I drew in a deep breath and was about to let out a scream at them to leave me be, when the muezzin's lonely call to prayer echoed over the silent, crawling chaos.
All heads slowly turned as one toward a lone needle-like minaret on the horizon. The pilgrimage started immediately.
They meandered through the streets as one long amorphous snake, beckoned by the haunting melody and I, stuck in the middle of the thing, had no choice but to follow. Their offerings were gone, and I was no more to them than another pilgrim in the procession. The song grew louder and the tower taller the closer we came. The head of the long line emerged into the open square below the spire and wound to the right around it in a long coil that eventually met the tail. As my part of the snake entered the square, I stopped struggling to free myself. It had been where I was headed from the beginning. I looked up and squinted against the dawn. A cold chill ran down my spine as my eyes found the blue and white bathrobed muezzin leaning her petite figure over the thin railing. It was Judith, my mother. The veins in her delicate neck bulged as she strained out the mysterious, ancient words. She smiled and pointed me out in the circling crowd at the end of each exhausting refrain, her black eyes laughing.
The call to prayer still sang out as I gasped myself awake. Cool gray light filtered down through the bars.
"It's their idea of an alarm clock," said Reginald from his bunk on the other side. "It comes five times a day. Go back to sleep Evan. It's better that way."
Reginald had snapped out of a snoring sleep and scrambled to his feet in front of the small trap door before the guard had finished yelling his Arabic command. He put the lid back on the wooden chamber pot and shoved it into the anonymous set of hands reaching through the opening. A fresh one was handed back along with two stainless steel bowls and a brown disk of unleavened bread.
"Here we go," said Reginald handing me a cup. "The Outpost's finest."
"Is that the name of this place?"
"That's what Steen called it, I guess that's the name he was told. He said it used to be a French Legionnaire outpost."
"Is this the only meal of the day?"
"No, there is one more in the afternoon. It comes with a grapefruit every other day," he said almost boasting. "What are you in for Evan Michaels?"
I tore a strip off the loaf and dipped it into the bowl of thick gruel. "I stole a painting."
"Are you an art thief?" he asked wide eyed.
I shook my head as I swallowed the tasteless mush. "No I'm not... I don't know what I am."
"How long did you get?"
I looked into his eyes while I mustered the courage to say the words. "Twen... Twenty five."
"Years?" he asked in disbelief.
I leaned back against the wall and rolled my eyes up toward a guard as he paced along the catwalk above the cell bars.
"Whew bloke, that's a stretch. Have you been inside before?"
"Yeah, in Bulgaria."
He raised his eyebrows curiously. "Well Yank, you sure work in some strange places. What was the Bulgarian jail like compared to this place?"
"I don't know yet. What's the drill here? Do we work? Do we ever go outside or is this it?"
"Oh we go out, two hours a day, but that's the good news, the bad news is the infidels' time in the yard is during the heat of midday. But they don't work us and they only beat us until their arms get tired," he said laughing. "Sorry, I suppose I shouldn't joke ‘bout it. Seriously, they tire of the abuse after a while. It's better if you don't fight back. The only rule I have is that you not use the chamber pot until nightfall or early morning, otherwise you'll soil the water and we'll have nothing to drink. And when you do get thirsty drink from the rag, it's safer. I don't want another episode like before with Steen, especially now. I'm a short timer," he said in a toothy grin. "Eight more months of this, then it's fuck you Saheeb, and I ride a camel out of this place."
"How long have you been here?"
"Almost three years. I got three and a half for possession of hashish and pornography. Both violated the word of Mohammed, the judge said. I've got some words for Mohammed and I'm going to scream them out loud at him just as soon as I'm back in jolly old England."
I chuckled and raised my cup out towards him. "Have a pint for me ehh?"
He smiled wide and clinked my cup. "Surely."
By midday, the scent of urine and filth soured the stifling air above the cellblock. The constant ghostlike murmur of other captive voices was broken by the haunting wails of Moslem prayer and Reginald's endless chattering. He filled any empty moment with one-sided conversation as though he had an enmity with silence.
The cell door flew open without a warning around noon to reveal the sergeant, club held tight in his grimy hands.
"Time to go," said a joyful Reginald as the fat Arab sergeant walked in.
"Go were?" I asked.
"You no talking!" shouted the sergeant as the stepped forward and laid a baton blow across the instep of my bare left foot.
I cried out, gripped my foot and rolled onto the floor as he drew back for another go. I bit hard on my tongue and lay defenseless before him. To my surprise, it was not the guard's baton that landed on me, but Reginald's hand. He placed one hand on my shoulder and one up toward the guard in my defense. I lay still as my cellmate spoke in smiling apologetic nods. The Arabic rolled off Reginald's tongue effortlessly. I couldn't understand but knew from his appeasing tone and posture that he pleaded on behalf of my ignorance. Reginald cowered to the floor next to me as the sergeant drew back again. The young guards in the hall laughed as the fat man spat on both of us and walked out.
"Can you walk?" whispered Reginald.
I nodded.
"Come on. We have to go. I'll help you," he said lifting me up.
The open courtyard was little more than a square of barren earth bordered by four stone walls. Uniformed guards paced along the tops of the walls, each one's rifle at the ready. A smaller square of low whitewashed stones lay just inside the walls.
Reginald placed his arm around me as we entered. "Come on. It will feel better if you walk it off."
The desert air was a refreshing change from the cellblock and the open expanse of sky seemed to lift my mood by some small fraction.
"What's the line of white stones for?" I asked.
"That's the proverbial line in the sand. It is forbidden to go beyond it. If you do, those monkeys up there will put a pill in you quick as a whistle. I've seen them do it twice, head shots both times. Turned the poor bastards off like flicking a switch. How's the foot?"
"Better," I said, looking up to lock eyes with a passing guard.
The temperature in the cellblock dropped dramatically as the sun slipped below the horizon. I sat on my bunk trying to ignore the stench and Reginald's ramblings on everything from cricket strategy to Irish autonomy. I nodded and grunted in agreement just often enough to keep his attitude even.
"What's that?" I asked, pointing to a cardboard box tucked under his bunk.
He leaned over and slid the box out into the dim light. "This is a collection of crap sent by the Red Crescent. They come here every six months and bring care packages like this. Let's see here," he said, tossing the contents onto the floor one by one, "an English language version of the Koran, fucking useless, a little Arab skull cap hat, fucking useless, and notebooks of empty paper and pens for writing letters, fucking useless," he said sarcastically.
"Why are the notebooks useless?" I asked.
"There's no mail here, no pickup, no delivery. We have no form of communication with the outside world. If whoever you have on the outside didn't know you got in trouble here, then they won't know anything of what happened to you until you get out. That's the thing that weights on me the most Evan," he said in a serious tone. "Back in the West End, I left a beautiful young wife and a one year," he checked himself for a second, "a four year old boy. They know nothing about what happened. They probably think I'm dead, and I must remain so for another ei
ght months, each day wondering if I'm still in her thoughts, wondering what proxy lies between her legs and acts as father to my son."
I laid back against the wall and felt a part of my spirit leave. It was the part of me that still clung to the hope that my gift, a well placed favor from Ramsay, might remedy my condition. She had no idea where I was, nor did anyone else for that matter. I had been denied any form of communication or representation until I reached Tunisia, and by then it was too late. The realization then came over me quite effortlessly that if she was not empowered to commute my sentence then, as Samas had said, that responsibility naturally fell upon my own shoulders.
"Well, it's about that time," said Reginald as he got up and placed the open chamber pot at the foot of his bunk.
"Time for what?" I asked.
He stepped up onto the edge of his bed and peered into the open bucket. "The lowering of the colors," he said as he unbuttoned his tattered trousers and dropped them around his ankles. He aimed his penis with his right hand and held his left high overhead like a conductor about to set his orchestra in motion. His head was cocked to one side as though waiting for some starting signal. He began to relieve himself a split second after the muezzin began the evening call to prayer. The sound of his urination, exaggerated by his elevation, splashed loudly into the hollow bucket and echoed beyond the confines of our cell into the length of the cellblock, testing even the most faithful. He struggled to keep the stream steady as he set his left hand into motion and conducted himself in a loud whistling version of 'God Save the Queen.' The urination continued, but the song faltered as his face broke into smiling laughter.
"I trust you'll torture them with your 'Star Spangled Banner' after I'm gone," he said in a chuckle as his last trickling drops landed in the bucket.
I laughed aloud, but only because he did and only because I couldn't help but enjoy his small snub. But the laughter escaping me rang hollow as it began to sink in. It was no accident that I was there. Whether through aspiration or desperation, everyone eventually finds their own level. And I knew that I had found mine.
As the days began to run into one another and time started to pile up behind me, a strange phenomena emerged. My mind, unencumbered through hour after unending hour of idle emptiness, started, of its own volition, to pay attention and take note of every tiny detail in my surroundings. For the first few weeks I played with my heightened senses as a novelty, passing whole days tracing every crack in the floor back upstream to its main tributary or counting my own breaths up into the thousands. It was only later that this sharpening, this intolerable sharpening, began to reveal edges to all things as though a giant lens had brought everything into a crisper, clearer focus than man had been designed to endure. Day by day, week by week the edges continued to sharpen until it seemed one blow might be enough to cleave one thing from another and shatter the entire existence around me. But that blow never comes and that unbearable clarity progresses, until you begin to see your own edges against the larger background. At that point the clarity supersedes the prison and thus becomes the object of escape.
Shortly after that is when I reached into the box under Reginald's bunk for the notebooks and pen and began to set down this story. It's ironic, I had read several autobiographies before this episode began and with each page turned I would always think of the author and wonder where he sat as he penned out the story of his life, what photographs sat on the desk, whispering to him of long forgotten laughs and losses, and what trophies rested on the mantel as a testament to toil and achievement. I write mine from the confines of cell 145 in an unnamed Tunisian desert prison.
Chronicling these events over the past months has helped to focus my idle mind away from these ever refining powers of observation that plague me. It has helped me come to an understanding as to how I arrived here. But having done so, I must confess I no longer know if this is the epilogue to the story or if the preceding pages are but a lengthy prologue and this is the story.
The torture and beatings are less frequent now than in the first weeks, but lately it seems that each evening abduction and obligatory all night session is more thorough and earnest than the one before. Their questions, if they even bother to ask them, roll off me and their blows affect me not to their ends, but instead to my own. Reginald is awake and waiting each time I'm dumped back into my cell. And each time he cleans me up and tells me I look fine. I don't believe him any longer but I can appreciate why he says it. I lay in bed at night and the sound of my own breathing sounds ridiculous to me, as though someone else is mustering the will to see it done.
Sometimes, usually after a session with the sergeant and an interrogator from Tunis, I reread the first parts of this manuscript and marvel at the change they have brought about in me.
Blow by blow, blight by blight, the attacks pile up against you, and you are forced again to re-muster your dwindling resources and tighten the defensive perimeters of your servile mind. Slowly, one mental rampart after another goes undefended, another post falls to the enemy, and another flag is lowered in the face of their superior numbers until even the tattered remains of what you once were become untenable. Standing in the wings of lucidity, master of nothing you survey, a decision is made and it makes sense, perfect sense. But then it had to, even to be considered in the first place. Salvation is seen in a last ditch effort to escape, to rise above the conditions you've sunk to, to dissolve life here before it dissolves you. At that point you stand as the plenipotentiary of all desperate men and as such, are compelled to action.
But I know better. I know the promise of peaceful death lingering just below the prospect of escape is a false one, for I exist and live now only because the person I was before is dead, which means I cannot exist without having superseded someone, even if that someone is who I once was. And if that is true, then conversely, like the caterpillar that surrenders itself to the moth, suicide must be seen as a life giving act. The day they helped me figure this out is the day I found the faith to become myself.
Most people think that faith has to do with religion and religion with divinity, but I tell you, most assuredly, that any man who has the courage to take his own life, any man who can choose the hour of his own death, any man who can stand at the very threshold of himself and step through, that man stands as close as any ever will to divinity. For if death is not a prelude to another life, then this time now is nothing more than a cruel mockery.
At times I wonder if my increased acumen has afforded me too close a scrutiny at my own edges. But secretly I know the fact that I have resolved myself to this end matters not, for I am at this end and realize that such resolution is but a pale preface to the eventual eventualities. What matters now is the doing, not the petty preamblings of forethought. I have been in the minority of extant men long enough and now long to slip into the welcoming arms of mankind's silent majority, if only they would have me.
Reginald is being released in two days and he has agreed to take the notebooks with him. It occurred to me to have him contact Ramsay for me once he is outside, but the oath of secrecy I adopted with this tattoo precludes me from exposing him to the truth. Because of that oath, I have written the notebooks in Bulgarian so that he won't know. I have asked him to hang on to them, in the hopes that some stranger might come for them in fifteen years or so. That person, I will tell him, might not even know exactly why they are at his door, but he is to give that young man or woman the three notebooks and tell them about me if they ask. As I pen these last words to whomever I will be, I am no longer able to fight it as it comes to me slowly and faintly, the low, steady, maddening sound of my own heartbeats as they echo back to me from the walls of this fatal room.
I sing the song of a deathless soul,
Whom Fate, which God made, but doth not control,
Placed in most shapes...
For though through many straits and lands I roam,
I launch at paradise, and I sail towards home;
The course I there
began shall here be stayed,
Sails hoisted there, struck here, and anchors laid;
For the great soul which here amongst us now
Doth dwell, and moves that hand , and tongue, and brow...
This soul, to whom Luther and Mohammed were
Prisons of flesh; this soul which oft did tear
And mend the cracks of the Empire and late Rome,
And lived when every great change did come,
Had first in paradise, a low, but fatal room.
From 'The Progress of the Soul' by John Donne 1573-1631
About the Author
D. Eric Maikranz lived in Italy during the late 1990’s where he authored two Italian travel guides: Insider’s Rome and Insider’s Venice and was a correspondent for UPI. A former writer for the Denver Post, he studied Russian Literature at the University of Colorado. He lives with his wife Desiree in Denver Colorado.
Endnotes
* An interesting allegorical title as cognomina is Latin plural for cognomen – a type of Roman nickname by which persons of some familiarity might address one another with usage often specified to members of a select upper class.
The Reincarnationist Papers Page 40