The Odd Couple
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista By Ray Alan The Odd Couple Aleppo emerges from the horizon like an oasis city surrounded by stone walls the color of moonlight. It dominates the northern Syrian plain as if still...
...they are urging the Turks to, at least, express regret...
...Most Christians were Armenians, despite the 1916 massacre that killed about 1.5 million of them...
...It dominates the northern Syrian plain as if still wary of Turks, Kurds, Bedouins, Mesopotamians, Westerners, and others propagating merchandise, religions and politics...
...About 400,000 Armenians now live in France and, as this is written, many of them are walking through Paris in memory of the victims of the 1916 massacre...
...French] people persist in speaking French, though many will speak English if shouted at...
...Everybody wants to blow up Downing Street...
...France, from time to time, is invaded by Germany...
...But Turkey's rulers still seem afraid to admit what is obvious: that a clear majority of Cypriots are historically and culturally Greek...
...Turkey is mature and strong enough to make this gesture...
...There is no wit in this pathetic hatemongering...
...In the last three decades of the 20th century, thousands of English and Scots settled in France and Spain...
...The three of them were thought to have emigrated to Australia...
...It is a printed diatribe of three foolscap pages by a British "adult" who lives in a pleasant area in the Midi...
...But others have never seriously studied English grammar, let alone the subjunctive innards of a foreign language...
...Asked if they'd like to return to Britain to live, they reply "No...
...Etcetera...
...We spoke to them and discovered that the man was a Turk...
...And the lady...
...Most Arab women had to cover themselves from eyes to ankles...
...After 1920 France, although a secular state, gave surviving Chris tians protection...
...they had a little hillside house with a garden at roof level...
...The Irishman was angry with British publishers for rejecting his autobiography...
...Too banal...
...The Eurotunnel makes it easier for the French government to flee to London...
...Back in the Mediterranean world, years passed before I met anyone connected with Aleppo...
...Many have revived the French or Spanish they learned at school, or attend small language classes, and have made local friends...
...She kept the place clean and made me superb lunches, but could not resist scowling at the "devils" in the consulate when she saw them from the balcony...
...I had an apartment near the Turkish consulate...
...At last, a few weeks ago, my wife and I were in a restaurant in a small Catalan port when...
...would be nice if it weren't inhabited by the French...
...As in any foreign country, watch your change at all times...
...One said: 'No...
...In fact, the first "English" pioneers before us were a retired American Army officer and his French wife, a pleasant couple who owned a huge house and a pinewood...
...He seems to have a complex—perhaps because he hasn't learned enough French to converse with local people...
...The second were a Communist Irishman who had worked for British officialdom and his Anglo-Irish wife...
...it happened...
...When I asked a contact in Cairo about this, he made inquiries and told me the sergeant had been a member of Britain's massive unemployed population before 1939...
...Nothing is more boring than a French novel except, perhaps, an evening with a French family...
...Soon afterward, depressed, he returned to Ireland to die...
...He insults his French hosts fanatically, but is careful not to sign what he writes...
...An Armenian lady came four times a week, with her 15-year-old daughter as chaperone...
...A few days ago, I received an example of the malice that "going abroad" can foster in people who think of it mainly in terms of a good climate and cheap booze...
...So I said I'd blow up Downing Street in the last chapter...
...Silently, I wished them well...
...He told me: "Two publishers wanted a stronger ending...
...He'd had a good War record, with three promotions, but that couldn't help him find a peacetime job and he now had a wife and child...
...Trouble, when it came, was generated by Greek religious fanatics and Turkish nationalists...
...Bloody Foreigners When my wife and I bought our little patch of Southern France, we were told we were the third English couple in the village...
...A few samples: "France...
...It is what Shelley called "words like a cloud of winged snakes...
...One evening I learned that after Hitler's War an English sergeant had sold an unused British Army camp, northwest of Aleppo, to two Syrians...
...When I spent several months there, Aleppo was inhabited mainly by Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims...
...We celebrated our meeting with champagne...
...When I first went to Cyprus, most of the island's Greeks and Turks were on good terms...
...Even Turks and Greeks have been getting together since last year's earthquakes, sharing ideas on reconstruction and future precautions...
...If an Armenian and a Turk can love each other, there is hope for humanity...
...The couple at the next table, fortyish, were speaking what sounded like Turkish, the woman slowly...
...And some curse themselves for leaving "Blighty" and its pubs and football—within minutes of cursing the Labor government and violent yobs...
...Jealous of Brits who obviously enjoy life in France and Spain, he is eager to sabotage Anglo-French friendship...
...Many Arabs disapproved of this, because Armenian women wore Europeanstyle dresses and no veil...
...They took me seriously...
...Gossip popped up in the intervals...
...Armenian—from Aleppo...
...but 30 years later, Syria was independent and many Christians and the last few Jews there were thinking of leaving...
...There was little public entertainment in Aleppo in those days, but after dinner Armenian women, children and young men often gathered in a little square or side street, singing and sometimes dancing...
Vol. 83 • July 2000 • No. 3
