Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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vanquished the dragon with his spear and the Archangel Michael conquered Lucifer by the sword. Yet it was the followers of the pacific St Francis of Assisi who kept Christendom alive here. The heroes of the Crusades, the marauding Knights Templar and Hospitaller, had fled long ago.
Padre Giovanni excused himself to discuss something with the women who were cleaning the church for Palm Sunday mass the next day. I thanked him for his time and left.
Walking out of the church courtyard into the road facing Mehmet Udimir’s library, I saw a small cinema, the profane neatly adjoining the sacred. A torn poster stapled onto a board in front advertised an Italian soft-porn film starring the Eritrean actress Zeudi Araya. I went in to take a look, but found the cashier fast asleep in a chair. I decided not to wake him. A doorway covered with a blanket led into a bare room with iron and plastic folding chairs set haphazardly on the cement floor. A flat wooden ceiling above and an arched window along one wall gave the room the feel of an abandoned Spanish mission. A white sheet stretched across one wall served as the screen.
Twenty-five men and boys sat in a room that could comfortably seat 200. There seemed to be no minimum age to watch this film of a bad Italian actor fondling the breasts of, first, a bad Italian actress, and then of Zeudi Araya, a lithe African, who herself soon fondled the breasts of the Italian actress, who reciprocated by fondling Zeudi’s breasts. I feared for the young boys, some aged eight or nine, not because they were exposed to the sight of bare breasts, which I took to be harmless, but that they might grow up to believe the sole object of sex was breast-fondling. The sounds of the lovers’ heavy breathing could hardly compete with the creaking of the old projector. What little dialogue there was, mainly expletives of one and two words, had been dubbed into Turkish. The film itself was grainy, obviously the last print of an extremely cheap production.
Every so often, some of the men got up to leave, no doubt bored. A few more pre-adolescent boys drifted in, without disturbing the somnolent cashier, and sat down to watch the Italian couple find the meaning of life on a tropical island inhabited by a naked black girl. On the wrinkled sheet, an appropriate medium for projecting this particular film, Zeudi Araya sadly waved good-bye to her Italian lovers. They were sailing back to Italy and out of her life forever, which I took as my cue to depart. I did not disturb the cashier. I was certain he preferred his dreams to the twenty pence I would have paid him for my ten-minute excursion into Turkey’s world of soft porn next to the “very old” church.
I returned to the church on Palm Sunday. The old altar and pulpit stood as empty reminders of the old Latin Mass, while microphones on the new altar and lectern carried the voice of Padre Giovanni in Turkish to the eighty people, mostly well-dressed women and children, of the congregation. When the priest reached the Pater Noster, he sang it in Latin. Perhaps he did that so that his mother and father, seated at the front, would understand at least part of the ceremony. They sat like two humble Italian peasants, the mother with a black mantilla on her white hair, and the father dressed in a shirt without tie buttoned at the collar. They were indistinguishable from their fellow Mediterraneans in the church and could easily have been Turkish, Greek, Syrian, or any other race of the civilisation at the “middle of the earth”. Behind them, children dressed in white held leafy twigs, though I wondered why they did not have palm leaves from the trees outside. The Mass ended, and outside other young boys were drifting into the cinema next door for a glimpse of Zeudi Araya’s breasts.
That evening, I strolled about the town. Alexandretta was pleasant, but run-down, with unrepaired roads and crumbling buildings. There was the smell of sea-air, mixed with that of diesel fuel, and the smoke of meat grilling on coals in the popular restaurants. Most of the streets were dark, only half lit by old street lights.
My exploration of Alexandretta’s limited night life was brief. On one street near Mehmet Udimir’s library, two night clubs stood side by side. One was the Kazablanca, and the other was the Tanca Bar. Their exteriors were lit with coloured lights, blinking in the darkness like Christmas trees, lights that were identical in border towns and ports from Tijuana, Mexico, to Trabzon. They beckoned the stranger into a forbidden world which, at its best, would be merely disappointing. There were men standing outside in cheap light suits, bright ties and pencil moustaches – the uniform of cabaret doormen throughout the world. Two of them were beckoning unwary pedestrians into the Kazablanca, so I walked into the Tanca, which at that moment had no one at the door.
As soon as I was inside, I knew I had made a mistake. It was so dark I could not see. I felt my way along a short, low corridor to a doorway which opened onto a long, only slightly less dark room. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that the ceilings were vaulted, strangely covered in a knitted pattern of wood slats. The twining wood all round gave the cavern a sylvan feel, in the worst and most forbidding sense, recalling fairy stories in which the child is warned not to go into the woods alone at night. I waited for the wolf.
The head waiter, dressed like the doormen of the Kazablanca, motioned me to an empty table. Men, alone or in groups, sat at other tables in rows along either long wall between the door and the bar. In the central file between the men’s tables were those of “the girls,” who sat together impassively, more than a dozen of them. None was sitting with any of the men. In ill-fitting dresses, with costume jewellery and dyed hair, they appeared to be either plain bar girls, there to encourage men to buy more drinks, or prostitutes. They were unusually ugly and unforthcoming for either. On the wooden dance floor, in front of which a three-man band was laconically playing “Oriental” music, there were no dancers, strippers, or even magicians.
I sat quietly for a minute trying to discern the sights in the room. Suddenly out of the darkness a waiter was standing in front of me. He had dark, greasy hair, and a moustache out of a 1930s film. He spoke to me in Turkish, which I could neither hear because of the music nor understand. I asked for “bira,” beer in Turkish and Arabic. He returned a moment later with a bottle of Tuborg, an empty glass on a metal tray and a tin dish with a few pistachios in it. He put the tray down on my small round table, and, with a flourish worthy of the uncorking of a bottle of vintage champagne, pulled the cap off the beer bottle. As delicately as any sommelier at Simpson’s with a choice claret, he poured the beer into the glass. Then he smiled and asked me to pay.
I did not understand. He repeated the price. I thought he said “bes” something. I recalled from the Farsi name for backgammon, “Shesh-Besh,” that “besh” was five. Perhaps he was saying “five something,” maybe 500. The band was still playing its loud, discordant music, so it was impossible to be sure. Was it 500 Turkish lira? I handed him a 500 lira note, a little less than one American dollar, but he shook his head. He wrote down a figure: 8,000.
“Eight thousand?” I asked, incredulous.
He nodded.
I did some quick figuring in my head. “That’s over ten dollars!”
He raised his eyebrows, then waved his hand to indicate the beer and the nuts. So, that explained it. With pistachios, a fifty cent bottle of beer cost ten dollars. Perhaps I had to take into consideration the cost of the entertainment and the presence of the girls at their private tables.
“That’s too much,” I said and stood to leave.
The waiter was clearly displeased, but he did not follow me or argue. The band continued playing its awful tune, and the girls sat as placidly as before. I walked into the blackness of the corridor and outside to the cool night. I knew that if I had been somewhere else, say Beirut, the waiter would have tried to force me to pay. He would have chased me and summoned assistance in the form of a security guard with ham fists and a .38 revolver. (In fact, that is exactly what had happened to me on my first night in Beirut in 1972.) The people here were mercifully more relaxed. I decided not to sample the delights of the Kazablanca, although a more serious investigator of the joys of Alexandretta’s night clubs would have persisted.
I walked along the same street to a normal, non-cabaret bar. It was open to the road with large windows and the inside was as lively as the Tanca Bar had been dead. Scores of mostly young men were talking and drinking beer, seated at stools along the curved, marble top bar or at the wooden casks which served as tables. There were no women – no bar girls, no wives or girlfriends, no young Alexandrettan ladies out on their own.