The Shattered Lens Read online

  This may also have had to do with the fact that I was inevitably bonding with my captors. Somehow I sensed that real freedom could not be divorced from your social context. We’re really only as free as we deem ourselves in relation to others. The paradox is that we are all dependent on others. In my better moments, during captivity, I started to fantasize about my previous life—the freedom it entailed—and realized how despite the illusion of freedom afforded by a seemingly inexhaustible array of movement and choice, I wasn’t all that free. Or at least I didn’t fully understand what freedom was, or could be. Here in the Light House, I was totally dependent on these fighters. This much was obvious. But over time, they had become increasingly dependent on me as well, on my eyes watching them. Because I represented the world outside their simple yet insane little corner of the civil war. And without that outside world, they would have no point of reference from which to justify their struggle.

  Even my relationship with Abu Talal was becoming more fraternal. He noticed my hair and beard had grown very long, so he gave me a trim. Surprisingly, he didn’t do such a bad job, and he was very proud of his work. But when I looked into the mirror, it was almost painful because it reminded me of who I was before I’d lost my freedom.

  Not long after Ramadan had begun, a government MiG fighter dropped a bomb right next to our house. Abu Talal took me out and walked me to where the ordnance had exploded, about a hundred yards away. It was a huge crater, which must have come from a 150-pound bomb. He showed all the destruction as he would to a comrade-in-arms. But I felt almost nothing, just the vague echo of a desire to maim him beyond recognition. And all the while I must have given him that sinister grin that had crept across my face during those mad walks around the pool.

  I came back to the house and took down the two T-shirts, socks and underwear I’d washed in a bucket and hung to dry on the balcony. I folded them on my mattress. Suddenly I unfolded the white T-shirt, held it up to the light, and stared bemusedly into its blankness. This is all I have. This is all I am.

  I wasn’t able to move, but my whole body felt like it was trembling. Tears started streaming out of my eyes at first. Then they gushed, with snot filling up my nose and me desperately trying to muffle the gasps in my throat and chest. I crumpled to my knees and buried my face in that shirt in the hope of stemming some incipient collapse. But my body could scarcely keep from shaking. I felt as if all I could really hope for was to catch my breath and prepare to die because there was nothing left of me.

  THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  THE UNCLE CAME BACK from time to time, and I always hoped he would give me a sign that everything had been organized, or pass me a note again saying, Tonight we go. But instead it was just that same hand gesture: Wait. In other words, be patient, don’t get your hopes up. In other words, some things might take getting used to—war, captivity, death. In other words, Bein Allah.

  My routine of praying on the balcony at sunset—repeating the same “Our Father” until the sun touched the mountain marking Lebanon and freedom beyond—had started to bleed into other parts of the day. I was there around noon, sitting in the plastic chair, and wasn’t so much praying as merely emptying myself of as many thoughts and worries as I could.

  Suddenly I saw Noor and Rabiyah running toward the house with big smiles on their faces. “Home, Jon! You’re going home!” They grabbed me, then pulled me out of the chair and into my room.

  “Hurry up, take your things.”

  So I grabbed whatever clothing I had and threw it into a plastic bag. I didn’t know where I was going, or even whether I should be worried. Every situation, even the happiest, felt like it contained a hidden trap. So as soon as I was alone for a second, I stepped out of the house and lifted the rock under which I’d hidden the Roman coins I’d taken a few weeks earlier. You never know. But for some inexplicable reason, I also took the pieces of souvenir shrapnel, which made no sense. I guess I just needed to minimize the gravity of the situation, make it feel like I was going home after a long vacation. I’d kept telling myself that when I was freed I would take these things with me, so I was not only preserving artifacts of captivity but also fulfilling something approaching a vow.

  Outside there were two SUVs with a group of soldiers around them, waiting for me. I knew all of them. They were Essad’s men. But Essad wasn’t there.

  They put me into the second SUV and we drove off, hitting one checkpoint after another, all manned by rebels, until we reached Yabroud. I remembered the area because that was the same road I’d taken on the day I was captured. I recognized many of the buildings, one specifically, a beautiful villa set in a neighborhood where wealthy people lived. Alfarook had pointed it out to me as I rode with him on his motorcycle: “My uncle built it.” That ride seemed so long ago, part of someone else’s life.

  When we got inside the city, the driver pulled over. They all got out of the car and told me to stay in. I waited for almost an hour, alone in the car with no one watching—at least no one I could see. They’d all gone into a house where I assumed they were negotiating my price and other details. Then they came out, took me from the car, and brought me into that same house. Inside I recognized two top officers whom I’d always seen with Essad. They’d been to the house many times during my captivity and were always polite with me. They had me sit in the living room, where to my surprise I saw the sheikh who had come to film me along with a soldier less than a week earlier. I wasn’t sure what to make of him. From the looks of the others, he was the most important man in the room. All the men were speaking in Arabic, and it sounded like they were weighing various options. Everyone’s reaction seemed to be contingent on the sheikh’s expression of approval or disapproval. The air was thick with tension and all of a sudden I understood that the sheikh was bargaining over my price. They’d brought me there to sell me to a group of Islamists. Jabhat al-Nusra, maybe. Or worse.

  A pang of panic cut into me. Though I couldn’t actually smell it, I imagined the foul miasma of the sheikh’s breath gathering in a cloud above him as it issued from between his jowls.

  They kept talking, more and more casually now, as if they’d settled a few prickly details. Occasionally one of them would turn my way and nod. Then, as their discussion sounded like it was heading for a conclusion, I caught the word Dimasha several times, so I asked, “Why Damascus?”

  They addressed my question as if I were an insolent child and had no say in the matter—which I clearly didn’t.

  “You’re going to Damascus,” one of Essad’s men said.

  Damascus meant I was being sold to the government. This, to me, was as bad as the Islamists—possibly worse. Immediately I had to stanch the gush of images revolving around Bashar’s torture rooms. Among the rebels, getting captured by the government was the worst of fates, much worse than having to deal with al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, who were effectively the rebels’ allies in this conflict, even though they’d been known to fight each other in certain areas.

  The men all stood up and shook hands. I stood up with them. Their faces changed. Everyone suddenly had a grim expression. They said goodbye to me stiffly—like Good luck, man, and Godspeed.

  Essad’s men left, and as soon as they did, two others came in. They were dressed in black military uniforms typical of the Shabiha, the Alawite militia loyal to Bashar and his regime. Shabiha means “ghost” or “shadow.” They had a fearsome reputation among all Syrians and had already been accused of numerous atrocities since the war had started.

  I sat back down when I felt the blood course out of my legs.

  The two Shabiha looked at me with intense smiles—too intense. Neither of them had a beard, which only confirmed they were Shabiha, as government troops tended to be clean-shaven. One of them wore Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. They both spoke English well.

  The guy with the sunglasses waved me toward him. “Okay, now we go quickly.”

  The sheikh stayed behind and shook my hand goodbye.

  They
led me outside to a small white car and put me in the back, then we drove off, four of us: one driver and the two Shabihas I’d already met. The guy with the Ray-Bans rode shotgun and kept an eye on me in the mirror.

  We headed east toward the road connecting Damascus to Homs; it passes a couple of miles east of Yabroud. It’s a major highway, Syria’s north–south axis, and it was controlled by government troops. About halfway to the main highway we pulled off where two white SUVs were waiting on the side of the road. We parked our car behind them and about six or seven men came out, dressed in black, carrying machine guns and kitted in military gear. These were government troops, for sure, and my panic welled up into a full-on rush.

  Shortly after the Syrian protests had begun, in the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in Egypt, Bashar al-Assad decided to use a heavy hand in dealing with the protesters. An array of stories about his torture chambers made their way around the press. It had never been any secret what kind of methods Middle East dictators and their secret services used to crush dissent, but with Syria in the spotlight every survivor’s account became fodder for news. I remember detailed descriptions of beatings, electric shocks, and humiliation practiced by professional torturers—all of them dressed in Shabiha black, at least in my imagination.

  The men in black told me to get out of the car and follow them to the second SUV. As I walked, one of them bumped my shoulder and scowled at me. I was queasy at the prospect of now being government property.

  Still, the guy with the Ray-Bans suddenly became very friendly and said, “You’re free now, you don’t have to deal with these bastard terrorists anymore.” He started talking about how the rebels were planting bombs near schools in Damascus, the massacres perpetrated in Alawite villages. “They posted video of one bastard eating the liver from one of our dead brothers. It’s sick. Fucking sick. And the world wants to help these terrorists.”

  The driver lit up a cigarette and I asked him for one. I still had all the Roman coins and shrapnel in my pocket, and I realized that if they found artifacts on me that belonged to the Syrian state, it would give them even more reason to question me and poke my testicles with a cattle prod. So at one point, when we stopped the car and the men got out to pee, I stashed the bag of coins and shrapnel under the mat at my feet.

  They handed me a black military outfit, with a matching black cap, so I could blend in. They also gave me a fake ID. “Whatever you do, don’t talk at the checkpoints.”

  I understood we were no longer in rebel-held territory. Everything near the main highway was under government control, and all the men suddenly seemed more relaxed.

  The SUV ahead of us opened the road at each heavily guarded checkpoint that cropped up every few miles, so when the soldiers looked into the vehicle they weren’t too curious.

  As we drove, Mr. Ray-Ban could tell I was nervous. He kept saying, “It’s okay.” But I couldn’t help imagining the torture rooms. Enough people had escaped or been released from Bashar’s prisons to recount their ordeals. One technique that was common to nearly all of them was having your body immobilized inside an empty tire while they beat the soles of your bare feet with a wire cable. Other accounts involved raping the prisoner’s mother or sister in front of his eyes in order to extract information. I knew this kind of torture was routine in most Middle East countries (no doubt why after 9/11 the United States supposedly outsourced some of their interrogations to Egypt and Jordan), but Bashar’s government had an especially sadistic reputation. So as I tried to better hide the bag of Roman coins under the mat with my foot, I was preparing the latter for contact with the wire cable.

  * * *

  AS WE APPROACHED DAMASCUS, Ray-Ban started speaking on his iPhone. Shortly after he hung up he handed it to me so I could read a text message that had been sent.

  “Now you’re free. I’m the man who negotiated your release and paid the ransom for you . . . You’re a very lucky man. Originally I was looking for two other French journalists and then stumbled upon you. Shortly we will meet. I’m very much looking forward to it.”

  I texted him back: “Thank you.”

  What more could I write? I had no idea who this person was, or even if anything written was true. All he basically said was, “I’m the guy who saved your life.” He didn’t even sign his name.

  After a couple of exchanges I gave the phone back to Ray-Ban. In the distance I could see the anonymous buildings on the outskirts of Damascus rising up in the stark afternoon light, and everything seemed to crystallize into that distilled sense of exhilaration and anxiety that had been driving my life since I started taking pictures.

  * * *

  BY LATE AFTERNOON we got to Yafour, a suburb in the hills west of the downtown area, where some of the richest Syrians live. As we drove past a mall, Ray-Ban turned around and asked, “Do you need some clothes?”

  “Well, I don’t have anything.”

  “Okay. No problem.”

  We pulled into a parking lot and he went into a department store. About ten minutes later he came out with a huge roller suitcase filled with stuff. (Up till then I’d always hated those suitcases and never traveled with anything I couldn’t carry over my shoulder. But all that changed when I realized that it was full of stuff for me, who’d been wearing the same ratty jeans and two T-shirts for all these weeks.) He heaved the suitcase into the back of the SUV and we drove to a safe house.

  All the men, who had been so tense and stiff before, were now relaxed and friendly with me. There were about a half a dozen Shabiha types guarding the safe house—which was actually a beautiful villa. I walked in and the rooms were lavishly decorated with sculptures and art and a flat-screen TV. In one room there was a long dining table with a vast and varied spread of food freshly prepared: salads, hummus, baba ganouj, grilled chicken, meats floating in gravy. It was as if they’d been expecting the arrival of an important guest. We all sat and ate. I’d always been a light eater, but because I hadn’t had anything similar in three months I dove in and stuffed myself.

  Afterward we smoked some cigarettes and Ray-Ban showed me into one of the bedrooms. “This is where you’ll be living for a while. I hope you’re comfortable. You’ll be in hiding, so you can’t go out.”

  After nightfall three men came in. One man was in his late forties, short, fit and very deliberate in all his movements. He wore a baseball cap to hide his face somewhat, but his intense eyes still shone through with obvious intelligence. He was accompanied by a man who looked slightly older, with jowls, beady eyes and a receding hairline that made his head look like a peanut. The third man was a translator who relayed the information even though it was clear that both men spoke English very well.

  The translator introduced them as Mohammed Aboud and Kamal Atrash, as if those names should have been familiar to me. (They weren’t.)

  “You’re going to be here for ten days,” the translator relayed. “Then you’ll go to Beirut. Once there, you’ll go the French embassy and tell them we helped you. But for now we still have to work something out. So you must stay here.”

  My stomach twisted a bit. So I wasn’t really free. I was just in a much more comfortable situation. They told me not to go out. In any case, it was dangerous because you could hear sporadic shelling all around the city. Most of it, though, was the government shelling rebel territory, like the Ghouta neighborhood, and other parts of eastern Damascus.

  * * *

  AFTER THEY LEFT, I hung out in my room with Ray-Ban. He asked me about my work and what I’d seen so far in Syria. A bloody mess, I told him. He said it’s always been a mess throughout history. Just not always as bloody. We became friends.

  He left me alone to rest for a while and I checked out my bedroom, which was very impressive. I even had my own bathroom. I examined myself in the mirror. My beard was thick and I looked extremely gaunt. My ribs were visible from all the weight I’d lost, and I pressed the ones that had been broken; they were still sore. Suddenly a wave of emotion rose up in my throat
. I felt as if I were seeing someone who had betrayed me long ago, someone I missed dearly. I touched the mirror like a man trying to break through and embrace the image, but as soon as I hit the solid glass the illusion dissipated. I shook my head and gathered my thoughts so I could assess my new situation.

  I opened the massive roller suitcase and it was crammed with jeans, shorts, T-shirts, polo shirts, belts, toothpaste, toothbrushes, even deodorant. I took a shower, put on some jeans, and fixed myself up a bit.

  Then my new friend came in and said, “We have to go. We’re going to see your man, Aboud.”

  * * *

  HE PUT ME IN the car and we drove about five minutes up the road. It was a clear warm night and both sides of the road were lined with opulent villas. The streets were full of men armed with machine guns and RPGs, all dressed in black.

  We turned into a road that led to a manor. The gate opened up and we proceeded up a driveway lined with motorcycles and quads. The driver turned to me and said, “Aboud is a very wealthy man. He buys all kinds of stuff.” It didn’t escape me that I was now in that category of “stuff.”

  There were more armed men as we approached the house. He took me out of the car and we walked through an expansive garden full of palm trees towering beside a huge house and swimming pool. On one side of the garden there was a tent with a wooden table. Sitting at the table was a small man wearing a pink polo shirt and jeans. It was Aboud.

  “Welcome to my home, Jonathan.” He spoke impeccable English, so it took a few seconds to recognize him as the man in the baseball cap who’d come to my room only a few hours ago. It wasn’t clear to me why he’d have brought a translator—but then again, less and less was clear to me the more I got entangled in this deal. Obviously I was in government-held territory. But I’d been handed over to these government troops by rebels ostensibly trying to kill them. It didn’t make sense. Maybe Aboud’s troops weren’t as loyal to the government as they were to Aboud himself, I thought. Many oligarchs in this part of the world have their own personal battalions. I’d been in enough murky war situations to know that they rarely made sense the deeper you looked. And any notion of “us against them” is more often than not an oversimplification. In most armed conflicts throughout history—the current Syrian one is a prime example—common interests, which can be economic or military, serve as aggregating factors for forces. Usually these forces vie with each other in a dance of shifting alliances. It’s more like eddies in a tide pool than a head-on collision. Right now I was swirling through a very complicated eddy, unsure of where I would wind up.