A Disappearance in Damascus (3 page)

I would love to go with him, I told the journalist that day, but not right then. I was still wearing what I had put on to meet him at his magazine office, a sleeveless shift dress over jeans. This was perfectly fine for the affluent areas of Damascus, which were modern and anything-goes, but not for the sort of outing where I should make an effort to dress modestly and not stand out. Just a glance at my non-Arab face would identify me as a Westerner, so I didn't bother with a headscarf—I'd had my fill of it in Iran; and in secular Syria even the president's wife didn't bother. But when I had time to think ahead I usually wore a wedding ring to visit poor areas, places where marriage was a life event as significant as birth or death. I'd bought the ring for ten dollars at a stand in a shopping mall, preferring to be pitied for having a cheap husband rather than admit that I lived with a man to whom I wasn't married. Unfortunately, the ring sometimes
required me to provide vivid descriptions of my wedding: inventing the dresses the bridesmaids wore, the hall or beach where the celebration took place—usually I opted for the beach. Thinking of this made me realize I hadn't called home lately. My boyfriend had emailed to say he had tried my number several times but couldn't get through.

“Don't worry,” said the journalist, interrupting my thoughts. “We'll take a taxi to her door.” Outside his office he quickly flagged down a cab on the busy street.

Twenty minutes later we arrived at her apartment. Ahlam opened the door—her husband was out, both kids still at school. Clad in jeans herself, she wore a heart-shaped pendant with a photo of a boy around her neck. Her eldest son, she explained, touching the portrait with one hand. He had died last year.

“In the war?” I asked. Later I would understand how hard it was for her to answer that question.

“Here in Damascus. An accident in hospital.” He had been eleven years old.

As she beckoned me to take a seat, I apologized for my bare arms. She looked at me blankly. She appeared not to have noticed. She offered me a cigarette as if to say:
don't be so uptight
.

I'd like to say I knew immediately who she was. That she was the most famous fixer in Damascus. But fixers are never famous—not to anyone except those in the know. They work in murky times and murky places. Which is when and where they are needed. And honestly? She didn't look the part. Later, because she lost herself in her work in the same way I did, I would sometimes forget how much she had been
through to end up here, but that day she gave me a glimpse of something she normally locked up. When she spoke of her son, she looked like someone with a broken heart.

She told me a bit of her story, in fluent English, explaining what had brought her here from Baghdad, and despite how harrowing it was I couldn't help but admire her attitude. She had a certain flippancy that told me she didn't care about things other people cared about, that she was her own person living by her own rules. She mentioned that she had worked for the international press in Baghdad, and when I said I was interested in meeting more Iraqis in her neighbourhood, she wrote her telephone number in the back of my notebook.

It was easy to miss the gravel turnoff from the paved highway that had taken me from the chic shops and modern restaurants and office towers of downtown Damascus. The taxi driver had to brake and reverse against traffic. Marking the roundabout on the main street of Little Baghdad—recently renamed Iraqi Street after its residents—was a large folk mural of Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria for three decades, painted in the style of a psychedelic rock poster. Every second shop window displayed a photograph of Assad's son Bashar, in moustache and aviator sunglasses and army fatigues, an obvious attempt to make him look less like the nerdy ophthalmologist he had been before taking the presidency in 2000 when his father died. Aside from its festoons of electrical wires and its taxis and sputtering motorcycle carts, the neighbourhood looked medieval.

Drab low-rise tenements emerged like dead teeth from streets of pounded dirt. The air smelled of roasting meat and
baking bread. A mule passed by pulling a cart overloaded with watermelons. At the roadside a bearded man with a wrestler's build sold cigarettes, his upper half so hale and robust that it took a moment to register that he had no legs. Farther along were the gold shops where Iraqi widows performed alchemy, turning their jewellery into bread; some did the same with their bodies once the gold was gone.

Looming above it all, aloof from the spectacle, was the magnificent shrine to Lady Zainab, granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammed for whom the neighbourhood had taken its name. With its turquoise minarets and gilded dome, the shrine was the only good reason for visitors to come here. Zainab is a heroine to the Shia for having stood up against oppression after the seventh-century battle that cemented the Sunni–Shia divide. The split began after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 AD, when there was a dispute over who would take his place. The Shia believed it should be the Prophet's direct descendant, and the Sunnis believed any upstanding male was electable. After the murder of the Prophet's closest male relative, Ali, a battle took place on the plains of Karbala in what is now Iraq. Ali's small band of followers, the
shia'tu Ali
, were slaughtered, and his daughter Zainab was taken to Damascus in chains. This was known as a Shia area because of the shrine, but now Iraqis of all sects—Sunni, Shia, Christian—lived here side by side as they used to in Baghdad.

It was Ahlam's suggestion to meet at the main street roundabout. In the warren of nameless alleyways that branched off from it, she figured I wouldn't be able to find her apartment. I waited under the red canvas awning that shaded an electronics shop, willing myself to look inconspicuous. This
wasn't easy. Westerners never came to this part of the city except in tour groups to visit the shrine. Fat and pale, they filed out of buses with expensive cameras dangling from their necks, blinking like newborns in the stark sunlight.

As I stood there, glancing at my watch, I felt a rising anxiety. Once, when I'd come here before meeting Ahlam, I had been swarmed by a group of Iraqi men. They were out of work. They were running out of money. They were desperate. They were angry. “I have a question for you,” said one of the men, his face inches from mine. “If people come and tell you to get out of your home, if they are killing you based on your identity card, if the international community does nothing—tell me, what will be your destiny?”

I had no answer to give him. The crowd was growing larger, gathering momentum. Crowds like that crave some sort of release, a catalyst, some object on which to vent.

Now, as I stood alone in the shadows beneath the canvas awning, a man walked past. He stopped short to rubberneck, his mouth agape, then took up a post beside me and watched me from the corner of his eye. When I caught him staring, he glanced away nervously. If he was a spy he needed to go back to spy school.

I was relieved to see Ahlam crossing the sunlit main street towards me. She was tall for an Iraqi woman. She wore men's black jeans, men's black shoes, and a man's overcoat that defied the oppressive heat—a style she had adopted when the war began and there were bigger problems to worry about than conforming to fashion. Her broad and high-boned face might have been beautiful if she had paid the least attention to vanity. But her face was unusual here because it seemed cheerful, right at home. As if we weren't walking through a
refugee slum where Syrian agents kept watch for rogue journalists and for any sign of the sectarian tinder that might set fire to Syria as it had to Iraq.

Phone in one hand, she greeted me with the standard three kisses—right, left, right—smiling as if our meeting here was the most natural thing in the world. We might have been two friends about to go to lunch. No one seemed to be watching us, but two policemen were standing beside the Assad rock poster directing traffic, their eyes concealed behind mirrored sunglasses. Leading the way to her apartment, Ahlam walked quickly but not as if she were in some kind of hurry. Merely the gait of a busy person. She stopped to talk to a shoeshine boy whose family she knew. Such boys were eyes on the street: useful sources of information.

Walking with her into the maze of yellow dirt alleyways, sweat pooling beneath my clothes, I felt a strange sensation. I felt relaxed. Almost happy. Like army commanders, sea captains and wilderness explorers, Ahlam's stubborn fearlessness made those around her feel fearless too.

She had come to Damascus after being kidnapped in Baghdad two years ago. The conditions of her release were a $50,000 ransom and a promise to leave Iraq forever. Her family raised the money—her younger brother Salaam sold a car; her sisters and sisters-in-law sold their jewellery; her older brother Samir organized loans to cover the rest. “For the money,” she said, reaching for her cigarettes as we talked in the sweltering heat of her living room, “they let me live.”

She came from a thriving Sunni farming village on the northwest edge of Baghdad, and spent the early months of the war working as a fixer for the
Wall Street Journal
. After
that, for the next two years, she had worked at a civil–military affairs office the Americans had built in her district. The General Information Centers (GICs)—the Americans, and anyone else referring to them, pronounced it “gik”—were connected to the Iraqi Assistance Center, which ran humanitarian operations for the US military. Hired as a caseworker on a salary of $450 a month, her job was to translate compensation claims for the families of war victims. A successful claim for someone killed by accident had a maximum payout of $2,500. But the centre, with its all-Iraqi staff, was largely left to its own devices, and since by then she was also a district councillor, she was soon made deputy director, addressing all manner of humanitarian concerns: the wounded, the orphaned, the widowed. A lot of her time was spent locating prisoners who had disappeared into American jails, leaving anxious families who came to her for information on their whereabouts.

Of course it was dangerous to be in any way associated with the Americans, but it was the only way to get anything done. “I had many threats from militias who thought I was a spy.”

First came a petrol bomb, tossed through her bedroom window. She returned from work one day to find her bed charred by fire, all her clothing incinerated. She had hidden her savings in her clothing: no one trusted the banks.

Then came flyers, delivered to the homes of her neighbours, accusing her of being a spy for the Americans. “I didn't care. I wasn't a traitor. My aim was to serve my people.”

She ignored the signs until the beginning of 2005, when the head of her district council was murdered. A rumour surfaced that another councillor had also been killed.
Concerned that it might be Ahlam, the Americans sent soldiers to knock on doors throughout her village. “Have you seen this woman?” they asked, showing her photograph to the very people who had been told she was a spy. Returning home from work that day, she felt the eyes of every villager upon her. “Now I was trapped.”

One cold January evening, a week after the murder of the council leader, she was gathering firewood beside the main road of her village. By day she was a professional woman, working twelve to fourteen hours, consumed by problems that seemed only to multiply, but outside of work she still had the responsibilities of a wife and mother. Since electricity was no longer reliable and cooking fuel now sold on the black market at outrageous prices, she had to cook for her family over a fire.

As darkness approached, and with it a bitter cold, she bundled twigs and branches into her arms. A car pulled slowly up alongside her and stopped. A black Mercedes with tinted windows. She could not see inside. The driver's side window lowered just enough for her to hear a man's voice. “Peace be upon you, sister.” A voice she did not recognize.

“And upon you peace,” she replied.

He tossed a scrap of paper from the window and the car sped away, its tires tearing up the road.

She walked over and picked up the paper. It was a handwritten letter, hastily scrawled. She read it in the dim light.

She dropped the bundle of sticks. She had received threatening letters before, and ignored them, but this time was different. “I knew I was next.” Gathering her husband and three children, throwing their belongings into the car, she moved to a friend's home, and from there they crossed the border and made their way to Syria's capital, Damascus.

She had thought she would stay in Damascus and keep her family safe, but her two older brothers followed her there to relay a message. Her flight, they told her, was being viewed as proof to everyone back home that she was exactly what she had been accused of being—an American spy. She came from a respected family; her father had been the most important man in their community. Their lives depended on those relationships of trust. If she stayed in Syria it would be like admitting she had done something wrong. For the safety of her extended family at home, she must return to Iraq.

Reluctantly, defiantly, she agreed. She left her husband with the children in Damascus and returned on her own. Before she left she bought new black jeans and a pair of new black boots; she decided she would walk with her head high and prove that she was proud and unafraid. When she arrived back in her village, her father-in-law, in lieu of a greeting, listed off the names of all those who had been killed or kidnapped in her absence.

This time she no longer slept at home but lived in her office at the GIC. She had everything she needed—food, a generator, a mattress, guards to watch over her. The Americans even offered her a car and driver, she said, but this she refused: it would be an obvious target. After her car broke down, she relied on her brothers to drive her around,
and when they were busy, on taxis. Taking a taxi was Russian roulette, and one bright summer morning in July 2005, flagging a taxi on the street, her luck ran out.