A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  I wrote to my boyfriend to tell him about Ahlam, careful not to raise too much alarm. I didn’t want my words to convey my fears, in case someone else was reading them, and I didn’t want to worry him, knowing there was nothing he could do. Do you think this puts you in any danger? he emailed back, seeing through my words. And then: I have learned to trust your instincts. He wrote that he was struggling now with creating enough emotional distance from you so that I am not going insane from missing you, but not so much that I disconnect.

  I knew, unhappily, that it was impossible for me to focus on two dilemmas at once. I was not capable of giving my full attention to one without neglecting the other, nor of being present in two places at once. As perhaps had been the case for a long time now.

  Journalists: I had to turn my mind to the journalists Ahlam knew. I spent several days writing and responding to contacts. I wrote to Deborah Amos, a correspondent I had met at the National Press Club in Washington. She often reported from Syria and had filed a piece on Ahlam for NPR, as had journalists for Salon.​com, the Nation, the Washington Post. She wrote me back, alarmed, offering to talk to people she knew at the UN. She had heard that Ahlam was on a watch list, but to arrest her? Why? she wondered, as I did.

  Al Jazeera was next. I wondered if they even knew what had happened after her last assignment. The satellite news channel was launched in the mid-1990s in the tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar by a group of BBC-trained Arab journalists who had tried to start a BBC affiliate in Saudi Arabia but had quickly been censored. Qatar, under a new and younger emir (he had overthrown his father while the old man was holidaying in Switzerland), agreed to put its money—and there was a lot of it, from their natural gas fields—into the Arabic broadcast initiative. Now they had also started an English channel that was putting other broadcasters around the world to shame. This was partly because they put real money into reporting, and partly because they often hired good fixers who had been doing stories behind the scenes for other English-language media and made them on-air correspondents. They had expert reporters deeply immersed in their regions reporting from all over the world at a time when every other broadcaster was cutting back.

  I remembered the name of the producer Ahlam had worked with and found him on their website. I sent him an email. He called me the next day from London, sounding worried—he hadn’t known—and promised to do whatever he could. He got in touch with Al Jazeera’s Damascus bureau chief, but, he emailed back to say, the bureau chief was unable to find out anything. Ahlam was a fixer. Not an employee. She worked contract to contract—like most magazine journalists, a situation I knew well—and so had no immunity, no aura of power to shield her. Though he didn’t say as much, I understood that she was on her own.

  —

  One afternoon, looking up from my laptop at my backroom table, I saw another foreigner amid the throng of Syrians in the main room. Blue eyes, a big bald head bent over his computer. I went over and introduced myself. He was British, working as a photographer for international magazines and making his home in Damascus. We had—an unsurprising sign of the small world we worked in—colleagues in common. He complained about the business, I complained about the business—a primal bonding exercise among journalists.

  They say that in times of fear people form kinship alliances, and they are right. In a split second my now-chronic reticence, which squelched speech and even thought, was overcome by a visceral desire to trust. Invited to join him at his table, I told him I had run into some trouble. A friend of mine, a fixer, had been arrested, I wasn’t sure why. The story soon poured out. How comforting in times of trouble to speak frankly with the assurance of being understood, not having to define one’s terms or explain how such things come about. After I had finished talking he related his own story.

  He was married to a Syrian woman. One day she was summoned to a meeting with one of the intelligence agencies. They presented her with a fat file containing transcripts of all his emails painstakingly translated from English into Arabic, and ordered her to spy on him. From that point on he began emailing himself long extracts from medical websites. “Elephantiasis of the testicles and the like,” he said. “Let them translate that.”

  I sent a superfluous message home recounting the beauty of Damascus, the glorious weather. Let them translate that. But a couple of days later, returning to the same café, I was unable to connect to the Internet. The manager came over to apologize. A new regulation. I must change the settings on my laptop and insert a code. Not their choice, he explained, pointing at the ceiling: an order from above.

  After that I went to different Internet cafés, using different computers, never staying longer than twenty minutes, though I wasn’t sure it made the slightest difference.

  —

  I felt helpless in the face of a great impenetrable system, a fortress that had neither windows nor doors. I was accustomed to obstacles in my work, but something always gave way eventually. Even when the path ahead involved diversions or dead ends, there was always a way in, or out. I remembered the prison I had visited in Beirut, when I’d gone there to report my passport missing—how I had walked up the staircase and out of there freely, with a sense of my own capability, my own capacity for action, intact. I could hardly remember the person who had done that. She had believed there were solutions to every problem. She had believed she could watch and ask questions and analyze without being caught up in any of it. It was part of the reason I had not connected my presence at Ahlam’s apartment with the dangers it posed for her.

  Ahlam saw what needed doing and did it. Perhaps that was why I had found her so appealing. Now that my belief in freedom of action, in agency, was gone, it seemed to me that it must have been an illusion all along. Just a luxury wrought by a worldview in which individuals believe they shape their own destinies—and a curse as well. In the West we are taught this from birth: that the course of our life is determined by how well we play our cards. The weak are weak because they did something wrong; the powerful have power because they earned it. Only now was I coming to understand the sense of fatalism so common in the East, where most of what happens is determined by forces beyond one’s control.

  I remembered what Ahlam had told me about being abandoned in the river as a girl, and fighting the current. “The difficulty isn’t to learn to swim in the water,” she had said. “The difficulty is to learn to swim in life.” She had faced the currents, the obstacles, and survived. Now she was caught in a current I could neither see nor understand. I felt it overwhelming me too, pulling me down.

  —

  In the past, before it became clear what can happen to those who operate outside the system and act as if they are free to do whatever they like, I would have thought nothing of the day when the power was cut to my apartment.

  It happened in the mid-morning, an hour when I usually walked down the four flights to go check email. Each day I stepped over a killing field of dead cockroaches in the stairwell. The woman who lived on the second floor was militant about them, spraying daily. And for that I was glad: if the cockroaches couldn’t make it any farther up the stairs, perhaps no one could.

  I waited an hour in the sweltering heat, expecting the power to come back on as usual. Power outages had increased with the influx of refugees weighing down an outdated power grid—Iraqis liked to joke that it was a way of making them feel at home. When it didn’t come back on I stepped into the stairwell and listened. I could hear the sounds of electric life whirring in other apartments. It was only out in mine.

  My landlady, a pious Sunni with a PhD in physics, came over the next day with her entire family to fix the electrical system. It was nothing, then, just a failure in a badly maintained flat. I began to relax. All was well, I was well, the A/C was working again.

  The following day, towards noon, I heard a pounding on the front door. I had just returned from checking email and was standing in the kitchen, contemplating the lack of food in the fridge. At the sound of knocking I froze.
I wasn’t expecting anyone. Hardly anyone knew I was here, and they would have phoned. I stayed silent, not making a sound. The pounding continued for a long time and finally ceased.

  A quarter of an hour later there was a clattering on the roof. I went out onto the terrace and looked up. A man was on the roof, attempting to lower a ladder down onto my terrace.

  I shouted. The word “police” translates into many languages. I saw a stick lying among the debris on the terrace and grabbed it, waving it at him like a sword. I would kill him with it if I had to, beat him to death. He pulled the ladder back up over the roof and fled.

  I wanted to call the police, and in a normal situation I might have. Now I feared them more than I feared the intruder. What if he was the police? In the past I would have interpreted this as nothing more than another strange coincidence, rather than a plot directed at me. And—it was coincidence. Within a couple of days, after urgent discussions with my landlady, I learned that the stranger on the roof was the neighbour across the hall, a shadowy figure I now recalled peering at me on several occasions through a crack in his door as I went downstairs. He was single at forty, living with his parents in the apartment next door, and had seen me coming and going. His parents were away and he wanted to “introduce himself,” as my landlady put it. She told me he was convinced that his dramatic overture would be welcome and was apparently shocked that I did not see it that way.

  And yet…I was deeply shaken. I felt as if the conventions of civilization were disintegrating. Maybe those too had been a fiction all along. Maybe my landlady was telling the truth when she assured me he would not bother me again—but she also wanted to calm me down; it was illegal to rent me this apartment in the first place, off the books.

  I could no longer, no matter what anyone said, separate coincidence from intentional threat. I remembered years ago reading J.M. Coetzee’s book of essays on censorship, Giving Offense. “When certain kinds of writing and speech, even certain thoughts,” he wrote, “become surreptitious activities, then the paranoia of the state is on its way to being reproduced in the psyche of the subject, and the state can look forward to a future in which the bureaucracies of supervision can be allowed to wither away, their function having been, in effect, privatized.” And, “All writers under censorship are at least potentially touched by paranoia, not just those who have their work suppressed.”33

  And so it happens. Where I had once been ready to dismiss anomalies, I now interpreted every event as a message. These two events—a power cut to my apartment, a foiled break-in to my apartment—were anomalous and singular, and in this way resembled gifts that are chosen with a specific recipient in mind. It is the same way the censor becomes internalized. He works his way into our private thoughts so deeply that he is always with us, always watching, even when he’s not there.

  —

  Ahlam had been gone without a trace for eleven days.

  Chapter 16

  THE FIXER’S FIXER

  PLZ CONTACT ME.

  I stared at the screen on the computer. The net café was quiet. The bored girl at the front desk had handed me the access code without a second look.

  Two phone numbers followed the message. One for a mobile phone, the other a landline. I wrote them down, transposing two of the numbers. It wouldn’t take a high-level code-breaker to figure it out, but it would be a hassle.

  I called the landline from my own landline in the apartment—an old rotary phone that was not registered to me.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  Hamid’s voice was like a gravel-crusher. “Gabriela told me,” he said. “She was worried after getting your email.” We agreed to meet the following afternoon at the Royal Café, across the street from the Cham Palace Hotel.

  —

  The Royal was one of those old-style Arab coffeehouses: smoke-filled, large as a warehouse, packed exclusively with men except for one young couple gazing longingly at each other across a table. I arrived exactly at five, taking a table at the back. Hamid arrived a few minutes later, having scoped the place first. He sat down heavily across from me and looked around. He had the kind of face that revealed nothing unless he wanted it to. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he said.

  We decided, after some debate, to go to my apartment where we could talk unseen. It was risky, but we could not think of a safer place.

  I walked on ahead, through the crowds heading home from work. Men in suits, women in dresses. People were stepping out of a patisserie, carrying little white boxes wrapped with string. There was a line outside the window wicket where a fat man in a white chef’s uniform sold hummus and baba ghanoush by the kilo, ladled into plastic bags.

  Hamid trailed me at a distance. After I had gone upstairs he waited a few more minutes and then buzzed up. By the time he reached my floor he was huffing and clutching his chest.

  He blamed his heart trouble on a recent visit to Baghdad to check on his home. His house was near the airport, a place of intense fighting. After his family fled he had rented it to a woman he knew, but the violence was such that he could no longer charge her anything: it was a comfort just to have someone watching the place. When he finally managed to get there she told him that she, too, had moved to Syria for a while—she herself had only just returned to check on her furniture. When she reached the house she had found it occupied by a group of young militiamen who thanked her politely for the use of a very good house and left. A few days later they came back. They had forgotten something. They went into the backyard and lifted a sewer grate, pulling out two large rockets that they carted away.

  Later, when she cleaned her furniture, she turned over the chairs and found papers stashed beneath them with lists of names. “She burned them,” Hamid said, “into ash.”

  As I put on water for coffee, he sighed and said that if the war ever ended he would change his name to Salaam—peace. I told him about the theory that it takes ten years after a war for a society to return to the status quo ante.

  “Even after ten years we won’t be back to zero,” he said, “because of the mentality of this new generation. This generation and the next two generations. They aren’t being educated anymore, they see nothing but violence. They’ve become easy to brainwash and they are caught between Saudi Arabia and Iran.” His goal, which he was devoting himself to these days, was getting his own children out. One son was already studying in the United States; another had a lead on a university scholarship there. After that, only one more to go.

  He looked around my apartment, taking it in. “This place is weird.”

  “I know.” I handed him a mug.

  I told him about the break-in. The neighbour on the roof with the ladder.

  “You should move,” Hamid said, stirring in sugar. “It’s not safe. Anyone can come in here over the roof. What if he comes back?”

  What if, undaunted by my reaction, he chose to try again? That was my fear as well. “I already paid two months’ rent in advance. I’m broke. And where am I going to go? I can’t leave right now.” Not without finding out what had happened to Ahlam. We took our coffees and two kitchen chairs onto the terrace, sitting side by side, looking out as twilight fell and the city darkened into points of light. A wind came up, scattering dust. My eyes blurred, but no tears fell. I hadn’t wept. A flock of birds flew overhead, black as bats. Where did they go at night? I wondered.

  We ran through the possible reasons for Ahlam’s arrest: her unofficial work with journalists, the unofficial school, someone with a grudge making a false report. Jealousies, petty slights—you never knew whom you could trust. And she had become the unofficial representative of Iraqis in Syria. Not everyone was pleased to have an activist in their midst.

  “You know what the people call her?” Hamid said. “They call her ‘Mother of the Iraqis.’ ”

  But that would have upset some, this status of Ahlam’s. He had once mentioned her name to a high-ranking female member of Iraq’s Baath Party who was living in Damascus.
She had stiffened, calling Ahlam “a one-woman NGO.” It was not a compliment. The implication was that Ahlam did whatever she wanted, working outside the system. Officialdom doesn’t trust such a person. From where do they get their power? What gives them the idea they can do whatever they want?

  “Maybe it has nothing to do with the Syrians. Maybe it has to do with Ahlam’s work in Iraq,” I said. “Before she came here…”

  Hamid knew she had angered some Iraqi factions because she did not distinguish between sects and refused to ally with any of them. Civil war breaks society into shards. Those who fall outside the new divisions—the minorities, the intellectuals, all who refuse to take sides—are left with no one to protect them. There was also the problem that she had helped the Americans in Iraq. Everyone who had done so was a target.

  Just before Ahlam was arrested I had met a middle-aged woman who had been a high-school teacher in Baghdad until a few months before, when US troops came to see her school. Given her fluency in English, she acted as the interpreter for their visit. The troop commander commended her English skills and, in front of the entire staff and students, suggested she might see them about a job. She declined, shocked that he would mention such an offer in public. The next day he sent someone to the school to inquire again as to whether she would like to work as an interpreter. She declined again, but word soon spread among her colleagues that she was in league with the US military. One afternoon a man approached her in the street. He was a large man, “very ugly,” she told me. “You are too old to rape and too poor to kidnap, so this is for you,” he said, holding out a bullet, her gift for “working with the Americans.” She fled to Syria.