A Disappearance in Damascus (23 page)

“
SO WHAT BRINGS YOU
back to Beirut?” the Emperor asked, rising from behind his desk to kiss me on alternate cheeks. It was close to midnight at MusicHall—the middle of the Emperor's workday, and the end of a very long day for me. I had showered and changed at the hotel room. The giant bouncer at the end of the red carpet leading up to the club had pointed me to the private office behind the coat check.

It was quiet in the office but for the pounding of music in the packed cabaret, where the winter before I had watched red velvet curtains part on a young man who brought the house down with Edith Piaf's anthem regretting nothing. I wished I shared that sentiment. But I needed to talk to the most connected man in Lebanon.

“I had some…trouble in Damascus,” I explained, sliding into a chair in front of his desk. MusicHall was Beirut's version of Rick's Café in
Casablanca
, though Michel Elefteriades, the Greek-Lebanese impresario who styled himself as “Emperor Michel I of Nowheristan,” looked less like Humphrey Bogart
and more like the leader of a Gypsy caravan spliced with Che Guevara. I'd interviewed him in the winter, thinking that at some point I would write about this place. I hadn't done so, but the two of us had become friends.

Twirling his sceptre, his cape draped on the back of his chair, he looked pleased to see me, a change from my morning's debacle at the UNHCR office in Douma. Unlike the Englishwoman who had wanted me gone, the Emperor liked having journalists around, passing on rumours or coming to him to confirm them, mixing with the British or French or Spanish ambassadors who paid him homage in his back office, along with politicians, UN officials, spies, and aspiring singers hoping to be discovered. He'd become famous as a judge on the Arab version of the televised singing contest
The X Factor
, but at heart he was a political operator. To him, politics was just another form of theatre.

“Why did you call me from the border?” he asked. “What was the urgency?”

Crossing from Syria into Lebanon had been a problem, but not for the reason I had feared. When I arrived at the customs wicket and presented my passport, the Lebanese border guard had looked from me to his computer screen, from the screen to me. “You,” he said, “made a mistake.” When I'd misplaced my passport in the winter, I had reported it missing to Lebanese intelligence. Having recovered it immediately afterward, and having had a plane to catch, I had neglected to inform them that the case was closed. Their computer, however, had not forgotten. At least he used that lovely word—mistake—which implied not guilt but incompetence, and could see from my passport photo that I was me.

“Just go back to Damascus,” he had said. “We can resolve this in a few days.”

“I couldn't go back there,” I told the Emperor. I couldn't face the prospect. In Damascus lay confusion, uncertainty, fear, loss, and the distinct possibility that my presence there was doing Ahlam more harm than good. I had to get to Beirut and find some perspective. Even the air along the border smelled fresher, carrying on it the promise of the Mediterranean. The sky seemed higher, less oppressive. Taking out my phone I had called the Emperor, who called someone he knew, and after two hours the border guard waved me through. The officer in charge of the crossing had somehow got the idea that I was booked to perform at MusicHall that night. I realized his misconception when he asked me what instrument I played. “Electric guitar,” I said after a moment's pause, fervently hoping someone wouldn't drag a Stratocaster out of a backroom and demand a recital while I protested that the acoustics weren't quite right. Fortunately that did not happen. But they had confiscated my passport—they said I could pick it up at the General Security headquarters in Beirut.

“You were in Syria again,” the Emperor said. “With your people, the refugees?” Through the walls I could hear a woman's voice belting out “Unchain My Heart.” Customers would be dancing in the aisles by now, waiters uncorking champagne.

“Yes.” I explained the broad outlines of Ahlam's arrest. “The charges against her—providing weapons to militias, running a human trafficking operation—it's all bullshit. It has to be. Maybe they're upset because she was talking to reporters, working for journalists, even when they'd told her
to stop.” I was coming around to Hamid's interpretation—that this was somehow about her work as a fixer, though exactly how wasn't clear to me. Hamid thought the arrest was meant to send a signal to other Iraqis who worked with journalists and to the refugees for whom she was a prominent figure, to keep them in line.

The Emperor tugged on his goatee, thinking. A waiter entered, bringing me a glass of Riesling on a tray. The Emperor was drinking Red Bull. He liked to be sober when nobody else was because his drug of choice was information.

“Have you spoken to—?” He reeled off a list of names, most of whom I had already contacted.

“I'm planning to go to the UNHCR here,” I said. “And Human Rights Watch. She worked for them both.”

Through the walls came thunderous applause. The singer would be taking her bow. “She's one of my new discoveries,” the Emperor said, smiling.

“How long do you think they will hold Ahlam?” I persisted.

“A few months. Three, four. If they are sending a message they will want to make it stick. Then, when she comes out, she will know to do as she's told. And because of the gravity of the charges against her, she won't be able to talk about what happened.”

It made sense. The charges were serious, the sort that you'd accuse people of if you want to ensure they will say nothing later on—if they are ever released. In an atmosphere of distrust, ludicrous allegations were all too easy to believe. Had she simply been accused of working for media, or being too bold in advocating for refugees, it would look like political repression. But not this way. This way, the victim became the guilty party, responsible for her own fate.

The Emperor offered to talk to people he knew. He held out a hand laden with silver rings.

“Anything. Thank you,” I said, taking his hand.

To be without a passport is to lose your freedom. Until I could get it back I was in bureaucratic limbo. And getting it back was not as easy as I had been led to expect. I had thought I would stay in Beirut for three or four days, maybe a week—just long enough to catch my breath—but I had not counted on having it confiscated, or the runaround that would ensue.

“Oh, they can hold your passport for months,” an American journalist I met in Beirut told me. We were sitting in a rooftop restaurant above Hamra Street, watching the camera crew that had commandeered the street below. Beirut is never more Beirut than after a conflict: less than two months ago there had been fighting here between Sunni militiamen—said to be supported by the US and Saudi Arabia, which hoped to divide the region between Sunni and Shia spheres, isolating Iran and Syria—and Lebanese Shia Hezbollah.
³⁴
Some of the Sunni fighters were said to be Salafi jihadists who had earned their stripes in Iraq, but they were handily beaten. The Lebanese army had remained on the sidelines to avoid a civil war, and with each street that was captured, the fighters from Hezbollah handed the army control. Five minutes after the ceasefire, café owners were busy moving chairs out onto terraces. The large plate-glass window in the women's shoe shop next to my hotel still had a bullet hole, but otherwise all evidence of the fighting had been cleaned up as if it never happened. Tonight the crew was filming a music
video—under strong lights, a young man with a bouquet of roses ran after a girl in a red dress.

“Months?” I said, incredulous. “You think it could take
months
?”

Having felt trapped in Damascus, I had somehow, in my attempted escape, landed in another trap. Every time I went to the General Security headquarters in downtown Beirut, handing over my phone, passing through a metal detector, descending into the cement holding pen in the basement, I waited two or three hours until an officer told me to come back again in a few days when the matter would be sorted. I knew I should probably offer to pay a “fee,” but no one had offered the opportunity.

It was disturbing to be back inside the prison of this vast intelligence complex, silently watching an officer clean his gun or question a poor Ethiopian runaway maid until her employer showed up in his business suit to claim her, all the while knowing that Ahlam was in a prison somewhere like this in Damascus—only worse, because she would be locked in one of the cells, and I feared what her interrogations were like. Was she being beaten? Was she being tortured?

To distract myself and pass the time I borrowed a copy of Hemingway's
A Moveable Feast
from the prison library, putting it back when I gave up for the day, knowing I could finish it the next time.

In between, thanks to the Emperor, I made headway over the next two weeks. I spoke with Nadim Khoury, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division. We met at an elegant restaurant downtown, part of the old historic bazaar that had been destroyed in
Lebanon's civil war and had only now, more than fifteen years after the war ended, been rebuilt. This was a sanitized, corporatized version of the ancient souk, people complained, without the soul of the original, a cash grab for elites who had privatized it. But at least wars end, I thought. At least people rebuild.

We stalled on the first idea—his offer to write a letter to the Syrian president demanding her release. “What if that just confirms that she worked for you?” I asked. “What if we're only giving them the proof they are looking for?” If they were after her for her work as an unofficial fixer, there were few worse crimes than illegally fixing for a human rights organization that was not supposed to be in Syria at all.

The UNHCR staff in Beirut couldn't do much that the Damascus branch hadn't, but they were happier to talk to me. They appeared less paranoid than their colleagues in Damascus, perhaps because they had less reason to be, because they were less infected by whatever hung in the air there. I felt the same way—Beirut was good for my state of mind even if I felt miserable most of the time. I was able to write emails and make phone calls without censoring myself, and walk down the streets without looking over my shoulder. People sat on café terraces, staring at their phones and gossiping, the women so brazenly dressed that I looked like a prude by comparison. There were good days and bad, but I found that keeping myself busy was the best way to manage depression, so I didn't mind going to General Security for the fifth and sixth time, and finishing Hemingway's memoir of the lost generation in Paris after the First World War.

I was in touch with Marianne and Alessandro, who were also trying to help Ahlam. Her arrest happened to coincide
with their multi-family wedding in Italy, so they had diverted through Damascus on their honeymoon. Over Skype to Damascus I told them what I had learned—that she was imprisoned in Douma, and the allegations. And Marianne, in her quiet, steely way, had been active. She told me she had contacted a lawyer she knew who had worked at UNHCR in Damascus—of course, as luck would have it, the lawyer had left the refugee agency the week before—but she was also in touch with someone who knew someone at the US State Department, who said that Ahlam had been cleared for resettlement to the US around the time of her arrest. Ahlam hadn't said anything to me, but that was easy to understand: being cleared for resettlement simply meant you should expect to wait around for a year or two while nothing happened, if it ever did.

Marianne had just met with the UNHCR protection officer handling Ahlam's case. “He says they don't know which prison she is in, or what the accusations are against her. He says it's a black hole.”

“They know,” I replied. It was near sunset and I was sitting on the balcony of my hotel room. One of the reasons it was cheap was that it overlooked a vacant lot where a huge machine spent most daylight hours boring an enormous and apparently pointless hole in the ground, scattering rocks and sand, never appearing to make any progress. It struck me as an apt metaphor for my life at the moment. “They know, but they don't want us to get in their way.” We were supposed to stay outside the yellow tape while the experts got on with things.

The protection officer gave Marianne the same advice he had given to me: don't go public—no big human rights
campaigns—since anything we did on her behalf could be used against her. After talking to him, Marianne had spoken to an official at the French embassy in Damascus, who told her they had a hard time even getting their own citizens out of prison. “Essentially, it would be the job of the Iraqi embassy to get Ahlam out,” she said. That wasn't even worth discussing. It was discouraging news.

She and Alessandro were about to leave Damascus and wanted to see me in Lebanon. They asked me to meet them at a lodge in the mountains, and overrode my protests that I couldn't afford it and considered myself terrible company, a possible hex on romantic relationships. I took a collective taxi, a large white van that rattled up hills, moving from the smoggy July haze over Beirut to greener and cleaner climes, seated next to an excitable girl who wore a small crucifix on a slim silver chain. Passing Bsharri, the quaint village where the poet Khalil Gibran was born, and apricot trees spilling their ripe fruit onto the road, I reached the lodge next to the last stand of the famous cedars of Lebanon. A stone wall, a few acres: a tree museum.

That evening Alessandro ignored the signs forbidding him to do so and clambered onto the stone wall. He walked around it, arms outspread against a sunset that dyed the whole sky red. Marianne shouted warnings that he ignored, to our delight. Their happiness together was stronger than my unhappiness, an antidote. Late into the night, in the woodpanelled dining room and up in rooms decorated with bright handmade carpets, we discussed Ahlam and what to do over very good red wine that seemed to have restorative powers.