Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
books? No newspapers?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
I asked for ink for my pens, and she wrapped a bottle in coloured paper like a gift. As I was leaving, a man who had heard me speaking Arabic invited me to his shop next door for coffee. While we drank coffee, other merchants drifted in and out; they seemed to spend much of their day socialising in one another’s shops. My accent in Arabic, obviously foreign, was basically Lebanese. They found it amusing, just as I found many of their pronunciations and words incomprehensible. Everyone, whether Turkish or Arab, was hospitable – in a way too hospitable. If I had accepted every offer of tea, coffee or lunch at home with a family, I would have had no time for anything else.
In the now crowded streets, many people spoke Arabic among themselves. I could hear mothers speaking it to their children, workers speaking it as they walked together along the cracked pavements. But no road, shop or advertising signs anywhere were written in Arabic. Everything written was in Turkish.
There was something disjointed about life in Alexandretta. Most people seemed to speak one language at home and among friends and another for official purposes. They thought in one language, yet they had to read another. Even the letters of this other language were foreign, since Atatürk had abandoned the “Old Turkish” Arabic script in favour of a modified Latin alphabet. They had one name at home, another on their identity papers and in public. When the names changed to Turkish, the authorities sometimes made arbitrary choices, often based on nicknames or profession. The same thing had happened in America, when new immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were greeted by Irish policemen who could not understand their foreign-sounding names, so simply gave them new, “American” names. When my grandmother arrived as a child from Mount Lebanon in the late 1890s as Nazira Makary, an Irish cop had re-christened her “Vera McCarey”, the name she kept until she married. Her stepfather, Semaan Zalloua, became “Joe Simon”. Under Turkish rule in Alexandretta, Hannoud Alexander was now Hind Koba. I discovered later that Mehmet Udimir had been born Mohamed Haj.
The Ottomans had not tampered with people in this way, leaving Arabs, Armenians, Circassians and countless other subject peoples free to speak and read their own languages, free to use their own names. Yet Turkey had become a “modern” nation, adopting Western nationalist ideology that forbade the old diversity of empire. No one complained in public. A few people, who had steadfastly defended the idea that Turkey was a democracy, begged me not to quote them by name on the subject of language and their sympathy with Syria for fear of arrest or reprisal.
I went back to the Hatayli Oteli to collect my bags. Ahmet the porter called for a taxi, several of which were parked across the road in the shade, to take me to Arsuz. Ahmet asked the driver the fare in Turkish. He then etched the figure 7,000 into the dust on top of the car. I said this was too high. The driver cursed in Arabic, so I began haggling with him in Arabic, dispensing with Ahmet as interpreter. We agreed on 5,000 Turkish Lira for a return journey, to include the wait in Arsuz while I checked in and left my bags. I wanted to be back in Alexandretta for an appointment at the old Church of the Annunciation with the Italian Franciscan priest, Padre Giovanni.
We drove along the coast road out of Alexandretta into green hills with the sea, except for a brief inland stretch, always at our right. The driver said his name was Mehrez, or Mehré in Turkish. When he asked me if I wanted to listen to Turkish music on his cassette player, I asked if he had anything in Arabic.
“Who do you like?”
“Feyrouz,” I said, the name of Lebanon’s most famous chanteuse.
“I don’t have Feyrouz, but I have Samira!” He popped in a tape of songs by Samira Tewfic, a popular Arabic singer who sang, like most Arabic singers, about love. With the music blasting in the old American taxi, we drove at speed along the deserted coast where green hills rolled gently into the blue sea.
Mehrez was curious about me. What was my nationality? Where had I learned Arabic? Where did I live? How many children did I have? What kind of work did I do?
“Sahafi,” I said, the Arabic word for journalist.
He had no idea what the word meant. I tried and failed to explain, but when I fell back on “kutub”, writer, he understood. It turned out we both had five children, two boys and three girls. When I said we lived in London, he seemed puzzled. I explained that my wife was English. He was silent. Minutes passed, and the hills which had until then hugged the coastline gave way to a fertile plain just north of Arsuz. He asked me again about London. “London is near where?”
Did he mean which part of London?
“No.”
Did he know London?
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“Where is London?” “Fi Ingilterra,” I said. “In England.”
“Fi Ingilterra,” he repeated, knowingly. “Helou.” Helou means “sweet”, but has the connotation “pretty”. Then he said London was “helou”.
I admitted that London and England were “helou,” and after a few minutes we both agreed that Alexandretta too was “helou.”
Mehrez pointed out the sights along the Arsuz road, the onion fields, olive groves and grazing pastures where in summer people from Alexandretta and the villages went for picnics. He offered to stop at several villages where we could drink home-made arak. He seemed disappointed that I had neither the time nor, at eleven in the morning, the desire for a glass of the strong distilled grape with aniseed and asked, “Would you rather have beer?”
We reached the northern outskirts of Arsuz, hideous with new buildings in creative forms of ugliness, as though the houses had been modelled on the Lego designs of a particularly troublesome child. Most of the two-storey structures had just been built or were nearing completion. Trees had yet to be planted, so there was no shade. Concrete dust was everywhere, a side-effect of the Westernising of housebuilding in a land rich with stone and forests which had for centuries until our own provided the materials for beautiful villas, temples and theatres. It was a relief to cross the little bridge at the mouth of the River Arsuz into old Arsuz, with its small cluster of eucalyptus-shaded stone houses. Wooden fishing boats bobbed up and down beneath the bridge, beyond which, almost hidden by pines and eucalyptus, was the Hotel Arsuz.
“Rosuz is the Hellenistik name of this charming little town,” I read in Mehmet Udimir’s tourist brochure. “Coming to Antakya, Selevkos Nicador set foot to shore here. There are some mozaics and the remnants of stone pillars are to be seen in Arsuz, from the middle ages.”
Mehrez drove into the hotel courtyard, where young men were playing soccer. One of them stopped playing and took me inside one of the hotel’s two buildings. He was enormously fat, with a gentle, friendly face, and spoke English well. He told me his father owned the hotel, which had opened in 1965, and that his name was Sedat Mistikoglu. He gave me a room in the newer building, a simple bedroom with windows on two sides, one facing the sea and a sandy beach and the other with a balcony over the courtyard. In the bathroom, there was a shower. I left my bags and went downstairs, where Sedat and his younger brother Suat asked me if everything was all right. They were proud of the hotel’s modern conveniences, the telephones in each room and the new plumbing. “We have just installed solar heating,” Sedat said, beaming.
“What happens when the sun doesn’t shine?” I asked, dreading cold morning showers.
“The sun always shines here,” Sedat assured me.
Back in Alexandretta, I asked Mehrez to take me to the Catholic church. He interpreted this to mean a general tour of Christian churches. He drove to several small churches with tin roofs, first a Greek Orthodox, then an Armenian Orthodox, then a church whose denomination was not indicated. I said I was late for an appointment, that the church I wanted, the “Franciscan” church, was “old and large”. He took me to another Orthodox church, which was tiny with a miniature basilica