not known for their reticence when horn-time comes. They provide a very reliable alarm clock, though.
Ammar and Syaman were still asleep, having come back from the internet cafe at god-knows-when. I got dressed, left them a note and headed out to experience my first glimpse of Damascus in the daylight. I got a call from Amir, my buddy from Aleppo. He was in town and had rented a car. I arranged to meet him for lunch at Bab Touma, the main entrance to the Old City. I walked in the noon heat through the winding, serpentine streets of the part of Damascus that has been inhabited for thousands of years. It is recognised as one of the oldest consistently inhabited cities in the world. There are no supermarkets here, or at least not in the conventional sense. There are markets that sell bottles of water and soft drinks and rolls of biscuits that, regardless of flavouring, all seem to taste the same. Fresh produce is sold in strictly compartmentalised sections. There are vegetable sellers who sell vegetables, fruit vendors who vend fruit and bakers selling bread, freshly baked, from tiny hole-in-the-wall operations. Here and there the odd touch of modernity clashes with the Old City feel, from the presence of an internet cafe to the backlit signs proclaiming allegiance to any number of foreign soft drink brands. The air was dusty and the narrowness of the streets meant that any car that passed forced me to plaster myself to the wall. People, as always, were incredibly friendly, waving, saying hello, offering me free samples. One experience that I always have when I travel that was borne out more forcefully on this trip is the fact that the less people have, the more generous they are with it. It makes the acceptance of an offer something that causes a twinge of guilt down deep because you know you are actively taking something they can scarcely afford to spare, but on the other hand the joy they derive from giving is, to them, a fair trade, something which takes a lot of getting used to for someone who grew up in London, where asking for a light gets the same reaction as asking to use someone's mother's mouth as a toilet.
I got to Bab Touma and bought a fresh orange juice from the stall on the very corner of the street that opens up into the square. The Bab Touma itself is a ruin and stands in a fenced-off area in the middle of an internal parking lot, separating the lot from the roundabout that, during my time there, saw an endless stream of traffic. Walking in Damascus is the fastest way of getting around most of the time. The alternative is to be at the mercy of the traffic, the never-ending screeching, honking, steaming, fuming ocean of cars bumper to bumper.
Amir pulled up and I joined him in the car. We looked for a parking space. My conviction that driving in Damascus is ridiculous was confirmed. The only options were to park in a lot which meant giving the keys to a remarkably shifty attendant or to park on the street and risk a ticket for whatever offence the occasional wardens felt like pulling you up on. Amir parked on the street and we went to lunch, which meant getting a shwarma from one of the stalls in the Old City. After having a munch, we walked deeper into the Old City to the Ummayyad Mosque, one of the largest in the world and maintained in pristine condition. Going in through the front entrance, we took off our shoes and were immediately bowled over by the sheer size of the space. The interior is laid out in a massive rectangle. The carpet underfoot is made up of hundreds of individual prayer mats, so that it is clear where one man's praying space ends and another's begins. A digital display in one corner showed the times of the five prayers for that day. The five daily prayers are one of the five pillars of Islam and the timing varies from day to day because they are based on sunrise and sunset.
Towards the front of the mosque was a shrine built around another coffin-shaped object. Green fluorescent light pulsed inside, giving it an eerie glow. Unlike the shrine I had seen in Lebanon, this one had an ingenious addition to make donations easier to handle. Instead of reaching through the mesh to place money on the object within, money could be slipped through a slit in a plastic tube that funneled the money down into a large container.
At the rear of the mosque we stumbled across a rather incongruous item. A baptism font. In a mosque. In Damascus. We were told that the font was very old and represented the time when Syria's Christians not only lived in peace side by side with the Muslims but also shared facilities due to limited space in the Old City.
We wandered out into the courtyard, which for me was the highlight of the mosque. The courtyard was immense and in its centre stood a shrine around which children played and couples walked. The courtyard was finished in smooth marble flagstones and, since we were all barefoot, it was very comfortable to walk around. There was an air of relaxation at this mosque that I haven't usually experienced at mosques. Usually there is a strict separation of men from women, an air of tense piety and a certain subliminal feeling that merriment is to be frowned upon. Here in the courtyard couples walked side by side, groups of women sat and talked, men met and juggled their ubiquitous prayer beads, children ran around shouting and playing, even kicking a ball around, all under the cheerful gaze of the adults. This did not feel like a place of stern religious fervour. It felt like a park in any European city.
As we strolled around, soaking up the atmosphere, Amir told me about his time in Damascus. He explained that he had been receiving an insight into Syrian society that few travellers ever experienced. He had been in Damascus for the best part of ten days and had, by his reckoning, already slept with four Syrian girls, one of whom was a virgin. One girl had even invited him to her family's villa for her mother's birthday party. He talked, shiny-eyed, about the unimaginable wealth the privileged Syrians enjoyed. The girl's apartment had cost 50 million Syrian pounds (about 750,000 euros), an incredible sum by Syrian standards. In a country where 30% of the population are unemployed and the lucky few like my new friend Ammar work six days a week for $400 a month, it seemed obscene. Amir continued to wax lyrical about the virtues of the passionate women who are hidden by their chadhors, apparently seething hotbeds of sexual desire and energy just waiting for the right guy to, ahem, tear aside the veil. The best word for women who wear the chadhors was used by Nick, the cyclist I met in Lattakia. Either as common slang or in a moment of unwitting brilliance, he referred to women who wear the chadhor as "covergirls". Amir had a definite passion for covergirls.
As we wandered out of the mosque, we paused by the side entrance. Amir pointed up at the ancient stone wall.
"Can you see him?"
"Who?" I asked.
"Jesus," he said with a grin.
After a moment, like a magic eye picture, sure enough, the pattern on one of the stones definitely resembled a bearded man in a robe.
"Jesus on the wall of a mosque," Amir said, shaking his head in wonder. "Amazing, isn't it?"
We walked around the mosque to a stall where Amir had previously ordered a pair of name-on-a-grain-of-rice necklaces for one of his ladies. As he was paying, his phone rang. It was his apartment. He had locked his bedroom door and the cleaning lady needed to get in. He said he'd call me later and took off. That was the last time I saw him. I hope it was because he got drawn into a prolonged and steamy encounter with a fiery covergirl. I hope he wasn't busted in flagrante with another virgin and made to pay a hefty price for his penile curiosity.
I walked into the Hammadiyah Souk, the entrance of which is a huge, ancient crumbling gate. It gapes directly across from the main entrance to the Ummayyad Mosque. Perhaps at some point the gates were joined, forming part of a covered walkway. The Hammadiyah Souk was a pleasure because it was not given over to the usual tourist tat, identical at every stall. The Hammadiyah Souk was crowded, packed to the rafters with locals, Damascenes shopping for everyday goods or just out enjoying the vibe. Every storefront declared its goods to the crowd. Hawkers laid out their wares on blankets to either side of the central walkway, making sure not to block the entrances to the shops. Even this wasn't enough. In the very centre of the walkway, kids with plastic toys, balloons and gyroscopes for sale ran demonstrations for small crowds, so that there was nowhere to turn where the wheels of commerce were not in motion. Everybody there was buying or selling something. Nobody grabbed my arm and dragged me into a cousin's carpet shop, like they do in Morocco. I wasn't consistently badgered by people offering assistance only to demand tips if I so much as spoke to them, as they do in Egypt.
Considering the frenzy of business all around me, the souk was an oasis of calm. The most pressure I experienced was when a shopkeeper waved at me and then made the hand gestures that said he was inviting me into his shop for tea. I was about to accept when, down a side alley, in a small internal courtyard just off the souk, a tiny group of shops around a common square that is called a khan, I spied two old guys playing backgammon. Game over. The souk could have been filled with naked two-headed hermaphrodites smoking opium from long-stemmed pipes held for them by dwarves on rollerskates but I still would have made a bee-line for the crackgammon. My addiction is strong, my resistance weak.
I walked into the khan, sat on a packing crate turned on its side and pointed at the board. One of the oldmen looked up.
"You want to play?" he asked.
He spoke English. This was beautiful. I told him that it was not a matter of want. I was a crackgammon addict. I HAD to play. He gave me a funny look but made some room for me to watch as he and his friend went at it.
If you've never watched old Arabic men play backgammon, here are some things that make it incredible to watch:
1) They play ridiculously fast
2) They pick up the dice before you have time to see what your numbers were
3) They seem to know where to put the pieces before the dice have stopped moving
4) They correct each other when the other one misses a good move
Playing against them is the same. After a couple of rounds they invited me to play and were delighted when I showed that I knew how to play the Syrian variation of the game. I sat there for the next six hours. A crowd gathered. As I played, if I didn't see a good move or took too long (i.e. five seconds) to make up my mind, a helpful hand from the crowd would simply reach in and move my pieces. I learnt a huge amount from that afternoon. I was given tea. They knew me by my first name within the first hour. When I left, guys I hadn't even been introduced to were yelling "Hi Mike!" as I walked through the souk. Word travels fast.
About two hours in, a guy named Bassam came and sat down next to me. He spoke no English, was very cheerful, very good at backgammon and talked loudly, rudely and constantly to everyone in the circle around the board. Everyone seemed to like him a lot. When I made a good move, he would give my opponent the Arabic version of the finger, which involves dipping your middle finger as if typing while keeping the rest of the hand normally poised. If they made a bad move he would shout something in Arabic and then laugh at them. He was a riot. The old man who spoke English was named Akram. Akram had learnt English on the street. In addition to English and Arabic he also spoke French and Italian. He made a living selling the base ingredients for perfume wholesale. When Nick, the cyclist from Lattakia, randomly showed up, Akram sorted him out with a Syrian SIM card in no time.
Late in the afternoon, as the frenzy of the crowd in the souk at the end of the alley seemed to be dying down, my phone rang. Captain Libya had arrived. I met him at the Ummayyad and brought him back to my new hangout where he was introduced to "the boys", a group of men whose average age was double my actual age. The person I played the most against that first day was a guy named Bashar who spoke decent English, but being shy and wary of mistakes didn't speak with me until he felt comfortable enough. Akram warned me that Bashar was the Man at crackgammon. Apparently he is acknowledged as the best player in Damascus. I was privileged, Akram told me, to have such a skilled opponent. Boy did he whup me good.
While handing me my ass, Bashar asked me about my wife, my family, the usual questions. He was surprised to hear that at 26 I had no children. He had five children. He was bald and was excelling at the Einstein look, bald pate gleaming in the sun, dark, unruly tangles of hair rising to either side of the dome.
After CL had arrived and gotten himself some food, the light was beginning to dim to the extent that I could no longer see the dice. I thanked my gracious hosts for the hospitality and the lessons and repaired with CL and Nick to the Shahbandar Palace Hotel. As we left, Akram and Bashar called after me.
"See you tomorrow!"
"Don't forget what you learned!"
At the Shahbandar, everyone already seemed to know who I was. The manager came out to say hello and showed me to where Ammar was at work behind the reception desk, which, oddly for a Reception, was at the rear of the hotel behind a subtle wooden partition. I guess for $120 dollars a night for a single room, nobody wants to see the guy taking their money. If it was my money, they'd need to put the receptionist behind bulletproof glass.
Ammar gave me the key to his apartment. Nick and CL were waiting outside. We let ourselves in to the house and a fierce little lady in a house dress was upon us in seconds.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
"We're friends of Ammar's," I said.
"How long you stay?"
"One more night," I answered.
She compressed her lips in the puckered manner of unhappy middle-aged women and chin-lifted at me.
"I don't like it," she said.
Ammar later explained to me that when he had friends come in the past, they had emailed and asked him to sort out accommodation. He had always arranged for them to rent the rooms the landlady kept downstairs for short-term guests. Since we weren't renting the short-term rooms, she was theoretically losing money. This made her unhappy. That is why she didn't like it.
CL dumped his bags and the three of us went out for a walk. The following day we were planning on going to a village in the Golan Heights that had been bombed by the Israelis and had a museum in it. Then we were going to go to Palmyra, the famous site of ancient ruins that provides one of Syria's strongest tourist draws. To visit the village in the Golan Heights we had to get special permission from the Ministry of the Interior. CL and I arranged with Nick for him to meet us the next day and Nick went back to his hotel, a cheap fleapit he had found for 200 Syrian pounds a night (under 4 euros).
CL and I strolled through the Old City, enjoying the atmosphere and the balmy weather. We were back at the apartment for midnight as arranged and Ammar got there two hours later. I tossed the key down to him from the apartment window. He let himself in and came in, laughing. I asked him what was up. He showed me the head of the key. He had snapped off the shaft of the key in the lock as he turned it. CL was properly introduced to him and Syaman and the three of them chatted for a while. CL was tired and I needed to internet wuite badly, so Syaman, Ammar and I went to the cafe round the corner. Ammar insisted on paying for my time. Syaman rolled over on his wheelie office chair every few minutes to dump a mound of pistachios on my desk. He would pour out a stack of them, look at me for a minute, smile his big chubby smile, dump out some more and then wheel himself away.
After I had finished with the various things the net has to offer that we somehow convince ourselves are so important, Ammar told me to come say hello to his girlfriend. Ammar's girlfriend was a Chinese girl who lives in Libya and works as an Arabic-English translator. When Ammar goes to Dubai, they are hoping she can get a job out there as a translator so they can be together. Living in Libya, she had given herself the Arabic name Kowther. We traded pleasantries over the internet headset in that way you do when talking to someone you've never met through a medium that denies you face-to-face communication. She was very sweet and talked glowingly of Ammar, an appraisal I agreed with wholeheartedly. Like every computer terminal I saw in a net cafe in Syria, there was a working headset for IM chatting. This appeared to be the basic form of communication. In Lebanon, Turkey and Syria, I met people, mostly guys, who had friends or girlfriends online and only ever saw or spoke to them through IM. Ammar was no exception, maintaining a relationship with a girl he had never been in the same room with only through the internet. I couldn't help but marvel at the fact that in Syria I couldn't access my own blog or Facebook, but Ammar was allowed to say whatever he wanted and see whatever he wanted through the IM video chat function. No wonder it was so popular. That kind of selective censorship really blew my mind.
We finished up at the cafe and went back to the flat. CL was on the air mattress, snoring happily. I crawled guiltily into my pilfered bed and fell into a deep sleep punctuated only by the sounds of cars blaring at each other in crowded alleys and the distant, imagined clacking of dice on a huge, dark, lacquered backgammon board.
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