The Shattered Lens Read online

  Back in New York, at my regular training pool, it felt like I was cutting through water like never before. The coach during my senior year in high school was Cesar, from Venezuela, who led a team at the 92nd St. YMCA. He separated me from the team and said he was going to train me individually. I spent that year swimming more than twelve hours a week. I was so tired at school that I often slept in class. He would pick me up in his shitty little car at five in the morning and drive me forty-five minutes to another pool just to train me. Then he would kick my ass for two hours, drive me back, and drop me off, after which I’d put my uniform on and go to school.

  Thanks to my mother I became a competitive swimmer. She was an adventure-seeking woman who flaunted an air of fearlessness that she hoped would rub off on me. As a single mother she felt she needed to toughen me up, perhaps to compensate for the lack of a male figure. She pushed from the beginning. I remember when I was nine and a friend of hers with a motorcycle came to visit. He offered to take me for a ride, but I was scared and refused to get on. She insisted, despite my crying, and forced me to hop on and go for a spin. Years later I’m one of the few nutjobs I know who move around New York City on motorcycles.

  As I walked around the empty pool I noticed there was shrapnel everywhere. If I had stood there instead of jumping in, I would have been killed or badly injured. I picked up a few metal shards—some pieces were almost as big as my hand—and gave them to Abu Talal. He examined them with his blue eyes, very impressed, as if I’d brought home a trout from a nearby river.

  * * *

  OVER TIME FARES AND I got closer. He was smart, and he was the only one I could have a real conversation with. I kept trying to get more information from him, but he’d told me all he knew. The upshot was that no one really understood what I was doing there. There was no useful information they could squeeze out of me. I assumed there was a price for my release, but no one was willing to pay it. For all I knew I may have been forgotten. My family back home may have just thought I was missing in action.

  On the opposite side of the main entrance there was a big balcony that overlooked the entire valley. Fares and I would sit there with charcoal left over from burning fires and on the cement he’d draw a map of where we were.

  “That’s Lebanon—five kilometers,” he said, pointing to the Qalamoun Mountains to the west.

  “Is someone trying to get me out of here?”

  “Don’t worry, Jon. You’ll go home.”

  I didn’t want to press him on how he knew. He said it with conviction enough to have me believe it was more than just wishful thinking, as if he’d overheard something.

  Fares gave me hope. In the meantime I’d become a fixture in the house. Early on, while I was still tied up, Noor walked by and looked at me with disapproval, then shot Abu Talal a look like, Why is this guy tied up? This is stupid.

  Shortly after that, they stopped cuffing me and I became a “free-range hostage.”

  A few times they took me to the headquarters. Headquarters was the four-story building just across the road from where I was being held. Up close I saw it had tinted bay windows.

  One time I went there with Essad’s brother, who was very nice to me. He paid us visits on occasion and during one of them came up to me and said, “Hey, come over with me,” or something like that. So I crossed the street with him. Essad was “Number One Man,” so going over with his brother, who fought alongside him, raised my status with the others. He brought me in and offered me some Marlboro cigarettes. We smoked in a large empty living room with just couches. After a few smokes he told me I had to go because his brother and the other officers were on their way back.

  The second time I was at the headquarters was when we’d come under heavy artillery strikes. I’d been sitting in the living room of our house with Mej and we got hit pretty hard, mostly around the yard. At one point the grass started burning. But we didn’t take a direct hit. We were lucky.

  When it stopped, Mej told me to run out of the house with him. The headquarters had much better protection. As we ran out of the gate and into the street, the shells started landing again. In the front part of the building there was a protected area. At the gate two rebels fell off their motorcycle. I could see them trying to lift up the bike as I ran, with shells landing all around. One shell landed a bit too close so they left the bike there and ran into the house, where the others were waiting.

  Once in the house we went down to the protected area full of boxes and waited an hour or two for the shelling to stop. One of the soldiers lit a cigarette and I bummed one off him. Just as I took a drag, one of the officers started yelling at us: “You can’t smoke here!” I looked around and noticed that this was where they kept a lot of their ammunition and explosives for making IEDs.

  Sometimes they had big gatherings with all the leaders, and they’d put a large carpet on the ground. They would invite me, too, except for once or twice because they were talking about military plans. They served hummus and other Levantine fare. I stole a jar of cheese. I don’t know why I stole it. I probably could have just asked for some cheese and they would have given it to me. It may have been an unconscious attempt to remind myself that I wasn’t, in fact, a guest—which was an easy illusion since my conditions had improved at the second house. But I was still a hostage, and I needed such little acts of defiance to keep my morale up.

  For example, I really enjoyed fucking with Baby Donkey’s mind. He was such a simpleton, but with an innate violent streak—the kind of boy who in the wrong hands can become a dangerous man. I stole cigarettes from him every chance I got.

  One day he captured a fairly big turtle and put it in the empty swimming pool. The boys always captured animals. Once they caught what I thought was a beaver. (I found out later that there aren’t any beavers in Syria, and it was most likely a hyrax or hedgehog or some other rodent-type mammal. But in my mind, with no Google to fall back on, it was a beaver.) They shot it and tried to cook it. It was disgusting, so they left the cooked carcass next to the house for weeks. Another time they captured a big snake and wound up killing it. I’m not sure if they tried to eat that.

  So Baby Donkey and I sat around the pool watching the turtle try to get out. When he went back in the house, I jumped into the pool, grabbed the turtle, and walked really fast to the orchards on the other side of the house. I put it right by the fence, where it started digging immediately with its long claws until there was enough space to sneak underneath. Then I went back to the pool and lounged in the sun as if I’d been sleeping. When Baby Donkey came back he asked where the turtle was. The puzzled look in his eyes—as if one eyeball didn’t quite know what the other was up to—convinced me he was a legitimate idiot and not just on the stupid side. I adjusted myself in the chair and looked at him as if I didn’t know what he was talking about. He gave up and walked away.

  While sitting at the pool one day it occurred to me that since we’d moved to the second house, I hadn’t been beaten. Obviously my status had changed, but I wasn’t sure whether that was to my advantage. Of course, as soon as I started to count my blessings, something happened to undermine my hope. I was just sitting outside in one of the garden chairs, smoking with a bunch of the other guys, who usually ignored me, when Abu Talal drove up to the house. He stepped out of the car in a visibly shitty mood, grabbed me, threw me out of the chair brusquely and sat in it. I skulked back to the house. I thought the beatings might start again, but later Fares told me something bad had happened to Abu Talal’s family.

  * * *

  SOME AFTERNOONS were very relaxed, especially when everyone else was out fighting. One time Rabiyah, Mej and I were just sitting in the TV room disagreeing about what to watch. I grabbed the remote control and put the news on, hoping to glean some information even though I couldn’t understand the Arabic broadcasters. As soon as he heard something he didn’t like, Rabiyah would just grab the remote from my hand and switch the channel to dancing women or some retro Syrian variety show that l
ooked like it was stuck in the seventies. There was a round stage with pouty Arab girls sauntering around, not seeming very happy with their work.

  “They’re hajiah,” Mej said. “Prostitutes.” Every time we watched these show girls someone had to say they were all prostitutes.

  Sometimes I’d take back the remote and we’d go back and forth, like Ping-Pong, anything to bide the time. It was an easy way of communicating, given the language barrier.

  Mej watched the girls and sighed. Then he looked at me and shook his head. “Jon is beautiful man,” he said. “Me no.” Indeed, there was something disproportionate about his stocky build. Apart from the fact that his hair was in a mullet, and a bad one at that, his limbs looked too short, or maybe too long. It was hard to tell, but the sum effect was just lopsided.

  He’d already told me that he liked a local girl named Nermin. When we were alone he would pull out his cheap little flip phone and show me a picture of her. Not exactly a beauty, in fact she looked as lopsided as Mej did, but there was a wholesome quality to her. A girl who was made to nurture. He didn’t want the other guys to know because he was afraid they might try to steal her, or make fun of him.

  He gestured to me. “You make picture.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. Why not.

  He went into his room and brought in the RPG launcher he liked to fire. I lowered myself to get on the same level, but when he saw the shot he said, “No, that’s not good.”

  “How the fuck would you know what a good picture is?” I said. “I do this for a living.”

  Still he insisted I take the picture from higher up. I tried to explain how that would make his legs look short and he’d appear even more out of proportion, but it didn’t manage to get through.

  After the RPG he went out and got the Pecheneg machine gun, then did his tough-guy pose with that. Once we had a couple of shots he was satisfied with, he sent them to Nermin.

  Not long after he sent the photos I saw Mej moping. As soon as we got alone I asked about Nermin. His face went sad and I could see him trying to hold back tears, but they streamed down anyway.

  “She doesn’t want me,” he said.

  I didn’t want to make him feel too awkward, so I said, “Don’t worry. It happens to everyone. I have the same problem.”

  That seemed to give him a glint of consolation. He looked like he was hungry for me to elaborate, but the language barrier precluded it. In any case, there was no point delving into heartbreak, not given the circumstances.

  * * *

  RABIYAH, I WOULD QUICKLY LEARN, was obsessed with sex. A wiry, high-strung young man with pitch-black hair, who probably had to jerk himself off and shoot his wad on a regular basis just to keep from short-circuiting, he was always talking about pussy and tits and wanted to know how to say those words in French and English.

  Once, while watching the prostitute showgirls on TV, Rabiyah looked at me and Mej and said something in Arabic as he grabbed a pillow and started riding it like a jackhammer, pogoing in and out. Then he turned to me with a thumb up and said, “Good, okay?”

  I looked back at him appalled, shaking my head, “No good, not okay.” Mej was watching the whole scene, embarrassed, but still curious about what my reaction would be. Rabiyah handed me the pillow to show them how it’s done.

  So suddenly I was holding a pillow and kissing it with gentle caresses. Basically I tried to explain foreplay to him. I showed him how to move his hands, and was trying to make him understand that you had to work your way in gently and not just impale her like you would a randy nanny goat.

  They were all watching me intently, studying every gesture. I tried to show them how to be smoother with the hips, so they could understand it wasn’t simply about pounding your prey into submission. I started slow, building up rhythm, back and forth. And they studied me, nodding, saying okay, giving me the thumbs-up.

  But it was very embarrassing for me, so I stopped after a while and handed the pillow back to Rabiyah. He took it enthusiastically and started going through the motions, more slowly this time, looking toward me for approval. I gave him a thumbs-up and left it at that.

  Later, when more dancers came on the TV, Rabiyah mimed my lesson again, thrusting his hips back and forth deliberately, face glazing over with the expression of a rabbit in a lettuce patch. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  He swallowed my snicker like a healthy dose of derision and timidly asked me to show him again. I was more than a decade older than him, and I obviously had more experience with women than he did—which wasn’t difficult, considering he almost certainly had never had sex with a girl in his life. He mimed the gestures, but it was as if he were saying, You have experience, you can imagine how I feel. Help me get through this unbearably awkward phase—old enough to perforate a man and bore a hole through half his body with a lethal projectile and expected to do no less . . . but forbidden from entering a woman.

  Even though I was embarrassed, I humored him, mimicking kisses and caresses. It felt sort of like playing air guitar, only more ridiculous. But I got over that quick enough, because I knew how awkward it can be to walk around with a full-grown, well-functioning male body and not know how to use it properly. I sensed that he knew something from porno videos, but he also understood that porn was the emotional equivalent of action-hero war movies. Having experienced real war, he already knew the Hollywood variety was just two-dimensional. His war wasn’t just those moments of noise and blood and heightened awareness; it was all that plus the endless boredom, fear, bitching and convincing yourself—more chaos and luck than clear-cut heroism. And because Hollywood also aspired toward realism, it was even more a travesty than some mythographic heroism. Likewise with porn. They try to keep it real enough so that the effect is always somewhat of a travesty compared to either idealized romance or the real emotions and sensations of making love.

  Deep down I think Rabiyah wanted to know how to bring a woman to ecstasy. When at last he showed me his hips moving more slowly, more sensually, I realized he sort of got it. It’s less about rhythm and friction than it is the easy giving up of one’s entire being.

  It certainly looked ridiculous from the outside as we both stood there in the middle of the room, air-fucking some imaginary lover, but it took us away, albeit briefly, from the awareness that we might not survive the coming days—and that’s already an accomplishment.

  As soon as we heard footsteps in the house, we stopped. It was our secret. Mej, Rabiyah and I: all three of us dreamt of making love. So did many of the others, I was sure, but these two were willing to open up, each in his own way, and share that vulnerable space inside them.

  Something within me sank after that episode. It was the core in me that wanted to make love but didn’t want to be reminded of the fact that this luxury, this gift had been taken away from me. I thought about what making love might mean to virgin warriors like Rabiyah or Mej, and what it meant to me, a privileged young man growing up in the frenetic capital of the world.

  * * *

  I LOST MY VIRGINITY as a matter of course. It was almost a nonevent. Lovemaking was never that idealized. It was more like getting laid. Eventually I’d fall in love with other women, but there was always some obstacle, some snag or circumstantial impediment. One of my most recent girlfriends, Tara, was older than me and already had a son. She wanted to have a child with me and was approaching the age when it would be too late, but I was too absorbed with my career, gone for too long and too concerned with navigating conflict zones to focus on a family. She was mature enough to recognize as much without giving me grief. The relationship disintegrated organically with the help of distance when I was away in either Africa or Asia. In the end we wound up remaining dear friends.

  Other women were much younger than I was. There was all the passion and intensity you could imagine from hooking up with a beautiful woman, but the urge that drew me to watch historic events unfold close-up was made up of a very similar passion and intensity. Ultimately the openn
ess to events seemed irreconcilable with the commitment and giving involved in a stable emotional relationship. The two modes of passion often crossed wires and the relationship came undone as a result of the centrifugal force.

  The natural solution might have been to find a woman who did the same work. The love affair between André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle comes to mind. They worked together during the Spanish Civil War under the name Robert Capa. Friedmann was also a mentor for Pohorylle, who became the first female photojournalist to cover the front lines. When the identity of Robert Capa became known, Friedmann continued using the name and Pohorylle took the pseudonym Gerda Taro. Sadly, the affair was short-lived because she died while reporting on that war. Capa continued shooting conflicts and he, too, died in action: stepping on a land mine in 1954 while covering the First Indochina War in Vietnam.

  I’d certainly met quite a few women in the Gerda Taro vein. But that would have been a nonstarter. Apart from the constant concern for your loved one plunging headlong into harm’s way, the last thing I wanted was to come home to a nurturing situation in which I wound up talking shop—politics, insurrections, and the attendant human tragedy: dawn light filtered through ordnance dust and the sheen of blood on a sidewalk. Not to mention the competition involved. Conflict reporters can be fiercely competitive and, as a result, highly opportunistic. Sometimes you can’t afford to help colleagues too much—especially if they want to be cowboys or are just plain stupid. So what about me? Was I stupid or just unlucky? I kept wondering—more so in my darker moments. And in this line of work you wouldn’t want to associate with too many unlucky people, lest the bad luck rub off on you. Mixing all these contingencies up with making love and nurturing, then giving yourself up entirely, seemed like a recipe for disaster and precluded any romantic affair with a colleague, no matter how beautiful.