Amman to Damascus

When we got back, it was hard to believe we’d been so close, that that place still buzzed and blew and yet, we hadn’t approached it. That it had existed at the other end of a taxi ride, caught there on the tearing hill upon which we had lived, (“anywhere”) and I sang the tricycle song as we waited with our bags lain around us. It was hard to believe that the place, moulded out of the rock, encircled by small tweeting migratory birds, home as soon as you breathed its air, was actually the next city along in the modern version of an ancient chain. Next up from the metropolis gutted by the trauma of exile and pasted over again with an appearance of modernity, in which we’d spent however many weeks and months. Where we’d sat in restaurants dedicated to a 65 year old dream of Jerusalem, still hung to as the last sense of home or place the owners had felt.

We sailed in- and almost buckled when I realised my image of the city had been re-collaged by the media, and I had doubted that all knowing synchronicity it possessed. Doubting its very existence, as if it were no longer a place, taken away and splattered on the front of all the tabloids, where the spellings and positioning of words in a sentence was still haphazard and it didn’t cost much to get things wrong.  

The taxi driver complained, and spoke to his wife, and all glances saw the soldier, bracing his machine gun like a lego figure, pointing it down from the top of the bridge. And the men returning from work in Amman for Eid in their villages, as we were with our burnt bread biscuits (and a stealthy bottle of tequila) in the boot, spoke about the safety of their village, and he tried to bring the conversation onto a more middle class level, and debated the cost of watermelon. And spoke above the toll the blood was having on the cost of its flesh without mentioning the blood or the flesh. 

As we inched in over Malki, I saw boy I had taught, staring into the air behind the boot of his parent’s land rover (he isn’t there anymore, surely?). The one who asked me the previous year, as we sat on the fish bowl bus, Why do you live in Syria, when you could live in England? With a breadth of meaning I hadn’t heard when adults chimed in with the same question, and I told him something about food, and smiles on the street, and the light air carrying missals from the depths of the desert at dusk, and thought it sounded stupid. 

And then we were there, and I complained he hadn’t got or listened to me, why were we there, where people (or we) were bound to our homes, to whispers, where the internet was like a snail, and I couldn’t submit the article I’d written about the paper shop. Then we ate the lebaneh that tasted like the cows’ hum by morning, and slept under sheets that were dried by the competing torrents of air that clapped each other’s cheeks and riled away laughing. And we felt I couldn’t go out, with the sun, and a baby, and mukhabarat spitting on the streets. All the Russian prostitutes were still there (are they still there? Why did I think they would have gone by then?). But the sky still adorned the city with the kind of halo it reserved only for grand, beautiful places. We went to the Ummayad mosque. And some Shami ladies caught me pacing in the endless tumult of the public. And crowned what they said about the family and the child, and the destiny of one’s life, which seemed so simple, but which hit a point talks in public with strangers in London rarely get close to, “we love our country, and we fear for it”, and I fumbled a hasty automatic reply, the one I repeated earlier at the border, and later to the police man, in default, without considering who I was answering or what their question might mean, “I’m not a journalist”. And I put my head down, as if I were still attached to an order that lived on, but whose heart had been plunged already, trained not to really be the full me. In obedience to the stifled feeling or extraction, a long slow process, as something interior moved to the exterior. 

And we came back, and people were sparse on (their?) streets, and wariness, worldliness, seemed a little more locked up. We waited at the bus station. That big depot of the country, point of departure and arrival for millions, a ramshackle building, the grease that oiled the country’s working. A little girl sang by the curb “Al Shaab ureed iskat al nitham (the people want the fall of the regime)” and then switched, in the same whining rhythm, catchy boredom, “Allah, Suria, Bashar wa bes” (God, Syria, Bashar and nothing else). Her words were taken tangled off, by the wind, into the rush, the grinding motors of cars all around her. Her mother was just a shadow and hand beside her. Someone was listening. Or was no one listening? In this state of flux, where better stories are still told, despite England’s vastly “superior” “education” system.  Despite state and private initiatives, despite the fact that lessons in the UK are pupil-led, interpretative, conceptual and nothing is absolute, despite all that, this is history, and better stories are still told in Syria. Perhaps nothing needs to be absolute when our material worries are over interest rate percentages rather than bread. Which did she hear on television, when? and which from the people she knew? Which would decide her future? Without grabbing and tearing her away from all that made her individual. We came back, on that lumbering eleven hour ride, from the village. Babies were normal on the bus, and I copied the other women when they changed the nappies in the sinks. We were in Arnoos at night. Our friends were happy, drunk on sugar, on new girls from Birmingham, the ones who sent them desperate money later. But then, they still had clothes straight from the market, gadgets saved or blagged, in their pockets. We sat around- delighting (though I’d forgotten there was anything strange about it by then), that I could be “out” in public, on a summer’s evening, at one o’clock in the morning, with music playing and a baby also sleeping on my shoulder. And yet, the silence, the lack of elasticity in connections, that slight doubt everyone seemed to have, on the evening of the biggest holiday of the year, was new. It wasn’t the same Sham we’d entered. 

Men were gathered in clusters around the naked bodies of their car, rocking to “their” music. People didn’t speak to the world, only to the groups they were in, (was it more like London now?). The boy came up to collect our bill and he told them he wouldn’t pay a table charge. Was it the 4 months we’d spent in Amman? Was it that he saw his country silently slipping away from him? “We’re from this country, why should we pay to sit in our own park?” the boy looked shy and blushed and said he would fetch the Hajji. The Hajji arrived, a gnarled, blond-grey man, crocked to one side, a shoulder desperately fighting to keep up pace with his hurried feet. “Go get the tourist police. We’re only paying the bill, no extras”. Strange, since he hadn’t argued the week before in the uptown juice bar overlooking Amman, strange, that he had to keep his tiffs for a Damascus park, at night. We all got up quickly and walked towards the gate of the park that we knew well. The group of youths started to follow us. Large, well trained, tanned, proud, Bashar emblems swinging inside their t-shirts.  They grabbed him and his brother and took them to the car. I heard the punches and felt they rocked the challis, I saw the lads crowd around like panthers. My heart was beating, that was it, the end, I felt that sudden flash of remorse, screaming at everyone, an English girl with a sleeping baby on one arm, a few months after all the tourists had gone home, and once the crazier ones, the one’s with wispy hopes of “knowing more”, had begun to arrive. The only customers he had were journalists, and the embassies rang everyday and asked to talk to his guests, who whispered through clenched teeth that he should say they weren’t here. Cock of the hat, a smile. Nothing to turn brows. The car pulled away. 

They all told me to go home. Why home? My husband has been taken away in a car with a picture of Basel Al Assad on the back for arguing over the bill with a café owner. The Shami ladies usually so full of advice and refuge, were advising immediate retreat. We navigated through the commotion and found a man who told us to go to the police station. We walked there and waited outside, only to find a police man come out with my husband and his brothers’ identity cards. He delivered them like grey faced strangers and said explicitly to me “I’m sorry, we thought they were Iraqis and were working here illegally”. And I knew most people never got returned. Or got coughed up out of buses months later, in a different town, beaten up, on a motorway, with no idea of their charges, to crawl back to where they called home, until now.  And I know this was just a little taster of what was suffered afterwards and is still being suffered. In the only city in the world where, to take someone else’s words, you can see an old man sitting on a street corner, with a cigarette in one hand and a cat in the other.