Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
other prominent Levant hoteliers, Horatio and Valerie Vester of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, had also signed. “We haven’t been able to visit them since 1967,” Sally said. Israel conquered East Jerusalem in 1967, and since then no Syrian could legally go there.
“How is Michael Adams?” Krikor asked.
“He’s fine. He lives in Devon and teaches at Exeter University,” I said. “His sons have become journalists.”
“I remember the night he showed up here from Beirut. He was the Manchester Guardian’s man there. It must have been twenty years ago, no, more. He was with two other journalists. They came up here. We had some brandy, and they were up all night.”
Aleppo was a city of memories, where past and present mingled in the air like cigarette and pipe smoke over Armenian brandy in the fading afternoon light. It was never an imperial capital, and it suffered no sudden changes. It had decayed slowly and become like a beautiful actress, wearing her old jewels and hiding her wrinkles with make-up. Youth had gone, but the grandeur and dignity were unmistakable and indestructible.
Sally asked me to accompany her to the Anglican Easter service that evening. I said I had already been to Mass twice. “Oh, please,” she said. “It will be very nice. It is about the only chance all the English wives here have to see one another.”
“I’m a Catholic,” I told her. “I’ve never been to a Protestant Easter service. I doubt they’d have me.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “You would be very welcome. Anyway, it’s in a Catholic chapel. It belongs to the Jesuits. I promise you’ll like it.” There was no Protestant church in Aleppo, but the Jesuits lent theirs to the Anglicans at Christmas and Easter when their vicar came up from Damascus.
In the evening, Armen drove his mother, his fiancée, whose name was Rubina, and me in his white 1958 Chevy Nomad station-wagon, more a tank than a car, to the Jesuit chapel for the Anglican service. Armen grunted when, as he dropped us off, I asked him whether he was coming in. “I’ll pick you up when it’s over,” he said. Sally raised an eyebrow at her son and said to me, “Armen doesn’t go to church.” Armen drove off in the Aleppo traffic, and Sally led Rubina and me up the steps.
Inside the tiny modern chapel were about twenty women, most of them formidable English matrons, made more English and more formidable by long years in the East. The room was quiet, and the mood seemed solemn, though some of the women had come only for this rare occasion when they were able to see one another.
We sat in the back. I did not know what to expect. Behind me I saw Anthony Akras, a Catholic like myself, but here in his capacity as British Consul. He handed everyone a hymnal. The hymns would play an important part in the service to come.
The priest walked up to the altar. He was not the sort of Anglican vicar I had seen in England, with starched collar and National Health spectacles. He looked more like one of the “with-it” Catholic priests I had known in California twenty years earlier: bearded, thin, dressed in a long white designer cassock wrapped tightly at the waist. When he spoke, his words came out less as sermon than as a breathless rendition of “Listen with Mother.”
“Today,” he said, in an excited whisper, “we are going to sing these hymns. So, listen carefully. This is a very special day, as I’m sure you all know.”
The matrons had no idea how special it was and were exchanging worried glances. The vicar began the service, which had some of the same formulae as the new Catholic vernacular Mass. He would interrupt the proceedings every few minutes to explain to the ladies what he was doing. Perhaps he assumed they had not been to church before. The service proceeded up to the Gospel, which he read from the Good News Bible with great enthusiasm, as though he were reading a children’s story, a magical tale about a stone and a sepulchre that we had never heard before. The sermon or homily that followed was better still. He talked about birth, rebirth, love, life, children and lions. He went on about C. S. Lewis. Suddenly, he asked his wife, a thin young woman, to stand and read from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This took about fifteen minutes, and the matrons were stunned. When his wife sat down again, the vicar beamed benevolently at her, like the host of a television talk show. When he pointed his open hand at her, I was afraid for a moment we would have to applaud. He then repeated the story in outline and slowly explained its message. I thought perhaps the repetition of the story of Asian the lion was for the benefit of a four-year-old girl across the aisle from us, but she was falling asleep. The vicar’s intonation never lost its sense of anticipation, as though he were perpetually on the verge of cutting a birthday cake.
“Now,” he surprised us, “we are going to have a special treat. This is a precious gift which our community in Damascus has come to know and love very much.” He paused. What could it be? Sally Mazloumian closed her eyes, as though she were trying to imagine herself somewhere else, probably at home by her warm fire. “We have,” the vicar continued, “two young men from our Damascus community here with us tonight, and they are going to sing for us.” He paused again. The women froze in panic. This was not the sort of Easter to which they had been accustomed in Scotland, Yorkshire or even the Home Counties.
Two well-dressed black men in their early twenties, who had earlier acted as ushers, walked from the back pew to the altar. “These two,” the vicar, who may have missed his calling as a television impresario, “are James and Kwachie.” The matrons around me increased the pace of their eyebrow-raising as the vicar, or “president,” as the new prayer book called him, presented James and Kwachie. “They are from Africa, from Zambia. Isn’t that right, James?” The young man on the right nodded. “And they are going to sing a special song they learned in their native land, at their church in Africa.” His emphasis on the word implied that it was a strange and exotic fairyland inhabited only by monsters, princesses and vicars. “And this is a special song for Easter.”
Without organ music, or music of any other kind, James and Kwachie began to swoon and sing on the altar step. The chorus of the song was, “There is a certain man, and Jesus is his name.” The song was pleasant, and James and Kwachie swayed to the tune. On the second singing of the chorus, the two men clapped their hands with the rhythm. The vicar stepped into the aisle and called out, “Let’s all clap.” He began clapping his hands and stamping his feet, motioning to the matrons to do the same. The four-year-old girl woke up and buried her head in her mother’s lap. Most of the women sat absolutely still. Too embarrassed to do anything else, a few women gently tapped their hands together.
When the service was over, and a bemused Anthony Akras had collected the hymn books, Sally whispered to me, “I promise I’ll never force you to a Protestant service again.”
A Lebanese “businessman” was staying in the hotel to rest from his work in Beirut. One evening on the terrace, he told me he owned a few illegal gambling shops in Hamra, a fashionable quarter of the Muslim, western half of Beirut. “I was a concert pianist,” he told me, “but I could not make any money. So I opened a little place with pinball machines. When the war started, I added slot machines.”
“Don’t you have problems with the militias demanding extortion?” All the militias in west Beirut demanded “protection money” from businesses, particularly from bars and casinos.
“We pay. We pay Amal. We pay Hizballah. We pay the Druze, so no one bothers us much.”
“I hear things are a bit quieter now that the Syrian army is back in west Beirut.”
“It’s much better now. Last year it was terrible. You couldn’t do anything. Even the gangsters were afraid to go out at night. I know: I’m a gangster.”
Early one evening, I returned to the hotel from a bookshop. Among the books I had bought was The Golden Reign: The Story of my Friendship with Lawrence of Arabia by Clare Sydney Smith, a woman who had known Lawrence when he was serving under her husband in the RAF. I went into Mr Mazloumian’s tiny office, under the stairs and behind the switchboard, and sat down. I showed him the book.
“I’ve known most of his friends,” Mr Mazloumian said. “I saw