Free A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell Page B

her. “Depend on yourself,” he said.
    More afraid than she had ever been, grappling with her new and hated abaya, she trudged down the driveway to the main road. Above her, date palms swayed in the sun. She was on her own for the first time in her life. The air was stiff with heat and the sweetness of the fields, with everything familiar and dear. Perhaps this was all a mistake. Perhaps it was hubris. She should have stayed home like her sisters and lived like every other village girl.
    It was too late to turn back. She could see the taxi coming from a distance, the future roaring towards her on wheels.
    When she got to the school she stepped out of the taxi, caught her legs in the folds of her garment and landed face down in the dirt. Ignoring the laughter of the other passengers, she stood up, brushed herself off and took her first steps into the world.
    —
    When Ahlam was a student at Baghdad University in the mid-1980s, her father paid for her to take lessons in streetfighting. She told me this one night as we walked down the dirt alleyway next to Zainab’s shrine. It was almost midnight. Almost silent. The golden dome of the shrine, lit from below, glowed like a gas flare.
    “I returned to my village from the university after dark,” she explained. She wanted to know how to defend herself and had seen a sign at a gym near the university offering self-defence classes for women. There an athletic young woman taught her how to wave her hands as a distraction and knee an attacker in the groin. To throttle a lecherous taxi driver with the handles of a handbag. To aim the pointed heel of a shoe at the jugular. She hadn’t had to use her training, she said, except during her kidnapping, when she collared the boy with the machine gun and threw him against the car. It was more of a mindset: knowing you had the tools to fight if you had to.
    Her father died of cancer six months before her university graduation. On his deathbed, when Ahlam moved a cot into his room to be near him, Ahmed had been planning her university graduation party. A feast, the new car he would present to her, with all the villagers in attendance. He wanted to show everyone who had opposed her education how proud he was, to show them all. “But he died too soon.”
    He was the one person who had believed in her without reservation. “With him,” she told me, “I felt like I had all the power in the world. He taught me to be gentle, to have a good heart, but in a dangerous situation not to be afraid. He taught me to be wild when necessary.” After his death she stopped eating and was soon so thin that people began warning her mother that she would join her father in the grave. But she marshalled her strength and completed her studies; it was what he would have wanted. She brought her diploma to his graveside. “Here it is,” she told him, holding it out to the air.
    She had been the first girl from the village to finish high school and the first, man or woman, to earn a university degree. Four other girls from the village later followed her to the university. “What’s so great about Ahlam?” parents began asking themselves. “Our daughter is just as good as she is.” What had been taboo was now a status symbol. When American soldiers later came to the village, they were struck by how educated all the girls were.
    But instead of the brilliant career her father had predicted, Ahlam went straight from university to the family farm. The war with Iran had shattered the economies of both countries. Sanctions were about to start, barbed wire around the country’s trade that would have devastating consequences for the newly educated middle class. Her mother, ill since the death of her father, was unable to manage alone. Ahlam, as the only unmarried daughter—even her youngest sister, Roqayah, or Tutu, as she was called, had married by then—was the one to whom the duty fell.
    The scent of green fields at dawn would always remind her of her