I met Khalid one month later at our regular spot in the Kempinski hotel in Istanbul. Even though he was his usual jovial self, I sensed that there was something he wasn’t telling me. Toward the end of the evening, I found out what it was. Sheepishly, Khalid asked me whether I remembered our conversation about Jamil and the French intelligence officer who was his biological father. I did indeed. Khalid then asked me whether I also remembered our conversation about the former French intelligence officer who was Huby’s friend. I told him that I recalled that, too. I was pretty sure where Khalid was going even before he informed me with a mischievous smile that Jamil had asked him to inquire whether I could find out if these two French agents happened to be one and the same. I replied that I would do so gladly. I reminded Khalid how he had suggested at the time that he would get more chips in his basket by waiting until Jamil asked for this information. But what really impressed me, I now told Khalid, was how he had managed to cash in Jamil’s chips with this request rather than his own. Khalid laughed. “I taught you well,” he said warmly. Suddenly he turned serious. “Habibi, we have to deal with Anas and his crew. If we allow them to continue in their evil ways, we will be enablers. Never forget what your own sages teach you: he who is compassionate to the cruel will end up being cruel to the compassionate.”
At his kiosk in Beirut one evening, Bassel received a call from his sister in Damascus. In between sobs, she told him that the doctors had given their mother only a few days to live, possibly even just a few hours. Her lung cancer had metastasized to the brain and from there all over her body, and she was heavily sedated, moving in and out of consciousness. Bassel’s sister implored him to come to Damascus to sit by their mother’s bedside, at least for one night. Disregarding Jamil’s plea not to make this dangerous trip, Bassel traveled to Syria in the middle of the night. His plan was to see his mother one last time and then return that same night to Beirut.
A friend from his former intelligence IT unit picked him up on the other side of the border and drove him to Damascus. In the apartment, his sister was waiting for him with tears in her eyes. Their mother, she told him, had passed away earlier that evening. She had tried to reach Bassel, but he had turned off his phone for the journey and removed the battery to prevent any GPS tracking device from following his movements. He had missed his mother by just two hours. Bassel was devastated. He begged his sister to come back with him to Beirut, but she told him that she needed to stay in Syria. Her boyfriend had gone missing, and she would not leave before she found him or at least learned what had happened to him. They parted after a long, tearful embrace.
Bassel’s friend was waiting downstairs to drive him back to the Lebanese border before sunrise. As Bassel left the building, two men stepped out of a car and approached them. One of the men called Bassel’s name. When Bassel turned around to face him, the other man fired two shots from a handgun with a silencer. The first shot hit Bassel in the chest. As he fell to the ground, the assassin stepped over him and fired another shot into the back of his head. Without another word, the men calmly stepped into the car and drove away. The whole thing had taken no more than fifteen seconds. Bassel’s friend stood there paralyzed in fear and shock before running into the building to find Bassel’s sister.
The killers were never found.
Loubna and her daughter made their way to a western European country. She was able to establish legal residence based on a sizable investment in a local community and was promised citizenship for herself and her daughter within three years. She has had tremendous success providing private clients with beauty and fashion advice, and the commissions earned from referrals to cosmetic surgeons haven’t hurt. At nights and on weekends, Loubna volunteered in two immigration centers, helping Muslim women in their transition from the refugee camps they left behind.
One Friday evening, three weeks after Loubna and her daughter had arrived in their new home, one of the immigration centers was firebombed by right-wing agitators. Nobody got hurt, but the psychological damage was great. Loubna’s daughter happened to be with Loubna at the center that evening. From that moment on, she refused to leave Loubna’s side, even accompanying her mother to every business appointment. It forced Loubna to take her out of school and have her tutored at home.
One month after the firebombing incident, Loubna and her daughter were shopping at the local supermarket. As she placed her items on the conveyor belt, she asked her daughter in Arabic to get another carton of milk. The woman behind the checkout counter uttered a racist slur, telling Loubna that she and her daughter were dirty Arab terrorists who should go back to their country and blow themselves up there rather than infest this Christian town. Before Loubna could react, a man who was standing behind her gently put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Allow me, please.” He then moved past Loubna so that he was facing the woman directly. “First of all, this lady and her daughter might not have a country to go back to,” he said in a calm but firm voice. “Second, I would much rather have people like her in our community than ignorant, hateful people like you. And third, you don’t even begin to comprehend the meaning of what it means to be a Christian.”
He then stepped back behind Loubna without saying another word. Loubna smiled and mouthed a grateful “thank you.” The cashier didn’t say a word and continued to check out her items in total silence, including the additional carton of milk that Loubna’s daughter had just placed on the counter. As Loubna and her daughter left the supermarket with their grocery bags, the cashier ran up to them. Loubna braced herself for another confrontation. Instead, the woman stretched out her hand and said, “I’m very sorry for the way I behaved. I apologize to you and your daughter.” Loubna nodded and shook her hand.
The following week, Loubna’s daughter agreed to go back to school.
Reem and Samar left Dubai in a painstakingly planned and executed operation. Since Anas and his thugs had confiscated their identification papers, they first had to obtain emergency UN-issued laissez-passer documents with the help of a friendly consular official in Dubai, whose wife happened to work at the UN offices in Geneva. To be on the safe side, this official also issued two temporary emergency passports, just in case the laissez-passer documents ended up being contested by some overzealous immigration officer—“belts and suspenders,” as the cautious official put it. The main challenge was to get Reem and Samar to the consulate in Dubai without their absence being noticed by Anas’s men. Reem planned every step meticulously. She asked one of the other girls in the apartment to cover for her and Samar by telling their guard that they were ill. When the guard started to shout and demanded to see Reem and Samar, the girl coolly told him that she was happy to get them but that their cough seemed to be contagious. In fact, the girl added, it might be wise for him to arrange a hospital visit for the two in order to keep everyone else in the apartment from catching whatever they had. The guard handed the girl five hundred dirhams and ordered her to put Reem and Samar in a taxi to the hospital to be examined immediately and not to return without a clean bill of health. In this way, Reem and Samar were handed not only the perfect excuse for their absence but also the money for the taxi to the consulate.
Once they arrived at the consulate, they were received by the friendly consular official who showed them the safe room in the building in which they would spend the night. The next morning, their travel documents arrived along with one-way airline tickets to the consul’s home country. That night, they left Dubai, together with a chaperone who accompanied them through check-in, passport control, and security. At the gate, he handed them over to another chaperone who boarded the plane with them.
As the plane took off and ascended into the sky, Reem and Samar looked out the window and watched the bright lights of Dubai fade away. They sat for over an hour in complete silence. Finally, Samar looked at Reem and smiled. It was her first real smile since they had been taken from their home in Qatana. Reem stared at her little sister in disbelief. She had been sure that she would never again see that beautiful smile on Samar’s face. Reem’s lower lip quivered before the floodgates finally opened and tears streamed down her face. A flight attendant rushed over and asked if she was okay. Reem nodded as she wiped the tears out of her eyes. Samar grabbed her hand and did not let go until they landed six hours later.
Three days after their arrival in their new home in Europe, and having received new identities, Reem and Samar were examined and assessed by two social workers to determine whether they would be able to join the local school after a two-month intensive language course. Reem blew the social workers away with her intelligence, and they concluded that she could skip a year and enter twelfth grade as soon as her language skills were adequate. Samar, on the other hand, refused to speak with the social workers, leaving them no choice but to recommend further counseling and homeschooling. Reem committed to helping out by teaching Samar herself in the evenings.
The social workers offered to place Reem and Samar with a family of Iraqi descent in order to provide an Arabic-speaking environment, but Reem turned down their offer and instead asked for a local family that did not speak a word of Arabic. When the social workers asked Reem why she preferred such a harsh and abrupt transition, she was analytical, almost clinical in her reply—first, because it would leave her and her sister no choice but to learn the local language and, second, because it preserved a language in which she and Samar could converse without being understood by their hosts. When one of the social workers asked Reem to reconsider so that she and Samar would have an environment that allowed them to maintain some continuity to their home and friends back in Syria, Reem glowered at her and replied that they had neither a home nor any friends left in Syria and that the door to their past was closed forever.
The social workers looked at each other in amazement. They did not have the heart to tell these two Syrian girls that they had actually contacted their family through the consul in Dubai in order to offer the parents a reunion with their daughters at a secret location. The father replied that the girls’ mother never spoke to him again and died of heartbreak a month after the girls were taken away and that his daughters were dead to him because they had dishonored the family by becoming prostitutes. He then hung up before the dumbfounded consul had a chance to say anything.
Reem thrived in school, and within three months she was the top student in her grade. One day, the teacher asked the students to talk about their background and identity. Most students mentioned their country, their language, their religion, their family, the sports team they rooted for, even their preferred comfort food. When it was Reem’s turn, she stood up and calmly proclaimed that she no longer had an identity. When the teacher asked her to explain, she said that only a person who had spent a lifetime walking on a straight road could maintain an identity. For her, there had been too many abrupt forks in the road, too many twists and turns, and too many dead ends. When she looked back on her path, she was unable to see her point of origin, unlike her fellow classmates who always knew where they came from. And that meant that she had lost her identity. Reem spoke these words deliberately, even serenely, with perfect diction in her new language. When she finished, the entire classroom sat in stunned silence.
For Samar, the transition was a little more difficult. Every day, she waited for Reem to come home from school. Before they would go over Samar’s syllabus together, their daily routine included a walk in the park: first one round on the periphery and then a stop at the playground, watching mothers and nannies play with their little children. There was one tall, handsome boy around Samar’s age, with beautiful, melancholy eyes, who was always there with his little sister. Reem noticed that Samar would watch him intently as he tapped his sister gently on the swings or bounced her on the seesaw, pushing off carefully so that she would not lose her balance. A tiny, faint smile crept up on Samar’s face as she watched the boy play with his sister.
One day, four weeks after their first walk in the park, the boy and his sister failed to show up at the playground. Samar asked Reem if she knew where the boy was and remained uncharacteristically agitated for the rest of the afternoon and evening. When he was back with his sister the next afternoon, Reem encouraged Samar to say hello. At first, Samar refused. But once the boy and his sister were about to leave, she closed her eyes, mumbled a prayer under her breath, and walked up to him. Reem stayed on the bench and watched the scene unfold from a distance. At first, the interaction seemed stiff and awkward, but after ten minutes, she saw something astounding—Samar was laughing. When the boy finally took his little sister by the hand and left, Samar returned to Reem with an impish smile. She told Reem that the boy’s name was Alex and his sister was Tatyana. Their parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who had moved to this country in the late 1980s. Samar asked Reem whether she would be willing to watch Tatyana at the playground the following afternoon so that she and Alex could go eat some ice cream together.
It turned out that Alex and Samar were the same age—Samar was exactly one week older than Alex. Three weeks after their first ice cream date, he persuaded Samar to come to school with him. Reem checked in with the social workers, and they agreed to give it a try, especially since Samar and Alex were in the same grade. The first month was difficult for Samar, but Alex happened to be the school’s star athlete and captain of the soccer team, which meant that all his teammates took turns as her guardian angel. Reem knew that her little sister had finally turned the corner the day she noticed that Samar did not pack the headless doll in her school bag.
A few months into the school year, Reem’s class read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The book had a profound effect on her, and she started to ask herself what she wanted to do with her life, now that she—unlike Anne Frank—had a chance at creating her own future. Her aspirations ran from writer to psychologist to doctor, but she felt unsatisfied. About three weeks after finishing Anne Frank’s diary, she was contemplating these career options while watching little Tatyana on the playground. Alex and Samar were off on one of their ice cream excursions. Unexpectedly, Tatyana’s mother showed up. The woman had been very kind and embracing to the two sisters and was grateful to Reem for minding Tatyana whenever Alex and Samar stole some time for themselves. She waved warmly to Reem from the bench as she watched her play with Tatyana.
When Alex and Samar returned, Reem joined the mother on the bench. After some chitchat, she playfully told Reem that, now that Alex and Samar had found each other, the time had come for Reem to find the perfect man for herself. “Show me a perfect man, and I’ll show you a liar,” Reem responded sharply. They both sat quietly for a few minutes, until the mother changed the topic and asked Reem whether she had given any thought to what she wanted to study at university. Reem replied that she hadn’t committed to anything yet and asked the mother in return what she had studied. The mother told her that it had been her dream to study law and become a criminal defense lawyer, but after she left Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, she never regained her footing or the confidence she had had as a young girl. And then, after Alex was born, she sacrificed her career plans in order to raise her son and then Tatyana.
That night, Reem stayed up late as she researched the field of law and the criminal justice system. By the time she switched off her computer at three in the morning, she had made up her mind. She would study law and become a public prosecutor.
Anas has been retired.
* In this epilogue, I have relied on the accounts of Jamil, conveyed via Khalid, with respect to what happened to Bassel and on the accounts of Loubna as they relate to her and her daughter. With respect to Reem and Samar, I witnessed some of the events described in person, in particular the interactions with the two social workers. I have also spoken to Reem’s schoolteacher who fully corroborated her narrative. With respect to the events and conversations for which I was not present, I have fully relied on Reem’s account for everything she and her sister experienced. I trust her unequivocally. She has never yet uttered a single untrue word to me.