In the Bathhouse of Lawrence of Arabia

Dear wishers:

This little story comes from our week in Syria, and I thought it might
be a nice one. You may wish to decide if it is suitable for certain
eyes.

Aleppo is a city in Northern Syria, not too far from the Turkish border,
and it is considered one of the most authentically ancient Middle
Eastern cities still in existence.

The city feels slightly European, but at its core it is deeply Eastern.
Directly in the center of this hot desert city is a huge hill, looking
distinctly like the caldera of a volcano, upon which rests a huge
fortress called the citadel. Built by Saladin to defend his city against
the ravages of the Crusaders, it is a typical Arab fortress – stronger
looking and more appealing to the eye than actually strong and durable.

Radiating out from the Citadel are the souks of the city. Souk is Arabic
for “market”, and the markets of Aleppo are considered the most exotic
in the Middle East, if not the world. One enters a dark cavernous world
under the hot desert sun, and suddenly is thrust into the ancient past -
a cool world of Bedouins, donkeys, turbanned men smoking aromatic
cigarettes, the smell of cardomen and spice, acres of stalls selling
everything from sheep guts to wedding dresses.

And what a world! Wandering amongst the women fully draped in black,
only pairs of brown eyes peering out from behind the full black chador
veil. There are few tourists here. Everything you take pictures of
conforms to your stereotype of what a Middle Eastern bazaar should look
like. Because so few tourists ever come here, camera toting
photographers are a rarity and usually not objected to.

Near the souks is the old Baron Hotel built by an Armenian family in
1909. For atmosphere and legend, it is hard to beat the Baron Hotel. It
is solid and French looking, and was once the most glamorous hotel in
Syria. But when it was nationalized by the Syrian government, it fell on
extremely hard times, and today it is still run in desultory fashion by
the descendants of Mazmoulian family that built it.

In its heyday, it was the only hotel in the region to offer European
standards of hospitality and cleanliness. It hosted guests like Agatha
Cristie, who wrote Murder On The Orient Express in Room 221. Christie
married archeologist Max Mallowan in 1930. Mallowan’s work took him
repeatedly to Syria, and their story together in Syria and at the Baron
Hotel is told in Christie’s book “Come Tell Us How You Live”. They made
the Baron Hotel their home. Poirot lived here too.

Behind these louvred shutters, the guests included Charles DeGaulle,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Charles Lindbergh. They ate caviar and wild boar
from the Euphrates River Valley. They sat on the back porch and shot
wild duck in the neighboring swamp (today it’s a taxi stand – wish
they’d continue shooting).

To the Baron came spies, smugglers and traders. Kim Philby, a high
ranking British diplomat stayed here for decades, and although he drank
himself into a near stupor every night, he never betrayed the fact that
he was a Soviet spy and had been for 20 years! “He was a charming man,
and had quiet playful eyes”, says Coco Mazmoulian who runs the hotel
today.

“Agatha Cristie”, he says, “had a deeply perceptive face. When she
stared at you, it felt like she had X ray eyes. Her look went right
through you.”

But the most famous guest at the Baron, who stayed for years and wrote
endlessly of his travels, and whose receipt for bar bill and room are
still posted behind the check in counter, was T.E. Lawrence – yes,
Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence checked into the Baron Hotel on September 6, 1909. He had just
walked 1800 miles across Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Syria,
visiting every Crusader Castle except one. He was 21 years old.

The boy dreamed of being a Crusader, even when first riding his bicycle
around Europe, visiting each and every castle. He should have lived in
the Middle Ages.

In his book, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” he writes, “Mecca was to lead
to Damascus, Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Baghdad;then there
was Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my
beginning an ordinary effort. All men dream, but not equally. Those who
dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds will wake in the day
to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous
men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, as if to make them
possible. This I did.”

After graduating from Oxford, Lawrence returned to the Middle East to
walk everywhere, appearing in villages as “the first European they have
ever seen”. From the Baron Hotel, he wrote to his principal at Jesus
College, “I have had a most delightful tour…on foot and alone all the
time, so that I have, perhaps, living as an Arab with the Arabs, got a
better insight into the daily life of the people than those who travel
with caravan and dragomen.”

The Baron Hotel still serves lunch in it’s high ceilinged ballroom, an
ancient French waiter places food on empty brown oak tables in ritual
fashion, but almost no one arrives for the two hour lunch period. Slow
and deliberately, he removes the food at the end of lunch. A small
anteroom looks just as it must have in Lawrence’s time, except for the
unpleasant addition of a TV which blares ridiculous Syrian TV programs.
The atmospheric bar, with the same coasters, the same posters, the same
1905 beer glasses, looks like a museum piece, but you can sit in its
dusty interior and actually have a drink.

The rooms, inelegant today, still have hand cranked dusty black phones.
The shower spigot is the same one that was used in 1917. Step out on the
balcony and watch horse carts, donkey carts, Arabian sultans walking
with 4 or 5 black robed wives, covered head to toe in the blazing 95
degree desert heat. Old Chevys and Studebakers share the road with
innumerable taxis and pedestrians.

This is it, you think, this is the real middle east. On the balcony next
door Winston Churchill once stood. But hotel has really fallen to
pieces. Still, there is something wonderfully romantic in its total
un-selfconsciousness. In Singapore this place would have been made into
a self-celebrating tourist attraction with rooms at $500 per night and
parking for tour busses. In the USA, a Lawrence of Arabia theme park
would be built next door. Here, an old waiter in a smudged, dirty black
vest and bow tie, hands me a “welcoming drink” with wrinkled hands (what
is it? I still don’t know!) and then he waits for a small tip.

In the lobby, thug like Syrians with shady eyes wait to “change money”
on the black market – to bring you anything imagineable from the souk,
from exotic fruit to a bowl of hashish. They are completely corrupt and
untrustworthy, but I didn’t care. They somehow add to the seedy,
decaying atmosphere of the place.

This is the essence of what the Raffles Hotel, E and O or Strand Hotel
would be if they were never fixed up. The hotel is completely fading in
the torporific sun, and I loved the place. Just sitting out on the
elevated terrace above the street was like moving in a time machine to
another era. The waiter then delivers you a beautiful argileh – a hubble
bubble water pipe standing fully 3 feet tall. Through a long pipe you
slowly suck in an apple flavored concoction (no drugs in it!) from a
large bowl with pieces of charcoal resting atop punctured tin foil. It
is the perfect antidote to Syria’s corruption and confusion. Sweet and
mellow. And after about an hour of smoking the argileh, you feel
infinitely at peace with yourself, and all the confusion, duplicity and
dirt of Syria fade away in the smoky haze of wonderment and appreciation
that a place like this could still exist and you’d be the only person
sitting here enjoying it.

After a few beers and two hours of the hubble bubble pipe, the
atmosphere of Aleppo looks pretty outstanding. Here you are in a country
no one visits, staying in a hotel once visited by some of the most
famous people in the world.

It was in this atmosphere of romantic wonder that Yves and I found
ourselves. Unable to bear the sad ritual of dinner at the Baron, we
retired to a more modern and flashy rooftop restaurant nearby where we
had simply the best meal of fried chicken, hummous, salad, and french
fries, washed down with dented silver cans of frosty Eastern European
beer.

While sitting at the table, we were approached by a kindly looking old
gentleman who introduced himself and asked us if we knew that Lawrence
of Arabia had stayed at the hotel next door. “Indeed, he used the
bathhouse which I own”.

“Really?” we said.

“Yes, it is a hammam – a bathhouse from the 15th century in the old
city. Lawrence of Arabia used to take his sauna there and steam bath,
then get a massage after his long walks across the Syrian desert
visiting castles. Even after he came back from Oxford, he came to my
bathhouse. Then my father was the masseuse there. He massaged Lawrence
of Arabia.”

“Really”, we said.

“Yes, please be my guest tonight. There will be many people there. You
can have a smoke of the hubble bubble, then a steam bath. In the Old
City, near the souk. I’ll meet you by the clock tower at 11 pm.”

Well, who could resist having a steam bath in the same bathhouse as
Lawrence of Arabia? Even though we had to shoot the next morning at 4:30
AM, we headed for the clocktower at 11 pm. There our friend met us and
led us into the old city souks.

What had once, by day, been a crowded, bustling and chaotic scene was
entirely different by night. No one was about, except for the occasional
sad stray dog. Our footsteps echoed on the large Roman cobblestones of
the market, all the shops closed and shuttered by huge metal doors,
locked by padlocks. Suddenly, almost like a ghost, an ancient character
might appear in the darkness – a turbanned man pushing a wooden handcart
or a Bedouin riding a donkey slowly, almost mystically across the closed
night market, a scene that could hardly have changed in the last 2000
years.

The hammam – the bath, was just a promised, ancient. Turning in off the
street through a high Mameluke stone archway, we were suddenly in
another world. A huge open space of couches raised to different
elevations, comfortable pillows strewn about and a faint awareness of
hot steam from distant rooms.

However, at this late hour, no one was around. “A tour group from
Germany will be arriving soon” our host told us. He took our valuables
and locked them in a tall wooden locker. “For safekeeping” he said and
winked.

Well, I’ve never been in a bathhouse, let alone an ancient one where
Lawrence of Arabia bathed. So I just followed along and hoped for the
best.

Our host spoke mostly French and addressed Yves mainly. He called me
“the professor”, for reasons I never actually determined. Probably not
because he’s been watching Gilligan’s Island episodes. He hopped on one
of the raised couches, and began to undress, handing us sarongs. We
followed suit.

Once we were completely naked, we wrapped the sarongs around ourselves
and our host led us into the hot bath. It was not as steamy as I would
have hoped, but we were instructed to lie down on hot hot Roman stones
in the middle of the bath. The heat was coming from beneath the stones
and they were just about hot enough to lie down on without pain.

He retired to another room, we could hear splashing water. I laid on my
back and contemplated the ancient ceiling of this bath. It was a rounded
stone dome. I had heard that they built these domes because of a lack of
good wood with which to roof houses. Mark Twain though the cupolas were
ugly “as the boltheads on a prison door” when viewed from the rooftops.
In the domed ceiling were triangular vents to allow the steam to escape.
I meditated on their bizarre and yet simplistic pattern.

Before I could get too caught up in this reverie, my name was called and
I headed for the “bathing area”. This was a small, private room just off
a rounded anteroom. Our host was sitting on the floor naked. I noticed,
for the first time, that he was covered with tattoos, which made me just
slightly uneasy.

Anyway, I took off my sarong, and proceeded to lie flat on my back in
the “washing room”. My host took pailfuls of water, alternatingly hot
and cold and splashed them all over me, scrubbing me with a hard sponge
and occasionally delivering a hard slap to the back or arms, and a pull
of the fingers.

Suddenly, and unexpectedly, he announced, “Let me show you what Lawrence
liked”. He shifted his weight, and accidently sat on my hand.

When he didn’t move at all, I was confronted by the uncomfortable
realization that his move might not have been unintentional. And I had
the sudden and uncommon realization (for most men) that another mans
genitalia were resting directly in my hand.

This was a first. My instinct was to try to move my hand as fast as
possible, but I detected a slight stiffening of his body to prevent such
an occurrence. He smiled and looked down at me “don’t you trust me?” he
said, “Lawrence did”. And quite suddenly I was filled with a loathsome
feeling about his man, and this situation.

But unlike TV movies of the week, I didn’t scream, panic, fight or
freak. I just moved my hand a little and waited for the next thing.

Inveterate travelers have a kind of resignation to their fate. If they
don’t, they are no better than “tourists”. You figure, “I’ll either die
(which might be a relief), or I’ll have a helluva story to tell”. Which
in fact, I thought, I will.

Now Lawrence’s masseuse started to vigorously soap my body, but it
seemed he was paying less attention to areas that might actually be
exposed and dirty, given this is a Muslim country. Instead, he focused
only on areas that might only be exposed to one’s loved one only on
their wedding night, given this is a Muslim country.

And suddenly, as his hands really began to probe areas which one’s loved
one might not see on their wedding night, I had two sudden and drastic
realizations. The first was that his tattoo came suddenly into focus and
I realized it said “Tenderloin, San Francisco” on it, and the second was
a scene from the film “Lawrence Of Arabia”.

Wasn’t there a scene in the film where Peter O’Toole is stripped and
beaten to a pulp after refusing the homosexual advances of Jose Ferrer?
Wait a minute, wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia gay, after all? Didn’t he write
about his excitement, in discovering in the Arabian desert, that he was
homosexual? And didn’t he describe how he craved sadistic sexual
encounters…..IN BATHHOUSES!!!! UH OH.

WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THIS BEFORE? WHY WAS I HERE WITH LAWRENCE OF
ARABIA’S MASSEUSE, THEN? And suddenly, I stood up, and said “thank you,
that’s enough. It’s really been fun, and we’ll have to do it again
sometime, but….”

At which point, Mr. Tenderloin doused me with a pail of cold water. He
said with disgust, “you are not like Lawrence of Arabia at all, you are
a wimp professor. Go.” and ushered me out.

Later, after Yves bath (I think he had the same experience, but also
handled it rather well before it got out of hand), our masseuse told us
that he had worked in California. In Los Angeles, on Hollywood
Boulevard, and in San Francisco, but had “lost his license”. He said he
loved Los Angeles best because, “the people understand me”.

Later, I read this passage from “Seven Pillarsd Of Wisdom” by T.E.
Lawrence. It describes a struggle he had with a soldier in a deserted
building in Deraa, the very scene from which Peter O’Toole’s scene was
taken:

“He took off his slipper and hit me repeatedly with it in the face. He
leaned forward and fixed his teeth in my neck and bit till the blood
came. Then he kissed me. Afterwards he drew one of the men’s bayonets. I
thought he was going to kill me, and was sorry: but he only pulled up a
fold of flesh over my ribs, worked the point through, after considerable
trouble, and gave the blade a half turn…then they splashed cold water
on my face, wiped off some of the filth, and lifted me between them,
retching and sobbing for mercy, to where he lay: but HE REJECTED ME!, as
a thing too torn and bloody for his bed that night. In Deraa that night,
at the citadel, my integrity had been irrevocably lost….”

His dedication in his book reads, “I loved you, so I drew these tides of
men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars, To earn
your freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be
shining for me.”

Well, I’ll just have to learn to dream a little less wakefully, thank
you very much, Larry.

When we last saw Lawrence of Arabia’s masseuse, it was after midnight.
He was running after a small group of Dutch tourists who had just
alighted from a local bus. We wanted to warn them, but how could we. His
scam worked. And would continue to work long after we’d left town.

Returning to the Baron Hotel, we were asked to sign the guestbook, a
long standing tradition there. Under comments, I simply wrote “Loved
Lawrence, but his masseuse is all hands”

Heading out of Aleppo for the Euphrates, we had a choice between the bus
or train. I prefer train travel, but when a man came up on the platform,
we opted for the bus.

He smiled, I saw no tattoo.

“Would you like to ride in the Agathie Christie Pullman?”

- Rick