by Jean Sasson
She had never been so joyous as on the day she slipped her dollars into her handbag and entered a store to purchase six computers and three printers. The joy surpassed even that of her wedding day, when in an elegant white suit she felt beautiful for the first time in her life.
With her dollars and her determination, Mayada reentered the world of commercial printing. With time, and after long hours each workday, her small business grew profitable. She was feeding and educating her children, without any assistance from anyone. With her success, Mayada came to believe that the worst of times were now behind her.
But she should have known better, she told herself now. Over the past few years, Baath officials had become increasingly suspicious of printing companies, because printed flyers were proving a popular method of attacking Saddam’s weakening government. Although she took great care to keep her business above official reproach, innocence alone did not keep one safe.
When she leaned slightly forward and looked through the front window of the car an awesome fear such as she had never known gripped her mind. She was on the way to the “Darb Al-Sad Ma red,” the “road from which there is no return.”
She knew by the route the car was following that she was being taken to Baladiyat, the headquarters of Saddam’s secret police, which also served as a prison complex.
Mayada had never before been inside this compound, but during the time the prison was being built, she had frequently passed the construction site in the mornings on her way to work. Never in her wildest dreams did she imagine she would one day be imprisoned there. But the unimaginable day was now upon her and she feared that death awaited her at Baladiyat.
Within minutes, the main entrance of the prison compound came into view. The automobile passed through a huge, grotesque black gate decorated with two hanging murals. In the gold-plated murals, Saddam overlooked the Iraqi people as they toiled in fields, factories and offices.
The driver stopped directly in front of a large building with small windows centered high atop the structure. Mayada went weak with dread, and when the two men lifted her from the Toyota, she noted the black sand clouds had completely obscured the sky. Her fear made her dizzy but she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, admonishing herself to remain in control of her senses. She found use of her muscles and forced herself to look up. The face of Saddam Hussein stared back from every compass point.
Mayada had been in Saddam’s presence more than once. She had even stood close enough to the man to note the dark-green tribal tattoo he once wore on the end of his nose.
Baath party slogans were plastered on posters everywhere. “He who does not plant does not eat.” Mayada couldn’t help but wonder if she would ever be hungry again. As they pulled her into the building she looked upward to say a small prayer. “God, keep Fay and Ali safe and return me to them.”
A man on either side of her guided Mayada up the stairs. At the top, emaciated men in torn, bloodstained clothing squatted on the floor, their hands bound behind their backs. Every face was bruised black; some faces still streamed with blood. No one squatting in the hallway spoke, but Mayada felt an aura of sincere compassion follow her awkward progress as she was dragged down the hall and into a nearby room.
By this time Mayada was stumbling and weeping in absolute terror.
Unlike many Arab women who were long burdened by cruel fathers and other men, Mayada had never known male dominance or masculine outrage. Her father, Nizar Jafar Al-Askari, had always been a gentle man. He never once favored the idea of sons over daughters, even though in Iraq a man surrounded by females is often pitied.
When Mayada was born, her father felt concern even for the reaction of Scottie, the much-loved black Scottish terrier he’d acquired in England. Mayada’s father lifted Scottie in his arms and took him into the nursery to sniff at Mayada’s feet. He advised Scottie that the feet of his daughter had been designated as his limit for the time being, but that one day soon Mayada would be old enough to play with him as his companion.
Deep in Saddam’s secret police headquarters, Mayada was overwhelmed by the wish to have her peaceful father by her side. She had never felt so alone in forty-three years of living as she did at that moment.
Someone shoved her from behind and Mayada was propelled into a room with a fierceness that loosened her sandals. She barely managed to catch her footing without sprawling on the floor.
A man stood behind a desk and shouted into a telephone. The skin on his face was youthful but his hair was completely white.
He slammed the phone down and glared at Mayada, then shouted, “And what do you think you were going to accomplish by this treason?”
Mayada began crying even harder at the word “treason,” for she knew that such a charge would mean certain death in Iraq. She clutched her hand to her throat and sputtered, “What do you mean?”
He screamed loudly, “You lowlifes have the guts to print leaflets against the government!”
She did not understand this charge. Her small print shop had never been asked to print leaflets criticizing the government, and even if it had, she would have refused. She knew such a thing would gain the attention of Saddam’s secret police and would end in the deaths of every man, woman and child associated with her shop. Only revolutionaries with a mind to overthrow Saddam became involved in such unlawful activities. She was a law-abiding citizen who was careful to stay far out of reach of political controversy.
As she stood there petrified, the white-haired man shouted, “Take this lowlife woman away! I will tend to her later!” Mayada feared what he meant, but her thoughts shifted to Fay and Ali. In Iraq, when a family member is arrested, the family’s children are often taken away to be tortured, as well. Mayada summoned all her courage and asked the white-haired man, “Where are you sending me?”
He looked at her and shouted, “Detention!”
Mayada’s background gave her the courage to ask, “Can I please make one phone call?”
Mayada was well-born, and knew that every Iraqi was aware of the prestige associated with her family. Operating on instinct, she delivered her own threat by adding, “My mother is Salwa Al-Husri.”
The man’s foot was raised inches from the floor, and he paused in that silly position to look at her. As he considered his response, he continued to hold his foot elevated. At any other time in her life Mayada would have laughed at his ridiculous posture, but the moment was wholly devoid of humor. Still, she felt the smallest glimmer of hope. Was it possible that the white-haired man did not know who she was? His apparent utter surprise gave her hope that her words might change the course of events.
She told him, “Sooner or later you will have to answer to someone. My mother has many contacts at the highest ranks.”
As in slow motion, he placed his upheld foot back on the floor. But she could see that he was still thinking. Without a word, he handed her the telephone.
Her trembling hands were so pale she wondered if somehow the blood had left them. She took the phone and dialed her home, praying that her children would answer, praying that they had not been taken. The phone rang and rang.
There was no answer.
Without looking into the man’s face, she fought her panic and dialed a second time, hoping that in her jumbled mental state she had misdialed her home number.
As the phone continued to ring, the man stood and watched, tilting his head first one way and then another.
Suddenly he grabbed the phone from Mayada’s hands. The fears of every bombing raid she’d endured during the war years could not compare with her terror at the idea that the secret police might lay a hand on Fay and Ali. But she would be left without an answer. With a smirk, the white-haired man gestured for her to leave.
Mayada had to make a second pass of the prisoners still squatting in the hallway, and she steeled herself with the knowledge that she was now one of them. And worse, no one outside Baladiyat knew where she was.
The two guards pulled matching, bla
ck-tinted sunglasses from their pants pockets and placed them across their eyes. They crowded around her, walking along with solemn expressions and nudging her shoulders with their hands to urge her forward. She was escorted out of the building and across the prison grounds.
Since she had never been to this compound before, she found herself comparing this new center of operations to the old secret police headquarters, a place she had visited a number of times during the 1980s, when family friend and mentor Dr. Fadil Al-Barrak worked there as Director General. At that time, she’d had no idea that the place she visited held such horrors. As far as Mayada knew, Dr. Fadil, as she called him, was a man in charge of Iraq’s security, a man who protected Iraqis from dangerous opposition groups or internal terrorists. When she visited Dr. Fadil at the secret police headquarters, she went there to discuss his books or to explore her writing career.
But now Mayada felt overwhelming guilt for benefiting from her family’s relationship with Dr. Fadil—she now understood that he had presided over a place where thousands of Iraqis were tortured to death. She now knew that she had deceived herself about the reality of her government’s shameful activities, and that in her youthful naïveté she could not see her country as she should have. She compared long-forgotten things that she suddenly remembered from the old headquarters with what she was now seeing at this new center. Everything was different, and the new buildings reflected those changes.
When Dr. Fadil was Director General—or, as he was called by everyone in the secret police service, “Al-Sayid Al-Aam,” or “Mr. General”—the secret police headquarters was in Al-Masbah, close to Park Al-Sadoun, a Baghdad area that was once inhabited by Jews and Christians. The homes in that area were built in the old Baghdad style, with ornate shutters and large balconies, and generous gardens where laughing children would play games of hide-and-seek and hopscotch.
One beautiful Iraqi morning, government officials had unexpectedly arrived and confiscated those fine old homes from their owners, then built a high fence around the neighborhood and turned the area into a warren of buildings and streets with hidden chambers.
Dr. Fadil, who had ruled over the entire department and answered only to Saddam, had built himself a modern office in the midst of these old homes. The ground floor of his office building was a garage filled with new Japanese automobiles, which Mayada knew had been given as gifts by Saddam Hussein. Dr. Fadil’s office was furnished with a huge mahogany desk and a dark leather couch, with two lofty chairs and glass coffee tables. The ceiling was constructed of small metal squares decorated in a pop-art image so dazzlingly bizarre that Mayada imagined it suitable for a dance club. His huge office had every modern convenience, including numerous monitors on which he could view every aspect of the rambling prison. Dr. Fadil’s office also boasted such luxuries as video machines, which were then very rare in Iraq, as well as a small movie screen on which he invited close friends to view the latest Hollywood movies. He even had a large swimming pool constructed at his office.
In the spring of 1984, Dr. Fadil had been promoted and transferred to the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and his new offices were located at Sahat Al-Nosour, in the Al-Mansour area. Mayada had visited him in his new headquarters at various times until 1990, when Saddam ordered Fadil’s arrest. She knew that if Dr. Fadil were still in charge she would be a welcomed visitor to Baladiyat, rather than a frightened prisoner.
Mayada and her two guards arrived at a solid block of concrete buildings. As she passed through the door she was taken into a spherically shaped office to the right of the entrance hall. There a small-boned man with a wrinkled face sat behind a circular desk. She eyed him closely. His face was wrinkled by worries, not by time. She could not explain how she knew that the man had been aged by what he had seen, rather than by the number of years that had passed, but somehow she knew.
He suddenly spoke. He ordered her to give him her possessions. He registered each item calmly: a ring, a watch, a wallet with 20,000 Iraqi dinars (about U.S. $10), a workbook with assignments for printing and design, a telephone book, a compulsory identification card, her keys and, finally, a note from her daughter Fay reminding her not to forget the luncheon date they had made for that day.
Another man suddenly came out of nowhere, grabbed her right hand and crushed her thumb onto an inkpad. He stamped an impression of her thumb on the list of her belongings. A second man then came into the room, and the two guards took her to the prison cells.
After passing a double door, she found herself in a long corridor lined with cell doors. The men stopped in front of the third door on the right. Mayada stood nervously while the thickset man unlocked the heavy padlock and gestured her to enter. Then she saw it. “52.” Terrified, she cried out, “Noooooo.”
She trembled in disbelief as she reached out toward the number. They were going to lock her into cell number 52. Her eyes began to prickle, then her flesh began burning from her toes to the top of her head. The number 52 pressed against her heart like an iron fist—52 was an unlucky number that had pursued her family for generations. Her beloved father had died at age 52, in room 52 at the Nun’s Hospital. Her father’s father, Jafar Pasha Al-Askari, had been assassinated at age 52. And now she was being locked into cell 52. Mayada felt certain that her arrest was as good as a death sentence. No! She could not enter that cell. No one could make her. She planted her feet firmly on the floor and looked around for something firm to cling to.
The pock-faced guard shouted. “Go in!”
Mayada’s voice was jerky, the words she spoke almost inaudible. “I cannot. I cannot.”
The guard’s jaw tightened. “Go in, I said!”
The second man gave her a violent shove.
Mayada flew sprawling into cell number 52. She groped at the cell wall with her fingers to keep from falling. Her vision blurred as she slid her fingers over the cool wall.
She heard the slamming of the door and the click of the lock behind her. She was trapped. With her palms pressed hard against the wall, Mayada regained her balance. She stood in the middle of a small, rectangular cell.
Flushed and panting and confused by the fluorescent lights on the ceiling and the dancing shadows all around her, she broke into tears when she realized that the shadows were not actually shadows at all. The images formed into women, and one of the women walked toward her. In a voice filled with kindness she asked, “Why are you here?”
The woman who moved toward Mayada stood silent, aside from her question, giving Mayada time to gather her wits. She made an effort to respond to the woman’s simple question, but could not speak. Instead, she flapped her hands and arms up and down. She did not know why she responded like this, and she worried what the other women must think. Genuinely frightened, she was afraid that the other women would call the guards to take her away to a mental ward. To avoid that fate, Mayada made a great effort to clear her lungs, which were bursting with tension. She struggled to force saliva onto her swollen tongue and into her dry mouth; she had had no water to drink since her morning arrest. She blinked her eyes several times in an attempt to adjust to the light. Mayada was too confused by the poorly lit interior of the cell to tally the indistinct silhouettes that she now knew were other prisoners, but she believed there were more than a dozen dark “shadow women.” For some reason, their presence gave Mayada a feeling of unexpected consolation.
She later learned that she was prisoner number eighteen in a cell meant to hold eight prisoners, but as Mayada looked around at the overcrowded rectangular cell, that number might as well have been eighty. A toilet had been purposely placed in the cell’s one spot that lay in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, the point toward which she was supposed to take her five daily prayers. This was an intentional insult against every Muslim, because all Islamic architecture takes great care to locate toilets as far away as possible from the direction of the Kaaba.
Mayada’s mind was now moved from her thoughts of prayer by a terrible stench. She had never sme
lled such a disgusting odor, even during the worst of the war, when rescuers were tugging at burned bodies that had been concealed under concrete ruins for days. The cell’s vile odor was so overwhelming that she could only imagine that it must have arisen from vomit covering the floor. She was so convinced that she stood in piles of filth that she lifted her sandals and examined the soles, but they were clean. She cautiously inhaled and decided that the odor was everywhere. She could only assume that the stench of lentils cooking in the prison kitchen had seeped through the cement of the cell, where it merged with the scent of unwashed bodies and the strong stench of the frequently used toilet.
Before turning her attention to the woman who had spoken, Mayada took another long look around the cell. Red, black and gray graffiti was scrawled on the walls—she hoped that the red messages weren’t written in blood. She saw a glimmer of sunlight coming through a tiny barred window at the top of the back wall. Two iron benches that she presumed were bunks ran along the sides of the room.
The owner of the sympathetic voice stepped closer and a hand gently touched Mayada’s shoulder. “Why are you here, little dove?” she asked.
Mayada looked into the woman’s face and saw that she was beautiful. The woman’s skin was extremely fair. She even had a few freckles scattered over her delicate nose. Her vivid green eyes shone.
The beautiful woman spoke again. “I am Samara. Why are you here?”
Other shadow women stepped forward to listen, and the expressions on their faces conveyed compassion for Mayada.
Mayada looked into their faces and shared the official explanation for her arrest. “The white-haired man told me that my printing company had printed something against the government, but that is not true. I have printed nothing against the government.”