by Theo Padnos
An FBI agent introduced herself to me. During the previous two years, she said, she and my mother had been collaborators in the effort to bring me home. I nodded. My mother? The FBI? I was willing to listen to this person on a provisional basis, to humor her, to see what might unfold, but I wasn’t quite ready to believe in a tale about the FBI coming to the aid of my mother.
A few minutes later, when the SUV was coasting down an Israeli highway, the FBI agent pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “I have to call your mom,” she said.
She herself could call my mother all she liked, I told her, but I knew that the sound of my mother’s voice was going to cause a general system failure in my emotional circuitry. I worried that if I were to start crying, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I declined the chat with my mom. I did, however, want to strike up a conversation with the FBI agent. I didn’t care whether I came across as a chatterbox or not. I hadn’t spoken more than a few words of English since the previous summer, when I argued with Matt Schrier over how we ought to execute our escape. So much had happened to me since then. I was anxious to share my news.
* * *
As things turned out, it took me several weeks to make my way to Vermont. A cousin was getting married in New Jersey. I felt like going to a wedding. There were other cousins to visit in Connecticut. My mother spends most of her time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In late August, the Cambridge streets are busy with university students. The students schlep their belongings into dorm rooms. They flit along the Charles in sculls. Cambridge seemed like a land of dreams to me. I didn’t want to leave it. As it happened, for weeks after my return, every remark, every falling leaf, every chance encounter, and every meal seemed like a miracle, designed by a loving providence just for me. When strangers in the street welcomed me home, as many did in those days, it was all I could do to keep myself from bursting into tears. Often I didn’t bother.
It wasn’t until October that my mother and I finally drove to the Vermont town I’d used as a model for the one in my novel. As we drove past the town green, my eye happened to fall on the village library patio. This patio—and especially the shade-giving maples that tower over it—had been much on my in my cell in Deir Ezzor. The place had seemed to me then the very picture of safety in small-town America. Yet in those days, I was anxious to tell a story about the smooth progress of evil in a place too serene to notice what was going on. Accordingly, in the story I wrote in my cell in Syria, the patio retained its aura of country calm but the place belonged to the evil forces in my book. They came and went as they pleased.
For an instant, as my mother and I drove past this library patio, it seemed to me that the fiction I had written about it in Syria was a matter of local fact. I was driving through a countryside beset by unseen killers, as I had lately been doing in Syria. The teenagers who lounged on on the library patio seemed to me, just for a moment, like lambs grazing before wolves. Because I had lately survived an encounter with such powers myself, it seemed to me that I knew how to cope with whatever was gathering in the shadows. And everyone else? The powers coming for the citizenry here, it seemed to me, couldn’t be confronted because no one knew where they were and couldn’t be reasoned with because they refused to communicate. They were, however, on the march. No one knew how to stop them.
A moment later, my mother and I drove past a high school soccer field. Already, I knew, a series of blood-curdling crimes had visited this community. In one episode, much reported in the local paper, a student—the star of the high school drama program—had been abducted, tortured, then left to die in a clearing in the forest.
I recalled some of the details of the crime. I knew, for instance, that during the torture, the victim had lost pints of blood. Afterward, somehow, she was able to sleep, but the next morning, when she woke, she felt she was dying of thirst. “Please!” she murmured to one of the torturers. He brought her a bottle of spring water. In order to make her more comfortable, he covered her body with his blue-jeaned jacket. Out of pity, he released her hands from her handcuffs. “You hungry, Gypsy?” he asked her. She could hear the young man speaking well enough, but because she was dying, she could not reply.
How terrifying the coming months would be, I thought.
For a few moments, as my mother and I drove, I was at a loss. The soccer jerseys flashed in the sunshine. I eyed a row of roadside houses. The evil that lingered in my imagination operated according to a logic no one could fathom. Perhaps it had no logic. When would it end? It goes on and on, I thought, because relentlessness is its nature.
My thoughts ran along these lines for a few moments, but even as I was thinking them, I was aware that I had come through my ordeal with my faculties intact. Was I so much bolder than anyone else? I was not and am not. If a destabilizing power were to establish itself here at home, I thought, my fellow citizens would live through a moment of shock, as I had done in Syria. But they were a robust lot. They were much stronger than they knew. In the fullness of time, they would gather themselves together. They would pitch themselves into the fray. Probably, they would come through it all with an enhanced appreciation of life. Had not some such awakening of the spirit occurred to me after my ordeal in Syria?
After my ordeal, I had lived my first hours of freedom within a bubble of euphoria. It had seemed to me that I had died, been born again, and that a new life in America had been sent to me the way God sometimes sends miracles to the bereft. I felt that the miracle could be taken from me at any moment. But the more I gazed at the field of soccer players, the more certain I was that the gifts I was looking on weren’t only for me and that they had no expiry date. All of this is permanent, I wondered? Anyone can participate? Though I knew it would take a while for me to accommodate myself to such a world, I was pretty sure that, in the fullness of time, I would have at it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As of this writing, I know only a few details of the rescue operation that saved my life. Apparently, many millions of dollars were paid. By whom? To whom? How many millions, exactly? To what use is this money being put now? Certain high officials among the terrorists in Syria and the diplomats in Qatar, I assume, know the answers to these questions. I do not.
I do, however, know that three cousins of mine, Viva Hardigg, Betsy Sullivan, and Amy Rosen devoted two years of their lives to delivering me from Jebhat al-Nusra. I’ve tried to express a few of my feelings about these efforts in chapter 8 of this book. I’m aware that the little bit I’ve written there cannot do justice to all that these cousins did for me. Over the past six years, I’ve come to think that this family-based rescue project deserves a book of its own. Were such a book to be written, the imperturbability of my cousins Hill and Henry Carter, who devoted themselves to their mother, Viva, as she was devoting herself to my rescue would play a central role.
My mother, Nancy Curtis, was seventy-five when I disappeared. At the time, her job as the publications director for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in Boston entailed ninety minutes of commuting per day and a forty-hour workweek. When I was in prison in Syria, I knew, as children can know these sorts of things, that she was refusing to give up. I did not, however, suspect that she had established herself as the moral and spiritual leader of a kitchen-based command center for international hostage rescue. Of course, I ought to have guessed.
In the hours following my release in August of 2014, I began to learn how many others came to our aid. My father, Michael Padnos, lobbied the world from his péniche in Joinville-le-Pont. When one is at death’s door, as I was occasionally in Syria, love of this kind, which I knew he had for me, echoes in one’s memory. I’m grateful to him for his passion on all important matters. I’m also grateful to the other members my famille parisienne, Sharron Welsh, Jacques Guyomarche, and Jöelle Chevalier. I realize that through the years, my father and I have been a handful. This Parisian family has responded to our many crises by offering us wine, food, and affection.
Since my retu
rn from Syria, five other families have looked after me. Though their graciousness has been obvious to all, they cannot know how much their kindness has meant to me. David and Katherine Bradley, John and Diane Foley, Ed and Paula Kassig, Art and Shirley Sotloff, Carl and Marsha Mueller—for the past six years, the bigheartedness of these people has accompanied me in everything I’ve done. Their selflessness humbles me.
When I was in Syria, the Atlantic Media staff members Shana Keefe, Aretae Wyler, and Emily Lenzner dedicated countless hours to my rescue. I am grateful to them beyond words. I’m also grateful to Enass Khan, Nasser Wedaddy, and to the many Teach for America volunteers who participated in David Bradley’s search for American prisoners in Syria. The dedication the team at Atlantic Media exhibited for the rescue of their fellow citizens fills me with confidence in the future. I’m also grateful to the journalists Bobby Worth and David Rhode for providing wise counsel to my mother’s team. James Harkin gave me wise counsel on my return. In Istanbul, Shane Harris and Sebnem Arsu aided my mother during a voyage to Turkey. My mother would not have been able to pursue her Istanbul meetings nor, for that matter, would she have been able to track down countless other leads if it had not been for the good will of the New York Times general counsel, David McCraw. I’m also grateful to Tik Root, a rising star in the journalism world, for the wise advice he offered my family during my absence.
For their kindness to me in and around Aleppo. I’m grateful to my fellow prisoners, Ali Ali and Cherif Makhlouf.
I owe my deepest gratitude to the entire FBI office in Boston for its efforts to help my mother’s rescue project. At the Washington FBI office, two agents I cannot name stood by my mother through the dark periods with the devotion of actual family members. They are breathtakingly competent professionals, as indeed are all the employees of the FBI with whom my family came in contact during the course of my ordeal. I’ll never be able to express how grateful I am to these public servants. I’m also grateful to Ambassadors Frank Ricciardone and Rolf Holmboe for their efforts to guide my family’s search. In Connecticut, Representative Jim Himes’s counsel proved invaluable and constant. In New York, Ambassador Samantha Power removed many of the obstacles my rescuers confronted. Elliot Thomson, who understood more of Ambassador Power’s effectiveness than my family did, encouraged my mother and cousins to keep after her.
For welcoming me home, I’m grateful to David Schisgall, Effie Peretz, and to Effie’s wonderful dad, Marty Peretz. I feel that these New Yorkers adopted me, then awakened me to a dazzling new urban life.
For looking after my medical needs when I came home, I’m grateful to Dr. David Barrett at the Lahey Clinic in Boston. For help with my book, I’m grateful to Maria Carbone for her assistance with the photographs and to Loudon Wainwright for permission to quote from “The Swimming Song.” I’m grateful especially to Jim Hornfischer whose early confidence in my idea gave me a feeling without which I wouldn’t have been able to begin: confidence in myself. I’m grateful to my editors, Colin Harrison and Sarah Goldberg, for their inexplicable, inexhaustible patience. Also, for their writing wisdom. Last, I’m grateful to Karen Demas who has made my homecoming happier than I ever dreamed it could be.
More in Personal Memoirs
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© KAREN DEMAS
Theo Padnos is the author of Undercover Muslim, which explored everyday life among Westerners as they studied in Yemen’s religious academies. He was held prisoner by the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al-Nusra, between 2012 and 2014. A documentary film called Theo Who Lived, about his experiences with Jebhat al-Nusra, was released in 2016.
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