I wondered what their massive windows looked like now, and whether they still lived on show to the gaze of thousands.
Was Asma locked up, or back home in Ealing, or Acton? When pictures of her appeared making charity packages with her husband or voting—voting!—in a referendum, I wondered if she was drugged, compliant, indifferent, complicit.
-- From Joan Juliet Buck's mea culpa in 2012 for her 2011 Vogue article about Asma al-Assad, Syria's First Lady. The uncurtained glass wall in the Assad's living quarters had mystified Buck when she visited them in December 2010 and continued to mystify her. Why should a head of state -- and an authoritarian state -- choose to live like that?
Someday she'll understand and when she does, will she cry out in horror? Will she fall on her knees and beg God to forgive her blindness?
Against that time I can only quote the last words in the film "Gladiator." Now we are free. I will see you again but not yet, not yet.
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