A Disappearance in Damascus (16 page)

On the surface life seemed as it had been. Ahlam's apartment was still a lively community centre and town hall. Yet the atmosphere was different. Less focused, more manic, looser, as if whatever structural elements that had been holding up the walls were buckling. Young people were always coming and going from the classrooms, racing in and then stomping down the stairs. And since her husband had left, half a dozen young men had taken to hanging out here, wandering in around noon from whichever family or friends let them sleep on their floors, staying till well after dark, discussing plans for things they would never do; smoking, talking about girls, about their families in Iraq: who had been killed; who was missing; whose houses had been taken over by militias. Mostly they talked about nothing. Their conversation consisted of banter, jokes, uncertain plans. Their legs jerked as they sat on the battered sofa, ashing their cigarettes on the floor. They got up, sat down, got up, sat down. They wanted action, action, to do something. They could hardly stand to sit around but there was nothing for them to do. The hours of their days were long, since they could neither work legally in Syria nor afford the tuition fees charged to non-Syrian university students. And if they had had that kind of money, they would have tried to be smuggled out.

“You should be president of Iraq,” one of them said to me. A charmer, slight as a fifteen-year-old though he was twenty-two, always impeccably dressed in the same neatly pressed black shirt and pants. It was one of his running lines. “You will be much better than the one we have.”

“Then I will have to start my own Abu Ghraib,” I told him. “And torture you the way you torture me by playing Céline Dion.”

His phone rang. I listened to the boy arguing. His parents wanted him to come back home and get married. No! If he could not support himself, he told them, how could he support a wife, and then no doubt a child? He wanted to work again, he had been trained as a mechanic, but in Iraq, he told me, after closing his phone, there are only three job opportunities: “To be killed, to be about to be killed, or to be kidnapped.”

In fact there were only two. He could join the security forces or join the militias, which amounted to the same thing. These young men, all of the ones I met here, were the kind that wars burn like fuel.

Ahlam channelled their surplus energy. They were her “assistants,” Sherlock Holmes with his Baker Street Irregulars. When she was fixing, she dispatched them to find sources for journalists or human rights groups. Now she sent them to visit people in hospital or families of children with special needs and bring back an assessment—her own private intelligence network. She sent them to find out how the next-door neighbour, shot in the hip in Iraq, was faring; he could not move from his mattress so another neighbour came to take him to the bathroom. In another apartment six men who had been released from Abu Ghraib were sharing a single room. She sent the young men to find out how the men were making do. Once, when a baby was born prematurely to a refugee couple, Ahlam brought two of her assistants with her to the hospital. She gave them the newborn to hold while she shouted at a doctor until he found an incubator.
The baby died anyway, two days later. The young men, Ahlam told me, wept with her when they heard.

In the past she had left her son and daughter in the care of her husband when she went out. Now she was relying on one of the young men to babysit. Hamza had golden blond hair and blue eyes—his mother was Iranian, as fair as he was. He had been staying with Ahlam's family for the past year, sleeping at night on a blanket in the living room, and I had occasionally encountered him there. The first time I met him I had taken him for European. His Western looks—the looks of an occupier—were the reason he had fled. Once, when he went back to visit his family, he was so swiftly reported that his mother had had to hide him on the roof for six weeks while militias searched for him. Now in Damascus, he had no family and no job, so he earned his keep. Hamza was often doing housework, passing a broom across the floor, emptying ashtrays, clearing away tea glasses.

They were all of an age when they should have been assuming the mantle of adulthood, learning a trade or cramming for university exams, looking around for a mate, but the war had frozen them in time. The society that raised them no longer existed; its values and expectations no longer made sense. “They have no aim, no purpose, they are only breathing, so I make them see the suffering of others and do something to help,” Ahlam said. They all called her “mother,” and I wondered if they filled some of the void left in her heart by her eldest son.

They completed the tasks she set them willingly because those tasks filled the vacuum of dead time and earned them her praise: they felt they had finally done something right.
When they reported back from their missions she let them play their music as loud as they wanted. In her apartment they danced with abandon, as if to shake the last of the energy from their limbs. Sometimes Ahlam just laughed at their antics and sometimes she joined them. She could still do that, still get up and dance, and I took that as a positive sign.

While I was researching PTSD among the refugees for my next article, I made time to work on my Arabic. Each morning, at precisely ten a.m., a woman named Umm Sally met me at Ahlam's apartment to give me lessons. Fifty years old, bone thin, prim and schoolmarmish in a black pantsuit and wire-rimmed glasses, Umm Sally was one of the volunteers at Ahlam's school. She was an excellent teacher, praising me lavishly whenever I got things right. I would be fluent in a month, she was sure of it.

As I wrote down words in the decorative script—so lush, so elegant, like composing a symphony—Umm Sally veered into the details of her life. I practised the verb “to forget,” and she told me she forgot to bring the picture of her husband, a professor. “He was beautiful,” she recalled. In the past she used to sleep like an infant, awaking to drink orange juice and milk and do her morning calisthenics. For six months after his murder she slept hardly at all.

She taught me:
It is necessary to forget
.

She showed me instead a picture of her only child, a girl of twenty-two. Her daughter looked pale and serious, like a ghostly Emily Dickinson. She loved music, wanted to go to music school, her mother said, but such longings were as useful as melted wax. Also, she hated to cover her hair but
that was necessary now because life was unstable and a girl without a father could not afford to take risks. So she refused to leave their apartment in Sayeda Zainab.

Sitting next to Umm Sally on the sofa, shifting around the protruding springs, I made lists of verb structures. I tried to get her to review the construction of the past tense as distinct from the present, which in the Semitic languages involves breaking the words apart. Umm Sally, her eyes glazing over, seemed not to hear me. “Past?” she said. “Iraq is in the past, not now.”

One morning Umm Sally turned to me, her glasses sliding down her nose onto her chin. We had been practising the verb “to love.”

“All my love is destroyed,” she murmured. “Where will I go?”

I took her hand and we sat in silence. Her hand so cool and dry, the day so warm. And then, as if shaking herself from a troubled dream, she asked me if I knew the word for picnic.

A woman had come to Ahlam to discuss her desire to be resettled, or smuggled, whichever worked, to a stable country where she could build a future. The woman had an additional complication: she had rescued a cat, and the cat now had kittens, and she wanted to bring the cat and her kittens with her.

Ahlam's phone rang, and she turned her back from this hopeless case to take the call. I could hear her speaking in English, making arrangements—times, places, yeses and okays and whens. I saw that she was on her second phone.

“Who was that?” I asked when she had finished.

It was a producer for Al Jazeera's English channel who had hired her to work as their fixer on a story about the recent
Swedish crackdown on Iraqi asylum seekers. Sweden was being overrun. She gave a small laugh: Sweden didn't want all of Iraq to move to Sweden, nor their cats and kittens.

“I thought you said you'd stopped working,” I said, surprise shading into alarm. “How do you know they aren't monitoring both your phones?”

She had the look I saw so often now. As if she couldn't really hear what I was saying. As if there were louder internal voices crowding out the present. I felt a pang of fear.

“You need to take this seriously,” I said, disliking my hectoring tone. “You can't be working for journalists anymore.” It was one thing to be at her apartment, another for her to be seen with a camera crew. I didn't like lecturing, telling her what to do. I don't tell friends what to do. But she wasn't a normal friend and this was by no means a normal situation. In the past it had been her job to tell me when to take precautions; now it seemed the tables had turned. I feared she didn't scrutinize the world with enough cynicism. I had enough cynicism for both of us. I pulled out the trump card. “What about your children?”

I knew she might not consider her own safety—there was a recklessness to her nature, and a romantic conceit that “right makes might,” when that notion had by now been demonstrably discredited. But her children were another matter. If anything happened to her they would be orphaned. And they were spirited, excitable, prone to laughter and tears. Often they clung to her, demanding attention, worried that she could be taken from them again. Now that their father was gone she was all they had. “If anything happens to you,” I said, pressing home the point, “what happens to them?”

If anything happens
.

Finally she fished around in her handbag. She pulled out some coins. This was the last of her money. Enough to buy bread. The money I had brought her in January had been spent on rent for herself and the classrooms downstairs. It was May now. And she said, if we wanted to talk about the children, this was about the children; there were bills to pay, children to feed, and with her husband gone, no one but herself to rely upon. So she had returned to work after all, which she had neglected to tell me, not wanting me to get upset, as I was doing now. A week before I arrived, she confessed, she'd called her friend Khaled from Reuters, asking him to spread the word that she was back in business. Maybe it was dangerous but it was life. You did what you had to do to survive.

Then, remarkably, the day took a turn for a better. Ahlam had to go to the offices of the International Organization for Migration, a partner of the UNHCR. Like everyone, she was applying to be resettled abroad, and of course it probably wouldn't happen—no one wanted Iraqis—but you had to try. There was also the problem that her family had paid a ransom to her kidnappers, which automatically eliminated prospective refugees from being accepted to the United States since they had, by paying ransom, given “material aid” to terrorists. But she had several effusive letters of recommendation from high-up American officers for whom she had worked, and this bolstered her case.

We shared a taxi downtown, seated in the back with the windows rolled down so Ahlam could smoke. It was a perfect blue-sky day, like every day in Damascus in May: full of life and promise, not too hot. Dirt roads turned to gravel then paved highway, like an educational film on the development
of modern infrastructure. A photo of a pair of smiling children swung from the driver's rear-view mirror; in the back window, an enlarged silhouette of President Assad—popular among taxi drivers. In the busy downtown streets, we passed beige and white low-rises interspersed with shops. Outside a florist, red bouquets poked from buckets of water. Through the window of a shoe store a woman was trying on a pair of silver sandals. A man walked by on the sidewalk, carrying a cage with a pair of songbirds, his other hand holding the hand of a little girl in a fuchsia sundress.

Now that her husband was gone, Ahlam needed to separate her application for resettlement abroad from his in order for the process to continue. When she and the children were resettled, she told me, she would get a divorce. I left her at the office, watching as she spoke to the security guard and was signed in, then I walked over to an Internet café.

Both of us were having difficulties with the men in our lives. I had received more emails. “You're gone so much, and even when you are here…” Every time I went away, the loneliness hit him harder, whereas I was usually too busy to feel lonely. He wrote that he wondered how other people in these situations, military spouses, for instance, resolved it: “I suppose some of them have affairs, but that just seems too messy.” He reminded me of how helpless he had felt when I had been in trouble in Iran. In those days, he wrote, he discovered his first grey hairs. Now he was wrestling with “the dilemma,” as he called it: if I stayed home he would be less lonely but I would suffer, and if I suffered then he would suffer, so all benefit would be lost.

In the crowded net café, reading through his latest email, I felt myself alone, and felt his aloneness too. He described our
situation with a clarity that in the dim light of the computer screens was blinding. Compa​rtmenta​lization came easily to me. There was work, there was home: different categories. And there was always something keeping us apart—half of our emails were about trouble connecting, being online at different times, phone calls that wouldn't go through, Skype calls disconnecting. I felt an urgent need to Skype with him now—to talk this all through, to soothe his loneliness, to reassure him that this relationship, the foundation on which we had known such happiness in the past, still mattered and could be saved. To say that he mattered. But it was four in the morning his time, and he had mentioned he had to get up early for work. There was a technology conference, or contract, that he had to fly to in North Carolina. As our careers had diverged over the past few years, I sometimes felt I understood his work no better than he did mine. On a gritty keyboard I typed that I missed him. I spoke of utter sadness. I tried to summon the courage his words exhibited in their raw honesty. “Is the real problem my leaving, or is it us, even when together?” It was the question he hadn't asked, but implied.