You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

years old at the time, while also holding down her own nearly full-time job for an NGO.

Maybe because Syria was the last place he worked before he’d been killed, it was the part of his career she kept at a bit of a distance. Since she had never been to the country herself, it also seemed more of an abstract war to her than what they’d experienced together in South Africa in the ’90s.

But now she looked more closely at these files, reading the descriptors on the photos. “IMG 3459, Syria, 2013, Al-Mezzeh military hospital.” “IMG 3460, Syria, 2013, Al-Mezzeh military hospital, bodies,” “IMG 3461, Syria, 2013, Al-Mezzeh military hospital, torture victim.” The list went on like this for a while. These were the images he had taken in the hospital that the Syrian government had used as a torture center, Grace knew. He’d managed to get access through a forensic photographer who worked for the regime, but the activity had put them both at tremendous risk. After he’d shot only a couple of rolls, he had to flee the country, or he would have become a victim of the regime himself. Later, the forensic photographer made it out of Syria, smuggling his own images with him. But that was much later.

Grace remembered how Pieter was when he came home from that trip to Syria in 2013. He had come in the door, looking as pale as a ghost, kissed and hugged her and Karin, and gone immediately into the guest bedroom, pulled down the blackout curtain, and slept for three days. She’d been afraid that he was gravely ill. He would only allow her to bring him soup and sit with him briefly. When she did, he would touch her face lovingly and then start to cry, begging that she let him just go back to sleep for a while. She did.

It had been traumatic for her too. She didn’t know what he had seen or how it had affected him, and she was concerned that this time it would leave permanent, but invisible, scars. Even later, when he had recovered and he came out and became his easygoing self again, he didn’t share with Grace what had happened. She had understood his struggle to communicate—extremely unusual for Pieter: he just hadn’t wanted to put it into words.

Only a few of the photographs he’d taken from that trip made it into the main media outlets, she remembered, and he had been dispirited when he was told the others were just too gruesome. The truth of what was happening needed to be told. But that was the irony about the media. The old maxim “If it bleeds it leads” didn’t apply if it got too bloody. There were rules at “family” news outlets about how much blood was suitable for publication, and these images, she came to understand, far exceeded those limits.

The truth was, Pieter hadn’t even wanted to show Grace these images, even though she had developed a pretty strong stomach for horror over the years. He had said they really needed to be shared with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, so someone could take some action. They were maybe beyond the scope of what public outrage alone could accomplish. Through a good old friend she knew at the court, Jenny Lentiner, an American who worked for the Office of the Prosecutor, she’d managed to put Pieter in touch with the right authorities. Things had moved forward from there.

But once again Grace sat in this office in an ergonomic chair in complete bewilderment. This was old news, Pieter’s old work, serious stuff, but yes, personal and private, and, eventually, classified material. What was it doing on Martijn’s computer? Why did Martijn have Pieter’s Excel sheets? What was he doing, or what had he done with them?

There had been a knot in her stomach all day, and now it started to ache, to burn. She was hit by the terrible reality that she was married to a man she did not know. What role had Martijn played in Pieter’s life before he died, beyond working as his accountant? How long had they known each other, before Grace found out that he knew him at all? Even if Martijn had somehow been granted these images by Pieter, say for safekeeping—giving him the benefit of the doubt—why would Pieter have trusted Martijn, and not her, his wife, with that task?

What was also strange was that the lists of the photographs had popped up, but the images themselves hadn’t. Maybe somehow they weren’t labeled under Pieter’s name? Maybe they were filed elsewhere? She tried clicking the photo app, to see what was there. Up jumped a whole slew of images she knew: pictures of Martijn’s boys growing up, images of his family with Lila, pictures of Grace and Martijn on trips to holiday destinations, images from their wedding, photos of all of them together—the new blended family of five.

Okay, that was comforting. That was what should be on this computer, she thought. Somehow she had landed back at normal.

Then she gave it a little more thought. That code name used in one of the Excel sheets. Oranje. That was it. Why not try that one instead?

She typed it into the search engine: “Oranje.” And wham! Thousands of images started piling onto the screen like a deck of cards thrown down on a blackjack table.

These, she knew instantly, were all the images Pieter had never wanted her to see: dead bodies, hundreds of them, strewn across cold concrete floors. Bodies wrapped in plastic, emaciated, stripped naked, and beaten. There were close-ups of individual bodies, with burns the shape of stove elements, strangulation lines on necks, gashes from whippings, limbs hacked and mutilated. The pictures were tossed at her by the computer, one after another, filling up the screen, photo file after photo file. Horror after horror after horror.

Grace, stunned and whiplashed, pushed herself back from the computer as if it, on its