The Shattered Lens Read online

  She trusted Doueihy, and she liked the French, but she never trusted the FBI. Of course no one was telling my father everything they knew, but she felt the FBI was the least forthcoming. Still, she never asked to talk to any of them directly. That was my father’s role. He interacted with people. That was his strength. My mother’s strength was the ability to remain cool-headed, and that helped my father get through the more difficult days. Calling her regularly helped him to think properly and not succumb to raw emotions. She became his reality check. And oddly enough, her toughness—to the point of callousness at times—was making him stronger.

  Learning about this dynamic only confirmed what I was already aware of: that I had inherited a lot—maybe too much—of my mother’s doggedness. Once she decided on some crazy adventure, there was no stopping her. Her tenacity could be frightening. I unconsciously tried to imitate her, pursuing an ostensibly mad path with cool precision.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER’S PRESENCE INCREASED as the emails back and forth with Doueihy grew more hopeful. In one he said, “We have identified the house and have it surrounded.” By “we” my father assumed he meant “his people,” but when he tried to imagine how many people it took to surround a house in possibly hostile territory, his concern grew. Then another email: “We have seen Jonathan and he is OK.”

  That was a period of daily ups and downs as the negotiations seemed to continually stall and restart. Sometimes there was no news for several days; then Doueihy would send emails saying his people could not cross the border or send news because of battles raging in the area. He seemed most concerned with Hezbollah. Then my father would get an email saying, “We are negotiating again.”

  So he was fairly optimistic the day when Doueihy dropped the real bad news on him: “There is another group that is negotiating to take Jonathan.”

  They switched from email exchanges to phone conversations because there was no time to be wasted.

  “Who are these people?” my father asked.

  “They’re bad people. Very dangerous. Jihadists. They’re close to convincing Jonathan’s captors to give him to them. We can’t let Jonathan fall into their hands.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “I have one hundred fifty people ready to assault the house. But I need your agreement as Jonathan could be killed during the assault.”

  “I see. I’ll need to talk to his mother.”

  “Hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  As my father called up my mother it was impossible for him not to imagine me in the hands of some hooded fanatic posing in front of a camera, poised to slit my throat for the sake of a spectacle meant to glorify the name of his horrific god. Somehow the image steeled his will.

  “This is the situation, Daniela . . . We have to make a decision.”

  She was quick: “We have no choice. Let’s do it.”

  He hung up and sent an email to Doueihy giving him the green light to send his men in and rescue me.

  * * *

  THAT WAS SEVERAL WEEKS before I was taken to Damascus. Even though my father and I have gone over the events from our separate perspectives many times, there are still big question marks. Initially, he didn’t know who the jihadists were. Later Doueihy identified them as Jabhat al-Nusra, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, aka ISIS, was still little known in Syria and operating more in the eastern part of the country at that time.

  I wondered if the smuggler had anything to do with Doueihy’s men. Or if the sheikh who had visited me and who seemed to hand me over to the government troops had anything to do with Jabhat al-Nusra. Things may have been clearer had I known whether the sheikh was Sunni or Shia. But I couldn’t tell the difference and it didn’t occur to me ask. In any case, looking for clarity in that part of world has always been a fool’s errand.

  Ultimately Doueihy would never publicly admit to any involvement. Moreover, he always maintained that my trip to Damascus was a fiction. And I assume he would never acknowledge connections to such high-ranking Syrian government figures as Aboud. But I’ve often wondered about the possibility that “Doueihy’s men” were actually Aboud’s men. I’ll probably never know for sure.

  * * *

  FORTUNATELY FOR ME, the assault didn’t take place. Doueihy called the following day to say that negotiations had restarted and appeared to be going well. My father became more optimistic, but by then the ordeal had taken its toll.

  Finally it all seemed to come to an end with the telephone call from Yann, after I had contacted him from Damascus. My father was visiting one of his closest friends in Los Angeles and eating at a Japanese restaurant. After the news they stayed at the restaurant and celebrated with beer after beer late into the night until the owner politely asked them to leave. He called my mother first thing in the morning and both waited for their scapegoat to return.

  DEBRIEFING

  I WAS FREE—MORE OR LESS. I still couldn’t do anything I wanted because I was confined to the French embassy in Beirut and needed to be debriefed. But at least the pall of coercion around me had lifted.

  Before my kidnapping I wasn’t exactly sure what a debriefing entailed. After I was released I found out it was a lot like an interrogation—minus the subtext of threat, and conducted by ostensible friendlies who try to give you the benefit of the doubt.

  Since I was one of the first hostages in Syria to be released, I was expected to be a source of unprecedented information. Almost as soon as we got to the French embassy, two casually dressed gendarmes came to debrief me; they looked like they were about to go on a leisurely Sunday stroll in the park with their families. I was put in a big room, just the three of us, and they asked me a series of questions in an attempt to piece together the timeline of my captivity. They showed me pictures of all the other people who had gone missing. They asked me if I’d seen them, if I knew who they were. I didn’t recognize any of them. They especially wanted to know everything about my release period: the day and night I spent in Damascus.

  I gave them a minute-by-minute account of how things had happened. They wanted to know how I was transported from one area to another, what kind of car, which roads we took, how many checkpoints.

  “Do you know who paid your ransom?” they asked.

  “Yes.” I told them about Aboud.

  “How do you know he was the one who paid?”

  “He told me himself. So did Atrash and the others. From the look of his manor house it didn’t seem like very much money for him.”

  They left me in the room alone for a while, then came back with a picture of Aboud. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  In all, the questions took about two hours. I was psychically exhausted. I looked around me: the grounds were palatial. And yet, I wasn’t sure if I was still incarcerated or not.

  * * *

  LATER THAT DAY I met alone with the ambassador Patrice Paoli, who was a very congenial man. We talked about the general situation in the Middle East, and specifically the Syrian War. From my scant experience with diplomats, I’d always noticed they had a remarkable capacity to say nothing substantial in a most eloquent manner. Paoli wasn’t like that at all. Maybe it was because we were speaking in private. Whatever the reason, he articulated a very nuanced understanding of the Syrian situation: a multifaceted war that was evolving into an even more complicated proxy war for external players, a war in which shifting alliances were the order of the day and trust could be bought as easily with money as with blood.

  He showed me the grounds of the Pine Residence, now the French embassy, which had been built during World War I in lavish Ottoman style so that the growing merchant class in Beirut could have a watering hole. Originally there was supposed to be a casino, but that never panned out as it came to be used as a military hospital during the war. There was also a tennis court on the grounds and a horse-racing track next door.

  He continually asked me if I was okay. He never used his authority to keep me at a distance, even though
he could have. After all, he was the ambassador of France in Lebanon, an important position because Lebanon had been part of the French Mandate between the wars and has remained Paris’s sole outpost in a very volatile region.

  When I saw the swimming pool I asked if I could use it. Fortunately, among all the things Ray-Ban had bought for me and put in my roller suitcase, there was even a pair of sporty shorts that could pass as bathing trunks.

  I ate dinner with the ambassador and his wife, who also went out of her way to make me feel at ease. Comfort does wonders to buttress your sense of freedom, even if you can’t go where you want to.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING I woke up with the first light and felt as if my brain had shut down. For about twenty minutes I didn’t know where I was. This must be what amnesiacs experience. I heard some chatter down the hall in French and all sorts of memories started coming back to me, but I couldn’t connect them to the palm trees and tall Mediterranean pines I saw outside the window.

  I lay in bed piecing together my situation. I was free. Sort of, depending on the definition. If freedom meant doing whatever I felt like doing then I certainly wasn’t free. I couldn’t just walk out and take a stroll through this hilly residential neighborhood. I had to ask permission. Maybe get an escort. But my wishes would probably be indulged because I was being held by friendlies and protected by them.

  By that token, I had also been held and protected by ostensible friendlies before this, in the Light House. They just weren’t as friendly as the people at the French embassy. The Syrian rebels could beat me if they wanted, but they’d stopped wanting to after a certain point. That said, they could and did sell me. It was all relative. As was my freedom. The French embassy could also beat me or sell me if they wanted to. But they wouldn’t. (Or at least that was how I was putting things together in my quasi-amnesiac state.) That was the social pact. I was a citizen of La République Française, and now I was at their embassy, which is considered to be sol français, French soil. I was a privileged heir of the revolution whose legacy was liberty, equality and fraternity.

  But it took a while for all that to sink in as I lay on my bed, unsure of which country I was in. I realized freedom—at least mine—was as precarious as the conceptual thread that held the words “I want” together. As soon as you don’t know what you want, you’re a prisoner. As soon as you find out you can’t get what you want, you’re a slave.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING DAY the same two casual gendarmes came to me and conducted another debriefing. They showed me photos of various rebel leaders, none of whom I recognized. Then there was a photo of Kamal Atrash, the Lebanese Druze who had convinced Aboud to raise his offer. After that came a series of photos of other people who had been kidnapped, journalists and aid workers, including the American photographer James Foley, who was the only one I recognized. But I’d never seen him in Syria or in person, only from the news.

  They asked the same questions from slightly different angles, trying to triangulate my responses into a three-dimensional representation of truth. They wanted to know if I’d been alone. What the military situation was. How many soldiers, types of weapons. What they did during the day. Whether they drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes. How often they prayed. I spent hours answering their questions and it occurred to me that I, too, wanted to triangulate some semblance of truth that I felt had begun to slip away. In that sense our will and desire—mine and that of my debriefers—coincided. That little tinge of complicity helped me feel freer.

  * * *

  WHEN THE TWO MEN finished, they told me the FBI would be coming in to debrief me. Now the Americans wanted to have a go at me. And why not? I was a dual citizen and a privileged heir to their ideals, too—land of the free, home of the brave, and whatnot. I had to fulfill my part of that social pact.

  The American debriefing had a very different flavor. Two men in suits walked through the French embassy and straightaway you could pick them out as G-men. They appeared to be much more serious about their work, much more in my face. The French came across as two nice guys, smart, but just some dudes you might strike up a conversation with at a café in a foreign country. The Americans were all business. They only showed me pictures of the American hostages: Jim Foley, Austin Tice, Kevin Patrick Dawes, and a few others.

  The FBI debriefing was a lot shorter and felt very abrupt compared to how the French did theirs. Once they’d asked all their questions, they said thank you and left, as if they had to clock out somewhere. They kept their inquiries into my health and mental state to a perfunctory minimum—just enough to get a sense of whether my experience had unhinged me to the point where it skewed my memory.

  * * *

  I STILL HAD THE BLACKBERRY they’d given me at the Marina Towers and Atrash had my phone number. So he had his daughter, who spoke good English, call me. “You should meet us today outside the embassy,” she said, conveying her father’s suggestion. “We’ll drive you and have a meeting.” I told her I’d get back to them. Of course as soon as I relayed this to the French authorities, they said, “You’re not leaving this embassy at all. You’re staying with us. You don’t have papers. We don’t know what they want from you.” In this case not being totally free kept me from having too much choice and wandering into another potential trap.

  It was never clear what Atrash wanted. I doubt he had bad intentions. Like everyone, he was probably just concerned about his own interests and wanted to make sure his ass was covered, but I never got the chance to find out.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I did yet another major debriefing with two French intelligence officers. If this was freedom, then it was pay-as-you-go freedom, with my memory as currency. But again, they were so friendly, so pleasant, that it turned out to be therapeutic. I finally had people to talk to, and in my own language—people who listened intently and genuinely seemed to care about my well-being.

  It made me look forward to going home and seeing my friends and family, even though I wasn’t sure how I would react.

  The rest of the day I wandered around the Pine Residence and ate delicious food. After months of simple Levantine fare I could finally indulge in the rich French cuisine I grew up with: cassoulet, gigot d’agneau, or boeuf bourguignon. The flavors brought me back to the days when my father would drive me to restaurants hidden in the middle of the French countryside.

  I especially looked forward to talking to Paoli. Without going into any details he gave me a fresh sense of all the political convolutions in this part of the world. The ambassador had a very realistic assessment of the Arab Spring, which everyone had been hyperventilating over just a couple of years earlier: basically, that democracy and mob rule were cut of the same cloth. It had taken France decades to evolve the institutions that had channeled the mob rule of the Terror into a bona fide democracy. And France came from a Christian tradition that had evolved the notion of individual dignity with respect to the human person, backed moreover by a Roman juridical tradition with long-developed laws regarding property rights: fundamental elements for elaborating the idea of “human rights.” It’s not something you can easily overlay onto a society with another history and tradition.

  I walked around the magnificent garden and watched the groundskeepers prune the trees. It was very colonial. As I looked out from the Lebanese hills I thought about the history and tradition of where I was standing. I wondered if there had been any sacrifices to Baal on this very spot. And then my brain shut down again. I didn’t want to think about it. From a wide-angle perspective this whole Syrian War struck me as a historical clusterfuck that could even help set off some global Armageddon.

  Whenever such thoughts pushed too hard against my skull, and my heart started skipping, I went to the pool to cool off. There were people coming and going, and the ambassador’s wife would often be relaxing there. It was a very big pool and I would just do laps back and forth to channel me into a zone somewhat loosened from all the uncertainties th
at had gnawed my nerves raw. I swam until the entire universe was unified in the act of inhaling and exhaling as I cut through the water. But from time to time that quasi-mystical state would be interrupted by the image of Essad floundering in the water with me teaching him the one thing that gave me a sense of peace.

  Swimming gave me an appetite and I wandered toward the dining room and adjacent kitchen. The chef saw me and must have known my situation, so he invited me into the kitchen and asked if there was anything special he could prepare. He’d lay out an array of cheeses before me and offer wine and whiskey. I hadn’t touched any alcohol in months and as soon as my tongue got its first taste I could feel the warmth work its way down my gullet to salve so many frayed nerves.

  * * *

  AFTER THE SECOND DAY I was moved to another room, downgraded because of the arrival of new guests. It didn’t matter because I spent a lot of my time on the Internet trying to catch up with my life. The embassy kept a computer next to the kitchen, so I’d communicate with the outside world and take breaks for wine and gourmet snacks, maintaining a nice buzz throughout the day.

  I even contacted the woman I’d made a date with in Paris for the day after I was supposed to have returned. I’d met her shortly before I left for Syria. I got kidnapped the very day after I’d set up the meeting.

  She responded, “You’re an asshole. I waited for you for two hours. Who does that? Now you’re reaching out months later?”

  I told her I’d explain if I saw her in Paris. Not even close to knowing what I had been through, she was understandably wary.

  One night soon after that, there was a dinner and a concert. Robert Doueihy’s wife showed up. She was French, and I’d known her for more than a year. In fact, it was through her that I met Doueihy, who set me up with the Doctor, who got me into Syria and hooked me up with Alfarook, who contacted his other fixer friend, who was probably the one who got me kidnapped. She wanted to see if I was all right and told me that her husband had been very concerned and in constant contact with my father. The subtext of the conversation was something like: For political reasons he can’t be associated with this publicly, but he’s very happy you made it through alive.