A Disappearance in Damascus (20 page)

I waited an hour in the sweltering heat, expecting the power to come back on as usual. Power outages had increased with the influx of refugees weighing down an outdated power grid—Iraqis liked to joke that it was a way of making them feel at home. When it didn't come back on I stepped into the stairwell and listened. I could hear the sounds of electric life whirring in other apartments. It was only out in mine.

My landlady, a pious Sunni with a PhD in physics, came over the next day with her entire family to fix the electrical system. It was nothing, then, just a failure in a badly maintained flat. I began to relax. All was well, I was well, the A/C was working again.

The following day, towards noon, I heard a pounding on the front door. I had just returned from checking email and was standing in the kitchen, contemplating the lack of food in the fridge. At the sound of knocking I froze. I wasn't expecting anyone. Hardly anyone knew I was here, and they would have phoned. I stayed silent, not making a sound. The pounding continued for a long time and finally ceased.

A quarter of an hour later there was a clattering on the roof. I went out onto the terrace and looked up. A man was on the roof, attempting to lower a ladder down onto my terrace.

I shouted. The word “police” translates into many languages. I saw a stick lying among the debris on the terrace and grabbed it, waving it at him like a sword. I would kill him with it if I had to, beat him to death. He pulled the ladder back up over the roof and fled.

I wanted to call the police, and in a normal situation I might have. Now I feared them more than I feared the intruder. What if he
was
the police? In the past I would have interpreted this as nothing more than another strange coincidence, rather than a plot directed at me. And—it was coincidence. Within a couple of days, after urgent discussions with my landlady, I learned that the stranger on the roof was the neighbour across the hall, a shadowy figure I now recalled peering at me on several occasions through a crack in his door as I went downstairs. He was single at forty, living with his parents in the apartment next door, and had seen me coming and going. His parents were away and he wanted to “introduce himself,” as my landlady put it. She told me he was convinced that his dramatic overture would be welcome and was apparently shocked that I did not see it that way.

And yet…I was deeply shaken. I felt as if the conventions of civilization were disintegrating. Maybe those too had been a fiction all along. Maybe my landlady was telling the truth when she assured me he would not bother me again—but she also wanted to calm me down; it was illegal to rent me this apartment in the first place, off the books.

I could no longer, no matter what anyone said, separate coincidence from intentional threat. I remembered years ago reading J.M. Coetzee's book of essays on censorship,
Giving Offense
. “When certain kinds of writing and speech, even certain thoughts,” he wrote, “become surreptitious activities, then the paranoia of the state is on its way to being reproduced in the psyche of the subject, and the state can look forward to a future in which the bureaucracies of supervision can be allowed to wither away, their function having been, in effect, privatized.” And, “All writers under censorship are
at least potentially touched by paranoia, not just those who have their work suppressed.”
³³

And so it happens. Where I had once been ready to dismiss anomalies, I now interpreted every event as a message. These two events—a power cut
to my apartment
, a foiled break-in
to my apartment
—were anomalous and singular, and in this way resembled gifts that are chosen with a specific recipient in mind. It is the same way the censor becomes internalized. He works his way into our private thoughts so deeply that he is always with us, always watching, even when he's not there.

Ahlam had been gone without a trace for eleven days.

PLZ CONTACT ME
.

I stared at the screen on the computer. The net café was quiet. The bored girl at the front desk had handed me the access code without a second look.

Two phone numbers followed the message. One for a mobile phone, the other a landline. I wrote them down, transposing two of the numbers. It wouldn't take a high-level code-breaker to figure it out, but it would be a hassle.

I called the landline from my own landline in the apartment—an old rotary phone that was not registered to me.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

Hamid's voice was like a gravel-crusher. “Gabriela told me,” he said. “She was worried after getting your email.” We agreed to meet the following afternoon at the Royal Café, across the street from the Cham Palace Hotel.

The Royal was one of those old-style Arab coffeehouses: smoke-filled, large as a warehouse, packed exclusively with
men except for one young couple gazing longingly at each other across a table. I arrived exactly at five, taking a table at the back. Hamid arrived a few minutes later, having scoped the place first. He sat down heavily across from me and looked around. He had the kind of face that revealed nothing unless he wanted it to. “Let's go somewhere else,” he said.

We decided, after some debate, to go to my apartment where we could talk unseen. It was risky, but we could not think of a safer place.

I walked on ahead, through the crowds heading home from work. Men in suits, women in dresses. People were stepping out of a patisserie, carrying little white boxes wrapped with string. There was a line outside the window wicket where a fat man in a white chef's uniform sold hummus and baba ghanoush by the kilo, ladled into plastic bags.

Hamid trailed me at a distance. After I had gone upstairs he waited a few more minutes and then buzzed up. By the time he reached my floor he was huffing and clutching his chest.

He blamed his heart trouble on a recent visit to Baghdad to check on his home. His house was near the airport, a place of intense fighting. After his family fled he had rented it to a woman he knew, but the violence was such that he could no longer charge her anything: it was a comfort just to have someone watching the place. When he finally managed to get there she told him that she, too, had moved to Syria for a while—she herself had only just returned to check on her furniture. When she reached the house she had found it occupied by a group of young militiamen who thanked her politely for the use of a very good house and left. A few days later they came back. They had forgotten something. They
went into the backyard and lifted a sewer grate, pulling out two large rockets that they carted away.

Later, when she cleaned her furniture, she turned over the chairs and found papers stashed beneath them with lists of names. “She burned them,” Hamid said, “into ash.”

As I put on water for coffee, he sighed and said that if the war ever ended he would change his name to Salaam—peace. I told him about the theory that it takes ten years after a war for a society to return to the status quo ante.

“Even after ten years we won't be back to zero,” he said, “because of the mentality of this new generation. This generation and the next two generations. They aren't being educated anymore, they see nothing but violence. They've become easy to brainwash and they are caught between Saudi Arabia and Iran.” His goal, which he was devoting himself to these days, was getting his own children out. One son was already studying in the United States; another had a lead on a university scholarship there. After that, only one more to go.

He looked around my apartment, taking it in. “This place is weird.”

“I know.” I handed him a mug.

I told him about the break-in. The neighbour on the roof with the ladder.

“You should move,” Hamid said, stirring in sugar. “It's not safe. Anyone can come in here over the roof. What if he comes back?”

What if, undaunted by my reaction, he chose to try again? That was my fear as well. “I already paid two months' rent in advance. I'm broke. And where am I going to go? I can't leave right now.” Not without finding out what had happened to
Ahlam. We took our coffees and two kitchen chairs onto the terrace, sitting side by side, looking out as twilight fell and the city darkened into points of light. A wind came up, scattering dust. My eyes blurred, but no tears fell. I hadn't wept. A flock of birds flew overhead, black as bats. Where did they go at night? I wondered.

We ran through the possible reasons for Ahlam's arrest: her unofficial work with journalists, the unofficial school, someone with a grudge making a false report. Jealousies, petty slights—you never knew whom you could trust. And she had become the unofficial representative of Iraqis in Syria. Not everyone was pleased to have an activist in their midst.

“You know what the people call her?” Hamid said. “They call her ‘Mother of the Iraqis.' ”

But that would have upset some, this status of Ahlam's. He had once mentioned her name to a high-ranking female member of Iraq's Baath Party who was living in Damascus. She had stiffened, calling Ahlam “a one-woman NGO.” It was not a compliment. The implication was that Ahlam did whatever she wanted, working outside the system. Officialdom doesn't trust such a person. From where do they get their power? What gives them the idea they can do whatever they want?

“Maybe it has nothing to do with the Syrians. Maybe it has to do with Ahlam's work in Iraq,” I said. “Before she came here…”

Hamid knew she had angered some Iraqi factions because she did not distinguish between sects and refused to ally with any of them. Civil war breaks society into shards. Those who fall outside the new divisions—the minorities, the intellectuals, all who refuse to take sides—are left with no one
to protect them. There was also the problem that she had helped the Americans in Iraq. Everyone who had done so was a target.

Just before Ahlam was arrested I had met a middle-aged woman who had been a high-school teacher in Baghdad until a few months before, when US troops came to see her school. Given her fluency in English, she acted as the interpreter for their visit. The troop commander commended her English skills and, in front of the entire staff and students, suggested she might see them about a job. She declined, shocked that he would mention such an offer in public. The next day he sent someone to the school to inquire again as to whether she would like to work as an interpreter. She declined again, but word soon spread among her colleagues that she was in league with the US military. One afternoon a man approached her in the street. He was a large man, “very ugly,” she told me. “You are too old to rape and too poor to kidnap, so this is for you,” he said, holding out a bullet, her gift for “working with the Americans.” She fled to Syria.

I had thought I had a convincing cover story—a visiting professor—but whoever was watching her might have seen right through it. It wouldn't be that hard to put together the pieces, or at least become suspicious. I asked Hamid if he thought it was my fault. It was a hard question to ask, because I was afraid of his answer, but he didn't seem to hear me. He was worrying aloud about what her arrest meant for other Iraqis in Syria. “Arrest someone like her, someone everybody knows, and it sends a message. So we all shut up.” Adding, “Especially because she's a fixer.” A link from the refugees to the outside world. As he was.

Both of us, staring into the blackness of that Damascus
night, were interpreting her arrest through our own lenses like a piece of conceptual art.

What we did not discuss was the most terrifying prospect of all: that she might have been arrested for nothing. This had been the case for many of the prisoners Ahlam had known in Iraq, picked up on baseless suspicions, over grudges, held forever and a day for nothing at all. With no good reason to arrest her, there would be no good reason to set her free. If Abu Yusuf's motivation was anger at her refusal to cooperate, her arrest could fall into that category. If no logical principles were at work, we were dealing with a form of madness.

It's sometimes said that the simplest answer is usually the right one, but the people who say that haven't spent much time reporting in the Middle East. Here, if the cause of something seems obvious, it is probably because it was designed to look that way, to steer one away from what is really going on.

I lit a cigarette.

“Can I have one of those? Don't tell my wife,” he said, as I handed him the packet and the lighter. “I'm supposed to quit because of my—” He pounded his chest.

We smoked in silence, side by side in the dark, like a pair of detectives on a late-night stakeout, or a pair of fugitives with nowhere to go.

“So what do we do? I've exhausted the official channels,” I said.

“UNHCR?” he asked.

“I'm talking to them. Every day. They're not telling me much. I think they are tired of me, actually. You could try.”

He nodded. He would do that. He knew people there.

“And the guys who used to be at her apartment, who hung out there all the time. One of them was living there.” Hamza, with the blond hair and blue eyes. “I could try to reach him. He might know what's happened to her kids.” Her kids. Who was taking care of them? “And how to reach her brother, Salaam.”

He agreed. Good idea. “I know someone else who might help us,” he offered. A friendly Syrian with connections to the country's military-security establishment. “We could pay him a visit.”

We decided to do the only thing we could, the one thing we were both good at: fact-finding. As the streets below us filled with the sound of evening crowds—people heading to restaurants, meeting friends—we focused on our action plan: to find out where she was being held, the accusations against her, and the status of her case.

I DIDN
'
T WANT TO STAY
in my apartment alone, so I called one of the two other people in Damascus who were still talking to me—amazing how quickly friends and colleagues had disappeared—and the only one who had nothing else to do. During the day Rana came over, but her parents expected her home at night: she had her teaching job, studies, and her married sister had recently had a baby, a sweet little boy she adored. So Kuki agreed to come and stay at night. When I asked if he had time in his schedule, he made the obvious point that “refugees don't have schedules.” Plus he was currently living with two aunts and a bunch of small cousins, so was glad of an excuse to get out. Just for a few nights, I said, until I was sure the stranger next door wasn't coming back for me.

“That won't happen,” said Kuki confidently, sipping the tumbler of wine I had poured him. His presence was a comfort and a distraction. He was self-absorbed, suffering from a keen awareness of his wasted youth. He had lost the past
five years (“the five
best
years”) and plenty of people who mattered in his life—relatives and friends kidnapped or murdered. I had been with him the day his aunt phoned to tell him a car bomb had gone off outside his parents' house in an upscale neighbourhood of Baghdad, blowing out the front door and killing the neighbour; he'd collapsed into a ball, expressing guilt at not being there to share their fate. No problem of mine could he take particularly seriously.

A heat wave was sweeping Damascus; a hot wind, stifling and oppressive. I pulled two mattresses from the bedroom into the living room, positioning them beneath the air-conditioning unit. The living room was musty, a tapestry of a hunting scene against one wall, an oil painting of a landscape, two ancient sofas that gave up clouds of dust when sat upon. Someone had once taken the trouble to make the place a home but that was long ago.

Kuki had majored in French in university but watched a lot of American movies. It was from movies, and from rap, that he had learned English. He could riff on 50 Cent, see deeper meaning in the lyrics. Sometimes he asked me to parse confounding lines. Now he told me he had renewed his residency permit in Syria with the assistance of an older Syrian actor who had influence. “He wants to help me,” Kuki said.

“Yeah, he wants to
help
you. Is he good-looking?”

He smirked. “I have a boyfriend.” He was still with the American from the Midwest whom he'd met through a website. “How are things with
your
man?” He often asked about my relationship, as if I had some secret formula for relationship longevity.

“We broke up, I think.”

He looked shocked. A lot had been riding, apparently, on me serving as a successful example of couples who manage to make a long-distance relationship work.

“When?”

“Officially?” It had happened in the days before. Or years before. “We talked on the phone. I couldn't say much.” You can't ask someone to be there for you when you've not been there for them. And you can't ask them to wait just because the timing is bad. “We couldn't talk very long—the phone line.”

I breathed hard, stifling emotion. There wasn't time for weakness now, I told myself. There was so much to be upset about that it would be easy to let the current pull me under. But it felt like the last rope snapping, the final anchor to my old life, to the person I used to be.

I did not of course consider whether my emotional response to my personal trouble offered insight into Ahlam's response to her world falling apart: events so devastating as to make my struggles paltry. Yet there was a passing resemblance, I think now, in our instincts to deny in order to keep moving, to move in order to keep denying. Was her response to unbearable loss—burying herself in the problems of others—the only way she knew to survive? I ask this question only now because in the moment we are creatures of instinct—fight or flight—while true revelation takes time, if it ever comes. And though she had always been like this, a problem-solver, a fixer, her work had become an obsession for her the way my work did for me in hard times.

I poured myself another glass of wine. It wasn't helping, but was worth a try.

“You could go back, work things out from there,” Kuki suggested, his mind still on my relationship.

I had been thinking of doing so before Ahlam disappeared—two and a half weeks ago. I realized I was measuring time in terms of before and after. “But I don't think it would make a difference,” I replied. “We're moving in different directions. It's not just this—not just being apart.”

I made Kuki tour the apartment, scout the perimeter, before we settled for the night, even though I knew he wasn't exactly the bodyguard type. No one was lying in wait; there was no one crouched behind a door or waiting to spring from an anteroom, but I felt as if there was. My judgement was off, my instincts, usually failsafe, were proving unreliable.

“What are you going to do when you get to New York?” I said when he returned, to change the subject. He had been called for interviews with the US Homeland Security, the next stage in his case for refugee resettlement. I considered it likely that he would be accepted: how many jihadists are both gay and out of the closet? Some could probably quote 50 Cent, but they couldn't dance to him.

I pulled sheets over the mattresses. No need for blankets. Even with the A/C running all night, it was hot.

“Maybe modeling, I don't know.” But the reality was he was twenty-five. Aging out. “If not, I can cut hair. I always cut the hair for all my aunts and my cousins.” His own shaggy mop gleamed with a new copper rinse.

He looked at my hair. My bangs were long and unkempt. Reaching out a hand, he tousled them and said, “I have scissors. Let me take care of that.”

“Thank you,” I said, moved in a way I could not explain.

He slept on the mattress next to mine, with his back to me. Listening to his reassuring, even breathing, I stayed up long into the night.

By the next afternoon Kuki was restless. He paced around. Checked his phone. Said he had heard about a party. We should go. I was waiting for Hamid to call, landline to landline, and in the meantime struggling with aimlessness, unsure what to do next.

“Come on, blondie. What else do you have to do? You can't stay here all the time. There might be important people there.” Adding, portentously, “People who could help you find Ahlam.”

On the face of it, it was a lie. But I didn't want to be alone. And maybe, by staying in, I would miss my chance to do something. I had often found answers to my questions by simply going everywhere, talking to everyone. As a journalist, you never knew where you'd catch a break.

That evening Kuki sat me on a chair, placed a glass of wine in my hand, and trimmed the strands that hung in front of my eyes, with utmost care.

I stood up and brushed myself off. He held up a mirror. “Looks good,” I said. And it did.

I was wearing the same jeans I usually wore. “Not that,” he said. “It's a party.” He dug around in my suitcase for my one and only decent black dress, which could be hung in the steam from a shower and still do the job, and held it up. “This.”

The party was on the rooftop of a fancy hotel, women dancing provocatively in the open air, men in tight black shirts who smelled like an explosion at a cologne factory. A society columnist for a local Damascus rag wanted to take our photograph but I bowed out—unimaginable, in these
circumstances, to be seen out on the town, to have my face and name in print. Kuki, naturally, absorbed the limelight with élan.

While he hit the dance floor, wearing a T-shirt with his nickname on it, I talked to a Frenchman with leonine hair and a billowy white shirt, open at the neck, a caricature of the European intellectual. He looked like Bernard-Henri Lévy. He was in the business of prosthetic limbs—the market in the Middle East, he told me, was booming. He offered to buy me a cocktail but I declined. Then he made his hand into a pincer claw and directed it towards me: “Le Shark,” he called it. “Le Shark.”

I fled the Shark. The music was deafening, the crowd pressing in around me. I felt guilty for being here. In anguish I found a spot away from everyone else on the edge of the roof, where I could look out over the city. She was out there somewhere, I could feel it.
Where are you? Tell me where you are
.

The Royal Café, eight p.m.

I arrived there first. Punctuality—that I could do. This time Hamid didn't even bother to sit down. “Let's go,” he said. I plunked down change for the coffee that had yet to come.

Through an Iraqi friend I had tracked down one of Ahlam's “assistants,” who said he could put me in touch with Hamza. “Hamza's the one who always took care of the kids when Ahlam was out,” I had told Hamid. “Maybe he knows something.” We were meeting the two boys under the bridge near the university.

I followed him out to the street where he waved down a taxi.

“Can the boy be trusted?” Hamid asked.

“That I don't know.”

The streets by the university were dark. The occasional cluster of students, passing on the sidewalk, gusts of sudden laughter and impassioned discussion. We walked towards the bridge.

I recognized Hamza immediately: his white face visible in the darkness, the boiled-blue eyes. He and the other boy were anxious, whispering, their faces close to ours, explaining how everyone around Ahlam had scattered after her arrest. Her disappearance had exploded the fragile world she had created, sending the survivors running for cover. They had thrown away their SIM cards, changed phone numbers, found new places to stay. Her apartment had been searched the day of her arrest. Agents had searched the classrooms too. All the books had been taken. I imagined the secret police puzzling over children's textbooks, trying to decode sinister messages. “The monkey lives in the jungle.” The line Ahlam's daughter had taught me from her lesson book. “The monkey lives in the jungle,” they would mutter to themselves, asking what it meant.

Hamza said the children were staying with him, that they were fine. But where? I asked. He would say no more, but showed me pictures of them on his phone. I was uneasy. I couldn't tell if they were recent since the children were both wearing the same track suits they had received in the winter, as presents for Eid. The pictures could have been taken long ago.

“What about Salaam?” I asked. Ahlam's brother.

“He is talking to the mukhabarat. Trying to get her released. Offering money.”

“What do you think?” I asked Hamid after they had left. He had kept his own counsel while speaking to them, his face a mask. Now he let it slide.

“I don't trust them.”

Two nights later we went to meet Hamid's Syrian contact. He reminded me of a movie-star cop: early thirties, handsome and square-jawed, picket-fence teeth, full of wisecracks. He was in his office answering phone calls when we arrived.

He shook my hand vigorously. “I'm Osama,” he said, grinning broadly. “Osama bin Laden.”

In his professional life “Osama” was a real-estate agent. His office resembled a doctor's waiting room, chairs stationed against the walls. He pointed to a woman who had just walked in the door. She wore pancake makeup, skintight jeans and a camouflage-patterned shirt, her eyebrows tweezed into a quizzical arc. “She's an Iraqi terrorist,” he said, winking. “Just out of Guantánamo.”

Hamid and I took seats while he answered another phone call. Osama's two young assistants greeted us. One of them immediately brought glasses of tea; the other brought over a month-old white kitten that he placed in my lap. At first it mewed as I petted its fur, and then curled up and fell asleep. Under my hand I could feel its rapid heartbeat. It was strangely comforting to comfort another being.

After Osama hung up, he and Hamid chatted briefly. Hamid filled him in on the man who had tried to break into my apartment. Osama's eyebrows shot up.

“You want me to take care of him?” he asked. This time he was serious.

No, no. That did not seem like a good idea. I could see that going very wrong. Nor was it a good idea to talk about Ahlam in a packed office with strangers coming and going and curious assistants listening in. After Osama had cleared away some paperwork and answered another phone call (“The President of Iran,” he informed me, covering the phone with his hand), we walked outside to talk in his car. He agreed to look into the case of “the missing woman.”

It was a week before Osama called back. We went to see him at his home, a simple but spacious apartment, lovingly decorated. He had a pretty blonde wife and two small children, a boy and a girl, who were taking lessons in English. They each sat on opposite arms of my chair, eager to practise. The boy, who was seven or eight, pointed at his older sister. “She's a donkey,” he said, in a fit of giggles.

“That's a very bad word,” I said. “You can't say that word.”

“She's a donkey!” he said, almost falling off the chair he was laughing so hard.

Hamid was talking to Osama on the sofa. When we left he filled me in. According to Osama's contact inside the military-security establishment, who said he had read Ahlam's file, she stood accused of giving information to reporters. This part was obviously true. The rest of it was harder to believe. She was charged with running guns to Iraqi militias and operating a human smuggling ring. The contact said the atmosphere around the case was serious. “Don't go near it,” he said.

We also learned where Ahlam was being held: at Douma Prison, on the outskirts of Damascus, just walking distance from the UNHCR office.