Anissa's Redemption

by Zack Love

  Chapter 34: Anissa

  Saturday, August 23, 2014

  To My Dearest,

  It’s now been over twenty-four hours since I learned the truth about Julien’s past and neither of us has tried to contact the other. I assume that Julien knows, thanks to his expertise in human psychology, that I’m trying to work through his extremely disorienting revelations, and that it’s probably best just to give me some time and space so that I can try to process it all. Or maybe he hasn’t contacted me out of shame – he feels guilty for having let me get so close to him while concealing such enormously consequential facts about his early life that have more relevance to me than just about any other woman on the planet, given my own experience, of which he’s all too aware.

  I haven’t contacted him both because I’m still very confused and shocked, and because talking to him just wouldn’t feel the same right now – almost as if I were talking to someone I had just met, but even worse, because someone you just met doesn’t cause you to feel unsure of your own impressions and beliefs about the world and the people in it. I somehow need to forget his past or reconcile it with his present in a way that makes sense to me, and I haven’t found a way to do that.

  In reality, people never correspond precisely to our impressions of them. So perhaps the strength of any relationship can be measured in terms of the gap that can be tolerated between who a person is in one’s mind versus in reality. After all, the more someone conforms to one’s expectations, the easier it is to accept that person. When Julien discovered that I wasn’t in fact a virgin, that was also a discordant discrepancy between what he thought of me and what he learned to be the case. And yet he handled that surprise like a perfect gentleman. Of course, the surprises relating to his past are infinitely more jarring and hard to accept, so they put our relationship to the test that much more.

  Oh, that’s Michael calling my cell. I’ll write more later.

  * * *

  I just got off the phone with Michael. He asked if I was feeling better after calling in sick yesterday. He also called to let me know that yesterday Maria and his MCA staff had helped him to organize a large protest tomorrow at Union Square, with several other organizations.

  “I realized yesterday that we have to strike while the iron is hot,” he explained. “The whole world is talking about the James Foley beheading, so now is the perfect time to make everyone realize that such horrors have been happening to Christians for centuries.”

  Trying to sound as if nothing unusual was on my mind, I said simply: “You’re absolutely right.”

  “So can I count on you to be there?” he asked, as I feared he would. Given everything that was still weighing on my mind, I didn’t know if I’d be ready to be around him and others, especially for a protest about beheadings. “Actually, why don’t you bring Julien?” he added, with no idea what sort of absurd irony accompanied his otherwise polite suggestion. “We’re all friends now, and he might as well feel included in the MCA’s activities as a full member, rather than just a spectator passing our rallies on campus.”

  “That’s kind of you, but I saw him the day after our dinner date with you and Maria, and I just don’t think Julien wants to think about beheadings at the moment,” I replied with the understatement of the century. “He’s been under a lot of stress at work,” I added, trying to offer some pedestrian reason for why he wouldn’t be interested in the protest.

  “OK, no worries. But you’ll be there, right?”

  “Yes,” I finally agreed reluctantly. Given everything that had transpired in the last forty-eight hours, I wanted to avoid a demonstration about beheading at least as much as Julien presumably did. But I was in a quasi-leadership role at the MCA, and my sister and Michael both expected me to join them there, so I didn’t really have the luxury of skipping it.

  “Great, thanks so much, Inās – I knew I could count on you. Oh, and can you please spread the word on social media and email? I’m going to email you the details as soon as we hang up.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll do that right away.”

  “Awesome – so Maria and I will see you there tomorrow, along with the rest of the MCA.”

  A few minutes later, Michael emailed me the exact time, location, and other details for the demonstration, and I shared the information on Twitter, Facebook, and in a mass email to my full list of contacts, including the press.

  Now I’m going to go for a run in the park, and try to clear my head a little. If I can calm my mind by focusing on my breathing, my steps, and my surroundings, maybe I’ll get some clarity about things.

  * * *

  Jogging through the park was helpful, as my mind wandered through many thoughts, principles, ideas, and memories. I realized that I’ve also been struggling with my own prejudice, formed by the last few years of so much tragedy at the hands of Islamists. Yes, I am affected by my own biases at times – that’s only human (especially after my experience) – but I also know that there have been many good Muslims along the way. The first who comes to mind is of course Mohammed Rajeh, who protected my life when I had nowhere else to go and who kept his promise to my father to take me to the airport, despite the risks to his safety in doing so; without his honorable kindness, I would probably be dead or miserable in Syria, rather than where I am today in New York. Then there is Awwad, who drove two hours to pick up Maria and Jamila from the Islamist-controlled town of Aziz, after they managed to escape their captivity. And there are the Sunni Muslim members of the Mideast Christian Association, who show their support and solidarity with persecuted minorities because it’s the right thing to do, and because they oppose religious extremism.

  Oh, and silly me for omitting Jihad Omar from the list of good Muslims who have made a hugely positive difference in my life. He donated twenty-one million dollars to the MCA, which helped countless Mideast Christians, including my family in Raqqa, when it was relocating to Kessab, and with the release of my kidnapped sister. And that wasn’t even Jihad Omar who sent the money – it was Julien Morales, a man who considers himself Catholic and was raised in that religion since he was nine years old, when his Catholic mother brought him to Mexico.

  As I think about all this, I now vividly recall one of the last things I heard my father say, when the Islamist monsters who killed him tried to get him to become Muslim and start treating only their fellow jihadi fighters: “When a bleeding man comes to the hospital, I ask which wounds to suture – not what God he prays to, or whose war he fights. And when a pregnant woman arrives, I ask whether a natural birth or a C-section is preferable, not who her prophet is.”

  If he were alive today, what would he say about Julien and whether I should accept his past? And what about the principles of my own faith? Doesn’t Jesus teach acceptance and forgiveness?

  I’m going to think about all of these things, as I go out to buy some groceries.

  * * *

  I just finished stocking my fridge and came back to my laptop, only to see that Julien sent me an email. Here’s what it said:

  Anissa, Querida Mia,

  I know you must be in a lot of pain right now, trying to piece together the puzzle that is my past and present. I know that pain all too well, because I have to live with it every day, alone. You are the first person with whom I’ve ever shared it (besides my mother, may God rest her soul).

  I chose you for that most intimate and dangerous of disclosures because I have more conviction about you than anything else in my life. In a very real sense, I might not be here writing this email to you but for your presence with me that night on the Brooklyn Bridge. So everything after that is “gravy” – a bonus that I can use to double down on my conviction about you. I’m all in, as they say in poker. I entrusted you with the most sensitive facts about my childhood, and – so that our relationship can be as sacred and honest as possible – I am sending you every single journal entry I wrote since the day we met. So now I am quite literally an open book to you. Like the details of my past,
these journal entries are highly confidential and for your eyes only. They are contained in the password-protected PDF that is attached to this email. The password to open the PDF is the name of the restaurant where I took you on our very first dinner date.

  I won’t contact you again, Querida, because I know that you need time to absorb everything that you’ve come to learn about me. I also won’t pressure you, because I’m obviously biased about what you should do and you are your own person, who must decide for herself the best way forward. So I’ll just leave you with this parting thought:

  Until last January, we were two shattered souls silently bearing their dark burdens in a cruel and lonely world. Life broke us both, but it also brought us together. Do we dare question that rarest of fortunes?

  Love,

  Julien

  Chapter 35: Anissa

  Monday, August 25, 2014

  To My Dearest,

  So much has happened in the last few days, but I’ll try to summarize the highlights in chronological order. And I should really start by telling you my thoughts on the email that Julien sent me two days ago, with his journal entries attached.

  During one of our very first dates, Julien once mused about how “cheap” communication is today, compared to the days of his youth, when people wrote letters by hand, stuffed them into envelopes, wrote out the address of the recipient, paid for postage, and had to go to a mailbox, and sometimes even the post office, to send them. Today by contrast, it’s all free, easy, and instantaneous, so the exchanged messages are almost taken for granted – from basic spelling to the depth and precision of the thoughts expressed. According to Julien, the quality of any given message sent today is, on average, markedly inferior to the missives sent in the days when they required so much more time, money, and effort to send. So perhaps an intense relationship is today measured more in quantity than in quality. Whereas lovers of long ago composed lengthy and beautifully crafted letters that maybe numbered in the dozens or hundreds over the course of a serious relationship, today’s close couples might exchange tens of thousands of poorly drafted, sloppy, telegraphic messages during the totality of their time together. The sheer volume of communications, with its ebb and flow, becomes a kind of testament to the fluctuating intimacy between two people over time. I thought about how Julien and I have that same record, and if we were to graph the number of words sent back and forth (on every messaging platform or technology) since the day we met, an outsider could probably tell from that visual representation, when we were growing closer, quarrelling, in love, or broken up. And with this latest email from Julien, the graph would skyrocket because of how many words were included in the attachment he sent over. More importantly, that attachment suddenly showed me how – even in the era of “cheap messages” – a single communication can be so qualitatively enhanced that it stands far above the mass of regular exchanges, in terms of its impact and meaning.

  Needless to say, the symbolism of his gesture was powerfully touching. In fact, I was so moved and impressed that the task of composing an adequate email reply became too daunting and I kept deferring it. I eventually tried to write my response but must have rewritten and then scrapped that email at least a dozen times. In the end, about twenty-four hours had passed since he had sent me his email, and I still hadn’t answered him in any way. Part of the time was lost just reading through his journal entries, which were generally fascinating – particularly the parts where he detailed his interactions with and/or impressions of me at various stages of our relationship. There was something incredibly intimate about entering his mind and viewing how it perceived and related to me.

  At around 3 p.m. yesterday, I realized that I had to leave my laptop and rush to the protest that Michael had organized, or I would arrive late. As I rode the subway down to Union Square, I decided that, upon returning from the demonstration, I would just call Julien because otherwise I might spend another few weeks obsessing over how to craft an email response that honored and reciprocated the exceptionally special message that he had sent me.

  The gathering at Union Square was bigger than any of the previous ones, vindicating Michael’s assumption that more people would show up and care about the issue now that the brutal barbarism of ISIS had targeted a U.S. journalist. There were speakers from the Christian, Jewish, and Yazidi communities, urgently warning the public to stop the genocide being committed by Islamist forces in Syria and Iraq. Michael was one of the three Christian leaders who spoke at the rally, and the signs held up by many of the MCA members there all echoed his core message that the ISIS threat could no longer be ignored. Maria and I stood together, each of us with a placard in one hand, watching Michael forcefully urge the U.S. to take military action.

  “Wake up, USA! Islamists have been beheading us for centuries. And now they are beheading you,” he boomed into the megaphone. “We have been the canary in the coal mine – serving as your early warning system, as we suffered unspeakable atrocities at the hands of violent Islamists. You preferred to look away, after growing weary of war. But today the world is too small and interconnected to run away from it. You can cover your eyes when ISIS turns Syria and Iraq into the slaughterhouses of religious minorities, but eventually they will come for you. Because you represent everything they oppose: religious freedom, human rights, freedom of speech, women’s rights, and countless other values that you take for granted but are the very basis of your civilization. Like Nazism in the 1930s, the cancer of Islamist extremism will not go away on its own. On the contrary, it will fill every power vacuum it can find and take root there, growing stronger by the day.”

  The people gathered in Union Square listened intently and I spied Maria looking with intense admiration at her new love. She noticed me looking at her and smiled. I jokingly whispered to her, “I’m a pretty good matchmaker, aren’t I?” She chuckled and nodded gratefully.

  We turned our attention back to Michael’s speech. “So you can destroy the threat now, when it is still relatively small, or you can fight it later, at a far greater cost. Two years ago, ISIS had under two thousand combatants. Today, in August of 2014, they reportedly have at least ten thousand fighters. They now control about 35,000 square miles of territory, bringing about six million people under their rule. By seizing banks, oil supplies, antiquities, and the property of those it subjugates, ISIS today has about two billion dollars, making it the best financed terrorist organization in the world. And experts estimate that every day ISIS makes up to another three million dollars from oil revenues. It’s built an extensive and sophisticated web of connected Twitter accounts that can amplify every single message up to fifty thousand times. This is ISIS today. It quickly grew to this size because no outside force stopped it. How will the ISIS threat look a year or two from now?”

  I looked around the crowd and it seemed to have grown to a few hundred people. I wondered why ISIS had chosen to antagonize the world’s last superpower, rather than stay below the radar to facilitate their vicious growth. On the other hand, such a brazen move was perhaps an effective way to recruit those who might be impressed by the organization’s willingness to defy and threaten the United States.

  I turned my attention back to Michael, as he continued. “Does the U.S. prefer to confront ISIS when they control half of the Middle East, including much of the world’s oil supply? Today it is raising a generation of children to convert or kill non-Muslims – do you really want them to get this jihadi education, so that they can later target your interests throughout the Middle East and carry out terrorist attacks in your cities? The U.S. has conducted all of about ninety airstrikes in the last two weeks since it finally decided to take action. But that is not fighting to win. Compare that to the air campaign of the Gulf War in 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. In about one month, coalition forces flew over 100,000 sorties, and dropped nearly that many tons of bombs, producing a fast and decisive victory. But the U.S. apparently thinks that there is plenty of time to manage the ISIS
threat.”

  Maria and I both shook our heads in disappointment, as we agreed with Michael’s assessment, and held up our signs, which both read “US: Stop the ISIS Genocides.” We saw that we were both reacting in the same way and smiled at each other. It was nice to share this moment with her, and I thought about how, if our parents and other siblings were still alive and in New York, they’d all be at this protest with us, equally impassioned about having their voices heard and just as impressed at Michael’s leadership.

  I focused again on what Michael was saying. “And weak U.S. leadership invites other bad actors into the game, like Iran. Yes, Iran, a Shiite Islamic state, has just happily offered to help the U.S. fight the Sunni Islamic State in exchange for lifting sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program. But the Islamic Republic of Iran also persecutes Christians and other religious minorities. Iran has an abysmal human rights record and is the world chief state sponsor of terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah, which – until September 11 – was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist group. So having Iran take care of the ISIS threat would be the height of strategic folly. That’s like giving nukes to a far larger and more dangerous Shiite enemy because you’re afraid of a smaller, rising Sunni enemy. There are no shortcuts here for the U.S. You can fight ISIS today, or you can keep waiting as the Islamic State grows ever more potent, and acquires more territory, fighters, and resources – and maybe eventually chemical or even nuclear weapons. But one way or another, a confrontation is inevitable.”

  A few minutes later, Michael introduced the next speaker and handed him the megaphone before stepping off the podium. He walked through the crowd until he reached us, at which point Maria gave him a big hug while still holding her sign. “That was brilliant,” she remarked, beaming.