While waiting for the van to fill with passengers, I took a radio out of my bag and heard on the BBC World Service a report on Turkey’s application to join the European Community. “Turkish standards are ready for EEC standards,” a Turkish official was saying. “Community membership will be a guarantee for democracy, as in Greece, Spain and Portugal.” Mark Sykes would have agreed. Although his 1916 understanding with the Russians and the French, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, created the borders which still plagued the Levant, he believed the Turks would make good Europeans. He thought this more natural than any union of Turks and Arabs. In his account of a trek with dragoman, cook and six other servants through the then-borderless Ottoman Empire in 1902–3, Dar-Ul-lslam: A Record of a Journey Through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, the spokesman of the British Empire wrote:
In speech the Turks are expressionless, quiet and laconic, using few gestures or similes [sic]; but with Arabs it is almost possible to follow an argument while not comprehending a word of the language. I have heard a person, who could speak with authority, state there could never be an amalgamation between Turks and Arabs, and I think there is no doubt this is true. A Turk will understand an Englishman’s character much sooner than he will an Arab’s; the latter is so subtle in his reasoning, so quick-witted, so argumentative and so great a master of language that he leaves the stolid Osmanli amazed and dazed, comprehending nothing. The Turk is not, truth to tell, very brilliant as a rule, though very apt in assuming Western cultivation. This may sound extraordinary but is nevertheless true so far as my experience carries me. Every Turk I have met who has dwelt for a considerable period in any European country, although never losing his patriotism and deep love for his land, has become in manners, thoughts and habits an Englishman, a German or Frenchman. This leads one almost to suppose that Turks might be Europeanised by an educational process without any prejudicial result, for at present they have every quality of a ruling race except initiative, which is an essentially European quality.
Twelve years after he wrote these words, Mark Sykes and fellow servants of two other European empires, France and Czarist Russia, drew the modern boundaries of the Ottoman Empire without consulting a single Arab or Turk. This became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Two years later, having heard from the leaders of the Arab Revolt, Sykes regretted what he had done. In October 1918, he wrote that Britain should “foster and revive Arab civilisation and promote Arab unity with a view of preparing them for ultimate independence.” He was too late. Sykes died a few months later in Paris as the peace conference that would divide Syria began.
After half an hour’s wait at Cilveögzü, two Syrian families on their way home managed to fill the van, and we paid the driver for what I had assumed would be a lift to the Syrian side. We passed a mosque on the left and, on the right, a statue of Atatürk bidding us farewell. The driver went all of a hundred yards, then stopped his van at the gate which marked the end of modern Turkish territory. There three soldiers in starched uniforms were standing at attention.
The driver told us to get out of the van and wait for a second vehicle to come from the Syrian side. I walked towards the refugee encampment, where the “children” and their friends were sitting around the fire. One of the soldiers refused to let me go any further, so they came over to me. I told Ernest and Antonio that Sister Barbara and Father Ferrari had spoken to their parents, who were staying at the Franciscan rectory in Ankara and were trying to find an embassy to give them a visa. The two brothers were still hopeful, telling me not to worry about them. Antonio said, “We’ll see you in England.”
I told the Egyptian we had mailed his letters and that the Egyptian Embassy said it would try to issue him a new passport. He complained that if he remained there much longer, he would ask to return to prison, where, “At least, I had a roof over my head.” I told the Gambian that Hind Koba in Alexandretta, who as British Consul represented Gambian interests in Turkey, had promised me she would help him. He showed no reaction.
The English-speaking border guard who had been with us before suddenly walked up to me. “Did you do anything for them?” he asked, with what sounded like genuine concern for the deported men.
“Not enough,” I said. “If their embassies don’t help them, what will happen if they escape into Syria some night?”
“I don’t know what will happen to them then.”
I rejoined the two Syrian families, with their small children and their bundles of groceries which they hoped to smuggle home, and we boarded an old, rusting Syrian bus. I waved out of the window to the lost souls of No-Man’s-Land, who waved back and shuffled through the dust to their camp. The driver collected our fares and started the five-mile journey through the stony foothills to the Syrian side. The last thing I saw before we rounded the bend was a large sign, which warned,
Yavu Yavu
Slowly Slowly
EXPLOSIONS
At Bab al-Hawa, the Gate of Winds, all was confusion. The Syrian side of the border was dirtier and more run-down than the Turkish border post, and much more relaxed. It resembled nothing so much as a desert petrol station, where north- and south-bound cars stopped under an open concrete cover for a kind of servicing. All arriving foreigners had to change money, $100, at the official rate at the government exchange office to the right of the carport. Inside, German tourists grappled with exchange rates, wondering how many German marks they would need to buy $100 worth of Syrian pounds. The clerks filling out forms and changing money on the other side of a long table in the dark grey room were little help. I handed them $100, and they gave me, after much writing in triplicate, 975 Syrian Pounds (SL) and a form to prove I had changed the money at the official rate of 9.75 SL to the dollar, rather than the “tourist” rate of 22 SL from the banks inside Syria or the 40 SL available on the black market. I walked across the carport to the police post for an entry stamp. Ancient electric lamps hanging from the ceiling did not work, and the windows were too small to brighten the grey, concrete walls. More than a dozen people, Syrians, Turks and foreigners, stood in the filthy room awaiting entry and exit stamps, but no officials appeared behind the open counter.
The only decoration on the wall above the empty desks was a portrait I would see as often as I had seen Atatürk’s in Turkey. The smiling, benign countenance of a man with parted dark hair and trimmed moustache turned up on desks, walls and windows in offices, hotels, restaurants and shops. It was pinned to sandbags at guard posts. It was imprinted on flags, drawn by hand on buildings and spray-painted through stencils on bridges and fences. In schools, children would draw the face in crayon and paste it up in their classrooms. The same face, though in profile, had appeared for a time on Syrian one-pound coins, withdrawn from circulation when devout Muslims complained that Islam forbade reproducing the human form. The same face sat on the shoulders of a hundred statues throughout the land, in town squares, at the side of the highways, in front of government buildings and army depots. In some pictures, the man wore a dark business suit, and his head was bare. In others, he had on a military uniform, his chest ablaze with medals and an air force general’s cap on his head. The picture in the border post had been taken many years earlier in black and white, but in other pictures, in more important offices, the man aged through generations of likenesses, the quality of the photography and painting improved, the pictures grew in size, acquired electric backlighting