Prisoners of Hope

by Dayna Curry

  “I am fine,” she said.

  Najib and Sonan asked her directly, “Are you okay?”

  “I will be fine,” she answered.

  Then Sonan commanded Maria-jan to stand up. “Get off the floor!”

  She could barely move, but Maria-jan gathered her strength and stood for him at attention.

  Heather: The others brought Maria-jan into the jailers’ room and laid her out on the bed under which I was lying. We all prayed for her—that the labor pains would stop and that the children would survive. She seemed to calm down. The storm of pain had passed. Her water must not have broken. Perhaps the sound of the bombs jolted her into false labor, we thought. Eventually, the others left the room thanking God.

  I stretched my hand up from underneath the bed and grasped Maria-jan’s hand. We both cried as she recounted the memory of her children’s death during a battle between Mujahideen factions.

  “I was at work that day wondering if my children were safe. When I returned home, I saw that a rocket had hit my house. I found my two sons dismembered in my courtyard. Their innards were everywhere. Their eyes were gone. My boys were dead.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I prayed silently. “When will it be over? When will the people of this nation be able to live in peace, without fear, without war?”

  My body was trembling. I wanted to be strong and encourage Maria-jan that we would get through the bombing.

  “Would you like me to sing a song about God taking care of us?” I asked her.

  “Yes, please,” she replied.

  I sang in English: “The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in pastures of green. He leads me beside the still waters of peace, restoring my soul, restoring in my soul.”

  As I sang softly, the peace of God calmed my heart. I wondered if the song was helping Maria-jan cope as well. Within minutes, I could hear her snoring. The singing must have worked. She had fallen asleep.

  Somewhere between nine and ten o’clock Afghani’s deputy arrived with a couple of his men. We expected that someone from the foreign ministry might show up to give us information and to ask us how we were doing.

  The deputy came to the door of the prison that night wearing a fatigue vest. In one breast pocket were extra cartridges for his Kalashnikov. In the other were extra rounds of ammunition. He carried a walkie-talkie in one hand and a phone in the other.

  I went to the door. “Was that America or the Northern Alliance?”

  His response was outrageous: “There is no war. No one is bombing. They are just practicing. Do not worry.”

  I almost laughed. “Those were bombs. Who is bombing?” I insisted. “Please get Afghani on the phone for me.”

  The deputy called Afghani and handed me the phone.

  “Afghani, this is Heather. What happened?”

  The Northern Alliance had attempted to bomb Kabul, he answered, but everything was under control. “You are safe,” he said.

  I was not reassured. He simply was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. In fact, we would have preferred to hear that America had bombed the city, since we figured the United States would be aware of our location.

  The next morning, one of our lady jailers, Roheena-jan, told us American planes had dropped the bombs not only in Kabul, but also in Jalalabad, Kandahar, and other cities.

  Dayna: Once the bombing started, our women jailers stayed with us only from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. They wanted to be at home at night. Bombing usually began at seven o’clock in the evening and occurred in rounds. The electricity would go out, and we would light candles in the hallway. Later, we ordered flashlights from the bazaar.

  We pushed our evening worship meeting to a later hour to compensate for the loss of electricity. Silke wanted more time to read before the sun went down and we lost power. To light our room, we placed a candle on the window ledge. One night Najib came down and asked us to put the candle out. He was afraid the planes would see the light and bomb the building. We chuckled. With current technology, the planes would be able to spot the building candle or no candle. Nevertheless, to placate Najib, Silke usually set a book in between the candle and the window.

  In the early days of bombing, Kati, Ursula, and I decided we would rather sleep in the hallway to get away from the picture window in our room. Silke and Diana stayed in the room. Their bunk bed was positioned in such a way that they believed glass shards would fly past them if the window blew. Heather began sleeping in the jailers’ room under the bed.

  At some point, sleeping arrangements shifted again, and I was the only one left in the hallway. Camping solo did not last long. One night a clattering sound woke me up: Mice were jumping around on the metal shelves near the entrance to our room. I could not bear the thought of mice crawling on me while I was asleep. The mice were the last straw. I went back to sleeping in the room.

  At first I tied a chawdur to the bed to shield myself from flying glass. I slept on the bottom bunk and tied the chawdur on the metal bed frame between the top and bottom bunks. Then Diana suggested using a board from the storage room to make a wall at the head of the bed. We also cracked the window to release pressure so the glass would be less likely to shatter in the event of a close explosion. Finally, Diana ordered thick, clear tape from the bazaar and taped big asterisks over the window to prevent glass from shattering into the room. I stopped using the board at that point.

  Since the women jailers were gone at night, we convinced Najib to allow us to lock ourselves in the building. He reluctantly conceded. We explained to him that being locked in from the outside while bombs were dropping would make us very nervous. We might need to get out of the building, we said.

  One night several weeks into the bombing campaign, we were having our worship meeting in the hallway when we heard a rattling sound at the door. We knew someone had locked us in. We stopped singing. Everyone became very nervous. Heather went to check the door. As we suspected, it was locked. Then she went to the jailers’ room and started calling into the courtyard, hoping Najib would hear from his office.

  “Sir, sir—we need more water! We need more water from the pump!”

  Heather went to the bathroom and emptied some of our containers so she could have them ready. We always needed water at night to flush the toilet.

  A man came down to the door. Kati and Heather went to talk to him. “Let us talk to Najib. We do not want this door locked,” they said. Najib came down and a discussion ensued.

  Silke looked at me where we were sitting in the hallway. “Dayna, they need you to go and talk to him. He likes you.” I got up.

  Najib was explaining that he was afraid for our safety. He said something about some Kandahari Taliban possibly coming to the prison to harm us.

  “Please,” he said. “This is for your protection. I love you as my sisters. We need to do this.”

  I explained that many of us would be very nervous if he locked us in. “We will not open the door unless you come,” I assured him. He gave in.

  “Do not even open it to me,” he said. “Do not open it to anybody.”

  After that incident, Heather and Diana wanted to damage the metal loop for the padlock.

  “That would be destroying the place,” Kati and I said. “It might get us in more trouble.”

  They came up with another idea and wrapped rope around the metal loop so there would be no room through which to slide a padlock.

  At night in our room, we could hear men pacing the floor above us and talking on their radios about the bombing. Georg told us Najib had built a small trench out in the men’s courtyard for protection.

  One night a loud banging sound in our room woke us up. I froze. Kandahari Taliban, I thought. They are coming to harm us.

  Moments later, we realized that a cat had gotten into our room and was hurling itself against the glass. The cat looked wild. I hid under the blankets. Brave Kati opened the window and let the cat outside.

  Heather: Normally bombs would drop for twenty minutes,
then stop for a couple of hours, then drop for twenty minutes, then stop, and so on throughout the night. Often we would hear a whistling sound and then an explosion. Sometimes we could hear aircraft overhead, then the whistling and then the explosion. We always heard gunfire.

  One night we were having our worship meeting when a bomb struck so close that it blew the doors to the bathroom and spare room wide open. The explosion frazzled us. Dayna jumped into Silke’s arms.

  Sleeping through the bombing proved nearly impossible. Dayna and some of the others took sleeping pills. I tried the pills once, but they served no benefit. Every night I was so wide-eyed anticipating the next round of explosions that I could not fall asleep. All night long I would lie under the bed in the jailers’ room and look at my watch. My stomach would tense up. My body would not relax. I passed the time by singing worship songs, praying, and thinking of my family. I always knew another round of bombing would come. If I could just make it to 5 A.M., when most of the raids ceased, I knew I would be able to sleep for a few hours. Once the day strikes started, I barely slept at all.

  By the time we got to the second prison I had deteriorated emotionally. I was exhausted and did not know from moment to moment whether I would be able to keep going. I thought I would rather die than continue on in such pain. I tried to hold on, but the more I tried, the more desperate and abysmal my existence became. I faced a crucial decision: Either I could quit wrestling with God and trust him, or I could continue fighting against fear’s unyielding grip on my life and in the end surely die from the anxiety and grief.

  I feared that if I gave God the power to decide whether I lived or died, then he would take my life from me. I was not certain God wanted me to live as badly as I did. In the end, the exhaustion served me well. I was too tired to keep wrestling. Though I could not see the way ahead, I chose to surrender to God. I gave up. I threw myself into God’s hands.

  I wrote: “Lord, all I can do is throw myself in your hands and say have your way. I am utterly desperate and I can do nothing, so I put my life in your hands. By now I’ve gone numb. It’s as though I can’t take any more, so I just have to shut down. God, I trust you! Lord, you’re my only hope. I resign now and ask for your grace to endure.… Oh God, I want to live, but my life is in your hands. If I live, I live for you. If I die, I die for you. In the end, you are in control and you have the last word.”

  My resignation released incredible freedom. The grip of fear began to loosen. I still struggled, but my spirits lifted and hope for my future returned. At times I even believed we might make it out alive. Even so, I ceased putting my hope in the end result of our crisis. My hope rested in the promise I had for eternity. Whether my natural life ended in prison or not, I knew I would live forever in heaven with Jesus. Though the Taliban could imprison my body, they could no longer imprison my spirit. I experienced freedom within, and I could go on.

  While at this major spiritual crossroads, I remembered a dream that I had while traveling to Afghanistan for the first time in 1998. Though we were headed to Kabul during peacetime and my heart was filled with joyful anticipation, in the dream I was deeply afraid. God took me in an elevator to a point above the city of Kabul. I prayed fervently and God told me to look down. The city was being bombed. Then I saw myself walking through the city. God was directing me: Turn left, turn right. The route I traveled was confusing and unpredictable. Each time I took a step, the place where I had been standing got hit with a bomb. War broke out all around me; yet, at every point, I was one step out of harm’s way. God was showing me exactly where to go.

  When I remembered this dream, I recognized it as a foreshadowing of my prison experience. The recollection helped me overcome fear. I believed God was indicating that I would come out alive and unharmed. After some time I told the others about the dream. They were encouraged and jokingly said, “If anything happens, we will make sure we get behind you!”

  We enjoyed some light moments in prison. One night I was reading with a candle in the hallway and writing letters. Everyone else was getting ready for bed. I had some bread beside me on a blanket, along with some cheese for a late-night snack. In the stillness I heard our portable heater slide slightly across the concrete floor.

  What was that? I thought. No one else was in the hallway, and I knew the heater could not move on its own. I went to investigate, and when I looked back in the direction of my book, I saw my bread had disappeared.

  “Diana, come out here!” I whispered loudly.

  Diana came with her flashlight and directed the beam on a mouse carrying a long piece of bread in its mouth. The mouse scampered off and disappeared through a hole in the wall near the bathroom.

  Neither of us liked mice and preferred to leave this one alone, but days earlier we had ordered a mousetrap from the bazaar. Diana and I decided to set the trap up. We placed it right underneath the hole near the bathroom wall.

  In the meantime, Dayna got up to go to the bathroom. Diana and I laughed and warned her she might run into a mouse. The next thing we heard was a piercing scream.

  “It’s a mouse! It’s a mouse!” Dayna cried.

  She ran back into the room and jumped on Kati. Diana and I followed her. We feared Najib would come downstairs to see what all the commotion was about.

  “I cannot believe you guys get mad at me,” I exclaimed. “This is crazy. You are totally freaking out, and it’s just a mouse!” We laughed. Within moments we heard the loud snap of the mousetrap.

  seventeen

  DAY SWEATS, NIGHT MOVES

  Dayna: Atif returned on October 10 with more booty from our parents. In the shipment were five sets of winter Pakistani dresses, two blankets, sweaters, two pairs of black loafers for Diana and Ursula, shoes and a new outfit for Georg, lice shampoo, books, more coffee, peanut butter, several asthma inhalers, asthma medicine, and sleeping pills.

  Once I arrived at the intelligence prison, my bout with asthma became an all-out war. Some combination of dust and stress likely aggravated the asthma, but for whatever reason, at the intelligence prison I constantly struggled to breathe. I began having to use my inhaler up to ten times a day. I would wake up at four in the morning gasping for breath. One afternoon the others graciously beat our carpets out in the courtyard and washed the floors to rid our room of dust.

  Before Atif returned with the inhalers and medicine, which I had requested from my mother in Islamabad, I took a different medical tack in an effort to solve the asthma problem. One morning Diana woke up recalling the name of a drug that she recognized would treat asthma. We ordered the drug from the bazaar and discovered that she was right. The guard who delivered the drug was very careful to repeat the instructions on dosage until he was confident I understood them. He warned me not to take too much.

  The drug did wonders for my quality of life. I took one of the pills in the morning and did not have to use my inhaler all day. On the first day, however, I got a bit carried away. I took the medicine—which is a stimulant—at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and became very wired. In the midst of my delirium, I made another bad decision. Early in the evening I took an Aleve to combat some achiness. Soon afterward my mouth went numb. I tried to sing during our evening worship meeting and slurred my words until I broke out laughing. I did not feel well for hours; the medicine kept me up all night. Fortunately, I had started reading The Firm, my first go at a novel in some time, which helped me pass the hours. I sat in the bathroom most of the night reading the book and expecting to vomit any minute.

  Another of the pharmaceuticals I had begged my mother to send also came with Atif’s shipment—wart medicine. I developed a wart back in the reform school prison, and the doctor at that prison told me stress had brought it on. I loathed the wart. Just as I began taking the medicine, I asked Silke to draw a picture of the wart for documentary purposes. At first she refused—the assignment was simply too ludicrous. But some minutes later she handed me a drawing: I was depicted decked out in my blue Pakistani dress with white emb
roidered trim—one of my four prison outfits—with my hair tied up in usual fashion. On my wildly oversized thumb, Silke had drawn an enormous wart. She dated the picture and wrote “Dayna’s Prison Wart” across the top. I loved the picture and asked Najib if he wanted to see it. He reluctantly nodded and smiled.

  One day after the medicine came, Roheena-jan, our jailer, approached me while I was out in the courtyard.

  “To get rid of warts,” she explained, “you must wait until there is a full moon. Then you must get a broom—a brand-new broom from the bazaar. You must stand in the moonlight and sweep the broom over the wart. Then the wart will fall off.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “You do not believe that kind of thing, do you?”

  Heather: Atif submitted an English version of our defense to the court on October 13 and included a copy of Mullah Omar’s decree stating that foreigners caught proselytizing were subject to three to ten days’ detention and expulsion from the country. We were now at the seventy-one-day mark. The man scheduled to translate the English version of our defense into Dari was late showing up, and when Atif finally got the Dari copies it was already evening. Atif dropped one of the copies off at the chief justice’s home.

  That evening, Kabul experienced the heaviest bombing yet. Bombing lasted for hours at a time—there were few intervals of quiet.

  I wrote: “Many bombs. Started approx. 7:10 p.m. Raids lasted up to 1 hr. [Two] bombs fell very, very near us. House shook for 5 sec. and front door [blew] open. [Two] other bombs dropped consecutively, also near us … Most terrifying so far. God covered us.”

  The next day, Atif resubmitted the Dari version of our defense to the court and met with the chief justice. The judge explained that he would take his time reviewing the case and possibly hold a session for inquiries before handing down a decision.

  Atif came back from the court frustrated. He expected the judge would want to prioritize the case due to the escalating war. Instead, Atif noted a decline in enthusiasm for pushing the case forward. In a wartime atmosphere, the chief justice had other responsibilities and high-level meetings to attend.