been sent. Asked him to work out what it says. I know a little German, but this baffles me. Something about love or something …’
He shook his head and muttered while he looked for a place to put the letter. He had an old-world charm but his speech, like all his movements, was slow and listless. He was blind in one eye and pretty blind in the other. Light annoyed him and around his forehead he wore a visor made from an old box of washing powder: ‘Omo for the brightest wash – Omo for the cleanest whites’.
After some minutes he closed the ledger, pulled down his visor, took the beaker of brandy and began to talk. The story of the Baron Hotel, like most Armenian stories, starts in Anatolia in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was then that Krikor’s grandmother left Kharput for her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Aleppo she stayed in a han, with the desert merchants and their animals. There was no hotel. So she bought a small premises near the souk. ‘Being a good Armenian, she named it the Ararat Hotel.’
Her son later rebuilt it, with an Armenian architect from Paris. And since then it has remained more or less unchanged. The parquet floor is still the same, the dark stained panels and the dark double staircase; the prints on the landing are still of the London – Baghdad Simplon Express (seven days: safety / rapidity / economy), and all the place lacks as a perfect period piece is a few aspidistras, spreading their languid fronds across the foyer.
During the First War the hotel was taken over by the Turks. ‘What champagne will you be serving at your Easter?’ asked Abdulahad Nouri Bey, a notoriously cruel member of the Deportations Committee.
‘Easter’, replied Armenak Mazloumian, ‘begins on the day of your departure.’
When they got news of their own deportation, the family managed to escape to the Bekaa valley, with the old matriarch, Krikor’s grandmother, claiming that the eighty children she brought with her were all her own kin. But the hotel came into its own after the war, with Syria under French control. The 1920s and 30s were heady days at the Baron. Aleppo stood at the exotic end of the Grand Tour and the Baron was the only place to stay. Krikor had a bi-plane and would take favoured guests flying over the desert to the ruins of St Symeon Stylites. Amy Johnson stayed at the Baron, so did Diana Cooper. Agatha Christie sat in one of its rooms, writing Murder on the Orient Express; the Household Cavalry stayed and ran a mock hunt up and down the stairs. A framed copy of T.E. Lawrence’s unpaid bill stands in the reading room. But now few people came to Syria, still fewer to the Baron.
The fat old labrador squeezed through the door. ‘Oh. Pasha,’ muttered the Baron fondly.
‘Pasha?’ I said. ‘Like the Turkish governors?’
But he laughed. ‘No, not Pasha. Portia – Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.’
The Baron asked me to lunch the next day. ‘Just something simple’ was five courses and didn’t end until it was almost dark. Our table of seven was the only one laid in the hotel’s large panelled dining room; the Kurdish waiter was attentive to a fault, serving everyone with great scoops of green dal and running round in a frenzy of high spirits. He had just heard from Radio Monte Carlo that the Kurds had shot down three of Saddam’s combat helicopters.
At the head of the table Krikor sat flanked by three fat Armenian women on a week’s holiday from Yerevan. They looked very Soviet in their long black leather coats and dyed hair, and said nothing throughout lunch. I felt a little low to think that Armenia, the object of my journey might in fact be more Soviet than Armenian. But Mrs Mazloumian, English by birth, had a different view of Soviet Armenia. ‘Sometimes I think I like it more than my husband does.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, they’re so gay. I had thought it would be grey and drab, you know, Russian. But when I got there, it was livelier than Aleppo.’
‘You surprise me.’
‘And Edjmiatsin’s so beautiful. I defy anyone to go there and not come out a better Christian.’
Opposite me sat an American journalist.
‘We don’t like journalists very much,’ challenged Mrs Mazloumian. ‘They’ve come here before and written some frightful nonsense.’
The American muttered some apology, but he was a little nonplussed. He was Jewish and Jews in Syria – beyond the walls of the Baron – are not very welcome.
‘Where are you based?’ I asked.
‘Bonn.’
At the end of the table Krikor’s eyes lit up from amidst his silent menagerie. ‘Bonn! So you speak German. The letter! Where’s that letter?’
The Kurdish waiter went off, a little too eagerly, to get it from the telex room.
‘Well, it’s a strange German,’ said the journalist. ‘From Slovenia, I think. A girl … she’s fallen in love with a Syrian policeman. “I need that man!” She cannot live another moment unless she finds that policeman.’
‘Poor girl!’ said Sally Mazloumian, who had also lost her heart in Aleppo. She had come out in 1947 as a nurse from England. Krikor was enchanted by her; they used to meet beneath an almond tree on the hotel balcony and within a short time were married. She had lived at the hotel ever since.
Yet her introduction to Aleppo and its Armenians had come much earlier. When she was a girl in England between the wars, Sally used to watch with particular dread the approach of a grey, willowy woman up her family’s Yorkshire drive. This woman would come selling strange things from abroad. They used to call her Pilgrim-Frances but Sally saw her as somehow ghostly and cold. Even the woven, rainbow-coloured runners that Pilgrim-Frances brought with her seemed pallid when Sally thought of who had brought them. Pilgrim-Frances had a sister – known universally as Miss Roberts. They had both come from a small village in mid-Wales. They were devout, serious girls and, when they received a ten thousand pound legacy, decided to dedicate their lives to the Armenian orphans of Syria.
Pilgrim-Frances stayed in Britain, knocking on the doors of country houses, while Miss Roberts went to Aleppo to receive the money that her sister raised. She lived with the orphans, sleeping on a damp mattress and, even on the coldest days of winter, wearing only cotton dresses. One day Miss Roberts heard from Pilgrim-Frances that in England King George V and Queen Mary were to celebrate their jubilee. At once Miss Roberts set her orphans to work on embroidering a special tablecloth. She designed it herself, with a set of matching napkins.
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