A Disappearance in Damascus Read Online Free Page A

Posters on the wall advertised a visiting European DJ. We drank the pink drinks that came with the cover charge.
    I told anyone who asked that I was a professor of fine arts. Or just a “teacher,” if that seemed easier. Kuki said—since he would have liked to be one—that he was a VJ for MTV Lebanon. He was shaggily handsome, skinny as a heroin addict, and could put on a convincing Lebanese accent.
    “Do you think anything you write will make a difference?” he asked me at our table looking out over the dance floor, lighting his last cigarette and crumpling the packet.
    It was a good question, an existential question, and one I had begun asking myself. I liked to distinguish the work I did from “parachute journalism”—flying in and out and thinking you were an expert when you could have written the same thing without leaving the office—or from the kind of institutional newsgathering that took its cues from press conferences, which meant that whoever gave the press conference wrote the script. But I had been writing long enough to doubt my own contribution. The whole media landscape—so many articles, so much commentary, so much noise—was changing fast, disintegrating. One article, a thousand articles, however in-depth and penetrating, what could they actually do beyond letting me say I had tried?
    George Orwell, in his famous essay “Why I Write,” said that aside from the need to earn a living, there were four great motives to write. The first is
sheer egoism
: “Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.” The second is
aesthetic enthusiasm
: the perception of beauty in the world; the desire to share a valuable experience; pleasure in “the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.” The third and fourth motives interested me most.
Historical impulse
: “Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.” And finally,
political purpose
: “Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction….No book is genuinely free from political bias.” 11 And, thinking about the article Iwas writing on the refugee crisis, to push the world towards reckoning with the long-term consequences. To show them a human face.
    It wasn’t too late to find out a few “true facts”—as opposed to the other kind—and store them up for posterity, but it was too late, at least with the story I was writing, to change the present situations of the people whose lives I was documenting. They might, of course, go on to better days, but there was no question that what was done to them was done. The dead were dead; some people really had been driven mad with grief. Observation, recording, documenting, what difference could that make? If the answer was “nothing,” was I doing it just for selfish reasons: to make myself feel better, less useless, less angry at various injustices? In which case the whole enterprise was not much more than therapy.
    “I don’t know,” I told Kuki. Salsa music pounded at my ears. A woman with an Afro was showing the dance floor how it ought to be done. “I think,” Kuki said, blowing a thoughtful smoke ring, “that people are busy.” He knew a fair bit about life in the West and the sort of people who read in-depth analyses in highbrow publications. He had an American boyfriend—they met online—and was trying to get accepted to the United States through the UNHCR. His dream was to live in New York, to become a New Yorker. “You write something, they read it,” he said. “Maybe they feel something. But what do they
do
about it?”
    Then he turned to his favourite subject. “How’s your man?” he asked. “How does he feel about you being away?”
    —
    Ahlam and I had been introduced three days before my trip to the border by a Syrian journalist who was on