“This is my family,” he says simply, pointing at his children and wife. “I’ve tried to put the past behind me and build something. Please don’t take it away from me.”
“I’m a journalist,” I repeat. “Not a spy, not a government official. I’m not going to take anything away from you.”
“But journalists often act as mouthpieces for their governments,” the Masuul complains to my fixer, who translates. “Like you—would you ever go on Al-Manar [the Hezbollah television station] and publicly say that Hezbollah did something right?”
“Probably not,” I reply honestly. “But that’s because I know doing that would prevent me from being taken seriously; it would be seen as me taking sides.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” he exclaims.
“What about you?” I counter. “Would you go on CNN and say the U.S. did something right?”
He smiles thinly. “Certainly not.”
“See? We all face certain constraints and realities in our jobs. That’s just the way the world is. But like my father, I’m a reporter. I have to try and stay in the middle.”
“But your father wasn’t always neutral,” the Masuul tells me. “Some of his writing was very pro-government; he would often repeat their lies.”
I consider this for a moment. Dad used to be a marine, after all. Perhaps there’s an element of truth to the claim that he may not have always been completely objective.
“We’re all human,” I say. “I know my father, and I’m certain he did his best to be unbiased. None of us do this perfectly; sometimes we want to believe what we’ve been told so badly that we make mistakes. If he ever advanced false government rhetoric, it wasn’t on purpose.”
The Masuul considers this for a moment; then nods. “I just need to know that you will be a journalist, the way you’re supposed to be,” he tells me. “I need to know that you will not hurt me because I’ve hurt you.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell him. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I will tell the truth as I see it.”
Then I feel the words pour out of my mouth, almost unbidden.
“I think we want something from each other,” I say. “I want to understand what happened to my father, and you want me to forgive you, don’t you?”
“I know you won’t ever forget what I’ve done,” the Masuul begins.
“No,” I interject. “I won’t. But I do forgive you.”
And it’s true. He had choices and he made the wrong ones. But a seventeen-year-old handed a gun in the middle of a civil war and told to hurt other people because he thinks they hurt him will rarely make the right decisions. That doesn’t mean that I excuse or justify what he did. But I understand it better now.
I can also see that he didn’t escape from his experience unscathed, that my father and the other hostages haunt him like frail, bearded wraiths. I think he sees them at night, the same way journalists see their ghosts, only the Masuul’s specters are vengeful and angry, biting off a piece of him every time they cross his mind.
The Masuul looks at me in wonder. “Thank you,” he says eventually. “There are no words for this. I never expected to hear that.”
I can see his wife smiling; his kids look confused but happy. I feel a great peace wash over me, cleansing the anger still clinging to the grooves and crevices of my mind. To my surprise, I find that I’ve completely lost interest in the machinations of countries like Iran and Israel, or the mistakes made by America. I’ll probably never know the answers to those questions with certainty after all these years. At this point, I’ve lost touch with how much of my reporting I can allow myself to believe and frankly I’ve stopped caring. Governments will always plot and scheme, trying to reap as much political benefit as possible from the tragedies of families such as mine. Asgari may have been an Israeli mole, or he may not have been. Perhaps Hezbollah didn’t mastermind the kidnappings, or maybe it did. The United States government probably bungled many opportunities to help Dad—that much I’m fairly certain of. But I’ve come to understand that this journey hasn’t really been about any of that at all. Every question, every lead, has led me to this moment, this place in the vastness of time, when I look my father’s kidnapper in the face and give him my forgiveness.
On my way back to Beirut, I call Dad on Skype. “Hi, sweetie,” he says when he picks up. “Are you home yet?”
“No, Daddy,” I whisper, my voice cracking. “I’m still in Lebanon.”
“Sulome? I can’t hear you. You’re still in Lebanon? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But, Dad, I got that interview, the one I was telling you about.”
His voice changes, becomes flat and empty. “With the man that held me?” Some time ago, I had shared with him the possibility that I might be speaking with one of his captors. Dad wasn’t able to place the Masuul by my description of him, but he said that made sense, since he was mostly blindfolded the whole time and there were probably a dozen men who had guarded him at some point throughout those seven years.
“Yes. I talked to him about you,” I say. “It was really hard.” Then I break. “I love you so much, Daddy. I’m so sorry. For everything. I love you.”
“Sweetheart,” my father tells me. “The fact that you got one of these men to trust you enough to tell you anything about this at all is astonishing. What you just did is the very height of journalism. I can’t tell you how proud of you I am.”
I feel some long-ignored part of me unclench. The cold southern air pours through the open car window, settling on my body like dust. I hear my blood in my ears. In that moment, my father is everything I need him to be, and I am a daughter he is proud of.
EPILOGUE
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
—JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
January 25, 2016
The U.S. government may have saved my life today.
I’m in Beirut, just after my final visit with the Masuul. I’ve been trying to go to Syria for two weeks now, to report on Hezbollah’s starvation siege of Madaya, a rebel-controlled city in the west of the country. My fixer managed to talk some of his friends into letting a couple of other journalists and myself illegally cross the border with them in a Hezbollah military convoy. The siege of Madaya has been reported extensively, but primarily by phone—it’s simply too dangerous to get that close, and Hezbollah isn’t generally so obliging to foreign press. But once again, my fixer’s connections appear to be solid—everything seems to be lining up.
Why would I enter a country ravaged by a conflict that’s claimed so many journalists and aid workers, including my friend Pete? Is any story worth the potential consequences of a decision like that? All I can say is that my existence has revolved around war since before I was born, and I’ve danced right up to the edge of it, but have still never actually seen what it looks like.
Jeremy asked me to marry him on my birthday last June and I said yes—something I scarcely believe is happening, given my relationship history. But I plan to have children with him and won’t put them through the agony of fearing for my life, so the time frame in which I feel comfortable taking a risk like this is diminishing. I want to see the demon that’s been capering just outside my line of sight for so long. I feel compelled to stare it in the face just once before my life changes forever.
So I’ve been preparing to go into Syria. We were supposed to make the trip yesterday, but the cease-fire between rebel fighters and Hezbollah was broken in a town close to Madaya, making it too dangerous to chance a border crossing. We decide to cool it and wait until we receive word that the situation has calmed down, which is what I’m doing when my U.S. phone rings suddenly.
“Hello, is this Ms. Sulome Anderson?” a very official-sounding male voice asks.
“This is she, may I ask who’s calling?”
“I’m a special agent with the U.S. embassy. I need to ask you a question, ma’am.”
“Yes . . . ?” I offer, co
mpletely befuddled.
“Are you planning a trip to Syria in the next couple of days?”
I’m dumbfounded. How the fuck would the American embassy know about my travel plans? Was it a friend with a big mouth? A concerned citizen?
“Um . . . why?” is all that comes out of my mouth. Smooth. Glad he can’t see my expression, because poker face is the opposite of what’s going on right now.
“We need you to come in today, ma’am,” the embassy official tells me. “It’s urgent.”
Feeling like I’ve been called into the principal’s office, I jump in a cab and ride to the embassy compound. There’s a sharp chill in the air, and my breath smokes when I exhale. The agent I spoke with on the phone earlier is waiting at the gate. He leads me into a spare, cold little room, where an attractive but serious-looking female FBI agent is waiting.
I sit on a couch and lean forward expectantly. They both look at me for a moment.
“Ms. Anderson, we called you in because it’s come to our attention that you’re planning to go into Syria this week,” the man begins.
“I know, I shouldn’t, right?” I say, half smiling. This must be the usual cautionary spiel they give anyone dumb enough to cross the border illegally.
The smile is not returned.
“No, ma’am, you don’t understand,” the female agent says to me. “We heard your name through intel. The Syrian regime knows you’re coming, as well as your history, and means to harm you. When we learned of this, we tracked down your number—you didn’t register with the embassy; you should do that, you know—and called you in so we could strongly advise you not to go.”
I take this in. I did provide my fixer with a photocopy of my passport to give to the Hezbollah guys we were planning to go with. Is it possible the paper ended up in the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s notoriously brutal regime? If it did, that would bode poorly for my personal safety. It’s widely believed that the Syrian government has been holding a freelance American journalist, Austin Tice, since 2012.
And given who my father is, I’d make a powerful bargaining chip for any ruthless political actor hoping to acquire a U.S. hostage. The American government would face a shit storm of epic proportions if I was taken, and might do all sorts of things to get me back. Assad could repeat what is widely believed was done to Tice and have his thugs pose as jihadi rebels, kidnap me, then throw me in a Syrian jail, and pretend he has no idea where I am—until he wants something, in which case I would make an even more valuable commodity than Dad was to his captors. And by the time I got out, even if I managed to escape being gang-raped, which seems unlikely given the regime’s tendency to use such tactics, I’d be lucky to have held on to even a shred of my sanity.
The lady FBI agent is rattling off a list of other, more generic reasons I shouldn’t go—there’s no U.S. embassy in Syria, if something happened to me I’d be on my own, etc.
“We can’t stop you, but we strongly feel that you should reconsider this trip,” she finishes, holding my gaze. “It’s our job to tell you that we feel you would be in great danger if you decide to continue with it.”
I assure them I will think about it, thank them, then they see me out. I feel almost numb as I wait for the taxi. Somewhat incredibly, I’m still finding myself debating whether or not I should proceed with the trip. Perhaps they’re just trying to scare me, I think. Maybe the regime wouldn’t take such a risk. They could be aware that I’m coming but mean me no harm.
My internal monologue continues along these lines for the rest of the afternoon. As I’ve just about made up my mind to go through with the story, my phone goes off again. Jeremy is calling me on Skype.
“Hi, baby,” he says when I pick up. “I miss you. When are you coming home?”
With those words, everything changes. I’ve left my return ticket open so I’ll have some flexibility when the Syria trip goes through. I also haven’t told Jeremy I’m planning to go there, mostly because I know his reaction will be less than positive.
But what if the embassy’s warnings are true? What if I walked into Madaya and never came out? What would that do to my fiancé, to my mother, my family, and my friends? How would Dad feel if he picked up the phone to find out his daughter is facing the same horrors he experienced for seven years? What’s the likelihood that any of them would emerge from that scenario with their psyches intact?
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I find myself saying. “I want to come home.”
But what’s going to happen in a couple of weeks, or months, after I’ve grown bored with the placid routine of life in the States and a bomb goes off in Dahiyeh or there’s another flare-up with Israel on the border? I know the answer to that. A big part of me will want to get on the next plane so I can tell people about how my mother’s country is descending into the darkness. But this job has become harder for me lately, and even when I’m in New York, I frequently find myself staring at some horror on my computer screen, fighting back angry tears. When you see, right up close, how ugly people can be, after a while the little kindnesses they are capable of start to feel like smoke in a hurricane—pretty but insubstantial, and powerless against the forces that batter everything around us.
My family life has become easier to navigate. Dad and I laugh a lot together, and I sometimes give lectures to his journalism classes via Skype. My mother still follows me from New York to Beirut and vice versa, determined to talk me out of this job. Jeremy and I just moved into a big old house in Brooklyn with a pretty yard that’s bright with flowers in the summer. We have a big dopey puppy and we fight sometimes, but at night he holds me close, and for the first time in my life I don’t feel alone. I know I’ve found someone to sit with in a warm, dry place, away from the storm.
I’ll never be able to turn away from Lebanon. It’s become a part of my identity, and I’d miss it like I’d miss an amputated limb. But for now, for at least a little while, I want to find something lovely and simple to call my own. I want to be able to enjoy walking into a room and knowing exactly who I am and why I’m there, in a way I never have before.
That being said—as much as I tell myself I want a normal life, the conflict bug itches, and I become bored and restless without the high stakes of the Middle East. I have a feeling this is a war I’ll be fighting with myself for some time.
Much of what I’ve written in this book could be the ravings of a woman driven out of her mind by circumstance; I imagine many people will say that. Perhaps it’s all just the product of a fevered imagination racked with delusions and my words are completely removed from the ordered existence we can all believe in.
Or maybe it’s all of us who are crazy. From the sneering pundits to the politicians who’ve sacrificed their morals one by one to the bored reality-TV stars to the religion-drunk militants who believe God lives behind a machine gun—when I feel hopeless it seems like maybe this whole fucking world is off its meds. Maybe most of us are clinging to the dream of a reality we can accept as we’re moved around like bits of tinfoil on a grimy basement floor. Maybe we’re vividly hallucinating safety in a world that’s slowly metamorphosing into a snake, the kind that eats its own tail.
Some of us have seen the snake up close, smelled its breath, and counted the yellow teeth in its ravaged head. We’ve become familiar with the tedious, everyday brutalities of conflict—the word animals hissed through the teeth, the way a refugee’s tent smells when it burns at night. We know what happens when the links between human beings begin to fray. All of us, including those of us who see these things firsthand—we should listen harder when we’re told it’s time to wake up.
My fixer once told me a story about his time as a teenage soldier in Hezbollah during the war. He and his friend were guarding the road to the airport and a Christian family drove up: a husband, wife, and their two children. They were trying to flee the country, like so many Lebanese at the time. My fixer’s friend made the family get out and lined them up. A common wartime practice involved stopping people
at checkpoints, looking at their IDs, and shooting them on the spot if they were members of a different sect. His friend was getting ready to kill unarmed civilians as they stood there, quivering and begging for their lives.
My fixer says he stopped his friend from shooting the family. The two of them got into a fight. His friend was so amped up that he put his gun to my fixer’s head. But my fixer finally managed to talk him down, put the family back in the car, and sent them on their way.
A couple of years ago, that same friend called him. They hadn’t spoken in years.
“Thank you for stopping me from killing those people,” his friend said. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I had done it.”
This is the nature of war. Journalists see the insanity that possesses people when their world suddenly turns hell-like and human life loses its value. Some make the right choices under those circumstances; others, like the Masuul, make the wrong ones. As with the victims and the perpetrators of conflict, some reporters manage to keep their souls intact. Many don’t.
For the moment, I want to sit in my garden in Brooklyn and watch the sun through the leaves. I might return to Beirut in a month, or I might not.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I was first shopping around the idea for this book, one editor gave me some well-intentioned advice. “You’re only twenty-eight years old,” she said. “You’re too young to write a memoir.” Needless to say, I didn’t listen, and here we are.
I’d first like to thank Denise Oswald, my wonderful editor at Dey Street, who had my back like a true soldier throughout this process. But I wouldn’t ever have found myself in the same room as Denise were it not for my lovely literary agent, Lindsay Edgecombe of Levine Greenberg, who believed in my work and took a chance on a first-time author.
Thanks must also go out to every digital security expert I harassed while writing this book, especially Dan Guido of Trail of Bits and Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I appreciate your patience and willingness to humor me.
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