Die Backerei (eBook)

II. Aleppo - 1938

You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies!

1 Corinthians 15:36

The Symoon had arrived early to usher in the Christian celebration of Easter in the French Mandate of Aleppo. The heat of the bone dry desert wind had turned the brilliant sapphire blue of the morning sky gently hugging the earth into a pallid gray gauze that hung so high above the globe one could imagine the stars sitting just beyond.

Under this canopy thin and sere, three opposing sides watched as Ondatra zibethicus performed a pirouette in a small pond fed by fresh spring water on the rocky hilltop, one of eight surrounding the old city of Aleppo. The object of their interest would draw its last breath an instant later impaled on the end of a long, sharpened stick wielded by one of the two ragged boys watching with anticipation from the bank.

Because they were factory boys who worked in the sweatshops of Aleppo where shimmering bolts of silk cloth were made, they would not have known this animal as Ondatra zibethicus nor as its French derivation le rat musqué inasmuch as they were the expendable loose threads of the French Mandate of Aleppo to whom knowledge of a broader, better world was denied. They simply knew the once frolicking muskrat as dinner.

The two were a scrawny six and nine-year-old living lives of grey amidst richly textured cloth in blues and yellows, reds and creams, often adorned with gold and silver colored threads that made them shimmer in the light. The boys were the deadenders of the Silk Road which extended back to a distant time when cities such as Palmyra and Aleppo were critical stopping points on the route between China, India and the Mediterranean ports from which the textiles of Syria, prized by traders and travelers, were shipped to Imperial Rome.

The second of the three opposing sides was a group of three boys. Two were dressed in the knickers, crisp white shirts and bandanas of schoolboys from the French enclave in Aleppo. The third wore the same bandana except the white shirt was worn as a tunic over a chalwar, the loose fitting, ankle length trousers worn by Arabs and was the son of an officer in the Bedouin cavalry that fought alongside the French in the Levant. They were large and seemingly well-fed boys who by contrast to their pencil thin opponents diminished them still further.

They hid in a fold of the hill behind two ancient olive trees and used the fruit the trees had jettisoned to torment the two factory boys, who swatted away the olives thrown at them like mosquitos on a humid day all the while looking for the source of their torment. The schoolboys finally sounded the charge and swarmed the annoyed and bewildered factory boys throwing the nine-year-old into the pond and snatching the stick that still held the muskrat away from the younger boy.

An instant later the third of the three opposing sides engaged. Not amused by the cruel game the schoolboys were playing, a tall and lanky 13-year-old with a mane of disheveled, coal black hair collected a handful of the smooth, cream colored stones that covered his path to the ancient citadel of Aleppo and took the measure of the one he fingered in his right hand.

He had been carrying the daily delivery of bread arranged neatly in the bulging French army duffel bag to the German archeologists working at the citadel of Aleppo when he had come upon the Battle of le rat musqué and had placed his valuable cargo carefully against the large bolder that partially concealed his presence. Satisfied that the stone in hand would fly straight and true, he flung it at the largest of the three boys who screeched at the top of his lungs as the small stone found its mark hitting him squarely on the bridge of the nose and knocking him flat on his back.

The crying, screaming agony of the French schoolboy disoriented his two companions. It was barely a minute before the young Bedouin whose broad, square face made a perfect target, took a second stone dead-on cutting his lip and chipping one of his front teeth. Their unseen antagonist was playing for keeps.

The lanky 13-year-old rounded the bolder moving rapidly toward the vanquished schoolboys, arm raised with a third missile at the ready, as two of the schoolboys struggled to pick up the still blubbering first boy hit, who was licking blood from his upper lip, to make their retreat. The two factory boys, who had retrieved the muskrat in the confusion stood mesmerized by the ignominious defeat of their tormentors at the hands of a boy they did not know and who instead of a stone now threw a rounded loaf of bread at them.

The two factory boys brought three pursed fingers to their foreheads in a hasty Salaam and disappeared down the far side of the hill. The victorious 13-year-old, henceforth to be a marked man in the French Mandate of Aleppo, continued onward to the citadel with his daily delivery of bread to the German archeologists there.

*****

The striking woman with Bedouin tattoos left conversation, comment, awe, admiration and revulsion in her wake among the denizens of the old city of Aleppo as she made her way first through the elegant stone arcade of the Khan al-Shouneh souq, the ancient, covered marketplace near the citadel that had been in continuous operation here since 1542. Khan al-Shouneh offered the traveler everything from dried fruit to exquisite Alepine art pieces. Shortly thereafter, she would pass through the Souq Arslan Dada, the bustling center of leather and textile trading in the old city at one of the main entrances to the walled old city from the north.

But as rich as these covered markets were with treasure, she barely gave any of it a second glance while the people milling around her could not help but linger on the exotic girl who strode past. It struck the basket maker, who routinely cheated his customers but was otherwise a good man and a good father to his children, that she was quite young and shy.

To the purveyor of dried fruit, nuts and all manner of spice, who was the best purveyor of such things in Aleppo but who was not a good man in any respect (but this is a story for another time), she was well beyond her prime. He saw a woman who was tall, shapely and aloof with a head of dark hair that was nearly shaved but for a thin carpet of bristle that gave her the other-worldly aura that bewitched the purveyor of dried fruit with an amalgam of fear and lust.

She wore the riding clothes of an aristocrat who was not of this place – a white shirt, khaki jodhpurs and riding boots that were caked in mud. Tucked into her belt was a sheath that concealed all but the ornate handle of a large dagger, a curved Bedouin Khanjar, capped by an ivory hilt in the shape of a lion’s head.

More notable still were the tattoos – what appeared to be a cross in the customary Bedouin position on the chin as well as the Sufi symbol of a heart held aloft by wings on the back of her right hand. And at the hairline on the nape of her neck, there was what appeared to be a jar afloat on waves, a symbol whose meaning was known only to its bearer.

The striking woman with Bedouin tattoos was preceded by the major domo of one of the finest households in Alepp, the shortened form of Aleppo used by its natives, where she and her husband would be guests during their stay. The major domo, a nervous little man, moved at a fast clip changing directions in the Souq’s like a frightened mouse in a maze while holding a conversation with himself the entire time.

She was followed at a respectful distance by Pushpa, her husband’s manservant, in his customary royal blue fez, who reflexively placed his pince-nez on his nose to survey the treasures around them only to have it fall off a step later. This fast-moving procession eventually entered the winding alleys of the Christian quarter Al-Jdayde, where aristocratic mansions soared into the sky engulfing the procession in dark, stone canyons lit by a bright blue ribbon of sky.

The search today would not be for treasure but for provisions to fill the larder after the arduous journey in the truck convoy from İskenderun, Aleppo’s main port on the Mediterranean. Her husband was a Bedouin who had exchanged the heat and grit of the Siwa Oasis and Great Sand Sea of Egypt to build an empire on another sea, and his shipping company now connected the Levant to all of the major ports of Europe. He had come to Alepp to personally supervise the transport of artifacts to Berlin from the newly excavated Temple of the Storm God at the ancient citadel that dominated the quarter of Aleppo known as the old city.

Her guide led their procession through twists and turns leading to other twists and turns and others still. At last, there was a high-pitched squeak as if someone had stepped on a mouse, but it was the triumphant major domo instead who had just set his sights on their destination – a bakery renowned for the best Kebbeh Halab in the region.

The major domo’s mouth watered at the thought of the Kebbeh Halab, a baked or fried ball of bulgar wheat filled with lamb, goat or...