My Torturess

by Bensalem Himmich

  I could no longer stand to listen to this endless flow of verbiage from the judge who wielded such power over me.

  “You mention piss, Sir,” I interrupted.

  “Oh, do you have an opinion on the subject?” he asked.

  “No, Sir, but I do have an urgent need . . . to piss. I’ve been afraid of not being able to hold out while I’ve been sitting here. I might wet my trousers, and that wouldn’t be fitting in your exalted presence . . .”

  “Okay then, get up and go. But don’t forget that, if you‘re stubborn and keep things to yourself, Mama Ghula will straighten your teeth for you . . .”

  I pointed at the sky above.

  “God alone created me,” I replied. “He’s the one who gave me straight teeth.”

  “But Mama Ghula will make them level with the ground,” he yelled at me as the phone started ringing again.

  In the secretary’s office, Miss Na‘ima thrust a piece of paper into my pocket, then took me to the door and handed me over to the guard, who immediately bound my wrist to his. He was furious and vowed a solemn oath that in future this would be the only way I would be allowed to walk anywhere with him. I paid no attention to his rants, but used my free hand to check on the piece of paper in my pocket. I was looking forward to the opportunity to open and read it once I was left alone.

  13

  The Letter That Is a Gleaming Light, and I Witness Executions

  Back in my cell, I searched high and low to see if there were any hidden cameras or concealed microphones and made sure that at the very least nothing like that was visible to the eye or tangible to the hand. Even so, I decided to wrap myself up in my thin wrap and huddle up to read the contents of the thin sheet of paper.

  And how amazing and wonderful were the things I read!

  “My dear Hamuda,

  “I have sensed in you the scent of my beloved homeland, coupled with your innocence of the charges leveled against you, charges in which you have no part. There is neither time nor need for me to tell you my own story. Yours is more noteworthy because it is more painful and bloody. Take great care. Every heroic act of defiance you perform, every resistance to torture, makes you a candidate for their designs: that you become a double agent to be inserted by the Americans and other Western secret service agencies into groups that they consider to be extremist or terrorist. Every single investigator at this center and its multinational directors have one aim, to create cooperative and well-programmed agents, and then to bump them off with deadly weapons if they should happen to go astray or resist in any way. It does not matter whether or not you reveal things to them; that’s just a means whereby they can get you to be compliant and turn you into a convinced tool in their hands ready to perform specific designated functions for them. Then they have you trapped in a deadly vortex from which the only escape is death. Through suffering and bitter experience, the woman writing these lines to you is well aware of what you’re saying. I had no choice but to enter this service—God curse poverty and unemployment!! At this point I see no way of getting out of it alive . . .

  “So, my dear Hamuda, If you find it difficult to become what they want, a willing servant of their devilish designs, then you need to come up with a solution that may help you escape if you can do it right: you need to pretend to be crazy and sick. Shower your interrogators with every conceivable kind of ridiculous and crazy talk; threaten your torturers with your hacking cough and the risk of contagion from your illness. Maybe they’ll eventually give up and send you back to your homeland or somewhere close to it. You may well be drugged again, and, when you finally wake up, you’ll find yourself tagged with an electronic monitor and permanently at risk of a bullet to the head, which may hit or miss if you so much as tell your story to anyone else or raise a complaint against some unknown entity.

  “Time is short, and the danger is immense.

  “Make sure you don’t look for me or ask any questions. If you should happen to appear before this same judge again and I still happen to be in his service, bear with me in silence if I’m forced to curse you and even hit you.

  “This letter that I’ve written to you places my life in your hands. By God, if it were to fall into their hands, they’d tear me limb from limb. Hide it where no one can find it or else destroy it completely. I pray that everything will eventually turn out well for you . . .”

  I mouthed a prayer of fervent thanks to my fellow countrywoman, who had shown me such kindness, and immediately started looking for somewhere to hide the letter. While I was searching and assessing the situation, the guard yelled to me to get my food. With that, I ripped the letter into tiny pieces, shoved it all down my throat and under my tongue, then took the broth and swallowed it all, along with everything I’d stuffed into my mouth.

  “So, Na‘ima,” I told myself, “your letter’s now become its own blessing!”

  Yes indeed, a blessing that I had literally ingested, so there was no need to worry about its being discovered or disseminated. I’ve nourished myself on it so that I can now gain strength from its valuable advice. Now my path ahead is illumined.

  Thanks to this short message from Na‘ima—a kindred spirit who resides inside my heart and mind, I can now begin to make out some of the principal features of this cryptic labyrinth in whose infinite recesses I find myself wandering helplessly.

  I’ll confess that I once had a nagging suspicion, a devilish thought, one that made me think of that message as a poisonous ruse or trap. But I rapidly squelched the very thought and put it out of my mind, not least when I thought about the woman who had risked her job and even her very life in order to offer me some help. Her behavior and the message she had given me seemed to be totally truthful and trustworthy. And, if that were not the case and the opposite were true, then there was no hope for mankind nor anything else I could lose. A life of complete futility and death itself would be one and the same.

  In my inner soul and being then, Na‘ima was indeed my gleaming light and my support. Through God’s power, the road to salvation lay with my own mind and its ability to come up with some cunning ploys, things that would involve concealment, deceit, duplicity, ambiguity, and outright distortion. Fair enough, then! Let heart and slate remain open to all eventualities, adjusting to the subtleties of circumstance and situation as may be necessary—and all following the dictates of mind and insight and the intuitions of the heart.

  Some of the strands in this maze were now becoming clearer. What I had to do, but very gradually, was to uncover other strands that were still hidden or obscure. However, what was now completely clear and not subject to the slightest doubt was that this secret prison of unknown location was being directed by unknown foreign agencies. The policies were being implemented by people of a variety of nationalities (I had also encountered Arabs up close). Within that system I had been programmed to go through a variety of trials and examinations, duly labeled torture, abuse, and brainwashing. Once I had managed to survive the worst of these dreadful processes through my own endurance, I would then be a candidate for one of a number of disgusting positions that were in hot demand from the spy agencies that were clearly in charge. Those positions included agents who would infiltrate opposition groups, some who would collect valuable information, others who would become hired assassins, and still others whose functions I neither knew nor could even conceive.

  The designers of this fiendish scheme can undoubtedly rely on a reserve army in the millions, one that only grows larger with time and is reinforced by the unemployed and people in search of a morsel to eat. The misery of such people is a positive boon for these forces; their misfortunes become the dung and poison needed to tame whole nations and terrorize their peoples.

  So here I find myself facing one branch of a worldwide network, pyramidal in structure, and with tentacles that reach in every direction to grasp all kinds of false gods in their clutches and dogs of various breeds and specialties to implement their policies.

  As I thought of dog
s, I was suddenly reminded of a poem, “In Prison,” written in the 1960s by the Egyptian poet, Fu’ad Nigm,* when he was being held in the Qal‘a prison in Cairo. I could only remember bits of it, but recited them to myself and then yelled them out loud to the walls and bars of my cell:

  Here in prison, good grief!

  Death and suffering,

  But suffering for whom?

  They’re all curs,

  Guard dogs,

  Hunting dogs,

  Standing there with chains,

  Alongside ‘Antar and Abu Zayd.*

  So these dogs—God protect you, Na‘ima!—and their masters have these fiendish schemes to subdue and enslave the earth’s most wretched people in accordance with their tyrannical desires, and here am I, the one and only master of myself. Only I can come up with something to thwart their program and counteract their designs and calculations. My plan has to involve a combination of feigned idiocy and sickness. Yes indeed, I myself—and I ask God’s forgiveness for invoking this “I”—am that one individual seed, weak perhaps in body and size, but yet strong in faith, something that in my current situation is the strongest and most resolute quality I possess. I will either save my spirit from imminent and dire destruction and emerge safe and sound, or else I will die a martyr’s death. In either case, Na‘ima, I shall raise the flag of victory as a shining point of light and significance, to be added along with all the others like it to the lists of revolutionaries who have risen up against tyrants, and equally against those who have allowed themselves to fall prey to thoughts of resignation and submission.

  At first I thought about grasping my pen and some pieces of paper so that I could record my dreams and ideas and then hide them under my bedcover along with the mirror, but I postponed the idea when a masked guard suddenly entered my cell and tied my hands behind my back. He then escorted me along corridors and hallways that were unusually packed with guards and prisoners. When we reached a back yard that I had not seen before, he placed me in the middle of a crowd of other prisoners. He told me that we were there to witness the execution of five terrorist leaders who had all confessed to accusations of murder and other crimes that had been made against them. When I opened my mouth to ask a question, he ordered me to shut up.

  The crowd was made up of scattered groups of prisoners. The guards who, as usual, mingled with them, prevented any individual conversations. The sun was high in the sky, which suggested that it was close to midday. The atmosphere was as heavy as lead. The only sounds were people clearing their throats, clanking chains, and general fidgeting. All of a sudden, speakers that were partially visible on the guard towers started blaring out drumbeats, and five men, hands and feet tied, came out of a steel door in one of the buildings facing the other prisoners. They were followed by two masked soldiers with loaded weapons. They ordered the five men to stop, spaced a few feet apart, with their backs to a dilapidated high wall

  I was standing in a spot from which I could look straight at the faces of the men facing execution. There were no signs of panic or anxiety. I told myself that these were genuine heroes, willing to sacrifice their lives in the cause of their struggle, not showing the slightest fear in the face of death. As I took a closer look and focused more carefully, there was Ilyas Bu Shama standing to the far left of these heroic figures. His head was held high, his expression was clear, and he had a smile on his face. I can swear the oath that Ilyas himself would have me swear: “By the fig and olive, by Mount Sinai” [Sura 95, The Fig, vv. 1–2] it certainly was Ilyas. I yelled his name as loudly as I could.

  “God is with you, Ilyas,” I shouted as loudly as I could. “You’re dying in the cause of the truth and will rise again in Paradise along with the companions and martyrs . . .”

  The guard punished me by hitting me on the head from behind. He pointed out that Mama Ghula had just come into the yard on what looked like an inspection tour. She was wearing dark clothing and carrying a collection of black plastic bags. This time she was not accompanied by her gigantic black assistant or any other gorillas With her fat, fleshy body and stunningly ugly appearance, she was the only person who was walking around, strutting like a peahen at times and prowling like a leopard at others. She headed over to the crowd of onlookers and gave them all vicious looks full of contempt, chewing on gum and rubbing her thighs in a suggestive manner that managed to disgust even the most sexually repressed of the prison population. I noticed that she gave me special attention, just in case I decided to surprise her with a lewd wink or salacious gesture. She may have realized that I was challenging her, cursing the day she was born and everything she did; either that, or else that my madness had worsened and intensified. But the whore turned away and ignored me. Then, all of a sudden, a primitive-looking prisoner came into the middle of the yard and galloped toward her like a horse.

  “Long live jihad,” he yelled. “Long live revenge! God is most great! He is the only victor . . .”

  But before he could reach his target, a soldier shot him dead. Witnesses immediately pronounced the fourfold “God is great,” while the man’s killer removed his body from the scene.

  Mama Ghula completed her inspection tour without batting an eyelid at what had just happened. She then headed over to the five men and conducted the same sort of inspection routine. Accompanied by a man wearing a clerical costume (which made him look like some kind of demon), she stood in front of each one of them, talking to him as though she was going to either cuff him or bargain with him. That done, she covered his head with a black sack, and the cleric pronounced what I assumed to be the statement of faith or the prayer for forgiveness or both. They both did the same routine with the other four men. When she reached the last man in the row, Ilyas Bu Shama, he resisted having the sack put over his head. He launched himself at her, and bit her on the ear, making it bleed. She cried out in pain, and the cleric rushed away to get help. Soldiers hurried over and rescued their boss.

  Defying the iron grip of my guard, I yelled words of triumph and support to Ilyas, accompanied by a muted buzz from the prisoners, which soon became a crescendo of noisy objection and abuse. All the while, the soldiers were emptying their rounds into the bodies of the five men, following the orders of Mama Ghula, who gradually withdrew under the protection of male orderlies. When the guards set about loading the corpses into the back of a truck that was ready to take them away, a tremendous hue and cry arose and threatened to get worse. However, everyone promptly heard the whizz of bullets being fired into the air from some of the guard towers, and the yard was soon wrapped in a silence more profound and deadly than that of the grave.

  There now prevailed a truly funereal atmosphere as the prisoners were led away under intensified guard to the communal cafeteria. There they sat down to eat a meal, the repetitive contents of which told me that it was lunch.

  I had no desire to break into everyone’s silent contemplation, but rather I needed to perform a religious obligation.

  “My friends,” I told the community, “men of profound faith with dreams as large as mountains have today died before your very eyes. We can do no less than turn, one and all, towards the qibla, say the prayer of the absent, and pray for them . . . My brothers, let us all say the four ‘God is greats’ . . .”

  Nobody responded or even moved. At some tables, they started laughing out loud, and it gradually spread to other tables as well. The whole thing astonished me, and I was utterly disgusted. How could I not be? How? When things returned to their normal state, I happened to hear something uttered in my direction from one of the tables:

  “Weeping over the dead is a waste, saint of God. With enough cares all you can do is laugh . . .”

  I paid no attention to this comment, but started doing the ritual myself: first once, then again. By the third and fourth time, the sound of other tired voices could be heard praying along with me. When I sat down again, feeling aggravated and disgusted, my neighbor leaned over and whispered in my ear.