Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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lira. The bar was not exactly clean or well lighted, but it was friendly and relaxed, and cleaner and better lit than the Tanca. There were two television sets, one in each of the two rooms separated from each other by the bar. They were playing the video of a Turkish thriller. In every scene, men were either punching or shooting at each other. In one segment, a group of men chased another group of men in cars. When nearly everyone was dead, the video ended and the barman turned it off and put on a cassette of Turkish pop music. But for the language spoken and the absence of women, it could have been a college beer bar anywhere in the Western world – young men in jeans, glasses of lager, music, a kitchen serving hot sandwiches. One man kindly offered me a beer and tried to welcome me into his conversation, but we discovered we had no common language. I tried English, French, Arabic and a few words of Spanish and Italian. He tried Turkish and what might have been Kurdish. He settled for a clink of glasses and a hearty pat on my back. What more could anyone ask?
At breakfast in the Arsuz Hotel, the old waiter in a uniform of black trousers, white shirt and tie, walked slowly across the terrace carrying breakfast on a tray. He tilted his thin body towards the table as he laid out the small breakfast dishes of olives, bread and white cheese. He poured tea from a tin pot into a cup and asked in Arabic if I wanted anything else.
“No,” I said. “Thank you.”
The waiter, whose name was Iskandar, Arabic and Turkish for Alexander, had somehow adopted me in my few days at the Arsuz Hotel. From the time we struck up a conversation in Arabic when I arrived, he would not let the Turkish waiters serve me. He was moody and would run his hand through his thinning grey hair and shake his head disapprovingly if I asked one of them for anything. He would always try to give me something extra, sometimes new green olives alongside the black, sometimes fried eggs, which I could see were not being served to the other guests. Despite his moodiness, he was a gentleman who moved and spoke with great dignity. He was proud that he came, not from this village, but from the ancient city of Antioch. He sympathised when I told him my shower that morning had been cold. Apparently, I was up too early for the sun to have had time to heat the water. I suspected he was solicitous because he enjoyed having a guest in the hotel who spoke his language, however badly and with however strong a Lebanese accent.
When I asked Iskandar where I could find a taxi to take me into Alexandretta, he advised me to save money by using the “dolmüs,” a taxi which picked people up and dropped them off anywhere on a fixed route.
“Why do you want a taxi?” he asked reproachfully. “Taxis cost 5,000 lira. The dolmüs is only 250.” In Turkey, the dolmüs was usually a micro-bus. Like the service in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, the dolmüs was the normal transport for the poor. They called it “dolmüs”, here because it was “stuffed” with passengers, the way they called courgettes or vine leaves “stuffed” with rice and meat “dolma”.
When I reached the Ford micro-bus parked in the main square, it was already filled with fifteen people in twelve seats. We waited a few more minutes to stuff in another passenger before the bus began its journey north. The driver, his dashboard decorated with a turquoise stone to ward off the evil eye, stopped every so often on the way to let someone off or on, often leaving the road altogether to seek out passengers in the villages.
There were more women than men on the bus, and all of them, even the babies, wore gold earrings. The peasant women wore scarves with polka-dots or other designs in lurid colours over their hair. Women were not expected to have to sit next to men. We were about halfway to Alexandretta when a fat old peasant woman with a gold tooth pulled herself with both hands up the step into the bus. She examined us carefully and saw that the only empty seat was next to an inoffensive-looking young man. She hesitated, but finally sat next to him. When another old woman with hennaed hair noticed this unfortunate state of affairs, she picked up the small child next to her and sat him on her lap. She then invited the other old woman to sit where the child had been, an offer immediately accepted. Several people looked with disapproval at the young man, who had done nothing throughout this little drama.
In Alexandretta, Hind Koba took me to meet her elusive brother-in-law, Abdallah Tanzi, who lived in a flat a floor below her apartment near the sea. The building was a representative 1950s study in concrete with small balconies studded along its sides, and in her sister’s flat the reception rooms were typically Oriental, with heavy wooden dressers and tables, dark stuffed chairs and dark walls. Abdallah Tanzi was a friendly man in his late 60s, short, stout and bald. A friend of a similar age, taller and thinner, but just as bald, was visiting from Beirut.
Hind’s sister asked the maid to bring us cups of tea, and Tanzi showed me his letters of recommendation from American companies he had represented, as well as photographs of his son’s graduation from Illinois State University. This son lived in Chicago; his daughter lived in Istanbul, where she worked as an economist; only one child, a son who worked as an engineer, lived in Alexandretta. His English, like Hind’s and her sister’s, was fluent. The maid carried in the tea, which, unusually, was served in china cups. Tanzi talked about Alexandretta, where he had been born under the French Mandate. “For a married couple,” he said, “life is pleasant. For a single person, it depends on whether he has friends. There’s nothing special here.”
I asked him about 1939, the year Alexandretta ceased to be a part of Syria. “Maybe twenty-five per cent of the people living in Iskenderun at that time left,” he said. “They were the minorities, if you’d like to say, the Christians.”
“You’re Christian. Why did you stay?”
“Because we didn’t feel anything. It was everything regular. Nothing special.”
“Did you speak Turkish then?”
“Yes, but not as good as now. The mother tongue is Arabic.”
“How does life here compare with life in Syria?”
“We hear that life is more pleasant here. There is a big shortage of consumer goods there. The administration is much more democratic here.”
“Can you travel to Syria easily?”
“I think it’s difficult to get a Syrian visa. Previously, we used to get it at the border. Now, we have to go to Ankara.”
“Do any Arabs want this to be part of Syria?”
“Even if there are feelings,” he said, “no one here would express them.”
“Syria claims Alexandretta. Does that mean anything?”
Tanzi began to answer, but was interrupted by his guest, Georges Sayyegh, who had until then been playing chess with Hind and now insisted on playing chess with me. I explained I had come not to play chess, but to talk. Another man arrived to play bridge. Hind asked me whether I would like to see a videotape of her MBE investiture at the British Embassy in Ankara. She put on the video, which showed her in a crowded reception in the grand surroundings of the Embassy. She looked happy and shy, like a little bird escaped from her cage in Alexandretta excited to find her way to the flocks in Istanbul. The ambassador delivered a speech in which he complimented “Hannoud Alexander” on her years of service to British subjects in trouble. When the tape ended, she showed me the MBE. “Why did he call you Hannoud Alexander?” I asked.
“That was my name,” she explained, “before we had to change.”
“You had to change your name? Why?”
“When this area was ceded to Turkey, everyone had to take a Turkish name.”
The maid came back into the room, carrying a sweet cake which she put in front of me. I thanked her in Arabic, and she went back to the kitchen embarrassed. Sayyegh then insisted we have a game of chess. We played in silence for nearly an hour until I conceded. Sayyegh, having destroyed any chance I had of conversation with this older generation of Alexandrettans, stood up without a word and walked into the next room. There, the three old men were preparing the cards for a game of bridge and called me to play with them. I admitted I did not know how.
Another afternoon, I went to Hind’s apartment to visit her and her two sisters. They had just eaten lunch, but she told me