A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  “I wish I had hair like that,” I said. Mine is fine and fair.

  “You know,” she said, “when I was a teenager I wanted to cut it off. It was down to my waist. So hot in the summer. But my family loved it so much.”

  Was I married? Ahlam asked. I told her the truth—no, not officially. Children? No. What does your boyfriend think of you going away all the time? I confessed that it was a strain. But I loved my work. It wasn’t about choosing one thing over the other; I had to work like I had to breathe.

  She agreed with me: the work gave life meaning, it was the essential. “I would have been just as happy if I had not got married,” she said, lighting a cigarette. She turned the subject back to me. “Your boyfriend misses you.”

  I reached for her cigarettes and shook one out. “Maybe that’s the problem,” I said.

  She looked at me sympathetically and waited for me to go on. I was hesitant to burden her with my concerns. The gradual demise of a long relationship that showed obvious signs of deterioration whenever I was in the field for too long, and nagged at me even as I ignored it, was petty by comparison to what she dealt with every day.

  “We have a nice apartment in Vancouver,” I said. “Small but nice. Near the beach. He’s a good person.” I described how he had ingeniously created an office for me from a series of bookshelves organized at right angles so as to carve out an extra room. “I sometimes think, if there’s an earthquake, I’ll be killed by falling books.”

  I described how we had met a dozen years ago, when we were still sorting out who we were. We took turns putting each other through university, all the way through graduate school. Until now, one of us had always been studying, the other working. We were different people now than when we had met, arguably better people, but not the same.

  “What’s he like?” she asked.

  “Intelligent. Good-looking. Driven. Works in technology. Sometimes in Silicon Valley. Where they work with computers, that sort of thing.” I couldn’t be sure she had heard of Silicon Valley. “He can explain string theory, the Grand Unified Theory. Physics.” I paused, wondering if I was losing her. “The thing is, he’s always been supportive of my work. Whenever I’m getting ready to head somewhere, like here for instance”—I indicated my apartment with the cigarette—“I have a few bad nights where I think I must be crazy, because normal people don’t do this kind of work. And he’s always told me just to go. But I go away too much.” Going back was getting harder.

  “The worst was Iran. A year and a half ago I was reporting a big story. I went everywhere—Khuzestan, Kurdistan, Bushehr. I wanted to know everything so I could write about the people there. But I was away for six months straight, living a completely different life. When I went home it was so”—I struggled for the right word—“disorienting.” Returning had left me with what anthropologists call the shock of re-entry. “For a while I could only sleep if I lay down on the floor.” I had felt a craving for something solid beneath me.

  I had never told anyone about that, even my boyfriend who thought I was sleeping on the living room sofa, which was challenging enough. That time away had been especially troubling for us. Towards the end I had been threatened with arrest and called him in a panic, then been cut off when my phone card ran out. I hadn’t been able to call back for three days. In that time he had not slept, imagining all the scenarios—jail, torture, death—yet helpless to do a single thing about it. While I was active, absorbed in keeping myself out of prison, he endured the terrifying anguish of the person left behind.

  I stopped talking and got up to pour us more tea. She was holding the pendant she always wore, that held the small photo of her son Anas who had died the year before. She placed it back around her neck, then tucked it into her shirt.

  “Why do you do that?” I asked, handing her the tea glass. “Put it inside your shirt?” When I first met her she used to wear the pendant with her son’s picture on the outside of her clothing.

  “Abdullah”—her middle child—“has been becoming upset remembering his older brother. So now I put his picture away, by my heart.”

  Her eldest son had been a fine, tall, obedient and clever boy, as she described him: “My right hand.” Anas was eleven years old—“eleven and a half”—when he returned from school in Damascus last May complaining of pain in his side. This from a boy who never complained, who had left behind his home and friends without a word. Other kids threw fits, begged to be allowed to bring computers or toys or refused to understand why they had to leave their homes at all, but not him. So at first she wondered if he might have been beaten up at school, a foreigner in a wildly overcrowded Syrian classroom, taunted by other boys who resented the newcomers. A bit of schoolyard bullying, the sort of thing a boy that age knew to keep to himself; his parents had enough problems. The doctor at the hospital in Damascus said he had a kidney stone and gave him an injection. Within moments Anas was dead.

  A supervisor at the hospital came to investigate, calling in the doctor. The pair began discussing the case in English in front of her, thinking she wouldn’t understand. The supervisor said the medicine was not meant for a child of that age. “I felt what it was to stand in front of the person who had killed my son, and because I was a refugee, be afraid to open my mouth.” She paused. “After that you can only take care of the people around you, nothing else.”

  Would it have been better if her son had been killed by the war? At least that would have made a kind of sense, even if a terrible sense, because everyone knows that children die in wars. You can talk about it, rage about it; people understand it. At Ahlam’s apartment I had spoken to a woman whose only child, a boy Anas’s age, was killed on the fifth day of the war when air strikes dropped a missile on their house. But Anas’s was a death without reason, a death that cancelled out meaning.

  Something else had changed when Ahlam stood next to her son’s still-warm body in the hospital. She looked across the bed at the face of her husband, who stood there helpless, immobile, unable to do what he ought to have done in that moment and take her in his arms. In such cases parents either grow closer or break apart. The distance across the bed, the slight boy lying there between them, no longer breathing—in that moment she slipped off her wedding band and dropped it into her pocket. The end of something, the silent breaking of a bond.

  “That’s when I said, it’s finished.” Later she gave her wedding ring to a young man in Little Baghdad who was planning to propose to a girl he loved.

  Ahlam’s extended family had insisted that Anas be buried in his homeland. She had promised her kidnappers she would not go back, but it was tradition, and the family would not relent. Her brother Salaam, the driver, organized a convoy of vehicles: Ahlam and her husband and the two younger children in one SUV, her son’s body in another, a third filled with men Salaam had organized to guard them should they come under attack. They left Damascus at three in the morning and arrived in their village on the outskirts of Baghdad thirteen hours later.

  She never learned the exact site of the grave. Though she begged her family to take her there, they refused. She was treated, she said, as a foolish woman who would collapse, when she only wanted to see her son for the last time. “He stayed eleven and a half,” she said. “He will always be eleven and a half.”

  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 journ
alists 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.