Journal of Italian Translation

Blossom S. Kirschenbaum /Fernanda Pivano
The next day Lino said:
“Why don’t we go to Damascus?”
“To Damascus?” I said. “Without a guide?”
“What do we need a guide for?” was the reply.
Thus we left by car on our own for Damascus. The road soon
began to stretch out through the desert and on both sides we saw
every so often Bedouins in little groups of four or five at a time.
We’d have liked to stop and speak with them, but without an interpreter
there was no use thinking further about it. I don’t recall
how long this happy journey lasted: we stopped only when the
police barred the way at the frontier.
The war hadn’t started yet, or maybe there were the first skirmishes,
but at this border post we were detained for six hours. No
one was capable of reading the western alphabet and the border
police kept on passing our documents from one to the other and
turning them between their hands a though finding them suspect.
It was a hopeless situation.
“You’ll see that we won’t make it back to Beirut this evening,”
I said. I thought:
“Who knows where I’ll end up sleeping.”
At last a soldier arrived who knew how to speak English. In a
few minutes they let us go through, all of a sudden smiling and
friendly; but when we reached Damascus it was late afternoon,
the museum was closed and we set out blindly wandering in search
of a hotel.
There’s no point describing what we found. Instead we found,
at the still open bazaar, a rosary of wooden beads and some silver
necklace that I’ve worn for years and still wear now; and we spent
the evening walking through the darkened unpaved streets, their
middle-eastern odors overlaid on the smell of cooked goat-meat,
the windows shut and a total absence of accommodations for tourists.
Next morning we were at the door of the museum before it
opened, and when they let us in we received our reward: there
were tens of Sumerian statues and figurines, those famous ones
seen on the dust-jackets of all the books about the Sumerians. The
identifying note-cards were perfect: someone who had never heard
anything about the history of those places departed knowing all.
We left again convinced that the one in Damascus, along with
the one in Beirut, was one of the better arranged museums in the
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