A Disappearance in Damascus (22 page)

“
DOUMA
,”
I SAID, LEANING
over the seat to make sure the driver could hear me. He was very old—he looked about ninety—and tore through narrow side streets at a terrifying speed. It was ironic that I was going to the neighbourhood where we believed Ahlam was being held. Douma Prison, named for the suburb of Damascus where it was located, was less than two hundred metres from the UNHCR office. I had made an appointment by phone to tell the refugee agency what I had gleaned about Ahlam's case from my meetings with Osama, since news of this import had to be delivered in person.

“Douma,” I said to the driver, shouting this time, showing him the address written in Arabic.

“Insha'Allah
!
”
he shouted back. Lord willing. It was a term I really didn't like applied to something as simple as driving across town, but he seemed almost deaf and, in enormously thick spectacles, possibly blind. He shot through another cross street without bothering to look.

The Lord willed. He dropped me off at the UNHCR office building, where I signed in with a security guard before being escorted upstairs to the office of an information officer who had been my press liaison when I'd visited the refugee registration centre last summer. An Englishwoman with the wilted complexion of someone who didn't take well to the heat, she had seemed capable but overworked. Today, as I sat down excitedly across from her in her small drab office, she looked merely impatient. I had been calling them every day for almost a month now; she probably thought today would be more of the same. But I was elated—I had news for her. News for which I was certain she would be grateful.

I gave her a quick précis, telling her that Ahlam was likely nearby in Douma Prison, describing the charges that had been outlined to me.

“Who told you this?” She sounded annoyed.

I explained in vague terms that I had been talking to people.

“What people?” she said.

I said I'd rather not say. I could not bring Hamid into this. Or his Syrian sometime-real-estate-contact Osama.

“Why are they talking to you?” Her voice was cold. “If they have information they should come to us.”

This was not how I had expected the meeting to go. She seemed less interested in what I had to say than in the fact that I had news to share. “But they don't do that, do they?” I said. “They don't come to you.” I maintained a level tone, not wanting to be rude by spelling it out for her. The UNHCR was engaged in a balancing act that left them trusted by no side. The refugees, who had to reveal why they had fled in order to receive a registration certificate, and feared
answering that infernal question about their sect, often told me they suspected the UNHCR of spying for the Syrians; the Syrian authorities, meanwhile, thought the UNHCR were agents of American foreign policy. It was a thankless task for the refugee agency. But my implication had not been lost on the official because she stood up from her desk, no longer merely impatient but furious.

“You should get out of here,” she said heatedly, indicating the door. “Out of Damascus. Out of Syria. You are making things worse. Leave Ahlam to us.”

“That's done a lot of good so far,” I said, my tone rising to meet hers.

We ended the meeting in a shouting match.

My good mood of the morning was over. Whatever sense of purpose or empowerment the information had given me was gone.

In the taxi back to my apartment my thoughts veered between anger and self-approbation.
Of course
I was making things worse for the UNHCR—that was the whole point. I wanted them to feel pressure to do something. And no doubt, because of me, they had heard from the Red Cross and the journalists I had informed. No doubt they were tired of my constant badgering. Well, too bad. But—here my anger crumbled into depression—what if the official was right? What if, as she implied, I was only making things worse
for Ahlam
? Then what the hell was I doing here?

I had arranged to meet Rana that day, and she came to my apartment. I was relieved to see her, someone who actually wanted to talk to me. It was just past noon but I kept the shutters closed all the time now so the dusty rooms were in
permanent twilight. She sat across from me at the kitchen table, hands folded. She was elegantly dressed as always, and composed. She had opted for lemon yellow today, from skirt to blouse to headscarf.

I buried my face in my hands. Nothing I did worked. Everything I touched turned bad. I could no longer be sure anything I did was in Ahlam's interest. I wondered if I was starting to lose my grip. For the first time since Ahlam disappeared I wept.

When I had recovered, I said, “I used to feel like a normal person in Syria. Like I could go about my life. Now I feel trapped in a police state.” I met Rana's gaze. “How can you live like this?”

My tone must have sounded accusatory—as if this were in some way her fault. I felt ashamed. Here I was, behaving as badly as the Englishwoman, who herself must be on the verge of burnout, overwhelmed by the impossible tasks she confronted.

But Rana was silent, not reacting but thinking. After a long moment she spoke.

“This is the price people pay when they don't want civil war,” she said. “Look what happened in Lebanon.” Fifteen years of bitter sectarian war. “Look at Iraq.” Iraq was the object lesson, the fate everyone feared. “How is that better?” Her voice was low and measured. “Because we hate war,” she said softly, “we accept everything.”

Her words punctured my self-righteousness. Sometimes you have to live with the unacceptable because the alternative is so much worse. I had daily seen the strengths of Syria—its tolerance of difference, its warmth, the sympathy for the
survivors of war. On every street, down every alleyway, I met kind and intelligent and generous people—Rana was one of them. And so long as they did not involve themselves in politics, they were free to go about their lives as they chose. On a political level, compared to other countries in the region, Syria's government was no different and in many ways better: women like Rana were free to work and drive and go to university, have boyfriends or reject them, and wear a lemon yellow headscarf or a miniskirt if they preferred. A tradition of tolerance was a point of pride among Syrians. There were, of course, tensions between city-dwellers and the farm folk who were moving to the cities because of the drought—it had been another record bad year for rain—but these were class-based, not sectarian, pressures. They could be Kurdish, Alawite, Sunni, Shia, Druze, Armenian, Ismaili, Turkmen, Palestinian, Christian; no one asked and no one cared.

And I had seen for myself what had become of Iraqis. Not only was their nation destroyed, but so were the bonds of trust between people. They longed for the days of Saddam—“Not for him,” they told me, “for the security”—so they could go back to the lives they had loved, walk down the streets of their neighbourhoods, send their children to school with the assurance they would see them at day's end.

At that moment, though, I also understood that I did not have to accept everything. I could leave. And it was true that the words of the Englishwoman had stung. What if she was right, and by staying here I was actually endangering Ahlam? I should go. I had to go. I began packing my bags, throwing things into them untidily.

“Please,” I said, handing Rana the keys to the apartment. She often talked about her wish to live alone, which she
couldn't afford on her schoolteacher's salary, the equivalent of two hundred US dollars a month. “I'm going to go away for a few days. Not long. I'm just not sure I am doing any good here…Maybe I can do more from outside. If you want to stay at the apartment, you can. The rent is paid.”

An hour later I left by taxi for Beirut.

PART TWO

THE GUARDS AT DOUMA
Prison were not allowed to search the women. Since the rape of two teenaged runaways, for which the guard responsible spent six months in solitary, the only person with keys to the women's cell was the chief warden, who looked on as the girl who would be Ahlam's cellmate was ordered to pat her down.

The black steel door slammed shut behind them. The key turned in the lock. How strange, in a cell measuring not more than four by four metres, for Ahlam to find herself with a green-eyed brown-haired beauty with a pierced lip and a stud in her tongue.

The girl, whose name was Leila, watched with interest as Ahlam took in the tiny bathroom to the left of the door, the metal shelf along the back wall piled with thin blankets, the noisy fan near the ceiling behind which the faintest strains of daylight could be seen. Under the stark glare of fluorescents, Ahlam surveyed the army of cockroaches scuttling fearlessly
across the walls. “Don't bother yourself about them,” Leila said nonchalantly. “We have a peace agreement.”

Ahlam immediately signed on to the agreement. At mealtimes the two of them laid down a line of crumbs on the far side of the cell so they would not be disturbed. The treaty was honoured unless the cockroaches broke it by climbing over their faces while they slept.

“What's your story?” Leila asked, sitting next to Ahlam on the whitewashed floor. She was dressed in the silky black pajamas she had been wearing continuously since the night of her arrest four months ago. The pajamas, now somewhat the worse for wear, had at least been new when she was arrested.

Ahlam told her that she had been taken from her children for working for journalists and humanitarian groups, and had been interrogated over the course of a month. “What do you think will happen to me?” she asked. Though only twenty, Leila was the old hand.

“You need to talk to a lawyer,” Leila said.

“Where am I going to find a lawyer?”

“In the next cell.”

Along the back wall of the cell stretched a heating pipe. Leila got up and went to the far corner, crouching down beside it. “I'll speak to him,” she said. With her mouth close to the pipe, she spoke into it. “Where is the lawyer?” she said. “I want to talk to him.”

There was a scramble of male voices, then a man asking what she needed.

“There's an Iraqi lady here,” Leila said into the pipe. “She spent a whole month in solitary, in an isolation cell. She has
two children, a girl and a boy, and no one's taking care of them. We're wondering how to get her released.”

“Tell him my interrogation is finished,” Ahlam said.

After the last interrogation session, before she was moved, she had been given a questionnaire to fill out.

Where are the American forces in Iraq?
it asked.

Did they think she was a leader of the American forces?

She took the pen and wrote her answer:
I don't know
.

Where are the militias in Iraq?

Her answer:
I don't know
.

She figured this meant they had finished with her and she would shortly be released.

Ahlam could hear the man's voice through the pipe and she felt her heart compress as she took in his words. “Even if the interrogation is finished,” he said, “I suspect she's going to be here for at least four months.”

On the white washed walls of the cell, where past prisoners had marked their names or longings, Ahlam scratched out two hearts and inside them wrote “Abdullah” and “Roqayah.” But she found she couldn't stand to look at their names—her heart began to race with worry—so she rubbed them out with her hands.

Her eldest son did not need a heart; he was in her heart. In her cell she did something she had rarely allowed herself to do. She wept for him.

The days quickly developed a pattern. Waking at dawn, signalled by the distant strains of a mosque through the one small opening at the top of the cell where the fan rattled loudly. Hurriedly washing and filling plastic bottles under the meagre pipe in the stall-sized washroom which at least,
unlike her cell in solitary, had its own squat toilet. The water pipe shut off at noon, and being summer, it was hot, so she and Leila took turns rinsing off in the morning and, when the water came back on at night, once again before bed. There was no soap or shampoo, no way to eradicate the sweat and grime and itch of the lice that plagued them, and no change of clothing, so after they had showered they put their stinking garments back on.

It was the conviction of the guards that women could not be criminals—women could be stupid but not wicked—and it was their fear that the women prisoners would pray to God to curse them. So they tried to curry favour with the women and thus with God. After midnight, when the warden had gone home, they slid open the metal slat on the cell door. Through the slat they shared whatever they had: food their wives had packed, newspapers, cigarettes, information, even (though it was forbidden) a copy of the Koran. Most of the guards were Druze or Alawite—Abu Yusuf was Christian—but in the main they were ordinary folk. What they feared most was punishment, which is why they had treated Ahlam so rudely in isolation, having been ordered to have no contact with her.

At first they spoke only to Leila, the longest serving prisoner, and the most beautiful. When they ascertained that Ahlam had serious charges against her and could not have been planted there to spy on them for Syrian intelligence, they began to talk to her. And, not surprisingly, in Ahlam they found a confidante. It had always been this way, people talked to her. They confessed their sorrows and secrets: the negligent wife who would no longer sleep with them, the lazy good-for-nothing son, various adventures with girlfriends.

Sadiq, who had guarded her in the isolation cell, was one of the guards for the women here, too, but he distinguished himself. He always had a book with him, so at night Ahlam and Leila stood by the eye-level slat and listened as he read to them. While reading from Babylonian history he served them Arabic coffee—strong and black, an unfathomable luxury, more delicious than any coffee they had ever tasted. Fearful of leaving any sign that he had allowed the women to smoke (for which he would receive an automatic six-month sentence, the same as for rape), he held a cigarette to their lips through the slat.

He told them he had worked in the prison for twenty years. He told them stories: one about a prison in the desert of Palmyra with a dozen floors below ground that no one knew about until the prisoners—those still alive—were released in 2000 after Bashar al-Assad came to power. “Thank God you don't live in Bashar's father's time,” he said to Ahlam, speaking of the Syrian president's fearsome predecessor. “He would just have put a bullet in your head.”

Ahlam and Leila passed the hours talking. Leila told her of the nightclubs where she used to go. “We'd go to Beirut. We went to drink, smoke hash, and returned to Damascus the next day. We just wanted to be wild.” She knew all the top DJs, all the best clubs, had partied across Lebanon and Jordan. Playing with the stud in her tongue, or pacing the cell—a panther in its cage—she spoke about her past. How she had been raped as a little girl by a shopkeeper, how her father refused to press charges. How her parents, both doctors, fought all the time. Leila was fluent in English, having been taught by them. After their bitter divorce her father married a woman who had only one arm; the other she had lost
in a car accident. By this time her father was injecting himself with morphine he stole from the hospital where he worked, and her stepmother treated her as the family slave, awakening her at five in the morning to clean, run errands and serve them until midnight. At thirteen, she ran away to her mother's house but nobody watched over her and her only contact with her father was through the bank machine: whenever she needed money she could take whatever she wanted. By fourteen, she was drinking, hanging out with a group of wild teenagers in Damascus. Then she discovered cocaine and her fiancé, who was now in another sector of the prison.

One evening the warden unlocked the door to the cell. “Get ready,” he barked, as Ahlam was handcuffed and blindfolded. “They're going to interrogate you.”

She was brought to the familiar room three doors down, where Abu Yusuf was waiting for her. She had not been here in several days, but she remembered his voice very well. He beat her with the stick and reminded her that she was a traitor. Then abruptly he stopped. The door opened and someone was brought in.

“Don't say a word,” Abu Yusuf ordered her. “If he hears you, we're going to beat him.”

Behind her a confused voice was asking why he had been handcuffed and blindfolded, why had they arrested him, why had they brought him here—what had he done? She knew that voice, and knew her brother's cologne.