The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians

In less than an hour the crimson roof topped the hill and was back.

‘It’s good?’

He nodded. We accelerated up over the hill, through no man’s land and down to the Syrian border. There I left it all to him. We passed from one office to the next, waited while a South American diplomat checked two feather-boaed dancing-girls into the country; collected stamps and filled in forms; I fielded strange questions about my family and my contacts in Beirut, and assured them I’d never even thought of going to Israel (I’d hidden all my letters of introduction from the Jerusalem patriarch). At some stage Stepan paraded the palms of the border guards before me: ‘Ten US dollars here … five there … nothing for him … one hundred Syrian pounds.’

And then with a nod we were through the frontier, with a Syrian major propped between us on the bench seat, being waved through customs and the remaining checkpoints, bouncing and rolling down a runway of a road into Syria, towards the desert, beneath a winter sun that picked out every crease and knuckle of the dry cliffs.

Stepan slid a tape into his cassette machine. ‘Frank Sinatra – “Fly Me to the Moon”. My favourite one!’

‘Stepan, you did well,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

He laughed and said, in Armenian, ‘This man here is secret policeman. I know them all and this one is bad. He told me they sent four telexes yesterday about you to intelligence in Damascus. You are lucky!’

Not luck, I told him, but another triumph for the Armenian network. It had been the toughest border to date. After several weeks on the road it seemed a great achievement and bolstered my faith in the Armenians. The dozens of other hurdles between here and Armenia looked smaller and strangely, unexpectedly, I found I was delighted to be back in Syria. I really didn’t think I’d get in.

Between us, the secret policeman leaned forward and pointed down a bank. The wreck of a car lay upside down thirty feet below. ‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘I was in that car. Three times it turned over.’

‘Weren’t you hurt?’ asked Stepan.

‘My driver, he is in hospital. But I was all right. God makes sure the good men survive.’

Stepan banked the Red Beast down through the outskirts of Damascus. The modern city was little more than a series of wide, straight boulevards and elaborate fountains, the sure mark of a grim dictatorship. We left the major on the steps of a ministry building and headed towards the Old City. Stepan pulled up at one of the gates.

‘Follow the Street Called Straight until you reach the Gate of the Sun.’

I nodded.

‘There on the right you will see the Armenian church of Saint Sarkis.’

‘Right.’

‘Ring the bell many times. The doorman is often drunk.’

But it was Sunday and the door was open. The liturgy had just finished and half a dozen Armenians sat drinking coffee with the priest.

I handed him my letter from the Catholicos in Beirut. He received it with enthusiasm and he showed me a room at the top of the Armenian school. The place was only half built and building-dust lay like a patina on the mattress. For a long time the door wouldn’t open, then it wouldn’t shut.

‘I hope it’s all right,’ he said.

‘It’s fine. I’m very grateful.’

I meant it. In Beirut I’d been warned about Damascus hotels: full of dangerous extremists. I wasn’t sure I believed it, but was pleased – at this time especially – not to have to find out.

Off the Street Called Straight, in amongst a warren of cobbled alleys, I found a sun-lit courtyard which corresponded to my directions. Cloistered by horseshoe colonnades, the tiled floor was awash with soapy water. A woman bent over it, scrubbing vigorously.

‘Hagop?’ I called.

She gestured to a staircase in the far corner and eyed me as I tip-toed across her morning’s work. She was not pleased and a hail of Koranic curses followed me up the stairs.

Hagop was a friend of Yervant, the gull-shooting painter in Beirut. ‘See him,’ urged Yervant. ‘See if he is OK. He has had some problems …’

Hagop had the Armenian penchant for dark rooms. All I could see to begin with were narrow strips of light slanting through the shutters. The window was open and I could smell the baker’s ovens below and hear the hum and clatter of the souk. Hagop sat on a divan and the smoke from his cigarette rose and curled in and out of the strips of light. He had a thick, modulated voice and his English was good.

‘How is Yervant? I think the war was bad for him. I don’t know why he didn’t leave.’

‘He’s glad it’s over.’

I could see Hagop more clearly now. He was a compact figure in t-shirt and jeans and no shoes. His legs stretched along the divan, crossed at the ankles. All his movements were slow and measured and his thin lips twitched slightly as he spoke.

He re-lit his cigarette. ‘I have been planning for some time to return to Beirut. When this Gulf situation is sorted out, I will go back. For now I have taken this room. I feel happy in this room.’ He pulled his palm slowly across his forehead. He did not look happy. ‘I have been reading some things by our Gregory of Narek, from his Book of Lamentations. You like his work?’

‘Yes – very much.’

‘For me Gregory is a master. I hear his voice between the lines. You know how he writes and it seems so hopeless? About how he feels like the foal of an ass, or a broken lock in a door, and that he could not tell all his sins even with a sea of ink and a grove of reeds? Yet I feel such joy reading him.’

Hagop smiled to himself. He and Gregory had little in common. Both of their families had come from the mountains around Lake Van, both shared the Armenian passion for jeremiads. But Gregory, born in the tenth century, had been an intensely pious man, a mystic, devoting his life to prayer and rarely moving from the monastery. Hagop on the other hand could hardly keep still. His story as he told it, of a water-boatman life skimming across the surface of the Middle East, made me realize how precarious the diaspora now was. He had spent fifteen years in a worldly frenzy of travel; there were few towns in the Middle East he had not been to, few things he had not traded. Borders of every kind had tumbled in his path and now there was nothing new.

But he had resisted going to Turkey. Someday he would, but for the moment, well, Armenians are not welcome. I tried to describe for him Lake Van and its high, blue light and the mountains around it. He sighed and shook his head; it was a world away from here.

Hagop’s grandfather had been seven when he’d seen Lake Van for the last time. The Turkish zaptieh came to the village and drove them all out. Those who weren’t shot at once were marched down from the mountains towards the desert. Twenty-five of his family left; only he and a cousin survived. The old man never spoke of these things. But shortly before he died he sat young Hagop at his feet and calmly told him everything.

The village was not big. There’d been a fountain in the square where the horses drank and sometimes water from the trough would slop over into the square. The people gathered at the fountain before the march. He remembered then how silent the older marchers were and the shouts of the zaptieh. He remembered them taking his sister, and the woman who wandered off into the desert with the guards running after her and shouting, ‘Come back! Where are you going?’ and she saying simply, ‘I am going to the funeral of God.’ He recalled the thirst of those dry regions of southern Anatolia; the marches followed the old road beside the river but they could not drink. His brother cried and begged for water and his mother scooped a cupful from the imprint of a donkey’s hoof. A day later the boy died; his mother was dead within a week.

Hagop’s grandfather and his surviving cousin had somehow reached one of Aleppo’s orphanages. From there they moved to Beirut. They both married at about the same time orphaned girls from the same region around Van. But for his cousin the weight of what they had been through overwhelmed him. With his wife expecting their first child, and the next generation ensured, he hanged himself.

Hagop’s father meanwhile built up a business in Beirut retailing European clothes and again had one child, a son. Hagop himself grew up to an easy life. He was bright, indulged by his father and exposed to all the temptations of Beirut in the late 1960s. Studying at the American University he became involved in the lucrative fringes of Beiruti commerce. Within a few years he was running a dubious venture trading antiquities. The war stifled that operation, but soon all sorts of other things were passing through the crumbling capital: raw opium, guns, hashish from the Bekaa valley.

Hagop was drawn in by it. His business spun higher; the possibilities seemed limitless. But he began to make mistakes and for six months fretted in an Egyptian jail convicted of currency smuggling. Then he began to dip into his own bags.

One night in northern Iraq, in the town of Mosul, he stepped on to the flat roof of an apartment block. It was a hot night and he was twitchy and wide-eyed from months of cocaine use. He stood on the parapet and saw the edges of the night flashing with orange. Part of him knew these were the well-head fires of the desert oil stations, but as he watched them, they grew, ringing his own horizons so that he could no longer move. He thought he was in Hell. All that his grandfather had told him came back. He saw the Turkish zaptieh riding beside the convoy. He felt his throat parched and saw the damp imprint of the donkey’s hoof. He felt his tongue fur up and stick in his mouth. His face flushed with heat. When he looked down and saw his own skin peeling, he tore off his shirt and ran inside. Drinking from a bottle of water, he had hallucinations of a quite different kind: the village near Van with his young grandfather squatting in the shade of a walnut tree, splashing in the fountain’s overspill.

‘That was worse than the flames,’ said Hagop. ‘I realized then what it was to be Armenian. That village I saw is now always with me.’

Thereafter Hagop was a different man; he became a committed Armenian. He started to study music seriously and combined it with his other resolution – to live in Armenia, Soviet Armenia. He gained a place at the Conservatoire in Yerevan. That was two years ago.

He lit another cigarette and looked at me darkly. ‘Let me tell you about Armenia. Great Armenia! When I first arrived in Yerevan, I couldn’t believe it. Armenians in an Armenian city, in the shadow of Ararat. I got involved in everything – political meetings, the arts. I spoke to the composers and the poets and read many books of Armenian history. I even started to write an opera based on the court of the Bagratids at Ani. I became a “Good Armenian”. But after a while something changed.’

Hagop was there when they started to kick against Moscow. Yerevan became charged with the idea of change; intellectuals saw the hold of the Kremlin weakening. At last they could speak out. But the new climate had its darker side: liberalism belied anarchy, nationalism became a by-word for banditry. Guns fell into the wrong hands and decades of bitterness and frustration spilled over in peculiar ways.

Late one October night Hagop was walking home through Yerevan. A car pulled up and the rear door opened. Two Armenians climbed out and bundled him into the car. They pressed the muzzle of a Kalashnikov to his cheek and drove him up to the mountains. There they forced him to kneel and to clear the rocks from a small patch of ground.

‘Now, dig a grave!’

For three hours they toyed with him, threatening to shoot him, abandoning him for a while, then returning. Just before dawn they took him down to Yerevan and dumped him outside the railway station.

‘I still don’t know what they wanted. They knew I was from abroad. I offered them dollars – but it wasn’t money. I stayed in Yerevan a few months longer, but after that night, things were not the same. If you reach Armenia, be careful.’

‘And are you still a “Good Armenian”?’

He smiled for the first time. ‘I’ve no idea. But I am certainly more Armenian.’

When I left Hagop it was almost dark. For some time I wandered, half lost, through the narrow streets around the souk. Not for the first time I felt numb and baffled by Armenia. I was haunted by the image of a flame and the Armenians spinning round it like moths; like Hagop I now felt by turns drawn in and repelled by it. At the end of the evening I returned to the gate of the Armenian compound. I rang the bell but there was no response. I called and threw pebbles at the guard’s window. Nothing. I was tired and distracted and abandoned myself to going into the city centre, and the hotels I had been warned against.

Two of them turned me away when they saw my passport. In a third they grunted and gave me a room. I lay on the bed and idly watched the cockroaches pad across the wall. In my fatigue they became allied tanks in the Iraqi desert …

I woke from a sweaty dream in which Palestinian guerrillas were kicking down the door. I took off my shirt and saw with some alarm the Hebrew letters of its label. I’d bought the shirt in a department store in West Jerusalem. All the anxiety of the past few days spilled over. Convinced I’d be taken for a Mossad agent, I pulled out the label and cut at it until the patterns of the letters were no more than formless shreds of cotton on the floor.

The following morning I took a bus to Aleppo and saw again the wide-open face of Syria. Between the bunched-up chaos of Damascus and Aleppo the horizons fell to a flat, featureless desert. The gates had closed on the hubbub of the souk, the everyday mayhem of Arab towns, and the world was suddenly still and quiet. I thought of the silence two years ago at Shadaddie and the dark silence of the cave, and before that the silence of the hills around the plain of Kharput. Silence was the seal on the Armenian massacres: Turkish silence, Armenian silence, desert silence.

I still had the sketch map I’d been given then in Aleppo. It was now annotated with dozens of notes and I planned to go back with it to the desert north of the Euphrates. But first I needed a few days in Aleppo, a few days of planning, a few days with those who’d survived. Since the exodus of Armenians from Beirut during the civil war, Aleppo’s community has swelled dramatically. Now there are close to one hundred thousand Armenians living in the city.

If Aleppo can be considered something of an Armenian centre, then its own centre must surely be the Baron Hotel. At the foot of the Baron’s sweeping double staircase dozed a portly golden retriever. From time to time a chamber-maid or guest would step over her but she did not move. Crossing the parquet floor I propped my bag against the reception-booth and asked for Baron Mazloumian. (‘Baron’ is the Armenian ‘Mister’ dating from the Crusades when the Armenians noticed that all the best French names were preceded with ‘Baron’. Mazloumian was the hotel’s proprietor.)

‘At a quarter past ten every evening he comes in to do the telexes.’

So I wrote him a note, arranged a room and, in the late afternoon, stepped out into the fading yellow of the town. Aleppo was fleshier than Damascus: more Arab, less Ba’athist. Along the outside of the pavements, loose calico swung against the hips of the desert drovers; on the inside hawk-eyed merchants squatted beside cheap watches, lighters and rainbow racks of useless plastic things. In the shadowy hinterland were the cinemas. Posters made banal promises of semi-nudity, gun-laden banditry and rough justice. In one were rag-doll bodies swinging from garrets, in another beckoned the pink chiffon charm of Scheherazade, through another galloped the Mongol hordes. I plumped for A Town called Bastard and paid fifteen Syrian pounds for a broken seat.

Ten minutes was all I could stand – and all it took for the carnage on-screen to spill into the aisles. Several boys wrestled on the floor. Others yelled support or argued nonchalantly in groups while bursts of automatic gunfire rattled unnoticed from the speakers. It all seemed too familiar.

Behind the cinema were the open-fronted workshops of the Armenian mechanics. A bare-footed boy was chasing and coaxing a tractor tyre along the cobbles. The monochrome interiors echoed with metallic sounds and it seemed that nothing in that street was not dedicated to restoring – as swiftly as possible – life to broken cars. The row of workshops looked like beds in a busy field hospital. I thought of the adage about Armenians in Syria, that without them the government would collapse: Assad depends on his secret police, and the secret police depend on their cars – and no one can fix cars like the Armenians.

Near the place of the mechanics was a subterranean arcade full of photographers’ studios, many of them also Armenian. I needed a new stock of passport photographs for my on-going quest for visas and pushed open the door of Kevork’s Yerevan Foto Studio. Photography, like fixing cars, is also a talent of Armenian exiles. Karsh of Ottowa, who gave us the grizzly-sad picture of Hemingway, who snatched Churchill’s cigar from his mouth in order to make him angry enough for that famous bullish portrait, was born of Armenian parents in Mardin, southern Turkey. In Beirut I’d been to the studio of Varoujan Sethian who flicked through his portfolio of official portraits: the leaders of Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain (not Jordan, as King Hussein has his own Armenian photographer). He had had four Lebanese presidents in his studio in recent years (two had subsequently been assassinated). And his pictures of President Assad had now been reproduced and posted in offices, in car windows and on almost every street corner in Syria.

Kevork’s Foto Studio was more commercial. He cupped my chin in his hand, then bent down behind an old plate camera.

‘Yes, sir. Very good. Hold it like that. You married? … You have pretty girl? Very … nice!’ His flash bowl bathed everything in a sudden white light and it was done.

Kevork had started as a darkroom assistant when he was fifteen. His parents had both been from the orphanages, too young to remember anything about how they got there from Armenia. They had had one child and no money. When he was sixteen Kevork borrowed thirty dollars from an American to buy a camera. The American clearly did not expect, or want, the debt repaid. But Kevork turned up five months later at the Baron Hotel and gave the American his cash.

‘I used to work sometimes all night in the darkroom, but the chemicals made me ill.’ Now Kevork had his own family to help him out. ‘Let me introduce you!’

He assembled them in the studio. ‘Now. This son, he do video US system. Other son do video European system. My wife, she do Muslim weddings.’

‘Why don’t you do the weddings?’

‘Christian gentleman no go to Muslim wedding.’

‘Why not?’

‘They may kill him.’

‘So what sort of photography do you do?’

‘Propaganda photo.’

‘Propaganda? For whom?’

‘All people – government people, family people. I do work for blind.’

‘Blind people?’

‘Yes. They like holy place propaganda. I do moskies and shrines.’

‘But they cannot see your pictures?’

‘Of course not – they are blind.’

I was back at the Baron by ten fifteen and Krikor Mazloumian was there in his office, checking the ledger against the day’s telexes. As the hotel’s tourist trade had slackened so its telex machine rattled into service for Aleppo’s Armenians. Soviet Armenia was opening up and the Levantine diaspora was again learning to combine its two driving passions: business and the homeland.

It was a high-ceilinged room, with the telex in one corner and Armenia’s modern iconography pinned to the flaking walls. The snowy summit of Ararat hovered above Krikor’s head; on the opposite wall Yerevan’s Martyrs’ Monument stretched its brutal limbs over the Eternal Flame and, above a battered grey filing cabinet, a map showed the borders of old Armenia stretching across the east of Turkey.

Krikor reached into the filing cabinet and fumbled around. He came out with a bottle of Armenian brandy. ‘You don’t speak German, by any chance?’ he asked, filling two plastic beakers.

‘No.’

‘Pity. Chief of Police gave my son this letter he’d been sent. Asked him to work out what it says. I know a little German, but this baffles me. Something about love or something …’

He shook his head and muttered while he looked for a place to put the letter. He had an old-world charm but his speech, like all his movements, was slow and listless. He was blind in one eye and pretty blind in the other. Light annoyed him and around his forehead he wore a visor made from an old box of washing powder: ‘Omo for the brightest wash – Omo for the cleanest whites’.

After some minutes he closed the ledger, pulled down his visor, took the beaker of brandy and began to talk. The story of the Baron Hotel, like most Armenian stories, starts in Anatolia in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was then that Krikor’s grandmother left Kharput for her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Aleppo she stayed in a han, with the desert merchants and their animals. There was no hotel. So she bought a small premises near the souk. ‘Being a good Armenian, she named it the Ararat Hotel.’

Her son later rebuilt it, with an Armenian architect from Paris. And since then it has remained more or less unchanged. The parquet floor is still the same, the dark stained panels and the dark double staircase; the prints on the landing are still of the London – Baghdad Simplon Express (seven days: safety / rapidity / economy), and all the place lacks as a perfect period piece is a few aspidistras, spreading their languid fronds across the foyer.

During the First War the hotel was taken over by the Turks. ‘What champagne will you be serving at your Easter?’ asked Abdulahad Nouri Bey, a notoriously cruel member of the Deportations Committee.

‘Easter’, replied Armenak Mazloumian, ‘begins on the day of your departure.’

When they got news of their own deportation, the family managed to escape to the Bekaa valley, with the old matriarch, Krikor’s grandmother, claiming that the eighty children she brought with her were all her own kin. But the hotel came into its own after the war, with Syria under French control. The 1920s and 30s were heady days at the Baron. Aleppo stood at the exotic end of the Grand Tour and the Baron was the only place to stay. Krikor had a bi-plane and would take favoured guests flying over the desert to the ruins of St Symeon Stylites. Amy Johnson stayed at the Baron, so did Diana Cooper. Agatha Christie sat in one of its rooms, writing Murder on the Orient Express; the Household Cavalry stayed and ran a mock hunt up and down the stairs. A framed copy of T.E. Lawrence’s unpaid bill stands in the reading room. But now few people came to Syria, still fewer to the Baron.

The fat old labrador squeezed through the door. ‘Oh. Pasha,’ muttered the Baron fondly.

‘Pasha?’ I said. ‘Like the Turkish governors?’

But he laughed. ‘No, not Pasha. Portia – Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.’

The Baron asked me to lunch the next day. ‘Just something simple’ was five courses and didn’t end until it was almost dark. Our table of seven was the only one laid in the hotel’s large panelled dining room; the Kurdish waiter was attentive to a fault, serving everyone with great scoops of green dal and running round in a frenzy of high spirits. He had just heard from Radio Monte Carlo that the Kurds had shot down three of Saddam’s combat helicopters.

At the head of the table Krikor sat flanked by three fat Armenian women on a week’s holiday from Yerevan. They looked very Soviet in their long black leather coats and dyed hair, and said nothing throughout lunch. I felt a little low to think that Armenia, the object of my journey might in fact be more Soviet than Armenian. But Mrs Mazloumian, English by birth, had a different view of Soviet Armenia. ‘Sometimes I think I like it more than my husband does.’