A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  I unlocked the door of my room and locked it again behind me. Looking around at the faded furnishings, still holding my passport, I realized I could not stay here. In another day or two, a photocopy of my passport would make it onto somebody’s desk. Perhaps it was sitting there already, waiting for a bored state employee to return from lunch. After that it might only be a matter of time before someone came here to ask the man at the front desk about me.

  I couldn’t stay here, but I couldn’t leave Damascus either. If I left, I would leave Syria altogether, and were I to be detained at the border—“come this way, sit here,” scenes I knew from past experience—I could imagine waiting in a drab office while a junior clerk or career-minded lieutenant typed a simple web search and pulled up, instantaneously, my article on the refugees from Iraq. If he had any English at all he would skim to the part where I wrote about the woman in Sayeda Zainab. Name changed or not, it would be easy to identify her. They would already know she was the key fixer on anything to do with refugees. If they were looking for reasons to hold her, working for an undercover journalist would fit the slot.

  I perched on the worn coverlet at the foot of the bed and looked through my wallet, mentally calculating what remained in my bank account. There was a bank I had discovered here, registered in Lebanon, that allowed me to take out money, though the statements made it appear that I had withdrawn it from Beirut. Funds would still be tight. There was teaching awaiting me in Vancouver in September, three months away, by which time my Syria visa would have expired. Meanwhile I couldn’t file stories from Damascus without drawing attention to my byline, or take assignments elsewhere.

  There was only one assignment anyway. Since I was here and she was there—wherever “there” was—that was my assignment: to look for her. That was where I had to begin.

  For that I needed freedom. Freedom to move around, ask questions, talk to people without being watched. If I had to stay in Damascus, I would have to go underground.

  —

  First I tried to get my old apartment back, the one I’d rented the year before. It seemed to me that if I could stay there, everything would go back to being the way it had been. Ahlam would go on being—what? It made no logical sense but in the irresistible magical thinking that overtook me, if I could return to that tidy studio apartment with its flamingo-pink terrace overlooking the city, I would be safe and she would be conjured back into existence.

  I found the telephone number of the landlord in the back of one of my old notebooks. At least I hadn’t torn that number up. It seemed like a good sign—I still had his number—and he was obliging on the phone, but explained that his son was back from medical school in the United States and was using the apartment to study. He offered to speak to his son on my behalf, and for a brief time I was under the illusion my plan would actually work. I would move back to the top of those stairs and Ahlam would return unharmed, like a film running backward. But when I called him again it turned out his son would not agree to help me turn back time: he had his future to think of, his exams.

  I considered two other apartments. The first was too expensive and on the ground floor. Anyone could break in at any time. The second, on the top floor of a walk-up next to a department store, was almost perfect. It had a stale, locker-room smell, but I could live with that. I was ready to tell the landlord, a short stocky man in a suit, that I would take it, when a couple scuttled out of the bedroom I hadn’t even bothered to check. The man, so tall his head almost touched the low ceiling, was buttoning his shirt, while the heavily made-up girl ran a hand through tangled hair. “That’s my brother and his wife,” said the landlord stiffly. Not unless they had different fathers. Otherwise the place was renting by the hour.

  Instead I found an ersatz version of my first apartment, a handful of blocks away, in a walk-up ensconced between a wine bar and a European clothing store that sold clubwear: ripped jeans, glitter T-shirts, see-through tops. A Westerner would be expected to live somewhere like this. I would not stand out.

  I paid cash to the owners, who wished to avoid paying taxes and so did not register with the authorities. They had asked for two months up front, so in the back office of a garment factory, amid the clamour of sewing machines, I counted out a thousand dollars’ worth of Syrian pounds.

  The apartment was dusty, almost squalid, uncared for, but it was on the top storey, its front door accessible only off an enclosed central terrace. From the artifacts abandoned by former tenants—rolling papers, a Paulo Coelho novel, a love letter in broken English to someone named Giorgio from a girl who sought a future in their Damascus fling, beginner Arabic translations (“in the morning I drink coffee”)—I assumed it had previously been rented by European students living the hash-smoking Orientalist fantasy. Someone had tried, and failed, to paint Che Guevara’s face on a canvas rolled up in a corner of the terrace.

  Inside, I turned on the air conditioning and opened my notebook to the last interview I had done, the day before Ahlam went missing. It was with a psychiatrist who had practised in Baghdad, a solemn, intelligent man, now a refugee himself. I had written down his thoughts about a teenaged patient of his who had witnessed her father being kidnapped. She suffered sleep disturbances, paranoia, certain that at any moment she and her mother would be next. “There was a question of how to treat her,” he said. “Was this an irrational fear?”

  After that the notebook was blank. White pages, like an expunged memory. Only a line I had written since. I have a nightmare where I hear the sound of electric drills and wake in a state of raw fear.

  Even jotting down that dream—borrowed threads of the sort of torture described to me in interviews with Iraqis—took enormous effort. To write about the nightmare of Ahlam’s disappearance was another matter. I lacked the clarity of thought, the stillness that writing demands. Even if I wanted to defy the UN staffers and publish something about what had happened, I’m not sure I could have strung the sentences together. I could feel my mind going in uncertain directions, shadows contorting into phantasms. I was afraid: afraid of being watched, being taken, being tortured. I was equally afraid of myself: that my presence put others at risk. I wanted to contact the young men who had made Ahlam’s apartment their clubhouse—her assistants—to find out what they knew and where her children were; or her brother Salaam, who might be here from Baghdad already, looking for her. But Ahlam had been my link to them, and she was missing—the missing link. And I had begun to fear my own words, my data trail, as if I held the power of life and death in my hands. If I had put her in danger, anyone who talked to me could be in danger too. Was this an irrational fear?

  I went to the kitchen to boil water for coffee. With the shutters on the window closed against the blinding afternoon, it was dark and stuffy. When had this kitchen last been cleaned?

  I was still able to step back and regard my situation with some equanimity. I had been in dangerous situations before: hiding in a house in Bethlehem surrounded by gunfire when a child was shot in the head; on the Iranian border with Iraq, where I was held and interrogated overnight in a police station. Did I know, they asked, government buildings had been bombed, the blame placed on the British troops directly across the border in Basra? Perhaps I was their spy? (It took several hours, and several phone calls to Tehran in the middle of the night that went unanswered, for the jackbooted official with the three-days-growth beard to decide that a woman, by definition, could not be a spy.) Never forgotten was the time I was told by a colonel in the formidably named Disciplinary Force of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tehran that if I tried to renew my visa one more time he would personally see to it that I was arrested (that was the time, when I phoned home to alert my boyfriend, that my phone card ran out, leaving him for days not knowing if I was alive or dead. It would be a turning point in our relationship). Yet in none of these situations, arguably more dangerous, was I as anxious as I was now.

  Perhaps I had been too absorbed by what was happening in the moment to think abo
ut the future. Perhaps because it was only my own safety that was at stake, I figured I could take whatever came, that if they hurt me they could only hurt me. And I had my passport, and all the protections it afforded. This was different. This implicated me, it may have been because of me, but I wasn’t the one imprisoned.

  Was she taken because of me? The question plagued me. She had taken many risks, and I was one of them; I had taken risks—she was one of them. She knew everyone; any of those everyones could have been the reason: Al Jazeera, which had employed her for their story three days before her arrest; the BBC, which had aired a documentary in which she featured some weeks earlier, broadcasting it throughout the Arab world. Amnesty had her face on the cover of their latest report. Indeed, the mere fact that Ahlam knew everyone could be the reason in itself: it was presumably the reason Abu Yusuf had pressed her to spy on other refugees and foreign reporters.

  As the water boiled, I rummaged in a cupboard. A previous tenant had left behind half a bag of sugar, and I still had the coffee I’d packed in my hasty move from the Kuwaiti Hotel in Little Baghdad, paying my tab to the manager at the Kuwaiti while smiling as naturally as I could, promising to come back soon. I knew that I wouldn’t. The year before, when the alleys and apartments there were still a mystery to me, I had been edgy, cautious, afraid of being watched, then had had those fears stilled by Ahlam’s fearlessness, which, just like fear, was contagious. I had been right to be worried: she had been wrong.

  And even if this was not my fault, even if her arrest had nothing to do with me—and I thought that was possible, from certain vantage points even likely—I was still responsible for her. We had been a team. If our positions had been reversed, if during our fieldwork I had been the one hauled away, I was certain she wouldn’t have simply gone on without looking for me. Our friendship had been forged through the work, and it was the work she did—on behalf of me, and all of us—that had put her in danger.

  So what, I asked myself, could I actually do? I wished Ahlam was there to give me advice. Locating disappeared prisoners had been her specialty in Baghdad. I remembered what she had told me about her methods, how she had persuaded an American general to give her the names of the prisoners under his command; and when the commander of another prison ignored her requests, found a translator to secretly pass her information. When she told me what she had done, she said, “Your situation forces you to do something official and something unofficial.”

  Official channels were the least likely to cause problems, but whenever I phoned the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the status of her case was like a weather report that never changed. She had been gone for a week now, and I called every day. They continued to tell me they were working on it. They said that if they pushed too hard, they could jeopardize all the other people in prison.

  So how hard would they push? How many resources could they devote to a single life when they were considering the whole venture, all the millions of refugees with all their millions of problems? They all but said as much to me.

  I understood one critical thing: they didn’t know as much as I did about where she had come from, whom she knew, who she was, or how crucial she had been to getting these stories out into the world; nor would they be devoted to this single task, the only assignment I had.

  The coffee was bitter. I had to buy milk. Food—that would also be a good idea. Dumping the coffee down the drain and rinsing the glass under the tap, I considered whom to talk to next. I recalled stories about the Red Cross visiting prisoners in wartime. A neutral body. On the side of the ordinary person caught in the war machine. Was that still the case? I had met a Frenchman at Ahlam’s apartment who used to work for the Red Cross in Iraq.

  I locked the door behind me—a satisfyingly solid door, with a deadbolt—and headed downstairs to the Internet café to look up the Red Cross.

  Chapter 15

  OFFICIALDOM

  THE DAMASCUS HEADQUARTERS OF the International Committee of the Red Cross turned out to be within walking distance. It felt good to be on my way somewhere, showered and smartly dressed, leather satchel worn crosswise, like someone headed to a promising job interview. Passing a sun-bleached park where children were playing, I stopped at a stand to buy a card with phone time. I would have liked to have a phone not registered to my name, but all SIM cards had to be registered with official ID so there was nothing to be done about that. Whenever I talked on the phone or wrote an email I asked myself: How would someone else interpret this? When I needed to call someone about Ahlam, I tried to use the landline in my flat.

  The neighbourhood I was walking through looked vaguely familiar. I recalled the apartment I had visited around here with Ahlam in the winter—a pair of Serbs, friends of Mona—she had been getting ready for a party. That seemed like another world, another life. It had crossed my mind to call Mona again, but I abandoned the idea since it seemed to me she had abandoned Ahlam. Whatever Mona’s problems were, instinctively I didn’t want her to know I was still around and looking for Ahlam.

  The Red Cross headquarters was a typical spartan NGO set-up. The chief of mission welcomed me into his office. He was slim, late middle-aged, with a genial, cultured manner. A classic Swiss, ready to hear me out. Taking the proffered seat, I explained everything: my work with Ahlam over the past year, the arrest, its possible context. When I told him of the many people who had been coming and going from her place, including Westerners, an amused smile played on his lips. “The authorities love that, don’t they?” he said, by which he meant the opposite. When I told him how she had been working as a fixer for international media in both Iraq and Syria, he added, “I’m surprised she wasn’t stopped long ago.”

  He sat with his ankles crossed, fingers pressed together, thinking. “The government here suffers from a form of paranoia.” So do I, I thought, but managed not to say so. It was a relief to talk to someone who took me seriously. I didn’t want to give him any reason to discount my concerns.

  For that brief hour I felt blanketed in diplomatic immunity. Not crazy, not a threat, not a carrier of the plague. In the end he agreed to press his contacts on her behalf. He would talk to the UNHCR, add his voice. He stood to see me out. “Don’t be optimistic,” he said. And then, as if to blunt the force of that pronouncement, “It is good that you came here.”

  Walking back from his office, buoyed yet wondering whether anything would come of it, I considered my other options. Official channels. The summer before, I had interviewed two Syrian government officials to ask about the effects of the refugees on the economy. Ordinary Syrians were hurting because of inflation, and the refugees were bringing social problems such as prostitution and black market labour, and exacerbating fears of the war spreading over the borders. The government was anxious about US intentions; quite rightly too. Washington’s war planners had made threats to take down Syria after Iraq, and the government was dangerously isolated in this time of heightened sectarian tensions. Syria, with a minority of Shia-derived Alawites ruling a majority Sunni population, was a photographic negative of pre-war Iraq.

  The first official I had met was a suspicious, Cold War type who only warmed up when we discussed Graham Greene, the topic of his PhD dissertation. But he had confirmed something I had been investigating: the Americans wanted to cherry-pick the refugees, taking those who had worked for them—like Ahlam, it occurred to me now—and leaving behind the widows, the orphans, the disabled, the war-wounded. As usual the UNHCR was caught in the middle. The other official was young, easygoing, disarmingly confident, one of the new breed of technocrats bent on turning Syria from a socialist economy to a free-market one. An engaging, chubby guy in a well-cut suit who joked about his weight, he was a Catholic, educated at the London School of Economics.

  But which official to trust?

  I had liked the LSE guy. He was funny, not your average drab economist. More the kind of person who believed that with the right manoeuvring of numbers and policy tweaks you could remake society int
o some sort of automatic capitalist utopia, like a self-winding watch. But maybe I just liked him because his sort was familiar to me, a product of my own culture’s aspirations.

  But if I talked to either of them I would be forcing them to consider what to do about me. I would lose the one advantage I had, the ability to move around unnoticed. And if they were upset about Ahlam’s work as a fixer, and thought she had broken the rules by working unofficially, any noise from me would simply confirm their suspicions. I would have to explain how I knew her and might be interrogated myself. It seemed better not to put myself in a situation I couldn’t control.

  The only person I could think of who knew Ahlam, and might have reason to be concerned about her as much as I was, was her friend, the other Iraqi fixer, Hamid. I had been impressed with him when he came over to Ahlam’s apartment with Gabriela. He was well-connected, reliable, and Ahlam’s equal—with an equivalent competence and toughness. Hamid would be a good person to talk to, but I had already written to Gabriela and hadn’t heard whether she’d talked him. In the meantime I didn’t want to contact him directly. I had put one fixer at risk; I didn’t want to endanger another. Tracking down people for information I needed was my profession, yet this time I had no idea where to start. Every possibility seemed to have a corresponding and equally powerful argument against it. The voices in my head were at odds with one another, in a tug-of-war that neither side could win.

  On to the next possibility: to contact other journalists who knew Ahlam and see whether, like the Red Cross, they could work their back channels and do something.

  —

  A few blocks from my new apartment was an air-conditioned café with free Wi-Fi where I often went to check email. The café had been my haunt the year before when I still had my flamingo-pink terrace and the confidence that I could observe events without becoming ensnared. It was a popular place jammed with young couples drinking milkshakes and surfing on their laptops or watching soccer games on big-screen TVs. Staff in black-and-white uniforms walked around, refreshing the dying coals on water pipes or delivering ketchup and fries. The windows of the café were made of one-way mirrors so you could look outside but no one could see in. It was one of the reasons young people came here—to avoid their elders’ prying eyes. Every afternoon I took a discreet table in a backroom where I could see out into the main room but wasn’t immediately visible.