Illusions, Delusions, Allusions

He had a habit of never wanting to pay the full freight for his reading material. So his large and growing library of books are mostly of second-hand vintage. Not that he isn't particular about the shape they're in. He will buy second-hand books only if they're in fairly pristine shape. He does have his standards. He has been known to relent, however, if he comes across a publication he recognizes as hard to come by, one that has been well leafed, but that he decides he must have.

The copy of Inshallah, the novel by Oriana Fallaci, was in prime shape. Clearly, whoever originally owned it took good care of it. That is a presumption that might of course not be the case. It might have been bought with the thoughtful intention of reading it, but placed on a shelf somewhere and forgotten, until someone got tired of looking at it, dusting it, and gave it up to a second-hand book shop. It might have represented a gift that was unappreciated; the giftee having no intention of reading it, and that might have preserved its appearance.

Whatever the case he was intrigued by the very concept of Oriana Fallaci having written novels. He 'knew' her only by reputation, as a bold, enterprisingly fearless news interviewer. She would undertake to strive for interviews with dictators, tyrants, champions of justice, prisoners, activists, royalty, to question them audaciously and report in her own inimitable way on the results of those interviews. Her formidable reputation for honesty and clarity won her a large following.

She was granted interviews with reclusive personalities not given to permitting themselves to be interrogated and reported upon by others of her profession. Iran's revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini, for example. She was given exclusive rights to publishing details that were withheld from others. She had always captured his imagination, a woman in her prime and beyond, once beautiful, obviously aware of her beauty and its effect on people, but utterly devoted to her craft of revealing the truth to her readers.

He thought he knew as much as there was to know about Lebanon, that once-proud country with its fabulous landscape and multifarious populations. As much as anyone living in the West might, acquainted through the electronic media with expatriate Lebanese whose unquestioned mastery of comedy or drama or literature gave them a wide audience. Of whom his parents were so proud.

And the sinister, dark side of the country with warring sectarian violence and brutal abductions and assassinations. Reading Fallaci's novel, was a revelation, an introduction to Gehenna-on-Earth. Little wonder, he thought, his parents refused to discuss the country. He was not more than one-quarter of the way through the novel, yet. Its bleak, dark message of failed humanity should not have bothered him as much as it did, but it did.

And odd thing to happen, he couldn't understand why, when he'd originally leafed through the book carefully before committing to its purchase and he hadn't come across what had been inserted in it, until the packet fell out, last night. A kind of booklet, (Pictures to-day ... treasures to-morrow - Available at all Tamblyn Drug Stores: Tel-Vision Prints) as it were, with photographs fastened within it.

The pictures were old. He could see that immediately; black-and-white; hairstyles and clothing divulging their agedness. Reminding him of the old photographs in the family albums his parents had collected of people he had never met and never wanted to meet, but meaning something to his parents, obviously.

When he turned them over, the dates were there, place-names and peoples' names. Taken in 1952, at an RCAF base in Chatham, New Brunswick. And among the names of people, there, incredibly, was his own name, scrawled alongside the others. He quickly turned the photo over to more closely scrutinize the faces of three men standing, two women and two children in the foreground, kneeling.

He had no idea who they were, although there was a sense of familiarity, looking at them which he ascribed entirely to similar photos he'd seen in his parents' albums with war-time base housing in the background, and civilian personnel in the foreground. And there, labelling one of the middle-aged men, was his name.

Who were the photos representative of? How peculiar that an uncommon name like his was present in such an unlikely place. Related, he wondered...? Not likely, none of his people had ever been there to his knowledge, nor with the RCAF. He turned to the novel flyleaf, but the presumed name of the original owner had been too carefully blacked out.


Lebanon Photo: Beirut at dusk