Nobody knows the full Luna. Not even her fiancé. Not even her lover. From the two of them her lover comes closest, but he doesn’t even know her exact address in Bratislava, because she is afraid he would send her letters and gifts to that address and her fiancé would notice something is going on. Her lover is a hopeless romantic and can be very impulsive, so she prefers not share her address. Whenever they meet they meet in one of his apartments. All the thoughtful gifts he gives her, all the letters, she keeps in shoe boxes stored away in her mother’s house in Komarno, in the south of Slovakia.
Luna is 29. Her father is Lebanese. Her mother is Slovak. She’s the youngest of three. She was born in Beirut. In 2006 her family moved back to Bratislava, because of the Israeli invasion. In Slovakia her father’s philandering and his alcoholism got out of hand. Eventually he moved back to Beirut. Her parents never got an official divorce. She hates her father and adores her mother. Unfortunately she inherited some of her father’s vices. It’s not the alcoholism, it’s the cheating. She hates herself for it, but she’s not ready to commit exclusively to either her fiancé or her lover. If she’s completely honest there are even a few guys she allows to have the illusion that one day they will be her lover. She can’t help it.
Luna works at a bank. She is responsible for the fight against fraud. When she thinks about her love life and her job she thinks: who could be more qualified to fight fraud than a full-time fraudster?
Her fiancé she keeps around for status reasons, his loyalty and commitment. He’s a wonderfully safe option that goes well with her very mild self-diagnosed narcissicm. It’s the guy she can be seen in public with. The kind of guy her father will approve of. Even though she hates her father she realizes his approval and admiration means the world to her. This is a trait that she often fights, but never really defeats. Her lover is not presentable in public spaces, because he has long hair and is two inches shorter than her. Luna is six feet. To be very precise, she measures 181 cm. Her lover measures a mere 174 cm. Personally she couldn’t care less. He makes her fly to the moon and back every second they are together. But how does it look in the eyes of other people, you know? He looks like an little elf and he is not a good dresser. The kind of attention she gets from him, the depth of their conversations are extremely dear to her. She’s never felt anything like this. Although she is very prudish her lover is allowed to go down on her during her period. There is nobody she feels more like herself with. And yes, he doesn’t know her address. He knows her well enough to never ask. She knows she is hurting her lover, but she can’t let him go. Her financé is blissfully ignorant and she is hell-bent on keeping it that way. The only point of contention is why she is always texting her ‘female friend in Switzerland’. Hmm…
Luna studied international relations. Her big dream was to make it big in diplomacy. The furthest she got was a top paid job at a Lebanese consulate in the US. She already had her job at the bank when she manages to get the position at the consulate. And maybe hoarding options is one of her main characteristics, because she never quit her job at the bank and combined her old job with her job at the consulate. That’s two fat paychecks. That’s how she’s already bought a house at her age. With these real estate prices…
Eventually she returned to Slovakia, because she hate American culture. She hates the pace of it. She hates the superficial, obligatory optimism and cheerfulness. The flimsy veneer of friendliness with hunger for money, money, money always lurking underneath. Also the inherent escapism and self-deluding of the American spirit makes her stomach turn. Luna is deeply conflicted about many things. She prefers to live in Slovakia, but at the same time feels shame, because in the US she made more money, had more status and made more of an impression at fancy dinner parties. At the same time she prefers to be in a country where the waitress will not hide it when she is in a terrible mood and doesn’t fake a two foot wide smile yelling ‘Hi, am Becky and I will be your waitress.’ Luna never smiles in public. Not only does smiling cause wrinkles, it just doesn’t come natural to her. There is a sadness festering inside Luna that she’s never been able to shake off. Only her lover sees it and is trying his most driven best to suck it out of her.
She feels like she needs to do something out of the ordinary. Something life-changing. Something real.
She’s considered participating in an Ayahuasca ritual, but there is just no way she is going to vomit in the presence of other people.
And so Luna finds herself in a war zone.
She’s lied to her boyfriend that she is visiting her father in Lebanon.
Her lover knows where she is, but has sworn to not tell a soul. He offered to go with her, but she was radically opposed to that idea. This is something she has to do alone. Besides, her lover has two little children with another woman and Luna always makes sure he spends all the time that he can with them. Joining her in Gaza would be flagrantly irresponsible. As mentioned, Luna is deeply conflicted, because she wants her lover to be a great father, but she lives with the fact that he is cheating on his wife with her.
At work they think she is home officing from Komarno.
Her mum thinks she is on a business trip to Paris.
Can Luna keep track of all her lies?
She can.
She’s the daughter of a raging alcoholic.
She was six when she started hiding his whiskey bottles.
All her life she has lied to meet boyfriends, to go to parties, to travel to locations her father would never approve of, etc
Her father only knows her accomplishments and nothing else and her accomplishments aren’t good enough. According to her father she should have triple the income she has right now.
Getting into Gaza is very tricky, but she used some of her old diplomatic contacts. Diplomats from the US, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi-Arabia and even one from The Netherlands have pulled strings for her.
So here she is. Touring Gaza with two guides. One from Bangladesh and one from New Zealand. Both of them with some diplomatic status.
What she is doing makes no sense whatsoever on a rational level. She only knows that her heart is screaming to do this.
The destruction she sees boggles the mind. It’s way worse than she’s expected. Abandoned towns. Destroyed houses. The smell of death everywhere. She had been warned about that.
The Gaza strip is small. Her plan is to go from the north to the south.
She’s never written anything except for her master thesis and anti-fraud protocols, but she is toying with the idea of writing a book about her experience.
Privately she is hoping to find herself in this extremely conflicted setting.
She didn’t tell that even to her lover, but he may have guessed.
Maybe Luna hopes to find reasons here to stop caring about expensive custom-made haircare products. Maybe she will stop caring about going to very regular teeth whitening treatments. Maybe she will start caring a little less about working out with a trainer three times a week to maintain her sixpack and her firm Latina shaped ass. Maybe she will even stop caring about having almost no breasts. Maybe she will stop worrying about how to maximize her income. Maybe she will find out if she should be with her financé or her lover or neither.
Perhaps it makes no sense to go and look for answers to very personal questions in a war zone, but people have done way crazier things.
She does care about the Palestinians. She’s donated to the Palestinian cause in several ways. She really does wish she could write a book about the situation that would expose Israel as the murderous state she’s always thought it was.
Instead of answers she finds the bodies of kids. Horribly mutilated. An abandoned tent. Flies everywhere. The mum and the dad of the kids are also dead. Six corpses in total. Horrific burns. Limbs hanging in frazzles barely attached to the bodies. The worst smell she has ever encountered. She rubs more patchouli on her hijab. She sprays more of her outrageously expensive perfume ‘heures d’absence’ on her chest. The chest she hates with every fibre in her body for being so stingily flat. She’s considering to have her lips turned into inflated duck lips, but no matter how much she hates her breasts she feels it’s wrong to go for breast implants. Maybe that’s twelve years of Catholic school speaking.
She realizes that she thought the sight of so much catastrophic suffering would change her. Set her priorities straight. Bring out the real her. The pure her. The good her.
Unfortunately all she catches herself thinking is that she wants to go home and that coming here was a most foolish, erratic, self-indulgent mistake. And she hates herself for wanting to be home, safe in her bedroom sipping hot cocoa and watching Netflix and reading the adoring messages of her lover and then to fall asleep next to her safe financé.
The only hatred that’s even more intense than the hate she feels towards herself or towards her father is the hatred she feels for the scum that bombed this family.
Her guides are considering if they should bury the bodies or who they could alert to come and get them. They should be identified. They take a lot of pictures. Take a lot of notes.
She pushes herself to take a very good look at the dead.
This is what she came for. To burst her comfortable, selfish, self-obsessed bubble.
The sight of the intestines bulging out of the little bellies of the kids makes her dizzy. Combined with the insane heat she wonders why she is not collapsing and losing consciouscness.
Her guides manage to alert the proper authorities. They drive on.
It’s almost impossible, but it really goes downhill from there.
Luna has treated herself to five days of the most brutal destruction, the most apocalyptic scenes, the worst sights, the most putrid smells and the most harrowing pleas and screams.
She feels like she cannot justify her catastrophe tourism unless this experience will have a profound, positive impact on her life and the world.
When she is back at the aiport in Tel Aviv, where only her diplomatic connections, keep the Israelis from confiscating her two smartphones, she feels like she has to do something, decide something, help to stop the carnage. She considers returning to the world of diplomacy, but she knows how impotent that world is. It’s all theatre. Expensive theatre paid for by small tax payers.
Eventually she has to admit to herself that she could make different choices, and she could perhaps make a difference in the world, if she gave up on a lot of things. She doubts you can stop wars and still find the time for pedicures, manicures, having every hair on your body south of your eye brows lasered away, traveling to exotic locations to hang out on the beach and other things she loves to do AND loves to have others know that she is doing them.
The most radical decision Luna makes is to stop feeling guilty about being selfish.
Yes, there is unspeakable horror in this world and yes, she does wish she could take it all away, but she is not willing to pay the price to maybe make a tiny little difference.
So she chooses to enjoy her life and shrug off the nagging guilt as much as much as possible.
She will continue to send some money to good causes, she will keep up to date with world affairs, but she wants to be honest with herself and the truth is that she is commited to living a most pleasurable life and move around in high society circles.
She tells herself her upbringing, her status obsessed, womanizing, alcoholic father combined with a hypercapitalist society programmed her to be this way.
To her credit, Luna never engages in online virtue signalling.
She doesn’t see herself as a good person.
She likes that quote that goes: good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
Back home she has her lover massage her and buy her flowers and she has her fiancé buy her dinner in Bratislava’s most expensive restaurant.
Her lover asks what it what like to spend a week in a war zone.
Her financé asks what it was like to to spend a week with her father.
She gives both the same answer.
‘Infinitely worse than I could ever have expected. On every possible level.’
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The Confessor 