The Pillars of Hercules

Given his overripe imagery and his feverish imagination, it is wrong to expect to find Durrell’s Alexandria. He says himself that his Alexandria, “half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.” That is true. And events have changed the cityscape. The Rue Nebi Daniel, where Darley, the narrator, lives and so much of the action takes place, is easy enough to find on the 1911 Baedeker map (running north-south, from the Jewish synagogue to the station) but nowadays is Horreya (Freedom) Street. In Durrell’s novels it is a dream-city, full of fantasies of food and sex, and even the descriptions are dreamlike, as an evocation of the body of water that lies just behind Alexandria, “the moonstone mirror of Mareotis, the salt-lake, and its further forevers of ragged desert, now dusted softly by the spring winds into satin dunes, patternless and beautiful as cloudscapes.” But that fictional city was gone, if indeed it had ever existed; and so was Flaubert’s Alexandria and E. M. Forster’s.

The great Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who lived most of his life in Alexandria (and worked for the Ministry of Irrigation), told a different story. In his poems he had celebrated the richness, the history, the squalor, the eroticism of the place as something human. His sense of reality caused him to be labeled decadent. In “The City” and “The God Abandons Antony” he had emphasized that the city was something within us, sometimes as “black ruins” and sometimes representing human hope or failure. “The city is a cage … and no ship exists / To take you from yourself.” The English poet D. J. Enright wisely wrote, “It is not that Cavafy reminds us that we are merely human. He reminds us that we are human.”

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

There were fleeting glimpses from certain books I had read, some aspects of dereliction, like a couple in tatters, and you think: That broken rag on her head was once a turban, and there were gaps on those shoes where there had once been jewels, and her shreds had once been silks. You could make out what it must have been from what it was, like the town auditorium in Crete that had once been a mosque, and the claustrophobic church in Siracusa that had been a Greek temple.

The hookahs, the so-called hubble bubbles, are still in Alexandria, and so are the cafes where the men sit sucking on these waterpipes, while cripples and flunkies fill them and keep them alight; the tottering buildings, the Cecil Hotel, the Corniche and its cooling breeze, and the children fishing from the edge, swallows crisscrossing the heaps of garbage, the jetty of the Corniche ending in the fort that was built with the rubble of the Pharos, the lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the “clang of the trams shuddering in their metal veins.” The stalls of watermelon, and fish, or almonds, the men with pushcarts doling out the mucky fava bean mixture they called foul. The air full of brick dust, “sweet smelling brick dust and the odor of hot pavements slaked with water.” The city was physically recognizable; the way life is lived outdoors on its streets and pavements makes the city visible and tantalizing, too, for what else remains indoors and hidden? At the very least, with the well-turned phrase, “a thousand dust-tormented streets,” Durrell could be assured that in this respect his description of Alexandria would never be out of date.

Alexandria was a broken old hag that had once (every other writer had said so) been a great beauty; she was not dead, but fallen.

It was not quite true that no one had described the Alexandria that I saw. There was one man, Naguib Mahfouz. He wrote in Cairo, but his inspiration came from Alexandria, where he spent the summer months of each year. “Only twice in his life has he been abroad,” one of his translators wrote, “and after his second trip he vowed never to travel again.” He had won the Nobel Prize in 1988, the Arab world’s only Nobel laureate in literature. At the moment Mahfouz was in trouble.

Two weeks before I arrived in Alexandria, while I was still on the Seabourne, visiting Taormina, Mahfouz had been stabbed by a Muslim fanatic in front of his apartment house on Sharia Nil in Cairo. He had been in intensive care since then. Mahfouz had been denounced by the blind cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and just as he had inspired the bombers who had tried to bring down the World Trade Center, he had filled another poisonous little apostle in Cairo with the resolve to murder Mahfouz.

It was a sudden stabbing on the street and had left a deep wound in Mahfouz’s neck. Mahfouz was an old man, eighty-three, a diabetic, and he had been seriously injured. Blood pouring from his wound, he had been taken to the hospital, which was fortunately only a block away. He was still in the intensive-care ward of the Cairo hospital.

I decided to take the train to Cairo to see whether I could talk to him. It was either that or a visit to the pyramids with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan.

Meanwhile, Alexandria was having an odd effect on me, plunging me into dream states, in which I was a sort of Prospero figure in a big rambling estate, among all sorts of Eskimos and Indians and old friends; and even odder unrepeatable sexual dreams. Was it the bright light of early dawn blazing through my porthole, the stillness of the ship at its berth in the Western Harbor, the mutters and bells and clangs? All that, and the city itself, everything I had read about Alexandria was feeding my imagination, provoking desires.

The news was bad. Tourists were being shot by fundamentalists in Luxor and Giza. Some had died of their wounds. The body count was fifteen this year, two last week. Some of the victims had been on tourist buses, others on trains.

“They shoot into First Class—they know where the tourists are on the trains,” Raymond Stock told me.

Raymond, an American poet, essayist and teacher, was Mahfouz’s biographer. He was fluent in Arabic and had lived in Cairo for four years, keeping in daily contact with his subject, whose apartment was not far away. I called Raymond from a pay phone at the port of Alexandria soon after I arrived on the Akdeniz. He said that even though Mahfouz was in the hospital he had still been seeing the wounded man almost every day and that he was slightly improved.

“Is there any chance of my seeing him?”

“I’m just going to the hospital now,” he said. “They might move him out of intensive care and if they do we could visit him this afternoon.”

On this very slender possibility I made plans to take the two-hour train trip from Alexandria to Cairo. But there was nothing else I wished to do; the pyramids, the Sphinx, the bazaar, the museums—they could wait. One of the aspects of the classical Grand Tour that I had always found attractive was the way the traveler sought the wisdom of great men. Naguib Mahfouz was certainly one of those.

“I have been driving a taxi for twelve years, and this is the first time I have ever taken a tourist to the main railway station,” the taxi driver told me.

“I’m not a tourist,” I said.

“Why you take the train?”

“So I can look out the window.”

And, I thought, so that I can verify something I had read: “Alexandria Main Station … the noise of wheels cracking the slime slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows … the long pull of the train into the silver light … the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound … a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.”

That was Justine, and the nice image of “the giant sniffing of the engine” had to mean a steam locomotive. That was the only difference. If I had known what the station was like I could have answered him: I want to go to the railway station because I want to enter a time warp.

But this was true of many railway stations. The two main stations in Istanbul had hardly changed at all. Haydarpasa was a hundred years old but the only difference was that diesels had now replaced steam. The same had been true in Trieste and Split, even in Tirana and Messina and Palermo, in Valencia and Alicante and Marseilles. Railway stations are not timeless, but—too well-built to modernize, too large and dirty to purify; often elderly, sometimes venerable—they retain a sense of the past.

The three classes of tickets, the confusion at the ticket windows, the pushing and shoving and the queue-jumping men cutting ahead, the texture of the cardboard tickets, the very smudges of the printing, made it seem an experience from a former time, from a paragraph in a book written long ago. The torn advertisements fraying from the wall, the “Women’s Waiting Room,” the filthy platforms, the beggars, the sweet-vendors and newsboys, and the shafts of dusty sunlight slanting onto the rails, the clopping of horses in the courtyard; these details, part of the present, might be found on the same old page.

Assuming that the Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist gunmen traveled Third, and their victims were in First, I decided to buy a Second Class ticket to Cairo on a later train. This presented a difficulty which illustrated one of the dilemmas of Alexandrian life. Outside the station I was ambushed by men screaming at me, hectoring me to buy melons, or nuts, crocodile-skin shoes. Inside, at the ticket window, I found myself begging a clerk to sell me a train ticket. It was perhaps an Egyptian paradox: The things you don’t want are pushed in your face; the thing you want seems unobtainable. After some perseverance, and luck, I found the right ticket window. It was outside the station—not many people knew where the First and Second Class ticket windows were, which was perhaps a comment on how hard-up Alexandria had become. I bought a round-trip ticket.

Then, to kill time, and see the city, I took a tramcar ten stops, west, into the old Arab Quarter. Here and there I spotted Turks from the Akdeniz haggling with Egyptians over figs, or fruit, or candy; or tourist junk—plaster sphinxes, beads, brass plates, leather purses, stuffed toy camels, crocodile-skin belts. Turk and Arab, with no language in common, screamed at each other in broken English.

“Fie dallah!” cried the Egyptian hawker.

“Free dallah!” the Turk yelled.

“Fuh dallah!”

“Duh wanna.”

“Meester—best prass for you.”

“Free dallah!”

On the way back to the railway station my returning tram became jammed in traffic so dense I had to walk or else risk missing my train.

The problem was a dead cart-horse on the tracks a quarter of a mile away at the center of Alexandria. I chanced upon it after passing through the stopped traffic of honking cars and taxis, the trams, buggies, trucks, buses and motorbikes. At the head of all this traffic was the dead horse, still in its traces, its wagon overturned on the tramlines. It had been killed on the spot by being struck by the tramcar. One of the tram’s front panels was dented and smeared with blood. The horse was a gray nag, very skinny, tortured-looking eyes and wrung withers, with a big red gash on its hipbone and another on its leg. The death of this one miserable creature had brought the city of Alexandria to a halt.

The train to Cairo passes through the heart of the Delta, through suburbs and Sidi Gaber, past the shantytown sprawl and the brick tenements hung with laundry, Arab boys kicking a football in a clearing between two vegetable patches, and then the railway line offers a panorama of the Delta’s agriculture—cotton fields, grape arbors, wheat fields, rice paddies, fields of leafy greens and bean stalks. Every foot of the Delta was cultivated, all the flatness demarcated into gardens and fields. The canals were so choked with hyacinths and papyrus that water traffic was unthinkable. Even in the heat of the day there were people in the cotton fields, picking the cotton, and hauling sacks. The animals sought shade, though. It was hot and dry, and goats were pressed against flat walls, their flanks against the brick, because that ribbon of shade offered the only relief against the sun overhead.

Only two branches of the Nile pass through the Delta. The Cairo train crosses both of them, the Rashid Branch at Kafr el Zaiyat, and nearer Cairo, at Benha, the Domyat Branch. I had never seen the Nile before, but here there was not much of it. There are so many dams upriver that a relatively small flow of the Nile penetrates this far. And the most recent one, the Aswan High Dam of 1970, so reduced the flow of alluvial soil that the northwest edges of the delta towns that had always been gaining land (because of the easterly flow of the Mediterranean current here) were now being eroded by the sea. The Nile Delta was shrinking.

Because they were so dusty and sunbaked and neglected, the towns of the Delta, even the larger ones like Tantra and Benha, were impossible to date. They seemed to exist in that Third World dimension of poverty and neglect that held them outside of time.

The mob at Cairo Station, people struggling to leave, people struggling to secure a taxi or board a bus, hustling, haggling, picking pockets, or simply standing and looking desperate, was the worst, most frenetic, I had seen anywhere in the Mediterranean. The taxi drivers were the most rapacious by far. It is no surprise to learn that a great proportion of New York’s taxi drivers began their careers here in Cairo, and many of these same men would soon be joining them. It was not that they were rapacious—rapacity becomes instinctual among the urban poor in the Third World, as a survival skill—but that the simplest transactions always turned into a tiresome bidding war, in which you were always cheated.

“Fifteen dollars,” a cabbie told me when I said where I wanted to go. This was nine times the normal fare. Just being quoted a fare in dollars in this far-off country irritated me.

But my efforts were rewarded. I met Raymond Stock at the Semiramis Hotel and he greeted me by saying “Mahfouz is expecting you.”

He explained the stabbing while we had coffee. Sheik Omar had issued the fatwa on Mahfouz in 1989 from his seedy little mosque in New Jersey. It resembled the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, and coming so soon after that well-publicized one, it seemed as though Sheik Omar was trying to upstage the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mahfouz, too, was being accused of writing a blasphemous book. Sheik Omar called him “an infidel.” The book was Children of the Alley (Aulad Haratina). In one reading it was just a neighborhood tale of life in Cairo, but it was poetic too, and much could be read into it. That was the problem—its allusiveness. It seemed to contain echoes of the Koran, and the Bible, too. This was not as strange as it seemed. Time had done very little to change the Arabic language or the structure of Egyptian life. The character Qasim was a familiar figure in Cairo, but he had certain qualities in common with the Prophet Mohammed (and his chapter abounded with Koranic parallels). Rifa’a somewhat resembled Jesus, as the character Gebel resembled Moses. It was the story of a delightful family, said its most recent translator (my brother, Peter Theroux), but within this was a deeper story, of the spiritual history of mankind. The novel has 114 chapters; the Koran has the same number. “It is not a history of God,” Mahfouz had said, “but rather a history of God the way Man has insisted on imagining Him.”

The stabbing came about in this way. Mahfouz had an informal weekly meeting with his pals in Cairo. They were mainly old men and called themselves “the vagabonds” (harafish). But a few weeks before, there had been a quarrel—a trifling matter but it kept Mahfouz at home the following week. When the dispute was patched up, Mahfouz was with his pals again—and that was the night the assassin came for him. He said he was an admirer. He was a member of Sheik Omar’s Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya, the fundamentalist Islamic Group.

“If you come here tomorrow at five, you will find him,” Mrs. Mahfouz told them.

No one, not even she, suspected that someone would try to kill Mahfouz. In any case, Mahfouz made no concessions. He was fearless. He walked every day in the open air. Everyone who knew him, knew his movements. He was a familiar figure in Cairo, he walked all over the city, and he lived without a bodyguard. There was a feckless doorman at his apartment house but that man was half-asleep at the time of the attack.

The attacker approached Mahfouz the following day, just before five o’clock, as Mahfouz was getting into a car. Seeing him, Mahfouz in a reflex of courtesy turned to greet him. The man drew out a knife with a seven-inch blade and thrust down, stabbing Mahfouz at the base of his neck on the right side, cutting the carotid artery and slicing the radial nerve.

In his haste, the attacker forgot to cry out “Allah-u-akhbar!” and this omission (so he told police afterwards) explained why he had failed in his mission to murder Mahfouz. For this lapse, Allah delayed the death. He remembered to say it afterwards. “That is why I got away.” Other people said the man was simply unprofessional, since he had used a lowly kitchen knife for this important deed.

“I am being chased by a thief,” the man said to the taxi driver, who, unsuspecting, bore him away.

Meanwhile, Mahfouz had fallen and blood was pumping out of his severed artery and onto Sharia Nil. The man who had come to give Mahfouz a ride compressed the wound, stanching the flow, and the wounded man was hurried to the Military Hospital, just a few minutes away.

Bleeding profusely but still standing, Mahfouz said to the doctor, “There’s some blood here. I think you should look at it.”

He was immediately given two pints of blood, and during surgery another eight pints.

In another part of Cairo, the attacker was caught and held by some people whose suspicions were aroused by his strange behavior. The man did not deny what he had tried to do.

He said, “If I am released I will try again to kill him.”

In the newspaper Al-Ahram, Hasan Al-Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front, said, “The Egyptian fundamentalists’ use of force is a legal and honorable action, as were the attacks in Tel Aviv [the recent bus bomb] by Hamas.”

The most enlightened view—and it underlined the paradoxes of the issue—was that of Professor Edward Said, who wrote in Al-Ahram, “Mahfouz’s stabbing highlights the total bankruptcy of a movement that prefers killing to dialogue, intolerance to debate, and paranoia in favor of real politics.”

But the blame had to be shared: “It is hypocritical now to say to Mahfouz’s assailants only that they are crude fanatics who have no respect for intellectuals or artistic expression, without at the same time noting that some of Mahfouz’s work has already been officially banned in the Arab world. One cannot have it both ways. Either one is for real freedom of speech or against it. There is little basic distinction in the end between authorities who reserve the right for themselves to ban, imprison, or otherwise punish writers who speak their minds, and those fanatics who take to stabbing a famous author just because he seems to be an offense to their religion.”

Children of the Alley had the distinction of being banned in every Arab country, and many of those same countries included other Mahfouz novels in this ban. Small wonder, as Professor Said had suggested, that the fundamentalists seemed justified in their murderous intentions.

“He’s glad to see you,” Raymond said. “I told him you helped get him into the American Academy.”

“He got himself in,” I said.

The smiling man, supine in his bed, his neck bandaged, his hand in a splint, that greeted me in the intensive-care ward did not seem the dangerous man who had been vilified all over the Arab world. His expression was serene, his eyes clear. He was weary from what could have been a mortal wound, but he welcomed his visitors with animated conversation. He was modest, he teased, he even laughed and, soon after, this man who had been stabbed by a religious nut with a kitchen knife said, “It hurts when I laugh.”

Raymond introduced me. He said, “This is the man I told you about. He was one of the people who supported your application to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

Mahfouz began to laugh a little as Raymond repeated this in Arabic, as though a witticism had occurred to him that he was anxious to deliver.

“Raymond’s exaggerating,” I said.

Mahfouz said—his first words a joke—“I am the first person to be stabbed for being a member of the American Academy!”

He then uttered a dry chattering laugh that convulsed him and caused him pain. He was in a ward with about ten other men, all of them bandaged, with drip-feeds, and monitoring devices, and with plastic curtains around their beds. But Mahfouz’s intelligence, and his sweetness, shone in his face.

“How are you feeling?”

“I can’t write,” he said, and swung his splinted right hand on its sling. “That is bad.”

Dr. Yahyah el-Salameh said, “The hand problem was caused by nerve damage. The knife hit the radial nerve. So his hand is paralyzed.”

“My eyesight is bad, and I can’t hear,” he said. “That wasn’t the attack. That is because of my diabetes.”

Some of this was in English, some in Arabic. His accent could have been the accent of one of his characters that he had described: “like the smell of cooking that lingers in a badly washed pan.” Raymond stood behind me, translating. Mahfouz understood most of what I asked him, though from time to time he needed Raymond’s help.

“Tell the people at the American Academy that I am very grateful,” he said, clutching my hand. “Please thank them.”

“I know they’re worried about your health.”

“It was a shock, but—” He smiled, he laughed a little; he did not want to dwell on the attack.

“What do you think about those people?”

“I feel no hatred,” he said, slowly, in English. “But—”

He was gasping, having a hard time getting the words out. Dr. Yahyah looked anxious, but Mahfouz waved him away.

“—it is very bad to try to kill someone for a book you haven’t read.”

He was sniggering again, and seeing me laugh, he kept on talking, gesturing with his wounded hand.

“If you read the book and don’t like it,” he managed to say, stopping and starting, “then, okay, maybe you have a reason to stab the author. Eh? Eh?”

It was as though he was turning the whole attack into a violent absurdity. Something of the same kind occurs in his strange story “At the Bus Stop,” where the passive onlookers to a series of disconnected intrusions and sudden incidents all die in a senseless hail of bullets. That story and some others in the collection The Time and the Place have the logic and distortion of a nightmare, a blend of comedy and horror and the lack of logic that life confronts us with. He was saying: As a shy and peaceful man—elderly, deaf, half-blind, diabetic—wasn’t it ludicrous that he had been knifed? He was old and physically shrunken, like the character of whom he wrote: “There’s nothing left for death to devour—a wrinkled face, sunken eyes, and sharp bones.”

“But I am sad,” he said.

And he explained that the whole thing was pathetic. This was silly and futile. The fundamentalists were, most of all, ignorant.

“I thought they had learned something. I thought they were better than before. But they are as bad as always.”

“I think he is getting tired,” Dr. Yahyah said. “Maybe you—”

As though defying the doctor, Mahfouz said, “Fight thought with thought—not thought with violence.”

It was what he had said when defending Salman Rushdie against the supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The effort of his speaking, much of this in English, had wearied him. He saluted us. He said he would be better soon—“Come back to Egypt then—we’ll talk”—and he gripped my hand in his left hand and tugged it with affection.

Afterwards, I realized that I had been the one who had raised the religious issue and harped on the attack. But in retrospect I had the feeling that Mahfouz would have been much happier talking about something else—his work, perhaps, or Islamic aesthetics, or the weather, or Alexandria, or the French philosopher Bergson (who had worked on a theory of humor), or music, for which—before his deafness—Mahfouz had had a passion. He did not regard himself as a victim. His fatalism was part of his humor, and his modesty, and most of all it made him fearless.

My train back to Alexandria was El-Isbani, “The Spaniard,” though no one could explain why it was called that. It was an express, it rushed across the Delta, stopping two or three times, and Alexandria on the return seemed serene, as Mahfouz had described it: “Here is where love is. Education. Cleanliness. And hope.”

I had a drink at the Cecil and walked down the Corniche in the darkness, listening to the waves lap at the shore. “A great blue mass, heaving, locked in as far as the Fort of Sultan Qaitbay by the Corniche wall and the giant stone jetty arm thrusting into the sea.” This is Mahfouz, in his novel Miramar. “Frustrated. Caged. These waves slopping dully landwards have a sullen blue black look that continually promises fury. The sea. Its guts churn with flotsam and secret death.”

Alexandria made sense to me now. It was not a derelict or threatening place. It was an ancient city, founded by Alexander the Great around 332 B.C., and rising and falling with the fortunes of this end of the Mediterranean, it had been many different cities since then. Mahfouz had been born in 1911 and had witnessed the violent 1919 revolution, the various occupations—Greek, Turkish, British; the Second World War, the rise of Nasser, the fall of Nasser, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the humiliation of the Israeli Six Day War of 1967. He had seen E. M. Forster come and go; he had been in Alexandria in the late 1940s, when the action of Durrell’s novels had unfolded. He had watched these writers and their characters depart. And it was right that after the romantics and the fabulists had finished with the city, and the fantasies had ceased to be credible, the city had been reclaimed by a realist like Mahfouz, who possessed sympathy, and alarming humor.

I slept in my cabin on the Akdeniz, and woke exhausted and enervated by my dreams. Then I went into town again, bought the newspaper, and went to a cafe to read it. An Alexandrian joined me, Mr. Mohammed Ali.

“Cairo people are not like Alexandria people,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“We are Mediterranean people,” he said. “We are used to so many other nations, so many other different people.”

“But everyone in Alexandria is the same now. Isn’t that so?”

“We are people of the shoreline and the water,” he protested. “We have maybe three million people. Cairo has fifteen million!”

While I was in Alexandria, on the evening of my third day, the Arabic newspaper Al-Ahali (The People) published Naguib Mahfouz’s offending novel, Children of the Alley, in a special edition that sold out within a few hours of its hitting the street. “After 25 years of its absence from the Egyptian people!” the headline said. The whole book, in thirty broadsheet pages, had been printed without permission, infringing Mahfouz’s copyright. At first glance, it seemed a challenge to the hard-liners, but Raymond Stock had lived in Egypt long enough to find a sinister motive possible: Remember when Mao started the Hundred Flowers Campaign in order to get intellectuals and rebels out of the woodwork? he said. Well, this might be something similar, the publication of the blaspheming novel encouraged by the fundamentalist sheiks, to see who would applaud it. In this way, identifying the infidels, and rousing potential stabbers of Mahfouz. Whatever, it was an event, and it seemed to electrify the city. All at once, in the space of a few hours, everyone in Alexandria was reading Mahfouz’s novel.

“All gone,” the newsboys told me.

Looking for someone to help me buy a copy, I met a man who had bought five. They were at his house, he said, or he would have given me one.

“I spent forty pounds [about $14] on one copy last year!”

This man, Mohammed Okiel, asked one of the newsboys who had turned me away earlier, claiming he did not have a copy. Browbeaten by Mohammed Okiel, he found a copy of the special edition under some movie magazines. He had the decency to say “Sorry” to me in English.

“He is ashamed,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed was a lawyer. We found a quiet backstreet cafe, where young men were puffing on hookahs, and we drank a cup of coffee and talked about Mahfouz. I did not say that I had seen him in the hospital in Cairo—it was too improbable, and it was boasting. Besides, I wanted to know what other people thought.

“Naguib Mahfouz is a great man,” Mohammed said. “And he is a very great writer.”

“Have you read the novel?”

“Yes, Aulad Haratina is a great novel. I like it very much,” he said. “All the prophets are in it. Jesus, Moses, Mohammed. But it is also about us—we people.”

“Are you a religious person?”

“No. I have no religion,” he said. “Religion is false. Christian, Muslim, Jewish—all false.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because they cause trouble.”

“Don’t they bring peace and understanding, too?”

“People should be friends. I think it is easier to be friends without religion,” he said. “You can have peace without religion. Peace is easier, too, without religion.”

The texture of Alexandria, all the metaphors, and the romance and the layers of history were irrelevant to that simple reflection. It seemed a salutary and humane thought, too, because in a matter of hours the ship’s lines were loosed from the quayside, and we sailed out of this sea-level city, passed the lovely palace of Ras el Tin, and the old yacht club, and the lighthouses, and the ships at anchor. As the sun set directly behind our stern, we plowed east along the crescent of the Delta, towards Israel.

On deck after dinner, watching the Rosetta lighthouse winking from the Egyptian shore, at the narrow mouth of the Rashid Nile, Onan said—speaking as though I were not present—“Paul ran away from Alexandria. Where did he go?”

“There is something about this man,” Samih Pasha said, and his mustache lifted as he smiled at me. He then tapped the side of his nose in a gesture of suspicion. “Something—I don’t know what.”

“I had business to attend to,” I said.

“We saw the pyramids,” Fikret said. “But for just a little while. Fifteen minutes at the museum. Then the shopping. Women shopping.”

“I was very angry,” Onan said.

I said, “You can’t leave Egypt unless you have a small stuffed camel toy and plaster model of the Sphinx.”

“You see? He is making a joke,” Samih Pasha said. He tapped his nose again, once again drawing attention to its enormous size. “Something, eh?”

Fikret said, “I think Mr. Paul is right. He does his business. He doesn’t waste time.”

“You are going to Jerusalem?” Onan asked me sternly.

“If I have time. Are you?”

Onan sucked his teeth in contempt, to demonstrate the absurdity of my question, and then he said, “The only reason I am on this ship is to go to Jerusalem. Not the pyramids, not the Sphinx. I don’t care about the Nile. But Jerusalem. It is a holy place!”

His tone was just a trifle shrill, combining something military with something obsessional, a touch of the ghazi—the warrior for God Almighty.

“Relax, Onan, of course I’m going to Jerusalem,” I said. “I have the feeling you are making a pilgrimage.”

“It is your feeling,” he said. “I must find a concordance in Israel—for the Bible. I read Hebrew. I am interested in the Bible.”

“Yet I feel that you are a devout Muslim.”

“Once again, it is your feeling,” Onan said. “I believe in the words of the holy Koran. I believe in Heaven and Hell.”

This statement had an effect in the darkness of the Levantine night. We had passed beyond the sea-level lights of the shore and were traveling surrounded by dark water and dark sky, a cosmic journey on a rusty ship.

Fikret was muttering to Samih Pasha. He said, “General Samih knows a joke about hell.”

“Thank you very much,” Onan said tersely.

“A man dies and doesn’t know whether to go to heaven or to Gehenna, as we call it,” Samih Pasha said, smiling broadly. “So an angel comes and shows him two breeches.”

He paused and smacked his lips, to make sure we had taken this in. I thought: breeches? Then I thought: Yes, bridges.

“First breech is Heaven. Very nice. Clean. Peaceful. Seenging,” Samih Pasha said. “Second breech. Man looks. Is Gehenna. Music! Fun! People dancing! Boys! Gorl!”

“‘Weech breech?’ the angel asks him. Man says, ‘Second breech! Thank you very much!’ He find gorl right away. Nice! He begin to make love to her. Nice! But! Something is wrong. He cannot make love. He look—no holes!”

Onan frowned, Fikret squinted. I said, “No holes,” and was interested that this Turkish man should use the plural.

“The man says, ‘Now I see why this is Gehenna!’ ”

I laughed, but no one else did, except the General, at his own joke. Onan continued to glare at him. Fikret said with his usual solemnity, “I understand.”

That night, lying in my cabin, I thought of poor diminished Alexandria, and it seemed logical that it should look that way, after so much of it—streets and buildings and monuments—had been ransacked by writers.

Offshore, twiddling my radio, I got classical music—Beethoven’s violin concerto from the Israeli shore—and remembered that the last time I had heard such music was in Mediterranean Europe. That was not so odd, for after all, Israel is an outpost of Europe. The moral high ground as a refuge and a garrison.

And because of the ethical commitment and the financial burden required by Israel of all Americans it is impossible for Americans to go to Israel and not feel they have a personal stake in it—or more, that Israel owes them something—perhaps an hospitable attitude? Reflecting on the twelve-figure sum of approximately one hundred billion dollars that America has given Israel since 1967, that was my feeling. It was not a number I ever dangled in front of an Israeli, though on deck at the port of Haifa, I said to Samih Pasha, “As an American taxpayer, I think I own that building.” He laughed and later in Turkish Cyprus, a place that is a drain on Turkey’s budget, Samih Pasha said, “That building! I paid for it! It’s mine!”

“Now Paul is going to disappear,” Fikret said.

“Bye-bye,” the General said.

Onan was busying himself with his maps and scriptures, in preparation for his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He looked more intense than ever, and even somewhat feverish, his eyes bright with belief.

The Akdeniz had hired a bus for those Turks who wanted to go to Jerusalem. A number of people had signed up for the trip, but many—as in Egypt—were interested in looking at Ottoman sights, whatever Turkish castles and fortresses they could locate. The passengers on the Seabourne Spirit were offered a four-hour tour of the whole of Israel, called “The Holy Land by Helicopter.” It is a very small place, and so this was not as odd as it sounded, and the helicopter tour took in all the main cities, including Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, and ended at the citadel of Masada—the scene of the famous massacre—with hampers of picnic food, and chilled champagne.

I had no particular plans in Israel, just a general desire to travel down the Mediterranean coast, to Tel Aviv and Gaza; to see Jerusalem; to pay a visit to a writer in Nazareth, who was Arab and Christian and an Israeli citizen. But this was all premature, because when I went into the Akdeniz’s lounge to collect my passport I found myself surrounded by armed men.

“Israeli security,” one man said. “Is this you?”

It was my passport, the page with my goofy picture on it.

“Yes.”

“Come with us.”

I was taken to a corner of the lounge, while the Turkish passengers looked at me with pity. They were the problem, not me. Every one of the other passengers, the whole crew, the officers—from the captain to the lowliest swabbie—every person on board the Akdeniz was a Turk.

“You speak Turkish?” one of the Israeli security men asked.

“No.”

“But everyone on this ship is Turkish.”

“Some of them speak English,” I said.

“Are you traveling with someone?”

“No.”

A man flicking through my passport said, “You have been to Syria.”

“No,” I said. “That visa’s been canceled. I had to pick up my passport early in order to catch this ship. Out of spite the Syrians wouldn’t give me a visa.”

“Why are you the only American on this ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What is your profession?”

I hesitated. I said, “I’m in publishing.”

These men wore pistols, two of them had machine guns. They did not wear uniforms, but they were soberly dressed and seemed very intent on discovering how an American could be traveling alone with so many Turks.

“And now I’m a tourist,” I said.

It hurt me to have to admit that, but I thought generally that tourists got away with murder and that being a tourist was an excuse for any sort of stupidity or clumsiness. You can’t do anything to me—I’m a tourist!

“What are you going to do in Israel?”

“Look around, then leave.”

“What do you have in your pockets?”

“You want to search me?”

A woman approached. She muttered impatiently in Hebrew, and it had to have been, “What’s going on here?” The men muttered back at her, and showed her my passport.

“Yes,” she said. “This ship is Turkish. The people are all Turkish. But you—why are you on board?”

“Because they sold me a ticket.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“Istanbul,” I said.

And at this point, faced by Israeli Security and having questions barked at me, I was on the verge of asking whether this was a traditional Israeli way of greeting strangers: sharp questions and even sharper gun-muzzles in my face.

“What are you doing here?” the woman was asking me, as she leafed through my passport, the sixty pages filled, as you know, with exotic stamps—China, India, Pakistan, Fiji, New Guinea, Rarotonga, Great Britain, Albania. She flipped to the first page.

“Are you the writer?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “I have read your books.” She said something in Hebrew to the security men. “Now I know why you are on that ship.”

“Thank you. Does that mean I can go?”

“Okay. No problem,” she said, and wished me well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Akdeniz, the Cimonoglu family and others were being divested of their passports. “Because we are young—we have the whole family, even children, with us,” the mother, Aysegul, told me later. “They think we want to stay in Israel and take jobs! But we have jobs in Turkey! I will write an angry letter to the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.”

What are you doing here? was a question I usually felt too ignorant to answer. My answer had to be: Just looking.

Curiosity was my primary impulse—sniffing around. But I also wanted to see things as they are, especially the aspects of any country that were likely to change. The look and the feel of a place, the people—what I could grasp of their lives. Politics seldom interested me, because there were too many sides, too many versions, too much concern with power and not enough with justice.

Most of the time I felt like a flea. I could not pretend that I was part of a place, that I had entered the life of it. I was a spectator, certainly, but an active one. I was also passing the time, and there was nothing unworthy about that. Most people like to think they are in search of wisdom. That was not my motive. Perhaps it was all very simple, even simpler than curiosity and that, in all senses of the phrase, I was making connections.

I walked off the ship and around the harbor and looked for the Seabourne Spirit. It was due in Haifa the following week, I was told. That was a pity. I had thought I might see Jack Greenwald again. I continued walking into town to buy some envelopes so that I could send some accumulated books and maps back to myself.

Walking along, I kept seeing the same series of books, the repeated title, The Land of Jesus, Das Land Jesu, La Tierra de Jesus, La Terra di Gesù, La Terre de Jésus.

The woman at the stationery store said, “Nine shekels.”

It was a word I never got tired of. I found it a slushy and comical word, filled with meaning. Shekels was like a euphemism for money, but it had other similar-sounding words in it—shackles and sickles and Dr. Jekyll, all money-lenders’ meanings. It was impossible for me to hear the word and not think of someone demanding money. At this point, I had no shekels.

“You can change dollars into shekels at the bank, or on the street—the black market,” she said. “The rate is three shekels and twenty agorot.”

But when I asked on the street, fierce men—Russians, Moroccans, Poles—said, “Two shekels, ninety agorot! Take it! That is the best price!”

“I want three shekels,” I said, though I did not care. I liked saying the word shekels.

A man selling hard-core porno videos from a pushcart on the street shouted, “No one will give you three shekels! You change money with me!”

The way these Israelis spoke to me had more significance than what they were saying. It was as though they were always giving orders, never inquiring or being circumspect. Other Israelis I dealt with that first day in Haifa were the same, and I noted the tone of voice and the attitudes, because they did not change in the succeeding days.

They were gruff, on the defensive, rather bullying, graceless and aggrieved, with a kind of sour and gloating humor. They were sullen, somewhat covert, and laconic. They seemed assertive, watchful and yet incurious; alert to all my movements, and yet utterly uninterested in who I was. I did not take it personally, because from what I could see they treated each other no better.

This abrupt and truculent behavior surprised me, especially as I had become accustomed in my week on the Akdeniz to elaborate Turkish courtesy, the greetings, the gratitude, the rituals of politeness. Turks almost never raised their voices in polite company, and they had a number of expressions for taking the blame for a mistake rather than risk causing offense. Dealing with other people, Turks tended to seek permission. Casually bumping into someone they said, Kasura bakmayan, “Please don’t notice my mistake.”

Some Israelis were as elaborate and Semitic in these courtesies as Turks and Egyptians had been, but there were few of these. They were silent or else muttering Sephardis, Moroccans, Algerians, Spaniards, with dark expressive eyes, and these people could be very polite. The rest were familiar in a Western way—European, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian; urbanized, exasperated. They sweated, they complained, they peered with goose-eyes and raised their voices. They looked uncomfortable and overdressed; they looked hot.

An address I had to find in Haifa was on Tzionut Street—Zionism Street. About ten years ago it had been called United Nations Street, because at the time Israel had been befriended by the U.N. and this was one of the ways they showed their thanks, crowning a city street with the name of the helpful organization. But in 1981 a resolution was passed by some countries in the General Assembly, equating Zionism with racism. The Israelis were so annoyed, they changed the name of Haifa’s United Nations Street to the hated word Zionism.

I was looking for the writer Emile Habiby, but he was not in his studio in Tzionut Street. He might be out of the country, a neighbor told me. Or perhaps I should try his home in Nazareth.

Haifa had the look of a colony, which is also the look of a garrison. Its new buildings looked out of place—imported, like foreign artifacts—on the heights of the hills, among them Mount Carmel, that bordered its harbor and its sea-level town of merchants. There were of course soldiers everywhere, and many people—not just the obvious soldiers—carried sidearms. The city did not have an obvious religious atmosphere either, and its secularism was jarring after all the expressive pieties of the Islamic world I had recently seen. The most conspicuous place of worship in Haifa was the enormous Baha’i temple—jeered at by Onan as “a ridiculous religion—not even a religion.” (He had the same disdain for Sufism: “They take the Koran and just fly away with it!”)

Just as I was surprised by the offhandedness and the truculence, I was pleased by many other aspects in Haifa that I had not expected. The food, for example. It was the cleanest, the freshest, the most delicious I had found since Italy—but it was less meaty than Italian food, and lighter. It was salads and fish and fresh bread, hummus and ripe fruit, just-squeezed juice and pure olive oil. It was not expensive. Everyone ate well.

The public transport was another pleasant surprise. There was a train to Tel Aviv. There were buses. From the bus terminal in Haifa you could go anywhere, every half hour, and because this was Israel there was not a town or village in Israel that was not reachable in a few hours. Jerusalem was an hour and three quarters. The Dead Sea was two hours. Nazareth was an hour. Tel Aviv about an hour. A bus to Cairo took half a day, which was nothing. President Clinton had just visited the previous week to be present at the signing of the Israel-Jordan Peace Accord. So there were buses to Amman, too.

The intellectual life of Israel was visible in terms of public lectures and bookstores—I had not seen such well-stocked bookstores since leaving Italy. Croatia’s were pathetic, Greece’s stocked school textbooks and women’s magazines, Turkey’s were no use to me, nor were Egypt’s. Israelis sold every sort of book and magazine, in all the languages that Jews spoke, which was almost all the languages of the world. There were museums with rich collections, classical music on the radio and symphony concerts. I like going to concerts, listening to live music; I went to two good ones in Israel. I could have gone to many more if I had stayed longer. Israelis complained of the high cost of living, and the high inflation, but nothing in Israel struck me as being very expensive.

And there was a suburban atmosphere which also made it seem peaceable if not downright homely and dreary. This first impression was borne out by my travels to other towns and cities, for so much of Israel had the texture and pace of a retirement community, and—alone among Mediterranean countries I saw—the whole land was noisy with the persistent whine of air conditioners.

Strangest of all, I felt a sense of safety. Perhaps it arose from the colonial look of the city, and the orderliness of the stores and streets. I never felt at risk—or rather I felt that I was among millions of people who were taking the same risk.

But of course you only feel very safe in Israel if you are ignorant. I did not know it then—I learned it by degrees—but Israel was in a terrible period, one of its worst cycles of murder and retribution. What I took to be somnolence was suspense.

Another thing I learned about Israel: never question a date, because everyone took liberties. A person might allude in one sentence to something that happened last week, and in the next breath he would be in the Bronze Age, quoting the Torah and mentioning Egyptians at the time of Moses, making it all seem like it was yesterday. It was poetic license, but it was often the basis of Israeli political or military decisions. Egyptians claimed that on the walls of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was written “Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile!” It was not merely a misquotation, but a misrepresentation of Genesis 15:18 in which God promises Abram and descendants all land, from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, which is not the Nile but the Sea of Reeds. On the other hand, “God gave it to us” is not usually the equivalent of a Purchase and Sale Agreement.

The same doubtful history and wobbly logic made it normal for Israeli immigrant citizens from Morocco and New York City and Kiev to think of themselves as Israelites, and Israeli life today as a rehash of the Torah, in which the chosen people were taunted and held captive and laid siege to by idol-worshiping pagans. They never used the word “Palestinians”—always saying “Arab” instead, because it depicted an upstart horde and served to make Israelis seem the underdogs (there were so many more Arabs in the Middle East than there were Palestinians). Egyptians avoided the word Arab too. They were part of the same theater of self-dramatization. This was the land of the Pharaohs, they said; they were pharaonic. “We built the pyramids!”

So the Israelis were not alone in taking liberties, but it made life rather confusing for a traveler when Mediterranean peoples were so busy misrepresenting themselves. Most inhabitants of its shores took the most fanciful liberties with their ancestry. In fact, though no one ever said so, the Mediterranean was almost devoid of aborigines.

Anyway, I took the train down the coast from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Israeli Railways was celebrating its centenary. A hundred years ago Israeli Railways did not exist, of course; but who had built this line? Probably the British.

Something that bothered me greatly were the numerous people traveling armed with rifles, usually large and very lethal-looking ones, and pistols. Most of those people were soldiers and one of the characteristics of Israeli soldiers on trains and buses was their fatigue. They always looked sleepy, overworked, and no sooner were they on a seat than they were asleep, and I often found that their weapons bobbled in their arms were pointed directly at me.

This happened on my very first ride, as a soldier in the seat opposite made himself comfortable to sleep, put his feet up and propped his Uzi automatic rifle, so that it was horizontal in his lap, and it slipped as he dozed, and was soon pointing into my face.

I said, “Excuse me,” because I was afraid to tap his arm and risk startling him and the weapon discharging.

He did not wake, but after a while I raised my voice, and asked him to take his rifle out of my face.

Grumbling, without apology, he shifted in his seat and moved his rifle so that it was pointing at the woman across the aisle, who was so engrossed in reading a medical textbook, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, that she did not notice the man’s weapon.

“Now it’s pointing at her,” I said.

He slapped and pushed the rifle, and though it was still not upright as it should have been, he grunted and went back to sleep.

Walking up and down the crowded coach, I counted the weapons: two in the next row, a frenzied man in a white shirt with a nickel-plated revolver, a soldier two rows back with a pistol and a rifle, ditto the soldier next to him, a woman in uniform lying across two seats with her big khaki buttocks in the air and a pistol on her belt, seven more armed passengers farther down. My feeling is that all weapons are magnetic—they exert a distinct and polarizing power, and nearly all attract violence. The gun carrier’s creed is: Never display a weapon unless you plan to use it; never use it unless you shoot to kill.

For the first time on my trip I suspected I was traveling in a danger zone. I had never seen so many weapons. And yet, as I said, I did not feel that I was personally threatened. That was one of the many paradoxes of Israel: it was a war zone and yet it was one of the most monotonous places imaginable.

We passed Carmel Beach, some condos going up, and a sign, “The Riviera of Israel.” It was rubble and rocks and, farther on, dunes. The coast had the look of a shoreline that had been leveled so that it could be defended. There were no obstructions, it was all visible, nowhere for a landing party to hide. In military jargon such a landing was called “an insertion”—a rapid on-shore penetration by stealth under the cover of darkness, men leaping out of small boats and hitting the beach. Many had been attempted, but few had succeeded. The very idea, though, that such military actions were contemplated here made this section of coast south of Haifa unlike its Riviera namesake.

At Binyamina and beyond was the reality of the country—that it was really very empty and underpopulated, that the garrison mentality is strong (people living in places they can defend) and that it was agricultural, intensively cultivated in many places, banana groves set out with precision and order, grape and vegetable fields beneath the green and rocky hills of Har Horshan.

The orchards and citrus groves I had expected to see in Israel were there on the coast near Netanya, with rows of eucalyptus, the gum trees that were used everywhere as giant quick-growing fences and windbreaks. Plenty of fruit trees, and canals, and craters and scrubby ditches; but where were the people? This coast was one of its most populous regions and yet it was thinly settled.

The settlement of Hertzliyya was celebrating fifty years of prosperity, and agriculture flourished there, too. But with such subsidies, so it should have. It seemed to me much more extraordinary that Mediterranean countries that did not receive three billion dollars a year in foreign aid were growing fruit and running schools and defending themselves.

Approaching Tel Aviv, I saw for the first (and last) time on the shore of the Mediterranean a drive-in theater. It was beside the tracks, and also beside the sea. It was advertising a double feature in Hebrew on the marquee.

That was appropriate enough, for no city in the entire Mediterranean looks more like an American concoction than Tel Aviv. It was wrong to compare it (as many people did) to Miami and its tangle of suburbs. Tel Aviv was both more sterile and less interesting, and it was strangely introverted; its streets were lifeless, its different cultures, and its tensions, masked.

So what was it? Tel Aviv had no Mediterranean look, nor anything of the Levant in its design; it was Israeli in the sense that Israeli architecture and city planning is an American derivative. Somewhere on the east coast of Florida there must be a city that Tel Aviv resembles, a medium-sized seaside settlement of ugly high-rise buildings and hotels, a shopping district, a promenade by the sea, not many trees; a white population watching gray flopping waves under a blue sky.

Did the appearance of it mean anything? I spoke to some people in Tel Aviv. I began to think that what was visible in Israel was less important than what was felt.

“You know about the bombing?” a man named Levescu said to me, utterly dismissing a question I had asked him about the look and the texture of Tel Aviv. He waved away what I had said with an irritable gesture. “Twenty-five people! On a bus! An Arab!”

“Yes, I read about it,” I said. “Terrible.”

“Terrible!”

This tragedy had put Tel Aviv in the news for having had one of the worst massacres in recent Israeli history: twenty-five dead, forty-eight people wounded. That had happened only a week before.

“It was revenge, wasn’t it?”

“Revenge—for what? It was murder!”

Some months before, in Hebron, a man named Baruch Goldstein had entered the Shrine of the Patriarchs (a mosque, but also a synagogue, where Abraham, Rebecca, Leah, Isaac and Jacob are entombed) during prayers, perhaps with the connivance of Israeli soldiers—after all, Goldstein was heavily armed—and howled, “No Arab should live in the biblical land of Israel!” He machine-gunned twenty-nine men to death, severely wounded over a hundred men, and was himself beaten to death.

The members of the Palestinian group Hamas (an Arabic acronym but also meaning enthusiasm or ardor or zeal) had vowed revenge. The Tel Aviv suicide bomb was their reply.

“There will be no dialogue with Hamas,” Prime Minister Rabin had said on Israeli television. “We will fight to the death!”

I mentioned to Mr. Levescu that it seemed there would be more violence.

“You didn’t hear the news?” Then he told me.

Three Palestinians had just been killed that morning at a checkpoint in Hebron.

That night watching television in Tel Aviv I saw another killing, and it had taken place either that day or some few days earlier. A videotape taken by a freelance journalist showed an Israeli soldier giving the coup de grace to an injured and unarmed Palestinian. The tape showed the soldier sighting down his rifle and firing a bullet at the struggling man’s head and blasting the skull to pieces. It was explained that the man, Nidal Tamiari, had had a fistfight with the soldier. The military denied that the soldier had shot the man in cold blood. The spokesman said, “He was verifying the kill.”

It was too late to ask Mr. Levescu what he thought, but in any case I had a feeling I knew what he would say. This is war! He had said it often enough in our conversation at the cafe by the sea in Tel Aviv. His sentiments were predictable, and his story was fairly typical.

“We left Romania in 1946,” he said. “Father, mother, brother and me, and sister.”

They crossed the border into Hungary, made their way by train to Budapest, where they hid. They were smuggled to Vienna, then into Germany. They stayed awhile, they received some help, they headed south to France, moving slowly, and once on the coast traveled east, entered Italy and got a train to Bari. A ferry took them to Cyprus. They were among many Jews there, awaiting transfer to Israel. At last they arrived in Haifa. The trip from Romania had taken a year.

“My father joined the Haganah [“Defense,” the Jewish guerrilla army prior to independence] and we were given a house,” he said. “The house is still there in Haifa. Arabs were our neighbors. We visited them. They came to our house. We liked their food better than they liked ours. We ate with Arabs!”

That reminiscence, like the Pilgrim Fathers befriending the Red Indians, and being helped by them, was a frequent detail in stories of Israeli pioneers in Palestine.

“Weren’t you fighting the Arabs?” I asked.

“Other Arabs,” he said. “And British.”

“Which other Jews were here when you arrived in 1947?”

“The first wave had been Russians. Then Poles. Then Bulgarians and Romanians,” he said. “In the 1950s we got Moroccans and North African Jews—Algeria, Tunisia. And others.”

“Americans?”

“Not many from America,” he said. He laughed—not mirth: it was a nervous expression of the Israeli ambivalence towards America. “Americans come here. They look. They smile. They know they have something better.”

“What do you think of America?”

“America is the grandfather of Israel,” he said. Or it might have been “godfather.”

The following day, in Gaza, at the Palestinian settlement of Khan Yunis, a Palestinian journalist, Hani Abed, was blown up by a sophisticated bomb that had detonated under his car when he turned the ignition key. Such a bomb could only have been placed there by the Israeli secret service members, Mossad. It seemed as though what Rabin had said just the other day about fighting to the death was being proven.

This was not denied; on the contrary, it was heavily hinted that this was so by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz (The Land): “Hani Abed … got the punishment coming to him, ‘for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind,’ ” including Hamas in the denunciation.

Wiping someone out and then quoting a bit of blood-spattered scripture (this text from Hosea 8:7 was an old standby) seemed fairly routine. But of course that was not the end of it, for several days later a boy on a bike pedaled past an Israeli checkpoint into Gaza City and blew himself up, along with two soldiers, and he was instantly proclaimed a martyr for the Palestinian cause.

That was an about average week. I happened to be there, writing it down. It went some way towards explaining why the Israeli soldiers were anxious and fatigued, why strangers never chatted in trains or buses, and why the atmosphere was so sullen.

There had been no public expression of bereavement in Tel Aviv over the bus bombing. No flags at half-mast, no wreaths, no ribbons. There were angry letters to the Jerusalem Post in this regard: “What is wrong with us that we cannot express our own grief.”

That did not mean that no one grieved; there had to be great sorrow. But the silence meant there also had to be tremendous resentment, anger and frustration. Out of this bitterness came feelings of revenge, and support for any politician who vowed it (as most did, ad nauseam) to the death. This and the unforgiving attitude seemed an Israeli rather than a Jewish reaction.

There was not much public expression of joy either—not much laughter, no talking on buses and trains, no sense of animation; more a sort of sick-of-it-all, seen-it-all attitude that was laced with suspicion. After dark the Tel Aviv streets emptied, and the same was true of Haifa—almost no nighttime pedestrians. That was a clear sign of high anxiety.

Even Tel Aviv, in spite of its long beach and leafy suburbs, had the look of a fortress, for its militarism gave it the same colonial garrison look that Haifa had. It looked out of place, built on sand, artificial and incongruous. It was both too big and not big enough, and only its traffic and loud music and air conditioners gave it a Miami sound.

I went to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, about a twenty-minute walk from my hotel. It contained a number of works which I had seen elsewhere—rusty shovels (“Untitled #34”), flashing lights (“Neon Fragment”), rags on hooks (“Work in Progress”), and the last resort of the artist barren of imagination, broken crockery glued to plywood (“Spatial Relationships”)—perhaps the splinters and shards of the very plates the artist’s spouse had flung in frustration, crying, “Why don’t you get a job!”

This frivolity did not speak of Israel, but obviously someone—a wealthy person in Tel Aviv—had put up the money for this. One exhibit showed photographs of small naked girls, six- and eight-year-olds, smiling, with trusting faces, sitting with their legs apart. The expression “kiddie porn” did not describe such pathetic trust and violation.

We have all been in such art museums and said, “It makes me mad.” And been told by the ludicrous supporters of such junk, “That’s good. It’s supposed to make you mad.”

But the museum was not a total waste. There was also a one-person show by an Israeli artist named Pamela Levy—photographic paintings, all of them arresting, many of them upsetting. Some were scenes of battlefields, showing dead and dismembered soldiers, and the horror of war. Many were depictions of biblical characters, or Old Testament re-creations of Israeli life, hairy men and chubby women in classic poses. Many of the naked men were shown hooded. “Lot and His Daughters” had a sinister carnality—naked girls and a supine old man, and the painting entitled “Rape” was disturbing most of all because it looked like a form of fooling that was about to turn violent.

The artist Pamela Levy had been born in Iowa in 1949 and had come to Israel in 1976. She was as much of an Israeli as anyone else here, but I felt that her painting said a great deal about the state of mind here: the repression, the aggression, the fantasies, the nakedness, the sexual ambiguity, the terror. Those paintings seemed to offer an insight to the turmoil in the country, and so her art was true.

Later, I had lunch with the Cohens from London. I bumped into them in a restaurant and we talked. They were an elderly middle-class couple, very polite to each other and pleased to be in Israel. It was their annual holiday.

“Every year we come, just about this time,” Mrs. Cohen said. “We’ve seen so many changes.”

“Has Tel Aviv grown very much?”

“I can remember when none of this was here,” Mr. Cohen said. “Are you from London?”

“I used to live in south London,” I said. “Clapham—Wandsworth way.”

“Are there many Jews there?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

And as I was muttering to myself, “How should I know how many Jews there are in Clapham?” it occurred to me that perhaps I had been privy to a secret exchange. When Jews met in safe places each asked where the other was from and said, Are there many there?

“I think there’s a synagogue in Putney,” I said.

“Hammersmith,” old Mr. Cohen said.

Changing the subject, I mentioned that it was my first time in Israel and that I liked the food.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Cohen said. She mentioned several restaurants for me to try. “They’re not very nice but at least they’re kosher.”

The streets were empty at nine o’clock, and Tel Aviv, which advertises itself as “The City That Never Takes a Break,” is not much after dark. It was just a wall of unforgiving concrete; not pretty, not even very interesting, but like the rest of Israel in being clean and orderly and full of public buses. No graffiti, no apparent disorder, and so naive people who were unaware of what was going on were reassured by this appalling ordinariness.

The beach at Tel Aviv continued south to Jaffa where, within a few feet, it turned into an Arab town. But it was not a popular destination. Most people stayed right here at the center of town, and it made me think that this was perhaps more an Eastern European dream of the seaside than an American one, illustrating the Shakespearean solecism, the stage direction in The Winter’s Tale: “the coast of Bohemia.”

I woke early, and called Emile Habiby. He was still out of the country, so I checked out of my hotel and got a ten-shekel bus ticket to Jerusalem. In this week of revenge killings I expected the bus to be filled with soldiers, and it was; but they were asleep, hugging their rifles, and when they woke up they looked cranky. The rest of the bus passengers were the assorted citizens of Israel—Moroccans in track suits, Hasidim in black hats, followers of the Lubavitcher sect whose messiah, recently deceased, was the Rebbe Schneerson. (An exact duplicate of the messiah’s Brooklyn brownstone, down to the iron rails and the aged brickwork, had been built in Jerusalem, so that he would feel at home in the event that he should visit Israel.) There was a woman with a violin and another with a viola, students with textbooks, people with groceries, and pilgrims—but a pilgrim is just another sort of tourist.

Down the highway, into the semidesert and Route One through the rocky hills. But it was all more familiar than it should have been. The guardrails were American-style, and so were the signs and barriers and arrows and signal lights, and all this hardware gave a distinct sense of being in the United States.

The four-lane road passed ravines and steep slopes, some wooded summits. Old-fashioned armored cars and rusty trucks had been left by the roadside as memorials to the men who had died in what the Israelis call the War of Liberation. The vehicles, so old, so clumsy, roused pity. It was rough country, and even with the stands of slender cypresses it looked bereft, as the buildings did by the side of the road, plain, unornamented, with that same garrison look, the flat military facade which was Israeli architecture. Most buildings in Israel seemed as though they had been designed to withstand an attack.

Jerusalem is a city in the hills. The outskirts were steep and suburban, and the higher the bus climbed the denser the buildings. The bus station was like any old bus station, crowded, chaotic, with an added element of anxiety, for violence was an outdoor activity in Israel. Because Jerusalem’s terrain is irregular the streets are twisty and steep. This makes it hard for someone on foot to get a good clear sight of the city—or rather the two cities. The Old City is the Jerusalem of postcards. But West Jerusalem is the city of politics and commerce; it is still being built and settled as the Israeli capital, as though a deliberate challenge to anyone who harbors the idea of internationalizing it.

Asking the way to the Old City, I met an Ethiopian Jew, Negu. The colloquial term for such people was Falasha (“stranger” in Amharic), but it was rejected by them, as obviously contemptuous. He said he would show me the way. He had little else to do. He was not working.

“You could join the army, couldn’t you?”

“I am too old for the army.”

But he was hardly thirty, and as Israel was a country where, of necessity, soldiers were all ages and sizes, I could not understand why this was so.

“Would you be a soldier if they let you?”

Negu shrugged. He did not want to pursue this. He was thin and tall and quite black, with piercing eyes and an odd sloping walk, with a twitch of alertness in it, always seeming to be aware of what was happening around him.

“When did you come here?” I asked.

“Six years ago.”

“From Addis Ababa?”

“My village is eight hundred kilometers from Addis Ababa.”

“This must be quite a change from that.” Eight hundred kilometers had to be the remote bush, the very edge of the country, on one of the scrubby borders—of the Sudan, or Kenya, or Somalia.

We were walking through the busy precincts of West Jerusalem, where there were offices and agencies and shopping districts and hotels. Ahead I could see the domes of the Old City, an ancient skyline, but here it was all bustle—people, traffic, the same hectic anxiety that I had felt in the bus station, an air of apprehension; each person walked just a beat faster, and voices were more insistent and a few octaves shriller.

“In some ways, Israel is better.”

But he was doubtful.

“Better than your village in Ethiopia?”

“In some ways only. In other ways, no. Ethiopia is good.”

“You’re a Jew, though?”

“Yes. I am a Jew. We do not use these things on our head,” he said. He pointed to a passerby wearing a yarmulke.

“You have a family?”

“Yes. Wife. Children,” he said. “We are Jews.”

“Will you stay here?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

He shrugged, the same shrug, irked by my curiosity, wondering who I was and why I was asking.

“That is the gate you are searching for,” he said, and left me.

It was the Jaffa Gate, which took me through the Armenian Quarter to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I went inside, jostled by hurrying visitors, and then walked to the real treasure of the city, Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock and, a little farther on, the Al Aqsa Mosque. There I met Fikret, from the Akdeniz, who had lost the others.

“I was at the Crying Wall,” he said. “I cried!”

“Where is Bible Man?” That was our nickname for Onan.

“He is looking for Hebrew books,” Fikret said. “He has already bought one for sixty dollars.”

We walked together through the Lion’s Gate, to the edge of the Mount of Olives. Fikret reminded me that this was a city that was sacred to Muslims, which all believers tried to visit.

Jerusalem was a little jewel in the hills, a lovely city, certainly one of the most beautiful I had seen on my trip. But as a place of pilgrimage, inspiring a sort of breathless pilgrim, eager to possess it, with that special intensity, Jerusalem merely glittered for me. I found myself resisting its power to cast enchantment. Praying there seemed like theater, requiring a suspension of disbelief or a self-conscious fakery. And the city was a symbol. In Israel symbols were always useful shorthand, and so they were chosen as targets—they were exaggerated, or destroyed; either way, they lost their reality.

Fikret stayed, saying he was going to look at the mosque again. I decided to return to Haifa. Back at the bus station I tried to buy a ticket to Gaza.

“No, no, no,” the ticket seller said, and waved me away.

I asked a policeman. He shook his head. He said that, because of the recent shootings and bombings, the territories were closed. I would not be able to get through a checkpoint at the border.

“That’s too bad.”

“That is not bad,” he said. “You are lucky you can’t go to Gaza. It is dangerous.”

At the bus station, asking directions, a man heard me speaking English and took me aside. He was thinking of emigrating to the United States. Did I know anything about Orlando? He wanted to become a driver there—not necessarily a taxi driver, but something a little more colorful, perhaps a limo driver.

“I think I could be a success there, with my English accent,” he said.

It was true, he had the ghost of an accent, but though his reasoning seemed preposterous, I said, “Sure, they’re bound to think you’re David Niven, but how is Israel going to manage without you?”

“There’s no money here,” he murmured, and slipped away.

To reassure myself that the Akdeniz would not leave Israel without me I talked to the purser. No, the day after tomorrow, he said; and so I was free to go to a concert, the Haifa Symphony Orchestra: Elgar’s “Introduction and Allegro for Strings,” Tippett’s “A Midsummer Marriage,” Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini,” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony in C.”

Afterwards I saw six decorous prostitutes crouched at the corner of Sederot Ha’atzma’ut and little Lifshitz Street, and they were laughing and making kissing noises at me. I attempted to talk to them—they were bound to be fluent in English—but realizing that I was not interested in anything else they turned away. Besides, they saw some potential customers hurrying along, two young Hasidic Jews with big black hats and black frock coats, velvet yarmulkes, side-curls and black pants tucked into black socks. They walked in a flapping flat-footed way, and quickened their pace when they saw the prostitutes, who just laughed.

I followed the Hasidic boys for a while, just to see where they were going—up to Mount Carmel or over to the crumbling buildings of Wadi Salib. Seeing them in the bus or the train, in the desert heat, these black-suited and bearded Hasidim always made me perspire. Dressed for chilly nineteenth-century Poland, they made no allowance for being in the desert of the Middle East. They also seemed out of place because Israel was so secular—Christian or Orthodox churches were more numerous in Haifa than synagogues. People were polite but pieties were rare, courtesy scarce. It was not rudeness; it was more a sort of truce. Everything was practical and measured. What was the fear? Was it that generosity, which is also goodwill, exposed you to strangers and thereby put you at risk?

Back at the Akdeniz all the Turks were on board. They were relaxing. After the tension and the seriousness of Israel, these Turks seemed the soul of jollity. The food was Turkish, the music was “Arabesque” syncopation and Turkish movie themes. It was at a distant pier, a twenty-minute walk from Gate Five, Port of Haifa, the turnstile where we had to show our passports. For the passengers, the ship was Turkey.

I was still reading the Trollope novel, Dr. Wortle’s School, about the fuss in an English village over an apparent impropriety. Tonight the embattled doctor was reflecting, “It is often a question to me whether the religion of the world is not more odious than its want of religion.”

Emile Habiby had arrived back in Israel. When I telephoned him he said that he would get into his car and meet me in Haifa. I protested—no, he had jet lag. I would come to Nazareth. On my map, Nazareth was about halfway to the Sea of Galilee—about thirty-five miles, less than an hour.

“But how will I find you?”

“Everyone knows me. Just ask anyone, for Habiby sofer.” Sofer is writer in Hebrew.

I found a taxi driver, Yossi Marsiano (“Like Rocky Marciano”). He was a Moroccan Jew, from the north Moroccan town of Ouezzane. He was edgy and impatient. He had a way of grinning that showed no pleasure at all, only pure hysteria. I told him Habiby’s name.

“He’s an Arab?”

“He’s an Israeli.”

This was true, and more than that he was a Christian and a Palestinian as well. Yossi was confused, and for a moment it looked as though he regretted having agreed to take me. Then he told me to get into the car, and to hurry.

“How much?”

We agreed on one hundred and sixty shekels.

“Get in. We go,” he said. “In, in.”

Leaving Haifa and passing the populous bluff of Mount Carmel that dominates the city, it was impossible not to think of Habiby. He had written about those specific heights a number of times in his novel Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter (translated by Peter Theroux, 1995). One of the glimpses is fanciful, Mount Carmel as “a bull with its snout turned up, ready to lunge at a matador come to him from the land of Andalusia. He disregards him in anticipation of matadorial carelessness; if he ignores him, thebull will not give him a moment’s respite…. [But] he is as patient as the Arabs.”

In another part of the novel, Mount Carmel is remembered by the narrator as the wilderness of his childhood, “still a virgin forest, except for its lighthouse, which was, in our eyes, closer to the stars in the heavens than to the houses of Wadi al-Nisnas…. The wild melancholy of al-Carmel took our breath away.” Returning hopefully, he sees it as it is today, a promontory covered with apartment houses and condominiums, and fenced-in mansions. It is now denuded of trees; gone are the flowering plants, the terebinth, hawthorn, fennel and paradise apple that had protected it. The old spring has dried up, and the narrator reflects on “how mountains die—how Mount Carmel is dying!”

It is an oblique reference to the way that modern Israel has spread its new buildings over an ancient landscape, turning familiar contours into unrecognizable (and unmemorable) urban sprawl. The growth was still in progress. No sooner had Yossi and I reached the north end of Haifa than we were in a traffic jam.

“Road fixing,” Yossi said.

While he reassured me that this was nothing, a matter of minutes, he continued to fret. That was an Israeli paradox, a person obviously troubled and anxious saying, “No problem!” Yossi was fretful. We inched along. He banged the steering wheel in anger and became self-conscious and said in his unconvincing way, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

I was not worried. Nazareth was not far. But to take Yossi’s mind off the traffic jam I asked him how he had come to Israel. Every Israeli had a migration story. In the 1950s, Yossi’s parents had not seen any future for themselves as a minority in the remote Moroccan town of Ouezzane, surrounded by Arabs, and so they had decided to take their small children and settle in Israel.

On the surface, it was a back-to-the-homeland story, but where was the work? Where was the money? It was all right for Yossi’s father, who was a bank clerk, but Yossi and his brother did not discern any bright new Israeli dawn. The brother moved to Los Angeles and prospered. So much for the homeland as a refuge.

“I went to Los Angeles to visit him,” Yossi said. “In California you can’t walk on the street. Just Mexicans walk. Everyone else drives.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Yes! I was there! No one walks!”

“But your brother is happy there, right?”

“Right. And I want to live there. I want to work, get a Green Card. But how can I, if I can’t walk on the street?”

Impatient in the stalled traffic, he had become shrill. I decided to agree with everything he said about the United States, no matter how offensive or inaccurate it was.

“Manhattan is better. You know that.”

“It sure is,” I said.

“Too many Jews in Manhattan,” Yossi said, his grammar slipping. “That is good. I talk to the Jews, they talk to me. I think, maybe I go there and get some money. Here is no money.”

“But this is the Jewish homeland, isn’t it?”

“No money here,” he said, smacking the steering wheel. And he started to grumble. “America is dangerous. Guns. Trouble. Why I want to go there?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Because here is bureaucracy,” Yossi snapped back. “Office. Papers. Application. Permission. ‘Hello—No, sorry, is closing, come back in two hours.’ ‘Come back tomorrow.’ ‘Come back next week.’ ‘Sorry I cannot help you.’ ‘You pay one hundred shekels.’ ‘Officer is not here now.’ ‘Where is your papers—you have no proper papers.’ This is shit!”

It was quite a performance, and it certainly convinced me. I shut my mouth and let him fume until the traffic eased. But he was soon chattering again.

“This Habiby sofer—he is an Arab, you say?”

“He’s an Israeli—Christian. Born in Haifa,” I said, and resisted adding, Unlike you, Yossi.

“More road fixing!” Yossi said.

More traffic, a bottleneck; an hour went past, and then we were on our way, in a road that skirted a large village.

“That is an Arab city,” Yossi said.

“What is its name?”

“I don’t know.”

I saw from my map that it was Shefar’am—small houses on a hillside, sprawling further, some animals grazing in the foreground; not much else.

“No streets, no numbers, no names—like this Habiby. ‘Ask for me—ask for sofer.’ No number, no street. In Haifa you can go anywhere—too easy. Jews have numbers!”

“I’ll try to remember that, Yossi.”

As the obstacles increased, Yossi became shriller and in his shrillness more anti-Arab.

“Look at the houses—not clean! The streets this way and that! No numbers!”

The road to Nazareth became narrower, the line of traffic slower, and Nazareth itself across the desert and occupying a high hill was like a distant vision, almost a mirage. It was physically different from any other of the places I had seen in Israel, not just the style of house, but the way they were piled up, some of them leaning, the look of accumulation over the years, added rooms and windows, wall upon wall, the layers of tiled roofs. The foundations were ancient, but higher up, the third or fourth story was more recent. It was the sort of growth that was characteristic of wonderful old trees—fragile shoots on young branches that crowned a thick immovable trunk. Nazareth had that same grip on its hill—it was something venerable, with deep roots, still growing.

People worked outside in Nazareth, too—some of them were the sort of occupations that were usually pursued in the open air in the Middle East—carpentry, wood carving, car repair; but there were men fixing televisions and painting signs, too. They were banging dents out of car fenders, and selling fruit, and stacking bricks. Unlike the indoor existence that people lived in Jewish Tel Aviv or Haifa, life in Muslim Nazareth spilled into its streets.

That was another difference between Jews and Palestinians. It annoyed Yossi.

“You see? Just people everywhere, and not clean, and what are they doing?”

They were working, they were sitting, they were dandling babies, they were exuding an air of possession and belonging.

“Look over there,” Yossi said, and pointed to the east, another settlement, an extension of Nazareth, but newer, with whiter buildings and tidier roofs and emptier streets, the Jewish settlement of Natseret Illit.

“Jews! Jews! Jews! Jews!” Yossi said.

We started up a hill (“Too many cars! All these Arabs have cars!”), entered an area of twisty streets (“So dirty!”), continued to climb (“Houses have no name, no number—like Morocco Arabs”) and yelled at passersby, “Habiby—sofer!”

The name did not ring any bells with the passersby.

We kept going. Sunshine turned to twilight. Dusk gathered. The dust of Nazareth was reflected in car headlights and people and animals wandered in the road (“Arabs!”). The lights did not help; their glare made it harder for us to see, and finally in the interior of the upper town, instead of illuminating the road the lights blinded us.

“Haifa is not like this! Look at Arab streets!”

He was ranting and it seemed we were truly lost when he asked a man and woman where Habiby lived and they said in a Scottish accent that they had only been in Nazareth for two days and had no idea.

“Forget it. Let’s go back to Haifa. We’ll never find the house.”

“You must find your friend!” Yossi screamed, making a U-turn in the dark. “And I must smoke a cigarette!” He was very upset. He screamed again incoherently. He was saying, “Don’t worry!”

The only lighted doorway on this street was a bakery. A man in flour-dusted overalls stood holding a squeeze bag of frosting and was using its nozzle to decorate some jam tarts. He had not heard of Habiby, but he said in Arabic, “Why don’t we call him and ask him directions?” He did so. The street was not far, he explained. He sat down and smacked some flour out of a shallow cardboard box and turned it over. Very slowly, he sketched a map on the bottom of the box. Then he handed this box to Yossi, and off we went, higher, almost to the top of the hill of old Nazareth.

Emile Habiby’s house was large and rambling, set among others on a steep hillside, filled with people, mostly women and children, all of them Habiby. The author had three daughters and ten grandchildren; his first great-grandchild had just arrived.

He sat, the patriarch, surrounded by this energetic family. He was seventy-three, stocky, even bull-like, with a heavy sculptured head and a raspy voice and a booming laugh. He had the build of a Mediterranean fisherman—he had worked on a fishing boat out of Haifa for many years; but he was also one of Israel’s intellectuals. He had published a number of novels, among them The Secret Life of Saeed and Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter, and he had won several literary prizes, the Order of Palestine in 1991 and the year before that the Jerusalem Medal. Two previous recipients of the Jerusalem Medal were so outraged at the fact that the prize had been awarded to an Arab that these thinkers (who had been singled out for their contribution to humanity) returned their medals in disgust. The absurdity was much enjoyed by Habiby, whose novels are excursions into the fantastic.

I had encouraged Yossi to come in with me and, welcomed, given a cigarette, he sat calming himself in this Palestinian household, a great nest of Habibys. Cups of coffee appeared and pastries and small children. In the kitchen other children were being fed, and the Habiby women were talking and laughing. I was moved as much by the size and complexity of the family as by its harmony.

And at last Yossi was smiling a real smile. In spite of all of his abuse and his shrieking, we had arrived, and he was happily smoking and we were receiving the best welcome imaginable, with food and compliments and solicitous questions.

There were pictures of Jesus on the wall, and portraits of the Madonna and Child. It was a reminder that this was a Christian family, and such pictures could not have been more appropriate since Nazareth was the home of Mary and Joseph. The Basilica of the Annunciation had been built over the house of St. Anne, and even Joseph’s workshop had been discovered and excavated in Nazareth, and there it was for all the world to see, the workshop of the best-known carpenter in Christendom.

“It’s good of you to come all this way,” Habiby said. “Though you know I would have come to Haifa to see you.”

“Yes. But I found the trip out here interesting,” I said. Especially when Yossi had pointed to the Jewish settlement of Natseret Illit and howled, “Jews! Jews! Jews! Jews!”

We talked about the tension since the massacre in Hebron. Habiby had written an article in The New York Times about it in which he had said, “One cannot go on pretending that nothing has changed,” and that the error many Israeli leaders and politicians had made was in refusing “to tell their people that they must reach out to the Palestinians; they have nobody else to rely on in the long run.” He was encouraged by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’s condemnation of the assassin Goldstein.

What had happened afterwards had been inevitable, since both sides vowed retribution. But his view was that both Palestinians and Israelis had a duty “to stand up to our own extremists.”

“There is an old Arab saying,” Habiby said, “that the Jews celebrate their feasts around gardens, the Christians around kitchens, and the Muslims around graveyards.”

A peace conference was going on at that moment in Casablanca, to which Yitzhak Rabin had been invited. I asked Habiby what he thought of the Israeli prime minister’s contribution.

“He talked too much. He should have proceeded slowly,” he said.

“You mean he was demanding too much?”

“No. He didn’t realize where he was,” Habiby said, throwing up his hands. “He was in Morocco, not Israel. He was among Arabs. But he talks to these Arabs as though he is talking to his own people.”

He was referring to Rabin’s manners, his characteristic bluster. “Being tough and businesslike, giving orders.”

“That’s it. But a little politeness would have been helpful.”

“I suppose he is feeling confident now that he has made a peace agreement with Jordan.”

“It should still be possible for him to show some politeness,” Habiby said. “Now they are committed. But instead of all this public boasting and all the urgency, why not use a little tact?”

Tact was a scarce commodity in Israel. Suspicion was so ingrained, and fear so common, that every sphere of life was affected, and the absence of faith and goodwill made people brusque. Israelis had struggled to arrive at this point, but life was still a struggle, and they perhaps saw, as Habiby had said, that they had no one else to rely on; the only allies Israelis would ever really have would be the Palestinians.

“Charmless,” I said. It was a word that summed up the atmosphere of Israel for me.

“Yes,” Habiby said, and gestured with his cigarette. “As for the peace agreement, I am not hopeful. I have doubts. But there is no going back.”

He had written, “We, Israelis and Palestinians, are already fated to be born again as Siamese twins … true solidarity with one is contingent on true solidarity with the other. There is no alternative.”

“What brings you to Israel?” he asked.

“I’m just traveling around the Mediterranean. At the moment, I’m on a Turkish ship,” I said. “It’s in Haifa—leaving tomorrow.”

“I have been traveling myself,” he said. “I must stop traveling or I’ll never write anything.”

“I know the feeling. Monotony is the friend of the writer.”

Yossi joined the conversation, first in English, then in Hebrew. Several times I interrupted to say that we ought to be leaving—after all, I had visited on such short notice. More food was brought. We ate. Habiby roared, describing the pompous attitude of Israeli politicians. Yossi nodded—yes, he agreed, it was awful.

Later than I intended, Yossi and I left, the whole Habiby family turned out to see us off and make us promise that we would come back again.

“You see, Arabs? The door is always open,” Yossi said in an admiring way. “We come there, the door is open. Cigarettes for me. Some food, thank you. Coffee, yes. Some more. Please, thank you. Take some extra.”

“You like that?”

“Oh, yes. Is good,” Yossi said. “The Arab door is always open.”

We got lost again, but Yossi was calmer. He stopped and instead of shouting out the window he got out of the car and asked directions. A man said that he would show us the way, if we followed him. We were taken down a dark narrow road through the Balfour Forest, and then on a different route to Haifa.

At Haifa, Yossi was reminded again of the hospitality at Nazareth.

“We lock our doors,” he said. “Jews don’t have open doors. No pastry. No food. No coffee.”

“What do Jews have instead of open doors?”

“Just hello. A little talk. Then good-bye.”

He kept driving, and he had second thoughts. He suspected that he had given me the wrong idea.

“But sometimes an open door is bad,” he said. “You want to talk to your wife, eh? People doing—what is Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“Laughing.”

“Yes. Laughing. It is bad. Open door can be bad. And look,” he said, and nodded at the heights of Haifa just ahead of us, Mount Carmel, the populous cliffs. “Those streets have names. Those Jews have numbers.”

He drove me to the port. He became sentimental again. “It was nice how they served us. Food. Coffee. That was nice,” he said. “You know that man was talking politics to me?”

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him, don’t ask me. I don’t know about politics.”

Instead of eating on the ship I found a restaurant and spent the last of my shekels on a meal. Every meal I ate in Israel was delicious, and I had found the Israeli countryside an unexpected pleasure. The restaurant was almost empty, like the streets; like everything else in after-dark Haifa. Everyone was home, watching TV, doing schoolwork, worrying.

All the Turks were on board the Akdeniz, so eager to leave, and in such a mood of celebration that even from my cabin I could hear them singing, their voices and their plonking instruments vibrating in the ship’s steel hull, making the thing throb with music of the Arabesque.

Sometime in the night I heard the sounds of departure—clanking chains, the lines slipping and straining in the winches, barks in bad English from ship to shore and back again, and then the reassuring drone of the engines and the ship rocking slowly in the deep sea. Then uninterrupted sleep was possible.

Dawn was bright, the glare of a dusty shoreline and a fortress, a Gothic church in the distance among rooftops, Northern Cyprus. It was not a province of Turkey—silly me for thinking so—but a sovereign state, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, bankrolled and backed and guarded by Turkey, the only country in the world which recognizes it. It was about a third of Cyprus. The southern part was Greek, and the Green Line, guarded by United Nations soldiers, divided the two. Ever since this partition there had been peace on Cyprus.

Famagusta had been renamed by the Turks Gazimagosa—the Gazi an honorific term for a warrior, since the town had come through the war with valor. It was a small town, and its port was located in the old part, surrounded by a Venetian wall. It was very ruinous, all of it, and my impression was that Turkish North Cyprus was having a very bad time. Walking slowly with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan, it took us thirty-five minutes to see the whole of Gazimagosa, including the church, which was no longer a church: the Gothic cathedral of St. Nicholas had been turned into the Lala Pasha mosque by the grafting of a minaret onto one of the spires.

“This is it,” Samih Pasha said, tweaking his mustache. “So we go to Girne.”

“You come with us, effendi,” Onan said. “We worried about you in Israel when we didn’t see you.”

Greek Kyrenia was now Turkish Girne. It was about sixty miles away. The four of us found a taxi, and I let the Turks haggle with the driver. They came away saying, “No, no. Ridiculous!”

The driver had said that he could not take us for less than eight hundred thousand Turkish liras. This was $25—an outrageous amount to the Turks. I did not say that it seemed reasonable, because I was curious to know what their solution would be. It was a seventy-five-cent ride in an old bus to Lefkosa (Nicosia), a city that had been bisected by the Green Line. From there we would have to catch another bus to Girne.

On a bus that swayed down an empty road, past unplowed fields in the November heat of Cyprus, the wobbly wheels raising dust, the passengers dozing, the landscape looking deserted and arid—water was scarce, the last harvest had been terrible, the little nation was ignored by everyone—I was thinking how odd it was to be here, traveling across this bogus republic. The bus was uncomfortable, the road was bad, the food was awful, the weather was corrosive. But I had never been here before, which was justification enough; and I felt a grim satisfaction in being with a little Turkish team of men who kept telling me they worried about me when I was out of sight.

It was only an hour and a half to Lefkosa. The onward bus was not leaving for another two hours. In spite of his age, Samih Pasha walked quickly into town. He said he was eager to see the Green Line.

“Have you been here before?”

“Yes, but not on the ground,” he said, smiling. When he smiled his big mustache lifted in a big semaphore of happiness. “I was flying.”

In the ethnic fighting of 1964 and again at partition in 1974, it had been Samih Pasha’s task to fly his F-100 fighter plane from one end of Cyprus to the other, from his air base in Turkey. The object was not to engage Greek planes—the Turkish air force dominated the skies—but to break windows.

“I am flying at ten meters,” Samih Pasha said, “and when I get over Lefkosa I let out the afterburner and make a big noise—an explosion, you can say—and all the windows break!”

“Greek or Turkish windows?” I asked.

“Both! Impossible just to break Greek windows!”

And he described with pleasure the way his fighter jet streaked low across Cypriot airspace, scaring the bejesus out of the Greeks, and reassuring the Turks, who (so it was said on this side of the Green Line) had been systematically oppressed by them.

We walked down one rubbly street and up another, past some shops just closing for the lunch time siesta, to the United Nations checkpoint: a sentry post, a shed, a barrier, and a bilingual English-Turkish sign, STOP/DUR.

“I’d like to pass through,” I said to the soldier in the blue beret who stood holding an automatic rifle.

“No.”

“I just want to see Greek Cyprus and come straight back.”

“It is impossible.”

“You see?” Onan said. The others had watched me. They were much too polite to ask the soldier.

A woman came out of her house nearby and said hello in English. Her house had a colonnade in the front, and a pretty porch. I asked her whether she had crossed the Green Line, which was fifty feet away. No, she said, not for twenty years.

“This house was given to me by my father,” she said when I complimented her on it. “That was in 1930. Over there”—she pointed across the street to some abandoned houses—“was an Armenian family, and some Greeks. But they left.”

“Were they forced out of their houses?” I asked.

She got my point, and without replying directly to the question, she said, “My house in Limassol [in Greek Cyprus] is wrecked. They took my antiques. They took my Mercedes car.”

I was sorry that I had gotten her onto the subject, because the others left me listening to her litany of complaints. I sympathized. This had been a prosperous capital and now it was a wreck of a place, and we stood on a blocked road, among deserted houses, and the old woman was saying, “They won’t find a solution—not soon—”

A wall of atrocity photos was on display, under glass, on the Turkish side of the Green Line. They were blurred and smudged, some of them hard to make out. But the captions told the whole story, sometimes with sarcasm:

—A Greek Cypriot priest who forgot his religious duties and joined in the hunting and killing of Turks

—A Mother and Her Three Children Murdered by Greek Cypriots in the bath of their house in Nicosia

—Mass Grave

—Refugees

—Burned Village

—Frenzied Greek Cypriot Armed Bandit

—Dead bullet-riddled baby—Life was hell for us in 1963–74. We cannot return to those days.

“That is true,” Fikret said. “It was really bad. They tortured people. The Greeks burned Turkish villages. They made us suffer.”

“Aren’t you glad you had General Samih, three-star window-breaker, to help you?”

“This man,” Samih Pasha said, tapping his head and squinting at me, “he is always writing things down. I ask why?”

He had seen me scribbling atrocity captions. I said, “Because I have a bad memory.”

We walked to a restaurant, Sinan Cafe, farther down the Green Line. It was half a cafe, for it had been split in two by a wall that blocked the street; this main north-south road was now a dead end. On the wall a sign said, 1st Restricted Military Area—No Photographs! with a skull and crossbones.

Fikret and I drank a coffee. The owner said, “Want to look over the wall. There’s a good view from upstairs.”

We went to the second floor of his house and peered over the Green Line into Greek Cyprus. I could see ruined rooftops, broken tiles, no people; but in the distance was a tall pole flying the Greek flag, in defiance. As though in reply, from the Turkish side there was a Muslim call to prayers, the long groaning praise of Allah.

“Fikret, what do you think of Greeks?”

“Greeks in Turkey were prosperous, because they were good businessmen,” he said. “We do not hate each other.”

“But Greece is in the EC.”

“They don’t belong there, but neither does Turkey,” he said. “We are still a backward country. Does the EC want another headache?”

The four of us bought fifty-cent bus tickets at the Lefkosa bus shed and went another twenty miles over a mountain range towards Girne, on the north coast. The shoreline was rocky, and the land rose to black and rugged cliffs. Samih Pasha described how Turkish troops had landed just west of here in 1974. He pointed out the caves in the cliffs where they had hidden themselves and ambushed the Greeks, driving them south. We stopped at Bellapais.

“The quietness, the sense of green beatitude which fills this village,” Lawrence Durrell wrote of Bellapais, high above Girne, not far from the Crusader castle St. Hilarion, where Richard the Lionhearted spent his honeymoon. In his house there, described in Bitter Lemons, Durrell began writing his Alexandria Quartet. Nowadays Bellapais is perhaps more remote and dustier than it has ever been, but it is still very pretty. Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.

But the town of Girne had the same look of desolation as the larger settlements I had seen in this embattled corner of the island. Empty streets, scruffy shops, empty hotels. I went to the largest hotel, on the seafront, just to see whether I could make a telephone call. The woman at the switchboard said it was impossible.

“You can’t call outside of here,” she said. “No one recognizes us!”

Samih Pasha and Onan and Fikret commiserated with the woman, saying it wasn’t fair. Yet it interested me that this portion of island in the Mediterranean was regarded as such a pariah that it had no contact with any country beyond its borders; and its greatest enemy was on the other side of the Green Line.

Suddenly Onan said, “We have to go. We will see you later.”

Watching him hurry away with Samih Pasha, Fikret said, “They will go to the Officers’ Club to eat.”

“Onan’s a soldier?”

“I think, yes. Bible Man was in the army before.”

“What about us? Bean soup at some awful place, eh?”

Fikret shrugged. He did not complain. We went to a restaurant and had bean soup and salad and rice. The waiter was perspiring in the heat, his hair plastered to his head. A man carved slices from the upright log of grilled meat chunks called a doner kepab and mocked us for not trying some of the greasy scraps. A beggar woman crawled inside the door and sang pathetically, I am in trouble—Allah sent the trouble to me, until the man standing at the meat log threatened her with his meat fork.

“I want to ask you about marriage,” Fikret said.

Now I knew why he had seemed so preoccupied. I said, “What’s on your mind?”

“I have been thinking about marriage.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-six. But I have never been married,” he said. “How old should the woman be?”

“Have you had a woman friend?”

“A young one. She was twenty-eight, a nurse,” Fikret said. “She was too young for me. I told her to go back to her young man. But she was nice. And she was my height.”

The height issue was important to Fikret. He was rather short. I said, “Why do you want to get married?”

“I don’t like to be alone. I live with my brother,” he said. “He is not married. He is discreet. But—” He leaned closer. “Please tell me what to do.”

“Find a friend, not a wife,” I said. “Don’t think about her age. If you like her and she likes you, everything will be fine. Maybe you will marry her.”

This did not console him. He was still fretting.

“My life is not getting any better,” he said.

“Fikret, don’t look so desperate.”

“I think my life is getting worse.”

We went to a cafe down on the seafront for dessert and were served by a pretty waitress. Fikret smiled. I urged him to talk to her. She was a Turkish immigrant, having fled from “Bulgaristan”—Bulgaria was full of Turks, Fikret said. He named six former Soviet republics as Turkish, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang? “That’s Turkish, too.” He talked awhile with the waitress. But she was married. She had gotten married just a month ago. Fikret shrugged. Just his luck.

“This seems a sad place,” I said, as we walked along the shore afterwards. “Why is that?”

“It is isolated,” he said with such suddenness I realized that the word was in his mind. He felt isolated too, and sad.

On the way back to Gazimagosa, across the plains, Fikret said that one of the most famous Turkish fortune-tellers lived in that town. Her name was Elmas—the Turkish word for diamond—and she was noted for being so prescient that people came from all over to have her read their palms. Not just Turks, but people from many countries.

“They send her plane tickets and money, so that she can visit,” he said. “She knows everything.”

“Let’s find her,” I said. “We can ask her about your future.”

But, looking for her in Gazimagosa, we were told that we were too late.

“After five o’clock Elmas does not say anything,” a Turk in town told us. “You can find her, but she will not speak.”

We walked in the failing light through the town towards the port. When night fell, Turkish Cyprus was in darkness, because electricity was so scarce. Children chased each other in the dark, screeching miserably, the way children in the water howl and thrash, pretending to be drowning.

How strange that a place that had been so important, even illustrious in history, could be so decrepit. The north coast was associated with Richard the Lionhearted, who had led his Crusaders in a victory that gave them command of three castles at the edge of the Kyrenia Mountains, which they held. The Venetians had built the town’s fortifications. The original of Othello had done some of his soldiering here. More recently this eastern coast was noted for its beaches. Lawrence Durrell had written his book Bitter Lemons not far from the spot in Girne where Fikret said, “It is isolated.” Now it was a backwater, with U.N. soldiers guarding the Green Line and twenty-seven thousand Turkish troops hunkered down in the hinterland.

This was one of the few places the Akdeniz stopped, where the local food was worse than that on the ship. At dinner we saw Samih Pasha and Onan, who had just arrived back from Girne and the Turkish Officers’ Club.

Onan said, “I have been feeling bad because we left you.”

“You had to do your duty,” I said. “I had not realized that you were a gazi.”

“I am not a gazi,” Onan said. Samih Pasha had begun to laugh.

I said, “I know it must be important to you to discuss your battles with the other gazis in the Officers’ Club. And of course the Pasha had to do the same, reliving his famous window-breaking attack on Lefkosa.”

I kept it up, jeering at them for abandoning Fikret and me in Girne. Onan remained stern and apologetic. Fikret laughed—it was good to hear: he laughed so seldom.

Samih Pasha peered at me and said, “There is something about you.”

The weather turned windy after we left Cyprus, but there were fierce storms elsewhere in the Levant, the captain told me. Storms could be terrible here. “The waves breaking across the ship, so it is like a submarine.” Alexandria was a difficult harbor to enter in a storm. “One time I spent five days going back and forth, one hundred miles east, one hundred miles west, before we could go in.”

The Akdeniz became for me like a seedy hotel in which I was an old-time resident. A Turkish hotel: the food, the music, the greetings, the courtesies, the wives in their old-fashioned frocks and shawls, the old soldiers, the young boy who spoke English well and was funny, the old woman—possibly crazy—who ranted at me in Turkish, “My name Ali” doing my laundry and overcharging me, then pretending to be surprised when I tipped him, the waiter who looked like Tom Selleck, the barman who said, “The usual?” The round of odd meals, cucumbers for breakfast, big meaty lunches, obscure stews at night.

The General, Samih Pasha, was always at the head of the table. I encouraged him to tell us war stories, and he obliged. His stories usually emphasized the courage of Turkish fighter pilots in NATO exercises. Where accuracy was concerned, the crucial factor in fighter bombing was nerve.

“You have to be brave,” Samih Pasha said. “Going maybe five hundred miles per hour. If you are not brave, you release the bombs too soon. The brave ones release bombs at the last minute for a hit, then count one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, and pull the stick.” He grinned, the tips of his mustache rising. “The G-force take you. Maybe you black out. But you are climbing.”

The Italian pilots were appalling, the Greeks even worse. The Turks on the other hand were so deadly that in a bombing raid of four planes the first two planes obliterated the target, leaving nothing for the last planes to bomb.

Samih Pasha’s high military status as a three-star general had gotten him a special passport. He did not need a visa to enter Germany. He had a multiple-entry visa for the USA. He showed me his military passport.

“Good passport,” he said.

“That’s not just a special passaport,” I said. “That’s a Pasha-port.”

He thought this was screamingly funny, though neither of the other Turks laughed.

At another meal I began baiting them about the Greeks. We had just been to Cyprus and seen the misery of the Turks on this divided island. And what about the Armenians?

“Ignorant people in Turkey might say things,” Fikret said. “But if you live with Greeks and Armenians you see they are good people. You understand them. Prejudice is ignorance.”

“I agree,” Onan said.

“And people who live far away from them have images of them that are untrue. But we like them.”

“But what about their Turko-phobia?” I said.

“That is understandable,” Fikret said. “Why should we blame them? Armenians too—we should understand, though I am sorry to say they believe that part of Anatolia belongs to them.”

In spite of my needling, the only criticism they offered was that it was said that Greeks and Armenians did not trust each other. “But we don’t know if this is true.”

It was relaxing to travel among people with so few prejudices, who were so ready to laugh, who could let themselves be mercilessly interrogated by me. They had a rare quality for people so individualistic—politeness. I also believed Samih Pasha when he claimed that Turkish soldiers were brave. Many had been sent to Korea, to fight on the U.S. side in the Korean war. Some had been captured and, refusing to talk, had died under torture.

I thought I might tap a vein of cruelty if I mentioned capital punishment. Mentioning the candidates in the U.S. elections who had campaigned advocating hanging-and-flogging policies, I asked how they would vote.

“I am a military man—a general,” Samih Pasha said. “All my life my job was to kill people. But I am against all hanging.”

“Because it is cruel?” I asked.

“It is cruel, yes, but it is also unjust,” he said. “That is most important. How can you be so sure? And for people to be sentenced and then wait ten or fifteen years on appeal is horrible.”

“In Iran they do it all the time,” Fikret said.

I said, “We do, too.”

“But not so much,” Onan said.

“Clinton believes in it,” I said, and told him the Florida and Texas figures; that thirty-seven states had the death penalty; and that New York was probably going to get it, as their new governor had promised it.

The Turks were silent. Samih Pasha said, “Terrible.”

That night the storm grew worse, and Istanbul was still two days off. Fikret got seasick. “I don’t like this weather,” he said. “I think I should get off the ship in Izmir.” It was not only a rough sea, with a stiff wind, the air temperature had dropped. Just a few days ago we had been in the heat of Haifa, and now everyone was wearing heavy clothes and complaining.

The Turkish songs in the lounge after dinner were tremulous and plangent and repetitive, and all of them in their lovelorn way reminded me (in Samih Pasha’s translations) of how long I had been away. The musicians played: a drum, a zither, a violin, a clarinet; and the sad woman sang,

The months are passing

—

I am waiting.

Why don’t you come?

Don’t leave me alone …

The Turks sat mournfully listening, eating ice cream, drinking coffee.

Every night

I want to stroke your hair

Every night

To touch it

Your hair

Every night

At Izmir I hurried into town and called Honolulu and was reassured. I strolled to the bazaar and sat under a grape arbor and had lunch, a fish kebab and salad. I read an item in the Turkish Daily News that the government was thinking of doing away with “virginity tests on female students and the expulsion of ‘unchaste’ ones from school.” Virginity tests?

In the afternoon the Akdeniz sailed into another storm, and Fikret hugged himself in misery on deck, regretting that he had not gotten off at Izmir and taken a train back to Ankara. With fewer people on board (half had disembarked at Izmir, including Samih Pasha and Onan) the ship had a somber air; and the cold weather made the mood bleak. The next day in the iron-colored Sea of Marmara under a gray sky it was even worse.

I stood with Fikret at the rail. This sea air, however cold, was fresher than the foul air down below on this ship of chain-smokers. We passed Usküdar, where Florence Nightingale had tended the sick during the Crimean War; it was now a prison. That gave me an excuse to ask Fikret the ultimate Turkish question.

“Do you think they torture people in Usküdar?”

He shrugged. The movement of his shoulders meant “probably.”

“How do you know?”

“All countries torture,” he said.

I let this pass. I asked, “What do they do in Turkey?”

“Beating on the feet—bastinado,” he said. The word was precisely right, and I was amazed that he knew it. “Also electricity and hanging by arms.”

“This would be, what? Crucifixion?” I said, as blandly as I could manage.

“Whatever,” he said. “To get information.”

I said, “But people lie under torture, so what good is it?”

He got agitated, and his seasickness made him groggy. He repeated that everyone did it. He said, “The Germans executed the whole Baader-Meinhof gang in prison and then called it a mass suicide!”

“I think it was suicide.”

“The British government tortures Irish people!” he said.

“They used to,” I said. “But it was sleep deprivation—keeping prisoners awake at night to question them. And I think they used noise, too.”

“That is worse than the bastinado!” Fikret cried. “That can make you lose your mind!”

He looked at me reproachfully. He was seasick and upset, and I had offended him by taking advantage of our friendship to ask him nosy questions. But that was the nature of my traveling: a quest for detail, conversation as a form of ambush, the traveler as an agent of provocation.

The mood passed as Istanbul came into view, a whole hill of exotic features—the palace, the minarets, the domes, the steeples, the tower; and below it the bridge, and the water traffic in the Golden Horn.

“I am going home,” Fikret said.

“I hope you find that woman you’re looking for.”

“Yes,” he said, and gulped as he tried to swallow his anxiety. “And where are you going?”

“Two weeks ago I was headed for Syria, when I saw this ship leaving and decided to join it,” I said. “Now I really am going to Syria.”

15

The 7:20 Express to Latakia

There was undoubtedly a more hallucinogenic experience available in poppy-growing Turkey than a long bus ride through Central Anatolia, though it was hard for me to imagine what this might be after a twenty-three-hour trip in the sulfurous interior of a bus of chain-smoking Turks, as day became twilight, turned to night, the moon passing from one side of the bus to the other, gleaming briefly in the snow of the Galatia highlands, fog settling and dispersing like phantasms, glimpses of dervishes, day dawning again, another stop, more yogurt, children crying in the backseats, full daylight in Iskenderun, rain in Antioch, all windows shut, the stale smoke condensing in brown bitter slime on the closed windows as fresh blue fumes rose from forty-nine burning cigarettes in this sleepless acid trip on the slipstream of secondhand smoke.

Being Turks, the smokers were courteous. I was repeatedly offered a cigarette. Yes, plenty for you—please take two!

On a train I would have been scribbling. That is impossible on a bus, which is only good for reading. I was jammed in a seat, with a pain in my lower back that crept to my shoulder blades as we bumped from Ankara to Adana. I retreated into books. I reread the whole of Hindoo Holiday. I read Maugham’s short novel, Up at the Villa. I read Myles Away from Dublin, by Flann O’Brien. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

In the blue haze of cigarette smoke I reflected on how I had been warned not to take this long route through Turkey.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I asked.

“That the bus will be stopped by Kurds and you’ll be dragged out and held hostage,” said my knowledgeable friend.

That happened frequently in southeastern Turkey, near enough to my route for me to be alarmed. Also, I was headed for Syria, a country very friendly towards the embattled Kurdish people.

“Gechmis olsen. May it be behind you.”

But it had seemed a matter of urgency that I leave. Istanbul was also having its problems. In the previous few days in the Istanbul suburb of Gaziosmanpasha there had been a riot between Muslim fundamentalists and the somewhat schismatic and more liberal-minded Alevi sect. The matter had started with a drive-by shooting—fundamentalists plinking at Alevis at a cafe. Two Alevis dead. Then rival mobs gathered. Twenty-one people had been killed and many more wounded, mostly by the police and commandos who had intervened. Encircling the rioting mobs, the police began firing at each other, like Keystone Kops using live ammo.

The funerals that followed were massive parades of screeching mourners, and hundreds and police and soldiers. At the same time more riots broke out on the Asian side of the Bosporus, at Umranye. That resulted in eight dead, twenty-five wounded and “400 listed as missing”—so the local newspaper said. There was more rioting in Ankara: more funerals, much more disorder. Buses and ferries, bearing furious or sullen passengers, heading from the Asian side were halted and turned back. In other parts of Istanbul there was fighting between fundamentalists and Alevis.

“A foreign power is behind this,” said Mrs. Çiller, the Turkish prime minister. She meant Iran, but Greece was also blamed for “withholding information.”

“What next?” I asked my Turkish friends.

“After Friday prayers tomorrow there’s supposed to be trouble, when people come out of the mosques.”

I said, “Then I think I will leave on Friday, before prayers.”

The ticket from Istanbul to the Syrian border was $25. It seemed a bargain until the bus filled with smoke. And because the weather was cold, the windows stayed shut.

“Ten years ago this was all open fields,” a Turk on the bus named Rashid said to me.

It was all high-rise housing now, and no trees, and in the bare stony fields tent camps had been put up by Gypsies—the tents made of blue plastic sheeting—and these urban poor, with their ponies and dogs, fought for space with the Turks in the tenements.

These were the Alevi neighborhoods. Rashid was a believer. Among his beliefs was metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Rashid as a good Alawite might be reborn as a star in the Milky Way. A bad Alawite might end up back on earth as a Christian or a Jew. He worshiped sun and fire—a legacy of Zoroastrianism. Orthodox Islam was based on five pillars—prayers, the Hajj, the Ramadan fast, charity and the confession of faith. Rashid rejected these. It was only later, in Syria, that I was told that one of the more peculiar Alawite beliefs is that women do not possess souls. It seemed just as peculiar to me that Alawites believed that men, and especially Alawite men, had souls.

Altogether it was not surprising, perhaps, that the fundamentalists, who had contrived to follow an equally bizarre but different set of beliefs and symbols, had declared war on them.

Speaking of symbols, the bus passed a market where a man was selling cucumbers. The cucumber is a potent symbol in Turkey. Hiyar—cucumber—is a synonym for penis. One of my Turkish friends had said to me, “No one uses the word cucumber in Turkish, because of the vulgar associations.” It was a bit like an English speaker being very careful to give a context when using the loaded word “balls.” But in Turkish a whole set of euphemisms was substituted for cucumber. Most people called them “salad things” (salatalik) so as not to offend polite taste.

Every so often there is a bomb scare in Turkey, sometimes involving the American Embassy. A telephone threat is made, a location is described. A man describing himself as a bomber hangs up. Then the counterterrorists go into action. Sophisticated thermal imaging equipment is brought to bear on an ominous-looking parcel left in a doorway. As many as a hundred men might have surrounded the parcel, to provide cover for those disarming it. In many instances the bomb-disposal experts find a large ripe cucumber in the parcel, with a note saying, This is what you are!

A television set at the front of the bus began showing a violent video of a sub-Rambo sort, all explosions, gunfire, and mutilation. I read Hindoo Holiday. I gagged on the cigarette smoke. The smoke gave me a headache. If the bus were stopped by Kurds they would look for a foreigner (so I was told) and find only me. I would be held captive and used with the utmost brutality. I wondered whether the Kurds smoked. If not, being their prisoner did not seem so bad.

After dark, at a cold windy pit stop, I bought a glass of yogurt.

“What did you pay for that?” Rashid asked me.

“Twenty thousand,” I said. Fifty cents.

“Life is so expensive here,” he said. “In Antakya you could get that for eight thousand.” Twenty cents.

He was making a return trip. He had arrived in Istanbul the day before to receive an order for his metalworking shop in Antakya. To save money he slept at the bus station and came straight back. He hated Istanbul anyway.

“And these,” he said, waving a pack of cigarettes. “Fifty thousand! Go ahead, take one—”

I read Up at the Villa, in which a pretty widow gets a proposal of marriage from a distinguished man about to take an important post in India. She needs time to think about it. The man departs. That night the woman goes to a party, where a young rascal proposes marriage to her. She laughs at him, saying she does not believe in love, but would like to use her beauty and make an unfortunate man happy for just one night. That same night she picks up an impoverished man who had been a waiter at the party. She takes him to her villa, prepares a meal for him, makes love to him, and then tells him why. The young man is so insulted he shoots himself. She panics and calls the rascal, who helps her get rid of the body. The distinguished man is scandalized when he hears what has happened, and the pretty widow ends up with the rascal, who spirits her away before the body is found.

I liked the idea of a great scheme (marriage to an ambitious and successful man) being undone by a single unthought-out act, but this frantic night was unbelievable. And I objected to the book because it did not sufficiently remove me from the irritating reality of noxious smoke and bad air and coughing passengers in the lurching bus.

Into Ankara, out again, through mountain passes, under snowy cliffs, past cold fields where low fog had gathered in ghostly wisps, and onward between black crags, and above it all a huge ivory cue-ball moon.

“I worked in Saudi Arabia,” a man named Fatih told me at another pit stop in the darkness. “I went to Mecca and Medina.”

“So you made the Hajj?”

“No, no, no. If you do that, you can’t drink alcohol and whatnot afterwards.”

He would purify himself with a Hajj some other time, when he was older, and past any carnal desire.

We eventually came to the middle of Turkey, Tuz Golu, a great lake, with the moon gleaming upon it; and another stop at two in the morning in cold clammy Aksaray, an area well known for its desolation and monotony and mud houses. I stood and stamped my feet and took deep breaths, and then reboarded and read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of neurological case histories. It was a salutary book—Oliver Sacks is full of sympathy for afflicted strangers and he usually determines that these people have developed strengths and gifts as compensation for the supposed defects. Also: “There is often a struggle, and sometimes more interestingly a collusion between the power of pathology and creation.” That was certainly true. If you were happy and normal why would you ever want to write a book? Indeed, why would you be on this bus at all? There was an aspect of dementia to the act of writing as there was to a desire to travel, but as Sacks pointed out, dementia was nothing to be ashamed of, and indeed was often a useful spur to imaginative or creative acts.

As I read this book, dayspring in the shape of a rising tide of pinkness gathered in the sky over the low hills of Anatolia, and the moon still showed in the clear sky. Then, towards Adana, bright daylight heated the bus, and field-workers and vegetable pickers traipsed down the road all bundled up, carrying hoes. Farther on, people bent double were already working in the fields. This green and fertile part of Turkey was chilly and sunny and flat, in the delta of the Seyhan River, the tucked-in corner of the Mediterranean, next to the Bay of Iskenderun.

Iskenderun itself, its puddled streets lined with thick palm trees, lay at the foot of a range of the dark Amanus Mountains, and beyond its small houses, and its onion fields, was the sea again, small waves slapping, the surface hardly disturbed, like the shore of a lake. It was the old sloppy Mediterranean Sea, not a body of water with many moods, but looking shallow and tame and almost exhausted. There was no fishing here, not even any swimming. And this place which Alexander the Great had founded after a great battle—until fairly recently it had been known as Alexandretta—was just a little tiled-roof town. Its beach, littered with windblown trash and dumped junk, was also reputedly the place which, when “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomitted Jonah upon the dry land,” the land that was this very beach. But here, as elsewhere, the sea is now no more than a backdrop to olive groves and fruit trees.

This province, Hatay, is disputed. The Syrians claim it as rightfully theirs, but the Turks control it. The people themselves speak a heavily guttural Arabized Turkish, and the markets both in Iskenderun and in Antakya—where I gave up and got off the bus and staggered, followed by hawkers and small boys, through the market to a hotel—seemed as Middle Eastern as it was possible to be, without many veils.

Recovering from the bus ride to this town on the border of Syria, I stayed here in Antioch (Antakya) for a night, and the next day hiked from monument to monument—the Roman bridge, the mosque and aqueduct, the Church of Saint Peter. There were ruined fortresses outside of the town, and one of them, the Castle of Cursat, had been built by crusaders.

More impressive to me than anything else was the market at Antakya, which was almost medieval in its bustle and its mud, small boys quarreling and fooling among the fruit stalls and meat markets, and the full floppy costumes of the country people, the women in pantaloons and shawls, the men in beards and gowns. The commerce was brisk—the selling of fruit and fish, the retailing of tonics and potions—and it was also a meeting place of people from the mountains and the seashore, from Turkey and Syria and Lebanon. It was not a covered bazaar but rather a large area of rough ground, where people were yakking and striking deals and watching staticky television and talking over bundles and sacks of lemons and heaped-up blankets, as boys rushed around selling glasses of tea on trays, or barrows of dried fruits and nuts. Cripples, beggars, beards, deformed people with boils and knobs on their faces, all the sects of Islam, and mud puddles and flaming braziers and the sizzle of meat, and a great sense of filth and life.

In this remote place people came up to me, and it was either a shaven-headed boy or else a hobbling old man, and they greeted me in Turkish, asking “Saat kach?”—What time is it?—because I was wearing a wrist-watch. I was perversely gratified because they had asked in Turkish, which proved that my long bus trip had had the effect of making me seem somewhat Turquoise, as rumpled and muddy as the rest of them. So I went about feeling anonymous and happy. The disciples of Jesus spent a year in Antioch preaching and it was in Antioch (Acts 11: 26) that, perhaps in answer to a puzzled question, “What sort of Jews are you?” they first began to call themselves “Christians.”

Looking for another bus to the Syrian coast, I was told that the western border was closed and that I would have to enter Syria by the Bab el Hawa—the Gate of the Wind—and proceed to Aleppo, before heading for Latakia, on the coast. It was hundreds of miles out of my way, but it was all right with me. I had heard that Aleppo was a pleasant place with a famous bazaar. And there was a railway train from there through the mountains to the Mediterranean.

There were only four of us on the Aleppo bus. Turks are not welcome in Syria, and not many Syrians ever get across the border. I sat with Yusof, a talkative and untruthful-seeming Tunisian who gave me several conflicting reasons for going to Syria.

“See this? Tunisian passport,” he said, shuffling the thing. “And this is an Iraqi passport. Why? Ha! You have so many questions.”

But even when I stopped asking questions he volunteered some strange information.

“I have a U.S. visa. I have lived in Verona. You speak Italian? Buon giorno! I sell gold—no, not always.”

The young couple were Turks from Bulgaria. They sat, holding hands, looking nervous.

We passed through a pretty countryside, the road just wide enough for one vehicle, poplars and stone cottages and plowed fields, and soon the Syrian border—the no-man’s-land, fenced with barbed wire, the meadows filled with crimson poppies and leggy asphodels.

“That is a Kurdish village,” Yusof said, indicating a cluster of huts. How did he know that? Farther along the narrow road he said, “Mister, have you been to Israel?”

I hedged, and denied it, and Yusof smoked and told me a few more lies, and the bus broke down.

The problem was the fuel line. The driver yanked up the floorboards and played with some rubber tubes, blowing on them. An hour passed. I got out and marveled at the wildflowers, and then sat and scribbled some notes. Another hour passed. The sky was gray. Surely the border would be closed if we waited too long? I was pacing up and down the side of the road, though the others, fatalistic Muslims, simply sat and waited.

“Yusof, why don’t we flag down the next car that comes through and take it to the border?”

“Best thing, mister, is be very careful,” he said. And he pointed cautiously and became conspiratorial. “Over there is Syria. That is another country. You hear what I am saying? Another country. So we wait.”

The driver tried the engine. It farted and died. He kept trying, stamping on the accelerator, twisting the key. I reckoned that very soon the battery would be dead. But after some minutes he fired it up and we got aboard and jogged along to Turkish customs. That was simple enough, a rubber stamp, a farewell. But the Syrian border was an obstacle course.

Yusof said, “Be careful.”

Now I noticed how weirdly he was dressed, in a shiny shirt and flared pants and clopping high-heeled shoes and gold chains around his neck and dense sunglasses. In spite of this, he was doing his best to be inconspicuous.

A small number of people jostled for attention at a desk, where a bored and rather indifferent soldier ignored them. I thrust my passport over their heads and, as though amused by my insolence, he snatched it and said, “American!” and laughed. I did not see my passport again for about an hour.

In the meantime, I found Yusof lurking. He said he wanted to buy me a drink. We had coffee, while he held a chattering conversation with some Syrians. I noticed that there were large portraits of President Assad all over the frontier. He was a man with an odd profile—beaky nose, big chin, surmounted by the squarest head I had ever seen. His portrait at its most accurate was like a cartoon parody: misshapen and villainous, his combed-over hairdo varied from portrait to portrait. His suit was too tight, his neck too thin, his tie ridiculous, his smile insipid. As for his politics (to quote I Kings II), “He was an adversary to Israel … and he abhorred Israel, and reigned over Syria.”

But there was another portrait—a younger man, with a slim stubbly face and sunglasses and army fatigues.

“Who’s that, Yusof?”

“No,” he said, meaning, Don’t ask. He paddled with one hand in a cautioning gesture.

The delay at the border today was caused by a group of Syrians smuggling shirts and pants in large suitcases. The absurdity of it was that while these smugglers opened their cases, revealing stacks of shirts in plastic bags, huge trucks rumbled past. They were German, and they were loaded with crates of German machinery, from a firm called Mannesmann. The crates were stamped For the Ministry of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq. Six of these vast flatbed trucks. They were headed towards Iraq, through Syria—and they were waved through by Syrian soldiers. It seemed to make little difference to anyone that Iraq was subject to U.N. sanctions and such a shipment of German machine parts was illegal. In the meantime the shirt smugglers were bullied and denounced.

Yusof took me aside. He put his hand over his mouth and muttered, “That is Assad’s son. He died. Don’t talk.”

We were summoned to the office and handed our passports. And then we were on our way. Those men wearing dark glasses and sipping tea, Yusof said. They were not travelers. They were members of the mukhabarat—Syria’s secret police. All this in a whisper, Yusof’s hand over his mouth.

“Here I like,” Yusof said. We were in a rocky landscape, with wide stripes of green. “Aleppo is good. I drink. I eat. I disco. I fuck. But—” He leaned over. “I don’t talk.”

Across the low hills some miles farther were minarets and a citadel on a bluff, and squat buildings: Aleppo. After all the small towns and villages of Turkish Hatay, this was like my myopic mirage, the distant vision which blurs and produces a sort of Middle East capriccio, blending beautiful rotting buildings with ugly new ones, the whole of it sifted and sprinkled with dust. Many places in the eastern Mediterranean looked that way to me, a hodgepodge of building styles surmounted by earthen-colored domes and the slender pencils of minarets.

“Come with me,” Yusof said. “I know this place.”

“I’m busy,” I said.

We were standing by the roadside, among honking taxis and buses, and within sight of twelve billboard-sized portraits of President Hafez al-Assad, Father of the Nation. But they were not as odd as the smaller but far more numerous portraits of his son. They were pasted to walls and to poles, they were airbrushed and stenciled onto masonry, they were stuck in every shop window; and every car in Aleppo displayed the young man’s picture, many of them gilt-framed, on a rear window shrine.

“You’re busy?” Yusof looked very puzzled, which was my intention.

It’s that man again, I thought, and asked Yusof his name.

He gave me a pained smile, and I realized that I did not need a ruse to drive him away. All I had to do was ask him my usual questions.

Yusof covered his mouth, and on the pretext of drawing on a cigarette, he muttered, “His son.” Yusof, although not Syrian, had the superstitious Syrian horror of speaking Assad’s name. He glanced around and added, “His name is Basil.”

“Basil?”

A wild look distorted Yusof’s features. I had said it too loud. He compressed his face in a furtive frown for a moment and then hurried away.

The cult of Basil had taken possession of Syria. Though it was a touchy matter, and politically suspect, I looked into it a bit. It was not easy. Syrians were voluble about everything except matters pertaining to their president. They hung pictures of Assad everywhere, they looked at Assad’s face constantly—that square head, that mustache, that insincere smile of fake benevolence, that hairpiece. A Syrian was never away from the gaze of this man. Assad had been staring at them for twenty-five years. He was as big as life and twice as ugly. But they rarely spoke about him, they almost never uttered his name.

“Big Brother is watching you,” a witty young Arab woman said to me later in Damascus. His titles are “Father-Leader” (El Ab el Khaad), and also Comrade, Struggler, General Secretary, President, Commander of the Nation.

“Or you just put ‘First’ in front of a word and that is a title,” a rebellious Syrian said to me in a low voice. “For example, First Teacher, First General, First Commander.”

Like many torturers, dictators, monomaniacs and tyrants, the most sinister and popular of Assad’s titles was “Friend.” Recently he had given himself a new honorific: Abu Basil—“Father of Basil.”

I asked Syrians to translate the inscriptions under Basil’s portrait. Basil the Martyr! was very common. But they also said, Staff Sergeant! Martyr! Cadet! Parachutist! Comrade! Beloved! Son! Knight!

Martyr—Shaheed—was an interesting word to use for dead Basil. The term was full of Koranic implications, usually describing a warrior who is sacrificed to the faith, going smiling to his glorious reward in Allah’s heaven. Palestinian suicide bombers are martyrs. Any victim of the Israeli secret police, the Mossad, is a martyr. The young man who knifed Naguib Mahfouz was described by his fanatic friends as a martyr after he was hanged in Cairo.

Basil’s martyrdom took place in January 1994, on the road to Damascus airport as the young man, habitually driving fast, sped to catch a plane for Frankfurt where he was embarking on a skiing holiday in the Alps. He reached the speed of 150 miles per hour (the figure 240 kilometers per hour was part of the mythology of Basil’s death) and he lost control of his car, and was killed instantly when it crashed. He was thirty-two and was known as someone who liked fast cars. After forty days of mourning, an enormous statue was erected to him in his father’s home village of Qardaha. The statue depicted the young man being propelled upward on a beam of light, his father (“Father-Leader”) standing at the bottom of the beam, and the son (“Martyr,” “Cadet, “Parachutist”) taking flight.

A younger son, Bashar, twenty-nine, took Basil’s place as his father’s successor. He had been studying quietly in London. He was summoned home, and is now next in line to the throne of his dynastic-minded father. Meanwhile, Assad’s rambunctious brother Rifaat (who, asserting the secularism of Syria, killed twenty thousand of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982 in Hamah) also has ambitions but keeps to himself in a villa on a hill outside Damascus. Rifaat’s portrait is not to be seen anywhere.

I had arrived by road from rural Turkey and been plunged into Syria, the chaotic and friendly city of Aleppo. I liked it as soon as I arrived. But I was too tired to take in anything except the cult of Basil. I found a hotel and had a nap. I woke in the dark, then went back to sleep until the next day.

Aleppo was gritty, ramshackle, and not very big. It had busy dusty streets, dust everywhere, in this sprawling itching place that is everyone’s idea of a city in the Middle East, rotting and unthreatening, mysterious, filled with the smells of food and scorched oil and damp wool and decaying bricks. It was not like a city at all, but rather a large provincial town, with a mixed population of Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and even a community of Jews. It had landmarks—the park, the citadel, the bazaar, the mosque, the railway station. I took a bus to St. Simeon’s Basilica. Simeon Stylites, as he is sometimes known, sat on a tall pillar for thirty years to mortify his flesh, haranguing the faithful from the top of this column.

I am not a pilgrim—I dislike the word in fact, and as with other religious sites I detected no odor of sanctity at St. Simeon’s, only a slight whiff of piety—humility, not holiness, and the definite sense of theater that I had felt in Jerusalem. I had sensed this often in places reputed to be holy, not sanctity at all, but a turbulent suggestion of passion and conflict.

Back in the crooked streets of Aleppo I realized that what I liked best about the place was a liberating sense that everything in the city was reachable on foot. Also Syria had the worst telephone system I had so far seen in the Mediterranean, and so I was never tempted to use the phone or send a fax. This also freed me from worrying that I had anything urgent to attend to; communication with the outside world was impossible. It invigorated me to feel out of touch, and it concentrated my mind on where I was.

I had been anxious about my trip to the coast until I walked to the railway station—a funny little Frenchified station with the usual Assad hagiography in any number of ludicrous murals—and saw that there were three trains a day to Latakia. At the station I engaged three young men—medical students—in a conversation about the murals. They immediately clammed up and made eye signals and hand gestures and all sorts of nonverbal suggestions to change the subject. This was what Albania had been like under “Friend” Hoxha.

It was not fidgeting caution but real fear—of, I supposed, the mukhabarat. Until late in 1994 there were six thousand political prisoners. Assad released some old sick prisoners, to impress the United States and to make himself seem magnanimous. But it was clearly not a country in which there was any dissent.

The pride of Aleppo is its bazaar, a vast covered souk crisscrossed with narrow lanes and the usual demarcations—silver here, gold there, carpets somewhere else; small cramped neighborhoods selling shoes, or scarves, or fruit, or spices. Tinsmiths, weavers, glassblowers. It served much more than its city. Everyone in northern Syria used the bazaar at Aleppo.

“Meester—I have sold nothing today. You must buy something!”

Winter was colder in Syria than I had expected. The days started almost frostily; at noon it was warm, then the temperature dropped through the afternoon, and at night it was cold again, everyone in sweaters and jackets. I decided to buy a scarf in the bazaar, not a two-dollar polka-dot Palestinian keffieh to wrap around my head, but perhaps the sort of five-dollar wool keffieh that served the nomads.

One of the characteristics of a Middle Eastern bazaar is that thirty stalls sell exactly the same merchandise, but the hawkers differ in their sales pitch, which are thirty kinds of attitudes ranging from a silent glowering from a man squatting on his haunches at the rear of the shop, sulking because you are walking past, to the active nagging of the stall-holder chasing you and plucking your sleeve—“Meester!”

I was looking for a warm scarf, but I was also looking for English speakers. I soon found five of them sitting among bolts of silk.

“Come here, Meester! Hello! Good evening, and how are you?”

This man introduced himself as Alla-Aldin—“Aladdin”—Akkad, and his friends and colleagues as Moustafa, Mohammed, Ahmed and Lateef. They were all young and insolent looking, yapping at each other.

“You are a French?”

“American,” I said.

“You are a Yank,” Akkad said. “That is what people call you. Please sit down. Drink some tea.”

I intended to buy a scarf and therefore accepted the invitation. I would have been more careful in a carpet shop. I sat with them and we talked about the cold weather, how damp it was in the bazaar, my travels in Turkey, my impressions of Syria, and so forth.

Moustafa said, “Do you mind if we call you a Yank?”

“Not at all. But what do people call you?”

“They call us donkeys,” Akkad said. “Because of the donkeys wandering around the bazaar. We don’t care. Donkeys are good animals. And we wander too.”

“What do you call Turkish people?”

“‘Mustache,’ ” Mohammed said. And to his friends, “Yes?”

Akkad explained, “Because they all have mustaches.”

“What about Egyptians?”

“We call them ‘Take-Your-Watch,’ because they are thieves.”

“Jordanians?”

“‘They-Only-See-Themselves,’ ” Moustafa said. “They are selfish, they think about themselves all the time.”

“What about Israelis?” I asked.

“Worse than Jordanians,” Akkad said.

“‘The sun shines out of their arseholes,’ we say. It is an Arabic expression for snobbish,” Moustafa said. “They think it, you see. So we call them ‘arseholes’ for short.”

“I don’t like to say this word,” Akkad muttered. “But it’s true they are very snobbish. They think they are better than everyone.”

“Are you married?” Moustafa asked me.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I am married and so is he,” Akkad said, indicating Moustafa. He pointed to Lateef, who apparently did not speak English—he smiled but said nothing. “He is a horse’s hoof.”

“Not a donkey?” I said.

“And I am a ginger beer,” Akkad said. “Although I am married.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It is slang,” Akkad said, and took out a book. He wagged it at me and said, “This Yank does not understand!”

The book was titled Australian Slang, and it was inscribed to Akkad from Ray, an Australian, in big affectionate blue loopy handwriting.

“My old boyfriend,” Akkad said. He batted his eyelashes at me. “He was a traveler like you.”

I leafed through the book of slang. Horse’s hoof—poof. Ginger beer—queer. Over a year paddling in the Happy Isles and I get a lesson in Aussie slang from a Syrian in Aleppo?

“I get it,” I said. “But didn’t you say you were married?”

“Yes. I just found out I am a homosexual one month ago, after five years of married life.”

“Isn’t that a little inconvenient?” I asked.

“Only for my wife,” Akkad said.

“But I like women,” Moustafa said.

“I like men,” Akkad said. “So does he. And he. And you see this man there”—another young man had paused in the lane of the bazaar to mutter to Lateef—“he was my boyfriend once. You see how he is ignoring me?”

“I agree with Moustafa,” I said. “I prefer women.”

“Women smell like omelets,” Akkad said.

“Do you like omelets?”

“No,” he said. “I like men. They smell like watermelons.”

“‘A woman for duty. A boy for pleasure. A melon for ecstasy.’ Isn’t that an Arab proverb?” I said.

“I have never heard it,” Akkad said. “I don’t understand.”

Moustafa cupped his hands at his chest to suggest breasts and said, “I like these melons on a woman!”

“I don’t like them,” Akkad said. “How old are you?”

I told him.

“No,” he said. “But if you are that old you must be happy. Very happy.”

“Yes, he is happy,” Moustafa said.

“I am happy,” I said. And thought: Yes, drinking tea in this bazaar on a chilly evening in Aleppo, in the farthest corner of the Mediterranean, listening to their silly talk, sensing a welcome in it, the hospitality of casual conversation, feeling I could ask them almost anything and get an answer; I am happy.

“Why did you come here?” Akkad said.

“To buy a scarf,” I said.

“I will not sell you a scarf now. Moustafa and Ahmed will not sell you a scarf. You know why? Because we want you to come back here tomorrow to talk with us.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Later I went to a restaurant and had hot bread and hummus, baba ghanouj and eggplant, salad and spicy fish chunks. I was joined by a student, Ahmed Haj’Abdo, who was studying medicine at the Aleppo medical college. He said he wanted to get high marks, so that he could study abroad and specialize. I introduced the topic of Assad, hoping to get more colorful information about the cult of Basil. Mr. Haj’Abdo got flustered and searched the restaurant desperately with his agitated eyes.

“Sorry,” I said.

He just smiled and then we talked about the weather.

The next day, my last in Aleppo, I went back to Akkad and bought a head scarf and asked him the best way to Latakia. There were so many ways—buses, “pullman,” minivans, taxis, shared cars, the train.

Akkad said, “The best way. You mean quickest? Safest? Most comfortable? Cheapest? What?”

“What does ‘safest’ mean?”

“The road is dangerous. It winds around the mountains. Sometimes the cars and buses go off the road and into the valleys. People die.”

“Train is safest and best,” Moustafa said.

“That’s what I always say.”

My first-class ticket to Latakia on the early train the next morning was two dollars.

There were a hundred or more Syrians in the waiting room of the railway station the following morning. In cold countries that are poor there is often a sartorial strangeness, people dressed differently and weirdly, abandoning fashion for warmth. Syria this winter morning was that way. There were women in black drapes, their faces covered, looking like dark Shmoos, and others like nuns, and still more in old-fashioned dresses and old fur-trimmed coats. Men wore gowns and women wore quilted coats and many people wore leather jackets and odd hats. There were Gypsies in brightly colored dresses, with thick skirts, and there were soldiers. The well-dressed and watchful secret police looked very secure and went about in pairs.

There was no such thing as a Syrian face. There were many faces, of a sort that was common in Europe and America—pale skin, red hair, blue eyes, as well as nose-heavy profiles and dark eyes and swarthy skin. Some could have been Spanish or French or even English. There was a Syrian Huck Finn face with freckles, and tousled hair. There was a Semitic face—nagging auntie with a mustache. There were people who looked like me. I was sure of this, because every so often I was approached and asked questions in Arabic, and the questioner was puzzled and abashed when I replied in English.

It was a cold sunny day in Aleppo, six in the morning, hardly anyone on the street, and so the rats were bold, foraging in the gutters as I kicked along noisily to keep them away. I wore a sweater and a jacket and a scarf. The rats ran ahead of me, nibbling garbage. One scampered on, glancing back at me at intervals, and panting, like an overexcited pet.

The 7:20 Express to Latakia was a beat-up train, with terrible coaches in second class and passable ones in first. But all the windows were so dirty it was hard to see out, and many were cracked, the sort of dense spider web of cracks that prevented anything from being clearly visible.

With my notebook on my lap, I wrote about the fellows in the bazaar and then, because I was short of books, reread The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the chapter on “street neurology,” thinking how resourceful Oliver Sacks was in walking the streets of New York City, diagnosing the ills of the people raving or chattering. In another place he quoted Nietzsche: “I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them … And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit.”

The ticket collector wore a dark suit and well-shined shoes and he smoked a cigarette. In his entourage were two soldiers and two flunkies. He snapped his fingers at each passenger and under the gaze of the soldiers—who were fat older men, straight out of Sergeant Bilko’s motor pool—he directed one of his flunkies to retrieve the ticket. Without touching it he examined it, and the second flunky tore it and returned it to the passenger. Five men, each with a particular role: a miniature bureaucracy in the aisle of the railway train.

Many offices I had seen in Syria were like that: several people doing one job, consulting, discussing, sharing the problem; or just being social, drinking tea, smoking, taking no responsibility.

Showing through the cracked windows of the train the suburbs of Aleppo had a fragmented and cubist quality, a wall of tenements as assorted puzzle pieces. We were soon in the countryside, the Syrian countryside where the mountains that rise parallel to the west coast, the Jabel an Nusayriyah, are among the loveliest in the Mediterranean. Eastern and southern Syria is desert, but this was a landscape of green cozy valleys and stone cottages—gardens, shepherds, wheat fields, olive groves and fruit trees. I had not expected such a fertile and friendly-looking land. Later, when I saw the desert, I realized that my stereotype was that—what the Syrians called the sahara, limitless waste.

But here it was peaceful, meadows of sheep nibbling flowers. I had expected gun emplacements and artillery men glowering through binoculars, not these stolid rustics clopping along on donkeys, and the lovely white villages of small domed houses; each settlement, surrounded by plowed fields, had a well and market and a mosque.

A man strode through my railway car, climbed onto a seat, removed a lightbulb from a ceiling fixture, and plugged in a tape deck. For the rest of the trip he fed tapes of screechy music into this machine.

The meadows in the distance were like crushed velvet, and closer they were scattered with wildflowers and banked by stands of sturdy blue-green pines. Even that loud music could not distract me from admiring a landscape I had never seen or heard about, and the thrill was that it was ancient, biblical-looking, the land of conquering, slaughtering David and the Valley of Salt. At Jisr ash Shughur on the Orontes River there were flowers everywhere and the town itself lay on the crest of a distant hill, as white as the white stone ridge it was built upon. We were hardly any distance from the Turkish border, and passing alongside it, but these villages were not at all like Turkish ones, either in the design of their houses or the way the people were dressed.

We penetrated the big green mountain range on our way to the shore, and circled the slopes of these peculiarly Middle Eastern-looking heights—so old were they, having been mountains for so long, so tame and rounded, they seemed domesticated by the people who had been trampling them and letting their goats and sheep canter over them, nibbling them since the beginning of the world. They were gentle slopes, with soft cliffs and unthreatening gullies and no peaks, green all over, with pine woods and villages in their valleys. They were not at all like the fierce mountains in the wilderness, with their sharp peaks and sheer cliffs and their raw and serrated ridges and their cliff faces gleaming like the metal of a knife blade.

That was something that I had learned about the Mediterranean. There was not a single point anywhere on the whole irregular shore that had not known human footprints. Every inch of it had been charted and named—most places had two or three names, some had half a dozen, an overlay of nomenclature, especially here in the tendentious and rivalrous republics of the Levant, that could be very confusing.

Three and a half hours after leaving Aleppo (Halab, El Haleb) we were speeding across a flat sunny plain of date palms and orange and olive trees, towards Latakia. It had been a long inland detour, but I was back on the shore of the Mediterranean.

I walked from the station to the center of town and found a hotel. After lunch, I walked to the port. I was followed and pestered by curb-crawling taxis in which young men sat and honked their horns. The only way to discourage them was to hire one—and anyway, I wanted to go north of Latakia, to see the ruins of Ugarit.

That was how I met Riaz, an unreliable man with an unreliable car. He spoke a little English. Yes, he knew Ugarit. Yes, we would go there. But first he had a few errands to run. This allowed me to see the whole of Latakia in a short time. It was not an attractive place. The only beach was some miles outside of the city at the laughably named Côte d’Azur, where on an empty road, a deserted hotel, the Meridien, sat on a muddy shore. That area had the melancholy of all bad architectural ideas exposed to the full glare of the sun.

“Who is that?” I asked Riaz as we passed statues of Assad. There were many statues of Father-Leader here.

Riaz laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. It was not a joking matter to stare at the statues, however silly they seemed. One statue in Latakia showed Assad hailing a taxi—his hand raised. In another he was beckoning—“I have a bone to pick with you, sonny!”—and in yet another he looked, with both arms out, like a deranged man about to take a dive into a pool, fully clothed. “I will crush you like this!” could have been inscribed on the plinth of a statue which depicted Assad clasping his hands rather violently, and a statue at the abandoned sports complex at Latakia showed the Commander of the Nation with his arm up, palm forward, in a traffic cop’s gesture of “Stop!”

Any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country which is headed for trouble. Leaving aside the fact that nature had not endowed this spindle-shanked and wispy-haired man in his tight suit to be cast in bronze, the unflattering statues still seemed provocative and irritating. In a hard-up place how could anyone be indifferent or willingly justify such expenditure? Syria was another country, like those of Mao and Stalin and Hoxha, of silly semaphoring statues of the same foolish old man, and in time to come they too would end up being bulldozed onto a scrap heap.

“What is his name?” I asked Riaz.

Riaz said, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” and looked wildly around in the traffic.

Two or three miles north of the city was Ras Shamrah. It had been an unimportant village until, in 1928, a farmer plowing on a nearby hill bumped his plow blade against the top edge of a symmetrical wall, buried in the ground. Further digging revealed it to be the wall of a large building, a palace in fact, and in time the foundations of an entire city were uncovered, thirty-six hectares of a royal town which was dug up in stages throughout the 1930s. That sort of discovery—even the detail of the plow blade—had happened many times before in the Middle East (and it was also a poor farmer in China who—with a hoe—found the terra-cotta warriors at Xian); peasant plowmen were probably the world’s first archaeologists. But Ugarit yielded a real treasure in the form of small beadlike clay tablets on which was inscribed the precursor of the alphabet I am using now. (Guidebook: “The writing on the tablets is widely accepted as being the earliest known alphabet. It was adapted by the Greeks, then the Romans, and it is from this script that all alphabets are derived.”) There were trinkets, too, bracelets and beads and spear points and knives; but the implications of the tablets the shape and size of a child’s finger bone were that this might be the earliest examples of human jotting.

Ali the caretaker apologized before charging me four dollars in Syrian piastres—it was almost his week’s pay—to look at the ruins. And he followed me, pointing to the crumbled walls and weedy plots, saying, “Palace … Library … Well … Aqueduct … Flight of stairs … House … Archway … Stables … Mausoleum …”

It was no more than a mute ground plan, spread over several hills, where with their narrow hooves balanced on the flinty walls goats cropped grass and pretty poppies grew wild. Having been excavated, it had been so neglected it was becoming overgrown, with rubble obscuring many of the walls; no pathways, no signs, no indication at all of what had been what. Ugarit (“once the greatest city in the entire Mediterranean”) was turning back into a buried city. It had been looted of all its trinkets and artifacts—they were on display in the Damascus Museum.

I liked being here alone, and felt it was all a throwback to an earlier time on the Mediterranean shore, when a traveler might stumble upon an ancient site and be shown around by a simple soul who lived nearby. The temples and villas of rural Italy, and Carthage and Pompeii and the ancient marble structures of Greece, had once been treated like this—just crumbling curiosities, where goats and sheep sheltered. Every so often a peasant would raid them for building blocks or marble slabs. That was definitely a feature of the Mediterranean—the temples turned into churches, the churches into ruins, the ruins buried until they became quarries for anyone who wanted to build a hut. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—we have the evidence of splendid engravings—Greece and Italy looked just like Ugarit did today, the ruins were novelties, broken cellars and fallen walls and stairs leading nowhere and tombs robbed of their artifacts and bones.

Sitting on a wall to admire it—the sun on the flowers and the grass that grew higher than the ruins—I was approached by Ali again.

“Alphabet there!” he said.

He pointed to a small enclosure, where in a shady muddy corner in a clump of weeds, the tablets had been found. It was as though it was sacred ground. In a sense it had been hallowed, by printed words, some of the first in this hemisphere. Five thousand years had passed since then. And here, in Syria, the very place that had given the world this elegant script, half the people were still illiterate.

On the way back to town, I asked Riaz, “Are there any ships that go from here to Cyprus?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

“So can I get a ship to Cyprus from Latakia?”

“I think.”

“You think yes?”

“I think no.”

He was right—no ferries ran anymore, though there were plenty of container ships in the port. The town was small and tidy and sunny, and with vaguely European architecture, unlike cold, dusty and oriental Aleppo. It seemed to me amazing that in the space of a single morning I had passed from one climate to another; and not only the weather here, but aspects of the atmosphere, were identical to a hundred other places I had seen on the Mediterranean shore. Latakia was another example of a town that had much more in common with a port in Greece or Albania or Sardinia than any of its own inland towns, the sunny Mediterranean culture of the languor, the bougainvillea and palms and stucco house, the seaside promenade.

“You want to see Lateen?”

He meant a Christian church, a Latin. (Christians in Syria are called Masihi for their belief in the Messiah.) There was one in Latakia, a Frenchified two-steeple cathedral dating perhaps from the 1930s. (The French had controlled Syria from 1926 until independence in 1946.) There was a sense of life in Latakia that was self-contained; the town was seldom visited by any foreigners—foreigners hardly came to Syria and when they did they kept to Damascus and avoided the rather stagnant and vandalized coast. Better than any bricks and mortar were the tangerines and oranges of Latakia. I paid off Riaz, and bought some fruit, and walked the streets, and went to bed early.

Sixty miles down the coast, two hours on the slow bus, was Tartus, a new town enclosing an ancient walled city. I walked around it and thought: How has it changed? The people still lived among goat turds and foul garbage piles and they scrubbed their laundry in washtubs and hung it from their windows, where the sun struck through the archways. The children played in the narrow lanes where open drains bore foul water to the sewers. Rats darted between bricks and in the ruined nave of a church there was more laundry. There were old and new parts of the walled city, but it was hard to tell them apart. People had extended the old houses, added rooms and stairways and vaulted ceilings and cubicles. Old men still sat under the arches of the city gate. I imagined that people here on the Syrian coast had more or less always lived like this, apparently higgledy-piggledy, but actually with great coherence, using all the available space, protected by the city walls and the privacy of their solid stone houses, in this honeycomb of an old town.

There was an island just off shore called Arwad. I wanted to look at it, but I could not find any boatman willing to take me there. So I walked along the beach. Tartus had the filthiest beach I had seen anywhere in the entire Mediterranean: it was mud and litter and sewage and oil slick. Perhaps that too was just as it had always been, the disorder and filth and carelessness. Swimming as a recreation and the craze for a suntan were recent novelties. In terms of its being regarded as an enormous sewer by the people who lived on its shore, the Mediterranean was perhaps no different from any other sea in the world.

“The sea in Western culture represents space, vacancy, primordial chaos,” Jonathan Raban wrote to me when I asked him why every sea on earth is treated like a toilet. Jonathan, one of my oldest friends, was the editor of The Oxford Book of the Sea. The biblical “waters” implying emptiness and chaos is specifically the Mediterranean. Jonathan indicated a passage in The Enchafed Flood in which Auden warmed to this theme of the disorderly sea: “The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelation notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that ‘there was no more sea’.”

“Put rubbish into it, and it magically disappears,” Jonathan said. “Water being the purifying element, you can’t pollute it—by definition.” Before the middle of the eighteenth century, “the sea was a socially invisible place; a space so bereft of respectable life that it was like a black hole. What you did in or on the sea simply didn’t count, which is partly why the seaside became known as a place of extraordinary license.” And he went on, “The sea wasn’t—isn’t—a place; it was undifferentiated space. It lay outside of society, outside of the world of good manners and social responsibilities. It was also famously the resort of filthy people—lowcaste types, like fishermen … It was a social lavatory, where the dregs landed up.”

Nothing held me in Tartus. Wishing to see the great Crusader castle known variously as the Krac des Chevaliers and Qal’at al-Hisn, I made a deal with a taxi driver named Abdallah, who said he would take me there and then on to Homs, where I could get a bus or a train to Damascus.

“Lebanon!” he cried out after twenty minutes or so, gesturing towards the dark hills to the south.

And then he turned north off the road and headed for the heights of the mountain range that protected the interior of Syria, and commanded a view of the whole coast. At a strategic point, above the only valley that allowed access, was the most beautiful castle imaginable. After a childhood spent reading fairy tales, and believing in valiant deeds, and associating every act of love, chivalry, piety and valor—however specious they seemed in retrospect—it is impossible to belittle the Crusader castles of the Mediterranean, the scenes where such deeds were first defined for such a child as I was.

The knight in armor, a sword in one hand, his crested flag in the other, is such a potent symbol of virtue that I never questioned it. I was inspired by the fantasy and the idea, not the historical truth of the Crusader Knights. To a great extent, Westerners derive their notions of self-sacrifice and morality and romantic love from the stories of Crusaders—and incidentally their prejudices against Muslims and Jews—and a sense of style, too, of jousting and armor and pennants and castles. The Krac was the epitome of that sort of dream castle, with ramparts and dungeons and symmetrical fortifications, and a chapel and stately watchtowers.

“Neither a ruin nor a showplace,” T. E. Lawrence wrote of the Krac in his obscure book on Crusader castles. In 1936 Lawrence walked one thousand miles in the three hottest months, to do his survey of these magnificent structures. And he was not exaggerating when he called it the “best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world.”

Leaving the castle, I said to Abdallah, “How far is it to Damascus?”

Giving me the distance in kilometers, it seemed to be little more than a hundred miles. There were still a few hours of daylight. We made another deal. He would take me there for forty dollars.

It was a rash move. I should have looked closer at his car. The road passed behind the mountains that border Lebanon, Al Jabal ash Sharqi. More important, the road passed along the edge of the Syrian desert.

“Sahara!” Abdallah yelled at the wasteland out the window.

Sheep cropped grass on the western side of the road. On the eastern side they would have starved. Camps of nomads, dark tents and flocks of animals were visible in the distance.

Just before darkness fell the engine faltered and Abdallah cursed, and the car replied, coughing one-syllable complaints, and then we were stuck.

“Okay, okay,” Abdallah said. To prove he was confident he took my picture and he screamed into the wind.

His high spirits were unconvincing. It was an electrical fault, he said. He waved to a passing car and said he would be right back. Then he was sped into the failing light, and dusk fell. I sat in the car, tuning my shortwave radio—news of the Israelis shelling southern Lebanon and blockading the fishing ports. Every so often a large truck went by, and the thud of its slipstream hit Abdallah’s car and shook it, and me.

Cold and unsettled at the edge of this desert, feeling thwarted, this enforced isolation filled my mind with memories of injustice—put-downs, misunderstandings, unresolved disputes, abusive remarks, rudeness, arguments I had lost, humiliations. Some of these instances went back many years. For a reason I could not explain, I thought of everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. I kept telling myself, “So what?” and “Never mind,” but it was no good. I could not stop the flow of unpleasant instances, and I was tormented.

From time to time, I laughed to think I was so removed mentally from Syria, but then I concluded that being in the middle of this desert had something to do with it. It was pitch dark and silent except for when the occasional trucks thundered by. I supposed that I was fearful and disgusted; I disliked the desert, I had been abandoned by Abdallah in this howling wilderness, where there was darkness and no water.

A pair of oncoming headlights wobbled off the road. Abdallah got out and approached the car laughing, carrying a gas can. Saying it was an electrical fault had been a face-saver.

It was late. Returning his gas can to the town of Deir Atiyeh, he stopped the car and I told him I was bailing out. There ensued a great whinging argument, as he pleaded, berated, complained and demanded more money than we had agreed on. I bought you oranges! he howled. I thought: I hate this nagging man. Then I said: Do I care? I gave him what he wanted and swore at him, and afterwards realized that the whole incident irritated me because I had been planning to tip him the very amount he had demanded.

In Deir Atiyeh, where I stayed the night, I had time to reflect on Assad’s personality cult. There was a large statue of the Father-Leader skating—perhaps on thin ice—in the center of Deir Atiyeh. There were also signs which a helpful citizen translated for me: “Smile! You Are In Deir Atiyeh!” “Be Happy—We Are Building the Country!” and “We in Deir Atiyeh Are All Soldiers of Hafez Assad.”

I have to call my informant Aziz, which was not his name, or else he will be persecuted and thrown into prison—the Syrian cure for dissenters—when the Commander of the Nation reads what I have written. “Aziz” was defiant. He said Assad’s vanity was ridiculous. “He was saluted at school each morning,” he said, when the kiddies entered the classroom. They chanted, “Hafez Assad, our leader forever!” and another one that started, “With blood, with soul, we sacrifice ourselves to you!” And it was he who told me that his palace in Damascus, built at a cost of $120 million—and of course no one but the Commander was allowed to enter it—was called Kasr el Sharb, The People’s Palace.

This glass and steel monstrosity, like a massive airline terminal, on a high bluff overlooking Damascus was almost the first thing I saw the next day when I reached the city. It can be seen from every part of the city; that is obviously one of its important features. The structure was as truculent and unreadable and unsmiling, as forbidding, as remote as the man himself. Vast and featureless, it could be a prison or a fortress, and in a sense it is. Assad has almost no contact with the people, and is seldom seen in public. He is all secrets, a solitary king-emperor. There are rumors that he is sick, that his son’s death was a shock, that he is in seclusion. Some days he is shown on the front page of the Syria Times sitting rather uncomfortably in a large chair, apparently nodding at a visiting dignitary.

Beneath Assad’s palace, Damascus lay, biscuit-colored, the chill of morning still upon it, the new suburbs, the ancient city, the souk, the mosques and churches, the snarled traffic, the perambulating Damascenes. For reasons of religion and commerce—its shrines, its mosques, its churches—Damascus is heavily visited. It is an ancient city, so old it is mentioned in the Book of Genesis (14:15–16)—Jerusalem is not mentioned until the Book of Joshua (10:1–2). Unlike Jerusalem, which as an old walled city and bazaar it somewhat resembles, Damascus is the destination of few Western tourists; but it is dense with its neighbors from the desert and the shore. It is the souk and the shrine for the entire region. “Damascus is our souk,” a man in distant Latakia told me. It is everyone’s souk. And the great Omayyad Mosque, built thirteen hundred years ago to a grandiose design, is the destination of many pilgrims. Beirut is only a short drive—two hours at most—and so there were Lebanese here too; and Iraqis, stifled by sanctions, shopping their hearts out; Nawar people, Gypsies from the desert, and the distinctly visible women with tattooed chins and velveteen gowns from the Jordanian border; gnomes in shawls, scowling Bedouins, and students, and mullahs with long beards, and young girls in blue jeans and hectoring touts in baseball hats.

In one corner of the walled city was the house of Ananias, who in Acts 9: 1–20 had a vision which commanded him to go to the house of Judas to receive Paul.

“Original house,” said a caretaker.

Perhaps it was. Perhaps this was Straight Street. But I was dubious. It was true that this was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, but it had also been besieged and wrecked and pillaged and burned at various times. The shops in the souk, which was larger than Aleppo’s, and better lighted and airier, sold brassware and tiles, inlaid boxes and furniture, rugs, beads, huge swords, bad carvings, knickknacks, and Roman glassware.

“Original glass,” the hawkers said.

They were small mud-encrusted perfume bottles which had recently—so these stories went—been excavated. There were small terra-cotta figures, too, and pint-sized amphorae. For just a few dollars I could be the owner of a priceless collection of Roman artifacts.

The head of John the Baptist is said to have been interred at the Omayyad Mosque. Anyway, there is a shrine to it in the interior of the mosque, which lies at one end of the covered bazaar. I walked there and saw a group of Iranian pilgrims squatting on the carpeted floor, all of them sobbing, as they were harangued by a blubbing mullah doing a good imitation of an American TV evangelist in a mea culpa mode, yelling, preaching, weeping, blowing his nose, wiping his eyes, while his flock honked like geese in their grief.

Looking on were incredulous Syrians, secretly mocking, smiling at the exhibitionism and looking generally unsympathetic.

“Are you religious?” I asked an Arab in the mosque.

“Not at all,” he said. He had come to look at the renovation of the mosaics and pillars in the courtyard of the mosque. It was a horrible job the workmen were doing, he said—an act of vandalism, they were defacing it.

“What is that man saying?” I asked, indicating the howling sobbing mullah. He was standing, stuttering and speechifying, and at his feet, the sixty or more people sat with tearstained faces, their shoulders shaking.

“He is telling the story of Hussein.”

Hussein, Ali’s son, was the grandson of Mohammed, and was beheaded in the year 680 by an army of the Omayyad caliphate at the Battle of Karbala in Iraq. It was a violent and dramatic story which involved Hussein witnessing the slaughter of his wife and children, surrounded by a hostile army, besieged, urging his horse onward, and at last apologizing to his horse as—helpless—Hussein is decapitated.

“And those sweet lips, that the Prophet himself kissed—peace and blessings be upon him!—were then brutally kicked by the soldiers—”

A great shout went up from the passionate pilgrims, and a tiny Smurf-like woman shrouded in black handed a wodge of tissues to the mullah. He blew his nose and continued.

“They kicked Hussein’s head like a football—!”

“Waaaa!”

What startled me was the immediacy and power of the grief. It was more than pious people having a good cathartic cry. It was like a rehearsal for something more—great anger and bitterness and resentment, as though they had been harmed and were nerving themselves to exact revenge. The howls of their grieving Muslims had the snarl of a war cry.

Assad was a dismal individual but, impartially intolerant, at least he could claim credit for keeping religious fanaticism in check. He had persecuted the religious extremists with the same grim brutality he had used in suppressing political dissent. It was perhaps his only real achievement, but he was characteristically ruthless, which was why the massacre at Hamah claimed so many lives. That was the trouble with dictators: they never knew when to stop.

This subject came up at lunch the next day with some Syrians I had been introduced to. It was one of those midday meals of ten dishes—stuffed vegetables, salad, kebabs, hummus, filled bread, olives, nuts and dumplings—that lasted from one until four and broke the Syrian day in half. But one of the pleasures of Syria was its cuisine, and the simplest was among the best. Each morning in Damascus I left my hotel, walked three blocks and bought a large glass of freshly made carrot juice—twenty carrots, fifty cents.

“Oh, yes, this is definitely a totalitarian state,” one man said. “But also people here are civilized. We are able to live our lives.”

How was this so?

“I cannot explain why,” another said. “There is no logic in it that you as a Westerner can see. But in the Arab world such contradictions are able to exist.”

“We allow for them,” the first man said. “It is very strange. Perhaps you would not be happy here.”

“Are you ever afraid?” I asked.

“There are many police, many secret police. People are very afraid of them.”

“Do people discuss Assad?”

“No one talks about him. They do not say his name.”

I said, “So what we’re doing now—this conversation—it’s not good, is it?”

They all smiled and agreed. No, it was not a good idea. And, really, in a totalitarian state there is nothing to talk about except the obvious political impasse.

“Do you think I should go to Beirut?” I asked.

“You know the Israelis are shelling the south?”

“How would that affect me?”

“Many of the fundamentalists have retreated to Beirut. They associate Israel with America—after all, America allows this to happen. They might accuse you of being a spy. It is not a good time.”

“What would they do to me?”

“Kidnap or—” The man hesitated.

“Shoot me?”

Out of delicacy, they were not explicit, but I had the distinct feeling they were saying, “Don’t go.” They lived in Syria. They visited Beirut all the time—it was such a short distance to travel, no more than sixty miles, and of course the border formalities.

“The last time I was in Beirut—just a few days ago,” one of them said, “Israeli jet planes were flying over the city, buzzing the rooftops, intimidating people, breaking the sound barrier—and windows.”

I was losing my resolve. That made me linger in Damascus. One of the happiest experiences I had in Damascus was at the house of a man named Omer, the friend of a friend. Omer was a Sudanese cement expert who worked for the Arab Development Corporation. He lived with his attractive Sudanese wife and three children in an apartment block about a mile from the center of Damascus.

We were drinking tea and eating sticky buns when he summoned his eight-year-old son, Ibrahim, to meet me. The boy did not speak English. He was tall for his age, wearing rumpled blue buttoned-up pajamas. He looked solemn, he said nothing, he stood and bowed slightly to show respect.

Then, without a word, he went to a piano in the corner, and sat, and played “Theme With Variations” by Mozart. It was plangent and complex, and sitting upright on the stool, the boy played on, without a duff note. In that small cluttered apartment I experienced a distinct epiphany, feeling—with Nietzsche—that “without music life would be an error.”

The fighting in southern Lebanon and the strafing of Beirut made me reconsider my jaunt along the Lebanese coast. I called the American Embassy in Damascus and asked for information. By way of response I received an invitation to a recital at the ambassador’s residence. On this particular Arabian night, the performance was given by a visiting American band, Mingo Saldivar and His Three Tremendous Swords. Saldivar, “The Dancing Cowboy,” played an accordion, Cajun and Zydeco music, jolly syncopated country-and-western polkas. At first the invited guests—about a hundred Syrians—were startled. Then they were amused. Finally they were clapping.

Afterwards, I found the ambassador talking animatedly in Arabic to a tall patrician-looking Syrian. I introduced myself and asked my question.

“Don’t go to Beirut,” the ambassador replied. “Not now. Not with your face. Not with your passport.”

The American Ambassador to Syria, Christopher Ross, a fluent Arabic speaker, is a highly regarded career diplomat, and an amiable and witty man. He is also a subtle negotiator in the delicate peace talks involving Israel and Syria. The sticking point was the Golan Heights. This large section of eastern Syria was captured by the Israelis in 1967 and has been occupied by them ever since—and partly settled—something that quite rightly maddens the Syrians. In this connection, Ambassador Ross saw a great deal of President Assad, had been to Assad’s bunker and would have been a fund of information for me, except that he skillfully deflected all my intrusive questions.

“I think the ambassador is right—stay away from Lebanon at the moment,” the tall man said. He was Sadik Al-Azm, from an ancient Damascene family. His professorial appearance—tweed jacket, horn-rimmed glasses—was justified, for he was a professor at Damascus University. He was noted as the author of an outspoken defense of Salman Rushdie.

“That seems rather a risky thing to have done in a Muslim country,” I said.

“What do I care?” he said, and laughed out loud. “This is a republic, anyway. Even our president defended Rushdie!”

“It doesn’t worry you that Syria is crawling with Iranian fundamentalists?”

“What do they know?”

“They know there’s a fatwa, they idolize Khomeini,” I said. “It seems to me they’d like to stick a knife in your guts.”

“The Iranians you see here haven’t read anything,” Professor Al-Azm said. “They haven’t read what I wrote about Rushdie, and they certainly haven’t read The Satanic Verses. I’m not worried. In fact, I am updating my book at the moment for a new edition.”

“Fearless, you see?” Ambassador Ross said.

“What do I care?” the professor said.

“I think this phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is misleading,” the ambassador said. “I call it ‘political Islam.’ ”

He went on to say that he felt it was related to many other movements that in my opinion were now actively obnoxious in the world—the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, the Pro-Life assassins, and so forth. The militant moralizers in the United States who represented a new Puritanism were ideologically similar to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Party of God. Ambassador Ross did not say so, but it was logical to conclude from this that the Reverend Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah had a great deal in common.

In Syria and elsewhere, unexpectedly, political Islam was growing. More people—many of them young—wore veils, fasted at Ramadan.

This severely orthodox reaction had something to do with the waywardness of governments and the crookedness of politicians. Instead of working within the system, people were adopting a religious scourge, which was a simpler remedy involving denunciation and murder. It was perhaps understandable, but I found it depressing.

I wandered away while the ambassador was challenging Professor Al-Azm on another recondite matter, and I fell into conversation with a Syrian, Mr. Hamidullah. After a while I asked him about the cult of Basil.

“Father-President groomed him for leadership,” Mr. Hamidullah said.

“Isn’t an election usually a more reliable way to pick a leader?” I asked.

“In your country, maybe. But Syria is much different. Here it is necessary to have a golden formula to govern.”

“I see,” I said. Golden formula? I said, “And President Assad has the golden formula.”

“I call it the Secret Key,” Mr. Hamidullah said. “Without it, Syria cannot be governed. Father-President was passing this on to his son. He knew that when he died the next leader would need to have the Secret Key.”

“And this Secret Key is necessary because—”

“Because this country is so difficult!” he said. “We have Druses, Alawites, Christians, Jews, Shiites, Assyrians. We have Kurds, we have Maronites. More! We have Yazidis—they are devil worshipers, their God of Bad is a peacock. We have—what?—Chaldeans! How to govern all of them? Secret Key!”

He grinned at me, having demonstrated to his satisfaction that the Hafez Assad dictatorship was necessary and that, in the absence of Basil, his second son, Bashar, would be the possessor of the golden formula, the Secret Police—sorry, Mr. Hamidullah! I meant to say the Secret Key.

On my way to Ma’aloula, a village in the mountains north of Damascus, I saw picked out on a hillside in white boulders a motto in Arabic.

“What does that say?”

“ ‘Hail to Our Glorious Leader.’ Meaning Assad,” said Abdelrahman Munif, and shrugged and puffed his pipe.

Munif is the author of a dozen novels. His Cities of Salt trilogy—Cities of Salt, The Trench, and Variations on Night and Day—had been translated into English, to great praise, by my younger brother, Peter Theroux, who suggested I meet Munif when I passed through Damascus. Munif showed me a limited edition of the first book. It was a deluxe large format with loose pages, boxed, with signed and numbered wood block prints by a famous artist, Dia al-Azzawi. I marveled at the prints. Munif smiled. Yes, he said—he had recently finished writing a volume of art criticism—they were very good.

He was born in Amman of a mixed Saudi-Iraqi parentage, and was raised in Saudi Arabia. Vocally out of sympathy with the Saudi leadership, who have banned his books and revoked his citizenship, Munif has lived in many places in the Middle East—as well as Paris—in his sixty-odd years and has held eight different passports-of-convenience, including Yemeni and Omani. Munif is an exile of a sort that hardly exists anymore in the Western world but is fairly common—at least as far as intellectuals are concerned—in the Middle East. He is essentially stateless, but remains unbending. In his last communication with the Saudi government he was told that he could have his citizenship back but he had to promise to stop writing and publishing.