The well and the tree
It’s difficult for me to mentally reconcile the existence of a modern bureaucracy in Syria with the arbitrariness of streets and addresses here. I don’t have an apartment number or building number, and my housing contract doesn’t even record a street name (although there is one). Instead, it records what an official sign across from my building proclaims, which is that this is the place where there used to be a well with a berry tree beside it. When I took my contract to the mokhtar, a very local-level government official, to obtain one of the supporting documents to apply for Syrian residency, he appeared completely befuddled by my locale, on which the CASA administrative employee proudly tried out some of his English slang by pronouncing it a “freak address.” “Do you live near the bakery?” the mokhtar asked me, trying to learn some usable information to record on the backside of the page in his record book upon which he was scrawling various pieces of vital information about me. No, I don’t live near the bakery, I said, but there’s a yoghurt and cheese store a few blocks away. He squinted at me dubiously and recorded this as an auxiliary to my freak address.
So I thought that this all must reach great heights of inefficiency, and I’m sure it does, but I also learned recently how very efficient it can be to be one of the only blond girls around in a neighborhood of families who have lived in Damascus for generations. Last week a friend who had never been to my apartment before forgot to bring her phone before setting out for a visit, and was hence unable to call me as instructed when she reached the graveyards that I had told her were a landmark. She decided instead to ask passersby where the foreign girl lived, although she first walked to a part of the neighborhood I rarely pass by and was only able to learn the location of a foreign girl who was described as very fat, which she insisted could not have been me. When she walked back a few blocks and had come within the proper radius of my house, she was able to learn the exact location of my apartment within two tries, both building and floor. So imagine my surprise when the very late friend I imagined must have gotten stuck in some snarl of a traffic jam between here and the Old City turned up on my doorstep exactly.
