A Disappearance in Damascus (25 page)

“
I HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU,
” said Rana. She was wearing all red today. Bright as a strawberry. We were at our designated meeting place in the square outside the Umayyad Mosque in the Old City. I took off my sunglasses to greet her. The square was flush with sunshine, with tourists, pigeons, and hundreds of Iranians on pilgrimage. One of the pilgrims had his video camera trained on the pretty Syrian girls walking past. Not very pious, I thought.

“What surprise?”

She looked excited, in her typical understated way. “We are going to the hammam.”

I had long been talking about going to one of the public baths. There had never been time. I had always been working, or thinking about work. It was strange how little any of that mattered anymore.

Rana, however, was on a mission to turn me back into a human being. She had taken me shopping the day before.
“You can't only wear black,” she said. She hated black. Never wore it. She was always a festival of colour.

“I actually
like
wearing black,” I said. “Black goes with everything. It goes with black.”

She took me to a French shop in Sha'alan and insisted I try on something
not
black. I left with a turquoise knit shirt that she approved of, and a pale blue dress the colour of the sky at dawn. In another week I had to leave. The flight had been booked out of Jordan months ago and my visa was set to expire. The only consolation was that I had exhausted everything I could do here for Ahlam so must see what could be done for her from the outside.

I followed Rana around behind the mosque, away from the crowds. She took me towards an obscure doorway that I never would have found on my own.

One day a week the hammam was reserved for women. In the reception area we paid the small fee and undressed, hanging our clothes on pegs on the wall. Beneath her red headscarf Rana had a chin-length curly bob. With her low, throaty voice, she looked and sounded like a jazz singer in 1930s Paris.

I hung up my jeans, then my shirt. “All my clothes?” I asked. “Everything?” I took my time, unsure of how to do this, feeling out of my element. The receptionist had handed each of us a shard of olive oil soap and a towel not much bigger than a napkin. I tried various methods of arranging the tiny towel around myself, each of which involved sacrificing something else. Passing through the wooden door into the baths, a thick cloud of steam enveloped us. Warmth and water, acres of white marble. Hot water running from taps
onto the floor, bowls with which to douse yourself. Young and old women mixed, the body's timeline of blossom and decay. An old woman with long hair in a thin white braid overturned a bowl and begun drumming, singing a folk song as her grandbabies tottered around her. I was struck, not for the first time, by how much more comfortable Muslim women are with their bodies than we are in the West.

After an hour, my skin had softened and I began to feel lighter. As I sat there, blanketed in steam, pouring hot water over my back, a large woman with thick arms lumbered in. She wore a cotton housedress over strong bare legs. “Go with her,” said Rana, as the woman seized me by the shoulders.

She pulled me into a side room, indicating a table where I should lie down. I lay down on my stomach while she gave me the sort of massage that felt like a beating. Pounding my arms, my shoulders, my back, my legs. So hard it must have left bruises. When she deigned to release me, I stumbled back into the main chamber, aware that I hadn't thought of a single one of my problems during the massage.

“How was it?” Rana asked, pouring a bowl of hot water over her back.

“I got out alive,” I said. “Your turn now.”

When the masseuse came back with Rana, it was my turn again. This time I was made to lie down on the marble floor in front of everyone and with an abrasive mitt the woman scraped the entire outer layer of skin off my body, treating me like a pot that had burned on the stove. Rana started laughing.

“Why are you laughing?”

“You're so dirty.”

“It only looks that way because I'm so pale otherwise,” I protested. “The dirt shows.” The dark matter. The dark thoughts, the bad energy, sloughed off me. I should have come here long ago.

I still had no news of Ahlam's children, or the whereabouts of Salaam, but on my third to last evening in Damascus a tiny window opened in the fortress. A glimpse, however shadowy, of how things might have come to pass.

That night I was invited to the home of a man who was famous among the expat crowd. A tall handsome theatre director who taught Arabic to foreigners, he could also have taught the art of cool. Late forties, with a rope of coiled hair pulled back in a Rasta-like ponytail, he walked with a natural grace and seemed always to have an arm draped around one or more beautiful women. Mazen was also an excellent cook—someone who could disappear into his kitchen at the arrival of unexpected guests and emerge moments later with a feast.

It was a Thursday night—his weekly salon. I had been to one such gathering last year, after the opening ceremony for Ahlam's school when the tribe of Westerners in attendance, wishing to drink beer, had migrated here.

Like Ahlam, our host was the sort of person who knew everyone. They had known one another, of course, and it was for that reason that I sought him out that night. He had spent several years in a Syrian prison in the 1980s, the time of the Muslim Brotherhood uprisings and the vicious crackdown that followed, when he was falsely accused of being a communist.

“Prison cured me of politics,” Mazen told me. Now he lived for the moment. He threw the best parties in all of Damascus. In the prison kitchen he had learned to cook for a crowd.

A book-filled bohemian house, world beats on the stereo, the place jammed with anthropologists and journalists and aid workers. Bottles arrived in brown paper bags, supplemented by our host's extensive liquor cabinet. He had an open-door policy—anyone was welcome at any time, the locals mixing with the foreigners. That way, according to the theory he outlined to me, he prevented suspicions from arising. If anyone wondered what he was up to, why people were coming and going at all hours, they were welcome to come over and join in.

Around midnight I was sitting alone at the table in his outdoor courtyard, vines trailing up the walls, drinking a third glass of wine and smoking apple tobacco from a water pipe. The evening air was cool, but I couldn't bear to be around so many people, making conversation.

A woman, young and pretty, came outside to introduce herself, having had me pointed out to her by our host. It turned out she was the Syrian wife of the British photographer I had met at the café, the one who had taken to sending himself extracts from medical websites about “elephantiasis of the testicles and the like” after she had been ordered to spy on him.

“You knew Ahlam, right?” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the music.

I nodded, exhaling a plume of smoke. She said she had heard about the arrest, and also the reasons why.

“Why?” I asked.

“For smuggling guns to Iraqi militias and human trafficking.” She uttered the charges, which I had heard earlier, like a fact. Accusations that were laughable but extremely dangerous: rumours have an afterlife because rumour is soon treated as fact and becomes fact through repetition.

“Who,” I asked, “told you that?”

“Mona,” she said.

“Mona.” It took a moment to register, pieces falling into place. Mona, in her belted raincoat, her gypsy hair and aura of permanent discontent. The unlikely bleeding heart. I had forgotten all about Mona. Had she been, all along, a spy?

Stunned, I envisioned various scenarios, all of which overlapped and intertwined like the vines snaking up the walls of the courtyard where I sat.

Scenario One: as a Syrian fixer, Mona would have to report to the Ministry of Information. Unlike Ahlam, who as an Iraqi worked unofficially, Mona would have to tell the Ministry every movement of her clients. Perhaps she had gained permission to work as a fixer in exchange for a little espionage on the side (Abu Yusuf's offer to Ahlam rang again in my mind), tracking Ahlam all along. Perhaps she had come up with the charges just to bolster her worth as an informant.

Scenario Two: more generously, perhaps, before or after Ahlam's arrest, she had been called in for questioning by intelligence and fed these lies, which she later repeated. Spreading the word, a smear campaign: equally effective in shutting Ahlam down.

Scenario Three: seeing Ahlam as a rival—“She wanted to be in the picture,” Ahlam's friend Tarek had said, to be the fixer everyone wanted—she set out to destroy her main
competition. Even if Ahlam did get out, with such charges following her, no journalist would go near her again.

I felt a rage so hot and fierce it had a cleansing force. “That's bullshit,” I told the woman, “and you should know it. If Ahlam was involved in human smuggling, don't you think she would have smuggled herself and her children out first? And she hated the militias. They destroyed everything.”

The woman turned and went back to the party. I picked up the water pipe, drawing on it until the coals glowed red. Was Mona involved? If so, how?

PART THREE

“
WE
'
RE HAVING A MEETING,
” Leila told the other women in the cell. It was what she and Ahlam always said when the two of them squeezed into the bathroom stall after midnight to share a smoke, when the warden had left.

“You'll be caught,” warned one of their new cellmates, “and we will all be punished because of you.”

“They won't catch us,” said Leila, smiling as she twirled the cigarette between her fingers. “They
gave
it to us.”

Where the old guard, Sadiq, was careful only to hold the cigarettes to their lips, the younger guards were less wary, handing out cigarettes liberally, especially when Leila asked. The guards had also given them lighters, one of which had fuel but no flint, the other flint but no fuel, so they used the one to light the other, and otherwise hid them on the far side of the shelf so the warden would not find out and punish the guards.

In the bathroom they shared the cigarette back and forth, discussing their fates. Leila's fiancé was an underworld character who had come up with a fantastical scheme
to sell uranium to the Israelis. One night when the two of them were partying at a hotel room in Jordan he'd dialled the Israeli embassy or consulate—Leila couldn't remember much, she was stoned out of her mind—and put her on the phone, telling her to make an appointment. The next day she returned to Damascus. Syrian agents, alerted by Jordanian intelligence, rousted her from her bed—she had been here ever since, awaiting trial for the past six months.

Like Leila, Ahlam had no idea when she would get out. After hearing Salaam's voice, smelling the cologne that lingered on his clothing, she pounded her own face in grief. The next day she was again brought to the interrogation room. This time Abu Yusuf had been replaced by a new interrogator who removed her blindfold and handcuffs. He was a dandy in a pink shirt with dyed black hair; a man of fifty who wanted to be twenty. He didn't lay a hand on her, only wanted her to answer a list of questions, most of which concerned Iraq. In particular he wanted to know whether she had heard any senior officers of the US military threatening to attack Syria. That, then, was the motivating fear: everything that had happened to her stemmed from it.

She answered his questions, and was about to do as instructed and put her thumbprint to the bottom of her testimony, then stopped and looked at him.

“What is it?” the dandy asked.

“I have only one question.”

“What's that?”

“Why am I here?”

He was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “Because you're not cooperating with the officer.” Captain Abu Yusuf. Whose career aspirations were going down the drain.

A guard came to take her back to the cell. “What are the charges against her?” the guard asked the interrogator. She was moved that he seemed to have spoken up for her.

“None of your business,” he said, not looking up from his report.

She hadn't seen her brother again. She had asked the guards about Salaam, but they figured he was in another sector of the prison that they did not enter.

Dropping the cigarette into the squat toilet, Leila sprayed the air with a bottle of perfume a guard had given her. They squeezed back out of the bathroom and rejoined the women who now shared their cell.

Along with a surly Kurd, who was there for forty days, there were many other women coming and going from the same four-by-four metres that Leila patrolled with her endless pacing. All the prisoners had been arrested for stupid reasons. A Libyan woman of twenty-five who had run away to marry her Egyptian boyfriend, whose parents had sent word to the Libyan embassy in Damascus to round her up. Another Libyan had fled a husband who was demanding her back. A Palestinian whose son had been caught illegally selling gasoline ration vouchers; her husband had also been jailed for their son's crime.

Two Syrian women, Salafis who followed a strict, conservative version of Sunni Islam that sought an Islamic state, were the only ones who veiled their faces. The older woman had a husband imprisoned in Guantánamo, arrested by the Americans in Pakistan for involvement with al-Qaeda. Trying to reach her husband, whom she hadn't heard from in three years, she had enlisted the younger one to help her write to her lawyer in London, since she didn't know how to
use email. The two of them had been accused of conspiring with their lawyer, who was Jewish. In fact, had their interrogators paid the least attention, they might have discovered that the women knew quite a bit about al-Qaeda's operations in Syria—operations that would soon transform all of Syria, and the region, as al-Qaeda alternatively broke from or joined the Islamic State.

Then there were the two wives of a man from Aleppo. The first wife, married off at the age of twelve, very pretty and very probably insane, had been arrested for singing a comic ditty mocking President Bashar. The second wife, very fat, was arrested for not turning in the first; she sat in a heap on the floor and cried that her brothers would kill her when she got out.

The two wives talked competitively about the costumes they wore for their husband, the dances they performed for him, since they split the nights. What infuriated the first wife most was not the fact of being in jail, nor even having her feet beaten during interrogations until they were so swollen that she could no longer wear shoes, but that the agents who searched her home had ransacked her teddy bear collection. She spent her time singing and dancing and trying to seduce the guards in exchange for cigarettes. One night she shouted and pounded the cell door so hard that the guards threw an entire pack through the slat and slammed it closed. Whenever any of the women prayed—and the Salafi women were usually praying—she mocked them. “You are just praying now because you're in trouble. If you weren't in trouble you would forget God!”

Four Ethiopian girls arrived, housemaids who had run away from their employers in Lebanon. They had been
caught with false passports in Syria. With them were captured several Iraqi men who had been trying to have themselves smuggled to Turkey in hope of making it to Greece and jobs in Europe. The Ethiopian girls were eventually sent to an immigration centre for deportation, while the Iraqis were sent to the men's cell next door, from which Ahlam heard the most terrible cries.

Twice a day the male prisoners from the cell next door were shuffled in small groups into the hallway outside the cells to use the bathroom, since unlike the women they did not have a toilet. Every time, they were beaten with sticks and strips of rubber tire along the way. With the women the guards could be kind, playing the music of Fairuz for them first thing in the morning, even letting them watch an American movie on a TV they set up in front of the cell door, sneaking them food or cigarettes. But to the men the guards showed no mercy.

While being beaten the men were forced to repeat, again and again, “Jail is a school to teach us how to behave.” And when the guards were bored, they went into the men's cell and randomly whipped the prisoners.

One day a batch of male prisoners arrived from Aleppo. They had been arrested for the crime of having tattoos. The oldest was no more than twenty-five, the youngest barely in his teens. They were beaten upon arrival, ten strokes each. “We must teach you to be real Arab men and not to defile your bodies,” they were told.

One of the guards who often gave Ahlam cigarettes handed his blood-spattered shirt to the women to rinse under the thin shower in their bathroom, before the blood could set. He showed Ahlam his hands, how the skin had
blistered from all the beatings he had delivered.

“How can you do this work?” Ahlam asked him. “These men are human beings.”

“Listen to me,” he told her. He was angry. “I know not everyone in this jail deserves to be here, but what can I do? I'm just a guard.” He had taken the job because he had no education—even the most educated guard had not completed the sixth grade—and the salary of two hundred dollars a month fed and housed his family. If he wanted to quit, he would have to bribe someone and get a medical report to prove he could not finish his commitment. “You have to serve for twenty years.”

Another of the guards, the youngest of all, refused to beat a thin old man who was obviously ill. Instead he slipped the old man food and allowed him to take showers in the heat of summer. When the warden found out, he beat the guard in front of the old man. From the slit beneath the door of her cell, Ahlam could hear blow follow blow.

After midnight, Leila talked to the men in the neighbouring cell through the heating pipe along the back wall, asking how their day was or what they'd had for lunch. There were thirty men in a cell the same size as theirs. They had to sleep in shifts, legs to head, the others standing until they changed places.

It was a mystery what was happening in the far cell on the other side of the men's. This was known as the “al-Qaeda cell,” for the fifteen or so men who had been arrested as part of a crackdown designed to please the Americans. Ahlam already knew that Syria was cooperating with the US to prove they were coming down on al-Qaeda, though the
cooperation went much further than she knew. Among the fifty-four countries involved with a top-secret CIA program that kidnapped and “extraordinarily rendered” terrorist suspects to be tortured abroad after 9/11, Syria, along with Jordan and Egypt, was one of the most common destinations.
³⁵

The prisoners in the al-Qaeda cell had been there for a long time—a year and a half according to the guards, who had strict orders not to go near them. But in all that time, the guards had heard no evidence against them.

The only time Ahlam saw anyone from the al-Qaeda cell was when those prisoners went on a hunger strike. One of them lost consciousness and a doctor was summoned. She heard him being carried into the corridor outside the cells. She pressed her eye to the small hole by the slat where the welding had chipped away. She could just make out a man who appeared to be in his fifties, and heard him talking weakly to the doctor in the hallway. “I have four children,” the man was saying. “I fled Iraq to give them a secure life. I was targeted down there, I had to flee my house, and now they have arrested me because I have money. Is that a crime?” He began to cry. “Nobody knows where I am, not my children, not my wife, nobody.”

It reminded Ahlam of what Abu Yusuf had said the last time he spoke to her. “You can stay here for years,” were his final words, “and nobody will know where you are.”

Before prison, Ahlam had dreamed of having forty-eight hours in a day: time to rest, to eat, to finish the tasks she had set herself. Now time stretched out as it had not done before. Never, with the exception of her kidnapping in Iraq, had she had nothing to do but wait. Her back ached from sleeping on the
cement floor. The thin blankets were infested with bed bugs. She pleaded with the guards for medication to help her sleep through the pain but it made her dizzy so she stopped taking it. She tried to remember how to do yoga. Stretching up and over, up and over, breathing from the stomach. The other women laughed, all except Leila, who joined her. Leila practised yoga. She was always active, pacing back and forth for hours, or nervously toying with the stud in her tongue.

One day a wealthy woman arrived wearing tight capri pants and a low-cut blouse. Brought to the cell, still asking after the gold jewellery that had been confiscated upon her arrest, she demanded to know where to find the air-conditioning unit. Ahlam pointed to the fan high up in the wall, where the faint hints of daylight came through. “That is our air conditioner,” she said.

The rich, Ahlam deduced, usually landed in jail because they had offended someone in government or refused to pay off a high official. They were allowed special privileges: to walk around the hallways, to smoke as they pleased, to have their own food delivered to their cells. One of the male prisoners, the guards told her, had been caught with $70,000 in cash at Damascus airport. After he arrived, life became better for everyone.

At night the wealthy prisoner ordered takeout and ate at a table in the corridor with the guards: fried chicken with fries, pizza, good bread with meat or zaatar. He always gave his leftovers to the women. He also bought the women soap, shampoo, sanitary products to replace the strips of old cloth the guards had given them, which they had been forced to wash and reuse. He provided cigarettes for the guards to dispense. The male prisoners never got the leftovers but
were given tomatoes and onions to supplement their prison meals and enough cigarettes that they were able to share one among four of them twice a day.

The old guard, Sadiq, had already given Ahlam a contraband toothbrush, though, ever cautious, he worried that any such item might be used for a suicide. One day, Ahlam saw blood on the clothes and hands of the guards. An elderly doctor who had been held in solitary confinement for three months had slashed his wrists with a shard of glass from his spectacles. As punishment for not preventing the man's death, the guards were forced to stay in the prison for ten days without leave.

The wealthy prisoner, when he heard that the women had no change of clothes, bought them three robes in different sizes that they could put on while they hung their laundry to dry from the shelf. Ahlam had not worn new garments since her son died, but she began wearing one of the robes at the urging of the Salafi woman whose husband was imprisoned in Guantánamo. “It's been two years,” the woman told her kindly. “It is time to stop mourning.”

Whenever chicken was served from the rich man's leftovers, a cat and her kitten came to the opening high in the cell, where the fan was, and Ahlam threw them scraps. The fan roared and clattered, keeping everyone awake at night. When the guards gave them a plastic broom to clean the cell, she or Leila began jamming the broomstick into the blades of the fan in order to sleep.