“I know his books. I come from California.”
“William Saroyan used to stay here when he visited Aleppo. He told me I should write my memoirs.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I can’t be bothered. Saroyan was a marvellous man. He loved Aleppo, and he stayed here a long time. Later, he came by ship to Latakieh. He met an Armenian there, who invited him home. Saroyan left a few hours later, and the Armenian then wrote a book about their friendship.”
“You think it was like that for Lawrence.”
“Obviously,” he said. “Everyone wrote books about Lawrence. How many of them really knew him?”
“Did you know anything about him?”
“From all his real friends, it seems he was completely above board. He was an ascetic. He was an idealist. He was a bloody fool.” Mazloumian was emphatic on the last point.
“Why a bloody fool?”
“He refused all honours, all awards,” he said. “The more important thing was, he refused to play any role here after the war, because he was afraid the Arabs would think he had gone into the revolt for personal motives.”
I wondered whether it would have made any difference, whether Lawrence could have used the prestige of his war exploits to plead for justice in Syria. The French and British had ignored both their promises to their Arab allies and the wishes of the American President Woodrow Wilson in their post-war haste to carve Syria between themselves. They could afford to ignore a young officer who had gone native.
Mr Mazloumian invited me back to the house for a drink. We sat by the fire, sipping Armenian brandy and recalling the spirits of Aleppo. Armen came in with a Swedish television crew, who had an appointment to interview his father for a film on Aleppo. I offered to leave, knowing how little most journalists and film-makers liked having their colleagues around while they conducted interviews. The Swedes kindly asked me to stay, so I moved out of their way and listened. I had already heard most of the stories Mr Mazloumian was telling the Swedes, but they managed to elicit one I had missed. It was about his childhood in the First World War.
“Our family fled to Zahle, a beautiful village in the Bekaa Valley, rather than be taken to Mosul. At that time, Mosul meant certain death for all the Armenians moved there by the Turks. In Zahle, I became very ill with typhus. I had a high fever. The one who stayed by my bedside was my grandmother. I remember hearing her pray to God for the life of this little boy. She offered her own life if I lived. And that is exactly what happened.”
At a desolate crossroads about five miles north of Aleppo, Armen Mazloumian and I visited a stone monument known as Qabr Inglizieh, the English Tomb. Armen had put me in the Chevy Nomad, fought the Aleppo traffic, damned everyone who got in his way, and taken me to the site of the final battle in the Levant of the First World War. The encounter between British and Ottoman imperial troops was more of a skirmish, but Britain had left there a three-sided pillar, twelve feet high, to commemorate the event. There was no mention of this battle in Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, nor in the memoirs of other British officers who fought in the Syrian campaign. It was not clear who, if anyone, won. Atatürk’s retreat, with his forces intact for the defence of Turkey, succeeded. The British army conquered Syria. In that sense, both sides won. The only losers were the Syrians, from Alexandretta to Aqaba, who passed from the subjugation of one empire to two.
“Well, this is it,” Armen said. “You wanted to see it.” I paced around the memorial, looking at each of its three faces in turn. One surface was bare stone, but the other two had English inscriptions.
“ON THIS SITE WAS FOUGHT on October 26th 1918 between 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade 5th Cavalry Division, Egyptian Expeditionary Forces and THE TURKISH FORCES the last engagement in the Middle East of THE GREAT WAR 1914–1918.”
From top to bottom on the other face were the words: “ROLL OF THOSE WHO FELL IN THIS ENGAGEMENT OR THOSE WHO DIED OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN IT.”
There followed the names of four British officers and seventeen Indian soldiers, both Hindu and Muslim, of the Jodhpur and Kashmir Lancers. Around the monument, a low fence of barbed wire had twisted and fallen into decay. Within the wire, the English Tomb rose straight from the dust. There was no marble plaza to accommodate the visitors who never came. There were no flowers to commemorate the dead, and no one maintained the site. Weeds grew all around, and trucks drove past without slowing. A steady wind blew the sand into our faces, a wind that over centuries would wear the stone away, until first the words become illegible and then the stone itself eroded to formless rock to be taken to a museum and preserved under glass as a “monumental ornament, c. 1800–2000 AD.” Yet the stone marked the location where the war which promised Syria its freedom came to an end. It marked the last spot where Mustafa Kemal, who would soon be called Atatürk, covered the retreat of his forces into what would become the Republic of Turkey. This was the site of the battle that sealed Syria’s fate, placed borders across its hills, separated families one from the other and resulted in the wars, dispersals of peoples and tyrannies which have marked its twentieth-century history. This was where an empire, an empire four centuries old, had made its final stand. It was not an empire for which Armen, an Armenian whose kin had been murdered in the death-rattle of that empire, was likely to shed a tear.
One afternoon, we got into Armen’s Chevy Nomad, which was always parked in a garage under the terrace in back of the hotel. He reversed, as he always did, down the drive and through the stone gateway that led to the busy street in front of the hotel, Rue Baron. There could not have been more than a millimetre of space between the car and the pillars on either side, but Armen never bothered to look and never scratched the car. As we backed into the traffic on the one-way street, a man who looked like a beggar approached Armen’s side of the car. He put a grimy hand through the window, but Armen ignored him and continued to pull away. The man stayed with the car as Armen shifted into drive and moved forward with the traffic. We stopped at a red light with the other cars, and the man was still with us. Armen turned his head, regarded the man carefully and uttered a sound that was something between a bark and a growl. “Urrrghhaaaa,” he roared at the man, who backed away, startled. The light changed, and we drove off. “That guy’s always bothering me,” Armen explained. “I keep throwing him out of the hotel, and he keeps coming back.”
Armen took me around the low hills on Aleppo’s edge, hills which had become suburbs. All the building was in stone, taken from nearby quarries. The stone architecture made Aleppo one of the prettiest cities in the Levant and one of the few whose twentieth-century houses and offices did not offend the eye. They blended with the older buildings, developing themes which had always been used by Muslim designers, the dome, the arch and the tower. Many had graceful terraces and balconies, and even the larger, fanciful houses under construction had charm.
“This is Aleppo University,” Armen said, pointing out a rare complex of square, mostly glass structures. “It’s not as good as Damascus University.”
“Is Damascus University pretty good?”
“It’s pretty bad.”
Around the university were new stone villas in the Shahba and Omran Quarters, more of the gradual growth of Aleppo. We went on to Aleppo College, which was until 1967 an American high school. After the Arab–Israeli War in June of that year, and Syria’s breaking of diplomatic relations with the United States, the school closed. The local Protestant community reopened it. We saw boys playing soccer on the football field, their parents watching from the sidelines as we parked nearby. All the former staff cottages were empty and derelict. “I’ve been in all these houses,” Armen said. “I know all the teachers and missionaries who lived in them. It would break their hearts if they could see them now.” As we walked