A Disappearance in Damascus Read Online Free

(or because of) being attractive and educated. She had turned down many suitors because she didn’t want a controlling husband or a backward one. Though she was studying at night towards a second degree in international law, she still lived with her parents in an apartment where she and four sisters, all university-educated, slept in a single giant bed. “Like kebabs,” Rana said.
    That first week I camped at the Damascus apartment of a freelance filmmaker from New York who had sublet me a mattress on her balcony. She was a skinny redhead in her early thirties with a finely calibrated register of anxiety—not a bad quality for a journalist to have unless it tips over the edge. Which it did the morning the air conditioner died.Admittedly, in the midst of a heat wave, this was a crisis. Standing in the bare-bones kitchen, stirring instant coffee into boiling water and still not quite awake, I listened to her screaming over the phone at her landlord. She wanted him to come over and fix the problem immediately so she was layering it on, simultaneously claiming the malfunction had made her ill, praising the great country of Syria, and alluding to having spoken to “officials” and “police” who all agreed that he had overcharged her on the rent. Of course she wasn’t ill; Syria wasn’t great; and we assiduously avoided officials and police. They considered all foreigners spies, which is how we saw them in return. She had even put a picture of President Bashar al-Assad on the outside of our door, hoping to allay any suspicions about the possible journalistic activities taking place inside. And the rent, though almost as much as she paid for her half of a spacious loft in Brooklyn, was in line with demand: rents in Damascus had suddenly tripled with the arrival of more than a million middle-class Iraqis carrying their life savings in cash.
    I’d enjoyed sleeping under the clear moonlit sky on her balcony, lulled by the hum of late-night traffic. But I needed a room, not a balcony, and after much searching I’d found my own place. It was on the fifth floor of a downtown walk-up, since Syrians, the owner wistfully conceded, objected to climbing more than three flights of stairs. Too small for more than one person, it was one of the rare Damascus rentals that didn’t have crowds clamouring to pay whatever the landlord wanted. I was glad to be getting out of the overheated apartment and away from a roommate who had recently discovered that the pharmacies here didn’t require a doctor’s prescription to give her all the Xanax she needed.I was going to be on the top floor, above everything, looking down on the city, able to see without being seen, invisible, almost omniscient: a writer’s fantasy. I was going to understand everything that went on, I imagined, and would avoid being caught up in any of it.
    Rana and Kuki weren’t fixers: neither had connections or could lead me to sources, though both were game for helping me with whatever I had in mind. Kuki had been an interpreter in Iraq. Not for the army, but for one of the companies that made a fortune supplying overpriced goods to the army. He was young, educated, upper-class, subsisting on money from his parents in Baghdad, a professor and a lawyer whom he’d left behind after a letter arrived on their doorstep threatening to murder the entire family unless their gay son left the country. He came with me on a number of early exploratory interviews and said it made him feel better to see people worse off than he was. Before the war he had been a fashion model in Baghdad—he showed me his portfolio—and he was still vain, refusing to tone down his rock-star attire of tight black T-shirt and white-framed sunglasses even when we were working. Wherever we went, people stared.
    One night the two of us went to a bar in the Old City, down tangled alleyways, under a pink neon sign. It was salsa night, hot and smoky, and a steamy, sexy crowd was shouting to be heard.