Free Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius

Sundays, my father would take me to the house of the richest man in Dibbiye, who we called Emile-Bey. It was a great mansion on top of the highest hill in the area. The fishermen from Saadiyat said they could see the red tile roof of Emile-Bey’s house from many miles out at sea.
    “Emile-Bey took an interest in my education. Perhaps because I was a poor Moslem boy and he was a wealthy Maronite who hated the sectarianism of Lebanon. Perhaps because he had no son of his own. I don’t know why. But he tutored me in Arabic, French, and eventually English.
    “When I was fourteen, he arranged for me to go to an English-language school several miles away in the village of Mishrif. He said the era of the French in Lebanon was over. The era of the Americans was beginning.”
    “Was he right, do you think?” asked Rogers.
    “We shall see.”
    “Yes indeed,” said Rogers. “We shall see.”
    “I loved that school,” Fuad continued. “The other students were so much more sophisticated than I was. They wore fine clothes and some of them had travelled abroad. I loved to speak English with them. It became a kind of snobbery. When we were around poor Arab boys in Mishrif, we would always speak English. They must have hated us for it.
    “By the time I was in high school, I loathed my village. I hated the moukhtar, the village leader, who had bad teeth and always had crumbs of food in his mustache. I was embarrassed by my sisters, who were married and already had too many children, and by my cousins, who were poor and stupid. Most of all, I was embarrassed by the backwardness of Arab village life.
    “You cannot know what it was like to be a young Arab in that time, dreaming of the liberation of your people from so much stupidity. In school, that was all we talked about. We gathered around the radio to hear Nasser speak from Cairo on a station called the Voice of the Arabs. We skipped school when Inam Raad and Antun Saade, two famous Syrian nationalists, came to Mishrif and addressed a public meeting. That was when I began to think that America was the answer for the Arabs.”
    “Why?” asked Rogers.
    “I don’t know,” said the Lebanese. “Perhaps because America seemed so pure. And so far away.
    “For whatever reason, I decided then that I would go to the American University of Beirut. Emile-Bey encouraged me and offered to help pay the cost of my studies. And he did something else.”
    “What was that?” asked Rogers.
    “He sent me to America, as a graduation gift, the summer after I finished high school. What a trip it was! The flight took nearly seventy hours by propeller plane. We stopped in Paris, Dublin, Newfoundland, and New York. I felt as if I had landed in another world.”
    “Where did you stay in America?”
    “With an American family who were friends of Emile-Bey. A doctor’s family. It was paradise. They had a swimming pool and fruit orchards. They took me to movies and camping trips in the mountains. Can you imagine what that was like? For an Arab boy whose childhood memories were of dust and mud and chickens in the yard? When I got back to Lebanon at the end of the summer, I was in love.”
    “With who?”
    “With America.”
    Fuad paused. He looked away from Rogers and toward the window and the lights of Beirut beyond.
    “Can I have a drink?” asked Fuad.
    “Sure,” said Rogers. “What would you like?”
    “Whisky.”
    Rogers returned from the kitchen with two large tumblers of Scotch.
    “You were talking about falling in love with America,” said Rogers.
    “Lebanon must have been jealous,” said Fuad. “For it soon took its revenge.”
    “What happened?”
    “In 1964, when I was a senior at the American University of Beirut, the dean of students called me into his office one day and told me that my father had been killed—murdered—in a political quarrel. He told me that it was too dangerous for me to go to Saadiyat-al-Arab and that I would have to stay in Beirut for a few days.