A Disappearance in Damascus Read Online Free Page B

his way tosee an Iraqi woman in Damascus’s Little Baghdad—Sayeda Zainab—and invited me along. “She might be interesting for you.”
    Ask Syrians what they thought of Little Baghdad and the word “backward” usually came up, or the joke about the two Iraqis expressing their surprise at seeing something unusual: a Syrian! The last time I had gone there my taxi driver, an avuncular man who believed he was dealing with a confused tourist, tried to talk me out of going. “There’s nothing to see there,” he insisted into the rear-view mirror. “Just Iraqis.”
    Home to three hundred thousand refugees, this was where Baghdad had transplanted itself. It was insular, poor and unstable—the Syrian secret police, the mukhabarat, hovered over Little Baghdad the way cops do around high-crime neighbourhoods.
    I would love to go with him, I told the journalist that day, but not right then. I was still wearing what I had put on to meet him at his magazine office, a sleeveless shift dress over jeans. This was perfectly fine for the affluent areas of Damascus, which were modern and anything-goes, but not for the sort of outing where I should make an effort to dress modestly and not stand out. Just a glance at my non-Arab face would identify me as a Westerner, so I didn’t bother with a headscarf—I’d had my fill of it in Iran; and in secular Syria even the president’s wife didn’t bother. But when I had time to think ahead I usually wore a wedding ring to visit poor areas, places where marriage was a life event as significant as birth or death. I’d bought the ring for ten dollars at a stand in a shopping mall, preferring to be pitied for having a cheap husband rather than admit that I lived with a man to whom I wasn’t married. Unfortunately, the ring sometimesrequired me to provide vivid descriptions of my wedding: inventing the dresses the bridesmaids wore, the hall or beach where the celebration took place—usually I opted for the beach. Thinking of this made me realize I hadn’t called home lately. My boyfriend had emailed to say he had tried my number several times but couldn’t get through.
    “Don’t worry,” said the journalist, interrupting my thoughts. “We’ll take a taxi to her door.” Outside his office he quickly flagged down a cab on the busy street.
    Twenty minutes later we arrived at her apartment. Ahlam opened the door—her husband was out, both kids still at school. Clad in jeans herself, she wore a heart-shaped pendant with a photo of a boy around her neck. Her eldest son, she explained, touching the portrait with one hand. He had died last year.
    “In the war?” I asked. Later I would understand how hard it was for her to answer that question.
    “Here in Damascus. An accident in hospital.” He had been eleven years old.
    As she beckoned me to take a seat, I apologized for my bare arms. She looked at me blankly. She appeared not to have noticed. She offered me a cigarette as if to say:
don’t be so uptight
.
    I’d like to say I knew immediately who she was. That she was the most famous fixer in Damascus. But fixers are never famous—not to anyone except those in the know. They work in murky times and murky places. Which is when and where they are needed. And honestly? She didn’t look the part. Later, because she lost herself in her work in the same way I did, I would sometimes forget how much she had beenthrough to end up here, but that day she gave me a glimpse of something she normally locked up. When she spoke of her son, she looked like someone with a broken heart.
    She told me a bit of her story, in fluent English, explaining what had brought her here from Baghdad, and despite how harrowing it was I couldn’t help but admire her attitude. She had a certain flippancy that told me she didn’t care about things other people cared about, that she was her own person living by her own rules. She mentioned that she had worked for the international press in Baghdad, and when I said