3 Chapter 3. Detained in Syria

In late June, I travelled southeast to the cities of Adana and then Gaziantep. On July 1, I crossed the border into Syria. The last miles of Turkey before crossing into Syria were in stark contrast to the miles before. The beautiful, multi-hued hills sank lower and lower into the earth, until finally I was squirted out onto a burnt, flat plain. As was the custom with many travellers, I stayed my last night in Turkey in the city of Gaziantep, then wearily the next morning took a bus to the border town of Kilis—a dirty grey place, as all border towns tend to be. Even then, Syria did not have a robust reputation for safety. Except for wary journalists, consular officials, and arms merchants, few foreigners went there. I was anxious, frankly, as I began walking through an endless battery of check points, my anxiety combining with fatigue and a bout of diarrhea that required me to enter a mosque along the way to use its latrine.

As I set off again, I remembered that I had in my backpack a small tube of toothpaste that I had bought while in Israel weeks earlier. The tube’s contents were written in Hebrew lettering, which was a problem as Israel and Syria were not then—or now—on cordial terms. Paranoia struck deep. What if the border guards searched my pack? What if they found the offending item? I decided to take no chances. I unslung my backpack on the side of the road, took out the evidence, and deftly—I thought—threw the tube away between some bushes.

The deed done, I looked around me and saw a nicely dressed young man staring at me with narrow and perplexed eyes. How should I answer his look? Should I search amid the bushes and retrieve the toothpaste? Would that allay his suspicions—if indeed he was suspicious at all? Would it only bring more attention to me?

I decided to walk on. I told myself to not give way to paranoid thoughts. But anxiety is a mistress hard to ignore. At a distance of about thirty metres, I turned to look backwards. The young man was still looking at where I had thrown the tube, but now he was joined by an older woman in peasant garb. What were they thinking? Would they search the bushes? And if they found the tube, would they turn it over to the authorities? Although I was still on the Turkish side, the political divide likely meant nothing to the common people whose allegiance must surely be with the Syrians and not the Israelis. Would they alert the Turkish and Syrian police?

No, I told myself. Don’t be ridiculous. As I turned to walk again, a car picked me up and took me to the Turkish post. There I met two French travellers, Bernard and Jacques. Their presence and friendly conversation eased my anxiety about the toothpaste tube. We walked the asphalt no man’s land between the two border posts in forge-like heat, talking all the while of where we hoped to travel. It was a nice distraction. Half a mile later we arrived at the Syrian HQ.

The border guard’s questioning was cursory and polite. I had not obtained a visa earlier and needed one now, a process that caused a delay of a few minutes. My French colleagues and I were given tea while we waited. At last, visa in hand, we went to a nearby shop to change money while a swarm of officials inspected our passports anew. We then flagged down a taxi to take us to Aleppo.

I had thought that the peoples on either side of the border would be similar, but they were not: time and political boundaries create different peoples. I had learned a little Turkish but was at once engulfed by Arabic. The common dress too was different. Whereas most Turks wore Western slacks, shirts, and jackets, many of the Syrians dressed in long djellabas and kaftans. And where the traffic of Turkish towns was a meshed cacophony of off-key horns and merry jingles, the horns of Syrian vehicles seemed harsh and grating, joined with the grind of angry and impatient gears.

In Aleppo, the three of us got a room at the Zoofaram Hotel. It cost twenty Syrian pounds. The manager demanded our passports, which he kept—a not altogether unusual demand in many of the countries. Our room had no windows and the door wouldn’t lock, so we left the door open and stored our baggage downstairs during the day. The result was a welcome waft of wind at night that allayed the otherwise incessant heat.

By day, Aleppo’s streets were busy with buyers and sellers, water-bearing boys, boot blacks, Bedouins in traditional robes and headdress, businessmen in grey, striped jackets, and women modestly draped in abayas. The three of us spent the next two days visiting chai shops and the city’s main souk. We visited a hammam and took in a Syrian movie. On another occasion, we met, then escaped, the eager sales pitch of a well-dressed Syrian gentleman who, by his account, fluently spoke six languages and who tried to sell us ancient artifacts of no doubt recent manufacture, for which none of us had either interest or money.

In the evenings, we experienced the desultory squalor of our hotel roof, drinking a bottle of cheap Syrian wine, a kind of muscatel that left an unpleasant aftertaste but which we drank anyway. We looked out at countless lighted windows and other rooftops where equally countless poor and vagrant Syrians rented cots on hotel roofs under a heavy quilt of Middle Eastern stars. The sights, sounds, and smells drowned out any memories of the border incident.

On the Saturday morning after our arrival, we had breakfast and visited a hammam, then returned to our hotel to pack and leave for the ancient city of Palmyra. The hotel manager, passports in hand, greeted us. Looking dour and suspicious, he asked Jacques to fill out a desk card, something we had already done on our first day.

He then looked at me. “Are you the Canadian?” he asked. In my life to that point, I had been threatened by American police (twice), nearly arrested by the French gendarmerie in Marseilles, and forced to strip to my underwear by custom’s officers in Edmonton on an earlier return from Europe. But this seemed different. There was something especially ominous about the way the Syrian manager phrased his question.

“Yes,” I replied and reached to take my passport.

“You must wait,” he said, and reached for the phone. It was clear he was calling the police.

I grabbed my passport and told my unaware French companions to get their packs. As we were leaving, the manager kept ushering us to sit on a nearby settee. He pointed a finger at the card I had signed and then over at a police sign in the corner. I attempted a bit of subterfuge, as much for Jacques and Bernard as the manager, saying loudly that we had already paid and that it was no use trying to get more money out of us. It was an absurd interpretation of the situation, but it served to persuade the confused Jacques and Bernard to join me in hurrying away.

We walked quickly to the nearby bus terminal where I handed Bernard a ten-pound note and told him to buy me a ticket while I went to the W.C. Having decided (correctly as it turned out) that the police would catch up to us any minute, I took from my backpack my diary notes from my time in Israel. I haphazardly shredded them and dumped them into the toilet, along with a tiny medallion stamped “Nazareth.” As I left the W.C., Jacques came up and said the bus was leaving and that we had no time to lose. We ran outside and boarded a Homs-bound bus, a typically colourful dilapidation that looked like a jar of mixed olives.

We had made our escape. Or had we? I pondered whether I had let paranoia capture me and mourned the loss of my notes—for what?

The question was answered a few blocks away when the bus was flagged down by the whirling lights and screaming siren of a police van. A brace of Syrian officers boarded the bus and ordered the three of us to get off. We were placed in the back of the van. I mumbled something again about having paid the hotel bill and tried to appear calm if not amused. The van’s driver was a uniformed cop, but two others were in civilian clothes. The one in charge wore a tweed sports jacket. He had a dark, thick moustache set against a tight, scrawny face. His eyes were hidden by thick sunglasses. Tonelessly, he asked for our passports, a request with which I, feigning nonchalance, cheerily complied.

Was I in serious trouble? Were we being arrested? Might the Syrian police believe I was a spy? Was this the start of an international imbroglio? Or was this about nothing, only my paranoid imaginings? My immediate thoughts ran to my parents and to my Swiss girlfriend, as well as to my innocent companions with whom I would need to quickly disclaim any connection.

We arrived at the police station. The officers left with our passports and went inside the building. We were alone. More paranoia. Was the van bugged? I steered the conversation away from anything serious. Jacques must have thought the same thing and remarked only half in jest that perhaps the police van had microphones. We stayed very cool and calm, never mentioning anything about Israel or Middle East politics in general.

After a few minutes, the chief policeman came out and handed us our passports. It was all a case of mistaken identity, he said, and drove us back to the bus terminal. There, he apologized again, and brusquely shook our hands.

An hour later, we were on a bus to Homs. There, we took a dolmuş, packed with women and children, and—crammed among the luggage—a lone goat that bleated as we bounced along the desert floor. We arrived in Palmyra around 11:00 p.m. and got a hotel room, which we quickly vacated when we saw it was infested with one-and-a-half inch cockroaches. We slept that night, and the next two that followed, under an ancient temple’s entablature, beyond which myriad stars sparkled against the indigo sky. It was more painfully beautiful than any night I had ever known. I hold even more fondly today my memories of that moment, knowing that the temple where we had slept, which had survived two thousand years of cold, heat, and winds, was perhaps one of those destroyed in 2015 by ISIS terrorists. How near, I wonder, had we slept that night to the public square where, that same year, archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad was beheaded, at the age of eighty-three, for his efforts to rescue priceless artifacts from the city museum?

My fears of our earlier detention should now have been put at rest as the next day we boarded a bus to Damascus. After all, we had been released. But I was not relieved, and thoughts swarmed through my head. Was my release temporary? Was I let go in the hope that I might lead authorities to someone else? But who? Still uneasy, I replayed the events, each reiteration reinforcing my anxiety.

Years later, I view the incident as largely an exercise in paranoia, sparked by an overactive imagination and fatigue. Adding to this, the region was then (as it often was) riven with conflict, and a civil war raged in nearby Lebanon. Besides, I had only just finished reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), in which he describes being on the run from the Spanish left and right.

Perhaps I had even enjoyed the thrill of being wanted by Syrian authorities, as though I was playing a part in a spy novel of my own device. It was an intrigue of my own making, as I had, albeit unconsciously, begun the strange adventure by throwing away a toothpaste tube days before. It was absurd and irrational. Yet standing against any notions of rationality were the suspicious actions of the young man and peasant woman at the border and the fact that the authorities had clearly been looking for a Canadian traveller, of which there could only have been a handful of us in Syria. Finally, I could point out that I actually had been detained, even if briefly. Which might be my preference—that I was arrested under actual suspicion or was guilty of active paranoia?

I still felt uneasy as the three of us arrived in Damascus. The city was hot, dry, and dusty. The summer heat was already pushing 38°C. The traffic was loud and abrasive, and the streets dirty. We canvassed the cheap hotels for a room, but they were full and permanently occupied. At last, we visited a tourist bureau and a nearby chai shop.

A young Pakistani man joined us. He said he worked construction in one of the Emirates but had just returned from a holiday in Europe. “Mostly Copenhagen,” he said, though he had stayed long enough in Istanbul “to purchase a whore” for 150 lira, less than ten dollars. “Very good looking, too,” he assured us.

He began asking a lot of questions about how long I’d been travelling. The incident renewed my paranoia. It was time to leave Syria.

I said goodbye to my French colleagues, and the next day took a bus to Homs, where I stayed the night in a youth hostel—one of the few cheap accommodations without bed bugs or cockroaches. Next morning, I took a bus to Aleppo and finally a dolmuş to Azaz and a two-pound taxi ride to the border crossing. I walked briskly to the Syrian police quarters and pushed my passport through the slot to a desk clerk who looked at it and quickly handed it to his superior standing nearby. The clerk ordered me to step aside.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Harrison.”

“Speak clearly,” he growled, then copied the passport information onto a paper and stamped it. In all, the ordeal lasted two minutes, followed by an equally short visit to the money exchange.

It was another blistering afternoon as I set off for the Turkish outpost half a mile away on the other side of no man’s land. Yet I felt as if Atlas had lifted me high, high up among the clouds. I looked down at the welcoming Turkish flag, snapping in the khamsin wind.

A hundred metres from the first gate, an old woman beckoned me over to help her with a large duffle-bag with which she was struggling, along with a smaller one. A kind of gratefulness came over me, demanding I assist her. And so I did, despite the large bag’s full weight of at least seventy pounds. A few steps later, I was safe in Turkey. It was July 8.

Thus ended my six-day travel in Syria, an otherwise poor, run-down military zone of oppression—a brief journey into the realm of imagination and fear, whose borders are always open, always multitude. I remembered the translated English words inscribed on a ring in the Palmyra Museum, the spacing of which highlighted a particular meaning: “He who fears for his end will achieve no thing.”