My Torturess

by Bensalem Himmich

  It was excruciatingly difficult, but even so I managed to stand on my two feet. As I did so, I noticed they had sores festering. I staggered my way over to the door, and it was then that I realized that I was in a different cell from the one I had been in. The proof was that this cell had iron bars on the door, through which I could make out a dark corridor and walls crisscrossed with cracks and a number of damp patches. Looking to the left I could see a dark hall whose precise dimensions were unclear, while to the right I found myself face to face with a man whose primitive appearance put me in mind of cavemen. Using his cane, he handed me a full bag.

  “Your worshipfulness has enjoyed a long, deep sleep,” he told me in a disgusted tone. “Meanwhile poor me has a stopped-up toilet. So empty this in yours and then give it back after you’ve washed it. There has to be . . .”

  I was loath to respond to his request.

  “Take it, and may God have mercy on your father!” he pleaded. “It’s a whole week’s worth, and that’s a lot! One neighbor should look after another, as the saying has it . . .”

  I tottered over to my toilet with the bag, holding my breath as I did so. All I could find in my own cell was a narrow-diameter hole covered with a brick and a water tap. I decided that the whole thing was impossible, not only because the bag was so heavy but also because I was afraid that the stench would foul the air and expose me to disease. With that in mind, I wrapped up my bedcover and put it over all the furniture I could find. I then climbed up with the intention of emptying the bag through a skylight next to the roof. However, it fell out of my shaking hand and disappeared into some unknown vacuum.

  I climbed down again and rearranged the furniture, then lay down to recover my breath. Focusing on the skylight, I kept trying to ignore the foul stench all over me and reassemble the various thoughts and ideas inside my head. I could recall that, before my profound period of sleep, I had been subjected to a concentrated period of vicious torture administered by Mama Ghula and her muscle-bound gorilla assistant. I kept seeing the lovely image of Na‘ima, both during the torture session and afterwards in the health clinic, and the Christian female doctor who had subjected me to examinations that I now preferred to regard as special techniques rather than assuming the worst about them. That was particularly the case in view of the kindness and excellent treatment that I myself had received from her.

  I automatically searched my pockets, and there I found the two sprays with Fontoline written on them as prescribed for asthma sufferers. She had given them to me at the time, along with empty plastic containers that she had said were a gift to me from Na‘ima. While I was wondering about the meaning and purpose of such a gift, my neighbor asked me to give him back his bag. When I told him what had happened, he started yelling, banging the bars of his cell with his crutch, and threatening me with all kinds of perdition and misery. Many voices now rose from neighboring cells all along the hall, some of them demanding that I get the poor man his bag back and promise him a newer and cleaner one the next day, while others begged him to shut up, go to sleep, and consign my particular case to the Day of Judgment. As the din got louder and louder, my neighbor’s hysteria intensified even further. Now he claimed that I had taken his property and deprived him of it, and all for a sinister purpose I had in mind. He proceeded to pronounce all kinds of foul and disgusting oaths against me, and with each oath the prisoners all yelled “Amen.” This went on intermittently until early morning.

  So here was yet another category of torture being imposed on me in this particular cellblock, one that was undoubtedly reserved for lunatics and the insane. I had either been put here on purpose, or else—as I dearly hoped and wished—by mistake or oversight.

  I did not sleep for the rest of the night. Dogs kept barking, and the bedbugs were biting and sucking my blood. My only distraction was the thought of my Na‘ima, the possible significance of her gift, and the last thing that the doctor had whispered into my ear: “If you spit blood . . .”

  What is amazing is the way that, in spite of all the torture and suffocation I have been going through, my heart insists on beating and involving itself in life. The message that Na‘ima sent me and the signs of her hidden affection have undoubtedly played a major role in reinforcing my resistance.

  As morning dawned, I sat cross-legged, observing a guard who brought me some food or walked past my cell. I obviously had to inform the authorities that I was not in the right place, scratching my skin and pulling bedbugs off, warding off the effects of asthma by spraying my mouth, and waiting . . .

  I was not disappointed, in that half way through the morning I heard the voices of guards by my neighbor’s cell. I crawled over to the door and used the bars to stand up. Wearing masks, they were wrapping up my neighbor in a white shroud and preparing to take him away. The other prisoners meanwhile launched into the fourfold takbir and prayers for the dead. I joined them in this religious obligation as best I could. When things had died down somewhat, I drew a guard’s attention to the fact that I had been brought here by mistake and asked to be taken back to cell 112. Raising his eyebrows in surprise and derision, he put his key in the lock, handed me my dead neighbor’s crutch, and told me to follow him. Thus it was that I tramped behind the three men who were carrying the corpse while the other prisoners poked their hands through the bars in the block and poured all kinds of abuse and curses on me.

  “You’ve killed someone unjustly,” some of them repeated, “and now you’re walking in his funeral procession? May God challenge you and consign you to hell for everlasting!”

  When we reached a large space where a number of corridors met, my escort suddenly stopped me.

  “How did you come to be in the lunatics’ wing?” he asked.

  I told him what I knew, but then he asked me what they all meant by accusing me of killing my neighbor. I told him about the bag and its contents.

  “But they’re all saying the same thing,” he said after a pause for thought. “What’s your response?”

  “Officer, Sir,” I replied, “I never even entered the dead man’s cell. In law, the consensus of a group of lunatics has no validity.”

  He rubbed his neck as he gave the matter some more thought. Consigning the corpse to his assistants with instructions to take it to the gravediggers, he took me over to a door in a dimly lit block. Locking it behind me, he advised me to wait along with the people whom he called “people practicing for Judgment Day.” Meanwhile, he would look into my case and the whole matter of the bag.

  The shop where I now found myself consisted of a meeting hall with a high tin roof supported by wooden pillars planted in sandy soil. The whole place was teeming with people, young, middle-aged, and old. Some were standing in line while others—the handicapped and decrepit—were sitting down. I stayed close to the door, waiting for the officer to come back. An old man invited me to sit in his place, but I thanked him and pointed to the crutch I was relying on for support. When I asked him how he was and about this teeming mass of God’s servants, some of them took turns in answering.

  “Dear brother in God,” one of them told me, “people here have been just as you see them now. For almost a month the weak ones have been sitting on the ground, and the sick have simply been laid out there . . .”

  “Once a day,” a second one added, “they throw us down some pieces of bread, dates, and bottled water from the roof. So we eat what we’re given and wait here to be released by the One who is the only victor.”

  “Anyone who needs to relieve himself,” a third one continued, “has to plough his way through the ranks and get to that facility with wooden screens and cloth awning around it. There’s no water for ablutions, only stones. The prayers we perform fall far short and only involve fear. Those murderous tyrants make false claims about us: they say we’re all heretical extremists. Their torture methods go so far as to train us for the Day of Judgment—that is, in accordance with their own hateful expression and their sickly imagination . . .”

&nbs
p; “But we’re all willing to put up with it,” a fourth added. “We’ll either emerge with our lives or else be resurrected as martyrs.”

  Just then a voice arose—I could not see who it was—chanting these Qur’anic verses: “You who believe, seek help through patience and prayer; verily God is with the patient. Do not say to those killed in God’s path: ‘They are dead’; rather they are living, but you do not realize it. We will test you with a taste of fear, hunger, and a lack of property, lives, and fruits. Give the good news to the patient, who, when afflicted by misfortune, say: ‘Surely we belong to God, and to Him is the return.’” [Surat al-Baqara 2, The Cow, vv. 153–56]. Other voices responded, my own among them, with further verses. Just then, there was a hail of small bags and plastic bottles, and all of a sudden silence fell. I gathered up my share—bread, dates, and drinking water. The silence continued as everyone ate. Once that was over, a powerful voice was heard:

  “Servants of God,” it said, “the tyrants have prevented us doing ablutions and praying, so let’s respond by performing chants and intercessions. That way we can at least remain pure and keep ourselves strong. Our noble Prophet—may God bless and preserve him!—said: ‘God has ninety-nine names, and he who recites them will enter heaven.’ He also said that any servant of God who encounters a problem or who feels sorrowful and then prays to God will have that problem or sorrow removed and replaced by joy and happiness. Servants of God, recite God’s beautiful names with me. He is God, the only God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the King, the Holy, the Peace, the Believing, the Protector, the Mighty, the Powerful . . .”

  Everyone in the room, whether Arabs or non-Arabs, joined the speaker in his recitation. The very sight of so many necks straining forward, so many throats reciting, was enough to send shivers down the spine and warm the heart.

  Once the recitation, in which I participated as best I could, was over, silence fell again—that is, until the next phase:

  “Servants of God, the Lord of Mankind has said: ‘He who praises God thirty-three times at the conclusion of each prayer, extols God thirty-three times, and pronounces the takbir thirty-three times, then recites the hundredfold “There is no god but God, He is One alone with no partner; to Him belongs dominion and praise; and He is all-powerful,” that person will have his sins forgiven, even though they be as plentiful as the foaming waves in the sea.’”

  No sooner had this voice, that clearly belonged to a remarkable and effective imam, finished its exhortation than voices vied with each other to ask forgiveness, with exultations, shouts of praise, declarations of God’s unity, all in the numbers designated by the imam. Once that was completed, the crowd started chanting texts eulogizing the Prophet, sections from the burda poem of al-Busiri* and extracts from the Dala’il al-Khayrat by the renowned Sufi imam, al-Juzuli.* Some of them went on to recite other Sufi chants and to perform the devotional dance. The whole atmosphere was fraught with an amazing sense of spiritual presence.

  The various episodes in this profound and ever accelerating ceremony followed one another in inexorable progression. I joined in with both mind and spirit, although my body was exhausted by the need to lean heavily on the two crutches that by now had become an integral part of me. I was afraid that the officer would come back and not find me where he had left me, so I had to stay put near the door. I could not move away, even though my need to keep moving and my urgent desire to relieve myself were both becoming ever more insistent.

  The group closest to me started reciting the famous poem in which the Prophet’s companions welcomed him and his company to the city of Medina the brilliant:

  The new moon has risen over us

  from the folds of farewell.

  We are obliged to give thanks.

  Greetings to you, O best of summoners.

  The sheer enthusiasm of their chanting spread to other groups, and then to the assembly as a whole.

  The event that finally managed to calm their vibrant performance was when cold water started pouring out of gutters in the roof, all accompanied by a detached voice through the loudspeakers that kept repeating this slogan: “Cleanliness is part of faith. Clean yourselves without charge.” No one managed to avoid getting soaked, even if it was only intermittent, and here and there some people started sneezing, coughing, and having runny noses. For my part, I started shivering uncontrollably; my teeth were chattering, and I started hacking so badly that I could not use my asthma spray.

  Once the water stopped cascading down, everyone went back to the chants and incantations they were singing before. At this point even more people started dancing, and I presumed that they were trying to get some warmth back into their cold, soaked bodies. All of a sudden, loud techno music started blaring through the loudspeakers, so the chanters and dancers shouted as loudly as they could in order to drown out the music. However, they gradually became more and more exhausted, and little by little a powerful enforced silence began to take over.

  Most of the people present now sat in clusters in the floor. The techno music stopped, and voices were raised to announce that there were some dead. I noticed an old man just by my feet; after checking his neck vein and closing his eyelids, I was able to confirm that he was one of that number. Accompanied by the people close to me, I said the fourfold takbir. I then noticed the door opening and a group of armed guards wading their way through the clusters of people and starting to remove the dead on rubber stretchers. When two of them came over to get the dead man close to me and put him on the trolley, I collapsed on top of him, holding my breath. They were forced to take me with the dead man, the assumption being that I myself was also in the Angel of Death’s clutches. They transported me to the graveyard, while my ears resounded to the sound of gunfire, as the imam yelled out: “Remain steadfast, servants of God, remain steadfast!”

  By now it was dawn. The guards made do with lining up the corpses alongside a wide, deep ditch in the graveyard. They went off to do something else or to use what was left of the night to get some sleep. Like a wounded crocodile, I slithered my way from this ditch that had obviously been dug for an indiscriminate corporate burial. Eventually I reached a grassy strip where I was able to breathe freely and rest for a bit. Holding my hand over my mouth to stop coughing, I was able to empty my bladder, something I had had to control while I was on top of the dead old man.

  The sun rising in the sky shows no mercy on people trying to hide in this bare open desert, however much they try to scrunch up and make themselves invisible. Actually, the sun uncovers and exposes them, making them completely obvious to any wandering guard or person in a watchtower. As I lay there on the ground, I noticed a soldier’s boot close to my eyes. Raising my head to look at him, I heard him threaten me and tell me to stand up. It soon became obvious to him that I could not do that. He asked me if I was trying to escape, and I told him I was not. He then asked me for my prisoner’s number, and I spelled it out, quickly the first time, then more slowly. He was happy to carry me on his shoulders, as though I were hunting spoils.

  “They’ve been searching for you all over the place,” he shouted. “This morning you’re my prize. Pray to God that, when it comes to salaries, you’ll be the reason for my increase!”

  I now told my rescuer the story of my getting misplaced in the lunatics’ block, then in the hall for those practicing for the Day of Judgment. However, his mind was elsewhere, repeating the same thing over and over again and asking me to pray for him. Before he put me back in my cell and locked the door, he spoke about me to a number of soldiers and guards on the way—far more than required, and made them witnesses to the fact that he was the one who had discovered my hiding place and arrested me.

  16

  Between My Walls

  The Christian Fayruz

  How many long hours, or maybe whole days, I spent asleep, elongated periods that were interrupted only by abrupt episodes of wakefulness, about which I cannot remember any specific details but only the terrifying impact of their
visions.

  When I rubbed my eyes—it was noontime, I was appalled to see rats and mice congregating to consume the food that had piled up while I was asleep. What appalled me even more, however, was to see a woman’s head poking out of the bedcover in front of me. When I tried to stand up, I found that I could not do it. I shooed the mice and rats away, and they went back down the holes from which they had emerged. I hobbled over to the toilet and put the stone over it, then towards the door and pulled myself up using the bars. I started yelling, pointing out that, contrary to the practice enjoined by both God and His Prophet, there was a woman in my cell. The only result of my yelling was to hear my voice echoing back weak and feeble. That was followed by a remark from the prisoner who was my closest neighbor:

  “You moron!” he said. “They bring you a woman for your bed, and you turn her down! What are you, a man or a hermaphrodite? Fuck the harlot for free, you lucky man! If not, then give her to me, and I’ll fuck her as I’ve never fucked a woman before. I’m so frustrated, it’s unreal. Give her to me for a fair piece of hashish and a bit of spare change for the guard. What do you say?”

  I paid no attention to such foul-mouthed drivel, but still decided to give my breath and vocal chords a rest for a while. I then resumed my yelling and shouting. This time all I got out of it was waking up my newly arrived cell mate, who proceeded to accuse me of being a plant and spying on her in her cell while she was asleep. I immediately denied her any ownership of the cell, pointing out that the number 223 coincided with my own number. In exchange, I expended some choice words on a counterattack, accusing her of being an informer herself, someone whose function was to tempt me with sex as a way of getting information that the female ghoul had been unable to do by torturing me.

  I imagined that the investigating judge might be watching me through some hidden camera and laughing his head off at us. With that thought in mind, I leapt up, grabbed my blanket, and used it to cover myself as I squeezed against the back wall. I forced my mind and body to put God’s protective veil between me and this woman and imposed all possible barriers between us. But no sooner had she watched as I calmed down and avoided looking at her than she too leapt to her feet and stripped off her prison clothes.