The Shattered Lens

by Jonathan Alpeyrie

  The men offered me some tea and hooked me up to the Internet connection. They introduced me to the man who owned the operation: he was bald on top with white hair sprouting out on the sides, and so small that I could literally see the top of his head. He wore little rectangular glasses. Like most people in that part of the Levant he was very fair-skinned; many of them even had blue eyes. He spoke some English and invited me into another room. I entered and the door closed quickly behind me.

  This dental studio would serve as my office. On the right side there was the bathroom. Ahead was the staircase leading to the upper level, which had the Internet connection. Here I would sit with my computer every evening, connect to the outside world, and file my photos.

  After I had spent about an hour watching a man delicately file a set of dentures from behind his thick glasses, a tall, lanky guy with dark, sharp, hawklike features showed up. “Hi, I’m Alfarook, I’m going to help you.”

  Alfarook was to be my fixer. A “fixer,” in the trade of conflict journalism, is sort of a cross between a foster brother and Virgil leading Dante through the various circles of Inferno. He serves as translator and works his contacts to get you among the fighters. He can also be a driver and even provide you housing and food if necessary.

  Working with a fixer requires a degree of trust that there is rarely enough time to develop. You have to make split-second decisions based on first impressions, past experience, intuition, or default. Alfarook, then, was my Virgil by default. My contacts in Lebanon, through the smuggler, had provided him for me, and I didn’t even have to pay for his services. They just wanted to help the cause, they said: anything that would bring down the Assad government and establish a just rule in the country. Maybe the fact that I didn’t have to pay the fixer should have rung alarms. But it didn’t. In some situations you just have to accept kindness wholesale. Otherwise thinking about all the potential risks will paralyze you.

  On the whole, my first impression of Alfarook was positive. He was a polite, smart, and reserved young man in his twenties. He seemed to believe in the cause and support the anti-Assad rebels in the Free Syrian Army. But he wasn’t a fanatic. His English was quite good: he’d studied economics at Damascus University. So I asked him a few questions. Can we go see units on the front line? Can we go to hospitals or morgues? Can we go to areas that have been shelled recently? He said everything could be done, but I suspected he wasn’t as gung ho about putting himself in danger as some other fixers I’d had in the past. He gave me a cell phone. I went upstairs, got online, and sent my father a message that I was safe. He never wanted to know too many details. “Just tell me you’re okay,” he always said.

  * * *

  FROM THE DENTAL-LAB-CUM-PRESS-CENTER, they drove me to a building about a half a mile away and showed me the apartment where I would be sleeping. It was big, clean, and fairly void of furniture. There were a couple of other people staying in the apartment building, so the smuggler warned me not to talk too much. Foreigners drew unwanted attention, and there could be informers anywhere. They gave me the key and said lock yourself in and don’t make any noise.

  I spent the first night sleeping in the smaller room, which was heated and had carpeting. All the other rooms just had tiles on the floor. The older man who drove and the smuggler shared the room with me. We woke up early that morning because Assad’s forces were dropping bombs on the city—nothing particularly heavy, though. Everyone acted as if it were routine. The shelling would stop and then start again. We would look out the window and see a cloud of smoke rising, sometimes as close as a half a mile away.

  Later in the day the two men drove off, back to Lebanon. I never saw them again.

  In the mornings, as soon as I woke up, I’d call Alfarook with my new cell phone and he’d show up on his little 125 cc motorcycle. He’d take me around Yabroud to see areas in the aftermath of bombardment. Yabroud was important because it was strategically located near Al-Nabek, a slightly bigger city situated on the main Damascus–Homs highway, which was still under government control. If the rebels managed to cut off that highway, it would be a real blow. So of course the government regularly shelled Yabroud from Al-Nabek, which was less than five kilometers away. (I could walk five klicks in less than an hour.)

  If we had to go farther out, such as when they bombed nearby villages, we took a cab, but those roads were very dangerous. Rebels drove in unmarked vehicles, so anything on the road was fair game. And some of the villages had only a few hundred people, so we’d be the only car in sight.

  Although the attacks were nothing near as intense as the bombardment of Homs, random shells fell regularly on houses with civilians inside. There were always a few casualties next to the morgue or hospital. One time we got to a bombing site before any ambulances and there were a couple of dead people on the street. The civilians were clearly distraught, but you could also tell they were becoming inured to the carnage, walking past the casualties with their expression of outrage dimmed from repetition.

  Alfarook took me to see a few refugee camps as well, which were usually located in schools. Most of the refugees were from Homs. On several occasions I spent some time with rebel units in the city, but apart from sporadic artillery shells and token bursts of machine gun fire, I didn’t see any significant firefights.

  It developed into a routine: shoot pictures all day and go to the dental lab in the evening. Upstairs in my little office I’d edit the shots and file anywhere from fifteen to twenty photos to my agency in New York: young men with guns, some looking more ready than others; snipers lying in wait behind walls with holes blown out of them; families in the throes of grief, their loved ones and homes mangled beyond recognition; whole families of refugees in a single schoolroom; wounded in the hospitals; cadavers at the morgue, awaiting burial. I’d make a selection, choose the images where I caught the light in a way that revealed some emotion or even a glimpse of truth. And with a few clicks of my trackpad they were in my agency’s hard drive and out there for the world at large. Then I’d go back to my apartment and think about how to get better shots the next day.

  One afternoon Alfarook took me along with his best friend, a stocky blond kid, to go hunting for food. They handed me a rifle. “Try this,” Alfarook said. “It’s like a camera. Point and shoot.” I’d never been a gun person, apart from knowing a little about the history of military hardware, but either I was a natural, or just had beginner’s luck, because I took aim at a little bird in a tree about seventy yards away, pulled the trigger, and it plopped to the ground. We ate it cooked over a barbecue with Alfarook’s father at their country house, which had been damaged by shelling. Fortunately there was also goat meat and grilled tomatoes, because the tiny bird wasn’t exactly delectable.

  * * *

  DURING THE WEEK SPENT in and around Yabroud, I kept telling Alfarook I wanted to see more action, a little closer to the front line. When it comes to photographing conflicts, the calculus is fairly simple: the closer you get, the better the shot. And the more heated the action, the more emotion you capture. It doesn’t take a PhD. What’s essential, though, is a monomaniacal focus on your objective and a willingness to put yourself in danger. Then comes the aesthetic aspect, which requires the ability to foresee action about to happen combined with an almost esoteric understanding of light and its properties.

  We spent a few days with a unit and they took me with them to a sniper’s nest, which was quite dangerous because it was on a rise overlooking the main road that connected Homs to Damascus and the government troops had to be vigilant about keeping their supply lines safe. There were about ten men in a bombed-out building; everything around it was destroyed. You looked out the window and you could see Al-Nabek a few miles away, which was mostly controlled by the government. And they were firing on us from over there.

  Still, I wanted to go south. Alfarook didn’t have any contacts there, but he said he would introduce me to another fixer-journalist who did. We went by motorcycle to pick him
up at his building late at night. We climbed a staircase to a small, dark office in the back. There was a young man just sitting there, looking a little creepy as he sat slack-jawed in front of his laptop. He introduced himself. I sat down next to him on the couch and told him I wanted to see one of the units fighting closer to Damascus. “Okay, no problem,” he said. “I have a good contact with that unit. I’ll call him up and we’ll organize everything.”

  He showed us pictures that he’d taken of the Syrian army. I asked if we could get that close. He said, “No problem.” I couldn’t remember his name, but as far as I was concerned he was Mr. No Problem. Can we get a car? “No problem.” Can we get to the front line? “No problem.” I probably could have asked him if it was possible to sneak into Bashar al-Assad’s toilet and shave his balls while he was taking a crap, and he would have told me, “No problem.” So we agreed. He said to come back tomorrow and we’d set something up with Alfarook.

  In hindsight, I realize my alarm bells should have been ringing, but I was too bent on getting closer. I wanted to catch the expression on a soldier’s face as he tries to come to terms with the gravity of his task, or maybe even catch a glint of truth in his eyes when he empties himself of all thought, absorbed in the frenzy of action, and becomes a single mote of dust swirling through the rubble of history.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER ALFAROOK came in with his best friend Blondie’s white pickup truck, and the four of us—me, Alfarook, Blondie, and No Problem—drove south an hour and a half from Yabroud toward Rankous, which was about thirty miles from Damascus, to a rebel unit holed up in a small village. I’d been in Syria a week by then and had already made arrangements to go back to Lebanon, from where I would catch a flight to Paris.

  On the drive we stopped at a small town and parked the pickup in front of an abandoned villa. There were about ten soldiers there. We sat and had tea, everybody talking.

  After a while the commander of the Free Syrian Army unit, Abu Faras, showed up in his camouflage uniform. He was a cordial, heavyset man with childlike eyes nesting between his beard and the keffiyeh wrapped around his head. We talked for about forty-five minutes with Alfarook translating. He asked me where I was from. France, I said. “Why do you want to take pictures of our unit?” I told him I just wanted to get pictures of actual combat. I wanted to see the rebels fighting, understand their cause better. He seemed to take my motivation at face value, then went into a litany of crimes committed against the Syrian people by the Assad family.

  When Abu Faras finished talking, he excused himself to make a phone call. He came back ten minutes later and said, “Okay, let’s go.” I asked where we were going. “We can go to the front lines,” he said. “From there you will be close enough to see some of Bashar’s army.”

  They decided to use Blondie’s white pickup, although Blondie himself stayed at the villa. The commander took one soldier with him, but they carried no weapons apart from Abu Faras’s pistol.

  I got in the back of the car and sat next to the new fixer, No Problem. Alfarook was driving, Abu Faras sat shotgun. Another soldier was standing in the bed of the pickup, looking over the top.

  After about fifteen minutes we came to a checkpoint. There was a simple concrete structure with one opening and three walls, sort of like a bus stop. An SUV was parked behind it. Two men emerged from the concrete shelter wearing balaclavas and wielding AK-47s. They stopped the car. Abu Faras opened the window. He told them calmly which unit he belonged to, but they started shouting violently. They opened the passenger-side door and dragged him out onto the ground.

  That was when my mind switched from the calm hyperaware state I usually fell into as I was approaching a front line to “Oh shit!” mode. Everything shifted into slow motion, somewhat warped. Now I’m in trouble, I thought to myself. Right away I felt a rush of pure fear pumping through my chest and neck.

  They opened the back door on the passenger side, grabbed my shirt, and dragged me to the ground till I was planted on my knees. They did the same to the soldier in the back and the fixer. Now we were all on our knees, hands behind our necks. I looked up: two more men arrived at the scene; now there were four of them. They cuffed my hands behind my back and pulled my black T-shirt over my eyes so I couldn’t see. I could feel the metal of a gun barrel pressed to the right side of my head. A split second later it poked my temple. Then the deafening bang.

  All the noise around me was muffled in a liquid hum, and I thought, This is what dying must sound like. But in the ringing aftermath of the blast I realized I was still alive. I hadn’t been shot. But I was in shock. A simple pistol fired next to my ear had practically effaced my will.

  I looked through my T-shirt, which was somewhat threadbare, and saw Alfarook and No Problem on their knees to the right of the pickup, literally shaking with fear. Abu Faras and the soldier were behind me. The men in ski masks pulled their SUV around to the left side of the truck. They lifted me up and threw me in the back, behind the driver. I started worrying about all my gear, including my laptop, which was still in the white pickup truck. Then two of the men drove up in that same white pickup. I couldn’t see Abu Faras or his soldier anymore. They put me in the SUV. The fat man who fired his pistol in my ear was in the driver’s seat. Alfarook and No Problem were in the back with me. Riding shotgun there was a twitchy kid who looked somewhat psychotic. He kept his AK-47 trained on us.

  As soon as they got in they made a U-turn and drove away very fast. I tried to lift my head up to see but the psycho kid hit me viciously upside the head with the butt of his rifle and I had to brace myself not to fall back unconscious. We drove for about five minutes. Then we stopped. They opened my side of the door and pulled me out gently so I wouldn’t trip. The driver took me in front of the house. I was still covered and handcuffed, but I could see through the fabric of the shirt that I was in front of a door. There were two steps that led down to the house. I almost tripped, but he was holding me. He emptied my pockets and took everything: my phone, my wallet, my keys.

  I could see that the two fixers were on their knees in front of the house, their heads also covered. Then two shots were fired. I’m next, I thought. They dragged me away from the door again and pushed me back into the car. Alfarook and No Problem were stuffed in, too. They hadn’t been shot. But I could feel No Problem’s leg trembling against mine. It seemed he was more terrified than I was. Then they all got back into the SUV and we drove away.

  Within five minutes we came to another house. They threw us all on the floor with our hands tied behind our backs and blindfolded us with keffiyehs. The driver shouted a few things at me in Arabic, none of which I understood apart from the gist that I was in trouble. He seemed angry at the fact that I couldn’t understand, so he roughed me up with a few pushes and smacks. Alfarook was too stunned to translate anything.

  * * *

  WE ALL LAY on the floor in a small room while the captors yelled at us, kicked us, stepped on our heads. From time to time one of them fired out the window, probably just to scare us. I was on my belly and shaking because it was getting cold. I could see Psycho, the kid with the AK-47, on the couch.

  After about two hours my shoulder started hurting. So I told Alfarook to tell these fuckers to switch my cuffs from behind my back to the front. He tried to shush me, but I kept insisting, so he finally said something. The fat driver, whose name was Abu Talal, weighed the request with a grunt and agreed to switch the cuffs and turn me over, so now I could lie on my back with my hands crossed against my chest.

  Night fell, and at one point they removed the two fixers’ cuffs and let them walk out of the house. I was lying on my back and could see the entry door somewhat from under my blindfold. I saw their cheap made-in-China jeans. Then they walked out of my field of vision and I heard car doors open and close. I heard the ignition turn and the car driving away. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It might be good news for me.

  Or maybe it wasn’t good news. Maybe they were in on it.r />
  Later that night the same men came back—minus the fixers—and offered me tomatoes and french fries. Because of the blindfold I couldn’t see who was feeding me. Now they were gentle, trying to reassure me, saying it was all okay.

  But I didn’t buy it. I’m fucked, I thought. I imagined myself in the hands of some hooded figure in front of a camera, like in the videos from the Iraq War, and the knife sliding across my jugular, into my throat, the horrifying gurgles of blood gushing into my windpipe.

  Then a few more minutes would pass, massaging my faculties of reason until I convinced myself that everything was merely the result of some miscommunication. And I believed that I could convince them, too. If only we could understand each other.

  But suddenly that hope evaporated. I knew I was in trouble. No matter how much I tried to make sense of it—this is all just a mistake . . . somehow it’ll get resolved . . . this can’t be happening to me—I couldn’t deny that it was me there, blindfolded, woozy with fear and fatigue, no clue as to what these men were muttering, what they meant with their guttural grunts, and I thought, I’m fucked. I am truly fucked.

  THE DARK HOUSE

  WHEN YOU SPEND HOURS, DAYS EVEN, handcuffed and blindfolded, surrounded by voices you don’t understand apart from a tone and timbre that could easily be the prelude to more physical abuse and pain, serious questions inevitably crop up: What did I do wrong to get into such a predicament? Have I been flirting with some sort of death wish? Playing chicken with myself in order to feel more alive?