Free A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell

prayer—the Shia add a line about Ali, whom they see as the Prophet’s legitimate successor. Coming home from school that day she saw her father talking to someone. Eager to show off her knowledge, she asked him whether the man was Sunni or Shia. His palm came down hard on her cheek. “May that be a lesson to you. We are all brothers.”
    “What did you think?” I asked.
    “I was shocked. His spoiled daughter slapped? I still feel ashamed to ask that question.”
    The same went for rich or poor: no differences. “Coffins don’t have pockets,” he said.
    While he raised her like a boy, he also let her hide away in her room all day with a book, avoiding the women’s work that didn’t interest her. She had been taken to Mutanabbi Street, the literary heart of Baghdad, where amid the tens of thousands of books she found an Arabic translation of
The Old Man and the Sea
. “This is your salary for the week,” her father said, handing her enough money to pay for it. With her “salary” she became a regular customer at an enormous bookshop piled high with new and used books from around the world. It was here, on what became weekly visits, that she discovered Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo and the author of
Love in the Time of Cholera
whose name she always forgot. She fell in love with the tale of
Don Quixote
, the romantic idealist who sets out to right the world’s wrongs. She was an equal opportunity reader, devouring dog-eared copies of Agatha Christie alongside works by the famous tenth-century poet for whom the bookselling street was named.
    While the other girls in the village were scrambling up date trees, scything the long grass for hay, dreaming ofmarriage and children, she was discovering new worlds in books. Aside from her family, books were all she cared about. Later she would reflect on how her upbringing might have made her oblivious to certain matters. She remembered a time in the 1990s when she was completely broke and a pretentious neighbour came to tea at her empty house. “She was wearing gold bracelets, rings, earrings. She kept waving her hands as she talked. I wondered why she was moving her hands around like this, if maybe she had a medical problem, so I asked my sister about it later.”
    “You’re a fool,” her sister told her. “She is trying to show you she is rich!”
    By the time Ahlam had finished primary school she was fourteen. In those days, that was the age when village girls would begin entertaining offers of marriage. When her parents raised the subject—there was a suitable young man who had asked for her hand—she threw a fit. She screamed. She shouted. She didn’t want to get married. Well, her parents asked, what did she want then?
    She had a new dream: she wanted to go to high school.
    Her mother had married her father at fourteen. She was a country girl who wore gold bands around her slim bronze ankles and believed a pinch of salt would keep away evil. Her father was more worldly, but he himself had gone no further than learning to read and write: that’s all the children his age had been taught, and only the boys. Maybe he wanted his daughter to have opportunities he himself would have liked. “And I was the only one of his children interested in school.” Maybe he also wanted to protect her from the fate he saw befall so many women—like his uncle’s first wife, abandoned with two children after a disastrous forced marriage—mademiserable by the vagaries of men and fortune. Because the moment she spoke her dream aloud, he seemed even more excited by the idea than she was.
    “I am giving her a weapon,” he announced to those who argued that a village girl had no need of schooling in order to tend orange trees and date palms, and that mixing with boys at school could stain her honour. “No one,” he told them, “knows what the future holds.”
    The year was 1979, and no one did. A popular revolution had brought the deeply pious Ayatollah Khomeini to