An American In Syria

Mohammed

I used to teach U.S. history to high-school students in Syria. When I got there in 1999, the Internet, cellphones, and Coca-Cola were all illegal. I spent the first week before my job began taking long walks to familiarize myself with the ancient city of Damascus. A guard named Mohammed stood outside of the school, and he and I would talk about sports, the local tourist attractions, and such. Mohammed laughed at my accent and taught me to count in Arabic: Wahid, ithnan, thalatha . . .

The school had been built for the sons and daughters of diplomats, but it was open to children of all nationalities, and about 80 percent of my students would be Syrian. A couple of days before school started, I attended a teachers’ meeting. The principal warned us, “This is Syria, not America. There are different rules here. If someone mentions President Assad’s name, for good or bad, shut up!” Only the secret police were brave enough even to mention the president’s name in public, he told us. They would bug our phones and break into our apartments when we were not there. “You never know who is watching,” he said. “Mohammed, the guard outside the gate, is secret police assigned to our school.”

God damn it, I thought. My only friend in the whole Middle East is secret police.

That afternoon Mohammed tried to strike up our usual conversation: “Kevin, you went for a walk yesterday. Where did you go?”

Hearing sinister undertones in his question, I angrily shot back, “That’s right, Mohammed. I did go for a walk yesterday. But you know what? I don’t really remember where I went. Do you?”

Mohammed looked somberly at me, slowly nodded his head, and said, “Yes, Kevin, I do. Yesterday you walked to the bazaar, where you spent a lot of time in the bird market. You were hungry, so you bought some shawarma at a stand behind the mosque. You thought about going into a museum that you hadn’t noticed before, but decided against it. On the way home you got lost, but found your way again when you saw the hospital.”

Stunned, I stepped back in silence and walked home.

That night I sat on my couch, trying to work through what had happened. I realized that Mohammed had been telling me that he was secret police, and I should never forget it. We could talk about language, or food, or the World Cup, but whatever I told him, he had to report it. He had given me this warning as a friend.

That’s when I understood: there really was a whole different set of rules over there.

Natalia

When my mother first heard I was going to Damascus, she called Tariz, an old friend of the family who had fled Iraq back when Saddam Hussein was just another colonel in a corrupt regime.

Tariz said, “Ah, Damascus, lovely city. Kevin will be just fine, as long as he does not talk politics or date any of the local women.”

Oh, no, my mother thought. Kevin loves talking politics.

Syrian women have the long, dark eyelashes of the Bedouins, the sharp features of the Italians, the thick hair of the Greeks, the haunting eyes of the Armenians, the posture and style of the Persians, and a mixture of the skin tones of every civilization since Babylon. And they are old-fashioned — Old Testament old-fashioned.

At first, all I knew was that they were beautiful. I had taught myself to say, in Arabic, “I don’t speak Arabic, but I am looking for a friend to teach me.” This had worked well for me in Mexico as a strategy for meeting women, but the first woman I tried it on in Syria showed up for our “study session” with real books. Much to my disappointment, Natalia sat me down and started with the alphabet: Alif, ba, ta . . .

At twenty-one Natalia was already divorced from an arranged marriage. All she would say about her ex was “He was mean to cats, Kevin. How could my father expect me to love a man who was mean to cats?” Divorced at twenty-one.

One night, after a study session, Natalia and I were sitting in the park when a young man who appeared to know her came up, and they started talking. It sounded to me as if they were arguing, but I couldn’t be sure, so I whispered to Natalia that if she needed me to step in I would.

“No, Kevin, ” she said. “Don’t worry. It is OK.”

After he’d left, Natalia was so happy, she could barely contain herself. “That is the second man my father has arranged for me to marry since my divorce,” she said. “He said I was a whore, a slut, because I am walking around with you, a foreigner, a faranji. He said he was going to go back to tell my father, my mother, my family, my friends, my whole community that I am a whore.” She smiled. “Maybe now my father will leave me alone. ”

Not talking politics in a police state — that was the easy part.

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