A Disappearance in Damascus (6 page)

I had begun to feel like a medieval doctor bleeding his patients while holding out the promise of healing. In my case I knew better: nothing I could write had much chance of solving their problems or changing their destinies. I began to fear that the recitation of memory only reopened wounds.

When I asked Ahlam what she hoped to accomplish in her work as a fixer, she said, “Someone has to open the door and show the world what is happening.” I had come to Ahlam because she opened doors, and even as I walked through them I kept looking for something more in what I was seeing and hearing and writing down. I was looking for a gateway into something mysterious that eluded me. A way to understand the foreign country that was the war, and how anyone could survive and yet remain human.

She had. Ahlam had. Of all the people I met, she had somehow managed not to be crushed. Being around her felt, even for me, like a reprieve. I don't know why. Not then and not now. A great disaster had taken place, yet all was not lost. She was proof of that. It was the reason people came to her, although there was not always much that she could do. Just being around her made them feel better, as it did me.

AHLAM WAS BORN IN
1965, the fifth of seven children: three girls, four boys, all tall and strong like their father, Ahmed. It was a happy childhood, though that might have been a mixed blessing. It gave her dreams that set her up for loss, that placed her on the outside of the culture. That is what her name, Ahlam, means: dreams.

The way she told it, as we talked on those first sweltering afternoons and over the coming year, she had an unusual father. He was her mentor and closest friend. He was the person who protected her from the world and armed her for it, as if he had known all along she would need to be ready.

Ahmed was a self-made man. He was born in a Sunni village northwest of Baghdad, a secluded date grove along the western bank of the Tigris River that runs through the city. He was a second-born son, which meant his older brother was first in line to inherit the land Ahlam's grandfather owned and would eventually become the village sheikh.
Since Ahmed had neither wealth nor prospects, when it came time to marry, none of the girls in the village would have him. So he left the village and married a “foreigner,” as they called a girl from another tribe. While he didn't see his bride's face until their wedding day, it turned out to be a happy marriage—a partnership unusual for its time.

The newlyweds set up house in Kadhimiya, a nearby suburb of northwest Baghdad that had grown up around the city's holiest shrine for Shia Muslims: a place of gold shops and libraries and minarets and a bustling economy catering to the pilgrims who came to worship at the magnificent eighth-century burial shrine of the Imam Musa al-Kadhim, descendant of the Prophet. In Kadhimiya, the young family's prosperity grew along with their brood.

In 1958—the year the Iraqi royal family was machine-gunned, ending the monarchy the British had set up after the First World War—Ahmed opened a small service station where he specialized in oil changes. Soon he was doing well enough to invest in a fleet of delivery trucks that brought goods into Baghdad from as far away as Lebanon and Jordan. By the time Ahlam was born he was buying real estate, becoming the landlord of several houses and an apartment building in the rapidly developing suburb. “In ten years he made a fortune,” Ahlam recalled.

In 1978, Ahmed's older brother died, leaving the village without a leader. The villagers remembered the younger brother who had left home and made good; they paid him a visit. That year, when Ahlam was twelve and on the verge of finishing primary school, her family moved from the city into the big new six-bedroom house her father had built for them on the riverfront.

The village was a lush green oasis filled with orchards of lemon and orange trees, tall grasses, and sugary date palms that were notched along the trunks so the village girls—who normally left school after a year or two, if they went at all—could scramble up them, right to the top. Some four hundred people lived there in forty or so family clusters, spreading their houses out along the rise above the Tigris. As each new generation married and had families of their own, smaller houses constellated around the parental home. Everyone left their doors open to make it clear that anyone was welcome for tea or a gossip at any time. Their dirt driveways pushed through the greenery towards the paved highway that was a main route into Baghdad. The city was within a half-hour's drive, but seemed a world away.

At the outskirts of the village, near the main road, was a small mosque and a cluster of “everything shops,” selling the sorts of sundries they couldn't make or grow themselves. Ahmed's family would farm, of course—that was the point of having land—growing lemons and oranges and apples and dates, raising sheep and cows and ducks and chickens, and Ahmed would manage the village affairs while continuing to tend to his business concerns in the city.

His other children might jump on his back at the end of the day, be carted around on his broad shoulders, but Ahlam was certain she was his favourite. Her brother Samir, two years older, was the closest to her in age, and the two were early rivals. When Ahmed went out on business, it was Ahlam he let tag along. When he presided over village council meetings in the men's reception hall built onto their new house, he ignored the prohibitions against females taking part and allowed his curious daughter to sit by the door
and listen. After the men left he let Ahlam ask questions, explaining his rationale for making this or that decision.

As the new sheikh, he was already doing things that struck the villagers as odd. For one thing, he drove around with his pretty wife next to him in the passenger seat rather than seated demurely behind him in the back. For another, he decided to divide the land his older brother had left to him equally among all of his siblings, Ahlam's aunts and uncles, making sure the aunts received an equal share. Traditionally his sisters would not have inherited—what if they married out of the tribe and the land fell out of their hands?—but Ahmed disagreed with this policy. To ensure that there were no accusations of favouritism, he brought in a surveyor to mark off the plots, then allocated them by lottery.

“He was different from the other fathers,” Ahlam said. “He raised me like a boy.” With the river tantalizingly close to their new house, she longed to learn how to swim, something girls didn't do. When she broached the subject with her father, he called over Samir and one of her male cousins. “Teach her to swim,” he said.

“And of course they could not refuse an order, he's the father,” Ahlam said. But they didn't have to be happy about it. The two teenaged boys trudged sullenly down to the riverbank with the girl in tow. They drew twelve-year-old Ahlam out to where the current ran swiftest, then released her and swam off.

She fought, thrashing about in the dangerous current. “And in fighting I learned how to swim. But the difficulty isn't to learn to swim in the water,” she added, musingly. “The difficulty is to learn to swim in life.” Her father taught
her that. “He pushed me into the sea of life.” Taught her to drive a car, to shoot a pistol, to rely on herself in all things.

He was someone who understood that the hermetic world of the village was about to change. Perhaps because he'd seen the way women in Baghdad were trickling into the workforce: by the 1980s, they were working as doctors, professors, lawyers, running the ministries and public services, because the men were away at war with Iran. He might not have been liberal in a Western sense of the word, but neither was he in favour of a wife walking several strides behind her husband, nor of forced marriages, which he believed ultimately resulted in misery. He alone among the village men allowed his daughters to accept or reject prospective husbands, even if the results weren't always what he would have wanted. One of Ahlam's older sisters married a man who drank and gambled and beat her up. The other moved to her husband's hometown, a severe place where she wasn't allowed to set foot outside the house. Both of them eventually moved back home, divorced their husbands, and later remarried. In any other family this would have been a scandal.

Ahlam liked to quote the “life lessons” her father had taught her:

“Depend on yourself. Wherever you are, begin. Begin and the rest will follow.”

“If you're afraid, don't speak. If you speak, don't be afraid.”

“There is no difference between Sunni and Shia, and I will never hear you speak of that again.”

“That was the only time he ever slapped me.” She was six years old and they were still living in the city. At her primary school her teacher had taught the students the difference
between the two calls to prayer—the Shia add a line about Ali, whom they see as the Prophet's legitimate successor. Coming home from school that day she saw her father talking to someone. Eager to show off her knowledge, she asked him whether the man was Sunni or Shia. His palm came down hard on her cheek. “May that be a lesson to you. We are all brothers.”

“What did you think?” I asked.

“I was shocked. His spoiled daughter slapped? I still feel ashamed to ask that question.”

The same went for rich or poor: no differences. “Coffins don't have pockets,” he said.

While he raised her like a boy, he also let her hide away in her room all day with a book, avoiding the women's work that didn't interest her. She had been taken to Mutanabbi Street, the literary heart of Baghdad, where amid the tens of thousands of books she found an Arabic translation of
The Old Man and the Sea
. “This is your salary for the week,” her father said, handing her enough money to pay for it. With her “salary” she became a regular customer at an enormous bookshop piled high with new and used books from around the world. It was here, on what became weekly visits, that she discovered Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo and the author of
Love in the Time of Cholera
whose name she always forgot. She fell in love with the tale of
Don Quixote
, the romantic idealist who sets out to right the world's wrongs. She was an equal opportunity reader, devouring dog-eared copies of Agatha Christie alongside works by the famous tenth-century poet for whom the bookselling street was named.

While the other girls in the village were scrambling up date trees, scything the long grass for hay, dreaming of
marriage and children, she was discovering new worlds in books. Aside from her family, books were all she cared about. Later she would reflect on how her upbringing might have made her oblivious to certain matters. She remembered a time in the 1990s when she was completely broke and a pretentious neighbour came to tea at her empty house. “She was wearing gold bracelets, rings, earrings. She kept waving her hands as she talked. I wondered why she was moving her hands around like this, if maybe she had a medical problem, so I asked my sister about it later.”

“You're a fool,” her sister told her. “She is trying to show you she is rich!”

By the time Ahlam had finished primary school she was fourteen. In those days, that was the age when village girls would begin entertaining offers of marriage. When her parents raised the subject—there was a suitable young man who had asked for her hand—she threw a fit. She screamed. She shouted. She didn't want to get married. Well, her parents asked, what did she want then?

She had a new dream: she wanted to go to high school.

Her mother had married her father at fourteen. She was a country girl who wore gold bands around her slim bronze ankles and believed a pinch of salt would keep away evil. Her father was more worldly, but he himself had gone no further than learning to read and write: that's all the children his age had been taught, and only the boys. Maybe he wanted his daughter to have opportunities he himself would have liked. “And I was the only one of his children interested in school.” Maybe he also wanted to protect her from the fate he saw befall so many women—like his uncle's first wife, abandoned with two children after a disastrous forced marriage—made
miserable by the vagaries of men and fortune. Because the moment she spoke her dream aloud, he seemed even more excited by the idea than she was.

“I am giving her a weapon,” he announced to those who argued that a village girl had no need of schooling in order to tend orange trees and date palms, and that mixing with boys at school could stain her honour. “No one,” he told them, “knows what the future holds.”

The year was 1979, and no one did. A popular revolution had brought the deeply pious Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran, overthrowing the decadent American-backed Shah and his American-trained secret police. A group of Iranian students, worried—given the CIA coup of 1953—that the Americans were about to stage a counter-coup, had taken dozens of American diplomats hostage at the US embassy in Tehran, holding them for 444 days. Meanwhile Saddam Hussein, long known for a scale of violence shocking even for Baghdad, had taken the presidency of Iraq. With the support of the United States, which backed him even when he started using poison gas,
¹⁷
he would invade Iran within the year, launching a war that killed a million people, half of them Iraqis.

By then a small war was raging inside Ahlam's house. She had never seen her father like this: smoking cigarette after cigarette, furious at his own relatives, yelling at his sons. Since she was the first of their girls ever to attend high school, the entire village was talking, pressuring him to stop this dangerous and pointless precedent. Usually her father was calm, generous, decisive. Now she could hear him shouting: “She is my daughter and I decide!” And to the astonishment of the men who came to state their objections,
even to jeer at him that he seemed to want a daughter who could support him financially, he said, “I trust she will do something great.”

That her desire to go to high school coincided with the rise of Saddam Hussein had a lot to do with their objections. Since the assassination of the royal family in 1958, Iraq had been rocked by a series of violent military coups. By the end of the 1960s the Baath Party had consolidated power, having murdered thousands of suspected communist sympathizers based on lists provided by the CIA.
¹⁸
Saddam Hussein became vice-president to his cousin, a former general named Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, but in 1979 al-Bakr stepped aside.

It wasn't so much the change in leadership that upset the villagers—leaders had always come and gone—but his purge of senior members of his own party was alarming. Twenty-two men convicted of plotting against him had been executed. Meetings were held around the country to calm the situation: these men were traitors so no one was to feel sorry for them. Ahlam recalled her schoolteacher, a high-ranking Baath Party member who must have been rattled, telling her class she had seen Saddam Hussein shoot his own brother-in-law in the head.

What really upset the villagers, what affected them directly, was the new leader's education law. It required all children—girls and boys—to attend school to the end of sixth grade. This policy eventually made Iraqi women the most educated in the region, raising literacy rates from one in ten to nine in ten.
¹⁹
If the new law was intended to drag Iraq into the modern age, it was also viewed as an attempt to undermine tribal authority. And here was Ahlam, the daughter of the village's most prominent man, intent on going even further than the law
required. The struggle to stop her united the village. Her father refused to back down.