The “Arab Rambo”

At the risk of sounding like a Lonely Planet travel guidebook or an orientalist (these two dovetail pretty well, by the way), the old souq in Aleppo is a labyrinth of sights, smells, and sounds. Any traditional souq—and the souq in Aleppo is one of the biggest—is, depending on one’s personality, a delight or an assault on all five senses.

As one walks through the souq the wave after wave of colors displayed is mesmerizing. It seems without end and I usually end up meandering along in a trance (or is that my normal state?), much like strolling along a beach gazing at the surf rolling and crashing, rolling and crashing, rolling and crashing, rolling and crashing…infinitely. There is gold, gold, and more gold, yards of multihued fabric in every pattern, neon-colored sweat suits, sequined underwear, a rainbow of hejab wrapped on a rank of vacant-eyed mannequins, flashing lights racing around kids’ toy guns and trucks, and strings of blinking lights over the entrances of shops and on the dashboards and grilles of trucks. The colored lights on the trucks swirl around in hypnotizing circles, making it all the more difficult to remember to step out of the path of their turning wheels.

There is something captivating about symmetric displays. When I was on the high school dance team I realized that it didn’t matter how cheap a step was, when everyone danced in unison it looked amazing, and I feel the same way about the wares in the souq: the rows and rows of scarves, garden trowels, stacks of blocks of brown olive oil soap, packets of tissues, rolled rugs, squares of sweets, and giant barrels of chamomile, coffee, peanuts, and a fluffy white gel that upon asking I realized was Vaseline. The smells in the souq range from the pleasantly aromatic, like coffee (my favorite), cardamom, and cumin, to the less pleasant, such as cigarette smoke and people sweating too near each other.

Three other foreign students and I were wandering through this maze of shops, nibbling pistachio candies and listening to the honking horns, ringing mobiles, and little kids crying, when out of this cacophony a tall man with a shaved head in a blue sweatshirt called out to us, “Hello! Where are you from?” I turned my head away and attempted to scuttle off into the crowd but a wall of people and my naïve travel companions thwarted my escape. “From America!’ I heard my friend answer him. My heart sank and I tried to flee again but heard the man call after us, “I have a friend in America!” That’s great, I thought. Perhaps I know him? No, I don’t want to buy any of your jewelry. It’s beautiful, but I don’t have any money. No, really I don’t have any money. The man caught up to our group, “I have a friend in California, his name is Arnold Schwarzenegger.” Uh-huh. By this time we found ourselves delivered to the entrance of his—that’s right—silverwork jewelry store. I was aggravated at my peers’ gullibility and also with my lack of money (his jewelry really was beautiful). I was cynically slouching in the doorframe when he placed an aged photo album on the counter and proudly urged us to flip through it. It was filled with decades of snapshots from bodybuilding competitions.

In page after page of photographs, our silversmith friend was posed on the champion’s podium, wearing only the tiniest piece of narrow leather loincloth, with his colossal muscles bulging and gleaming with a slathering of bronzing crème. I recognized his titanic form in the Syrian championships, the Mediterranean championships, the Spanish championships, etc. (Incongruously, there was also a photo of his three-year-old daughter smoking a water pipe. It was taller than she was). I was astonished. My friend Charles exclaimed, “Holy shit man! I thought you were full of shit!” The Syrian man gleefully removed a long coral and silver necklace from his case and modeled it on his own neck. Once it was fastened, he playfully flexed his pecs, hurling the necklace ten inches into the air off his chest. We all jumped in shock and then burst out laughing. My skepticism vanished, and for the next two hours I sat smiling as we drank cups of tea and coffee and he and Charles excitedly discussed bodybuilding. He told us that starting ten months before his competitions he ate nothing but “breast of chicken,” or else a high-protein shake of water and puréed chicken breast. He told us he was known in the souq as the “Arab Rambo,” and if we ever came back through town he urged us to ask anyone where Rambo’s store is, and they would point us in the right direction.