36. Marley
THIRTY-SIX
MARLEY
I spent most of the flight listening to Everything is Illuminated , a book Bennett had recommended. It’s bizarre, funny, and best of all, requires focus, which gives me a break from thinking about the person who recommended it. I managed to sleep for the last forty-five minutes of the flight, and by the time we were boarding our domestic flight to Hatay, I was ready to jump into work. Once we’re settled for the night in Antakya, we’ll meet up with some colleagues I haven’t seen in a while. It’s also my first time going back to Syria in a couple of years and I’m anxious to get there.
Simon says we’ll be having lunch with a few other journalists at a Syrian restaurant in the city. One of his contacts has also set up an interview with a couple who recently fled the country. Our editor wants us to focus on the people impacted by the continuing conflict rather than the scenery. I was glad that was the direction they wanted to take because I prefer it to photographing bullet holes and crumbled walls for a week straight.
Searching out people to be story subjects does pose a greater risk than focusing on the conflict as a whole. It puts a target on our backs and requires a great deal more caution on our part, from how we go about finding people and then talking to them. Luckily we’re with well-seasoned guides and interpreters and, on this particular trip, two armed guards. I’m less thrilled about the guards as they’ll make it harder to move around under the radar.
Simon and I meet up with Naomi Kostenko, a Dutch-American photojournalist, and journalist Connor Moffit. He claims to have no nationality, preferring to call himself a citizen of the world, although his accent and passport give his Irish citizenship away. I’ve worked alongside Naomi before and even attended her wedding to a guide we’d met four years ago in Ukraine. We’d both been doing a story on the wildlife boom in Chernobyl, and she and our guide Petro had hit it off immediately. On the way back to our hotel, she’d leaned in and told me she was going to marry Petro one day. I’d asked if she’d taken her mask off one too many times in the radiation zone. Lo and behold, they became virtually inseparable for the rest of our trip, and then eight months later I received an invitation to their wedding in Apeldoorn, Holland. Petro is a stay-at-home dad now to their twins, and I’m expecting to see lots of picture updates throughout this trip.
The last member of our little gang is Nizam, a Syrian-Turkish interpreter we’ve worked alongside before. The restaurant we are eating at is actually owned by his cousin and his wife, which explains the warm welcome he gets when he joins us. Until he arrived we’d all just been enjoying some Turkish coffee, but now that he’s here Simon asks him to order for the table. We are going to feast like it’s our last meal, which in reality it could be. While no one acknowledges that fact, it’s something we all know well. We’ve all lost people on these types of trips, and we’ve learned not to take times like this for granted.
The mezze course arrives first with creamy garlicky hummus, baba ghanoush, and a bowl of mixed olives. I live for this kind of food, or really any kind of food I can dip carbs into. When fresh salads hit the table, Simon grabs the fattoush so fast we barely get a look at the presentation before he spoons a huge heap onto his plate. Shish taouk and lamb kefta follow along with a dish Nizam explains is fatteh.
“You know,” I say as I clean my plate with a piece of pita, “after the first time I was over here, I got home and went right to the grocery store. I bought all the spices used in Syrian food.” I start listing them with my fingers. “Sumac, cumin, Aleppo pepper, allspice, paprika—”
“You didn’t have cumin or paprika in your pantry?” Simon asks, sounding somewhat disgusted.
“I had salt and pepper, and I think cinnamon.” I shrug. “I don’t cook. But it wasn’t like I could just pop around the corner for some Syrian food. I figured I’d have to learn.” I pop the piece of pita into my mouth and savor the rich, complex flavors dancing along my tongue.
“And what was the first thing you made?”
I dab my mouth with my napkin and glance around sheepishly. “So I bought some hummus.”
Nizam gasps and shakes his head. “No, Marley, no. That is not the way.”
I laugh. “Trust me, I know, but baby steps. Anyway, I bought this”—I glance at Nizam, looking remorseful—“terrible, awful, an affront to hummus, store-bought garbage, and sprinkled some Aleppo pepper on it and then ate it with—prepare yourself, Nizam—store-bought pita.” Nizam dramatically grabs at his chest and feigns death as the rest of the table laughs. “ Everything else remains sealed.” I have to wonder if Bennett would make good use of the spices.
Simon thinks for a minute, and I see it click as his eyes widen. “Marley, I was on that first trip with you, and that was eight years ago.”
“What can I say? I am single-handedly keeping the restaurants in my town afloat.”
“You’re not there for most of the year.”
“And I make up for it when I am.” I smile around a plump olive.
“Oh, leave her alone,” Naomi says. “I don’t cook at all either. If I didn’t have Petro, I wouldn’t even eat in my flat.”
Soon our conversation turns from food to our plan for the next week. Simon and Connor have both been in contact with members of the rest of our envoy. Nizam expresses some concern with the armed security, and Connor tries to assure him that they won’t be obvious. They’ll look like members of the humanitarian team. I haven’t expressed my true feelings to anyone—in fact, I’ve barely acknowledged them myself—but I share Nizam’s concerns. There’s a fine line we need to tiptoe around, and this will make it harder to traverse.
The sun is dipping swiftly, and the chill of late November begins to seep into my bones. I’m half-listening to Connor and Simon exchange stories from the summit in London and half lost in thought. The area is so alive. People are out shopping and sharing meals together. Children are running around as parents stop to chat as they go about their routines. But my attention is snagged by a medium-sized white dog sniffing around a market stall. She’s thin, and without really knowing anything about dogs, I would wager she’s recently had puppies. She begins nosing under the fabric that is wrapped around the outside of the stall, and just as she gets her full muzzle under, a shopkeeper from across the way runs out waving a towel and yelling. The dog’s head pops out, and she moves to the opposite side of the tent.
I think for a split second of what Bennett would do right now. He’d likely follow her, instantly become her favorite thing, and take her and her brood home to his little rescue. I lift my camera and take a couple of pictures of the scene.
“What’s his name?” Naomi nudges me.
“Sorry?” I say, my attention snapping back to reality.
“You had this dreamy look on your face, and in my experience that is only brought on by a ma—” She stops mid-word. “Another person. Sorry, I assumed there was a man.”
I stare at her for a minute. “There’s no one. I was just thinking about how nice it is here. I wish the whole region was like this.”
“Mmm,” she agrees, but her expression tells me she knows I’m lying. “Hopefully one day it will be. My father was a journalist, did I ever tell you that?”
“No,” I say, suddenly interested in where this conversation is going.
“Well, both my parents technically, but my mom only did local stories in Amsterdam. My father on the other hand worked for one of the big American agencies. He was covering a trial at The Hague, and that’s how he met my mom. Anyway, he had been to Syria early in his career, and said it was one of the most magical places he’d ever been.”
“I can believe that.” Even after years of war, Syria held a certain something. It was like no matter how many pillars were lost, the country still maintained its pride in some way.
“He begs me not to go every time I do. After those journalists were kidnapped, he just kept telling me he would have never let me or my sister go after a story there.”
“Oh… that’s heavy.”
“When I asked Petro if he wanted me to stay, he said of course he did but he thought it was unfair to do that. ‘It is who you are, moya lyubov.’ My love,” she translates for me.
“Oh, trust me, I knew that term real quick being around you two during your first week together.” Petro had said it to her in passing one day, thinking she had no idea what he was saying. She’d blushed so hard that it gave her away. Petro then blushed and apologized for being so forward. I didn’t see them for three days after that. And that’s when I realize something. “How did you know with Petro? You two barely knew each other, and yet it seemed like you had always been together.”
“Honestly, I don’t really know. He just… felt like home, I guess. You know when you travel somewhere new and you just know deep down that this is your new favorite place? I’d never experienced that with a person before, until Petro.” I must look skeptical because she laughs. “Listen, I don’t believe in fate or anything. When I got home I did my best to not think about him. But at the end of the day, thinking about him was one thing that made me smile, and in our line of work, I kind of feel like we should grab onto those things. Luckily, Petro was totally fine with me grabbing onto him.”
Naomi and Simon were the only two people I knew in our field who had—or once had, in Simon’s case—a stable, long-term relationship. Breakups and divorces are incredibly common among our lot. People are gone for long periods of time, and that alone puts strain on a relationship. Add to that how we form strong bonds with the people we’re working with, and partners can get jealous. I’ve known colleagues who have gotten divorced because their spouses refused to believe they could be faithful when they were sharing hotels with the same people for weeks on end. And then in the end, it comes out that the spouse who was home was the one having an affair. Not to say people weren’t having affairs on this side too. Toss all of that in with the stress of doing this job, and it’s easy to see why doing it unattached is my preferred method.
“You’ll get it one day,” she says, smiling at me in the way happy people do.
“Whatever you say.” I laugh and roll my eyes.
“Well, friends, shall we head back to the hotel?” Simon says, standing and dropping a wad of lira onto the table.
I look out into the market one more time to see if the dog is still around before following the other three back to the hotel, thinking for the hundredth time since I arrived that I should text Bennett and knowing I won’t.