It must have been October, in maybe 1981.  It was a stunning day, having rained and washed all the summer grime out the air, leaving every pine needle glistening.  From my office window I could see Beirut gleaming down there on its broad shelf, surrounded by the blue sea. I had an urgent print job to take to a press so I stuffed my briefcase full of papers and left the office, happy to be out in the cool, clean air.

As I drove down the hill toward Ashrafieh, my head was full of what I would say to the printer, because I needed a rush job, but when I saw a woman standing beside the road I pulled over immediately.  There was very little public transportation in the area at that period, so I had made it policy to pick up women who stood around, hoping for a ride.

Leaning across my little green Nissan was easy, so I shoved the passenger door open to ask her, “Can I take you somewhere?”  Before I could get the words out she had flung herself into the seat, a plump woman with wind-blown hair, a noticeable kind of weariness and disarray about her.  I can still see her socks, the way they were slipping down into her high-heeled shoes.

“To the Saloomi Circle,” she said, the words sounding automatic.

I thought, What does she think I am?  A taxi driver? and said aloud, “I have to turn at Hayek.”

“Wherever you are going, Madame”

Right then I started to sense something unusual. It was the way her eyes darted here and there, bloodshot and wild. A muscle quivered in her cheek.  She seemed to be distracted, maybe terrified. Or crazy.  Yes, I thought. I have picked up somebody who is a little bit insane.

We were passing that building that had three metal shutters, each with a big hole punched through by a rocket, which in itself seemed like a bit of comic insanity. So I thought, Well, I have picked up some kind of desperate human being, but I will be civil anyway.

I asked her, “Have you been waiting long?”  I guess I was expecting her to start raving about the lack of transportation, the way hitchhikers often did, but she became busy with her purse and didn’t answer.  I was watching the heavy traffic developing ahead, seeing only from the corner of my eye her rough hands fumbling with the cheap metal clasp. It was a small clutch purse.

The movement of her hands was compulsive and clumsy.  She was saying, “My son,” as she was ripping a folded piece of newspaper out of the gaudy little purse.  “My son, he is kidnapped.”  Her voice was shrill, her eyes bulging.  “Kidnapped!” she shouted, “Kidnapped!” and she kept thrusting the folded paper closer to my face and slapping it with her fingers.

I needed only a glance to see that what she had in her hand was an ad like the ones we often saw in the papers, a picture of a missing person, a few particulars, a telephone number.

“Kidnapped?  How do you know?”

She told me a story, then, in little jerky pieces. She seemed worried that I didn’t believe her. She would say, “Madame, somebody took him. You understand?  Somebody took him. I have to find him.” She made a clutching motion in the air and then struck her breast bone with her closed hand as she said, “I have to find him.”

I asked questions. He had left their home in Ashrafieh to go to his brother’s house in Ijdeideh, saying, “I’ll be home for lunch.” He never came home.  He never even got to Ijdeideh.

“Between Ashrafieh and Ijdeideh a young man disappears?  In the city streets? In the morning?  It’s not reasonable,” I said, knowing all the time that it didn’t need to be reasonable.

“It happened like that,” she said. And I knew that actually it had happened like that to a thousand young men.

“He was just a boy,” she said and shoved the picture in front of me again.  He was eighteen, she told me. He had a moustache and looked older.

At some point I pulled over to the side of the road and found a scrap of paper in my own purse. I wrote down his name and his brother’s name and the brother’s phone number. I thought that I would want to call someone and know the end of the story, and it seemed important to her to help me get the details right.  I said I would pray for this boy, the precious disappeared son. She said, “Please, Madame.” I promised to pray as though he were my own son.  Indeed, I was thinking of my own son in college in America, barely more than eighteen, feeling what it would be like to have him just disappear like that.

“Two weeks.  Two weeks he didn’t come.”  She held up two thick fingers.  “Fifteen days nobody saw him.”

When I saw her trying to fumble the newspaper clipping back into that little purse, she seemed so weak and rattled that I got worried she might collapse in the street and never get home herself. I tried to encourage her.

“A friend of ours disappeared,” I told her.  “The Syrian Army had him, and we got him back safe.”

“It’s not the Syrians,” she said, sounding bitter for the first time.  I wanted to ask how she knew, but she suddenly cried out, “They will kill him; they will kill him,” using a word that meant to slaughter an animal and covering her mouth with a thick hand.

Suddenly I had this image in my head of a handsome boy with a knife at his throat and I told her, “No. Don’t talk like that.”  And then, feeling desperate myself, I said, “Madame, what can I do to help you?”

“I don’t know.  I go everywhere asking everybody.  I put it in the paper, and nobody calls.”  She jerked her thumb toward the cities on the mountain.  “I have been up there now to see these two big shots, but they won’t do anything.”

“I will pray,” I told her again.  And again, she said, “Please. Pray they don’t kill him.”

I had meant to go on and to pray later at home.  Didn’t I have an appointment somewhere? Instead I leaned on the steering wheel and prayed for this missing boy, while his mother muttered beside me. Afterwards I wiped my eyes; she crossed herself and said, “Thank you.”

“I know God heard us,” I said, because I believed it.  She tucked the paper into her purse.

Pulling into the street again, I asked her, “What is your name?”

She told me, and I gave her my name.

“Honored,” she said, touching her chest.

I promised to call.  I told her that for her son’s sake, we had to keep hoping.

“Yes,” she said.  “We have to hope.”  She seemed much calmer.

At the Hayek intersection I realized that she would need to walk the few blocks to the Saloomi Circle, and I decided to take her there.

“God bless you, Madame,” she said.  “God bless your children and keep them.”

There were taxis standing at Saloomi, and I knew she would find a ride.  I blocked one line of traffic around the circle to let her out, and somebody began honking immediately.

She thanked me again, heaping blessings on me and my children, grabbing my hand and kissing it. But half way out of the car, she turned, holding the door open with the same hand in which she clutched that shiny purse, and she suddenly froze, looking back over her shoulder, and her eyes were great and wild, that hint of insanity on her face again. And she said to me, “Is he dead?”

The question caught me unprepared so that I stammered, with those impatient horns blaring behind, before I said, “No, never.  It’s not possible.” I tried to say it with conviction and authority, because I wanted her to get home and not go stark crazy there in the street, but thatbit of hesitation had betrayed me.  She groaned, “Ya, Allah,” and threw up her hands and left without looking back.

 

I got to the press somehow and did my work.

In the coming months I prayed many times for the disappeared people, mainly one boy whose mother might be going crazy. I called the brother’s phone number many times.  No one ever answered.

In those 15 years of the civil war 17,000 people disappeared.