The following morning I took a bus to Aleppo and saw again the wide-open face of Syria. Between the bunched-up chaos of Damascus and Aleppo the horizons fell to a flat, featureless desert. The gates had closed on the hubbub of the souk, the everyday mayhem of Arab towns, and the world was suddenly still and quiet. I thought of the silence two years ago at Shadaddie and the dark silence of the cave, and before that the silence of the hills around the plain of Kharput. Silence was the seal on the Armenian massacres: Turkish silence, Armenian silence, desert silence.
I still had the sketch map I’d been given then in Aleppo. It was now annotated with dozens of notes and I planned to go back with it to the desert north of the Euphrates. But first I needed a few days in Aleppo, a few days of planning, a few days with those who’d survived. Since the exodus of Armenians from Beirut during the civil war, Aleppo’s community has swelled dramatically. Now there are close to one hundred thousand Armenians living in the city.
If Aleppo can be considered something of an Armenian centre, then its own centre must surely be the Baron Hotel. At the foot of the Baron’s sweeping double staircase dozed a portly golden retriever. From time to time a chamber-maid or guest would step over her but she did not move. Crossing the parquet floor I propped my bag against the reception-booth and asked for Baron Mazloumian. (‘Baron’ is the Armenian ‘Mister’ dating from the Crusades when the Armenians noticed that all the best French names were preceded with ‘Baron’. Mazloumian was the hotel’s proprietor.)
‘At a quarter past ten every evening he comes in to do the telexes.’
So I wrote him a note, arranged a room and, in the late afternoon, stepped out into the fading yellow of the town. Aleppo was fleshier than Damascus: more Arab, less Ba’athist. Along the outside of the pavements, loose calico swung against the hips of the desert drovers; on the inside hawk-eyed merchants squatted beside cheap watches, lighters and rainbow racks of useless plastic things. In the shadowy hinterland were the cinemas. Posters made banal promises of semi-nudity, gun-laden banditry and rough justice. In one were rag-doll bodies swinging from garrets, in another beckoned the pink chiffon charm of Scheherazade, through another galloped the Mongol hordes. I plumped for A Town called Bastard and paid fifteen Syrian pounds for a broken seat.
Ten minutes was all I could stand – and all it took for the carnage on-screen to spill into the aisles. Several boys wrestled on the floor. Others yelled support or argued nonchalantly in groups while bursts of automatic gunfire rattled unnoticed from the speakers. It all seemed too familiar.
Behind the cinema were the open-fronted workshops of the Armenian mechanics. A bare-footed boy was chasing and coaxing a tractor tyre along the cobbles. The monochrome interiors echoed with metallic sounds and it seemed that nothing in that street was not dedicated to restoring – as swiftly as possible – life to broken cars. The row of workshops looked like beds in a busy field hospital. I thought of the adage about Armenians in Syria, that without them the government would collapse: Assad depends on his secret police, and the secret police depend on their cars – and no one can fix cars like the Armenians.
Near the place of the mechanics was a subterranean arcade full of photographers’ studios, many of them also Armenian. I needed a new stock of passport photographs for my on-going quest for visas and pushed open the door of Kevork’s Yerevan Foto Studio. Photography, like fixing cars, is also a talent of Armenian exiles. Karsh of Ottowa, who gave us the grizzly-sad picture of Hemingway, who snatched Churchill’s cigar from his mouth in order to make him angry enough for that famous bullish portrait, was born of Armenian parents in Mardin, southern Turkey. In Beirut I’d been to the studio of Varoujan Sethian who flicked through his portfolio of official portraits: the leaders of Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain (not Jordan, as King Hussein has his own Armenian photographer). He had had four Lebanese presidents in his studio in recent years (two had subsequently been assassinated). And his pictures of President Assad had now been reproduced and posted in offices, in car windows and on almost every street corner in Syria.
Kevork’s Foto Studio was more commercial. He cupped my chin in his hand, then bent down behind an old plate camera.
‘Yes, sir. Very good. Hold it like that. You married? … You have pretty girl? Very … nice!’ His flash bowl bathed everything in a sudden white light and it was done.
Kevork had started as a darkroom assistant when he was fifteen. His parents had both been from the orphanages, too young to remember anything about how they got there from Armenia. They had had one child and no money. When he was sixteen Kevork borrowed thirty dollars from an American to buy a camera. The American clearly did not expect, or want, the debt repaid. But Kevork turned up five months later at the Baron Hotel and gave the American his cash.
‘I used to work sometimes all night in the darkroom, but the chemicals made me ill.’ Now Kevork had his own family to help him out. ‘Let me introduce you!’
He assembled them in the studio. ‘Now. This son, he do video US system. Other son do video European system. My wife, she do Muslim weddings.’
‘Why don’t you do the weddings?’
‘Christian gentleman no go to Muslim wedding.’
‘Why not?’
‘They may kill him.’
‘So what sort of photography do you do?’
‘Propaganda photo.’
‘Propaganda? For whom?’
‘All people – government people, family people. I do work for blind.’
‘Blind people?’
‘Yes. They like holy place propaganda. I do moskies and shrines.’
‘But they cannot see your pictures?’
‘Of course not – they are blind.’
I was back at the Baron by ten fifteen and Krikor Mazloumian was there in his office, checking the ledger against the day’s telexes. As the hotel’s tourist trade had slackened so its telex machine rattled into service for Aleppo’s Armenians. Soviet Armenia was opening up and the Levantine diaspora was again learning to combine its two driving passions: business and the homeland.
It was a high-ceilinged room, with the telex in one corner and Armenia’s modern iconography pinned to the flaking walls. The snowy summit of Ararat hovered above Krikor’s head; on the opposite wall Yerevan’s Martyrs’ Monument stretched its brutal limbs over the Eternal Flame and, above a battered grey filing cabinet, a map showed the borders of old Armenia stretching across the east of Turkey.
Krikor reached into the filing cabinet and fumbled around. He came out with a bottle of Armenian brandy. ‘You don’t speak German, by any chance?’ he asked, filling two plastic beakers.
‘No.’
‘Pity. Chief of Police gave my son this letter he’d been sent. Asked him to work out what it says. I know a little German, but this baffles me. Something about love or something …’
He shook his head and muttered while he looked for a place to put the letter. He had an old-world charm but his speech, like all his movements, was slow and listless. He was blind in one eye and pretty blind in the other. Light annoyed him and around his forehead he wore a visor made from an old box of washing powder: ‘Omo for the brightest wash – Omo for the cleanest whites’.
After some minutes he closed the ledger, pulled down his visor, took the beaker of brandy and began to talk. The story of the Baron Hotel, like most Armenian stories, starts in Anatolia in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was then that Krikor’s grandmother left Kharput for her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Aleppo she stayed in a han, with the desert merchants and their animals. There was no hotel. So she bought a small premises near the souk. ‘Being