A Disappearance in Damascus (9 page)

For the funeral ceremony her house was guarded by armed men from her village. In the room with the other women she turned herself to stone. Some of the villagers, some of the women who sat offering words of sympathy, were among those who had lauded her kidnappers, who called her
a traitor behind her back. She stared straight ahead, refusing to shed a tear. “They would have said my son's death was God's punishment for my work with the Americans.” She refused to give them the satisfaction of witnessing her pain.

When the family returned to Damascus she went right back to work. “I didn't even have time to feel sorrow for my son. I had two children to care for. I had the landlord knocking at my door for the rent. So I contacted the journalists I had known in the past to look for work. I didn't surrender.” As she spoke she touched the cord around her neck.

Perhaps all empathy comes from a wound. That hard lump of grief, which she took out from time to time, usually alone, fired her public activity, her obsessive drive to solve problems that had no lasting solutions. And there was no one among the refugees who had not lost someone dear. Her son's photograph, dangling from a blood-red cord, bound her story to their own, and without a word said everything.

In the weeks after her son died, Ahlam couldn't stand being in her apartment so she would leave her other two children in the care of her husband and visit Zainab's shrine to be alone with her sorrow. One day, a girl of sixteen saw her there, weeping. “What's wrong, Auntie?” the girl asked. Ahlam told the girl about her son's death and the girl started crying.

“At first I thought she was crying for me,” Ahlam told me, “but she said, ‘You are so concerned about your children, while my parents force me to do this work.' ” The girl was the youngest of three daughters in a family of ten. Her father rented a three-bedroom apartment to which he brought the men, mainly pilgrims holidaying at the shrine. If she or either of her sisters refused, they were beaten. The girl had
turned twelve the year the war began. That year her father made her lose her virginity to her cousin. “A foreigner,” he told her, “should not be the first.”

At night the dry brown hills above Damascus were lit up by nightclubs filled with tens of thousands of Iraqi girls and widows. Customers at the clubs exchanged thousand-pound Syrian notes, worth about twenty dollars, for monopoly money they could safely shower on the dance floor without fear of an errant high heel disgracing the face of the president's father. Inside, beautiful entertainers in glittering dresses sang songs of Sunni–Shia brotherhood. After some hours of drinking, the Iraqi clients started fights outside: “You are Shia, you people killed my brother!”

Rana, my schoolteacher-interpreter, always impeccably turned out, went to a good salon even if she covered their handiwork with a scarf. She told me she had seen a dozen Iraqi girls there the last time she had her hair cut. Hovering over a girl who looked about fifteen was an older woman who might or might not have been the girl's mother. She was advising the hairdresser—do it this way, move the tendril so it falls across her cheek.

In Little Baghdad there weren't any nightclubs. Most transactions took place behind the shrine, where Afghan opium was sold by pilgrims from Iran and refugee women came to negotiate the so-called temporary marriages that expired after an hour.

Ahlam had met two sisters—“Good girls, they had never spoken to a man in their lives”—whose parents were old and sick and had run out of money for food and rent in Syria. Each night the girls waited for their parents to fall sleep, then slipped out to the shrine, returning at dawn. Their parents
believed the money was being sent by a generous cousin who had long ago moved to Europe. “They will never know how those girls sacrificed to keep them alive,” Ahlam said.

On another occasion a boy had come to see Ahlam and told her he was planning to murder his uncle. His uncle had sold the boy's two cousins, his daughters, who were thirteen and fourteen years old, to rich men in Saudi Arabia who came in search of virgin brides—“pleasure wives,” they were called. The boy was enraged. His cousins were his friends and he missed them. He would stab his uncle, perhaps strangle him—he hadn't made up his mind. Ahlam was trying to talk him out of it. “What will it accomplish? You will go to jail and it will not bring your cousins back.”

While reporting for UNICEF on Iraqi adolescent girls, Ahlam and the French-American researcher, Marianne, whom I'd not yet met, learned the many ways the girls were being bought and sold. There were those, often orphans, who were trafficked by gangs; those prostituted by their own families; and a third category who on their own supported their families or themselves in order to survive.

Fearing such a fate, other families locked up their daughters to protect them. Their mothers had been engineers, accountants, librarians, teachers, but now it was as if time had rolled back a hundred years. In previous decades, when girls typically went to university and had careers, the marriage age had risen, but now it was dropping fast. Better they be married, before they became damaged goods. Better they be married and eating someone else's food.

Iraqi students could enroll in Syrian schools as Ahlam's had, but most had not been able to bring their school records with them or had missed too many years or simply had to
work. A blue-eyed boy from Baghdad who sold fruit at a sidewalk stand on the market street told me he wanted to study biological sciences. “To study,” he said solemnly, “is the most precious thing.” After we had spoken he chased me through the market, startling me because I heard his pounding footsteps before I turned my head. Could I help him? He had to support his parents, they were old, and he had missed the last four years of school. He wanted to finish high school and go to university. Perhaps I could take him to my country, or help him get to a university in Dubai? Listening to his earnest pleas I felt the helplessness of his situation and the uselessness of my own: I'm just a writer, I said.

Just a writer. A useless profession. Sometimes it seemed to me that all writing could do was comfort those who already understood what was wrong with the world by letting them know they weren't alone. To simply watch the loss of an entire generation—a generation that would otherwise have gone on to study something useful like dentistry, or even become writers and journalists themselves—was a position I was coming to despise. Nothing would change the fact that my interpreter Kuki expressed to me in one of our late-night discussions. “A little kid in Baghdad now, all he talks about is war. He knows the names of all the weapons, the names of everyone killed. So what will that kid be like at eighteen? They said this war was going to end terrorism but it will only bring more war, more terrorism.”

Ahlam saw what was happening to the next generation, but she was doing something about it. She explained that that was how the idea for a school had begun: she and Marianne had come to the same conclusion—that the international aid organizations had their hands tied, whether by lack of funds
or the rules they had to follow in order to be here at all—so they had come up with their own plan to create a space where the girls could meet one another and their parents would know they were safe. Marianne, who had a master's degree in International Affairs from Columbia University and had worked on development projects in several countries, donated the start-up money; Ahlam had offered up her apartment and spoken to qualified refugee teachers who were willing to volunteer their time. She was planning an opening ceremony and invited me to attend.

But there were concerns. Group meetings, even of schoolgirls, were against the law. “The mukhabarat are asking enough questions about all the people coming here,” she said, gesturing at her apartment.

“How do you know?” I asked.

She reached for her cigarettes and searched around in her bag for her lighter. “They told me to come see them.” Clicking. Clicking. Tossing the lighter down. “Not told—
ordered
. To headquarters.” I saw a lighter on her windowsill and passed it to her. She lit a cigarette.

“They want to know what I'm doing,” she said, exhaling. “It's strange for them, to see a woman who is active.” She shot me an amused glance that spoke of our shared awareness of what it meant to be thought strange as a woman.

There were certain things she kept from me. It's normal among colleagues. It is possible she didn't want to worry me with things I could do nothing about. Or, more likely, make me doubt the wisdom of working with her altogether. She may have noticed the way that certain journalists she used to work with were starting to keep a distance—an American reporter who stopped calling; a war photographer who used
to visit but no longer did—yet she never spoke about it. I only heard about that later, from the journalists themselves. In the meantime—and this was how the subject came up—she was contemplating ways to get the necessary permission to run the school.

The intelligence captain in charge of Little Baghdad was a pale man with a thin Syrian moustache who called himself Abu Yusuf. “A captain who wants to be a major,” as Ahlam described him. She had answered his summons, going to his office, taking the chair opposite his desk.

Who was she, Abu Yusuf demanded to know, about whom he had heard so much? “You are running around from six in the morning until midnight. We sent three men to follow you and they can't keep up.”

So the men who were following her were Syrian intelligence agents? She kept her expression neutral, as if this was not a surprise. “They must be out of shape,” she replied.

He was not amused. He had been watching her with mounting perplexity. With his next question he tried to fit her back into a category he understood. “Are you with the Sunni or the Shia?”

She wasn't with either side, she told him. She was with whoever needed her help.

But that made no sense to him. There must be something else at play. Abu Yusuf was a man who understood self-interest, games, hatreds, deceit. These were his stock-in-trade. He was, she thought, a careerist. A small man in the big system who wanted to make a name for himself. Later, when it became clear that he was not merely a temporary annoyance, I pondered this characteristic. How many catastrophes, how many wars, have been enabled by exactly these
sorts of careerists: diligent, ambitious, calculating, loyal to the basest forms of power, who use whatever levers they can grasp to prove themselves.

That day he took a copy of her passport and made her write out a detailed autobiography: family history, reasons for coming to Syria. “He was mainly interested in my work for the Americans in Iraq.”

Now she would need his agreement if she was going to run the classes. Otherwise trouble. There would be even more people coming and going. “Suspicious activities,” she said.

She told me she had found an ally, however, and this eased my mind. A Syrian woman named Mona who was, like her, a fixer for journalists. Some time after Ahlam's visit with Syrian intelligence, a young Iraqi filmmaker Ahlam knew had introduced the two of them, and they had hit it off. Mona too had covered the refugee crisis and she told Ahlam she wanted to “give back.” I was relieved to hear about this development; I hadn't met Mona but somehow I could immediately picture her: middle-aged, plain, perhaps with grown children and a hard-working altruistic air. Her involvement took a weight off my mind. I couldn't do much to help, and I wouldn't be here forever. Ahlam needed an insider. A Syrian professional who knew the lay of the land was a gift.

With Abu Yusuf watching her, Ahlam wanted proof that what she was doing was nothing he should worry about. To that end she asked me to go with her to the UNICEF office to request a formal letter acknowledging the field research she had done with Marianne. Marianne was out of town, but the stamp of officialdom would legitimize Ahlam, make it obvious that she was an expert on the issue of refugee girls, the classes a natural extension of the work she had done.
“If you come with me,” she said, “it will be harder for them to say no.”

I was pleased to be asked. Here was someone who was actually doing something, not just writing about it. Ahlam's usefulness was a counterpoint to my uselessness, set it in stark relief, and she was offering me a way to be of use. I could be part of what she did, do something practical and tangible rather than merely observe, and use my status as a Westerner to good effect.

We met at the UNICEF headquarters in Damascus one sun-blasted afternoon. I arrived by taxi; Ahlam was already there, watching for me on the street outside. We waited together to be ushered into the director's office. He was Egyptian, with a long sallow face. I could tell right away that he was sorry to see us. Rather than speaking to her in Arabic, as I expected, he directed himself to me in French, as if she wasn't there.

This time I was the translator, explaining what she needed. Just a letter stating that she had worked on the report. He sighed, leaning back in his chair, and spoke in ponderous French of the “process” of the “formalization,” and the need for a study in order to formalize the process, and then committee meetings, and budgets and more studies….It was clear he was only giving her an audience because I was there: a Western journalist who, having brought out my notebook as a prop, was ostentatiously taking notes.

Afterwards Ahlam and I sat in the park opposite the office. It was hot and dusty but pleasant, sunlight filtering through leafy jacaranda trees. Ahlam bought two coffees from a small stand and we sat on a bench smoking. I was angry but she was not. She said, “I knew it probably wouldn't work.”

Ahlam didn't blame the sallow-faced director. She reminded me that she was not employed by UNICEF—foreign NGOs like UNICEF could not hire Iraqis, who themselves were foreigners in Syria, “guests” without legal permission to work. Marianne was on contract and Marianne had hired her. But she had no contractual structure, no rights. And in such a situation there is nobody to come to your aid. It wasn't the director's fault. He must have felt he was being made the fool, asked for something he could not grant even if he wished.