‘So many monasteries …’
‘Two hundred years ago there were seven hundred monks on this mountain. The community has survived so long – survived the Byzantines, the Persians, the Arabs, Tamurlane, the Ottomans. Now there are just the two of us left.’
‘Do you think you’ll be the last?’
‘God alone knows,’ said Symeon, leading me over to the other side of the terrace. ‘But I certainly hope I’ll outlive Fr. Abraham.’
From the battlements we looked south, over the olive-covered hillsides, past the monastic vineyard and on down to the flat plains of Mesopotamia. We stood in silence.
‘It’s very lovely, isn’t it?’ said Symeon. ‘When I went abroad to do my studies it was this view I always remembered when I thought of home: these vineyards stretching away into the distance.’
‘Does the monastery make its own wine?’
‘The fundamentalists don’t like us doing it. In Dereici village ten miles from here they shot a Christian winemaker. After that most of the village vintners abandoned their vines. But that’s not why we stopped. The old monk who used to superintend the vintage died six years ago. Now the grapes are too small and bitter for wine. They’re a lot of work and there are simply not enough Christians left in the villages to help us harvest and dress the vines properly. Even the man who is looking after them now is off to Germany next month. His relatives are all there already, and his visa has finally come through.’
‘Is the exodus speeding up?’ I asked.
‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘It’s partly economic. Life is hard here at the best of times, and the stories of the wages and social welfare payments they get in Sweden and Germany have got around by now. But our people also have political problems. I can’t ever remember things being as bad as they are at present. Our people are caught in the crossfire between the government and the PKK. And now there is the Hezbollah too.’
‘Here? I thought the Hezbollah were in Lebanon.’
‘They’ve just set up here. The authorities seem to tolerate them as a counterweight to the PKK. They help the government in many ways, but of course they hate the Christians. Three or four months ago they kidnapped a monk in Idil district. He was on his way to officiate at a wedding when two gunmen in a car stopped the minibus he was on and ordered him out. They buried him up to his neck, and later hung him upside down in chains. They kept him for two weeks, until a ransom was paid.
‘Sometimes the Hezbollah kidnap Christian girls from remote farms and villages and force them to marry Muslims. They say they are saving their souls; it happened to four girls last year. Another Hezbollah unit has taken over Mar Bobo, a Christian village near here: about ten or fifteen gunmen live there now. They’ve seized the roof of the church as their strongpoint, and they make the Christian women wear veils. They say we should go back to Europe where Christians come from, as if we were all French or German, as if our ancestors weren’t here for centuries before the first Muslim settled here. Now our people live in fear. Anything can happen to them.’
‘Can’t you tell the police?’
‘If anyone did the Hezbollah would kill the family … Wait: look!’
Fr. Symeon pointed to a dust cloud now rising on the track from Mardin.
‘More visitors.’
‘It’s the army,’ said Symeon. ‘Two Land-Rovers.’
Below us, Mas’ud had also spotted them and was rushing over to his car.
‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.
‘I think he’s turning his tape machine off. It was playing a Kurdish nationalist song. The soldiers might have arrested him if they heard it.’
The Land-Rovers pulled to a halt by the monastery walls, and armed soldiers began to pour out, some carrying heavy machine guns.
‘My God,’ said Symeon. ‘Is it war?’
But the soldiers did not enter the monastery. Instead they fanned out into the olive groves, jumping over the fence. One soldier kicked down a gate as he passed; another began to throw stones at a pomegranate tree, attempting to dislodge the ripe fruit. Symeon shouted down at them to stop: ‘Use the gate! Don’t break the fence.’
He turned to me: ‘Look at them! Breaking the tree to get at the fruit. Smashing our fencing. This is too much.’
‘Is this all because of my visit?’
‘I fear so,’ said Symeon.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’d better go.’
‘You must go anyway. The sun is beginning to go down. You won’t get to Mar Gabriel unless you leave now.’
We walked down through the cloister to the car.
‘I’m very sorry for all this,’ I said.
‘Just make sure you tell the outside world what is happening here,’ said Symeon. ‘Go quickly now. God be with you.’
Mas’ud pulled away. When I looked behind me I could see the short black-robed figure of Symeon gesticulating at an officer, as the soldiers closed in around him.
The shadows were lengthening into a deep blue slur, spreading softly over the ridges and gullies of the Izlo Mountains. In the narrow river valleys shepherds were leading their flocks through rich groves of fig, walnut and pistachio trees. Women were fetching cooking water from roadside pumps; donkeys with bulging pack-saddles were ambling along the road. It was so easy to forget the troubles: only the continuous gauntlet of checkpoints and the occasional shell of an incinerated vehicle lying abandoned by the roadside reminded one of the dangers that the imminent twilight would bring.
We were making good time. It had just passed 4.30 and we were nearing Midyat, the nearest town to Mar Gabriel. In the distance on the left we could see the church towers of the Christian half of the town, flanked on the right by the minarets of the new Muslim quarter. On the edge of Midyat a large checkpoint had been erected, with a strip of sharpened nails laid out across the road like a fakir’s bed in a cartoon; behind it stood a slalom of oil cans. A line of bored soldiers were sitting in the shade, watching the cars zigzag through the obstacles. We were three quarters of the way through before one of the men – an officious looking conscript with a shaven head – decided to pull us in.
The man asked for our documents. He looked through my passport, pausing suspiciously at one of my Indian visas as if he had just uncovered conclusive evidence of my Kurdish sympathies. He examined Mas’ud’s ID, turning it over with a growing sneer on his face. Then he asked Mas’ud for the documents concerning the car. Mas’ud fumbled around in the glove compartment looking for them. It was clear we were in for trouble.
The conscript chose to take exception to something written on Mas’ud’s driving licence, and spent the next forty-five minutes cross-questioning him. I began to look nervously at the sinking sun and the minute hand on my watch. Eventually Mas’ud passed over a large banknote, folded up in his ID card. The man looked at it, and for an awful five seconds I thought he was about to expose Mas’ud’s attempt to bribe him. But he slipped it into his pocket without his colleagues seeing, and after complaining about the state of Mas’ud’s tyres, let us go. Mas’ud drove away muttering violent Kurdish curses under his breath.
It was now after 5.30. The sun was sinking behind the hills as we headed into the desolate country on the far side of Midyat. The road was now little better than a track; it contained no other traffic and was surrounded by no signs of habitation. There was no noise, no birdsong. It was completely silent; unnervingly so.
It was only when I began to look carefully at the shadowy country through which we were passing that I realised