“We are going to give it one more week first,” he said. Amnesty was speaking with the UNHCR about her case, letting them know they would soon be taking action. “If nothing happens, we go public.”
—
From Douma Prison, Ahlam was taken back to the immigration prison where she had last seen her brother. She had no idea what was going on until she entered a bare office where a UNHCR officer she had worked with in the past was waiting for her. You are getting out, the woman told her. Out? What did she mean? “To the United States. We did something unique,” she added, “something we’ve never done before.” The woman didn’t explain, and Ahlam could only wonder what strings had been pulled to effect her release.
From there she was driven to the UNHCR office in Douma, the same neighbourhood where she had spent the past five months in prison. In an office upstairs, she saw her husband and children.
She looked at them in shock. The children were so much thinner than when she had last seen them and stared at her with something like terror in their eyes. Their passports had been in her purse when she was arrested, so after Salaam’s arrest their father had arranged to have them smuggled out of Syria to be with him. Then, three days ago, an official from the UNHCR had phoned him in Iraq. “You’re being resettled to the United States with your wife and children,” he said. “Come to Damascus. Immediately.” They had returned only that morning, the children smuggled back into Syria on a bus the same way they had been smuggled out four months ago.
Abdullah ran up to embrace his mother, but Roqayah hung back, saying only a shy hello. She never showed fear, but later that day, when Ahlam used the excuse of brushing her daughter’s long black hair just to touch her, she was shocked to see strands of white.
In the UNHCR office the story changed again. Now they were being told they were leaving immediately, but their father would not be going with them. There had been a snag, since his resettlement file had been separated from Ahlam’s after he fled to Baghdad on his own; he would have to wait until the system could arrange for him to join them. Roqayah didn’t want to leave either. Torn between her mother and father, recently wrenched from her childhood home for the second time, she wanted them all to go home, to their big house along the Tigris where she had just celebrated her tenth birthday surrounded by family who loved her and life had seemed almost like it used to be before the war.
“I’ll follow you later,” her father assured them as he kissed them goodbye. Then he paused. Everyone was waiting. There was no time to waste. “You have to go,” he ordered the children. “Now.”
Ahlam was allowed to phone Salaam, who had reached their village in Baghdad, and her sister Tutu. She only had time to say goodbye, having no idea when or if she would ever see them again. Then she and the children were rushed to a white SUV flying a UN flag and driven straight to Damascus International Airport. Another SUV accompanied them. Still wearing the same clothes she had worn for the past five months, Ahlam asked the four officials guarding her to stop and let her find a change of clothing, but they refused. They had orders not to let her out of their sight. She asked if they could stop somewhere for cigarettes. They refused. She was given a badge and a bag with the UNHCR insignia and told not to lose them. “This is your identity now.”
At the airport the small family waited for six hours with the UN officials, who paced and looked at their watches. It was four in the morning by the time they were placed on a direct flight to Budapest, along with ten other Iraqi families who had been accepted for resettlement in various countries. From the sky, Ahlam looked out the window to see sunshine—the first full sun she had seen in five months.
Years ago, as a young woman, Ahlam had dreamed of being a flight attendant, and this was the first time she had ever flown on a plane. In Budapest airport she used the last of the money Salaam had given her to buy a pack of cigarettes. She smoked in an outdoor courtyard, shivering in the cold, not losing sight of her children for a single moment. From there, they changed planes to New York, joining a group of refugees who were heading to the US. Roqayah kept insisting she wanted to go home, and Abdullah, her happy-go-lucky son, never once stopped smiling.
Landing at JFK airport on October 27, 2008, Ahlam approached a man who was directing all the refugees.
“Where am I going?” she asked him.
He looked at her badge. “You are going to Chicago.”
“Chicago? Where is Chicago?” she asked.
“You don’t know where Chicago is?” he asked, amused.
She had no idea.
—
Five days after Ahlam landed in Chicago, I flew into O’Hare. She and the children were staying in Edgewater, a lakeshore community of north Chicago known for one of the highest concentrations of immigrants and refugees in the United States. The building she had been placed in by Heartland Alliance, an anti-poverty group that partnered with the US State Department to find housing for refugees, had fifty apartments, ten on each floor, and fifteen nationalities: Bosnians, Serbians, Colombians, Rwandans, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Congolese, Iraqis—you name the war. Down the street, outside the gaping entrance to the L-train station, local toughs in hooded parkas shuffled around in packs. “I fuck him up, bitch!” one of them shouted.
When I reached the apartment, I knocked nervously at the door. What would I find on the other side? I had spent so much time wondering if she was alive or dead, if she had been tortured. I wondered what she would be like now, if I would find myself talking to a stranger I no longer recognized.
It was the children who answered, as wide-eyed as I had ever seen them. “Where’s your mom?” I said, looking past them into the unfurnished living room. The light through the window was dim and the room was silent. “Ahlam?”
She had been as nervous as I was. She emerged from the hallway, shyly, and we embraced.
“It’s really you,” I said. “You’re really here.” And then, “Why are we crying? We should be happy.”
“We are crying for the past, for the present, for everything that happened in all this time.”
I pulled away so I could look at her. “I thought you would be in bed,” I said. “I came to make you soup, to take care of you. But you haven’t changed at all.”
“No,” she said, grinning. “I haven’t changed.”
Now she sat across from me at a card table set up on the beige shag carpet of her new flat, jubilant. A week ago she had been sleeping on the cement floor of a prison cell, certain she would be there for the rest of her life. Looking down she spotted a cockroach crawling on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. “Oh, my old friend,” she said, looking down at it. “I miss you so much.” She killed it with a shoe. “I never did that in prison. We had a peace agreement. But peacetime is over!”
—
Twelve-year-old Abdullah, amazed at all the useful objects people threw out in Chicago, had brought two television sets into the apartment. He alerted his mother that he had seen a third television in another alleyway but she told him that was enough. He and his sister were watching a Disney movie on one of them while Ahlam and I talked.
“Why did they arrest you?” I asked her. “Was it because of me?”
“They wanted me to spy on a journalist. Not you. Deborah Amos. From NPR.”
Amos, a prominent Mideast correspondent, had been covering the refugee story in Syria at much the same time that I had, going in and out of the country often as she gathered material for a book. She had met Ahlam before I came to Damascus, when she did a radio segment on Ahlam’s kidnapping in Iraq. I had known the two of them were acquainted, which is why Amos was one of the first journalists I’d emailed from Damascus after her arrest.
“They thought you were a professor.” Ahlam smiled. She explained how Abu Yusuf had asked her who the woman in her apartment was, then assured her, when she explained that I was a professor from Vancouver, that he already “knew everything” about me. She hadn’t contradicted him. “It was good that we spread that rumour.” He
knew only my cover story, spread from bread seller to cigarette vendor to hotel security guard, reinforced by every refugee who saw me at Ahlam’s apartment.
It was a revelation. I had, after all, eluded the secret police by working undercover. But although my sleight of hand had not jeopardized Ahlam after all, neither had it diminished the fear and guilt that had consumed me. The paranoia of the state, as J.M. Coetzee observed, had been reproduced in my psyche, such that the state had no need to bother with me. As Hamid had often observed, if her arrest had been meant to “send a message,” that message had been received.
Deborah Amos had told me she was not working undercover, though she was conscious of the perils of being observed: having heard Ahlam was on a watch list, she’d deliberately steered clear of her. Amos had obtained an official journalist’s visa through the Syrian embassy in Washington, DC. She had worked through all the right channels, done all the right things, which would have made her an easy target as someone to watch.
Whether this was a case of one branch of the security and intelligence agencies trampling on the decisions of another, a turf war among the more than a dozen overlapping agencies operating in Syria, Ahlam had no idea. It may simply have been one man’s attempt to further his career.
“What do you think of Syria now?” I asked Ahlam.
“Don’t forget, they took in more of us than any country in the world. No other country would help us.”
She could still regard her experience with nuance. And she seemed well, even euphoric. For both of us the sense of relief was like a drug. As for how her release had been achieved, she thought Amnesty International might have had something to do with it, and certainly the UNHCR had pulled out the stops. The UN agencies weren’t as powerful as people sometimes imagined, especially when working in dictatorships where their positions were tenuous. As Marianne put it: “They have to pick their battles.” Yet faced with countless other cases like Ahlam’s, countless other battles, they had chosen to fight this one. “What made Ahlam’s case different was that she had so many people pulling for her,” Marianne said. “She had so many friends.”
Over that kitchen table, Ahlam, bending her head to light a cigarette, told me how the agents who searched her apartment had made a beeline for her letters from American officials in Iraq. “They knew exactly where to look.”
“How could they?” I asked. “Who else knew?”
She had hidden her documents, she told me, months before her arrest. It was on a day when Mona had come by for a visit, back when relations between them were warm; it hadn’t occurred to her to hide things from a friend. When the old guard, Sadiq, had taken pity on her and read to her from her prison file, he told her someone had informed on her. The name on the report was Mona’s.
I asked her what she thought of Mona now. She went over to the window, painted so many times it no longer opened without a struggle. “It especially hurts when a friend betrays you,” she said quietly. She had been told by Tarek, before anything happened, that Mona was jealous of her renown as a fixer, but it was hard for Ahlam to fathom jealousy—it wasn’t in her nature. And Mona’s youth, beauty, potential were such that it was hard to understand why she would be jealous of a refugee who had only come to Damascus because she’d been kidnapped, and wore a picture of her dead son around her neck. She knew, of course, that Syrian fixers sometimes made deals with the Ministry of Information—some even had to give them kickbacks in order to be allowed to work. Everyone in the know was aware that this was the case. But the personal nature of the betrayal, by someone she considered a friend: this she could not grasp.
A cold wind gusted through the open window. In the alley below, a homeless man was bedding down for the night. Soon it would start to snow.
A few weeks later Ahlam slipped on an icy sidewalk and broke her arm. Her family in Iraq, with whom she was now able to keep in touch over the Internet, asked if she had broken it skiing, since that must be what she did all day now that she was living the American Dream.
—
Ahlam’s arrival in Chicago coincided with the financial crisis. Streets of boarded up shops with “For Lease” signs that already looked weathered, legions of homeless, many of them army veterans, who rode the trains all day to stay warm. These conditions did not bode well for refugees who were expected to be fully employed by the time their government assistance was cut off in eight months.
Within days other Iraqi refugees in Chicago had found her. A depressed widower raising three little boys, who needed Ahlam to help him fill out medical forms. A female journalist who had been raped in Baghdad and was now a single mother. A man with a brain injury who came on to the female journalist in the elevator, and his beleaguered wife who wept when she learned she was pregnant with a third child.
I came back to Chicago for the month of December. Having finished my teaching term, I wanted to interview her while details were still fresh. A woman from Amnesty International came to document her testimony. Beth Ann was about fifty, a pale redhead with grown children. Straightforward, with an intelligent blue-eyed gaze and an American directness, she had long worked on Amnesty’s Iraq file and was sent to help Ahlam settle in.
By the time I left, Beth Ann had become Ahlam’s close friend. She arranged the things Ahlam could not, emailing her daily to-do lists, browbeating her into showing up to doctor’s appointments, finding her a dentist willing to work pro bono (she had, beneath the nicotine stains, lovely white teeth), and putting a moratorium on her use of the term insha’Allah. “It’s like saying, ‘I’ll get to it if I get to it,’ and if not, blame God.”
The two of them concocted a plan to open an Iraqi Mutual Aid Society, a first for Chicago. Ahlam had always been good at coming up with ideas, but she didn’t know the American system as Beth Ann did. With Ahlam’s testimony, Beth Ann’s superlative organizational skills, and funding organized with help from Marianne, they pulled it off.
In 2009, the society opened, dedicated to helping refugees adapt to their new home. At first they ran it from Ahlam’s apartment, and then an article about Ahlam appeared in the Chicago Tribune. A wealthy philanthropist named Ann read the article and phoned, showing up with a check for $20,000, afterward supporting the Mutual Aid Society with $40,000 a year. The society was able to rent an office and begin their work in earnest. The following year Ahlam received an award from a local women’s group.
Within a year her children were speaking good English. Roqayah’s grades jumped from Ds to As. Taking off the headscarf as she moved into middle school, she emerged as a beautiful young woman, thirteen going on twenty, fluent in American schoolgirl slang. She admired Doctors Without Borders and was already talking about pre-med; Abdullah—a math whiz—about computer science.
I should end the story here. Happy ever after in the land of opportunity.
Chapter 27
ADAPTATION
AHLAM AND I HAD LONG engaged in banter that allowed us to stave off darkness. I would joke when I hadn’t been able to reach her for several weeks—her number mysteriously changed or her phone switched off—that I thought she’d disappeared again. And she would quip, “Yeah, next time they’re sending me to Guantánamo.”
“I hear the weather’s good there.”
“Better than Chicago.”
There are three stages people go through after arriving in a new place that has been envisioned as a kind of salvation. The first is the halcyon time in which they imagine that everything in the new place is perfect; everything back home bad, even horrible. The second is the gradual disillusionment, as the new life reveals its own troubles. Longing for the lost homeland, old friends, ways of life that have acquired the glow of nostalgia. Then comes the settling in, the adaptation. Letting go of the past and realizing there is no going back. People who talk of these stages say the process takes about five years.
When I came to see her in the summer of 2009, she had a car and a driver’s licence. Jason Pape, commander of the tank unit that used to han
g out at Ahlam’s house in Baghdad, had heard she was looking for work. He knew she would need a car for that to happen so he had given her his old Mercury station wagon with enough money to pay for the registration. Pape’s father had driven the car all the way from Kansas to Chicago.
Over the first year, while the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society was getting underway, Ahlam held a series of part-time jobs, some of which, like driving local children to and from school, seemed to cost her more in gas than she was earning. Flummoxed by Chicago’s tyrannical parking laws, which appeared to be the backbone of the city’s funding strategy, she accumulated a breathtaking number of tickets. This was money she could not afford, and she missed a couple of months’ rent. She found herself struggling to focus, haunted by the past.
Beth Ann found her a therapist at the Marjorie Kovler Center, an institute established in Chicago to help survivors of torture. After each therapy session she was exhausted; her entire body ached for days. She went for a while, then dropped out.
“Was she always so disorganized?” Beth Ann called me to ask. “Was she always this depressed?” I could tell she could not quite believe the stories I told of Ahlam’s competence, of triumphs that sounded now like myth. I had thought, when she was first released, that she hadn’t changed at all, but what Beth Ann said suggested I was wrong.
I said I remembered times when she was so exhausted she would sleep for two days straight. But then wake up and be exemplary. “I think she needs a year off,” I told Beth Ann, “to recover.” Which of course was impossible. The poor do not take a year off in Chicago and keep a roof overhead. When Ahlam came across a pamphlet advertising “free” money in exchange for signing onto a credit offer, it was Beth Ann who explained that nothing is ever free in America.
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