Sand continued to drift in through the open doors. The overhead fan swirled the grit into our clothes, hair, eyes, teeth. The women wore their hijabs tight across their faces, their eyes cast down, stealing glances at James and me. It was hard to tell what they thought of us, the only white people at the crossing. Certainly they were suspicious—mostly of me, I sensed, even though my head was also covered.

My boyfriend and I had arrived at the Syrian border after three months of backpacking in Turkey. In order to get to know some of the local people, we’d been hitchhiking everywhere. We were working menial jobs to help pay our way, and staying with locals whenever we could.

At the border crossing, we waited in a concrete room, empty except for two long benches set against one wall. At the other end of the room was a dirty window, where a border guard sat and processed passports. I could see our US passports in his stack, still waiting to be stamped. We had visas, but it hadn’t made any apparent difference. James and I were in our third hour of waiting, with no end in sight.

The room was sweltering, there was no water or food, and I was becoming desperate. “You’ve got to try again,” I told James. “Ask him why we’re being held. When we can go. Anything.”

“One more hour,” James said.

What was I to do but wait? I was a woman, and a foreigner. Best not to cause any trouble. I had just escaped a maze of sexual harassment in Turkey. Being a woman there had convinced me to always wear a headscarf.

Another hour passed. We were so close, at the border of Syria. I wanted to go to Palmyra—see the ruins, sleep on the hill of the Valley of Tombs, sing in the amphitheater, explore the Temple of Bel, walk down the kilometer of the Colonnade. An old man in a long white beard in Antakya had told us about Palmyra—called Tadmor in the Bible. “You must go,” he said.

Since this was 1986, we could go. Even then, though, the older Assad—Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president, Bashar al-Assad—hated Americans. US backing of Israel, which refused to return the Syrian land seized during the 1967 Six-Day War, angered the regime. Meanwhile, the country’s economy was being crushed by massive military expenditures that ate up more than a third of the budget. The Syrian people were confused and frightened. The old man in Turkey had urged us to tell everyone we were Canadians—“for your protection.”

Back in the concrete box, two old men who’d been waiting for a couple of hours were called to the window. They exchanged a few words with the official, their passports were stamped with a loud thwack, and they left the room laughing—perhaps at us.

By now I was livid. I stormed up to the window. “We were here before them! What’s this all about? You have to let us cross. This is absurd.”

I knew the man didn’t understand my words, but he understood my rage. He waved me and James into his office, smiling.

We stood there quietly for a moment. The official kept looking at us, his eyes darting back and forth. Finally, he said, “American.” It was more a statement than a question. I was about to say something when he pointed to James and asked, “You. Work?”

James mimed building a house—sawing, carrying lumber, hammering on the wall.

“Ah,” he said. “Ohh-kay.” Still looking at James, he asked, “Where you go?”

James said, “Dama.”

“Where go?” he asked again.

James rummaged in his backpack and pulled out our Lonely Planet guide. He opened it to a page about Damascus hotels and pointed to the one we had picked out earlier. The cheapest. “Clift Hotel,” James said.

The man grew agitated. He pointed to me now. “You! Work?”

I paused. It was a simple enough question, but the very reason I had come here was to avoid answering it. I was a director, but no longer wanted to be one. I was traveling to forget myself and all the angst of New York City’s theater scene: the madness of actors and musicians, set and costume designers, the frenzy of rehearsals, opening nights, reviews.

I pointed to the wall. There was a faded poster of an ancient amphitheater, maybe Palmyra’s, right there over his desk. “Teatro.” While traveling in foreign countries, I’d found that sometimes an English word dusted with some kind of accent worked.

This time it didn’t. The man just stared at me. I pointed again. “Director.” This time I rolled my r’s. He continued to stare. I tried again, still pointing to the wall. “Artist.” The man never changed his expression. Blank.

I fumbled around for yet another word, my frustration growing. Finally, I shouted out, “Actor!”

The man’s eyes grew wild. His mouth opened, then shut. He grabbed our passports—which had, at long last, made it to the top of the pile—and shoved them under all the others, at the very bottom. And then, with a flick of his wrist, he ushered us out.

We went back into the concrete room.

Another hour passed. By now, James and I were the only people waiting in the room. It was getting late, and we were exhausted. We had stopped talking, stopped trying to figure it out.

Ignoring us, the official began packing up. We watched him put on his cap, pick up the newspaper he’d been reading all day, and start toward the door. At that very moment, a man in a suit walked into the room. He was impeccably dressed—his white shirt perfectly ironed, his black shoes polished—and he carried a Syrian passport.

I ran up to him. “Do you speak English?” I asked.

He did. We’d been waiting for nearly six hours, I told him. Everyone had made it across the border into Syria except us. And we were being held without reason, and there were our passports under a pile on this official’s desk, and he’s leaving, and please help us.

The man, whose name we learned later was Hassan, marched over to the official and shouted two short sentences that sent him scurrying back into his office, where he promptly stamped all our passports. He practically ran back to Hassan with them, then hurriedly left the building.

Hassan handed us our passports. “I am so very sorry,” he said. “He is stupid. Come with me. I will take you to my home. You will bathe and eat and sleep, and then in the morning you can go where you want, and be free.”

I slid into the backseat of Hassan’s big white car that somehow, in the middle of the desert, seemed as untouched by dust as he was. James sat in the front. As we drove off, Hassan said, “Now, tell me what happened.”

James told him how we, the Americans, had been detained without explanation, while everyone else had been sent on their way. When he got to the part where the official took us aside for questioning, Hassan stopped him. “What were the questions?”

“Where we were from, and where we were going in Syria, you know—just those,” James said. “And our work.”

“And what were your answers?”

“We said we were going to Damascus to stay at the Clift Hotel,” I said. “James said he built houses, and I said I was a director in theater. But he didn’t understand, so I said I was an artist. And he still didn’t understand, so I said actor—and that’s when he went crazy.”

Hassan laughed. He laughed so hard, he sneezed, and the car swerved. “Oh, so funny. So very funny.”

I leaned back in my seat. It felt good to be wrapped in that laughter—on a soft seat, behind tinted glass, in an air-conditioned car, moving swiftly away from the border.

Finally, Hassan wound down. He sighed. “I am so very sorry. You see, it is all a terrible misunderstanding. ‘Actor’ means ‘whore’ in Arabic—it’s pronounced ‘aahrh.’ And the Clift Hotel in Damascus is where men can find whores. It is funny, no?”

We spent the night. Hassan and his wife treated us to hot baths, clean clothes, a five-course meal, and the best sleep we’d had in weeks. When we left, we all embraced. They told us they loved Americans.

• • •

The next day we were in Aleppo. A man we met on the bus invited us to stay with his family in their fifth-floor walk-up. The couple had five young children, and their flat just two bedrooms, but they insisted we take one of them. The kids taught us Arabic. The mother taught me to cook Syrian dishes like yabra’ and fatteh. The father took us through the city’s covered souk, where we saw rising above us, next to the marketplace, the slender minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo, erected at the end of the eleventh century.

Today, the market lies in ruins. The mosque’s minaret was pulverized five years ago during fighting between the Syrian Army and rebel forces.

In Damascus, a young Syrian man named Mufla befriended us. He instructed us on how to stay out of trouble in the war-torn city, where young soldiers no older than sixteen stood on the street corners, machine guns slung over their shoulders. “Whisper. Don’t point,” Mufla said. “And don’t talk to them. They can be crazy.”

Earlier this month, the Syrian Army and the Islamic State were reportedly still fighting to control an area in the south of Damascus.

At the end of our trip, we hitched a ride on the back of a beat-up delivery truck to Palmyra, the city the white-bearded old man had told us to visit. After hours bouncing through the windswept desert, there it was in the distance—majestic columns of sandstone against a clear blue sky. The Great Colonnade. And the Temple of Bel, dating back to the first century, its walls covered with carved hieroglyphs of birds and people. And on a hill overlooking the site was the Valley of the Tombs, where in a tower crypt a poisoned stray dog died in my arms.

All of these—colonnade, temple, tower—were smashed when the Islamic State took the city.

Now in its seventh year, the civil war drags on, having left an estimated 500,000 dead and millions displaced. Looking back on my visit there long ago, I think about whether the places and things I saw are now lost forever. And I think about the people who welcomed me so warmly, and wonder when they will be able to open their doors again to foreigners, without fear.

Dian Parker Dian Parker is a freelance writer who has published in a number of magazines and literary journals. She is currently working on a collection of narrative nonfiction. Email: dianparker9@gmail.com