Hàng Ngày

The crisp air draws my breath out of my lungs as I jump down from the van and the frosted grass sinks slightly under the weight of my feet. The gravestones stretch out before me, a mish-mash of squared, rounded and beveled edges popping out of the ground in an orderly pattern.

I am holding a small oak twig with a few browned and dried leaves hanging from its fingers. A slight breeze sneaks through the buttons in my jacket and kisses my stomach causing a brief shiver to pass from my lower back up through my neck. I shrug my shoulders back and begin making my way across the grass, following my memory back to May, to the sun breaking through the shallow rain clouds and my high heels puncturing the soft earth. The tears pressed against the backs of my eyes and my lungs tensed with the shortness of breath that only comes with life moments you know you will never forget.

I weave a path through the aged stones noticing the smoothness of each of them. Some are rough with the recent cut of the gravestone artisans, while others are worn with decades, some nearly a century, of rain, snow, sleet, and family tears. I approach the spot, and turn to my father who is also holding twigs from the oak tree in front of his childhood home.

My chest is tense again with the expectation of the emotions that may explode upon this moment. But as we approach the small stone laid flat upon the ground; as I look to the trees lining the low wrought iron fence of the cemetery; as the flaming tentacles of the setting sun shadowed by the bluish gray passing clouds fan out on the horizon, I feel an unexpected calm. A nothingness. A numbness; no loss of breath.

It has been six months since I stood on this spot and let a few scant tears drip from my eyes and fall to the earth on top of this freshly dug dirt. Six months since I tossed a few pieces of broken pottery that had been worn by the waves of the Gulf of Thailand, into the small square hole. The borders of the grave are still visible, despite the attempt to resod the hole that was dug for my grandmother’s ashes earlier this year.

I can still see her, the last time, sitting in her pale yellow armchair, the lamplight thrown across her face casting shadows on her right side while her left remains ensconced in the shadows of the blinds on the window. My father is talking and my brother is looking at him listening and I am not listening because I am only looking at her, looking at her face and her eyes as she drifts in and out of consciousness and her head rolls from side to side as she mutters inaudibly to someone who is not in the room. She opens her eyes and speaks with no sound to my father, looking with sudden animation at his eyes and he smiles at her, his eyes heavier than hers because he knows that this is the last time, the last time they will share this room, the last time they will share this gaze, the last time they will exchange words, or a lack of words.

We lay the oak branches on the ground in a neat pile and I stick the end of mine into the soft ground with a chuckle. I can tell by his tone of voice that my father doesn’t find it funny but he forgives me in my attempt to wash the moment with humor. I pull the twig out of the ground and lay it with the others. I say no prayers. I remember her sitting in that yellow chair in her old house while I played on the golden shaggy carpet with a set of blocks and miscellaneous plastic toys left from generations of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

As we walk away I look up to my left to see the sun’s fiery tentacles spreading across the sky, becoming brighter as the sun falls on the horizon and the edges of the blue clouds become more defined with the contrast.

“It’s good to remember sometimes.”

I don’t look at my father’s face but instead continue to stare into the falling sun, the colors becoming more vibrant, spreading from gold to pink and a deep purple that is cut into tiny puzzle pieces by the leafless branches of the trees. We walk through the cold, out of the low wrought-iron gates and I can say nothing, can feel nothing but the mesmerizing glare of the sun’s fingers creeping across the skyline, dripping into the darkness.

On Wednesday October 29th Geoff and I decided we had to get out of Damascus. Damascus is an interesting combination of old city and new city:

OK, it was mostly me who decided we needed to get out of Damascus, and the decision had been made well before Wednesday. In any case, Wednesday night we made a plan to travel to Aleppo (known by Syrians as “Haleb”) in the northern part of the country, stopping along the way at various other towns and attractions.

We headed out to the bus station in the early morning and arrived just in time to catch a bus to Homs in central Syria. I was initially impressed with the Syrian buses (if you want to know why I say initially impressed, keep reading…) The trip is only 2 hours long, but the bus is a large, air-conditioned tourbus with comfortable seats and a “bus attendant” serving tap water in little dixie cups. Cute.

We arrived in Homs around 11 and started asking around for a cervice (van-bus) to Krak des Chevaliers or Qal’at al-Ḥiṣn, a crusader-era castle about 60 km from Homs. We were told by a few taxi drivers that there were no cervices that day because it was Thursday (the Muslim Friday, the day before the weekend begins). We sure didn’t see any around so we let these cab drivers convince us that we should take a cab to the castle. It was actually really cheap, so we agreed and five minutes later were speeding down the superhighway towards the sea, the mountains of Lebanon rising out the lefthand  window of the car.

The castle was pretty awesome. Here’s Geoff carefully scooting along the castle wall.

In the cab Geoff had talked to the driver about taking us to Hama, another central town famous for giant water wheels and a good mid-point to hop another bus to Haleb. However, as we walked around the castle and Geoff began to relax and realize how much he had needed to escape Damascus, he told me about the Syrian coast which was only another 60 km away. Why not go? we said. So we got back in the cab and asked the driver to take us to Tartus.

We arrived in Tartus around 3 pm and spent an hour or so walking along the gritty boardwalk, watching the fishermen and soaking in the Mediterranean breeze. The harbor was an interesting combination of old and new, industrial and natural.

We started getting a bit tired and realized that we still had quite a ways to Haleb so we found the bus station and asked about tickets. Yikes, the next bus wasn’t until 7:30. That wasn’t going to work so we bought tickets to Lattakia, another city along the coast known for its open atmosphere and beach-seeking tourists.

We arrived in Lattakia at about 6 pm, just in time to catch the last bus to Haleb. There was some issue with us being Americans and we were called into a room with a few cops to ask us questions about our travel purposes. I could NOT have made this trip on my own. Geoff’s Arabic, thankfully, was fluent enough to answer these questions smoothly and we boarded the nearly full bus and took our seats in the back. The “bus attendant” came back to us and started talking to Geoff and motioning to me, and before I knew it I was sitting in the front row next to some random woman. “You’re going to sit with the girls,” Geoff told me. As the sun set over the sea, our bus pulled out of the station.

Twenty minutes later, something was wrong. The driver and his assistant were yelling intensely at each other and we slowly pulled to a halt by the side of the road. They got out and went to investigate the back of the bus. Slowly but surely the men on the bus also disembarked to offer their advice or simply to look on as the driver and his assistant pulled the guts out of the back of the bus and tossed them to the ground. After a good thirty minutes I decided to get out as well. I found Geoff and we watched the “action” for a while. The funny thing was, there was an automotive shop just 100 meters behind the bus. There was a little kid who seemed to be a part of the shop and was going back and forth between the drivers and his father with miscellaneous parts and advice. We stood there for another 30 minutes before the finally decided that the rotator belt they had installed was safe to go, and we all got back in the bus. It was nearly 7:30.

Turns out the woman next to me spoke some English. Her name was Marah’, and she was a student in Aleppo. She told me that the trip through the winding mountain roads would take at least three hours. Yikes. I settled back for the long ride and Marah’ and I spoke about our families, our lives and our futures.

We finally pulled into the bus station in Aleppo at a little before 11 pm and made our way to this hole-in-the-wall hotel where Geoff had stayed with friends once before. We dropped our stuff, washed our faces of the exhaustion, and set out to find a restaurant that Geoff claims is the best food in all of Syria. Beit Sisi was about 10 minutes’ walk away. Thankfully it was Thursday, and Syrians eat late, so we weren’t too off the mark. We enjoyed a light dinner and at 1:30 am decided we should leave so the staff could clean up and go home.

We left the restaurant and on a whim decided to walk to the citadel that stands in the center of Aleppo’s old town. On our way there we asked several people for directions, including a pickup truck with three guys in it who stopped to ask if we needed help. After they told us where to go they looked at us a little strangely and we headed in a different direction. A block later, this truck pulled up along side us again, and the guy in the back asked if we wanted a ride to the citadel. Geoff and I looked at each other. What the hell? Let’s do it.

We hopped in the back of this pickup with three guys we didn’t know and they drove us all around the city and eventually up to the citadel. Geoff thanked them and they smiled as they drove off in the opposite direction.

I didn’t have my camera, but here’s the citadel by day:

Pretty impressive, right? Imagine it lit up with golden streetlamps.

The streets were quieting down and we took a lap around the citadel, peering down into its moat and saying little. We were so tired. After our walk we made our way back to the hotel through the sleepy streets and finally collapsed into our beds at 3 am. Quite an adventure.

But the story doesn’t start there.

Last week I was in Syria. One of my best friends from high school has been there since August 2007, alternatively working, studying Arabic, and learning about one of the places that Americans understand least. I had been making empty promises to visit for months. I do not like empty promises, and I truly did want to see this region of the world that is so mysterious, even dangerous in American consciousness. I saved up my money, and I bought a plane ticket.

On my first day in Damascus, Geoff and I went down to the Old City where we walked around for a bit before stopping in to an internet cafe so I could assure my parents that I was still alive after the long flight. The cafe owner is a friend of Geoff’s and there was another man sitting with him who Geoff had never met. An artist. He started talking about his work and offered to show his studio sometime, it was just a few blocks away in the Christian Quarter of the Old City.

“Why not now?” we said. He nodded, and a few minutes later we were following this guy we’d never met through winding narrow alleyways until we came to a small gated yard and house a few feet below ground level.

The studio was stereotypical “artist” (sorry all my artist friends and relatives!): there were completed and yet to be completed paintings and sculptures strewn about the room, wires, rocks, pieces of plaster, paints, brushes, metal working tools, paper, pencils, pots, cups, plates, tubes of chemicals, and dust, dust, dust, strewn everywhere about the small entryway so that we could hardly move around to see the artwork.

The work on the walls was amazing. I was particularly captured by one painting, a landscape of a grassy field with a lone tree in the background, all shrouded in a veil of red color. I asked Geoff to ask the man what the picture was about (he didn’t speak much English and I spoke no Arabic at that point). After conversing for a few minutes Geoff told me that the painting was somewhat of an imaginary place, based on the landscape of the man’s hometown of Homs, in central Syria, but painted the color red because of the pain of battles fought in that area, the scars left on the landscape and the people. Very moving.

We continued into the larger back room where there were even more implements of design, tools, machines, piles of clay, blowtorches, and many kinds of media all about, and a large sculpture covered in plastic on a rotating table in the center of the room. He uncovered for us what looked like a large fish, but with human features, and with all kinds of natural media in various places: wood chunks, clay, designs of leaves and other earthen elements. He explained to Geoff, and Geoff to me, that he believes man and nature have developed a very violent relationship with each other. Through his work, he tries to integrate the two, forming a seamless connection, to show that man and nature are in fact one, complements of each other, each with elements reflecting the other.

We sat down to tea. He and Geoff talked for a long time, with Geoff translating bits and pieces here and there, and asking me questions to translate the answers back to this artist, who apparently is one of the most well known artists in Syria, teaches at Damascus University, and has been doing this work for many many years. While they talked his pet birds flew around the room, lighting on our shoulders once in a while, pecking at my earrings and eating peanuts out of this guy’s mouth (!!)

We talked about art. We talked about Syria. He asked what our visions and hopes were for the future, both our own and the world. He asked about my work and I told him that I help Americans and Vietnamese build good will and understanding through volunteer programs. We talked a little about this type of exchange. Then we talked about America, and America’s role in the world. The first of many conversations we would have about America that week. Geoff translated.

“Many years ago,” he said, “people in the world had two homes: the home where they were born and grew up, and Syria. Syria was the center of civilization, culture, trade, and activity.”

He took a sip of his matte and continued, “Now, everyone in the world also has two homes: the home where they were born and grew up, and America. Everyone knows someone in America, has a friend, a sister, a parent, a child in America. I think, the best thing that America can do to improve its status in the world is to make America a better place. Everyone knows someone in America. If America takes care of Americans, if America changes itself, everyone in the world will know.”

Last night’s election was not only a hallmark for America. It was not only a historical victory for African America, civil rights, the American Dream, or the American democratic party. Last night’s election was celebrated in many other places outside of America as a small first step in the redemption of America’s status as one of the world’s great powers, with the potential to do so much good work, and so much harm.

This is a post about America, and my hope that the people in this country, all of us, not just that man who will sit in the oval office come January, will continue to bring changes to America that will better care for our own people and thereby restore our ability to demolish the barriers of land, sea, prejudice, and misunderstanding that hold us back from truly establishing mutual relationships with our friends in other countries.