A Disappearance in Damascus (26 page)

One night they broke the motor. The next day the fan was removed and taken away for repair. On that day, a small miracle happened.

Ahlam and Leila were sitting on the floor of the cell as usual when a silver-winged butterfly flew in through the
opening where the fan had been. Seeing it, they began shouting, ecstatic to see something of the world outside. They were alive, they were not dead. They were living creatures. The youngest guard, the one who had taken a beating in place of the old man, ran over to see the commotion, sliding open the slat. He laughed to see the two of them up and jumping around, excited as children by the winged visitor.

“It's a sign!” he shouted. “It's a sign!”

As the summer gave way to fall, they waited for the sign to be fulfilled.

One night Ahlam dreamed of her son. A group of children wanted him to come outside and play with them. In the yard was a lovely garden with green trees, the children dressed all in white, but she refused to let her son join them. He would be with her always: she would not let him leave.

Sadiq slid open the slat on her cell and saw the tears on her face. “I have a child,” he said. “I have a girl.” Adding, “We are not the ones who put you in jail.”

Taking pity on her, he promised to try to find out the charges against her.

He returned a few days later, holding her prison file. There were several charges against her, he said, and read them out: spying, involvement in human smuggling, and taking money for refugees and giving it to Iraqi militias to buy weapons.

“You are a good and respectable woman,” Sadiq told her. “I can't believe this. But someone made this report against you. It is here in the file.” He read out the name.

I WAS LEAVING, AND
all my efforts to help Ahlam had come to nothing.

I went over to the taxis bound for Jordan, clustered in a dirt lot next to the Damascus bus station. It was exactly a year since I had met Ahlam. Back then I had wondered how, in the randomness of fortune, I'd found the ideal person to take me to the other side.

I had come here to tell the story of those who lived out the war's inescapable logic; those who had to pay the price that had been set by those who planned their fates and would never be called to account—who might right now be writing policy prescriptions for a well-funded think tank or delivering a keynote address.
³⁶
The article I had written had received some attention, created a ripple. But in the end it had accomplished nothing because it could not roll back time. Had I expected that? Had I harboured, even in my moments of doubt, a grandiose belief in the power of story to alter destiny? I had wanted to understand how the invasion had
started a civil war that was dividing the region. There were many who refused those divisions, but the person I knew who most embodied that dignified refusal had vanished.

If I could roll back time, if I could rewind the film of Ahlam's life, editing out the war, she would still be living with her family in their large house on the bank of the Tigris, all of them alive, whole, together, happy or heartbroken in ordinary ways. And here I was, returning to my old life—perhaps in an altered form, perhaps diminished—but her old life had been swallowed long ago.

The sense of powerlessness was humbling. It is how most of the world lives.

I slid into a taxi, joined by three Jordanian businessmen in suits, and we pulled out of the parking lot, towards Amman.

The businessmen, all of whom were in that amorphous profession known as “import-export,” spent part of the four-hour journey talking about Saddam Hussein.

A great man. Good for Iraq. Sorely missed.

You would think they were discussing the Dalai Lama.

“Don't you agree?” They tried to draw me into their discussion but I refused to share their high opinion of the man. By almost any measure Iraq was worse off now than it had been before, but his brutality was not in doubt.

On the long flight to New York, I thought about an earlier flight home, shortly after Saddam Hussein's execution at the end of 2006. An African-American in a bomber jacket emblazoned with the words “Operation Iraqi Freedom” had the seat next to mine. A US Navy man during the first Gulf War, he was heading home to Florida on a break from Baghdad, where he worked for a private contractor as a systems engineer. He was from the Deep South, he told me.
He was the only member of his family ever to own a house, and he hadn't seen his home in months.

Not only did he surprise me by being a harsh critic of the war, which he saw as a money-making venture for the likes of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld after a kind of mafia-style falling-out with their old friend Saddam, but he said something else that stayed with me.

I said something often said about the war: “This will end badly.” He fixed me with an unblinking gaze, as if to compel me to remember, and answered: “This. Will.
Never
. End.”

I stopped in New York for ten days on the way back to Vancouver. It was a kind of debriefing, and a chance to coordinate with Marianne and Alessandro, who lived a few blocks from a friend's apartment in Chelsea where I was staying. Walking down streets past art galleries, dog bakeries, and bistros serving twelve-dollar glasses of wine, I overheard anxious chatter about the economy, the stock market, complaints about bosses and bills; everywhere a cash register ringing.

So this is what normal people do…I had forgotten. I bought an old hardcover copy of
The Quiet American
from a grey-bearded sidewalk vendor and read it late at night, its pages yellow and musty, its words more real to me than anything I heard on the street. I met with Marianne and Alessandro and other people who knew Ahlam to talk about new avenues, new plans of action.

When I finally reached Vancouver, home, there was no one there to meet me. My luggage had been lost in transit. I was the last person standing at the baggage carousel, watching it go round and round.

PART FOUR

IN THE LATTER HALF
of October 2008, the key turned in the lock of the cell. The door swung open to reveal the warden. “Get ready,” he said. “You're going home.”

Ahlam had nothing to get ready. She said goodbye to the other prisoners in her cell, though the only one she would really miss was Leila, whose transfer the month before to stand trial had been devastating. Leila, though half her age, had become a friend.

She was led outside to a station wagon, where she saw her brother, already seated in the back. “Don't be afraid,” Salaam whispered. “We are going home.” His clothing hung loosely on his frame. Like her, his wrists were chained, but the chains were long enough for Salaam to reach his wallet, which had been returned with his money still in it. As the gate opened and the car pulled out to the street, he cupped an American hundred-dollar bill in his hand and slipped it in hers. “We might get separated and you will need this.”

They were taken to an immigration prison, Salaam to a men's wing and Ahlam to a cell with two dozen women, most of them Africans. The four Ethiopian girls who had been with her in Douma recognized her immediately. “You are here,” said the girls, so surprised, in their housemaids' English. “You are here.” They told her they were supposed to be deported but the Ethiopian government refused to pay their airfare. “Maybe you will be luckier than us.”

The authorities had returned her phones when she left Douma and the first thing Ahlam did was ask to be allowed to make a call. “I want to know about my kids. I'll pay you anything.” For twenty dollars, a guard let her out of the cell to use the phone. She called through the numbers but nobody was picking up. Finally she reached Ali, her former assistant. He seemed frightened at the sound of her voice. About her children, he said only, “They've been smuggled to Iraq.”

She didn't believe him. She no longer trusted anything anyone said. Her heart thundered in her chest as she wondered if her children were alive or dead.

In the immigration prison the prisoners had to pay for their own food, buying it from the guards, so whoever had money provided for the rest. Over the next three days, with Salaam's money, Ahlam bought chicken, rice, cigarettes, sharing these around. She was convinced she was being sent back to Iraq. Salaam had been immediately deported, to her dismay. She asked a guard why she hadn't been allowed to leave yet. “The buses were full,” he said. “We're waiting on your turn.”

The third day she was moved again, this time to a huge building where she was taken to a basement. Through
the darkness she could make out men sitting on the floor, eating, and hear the sound of other men screaming. She was taken into a vast room the size of an aircraft hangar, and left with six other women who huddled together in complete darkness, except for a tiny window at the top of the wall where the yellow light was fading towards night. The woman next to her, from Aleppo, said she was here because her husband was accused of being al-Qaeda. “They have taken me to pressure my husband to surrender.” A girl of about twenty with short black hair ran wildly back and forth, hiding behind her mother at any loud noise. Her mother told Ahlam they had been caught sneaking from Lebanon into Syria. They had no passports, they could probably not even conceive of such documents or how one might obtain them. Poor, uneducated, the daughter mentally ill, they had only wanted to visit the shrine of Sayeda Zainab.

They told her where she was: Military Intelligence Branch 235, the notorious torture prison otherwise known as Palestine Branch.

A door opened, and the girl cowered behind her mother. But this time food appeared—one boiled potato and two tomatoes per inmate. The girl gobbled hers down and began shouting, “I want food! I want food!” Ahlam, who could not eat, gave her meal to the girl.

That night she did not sleep. She sat stock-still in terror, convinced that she would never leave this place. Hours later the door opened. Her name was called.

“Yes,” she said.

“Interrogation.” That terrifying word.

She stood with great reluctance and followed the guard who would lead her to her fate.

“Please sit down,” said the interrogator. A handsome man in his mid-twenties: pale skin, brown hair. “I'm sorry to give you this trouble,” he said. “You are my mother's age.” He spoke to her calmly in the diction of an educated man. His questions were mainly regarding her husband's business dealings, which had accumulated unpaid debts. He asked her nothing about the Americans, nothing about Iraq, nothing about the allegations in her file. He finally sent her back to her cell in the basement, where she sat next to the mother of the simpleton. Through the window at the top of the wall she watched the break of dawn.

The next day she was transferred back to Douma.

“What are you doing here?” one of the guards asked in surprise.

“This is my home,” she told him. “You want to kick me out of my home?” She was overjoyed to be out of the dreaded Palestine Branch.

She was led back to her old cell. From the outside she pulled open the slat in the door and peeked inside. “What are you doing here?” the women asked, as surprised as the guards.

“I missed you so much I came back!”

For the next five days she returned to prison life. On the fifth day the warden came to tell her she was going home. Which could mean anything.

“Expect me to come back to you,” she said to her cellmates as she took her leave, “so don't be bad girls.”

Since leaving Damascus, through September and into October, I had been in touch with many different agencies and NGOs, particularly Reporters Without Borders. I wrote a case study, an overview of Ahlam's work for media and
human rights groups and the circumstances of her arrest that I was sending to anyone who might be able to help. Marianne had contacted the French foreign ministry, thinking the French government might be able to use their influence with the Syrians. Nothing seemed to be working. We began to talk about a public campaign, though we were still uncertain as to whether it would do more harm than good, as the UNHCR had warned.

In late October, my phone rang in the middle of the night. I groped for it in the dark. When I heard the voice talking on the other end, I came wide awake. “You're a friend of Ahlam?” the man asked. It was a researcher from Amnesty International, apologizing that he was unfamiliar with my time zone. Ahlam, he said, had been Amnesty's fixertranslator on four reports in 2007 and 2008. As I sat in the pre-dawn darkness of my new apartment in Vancouver, boxes of unpacked books stacked against the walls, we discussed details around her arrest. He asked me to email him the case study I had written. We talked about the possibility of launching an international media campaign if all else failed.

“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.