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’