From Antakya, Turkey, I took a late afternoon bus across the Syrian border to Aleppo, arriving after dark, and grabbed a taxi to the Hotel Baron, a formerly great hotel that displayed Lawrence of Arabia's bar bill but was now more than a little run-down. Early the next morning I left the hotel and walked to the modern Amir Palace Hotel nearby, where my guidebook said there was a Europcar office. There I was told the only rental car company was Hertz in the Chahba Cham Hotel, far away in the new city. I asked what a fair cab fare was to there, and they told me about 20 Syrian pounds (40 cents). I went out and asked a cab driver the fare. He said, ``100 pounds."
``Don't cheat me!" I said. ``20 pounds."
``50 pounds."
``20 pounds."
He nodded, or so I thought, and I got in. I learned later a meter would have been 15 pounds. At the Chahba Cham I got out and paid him 20 pounds. This made him angry, and he followed me into the hotel, demanding more, but I ignored him.
No one was at the Hertz desk; they were closed on Fridays. A young Arab man named ``Samir", who spoke excellent English, helped me out and located someone who could find their list of prices and tell me what time to come back the next morning.
I left the hotel and looked for a taxi to take me back to the Old Town. Only the same taxi was there in the hotel driveway, and he wanted 100 pounds. I didn't bother bargaining; I went out to the street and flagged down a passing cab. He didn't understand where I wanted to go, but another young Arab man, named ``Badr", who also spoke excellent English, suddenly materialized and translated for me.
I went to the excellent National Museum with exhibits on ancient Syrian cultures, got lost in the souqs of the Old Town, and found my way to the Citadel. After I left the Citadel, I was standing on the road around it taking its picture when a young Arab man came up to me and asked if I was American and what was my profession. He had to remind me that he was Samir, who had helped me out at the Hertz desk. He said he had studied computer science for a year, but he'd quit because they weren't teaching him what was important--how to build web pages. He asked if I could teach him how to ``hack". I said no.
We went to his family's carpet shop. It was closed on Fridays, but he said he liked to hang out here anyway. He gave me a cup of tea with cinnamon. He listed the five essential architectural sites in Aleppo; one was a former mental hospital, the Bimaristan Arghan, which he was anxious to take me to, but it was closed on Fridays.
While we were in the shop, two other young men came in. One of them reminded me he was Badr, who had helped me get the taxi outside the Chahba Cham Hotel.
Samir took me upstairs to where all the carpets were. I had considered buying one until I heard his prices. Okay, they were starting prices, but if he started that high, he wasn't coming all the way down to what I was willing to pay. He showed me the difference between silk and polyester--burn silk and it crumbles; burn polyester and it curls.
He took me out and walked around the souqs with me, and showed me the insides of a couple of old caravansarais, but mostly things were closed. Finally I told him I wanted to explore by myself for a while, and we parted.
I walked around the Old City a little longer, until I got some sense of the whole. Then I explored some of the newer downtown areas, including the Armenian Al-Jdeida district. I returned to my hotel and rested for a while.
In the late afternoon I took a taxi back to the Citadel and crossed the street to Hammam Yalbougha al-Nasry for a Turkish/Syrian bath. I spent what seemed like hours in the most distant chamber, a steam room, feeling like I was inside an espresso machine. Then to another room where a masseur scraped me with an abrasive plastic washcloth, then with lufa, and gave me a very forceful all-over massage. Tightly wrapped in towels, I returned to an alcove in the reception area for a cup of tea. In the next alcove were three German women, waiting their turn, and one asked me if I felt very relaxed now.
``No," I said. ``I feel quite tense."
But by the time I left the baths, I was beginning to feel a very deep relaxation, and I wanted to walk back to the hotel. My path took me past Samir's carpet shop, and when I passed there, Samir, Badr, and another young man were there. Samir invited me in.
They had a computer terminal there, and I asked about writing in Arabic. He sat me down and set me up with Word in Arabic. I typed ``bayt", the word for ``house", and watched the ``baa" turn from its independent form to its initial form, watched ``yaa" change from its final to its medial form. Samir put on a CD of some Arabic music and then a Canadian New Age singer with lots of Arabic elements in it. On the computer he popped in a CD of the tourist sights of Syria, and particularly urged me to go to San Simeon, northwest of Aleppo.
I told them my son Thomas's story of witnessing the World Trade Center attack, and then I realized I could show them the pictures he put on his web site. I did a bit of poking around and found it. Badr was fascinated, but Samir seemed bored. I displayed the picture of the World Trade Center on fire, seen from the Brooklyn Bridge, and that's when Samir said, ``In my next life, I want to be born in America."
I left and walked the rest of the way back to my hotel.
The next day I got my car from Hertz at the Chahba Cham Hotel and drove to Palmyra. The day after that I visited the ancient sites of Dura Europos and Mari, near the Iraqi border. The next day I drove all the way back through Aleppo to San Simeon and on to the ancient site of Ugarit on the Mediterranean. The day after that I visited Krak des Chevaliers, Apamea, and Ebla, and returned to Aleppo. I turned my car in to Hertz just before they closed.
That night I spent in the Bait al-Wakil Hotel, my only splurge on a hotel on the whole trip. It was $70 a night, rather than my usual $20 or less. It is an old Ottoman era house, built around a beautiful stone courtyard with a lovely fountain in the middle. The room was no bigger than I was used to, however. My bellhop turned on CNN for me and I lay on the bed and watched it for half an hour. The third day of bombing in Afghanistan, and the Americans now control the air space. Five anti-American demonstrators were killed in Pakistan. Arab nations disapproved of the bombing.
That evening, in another splurge, I walked half a block down the alleyway my hotel was on, to the Bait al-Sissi restaurant. I was seated just inside the door in a nice old courtyard, and I had good pungent hors d'oeuvres and a lamb brochette that was too spicy.
Just as I was about to leave, who should peek into the restaurant but Samir and Badr. I invited them to sit at my table, and we shared a plate of pistachios.
I suggested that they had a conspiracy against me and that is why they kept running into me. Samir didn't know the word ``conspiracy", so he got out his handheld English-Arabic translator.
``Conspiracy. Nice word," he said, and showed the translation to Badr.
I looked at the device, but it was too dark for me to read.
Badr ordered a water pipe to smoke. I took a few puffs--apricot-flavored tobacco.
``Oooh, I like the way you suck," Badr said.
Samir stared daggers at Badr as he asked me questions. What hotel was I staying at? What room number? Shall we go there now?
I pretended to interpret all his advances as attempts to sell me a carpet, and he picked up on this, so it became a metaphor.
Finally I said I was tired and was going back to my hotel.
They walked me back there. On the way, along the narrow alley, Badr said to Samir in English, ``Shall we kill him now?" I laughed.
At the entrance to the hotel, Badr suggested one more time that we all go to my room and have a party.
``I'm not interested in buying a carpet," I said.
The next morning I wanted to see the things in the Old Town that had been closed on Friday. So I walked straight down Sharia al-Kayyali to the Great Mosque. I was not surprised to see Samir outside the mosque, as though he had been waiting for me since dawn. He accompanied me into the mosque, which was under repairs and not in official use, though people still visited here to pray among the scaffolding. He waited outside for me when I went into the Madrasa Halawiyya, a school from the 1200s with a pleasant courtyard with a pool.
Then Samir led me though the narrow maze-like streets of the souq to a favorite building of his. On the way we passed Badr going the other way, with his arm over the shoulder of a younger boy. Badr said to me, ``Let me be your donkey."
Samir's favorite building was the Bimaristan Arghan, an ancient mental institution that he had mentioned before. Just inside the entrance was a beautiful courtyard with a pool and trees. The upper floor of the building rested on wooden planks which then rested on the lower-floor pillars, in an early feat of earthquake engineering--the wood would absorb the shock. Samir led me into the area of the cells where the insane were kept. The cells all had windows onto tiny courtyards with small fountains, on the theory, no doubt correct, that flowing water soothes the souls of the insane. The windows of the dangerously insane were barred; those of the ordinary insane were not.
In the deepest part of the interior, with the two of us alone in a tiny courtyard, Samir brushed my crotch with the back of his hand and let it remain there. I took his wrist, and pushing his hand away, said disapprovingly, ``Come on." That was the whole incident.
We continued through the building, and I asked more questions about the Bimaristan. Once outside I told him I wanted to wander around alone. He recommended Bab al-Qinnesrin, and we shook hands goodbye. I walked toward Bab al-Qinnesrin.
When I was in my early twenties hitchhiking around America, this sort of incident was common. In my blacker, lonelier moods traveling, I would think to myself, ``If a man talks to me, he wants either money or sex; if a woman, money." But it has been decades since then, and I can't imagine those young men were attracted to me.
I recalled a conversation I had once several years ago with a gay colleague at a sidewalk café on Váci Street in the old town of Budapest. We were talking about how many countries we had been in, and that led to a discussion of what the criteria were for counting a country. He suggested that you shouldn't count a country unless you've slept with someone there. I looked at the prostitutes pacing back and forth on the street in front of us and said, ``And not paid for it."
``Oh," he said, ``in some places that would just be rude."