In The Land of Old Maids and Bad Odds

For Jane Austen, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.

And, here in Syria, it appears to be a nearly universal truth that a 27-year-old, single female must be in want of a husband. At least, that’s what the older generation of my family, their friends and most taxi drivers seem to think.

When you meet someone here – at least when I’ve met people here – once they figure out your name and where you are from, the most common third question is “Are you married?” The fourth question: “Well, are you engaged?” Finally, the fifth question (if you can call it a question): “Don’t you want me to introduce you to someone?”

Just the other day, over coffee with my aunt and her friends, a former high-level military officer decided after five minutes that it was a major travesty that I was single and he would make it his personal goal to find me a husband.

“I have a long list of men for you,” he said. “But first, I take you to the beauty salon.”

Sitting with this guy under a blow dry machine, getting our toenails polished together? Wouldn’t even Sy Hersh balk at this kind of access? Tempting, tempting.

At 27, I’m a bit past the marrying prime as far as Syria goes. As my uncle kindly informed me without touching a calculator, I now have a four percent chance of finding my special someone. As the moon passed through the sky on my 25^th birthday, I apparently crossed over the marital Maginot line and into the Land of Old Maids and Bad Odds.

As arbitrary as it may seem, there is a system here, as my aunt explained to me: Once a girl hits 20 or so, she is considered eligible to start looking for a husband. But she doesn’t actually go out on a hunt for one. If she meets someone at a party or at school whom she is interested in, she tells her mother and her mother calls the boy’s mother. The two mothers then run through a check list of important factors which, according to my aunt, include the family’s reputation, wealth and education.

If everything checks out, the two families meet and, while their parents drink coffee and make small talk, the boy and girl get a chance to see if they have anything in common or have any chemistry. If one or both of the couple have an interest in one another, the mothers regroup on the phone later and plan another meeting. This time, the couple will meet without the family, but the girl will bring a male chaperone, typically an older brother. They might meet up like this a couple more times and then decide to become engaged and throw a big party.

As far as I can tell, once a couple is engaged, they can go on unchaperoned dates and really begin the process of getting to know each other. I don’t have statistics, but it seems to me that more engagements are broken here than in the US. In my eyes, breaking an engagement here is more like breaking up from a serious relationship. And that makes sense because divorce, particularly for women, seems to be a bit of a taboo, at least in my family’s social circle. According to my aunt, a divorced woman is really on the outs and will have serious trouble remarrying. Still, I’ve heard from younger people here in Damascus that divorced women are very popular for dates, however one defines popular.

Of course, there are exceptions to tradition. More and more, couples here in Syria meet at university or through friends and forgo the drawn out family-centric engagement process that is the tradition. I have a Syrian friend here who is also in her late 20s and working as a journalist. She’s lived with a boyfriend and she would never willingly let an aunt take her to a lunch on a set-up.

Whatever way you play it, by the time you reach 25, as far as traditional Syrians are concerned, you are on the brink of Old Maidom. There is actually an Arabic word for old maid – “ahhhnn-nise” (It’s another one of those Kermit the Frog words that you have to pronounce from the back of your throat). When I’ve used it to describe myself in polite company with my family, I’ve gotten some dirty looks. So as far as I can tell, it’s an insult. However, it’s a great weapon against the taxi drivers of Damascus who all seem to be looking for that special – and, more importantly, single - conversation partner to improve their English.

So for now, I am squarely “ass-bah” which I would translate simply into “single”, but it seems to actually mean “single and definitely looking.” Perhaps “looking” is just assumed for someone of my age. And as my family swarms around me, concerned about my marital status, I can’t help feel a lot like a Jane Austen character.

It struck me suddenly several nights ago when I was watching Pride and Prejudice with my cousin’s husband. We were watching the scene in which Mrs. Bennett tells Elizabeth Bennett that if she puts off marriage much longer, she will end up alone and penniless. My cousin’s husband and I had just been laughing about a strange lunch one of my aunt’s coaxed me into attending.

My aunt had been visiting Damascus from Aleppo for the weekend when she called to invite me.

“Don’t wear what you wore yesterday,” she said over the phone.

“Huh?” I said, trying to remember what I had been wearing.

“This is a nice family. High society. Very chic,” she said. “Make your hair nice. Yallah (Let’s go). Ok?”

“Ok,” I said. “So what should I wear?”

“Bye”

“What?”

She had hung up the phone.

I assumed that we were having lunch with a family that liked to get dressed up for meals and she was simply giving me a heads up so I wouldn’t make a total fool out of myself. As someone who feels most attractive in a bright red track suit, I thought this was fair warning.

I wore the nicest shirt I had brought with me to Damascus. I brushed my hair and put on a hint of lipstick (Read: I put some lipstick on and wiped it off after looking in the mirror). I honestly felt a bit over done. How fancy could lunch at someone’s house be, especially in such hot weather?

“You did your hair?” my aunt said, looking me up and down when I arrived at her house.

“Well, yeah. I don’t have a blow dryer so this is what it looks like,” I said.

“Ok,” she said, looking once more at my hair. “Well, we go, but we will put more lipstick on before we get there.”

My aunt had rung the doorbell outside of the family’s flat when she turned to me. She looked into my eyes, hers magnified by raccoon-eye sized, sparkly bifocals.

“Fix your hair. And don’t mention any boyfriends, if anyone asks. Ok? Yallah.”

I was about to ask my aunt what the hell was going on when a housekeeper ushered us into the living room of the apartment. Sitting on a sofa in a nightgown and watching music videos was the lunch hostess. We shook hands and she and my aunt proceeded to talk about me in Arabic. Every once in a while, the two asked me to clarify a point here and there, including what I had studied in college and, of course, my age.

Minutes later, my aunt turned to me, with the hostess still sitting at the next sofa in ear shot.

“Well, he’s not here.”

“Who?”

“Her grandson. He’s very good. He went to Dubai for business. He’s gotten a bit fat,” she said, blowing out her cheeks, “but I thought you might like him. Very good family.”

Of course. This was a set-up sabotage, disguised as fancy lunch! I was suddenly very glad that I didn’t have a blowdryer. I wished I had worn a paper bag.

Little by little, the hostess’ sons and their children appeared at the house, all in jeans and t-shirts. As each son came into the living room, my aunt would tell me what they did for a living.

“He is an engineer,” she said after the first son entered.

“He is an engineer,” she said after the second son entered.

And eventually, I found myself surrounded by a pack of attractive male engineers, watching Arabic music videos and smoking in silence.

In turn, they learned that I had studied anthropology in college and that I was 27, clearly my most important stats. I felt like we were pro-baseball players being introduced before the first inning of a big game. I was ready to take the bunt and get back to the dug out.

Luckily, I was seated next to one of the hostess’ teenage granddaughters during lunch. Her English was impeccable and we had a great discussion about basketball. She played for a woman’s team in Damascus. Before dessert and whatever other set-up rituals I hadn’t anticipated, I told my aunt that I had an appointment and backed out of the dining room with my ratty purse, leaving her and the hostess glaring at me.

OK. So while this whole idea of marriage here is totally alien and in some ways offensive to me, I can see it through my family’s eyes. For my aunt, I had reached a certain age and I needed to find a husband, or else spend my life alone and, in some ways, at odds with her society. For her, much like for Mrs. Bennett, an appropriate husband was one who had money, good looks and was part of a reputable family.

Taking me to lunch was, as I’m guessing she saw it, doing me a big favor.

Just as in the world of Jane Austen, there doesn’t seem to be the concept, at least among the older generation of my family and their circle, that a woman would want to be alone and care for herself or focus on a career before focusing on a family. And that’s not because they think women can’t have careers or aren’t intelligent. Not at all. One of my female cousins is a tourism consultant and another started her own clothing line. One of my aunts has her PhD and is a department chair at the University of Aleppo. Rather, I think the point is that for a woman, situating oneself in a stable family, the unit around which all activities seem to orbit in Syria, takes precedent over anything else as far as the older generation of my family is concerned.

Which, of course, explains the hullabaloo over setting one’s relatives up with potential husbands. In their heads, it’s a wild game of chess with hundreds of possibilities, requiring keen strategy and foresight. Will there be more surprise lunches? A trip to the salon with my retired military man? Undoubtedly.

Perhaps the more important question is are there any Darcys in Damascus?

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The Turkey (Border) Trots

Yesterday, I returned from a week of traveling around Southern Turkey where my grandmother grew up in a small border town before marrying my Syrian grandfather and moving to Aleppo.

It was a terrific trip with several Arabic school classmates through cities with layers and layers of ancient history, incredibly welcoming people and delicious desserts, including my new favorite rose-flavored Turkish delights. We traded national songs and bottles of Efes, the national beer, with a group of Turks one night at the base of the citadel in Gaziantep, a city known for producing the best baklava in the country. Another night, we watched the stars, sitting at the edge of the Euphrates River where black roses grow and where, just a couple hundred miles south in Iraq, I’m sure we couldn’t begin to imagine the horrors contrasting with our peaceful lounge in nature.

We discovered the following morning that when the Euphrates was dammed in 2001 alongside the small town where we stayed, no one had bothered to remove the buildings in its path. So after breakfast, we explored an abandoned mosque, half of which was full of silvery fish and sparkling green water. Sparrows perched on hanging wires in the main prayer room and from the top of the crumbling minaret, we looked out on the tops of roofs resting at the river’s surface.

Of all our adventures, I think the greatest highlight of the trip came at the very end as my friends and I attempted to cross the border back into Syria.

As you may have gathered, I’ve been having some troubles with food illness since I arrived. Crossing the border to Turkey was apparently not the great elixir. In fact, by the time we puttered up to the border checkpoint to return to Syria, I was feverish, my joints and back ached with flu-like pain and I was ready to toss my cookies in any quiet corner. Two Seven-Ups, aspirin and antibiotics went down the hatch and I hoped for the best, but the last thing I wanted to do was take the inevitably bumpy cross-country bus ride from Aleppo to Damascus in the middle of the night.

Luckily, the customs officers read my mind and decided to detain us. Well, not exactly. One of my friends had forgotten to buy a new visa before we left. His old visa had run out. Upon this discovery, the guards led us to an air-conditioned office where a uniformed officer, apparently in charge, was smoking at a desk and told us that this was a definite no-no – or mooshkeela. His officers, he told us, would need to send a fax to an office somewhere in Damascus to confirm that John was a student at Damascus University, despite the fact that he had a letter from the university indicating just that.

“It could be one hour. It could two hours. It could be three. Four. I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.

Amen, I thought, rocking myself in the breezy, cool air of his office. This was just what I needed.

“Yes. You may sit there,” he said, gesturing to the hot lobby through the double-plated window in his office that appeared as a mirror on the pedestrian side.

“Oh! Can’t we stay with you? I want to be with you,” I blurted out without thinking. I just couldn’t imagine being in the heat again.

“Well,” he laughed, “if that is what you want. Yes. You can stay here.”

For several minutes, we looked at each other awkwardly. Would we be staring at each other for four hours? Was he regretting his offer? I was almost regretting my request. Then, The General, as we later nicknamed him, pushed a button on his desk and another officer came into the office. Perhaps we were being escorted to the lobby.

“You want something to drink? Chai (tea)? Ahh-rah-weh (coffee)?” General said.

My friends said they would like tea. I declined, telling General that I was very sick and didn’t think drinking anything would feel good on my stomach. And, by the way, could I use his bathroom as soon as possible?

“I think you eat something bad,” he said. “Chai is good for this. You try. Ok?”

Then, he handed me a set of keys, one of which opened a special, nice bathroom at the back of the customs building. I should explain here that most toilets in Syria are really just porcelain lined holes. You don’t sit, you use your thigh muscles and you squat. Instead of toilet paper, there is a hose and you wash off. I apologize for the frank discussion of all-things bathroom, but it’s important to understand why General’s offer of a special, nice bathroom was an especially nice gift. When it’s 100 degrees or more outside and you are nauseated, a bathroom with a clean floor, no flies and a semi-antiseptic scent can go a long way. A very long way.

When I returned to General’s office, my friends were chatting him up. He was 32-years-old, single and living in Aleppo, about 25 miles south of the border. He had spent his birthday, the previous day, in this office.

“When I was in university, there is an exam always on my birthday,” he said. “Now, I spend my birthdays at work.”

He shyly toyed with two remote controls at his desk for several minutes, then turned on the television. He flipped through several music channels, a Syrian soap opera and stopped at Dr. Phil.

“Docteur Phil. I think he talks about things that are very small. There are more things to talk about,” General said, pausing briefly. “I think Docteur Phil needs a doctor.”

“I like the woman,” he added.

“Oprah?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes, her. I like her very much,” he exclaimed. Oprah, unlike Dr. Phil, he explained, discusses big and small issues that affect many more people.

Gaining confidence, he flipped from Dr. Phil to a black and white recording of a singer wailing “Habbbbbeee-beee! Habbbbeee-beee! (sweetheart)” on a stage with what looked like 20 accompanying violinists and a sign that said “Je T’Aime Love”.

“This was a famous singer of Syria,” he said. “Like Umm Kathoum. You know Umm Kathoum?”

We nodded. He changed the channels again, landing on an Arabic version of “Entertainment Tonight” and a segment about Nancy Ajram, a Lebanese pop singer that could be described as a Middle Eastern Britney Spears.

It appeared that Nancy had sprained her wrist but was still continuing to film a new video, certainly an issue of national importance. I’m not kidding. Here, it seems that pop singers are for everyone, not just young people. My 75-year-old aunt, for example, named her cat Nancy after the singer. She’s on billboards all over Syria, drinking Coca Cola, for which she is apparently the Middle East and North Africa representative. She stars in a Coke commercial playing right now which seems scant on plot, but I’m sure does the trick. Nancy walks into a house wearing a leather jacket and aviator sunglasses. She’s thirsty. She finds a Coke in her fridge and chugs it in one, somehow sexy gulp. When she tries unsuccessfully to shake out one last drop, she crushes the can with one beautifully manicured hand.

“Syrian women – hellway (beautiful)” I offered to the General.

“Yes,” he said.

“How do they do it? Is it makeup or what?” I asked.

“Do you think Syrian woman are pretty? Are you saying Syrian women are pretty?” he asked, now unsure what I was saying.

“Yes. Beautiful. And the Lebanese, too,” I said.

“Yes, but not the Egyptian,” he said, tsking. “They are big and black.”

Hmm. My friends and I shifted uncomfortably in our seats. This was probably not the time or the place for an open discussion about racism. Considering his love of Oprah Winfrey, it was also unclear exactly what General meant. We continued to watch television until he stood up and said he had business to address. We would be moving to another room for five minutes.

“We will see you again, won’t we?” I asked. I don’t know what had come over me, but I felt a strange attachment to General.

“Of course. Yes. Only five minutes,” he said.

A guard escorted us to a cool, dark room full of cots. Two other guards rushed to our sides and sprayed us with a cooling liquid that also doubled as a perfume. His efficiency scared me and I jumped when the cold spray hit my arms.

“Welcome! Welcome!” one said, gesturing for us to lay on the beds. The second guard took me to the next room where there was one cot and a large fan. Weak from fever, I moved slowly onto the cot, relieved to lay down. As soon as I lay down, he put a soft blanket around me, tucked it into the bed like a parent might for a sick child and put the fan directly on me.

“You are sick?” he said, half-asking, half-explaining. “Now, rest.”

My friends came next door minutes later, wanting to make sure everything was OK in the mystery room. They sat by my bedside while guards came in and out every couple of minutes, constantly offering cigarettes, tea and water.

“You are so nice,” my friend Tyler told one of the guards. “Thank you.”

“You are also nice,” the guard said. “We are sorry about how long you wait. You are welcome.”

With another guard, we discussed the US election. This guard did not like George Bush. Unlike other Syrians, mostly taxi drivers and shopkeepers, who have expressed their dislike of our president to me, he did not then ask what happened to Hillary Clinton or say he hoped for Barack Obama to become the next president. He seemed absolutely indifferent and walked out of the room.

When he returned, he carried a giant plate full of Arabic bread, scrambled eggs covered in pepper and a bowl of peeled cucumbers and sliced bell peppers.

“My friend made this for you,” he said. “You are hungry?”

We scarfed down the food. I hadn’t eaten scrambled eggs, one of my favorites, in months and they were delicious. My fever had broken, my bones had stopped aching and it felt good to fill up my stomach again with anything nutritious, let alone something delicious. Still, I had to eat slowly. Who knew what would happen when my body registered that I had introduced food to it again.

“Dania, why you not eat?” the guard said, concerned that I didn’t like the food. “Eat!”

He rushed back out of the room and returned with three glasses of generously sugared tea and, again, pushed cigarettes onto my friends. As we tried to finish the tea, he came into the room and told us that the fax from Damascus had come. Soon, John’s mooshkeela could be fixed.

We were escorted back to the lobby. I tried to stand in line as John sorted out his paperwork, but I felt dizzy from double-dosing antibiotics and I wanted to say goodbye to the General. I went and knocked on the door, a little worried that this was not so cool to do with a guard escort. General was no longer at his desk. He had been replaced with a new boss who was wearing a crinkly track suit and seemed ready for a brisk walk.

“Do you feel better?” he said. It was amazing how quickly news spread in this office.

“Yes. Thank you,” I said.

“Anything you need, please tell me. I will help you. We are sorry for the time you wait,” he said.

I returned to the lobby and put my head between my legs. Tyler came over and suggested we might want to ask the new General for help finding a taxi to Aleppo. Our taxi driver from Turkey had jetted hours before, understandably unwilling to wait with us and lose business. We knocked on the office door. Within minutes, New General had his men searching for a taxi driver and we were watching a late night movie about a ghost town in West Virginia with him.

Shortly, a guard returned with the driver. New General asked him a couple of questions, told him in Arabic that we needed to get to Aleppo quickly because we were late and that he needed to stay with us until we found reliable transportation. Just to be clear, I didn’t understand this in Arabic. New General translated this afterwards.

We got up to leave and Tyler, thankfully, asked if we could have a photo with New General to remember our happy times at the custom’s office (see above). He agreed and we snapped some shots. Then, we started to file out of the office to grab our backpacks when New General stopped me.

“I hope we see you again,” he said. “Welcome to your country!”