A Disappearance in Damascus (19 page)

Perhaps I had been too absorbed by what was happening in the moment to think about the future. Perhaps because it was only my own safety that was at stake, I figured I could take whatever came, that if they hurt me they could only hurt
me
. And I had my passport, and all the protections it afforded. This was different. This implicated me, it may have been because of me, but I wasn't the one imprisoned.

Was she taken because of me? The question plagued me. She had taken many risks, and I was one of them; I had taken risks—she was one of them. She knew everyone; any of those everyones could have been the reason: Al Jazeera, which had employed her for their story three days before her arrest; the BBC, which had aired a documentary in which she featured some weeks earlier, broadcasting it throughout the Arab world. Amnesty had her face on the cover of their latest report. Indeed, the mere fact that Ahlam knew everyone could be the reason in itself: it was presumably the reason Abu Yusuf had pressed her to spy on other refugees and foreign reporters.

As the water boiled, I rummaged in a cupboard. A previous tenant had left behind half a bag of sugar, and I still had the coffee I'd packed in my hasty move from the Kuwaiti Hotel in Little Baghdad, paying my tab to the manager at the Kuwaiti while smiling as naturally as I could, promising to come back soon. I knew that I wouldn't. The year before,
when the alleys and apartments there were still a mystery to me, I had been edgy, cautious, afraid of being watched, then had had those fears stilled by Ahlam's fearlessness, which, just like fear, was contagious. I had been right to be worried: she had been wrong.

And even if this was not my fault, even if her arrest had nothing to do with me—and I thought that was possible, from certain vantage points even likely—I was still responsible for her. We had been a team. If our positions had been reversed, if during our fieldwork I had been the one hauled away, I was certain she wouldn't have simply gone on without looking for me. Our friendship had been forged through the work, and it was the work she did—on behalf of me, and all of us—that had put her in danger.

So what, I asked myself, could I actually do? I wished Ahlam was there to give me advice. Locating disappeared prisoners had been her specialty in Baghdad. I remembered what she had told me about her methods, how she had persuaded an American general to give her the names of the prisoners under his command; and when the commander of another prison ignored her requests, found a translator to secretly pass her information. When she told me what she had done, she said, “Your situation forces you to do something official and something unofficial.”

Official channels were the least likely to cause problems, but whenever I phoned the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the status of her case was like a weather report that never changed. She had been gone for a week now, and I called every day. They continued to tell me they were working on it. They said that if they pushed too hard, they could jeopardize all the other people in prison.

So how hard would they push? How many resources could they devote to a single life when they were considering the whole venture, all the millions of refugees with all their millions of problems? They all but said as much to me.

I understood one critical thing: they didn't know as much as I did about where she had come from, whom she knew, who she was, or how crucial she had been to getting these stories out into the world; nor would they be devoted to this single task, the only assignment I had.

The coffee was bitter. I had to buy milk. Food—that would also be a good idea. Dumping the coffee down the drain and rinsing the glass under the tap, I considered whom to talk to next. I recalled stories about the Red Cross visiting prisoners in wartime. A neutral body. On the side of the ordinary person caught in the war machine. Was that still the case? I had met a Frenchman at Ahlam's apartment who used to work for the Red Cross in Iraq.

I locked the door behind me—a satisfyingly solid door, with a deadbolt—and headed downstairs to the Internet café to look up the Red Cross.

THE DAMASCUS HEADQUARTERS OF
the International Committee of the Red Cross turned out to be within walking distance. It felt good to be on my way somewhere, showered and smartly dressed, leather satchel worn crosswise, like someone headed to a promising job interview. Passing a sun-bleached park where children were playing, I stopped at a stand to buy a card with phone time. I would have liked to have a phone not registered to my name, but all SIM cards had to be registered with official ID so there was nothing to be done about that. Whenever I talked on the phone or wrote an email I asked myself: How would someone else interpret this? When I needed to call someone about Ahlam, I tried to use the landline in my flat.

The neighbourhood I was walking through looked vaguely familiar. I recalled the apartment I had visited around here with Ahlam in the winter—a pair of Serbs, friends of Mona—she had been getting ready for a party. That seemed like another world, another life. It had crossed my mind to
call Mona again, but I abandoned the idea since it seemed to me she had abandoned Ahlam. Whatever Mona's problems were, instinctively I didn't want her to know I was still around and looking for Ahlam.

The Red Cross headquarters was a typical spartan NGO set-up. The chief of mission welcomed me into his office. He was slim, late middle-aged, with a genial, cultured manner. A classic Swiss, ready to hear me out. Taking the proffered seat, I explained everything: my work with Ahlam over the past year, the arrest, its possible context. When I told him of the many people who had been coming and going from her place, including Westerners, an amused smile played on his lips. “The authorities love that, don't they?” he said, by which he meant the opposite. When I told him how she had been working as a fixer for international media in both Iraq and Syria, he added, “I'm surprised she wasn't stopped long ago.”

He sat with his ankles crossed, fingers pressed together, thinking. “The government here suffers from a form of paranoia.” So do I, I thought, but managed not to say so. It was a relief to talk to someone who took me seriously. I didn't want to give him any reason to discount my concerns.

For that brief hour I felt blanketed in diplomatic immunity. Not crazy, not a threat, not a carrier of the plague. In the end he agreed to press his contacts on her behalf. He would talk to the UNHCR, add his voice. He stood to see me out. “Don't be optimistic,” he said. And then, as if to blunt the force of that pronouncement, “It is good that you came here.”

Walking back from his office, buoyed yet wondering whether anything would come of it, I considered my other options. Official channels. The summer before, I had
interviewed two Syrian government officials to ask about the effects of the refugees on the economy. Ordinary Syrians were hurting because of inflation, and the refugees were bringing social problems such as prostitution and black market labour, and exacerbating fears of the war spreading over the borders. The government was anxious about US intentions; quite rightly too. Washington's war planners had made threats to take down Syria after Iraq, and the government was dangerously isolated in this time of heightened sectarian tensions. Syria, with a minority of Shia-derived Alawites ruling a majority Sunni population, was a photographic negative of pre-war Iraq.

The first official I had met was a suspicious, Cold War type who only warmed up when we discussed Graham Greene, the topic of his PhD dissertation. But he had confirmed something I had been investigating: the Americans wanted to cherry-pick the refugees, taking those who had worked for them—like Ahlam, it occurred to me now—and leaving behind the widows, the orphans, the disabled, the war-wounded. As usual the UNHCR was caught in the middle. The other official was young, easygoing, disarmingly confident, one of the new breed of technocrats bent on turning Syria from a socialist economy to a free-market one. An engaging, chubby guy in a well-cut suit who joked about his weight, he was a Catholic, educated at the London School of Economics.

But which official to trust?

I had liked the LSE guy. He was funny, not your average drab economist. More the kind of person who believed that with the right manoeuvring of numbers and policy tweaks you could remake society into some sort of automatic capitalist utopia, like a self-winding watch. But maybe I just liked
him because his sort was familiar to me, a product of my own culture's aspirations.

But if I talked to either of them I would be forcing them to consider what to do about me. I would lose the one advantage I had, the ability to move around unnoticed. And if they were upset about Ahlam's work as a fixer, and thought she had broken the rules by working unofficially, any noise from me would simply confirm their suspicions. I would have to explain how I knew her and might be interrogated myself. It seemed better not to put myself in a situation I couldn't control.

The only person I could think of who knew Ahlam, and might have reason to be concerned about her as much as I was, was her friend, the other Iraqi fixer, Hamid. I had been impressed with him when he came over to Ahlam's apartment with Gabriela. He was well-connected, reliable, and Ahlam's equal—with an equivalent competence and toughness. Hamid would be a good person to talk to, but I had already written to Gabriela and hadn't heard whether she'd talked him. In the meantime I didn't want to contact him directly. I had put one fixer at risk; I didn't want to endanger another. Tracking down people for information I needed was my profession, yet this time I had no idea where to start. Every possibility seemed to have a corresponding and equally powerful argument against it. The voices in my head were at odds with one another, in a tug-of-war that neither side could win.

On to the next possibility: to contact other journalists who knew Ahlam and see whether, like the Red Cross, they could work their back channels and do something.

A few blocks from my new apartment was an air-conditioned café with free Wi-Fi where I often went to check email. The café had been my haunt the year before when I still had my flamingo-pink terrace and the confidence that I could observe events without becoming ensnared. It was a popular place jammed with young couples drinking milkshakes and surfing on their laptops or watching soccer games on big-screen TVs. Staff in black-and-white uniforms walked around, refreshing the dying coals on water pipes or delivering ketchup and fries. The windows of the café were made of one-way mirrors so you could look outside but no one could see in. It was one of the reasons young people came here—to avoid their elders' prying eyes. Every afternoon I took a discreet table in a backroom where I could see out into the main room but wasn't immediately visible.

I wrote to my boyfriend to tell him about Ahlam, careful not to raise too much alarm. I didn't want my words to convey my fears, in case someone else was reading them, and I didn't want to worry him, knowing there was nothing he could do.
Do you think this puts you in any danger
? he emailed back, seeing through my words. And then:
I have learned to trust your instincts
. He wrote that he was struggling now with
creating enough emotional distance from you so that I am not going insane from missing you, but not so much that I disconnect
.

I knew, unhappily, that it was impossible for me to focus on two dilemmas at once. I was not capable of giving my full attention to one without neglecting the other, nor of being
present in two places at once. As perhaps had been the case for a long time now.

Journalists: I had to turn my mind to the journalists Ahlam knew. I spent several days writing and responding to contacts. I wrote to Deborah Amos, a correspondent I had met at the National Press Club in Washington. She often reported from Syria and had filed a piece on Ahlam for NPR, as had journalists for
Salon.​com
, the
Nation
, the
Washington Post
. She wrote me back, alarmed, offering to talk to people she knew at the UN. She had heard that Ahlam was on a watch list, but to arrest her? Why? she wondered, as I did.

Al Jazeera was next. I wondered if they even knew what had happened after her last assignment. The satellite news channel was launched in the mid-1990s in the tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar by a group of BBC-trained Arab journalists who had tried to start a BBC affiliate in Saudi Arabia but had quickly been censored. Qatar, under a new and younger emir (he had overthrown his father while the old man was holidaying in Switzerland), agreed to put its money—and there was a lot of it, from their natural gas fields—into the Arabic broadcast initiative. Now they had also started an English channel that was putting other broadcasters around the world to shame. This was partly because they put real money into reporting, and partly because they often hired good fixers who had been doing stories behind the scenes for other English-language media and made them on-air correspondents. They had expert reporters deeply immersed in their regions reporting from all over the world at a time when every other broadcaster was cutting back.

I remembered the name of the producer Ahlam had worked with and found him on their website. I sent him an email.
He called me the next day from London, sounding worried—he hadn't known—and promised to do whatever he could. He got in touch with Al Jazeera's Damascus bureau chief, but, he emailed back to say, the bureau chief was unable to find out anything. Ahlam was a fixer. Not an employee. She worked contract to contract—like most magazine journalists, a situation I knew well—and so had no immunity, no aura of power to shield her. Though he didn't say as much, I understood that she was on her own.

One afternoon, looking up from my laptop at my backroom table, I saw another foreigner amid the throng of Syrians in the main room. Blue eyes, a big bald head bent over his computer. I went over and introduced myself. He was British, working as a photographer for international magazines and making his home in Damascus. We had—an unsurprising sign of the small world we worked in—colleagues in common. He complained about the business, I complained about the business—a primal bonding exercise among journalists.

They say that in times of fear people form kinship alliances, and they are right. In a split second my now-chronic reticence, which squelched speech and even thought, was overcome by a visceral desire to trust. Invited to join him at his table, I told him I had run into some trouble. A friend of mine, a fixer, had been arrested, I wasn't sure why. The story soon poured out. How comforting in times of trouble to speak frankly with the assurance of being understood, not having to define one's terms or explain how such things come about. After I had finished talking he related his own story.

He was married to a Syrian woman. One day she was summoned to a meeting with one of the intelligence agencies. They presented her with a fat file containing transcripts of all his emails painstakingly translated from English into Arabic, and ordered her to spy on him. From that point on he began emailing himself long extracts from medical websites. “Elephantiasis of the testicles and the like,” he said. “Let them translate that.”

I sent a superfluous message home recounting the beauty of Damascus, the glorious weather. Let them translate that. But a couple of days later, returning to the same café, I was unable to connect to the Internet. The manager came over to apologize. A new regulation. I must change the settings on my laptop and insert a code. Not their choice, he explained, pointing at the ceiling: an order from above.

After that I went to different Internet cafés, using different computers, never staying longer than twenty minutes, though I wasn't sure it made the slightest difference.

I felt helpless in the face of a great impenetrable system, a fortress that had neither windows nor doors. I was accustomed to obstacles in my work, but something always gave way eventually. Even when the path ahead involved diversions or dead ends, there was always a way in, or out. I remembered the prison I had visited in Beirut, when I'd gone there to report my passport missing—how I had walked up the staircase and out of there freely, with a sense of my own capability, my own capacity for action, intact. I could hardly remember the person who had done that. She had believed there were solutions to every problem. She had believed she could watch and ask questions and analyze without being
caught up in any of it. It was part of the reason I had not connected my presence at Ahlam's apartment with the dangers it posed for her.

Ahlam saw what needed doing and did it. Perhaps that was why I had found her so appealing. Now that my belief in freedom of action, in
agency
, was gone, it seemed to me that it must have been an illusion all along. Just a luxury wrought by a worldview in which individuals believe they shape their own destinies—and a curse as well. In the West we are taught this from birth: that the course of our life is determined by how well we play our cards. The weak are weak because they did something wrong; the powerful have power because they earned it. Only now was I coming to understand the sense of fatalism so common in the East, where most of what happens is determined by forces beyond one's control.

I remembered what Ahlam had told me about being abandoned in the river as a girl, and fighting the current. “The difficulty isn't to learn to swim in the water,” she had said. “The difficulty is to learn to swim in life.” She had faced the currents, the obstacles, and survived. Now she was caught in a current I could neither see nor understand. I felt it overwhelming me too, pulling me down.

In the past, before it became clear what can happen to those who operate outside the system and act as if they are free to do whatever they like, I would have thought nothing of the day when the power was cut to my apartment.

It happened in the mid-morning, an hour when I usually walked down the four flights to go check email. Each day I stepped over a killing field of dead cockroaches in
the stairwell. The woman who lived on the second floor was militant about them, spraying daily. And for that I was glad: if the cockroaches couldn't make it any farther up the stairs, perhaps no one could.