‘You call me when your boyfriend’s back in town,’ Myriam said.
And Yassim was supposed to be back after just a few days. But two weeks go by, and Jacob still hasn’t heard anything from him. Jacob passes his time at the embassy letting his mind wander back and forth between the memory of Yassim’s smooth body and the terrible meeting he had with Myriam Awad.
Her indifferent expression is burned onto his retinas, and his mind is filled with what she told him about Yassim. That he’s a terrorist.
But he knows it can’t be true. She doesn’t know Yassim, she knows nothing at all about who he is, what he is.
Or does she?
It’s as if there are too many variables, too much contradictory information, too many emotions, and it makes it impossible for him to find any calm right now.
In addition, he can’t get those few seconds of the video she showed him out of his head. The bare room, the man on his knees in front of him. Fifteen years old. He couldn’t have been fifteen years old, it’s impossible. Besides, the whole thing was a setup. But it doesn’t matter. He’s a rapist now.
*
‘Did you eat something that was off? You look very pale, Jacob,’ Agneta says. She’s realized that not everything is as it should be with him, and she suggests he take a few days off to rest up.
But even though he doesn’t feel like being there, especially whenever he sees Vargander’s fit body striding down the corridor outside of his office headed to meetings in Beirut and the rest of the Middle East, he knows it would be even worse if he stayed home.
Instead, he catches Frida in the kitchenette and nags her to let him write a background memo on protests still raging into September, though they are slowly starting to ease up a bit now.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘But I don’t have time to supervise you. You’ll have to take care of yourself. Does that work?’
She gives him a pile of books and articles from a few English-language newspapers and a few names of researchers at American University that he can contact, and he finds it helpful to bury himself in Lebanon’s endlessly complex system of shifting alliances and sectarian groups. He reads about Shia-Phalangists, Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians, and about the civil war and the shaky, ineffective compromise that allows Lebanese state power to be shared between religious groups. He reads about corruption and nepotism, violence and war. He reads about how dissatisfaction had been boiling, and that it finally bubbled over when the government couldn’t even manage garbage collection any more. People overlooked the bad electricity, the unreliable postal service, the non-existent public transport and chaotic traffic. But stinking garbage in hot streets was apparently the breaking point for the young people from the various cultural groups, who joined together in protest for the first time. And then not just young people. And not just Western-educated elites, but also the ones who couldn’t imagine an alternative before. It all stands in the balance now. The protests are growing. Will it turn out like Egypt? Or Syria? Or will this suffocating compromise win in the end after all? Nobody seems to know. And Jacob doesn’t really know why he’s writing this memo or for whom or even how long it should be. He suspects it’s to keep himself occupied. But it doesn’t matter right now, because it gives him a temporary respite from the near constant anxiety pulsing inside him.
It has been more than two weeks, and he’s stopped manically checking his phone, when the text finally arrives:
I haven’t forgotten you.
‘The Ghost’
That’s all, but it’s enough to reawaken everything he’s tried so hard to forget. Both Yassim and Myriam.
He sits with the phone in his hand, reading the message over and over again. How should he answer? What do you say to a ghost?
He writes and rewrites; the words feel too big, as if they won’t fit on the screen. Finally, he sends only a large, red heart emoji. Nothing else is needed. Yassim knows. Jacob knows he knows.
The feeling settles in, it’s there when he wakes up the next morning, all through the day, even when he leaves the office after the sun sets. He buys a bottle of red wine in the small shop beneath his apartment. He needs peace and escape. He has to stop thinking about this dilemma, about who Yassim is. The risk he’s taking. If he’s not a terrorist, then who is he?
The key to the door doesn’t work, and he’s just about to put the wine bottle on the mosaic floor and grab hold of it with both hands when he hears a voice from within the shadows of the stairwell.
‘When were you planning to tell me he contacted you?’
Jacob turns around and sees Myriam in the shadows leaning against the wall.
‘Don’t think you can play both sides, Matti,’ she says. ‘You’re surely not so naive you thought we weren’t watching your phone?’ She moves towards him with those icy eyes flashing.
‘You landed yourself in the middle of this shit, habibi,’ she continues. ‘I know your head is spinning now. How can you have your cake and eat it too? Let me answer that question for you: you already ate it. The only things left are the crumbs of your life. Scrape them up and do what you can with them.’
He looks at her, shocked, confused. ‘I haven’t met with him,’ he says.
‘You will be crushed if you continue to waver on this,’ she says. ‘You have to understand that now.’
He nods slowly. All he wants to really do is disappear.
‘The second he contacts you, you contact me, do you understand? If you wait any longer, I promise you your life as you’ve known it will end.’
He understands nothing, and she already knows everything. But before he can ask, she’s disappeared into the shadows again.
*
Everything is quiet. A month goes by and Jacob starts to think Yassim might never contact him again. He’s sat with his phone in hand writing text messages over and over again. But never pressed send on them. He already knows that if he does meet Yassim he can’t break the rules, can’t force Yassim to be anything more than a ghost.
Maybe this is how it ends? Maybe it’s for the best? Or not maybe. It is for the best. If Yassim never comes back, everything will go back to the way it was before. No Myriam. No videos. No threats. No doubts about who Yassim is, no weighing attraction against risk, no gnawing suspicion that Yassim might be who Myriam says he is: a terrorist. A murderer.
Finally, the summer is over and an early autumn sun shines down at a new angle on the traffic and bullet holes and sidewalk cafes, and the only thing left from the protests are the graffiti, the memories and the conversations. Compromise won over the chaos. Maybe they’ve seen too much war here to have the stomach for a revolution? Jacob keeps working on his memo and has started meeting researchers at the university who are so friendly and interesting that sometimes he’s almost able to forget Yassim.
*
One day he’s walking over the pedestrian bridge from the Zaha Hadid concrete colossus that houses the Institute for International Relations at the American University when his phone vibrates in his pocket. He just met a very helpful Palestinian professor and for once is feeling calm.
Around him darkness has fallen, but the campus is still bustling with students on their way to their final lectures of the day and with crickets on the slope that leads down to the football field and the sea. It’s early October, the air is still warm and soft against Jacob’s cheek, but when he steps out onto the gravel that surrounds the Green Oval, a breeze moves between the trees and buildings. The students feel it too; they button an extra button on their shirts and move closer to each other, as if seeking shelter from what’s coming. It’s as though they all feel it at the same time: it’s not autumn yet, but not summer either, and a kind of melancholy falls over the city.
When he takes out his phone, he sees the caller has a blocked number, and whatever calm he felt is obliterated. As he answers, every detail surfaces, and he stops and leans against a low wall, listening. The chaos and stress make it almost impossible for him to breathe. But that’s not all. There’s something else, and it scares him even more. Is it love?
After the conversation, he can barely walk, almost stumbles over to a bench, sinks down with his eyes closed, the phone still warm in his hand. The breeze makes the pine trees behind him sway and the students quicken their steps. But Jacob could stay here forever, in this moment of expectation and fulfilment, hopeless dreams he’s been carrying inside him for almost two months. His skin feels electric; he’s surprised his clothes don’t catch fire.
Slowly he stands up and walks past the stairs by West Hall and the pillars, up towards the main gate. He remembers every syllable Yassim says in that short conversation.
‘I missed you. Can we meet in an hour? You remember where I live?’
Does he remember? He remembers everything, every nuance, every insignificant detail.
Yassim hangs up before Jacob even has time to respond. The wind is rising again, and he lets it carry him across the campus, take him all the way to the traffic on Bliss Street.
He’s halfway down the slope to the sea when he remembers Myriam Awad, and doubt overtakes him. But everything is so insignificant now that he’s heard Yassim’s voice. So weightless. So small in comparison.
He hurries. Whoever Yassim might be, whatever happens to Jacob, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that he’s about to see Yassim again.