A Disappearance in Damascus (7 page)

“What happened then?” I asked.

“The men shut up. He's the father, the sheikh of the village, so they could do nothing.”

To Ahlam he spoke words she would recall for the rest of her life.

“You're a free bird,
lozah
.” His pet name for her, almond. “Don't let anyone put you in a cage.”

She could continue with school on two conditions. One, that she behave. People would be watching for her to mess up. And two, that she wear the hijab and the abaya, the awkward shroud of black cloth that covered her from head to foot. “The most miserable thing was the abaya.” She kept tripping on it and falling down. “Everyone laughed at me. But I had to wear it. If not—stay home.”

The school was fifteen kilometres from the village. On the first day her father pressed coins into her hand. He pointed towards the highway where she would find a collective taxi to take her there. Despite her pleas he refused to go with her. “Depend on yourself,” he said.

More afraid than she had ever been, grappling with her new and hated abaya, she trudged down the driveway to the main road. Above her, date palms swayed in the sun. She was on her own for the first time in her life. The air was stiff with heat and the sweetness of the fields, with everything familiar and dear. Perhaps this was all a mistake. Perhaps it was hubris. She should have stayed home like her sisters and lived like every other village girl.

It was too late to turn back. She could see the taxi coming from a distance, the future roaring towards her on wheels.

When she got to the school she stepped out of the taxi, caught her legs in the folds of her garment and landed face down in the dirt. Ignoring the laughter of the other passengers, she stood up, brushed herself off and took her first steps into the world.

When Ahlam was a student at Baghdad University in the mid-1980s, her father paid for her to take lessons in streetfighting. She told me this one night as we walked down the dirt alleyway next to Zainab's shrine. It was almost midnight. Almost silent. The golden dome of the shrine, lit from below, glowed like a gas flare.

“I returned to my village from the university after dark,” she explained. She wanted to know how to defend herself and had seen a sign at a gym near the university offering self-defence classes for women. There an athletic young woman taught her how to wave her hands as a distraction and knee an attacker in the groin. To throttle a lecherous taxi driver with the handles of a handbag. To aim the pointed heel of a shoe at the jugular. She hadn't had to use her training, she said, except during her kidnapping, when she collared the boy with the machine gun and threw him against the car. It was more of a mindset: knowing you had the tools to fight if you had to.

Her father died of cancer six months before her university graduation. On his deathbed, when Ahlam moved a cot into his room to be near him, Ahmed had been planning her university graduation party. A feast, the new car he would present to her, with all the villagers in attendance. He wanted to show everyone who had opposed her education how proud he was, to show them all. “But he died too soon.”

He was the one person who had believed in her without reservation. “With him,” she told me, “I felt like I had all the power in the world. He taught me to be gentle, to have a good heart, but in a dangerous situation not to be afraid. He taught me to be wild when necessary.” After his death she stopped eating and was soon so thin that people began warning her mother that she would join her father in the grave. But she marshalled her strength and completed her studies; it was what he would have wanted. She brought her diploma to his graveside. “Here it is,” she told him, holding it out to the air.

She had been the first girl from the village to finish high school and the first, man or woman, to earn a university degree. Four other girls from the village later followed her to the university. “What's so great about Ahlam?” parents began asking themselves. “Our daughter is just as good as she is.” What had been taboo was now a status symbol. When American soldiers later came to the village, they were struck by how educated all the girls were.

But instead of the brilliant career her father had predicted, Ahlam went straight from university to the family farm. The war with Iran had shattered the economies of both countries. Sanctions were about to start, barbed wire around the country's trade that would have devastating consequences for the newly educated middle class. Her mother, ill since the death of her father, was unable to manage alone. Ahlam, as the only unmarried daughter—even her youngest sister, Roqayah, or Tutu, as she was called, had married by then—was the one to whom the duty fell.

The scent of green fields at dawn would always remind her of her father. It was him she would think of as she rose
from her bed at first light, as she took on the labour of tending their orchards and fields. She had known nothing until then about back-breaking farm work.

Slowly, watching the other girls, who laughed at her clumsiness but were eager to teach her, she learned to scythe the hay and load it onto the back of the donkey. Awkwardly, but growing in physical strength, she shimmied up the date palms to pick the golden fruit. Neighbours came to watch. “Look at the scholar!” they gloated. “A lot of good your education has done you. What a waste of time.”

Her tongue was as sharp as the scythe that cut her untrained fingers. “Education is a weapon!” she shot back, echoing her father's words. “I'll use it when I need it.”

“And that,” she told me, smiling broadly, “is what I did.”

She dreamed of becoming a flight attendant and seeing the world. But she couldn't afford the bribes for such a career, and wouldn't have been hired anyway: a country girl with no connections who wasn't about to sleep her way into a job. She thought of working at an embassy abroad, though the same contraventions applied. But when the world came to Iraq she could meet it. In the years between university and marriage, eager to give her mind something to do, she took English classes at the British Council in Baghdad.

That stopped when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Everything stopped and went into reverse. The people were told it was a revolution in Kuwait, not an invasion. When a friend burst into her house to tell her about the revolution she went to turn on the radio. There was no news, no signal, no BBC Arabic, nothing but static. Then, suddenly, the markets were filled with looted Kuwaiti
air-conditioning units and Kuwaiti furniture. A cousin returned from the war with hair that had turned completely white. People ran out to buy all the food they could find because they feared another war was coming.

I had been in the region during that war—I was a foreign student taking Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thinking he had a green light from the United States. He did not. Throughout the Gulf War that followed, when his Scud missiles sputtered towards Tel Aviv, I carted around the gas mask all students had been issued, sealing up the cracks of my dorm room with packing tape whenever the air-raid sirens sounded, waiting for the chemical weapons we feared would be deployed by Saddam Hussein. The campus was all but empty—everyone bunkering at home with family or having caught the first flight out—except for me and one other student who lived upstairs. Staring out of our gas masks, we watched the bombing of Baghdad on CNN as a series of flashes against green-glow night-vision cameras, the sound of our own breath roaring in our ears. When the war ended, and the news moved on to other stories, we returned to our studies and forgot Iraq.

But for Iraqis the international trade embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council from 1990 until 2003 was an extension of the battlefield, with ordinary people on the frontline. Hunger and disease swept the country. Corruption and smuggling became normal, even essential, laying the foundations of the mafias that would flourish after 2003 when the dictator and all restraints were gone.
²⁰
Where a schoolteacher's salary had been US$1500 a month, it was suddenly worth $2—enough to buy a plate of eggs—so
a stupid rich boy could now pass his classes without bothering to show up. Any crime could be cleared with a small payment to police, so only the poor and the political were jailed. As the state's authority withered, people depended on family to survive. Ahlam learned to roll cigarettes in newsprint. The mushrooms sprouting in her yard tasted like miracle food.

The sanctions were supposed to force Saddam Hussein to disclose the non-existent weapons of mass destruction and make reparation for the war against Kuwait, with the tacit goal of persuading Iraqis to rise up against him. But in fact they only crippled his opponents. “
His
people had everything they needed,” Ahlam said. Whatever they didn't have, they took.

The riverfront of her father's property had already been confiscated in 1983. Men with hard faces appeared one day and fenced off the land below their house. There was no question of negotiating. The men were armed. The land was for Saddam Hussein's half-brother, a man named Sabawi, who wanted a country estate—during the Gulf War Sabawi became head of the secret police.

Southeast of the village, Saddam Hussein had taken more prime riverfront. His son Uday, known to the villagers for sending his men around the city to kidnap beautiful girls for him to rape, held parties there whenever his soccer team won a match. These parties, which the villagers could hear at night, were unabated by sanctions. “Here we were barely surviving,” Ahlam said, “and every time his team had a victory he had singers and dancing and feasts that could have fed our entire village for a week.”

Ahlam married in 1994 at the age of twenty-nine—very late for a traditional woman from a rural family. The only reason she married at all was because, at the already ancient
age of twenty-eight, she had refused a doctor's hand and announced to her mother that she wanted to do a master's degree. “I saw the look in my mother's eyes. She was so worried about me. She imagined I was going to be alone, my chance finished.” A curse, as her mother saw it, for a woman to be without a man.

So when an engineer some years older proposed, she gave him a choice. He knew she was educated, active in the community, had many male friends. She was not, like other women, bound to hearth and home. If he accepted that, and did not insist that she conform, she would marry him. If not, they should go their separate ways. He accepted, and only a small number of times—three that she could think of—did he bother with the thankless task of trying to control her.

A year later came their first son, Anas. Another son and a daughter followed, each two years apart. They were hungry but they still had enough land to grow their own food. In the poorer south of the country—undeveloped, and punished for backing a failed Shia uprising against Saddam Hussein by having their historic marshlands drained—people were moving to Baghdad in search of work.

The year after she married she went with her husband to visit a friend of his who lived in Saddam City, a Shia slum in Baghdad, since renamed Sadr City. What she saw there shocked her. People lived in shelters built from stacks of empty oil drums. Their floor was a sheet on the ground. “They lived in the open. A gust of wind could blow down their homes. How could they send their children to school?” Education was free but they had to buy uniforms—impossible. And the kids had to earn. Girls and boys were set to manual labour from the age of five or six; their mothers and
fathers joined the Fedayeen Saddam militia in exchange for a salary. “Nobody cared about their poverty. Later they were among the main looters.”

Her older brother Samir had finished high school behind Ahlam, since during the war with Iran their father had ordered him to fail his exams so he wouldn't graduate only to die on the battlefield. Samir went on to do a PhD in economics, though the most lucrative part of his education was learning English. He began working as a driver and fixer for foreign journalists, employing the charm and resiliency that was a family trait. It was Samir who first introduced Ahlam to the correspondents who came to report on the sanctions. The first one she worked with was Stephen Glain, an American reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
.

Glain met Samir for the first time in 1999. He had been directed to the Al Rashid Hotel, a base for international reporters made famous during the First Gulf War as the headquarters for CNN. He was instantly mobbed by the fixers, drivers, translators and prostitutes desperate for foreign currency.

Glain's impression was deepened when he asked Samir his opinion of a staged patriotic event they had attended. “That?” Samir told Glain. “Fuck.” At a time when almost no one dared criticize the regime, Samir had named his two dogs Uday and Husay, after the dictator's sons. He invited Glain to dinner at his home, but suggested they go fishing beforehand.