The Shattered Lens

by Jonathan Alpeyrie

  But these questions won’t help when survival is the priority, so you sweep them away as fast as they come and archive them for when things get better. Because things have to get better. Any other attitude will get you lost in a bog of self-recrimination and doubt.

  With survival the priority, I knew I had to keep my psychic forces intact. In order to do that I couldn’t allow my fear to take me over. I couldn’t succumb to self-pity. The first thing I needed to do was accept my situation, as bad as it was, and block out anything that might trigger feelings of attachment to anything outside of my new universe: no family, no friends, no people, places, or things that had become a part of me and were now inaccessible. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it perfectly, but I had to block it out as best I could.

  * * *

  IN THE DARK, with a keffiyeh covering my eyes and metal handcuffs digging into my wrists, I quickly came to know my captors by the sound of their voices, their steps through the house, the foul smell of their bodies and breath. Every once in a while I’d lean my head back and peek under the blindfold, or just push it up a few millimeters to get a look at them and verify whether my other senses were accurate.

  Abu Talal was one of the men with the balaclavas who had grabbed us at the checkpoint, the one who had fired his pistol near my ear. He was the scariest of the crew. A hulking, fair-skinned man in his thirties with round, bearded face and blue eyes, he was the one who gave the orders to the younger men.

  Ali was a serious bearded man in his early thirties, a devout Muslim who seemed to be dedicated to more than just the overthrow of Assad.

  Then there was Psycho (I think his real name was Hakim, but to me he would always be Psycho), a wiry young eighteen-year-old with a sadistic streak and a lot to prove to his peers. This was the kid who had clocked me with the butt of his AK-47 in the SUV after we were cuffed.

  My favorite was Mej. His real name was some version of Mahmoud, but since that was such a popular name in Islamic societies, they all had to be differentiated with other nicknames. About eighteen years old, he was short, stocky, and sported a mullet haircut, as if he’d grown up on late-eighties TV. He spoke only about ten words of English but was eager to communicate, interact and learn. He was the one who would feed me and he always let me go to the bathrooms, which were outside the house. He even loosened my handcuffs when I asked.

  The foil of the group was another Mahmoud, a sixteen-year-old everyone called Baby Donkey because they thought he was an idiot. From my point of view, it seemed he was only there to spy on me. He would often linger behind the curtain and watch me to see if I did anything wrong, like try to lift my blindfold. None of the others liked him (an idiot comrade during combat can be a liability), so they would often take my side, and I’d steal cigarettes from him whenever I could.

  * * *

  DURING THE FIRST FEW HOURS and days of my captivity, I was haunted by the idea that someone had betrayed me. Could it have been my Lebanese contacts? The Doctor? Most likely it was one of my fixers. Already in Syria I’d heard stories floating around of fixers selling out their clients to kidnappers. But my first impression of Alfarook had been very positive. I’d made a conscious decision to trust him. More likely it was his friend, No Problem. But by the time I met him my judgment was too skewed by the prospect of getting closer to the action.

  Since it was clear that the anti-Assad rebellion would only get symbolic gestures of assistance from the United States and other Western nations, they had to rely on other means of sustaining themselves financially. Jihad-friendly Salafi networks in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states were one source. Kidnapping for ransom was another.

  But from the way both Alfarook and his friend were trembling in the backseat of the car I could tell they were genuinely terrified. You can’t fake that. If either of them was in on the kidnapping, then they weren’t privy to the details, because the sheer chaos of the scene scared the shit out of them and they, too, were subjected to a mock execution.

  Still, they were released that same evening. Maybe I’ll be released, too, I kept thinking in those first few hours and days. There must have been a misunderstanding. If I could explain myself in Arabic they’d see that this was a big mistake. I was on their side. I was trying to get their point of view out to the world at large, which in turn would increase sympathy for them. But as soon as a thought like that gained traction in my head, Psycho or Abu Talal would come by and step on it just to let me know where I stood with them.

  * * *

  AT OTHER MOMENTS THE pall of one prospect would drop down on me like a fishing net and entangle all my thoughts: You might die. I knew that my excessive zeal, recklessness, greed—whatever you want to call it—had compelled me to get just a little closer to the fighting, and that might cost me my life.

  I remembered how, right before I left on this trip to Syria, I’d gone with my father to see a talk by the author Sebastian Junger in New York. He’d recently given up work as a war reporter, attributing his newfound risk aversion to his recent marriage and the death of his colleague and longtime collaborator Tim Hetherington in Libya. During the Q&A I asked what he thought about Syria and he said point-blank, “It’s just too dangerous there now.”

  Obviously I’d stuffed that comment into my subconscious and let the vague aura of danger associated with the sound of “Syria” seduce me even further. I mean, why wouldn’t I have? I’d been there three times already—twice since the war started. I was fast becoming an old hand. I had outstanding contacts with people deeply involved in the rebellion. And I was generally very cautious. But I wanted to see just a little more.

  Objectively, this could sound like a death wish. For sure, I had chosen a profession that was much more dangerous than archeology. Now, with my hands cuffed and my eyes sentenced to darkness, I thought how easy it would have been to stop in Baalbek less than two weeks ago and explore the archeological sites there. In ancient times it was called Heliopolis—Sun City. That in itself was a stark contrast to my own darkness and cold. The early Christians in Heliopolis were scandalized by the tradition of ritual prostitution for young girls before marriage. In pre-Christian times they worshipped the god Baal—the same god to whom the Carthaginians supposedly sacrificed children. I could have been taking leisurely strolls around Baalbek and Byblos, sipping wine by the Temple of Bacchus or climbing the ramparts of a Crusader castle, imagining the daily rhythms of the ancients instead of languishing in my own fear. But I’d opted for an Indiana Jones–type life of excitement and was now beginning to get a sense of what it was like to be sacrificed.

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH I WANTED to block out such thoughts, I couldn’t help remembering the first time I’d nearly died while doing my work:

  It was February 2006 and I was covering a war in East Africa for the first time. For three weeks I followed men belonging to the Oromo Liberation Front, or OLF. The Oromo are an ethnic group in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, who have been fighting a rebellion in Ethiopia since the 1970s. The Ethiopian government has long been controlled by the Tigre minority, which is only 10 percent of the total Ethiopian population, while the Oromo make up from 40 to 60 percent—and they have no representation.

  My contacts in Europe set something up for me and I flew to Nairobi, Kenya. One of their men picked me up and drove me in his truck all the way to Moyale on the Ethiopian border. It took about two or three days to get to the border. I slept in the back of a truck, behind the driver. I needed to be smuggled in so that the Kenyan army wouldn’t find out. They put me up in a room with just a bed in the middle of a small town on the Kenyan side of the border. Then more men showed up, and at night they took me across the border into a dry savanna landscape full of small trees with thorns.

  I spent three weeks covering that war and didn’t see any fighting. But I certainly did a lot of walking—hundreds of miles. I tried to blend in with the fighters as much as possible, with khaki-colored trousers and shirts, but it was hard for a tall white guy to hide
. If we came into contact with strangers I would cover my face as if protecting it from the dust. By the end, I’d lost a lot of weight, even though they fed me and took care of me. The Oromo were very kind. If I was tired they’d carry some of my stuff. Basically we would walk all day, every single day, to evade Ethiopian army patrols. We’d go from one spot to another. At night I slept on the ground like everyone else.

  So there we were, in the middle of a bone-dry savanna on a clear night, looking up at the Milky Way’s thick stripe stretching from one end of the sky to another. It was that time in the late evening when you’re bathed with the purest form of happiness: that you made it through the day. And you just lie there—so tired it doesn’t matter where you are, how hard the rocks are, or even what animals are watching you in the distance. All that matters is that you’re alive and can experience the beauty of the earth and sky.

  I had a thick sleeping bag that I used like a cushion to lie on top of. Behind me I had a tree to lean against if I wanted. But I lay on my back instead to look at the stars. At a certain point one of the men said something and I wanted to lift my head up to see who it was. I interlaced my fingers and brought my hands behind my head to pull it up. Then I felt something like a twig or a piece of wood prick me.

  Within a few seconds I felt an incredible pain spread up my entire arm. My hand started cringing as all the muscles there contracted. I took my flashlight and covered it with my T-shirt before turning it on because I didn’t want to give away our positions to the army. I shone the light on the ground and there was the culprit: a scorpion, about three inches long, a small one. The small ones, I later learned, were more dangerous because they didn’t know how to inject the proper amount of venom; they shot too much. And this one was a cream-colored scorpion, the deadly kind.

  I killed the scorpion with the flashlight, then stood up. The pain kept spreading and I knew I was in trouble. I went to see the commander and tried to explain. He wasn’t sure what I was saying so we went back and I showed him the dead scorpion. The men’s jaws dropped, and I knew it was not a good sign. The guy who spoke English translated a bit, saying, “We lose soldiers like this all the time. At least one dies every month.” He basically said there was nothing they could do for me. Either your heart made it, or it stopped and you had a heart attack. Still, I thought: This is not going to happen. I’m not going to die like that. I’ll be fine. And eventually I pulled through. The pain lasted for about two or three days. But just in my arm.

  The next morning everyone was very impressed because I was still alive. One reason I may have pulled through was that I had a very big heart—literally—due to all the competitive swimming and water polo I’d done throughout my life.

  When I got back to France a few weeks later, though, I got really sick because the toxin had traveled to my stomach and pancreas. I was staying at my best friend Yann’s parents’ house and they called a doctor. The doctor said the toxins were going to be with me for many months, years even. And the problem was that if I got stung again by another one I could have a heart attack. (Needless to say, from that point on I’ve been careful of scorpions.)

  So I’d gone to Ethiopia to cover a war for almost a month and nearly died, yet in that whole time I didn’t witness a single firefight. Nevertheless, the Oromo soldiers left a deep impression on me. They had an integrity that was almost impossible to find in our atomized societies. They were living to fight for an ideal—an ideal in which their identity was inseparable from that arid earth we walked across all day long, a landscape bathed in moonlight or shimmering under the Milky Way at night. Everything—family, tribe, nation, land—was part of a single soul dependent on God. And they were fighting to keep that soul alive and integral.

  What I did witness was a primordial way of living that you simply couldn’t duplicate in any modern city. We walked, talked (or at least the other soldiers did), ate, and tried to survive amid the vastness of a landscape that was pure fiction to people who had grown up in cities such as Paris and New York, like I had. It was something out of National Geographic. You wanted food? You killed a goat or a camel, or hunted some other animal; you gathered what plants and roots you’d been taught could sustain you. It was so far removed from any office-job apartment living that—by nearly dying—I felt like I was giving birth to a new me. That’s what kept me going.

  * * *

  AS I LAY in the dark with a keffiyeh wrapped around my eyes, I knew I needed to adopt the same attitude as when I had learned that the scorpion sting could stop my heart. I just wouldn’t let that happen. It would be an act of sheer will. I won’t let them kill me, I kept telling myself. I’ll make them understand. One way or another, I’ll get them to let me out of here.

  In the room that would become mine, they placed a loose mattress on the ground parallel to the couch. It must have been a room for kids because there was a bunk bed and stickers of Care Bears, Mickey Mouse, and other cartoon characters on the wood. I kept leaning my head back to peek under the blindfold, trying to see where I was, what was going on around me. I was hearing a lot of voices in Arabic. Sometimes they were loud, and that would scare me. It was easy to become very paranoid and think that everything was about me. So if they were screaming I began to worry that they’d take out their aggression on me. And if they were laughing I assumed they were going to be gentle—unless, of course, they were laughing at me.

  All day long it was a constant struggle with my hopes and expectations. Back and forth, up and down. Anything—a cross look or a skewed smirk—could set me off on a secret emotional tailspin. But it almost never had anything to do with me.

  * * *

  ON THE SECOND or third night of my captivity I had a nightmare. I woke up screaming and panting. I couldn’t breathe because I was panicking. One of the guards came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked if I was okay. He was an ex-police officer who had deserted from Assad’s forces. I called him Flic to myself (“cop” in French). He was probably in his forties or fifties, constantly chain-smoking cigarettes—a bit crazy, but he took a liking to me.

  Flic eased me out of my nightmare. But as I awoke, my entire being felt compressed by the captivity. I was sleeping on the floor, surrounded by furniture. Three young soldiers were sleeping in the same room. The worst aspect was that I was no longer free to do as I wished. My life was not just out of my hands, but in the hands of someone, I don’t know who, using me as goods to make money—or worse, to make a point.

  A few nights later, while dozing off, I felt hands reaching for my feet. It was Abu Talal, cuffing my ankles. Now I was even less free than before. It meant my situation was getting worse. I couldn’t walk or move my feet because the metal was going right through my tendons and it hurt like hell. I felt like I was on a slow spiral downward.

  I convinced Mej to loosen them up. He was the first one I started talking to, because I’d immediately sensed that he was the key to making my situation easier. His cheeks puffed out a bit around his eyes, so you couldn’t really tell what color they were, but the roundness gave his mouth a very affable expression that seemed to extend to his whole being.

  Whenever I had to go to the bathroom, I always tried to ask Mej because he was the one who would offer me kindness.

  In those first few days a routine developed. Every morning I would get up early, right after dawn, and wait for Mej to wake up. I’d lie there chomping at the bit to see his eyes open so I could ask him about my situation and hear more information.

  But Mej was young and liked to sleep in. He’d wake up about an hour or two after I did and then doze off again. Once he was up for good he’d throw on his long three-quarter shorts, skulk into the bathroom with his mullet trailing behind him, and wash up.

  As soon as he got out I’d try to strike up a conversation.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “It’s okay, Jon,” he would say. “Very good, no problem, you go home.”

  That little bit of reassurance gave me hope. Even thou
gh I knew it was fake hope, it didn’t matter. It was enough to keep my will going. To make sure my heart wouldn’t stop.

  The routine turned into a ritual for me: getting him to give me information. There was an armchair between the bunk bed and the open doorway covered by a curtain, and he would sit there and look at me. I’d ask him, “Is everything okay?” And he’d reassure me. Then he’d feed me tomatoes and fries.

  We’d teach each other words in Arabic and English, simple words that revolved around communal living: bathroom, food, hungry, sleep. Gradually we built up to more intimate words: happy, afraid, bombs, war.

  The words out of his mouth—“It’s okay”—were like the Gospel to me, and I forced myself to believe them.

  * * *

  BABY DONKEY WAS STILL a kid, barely sixteen and “intellectually deficient,” to say the least. It didn’t take much intellect to figure out that someone like that with access to a Kalashnikov amounted to danger.

  He was often used to spy on me. He’d stand behind the curtain and peer out to see what I was doing in the room.

  I did all kinds of things I wasn’t supposed to do. For example, above the bunk bed there was a very bright fluorescent strip light that always annoyed me. It was right in my face and I couldn’t sleep. If no one was in the room, I would jump on the bed quickly and rotate the tube just enough so it would stop working. Then I would sit right back down and pretend nothing had happened. Somebody would walk in afterward and ask where the light was. Then they would fix it. That little act of defiance also became a ritual. And even though another culprit would have been unlikely, they never figured out that I was the one doing it.

  There was also something repulsive about Baby Donkey. I didn’t know how he had gotten his nickname, but I knew the other men had given it to him. In many languages, like French, calling someone a donkey is the equivalent of calling him a dunce, so I assumed it was an affectionate tease on the part of the older soldiers. In what became a running joke in the room, the men would ask me, “Who is Baby Donkey?” Invariably I’d point to the kid, and all the men would get a good chuckle out of it. Obviously it didn’t ingratiate me with him, but he remained rather harmless to me.