Outside, small children were playing on the beach and in the courtyard, chasing one another through the darkness. Some older children, boys and girls, stood by the windows and stared inside. As the evening wore on, more people retired to the chairs at the edge of the room, some of the oldest dozing contentedly. In the middle of the circle of dancers were the bride and groom, each with dark, curly hair and a little overweight, swaying to the rhythm. She was still in her white bridal dress, and he wore an ill-fitting white suit. Men took turns in approaching the bride and showering her with money while she danced seductively alone. Little boys would dart up to her feet to pick up the 100 TL notes, which they would present to the newlyweds at the evening’s end.
This was traditional village revelry, but the modern world was encroaching. A man was recording the evening on a video camera; the band had amplifiers and speakers, superfluous in a room so small; the men wore Western suits, the women shop dresses, costume jewellery and fur coats. A grocer’s son had married the daughter of the village sheikh. Arsuz’s richest Alawi family was now one with its most respected. These were signs of a new age, of growing wealth. Perhaps there were no more villagers, none of the peasants I had imagined at sunset, only the aspirant petit bourgeoisie.
The celebrations ended at midnight, when the band packed its drums and guitars, the video cameraman took down his lights, the waiters dismantled the tables and folded the chairs, and the families made their way home. Before dawn, most of them would be back in the fields.
In Alexandretta I had a lunch of grilled shrimps and a bottle of Efes near the port and then went to a photocopying shop. I had decided to photocopy all my notes and send them home in case something happened while I was travelling. The photocopying shop was on a corner, with picture windows on two sides and old calendars hanging on the walls. Inside, a man was photocopying documents and pages from books for the people queuing up. One of the five or six young men ahead of me in the queue turned and asked me in French whether I spoke French. He then asked where I was from, why I had come to Iskenderun and where I was going. It was not unusual, I had discovered, for strangers to ask the most personal questions. He said he was a French teacher from Istanbul. He asked me if I had read the Bible. He had read both the Bible and the Koran and had translated the Bible into Turkish. “From French?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It is a beautiful book.”
I said nothing, assuming that he as a Muslim was complimenting a Christian on his faith’s holy book.
He turned his back to the other young men in the queue and whispered, “Je crois en Jésus.” (I believe in Jesus.)
I was startled and looked into his eyes. He was completely sincere. I had once met a so-called “Jew for Jesus” in Jerusalem and found him completely mad. The Jew for Jesus had followed me to my hotel, proselytising on the way, insisting the Temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt. When I asked why, he said matter-of-factly, “Because that will cause the end of the world.” Had I now encountered a Muslim for Jesus? “Vous êtes musulman, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui, je suis né musulman.”
“Et vous croyez en Jésus comme prophète?”
“Non,” he insisted. “Je crois en Jésus.”
“Et Mohammed était un bon prophète,” I said, helpfully.
“Non, Mohammed n’était pas prophète.”
We talked a while longer, until each of us had completed his photocopying. He was on his way to Istanbul and I to Antioch, so we could not continue the conversation. He was the second Muslim convert to Christianity I had met in five days. In Antioch, I would learn of others, but I had no idea whether I had by chance met every Muslim turned Christian in Turkey or by an equal chance uncovered a trend. I decided to leave it to the anthropologists and missionaries, but I remembered Sir Steven Runciman’s words to me before I left on my journey: “I think the Seljuk Turks might easily have become Christian. They had converted to Islam, but they were very easygoing. It seems surprising, but quite a lot of Seljuk Turks did become Christian from being Muslim. There was a certain amount of inter-marriage. If they had become Christian, you’d have had a new Byzantium.” That was at the time of the Crusades. In the unlikely event of enough Turks becoming Christian now, the capital of the new united Europe might be Constantinople.
I found Mehmet Udimir in his library office, where the same ancient Mongol brought us tea. I tried to tell him that I’d had an interesting time in his tourism district and that I’d found people who spoke English and Arabic. “Arabi?” he said, his face lighting. “Takellem Arabi?” Do you speak Arabic?
Suddenly, we began a conversation. It was then he told me his name had been Mohammed Haj, that he had three sons and that he was an Alawi. He sounded pleased I was going on to Syria, where the president, a fellow Alawi, was “a very strong man.” Next time I came to Alexandretta, he said, we would go to his house and drink arak.
It was Hind Koba’s cousin, an interesting man who had studied at the American University of Beirut in the 1950s, who suggested that I see the French military cemetery before I left Alexandretta. Mr Philippi, or Philipioglu in Turkish, asked me, “If you are writing a book about the Levant, don’t you want to see what is left of the only Army of the Levant?”
The taxi driver who was taking me to Antioch that evening did not know how to find the cemetery, but Mr Philippi had written directions in Turkish, which said it was near the Belediye Ekmek Fabricase, the Municipal Bread Factory. We drove to a large bakery on the outskirts of town, east of the main highway, and then a hundred yards along the side of a high wall to a monumental gate. A lintel above the gate, supported by three arches, was inscribed, Cimetière Militaire Français.
“I never knew this was here,” the driver said as he stopped his old Ford.
The arch in the gate’s centre was higher than those on the sides, which had their own, smaller inscriptions. On the left were the words, Aux Morts de Syrie Cilicie, and on the right, lère et 4ème Divisions de I’Armée du Levant. We had reached the final resting place of the Army of the Levant, a small piece of a foreign field that would be forever France. It was as dismal and tragic as France’s Levant adventure itself, an enterprise begun in the Crusades, rekindled when Leibniz urged his plan for an invasion of the Ottoman Empire on Louis XIV, dashed for a century after Napoleon’s defeats in Palestine and Egypt, revived in the post-First World War occupation and flickering even then with a token force of paratroopers in Lebanon.
Within the high walls row upon row of stone crosses stood guard over marble slabs. As I walked slowly past each grave, reading the names of the officers and men, or the inscription to each soldat inconnu, a young man walked up behind me. Without disturbing the peace of the dead, he quietly told me in French he was the caretaker. His name was Salim, and he was twenty-one. His father had been caretaker for forty years before him. “C’est territoire français,” he said of the ground on which we stood. He told me there were 561 graves in all. He left me to pace the ranks, and, as I read the names and dates, I noticed something strange. All of them had died between 1919 and 1922, yet the First World War had ended between Turkey and the Allies in 1918. Enri Bonari, a corporal, had died on 17 February 1921. Auguste Boyer, also a corporal, had been killed on 21 July 1922. There was something even stranger, a spectre that kept cropping up: graves of members of the Légion Arménienne and the Bataillon Assyro-Chaldeen. Joseph Romechaud of the Armenian Legion died on 1 August 1919, and Gabriel Josim of the Assyro-Chaldean Battalion was killed on 29 March 1921. The Levant Army was a collection of local minorities, hired by the French to fight the Turks, when, after the war, the Allies, having taken Turkey’s Arab provinces, launched a campaign to conquer