Cleopatra’s Wedding Present!

Our book today is Robert Tewdwr Moss’s 1997 cult classic, Cleopatra’s Wedding Present: Travels through Syria, a strange and often lovely volume that’s also inescapably sad, since right after completing a final draft of the book, the author was left bound and gagged by robbers in his London apartment and suffocated before he could be found – a gruesome end to a life that had been lived, in the heyday of London’s 1980s newspaper world, with show-stopping elegance and heartwarming kindness. The book was to be something of a breakout move, maybe the establishing of a serious literary career far from the drudgery of Fleet Street deadlines. The idea that it would greet the world as a posthumous work would have struck its author as both horrifying and waspishly funny.

With his flamboyant dress and his always-surprised air, Robert Moss was the Perpetual Alien type of travel-writer, constantly fascinated and consequently constantly observant. He was a sensitive outsider even in his native land, and the transplantation to Syria’s ancient capital brought out a new vigor in his prose:

Damascus was far from a paradise today, even for the crabby old Aloui mountain goats who stood on its peaks. Most of it was not even beautiful anymore, although it had a festering splendour which turned up unexpectedly here and there – in an exquisite tenth-century fountain choked with garbage, an ancient funerary college in magpie stone with domes and minarets, its walls plastered with peeling bills, the wonderful khans whose stately domes had now collapsed in upon themselves and which now looked like eggshells gaping to the skies, but which were nevertheless bustling with porters, hawkers and merchants.

It also heightened his reflexive sense of yearning. Despite a catalog of experiences that would make a New York City go-go boy blush, Moss could be an oddly innocent creature in matters of sexuality. He sought stimulation everywhere and was forever shying away from it, and this gave him an inner vocabulary of lust and longing that he employed to full effect when writing about the twisty old streets of Damascus (where, in the 1980s, a “European” could scarcely pause to mop his brow without some local offering to sell him a boy at a terrific hourly rate):

I walked down to the gardens where the cafes were and sat on a seat facing the sea to recover my composure. A tall youth in tight jeans and a leather jacket slouched past. He hesitated by a bench at the end of the path on which a lone figure sat, and then moved to a bench directly opposite. After a while he stood up, crossed the path and sat down next to the figure. Cigarettes were lit, a conversation started. A few minutes later the two men got up and strolled towards my seat in the shadows. The second youth was wearing smart navy blue slacks and a dark cravat. As they approached, he was talking to the leather-clad youth in a low voice, their heads close together, and a splash of lamplight fell across his handsome face. He looked like a young Spanish aristocrat.

Amazingly, Moss finds a kind of genuine attachment to one young man (rather ominously named Jihad) in the course of his time in Syria, and a chunk of the book is devoted to their adventures – usually singularly mundane adventures, but no reader will ever say that in blame, so heartfelt and evocative is Moss’s prose throughout this, his only book. And there’s a great deal here on the workings of Syrian society under the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad (father of the desperate country’s current leader); regardless of race or religion, people always found it exceedingly easy to like Robert Moss and to confide in him, so his book ends up being far more interesting and revealing than much longer accounts of life in the country prepared by far more seasoned reporters.

Always, throughout these pages, Moss is as open to new experiences as he always was back in London, and it can lead to some memorable little moments:

The next morning, like all Syrian mornings, dawned with a peerless blue sky which indicated that the day would probably become very hot. Nonetheless I had noticed that occasionally, even in June, the sky here could be overcast with great dust clouds. Tariq, I discovered, welcomed such days, as they were cooler. ‘Put your hands on your face and tell me what you feel,’ he said to me once. I followed his instructions and found that my face was covered in fine grit. ‘The dust in the air protects us from the sun,’ he explained.

The University of Wisconsin Press hardcover of Cleopatra’s Wedding Present I recently found has an inset of the black-and-white photos the author took during his travels, and the book answers a need, since my old paperback copy fell apart years ago. I’ve kept re-reading it, melancholy to think of all the books Moss might have written, glad to have this one at least.