Ode to Damascus

Good Weekend, Fairfax Media

23 January 2016

The hopes and dreams of young Damascenes crystallise the tragedy of Syria.

As dusk fell over Damascus in the spring of 2008, I met two Syrian girls with big hair and brightly painted lips. They were poured into tourniquet tight jeans – stonewashed denim for one, classic indigo for the other – and teetered on preposterous heels. It was my first night in town and I asked them for the directions to al-Nofara, a traditional cafe that came highly recommended. They agreed to take me and off they walked, clacking over the cobbles of one of the world's oldest inhabited cities.

When we arrived at al-Nofara, said to have first opened 500 years ago, the girls did the ordering: tea and a hookah to share. We sat in a wood-panelled room as a man with a crimson fez and a salt-and-pepper moustache read aloud from One Thousand and One Nights, twirling a slender baton for dramatic effect. Most of the customers were Syrian. Like my companions, the girls were dolled up and the guys seemed to be channelling the young Bruce Springsteen.

My companions had dates that night, which they'd stalled with a few terse calls on their phones, but after an hour it was time to go. For an impromptu group, our farewells were surprisingly heartfelt. There'd been a kind of mutual allure at work.

I wanted at that very moment to be nowhere else in the world; they wanted to be elsewhere. I was enchanted by the minarets and domes, by the street along which St Paul had walked, and the frescoed third-century synagogue. The past! They just wanted a future. In the street outside the cafe they scrawled names, email addresses and phone numbers on paper serviettes. Then they asked if I could help get them out of Syria.

The girl with the better English, who I thought had the best prospects for a job in the West, was a graduate in metallurgy. Her name was Heaven – or Samaa. When I think of her, as I often do these days, I lament the lost Damascus that few were privileged to see; the Damascus of the tight jeans, big hair and bright lips.

The obstinate vitality of the younger generation had managed to cleave a kind of freedom from that paranoid society, even if it was only the liberty of style. This was three years before the Arab Spring, but the buds were there. And now they are blown away.

Earlier that day I had crossed from Jordan into Syria and by late afternoon I was strolling the streets of the Syrian capital, but not before a stand-off with a uniformed border guard. He had felt compelled to call a superior before stamping a journalist's passport, though for all I know he was phoning his wife and milking the situation for a bribe he never received.

Damascus was one of the most beguiling ugly cities I had ever seen: a characterful old quarter rising up from a crust of Roman masonry, encircled by a sprawl of dreck modern apartments stained by exhaust from the never less than boisterous inner-city traffic..

More in the hope than the expectation of a thaw in relations with the West, there were signs of entrepreneurship in the fledgling tourist industry. Damascene courtyard houses had morphed into boutique hotels, there was a contemporary art scene – not so much thriving as surviving – and the restaurants were a knockout. The one I found on my first night, a two-tiered palace called al-Naranj that served oceanic plates of Arab cuisine, became my hang-out for the next five.

I confess I spent so much time studying the vibrant trade in skimpy women's underwear that I could write a social anthropology doctorate on the subject. At the Souq al-Hamidiyah I gazed, entranced, as a crowd of women shoppers in black hijabs – like a murder of crows with handbags – sorted through the skimpiest of frilly things at an open stall. At a more upmarket shop I saw a pale mannequin adorned with a kind of disco thong pulsing with lolly-coloured electric lights. "The wife does a little dance for her husband," the sales assistant explained. "The lights are flashing. And when the music stops, the bra and panties drop off. Automatically."

President Bashar al-Assad's regime is, or perhaps was – any description of the Syrian tragedy hovers between past and present tense – deeply authoritarian. On that visit a Syrian described it to me, eyes shifting like a spy divulging a secret, as a "hard regime". Of course it was no secret; it was probably, in fact, an understatement.

Yet it's a truth rarely acknowledged about Assad that the hard man ruled at one time over a society that was relatively liberal, at least by regional standards, and more than notionally secular. Or, rather, he played a complicated game of survival dealing both secular and sectarian cards. But the matrix of Middle Eastern realpolitik is one thing. The felt reality of life on the street is another. And on that visit I also met, in the markets of Aleppo, a stall owner who was so theatrically gay that he seemed to be acting out a part in a burlesque: I doubt he would last a minute under an IS caliphate.

As for Heaven and her friend, I can only hope that another Westerner stopped them that spring to ask for directions. I took their details scribbled on those serviettes, and put them with my gear. I wanted to call them the very next night, but I was travelling with a group and subject to its centripetal social forces.

A fortnight later, on my return flight out of Abu Dhabi, I thought of a way to get Heaven out of hell. But when I looked for her details I found they had disappeared in the chaos of new-hotel-every-second-night travel. The only consolation I can offer myself – and it is really no kind of consolation at all – is that my ineptitude is a distillation of the West's larger failure. We could have done more for Syria, and we didn't come through. *