A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell Page B

international reporters made famous during the First Gulf War as the headquarters for CNN. He was instantly mobbed by the fixers, drivers, translators and prostitutes desperate for foreign currency.
    A scrum of men surrounded me as I disembarked from the GMC I’d hired for the fourteen-hour drive to Baghdad from Amman. I waved them off and they reluctantly parted to reveal Samir…in faded khaki pants and a polo shirt. He was standing ram-rod straight as he strolled over and casually extended his hand.
    “Welcome to Iraq,” he said. “May I be of assistance during your stay?”
    There wasn’t a trace of servility in his voice. I liked him immediately.
    “You’re hired,” I said. 21
    Glain’s impression was deepened when he asked Samir his opinion of a staged patriotic event they had attended. “That?” Samir told Glain. “Fuck.” At a time when almost no one dared criticize the regime, Samir had named his two dogs Uday and Husay, after the dictator’s sons. He invited Glain to dinner at his home, but suggested they go fishing beforehand.
    I asked him what kind of reel he used.
    “Reel?”
    I nodded. “What kind of rod and reel do you use when you fish?”
    […] Samir then explained that he and his brothers catch fish by extending a metal wire into the Tigris River and electrocuting it with a car battery.
    “That’s not very sporting,” I said.
    Samir looked at me as if he was appraising the village idiot.
    “We don’t want sport,” he said. “We want fish.”
    The fishing trip was unsuccessful but Glain had a wonderful dinner at the family house along the river. Ahlam was there, trying to bake bread in a clay oven, giggling every time she burned herself. She told him that after finishing university she never thought she’d have to bake bread like her mother and grandmother.
    Samir had already begun to subcontract work to Ahlam, at first just the translation of documents. Sometimes she even washed the journalists’ laundry. As more reporters came, too many for Samir to handle alone, he put his economics training to work. Perfecting the bait-and-switch, he would take one of them around for a while, then pass him off to Ahlamso he could work with another. It was through Samir that Ahlam met people like Khaled Oweis, the Reuters journalist who became the news service’s bureau chief in Damascus and later recommended Ahlam to correspondents there.
    At first, Ahlam told me, she was shy about working with strangers. “Get over it,” Samir said. She had no choice: she had a family to support, a husband with a talent for money-losing ventures. And besides, she was good at this, good at connecting this person to that person in pursuit of a story, good at dealing with all kinds of situations, crazy or sane. A natural fixer.

Chapter 6
FRIENDSHIP
    HOW DO FRIENDSHIPS EVOLVE? In part through shared experience, intense experiences of the sort Ahlam and I encountered in Damascus. Shared risk forges strong bonds.
    We began talking in shorthand, inside jokes, the private language that develops from esoteric knowledge, as we walked down dusty alleyways, stared at by curious children, buzzed by rickety motorcycle carts and the occasional Pepsi truck, the scent of roast peanuts and diesel in the air. Once, when I asked Ahlam whether she felt safe here in Little Baghdad, she said curtly, “Nobody’s safe here,” but when we were working together it seemed as if nothing could harm us. It was as if we were encased in a cocoon of mutual trust. There was no other way to work here. And there was no one else who knew exactly what it was like to do this work, no one who understood completely what it was we did.
    Ahlam and I were very different. We had sprung from different soil, from civilizations that were said to “clash,” but wewere both outsiders to our own cultures. A writer usually is, and the unusual life she had led set her apart.
    Maybe we were similar, too, in ways I couldn’t have foreseen. She was older than