A Thousand and Twelve Questions

First drafts are the hardest. Getting all the bits floating around in my head - all the hard facts and all the connections - to behave and getting them down on the page is a chore. Having a touch of a stomach bug doesn’t help.

Drifting to sleep last night, I could see the story. But when I woke up it was gone. I guess I’ll have to do the work.

            Fatima (not her real name) lives on the top floor of a crumbling cinder block and cement apartment building down a narrow street in Jaramana. The outer entrance is two steps up off a street mounded with small hills of crushed gravel and dusty leaking bags of Portland cement. There is a lot of new construction here.

            It’s hard to tell if Fatima’s building is new or old. Like so many apartment blocks in Damascus, the places seems half finished, like the workers got called away or took a break and never came back. In the dank, chilly stairwell, PVC electrical conduit sprouts anemone-like from the unfinished window frames. Cinder block walls on the landing are open topped, bits of trash stuffed in the gaps.

            Outside each apartment door, flocks of shoes herd around torn and stained doormats. The stairway winds upward, the screech and clatter of the street receding floor by floor.

            Fatima answers the door. In black jeans and sweater, her dark hair cut short, she hugs the old woman and they murmur to each other.

            About three feet off the thinly carpeted floor, a ring of smudges on the gray white wall in the entryway evidences children at play. The plaster walls are nicked, gouged, scribbled.

            Bags of rice and beans sag on the small counter in the tiny kitchen. Loaves of bread poke out of a paper sack. On the range top, a greasy teapot gurgles, wisps of steam floating from the spout.        

The bedroom is a heap of clothes and thin mattresses pushed against the walls. The cracked window is frosted white in the corners. A milky yellow mercury vapor streetlight bleeds into the room. There are no toys.

            The single fluorescent tube screwed high on the wall casts a sickly green glow over the common room. A refrigerator hums in a corner. A rust flecked electric heater with a single glowing element is the only heat.

            Sweet tea is brought out in small glasses. A plate of sugar cookies is passed around. Sitting in a plain chair, hands in her lap, Fatima looks only at the floor. Her fingers lace and unlace, skin raw, nails bitten to the quick.

            Jet-black hair spiking from his head, the boy, her son, peaks around the corner, his nose red rimmed from the sniffles. He sprints across the cold floor and clutches his mother’s knees. Her hands move to his shoulders, then his head. He looks up at her.

            Across the room, the older woman fidgets in the spongy orange upholstered chair. Her purse is perched on her knees. Behind her gold-framed glasses, her eyes dart around the room, moving from person to person.

            “He shouldn’t hear this,” she says. Fatima pushes the boy away but he springs back to her like attached by an elastic band. He smiles. This is a game. Fatima runs her fingers through his hair and the daughter gets up and gently pulls the boy away and into the other room.

            Fatima looks into the middle distance. Then down again at her ravaged hands.

            She tells her story.

This is a video of Rana Alouiby, my translator and fixer. I don’t know when the video was shot but, as her English was much better during my visit, it must have been awhile ago. Or she’s playing a role here. I don’t know.

Rana is a contradictory character. She talks a lot about peace but is quick to condemn Iraqis who’ve worked with the Americans as collaborators and traitors. She describes a childhood of relative priviledge under the documented brutality of the Saddam regime, skirting the murderous excesses and focusing on the petrodollar fueled golden age of the 1970’s and early ’80s. I trusted her to help get me the story I needed but as for her underlying political values I’m not so sure.

And now the project. This project has been gestating awhile. A long while. Frankly, I’ve been wrestling with how to structure the thing. I’d thought I’d blend all my experience together - the Sabean, my fixer, Damascus, etc. - into a larger metastory about the Iraqi diaspora.  Lately that’s seemed unwieldy. There is so much there. So much to tell. But upon reflection it did not seem to hang together. So I’m taking a different direction.

Now I’m going to break the whole into pieces. I’m going to work on two main pieces - the Sabean and the fixer.  The Sabean story stands on it’s own. An ancient people besieged, in exile and in danger of being lost. The individual stories I heard are harrowing and need to be told. While there are nuances and convolutions, their story is straightforward really.

The fixer story is more complex in a way. Rana, my fixer, translator and guide, tells a compelling story as well but one fraught with contradiction. And questions for me as a journalist. While her commitment to my work is unquestioned, her character is less easily ascertained. Does she have an agenda? I’ll have to dig into that, ferret out some truths. We’ll see.

So I’m standing in a recording studio, microphone in hand, singing. I’m singing and I can see a city street scene tumbling out before my eyes. I get to a certain point in the song and I flub it - make a mistake. I hear the recording engineer say in my headphones - “OK. Let’s call it a night.” But I don’t stop singing. I answer the engineer in song. He’s confused. I keep singing, trying to get it right. I try to stop but my throat clenches up like I’m going to cry. My eyes begin to burn with tears. I have something to say, something I need to say, something I need to say that makes me want to weep. But I can’t say it.

And then I do.

“God gave me this talent. So I have to sing.”

So the morning after I had this dream I went to a wedding. A Sabean Mandaean wedding at this run-down pool (everything is run down in this chaotic, dirty city) on the outskirts of Jaramana. As Rana and I arrived, the two brides were being dunked by the shaik in a raised, tile kiddie pool. Women were ululating and the guys were clapping and jostling to get a good angle for their cell phone cameras. Water spashed and the sun was actually hot for the first time this week. An old woman, head to toe in black, looked at me, fumbing to get my long lens attached to my camera and smiled.

“Welcome.”

Later, after interviewing three shaiks, an assitant shaik and a gravelly voiced man from Australia, we went to Kamal’s apartment. After sweet tea and lots of political talk, he told me about being kidnapped, burned with hot coals (the scars on his legs are pink), ransomed, his wife being raped in her own home(she’s sitting across from me on a couch) and the nephew he raised as a son being killed in his goldsmiths shop in Baghdad (the killers asked to see his ID to make sure he was the right guy before they murdered him). Although he knows he can never go back, Kamal wants nothing more than for Iraq to survive.

“I love my country,” he says. When his cell phone rings, it plays the Iraqi national anthem. Tears roll down Rana’s cheeks.

Later when I’m walking back to my flat in Bab Touma, filthy stray cats darting out from under the cars parked close to the walls of the narrow street, all I want is a hamburger. I’d heard or someone had told me about this moment when you’re an American and you’re traveling abroad and at some point you just want a hamburger. I wanted that hamburger. And I just wanted to be home.

“Once you’ve touched the dead,” Rana says. “You change.” The tip of her cigarette glows bright as she inhales. Beneath us the clattering hubbub of the street is muted under the clear cold sky. A perfect crescent moon hangs over the crescent atop a nearby mosque; it’s mineret girdled in green flourescent lights. Rana stubs out her smoke and flicks the butt down into the alley.

“I’ve seen terrible things, Steve,” she says.

We’re standing on the roof of the building in the Yarmouk neighbor where she shares and apartment with Theresa and Gabe, two Americans living in Damascus. They are learning Arabic and teaching English. They run a small program that sponsors Iraqi students to get into college in the States. Saturday morning a group of them is taking the TOEFL - Test of English as a Foreign Language. Theresa and Gabe worry the kids won’t get a good nights sleep the night before.

Rana is taking the test, too. She’s applying to the Columbia University graduate journalism program. Her English is excellent but she’s nervous about the test. I tell her she’ll be fine. She laughs.

“Easy for you to say,” she says.

Rana is Iraqi. She’s living in exile with her mother and sister in Damascus. She’s smart and funny and wears green eyeliner under her dark eyes. Rana is my fixer - my liason with the Sabean refugee community here in Damascus - setting up interviews (and translating) with families, leaders and, hopefully, the “pope” of the Sabean. Rana loves the Sabean.

“They are pure Iraqi,” she says. “They are the originals. They come before everyone else. They are kind and peaceful.” She says that’s one of the reasons they’ve been targeted by sectarian groups. On the phone earlier in the day, she told me about a man who saw 30-40 Sabean gunned down by Mahdi army fighters while they were performing one of their sacred rites. Still, Rana said, that man would give anything, his own life, to return to a stable Iraq.

“It’s really sad, ” she says in her Oxford inflected English. “My country is destroyed.” When I ask her about what happened during the American invasion in 2003, Rana goes quiet for a moment.

“I remember the first American I saw,” she says. “The helicopter was so low I could see his face. Behind the heavy machine gun. He was smiling.” She’s proud her neighborhood - Adhamiya (a bastion of Iraq patriots) - was the last to fall to the US.

“When Adhamiya fell, they said Baghdad was captured,” Rana says. She’s a patriot. She loves her country. She is disgusted by what the US and it’s allies have done to Iraq. She seen death and destruction - human beings mulilated, burned, torn apart - at the hands of the Americans and the terrible forces our invasion unleashed. On the roof, Rana tells me about being an aid worker recovering the dead during the second seige of Falluja in 2004.

“I picked up this middle aged guy. Not a resistance fighter. Shot by an American sniper,” she says. “His insides, his heart, were just falling out of his body.” Her back still aches from lifting the dead and she can’t get those images out of her head. Her friends told her to get out of Iraq, to rest and recuperate. Now she’s in Damascus.

Yet for all of that, Rana is kind to me, an American. She’s had me over to her apartment twice for tea or a meal. She’s working hard to get me inside with the Sabean - a notoriously private people. She’s thinking of angles for the story. I’m at a loss. I say I’m sorry. I say I can’t imagine.

“No, Steve, you don’t know what it’s like,” Rana says kindly. She’s right. I don’t.

“Steve, welcome,” says Samir, Marlboro jammed in the corner of his mouth. The leaden Damascus sky is hanging over the minarets and satellite dishes sprouting up out of the old city. Under my stocking feet, the tile is smooth and cold. My brain, foggy from a short nights sleep, somehow finds the words.

“Sabah el-kheir”

“Sabah el-nour,” replies Samir, his grin widening at my crummy Arabic. “Good morning.”

Samir and his brothers Hassam and Beshar are goldsmiths. In their workshop on the ground floor of the house where I’m renting a room, they sit at marble-topped desks working gold plate onto seemingly endless chains for jewelry. Hunched over, they use torches, tweezers and tiny flakes of gold leaf on the base metal chains; the constant rhythm of their feet pumping air through the torches keeps pace with the electronic Arab music spilling from the boom box perched atop the massive safe where they keep the gold.The clock on the wall is flanked by pictures Jesus and Mother Theresa. The brothers are Christian, Damascus born and bred.

After a shower, the call to pray echoes again. I imagine the Christians feel surrounded. Then again, perhaps they don’t think about it. In this enclave of a sprawling city, they have everything they need - shops, food, churches. And it’s been that way for over a thousand years.

It wasn’t the call to prayer that pulled me from my Sominex induced slumber this morning but the clang, clanging of a bell. The bell sounded right outside my door and ancient and I had no idea where I was. The bell stopped and I remembered I was in the al-Jasmine hotel in Bab Touma. A beautifully restored Damascene house, the al-Jasmine is posh without being pretentious and the guy at the front desk remembered me from my stay last August.

Standing in the crisp morning air, blue dome Syrian sky above me, the air is full of the playful sounds of children. Which explains the bell - the call to school. Bab Touma is the Christian quarter of the old city. Squat churches sit about every other corner; shrines, soot black smeared from votive candles are wedged here and there, with doleful Madonnas staring heavenward behind thin wire mesh.

After breakfast - crepe with banana and strawberry jam, chocolate croissant, bread, yogurt, hummus and Nescafe - I wandered about. Today is my day to get my footing before getting to work so I wanted to wander around a bit.  After walking through the old city, around the Umayyad Mosque and back to Bab Touma to see if the illusive Firas had woken up - he had not - I walked up a random street away from the old city into the city proper.   This part of Damascus reminds me of the shopping strips in the outer boroughs of New York - a swirling blend of commercial energy put to the endless task of selling ticky-tack stuff like designer clothes and perfume.

Everyone is very intent; focused on the task at hand. The sidewalks overflow into the streets. The short sharp blast of the car horn keeps everything flowing along. There are no Walk-Don’t Walk signs at the intersections - you just nudge out into traffic and make your way across. It works.

Heading back to BabTouma, I passed a crowd waiting in line at a bright green truck with a huge Nestle Milo logo emblazoned on the side. I saw they were handing out free samples so I joined the queue. The Milo was delicious - steaming hot and sweet. Welcome to Damascus.

There are various claims in this part of the world to being the oldest continuously inhabited spot. I’ve heard Damascus. I read about Aleppo earlier today while waiting in Amman for my connecting flight to Damascus and watching folks ignore the no smoking signs. And the public address tape loop pointing out the smoking prohibition. Who says those in the Middle East don’t have or express individual rights?

In “Understanding Iraq”, William R. Polk writes about Uruk, a big city state in Mesopotamia around  about 2500 BC, growing to the point of building walls around the city to protect the citizens. He goes on to point out that the growth of the cities also forced the powers that be to create deeds or laws “to bring order into the distribution of goods among the inhabitants”. This led, in Polk’s view, to the development of bureaucracies and eventually laws.

The plane from Chicago was crawling with American contractors - beefy guys with an air of of friendly menace. One guy was sitting in the same row as a woman dressed head to to toe in black, just her eyes showing.

Damascus is cold and damp tonight. I’m looking forward to getting started.