A Disappearance in Damascus (14 page)

Suddenly, everyone knew someone who had made it out. Some walked through the mountains into Turkey, bound for Greece, their gateway to Europe, paying smugglers $9,000—half up front and half on arrival. For $15,000 the teenaged son of a businessman made it to Sweden, said to be the Promised Land. Others were conned by swindlers and lost their life savings, or ended up stranded in Nigeria or Cambodia or India without documents. Yet others died en route, trapped in meat lockers or the backs of transport trucks. “Ninety-nine percent of us want to be smuggled out to a country where we can live in peace,” an Iraqi Mandaean told me. “The problem is money and safety.” They lived in terror that something would happen to force them back to Iraq—which it did when the Syrian war began in earnest, sending others scattering to surrounding countries or joining the exodus of Syrians to Europe.

While Europe tried to staunch the flow—the Swedish police were active in Damascus, trying to stop the smuggling—ever more innovative escape routes were being set up by the mafias who ran the lucrative human trafficking trade out of Syria; it was they who pioneered the underground networks that would later be used by Syrians themselves. One of the widows who frequented Ahlam's apartment left for Cyprus by smuggler's boat, carrying her newborn daughter in her arms. She made it over safely.

Good, I thought when I heard that. Good for them.

I felt myself, slowly, become part of the background. Part of the scene, where I like to be. Not that I completely disappeared—that wasn't possible. Around the subject of human smuggling in particular, the number one topic of conversation, I was assumed to be an expert. I had come from the West, after all—I ought to know something about how to get there.

“I have an idea,” said an old man, standing before me to outline an improbable plan by which he would pose as a tennis coach and convince customs officials to let him into Canada.

“Have you ever played tennis?” I asked. I imitated a tennis serve with a swerve of the wrist.

Well no, he had not. But could it be done?

Another plan, one that was clearly making the rounds, was to “rent” an authentic passport from a US citizen and give it back when he got to America. He'd be rich then, obviously, so paying for the smuggling service would not be a problem. Everyone thought, despite the lessons I tried to impart on economic and social policy, that all Americans lived in mansions, drove fancy cars and lived like movie stars. When I suggested otherwise, they smiled indulgently. They knew what they'd seen on TV.

One night we went to a restaurant in the Old City to meet a group of Ahlam's friends. The Old City was festive: young couples holding hands, families out for a stroll dressed in their best, shops decorated brightly for Christmas. A guy walked by wearing a jaunty Santa hat. I thought of the recent emails from my boyfriend, and tried to remember whether this would be the second or third Christmas in a row that I
would spend away from home. I had sent him an email, telling him about the widows who were becoming second wives. He replied that he had had a dream that he had two wives—one who went away, like me, and another who stayed home.

The restaurant was smoky, with white tablecloths and waiters in pressed white shirts, like an Italian supper club. We were ushered to a large table in a semi-private room in the back. Ahlam brought her children, who for once behaved themselves, excited at the novelty of menus and ordering. I had given Ahlam the envelope of cash from Marianne and Alessandro in New York, and her children were both proudly wearing the new track suits she had bought them for the holiday of Eid.

Several Iraqis were already seated at the table. One of them, shaved head, leather jacket, young and flashy, stood up with a drink in his hand. He greeted Ahlam with a brilliant smile. “Do you have any money I can borrow?” he asked her. Tarek worked, when he worked, making documentaries and freelancing for foreign media.

“You can afford to drink in a restaurant and you ask me that?” She laughed. “Go away,” she said, and sat down.

I took the seat beside her and introduced myself as a journalist writing about Iraqis in Syria. An older guest, speaking no English, with a pockmarked face, was eager to talk to me.

“He wants you to interview him for your story,” Ahlam said, setting her phone on the table next to her cigarettes. “He is an artist from Baghdad.”

“Why does he want me to interview him?” I asked. I had done many interviews already, in the hundreds, and I distrusted those who sought me out—it usually meant they wanted something more from me than to tell their story.

“He thinks it will help him sell his paintings. And help him get to the United States.”

“Thank him. Tell him, later. Another day.”

I glanced over the menu. Good—there was mezze, the tapas of hummus and baba ghanoush and fattoush and moutabel. These starters were as inexpensive as they were delicious and filling, unfortunately for restaurateurs who had me as a guest and expected them just to whet the appetite, not sate it. Good, also wine—alcohol was perfectly legal in Syria but in conservative Sayeda Zainab the only liquor store was so well-hidden that I never found it. We had just ordered when another guest joined us. Ahlam stood up and kissed her warmly.

“Deborah, this is Mona,” she said, as I stood to greet the newcomer. “Mona is helping me with the school.”

So this was Mona? She wasn't what I had expected—the stalwart, middle-aged woman I had imagined when Ahlam first mentioned her to me. Mona had a luxurious mane of dark hair that fell in tendrils down her shoulders, a face like a spoiled doll, and a belted raincoat that emphasized her figure. She was in her mid-twenties and looked like the kind of woman who makes a sweeping entrance in a detective novel with a tale that seems plausible until the trouble starts.

She spoke English, but her manner with me was aloof, as if she were Ahlam's friend and had to figure out whether she could trust me. Curiously, I felt the same way. She had brought a friend with her, also Syrian, her dark hair pulled up into a lazy bun. Both of them were fixers, Ahlam told me.

The fixer mafia. It was a small world. Fixers often knew one another, just as journalists inevitably do when our turfs overlap. The day before, a fellow fixer had stopped by
Ahlam's apartment when I was there, one I had immediately liked. Hamid was a gruff man of sixty with a square impassive face and thick old-fashioned glasses. I had heard of him before meeting him—he had worked for a journalist I knew in situations of extreme danger in Iraq. He was known as tough and reliable, solid as a block of granite. He was accompanied by a photojournalist, a Czech-American named Gabriela whose project was to photograph the refugees. As Gabriela and I talked—it was rare to meet other journalists around here, and I gave her my email so we could stay in touch—Hamid and Ahlam exchanged contacts and information with the fluency of colleagues. He had a voice like raking gravel. Hamid was the only Iraqi I met who came to see her on an equal footing, not asking for anything.

Mona and her colleague sat across from us at the table, lighting cigarettes. They talked in low voices while Ahlam attended to her excited children's meals—their mother wasn't much of a cook.

We had begun to use the term “if anything happens.”
If anything happens
was shorthand that neither of us decoded, any more than we had to discuss why Ahlam introduced me to everyone as a professor. Any more than she needed to explain why she had two phones. The first, which rang incessantly, a hundred times a day, was kept for regular calls from people in the neighbourhood or her family in Iraq. The other she had bought for her work as a fixer and the UN refugee agency.

It may be she was already looking around for a replacement for herself, but I don't think her intentions were that fully formed. She was just ensuring that there were backup
plans for backup plans, the way people with experience of things breaking down know to keep spare generators and extra batteries on hand. Mona, she told me, had become her primary backup plan,
if anything happened
.

For a while, she had also been talking to the mild-mannered high-school history teacher I had met in the summer, the one who had lost his job and home and nearly his life after being fired for having been a member of the Iraqi Baath Party. He was gentle, intelligent, cared about children, was a qualified teacher—an excellent choice as a backup to run the classes, if anything happened. But Mona was Syrian, and thus, in these precarious times, a better long-term backup for Ahlam.

The next time I saw Mona was at Ahlam's apartment. It was late afternoon and the small heater barely dented the cold. I wore fingerless gloves, warming my hands over the red-hot wires. It was almost as cold indoors as out, and almost as dark, the sky pressing greyly against the only window. The small apartment was full of refugees, as usual. Ahlam told me with concern how crowded it was becoming—hosting the classes in her apartment, with her and her family living there, the place not their own. Every weekend, dozens of teenagers were coming in and out, along with the volunteer teachers. She had noticed that there was another apartment for rent on the ground floor of her building that might be suitable, but it was beyond her means.

Mona was wearing high-heeled boots, looking like a film star slumming with the extras. She seemed as surprised to see me there as I was to see her. “I'm here all the time,” I said, which was more or less the case, but my words must have come across as a challenge, because she bristled. It
occurred to me that she and I were the only two people who were here by choice rather than necessity; we were neither lost nor destitute. My reaction to her made me examine myself: Was I defensive of my right to be here? Suggesting to her that Ahlam was as much my friend as hers? Could it be as simple as that?

Mona settled tentatively on a chair near the heater and lit a cigarette, talking to me woodenly about the school. I said I thought it was a hopeful project. It was, she agreed.

It struck me as odd to find her so eager to help with nothing obvious to gain from it, but I reprimanded myself for my ill will.

However, my confusion deepened on the visit Ahlam and I paid her a few days later, at a downtown apartment rented by a couple of her friends—tough-looking Serbs in leather jackets who said they worked in the oil business. Mona was helping the men prepare for a party, showing them where to pile the boxes of booze. She stood on a chair to pin up decorations, her skirt riding up her thighs.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked me, when she climbed down. There was no wine or beer, only spirits. She poured two glasses, handing one to me. Ahlam, phone at her ear, declined with a wave of her cigarette and walked into the kitchen where I could hear her talking.

Mona and I talked about why observant Muslims don't drink. “They smoke to make up for it,” I said, smiling.

“Or take drugs.” She proceeded to explain the logistics of smuggling drugs from Lebanon into Syria, wonderfully detailed information that I supposed she had gleaned from her work with journalists.

Later that week Ahlam and I were invited to a party at the home of Tarek, the young Iraqi I had met at the restaurant who made documentary films. Tarek and Ahlam were friends, even though she thought he spent all his money on drink so wouldn't lend him any, even if she had it to lend.

Tarek rented a cellar apartment that was built into the stone walls of the Old City. Before he got into film and journalism, he was in a rock band in Baghdad called Black Rose. “We were horrible,” he told me, “a shame to music history.”

Bottles littered his flat. He had nearly destroyed a book he was writing about the war by spilling a drink on his laptop. He talked a lot about returning to Baghdad, regarding it with the romantic idealism of someone longing for a destructive relationship that might have been okay once, even good. Did I know the taste of the fish that came from the Euphrates, how good it was? Had I any idea? He was determined to go back despite having been kidnapped twice—the second time by Shia like himself who meant nothing personal by it, were just making a living. They loosened his wrists so he could drink with them, then cried about the girls they had loved.

Seventeen of his friends had been killed, artists and journalists, part of the eradication of the intellectuals, but he said it would be better to die in the Baghdad he loved than to endure the soul death of exile. He liked to see Ahlam because she reminded him of home. “You
are
Baghdad,” he told her.

I had had a work obligation before the party. Tarek's friend, the artist with the pockmarked face who had asked me to interview him, had been phoning Ahlam repeatedly, needling her to get me to talk to him. I ignored him for a while
but it was easier to agree than put him off indefinitely. “May as well get it over with tonight,” I had told Ahlam, “since I'm sure we'll be seeing him at the party.” So we met him at a café near the Old City gate of Bab Touma. The interview revealed nothing but his narcissism. “He is telling us,” Ahlam said, stubbing out a cigarette, “that the woman who is working on his resettlement file at the UNHCR thinks he is a very great artist. She bought one of his paintings. He says she wants to have an affair with him.” He watched her proudly, nodding solemnly as she interpreted his words.

The three of us went to the party together, descending the stone stairs to Tarek's cellar. Ducking through the low doorway, I saw Mona. She was drunk and passed out on a bed. Was this the backup plan? If so, it wasn't very solid. That Ahlam seemed to trust her was the main reason I didn't dwell upon my misgivings. I would have plenty of time to do so later on.

The next day I left for Lebanon to complete my research. A few tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees had paid smugglers to take them west across the Syrian border, whether to find jobs in Beirut or another route to Europe. They were living in hiding in Beirut but I wanted to talk to them.