THE PAINTING NOT YET FINISHED
A Novel
It was nearly four in the afternoon when Rima Najjar set down her brushes and stepped back, twice, to take in the canvas stretched before her on the tilted table.
A Flemish work, seventeenth century, it had come to the museum’s restoration wing three weeks earlier, buried under yellowed varnish that had swallowed the central face whole: a woman seated by a window, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on some point beyond the frame that no one would ever see — as though she were waiting for someone who was never going to come.
“There’s still a stubborn patch in the left corner,” said Klara, her colleague, approaching with two cups of coffee. “You’ve been at this since morning without a single break.”
Rima smiled and took one of the cups.
“The face is finally coming through. Do you see it? The layer underneath was hiding something completely different from what we expected. She isn’t smiling the way we thought. She’s… uneasy.”
“Maybe she was waiting for a letter that never arrived,” Klara said, sipping her coffee. “That’s how it always goes with these old canvases — a whole story buried under a skin of varnish, and here we are, spending our lives scraping it away with the patience of monks.”
Rima laughed quietly. This was the part of her work she loved above all else: the moment truth surfaces from beneath the accumulated layers of time and neglect.
Thirty-four years of a life not yet long, fifteen of them spent in this quiet room overlooking a cobbled street in the heart of Vienna, giving old faces back their forgotten features.
She had been born in Damascus, though of that city she carried little more than scattered fragments: the smell of jasmine in a courtyard whose shape she could no longer quite recall, a woman’s voice singing in a narrow kitchen, a large warm hand holding her small one as they crossed a crowded street. These memories were like torn photographs, their edges lost for good — no matter how she tried, she could never piece them into a single, whole scene.
The family had left when she was four, under circumstances she had never fully understood. Her father spoke of it only with great caution whenever she asked, and her mother would weep silently whenever Damascus came up in passing conversation, then change the subject quickly. They settled in Vienna, where her father began modestly in trade and, over time, built a stable life. Then both her parents died together in a car accident on a mountain road, when Rima was sixteen, returning from a short school trip she had not gone on — a survival she had spent years regarding as an arbitrary mercy she did not deserve.
Her uncle Kamal took her in from that fateful night onward, though he spent most of his time between Dubai and Beirut — a successful, perpetually busy businessman, content with brief, regular phone calls and generous transfers that covered the whole of her university years but never once filled the real, familial absence she carried. He was always kind to her, courteous, generous — but distant too, in a way she could never quite name, as though a pane of clear glass stood between them: visible, but impossible to cross, however hard she tried.
“Will you come to the private viewing tonight?” Klara asked, breaking into her thoughts. “The auction house is opening a new gallery — there are two pieces that might interest you, from a private Syrian collection that just arrived from Istanbul.”
“Maybe,” Rima said, without lifting her eyes from the canvas. “I just finished this section, and I want to fix the layer before I leave.”
She worked in silence for another hour, drawing the solvent-soaked cotton gently over the surface, and new details kept surfacing: a faint shadow beneath the left eye, a small embroidered rose at the edge of her sleeve, a thin thread of light falling across her brow from a window that appeared nowhere in the painting itself. These were the moments that made her forget time entirely — when the canvas stopped being an inert, faded surface and became a window onto an entire life: someone who had lived, and loved, and waited, and perhaps died still waiting for something that never came.
Professor Steiner, head of the department, passed by, as he always did at the end of the day, making his rounds of the restoration studios. He was a man in his sixties.
“Beautiful work, as always, Rima,” he said, examining the canvas. “By the way — have you heard about the group of Syrian pieces that arrived at the auction house this week? Apparently from the estate of an old Damascene family, sold off after the death of the last heir in Istanbul. You might want to take a look, given your background.”
“Klara mentioned something, yes,” Rima said, feeling, for a passing moment, a flicker of curiosity she had no way of knowing would become, within a few short hours, a small detail in a much larger picture than she could imagine.
“You should,” Steiner said, turning to go. “These scattered little collections sometimes hold surprises no one expects.”
Rima smiled politely and said nothing more, not yet knowing how precisely her director’s offhand words would turn out to be prophecy.
By the time she left the museum it was past seven, the street washed in the pale orange evening light Vienna wears so well at this time of year. She walked, as always, toward her flat in the ninth district, over the small stone bridge across the canal, stopping at the bakery that sold fresh rye bread, then at the old flower seller who had known her by name for years.
“One white rose today, Fräulein Rima?” the man asked, with his usual smile.
“No, thank you, Herr Weiss. Not today,” she said, smiling back. “Something tells me this week won’t be needing flowers.”
She had no idea, walking home at that quiet pace, how wrong that offhand sentence would turn out to be.
When she reached the entrance of her building, she found Herr Berger, the elderly doorman who had worked there for two decades, waiting for her with an expression she had never seen on his usually placid face — something between bewilderment and curiosity.
“Fräulein Najjar, a parcel came for you today. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be honest.”
“A parcel? I haven’t ordered anything, and I don’t remember giving anyone my address recently.”
“It certainly wasn’t left by any ordinary courier,” Berger said, reaching behind his desk for a rectangular wooden box, wrapped in coarse linen and bound with sturdy jute cord. “A strange-looking man, tall, wearing a dark overcoat despite the warm weather. He barely spoke — just asked me to hand it to you personally when you arrived, then walked off before I could even ask his name. No sender’s address on the box, no postage stamp, not even your name printed the usual way — it’s written by hand, and elegantly so.”
Rima took the box carefully. It was heavier than she expected, and the old wood carried a smell of dust and time that reminded her of the museum’s storage rooms. She looked at the name written on the wrapping in dark black ink:
Rima Najjar
in an elegant Arabic hand, so precise it looked more like a painter’s script than ordinary handwriting, and beneath it, in smaller letters:
To be opened alone only.
A light shiver ran up her arms despite the warmth of the entryway. No one knew her full Arabic name, written so formally, except the small handful of family she had left.
“Thank you, Herr Berger,” she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. “It must be a late gift from a relative.”
“Perhaps,” the old man said, though his look was not entirely convinced. “Take care of yourself, Fräulein Najjar. That man left a strange impression on me. I couldn’t tell you exactly how to describe it.”
She climbed to her flat on the fourth floor and set the box on the dining table without taking off her coat. She sat before it for long minutes, studying it as though it were some living thing that might suddenly move. Finally, after pouring herself a small glass of white wine, she loosened the knot slowly and lifted the wooden lid.
Inside, wrapped in layers of soft white tissue paper, lay a painting, small — no more than fifty by forty centimeters. She peeled the paper away, layer after layer, her fingers trembling slightly, driven by a curiosity that was professional before it was anything else.
Then she saw the face.
Her heart stopped for one full moment, and she felt as though the air in the room had frozen.
It was an oil portrait of a woman seated at a slight angle, wearing a navy-blue dress with a simple white collar, her dark hair gathered behind her head with an elegant carelessness. But the face —
The face was hers. Exactly hers.
Not a passing resemblance, not some vague family likeness she could explain away with shared genes. Every detail matched, precisely: the curve of the left eyebrow, arched fractionally higher than the right in that familiar look of silent questioning; the small mole just beneath the right corner of the mouth, sitting in its exact true place; even the way she tilted her head slightly to the left when lost in deep thought — a habit Klara had pointed out in her more than once.
Rima sank slowly into the chair, her knees barely holding her, her eyes fixed unblinking on the painting, as though waiting for the painted face to move and say something that would explain all this sudden strangeness.
“This is impossible,” she whispered to herself, in Arabic — a language she rarely used when alone in her Viennese flat. “There has to be a logical explanation.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, and an image surfaced in her mind that had not visited her in years: a small courtyard paved in white stone, a jasmine vine climbing a wall painted pale blue, two women sitting on a wooden bench — one holding her small hand, the other sitting a little behind them, in shadow, her face impossible to make out clearly no matter how hard memory tried to bring it into focus.
Why now, of all moments, had it come back to her?
She opened her eyes again on the silent painted face before her, and felt something deep inside her, dormant for so many years, beginning slowly to wake.
She fetched the professional magnifying glass she always kept in her work bag and began examining the canvas with an expert’s eye. The paint layer was unquestionably old, with the fine, even craquelure known professionally as craquelure proper, consistent with an age of no less than thirty to forty years. The canvas was a heavy linen, of a type once common in certain workshops of the Middle East during that exact era.
She leaned closer to study the paint at the edges of the face, noting the handling of the shadow beneath the chin — a delicate gradation between burnt umber and pale red, a technique she knew well from her studies of an artistic school that had flourished in Beirut and Damascus during the 1980s. This was not the hand of an amateur, by any measure. It was the hand of a seasoned artist, one whose signature, given enough time, she could have picked out among a thousand other canvases.
She turned the painting over with great care to examine its back. There, written in faint pencil on the coarse backing canvas, was a date, still legible despite the years:
Autumn 1987
and beneath it, two Arabic letters, interlaced in the distinctive style of an artist’s signature:
A. H.
Rima stared at the date for a long time. She had been born in the spring of 1992. By every piece of physical evidence before her trained eyes, this painting had been made five full years before her own birth — bearing a face that matched her present one with uncanny precision.
She called Klara at once, her fingers trembling slightly.
“Klara, I need your opinion on something very strange. Now, if you can.”
Less than twenty minutes later, Klara was standing in Rima’s flat, staring at the painting in unbroken silence for over a full minute, her expression sliding gradually from curiosity into open astonishment.
“Rima,” she said finally, her voice low and taut, “is this… some kind of joke?”
“No. I didn’t ask anyone for anything, I swear to you.”
“But that’s your face exactly, Rima. Even the mole is in exactly the right place.”
“And this date on the back — 1987. Five full years before I was born. I’ve checked the math three times.”
The two friends spent the next hour examining the painting from every possible angle, comparing its details against old photographs of Rima in search of any logical explanation. Klara finally suggested that Rima take the painting to the museum’s textile and pigment analysis lab, to establish its true age with scientific precision.
“I’ll do it tomorrow morning,” Rima said. “But please, don’t tell anyone at the museum yet.”
“Of course. But Rima… doesn’t this frighten you? Someone knows your full Arabic name, knows your face down to the finest detail, years before you were even born, and then sends you the painting in secret, through some mysterious man?”
Rima admitted to herself that fear had already begun creeping into her chest, from the very moment she had lifted that first sheet of tissue paper from the face of that strange woman who was her, and was not her, both at once, in a contradiction she did not understand.
Before leaving, Klara said: “Let’s think about this logically. First: this could be a very skillfully forged painting, made recently to look old, using a real photograph of you.”
“I thought of that. But the craquelure in the paint is entirely natural — not faked, not by any method I know of.”
“Second possibility, then: there really is another woman, from an earlier generation, who resembles you to this uncanny degree.”
“But the mole, Klara. And the eyebrow. And the tilt of the head. That isn’t the coincidence of a general resemblance.”
Klara fell silent for a moment, then said, more gravely:
“Then there’s a third possibility left — the one I think you’ve actually been considering since the start: that someone in your family, maybe an entire generation, has been hiding something essential from you. A story you were never told. And that this painting, and whoever sent it, is trying to break that old family silence.”
Rima looked at her friend for a long moment, then at the painting, then nodded slowly — as though finally agreeing, if only in some silent place within herself, to the possibility she had been avoiding facing for the past two hours.
After Klara left, close to midnight, Rima stayed alone in her flat, sitting before the painting until very late. She tried to read, to watch something light on television, to busy herself with some small household task — but her eyes kept returning, as though pulled by a will of their own, to that face hanging on the easel in the corner of the living room.
Before she could bring herself to think of calling her uncle, she sat at her laptop and searched for “A. H.,” together with “painter,” “Damascus,” and “1987,” and got back a scatter of results that meant nothing. She felt a rising frustration — she who was used to finding precise answers to every question of a work’s authenticity, now utterly powerless before a mystery that concerned her own face.
She hesitated over calling her uncle Kamal, despite the time difference. Their relationship had always been courteous but distant. Whenever, over the years, she had asked him about details from her childhood in Damascus, he answered in vague, clipped generalities, then changed the subject.
Around one in the morning, her phone suddenly rang. An unknown number, with no clear country prefix.
She finally answered. “Hello?”
Silence on the other end, then a man’s voice — low, calm in a way that promised more than the words themselves let on — speaking fluent, correct Arabic in an accent whose origin was hard to place.
“Fräulein Najjar. Good evening. I hope you won’t rush to ask too many questions, too quickly, of people you don’t yet know. Not every resemblance in this world deserves to be uncovered at once, and not every old secret should be opened without proper preparation.”
“Who are you? Who sent me this painting?”
“I am not the enemy you’re picturing in this moment, but I am not the friend you need either — not yet. A time will come when you understand everything. But until then, keep the painting somewhere safe, and don’t show it to anyone. And please — don’t call your uncle Kamal about it now.”
Rima’s heart genuinely stopped at the mention of her uncle’s name.
“How do you know my uncle?”
“I want you to stay alive, and to stay as you are, without anything in your life changing before you’re ready for it to. There are people who want this painting, and the truth it carries, to remain buried forever. I am not one of them.”
“Then who are you?”
“Because some truths, spoken too quickly, without proper preparation, destroy more than they heal. Trust me in this one thing: I will not let you walk this road alone, when its true time comes.”
“And what if I refuse to wait?”
A short silence followed.
“Then I’ll be forced to move faster than I had planned, and that could put us both in a danger neither of us is ready for yet. Please — just give me a little time.”
But the line had already gone dead, leaving her in the heavy silence of the flat, the sound of her own pulse the only thing she could clearly hear in that moment.
She stood in the middle of the half-lit living room for long minutes, her eyes moving ceaselessly between the now-dark phone screen and the painted face watching her from the corner of the room with an unshakable calm — as though it had known all along, since it was painted five years before her own birth, that this exact night would come one day.
She did not yet know that this strange call was only the first thread in a complicated web that would, over the coming weeks, stretch all the way to a Damascus she barely remembered, to a family secret buried with great care more than thirty years before, and to a man she had not yet met face to face, but who had been watching her from a distance for a very long time.
At last she sat down on the sofa, hugging her knees to her chest like a frightened child, and looked for a long while at the painting in the room’s half-darkness, trying to convince herself that all of this was some great misunderstanding that would resolve itself in the light of morning. But some part of her, deep down — a part she had not known existed until that very night — was whispering something entirely different: that her life, everything she had known and grown used to and built, painstakingly, over thirty-four years, was about to change, irrevocably, and completely.
The next morning, when Rima woke after a restless, sleep-thin night, she found a single text message on her phone, sent at exactly four a.m. from the same unknown number — a single short sentence, but enough to freeze the blood in her veins:
“You’re not the only one.”
Directly beneath the sentence, a small image, its quality deliberately low: another photograph of the same painting, but from an entirely different angle, showing that part of the original canvas had been carefully folded behind the wooden frame, hidden deliberately from direct view. In it, the vague outline of a second face — another woman, standing behind the seated woman in the foreground, her face left unfinished, as though the painter had suddenly stopped, perhaps interrupted, before finishing her final features.
A face that resembled Rima’s too, disturbingly so, to a striking degree — but not quite it, not entirely, once she looked closely at the slight differences her trained eyes were slowly beginning to catch.
She stood a long time in her small kitchen, her morning coffee going cold, untouched. She tried writing a reply to the unknown number:
“Who are you? Who is the second woman in the painting?”
But she deleted the sentence before sending it. She felt that any word she wrote might be an irreversible mistake, in a game whose rules she did not yet know.
She thought of the call from the night before, of the stranger’s specific warning against contacting her uncle Kamal, and of the painful irony that, only hours earlier, she had been on the verge of doing exactly that. How had he known she would be thinking, precisely, of calling him?
She glanced at the clock; she needed to get ready for the museum, where she would take the painting, in secret, to the analysis lab as she had promised Klara. But she suddenly felt that this would not be enough — that the answers she was searching for would not be found in a scientific report on the age of canvas and paint, but somewhere far further away, a place she had not visited in thirty full years.
As she set the cold coffee cup aside, she suddenly remembered Professor Steiner’s words from the day before: a collection of Syrian pieces that had arrived at the auction house, from the estate of an old Damascene family, sold off after the death of the last heir in Istanbul.
A cold shiver ran through her whole body. Was it mere coincidence? Or was there some hidden thread connecting that mysterious collection to the painting that had reached her the night before? She decided, in that exact moment, that her first stop this morning would not be the analysis lab, as she had promised Klara, but the auction house itself.
She stood before the large mirror by the entrance before going out, looking at her reflection for a long moment, as though comparing it, without quite meaning to, with the painted face hanging behind her in the room. It was herself, unmistakably — yet she suddenly felt that another face was staring back at her from somewhere deep within that reflection, a face she had never seen before, yet somehow, strangely, familiar.
She shut the door behind her and went down the stairs at a faster pace than usual, carrying in her bag the painting, carefully wrapped once more, and in her chest one large question beginning to swallow all the smaller ones that had kept her awake through the night:
Who was she, truly, if she was not — as she had believed for thirty-four years — simply an ordinary woman born in Damascus who had emigrated as a child to Vienna?
For the first time in many years, Rima found herself thinking seriously, and this time with full awareness, about traveling to Damascus.
The auction house occupied an elegant stone building near the great ring boulevard at the heart of Vienna, its façade lined with tall windows from which dark velvet curtains hung.
Rima stood before the grand glass door for a full minute before pushing it open, trying to remember the pretext she had rehearsed on her way there: that she had come purely in a professional capacity, a restoration expert whose curiosity was simply part of the job — not a woman chasing the ghost of her own face across three decades.
She was met by a woman in her forties, dressed with a studied elegance, who introduced herself as Veronika Hofer, head of the Oriental department.
“Fräulein Najjar! What a pleasant surprise. Professor Steiner mentioned you might come by. Please, the collection is laid out in the back room for the private viewing.”
Rima followed her down a long corridor lined with paintings from different eras, aware that her heart was beating faster than any routine professional visit warranted. When she entered the room, she paused for a moment at the threshold.
The pieces were arranged on tables draped in black cloth: an engraved copper platter, a set of small manuscripts, an old silver necklace, and on the last table, at the far end of the room, three paintings propped against a wooden stand.
She approached with slow, deliberate steps, trying not to betray the tension gripping her chest. The first painting was a landscape of an orchard, unsigned. The second, a portrait of an old man in a fez, apparently from the turn of the twentieth century.
The third stopped her cold.
It was a small group photograph, originally black-and-white and then hand-tinted with light watercolors in the fashion of the time, of an entire family standing before a traditional Damascene house, its carved wooden door not unlike the ones she had seen in books about old Damascus.
In the front row sat two women who looked almost identical, wearing matching dresses that differed only slightly at the collar, each with a hand resting on the other’s shoulder.
Nothing in the photograph proved anything outright, but something in the shape of the two faces, in the way they sat, in that eerie symmetry between two women who looked like twins, made Rima’s hand tremble as she reached to take hold of the frame.
“Do you know who they are?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound casual, unstrained.
Veronika stepped closer and checked the small identification card fixed to the back of the frame. “The notes that came with the collection are frustratingly sparse, I’m afraid — most of the original documentation was lost or never kept. But this says: ‘The Najjar family of Damascus, circa 1965.'”
The floor seemed to tilt slightly beneath Rima’s feet.
“Najjar? That’s… that’s my family name.”
Veronika’s eyebrows lifted in genuine surprise. “Really? What a striking coincidence! Though Najjar is a fairly common name across the Middle East, isn’t it? Probably no real connection.”
Rima didn’t answer. Her eyes stayed fixed on the two nearly identical women in the photograph, searching their faded features for something like an answer.
Standing directly behind them, with unmistakable confidence, was a middle-aged man, his hand resting on the shoulder of one of them specifically — the woman seated on the right — in a gesture that carried something closer to ownership than the usual paternal warmth.
“May I see the rest of the documentation that came with this particular piece?” she asked finally. “As a restoration specialist, I might be able to help document the collection more thoroughly.”
Veronika hesitated a moment, then said, “The complete file is kept in the archive, but I can show you a scan of it. Come with me.”
She led her to a small office behind the room and opened a digital file on her computer screen. “The whole collection came to us through a lawyer in Istanbul, representing the estate of a woman who passed away last month — the last living member of a particular branch of the family. Her name… here it is — ‘Wafa Najjar,’ born 1961, died in Istanbul with no direct heirs.”
Rima read the name three times in a row, as though she expected the letters to rearrange themselves if she stared long enough. She had never heard that name in her life — not from her father, not from her uncle Kamal, not in any passing conversation or family gathering. And yet something in the way the name was written in the file — an old phone number crossed out by hand in the margin of the document — made her feel she wasn’t looking at a stranger’s name at all, but at one piece of a puzzle that had been deliberately kept from her, her whole life.
“Could I get the contact information for the lawyer you worked with?” she asked, trying to hide the slight tremor in her voice. “For documentation purposes only, of course.”
Veronika looked at her with a flicker of curiosity, as though she was beginning to sense that this was more than passing professional interest, but she made no comment.
“Of course, I’ll get you his card. His name is Mr. Ünal, he has an office in Nişantaşı.”
While Veronika searched for the card, Rima took one last look at the screen, at the list of items filed under the same estate. One entry had not been placed on display, described in the barest terms: “Personal correspondence journal, in Arabic, not for sale, reserved for potential heirs, if any come forward.”
She read the last line twice. “Potential heirs, if any come forward.” As if someone, even in this dry legal document, had known that one day someone would come looking.
Rima left the auction house with the sun still high in the midday sky, but she felt as though she had stepped out of a dark tunnel into a light her eyes could no longer easily bear. She sat on a stone bench in the neighboring garden and took out her phone to call Klara, then stopped.
She thought of the stranger’s words the night before: “Not every old secret should be opened without proper preparation.” And yet here she was, opening one door after another with her own hands, feeling no regret at all — only a growing hunger for knowledge, as though thirty-three years of deferred questions had suddenly all woken at once inside her.
She looked at the small card Veronika had given her: “Ünal Demir, Attorney, Nişantaşı, Istanbul.”
She sent Klara a short message: “Not going to the lab today. I’ll tell you everything tonight. Need to book a flight.”
Less than two minutes later her phone buzzed with a reply. It wasn’t from Klara.
It was from the same unknown number.
“I noticed you visited the auction house. I warned you against rushing, not against stopping. If you’re truly set on going to Istanbul, don’t give the lawyer Ünal your full name before you and I meet face to face. I’ll be at a café near the Central Station, tomorrow at four in the afternoon. Come alone.”
Rima stared at the message for a long time, a cold feeling creeping into her fingertips despite the warmth of the sun overhead. How had he learned of her visit to the auction house within a matter of hours? Was he actually watching her, or did someone inside the auction house itself report her movements to him?
She looked around the garden, at the passersby, at the windows overlooking her from the neighboring buildings, wondering for the first time whether some eye was watching her at that very moment, from a place she couldn’t identify.
And for the first time since the wooden box had arrived at her building’s door, the fear gripping her chest was no longer just about the mystery itself, but about a new and unsettling realization: she was no longer searching for the truth alone in the dark, as she had believed — someone had been walking beside her in that same darkness from the very beginning, step by step, without her ever once seeing him.
Rima spent that night suspended somewhere between waking and sleep, tossing in bed while her mind kept reassembling the same puzzle over and over: a face, a photograph, a name, a message. When she called Klara the next morning to tell her what she had found at the auction house, there was a long silence on the other end of the line before her friend spoke.
“Rima, listen to me carefully. I know you won’t stop, and I’m not going to waste my breath trying to talk you out of it, because I know you well enough to know it’s pointless. But I refuse to let you go meet a man you know nothing about, in a café, alone, with no one else knowing where you are.”
“I’ll send you the exact location before I go. And I’ll stay somewhere public the whole time.”
“That’s not enough, and you know it.” Klara sighed audibly down the phone. “At the very least, let me sit at another table in the same café, from a distance, without him knowing I’m with you.”
Rima hesitated for a moment, then agreed, feeling a quiet relief she wasn’t ready to admit even to herself: that she was, in fact, afraid — more afraid than she had allowed herself to show.
Before heading to the café, Rima stopped by the museum’s analysis lab, where her old colleague Jürgen, the pigment and textile specialist, was waiting for her with the results of a test she’d had him run in secret two days earlier, on a tiny sample from the edge of the painting.
“The result is conclusive, Rima,” Jürgen said, flipping through his papers. “The radiocarbon dating of the canvas, and the composition analysis of the oil pigments — both point clearly to a period between 1985 and 1990. No trace of any modern materials, no sign of any known forgery technique. The painting is authentic, and genuinely old, as we thought.”
Rima nodded slowly, as though she had been expecting exactly this result, and yet she felt an added weight settle on her chest when she heard the final scientific confirmation. There was no room left for doubt now, no space left for the hope that all of this was simply an elaborate trick about to unravel at any moment.
“One more thing,” Jürgen added, lowering his voice though they were alone in the lab. “I found a very faint trace of a second paint layer beneath the visible one, specifically in the upper right corner. It looks like the artist began painting something there, then deliberately covered it before finishing. I can’t tell what it was without an infrared scan at a more specialized lab.”
At a quarter to four exactly, Rima walked into the café near the Central Station, a small place dominated by dark wood and the smell of freshly roasted coffee. She chose a table by the window, from where she could see the door clearly. Klara sat several tables away, pretending to be absorbed in her phone.
At four o’clock sharp, a man in his mid-forties walked in — tall, as Berger had described, but his coat this time was light-colored, less severe than she had pictured. He walked straight to her table without hesitation, without scanning the room, as though he had known exactly where she’d be sitting before he even walked in.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, sitting down directly across from her, in the same calm voice she had heard on that first call. His face was ordinary in an unsettling way — features that drew no attention and yet weren’t easy to forget, calm brown eyes carrying something closer to old grief than to threat.
“My name is Nabil. I won’t give you my family name for now — not because I don’t trust you, but for reasons you’ll understand later.”
“And why should I trust you?” Rima asked directly, trying to make her voice sound stronger than she felt.
Nabil gave a faint, sad smile. “You shouldn’t have to. I haven’t asked you to. I’m only asking you to listen, and then decide for yourself.” He ordered a coffee from a passing waiter, then went on. “I knew Wafa Najjar. I worked for her for many years, since I was a young man in Istanbul. She was a woman carrying a very heavy secret, and she spent the last twenty years of her life trying to find the right way to bring it to you, without destroying your life in the process.”
“Who was she, to me?” Rima whispered, feeling her voice suddenly threatening to fail her.
Nabil looked at her for a long moment, as though weighing every word he was about to say on some precise, unerring scale.
“She was your mother’s aunt. The elder sister of a woman named Lamis, who was — if all the evidence I have is correct — your true grandmother. Not the woman you knew by that name in your family.”
Rima froze in place. “That’s impossible. My grandmother died years before I was born, I know that for certain — my father used to speak of her sometimes.”
“Your father,” Nabil said, with a gentleness that hurt, “only knew part of the truth. He may never have known the whole of it before he died. The woman who raised him, the one he believed his whole life was his real mother, was Salma — Lamis’s twin. They exchanged places, in extraordinary circumstances, in 1988, for reasons Salma herself never expected to last more than a few months.”
Rima felt the room turning slowly around her. “And… Anwar Hilmi?” she asked, remembering the initials signed on the back of the painting.
For the first time since he’d sat down, real hesitation showed on Nabil’s face. “He was the man who painted Lamis, that autumn, in Damascus. He was also…” He paused, as though recalculating what should be said now and what should wait. “He was also the reason Lamis disappeared, in December of that same year. No one saw her alive after that date.”
A heavy silence fell between them. From a distance, Klara watched the scene with clear worry on her face, unable to hear the words but seeing plainly that something enormous was unfolding at that table.
“So Salma, who raised my father, is the same one who…” Rima couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I don’t know the full details of what happened to Lamis, or Salma’s true role in it. That’s exactly what Wafa was trying to uncover in the final years of her life, before the illness caught up with her. She left you a journal of letters, kept in Istanbul, which she believed held the answers she’d searched for her whole life and never fully found.”
Rima looked at him for a long moment. “Why you? Why are you the one telling me all this, and not the lawyer, or my uncle Kamal?”
Nabil straightened in his seat and glanced around, a movement almost too quick to notice, the habit of someone who had lived cautiously for many years. “Because your uncle Kamal,” he said finally, his voice lower than before, “is exactly the one who does not want this truth to ever come to light. And he has, for many years, put no small effort into keeping it that way.”
Nabil left the café after leaving her a small white card bearing nothing but a handwritten phone number, no name, no address. “Call this number when you arrive in Istanbul. Not before. And please, don’t tell the lawyer Ünal anything you heard today. Let him think you’re simply a distant relative checking on the estate — nothing more.” Then he rose, slipped between the tables, and disappeared into the crowd of the Central Station with striking speed, as though he knew every exit of that place by heart.
Klara rushed to her table the moment the man vanished from sight. “Rima, you’re completely pale. What did he tell you?”
Rima sat silent for a few moments, trying to find some starting point for what she had just heard — something that would make the story sound plausible, said out loud in a noisy café in the middle of Vienna. Finally, she told Klara everything, word by word, while her friend listened with her eyes widening further and further.
When she finished, Klara stayed quiet for a long while, then said in a low voice, “So the woman who raised your father isn’t your real grandmother? And your uncle Kamal knows, and has been hiding this for decades?”
Rima nodded slowly, unable to say another word in that moment.
“Rima, you can’t believe every word a stranger you just met tells you. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he has some hidden interest you don’t know about.”
“I know that,” Rima said finally. “But the photograph at the auction house, and Wafa’s name, and the date written on the back of the painting… all these details can’t just be invented. There’s a real thread here, even if the man isn’t honest about every detail.”
On her way home, Rima stopped by the museum once more, and went down to the archive in the basement, where old exhibition catalogs and records of cultural exchange with other museums, going back decades, were kept. The archivist, an elderly woman named Frau Wertheim, knew Rima well from her many research visits over the years.
“I’m looking for any mention of a Syrian painter named Anwar Hilmi — possibly an exhibition planned in the late eighties,” Rima said, trying to make her question sound like routine academic research.
The archivist searched her old computers and paper records for over half an hour before returning with a thin, dusty folder.
“I found exactly one thing,” she said, opening the folder to a specific page. “Correspondence between our museum and a cultural institute in Damascus, dated November 1987, discussing preparations for a joint exhibition of a promising young artist named Anwar Hilmi, planned to be held in Vienna in the spring of 1988. But the correspondence stops abruptly after that, with no explanation. No later mention of the exhibition, and none of its cancellation — as though the file was simply closed and never reopened.”
Rima looked at the date of the last letter in the folder: December 12, 1987. The exact same month Nabil had mentioned — the month Lamis had disappeared.
“May I take a photo of these pages?” she asked, her voice nearly choking.
The archivist agreed without hesitation, unaware of the weight those creased pages carried for the woman standing before her.
That night, Rima sat in her flat before her laptop, a flight-booking page open in front of her, her finger hesitating over the confirm button. Vienna–Istanbul, a morning flight two days out.
She looked at the painting hanging in the corner of the room, at Lamis’s face — her own face, precisely — and for a moment felt as though the painted eyes were silently urging her forward, despite every warning, despite the vague danger beginning to take shape on the horizon.
She thought of her uncle Kamal, of all those brief calls over the years, of a distance she had always taken for nothing more than the preoccupation of a busy businessman, and now, in light of what she had heard from Nabil, that distance took on a new and troubling meaning: a man carrying a heavy secret, keeping space between himself and her because he feared she might one day discover what he was hiding.
She pressed the confirm button at last. The screen flashed with a green booking confirmation.
Before shutting down the computer, she hesitated a moment, then opened her contacts, her finger lingering long over the name “Uncle Kamal.” She remembered Nabil’s first warning: “Don’t call your uncle Kamal about it now.” But she also felt that total silence toward him, while she was about to fly to Istanbul to chase a secret that was, after all, his own, felt like a kind of betrayal in itself — even if he was the one who had betrayed her trust first, by hiding the truth all these years.
In the end, she closed the phone without calling, choosing instead to write a short text, neutral enough not to raise his suspicion: “Uncle Kamal, I’ll be traveling to Istanbul for a few days for work related to the museum. Just wanted you to know.”
The reply came within minutes — faster than she was used to from him: “Istanbul? For what exactly? Is everything all right, Rima?”
She read the message twice, feeling out its written tone for signs of real worry hiding behind the neutral words. For the first time in her life, she felt she wasn’t just reading a message from her distant, busy uncle, but reading a message from a man trying, in his usual polite, quiet way, to find out exactly how much she knew, and how far she had gotten.
She wrote back a brief reply: “Everything’s fine. I’ll call you when I’m back.” Then she switched the phone off completely and put it in the drawer farthest from her bed, as if she wanted to put some distance, even symbolic, between herself and the voice of a man she was beginning, for the first time in her life, to wonder if she had ever really known at all.
The plane landed at Istanbul airport at midday, under a pale gray sky that threatened rain not yet fallen. From the window of the taxi, Rima watched the city unfold before her: slender minarets breaking the skyline, buildings stacked across overlapping hills, and old wooden houses here and there resisting the creep of modernity with quiet stubbornness. She had never visited Istanbul before, and felt, for one strange moment, that she was approaching something like a threshold — a city that was neither the Damascus she barely remembered, nor the Vienna she had lived her whole conscious life in, but a way station in between, as though fate had chosen it deliberately to be the door through which she passed between two lives.
She settled into a small hotel in Nişantaşı, near the lawyer Ünal’s office. She called his office as soon as she arrived, and an appointment was set for the following morning.
Before calling the number Nabil had given her, she sat on the edge of the hotel bed for a long while, trying to calm the pounding of her heart. Finally, she pressed call.
He answered on the first ring, as though he’d been holding the phone in his hand, waiting.
“You arrived safely, then. Good.” He paused a moment, then added: “The lawyer Ünal is an honest man — don’t worry about him. But he doesn’t know the full story, and it’s better it stays that way. He’s handling Wafa’s estate in a purely legal capacity, nothing more.”
“And you?” Rima asked. “Will you come to the meeting with me?”
“No. But I’ll be nearby. Call me the moment it’s over.”
The office of the lawyer Ünal Demir occupied the third floor of an elegant old building, its dark wooden furniture suggesting it hadn’t changed in decades. She was received by a man in his late fifties, smartly dressed in a gray suit, with thick-framed glasses.
“Fräulein Najjar, an honor. Please, sit.” He gestured to a chair before his desk, heavy with carefully arranged papers. “Ms. Veronika from the auction house told me you’re interested in learning more about the estate of Mrs. Wafa Najjar.”
“Yes,” Rima said, choosing her words with the same caution Nabil had advised. “My family name is also Najjar, and I thought there might be some distant connection. I just want to understand a little about Mrs. Wafa’s background, if that’s possible.”
The lawyer opened a thick file before him. “Mrs. Wafa Najjar lived in Istanbul from the late eighties onward, having left Damascus under circumstances she never disclosed to anyone, as far as I know, and worked for many years in the antiques and art trade. She never married, and had no children. She kept only very limited contact with her family in Syria, and in the last years of her life, fell seriously ill, and spent most of her time putting her personal affairs and possessions in order.”
“Did she leave a specific will?” Rima asked. “Given that she had no direct heirs.”
The lawyer nodded slowly. “This is the unusual part of the case, Fräulein Najjar. She left the bulk of her estate to a charitable foundation, but she set aside one item specifically for those she described as ‘potential heirs, should they exist and come forward within five years of her death’: a journal of personal letters, held in a safety deposit box at a bank here in Istanbul, with strict instructions that it not be opened except by the person who could prove their connection to the name specified in her will.”
Rima felt her heart racing. “And what is that name?”
The lawyer looked at her directly, a flicker of suppressed professional curiosity in his eyes. “Mrs. Wafa wrote in her will: ‘To the sole granddaughter of Lamis Najjar, whatever name she grew up with, whatever country she came to live in. She will know herself when she sees the face in the letter journal.'”
A long silence settled over the office. The lawyer studied Rima with careful attention, as though only now, in this exact moment, realizing that the woman sitting before him might not be a merely curious visitor who happened to share a family name.
“I’m Lamis… I mean, my grandmother’s name is Lamis,” Rima said finally, feeling the words leave her mouth with a strange difficulty, as though she were pronouncing a name she herself had not known, until a few days earlier, belonged to her.
The lawyer leaned back in his chair and looked at her for a long moment. “Then let’s go to the bank now, Fräulein Najjar. I believe we have a good deal of paperwork to get through, and a journal that has been waiting for you for years.”
The procedures at the bank took two full hours: identity verification, signatures on countless documents, phone calls with central bank staff to confirm the will’s validity. At last, Rima found herself alone in a small room set aside for opening deposit boxes, a rectangular metal box before her.
She opened it with trembling hands. Inside lay a thick leather journal, its brown cover worn at the edges, and on top of it, kept between the first two pages, a small black-and-white photograph.
She lifted the photograph carefully. It showed a young woman, perhaps in her late twenties, standing before an artist’s studio, judging by the paintings scattered behind her, smiling a full, genuine smile — utterly unlike the anxious expression Rima had seen in the painting sent to her. Beside her in the frame stood a thin man holding a paintbrush, looking at her rather than the camera, with a look that needed no great explanation for anyone to grasp its nature.
On the back of the photograph, in an elegant feminine hand: “Anwar and I, in the studio, summer of 1987. Before everything changed.”
Rima sat in that small cold room, staring at the face of the woman who was her grandmother, and felt, for the first time in her life, that she was looking into something truly like a mirror — a mirror that crossed time, not just distance, and returned to her a face carrying all her own features, but also carrying an entire life she had never lived, a love she had never known, and an ending she had not yet uncovered.
She opened the first page of the journal with a trembling hand, and began to read.
The journal was written in an elegant hand, slanted slightly to the right, blue ink faded in places to a pale gray. These weren’t letters ever sent, but daily confessions — Lamis writing to herself, or perhaps to some imagined reader she never knew, one day, would be her granddaughter, in a cold room in an Istanbul bank, decades later.
Rima read the first page:
“Damascus, March 1987. I met him today for the first time, at the young painters’ exhibition held by the institute. His name wasn’t known yet outside a small circle of artists, but his painting, hung in the far corner of the hall, stopped me in my tracks without my meaning it to. He was standing behind me when I heard him say: ‘You’re the only one who’s stood in front of it for more than a minute.’ His name is Anwar. A poor, stubborn painter, his face carrying the exhaustion of many sleepless nights of work.”
Rima paused a moment, picturing the scene: an exhibition hall in Damascus in 1987, a young woman standing before a painting, a man introducing himself with a sentence she couldn’t have known, that day, would one day carry the weight of an entire history.
She kept reading, moving through pages that recorded quiet happiness and, elsewhere, mounting worry. Lamis wrote of her repeated visits to Anwar’s small studio in the Qaimariyya quarter, of the tea they drank on the rooftop watching the sun set behind the Umayyad Mosque, of long conversations about art and politics and a country they dreamed of that did not yet exist.
“September 1987. My sister Salma says I’m being reckless, that Anwar isn’t the man our family imagines for me. Maybe she’s right. But I’ve never felt what I feel when I’m in that studio, among the smell of oil paint, his calm voice explaining why he chose one color over another to fill some small shadow in the corner of a painting. Salma, my twin, knows me better than anyone alive — but she doesn’t understand this particular feeling, and maybe she never will.”
Rima felt a shiver at the first mention of Salma’s name in Lamis’s own hand, not in Nabil’s retelling. So it was all true — every detail that had, at first, seemed like an impossible tale.
She kept reading for a full hour, moving between pages of quiet joy and others of rising dread. Lamis wrote of her family beginning to pressure her to marry another man, from a wealthy, influential family, chosen by her father years earlier without ever truly consulting her. She wrote of her growing fear, and, in the same breath, of her determination not to give up Anwar despite every pressure.
Then she reached a page dated late November, the handwriting more agitated than any page before it:
“November 1987. What I feared happened today. My father found out about Anwar, and that the exhibition planned for him in Vienna might mean we’d marry and leave the country together. He erupted in a way I’ve never seen from him before. He said ‘a man with no lineage and no money will never carry our family’s name,’ and that Anwar had ‘suspicious connections’ he didn’t elaborate on, hinting that the man had ties to people who openly criticize the authorities in his paintings and private writings, and that this alone was enough to destroy the whole family if my relationship with him continued to be visible to anyone. Salma stood by my side in front of my father, but I saw something in her eyes I didn’t understand at the time: a fear not only for me, but for something else, something larger, that she wasn’t ready to share with me.”
Rima stared at that last sentence for a long time. “A fear not only for me.” There was something else beneath the surface — something even Lamis herself hadn’t clearly grasped when she wrote those words.
She turned the pages faster now, driven by an urgency bordering on panic, searching for the final pages, for what had happened in December. But she found the journal ending abruptly on a page dated December 8, 1987, far shorter than all the others, the handwriting rushed, as though written hastily in a moment of real fear:
“No time to write in detail. Anwar says we have to leave before the end of the month, that someone is watching him, that it’s no longer safe, for him or for me. Salma proposed a mad plan to me yesterday — I never thought she’d go this far for my sake. I’ll write more when…”
The last sentence was left unfinished, cut off in the middle, as though some hand had wrenched the pen from Lamis’s own at that exact moment — or as though she had simply never been able to write again after that day.
The rest of the journal’s pages were entirely blank.
Rima sat in a long silence, the journal open on her lap to that final page, and felt tears gathering in her eyes for a woman she had never met, yet felt, suddenly, that she knew better than almost anyone else in her life — perhaps because she saw in those hurried, unsettled words something of herself: a fear she recognized well, and a determination to love despite every warning that echoed, unsettlingly, her own determination now to keep chasing this mystery despite everyone who had warned her to stop.
“A mad plan.” Rima read the phrase over and over. What exactly had Salma done? And how had it ended with her — Lamis’s own twin — raising a child who carried her sister’s blood, not her own, living out the rest of her life pretending to be his real mother?
She closed the journal with great care, held it to her chest for a moment, then took out her phone and called Nabil at once, as she had promised.
“You found the journal, then,” he said the moment he answered — not a question, a statement. “The letters stop suddenly, don’t they? On December eighth.”
“How do you know that so precisely?”
“Because Wafa told me herself, many times, in the last years of her life. She tried, until her very last day, to understand exactly what happened after that date. She never managed to. But she left me, a few weeks before she died, a single address in Damascus — an old woman, still alive, perhaps the last person who truly knows anything about what happened in those final days.”
Rima felt her heart racing again — but this time it wasn’t only fear, it was something closer to inevitability. “Damascus, then.”
“Yes,” Nabil said quietly. “I think you’ve known that since the beginning, even before we met in Vienna. Every thread in this story leads, in the end, to one place.”
Rima returned to her hotel room in Istanbul, and the decision to travel to Damascus, which just hours earlier had been nothing more than a vague thought turning over in her mind, had become an inescapable fact. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at her Austrian passport lying open before her, and thought for a moment of a strange irony: that she would be returning to the city where she was born as a foreign tourist, carrying a passport that bore no visible connection to it, searching for roots whose true shape she didn’t even know.
She called Klara to tell her what she had discovered in the journal, and of her new decision. Klara was silent for a long time on the other end of the line, then spoke in a voice full of real worry.
“Damascus, Rima? Right now, of all times? You know the situation there isn’t simple, and that you don’t really know anyone there, not even the local dialect fluently.”
“I know standard Arabic well, and some of the dialect I picked up from my uncle over the years. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
“And Nabil? Is he going with you?”
“I don’t know yet. He hasn’t said so directly.”
After ending the call, she rang Nabil again. “I want to go to the address Wafa left. Will you help me?”
A brief silence followed on the other end. “I’ll send you the address, and the woman’s name: Khadija. She was the Najjar family’s neighbor in the Shaghour quarter for many years, and still lives in the same house, as far as I last knew. But I won’t be able to accompany you, Fräulein Najjar. My entering Syria… is complicated, for reasons I can’t go into right now.”
“Then I’ll go alone.”
“I know you’ve already decided that, and I won’t try to talk you out of it. But please, be very careful, and avoid mentioning your uncle Kamal’s name to anyone there. The Najjar family still has wide connections in Damascus, and no one knows exactly who tells what to whom.”
Before leaving Istanbul, her phone rang with a call she hadn’t expected: her uncle Kamal.
She hesitated a moment before answering, then decided that ignoring the call would raise his suspicion more than it would ease it.
“Hello, Uncle Kamal.”
“Rima! Finally. I tried calling you several times. How are things in Istanbul? What exactly is this work that’s taken you there?”
His voice carried its usual friendly warmth, but Rima, for the first time in her life, listened past the tone, to the faint tension living behind every word.
“Work related to an art piece that came into the museum,” she said, choosing a white lie close enough to the truth to sound convincing. “An investigation into the origin of an old painting. Nothing exciting.”
“I see.” He paused briefly, then added, in a careful tone: “And will you be staying in Istanbul, or do you have other plans?”
Rima felt the question wasn’t as innocent as it sounded, that it carried behind it a real worry he was trying carefully to conceal.
“I don’t know yet,” she said, avoiding a direct answer. “I might extend the trip somewhere else, if professional necessity calls for it.”
A long silence held on the line, then Kamal spoke, his voice lower than before, in a tone she had never heard from him:
“Rima, whatever it is you’re thinking of doing, I want you to know one thing: everything I’ve done, or not done, across all these years, was to protect you, and nothing else. Please trust that, even if you don’t understand everything yet.”
Rima froze where she stood. He had never said anything this unsettlingly clear before, had never openly admitted there was something that needed “understanding” at all.
“Uncle Kamal, what exactly do you mean?” she asked him directly, feeling that this might be the closest he had ever come to a full confession.
But he retreated at once, as though he’d realized he had crossed a line he hadn’t meant to cross. “Nothing specific, just… take care of yourself, that’s all I mean. Call me when you settle wherever you’re going.” And he hung up before she could ask anything else.
Rima stood staring at the silent phone in her hand, replaying every word her uncle had said, feeling that she had just come to the edge of something far larger than she had imagined — something that could make a man known for his composure and unshakable calm slip, if only for one moment, into something close to confession.
The next morning, Rima stood in the passenger line at Istanbul airport, waiting to board the flight to Damascus. In her carry-on bag she carried Lamis’s leather journal, wrapped with great care, and the small photograph. She had left the original painting behind in Vienna, locked in a cabinet in Klara’s flat, after the two of them had agreed that carrying it into Damascus would be an unnecessary risk.
While she waited in line, she felt a steady gaze on her back — the kind of look her newly awakened instincts had begun to recognize in everyone around her. She turned quickly, but found only passing faces she didn’t know, travelers absorbed in their luggage and their phones.
Perhaps it was only her imagination, the product of tense days and too little sleep. Or perhaps, as she had begun to suspect with growing conviction, she truly had never been alone on this road from the start — just as Nabil himself had said, that first night.
When boarding was called, Rima walked toward the gate with steady steps despite everything, aware that she was about to cross a threshold beyond which her life would never again be what it had been before.
From thousands of feet up, Damascus appeared to Rima as a golden expanse spread across the flank of a bare mountain, at its center a faint green that every Syrian knows to be the Ghouta, even those who have never seen it with their own eyes. She pressed her forehead against the cold window glass and felt something stir deep within her that she had never felt before — not a memory, exactly, but something older than memory, as though her body recognized this place before her mind could.
At the airport gate, she stood in a long line for inspection and passport stamping, watching the faces around her: families returning from travel, men carrying weary luggage, children running between legs, laughing despite the visible exhaustion on their families’ faces. The passport officer asked her the reason for her visit, and she answered that she was an Austrian tourist come to see the sights of the Old City, and felt a faint bitterness as she spoke those words — for it was only half a lie. How could she be called a “tourist” in the city where she was born?
She took a taxi toward a small hotel she had chosen in the Qaimariyya quarter, relatively close to the address Nabil had given her. From the car window, the city began revealing itself to her piece by piece: narrow streets tangling in a chaos that carried its own order, crowded markets thick with the smell of spices and freshly roasted coffee, old stone walls bearing the marks of centuries of history piled on top of one another with no clear arrangement.
Then, at a sudden turn, the car passed alongside an old stone wall climbed by a dense jasmine vine, its scent slipping in even through the closed car window.
Rima froze in her seat.
It was the exact same scent — the one that had so often visited her in the scattered fragments of memory of a courtyard whose shape she could no longer quite recall. She closed her eyes for a moment, and the same image returned that had visited her in Vienna the night the painting arrived: a small courtyard paved in white stone, two women sitting on a wooden bench, one holding her small hand.
But this time the image was clearer than it had ever been, as though her actual return to the city had sharpened the edges of that distant memory. She saw the second woman, sitting a little behind them in the shadow, move for a moment, and turn her head toward her very slowly, as though about to reveal her face at last after all these years of mystery…
Then the car jolted over a pothole in the road, and Rima snapped back to the present, her heart pounding violently, her hands sweating against her bag.
“Are you all right, miss?” the driver asked through the mirror, noticing the sudden paleness of her face.
“Yes, I’m sorry, my mind wandered a little,” she said, trying to make her voice sound normal.
After settling into the hotel and taking a quick shower to wash off the fatigue of the journey, Rima went out to walk alone through the Old City before her first visit to Khadija’s house in the Shaghour quarter, deciding to give herself a little time to recover from the disorientation that had overtaken her in the car.
She walked through the covered Hamidiyah Souk, amid a loud crush of vendors, shoppers, and local tourists, beneath an old metal roof through whose holes thin threads of light slipped in, like scattered stars in the middle of a fully lit day. She stopped for a minute before jewelry and copperware sellers, remembering the description of the very first painting that had begun this entire journey — a Flemish portrait of a woman waiting for a letter that never came — and felt a faint irony at fate’s expense: here she was too, waiting for letters, except this time she was trying to force fate itself to deliver them to her.
She continued on until she reached the square before the Umayyad Mosque, and stood a long while gazing up at the two towering minarets against the clear blue sky. She remembered a line from Lamis’s journal: “Tea on the studio roof, watching the sun set behind the Umayyad Mosque.” She looked around at the surrounding rooftops, wondering which one had been the roof of Anwar’s studio, the place that had witnessed the beginning of a story that had ended — or perhaps had never ended at all — its strange threads tangling across thirty years until they reached her, in this exact moment.
As she stood there, she felt a light hand touch her shoulder.
She turned quickly, her heart leaping in her chest, to find before her an elderly woman, wearing a simple black abaya and a white headscarf, her face carved with deep wrinkles that carried the wisdom of many long years, staring at her with a fixed look Rima couldn’t mistake: the look of someone seeing a face they know well, in a place it has no business being.
“Dear God,” the old woman whispered in Arabic, her hand trembling as she raised it to touch Rima’s cheek with great care, as though confirming that what she was seeing was real and not imagination.
“Lamis? Could it really be you? After all these long years?”
Rima stood silent for a moment, unable to find words fit for a moment she had never imagined living through: a total stranger in the square of the Umayyad Mosque calling her by the name of her late grandmother, as though thirty years had simply never passed at all.
“I’m not Lamis,” she said finally, her voice trembling despite her attempt to stay calm. “My name is Rima. Rima Najjar. I believe Lamis… was my grandmother.”
The old woman looked at her for a long time, her eyes filling with tears not yet fallen, then pressed her hands over her mouth for a moment as though holding back a sob about to break loose.
“Of course, of course, my dear girl, how could I forget? Lamis has been gone a very long time now, I know that well, but your face… your face has suddenly brought back days I thought I had buried with my memory forever.” She wiped her eyes with the edge of her black abaya. “I’m Khadija, dear girl. I was your family’s neighbor in the Shaghour quarter for many years.”
Rima felt a shiver run through her entire body. “Khadija? You’re… you’re exactly who I meant to visit today!” She pulled from her bag the small slip of paper on which Nabil had written the address. “How… how did we come to meet here exactly, in this square, with no appointment at all?”
Khadija smiled a strange, sad smile. “There are no coincidences in this old city, my dear, I’ve believed that for a very long time. I pass through here every day at this exact time, on my way to afternoon prayer, for more than thirty years now. Perhaps fate was waiting for this exact moment to bring us together.”
She took Rima’s hand with a tenderness she hadn’t known from anyone in a very long time. “Come home with me, please. I have so much to tell you, and I think you’ve come from very far away to hear it.”
Khadija’s house in the Shaghour quarter was a traditional Damascene house, with a small interior courtyard at its center, a small stone fountain, dry now for years, and lemon trees shading one corner of it. They sat on cushioned seats near the fountain, while Khadija’s young daughter brought a tray of tea and sweets.
“Your family lived in the house right next door,” Khadija began, her eyes lost in a distant memory. “I was about the same age as Lamis and Salma. We were friends since childhood, playing together in this very courtyard where you’re sitting now.” She paused to sip her tea, as though gathering her courage to go on.
“They were miraculously alike in appearance, Lamis and Salma, but they were completely different in spirit. Lamis was a dreamer, brave to the point of recklessness, in love with painting and poetry and everything outside the ordinary. Salma, on the other hand, was practical, cautious, loving her sister to the point of madness but always more afraid for her than she should have been.”
“And Anwar?” Rima asked, unable to wait any longer.
Khadija’s face darkened suddenly. “Anwar Hilmi, yes. A gifted painter, but also a young man unafraid to say what he thought, even in a time when silence was safer than speech. He used to meet with a small group of friends, young writers and artists, talking about change, about freedom, about things that stirred the suspicion of those who didn’t like hearing such words in those days.”
Khadija set her teacup on the small table with a slow, heavy motion. “Lamis and Salma’s father, Abu Khalid, was a man of standing and connections, and he feared that his daughter’s involvement with Anwar would bring the eyes of the security services down on the whole family. He tried everything to end the relationship: threats, then the temptation of a different marriage, then threats again, more serious this time.”
“What exactly happened in December?” Rima asked, her voice nearly choking. “I read in Lamis’s journal that she was planning to run away with Anwar, and that Salma proposed some plan to her… but the journal stops suddenly there.”
Khadija looked at Rima for a long time, her face carrying a visible inner struggle, as though deciding, after thirty years of silence, whether the time had finally come to speak or not. At last, she took a deep breath.
“On the night of the eighteenth of December,” she said, in a voice that barely rose above a whisper, “Lamis was supposed to flee with Anwar to Beirut, and from there to Europe, where his exhibition in Vienna would give them an acceptable pretext for the trip. Salma, who looked exactly like her, suggested that she stay behind in Damascus, taking on her sister’s identity for just a few days, until they could be sure Lamis had arrived safely and that no one had noticed her disappearance right away — to confuse any possible pursuit.”
Khadija paused a moment, and this time her eyes filled with real tears. “But someone grew suspicious. Men came in the middle of the night to the family’s house, asking for Lamis by name, and found Salma instead — and believed, for a few hours at least, that they had caught the woman they were looking for.”
“What did they do to her?” Rima whispered, aware she was about to hear the most dangerous part of the entire story.
“They held her for two full days,” Khadija said, her voice gradually breaking. “Before they discovered the mistake and released her. But she came out of those two nights an entirely different woman from the girl I had known my whole life. And when she learned that Lamis had never made it to Beirut, and that Anwar too had vanished along the way, something inside Salma broke, and it never went back to its place again.”
A long silence fell over the courtyard, broken only by the rustle of the lemon tree’s leaves in a light breeze. Rima felt her heart beating in her throat, not her chest, and that the whole world had shrunk to this small courtyard, this dry fountain, and this breaking voice telling her real family’s story for the first time.
“Go on, please,” Rima whispered. “I want to know everything, however hard it is.”
Khadija let out a long sigh, as though emptying years of weight from her lungs. “We never knew the full details of what happened to Lamis and Anwar that night, and no one in the quarter knows for certain even today. What we know only, from what leaked out later through people who worked in that same agency, is that they were stopped at a checkpoint on the road to Beirut, just one hour before reaching the border. Their car was carrying paintings and art supplies for Anwar’s exhibition, and that alone was enough to raise suspicion.”
“And after that?” Rima asked, though part of her wished she wouldn’t have to hear the answer.
“They were both detained,” Khadija said. “But I don’t know exactly where they were taken, or how long that detention lasted. What reached us over the years were conflicting accounts: some said they were released after a few weeks and left the country secretly in the end, some way or another, without ever daring to contact anyone for fear of exposing the family to further harm. Others say Anwar was never released at all, and that his fate remained entirely unknown.”
Rima looked at Khadija’s face, searching it for an answer the old woman hadn’t dared to say outright. “And you, deep down, which account do you believe?”
Khadija bowed her head for a long time, then finally raised it, and in her eyes was something like an apology. “I believe one of them survived, my dear. How else do I explain word that reached Lamis’s father, Abu Khalid, a few months after her disappearance: that his daughter was alive, but would never return, and that the family had to forget her entirely, for her own safety and everyone else’s.”
Rima felt hot tears sliding down her cheeks without quite knowing when she had begun to cry. “So maybe she’s still alive? Maybe somewhere?”
Khadija reached out and took Rima’s hand with tenderness. “After thirty years, my dear, if she is still alive, she would be about my age now. I don’t know if she ever found the courage to reach out to anyone, or if she’s still afraid even now. But there is one thing I know for certain: Wafa, Salma and Lamis’s other sister, who moved to Istanbul years after her, believed the same thing, and spent her whole life trying to find some trace, any trace, that would prove or disprove that possibility.”
“And Salma?” Rima asked after a long silence. “How did she end up living the rest of her life under her sister’s identity?”
Khadija returned to sip from her tea, entirely cold now in her cup. “After Lamis disappeared, the whole family collapsed. Abu Khalid, who had thought he was protecting his family by forbidding his daughter from marrying the man she loved, found he had lost her forever, and spent the rest of his life carrying that guilt like a stone on his chest. Their mother fell ill a few months later — grief, no doubt — and died within two years.”
“And Salma was left alone,” Khadija went on, “carrying her sister’s name, which she had taken on for only a few days, without knowing now how to shed it, the time for that having long passed. The people of the quarter, who didn’t know the full details, had grown used to ‘Lamis’ being the one who stayed, and ‘Salma’ being the one who fled and disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Correcting that would have meant reopening the entire file, and exposing whatever remained of the family to a new danger no one was prepared to bear.”
“And when she married, and had my father…” Rima said, feeling the pieces finally settling into their true places. “She was already carrying the name ‘Lamis’ on all her official papers.”
Khadija nodded, deep sorrow on her face. “Exactly, my dear girl. She married under her sister’s name, gave birth under her sister’s name, and died under her sister’s name in the end, carrying a secret heavier than any human being could bear across an entire lifetime. And your father, God rest his soul, grew up believing his mother was the true Lamis, while it was his aunt who actually carried that name in truth.”
Rima sat silent for a long while, trying to absorb the weight of what she had just heard: that her entire life, the name she carried, the family she had grown up in, had all been built on a forced impersonation that lasted thirty years, begun as a desperate plan for just a few days to protect a beloved sister.
“Uncle Kamal,” she said finally, new threads of worry beginning to tangle in her mind. “My father and my uncle were both born of Salma herself, weren’t they? So he knows all of this?”
Khadija looked at her with visible hesitation for the first time since their conversation began. “Kamal was the youngest, not born until six years after that night. I don’t know when or how he learned the truth, if he even knows it fully. But there is one thing I know, dear girl, and I feel it my duty to warn you of: a few years ago, a man came asking around the quarter about the details of that night, carrying a business card bearing the name of a trading company in Dubai. When I asked who he worked for, he answered, after some hesitation, that he worked for a Syrian businessman named Kamal, trying to make sure that ‘no one stirs up old stories that might harm the family’s reputation.'”
Rima left Khadija’s house at sunset, the city behind her sinking gradually into that particular golden light Damascus is known for at this time of day. She could barely feel her legs beneath her, as though the weight of what she had heard in those few hours had stripped her body of all sense of immediate physical reality.
Before she left, Khadija asked one thing of her: that she visit the old family house next door, even though it had been sold long ago to another family. “The current owner is a good man,” Khadija said. “He knows me well, and won’t mind if you tell him you’re the granddaughter of the old family who built the house.”
Rima stood before the carved wooden door, comparing it in her mind to the photograph she had seen at the auction house in Vienna: the exact same door, despite the fresh layers of paint that had tried to hide its true age. She knocked hesitantly, and was received by a man in his fifties, who welcomed her warmly once he learned the reason for her visit, and let her in to walk through the courtyard she had visited in her scattered memories her whole life.
The courtyard was smaller than she had always imagined, but it was unmistakably the same one: the white paved stone, worn in places now, and the wall painted pale blue, though the color had shifted slightly. She didn’t find the jasmine tree that had always accompanied her memory — it had been cut down years ago, the homeowner told her — but she stood where the old wooden bench had once been, no longer there, and closed her eyes, and for one moment, felt a small warm hand holding hers.
On her way back to the hotel, full darkness having fallen now, Rima noticed a black car moving slowly a short distance behind her, at almost the exact pace she was walking on the pavement. She tried not to show her worry, and suddenly turned toward a narrow side street.
The car kept following her for a few more meters, then stopped abruptly. A tall man in a dark suit got out and approached her with steady steps.
Rima’s heart froze in her chest. She thought for a moment of screaming, but the street was nearly empty at that hour.
“Fräulein Najjar,” the man said, in a tone that was calm but entirely cold, with no warmth in it at all, utterly unlike Nabil’s quiet, sad voice. “Your visit to Damascus has drawn far more attention than you imagine. I strongly advise you to end this little trip, and return to Vienna, to your quiet life, before you entangle yourself in matters that don’t concern you.”
“Who are you?” Rima asked him, trying to make her voice sound stronger than the very real trembling she felt. “And who sent you?”
The man gave a cold smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m not here to introduce myself, or to give you names. I’m only here to deliver a simple, clear message: some doors were closed for good reason, a long time ago, and those who try to open them again usually come to regret it — they, and those they love.”
Rima felt real cold run through her veins at the mention of “those they love.” “Is that a threat?”
“It’s advice, Fräulein Najjar, offered in genuinely good faith. Enjoy the rest of your stay in Damascus, visit the sights if you like, then go home. There’s no need to search any further into old family tales — their real owners died long ago, and there’s nothing to be gained from disturbing their rest.”
Then the man turned calmly, went back to his car, and it pulled away down the dark street, leaving Rima standing alone, her whole body trembling now despite the warmth of the spring night.
Rima returned to the hotel almost running, shut the door of her room behind her, and leaned against it for several long minutes, trying to calm her ragged breathing. Finally, she called Nabil.
“Something just happened,” she said, her voice still shaking. She told him every detail of the confrontation, while he listened in complete silence on the other end.
When she finished, a long silence held before Nabil finally spoke, his voice carrying a worry she had never heard in it before. “That’s faster and more dangerous than I expected. I didn’t think they’d move this quickly.”
“Who are they? Is this my uncle Kamal?”
“I don’t think your uncle sends men to threaten you on the streets of Damascus at night, Rima. That’s not his style, and it’s not remotely in his interest to tarnish the family’s reputation in such a crude way.” He paused a moment, as though thinking deeply about what he was about to say. “I think there’s another party in this story, Rima, one we didn’t know existed yet — a party with a far deeper interest in keeping Anwar Hilmi’s story buried forever, far greater than simply protecting one family’s reputation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Rima, that you need to leave Damascus at the earliest possible opportunity, tomorrow morning if you can. And once you’re somewhere safe, I’ll tell you what I’m truly afraid of, and why I’ve stayed silent about it until now.”
Rima slept only a few broken hours that night, and booked, early the next morning, the first available flight out of Damascus — this time to Beirut, from where she would continue her journey later. She felt a strange heaviness as she left the city that had been, until a few days earlier, nothing but a faded name in a memory whose outlines she couldn’t clearly make out, and had now become, in the span of a few short days, a place carrying all the secrets of her real life.
She said goodbye to Khadija by phone before leaving the hotel, and the two of them cried together for several long minutes — two women who had been strangers to each other until only yesterday, now bound by a connection words could not easily describe.
“Come back to me, my dear girl, when everything settles down,” Khadija said. “Damascus is your city too. I won’t let anyone make you forget that.”
At Beirut airport, while waiting for her connecting flight to Vienna, Rima called Nabil as she had promised.
“So you arrived safely,” he said, and his voice, for the first time, sounded genuinely relieved. “Now I can tell you what I’ve been afraid of.”
Rima sat down in a quiet corner of the waiting area, and listened with all her senses.
“Anwar Hilmi did not die on that road in 1987,” Nabil said slowly, as though choosing every word with extraordinary care after years of long silence. “He was held for many months, and treated with a cruelty I don’t want to describe in detail right now. But a senior officer in that same agency, for reasons of his own he never disclosed, decided to save him instead of letting his fate end as it did for so many others in those days. He was finally released in secret, but on one irrevocable condition: that he vanish forever, that he give up his name and his entire identity, and that he never try to contact Lamis or any member of her family again, no matter what happened, for the rest of his life.”
Rima felt her heart stop for a moment. “And Lamis?”
“I still don’t know her fate with complete certainty,” Nabil said, with a sincerity carrying real grief. “My father himself never knew what happened to her after that night they were torn apart. He spent the rest of his life carrying that question like a wound that never healed.”
“You know all these details with astonishing precision, Nabil,” Rima said after a brief silence, feeling that something in the way he told the story concealed a deeper truth than what he was saying. “Far more than an ordinary employee who simply worked for Wafa would know.”
A long silence held on the line, longer than any silence that had come before it between them. “Because Anwar Hilmi,” Nabil said at last, his voice nearly breaking, “is my father, Rima. He lived the rest of his life under another name, in another country, later married another woman and had me, but he kept, until his last day, speaking of Lamis every night he thought I was asleep and couldn’t hear him.”
Rima sat frozen in her seat, unable to say a single word for long seconds. “You… you’re his son? Then why didn’t you tell me this from the start?”
“Because my father died only two years ago, Rima, still carrying a false name even on his death certificate. And because the very officer who once saved his life is now, after all these years, a very powerful businessman, still watching closely for any attempt to reopen this old file, afraid that the details of what he did back then might come to light — both the part where he saved my father’s life, and the other, far darker part, that my father never spoke of openly even with me.”
Rima felt a small piece of the puzzle finally becoming clear. “And this man who threatened me on the street — he works for this former officer?”
“I think so, yes. And that frightens me far more than anything I fear from your uncle Kamal. This man has the power and the influence to protect his secret at any cost, Rima, and he’s done so before, with other people who tried to get close to the truth over the years.”
Rima took a deep breath, trying to absorb this latest revelation. “So we… you and I, we’re not blood relatives at all?” she asked, feeling the absurdity of the question even as she spoke it, but needing to be certain.
Nabil gave a light, sad laugh — the first real laugh she had ever heard from him. “No, we’re not blood relatives, Rima. But our two families’ stories are tangled together in a way that can’t be undone, and I think that’s enough to make us, at the very least, something closer than two strangers who happened to meet in a café in Vienna.”
When the plane landed at Vienna airport, Rima felt a strange, double sensation: relief at returning to a safe, familiar place, and a feeling that this same place no longer felt like “home” in quite the way she had known for thirty-four years. Vienna was the city where she had grown up, but Damascus had now become, after just one visit, something far deeper than that — something like a root she hadn’t known she needed until she finally found it.
Klara was waiting for her at the arrivals gate, and hugged her tightly for a long while before pulling back to examine her face with worry. “You’re so pale, Rima. What happened there? Your short messages didn’t tell me enough.”
The two friends spent the rest of that day in Rima’s flat, where she told her everything in detail: Khadija, the old house, the man who threatened her in the street, and finally, Nabil’s revelation of his true identity. Klara sat silent for a long time when the story ended, staring into her cold coffee cup.
“Rima, I know this will sound harsh, but I feel I have to ask you: how do we know Nabil is really telling the truth? Everything we know about him comes only from his own mouth.”
“I know that,” Rima said calmly. “But Khadija confirmed a huge part of the story entirely independently, without even knowing Nabil existed. And I saw the threat with my own eyes, and I heard real fear in his voice when he warned me. I don’t think a man invents all these details about a dead father, and about a fear he’s lived with his whole life.”
That evening, after Klara left, Rima sat alone before the painting she had brought back from Klara’s cabinet, and looked long at Lamis’s face, now with a complete new understanding of her life, her love, and her mysterious disappearance. Then she picked up her phone, and called her uncle Kamal, for the first time since leaving Istanbul.
He answered after just two rings. “Rima! Finally, I’ve been so worried. Where are you now?”
“In Vienna, Uncle Kamal. I got back today.” She paused a moment, gathering her courage for what she was about to say next. “But I didn’t go to Istanbul just for museum business, as I told you. I went to trace the estate of a woman named Wafa Najjar. Then I went to Damascus, Uncle Kamal. I met Khadija.”
A long, heavy silence held on the other end of the line, a silence unlike any she had ever heard from her uncle in all the years she had known him. When he finally spoke, his voice was entirely different — exhausted, as though years of accumulated weight had suddenly fallen from his shoulders and he could no longer bear carrying it alone for one more moment.
“So you know now,” he said simply, without denial, without any attempt to evade. “I knew this day would come, someday. I just didn’t know when, or how I would bear hearing your voice say these words.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Rima asked him, feeling her tears return once again. “All these years, you let me live without knowing who I truly am.”
Kamal let out a long, tired sigh. “I didn’t know the full truth myself, Rima, not at the beginning of my life at least. My mother, whom I believed my whole life to be Salma, only told me the truth on her deathbed, when I was thirty years old. She asked one thing of me before she passed: to protect the family, and to protect you especially, because you were still a small child then, having just lost your parents, and I believed the truth would have destroyed you at that age.” He paused a moment. “And to protect you from the man who was still, until my mother’s death, watching closely for any movement in this file.”
“The former officer,” Rima said. “The one who saved Anwar.”
“So you know that too.” Rima felt her uncle’s voice now carrying a strange relief, despite everything, as though he finally felt, after decades of isolation in this secret, that he was no longer alone in it.
“Yes, I know him, and I fear him more than you can imagine, Rima. He’s the reason behind all those brief, sparse messages I sent you over the years, and all that distance I deliberately kept between us. I was afraid that being close to you would make you a target for him someday, if he suspected I was hiding something from you worth uncovering.”
Rima sat silent, feeling for the first time in her life that she truly understood that pane of glass she had always sensed standing between herself and her uncle: it hadn’t been a wall of indifference, as she had always believed, but a wall of protection, built with a silent fear that had lasted for decades.
“I need to know everything, Uncle Kamal,” she said finally. “Everything you know about this man, and exactly what he did. I can’t stop now, not after everything I’ve seen and heard.”
“I know that,” Kamal said, with a quiet sorrow. “And perhaps it’s finally time for this family to stop hiding. I’ll come to Vienna in two days, Rima. I’ll tell you everything face to face, as I should have done a long time ago.”
Kamal arrived in Vienna two days later as promised, and Rima stood in the arrivals hall watching the door with a tension she hadn’t felt in years. The last time they had met face to face had been at her parents’ funeral, when she was still a girl of sixteen, standing behind a thick veil of grief through which she could see nothing but blurred, sympathetic faces.
When he finally appeared, Rima felt a small shock: a man in his late fifties, elegant as always, but something in his eyes looked entirely different from the image she had built of him in her mind over the years — a distant man, cold, always busy. The man standing before her now looked exhausted, fragile in a deeply human way she had never expected from him.
He hugged her with an unusual force, a long, silent embrace, as though trying to make up in one minute for all the years of distance he had imposed on himself. “You’ve grown so much, Rima,” he said finally, his voice catching slightly. “And you look more like her every time I look at you.”
They sat in Rima’s flat until late into the night, the painting hanging in the corner of the room watching them in its usual silence. Kamal took from his bag a thick file of papers, gathered over long years in silence, which he had never dared to use.
“His name is Farouk al-Masri,” Kamal said, placing an old photograph on the table: a man in his forties, in formal military uniform, sharp features, cold eyes. “He was a senior, powerful officer in the very agency that detained Anwar and Salma that night. A few years later, he suddenly resigned from military service, and used his wide connections and sensitive information to build a vast business empire, which later extended to Dubai, Beirut, and several other capitals.”
“And what exactly is he afraid of?” Rima asked, studying the photograph with cold eyes, trying to see in that face the man who had threatened her, hidden behind another man on a dark street in Damascus.
“Even though he did, in the end, save Anwar’s life, the way he saved it wasn’t clean at all,” Kamal said with visible bitterness. “From what I know from my mother, Farouk didn’t release Anwar for free — he used him for years afterward as a silent witness to deals and dealings that were in no way legal, exploiting the man’s constant fear of being detained again if he refused to cooperate. Anwar carried in his memory, until his death, names, dates, and details sufficient to destroy Farouk al-Masri’s reputation entirely, should they ever come out into the open.”
Rima suddenly understood a new dimension of the story she hadn’t expected. “So Nabil might himself be carrying dangerous information, inherited from his father?”
“Very likely, yes. And that perhaps explains why Farouk is moving now, only two years after Anwar’s death, once he began to fear that the son might inherit not only the grief, but the secrets too — and might one day use them.”
Rima looked at her uncle for a long time, and asked a question that had been pressing on her since the conversation began. “Uncle Kamal, what do we do now? Do we confront him? Do we report it to the authorities? I don’t even know where to start.”
Kamal thought for a long time before answering, his fingers drumming nervously on the edge of the table. “I think we first need to speak with Nabil directly, face to face, the three of us together. If he really does have information, or papers his father left him, they may be our only weapon against a man with Farouk’s influence. We can’t rely on the authorities in a country where this same man still enjoys wide connections to this day.”
Rima called Nabil at that moment, and put the phone on speaker. “Nabil, my uncle Kamal is here with me in Vienna. We need to meet, all three of us, as soon as possible.”
A brief silence held on the other end of the line. “Tomorrow,” Nabil said finally, his voice carrying a new resolve she hadn’t heard in it before. “I’ll be in Vienna in the morning. And I’ll bring with me something my father left me before he died — I long thought the right time to use it would never come. Perhaps that time has finally arrived.”
Nabil arrived at Rima’s flat the next morning, carrying a small leather bag that looked old, finely made, bearing the marks of long use. He paused at the door for a moment when he saw Kamal standing inside, as though something about facing the man who had lived for decades on the other side of that same silence unsettled him for a few seconds.
“Mr. Kamal,” Nabil said finally, extending his hand with careful courtesy. “My father spoke of the Najjar family often, though of course he never met you, since you were born after his disappearance.”
Kamal shook his hand firmly, a strange mixture of grief and gratitude in his eyes. “Your father saved our family’s life with his silence for thirty years, despite everything he suffered. Thank you for coming, son.”
The three of them sat around the same table on which the wooden box had first been placed, at the very beginning of this whole story, and Nabil opened his leather bag with great care.
“My father left me this only a few weeks before he died,” he said, taking out a bundle of yellowed papers, some printed, some written in a trembling hand. “He ordered me not to open it except in one case: if I ever felt that Farouk al-Masri, or anyone working for him, posed a real danger to someone still living. He told me: ‘These papers aren’t for revenge, only for protection, if you ever need to protect yourself or any other innocent person.'”
He spread the papers on the table with extraordinary care: copies of old official documents, detailed names and dates, photographs of bank receipts bearing Farouk al-Masri’s own signature, and the names of shell companies used, as Anwar had written in a note in his own hand, “to launder the proceeds of deals that would never have seen the light of day had their truth been known.”
Rima examined the papers with the eye of a restoration expert accustomed to studying old documents with precision, and felt the weight of what lay in her hands: no longer just a family story, but tangible physical evidence of real crimes, documented by the hand of a man forced to live years of silence.
“Why didn’t your father ever use this?” Kamal asked, examining one of the documents with a slightly trembling hand.
Nabil leaned back in his chair, and looked into the distance for a moment, as though summoning his father’s memory. “He was afraid his whole life, Mr. Kamal. Not for himself alone, but for me, for my mother, and for anyone who might be harmed if Farouk sought revenge. He always used to tell me: ‘Revenge doesn’t bring back what we lost, it only endangers what we have left.’ But in his final days, when he knew he wouldn’t live long, he began to think differently. He told me perhaps it was time for the fear to stop with his generation, rather than pass on to another.”
Rima sat silent for a long while, turning over in her hand a photograph of a bank receipt dated 1991, and felt she was now truly holding a real weapon, not just passing family curiosity. “What do we do with these papers now?” she asked. “Do we hand them to the authorities? To a newspaper? Confront Farouk directly?”
Kamal and Nabil looked at each other for a moment, as though exchanging a silent question neither had yet dared to voice outright.
“I think,” Nabil said finally, slowly and carefully, “that the best way to deal with a man like Farouk isn’t direct confrontation, which might put us in danger, but sending him a clear message: that this evidence exists, kept somewhere safe, and that it will be published automatically if any harm comes to any of us. A man like him understands the language of deterrence far better than he understands the language of direct justice.”
Rima nodded slowly, agreeing with the logic of the plan, but another question still weighed on her chest. “And Lamis? There’s still a question we haven’t answered: is she really alive somewhere? Does Farouk know something about her fate that no one has told us yet?”
Nabil looked at her for a long moment, something like final hesitation in his eyes. “There’s one page in this bundle I haven’t shown you yet, Rima. My father wrote it in his own hand, in his final days, when he no longer feared anything at all. I think you should read it yourself.”
He took a single small sheet from the bundle, carefully folded, and held it out to Rima with a slightly trembling hand.
Rima unfolded the paper with hands trembling so visibly she didn’t even try to hide it anymore. The handwriting was faint, broken in places, like the writing of a man who knew his hand wouldn’t hold a pen for much longer.
“To whom it may concern, should fate ever bring Lamis’s granddaughter to these words:
I did not learn Lamis’s true fate until a full twenty years after that night we were separated at the checkpoint. In 2007, while I was living in a small town in the south of France under a name that wasn’t my own, I received a letter I never expected, sent by a lawyer in Geneva, informing me that a woman named ‘Catherine Laurent,’ a French national, had died a few weeks earlier, and had left a will requesting that I be sought out, and that I be given a small journal of letters she had kept her whole life.
Catherine Laurent was Lamis, whoever is reading these words now. She too was released, after long months of detention, but on a condition identical to my own: that she vanish forever, take on an entirely new identity, and never try to search for me or for her family. She was sent to France as part of some secret arrangement I never fully understood, and built a quiet, simple life as a drawing teacher at a small school. She never married, and had no children. She lived alone, painting one single painting each night of a face she hadn’t seen in reality for two decades, then tearing the painting up in the morning, afraid someone might one day find her because of those paintings.
I was never able to see her. The lawyer told me she died peacefully, in her sleep, after a short illness. But her journal was full of memories of us, of our small dreams that never came true, and of something else, far more important, that she herself hadn’t known on the day we were separated: that she had been pregnant when she was arrested, only a few weeks along, and hadn’t discovered it until later, and had decided to keep it hidden even from the child itself as they grew, fearing the child too might become a target for those who still feared the name Lamis Najjar returning to life.”
Rima stopped reading, her hands now trembling violently. “A child?” she whispered, her voice choking completely. “Lamis had a child?”
She kept reading, her heart pounding hard enough to hurt:
“She raised her in Geneva under another name — a daughter, born in 1988, a few months after her release. She named her ‘Sophie,’ but wrote in her journal that she secretly called her ‘Rima,’ a name she had once intended to give her own daughter, had her life been allowed to unfold differently. That Sophie, Lamis’s true daughter, is, as far as I last knew, still alive, living somewhere in Europe, knowing nothing of her true origins, not even that she was born under extraordinary and secret circumstances.”
The paper slipped from Rima’s hand, and she sat in complete silence for several long minutes, unable to utter a single word.
She had an aunt. Her name was Sophie. Lamis’s true daughter, who knew nothing about herself, living somewhere in Europe, perhaps only a few hours from Vienna itself.
“Rima,” Nabil whispered carefully, placing his hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Rima raised her eyes to him, tears sliding down a face that suddenly carried an entirely new meaning she had never expected. “This journey isn’t over yet, is it? I have a real aunt, somewhere, who doesn’t even know who she truly is. I can’t leave it like this. I have to find her.”
The three of them stayed sitting around the table until late that evening, discussing two parallel plans that needed to be handled at the same time: how to search for Sophie, and how to send a deterrent message to Farouk al-Masri without exposing anyone to further danger.
“Let’s start with the lawyer in Geneva,” Nabil suggested. “The one who contacted my father in 2007. He may still be alive, or at least his office may still hold records of the case.”
“I have his name in the letter he sent,” he added, searching through the bundle of papers until he found the original letter. “The lawyer Jean-Pierre Rousseau, an office in Geneva.”
Rima wrote the name in her notebook with a hand still trembling slightly. “I’ll call him tomorrow morning. But even if Sophie is still alive, how do I tell her? She knows nothing about me, or about her own truth. She may have built an entire life she doesn’t want suddenly shaken by a strange woman appearing out of nowhere to tell her everything she knew about herself was a lie.”
Kamal looked at her with eyes carrying an understanding she hadn’t expected. “You know now exactly what it means to suddenly discover a truth like this, Rima. Perhaps that makes you the only person in this world capable of telling her with enough gentleness and wisdom.”
Before Nabil left that night, they talked at length about Farouk al-Masri. Kamal suggested making multiple copies of the documents, depositing them with three lawyers in three different countries, with clear instructions to publish them automatically should any of the three of them, or Khadija, or Sophie once they found her, come to direct or indirect harm.
“I’ll take charge of sending the message to Farouk myself,” Kamal said, with a resolve Rima had never known in him before. “I know a way to reach him, through an intermediary I used for years to pay what I thought was the price of his silence. I’ll tell him the family is no longer afraid, and that any further attempt to threaten us will be met with the immediate publication of everything we know.”
Rima felt a strange pride in her uncle at that moment — a man who had lived decades governed by his fear, now transforming before her eyes into someone else entirely, as though revealing the secret itself had freed him from a weight he could no longer bear.
The next morning, Rima called the office of the lawyer Rousseau in Geneva. A secretary answered with a formal French accent, telling her that Mr. Rousseau had retired years ago, but the office still kept an archive of his old cases, and that she would need to prove a formal family connection to obtain any information regarding the case of “Catherine Laurent.”
Rima spent the following days in a whirlwind of official paperwork: requesting a copy of her father’s birth certificate, proving her lineage through a comparative genetic test against DNA she had carefully extracted from a strand of hair caught in Lamis’s own old leather journal, endless official correspondence with the Swiss civil registry authorities.
Every step of this path was slow, exhausting, so bureaucratic it nearly broke her patience more than once, but she reminded herself each time of Lamis’s face in the painting, and of that sentence Anwar had written: “She secretly called her Rima.” She felt she was now carrying a real trust, not mere personal curiosity, but a silent promise to a woman she had never met, to complete what she herself hadn’t been able to finish.
After two full weeks of exhausting waiting, an email arrived from the office of the lawyer Rousseau, its subject line carrying a few words that changed everything all over again: “Regarding your inquiry about Ms. Sophie Laurent — current address available.”
The address led to a small, quiet village in the Alsace region, on the border between France and Germany, where Sophie Laurent worked, as Rima discovered through careful online research, as an art teacher at a small secondary school — exactly as her mother had been before her, without ever knowing she was walking in her footsteps.
Rima decided to go alone on this particular trip, feeling that Nabil or Kamal’s presence might make things more confusing for a woman who knew nothing about all this complicated history. She took a train from Vienna, and spent the long hours of the journey trying to find the right words, the least shocking way to say to a total stranger: “I’m your niece. Your mother isn’t the woman you think she is.”
The next morning, Rima stood before the small school, watching the door with a worry similar to what she had felt when she first saw the painting. She finally saw her come out during the midday break: a woman in her late thirties, dark hair gathered with an elegant carelessness behind her head, carrying a roll of drawings under her arm, and on her face, despite the subtle differences in features from Rima’s own, something a restoration expert’s eye, trained to read faces with precision, couldn’t mistake: the same curve of the eyebrow, the same tilt of the head when thinking.
Rima approached with hesitant steps. “Excuse me, are you Sophie Laurent?”
The woman looked at her with polite curiosity. “Yes, that’s me. Can I help you?”
Rima hesitated a moment, then decided that direct honesty, even if shocking, was better than any roundabout preamble. “My name is Rima Najjar. I know this will sound very strange, but I’m carrying information about your late mother, about her life before she came to France. I thought you had a right to know it.”
Sophie’s face darkened suddenly, a mix of caution and real curiosity. “My mother never spoke of her past. She always said she didn’t like looking back. Who are you exactly, and how do you know something about her that I don’t even know myself?”
“Could we sit somewhere quiet?” Rima asked gently. “It’s a long story, and I want to tell it to you properly, without rushing.”
They sat in a small café near the school, and Rima began telling the story from the beginning: the painting that had reached her in Vienna, the astonishing resemblance, the journal in Istanbul, Khadija in Damascus, and finally, the last page Anwar Hilmi had written before his death.
Sophie listened in unbroken silence the whole time, her face shifting gradually from doubt to astonishment to something far deeper — something like an old grief finally finding its true name after long years of unexplained mystery.
“She used to paint every night,” Sophie whispered finally, tears sliding silently down her face. “I always thought she was painting landscapes, or ordinary things. I never once saw what she was painting, because she always kept her room door closed when she painted, and in the morning I would find nothing — no painting, not even scraps of paper in the wastebasket. I thought it was some strange hobby she never told me the details of, and I never understood why.”
Rima took from her bag a photograph of the original painting that had started everything, which she’d taken with her phone before the trip. “I think this is what she was painting, night after night, for twenty years. Her own face, as it was in Damascus, before everything changed.”
Sophie looked at the photograph for a long time, then raised her eyes to Rima’s face, then went back to the photograph again, comparing the two faces in silence. “You look so much like her,” she said finally, in a trembling voice. “And I… I think I’m seeing now, in your face, something I used to see in my own mirror every morning without ever truly understanding where it came from.”
She reached out hesitantly, and took Rima’s hand across the table. “Thank you,” she said, her voice breaking completely now. “Thank you for not letting me live the rest of my life without knowing who I truly was, and who my mother truly was.”
On her way back from Alsace to Vienna, Rima received a call from her uncle Kamal, his voice carrying a tone she had never heard in it before, a mix of tension and relief at once.
“The message reached him,” Kamal said the moment Rima answered. “I sent him a copy of the documents, with a clear message through the same intermediary: that additional copies are held by three lawyers in three different countries, and that any harm coming to any of us, including Sophie, who has now become part of this story, will result in their immediate publication in the region’s most widely read newspapers.”
“And what was his response?” Rima asked, her heart pounding with tension.
Kamal let out a long sigh. “He didn’t respond personally, of course — a man of his standing doesn’t speak directly on such matters. But the intermediary called me two days later, and passed on a very brief message: ‘No need for further tension. The past stays in the past, and so the present stays in the present. Let each of us live our lives in peace.’ I think that’s his way of saying he accepts the truce, Rima, as long as the evidence stays kept as a silent guarantee, without actually being published.”
Rima felt relief spreading through her whole body, but it was a relief tinged with a faint bitterness. “So a man like that, after everything he’s done, gets away without any real punishment?”
“I know this isn’t full justice, Rima,” Kamal said with wise calm. “But full justice isn’t always within our reach, especially with men who built their empires on the ruins of others’ silence. What we got today is something else, perhaps more important: real safety, for us and for those who come after us, and an end to thirty years of silent fear this family carried alone.”
After the call ended, Rima sat in her seat on the train, watching the European countryside race past behind the window, green fields and small quiet villages following one another in a reassuring rhythm.
She thought of everything that had happened in the past few weeks: a painting arriving in a wooden box, a face resembling her own painted years before her birth, a journey to Istanbul then Damascus then Alsace, one thread leading to another until the whole story unraveled: a forbidden love, a twin’s sacrifice, an identity assumed for decades, and two women who lived two entire lives under two names that weren’t truly their own.
She took out her phone, and looked at the photo she had taken with Sophie before leaving, two women carrying the features of a single family, meeting for the first time after decades of unintended separation. She felt a genuine smile forming on her face for the first time in many days.
Her phone buzzed with a new message. It was from Nabil: “Did you get there safely? I want to know how the meeting with Sophie went. And also… I want to see you when you’re back. There’s something I want to say to you, that has nothing to do with Anwar or Lamis or any of this old story this time.”
Rima smiled as she read the message, feeling an unexpected warmth slip into her chest — a warmth that had nothing to do with the mystery that had first brought them together, but with something entirely new that had been quietly growing between them through all those weeks of calls and meetings and shared fears.
Rima returned to Vienna on a quiet spring evening, the city welcoming her with that soft orange light she had always loved. Nabil was waiting for her at the train station, holding a single white rose. Seeing it, she remembered the old flower seller who had offered her that same rose every evening, on that distant night when this whole journey had begun, when she had turned it down, saying that week wouldn’t be needing flowers.
“You misjudged that week,” Nabil said with a faint smile, when she told him the memory, holding the rose out to her. “That week needed far more than one rose, if only you’d known what was coming.”
In the days that followed, Rima took the painting to the museum’s restoration lab, to finally finish what she had begun weeks earlier: uncovering that hidden layer Jürgen had pointed to in his first examination, in the upper right corner of the painting.
She worked with the patience of monks that Klara had always described, drawing the moistened cotton gently across the surface, layer after layer, until at last what Anwar had begun to paint, then deliberately covered, came into view: small words, written in a fine artistic hand between the shadows of the background, in Arabic, nearly vanished entirely had Rima’s hand not known exactly where to look:
“To whoever one day sees this face:
This love was not completed in its time, but it never ended. Look at it as you are, not as she was, and carry forward what we could not.”
Klara stood behind her, watching the revelation in stunned silence. “Rima, this… this means he knew, even as he painted that picture near the end of his life, that it would one day reach someone carrying Lamis’s face.”
“He couldn’t have known exactly,” Rima said quietly, still staring at the newly revealed words. “But he hoped. He painted her, and left her a message, trusting that time would eventually find its way to deliver it to whoever needed it, even if it took another thirty years.”
After finishing the restoration, Rima invited everyone to her flat: Kamal, who now visited her almost every two weeks, after the glass wall that had separated them for decades had finally worn away; Nabil, whose presence in her life had become something she couldn’t imagine the weeks without; and Klara, of course, who had accompanied her through every step of this long journey.
On the screen, over a video call, Khadija appeared from Damascus, smiling, and on another screen beside it, Sophie from Alsace, who had promised to visit Vienna the following summer to meet the rest of the family for the first time face to face.
Rima looked around her in that moment: a family of a kind she had never imagined, scattered across three continents and three languages, brought together in the end by a wooden box that had arrived at her building’s door on an ordinary evening she had expected nothing from.
She looked at the painting hanging before her, Lamis’s face gazing at her calmly, but something in those painted eyes seemed different now from how it had looked the first night she saw it: the anxiety once visible in her features no longer looked like an endless suspended waiting, but a quiet contentment, as though the message the painting had carried through all those years had finally reached those it had been waiting for.
The summer passed quickly, the way seasons pass when life is finally full again after long years of unexplained emptiness. Sophie kept her promise, and arrived in Vienna in late August, carrying in her bag a small painting she had made herself specially for the occasion: the face of a woman smiling in complete freedom, no anxiety in it, no waiting, inspired by the old photograph Rima had found in the deposit box in Istanbul — Lamis in Anwar’s studio, the summer of 1987, before everything changed.
Everyone gathered at the Vienna museum itself, in a small room Professor Steiner had set aside, after Rima told him part of the story, which moved him with a human depth rarely encountered in his ordinary daily work, to hold a small private exhibition: Lamis’s original painting, now fully restored, at the center of the room, beside it Sophie’s new painting, and between them, in a small glass frame, the photograph that had brought Lamis and Anwar together that distant summer.
Rima named it, with everyone’s agreement, “The Painting Not Yet Finished,” in tribute to that phrase that had echoed so often in her mind throughout her journey: that Lamis and Anwar’s story had not been completed in its own time, but it had never ended — it had gone on being painted across generations, in faces not yet born, in cities the original owners of the story had never once set foot in.
Rima stood on the evening of the opening, among the small, carefully chosen group of guests, Kamal to her right, Nabil to her left holding her hand quietly, Sophie and Klara nearby, exchanging conversation in broken French and genuine laughter.
On the large screen mounted in the corner of the room, Khadija appeared from Damascus via a live video call, smiling with visible pride, and behind her in the frame, a glimpse of the courtyard of her old Damascene house, where every thread of this story had truly begun, long decades before.
Rima looked at the original painting before her, then at the faint reflection of her own face on the glass of the frame surrounding it — the same gesture she had once made before the mirror in the entryway of her Vienna flat, on the morning after the wooden box arrived.
It was herself, unmistakably, just as she had been then. But she no longer saw another strange face staring back at her from the depths of that reflection, as she had felt on that distant night. That other face had become part of her now, reconciled with the face she had known her whole life, neither a stranger to it nor separate from it, but a natural extension of it — one continuous story across three generations of women who carried the same face, the same name, though they had lived entirely different lives.
Nabil came quietly closer, and whispered in her ear: “What are you thinking about?”
Rima smiled, looked at him, then at the painting once more. “I’m thinking that every painting, however long it waits to be completed, finds in the end the hand that finishes it. And that some stories, despite all the darkness and silence and fear that stretch across decades, always find their way, in the end, to the light.”
They stood together for a long while before the painting, on that warm summer evening, while the overlapping voices of a family born from the womb of an old secret filled the room around them: Arabic, German, and French tangling together into one warm fabric, just as the threads of this story had tangled across thirty years and three continents, to find at last its completion in this small warm room, where the painting no longer waited for a letter that would never come, but at last celebrated the arrival of every letter it had waited so long for.
THE END
Numan Albarbari
Backnang – Baden-Württemberg – Germany
Thursday
22 Jumada al-Akhirah 1445 AH
January 4, 2024 CE