Syria was a puzzle then, as it is a puzzle now. And the puzzle has remained pretty much the same. One morning, during my visit, there was a mass demonstration against the Sadat peace initiative. Hundreds of thousands of people assembled, marched, chanted. The story of the demonstration was front page new in The New York Times. But I was there, and everyone with whom I spoke, people on the street and government officials alike, agreed that the regime could as easily have turned out just as large and just as "enthusiastic" a demonstration on behalf of the Sadat initiative - or, for that matter, on behalf of the moon's being made of green cheese. There is a kind of joke - black humor, to be sure - on which the society is structured, and everyone is in on it. The problem is that in a country of khaki and gray, in a city of prisons and police, the one absolute rule is that you are forbidden to laugh at the joke. As one intellectual told me, "We have newspapers that are not newspapers, political parties than are not political parties, and a middle class that is not a middle class. Nothing here is what it is supposed to be or what it is called. I don't care, frankly, whether we become a petit bourgeois society, or a communist society, or whatever it is we may become. I just want us to be what we say we are."

The joke, in short, is not funny, so it's easy not to laugh. In the morning, you demonstrate against Sadat. In the afternoon, you get lost in the intricate soukhs, the vast ands tangled markets that make the city seem so exotic. And in the evening, you sit in a fairly decent restaurant and talk with a visiting American Jew, and it could be New York or Paris. The only concessions to the rules are that you whisper, and you do not laugh.

Israel will not, nor is there any reason it should, concede the principal Syrian demand, which is that it commit to full withdrawal from the Golan before security arrangements are discussed. In that context, Syria insists on a return to the June 4 border rather than to the 1923 border. But Israelis, for their part, have long since come to believe that a return to June 4 is out of the question, since it would give Syria too much control over and access to Israel's national water reservoir, Lake Tiberias.

The border issue, even though only a few kilometers are at issue - and in some places, a few yards - is enormously complicated. What is at issue is not what is at stake. What is at stake is water. The pesky problem is that the 1923 border does not solve the water problem; absent detailed security arrangements, the 1923 border is no better from Israel's standpoint than the June 4 border. That is why Israel insists on resolving the security questions first.

But Syria's claims are not frivolous. It is likely that Syrian civilians will return to their pre-1967 homes in the Jordan Valley, and if they do, their need for water will have to be resolved somehow. And that is why both issues, security and the extent of Israel's withdrawal, must be resolved simultaneously.

That can be accomplished if the parties want it to be. It can be accomplished away from the cameras and microphones, which is exactly what the professionals from both sides are doing just now. Whether in the end President Assad wants peace with Israel remains, however, a bit of a mystery. The assumption that he does is bolstered by his readiness, as reflected in the draft agreement prepared by the Americans and leaked by Ha'aretz, to enter into full diplomatic and even neighborly relations with Israel. From his standpoint, these are plainly concessions meant to persuade the Israeli public to vote "yes" in the referendum on peace with Syria. The assumption that he does not is bolstered by the more recent statements out of Damascus, laying down impossible conditions and demanding that those conditions be met. Negotiation by ultimatum is never productive.

Still, there's no reason to despair, not yet. The professionals on both sides know what they are doing, know the stakes and know the constraints both geographic and political. And Assad has already gone farther than anyone might have supposed he would. Damascus remains both sinister and cryptic, but we should pay as much attention to the hints from the back room as we do to what is said into the microphones or written in the newspapers.