Jessica is an architect and writer from London. Her non-fiction work has mostly been about parenting and disability, and includes her memoir, The Cracks That Let the Light In (2021).

Now Jessica is working on fiction and non-fiction set between Damascus, Doha and London based on her time living and working in those places.

Email: jess.moxham@gmail.com

An Evening of Light

February 2007

We lived in Mezzeh, a residential area on the road out towards Beirut. After I had been in Damascus for a few days, and still wide-eyed, we hailed a taxi to visit Lina, and her husband Hassan, who lived on the other side of the city in Abbassiyiin. My husband told the driver our destination and he replied in fast streams of Arabic, turning to smile at us. The taxi was an old yellow saloon car with a beaded cloth covering the dashboard, the seats reupholstered in a wipeable plastic and the back windscreen covered with a huge photo of the president, Bashar Al Assad. The seatbelts were for show. We joined the busy road into the city, passing the National Museum and the Citadel, but I was distracted by policemen standing at roundabouts blowing whistles, wearing black leather jackets in the cold February air. Pictures of Assad were everywhere, on buildings and buses, often surrounded by hearts or flags. Juice stalls had big mounds of oranges. I couldn’t understand what the driver and my husband were talking about, but I gathered I had been identified as his wife when they both glanced towards me. I would be in Damascus for nine months and I didn’t want to rely on my husband to translate.

We found Lina and Hassan’s block and went through the open doorway, up dark stairs, past doors with numerals that I didn’t recognise and a lady scrubbing the floor. Hassan answered the door, smiling and waving us in. ‘Jessica, we are so pleased to meet you,’ he said in accented English. 

We took off our shoes and went through to a room with thick curtains, sofas around the edge and family photos on the shelves. I was introduced to Lina who insisted we sat, and offered us the brewing coffee that permeated the room, and slices of cake with layers of sponge and cream dusted with chocolate. Lina’s English was perfect with a slight American accent. She wore a bright white hijab covering her hair, tucked into her shirt, and accepted a cigarette from Hassan when he offered them to us all. She was reserved, asking precise questions and sometimes leaving long pauses in conversation, until my husband told her a funny story about using the wrong word in a shop and she laughed a lot, high peals of amusement, before kindly tutting at him for making the mistake. 

Their small son, Nizar, toddled around the room, playing with toys, a delightful distraction from the slightly stilted conversation of two languages and new acquaintances. I was unsure whether the silences were awkward or a cultural difference. From holidays in Egypt, I could order water or ask for the loo in Arabic, but I wanted to be able to speak properly. Lina was already teaching the language to my husband and agreed to teach me too. We agreed I would have four lessons a week, every morning from Sunday to Wednesday. 

‘What do you want to learn?’ Lina asked. 

‘I want to be able to speak to taxi drivers and do shopping,’ I said. ‘To be less of a tourist.’

‘You will,’ Lina said, nodding confidently.

There are lots of kinds of Arabic: Fuhsa is the formal Arabic of newspapers and government ministers that my husband was learning, then there are the colloquial languages of people buying vegetables and chatting to their friends. I was going to learn Shami, the everyday Arabic that would allow me to talk to people in Syria. On the morning of my first lesson, my husband gave me a map with Lina and Hassan’s house marked, and a sheet of paper with key words written phonetically. He had included ‘Do you have a meter?’ because otherwise I’d have to try and negotiate the fare. 

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, knowing that I was worried. ‘Just don’t pay more than 200 lira.’

I found a taxi and was relieved to see its meter. I read out the first phrase on my sheet to say where I wanted to go: ‘Biddi ruuh aal Abassiyyin.’ The driver said something back to me and I smiled enthusiastically while reading the next line: ‘Ana baaref aarabi shway,’ (I only know a little Arabic). I sat back anxiously as the car joined the frenzy of the autostrade and the driver negotiated the roundabout and policemen by the Sheraton. I remembered the part of the route that ran alongside the Barada river, which was a small dribble even in winter. We turned left, then right, and I recognised a park we had passed before. ‘Liff al yasaar,’ I said to the driver, pointing to the right. He seemed confused and gesticulated while talking to me, but looked at my hand and turned. I asked him to stop, ‘if you please’. His protestations as I handed him 200 lira were half-hearted so I walked away through the open gate of Lina’s building.

Lina opened the door to me, asking about my journey and offering me tea. She wasn’t wearing her hijab and I saw her hair was dark brown like mine. We went into a side room with two armchairs around a low table, and Lina passed me another sheet of paper with words written phonetically. She started to teach me the basics. ‘Ismi Jessica. Ana britaniye.’ My name is Jessica. I am British. I laughed nervously when I made mistakes, but Lina was encouraging, speaking slowly so I could imitate her. With her feet tucked up beside her on the armchair, she was less formal than I had expected. I liked her. 

After the lesson I stood at the side of the road looking for the yellow of a taxi. The first few ignored me, but eventually one pulled over: ‘Biddi ruuh aal Mezzeh,’ I said and tracked our progress against my map, noticing all of the florist shops full of roses for Valentine’s Day, nodding nervously when the driver said things to me. When I spotted the buildings near our flat, I asked the driver to ‘Liff aal yameen’ and indicated to the left. Like last time, the driver said something quickly and seemed annoyed, but turned and stopped. I let myself into the quiet, still hallway of our flat, relieved to have made it back. 

‘Both drivers seemed really confused when I tried to give directions,’ I said to my husband later, pointing to the phrases. 

‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve written Left and Right the wrong way round!’

I did the journey four times a week in each direction. Every time, I accepted Lina’s offers of hospitality, and she brought me a cup of black tea with sugar since she never had milk. A maid was with Nizar during our lessons, but sometimes he came to the door and we’d welcome him in. He was one year old, chubby-cheeked and inquisitive, with huge brown eyes and a slightly unstable gait. Maybe because Lina had Nizar, or because she was my teacher, I’d assumed she was older, but in a lesson about numbers and ages I discovered she wasn’t. I treasured these nuggets of information like small prizes, because almost all my friends were in London and now at least I was making one new friend in Damascus.

‘Did you know Lina’s the same age as us?’ I said to my husband one night. ‘You know she doesn’t wear her hijab with me?’

Mount Qasioun overlooks Damascus and we went up its winding roads late one afternoon, eventually coming to a strip of cafes. We sat at a small table on a terrace, looking down on dense blocks of buildings separated by the arteries of main roads, laid out like a map. We could see the ordered geometry of the newer districts was different to the crowded jumble of the walled old town, and the green spots of occasional parks. It was beautiful, and the more we looked the more we saw in one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. As the sun set the muezzins of hundreds of mosques below began calling people to prayer, the green lights of their minarets glowing as darkness fell. 

‘Wow,’ my husband and I said to each other. 

We explored the old town, the ancient walled city of Damascus, entering through Souq Al Hamidiyye, the pedestrianised shopping street covered by a dark barrelled roof peppered with small holes rumoured to be from bullets. Dresses and thobes, inlaid boxes and shisha pipes spilt out of brightly lit shops onto the pavement. People were queuing for ice cream made with mastic, scooped into cones and rolled in pistachios. A boy threw clicking magnetic beans into the air, a man knelt on the floor beckoning us over to see his vegetable peelers displayed beside flowers made of carrot. Groups of women in white hijabs and long coats carried full shopping bags while men gesticulated for us to join them in their shops. You are welcome, ‘Tfaddali,’ they said. 

We walked towards the light at the end of the souq, a small square open to the sky, and followed a high wall round to a sign in imperfect English saying we could pay to enter the Umayyad Mosque, as long as we wore the special clothes: brown hooded cloaks that made us look like Ewoks. I felt ridiculous until I walked out into a vast colonnaded courtyard, the polished stone in the middle reflecting the minarets and intricate gold mosaics around the edges. The floors were cold against my bare feet. This was where John the Baptist’s head was buried, where Jesus, a prophet in Islam, will return before the Day of Judgement. You could see fragments of the original Roman temple in the walls, which was a cathedral before it became the fourth most holy place in Islam. History upon history.

When we left we walked east along the street ‘which is called straight’ in the Bible, and into the Christian quarter. There were more shops with pyramids of olive green Aleppo soap, and workshops with carpenters chiselling wood. We eventually reached another gate to the old town, Bab Sharqi, where the scales fell from Saul’s eyes and he had his Damascene conversion. My husband hailed a taxi on the busy road just beyond the city walls and haggled about the fare. 

‘Tehki aarabi?’ the taxi driver asked in amazement. 

I could understand some of what they said and when I heard ‘my wife’ I greeted the driver the way I had heard my husband do and then practiced with Lina. 

‘Yaatiik il aafiye,’ I said. May you have good health. 

My husband smiled encouragingly as the driver lavished praise on my three words of Arabic.

One day we got a smarter taxi to take us from our flat down to the autostrade and turn right rather than left, away from the city. We were driven 120km, over the mountains and through border control to Beirut where we stayed for the weekend. We drank Lebanese wine and visited French bakeries, walking past the military roadblocks set up during unrest the previous year. Six years later, after the war in Syria had made Damascus unsafe, we would visit Lina and Hassan in Beirut, flying from London rather than taking a taxi. Lina would give us instructions to find her flat, and as always she would beckon us in, ‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ (Welcome), offer us tea, lay out cake, ask us how our journey had been. 

But in 2007 in Damascus, we were all safe, and we hired a car. I was nervous about driving but also keen to not have to find taxis every day. I reminded myself to stay on the right and hold my nerve. Since three lane roads had at least four, sometimes five, lanes of traffic, it was impossible to mirror-signal-manoeuvre in the way I had been taught, so I gave up on the mirror and sometimes the signal. My husband had been pulled over by the police for doing an illegal u-turn so I tried to work out which road rules were essential and which were more flexible. I couldn’t decide whether the standard of driving was terrible or impressive, with fewer accidents than you’d expect. I learnt the word for donkey as it was shouted out of car windows.

Lina was impressed by my willingness to drive and I liked the idea of myself as brave. She praised god every time I made it to her house unscathed: ‘Alhamdullilah.’ When my husband was using the car, I was also more confident getting taxis now I could speak some Arabic: 

‘Sabah il kheir,’ I said as good morning. I want to go to Abassayin, I said, mimicking Lina. 

‘Afwan, ana baaref aarabi shway.’ Sorry, I know only a little Arabic, I said when they tried to engage me in conversation, delighted to have fooled them with my accent but knowing my Arabic still couldn’t keep up.

We had a book – The Monuments of Syria – which listed all of the ancient sites in the country. We set out to find one just outside the city one afternoon. Parking at the side of a road on the edge of a village, we started walking up the side of a dry gorge. My husband asked a passing shepherd, wearing a red and white kiffeyeh on his head, if he knew of Roman ruins nearby. Offering us a segment of his orange, he took us up to the remains of an ancient aqueduct hugging the side of the slope. The channel was wide enough to walk along and at the end Latin words had been carved into the mountain. We sat and looked across the canyon, the buzz of occasional motorbikes below. Small hardy plants clung to pink and terracotta rocks while a man in a white thobe walked along a plateau below, tending some small trees just above the banks of the Barada river that flowed into Damascus from here. The book told us there were legends associating this ancient landscape with the story of Cain and Abel and we looked for which historical site we might find next. 

I was learning how to pronounce the letters for which there was no equivalent in English. The sound written as 3 in English characters came from the back of the throat and I largely failed to say it accurately.

I found a butcher and guessed how much meat I needed for dinner. 

‘3atini nos kilo 3ejel mafruume,’ Give me half a kilo of minced meat, I said and he seemed to understand me. At home I made spaghetti bolognese and we watched Emirati TV channels. One day we bought a Blood Diamond DVD but there was a massive head in the middle of the screen and we could barely hear Leonardo di Caprio over the sniffing of the cameraman covertly filming in a cinema.

Lina told me about her wedding and I learnt ‘jozi,’ my husband. ‘3eres,’ wedding. We had both been married for just over a year, and we compared the Signing of the Book ceremony in Damascus to a chapel service in London. Lina taught me an Arabic saying: A marriage is like a watermelon. How it looks from the outside is completely different to what you find when you cut it open. We talked about our marriages, with a new child for her, a new country for me. I loved the way Lina talked about Hassan, how I saw them make each other laugh and ask what each other thought. Their marriage reminded me of my own. We agreed our husbands were good fruits.

After a trip to the UK in April, I brought flannel pyjamas back for Nizar as requested and Lina started teaching me the Arabic alphabet, matching letters to the sounds I knew. I began to write, slowly, right to left, and tentatively read signs and shopfronts. Damascus let me in a little more as I settled into the city and the way it talked. My husband and I would go to restaurants in the evenings and discuss Arabic, him explaining verb forms to me, me teaching him words for food.

‘Biddi ou’iye ba’dunes iza btriid,’ I said to the friendly man working in the vegetable shop near our house. I want 200g of parsley please. To make my own tabbouleh.

Later in the spring, Lina invited us to her sister’s wedding party, lending me a dress to wear and we went together to get our eyebrows threaded. At the party I watched rows of men dancing the dabke, stamping and smiling. We met some new friends for dinner at a restaurant in the shadow of the minarets of the Umayyad Mosque. We told them about the Roman aqueduct we had visited, as we ate hummus and baba ghanoush with flatbread and bright pink pickles. When I told them a little about Lina, and my lessons, and going to her sister’s wedding, they said their Arabic teacher was nothing like that.

It was Nizar’s second birthday and in one of my lessons Lina asked me if I wanted children. 

‘Na3m, ilhamdullilah’ I said. Yes, God willing. 

She told me to wait a while, saying having Nizar had been a shock. The sleeplessness, the short tempers of two exhausted people working out how to be parents. Very few of my friends had had babies, and I was struck by her love for Nizar alongside her confusion at how hard it had been. She was happy to be teaching again but also so, so tired. 

‘I’ll wait,’ I reassured her. 

She was teaching me possessive suffixes and we used them all: your son, my husband, my family, our friends. I learned not just Arabic words, but what it might be like if, when I had a child. I knew I wasn’t ready, but maybe soon.

By early summer, Damascus was hot and we were spending more time in our garden, where two tortoises emerged from a corner and bashed their shells against each other. My husband gave me beautiful chairs inlaid with mother of pearl for my birthday. People from the UK came to stay in our spare bedrooms and we showed Syria off to them, reaping the rewards of our early, more lonely, months exploring. We took my parents to the ruined Roman city of Palmyra, and a friend to an amphitheatre near the Jordanian border, others to Aleppo in the north. We stopped at the water wheels in Hama, and Crusader castles. We ate at smart restaurants and family-run cafes – tabbouleh and fattoush, chicken kebabs and chips. Always accompanied with boxes of tissues and bottles of water, and ‘Sahtein!’ from the waiters. Bon appetit!

‘Zurtee kiteer min il-amakin is-soorieh. Aktar minee!’ Lina joked, though it took me a while to laugh as I painstakingly translated each word. You visit, past tense, You have visited. A lot. Of. The places, the Syria, Syrian places. More. Than me!

In Damascus we met some local friends at a rooftop bar, chatting and dancing until late. We were invited for dinner at friends’ houses, and to a concert in a historic house in the old town. I had invitations in English and some conversations in Arabic and I was so happy to have been let into the city. 

By mid-September the new moon had arrived and Ramadan began. Lina invited us to Iftar, the meal that breaks the fast, at Hassan’s family house in the old town. We walked through Souq Midhat Basha as it was starting to get dark, stalls piled high with dried fruit but few people shopping. We found Beit Mardam Bey on an unremarkable street – greyish stone walls on both sides with small windows set high so you couldn’t see in. Electricity cables drooped between the buildings, and cats wandered. 

When I knocked on the heavy wooden door, Hassan, always smiling, welcomed us through the dark passageway into an open courtyard with a trickling fountain in the centre of a black and white stone floor, groups of comfortable chairs surrounded by fruit trees. An open room at the far end had a large mirror reflecting the glowing lights, delicate arched windows and doors all around. When these houses were built the dark basalt stone was quarried in Mezzeh, which was then outside the city.

A door on the right of the courtyard led to the kitchen, where Lina and her sister-in-law were putting freshly fried kibbeh onto platters which I carried through to a dining room, though on that night it was warm enough for us to eat in the courtyard. When the sun had set we were given juice and a date each. I helped Nizar drink from a cup, holding it up to his mouth to avoid drips, before he went to play with a small boat in the cool water of the fountain. Originally the water would have been funnelled through channels from the Barada river, but no longer. Everyone helped themselves to food and we sat around the fountain as it got darker. Candles were lit. Hassan showed us the main reception room of the house, where pale turquoise walls, ornate chandeliers and silk damask upholstery felt almost French. It was where dignitaries would have been received. There were paintings and black and white photos of his ancestors on the walls, and he told us the story of one who wrote the national anthem. I felt extraordinarily lucky to be there.

The smell of cigarette smoke mixed with jasmine. I greeted other guests with the scripts I now knew, ‘Masaa ilkheir,’ Good Evening. ‘Masaa ilnour,’ Evening of Light, they replied. 

‘Kiifek,’ How are you? Hassan’s sister asked me. 

‘Mnieh,’ I replied and she grinned because this was Shami Arabic, and I sounded exactly like Lina. 

It got later but not much cooler. The perfect temperature. Nizar called my husband ‘Mama,’ and we all laughed. We only had a few days left in Damascus and I was sad to be leaving, feeling nostalgic in advance. Hassan presented us with a beautiful backgammon set to take with us, a box made of intricately inlaid wood which folded open to reveal the pieces and board for the game. 

‘Bshoofak,’ I said as we left to thread our way back through the narrow streets. We’ll see you.

 ‘Tusbih ala khair,’ Lina said to us as we hugged goodbye. May you awake to goodness.