A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  To distract myself and pass the time I borrowed a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast from the prison library, putting it back when I gave up for the day, knowing I could finish it the next time.

  In between, thanks to the Emperor, I made headway over the next two weeks. I spoke with Nadim Khoury, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division. We met at an elegant restaurant downtown, part of the old historic bazaar that had been destroyed in Lebanon’s civil war and had only now, more than fifteen years after the war ended, been rebuilt. This was a sanitized, corporatized version of the ancient souk, people complained, without the soul of the original, a cash grab for elites who had privatized it. But at least wars end, I thought. At least people rebuild.

  We stalled on the first idea—his offer to write a letter to the Syrian president demanding her release. “What if that just confirms that she worked for you?” I asked. “What if we’re only giving them the proof they are looking for?” If they were after her for her work as an unofficial fixer, there were few worse crimes than illegally fixing for a human rights organization that was not supposed to be in Syria at all.

  The UNHCR staff in Beirut couldn’t do much that the Damascus branch hadn’t, but they were happier to talk to me. They appeared less paranoid than their colleagues in Damascus, perhaps because they had less reason to be, because they were less infected by whatever hung in the air there. I felt the same way—Beirut was good for my state of mind even if I felt miserable most of the time. I was able to write emails and make phone calls without censoring myself, and walk down the streets without looking over my shoulder. People sat on café terraces, staring at their phones and gossiping, the women so brazenly dressed that I looked like a prude by comparison. There were good days and bad, but I found that keeping myself busy was the best way to manage depression, so I didn’t mind going to General Security for the fifth and sixth time, and finishing Hemingway’s memoir of the lost generation in Paris after the First World War.

  I was in touch with Marianne and Alessandro, who were also trying to help Ahlam. Her arrest happened to coincide with their multi-family wedding in Italy, so they had diverted through Damascus on their honeymoon. Over Skype to Damascus I told them what I had learned—that she was imprisoned in Douma, and the allegations. And Marianne, in her quiet, steely way, had been active. She told me she had contacted a lawyer she knew who had worked at UNHCR in Damascus—of course, as luck would have it, the lawyer had left the refugee agency the week before—but she was also in touch with someone who knew someone at the US State Department, who said that Ahlam had been cleared for resettlement to the US around the time of her arrest. Ahlam hadn’t said anything to me, but that was easy to understand: being cleared for resettlement simply meant you should expect to wait around for a year or two while nothing happened, if it ever did.

  Marianne had just met with the UNHCR protection officer handling Ahlam’s case. “He says they don’t know which prison she is in, or what the accusations are against her. He says it’s a black hole.”

  “They know,” I replied. It was near sunset and I was sitting on the balcony of my hotel room. One of the reasons it was cheap was that it overlooked a vacant lot where a huge machine spent most daylight hours boring an enormous and apparently pointless hole in the ground, scattering rocks and sand, never appearing to make any progress. It struck me as an apt metaphor for my life at the moment. “They know, but they don’t want us to get in their way.” We were supposed to stay outside the yellow tape while the experts got on with things.

  The protection officer gave Marianne the same advice he had given to me: don’t go public—no big human rights campaigns—since anything we did on her behalf could be used against her. After talking to him, Marianne had spoken to an official at the French embassy in Damascus, who told her they had a hard time even getting their own citizens out of prison. “Essentially, it would be the job of the Iraqi embassy to get Ahlam out,” she said. That wasn’t even worth discussing. It was discouraging news.

  She and Alessandro were about to leave Damascus and wanted to see me in Lebanon. They asked me to meet them at a lodge in the mountains, and overrode my protests that I couldn’t afford it and considered myself terrible company, a possible hex on romantic relationships. I took a collective taxi, a large white van that rattled up hills, moving from the smoggy July haze over Beirut to greener and cleaner climes, seated next to an excitable girl who wore a small crucifix on a slim silver chain. Passing Bsharri, the quaint village where the poet Khalil Gibran was born, and apricot trees spilling their ripe fruit onto the road, I reached the lodge next to the last stand of the famous cedars of Lebanon. A stone wall, a few acres: a tree museum.

  That evening Alessandro ignored the signs forbidding him to do so and clambered onto the stone wall. He walked around it, arms outspread against a sunset that dyed the whole sky red. Marianne shouted warnings that he ignored, to our delight. Their happiness together was stronger than my unhappiness, an antidote. Late into the night, in the woodpanelled dining room and up in rooms decorated with bright handmade carpets, we discussed Ahlam and what to do over very good red wine that seemed to have restorative powers.

  We talked about my return to Damascus as soon as I could get my passport back. “Ahlam’s brother must know something,” I said. They hadn’t met Salaam, or any of the young men I’d come to know at Ahlam’s apartment, but I thought I might be able to reach Salaam safely through Hamza, Ahlam’s assistant. Hamza had told me that the children were fine, and that Salaam was talking to the mukhabarat. I had to get there soon, while I still had a few more weeks left on my Syrian visa; and money was short so I had best use my time wisely. By the time I left them, two days later, and descended to the seaside of Beirut, something of my former self had returned to me. I was feeling bloody-minded. I descended further, into the basement of the intelligence complex, and again found the officer who was supposed to be handling my case.

  “My brother is getting married,” I told him, meeting his gaze. “In three days. In Jordan. My family is expecting me. I need my passport immediately—they will be heartbroken by my absence.”

  “Come back tomorrow,” he said.

  “You always say that.” Only he didn’t. He usually said to come back in a few days. “I have been here seven times.”

  “Come back tomorrow,” he repeated.

  When I appeared the next day, he reached into a drawer in his desk and handed me my passport. It must have been there the whole time.

  That night, I took a collective taxi back to Damascus to look for Salaam, but it was too late.

  Chapter 22

  THE CHILDREN

  THE MORNING THEIR MOTHER disappeared, Abdullah and Roqayah had gone to school as usual. It was the last day of classes, the beginning of the summer break, so they picked up their diplomas, wishing their mother was there to see the ceremony. But their mother wasn’t at home, either, when they returned. No one was there except Hamza, the young man who lived with them. Later that day, a middle-aged cousin came and took them to her home. It was then that they heard their mother was in jail. She wasn’t coming back.

  When Roqayah asked people why her mother had been arrested, she heard different answers:

  “It’s your dad’s fault.”

  “It’s because of the Iraqis getting her in trouble.”

  “It’s the foreigners she worked with.”

  “Her friend Mona informed on her.”

  She didn’t know what to think, and her older brother seemed even more confused that she was, as if it was normal that their mother was in prison and they were sleeping on the floor at a widowed cousin’s along with her five kids. In fact, the cousin was hardly ever around. Since her husband had been murdered, she had become a wealthy man’s second wife, so she often left the younger children in the care of her teenaged daughters when she went to join him.

  After a couple of weeks, one of the refugees—an Iraqi man who had been tortured
in Abu Ghraib under the Americans and never quite recovered, and had often been in their apartment asking their mother for this or that—told their cousin that he would take them to the police station in Little Baghdad. Maybe if the police saw the two orphans, he said, they would realize they needed their mother and free her.

  “How are you related to them?” an officer asked the man.

  “I’m their uncle.” It was a lie.

  “Why don’t you take them then?”

  Perhaps that’s when the idea came to him, or perhaps he’d had it all along. He took them to his home instead of returning them to their cousin’s apartment. His own flat was filthy: insects crawling on the floor, a flooded kitchen, a big pile of dirty laundry in the bathroom that reeked of mildew. His wife, an angry and depressed woman, ordered her husband around incessantly; he seemed afraid of her. That night the man called their father, who was still in Baghdad, and put the kids on the phone. When he took the phone back there was something said about money. Within a few days they had moved with the man and his wife to a big new apartment.

  Every night the children spoke by phone to their father in their village outside Baghdad. He could not come to them because he had been threatened in Damascus over unpaid debts. They also sometimes spoke to their aunt Tutu, their mother’s sister. Roqayah didn’t like to complain—at nine years of age she had accepted the fact that complaints changed nothing—but one evening she confessed to her aunt that the man they were staying with frightened her; he often walked around the children in nothing but his underwear. Frantic with worry, Tutu made the dangerous journey from Baghdad to Damascus to claim them.

  Salaam had been working all this time, or he would have claimed them sooner. Now, with his sister Tutu there to help him, he rented an apartment for the four of them in Sayeda Zainab. They made a point of spoiling the kids, taking them to a nearby amusement park, paying for them to go on rides. Safe in the arms of family, smothered with attention, the children seemed almost okay.

  On the morning of July 1, Salaam stopped by a transportation company to pick up the money he was owed for his work as a driver. The man who worked at the office stalled him. “Just wait,” he said. “Come back in a bit.”

  Salaam decided to use the time to pick up a load of clean clothes from the laundry, thinking to bring it back to his apartment and take a shower. He was a good-looking man, if carrying a bit of extra weight that was a professional hazard for drivers, and took pains with his appearance. He looked forward to spending time with his nephew and niece who were at the apartment with Tutu.

  Salaam had been meeting people from the mukhabarat to try to find out more about his other sister, but he had soon realized there were many Syrian security and intelligence departments and they didn’t all communicate. That day he was determined, after he had picked up his laundry and taken a shower, to try again to find someone who could help him. He had helped raise the money to pay for Ahlam’s ransom in Baghdad; if he could find the right person to bribe, he would gladly pay for her to be released again.

  But at the laundry, he saw the man from the transportation company. He was pointing him out to a group of men. The men arrested him right there.

  At intelligence headquarters, four agents stood around a man seated at a desk who introduced himself as Captain Abu Yusuf.

  “What’s going on?” Salaam asked him. “Why did you bring me here?”

  He was shown photos of Ahlam and her husband with the American military outside their house in Baghdad. The Americans had given Ahlam the photos as a souvenir; she had hidden them with her documents.

  “That’s my sister,” Salaam told them. “And that’s her husband.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Not here. He’s in Iraq.”

  With that Salaam was handcuffed, wrists behind his back, and driven to his apartment. Tutu opened the door. Abu Yusuf marched past her into the apartment. The terrified children ran to their aunt. “Where’s your machine gun?” he demanded of Salaam, who denied having a weapon.

  Calmly and methodically, they tore the place apart. With Abu Yusuf directing, the four agents turned over mattresses, pulled everything from the cupboards and closets. Looked under the fridge, inside the fridge. After they had searched the living room, they directed the family to sit there. Tutu chain-smoked. Salaam asked if he could smoke but was told, “Not now.”

  They found nothing. An hour later Salaam was blindfolded in addition to being handcuffed and taken back to the vehicle. They took him to Douma Prison, the same prison where Ahlam was being held, though he did not know this.

  The guards took his wallet and his clothing, leaving him in his underwear. He would only be allowed to dress when he went into interrogation. In the meantime he was taken to a solitary cell in the basement of the north sector of the building. The guards didn’t speak except to call him a son of a bitch, and to insult his mother and sister.

  It was one month and a day from his sister’s arrest.

  —

  Two and a half weeks after Salaam was arrested, I crossed from Lebanon through the Syrian border without incident. This could mean one of two things. Either I was not being watched, or I was and they did not want me to know it. But something had changed. I was no longer afraid. Go ahead. Follow me around. Arrest me. I realized that I could accept many things. I could accept not fulfilling whatever ambitions had landed me here in the first place. I could accept the knowledge that nothing I wrote or would ever write would change a thing and that the world would continue to create and destroy and create and destroy as it always did. I could accept living without a relationship. I would still be okay. What I could not accept was Ahlam being gone. It was unthinkable that she had been missing for almost seven weeks. Unthinkable that she could be lost and never heard from again. Unthinkable that I could do nothing. Even though I knew how many other people in other prisons had been missing for years until everyone who had known them forgot or moved on.

  My first call was to Hamid. This time we arranged to meet at the downtown apartment where I had spent that first claustrophobic night after Ahlam disappeared, off a busy main street filled with women’s shoe shops, overtop a convenience store. The freelance journalist who had rented it had flown home early so was no longer worried that my troubles might be contagious. She had generously offered that I could stay there. It was too dangerous to return to the apartment I’d been at before and I didn’t want to: I had felt powerless there.

  In the living room was a small TV and a couple of heavy books—one about genocide, another about the civil war in Lebanon, that she must have deemed too cumbersome to pack. Hamid and I sat on chairs with the lights off. In the window stood cactus plants, needles out like armed sentries. Hamid’s face looked grey, the skin slack around his eyes. He was smoking again, not even bothering to claim otherwise.

  “What happened to you?” I asked. I had received a distressed email from Gabriela, the Czech-American photojournalist, who had been planning to come back to Syria, saying he had told her he couldn’t be her fixer anymore; he had stopped that line of work. Gabriela could tell he seemed demoralized. She wondered if it was because his youngest son, suffering the disruptions, had done poorly on his final high-school exams, making it difficult to apply to universities abroad. And that was the sole aim of Hamid’s life: getting his children out.

  But of course it wasn’t that. Or not only that.

  While I was in Lebanon, Hamid told me, he had been called in for questioning by one of the intelligence agencies. Forced to sit for days in a waiting room, ordered back in each morning, leaving at closing time, coming back the next day. No one told him why he had been summoned. “It’s a technique,” he said. “It breaks you down.”

  When at last he had an audience with an intelligence official, he could not figure out from their line of questioning why they had called him in. “They didn’t say her name.” Ahlam’s, he meant. If her arrest had been intended to send a message, the message had been received. Hamid sto
pped fixing.

  Meeting with me now placed him in danger. I knew he only did so because loyalty was built into his marrow, a quality even self-preservation could not trump. But as he explained bluntly though with diplomacy—it was nothing personal—he could not help me anymore.

  I understood. And was grateful for the help and support he had given, a solid presence when I had felt myself sinking. And it was thanks to Hamid, indirectly, that I learned the fate of Ahlam’s younger brother.

  —

  It was Hamza who told me. The blue-eyed one who had met us under the bridge by the university after dark the month before. When I phoned Hamid upon arriving in Damascus, I’d called one of the numbers listed as “H” in my notebook—not the most sophisticated coding system: Hamza answered. But he was glad I had called, and eager to see me again. I arranged to see him on my own, keeping in mind that Hamid had told me he didn’t trust him.

  We met at the Umayyad Cave, a dank cellar restaurant down a back street in the Old City. Descending the stone staircase, I found myself in what appeared to be a clandestine meeting place for couples. Lovers’ murmured conversations filled the darkness. Taking an empty table in a corner, I ordered tea and nuts in Arabic from the old man who ran the place. Hamza and I had agreed to arrive and leave separately, removing the batteries from our phones.

  Hamza brought an English-speaking friend in his early twenties, another of the young guys who used to hang out at Ahlam’s apartment. It occurred to me that without Ahlam to direct their energies and keep them out of trouble, these boys were amoral, good or bad depending on the winds, but mainly concerned with their own survival. All of them, Hamza said, had been practising the answer to whether or not they knew Ahlam. “Who’s she?” he quipped, laughing nervously. When you’re in enough trouble, nobody knows your name.