A Disappearance in Damascus (15 page)

In the next ten days I made a lot of contacts—including “the Emperor,” a swarthy Greek-Lebanese ex–guerilla fighter who ran MusicHall, a famous cabaret that was a watering hole and listening post for European ambassadors, politicians of all stripes, shady tycoons and even shadier James Bond characters. Most of what happened in the hive of conspiracy that was Beirut was never known, except here, where
red velvet curtains parted on a young Arab man in a white suit who sang a perfect, plaintive Edith Piaf.

I was running out of time, exacerbated by a hassle of my own creation. In Beirut I misplaced my passport—a serious mistake that required making an intelligence report at Beirut's gigantic General Security complex. Escorted to a windowless holding pen in the basement prison, told to sit tight next to downcast men in handcuffs, I found myself with the very refugees I had come here to find. Iraqis in Lebanon, I learned while I waited for the intelligence officer to complete my report (in longhand, there were no computers), were being arrested and forced to choose between indefinite imprisonment and deportation to Iraq. They chose prison.

I was lucky: the taxi driver who found my passport had brought it to the Canadian embassy, which I discovered when I arrived there with the Lebanese intelligence report in hand. My freedom of movement was returned to me, and the next morning I made the four-hour drive back to Damascus. My flight home would be leaving from Jordan late that night, which meant another four-hour taxi ride from Damascus to Amman to bookend the day. But I wanted to spend the few hours I had left with Ahlam. Between the summer and the winter I'd spent three months talking to refugees. I had everything I needed to write. I was saying goodbye.

“Here,” I said while the two of us had tea at her apartment. I handed her an envelope—money from a fundraising event in Vancouver where I had given a talk and mentioned the work she was doing. A donor wanted it to go to supporting the school, and had arranged for me to pick it up in Lebanon, since Syrian banks were under sanctions. “You should hide
it somewhere,” I said, standing up to look beneath the battered burgundy sofa for a hiding place. “Otherwise someone will take it from you.” All sorts of people came through her apartment. Most were desperate, a few no doubt prostitutes or thieves, doing whatever to get by. She didn't judge. But I worried.

“Maybe you can rent a proper space for your classrooms,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. She clapped her hands together. “Yes!” Now she could move the whole thing downstairs.

I waited until she had proven to me that she'd found a place to hide it, on the underside of a padded armchair where she could affix the envelope beneath the wires and no one would think to look.

Ahlam seemed happy, and that made me happy. The money would help cover things here for the next few months. But I understood, with some shame, that it served me too: it lessened my guilt about walking away.

By late afternoon, as darkness fell, her apartment was even busier, more frenetic than I remembered. It was like a railway station crammed with travellers who keep arriving but never leave. There were at least twenty people hanging around, talking and smoking in the dusky light, faces lit like Rembrandt paintings, and quite a few I hadn't seen before, when I thought I knew all the habitués. I didn't see Ahlam's husband, but then again he was often gone, and half invisible when he did turn up, lost in depression.

Abdullah and Roqayah were there, watching all the people demanding their mother's attention. “The monkey lives in the jungle,” I said to Roqayah in Arabic, as greeting or secret handshake. She was an exceptionally pretty child,
with green eyes that startled, and had already begun wearing a headscarf because men bothered her in the streets. It made her seem older than her happy-go-lucky brother, more watchful.

The apartment had the air of a party that had sped up when it was supposed to be winding down. One of the young men I recognized was there, along with two or three other guys his age. Ahlam sent them out to find a driver willing to take me to Amman.

But something seemed different, though I couldn't say exactly what. Maybe just the fact that I had been away and then returned, the slight alteration of perception. It always happened when I returned home as well, and saw everything differently—amazed at the easy certainties, the unquestioned faith in the way things were, the values that struck me as absurd. In a few days the feeling usually passed and I would revert to normal, behaving just the same way.

As night fell, blanketing the neighbourhood in darkness, Ahlam accompanied me downstairs to the taxi that would take me to Jordan and a flight home. For a brief moment we were alone. She buried her face in my shoulder and for the first time I noticed how exhausted she seemed, as if some force had been leached from her character.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. I almost didn't hear her muffled words as she helped me put my bags into the back of the car, then almost wished I hadn't.

“I need you so much,” she said, “in these dark times.”

I felt embarrassed and inadequate. We had become friends but I was leaving. The fieldwork for my article was complete; my own work was done. We would keep in touch, exchange occasional emails, but the chances were good, I knew from
experience, that I would never see her again.

“You have to go,” she said, as the driver stood next to the open door, waiting. She looked stoic, resigned. I got into the car.

Driving through the blackness of that winter night I could see my own face reflected in the window of the car and the moon bobbing up over the desert like an unanswered question.

IF AHLAM HAD NOT
stopped answering my phone calls and emails that might have been the end of it. You do a story, get to know people, even to care about them, then you leave. It's always this way. You think it won't be but it is.

I finished my story for
Harper's
on the refugee crisis. As usual, the writing process was painful and took longer than expected. Ahlam made an appearance, though I changed her name. It is something I usually do when writing about vulnerable people who might not foresee the consequences of talking to international media, a media that can easily reach those who wish to do them harm. In the words of her father, which I quoted in the piece: “No one knows what the future holds.”

The article was well received. It went on to win an award. I gave a couple of television interviews in New York and was invited to moderate a panel at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. I was busy, new opportunities were
presenting themselves. I should have been satisfied. It should have been enough.

Usually when a piece is published the fever breaks and I find myself wanting to move on to another subject, the past neatly wrapped up in words. This time that did not happen. My customary life held no interest. “Even when you
are
home,” my boyfriend pointed out, in one of our increasingly frequent arguments, “you aren't really here.” As he spoke he proved his point, because my thoughts were elsewhere: with Ahlam, who kept her silence. I had a feeling that something was not right.

In these dark times
. She had seemed distracted, distraught. I had been too absorbed by my impending departure to work out what it meant.

Weeks passed without a word. The muted buzz of overseas calls ricocheting through satellites and back to Earth, unanswered. Emails floating in the ether. Did anyone open them?

After the
Harper's
piece ran, an editor at
The New Republic
had asked me to pitch them ideas. I suggested something on the psychological effects of the war on civilians. PTSD was widespread: that story had been told about army vets, but what about those who didn't have armoured vehicles or battle training? What about those at whom their guns were aimed? The editor was tentatively interested and asked for a formal proposal.

In my makeshift office, behind the wall of books, I contemplated aloud what to do. I could go back to Damascus, make sure Ahlam was okay, and get going on a new story, somehow make it all work financially.

“You should go,” my boyfriend said from the other side of the wall. It was what he always said, but this time his tone
had an edge. “If you don't, you'll be miserable,” he added. “That means I'll be miserable too.”

Would I have listened if he had argued otherwise?

In April I finished teaching a class. I bought a plane ticket and was gone.

I arrived in Damascus to the warm embrace of spring. The scent of jasmine hung thickly in the better neighbourhoods, the jacaranda trees about to bloom. I could feel the energy returning to my blood, a quickening of the senses, like awakening from a long hibernation. Even the scent of pollution, car exhaust, dust was exhilarating.

I had tried from Jordan to reach Ahlam and tell her I was coming but received no reply. No matter. I told myself she was simply too busy, caught up in her numerous projects. It made more sense simply to go there. After all, where else could she be? It wasn't as if she could pick up and leave. That was me—I was the person who could do that.

The manager at the Kuwaiti Hotel greeted me warmly and without surprise, as if he had been expecting me. My former room was occupied—I could have it back in a couple of days. In the meantime, for the same twenty dollars a night, I was given a room that was ridiculously large: eleven single beds arranged around the perimeter. The walls were pink, the ceiling mauve; it might have been meant for a family of lunatics. Noise rattled the windowpane—children's cries, a police whistle, the drumbeat of passing music, the rumble of motorcycle carts with bad engines. I couldn't make up my mind which bed I would sleep in, and in the end scattered my belongings everywhere so as not to feel lonely.

The first thing I did was call Ahlam. The phone rang for a long time but there was no answer. I waited, then called again, envisioning the room in which it must be ringing, the bare white walls, scuffed linoleum, the worn velvet sofa. No answer. She was never separated from her phone. I searched through my notebooks for the number of anyone who might know where she was. Mona. She would know how to reach Ahlam.

Mona answered on the first ring. I told her I was trying to reach Ahlam. “Have you seen her?”

Mona sounded guarded. She hadn't spoken to Ahlam lately and had no idea where she was.

I hung up, more worried now. I tried Ahlam's number again. If she didn't answer I would simply walk the five or six blocks to her apartment and pound on the door. The phone rang for a long time. Just as I was about to hang up she answered. Her voice sounded reedy and small, like a child's. She said she had been sleeping, though it was early in the evening. A half-hour later she was at the door of my hotel room.

The same person, though slightly diminished. She had lost weight, or the winter had bleached her skin. Behind her, in the hallway, stood a tall young scarecrow with a blue bandana wrapped hip-hop style around his head. Thinking he had followed her, or was dangerous, I ushered Ahlam inside and closed the door in his face.

“He's with me,” she said, laughing, her composure restored. His name was Ali and he was her assistant.

“In that case,” I said, revising my opinion and letting him in, “perhaps he can assist me in opening the bottle of wine I bought at the Duty Free.” I had imagined celebrating.

There was no corkscrew in the kitchen, nor, Ahlam said, likely to be one anywhere else in Little Baghdad, so Ali operated on the cork with a kitchen knife, playing music on his phone and singing along, embracing the illicit nature of his task. As he went about it, bits of cork flying, Ahlam sat on one of the beds and explained why my emails and phone calls had gone unanswered.

First, her husband was gone. He had returned to Baghdad.

In my mind, a picture of her husband. Slightly stooped in the way of tall thin men, white hair thick as thatch, a pleasingly gaunt face. A kind man, was my impression, not unintelligent but not cunning in ways now mandatory. She told me he had been taunted by other men—even by the Syrian intelligence when they came to check on what she was up to. “They told him, ‘You let your wife support you.' ”

She lit a cigarette—at the Duty Free, where I had bought them for her, a carton of Marlboros sold for six US dollars—and I went to find an ashtray in the kitchen, where Ali was making progress. When I returned she continued.

Her husband had become involved in a business scheme that promised attractive returns. He had borrowed the money and of course the investment foundered, a scam all along. He wasn't able to pay the money back. There had been threats. Texts appearing on his phone, which she had found. “They said they would harm our children if he did not pay.” When she confronted him he did not want to talk about it, telling her, “I will take care of this.” But there was no possibility of taking care of it, of her, of anything.

He wanted Ahlam to return with him to Iraq. It was obvious she could not—she was already a target, had been seriously threatened.

She told the kids that their father had gone to find work in Aleppo. She didn't want to worry them or, because they were too young to keep secrets, have them spread the news. If word got out, she would be compromised, unable to continue her projects without tongues wagging. If her husband's decision to leave was a relief in some ways, she was also left with one less layer of protection.

Immediately she had been summoned by Captain Abu Yusuf. She found him at his office in the local intelligence headquarters, as usual behind his desk—pale, small moustache, ever the harried bureaucrat. But a bureaucrat with a gun.

“We hear your husband has left,” he said, looking up from his paperwork.

So he knew. She hadn't told anyone, but he knew.

And then, as if he were operating a benevolence society: “We can help you with things.”

“What things?” she asked.

“With anything,” he said. “Fake passports, human smuggling. All we want from you are names.”

“Whose names?”

“Anyone.”

“What for?”

“It's time for you to do for Syria what you did for the Americans in Iraq.”

She never tried to hide the fact that she had worked for the Americans. Others did. I had met them, on the run from threats to themselves and their families, branded as traitors to their country. She did not accept this verdict on her conduct. She believed she was helping her own people the only way she could: by working with those who held power to help those who had none. There was no government
anymore—there was still no real government—so it was the Americans or nothing. “I was dealing with
reality
.” Reality demanded nuanced thinking, a kind of moral reasoning from a world ever more black and white. Now, seated in front of her behind his desk, another kind of reality, a man who only understood giving and taking orders, and saw his chance to make something of her, and of himself.

Fake passports, human smuggling—he was dangling such incentives because he presumed she was the same sort of person he was. It was as comical as the room in which we now sat, as incongruous. And dangerous. He told her he wanted her to be his eyes and ears, to have her spy on other refugees and foreign reporters and report back to him.

She told him the truth: that she was grateful to Syria for its generosity. That if anyone threatened to do the country harm she would tell him.

“And would you?” I asked.

“Of course. If someone wants to plant a bomb or attack Syria? Even if he did not order me, I would tell him. Remember, this is the only country that gave us shelter. No other country would help us.”

But she would not be his informant. That implied submission, an abandonment of moral agency.

She left his office feeling constricted, a tightness in the chest. Months earlier, when she first realized that Abu Yusuf had been sending men to follow her, he had phoned her to say, “My man saw you with someone from the BBC.”

“Yes,” she replied, “and there was someone from the Ministry of Information with us,” knowing he wouldn't check. “He came to translate. All I did was take the journalist to interview Iraqi families. No Syrians, only Iraqis.
There are two million of us in your country and we need to find a solution for them. Anyway, I am no longer fixing for journalists.”

But she had not been reporting to the Ministry of Information; and she had been working for two researchers from Human Rights Watch, an organization banned from entering Syria.

“You can't be serious,” I said. “Ahlam! If he finds out you were working for them, it will be huge trouble.”

“The researchers only stayed forty-eight hours,” she said, waving aside my concerns. “Someone came to ask about them at their hotel, so they were afraid of being arrested.”

Now Abu Yusuf was calling her every two or three weeks, asking, “What do you have for me?”

So she stopped working for journalists. Stopped responding to emails. She became more careful on the phone, not taking calls from overseas numbers. “That's why I didn't answer you. I didn't want to make trouble.” The pains in her heart returned. Today was the first time she had left her bed in three days.

“What about Mona? Is she helping you with the classes?” I asked. I recalled the last time I had seen Mona, in Tarek's cellar apartment in the wall of the Old City, passed out drunk, her long hair fanned around her face. It was Tarek who had introduced Mona to Ahlam.

Mona, she said, had begun telling people that she, Mona, was running the classes for refugee girls. “I didn't mind,” Ahlam said. “And she helped me find volunteers to teach English and French.” But then, without warning, Mona stopped calling, stopped coming around, cut her off. Ahlam was hurt. She could run the classes on her own, but she had
considered Mona her friend, her backup. She went to see Tarek to ask him what was going on.

“She's just a fool,” Tarek told her. “She's jealous of you.”

“Why?” asked Ahlam, astounded. She often missed such cues. The woman waving her hands, over tea, to show off gold.

“Because you are who you are.”

Mona had volunteered at the UNHCR in media relations in order to make connections with journalists. “She wanted to be in the picture,” he said. “She wanted to be famous. But the only fixer the journalists wanted to work with is you.”

Ali brought the bottle from the kitchen, looking pleased with himself. I poured wine into a tea glass, bits of cork floating on the surface.

“You want some?” I asked Ahlam. “You might need a glass.” She shook her head, laughed, and I drank alone. Ali, who spoke no English, was sitting on one of the beds playing music on his phone: Céline Dion, who had many Iraqi fans.

I had come on impulse, without a clear purpose besides assuring myself that Ahlam had not disappeared. Now I thought I should see if I could turn the time to good use. I decided to start work on background for the PTSD story. This time I didn't need Ahlam's help so need not put her at any further risk. I had plenty of contacts already in hand. I would continue my research on my own and meanwhile keep an eye on her.

On the first afternoon Ahlam took me downstairs from her apartment to show me the classrooms she had rented: a trio of simple rooms on the main floor of her building. Some volunteers had painted the walls with murals of bright
flowers to make them less gloomy. In one of the classrooms, a young woman was giving a lesson in mathematics, writing equations on a whiteboard.