He was the one person who had believed in her without reservation. “With him,” she told me, “I felt like I had all the power in the world. He taught me to be gentle, to have a good heart, but in a dangerous situation not to be afraid. He taught me to be wild when necessary.” After his death she stopped eating and was soon so thin that people began warning her mother that she would join her father in the grave. But she marshalled her strength and completed her studies; it was what he would have wanted. She brought her diploma to his graveside. “Here it is,” she told him, holding it out to the air.
She had been the first girl from the village to finish high school and the first, man or woman, to earn a university degree. Four other girls from the village later followed her to the university. “What’s so great about Ahlam?” parents began asking themselves. “Our daughter is just as good as she is.” What had been taboo was now a status symbol. When American soldiers later came to the village, they were struck by how educated all the girls were.
But instead of the brilliant career her father had predicted, Ahlam went straight from university to the family farm. The war with Iran had shattered the economies of both countries. Sanctions were about to start, barbed wire around the country’s trade that would have devastating consequences for the newly educated middle class. Her mother, ill since the death of her father, was unable to manage alone. Ahlam, as the only unmarried daughter—even her youngest sister, Roqayah, or Tutu, as she was called, had married by then—was the one to whom the duty fell.
The scent of green fields at dawn would always remind her of her father. It was him she would think of as she rose from her bed at first light, as she took on the labour of tending their orchards and fields. She had known nothing until then about back-breaking farm work.
Slowly, watching the other girls, who laughed at her clumsiness but were eager to teach her, she learned to scythe the hay and load it onto the back of the donkey. Awkwardly, but growing in physical strength, she shimmied up the date palms to pick the golden fruit. Neighbours came to watch. “Look at the scholar!” they gloated. “A lot of good your education has done you. What a waste of time.”
Her tongue was as sharp as the scythe that cut her untrained fingers. “Education is a weapon!” she shot back, echoing her father’s words. “I’ll use it when I need it.”
“And that,” she told me, smiling broadly, “is what I did.”
—
She dreamed of becoming a flight attendant and seeing the world. But she couldn’t afford the bribes for such a career, and wouldn’t have been hired anyway: a country girl with no connections who wasn’t about to sleep her way into a job. She thought of working at an embassy abroad, though the same contraventions applied. But when the world came to Iraq she could meet it. In the years between university and marriage, eager to give her mind something to do, she took English classes at the British Council in Baghdad.
That stopped when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Everything stopped and went into reverse. The people were told it was a revolution in Kuwait, not an invasion. When a friend burst into her house to tell her about the revolution she went to turn on the radio. There was no news, no signal, no BBC Arabic, nothing but static. Then, suddenly, the markets were filled with looted Kuwaiti air-conditioning units and Kuwaiti furniture. A cousin returned from the war with hair that had turned completely white. People ran out to buy all the food they could find because they feared another war was coming.
I had been in the region during that war—I was a foreign student taking Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thinking he had a green light from the United States. He did not. Throughout the Gulf War that followed, when his Scud missiles sputtered towards Tel Aviv, I carted around the gas mask all students had been issued, sealing up the cracks of my dorm room with packing tape whenever the air-raid sirens sounded, waiting for the chemical weapons we feared would be deployed by Saddam Hussein. The campus was all but empty—everyone bunkering at home with family or having caught the first flight out—except for me and one other student who lived upstairs. Staring out of our gas masks, we watched the bombing of Baghdad on CNN as a series of flashes against green-glow night-vision cameras, the sound of our own breath roaring in our ears. When the war ended, and the news moved on to other stories, we returned to our studies and forgot Iraq.
But for Iraqis the international trade embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council from 1990 until 2003 was an extension of the battlefield, with ordinary people on the frontline. Hunger and disease swept the country. Corruption and smuggling became normal, even essential, laying the foundations of the mafias that would flourish after 2003 when the dictator and all restraints were gone.20 Where a schoolteacher’s salary had been US$1500 a month, it was suddenly worth $2—enough to buy a plate of eggs—so a stupid rich boy could now pass his classes without bothering to show up. Any crime could be cleared with a small payment to police, so only the poor and the political were jailed. As the state’s authority withered, people depended on family to survive. Ahlam learned to roll cigarettes in newsprint. The mushrooms sprouting in her yard tasted like miracle food.
The sanctions were supposed to force Saddam Hussein to disclose the non-existent weapons of mass destruction and make reparation for the war against Kuwait, with the tacit goal of persuading Iraqis to rise up against him. But in fact they only crippled his opponents. “His people had everything they needed,” Ahlam said. Whatever they didn’t have, they took.
The riverfront of her father’s property had already been confiscated in 1983. Men with hard faces appeared one day and fenced off the land below their house. There was no question of negotiating. The men were armed. The land was for Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, a man named Sabawi, who wanted a country estate—during the Gulf War Sabawi became head of the secret police.
Southeast of the village, Saddam Hussein had taken more prime riverfront. His son Uday, known to the villagers for sending his men around the city to kidnap beautiful girls for him to rape, held parties there whenever his soccer team won a match. These parties, which the villagers could hear at night, were unabated by sanctions. “Here we were barely surviving,” Ahlam said, “and every time his team had a victory he had singers and dancing and feasts that could have fed our entire village for a week.”
Ahlam married in 1994 at the age of twenty-nine—very late for a traditional woman from a rural family. The only reason she married at all was because, at the already ancient age of twenty-eight, she had refused a doctor’s hand and announced to her mother that she wanted to do a master’s degree. “I saw the look in my mother’s eyes. She was so worried about me. She imagined I was going to be alone, my chance finished.” A curse, as her mother saw it, for a woman to be without a man.
So when an engineer some years older proposed, she gave him a choice. He knew she was educated, active in the community, had many male friends. She was not, like other women, bound to hearth and home. If he accepted that, and did not insist that she conform, she would marry him. If not, they should go their separate ways. He accepted, and only a small number of times—three that she could think of—did he bother with the thankless task of trying to control her.
A year later came their first son, Anas. Another son and a daughter followed, each two years apart. They were hungry but they still had enough land to grow their own food. In the poorer south of the country—undeveloped, and punished for backing a failed Shia uprising against Saddam Hussein by having their historic marshlands drained—people were moving to Baghdad in search of work.
The year after she married she went with her husband to visit a friend of his who lived in Saddam City, a Shia slum in Baghdad, since renamed Sadr City. What she saw there shocked her. People lived in shelters built from stacks of empty oil drums. Their floor was a sheet on the ground. “They lived in the open. A gust of wind could blow down their homes. How could they send their children to school?” Education was
free but they had to buy uniforms—impossible. And the kids had to earn. Girls and boys were set to manual labour from the age of five or six; their mothers and fathers joined the Fedayeen Saddam militia in exchange for a salary. “Nobody cared about their poverty. Later they were among the main looters.”
Her older brother Samir had finished high school behind Ahlam, since during the war with Iran their father had ordered him to fail his exams so he wouldn’t graduate only to die on the battlefield. Samir went on to do a PhD in economics, though the most lucrative part of his education was learning English. He began working as a driver and fixer for foreign journalists, employing the charm and resiliency that was a family trait. It was Samir who first introduced Ahlam to the correspondents who came to report on the sanctions. The first one she worked with was Stephen Glain, an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Glain met Samir for the first time in 1999. He had been directed to the Al Rashid Hotel, a base for international reporters made famous during the First Gulf War as the headquarters for CNN. He was instantly mobbed by the fixers, drivers, translators and prostitutes desperate for foreign currency.
A scrum of men surrounded me as I disembarked from the GMC I’d hired for the fourteen-hour drive to Baghdad from Amman. I waved them off and they reluctantly parted to reveal Samir…in faded khaki pants and a polo shirt. He was standing ram-rod straight as he strolled over and casually extended his hand.
“Welcome to Iraq,” he said. “May I be of assistance during your stay?”
There wasn’t a trace of servility in his voice. I liked him immediately.
“You’re hired,” I said.21
Glain’s impression was deepened when he asked Samir his opinion of a staged patriotic event they had attended. “That?” Samir told Glain. “Fuck.” At a time when almost no one dared criticize the regime, Samir had named his two dogs Uday and Husay, after the dictator’s sons. He invited Glain to dinner at his home, but suggested they go fishing beforehand.
I asked him what kind of reel he used.
“Reel?”
I nodded. “What kind of rod and reel do you use when you fish?”
[…] Samir then explained that he and his brothers catch fish by extending a metal wire into the Tigris River and electrocuting it with a car battery.
“That’s not very sporting,” I said.
Samir looked at me as if he was appraising the village idiot.
“We don’t want sport,” he said. “We want fish.”
The fishing trip was unsuccessful but Glain had a wonderful dinner at the family house along the river. Ahlam was there, trying to bake bread in a clay oven, giggling every time she burned herself. She told him that after finishing university she never thought she’d have to bake bread like her mother and grandmother.
Samir had already begun to subcontract work to Ahlam, at first just the translation of documents. Sometimes she even washed the journalists’ laundry. As more reporters came, too many for Samir to handle alone, he put his economics training to work. Perfecting the bait-and-switch, he would take one of them around for a while, then pass him off to Ahlam so he could work with another. It was through Samir that Ahlam met people like Khaled Oweis, the Reuters journalist who became the news service’s bureau chief in Damascus and later recommended Ahlam to correspondents there.
At first, Ahlam told me, she was shy about working with strangers. “Get over it,” Samir said. She had no choice: she had a family to support, a husband with a talent for money-losing ventures. And besides, she was good at this, good at connecting this person to that person in pursuit of a story, good at dealing with all kinds of situations, crazy or sane. A natural fixer.
Chapter 6
FRIENDSHIP
HOW DO FRIENDSHIPS EVOLVE? In part through shared experience, intense experiences of the sort Ahlam and I encountered in Damascus. Shared risk forges strong bonds.
We began talking in shorthand, inside jokes, the private language that develops from esoteric knowledge, as we walked down dusty alleyways, stared at by curious children, buzzed by rickety motorcycle carts and the occasional Pepsi truck, the scent of roast peanuts and diesel in the air. Once, when I asked Ahlam whether she felt safe here in Little Baghdad, she said curtly, “Nobody’s safe here,” but when we were working together it seemed as if nothing could harm us. It was as if we were encased in a cocoon of mutual trust. There was no other way to work here. And there was no one else who knew exactly what it was like to do this work, no one who understood completely what it was we did.
Ahlam and I were very different. We had sprung from different soil, from civilizations that were said to “clash,” but we were both outsiders to our own cultures. A writer usually is, and the unusual life she had led set her apart.
Maybe we were similar, too, in ways I couldn’t have foreseen. She was older than me, but both of us had grown up in communities that told us who we were going to be and had managed to rebel. Both of us came from large families—I’m the eldest of eight—from small towns (mine on the outskirts of Vancouver, hers of Baghdad) where what we should do or should want were burdens we had worked hard to shrug off. We had both made it out through education. She had the help of her father against the barrier of culture; I had the help of my schooling against the barrier of my father.
When Ahlam told me of learning to swim, fighting the current, thrashing not to drown, I remembered an event that took place when I was about the same age, twelve or eleven. We were at a lake in the Pacific Northwest on a family vacation. My father had been shoving my younger brothers into the water from a boat, perhaps our new boat—he, too, was a self-made man who had become well-to-do—and whenever they scrambled out, he threw them in again, laughing as they sputtered and choked. I was sitting behind him, watching him torment my brothers. It was nothing new, it was how he always behaved, always the bully. But that day was different. That day some demon made me want to let him see what it was like. He was leaning over the edge of the boat precariously. I stood up, placed my hand on his back, and pushed. I still recall the feel of his back, the give as he fell into the lake, my astonishment at my part in it, that it had actually worked. Soaking wet and furious, he hauled himself out and turned on me, pushing me into the water and holding me under. I fought to breathe, sinking under, over and over again, his hand on my head holding me down.
A year later I was sent to private school, an attempt to reform me that turned out to be a saving grace. Since I was a good student, which might well have been lost on the mediocre school my brothers attended, there was an assumption on the part of my teachers and peers that I would go on to bigger things. Ahlam and I both left behind the world we knew for educations that forever put a distance between where we had come from and where we were going. We learned early to rely on ourselves.
And though we were both well-read, we were also drawn to empirical experience, to the turmoil of the tangible world. For me, in order to bear witness to it; for her, I think, to solve it.
Neither of us liked being told what to do either, a mentality that is characteristic of freelancers who prefer to go their own way, follow their own stories, which is to say their own minds. We shared a disregard for convention and other people’s ideas of what it meant to “behave ourselves,” which is usually code for “shut up.” You could see it in her smoking, something women in her society didn’t do (or if they did, it was in secret), and in the way she talked to men as equals, ordering them around when necessary, cajoling them otherwise. Shouting at the younger men if they were unruly, mocking them with an ironic word, keeping them in line. I enjoyed watching her conduct herself with such finesse and good humour, managing the refugees who treated her apartment as a gathering place, wanting her to resolve their life problems as if this were the same village council she had watched her father run and she were now the patriarch. And we both liked to immerse ourselves in the lives of other people, gripped by the human drama, though she had lived that drama in ways I couldn’t even begin to
share.
It is possible, even probable, that our similarities blinded me to the vast chasm of our differences. For I had come here by choice. I chose where I went and when I left. “Because of your passport,” an Iraqi man had said to me, pointing out the irreconcilable difference between him and me, “you can go anywhere.”
I had the status of a lucky birth in a lucky country at a lucky time for women, when I could carve out the life I wanted. I had a home to return to whether I appreciated it or not. If I didn’t like something, or the going got rough, or when I’d wrapped up my research, I could just leave. Though I often felt broke, a plane ticket on a credit card was not beyond my means, nor would my passport be turned away at customs. I had a foot in her world but one step could remove me from it; it couldn’t envelop me; I couldn’t fall far. Barring something extraordinary happening, there was too much holding me aloft.
The truth was that Ahlam was one of the people I was writing about, one of history’s casualties, a refugee from a war planned and executed by my culture; a person who, because of us, no longer belonged anywhere.
—
In the evenings I always landed back at my apartment. It was another life. At night I transcribed interviews, made notes and phone calls, read a biography of the English explorer Gertrude Bell, who famously drafted the previously non-existent borders of Iraq for the British after the First World War, defining the country where Ahlam was born.
One night Ahlam asked me if she could come over. The water had been off in her apartment for several days. She was longing to take a shower.
When she arrived I gave her a towel, soap, shampoo, and put on a kettle for tea. While she was in the shower I turned on the small television my landlord had left for me, watching Al Jazeera with the sound off. A flash of White House spokesman, his mouth opening and closing.
When she emerged, we sat on the pullout sofa, drinking tea while she let her hair dry. It fell halfway down her back. She held up a thick sheaf of it in one hand and looked at it critically.
A Disappearance in Damascus Page 7