A Disappearance in Damascus (27 page)

“Why did they arrest you?” I asked her. “Was it because of me?”

“They wanted me to spy on a journalist. Not you. Deborah Amos. From NPR.”

Amos, a prominent Mideast correspondent, had been covering the refugee story in Syria at much the same time that I had, going in and out of the country often as she gathered material for a book. She had met Ahlam before I came to Damascus, when she did a radio segment on Ahlam's kidnapping in Iraq. I had known the two of them were acquainted, which is why Amos was one of the first journalists I'd emailed from Damascus after her arrest.

“They thought you were a professor.” Ahlam smiled. She explained how Abu Yusuf had asked her who the woman in her apartment was, then assured her, when she explained that I was a professor from Vancouver, that he already “knew everything” about me. She hadn't contradicted him. “It was good that we spread that rumour.” He knew only my cover story, spread from bread seller to cigarette vendor to hotel security guard, reinforced by every refugee who saw me at Ahlam's apartment.

It was a revelation. I had, after all, eluded the secret police by working undercover. But although my sleight of hand had not jeopardized Ahlam after all, neither had it diminished the fear and guilt that had consumed me. The paranoia of the state, as J.M. Coetzee observed, had been reproduced in my psyche, such that the state had no need to bother with
me. As Hamid had often observed, if her arrest had been meant to “send a message,” that message had been received.

Deborah Amos had told me she was not working undercover, though she was conscious of the perils of being observed: having heard Ahlam was on a watch list, she'd deliberately steered clear of her. Amos had obtained an official journalist's visa through the Syrian embassy in Washington, DC. She had worked through all the right channels, done all the right things, which would have made her an easy target as someone to watch.

Whether this was a case of one branch of the security and intelligence agencies trampling on the decisions of another, a turf war among the more than a dozen overlapping agencies operating in Syria, Ahlam had no idea. It may simply have been one man's attempt to further his career.

“What do you think of Syria now?” I asked Ahlam.

“Don't forget, they took in more of us than any country in the world. No other country would help us.”

She could still regard her experience with nuance. And she seemed well, even euphoric. For both of us the sense of relief was like a drug. As for how her release had been achieved, she thought Amnesty International might have had something to do with it, and certainly the UNHCR had pulled out the stops. The UN agencies weren't as powerful as people sometimes imagined, especially when working in dictatorships where their positions were tenuous. As Marianne put it: “They have to pick their battles.” Yet faced with countless other cases like Ahlam's, countless other battles, they had chosen to fight this one. “What made Ahlam's case different was that she had so many people pulling for her,” Marianne said. “She had so many friends.”

Over that kitchen table, Ahlam, bending her head to light a cigarette, told me how the agents who searched her apartment had made a beeline for her letters from American officials in Iraq. “They knew exactly where to look.”

“How could they?” I asked. “Who else knew?”

She had hidden her documents, she told me, months before her arrest. It was on a day when Mona had come by for a visit, back when relations between them were warm; it hadn't occurred to her to hide things from a friend. When the old guard, Sadiq, had taken pity on her and read to her from her prison file, he told her someone had informed on her. The name on the report was Mona's.

I asked her what she thought of Mona now. She went over to the window, painted so many times it no longer opened without a struggle. “It especially hurts when a friend betrays you,” she said quietly. She had been told by Tarek, before anything happened, that Mona was jealous of her renown as a fixer, but it was hard for Ahlam to fathom jealousy—it wasn't in her nature. And Mona's youth, beauty, potential were such that it was hard to understand why she would be jealous of a refugee who had only come to Damascus because she'd been kidnapped, and wore a picture of her dead son around her neck. She knew, of course, that Syrian fixers sometimes made deals with the Ministry of Information—some even had to give them kickbacks in order to be allowed to work. Everyone in the know was aware that this was the case. But the personal nature of the betrayal, by someone she considered a friend: this she could not grasp.

A cold wind gusted through the open window. In the alley below, a homeless man was bedding down for the night. Soon it would start to snow.

A few weeks later Ahlam slipped on an icy sidewalk and broke her arm. Her family in Iraq, with whom she was now able to keep in touch over the Internet, asked if she had broken it skiing, since that must be what she did all day now that she was living the American Dream.

Ahlam's arrival in Chicago coincided with the financial crisis. Streets of boarded up shops with “For Lease” signs that already looked weathered, legions of homeless, many of them army veterans, who rode the trains all day to stay warm. These conditions did not bode well for refugees who were expected to be fully employed by the time their government assistance was cut off in eight months.

Within days other Iraqi refugees in Chicago had found her. A depressed widower raising three little boys, who needed Ahlam to help him fill out medical forms. A female journalist who had been raped in Baghdad and was now a single mother. A man with a brain injury who came on to the female journalist in the elevator, and his beleaguered wife who wept when she learned she was pregnant with a third child.

I came back to Chicago for the month of December. Having finished my teaching term, I wanted to interview her while details were still fresh. A woman from Amnesty International came to document her testimony. Beth Ann was about fifty, a pale redhead with grown children. Straightforward, with an intelligent blue-eyed gaze and an American directness, she had long worked on Amnesty's Iraq file and was sent to help Ahlam settle in.

By the time I left, Beth Ann had become Ahlam's close friend. She arranged the things Ahlam could not, emailing
her daily to-do lists, browbeating her into showing up to doctor's appointments, finding her a dentist willing to work pro bono (she had, beneath the nicotine stains, lovely white teeth), and putting a moratorium on her use of the term
insha'Allah
. “It's like saying, ‘I'll get to it if I get to it,' and if not, blame God.”

The two of them concocted a plan to open an Iraqi Mutual Aid Society, a first for Chicago. Ahlam had always been good at coming up with ideas, but she didn't know the American system as Beth Ann did. With Ahlam's testimony, Beth Ann's superlative organizational skills, and funding organized with help from Marianne, they pulled it off.

In 2009, the society opened, dedicated to helping refugees adapt to their new home. At first they ran it from Ahlam's apartment, and then an article about Ahlam appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
. A wealthy philanthropist named Ann read the article and phoned, showing up with a check for $20,000, afterward supporting the Mutual Aid Society with $40,000 a year. The society was able to rent an office and begin their work in earnest. The following year Ahlam received an award from a local women's group.

Within a year her children were speaking good English. Roqayah's grades jumped from Ds to As. Taking off the headscarf as she moved into middle school, she emerged as a beautiful young woman, thirteen going on twenty, fluent in American schoolgirl slang. She admired Doctors Without Borders and was already talking about pre-med; Abdullah—a math whiz—about computer science.

I should end the story here. Happy ever after in the land of opportunity.

AHLAM AND I HAD LONG
engaged in banter that allowed us to stave off darkness. I would joke when I hadn't been able to reach her for several weeks—her number mysteriously changed or her phone switched off—that I thought she'd disappeared again. And she would quip, “Yeah, next time they're sending me to Guantánamo.”

“I hear the weather's good there.”

“Better than Chicago.”

There are three stages people go through after arriving in a new place that has been envisioned as a kind of salvation. The first is the halcyon time in which they imagine that everything in the new place is perfect; everything back home bad, even horrible. The second is the gradual disillusionment, as the new life reveals its own troubles. Longing for the lost homeland, old friends, ways of life that have acquired the glow of nostalgia. Then comes the settling in, the adaptation. Letting go of the past and realizing there is no going back. People who talk of these stages say the process takes about five years.

When I came to see her in the summer of 2009, she had a car and a driver's licence. Jason Pape, commander of the tank unit that used to hang out at Ahlam's house in Baghdad, had heard she was looking for work. He knew she would need a car for that to happen so he had given her his old Mercury station wagon with enough money to pay for the registration. Pape's father had driven the car all the way from Kansas to Chicago.

Over the first year, while the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society was getting underway, Ahlam held a series of part-time jobs, some of which, like driving local children to and from school, seemed to cost her more in gas than she was earning. Flummoxed by Chicago's tyrannical parking laws, which appeared to be the backbone of the city's funding strategy, she accumulated a breathtaking number of tickets. This was money she could not afford, and she missed a couple of months' rent. She found herself struggling to focus, haunted by the past.

Beth Ann found her a therapist at the Marjorie Kovler Center, an institute established in Chicago to help survivors of torture. After each therapy session she was exhausted; her entire body ached for days. She went for a while, then dropped out.

“Was she always so disorganized?” Beth Ann called me to ask. “Was she always this depressed?” I could tell she could not quite believe the stories I told of Ahlam's competence, of triumphs that sounded now like myth. I had thought, when she was first released, that she hadn't changed at all, but what Beth Ann said suggested I was wrong.

I said I remembered times when she was so exhausted she would sleep for two days straight. But then wake up and be
exemplary. “I think she needs a year off,” I told Beth Ann, “to recover.” Which of course was impossible. The poor do not take a year off in Chicago and keep a roof overhead. When Ahlam came across a pamphlet advertising “free” money in exchange for signing onto a credit offer, it was Beth Ann who explained that nothing is ever free in America.

But there was someone who could keep a roof over her head, and that was Ann, the generous philanthropist who had discovered Ahlam through the article in the
Tribune
. After two years in Edgewater, Ahlam and the children moved to a leafy suburb where Ann had found them a better two-bedroom and paid the difference on the rent. Both of the kids had experienced bullying, and this way they could go to a school that did not need a police car permanently stationed outside.

When I visited again in the summer of 2011, the entire city sang with cicadas—a lovely sound. I was staying with Ahlam in her new apartment in Evanston, and had come expecting to stay up all night talking, catching up, but she was dropping into bed exactly at eleven p.m., awaking at seven on the dot. The person I knew, the quixotic, insomniac, bold and funny person, had been replaced by a robot.

When she talked she seemed faroff, as if she were speaking from behind bulletproof glass. She told me there had been flashbacks. We were driving, I remember, through her new neighbourhood, green with parks and tree-lined streets, past shops selling gluten-free cupcakes and organic produce, dog-grooming, edible fruit arrangements, custom picture frames. There was more than one bookstore and a library, but the little girl who had read every book she could get her hands on now lacked the capacity for sustained concentration. There was too much chaos in her head.

“What triggers the flashbacks?” I asked.

“Sirens,” she said. “Or a baby crying.” She drove as if in a trance. She kept cigarettes on the backseat and reached for them, shaking one out. “I can't stand that sound.” She told me about the day in 2004 when there had been a bombing near her office in Baghdad. It was during the festival of Ashura, when observant Shia mourn the loss of the battle in Karbala fourteen centuries ago that started the Sunni–Shia rift. Thousands of families poured in through the massive wooden doors of the shrine in the suburb of Kadhimiya, touching the brass knocker as they entered to worship. At least seventy-five people died there that day—another sixty during a simultaneous attack on pilgrims in Karbala. It was the worst day of violence since the fall of Saddam Hussein and was blamed on al-Qaeda, which wanted civil war. Hearing the explosions from her office, she ran the several blocks to the shrine. All she could hear amid the shouts and sirens, all she could recall hearing, was an infant's cries. She followed the cries until she found the baby and pulled him from his dead mother's arms. The woman's body had shielded her son from the blast and saved his life.

I awoke one morning to drink tea with Ahlam before she left for work. She stood up to light a cigarette and looked out the kitchen window at the new day. Her face was blank. I got up from the table and put my arms around her. “Where are you?” I asked. “Tell me where you are.”

Between us was an overwhelming sadness. The full force of what she felt and what she could not feel was with us in the room. For the first time I understood that she was still captive to the traumas she had lived through. Her symptoms, common to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, had
been blunted by the drugs her doctors prescribed. This one to make you sleep the first half of the night, that one for the second half, this one to stop the flashbacks, another for the depression, another to combat the side effects of the others.

She spoke of her son who had died, whose mother hadn't managed to save him. “He will never see Chicago. He will never swim in the lake or walk in the snow.”

He was eleven and a half. He would always be eleven and a half.

“Why did I live?” she asked me. “I feel I'm not alive.”

She had been, when I knew her in Damascus, more alive than anyone I've ever known.

Perhaps I had idealized her. Easy to do that with people who have risked their lives for you. I began tracking down journalists and American military officials who had known her. I wanted them to give me perspective, but listened as if anticipating a blow. I feared they would tell me she wasn't the person I remembered, that it was self-deception. But all they could do, in the words of the first journalist she ever worked for, Stephen Glain, was “add to the heap of superlatives that Ahlam routinely inspires.”

They called her honest, competent, tough. They said—this was Khaled Oweis, the Reuters bureau chief in Damascus—“she had all the qualities you associate with the great Iraqis, except she wasn't wealthy.” They said she was charming, bold, outrageous. Brave. Generous. Warm. “Badass.” Empathetic. Smart about what needed doing and did it. Was reliable, likeable, funny. Sometimes sad. Nonsectarian at a time when the Shia ascendancy in Iraq made that a rare quality indeed.

In Skype calls and phone calls and emails, I was given a picture of someone even more influential than I had known at the time—“Did you know she fixed for Jeremy Bowen at the BBC? And Lina Sinjab at the Beeb, Lina loved her.” Perhaps because she had been that missing link, our bridge across the divide towards a common humanity. That was her gift to us. She represented the spirit of the places we had come to know through her, whether Baghdad or Damascus, that were no longer what they had been, and in the deepest sense had disappeared.