Damascus is full of holiday cheer the day I visit in December. Despite being a majority Muslim country, Christians still occupy a large portion of the country’s religious, and they have reminded everyone that even though Syria perpetually exists on the brink—what with the power outages, unemployment, the unaffordability of fuel, and the unhealed wounds of war—they still will celebrate Christmas with the same gusto as Christians living in the West. As a child anxiously awaiting Santa’s arrival on Christmas Eve, I never imagined that he first had to visit all the boys and girls in Syria, and if you had told me, the news would have probably annoyed me, given that it meant he had to visit more homes before eventually arriving to mine.
Signs of Christmas are everywhere. In front of the Umayyad Mosque, for example, which is one of the largest and oldest mosques in the Muslim world, Santa Claus saunters about. Dressed all in red and wearing his trademark toque, he carries a bunch of balloons in his right hand and has a sack draped over his left shoulder. Some children approach him, cautiously, and receive a balloon, but some also keep their distance, and at times, Santa only wanders aimlessly, having no children to entertain or to please. A soldier dressed entirely in green, save for his white trainers, approaches Santa, and together they chat for a few minutes, about what I cannot say. The two of them together, red and green, form an unlikely duo, until I realize that both expect good behaviour and punish naughtiness in their own specific ways.
Santa takes a tea from a nearby vendor and must pull his fake beard down before he can sip it. The revelation that Santa’s beard is fake does not seem to upset any of the passing children, and the ordinary man wearing Santa’s attire does not try to hide his duplicity. He just sips and chats with the soldier in the space between the mosque and Al-Hamadiyah Souq. I fervently believed in Santa as a child; if Santa had had a religion in his name, I would have been his most fervent devotee. I do not remember how I reconciled all the holes in Santa’s story or how I explained away so many of the obvious lies, but I did—because I had to. The pain of Santa not existing in the world would have proved too strong for me to accept the obvious. He had become so much of my worldview that to think of life without him would have unfastened my existence, and I would have floated away like one of Damascus Santa’s balloons.
Another Santa arrives on the scene and is much slimmer than the one already talking to the soldier. The clothes barely cling to his body; I imagine his emaciated frame being knocked over from the slightest of breezes. He spots the other Santa working on the mosque and instead of finding another area bereft of a Santa, he joins the others and their conversation. This is poor Santa work. Incompetently broadcasting a fake beard is one thing, but for two different Santas to chat and joke in the company of children, potentially making them question the veracity of the entire tale, is shoddy Santa work. As a child, if I had queued to visit Santa at a mall and summoned the courage to reveal my deepest wishes only to see another Santa wandering past stores and stopping occasionally to window shop or buy a coffee, it would have first ruined me and then outraged me because at some level, the sight of a second Santa would have forced me to face some uncomfortable truths and to try and make some tenuous arguments. I’m sure I would have though. I would have explained away the doppelgänger, since early on, I had accepted that the mall Santa was not the real Santa but only a messenger, a trusted employee, who would relay the child’s wants to the real one working in the North Pole. So, this second Santa, I would have reasoned, must have received poor information about to which mall he should have gone. But what about the children who were not as mature as me and who did not know that the real Santa employed hundreds, no thousands, of Santas worldwide to help him with his work? Would the sight of the second Santa have destroyed their belief? I imagine thousands of children in tears, inconsolable, marching home and then setting fire to all their presents, their stocking, and even their Christmas tree. “I don’t believe in Santa,” they would tell their parents. “He does not exist,” they would shout. And what happens to Santa if children no longer believe in him?
The children passing by the mosque do not seem that perturbed by the sight of two Santas. They do not grab their mother or father by the sleeve of their coat, point at them, and then demand an explanation. There are no difficult conversations. In fact, the children who do hang around the mosque are far more interested in our presence, as tourists, than the Santas. In rudimentary English, they introduce themselves and want to know what we think of their country. They smile and laugh at our responses and then debate among themselves how to properly translate their more complex Arabic questions into English. Other children gravitate towards us because we have expensive cameras hanging around our shoulders and probably big, fat wallets in our pockets. They have items to sell, and we have disposable income—obviously. While the Santas drink their tea and socialize with the soldier, boys, no older than seven or eight, approach us with beautiful roses. Their little fingers hold the stems high so that we may have a beautiful view of the rose and its gorgeous petals. Yet despite the flower’s obvious beauty, we have no practical use for the rose, so we answer each presentation with a “La, shrukran.” No thank you. We keep saying it as politely as we can, since we do not want to seem rude or oblivious about the obvious difference in status between us and the boys. They are persistent, however, and our indifference to what they sell only motivates them more and makes them work harder and harder to sell just a single rose. I do know how each child acquired their roses, nor do I know what happens if they return to where they came with the same number of roses as when they left, but I do sense a desperation grow within each as we meet their gestures with an increasingly stern no.
Our tour guide has gone to fetch tickets for the mosque, and we are left at the mercy of the children. Between each rose, in those brief seconds of relative calm, I gaze around me, standing as I am in the beating heart of Damascus, and let my presence in Syria wash over me. The capital does possess a dynamism that surprises me; people go about their business, or at least the mundane, movements of getting things done, as if Damascus, their home, only a few years ago, had not been on the verge of collapse. On the city’s outskirts, just a few kilometres from where I stand, the ruins of bombed buildings testify to just how close Damascus came to destruction. Yet the old city now buzzes. War is far away. Coffee shops are packed as are the famous ice cream parlours. Shisha is smoked liberally. Families sit at tables and eat their lunch together. Laughter is heard. Men play backgammon; others beckon pedestrians to enter their shops. A man plays with his dog.
There is the simple desire to step forward again and again into the future. The ruinous decay of the past, all the busted bodies and bloodletting and betrayals, has been consigned to the dust tray and then to the bin. Yet despite the efforts to clean the streets of the past, the bags do pile up. There is after all a lot of trash. Wars produce much of it. Blood and limbs and ugly, ugly stories. So the bags are heavy and look like they may split. Even a strong person could only carry one at time and from the bottom; otherwise, the plastic could rip and spill the contents onto the floor. They are messy, too. Liquids drip from the openings, even though desperate fingers have tied the tops tight. People have just dropped them to the side and in the corner. There is no order. No method. So the pile just grows and grows. And I suppose that would be fine if some team would come and collect them and them dump into some landfill. But no one comes. People are just too busy. Smoking. Laughing. Eating. Fair enough. It’s an unenviable job but still essential because eventually, maybe not immediately, these bags will start to intrude upon the laugher and the smoking. Until then, though, until the bags are so many that a person cannot even light a cigarette without feelings the contents, an elbow and skull, the citizens just pretend they are not there. There is nothing there but space to be walked. There is nothing there but a future to be imagined.
Our guide has returned with our tickets in hand, and we congregate at the mosque’s entrance, awaiting our turn to enter. The boys with the roses, however, have not let up in their pursuit of us. There is something heroically tragic about their persistence, about their fanatical belief that if they just keep trying that one of us will eventually relent and exchange some money for one of their roses. None of us do, however, and the boys must sense that their window of opportunity is closing, since they become a bit more frantic in their efforts to convince us that even if we do not need a rose, since it is not the most practical item for a traveller to Syria, we can still buy one, just one, so that the boy may feel that he has earned the money through his dogged work. We could throw the rose into the rubbish bin as far as the boys are concerned, or even plucked the petals one by one until only the bare stem remains, hell, we could even eat the rose in front of the boys or stomp it under foot, just so long as each got their money, just so long as each did not have to admit that they begged for it.
An elderly man sits on a wooden chair in front of the mosque. His exact purpose I cannot ascertain, but he has been watching the boys and their selling with increasing disgust. The boy closest to him is in the middle of convincing a tourist, through body language alone, that she could not possibly live without the rose now caught between his fingers, but his sales patter is interrupted by the elderly man, who calls the boy over to his side. Before the boy can ask the man what he wants or, better yet, why he has felt the urge to ruin his sale when the interaction was going so well, the elderly man slaps the boy hard across the face. The impact makes a sound that even draws the eye of those who had not witnessed the hit. Something has happened. Such a sound is uncommon. We the tourists secretly condemn the man for the slap, but say nothing, even though it was our refusal to buy a rose that forced the boy, as well as his associates, to become more aggressive in their approach. As for the boy, the slap has rendered him momentarily speechless. He just looks sheepishly at the man, trying to process what he had done to provoke such violence. Before the tears come, incomprehension sketches itself over the boy’s face. Why he asks without uttering a sound. What had he done except to earn a little money with dignity? He should be in school, or at least at home preparing for tomorrow’s lesson, but instead he must humiliate himself at the feet of tourists who know nothing of hardship or war but can sample the very best of his country, without any of its ugliness, and then go home and tell whoever will listen how they had visited Syria—yes, that Syria.
Shock gives way to humiliation and then to tears. The boy scurries away from the elderly man and his wrath, lest he receive another blow. All the roses suddenly disappear, and we now have a unmolested path into the mosque and its quiet piousness. The elderly man says nothing to us as we pass, and we say nothing to him. I am full of judgment though, lots of outrage, but since it would be inappropriate to scold an elderly man for slapping a boy in a country I do not call home, I swallow my disgust and let its warmth massage my insides. There is no reprimanding; there is no calling-out. There is only silence and entry. We walk into Ummayad mosque and feel its pull; history oozes from its walls. With our cameras snapping at anything intoxicating, we soon forget about the boy and the slap, but we cannot fail to notice that inside the mosque, there is not a single rose to be had.