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I’ve been sitting at the Syrian border for just over an hour, in a long, gleaming hall of well-scrubbed floors and well-polished bureaucracy. Behind a window that stretches half-way to Homs, men in crisp green military fatigues are shuffling papers and stamping passports and working the phones like some sort of telethon for underprivileged kids in Aleppo. I’ve handed my passport to a haughty, moustachioed little guy who puts it down and then walks away like it’s been giving him dirty looks. When he returns he has a silver teapot that he hands across the counter to a dowdy old man - the suggestion being that I should make myself at home, since there’s little chance I’ll be rolling into Damascus before nightfall.
Fortunately, I’ve come prepared. I’d heard horror stories of six- and seven- and eight-hour waits at the Syrian border - faxes and phone calls to Damascus, gruff interviews by stern, uniformed men with nothing to lose - and so I picked up a few liters of water and two packages of cookies in Baalbek before settling in for the day. Off to an ambitious start at half-past seven, it was still close to noon when my taxi - a canary-yellow Pontiac with racing stripes on the doors - finally pulled up to the Lebanese border post. There was a delay with my passport - I’d overstayed my visa by two days - and only after a great commotion of photocopies and approvals did the guard stare grimly toward the Syrian frontier and wish me a pleasant trip.
There are fifteen kilometers officially separating the two countries - the sort of diplomatic no-man’s land that gives the guys at Rand McNally fits. The taxi whizzed past billboards for Damascene restaurants and Syriatel cellphones, through a landscape of gently sloping hills as gray as the grim sky above, until a gleaming duty-free shop shimmered into view. This was - it’s safe to say - not the first impression of Syria I had in mind. Italian shoes and French perfumes beckoned from the windows; the familiar, cheerful pastels of the Dunkin’ Donuts logo promised a delicious, artificially sweetened introduction to the country.
Welcome to Syria, indeed.
A half-hour later I was shelling over three US bucks for a watered-down frappucino, the last dregs of which are still settling in my stomach as a ruddy foreigner struts to the visa window. He has a look of vigorous health about him, his blonde hair swept back in an immaculate wave. He’s wearing high-tech hiking shoes and a button-down shirt rolled up his muscular forearms, and you don’t have to spend too much time around the Middle East to know this guy’s got “Foreign Correspondent” written all over his face.
Sure enough, when I start to chat with his driver - a tall, garrulous Lebanese guy with a well-developed paunch - I find out he’s a reporter for NBC News. He’s working on a story to which he’ll only cryptically allude. “We’re going to interview the big guy,” he says, with the sort of nonchalance that suggests he and President Assad are getting together for their weekly brunch at Mahmoud’s House of Falafel.
For the next half-hour I watch him lug his lap-top around the hall, searching for an outlet while his driver negotiates with the officials in a manner perhaps best described as “breezy.” There are problems with a fax from some local news affiliates, and the reporter - showing the remarkable grace-under-fire of our most battle-hardened correspondents - keeps suggesting, “Did he call Mustaba? Have him call Mustaba,” all the while scurrying around on all fours with his extension cord. His driver’s leaning against the counter with a look of weary patience, and you can practically see him weighing the prospective shitstorm of the Syrian army’s wrath against the sheer pleasure of giving this guy a few quick kicks to the scrotum.
I take a toilet break at the WC across the road, a small concrete room that wallops you with its odor from twenty paces. The urinals are overflowing and there are piles of shit on the floor, and if irrefutable proof were ever needed that Syria does, indeed, have weapons of mass destruction, a quick whiz at the border should be enough to convince the Security Council that another strongly worded resolution is in the cards.
Two hours have crawled by and my passport’s moved about six inches closer to Damascus. Beside me an old man with a bright, ruddy bald spot is fidgeting with his papers. He’s wearing a mock turtleneck and a brown sports jacket and has an expensive-looking leather satchel in his hands. He introduces himself - a retired professor from Berkeley - and sighs a mighty sigh. For three hours he’s been waiting for the transit visa that will take him from his family home in the Lebanese Chouf to his summer house in Aqaba. Fortunately, as a former professor of archaeology and antiquities, he has no shortage of conversation topics to while away the minutes.
“Baalbek? Ah, the remarkable story about Baalbek…,” he begins, his lower lip quivering with an ecstasy that has me nervously shifting toward the door.
An hour later I’m called back to the window - an inauspicious omen. With little hope that my visa’s been processed in under three hours, I’m bracing myself for what promises to be a fierce line of questioning. “Have I ever been to Israel? Of course not -
hamdullah! But I’d sure love to give those Zionists a piece of my mind…”
But the official flashes a broad, encouraging smile. “
Ahlan wa sahlan,” he says. “Welcome to Syria.” He points me to the currency exchange window, and I fork over sixteen bucks with what I’m tempted to call dumbstruck joy. Nearby a young American couple has watched the whole exchange; they’ve already been waiting for close to six hours, trudging next door in the blazing heat to stock up on munchkins and glazed chocolate donuts. My improbable luck seems to be an especially bitter salt in their wounds, and as I slip my two packages of cookies across the counter with a grateful, slightly ingratiating “
shukran,” they’re softly rapping on the windowpane and asking if someone could please phone Damascus.
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