A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  As I turned past the shrine and crossed the busy main street, dodging taxis that slowed or honked at the sight of me, I realized that I would be leaving here soon. Worried as I was for Ahlam, I couldn’t be here forever, and I had to earn my keep. With a few more interviews I could write another story. I stopped to buy a packet of cigarettes for her from a sidewalk stand, handing the boy exact change without being asked. I needed to go home, to my real home, and deal with my own reality.

  As I wended my way through the alleyways towards Ahlam’s apartment, I thought I felt something. A pair of eyes, a man standing next to a motorcycle, staring intently. The sense of being followed occurred to me but I abandoned it like a whim. After years spent working undercover in places where journalists were unwelcome, my radar could be oversensitive; as the only Westerner in the neighbourhood, I shrugged off curious stares.

  By nine a.m. we were drinking tea alone at Ahlam’s apartment—the teaspoons of sugar dissolving into a glass, my notebook as usual on my lap, reviewing Arabic verb conjugations from yesterday’s lesson with Umm Sally—when a man knocked at the door. Ahlam went to answer it and stepped out into the stairwell. I could hear them speaking but not their words. Nevertheless I felt an immediate shift in the atmospheric pressure of the room. Without getting up I looked around, wondering where I might hide my notebook, estimating how long it would take to find something that had been concealed in here. Not long. The living room was a box except for a doorless closet crammed with her children’s belongings. I placed the notebook back into my bag and sat there, waiting for her to return. The minutes stretched out, timed to the beating of my heart.

  When she returned, the man walked into the room ahead of her. He was short, unsmiling, a vain little moustache like a hyphen above his mouth. The kind of man who, whatever he is wearing, always appears to be in uniform. I knew, without a word from either of them, that he was one of those responsible for keeping order among the newcomers, to ensure that the war did not come with them to Syria. A man of limited powers and yet—for those under his authority—unlimited.

  She was to accompany him to their headquarters to answer some questions. Men were waiting downstairs to escort her in a car. They told her she would be gone for a few hours. This had happened before, such official summonings, at least half a dozen times. When she was sick in bed for a week after her husband left, they had panicked and sent a man to check on her: why was she staying at home, changing her patterns? But never before had a group of men come for her.

  By now I was on my feet. It was a long and awkward moment as the three of us stood stock-still in the room, none of us moving or meeting the others’ eyes. Finally he broke the silence. “Get rid of her,” he said to Ahlam in Arabic.

  She had been standing beside him and now she walked over to me. “Go,” she said, her face close to mine. “Go to your hotel. Go now.” In her voice was an urgency I had never heard before, though her face betrayed nothing. Her expression was flat as a becalmed lake. This vacancy, this flatness in someone always so animated, someone whose face I knew as a stage on which every sort of emotion played, was far more menacing than the presence of the stranger.

  I took my bag with my notebook and left, retracing my steps of earlier that morning. I barely recall the walk back. Only the acid flush that carried up my face like a rash, the pulse in my ears, the sensation of being watched. And yet, when I looked around, no one was paying me the least attention. The locals were used to me now, a neighbourhood fixture. “Doktorah!” A shopkeeper I knew shouted greetings from the shadowy interior of his shop. His voice was friendly, unaffected. That feeling I had of being watched earlier this morning—was it as fabricated as the one I felt now?

  At the door of the hotel, I studied the face of the young security guard who slept at night on a mattress inside the front door. He smiled, greeted me as usual, asked after my health. Up the flight of stairs, taken two at a time. In the glass-panelled office across from my room, the hotel manager was playing solitaire on his computer with his little son, a pale redhead, on his lap. He waved to me, indicating that I should join them for tea.

  No one had been here to ask about me.

  My room was like a cave, self-contained and insular. Inside, everything was as I had left it: my audio recorder still lying in a tangle of cords, books pell-mell, a half-made single bed, a towel drying on the door of the wardrobe that I never used. Through the window high up on the wall I could hear the sounds of the day unfolding as it should, horns honking, children laughing, the clatter of working life.

  How strange that I had come to love it here.

  The air-conditioning unit had a leak. The pot I had placed below it was about to overflow, so I emptied it into the sink and then lay down on the bed with the lights off.

  Before, the leak had not bothered me but now each drop was a question that rippled outward. Drip—She is gone. Drip—Where has she been taken? Drip—Just a few hours, he had said.

  This had happened before. It was nothing unusual. Was it my presence that had drawn them this time? Did they take me for a spy? Perhaps I had set off a tripwire. For all my bullshit lectures to her about not working with journalists and putting herself in needless danger, I had overlooked something. I was a journalist.

  I had known the signs were bad. After all, that’s why I had come back to find her. Because I had trusted in my own cover story, trusted it was a sound cloak of invisibility, I had not quite taken in Ahlam’s vulnerabilities. Or I had taken them in, but then I must have grown complacent. Maybe because everyone here was vulnerable. Every day something bad happened to someone, and it was normal to be wary, to be worried, but also normal to think of it like a car bomb—always happening to somebody else. Or maybe I was the bomb. Or the two of us together were.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  An hour passed, and my phone rang. I answered, hoping to hear Ahlam’s voice telling me that everything was fine, the coast was clear.

  It was Umm Sally, my Arabic teacher.

  “Where are you?” she asked. Her voice was kind, concerned, betraying no annoyance. She had come to Ahlam’s apartment to meet me for my lesson and found no one there. The children would be at school but where was everyone else? The apartment was empty. She had brought the picture of her husband to show me.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Something came up.”

  How rude I must seem, the obnoxious entitled Westerner who did not consider the effects of her actions on others. I could not tell her what happened over the phone, could not say anything that might jeopardize her or anyone else. I would explain everything later, learn the words of apology, admire the photograph of her husband, so beautiful and gone. It did not occur to me that I would never see her again.

  I thought it wise not to sleep in my room that night. Instead I stayed at an American friend’s apartment on a busy downtown street, a two-bedroom above a convenience store. Awakening in the middle of the night in the dark, I couldn’t remember where I was. The air was hot and sticky, claustrophobic, a ceiling fan barely nudging the air. The next morning she asked me to leave. She was a freelance journalist and didn’t want trouble. For the first time I understood something that had managed to evade me all of my life: trouble is a contagious disease.

  I took a collective taxi back to Sayeda Zainab, bumping along the pitted road in the van with the other passengers, comforted by their benign presence. When it stopped near the shrine I got out and walked the last block to the hotel. Another beautiful spring day. Dust and heat and people going about their ordinary lives. It was the first of June.

  Nothing in my room appeared to have been touched, though I wondered if I ought to have rigged something—arranged a strand of hair as one reads about in novels—to know for sure. It was possible that Ahlam had already returned to her apartment but I didn’t dare to phone her or any of the Iraqis who might know. Anything to do with Ahlam was now radioactive.

  I went downstairs to the net café around the corner. There might be an e
mail from her or someone who knew something. In the smoke-filled café, there was only one terminal available, the rest occupied by noisy gamers who shouted in pain or triumph as if they were experiencing the life on their screens. I was glad of that—they didn’t look up when I sat down.

  I scrolled through my emails. Nothing about Ahlam. There was only one of a personal nature—Gabriela, the Czech-American photographer I had met at Ahlam’s last winter when she came over with Ahlam’s friend Hamid, the hard-boiled fellow Iraqi fixer. Gabriela wondered if I had made it back to Damascus. How exciting it must be to see old friends there. She was finishing some work in Washington and planning her own trip back, wanting advice, wondering if conditions had worsened.

  I typed a cryptic response: A. may be in some new trouble with intel. She had to go to them yesterday and I haven’t heard from her since…I’m worried about her, though she has a thousand lives…

  I logged off and walked back to my room. I had bought two cans of Tuborg beer at a liquor store downtown and opened one of them, lukewarm, as I sorted through my belongings. I considered my audio recordings, but my recorded interviews didn’t mention names; I kept those separately in my notebooks. Looking through my notes I tore up the pages with names into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. My laptop? That was probably okay—my sources here didn’t email me; they texted. I deleted every phone number, every text message from my phone, copying the most important numbers onto an inside page of my notebook in code.

  I was startled by the sound of my phone ringing. It was a voice I recognized. The American editor at Syria Today, an English-language newsmagazine. “Come to the office.” Something to speak to me about. He insisted. “Come now.” And then I remembered. He had introduced me to the Syrian journalist who brought me to meet Ahlam almost a year ago.

  An hour later I was at the magazine office sitting across from him and the Syrian journalist.

  “Ahlam has been arrested,” the journalist informed me.

  “How do you know?” I assumed he had channels—after all he was a journalist—but then he explained that he had heard about it from the Iraqi woman who cleaned his office.

  “Really? How would she know?”

  “They are saying you are Mossad or CIA,” he continued, without clarifying. “That’s why she was taken.”

  “If I’m a spy, it’s only for myself,” I said. “And I should pay myself better.” My voice sounded tinny and defensive. And wait: “Who are ‘they’?”

  “They” were the community, the street, where information was rumour and innuendo. “They” said she was in prison, but then again, they knew nothing. All we knew for a fact was that she was gone.

  He told me I had to move out of Little Baghdad. Now. Today. Immediately. A Westerner like me attracted too much attention there and they might be lying in wait. But I should stay in Syria. If I left I could be captured at the border and it would look like I was fleeing.

  And so it begins. The paranoia. The fear. It spreads out in waves and infects everyone around you. It infects your mind, your thoughts. You begin to monitor your actions, your words, to see how the watcher might view them, and it is always the same way: with suspicion. You begin to regard others in the same paranoid fashion: Is that person asking me questions, so nonchalantly, seeking information on behalf of someone else? Am I replying appropriately, reacting in a way that could be construed as having nothing to hide?

  I began to wonder about Ahlam, whom I’d thought I knew. About the Syrian journalist, and how he knew what he said he knew. About my own role in Ahlam’s disappearance. And all those who surrounded her, needed her, availed themselves of any help she might offer, and occasionally envied her too, this woman whose power derived from no one but herself.

  Chapter 14

  THE CAGE

  I FOUND A ROOM at the Sultan, a backpacker’s hotel near the railway station outside the Old City walls. It was a musty place filled with decorative cushions and a film of dust as old as the hippie trail. A French couple chain-smoked in the breakfast room, arguing over a guidebook.

  It was a short walk from the Sultan through stark morning sunlight that left me feeling exposed to Souk al-Hamidiyeh, the covered bazaar in the Old City. It seemed like a good idea to play the tourist. Besides, I needed the souk: a dim and cavernous tunnel where I could dissolve into the cosmopolitan stew of nationalities and religions. Greek Orthodox priests in flowing robes striding past women in jeans and men in business suits; white headscarves, no headscarves, nuns in habits, kids in school uniforms, tourists in shorts. This mix of peoples was the best thing about Damascus, the thing I always loved. I could not have imagined that I was witnessing a final act—that this age-old tradition of pluralism would shortly disappear, adding millions of Syrians to the millions of Iraqis seeking refuge in the outside world.

  Like Ahlam. Two more days had passed without a word. In the taxi from the journalist’s office I had called a woman I knew at the UNHCR and asked her to meet me for a drink. Sitting in an upscale bar filled with the after-work set, she wanted to know why I hadn’t told her about this over the phone.

  “Over the phone?” I had said. “You want me to tell you this over the phone?”

  After that meeting I spoke daily to the staff at the refugee agency. They were investigating her disappearance, they told me, meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They did not yet know where her children were. I pointed out that it was a good thing Ahlam had worked for them, because it meant they had a level of responsibility for her well-being. I offered to write an article, but they urged me in the strongest terms not to publicize her arrest. If I did she might be deported to Iraq, and we all knew what that meant. And if I had it in my head to involve the human rights groups she had worked for—Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Refugees International—it would only make it harder for the authorities to back down. “The international groups can scream and shout,” said the protection officer in charge of her case. “It will do nothing.” The same, he implied, went for me.

  Now I pushed through the crowds, ignoring the overtures of vendors touting garish belly-dance costumes, lizard skins marketed as miracle cures, knock-off versions of brand-name perfumes, samovars as tall as a man. A man in a wheelchair had parked himself directly in the path of passersby, selling flesh-toned balloons printed with Chinese characters. There was, as always, a lineup outside Bakdash, the nineteenth-century brass-and-wood pistachio ice cream shop that was a Damascus landmark.

  I had no idea what I was looking for. Escape. Oblivion. The comfort of timelessness. That’s always why I came to the Old City, to lose myself within ancient walls that spoke of endurance, solidity, immunity to cataclysm. I passed beneath the Roman columns of the Temple of Jupiter into the wide sundrenched square and turned down a narrow stone passageway. There, across from a rainbow of carpet shops, an artist’s studio caught my eye. In the dirt-smeared windows were small naive portraits of veiled women. Some revealed a single eye and others were merely black shrouds. Yet they were oddly cheerful, like a set of Russian dolls. They reminded me of Ahlam, who had managed to maintain her humanity within constraints that would have crippled anyone else.

  Pushing open the door, I found an old man brewing tea over a stove on the floor, a cigarette in his mouth. The air hung with a curtain of pungent brown smoke as thick as my depression. Brushing aside piles of papers and books, he invited me to take a seat. He was an artist, he said in fluent English. He had adopted the profession at the age of fifty-one after he was unable to find a publisher for his last book, Temptations of the Devil.

  So, a heretic then?

  “No—a Sufi.” The mystics of Islam.

  He made me tea—“You like mint?”—and insisted I join him with a Gauloise. Then, while we sat on low stools across from one another, he read me his philosophical meanderings, rendered in Arabic calligraphy and framed around the shop.

  My God, when I met you after all this suffering from searching for you, I found myself in fron
t of myself!

  My God, I think that all the language in the world cannot explain my feelings when you said to me you have no hell.

  “No hell—and no paradise,” he said, putting aside his musings. “We are working with God to perfect this life.”

  Sitting there, amid the narcotic comforts of art and tea and nicotine, the outside world faded. Breathe. I could almost breathe.

  The old man told me he had once been married to a Palestinian woman, and once to a beautiful German anthropologist who had left him to marry an African prince. “He was so tall! So black!” And she as pale as milk.

  He had come to Sufism on his own. “God does not want us to pray to him, to build a temple. No, no, no! No. To develop this life with him.”

  It was a perfect description of Ahlam’s cosmology. “Wherever you are, begin,” she often said, quoting her father. “Begin and the rest will follow.”

  But begin how? And what would follow?

  The eyes of the women in the paintings watched me from shelves around the small studio. Though they were clad in black, the artist had surrounded them in bright pointillist colours as though they were emitting light. As though, through art, he had freed them.

  I remembered what Ahlam had told me about her girlhood on the Tigris, sitting with her bare feet dangling out of her bedroom window overlooking the river as she read books about other lives and worlds. I remembered what her father had said when she was still that girl. “You are a free bird. Don’t let anyone put you in a cage.”

  Somewhere, in this city, she was in a cage, and I could think of no way to pry open the bars.

  —

  Back at the Sultan, the man at the front desk was chatty, pointing out a bookcase bulging with airport novels that guests had left behind, and suggesting a travel book that might be of interest. I pretended to care. That was why I was here, to see the sights. He handed me my room key, along with my passport which he had taken to complete my registration.