A Disappearance in Damascus (18 page)

I FOUND A ROOM
at the Sultan, a backpacker's hotel near the railway station outside the Old City walls. It was a musty place filled with decorative cushions and a film of dust as old as the hippie trail. A French couple chain-smoked in the breakfast room, arguing over a guidebook.

It was a short walk from the Sultan through stark morning sunlight that left me feeling exposed to Souk al-Hamidiyeh, the covered bazaar in the Old City. It seemed like a good idea to play the tourist. Besides, I needed the souk: a dim and cavernous tunnel where I could dissolve into the cosmopolitan stew of nationalities and religions. Greek Orthodox priests in flowing robes striding past women in jeans and men in business suits; white headscarves, no headscarves, nuns in habits, kids in school uniforms, tourists in shorts. This mix of peoples was the best thing about Damascus, the thing I always loved. I could not have imagined that I was witnessing a final act—that this age-old tradition of pluralism
would shortly disappear, adding millions of Syrians to the millions of Iraqis seeking refuge in the outside world.

Like Ahlam. Two more days had passed without a word. In the taxi from the journalist's office I had called a woman I knew at the UNHCR and asked her to meet me for a drink. Sitting in an upscale bar filled with the after-work set, she wanted to know why I hadn't told her about this over the phone.

“Over the phone?” I had said. “You want me to tell you this
over the phone
?”

After that meeting I spoke daily to the staff at the refugee agency. They were investigating her disappearance, they told me, meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They did not yet know where her children were. I pointed out that it was a good thing Ahlam had worked for them, because it meant they had a level of responsibility for her well-being. I offered to write an article, but they urged me in the strongest terms not to publicize her arrest. If I did she might be deported to Iraq, and we all knew what that meant. And if I had it in my head to involve the human rights groups she had worked for—Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Refugees International—it would only make it harder for the authorities to back down. “The international groups can scream and shout,” said the protection officer in charge of her case. “It will do nothing.” The same, he implied, went for me.

Now I pushed through the crowds, ignoring the overtures of vendors touting garish belly-dance costumes, lizard skins marketed as miracle cures, knock-off versions of brand-name perfumes, samovars as tall as a man. A man in a wheelchair had parked himself directly in the path of passersby, selling flesh-toned balloons printed with Chinese characters. There was, as always, a lineup outside Bakdash, the
nineteenth-century brass-and-wood pistachio ice cream shop that was a Damascus landmark.

I had no idea what I was looking for. Escape. Oblivion. The comfort of timelessness. That's always why I came to the Old City, to lose myself within ancient walls that spoke of endurance, solidity, immunity to cataclysm. I passed beneath the Roman columns of the Temple of Jupiter into the wide sundrenched square and turned down a narrow stone passageway. There, across from a rainbow of carpet shops, an artist's studio caught my eye. In the dirt-smeared windows were small naive portraits of veiled women. Some revealed a single eye and others were merely black shrouds. Yet they were oddly cheerful, like a set of Russian dolls. They reminded me of Ahlam, who had managed to maintain her humanity within constraints that would have crippled anyone else.

Pushing open the door, I found an old man brewing tea over a stove on the floor, a cigarette in his mouth. The air hung with a curtain of pungent brown smoke as thick as my depression. Brushing aside piles of papers and books, he invited me to take a seat. He was an artist, he said in fluent English. He had adopted the profession at the age of fifty-one after he was unable to find a publisher for his last book,
Temptations of the Devil
.

So, a heretic then?

“No—a Sufi.” The mystics of Islam.

He made me tea—“You like mint?”—and insisted I join him with a Gauloise. Then, while we sat on low stools across from one another, he read me his philosophical meanderings, rendered in Arabic calligraphy and framed around the shop.

My God, when I met you after all this suffering from searching for you, I found myself in front of myself!

My God, I think that all the language in the world cannot explain my feelings when you said to me you have no hell
.

“No hell—and no paradise,” he said, putting aside his musings. “We are working with God to perfect this life.”

Sitting there, amid the narcotic comforts of art and tea and nicotine, the outside world faded. Breathe. I could almost breathe.

The old man told me he had once been married to a Palestinian woman, and once to a beautiful German anthropologist who had left him to marry an African prince. “He was so tall! So black!” And she as pale as milk.

He had come to Sufism on his own. “God does not want us to pray to him, to build a temple. No, no, no! No. To develop this life
with
him.”

It was a perfect description of Ahlam's cosmology. “Wherever you are, begin,” she often said, quoting her father. “Begin and the rest will follow.”

But begin how? And what would follow?

The eyes of the women in the paintings watched me from shelves around the small studio. Though they were clad in black, the artist had surrounded them in bright pointillist colours as though they were emitting light. As though, through art, he had freed them.

I remembered what Ahlam had told me about her girlhood on the Tigris, sitting with her bare feet dangling out of her bedroom window overlooking the river as she read books about other lives and worlds. I remembered what her father had said when she was still that girl. “You are a free bird. Don't let anyone put you in a cage.”

Somewhere, in this city, she was in a cage, and I could think of no way to pry open the bars.

Back at the Sultan, the man at the front desk was chatty, pointing out a bookcase bulging with airport novels that guests had left behind, and suggesting a travel book that might be of interest. I pretended to care. That was why I was here, to see the sights. He handed me my room key, along with my passport which he had taken to complete my registration.

I unlocked the door of my room and locked it again behind me. Looking around at the faded furnishings, still holding my passport, I realized I could not stay here. In another day or two, a photocopy of my passport would make it onto somebody's desk. Perhaps it was sitting there already, waiting for a bored state employee to return from lunch. After that it might only be a matter of time before someone came here to ask the man at the front desk about me.

I couldn't stay here, but I couldn't leave Damascus either. If I left, I would leave Syria altogether, and were I to be detained at the border—“come this way, sit here,” scenes I knew from past experience—I could imagine waiting in a drab office while a junior clerk or career-minded lieutenant typed a simple web search and pulled up, instantaneously, my article on the refugees from Iraq. If he had any English at all he would skim to the part where I wrote about the woman in Sayeda Zainab. Name changed or not, it would be easy to identify her. They would already know she was the key fixer on anything to do with refugees. If they were looking for reasons to hold her, working for an undercover journalist would fit the slot.

I perched on the worn coverlet at the foot of the bed and looked through my wallet, mentally calculating what
remained in my bank account. There was a bank I had discovered here, registered in Lebanon, that allowed me to take out money, though the statements made it appear that I had withdrawn it from Beirut. Funds would still be tight. There was teaching awaiting me in Vancouver in September, three months away, by which time my Syria visa would have expired. Meanwhile I couldn't file stories from Damascus without drawing attention to my byline, or take assignments elsewhere.

There was only one assignment anyway. Since I was here and she was there—wherever “there” was—that was my assignment: to look for her. That was where I had to begin.

For that I needed freedom. Freedom to move around, ask questions, talk to people without being watched. If I had to stay in Damascus, I would have to go underground.

First I tried to get my old apartment back, the one I'd rented the year before. It seemed to me that if I could stay there, everything would go back to being the way it had been. Ahlam would go on being—what? It made no logical sense but in the irresistible magical thinking that overtook me, if I could return to that tidy studio apartment with its flamingo-pink terrace overlooking the city, I would be safe and she would be conjured back into existence.

I found the telephone number of the landlord in the back of one of my old notebooks. At least I hadn't torn that number up. It seemed like a good sign—I still had his number—and he was obliging on the phone, but explained that his son was back from medical school in the United States and was using the apartment to study. He offered to speak to his son on my behalf, and for a brief time I was under the illusion my plan
would actually work. I would move back to the top of those stairs and Ahlam would return unharmed, like a film running backward. But when I called him again it turned out his son would not agree to help me turn back time: he had his future to think of, his exams.

I considered two other apartments. The first was too expensive and on the ground floor. Anyone could break in at any time. The second, on the top floor of a walk-up next to a department store, was almost perfect. It had a stale, locker-room smell, but I could live with that. I was ready to tell the landlord, a short stocky man in a suit, that I would take it, when a couple scuttled out of the bedroom I hadn't even bothered to check. The man, so tall his head almost touched the low ceiling, was buttoning his shirt, while the heavily made-up girl ran a hand through tangled hair. “That's my brother and his wife,” said the landlord stiffly. Not unless they had different fathers. Otherwise the place was renting by the hour.

Instead I found an ersatz version of my first apartment, a handful of blocks away, in a walk-up ensconced between a wine bar and a European clothing store that sold clubwear: ripped jeans, glitter T-shirts, see-through tops. A Westerner would be expected to live somewhere like this. I would not stand out.

I paid cash to the owners, who wished to avoid paying taxes and so did not register with the authorities. They had asked for two months up front, so in the back office of a garment factory, amid the clamour of sewing machines, I counted out a thousand dollars' worth of Syrian pounds.

The apartment was dusty, almost squalid, uncared for, but it was on the top storey, its front door accessible only off an
enclosed central terrace. From the artifacts abandoned by former tenants—rolling papers, a Paulo Coelho novel, a love letter in broken English to someone named Giorgio from a girl who sought a future in their Damascus fling, beginner Arabic translations (“in the morning I drink coffee”)—I assumed it had previously been rented by European students living the hash-smoking Orientalist fantasy. Someone had tried, and failed, to paint Che Guevara's face on a canvas rolled up in a corner of the terrace.

Inside, I turned on the air conditioning and opened my notebook to the last interview I had done, the day before Ahlam went missing. It was with a psychiatrist who had practised in Baghdad, a solemn, intelligent man, now a refugee himself. I had written down his thoughts about a teenaged patient of his who had witnessed her father being kidnapped. She suffered sleep disturbances, paranoia, certain that at any moment she and her mother would be next. “There was a question of how to treat her,” he said. “Was this an irrational fear?”

After that the notebook was blank. White pages, like an expunged memory. Only a line I had written since.
I have a nightmare where I hear the sound of electric drills and wake in a state of raw fear
.

Even jotting down that dream—borrowed threads of the sort of torture described to me in interviews with Iraqis—took enormous effort. To write about the nightmare of Ahlam's disappearance was another matter. I lacked the clarity of thought, the stillness that writing demands. Even if I wanted to defy the UN staffers and publish something about what had happened, I'm not sure I could have strung the sentences together. I could feel my mind going in uncertain
directions, shadows contorting into phantasms. I was afraid: afraid of being watched, being taken, being tortured. I was equally afraid of myself: that my presence put others at risk. I wanted to contact the young men who had made Ahlam's apartment their clubhouse—her assistants—to find out what they knew and where her children were; or her brother Salaam, who might be here from Baghdad already, looking for her. But Ahlam had been my link to them, and she was missing—the missing link. And I had begun to fear my own words, my data trail, as if I held the power of life and death in my hands. If I had put her in danger, anyone who talked to me could be in danger too.
Was this an irrational fear
?

I went to the kitchen to boil water for coffee. With the shutters on the window closed against the blinding afternoon, it was dark and stuffy. When had this kitchen last been cleaned?

I was still able to step back and regard my situation with some equanimity. I had been in dangerous situations before: hiding in a house in Bethlehem surrounded by gunfire when a child was shot in the head; on the Iranian border with Iraq, where I was held and interrogated overnight in a police station. Did I know, they asked, government buildings had been bombed, the blame placed on the British troops directly across the border in Basra? Perhaps I was their spy? (It took several hours, and several phone calls to Tehran in the middle of the night that went unanswered, for the jackbooted official with the three-days-growth beard to decide that a woman, by definition, could not be a spy.) Never forgotten was the time I was told by a colonel in the formidably named Disciplinary Force of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tehran that if I tried to renew my visa one more time he
would personally see to it that I was arrested (that was the time, when I phoned home to alert my boyfriend, that my phone card ran out, leaving him for days not knowing if I was alive or dead. It would be a turning point in our relationship). Yet in none of these situations, arguably more dangerous, was I as anxious as I was now.