CAMPO SHAR-AL-NES
BROUMANA, LEBANON
THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO
Mattie, three and a half years old, climbed slowly to the old, twisted juniper and sat down. She put her thumb in her mouth.
“If you hide there,” said Alexander, “Nebbie won’t find you. Hide behind the juniper. I’ll rescue you. Don’t eat the berries.”
“Is this okay?” she whispered.
“Perfect.”
Down the hillside, Alexander could see the houses at the edge of Ruwaisseh. It was so hot the rooftops appeared to melt in the haze. He smiled. They’d be here soon. It was time to hide.
In Broumana that summer, the day and night blended into an endless hot continuum. On the hillside above the Lazarists Monastery, the juniper berries were mottled with the first patches of red as they ripened. They’d make Mattie hard to see, even in her orange tunic. Nebbie would find her, but it would take time. She was a sacrifice.
Downhill a distance, Alexander found the rock; he’d seen it before and had made a mental note of it. It was an odd formation that spread out horizontally atop the hill, like a reclining woman. This was where he
knew Father would lay their belongings: the old wicker lunch basket, a jug of water, and the prayer blankets.
From the village he heard voices, still some five minutes distant. He took off his clothing—all of it. He rolled it up then tucked it in a small hole he’d dug, then covered it with dry soil.
He lay down in the dust. It was scalding hot, but he endured the pain. He rolled slowly down the hill, turning several times. He could taste the dirt in his mouth.
Voices grew louder, followed by the crunching of sandals on the hillside. Alexander crawled back up the hill and nestled beneath a ridge on the side of the big rock. He tucked his head into his lap so that only the smooth surface of his brown, dust-covered back would show. He had become part of the stone.
“Here we are,” said Aswan, Alexander’s father.
Alexander listened as the sack was placed down on the ground. A tingling sensation filled his heart. He didn’t move. They placed the sack on the rock so close to him he could feel a small breeze when the sack was opened.
“I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” said Father. “Don’t you have something to do, Nebuchar?”
Alexander hated his older brother. Nebuchar refused to play with Alexander, too old and mature for games with his five-year-old sibling. Except on Sundays, family day. Father made him play. Nebuchar would oblige him grudgingly, though secretly he relished the actual moment of discovery, enjoyed it because with his fist he would rap Alex and even Mattie with a hard knuckle to the skull.
While Nebuchar began to search, Alex could hear his father setting out the plates. He smelled the chicken and garlic, and the figs, he could even smell the rice. His favorite meal. His father cooked only on Sundays and it was the only dish he knew how to prepare, but he did it with elaborate care, in honor of their late mother, he said. The way father did it, the figs cooked for three whole days in the small tandoor oven, heated by the fire, so that they melted in your mouth when you bit in.
“You might as well come out. You know I’ll find you.” Nebuchar walked to the base of the big cypress. There was a small notch that was just big enough for a coyote or a small child. Empty.
“Mattie!” he yelled. “Alex!”
From the distance, his father laughed. “What? Big man can’t find his little brother and sister?” Their father now sat on the rock, not more than a foot from Alexander, drinking a cup of water. “Do I need to come and help you, Nebbie?”
“No! I’ll find them.”
Nebuchar walked around the cypress toward the juniper, this out of sight from his father. He saw little Mattie, smacked her in the head.
“Got you!” he yelled as Mattie screamed and began to cry. “Where’s Alex?” he demanded.
“I’m not telling. I hate you, Nebbie.”
“Tell me or I’ll hit you again.”
“No!” she yelled and she ran to her father.
Nebuchar circled the hillside slowly, eventually reaching the picnic site.
“You hit a three-year-old girl?” their father asked angrily. “That’s the sign of a weakling and a coward. You’re twelve. No lunch for you today.”
Nebuchar was silent. Alex bit his tongue, tempted to laugh.
“I know what goes through that mind of yours,” said his father. “I’d suggest you say nothing for one minute. If you raise your voice at me or so much as kick your foot in the sand I’ll send you back down to the house and you’ll spend the rest of the day washing the tiles on the roof.”
Alex shuddered with pleasure, wishing he could see Nebbie’s face.
“Where is he? I can’t find him.”
“What do you mean you can’t find him?”
“He’s nowhere. I’ve looked everywhere.”
Father removed Mattie from his lap and served her a plate of the chicken. She stopped crying and began to eat.
Father stood and did a slow turn, looking in all directions. “Alexander!” he yelled. “Alexander!” Father took a walk down the hill, then returned.
“He’s gone, I tell you.” Father laughed. “He beat you. And soundly at that.”
“Yeah,” said Nebuchar, “but when I find him—”
“When you find him you’ll congratulate him and leave him alone. Do you understand?”
“Okay.”
“Well, anyway, let’s eat. I must get back and prepare for tomorrow’s lecture.”
“But Alex,” said Mattie. “Where’s Alex?”
“He’ll show up,” said their father. “I know Alex. Wherever he is, he’s okay. Let’s eat.”
Aswan made himself a plate of chicken, put the cover back on the dish and set it down.
“Jesus Christ, mother of the lamb!” He’d put the dish down on Alex’s back. Alex stood up, naked and covered in dirt from head to toe.
“Alex!” Mattie yelled. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Alex crossed his arms proudly. “That’s how you hide from the wolf.”
“Well?” his father said, laughing, looking at Nebuchar. “Don’t you have something to say?”
“Congratulations, dragon,” he spat out.
Alex smiled. He walked to the tip of the rock. He knelt down and brushed the layer of dirt from the hole, and pulled out his clothing.
His father chuckled—and continued to do so the rest of the day. “You’re brilliant,” he said. After Alex dressed, he handed him his plate of chicken. “How did you think of that idea?”
Alex’s eyes peered out coldly through the brown dust caked to his face. He stared at his brother. “To hide from the wolf, the only way to survive is to hide in plain sight.”
“To hide in plain sight,” his father repeated that evening after prayers. “To hide in plain sight.”
The wisdom of a five-year-old.
In one brief moment, all of Aswan’s unfocused hatred coalesced into a stark course of action.
When the three men arrived that evening, as they had every Sunday
evening for two years running, Aswan described a vision that would serve as a blueprint for the terror to come.
“I’ve had a vision, brothers,” he said after the tea was poured. “I know how we’ll stab a dagger into the heart of our enemy.”
The group of men, four in all, began as a prayer group at the University of Beirut. Aswan, who was chairman of the European Languages Department at the university, had been the last to join. He didn’t like to proclaim his religious identity; he thought it was a private matter, for family only.
After his wife Rhianne died, though, Aswan changed. He changed in so many ways even he didn’t understand them all. His temper, which before had smoldered like a fire within, calmed. He found that his love for his children, his patience, his joy from being with them, grew. He also began to pray more. Hours at a time. As he did so he became closer with the true meaning.
But if the temper abated and the love of family grew, in some way it was balanced by something else that happened. Aswan began to hate those he saw as responsible for his wife’s death. And the hatred became interwoven with prayer.
At his wife’s funeral, a colleague from the university named Mohammed invited him to join the small prayer group. At first they devoted the time to prayer, but that soon changed. They started to drink tea and talk, then pray, until finally the prayers ceased altogether and only talk happened.
But the talk . . . oh, the talk. The discussions, they all felt, were nearly as important as the prayer. Because as they talked, they all found a common thread, which became a powerful tether uniting them. They hated America.
Mohammed had earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, as had Palan, the third member of the group. They had shared an apartment on the outskirts of Cambridge. The fourth member of the group, Binda, was a junior professor at the university. Like Aswan, he’d never been to America. But like many who’ve never been, he hated it with even more intensity than the others.
So they spoke of America’s government. How it grew out of bloodshed
and recklessly cast its shadow wherever it chose, in Vietnam, in Iran. Of Israel, their most hated enemy, and how America protected her with guns and money.
That fateful Sunday evening, Aswan poured wine into each of the teacups. It was a special occasion.
“It will work this way,” Aswan explained. “It can only work this way. . . .”
That next autumn, as planned, Mohammed accepted the teaching post at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Palan went to America too, taking a job in the maintenance department of a small nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania called Three Mile Island.
And exactly one year after that, young Alexander was ripped from his bedsheets at age six in the middle of the night. He wasn’t harmed, but it was sudden and deliberate, like a kidnapping. Unlike a kidnapping, however, it was a plan designed by his own father and carried out by Binda. He took him at three thirty in the morning. Binda muffled his screams with a handkerchief stuffed into his small mouth. When the struggling and screaming stopped hours later, as the dawn approached, he drugged Alexander. It was only Valium, but it stopped the crying.
“It has to be this way,” Aswan had said that night with the wine. “It must be this way. Sudden and violent, not gradual.” Mohammed and his wife Calla had to become Alex’s parents, and not just his guardians. He must be ripped from the womb. “He must be loved like a son by you, Mohammed. Can you love my son? Can you and Calla raise him as Rhianne and I would have?”
“We can. We will.”
“I love him the most of all of my children, you see. But I can’t tear him from his own home. That must be you. In this way I sacrifice all for our cause, but I’ll never recover.”
To hide in plain sight,
thought Aswan that terrible morning after Alexander vanished, as he shivered in his bedroom, tears flowing down his cheeks, holding Nebuchar, also sobbing, and Mattie, confused and hysterical.
So it began.
In Bethesda, they lived in a sprawling shingle-style home, with Navy
blue shutters and a low, white picket fence. In the big backyard, Alexander learned to play football and baseball with the neighborhood children.
He strongly resembled Calla. For whatever reason, despite the fact they weren’t related, he possessed her sharp, beautiful nose. His coloring was light, but Mediterranean. By ten he was already six feet tall, and startlingly handsome. At twelve, one of the neighborhood girls, the daughter of a French diplomat stationed in Washington, kissed him on the lips. Also that year, at school, he got into a fight with a child named Kevin, who thought Alexander had shoved him in the hallway. Kevin broke Alexander’s nose with his first punch, but it was Alexander who, upon seeing and tasting his own blood, went into a frenzied rage and beat the bully with his fists, not only breaking the boy’s nose but also knocking out two front teeth.
Alexander grew quickly to like strawberry ice cream, coffee, girls, and reading, especially Ernest Hemingway. They raised him as an Episcopalian because it was part of the plan that he assimilate. He had many friends, and a best friend, George, the youngest son of a brood of four boys who lived next door. They strung Dixie cups together with a long string between the two big houses so that they could talk to one another, a set of low-tech walkie-talkies. On Sundays, he and George, sometimes with George’s older brothers, would walk to the movie theater on Connecticut Avenue and catch a matinee. It was with George that Alex drank his first beer. When George’s family moved back to Kansas after his father was transferred by General Electric, it was the most devastating event of Alex’s young life.
He couldn’t remember the night they’d torn him from his home in Lebanon. Aswan was like a dream father whom, when Alex was alone, he would recall in foggy images, warming him in a way that was just below his ability to articulate in words even to himself. His true mother’s face he never forgot, but everything else seemed hazy. Had he
had
another father? Had he even been to that place, or was it a dream? That beautiful city that smelled of ocean and pine and dust?
For Mohammed and Calla, he was a blessing. Who would’ve known Calla would prove barren? All of her love that she had in her heart, the
love she always planned on giving to her own children, went to him. Mohammed was awed by the young boy. In everything he did, Alexander excelled. Like his real father, Alex had a talent for languages. By sixteen he exhausted the Episcopal Academy languages department, and was fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian. His junior year at Episcopal, he scored a perfect 1,600 on his SAT. It was obvious Alexander would go wherever he wanted for college. On the Episcopal lacrosse team, Alex played midfield and was captain of the team his senior year. He loved lacrosse more than anything and was named all-American at the end of the season. When Alex applied to college, it was only to schools that had strong lacrosse programs—Princeton, University of Virginia, Yale, and Harvard. He was accepted by all of the schools and chose Princeton.