A Disappearance in Damascus (13 page)

AT JFK AIRPORT, THE MERCENARIES
bound for Iraq via the New York flight to Jordan were easy to spot. Clad in Oakley wraparound sunglasses and Quiksilver T-shirts, the uniform of the off-duty hired gun, five of them did tequila shots at the bar next to the Royal Jordanian boarding gate, where I was nursing a glass of water and a hangover.

“I'm always shit-faced when I fly transcontinental,” the one who looked like a
Top Gun
pilot boasted to his friends. “We rule two-thirds of Iraq and all of Afghanistan!” shouted his nerdier colleague, proposing a toast. They talked of being “assassins.”

I was booked on the same flight, having spent the previous days in New York meeting with editors and friends. Over lunch with Luke, my editor at
Harper's
, we discussed the structure of my piece on the refugee crisis and the reporting I still needed to finish it. He drew a complex diagram in marker on a placemat and I nodded as if it made perfect sense. I told him I was going to start in Jordan, then check in on Damascus for a week or so. I was planning to focus a
segment of the piece around the refugees who congregated at Ahlam's apartment; their situation could only have worsened in the last three months as they burned through their savings. After that I would go to Beirut where I had learned that tens of thousands of Iraqis were paying smugglers to take them over the border from Syria to Lebanon.

The night before had been a noisy reunion of the Westerners I had met in Damascus through Ahlam. I embraced Marianne and Alessandro, who had finished their work in Syria and were settling into life together in Chelsea. Their wedding was planned for the summer in Italy, a logistical challenge joining families across countries and continents, but they seemed very happy. At their apartment, with its high ceilings and ornate plasterwork, Alessandro uncorked a bottle of red while talking animatedly about an Iraqi film festival he was organizing in Milan. The focus was the plight of media workers in Baghdad, but he hoped that some of the filmmakers who were planning to attend would be granted asylum. That way, he explained, regardless of who came to the screenings, something good would come of it.

Marianne had moved on to other development work after finishing up with UNICEF—adolescent girls remained her focus, they were so vulnerable, she said, and tended to slip through the cracks—but she worried about Ahlam. “If anything happens to her,” she told me later in the evening, as one of the guests clambered out onto the fire escape for a smoke and another struggled with a corkscrew, “at least Mona can keep the school going.” Mona, she reminded me, was the Syrian woman who had offered to help Ahlam run her classes. She hadn't been at the opening ceremony so I hadn't met her, but what struck me was the first part of Marianne's
statement—the acknowledgement that something
could
happen to Ahlam.

Not possible, I thought. Of course I remembered the meetings with Captain Abu Yusuf, and how surprised Ahlam was to learn that the Syrians were sending intelligence agents to follow her around. Yet the school had opened without a hitch, so perhaps the worst was past. “Nobody's safe here,” Ahlam had told me during our work together, but compared to other refugees she seemed invincible—a force of nature. Besides, she had so many friends. Before I left that night, Marianne slipped me an envelope to give her. “For the school,” she said. “Or whatever she needs.”

At the airport bar, the men had sent the only woman at their table, a hard-looking blonde in a short denim skirt, to the barman for another round. When she returned I noticed her tattoo: a snake winding up her calf.

Jordan was a transit hub for contractors heading into Iraq—men you always saw in airports like Frankfurt or Dubai. A lot of them worked for KBR, a spinoff of Halliburton, whose former CEO Dick Cheney helped mastermind the invasion of Iraq after becoming vice-president to George W. Bush. If there was an undisputed winner of the war in Iraq, it was KBR, which took in multi-billions in no-bid contracts. Others worked for Blackwater, the most notorious of the dozens of private military and security firms who made up a shadow army that for the first time ever outnumbered traditional troops. These included firms you'd never heard of until you listened to their employees talk about “killing bad guys” as if they really believed that. Some earned in a day what a grunt, which many of them had been, earned in a month. They counted when it came to their paycheques, but
not when they died. Conveniently, their numbers were left out of the body count back home.

This group was from SOC, which I learned when they toasted their employer. Special Operations Consulting, when I looked it up, was a Nevada-based company started by six Navy SEALs that specialized in “international force protection.” It had recently been expelled from Namibia for illegally attempting to recruit low-wage guards for US military bases; other SOC recruits alleged abuse on the bases, with female contractors passed around for sex.
³²

On the ten-hour flight over I was seated next to a woman with a wailing baby. My head throbbed, so I asked to be moved to an empty seat in the back. On one side of me sat an Arab girl reading a book called
God's Answers to Life's Most Important Problems
. On the other side was a bearded contractor, approximately six foot six, wearing a T-shirt with a skeleton brandishing an M16 and the words
US Army: We're the Ultimate in Body Piercing
. Hemmed in by religion and militarism, I tried to get some sleep.

THROUGH THE WINDOW OF
the taxi, the city rose abruptly from the desert, veiled in cold white mist. At the outskirts, the driver, who had brought me all the way from Jordan, nosed into Sayeda Zainab, sloshing through potholes filled by recent rains. He had trouble finding the Kuwaiti Hotel, which had been recommended to me with the words “cheap” and “clean,” and was forced to circle the block several times, stopping to ask for directions. Finally I spotted a narrow glass door, wedged in next to a kitchen shop. I pulled my bags out of the back and hauled them up the stairs to the manager's office on the second floor.

I looked around the room he offered me with satisfaction. It was a lodging for pilgrims: two single beds, furnished kitchenette, bathroom, prayer rug. A little settee for guests. A sharp chemical scent assured me it had recently been sprayed for cockroaches. Just a block from the shrine in Little Baghdad—luxury.

I called Ahlam from the phone in the manager's office. In a matter of minutes she flew in the door. Breathless, as if she had been running. “You came back,” she said, dissolving into tears. I felt embarrassed but pleased, standing to embrace her as the manager, who had made tea, watched us with amusement. No one had ever cried with happiness at seeing me. I come from an inexpressive culture, where tears are private matters reserved for sadness or self-pity.

It was late, well past dinnertime. I needed bread, coffee for the morning, a new SIM card for my phone. Ahlam and I headed outside to the market in a tumble of words, arm in arm like mismatched school chums—she, the shorter one, all in black; I, at nearly six feet, the ponytailed giantess in jeans.

She had been ill, she said. After her kidnapping back in Iraq, she'd suffered a heart attack, and since then experienced intermittent heart pain. I said I had been…busy, away, on assignment in a rainforest on the other side of the planet. I never knew how to explain my life to someone for whom it must sound so carefree. And anyway, I was happy—glad to be here, now, to be absorbed and fascinated. That in itself defied explanation. She was happy too to tell me she was now a neighbourhood representative for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The refugee agency had recently brought over an Egyptian rock star as a goodwill ambassador and she had been showing him around. The work was voluntary, but it gave her a monthly stipend for expenses, and just as importantly provided connections, access to information and a sort of legitimacy. The staff there had to return her calls. She laughed. “Maybe now the Syrian intelligence will leave me alone.” Abu Yusuf was still
calling her in for meetings, still flummoxed, but it appeared to me that she was in a more stable position.

At the market, electric light from stalls and shops splashed over darkened streets and illuminated faces at close range, like a farm fair at night. It was so densely packed that we had to unlink arms and wedge ourselves into gaps. As the crowd surged around us, we were stopped by a woman, a widow who wanted advice on obtaining food rations. Then another woman approached her through the crowd. Also a widow.

“So you're, what, the mayor of this place now?” I asked after they left. Ahlam grimaced, then laughed. “You're the mayor of Little Baghdad,” I said, laughing even harder, throwing an arm around her back. “Congratulations. No one else would want the job.”

A few weeks earlier I had been sailing through the Great Bear Rainforest off the west coast of Canada to write a travel piece for
Canadian Geographic
. The rainforest, stretching across an archipelago of thousands of islands and webbed fjords, is one of the last inhabitable places on the planet that, on satellite images, still turns black at night. For nine days there was no phone reception, no email, no headline news. I was about as far off the grid as you can get.

It wasn't my usual sort of assignment, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a place with few human footprints, so when an editor dangled it, I bit. From the boat I watched grizzly bears with great bands of muscle across their hulking backs rear up along the shoreline. I perched astride the bowsprit while two Dall's porpoises raced alongside the ship, their silvery skin almost near enough to touch. I looked for
and found the famously elusive white Kermode spirit bear, the rarest bear on earth.

In the rainforest, history is written on the rings of thousand-year-old red cedars. Human endeavour is the golf balls shot off cruise ship decks that wash up on rocky outcrops. And plastic, so much plastic, is our culture's legacy. Sleeping in the wheelhouse of the hundred-year-old schooner through a violent storm, I dreamed about the death journey of the salmon. The salmon, as it battles upriver to spawn, grows fangs and a snout, turning from Jekyll into Hyde. After spawning and giving up its life, it floats downstream, providing food for bears, eagles, trees, for every living thing.

If the rainforest seemed like a vision of the deep past, Sayeda Zainab—Little Baghdad—seemed like the future. Masses of humanity, on the run from our own species and our uniquely destructive abilities. Here, I was about as far as it was possible to be from that place of natural cycles. Here, when someone died, it was almost always for nothing.

As we made our way through the market, passing carts selling soccer jerseys and cheap colognes with names like One-Dollar Man, Ahlam caught me up on recent events, which had become more dire. The conflict in Iraq was reaching deeper into Damascus. Three refugee ex-generals had been found in an apartment nearby, hog-tied and strangled. Another ex-general, in a neighbouring apartment, fled upon hearing the news; no one knew where he ended up. A widowed mother of three who was working as a prostitute to feed her children was murdered by a family member who had come from Iraq to protect the family “honour.” And an Iraqi television director who made programs critical of the political situation in Iraq had been stabbed thirty-seven
times outside his Damascus office. His name had been on a list of “cultural targets” published by an Iraqi militia.

On the edge of the market was a stand piled high with fresh-baked bread. I stopped to buy some. The vendor looked at me as if couldn't quite believe what he was seeing, the only Westerner around. “Who is she?” he asked in a shocked whisper.

“A professor,” Ahlam told him. She needed no prompting from me. Not to answer would be to leave a vacuum into which rumour would flood, and rumour was the main source of news.

On the second morning, awakened early by the call to prayer, I dressed and walked the winding alleys over to Ahlam's apartment. She'd be awake—sleep did not come easily to her and she was always awake. Nearing the gold dome of the shrine I passed the only other person who was on the street at this hour, a young cigarette vendor who was slapping his arms to keep warm. He beamed a broad smile, shouting his greeting through a fog of breath. “Welcome,
doktorah
!”

I had been here less than thirty-six hours. News travelled fast.

December mornings were cold and damp, fingers of mist transforming the alleyways into a medieval film noir. The mist draped itself around the neighbourhood the way it had over the rainforest, guarded there by eagles atop tall cedars, here by minarets.

Since the summer, I had become familiar with the Escher-like maze of streets and alleyways, though I took back routes, never lingered. I was no longer on top looking down, but had
burrowed my way to the centre of Little Baghdad. I tried to make myself invisible, and at times felt I must be succeeding. When a knot of Iranian pilgrims emerged from the shrine chanting, arms swinging, they flowed around me like a river around a stone.

I rarely bothered going downtown except to visit Kuki or Rana, and they were not eager to come to me. When I went to dinner with Rana and her family—a boisterous clan who were always trying to force-feed me—I told them where I was living. One of Rana's sisters, a pharmacist who wore too much makeup, shouted something I couldn't follow. She pantomimed striking her forehead, then collapsed into laughter.

“What did she say?” I asked Rana.

“It's an expression.” Rana smiled. “ 'May God fix your head.' ”

“But I like it there,” I protested. “You'd be surprised.”

I was teaching Ahlam yoga. Since her kidnapping, when she was thrown from truck to truck, Ahlam had found moving her shoulder to be painful, so while her husband and children were still asleep in their bedroom, we stretched our arms up, up, up. Now bending, now touching toes, then up again. “Bend your knees,” I said, watching her and illustrating. “Just slightly, when you turn.” Then lifting the arms up and over, up and over, breathing from the stomach. She joked that we could offer classes: one for the victims of Saddam Hussein, one for the victims of the Americans, one for the victims of the militias. We would have lineups around the block.

I had planned to stay for a week, catch up on the latest developments, then leave to continue my research in Beirut. But a week became two, became three, and still I stayed.
Each morning I descended the stairs from my hotel room with a wave to the slim moustachioed hotel manager, who looked like a waiter in a French restaurant. I bought a pack of cigarettes for Ahlam from a sidewalk vendor, and bread and cheese to share, and spent my days at Ahlam's apartment. I didn't need to hustle anymore. I had the base I had been looking for. I treated the burgundy sofa as a theatre box seat, taking notes as people talked. Since she was more or less the mayor of this community of exiles, her apartment the town hall, I could simply sit there while their stories came to me.

Ahlam was still running the classes from her apartment, although the school was on winter break. There were seventy students now coming on weekends, divided into classes that ran from nine in the morning to nine at night: a morning class for girls in English, a noon class in English conversation, an afternoon class for boys in math and English, then French lessons for girls in the evenings. She had introduced the class for boys after a group of them had made the case that they, too, deserved to learn. Ahlam was the headmistress, but the classes were taught by volunteers—some of them Westerners, others Iraqi schoolteachers. Roqayah, her precocious daughter, now nine, was learning English in her mother's classes, and was always quizzing me on my Arabic, correcting my deplorable accent. She had chosen a line from one of the textbooks, making me say it back to her in Arabic. “The monkey,” she said in careful English. “Lives. In the jung-le. Now you.”

Meanwhile the apartment had become a temporary warehouse for donations from a mosque in New York. All day long mothers came by to rifle through the wall of black garbage bags filled with used winter clothing, fitting warm coats
onto the stiff arms of children. They heaved up packages of donated foodstuffs. “Write your names here,” Ahlam said, handing them a list, making them sign and pose for a photograph. “So the donors know I did not steal,” she explained.

“Now,” she told the recipients, “you won't tell anyone where these things came from?” She made them promise. If word got out she'd be mobbed. “I will have to put a notice of my death on my door,” she told me. “Some will cry for me; some will cry for their packages.”

Pacing around her apartment in a green army surplus jacket, a phone to each ear, cigarette between her lips, Ahlam looked like a guerilla fighter commanding operations. While she shouted orders and handed out packages, her apartment was the centre of lively activity, laughter, commiseration.

“The problem with these kerosene heaters,” she said, looking at a stack of them that had been given by a famous Syrian actress to honour the death of her grandmother, “is how to afford kerosene.” Even so the heaters were gone from her apartment within hours.

People came to get news, advice, their packages. And mainly, I think, to feel as I did—less alone. When I had told my boyfriend I was going to be away for December—and Christmas—he had assured me that he would be fine. But almost as soon as I had left his tone changed. He recounted in an email a dinner alone at a restaurant when he was pierced by the sight of a couple holding hands. He wrote:
Maybe I just have to find a way to accept this. We will talk when you get back and try to sort this out
.

I did what I usually did: gave myself over to the work. Things were much worse since I had been here in the summer. Walking down the alley towards Ahlam's, I was
trailed by a morose teenaged shepherd who was earnestly trying to sell me one of his flock—just a small one, he suggested. During the holidays of Eid al-Adha, Muslims are meant to butcher a sheep the way Abraham did after proving to God that he was willing to kill his own son. (This story always struck me as reflecting badly on both Abraham and God.) But Iraqis were too broke this year to eat lamb. “We are becoming veg-et-ar-ian,” Ahlam said, laughing, her tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar word.

One day her neighbour's son disappeared, a young Iraqi on the run from the Syrian police. Some said he had been selling forged Syrian residency permits, others that he was running a network of girls. All we knew for sure was that a sympathetic police officer had warned his two brothers to stay out of sight lest they be rounded up in his stead.

The two young men, breathless and pale, came over to hide out. Years later I would learn that one of these brothers, a devoted nationalist and family man, would return to Iraq, where he would be killed by Islamic State militants while attempting to get his wife and son out of the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul. The other brother would make it to the United States, where he would become a successful drug dealer.

For now their futures were undecided. As they joined us, a woman in a full face veil walked in the door, sank into a plastic chair, tore off her veil and waved her fingers in the air for a cigarette. One of the brothers scrambled to give her one, standing up to light it for her. Inhaling deeply, she fluffed out her dyed blonde hair with her fingers. Even in Little Baghdad, where almost every woman but me covered her hair—no one seemed to care—I hadn't before seen anyone fully veiled. And underneath she looked like a femme fatale. It turned out
that she was a widow who had recently solved the problem of single motherhood by becoming a “second wife.” The veil came about because her new husband, a well-to-do businessman who worked between Baghdad and Damascus, wished to hide his second wife from the first. In this way his neighbours had no idea she was not the same wife he kept in Baghdad.