A Disappearance in Damascus (8 page)

The fishing trip was unsuccessful but Glain had a wonderful dinner at the family house along the river. Ahlam was there, trying to bake bread in a clay oven, giggling every time she burned herself. She told him that after finishing university she never thought she'd have to bake bread like her mother and grandmother.

Samir had already begun to subcontract work to Ahlam, at first just the translation of documents. Sometimes she even washed the journalists' laundry. As more reporters came, too many for Samir to handle alone, he put his economics training to work. Perfecting the bait-and-switch, he would take one of them around for a while, then pass him off to Ahlam
so he could work with another. It was through Samir that Ahlam met people like Khaled Oweis, the Reuters journalist who became the news service's bureau chief in Damascus and later recommended Ahlam to correspondents there.

At first, Ahlam told me, she was shy about working with strangers. “Get over it,” Samir said. She had no choice: she had a family to support, a husband with a talent for money-losing ventures. And besides, she was good at this, good at connecting this person to that person in pursuit of a story, good at dealing with all kinds of situations, crazy or sane. A natural fixer.

HOW DO FRIENDSHIPS EVOLVE?
In part through shared experience, intense experiences of the sort Ahlam and I encountered in Damascus. Shared risk forges strong bonds.

We began talking in shorthand, inside jokes, the private language that develops from esoteric knowledge, as we walked down dusty alleyways, stared at by curious children, buzzed by rickety motorcycle carts and the occasional Pepsi truck, the scent of roast peanuts and diesel in the air. Once, when I asked Ahlam whether she felt safe here in Little Baghdad, she said curtly, “Nobody's safe here,” but when we were working together it seemed as if nothing could harm us. It was as if we were encased in a cocoon of mutual trust. There was no other way to work here. And there was no one else who knew exactly what it was like to do this work, no one who understood completely what it was we did.

Ahlam and I were very different. We had sprung from different soil, from civilizations that were said to “clash,” but we
were both outsiders to our own cultures. A writer usually is, and the unusual life she had led set her apart.

Maybe we were similar, too, in ways I couldn't have foreseen. She was older than me, but both of us had grown up in communities that told us who we were going to be and had managed to rebel. Both of us came from large families—I'm the eldest of eight—from small towns (mine on the outskirts of Vancouver, hers of Baghdad) where what we
should
do or
should
want were burdens we had worked hard to shrug off. We had both made it out through education. She had the help of her father against the barrier of culture; I had the help of my schooling against the barrier of my father.

When Ahlam told me of learning to swim, fighting the current, thrashing not to drown, I remembered an event that took place when I was about the same age, twelve or eleven. We were at a lake in the Pacific Northwest on a family vacation. My father had been shoving my younger brothers into the water from a boat, perhaps our new boat—he, too, was a self-made man who had become well-to-do—and whenever they scrambled out, he threw them in again, laughing as they sputtered and choked. I was sitting behind him, watching him torment my brothers. It was nothing new, it was how he always behaved, always the bully. But that day was different. That day some demon made me want to let him see what it was like. He was leaning over the edge of the boat precariously. I stood up, placed my hand on his back, and pushed. I still recall the feel of his back, the give as he fell into the lake, my astonishment at my part in it, that it had actually worked. Soaking wet and furious, he hauled himself out and turned on me, pushing me into the water
and holding me under. I fought to breathe, sinking under, over and over again, his hand on my head holding me down.

A year later I was sent to private school, an attempt to reform me that turned out to be a saving grace. Since I was a good student, which might well have been lost on the mediocre school my brothers attended, there was an assumption on the part of my teachers and peers that I would go on to bigger things. Ahlam and I both left behind the world we knew for educations that forever put a distance between where we had come from and where we were going. We learned early to rely on ourselves.

And though we were both well-read, we were also drawn to empirical experience, to the turmoil of the tangible world. For me, in order to bear witness to it; for her, I think, to solve it.

Neither of us liked being told what to do either, a mentality that is characteristic of freelancers who prefer to go their own way, follow their own stories, which is to say their own minds. We shared a disregard for convention and other people's ideas of what it meant to “behave ourselves,” which is usually code for “shut up.” You could see it in her smoking, something women in her society didn't do (or if they did, it was in secret), and in the way she talked to men as equals, ordering them around when necessary, cajoling them otherwise. Shouting at the younger men if they were unruly, mocking them with an ironic word, keeping them in line. I enjoyed watching her conduct herself with such finesse and good humour, managing the refugees who treated her apartment as a gathering place, wanting her to resolve their life problems as if this were the same village council she had watched her father run and she were now the patriarch.
And we both liked to immerse ourselves in the lives of other people, gripped by the human drama, though she had lived that drama in ways I couldn't even begin to share.

It is possible, even probable, that our similarities blinded me to the vast chasm of our differences. For I had come here by choice. I chose where I went and when I left. “Because of your passport,” an Iraqi man had said to me, pointing out the irreconcilable difference between him and me, “you can go anywhere.”

I had the status of a lucky birth in a lucky country at a lucky time for women, when I could carve out the life I wanted. I had a home to return to whether I appreciated it or not. If I didn't like something, or the going got rough, or when I'd wrapped up my research, I could just leave. Though I often felt broke, a plane ticket on a credit card was not beyond my means, nor would my passport be turned away at customs. I had a foot in her world but one step could remove me from it; it couldn't envelop me; I couldn't fall far. Barring something extraordinary happening, there was too much holding me aloft.

The truth was that Ahlam was one of the people I was writing
about
, one of history's casualties, a refugee from a war planned and executed by
my
culture; a person who, because of
us
, no longer belonged anywhere.

In the evenings I always landed back at my apartment. It was another life. At night I transcribed interviews, made notes and phone calls, read a biography of the English explorer Gertrude Bell, who famously drafted the previously non-existent borders of Iraq for the British after the First World War, defining the country where Ahlam was born.

One night Ahlam asked me if she could come over. The water had been off in her apartment for several days. She was longing to take a shower.

When she arrived I gave her a towel, soap, shampoo, and put on a kettle for tea. While she was in the shower I turned on the small television my landlord had left for me, watching Al Jazeera with the sound off. A flash of White House spokesman, his mouth opening and closing.

When she emerged, we sat on the pullout sofa, drinking tea while she let her hair dry. It fell halfway down her back. She held up a thick sheaf of it in one hand and looked at it critically.

“I wish I had hair like that,” I said. Mine is fine and fair.

“You know,” she said, “when I was a teenager I wanted to cut it off. It was down to my waist. So hot in the summer. But my family loved it so much.”

Was I married? Ahlam asked. I told her the truth—no, not officially. Children? No. What does your boyfriend think of you going away all the time? I confessed that it was a strain. But I loved my work. It wasn't about choosing one thing over the other; I had to work like I had to breathe.

She agreed with me: the work gave life meaning, it was the essential. “I would have been just as happy if I had not got married,” she said, lighting a cigarette. She turned the subject back to me. “Your boyfriend misses you.”

I reached for her cigarettes and shook one out. “Maybe that's the problem,” I said.

She looked at me sympathetically and waited for me to go on. I was hesitant to burden her with my concerns. The gradual demise of a long relationship that showed obvious signs of deterioration whenever I was in the field for too long,
and nagged at me even as I ignored it, was petty by comparison to what she dealt with every day.

“We have a nice apartment in Vancouver,” I said. “Small but nice. Near the beach. He's a good person.” I described how he had ingeniously created an office for me from a series of bookshelves organized at right angles so as to carve out an extra room. “I sometimes think, if there's an earthquake, I'll be killed by falling books.”

I described how we had met a dozen years ago, when we were still sorting out who we were. We took turns putting each other through university, all the way through graduate school. Until now, one of us had always been studying, the other working. We were different people now than when we had met, arguably better people, but not the same.

“What's he like?” she asked.

“Intelligent. Good-looking. Driven. Works in technology. Sometimes in Silicon Valley. Where they work with computers, that sort of thing.” I couldn't be sure she had heard of Silicon Valley. “He can explain string theory, the Grand Unified Theory. Physics.” I paused, wondering if I was losing her. “The thing is, he's always been supportive of my work. Whenever I'm getting ready to head somewhere, like here for instance”—I indicated my apartment with the cigarette—“I have a few bad nights where I think I must be crazy, because normal people don't do this kind of work. And he's always told me just to go. But I go away too much.” Going back was getting harder.

“The worst was Iran. A year and a half ago I was reporting a big story. I went everywhere—Khuzestan, Kurdistan, Bushehr. I wanted to know everything so I could write about the people there. But I was away for six months straight, living
a completely different life. When I went home it was so”—I struggled for the right word—“disorienting.” Returning had left me with what anthropologists call the shock of re-entry. “For a while I could only sleep if I lay down on the floor.” I had felt a craving for something solid beneath me.

I had never told anyone about that, even my boyfriend who thought I was sleeping on the living room sofa, which was challenging enough. That time away had been especially troubling for us. Towards the end I had been threatened with arrest and called him in a panic, then been cut off when my phone card ran out. I hadn't been able to call back for three days. In that time he had not slept, imagining all the scenarios—jail, torture, death—yet helpless to do a single thing about it. While I was active, absorbed in keeping myself out of prison, he endured the terrifying anguish of the person left behind.

I stopped talking and got up to pour us more tea. She was holding the pendant she always wore, that held the small photo of her son Anas who had died the year before. She placed it back around her neck, then tucked it into her shirt.

“Why do you do that?” I asked, handing her the tea glass. “Put it inside your shirt?” When I first met her she used to wear the pendant with her son's picture on the outside of her clothing.

“Abdullah”—her middle child—“has been becoming upset remembering his older brother. So now I put his picture away, by my heart.”

Her eldest son had been a fine, tall, obedient and clever boy, as she described him: “My right hand.” Anas was eleven years old—“eleven and a half”—when he returned from school in Damascus last May complaining of pain in his side. This from
a boy who never complained, who had left behind his home and friends without a word. Other kids threw fits, begged to be allowed to bring computers or toys or refused to understand why they had to leave their homes at all, but not him. So at first she wondered if he might have been beaten up at school, a foreigner in a wildly overcrowded Syrian classroom, taunted by other boys who resented the newcomers. A bit of schoolyard bullying, the sort of thing a boy that age knew to keep to himself; his parents had enough problems. The doctor at the hospital in Damascus said he had a kidney stone and gave him an injection. Within moments Anas was dead.

A supervisor at the hospital came to investigate, calling in the doctor. The pair began discussing the case in English in front of her, thinking she wouldn't understand. The supervisor said the medicine was not meant for a child of that age. “I felt what it was to stand in front of the person who had killed my son, and because I was a refugee, be afraid to open my mouth.” She paused. “After that you can only take care of the people around you, nothing else.”

Would it have been better if her son had been killed by the war? At least that would have made a kind of sense, even if a terrible sense, because everyone knows that children die in wars. You can talk about it, rage about it; people understand it. At Ahlam's apartment I had spoken to a woman whose only child, a boy Anas's age, was killed on the fifth day of the war when air strikes dropped a missile on their house. But Anas's was a death without reason, a death that cancelled out meaning.

Something else had changed when Ahlam stood next to her son's still-warm body in the hospital. She looked across the bed at the face of her husband, who stood there helpless,
immobile, unable to do what he ought to have done in that moment and take her in his arms. In such cases parents either grow closer or break apart. The distance across the bed, the slight boy lying there between them, no longer breathing—in that moment she slipped off her wedding band and dropped it into her pocket. The end of something, the silent breaking of a bond.

“That's when I said, it's finished.” Later she gave her wedding ring to a young man in Little Baghdad who was planning to propose to a girl he loved.

Ahlam's extended family had insisted that Anas be buried in his homeland. She had promised her kidnappers she would not go back, but it was tradition, and the family would not relent. Her brother Salaam, the driver, organized a convoy of vehicles: Ahlam and her husband and the two younger children in one SUV, her son's body in another, a third filled with men Salaam had organized to guard them should they come under attack. They left Damascus at three in the morning and arrived in their village on the outskirts of Baghdad thirteen hours later.

She never learned the exact site of the grave. Though she begged her family to take her there, they refused. She was treated, she said, as a foolish woman who would collapse, when she only wanted to see her son for the last time. “He stayed eleven and a half,” she said. “He will always be eleven and a half.”