Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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on board. He fell in love with her. She was not in love with him. He shot her dead in a hotel in London.”
Krikor Mazloumian turned the logs with a metal poker, reviving the fire. “I remember another night when a British officer here received an order to pick up a general from the Turkish border, put him up in the hotel for the night and take him down to Jerusalem. The officer met the general, who was in civilian clothes in accord with Turkish neutrality laws during the war, and brought him to the hotel. As he turned to leave, the officer told the general, ‘The car will be ready at 8 tomorrow morning.’ The general asked him,
‘You mean, you’re going to leave me alone tonight?’
‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’
‘Do you customarily leave Wehrmacht generals who are defecting to your side unguarded?’ The officer then posted two sergeants outside his room until morning. That was what made the work interesting.”
“Does it still have some moments?”
“No,” Mazloumian said. He looked miserable. Reliving those happier years was the only relief from the pain in his eyes and the decay of the hotel.
As I left him, sitting by the fireplace, Sally was putting the drops into his eyes. As they dripped down his strong, weathered face, they looked almost like tears.
Although Krikor Mazloumian regretted the passing of his hotel’s golden age, the Baron’s still attracted its share of unusual characters. One evening, a man I met in the hotel bar told me proudly he was an Aleppo Jew, and said he often came to the hotel for a drink. He asked me, as so many Syrians did, that if I should mention him in my book, not to use his name. He thought there were less than a thousand Jews left in Aleppo, about five hundred fewer than the Jewish medieval traveller Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela had counted in 1165 AD, and a far smaller community than had lived in Aleppo before Israel came into being in 1948. “There are many more Jews in Damascus than here,” I said.
“Yes, but we are much better.”
“Is it difficult for Jews here, with the restrictions?”
“There are hardly any restrictions any more, but we Jews can’t win, you know,” he said. “The US Embassy gives us multiple-entry visas for America, easily, just because we’re Jews. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”
“Better than being a Lebanese Shiite applying for an American visa,” I said.
“But then, I get to JFK in New York. You know what the immigration officer said? He said I had to go back. He wouldn’t let me in, because Syrians were undesirable.”
At 10 a.m. on Easter Sunday, I returned to the cul-de-sac of the three churches. The square was nearly empty, much quieter than on Good Friday. At the Melkite Mass, a white marble chancel screen divided the altar from the small congregation. Cherubs’ heads, flowers and religious symbols carved into the marble cast their shadows, outlining them sharply against the white. Above the altar partition, along its length from one wall to the other, was a row of ikons. Above each ikon was a white dove, and hanging from the beak of each dove was a white stone ball, like an egg, symbol this and every Easter of rebirth. Hanging from each ball was a brass sanctuary lamp, lit again now that Christ had left his tomb. Many of the ikons in the church represented St George, a favourite with Greek Catholics. Through an opening in the middle of the screen, the altar was visible, canopied and elaborate. The priest, as in the old Latin mass, faced the altar, his back to the people, singing the Mass, with old men near the altar singing the responses. They sang the liturgy like Latin Gregorian chants, a capella, and it was beautiful. When Mass ended, the bearded priest turned to bless us, and we filed out quietly.
At 11 a.m., the Maronite Mass nextdoor was a stark contrast: the building was much darker and larger. It had none of the painted columns and blue ornate mouldings of the more rococo Greeks. The congregation was larger, and no partition separated them from the altar. There was a canopy over the altar, but simpler than the Melkite, without the Greek’s ornaments, in dark yellow stone like the church building itself. There were similarities as well: the priest faced the altar, and he sang without music. Most of the people received communion, kneeling at the altar rails as Catholics in the West used to. Everyone departed quietly, stopping to speak in low voices on the church steps outside.
The day’s major liturgical event had been the 7 a.m. Mass at the Greek Orthodox cathedral. I had missed it, beginning as it did before my breakfast. One Catholic who went said the ceremony took three hours and was attended by hundreds of Orthodox and a few Catholics.
After the Maronite Mass, I went to the Mazloumians’ house for an Easter Sunday drink. Just after I sat down with a small Armenian brandy in my hand, the real Easter Sunday visiting began. An old man who sold pianos was the first to arrive. Sally spoke to him in Armenian, offered him a chair and gave him a glass of brandy. She then left the room and returned with more visitors, a couple and their three beautiful daughters. The middle girl, a strikingly beautiful, dark haired child, was named Sevan after a lake in Armenia. The seven-year-old was nicknamed Mauke, Armenian for mouse, and she was surprisingly mouselike. Her response to every question was to put her hand over her mouth, giggle and hide behind one of her sisters. The girls’ parents and the Mazloumians talked about their many trips to Armenia, friends they had in the capital, Erevan, and changes they had noticed there over the years.
Sally could not have been kinder to any of us, pouring brandy, bringing more nuts from the kitchen, speaking English to me, Armenian to her other guests, and making certain her husband had his eyedrops. Somehow, though, she seemed aloof and somewhat lonely. All the foreigners who were her friends in 1947 had left Aleppo, as had her daughters. It seemed that most of the other Englishwomen in Aleppo were married to Syrian Muslims, and they did not socialise outside their own houses and families.
Armen said the Armenians were the craftsmen of Aleppo. “There is an old saying in Aleppo,” he said. “The Armenian makes, and the Muslim sells.” He said an Aleppo Jew once told him, “God created the Jew with a head, the Armenian with hands and the Muslim with a prick.” To Aleppo’s Jews, he insisted, goy referred to Muslims, while Christians were Ar-ririm, “uncircumcised Gentiles.” The Jews of Aleppo had another saying, “Don’t trust the goy, even if he’s in his grave.” Armen considered himself an authority on all Aleppo’s communities, the Jews, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, Arab Sunnis, Alawis, and he probably was. He met them all every day in his hotel.
As the afternoon wore on, the other guests left, and Krikor poured the three of us more brandy. He put a record of an Armenian Gregorian Mass on his phonograph, sat down and closed his aching eyes for a moment to listen. We talked about Aleppo, the Armenians who lived there and some of those who left. Krikor mentioned the book In Aleppo Once, by a mutual friend in London named Taqui Altounyan, about her illustrious family. Her grandfather was a physician who owned the hospital where Sally had come to work as a nurse after the Second World War. There had been terrible divisions in this talented family, because, as they said, the grandfather had left the grandmother for a younger woman. Ernest Altounyan, the son, who was also a doctor, never spoke to his father again. Ernest had served in the British army and had been a close friend of T. E. Lawrence. The Altounyans’ hospital had closed by the 1950s, and no Altounyans remained in Aleppo.
Sally showed me the wedding gift the Altounyans had given her forty years before. It was a book, bound and painted by hand, with flowers drawn on many of the pages. In it were the names of forty years of guests of the family, rather than the hotel, for which there was another book. She asked me to sign, and I put my name there after pages on which I saw Patrick Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding, David and Ruth Holden, Freya Stark and my old friend, Michael Adams. Almost every signature I mentioned, leafing through the book, brought a story from Krikor or Sally: the marriage at the British Consulate in Aleppo of Robert Stephens and Taqui Altounyan, the second marriage and scandal of the old Dr Altounyan, the murder of David Holden in Cairo.
“Who do you think did it, Charles?” Sally asked me. David Holden was the Sunday Times Middle East correspondent, who was murdered after taking a taxi from Cairo airport in 1977. The Sunday Times, when Lord Thomson owned it and Harold Evans was the editor, devoted its then considerable journalistic