The Silence and the Roar

by Nihad Sirees

  I nodded, put my pipe back in my pocket and followed him. He opened the door, allowed me to enter and then shut the door behind me.

  There was a cluster of desks inside a medium-sized room, occupied by Comrades who looked alike and were all dressed the same. There was a computer on every desk that the Comrades worked at in silence. They were transferring the announcements from papers to computer. The walls were covered with pictures of the Leader and posters with selections from his speeches. I didn’t know which desk was the one for me. Everyone raised their eyes to me, staring without volunteering so much as a hint about which way I was supposed to turn. I stopped in the middle of the room and looked around at them. I had never seen people so socially detached. One of them shouted for me to approach his desk. He barked an order—“Approach!”—without saying please. I sat down on the chair in front of his desk, the seat designated for interviews. I sensed that this Comrade had not just arrived but had kept me waiting this whole time for no reason, or perhaps for one reason in particular—so that I would wait outside—without realizing that I was going to be able to acquire important information about this propaganda mill on my own.

  Comrade Rashad’s name was printed on a square block attached to the front of his desk. He asked me what I wanted, as if he still did not know, so I told him, “I want my ID card back, the one the Comrades took from me at the march today.”

  “And why did they take it from you? What did you do?”

  “I stepped in to save a young man they had jumped on and started beating.”

  “Why did this young man concern you at all?”

  “He concerned me because they were beating him.”

  “And since when are you a defender of those who evade the marches?”

  “It’s my duty.”

  He stared at me callously, revealing the extent of the hatred that Comrades of his kind reserve for me. I glanced at the others and saw they were watching us even as they pretended to be working away on their equipment. I turned back toward him as he asked me, “So you were at the march?”

  “I don’t go out much for marches but I was—”

  “So you’re a traitor, then?” he interrupted, the expression on his face plainly marking out his hatred for me.

  “You can call anyone you want a traitor as long as you’re the one holding the pen.”

  My words provoked him. His face turned all red and he wiggled his bum in his chair. He pulled the keyboard closer and I noticed his hands tremble slightly. I crossed one leg over the other and pulled out my pipe, glad that I could make him turn red.

  “Your full name!”

  “Why are you pretending you don’t know my name? Anyway, I’m Fathi Abd al-Hakim Sheen.”

  He plunked on the keys and then stopped to read what appeared before him on the screen. He was trying to play some kind of role but he was not a very good actor. He wanted to insinuate that I was a nobody but he proved the very opposite, that he was the unknown one. I took out my lighter, hoping to enrage him even more. I still had the upper hand. I wanted to mess with him even if it meant that I never got my ID card back. He became conscious of the pipe and the lighter, and with the hilarious displeasure of a nursery school teacher, he said, “Smoking is forbidden.”

  “I know, but as a pipe smoker I’ve got used to habitually holding the pipe and the lighter. I won’t light it.”

  I nodded at the computer screen that I couldn’t see because I was sitting behind it, and asked him, “So, what have you come up with?”

  “Your ID card isn’t here.”

  “Where is it then?” I asked, amazed. “I can’t just walk around this country without it. Everyone has started asking me about it.”

  “It’s at one of the security services. It seems they want you to pay them a visit.”

  “What does security have to do with my ID card? They didn’t take it from me. One of you took it from me.”

  “They have it.”

  He wrote the name and address of the security apparatus on a scrap of paper and dropped it into my hand. I held the paper and saw that in addition to the name and the address he had written a kind remark and drawn a line underneath it: My apologies, Mr Fathi. I raised my head to him and saw that he was trying to pretend to get back to work on his computer. I continued staring at him in disbelief but when he turned toward me there was a completely different look on his face. He looked away and started tapping on the keyboard. Writing a response on the other side of the scrap of paper before handing it back to him, I asked, “Do you want me to leave?”

  “You can go now.”

  “But I don’t understand. How did my ID card get over there?”

  “They wanted it. That’s all you need to know.”

  I had written to ask him if we could meet later that night and he handed back the piece of paper with the following response: Abu Nuwas restaurant, one o’clock. I nodded my head and exhaled, then put the paper in my pocket and stood up. I reached out my hand to say goodbye but he ignored me and continued stabbing the keyboard with two fingers. I turned around and walked toward the door, sensing that everyone was watching me while they worked. I walked out into the basement corridor to find the two Comrades who had escorted me there waiting for me. I walked toward the stairs with them trailing behind me.

  When I finally left the Party building the streets were nearly empty. The Leader’s voice blared from TV screens and from megaphones attached somewhere on the building. There was a warm breeze and the stars were twinkling in the sky as the tree branches swayed lazily. I wished that all the man-made sounds would fall silent, leaving only the soft sounds of nature, like those made by the breeze when it blows through strong, leafy trees.

  I had become a lover of silence ever since the revolutionaries had started making their addresses and leading their marches. I’m not talking about absolute silence. That’s impossible anyway and I’m not asking for it. What I mean instead is the silence that allows for those gentle sounds that are all around us to actually reach our ears. Noise prevents them from doing so; it kills them. Let me explain: there are sounds that are killed by man-made noise, like the cooing of pigeons early in the morning. A pigeon once built its nest above my window, on the stone ledge that was put there for some architectural reason. In the morning I used to hear its tender cooing but as soon as vehicle noise in the streets got going, the sound would disappear completely. I assumed the bird had flown away in search of food, but I was mistaken because I found it huddled in its nest. I concluded that it had still been cooing only I couldn’t hear it above all the noise. Or perhaps it had committed itself to silence, like me, because to carry on cooing would be worthless since nobody would be able to hear it. On another occasion Lama brought a turtle home with her, feeding it lettuce and then letting it get lost for several days underneath the furniture. As I mentioned before, Lama’s building is distinguished by its tranquillity and stillness. One time when I was somewhere between sleep and wakefulness I heard a short, soft, intermittent chirping. It was the silence that allowed the gentle voice of the turtle to reach my ears and me to hear it; I was able to discern it. This is the sense in which I imagined how many beautiful and tender sounds are lost to us because of the noise made by our noble politicians, their vehicles and their ways of exporting the revolution.

  Have any of you ever heard an owl at night? Every year we used to go somewhere near the coast, an isolated house where orange trees bordered us on three sides while the sea occupied the fourth. I would take pleasure in the stillness there. Stillness doesn’t mean the absence of sounds, not at all, but rather the tranquillity that allows one to perceive quiet, soft and distant sounds. In addition to the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks on the distant shore and the crowing of the rooster before dawn in the outlying village, there are other sounds that leave a perpetual yearning for that tranquil place in the soul, including the sound of water babbling in a small brook and the lowing of a cow or a dog barking in a remote village and, last but
not least, the hooting of the owl that feels sated after catching a mouse and ravenously devouring it.

  The most beautiful sound in the world is the voice of the muezzin making his call to prayer from the minaret two miles away from my building as the city slumbers in a deep sleep, as all modes of transportation stop moving, as the streets are emptied of people and cars, and as the TV stops broadcasting the Leader’s speeches.

  But the most beautiful thing in the entire universe is the silence that allows us to hear soft and distant sounds.

  I walked from the Party building to the military security compound on foot, and with the Leader’s voice trailing after me from the loudspeakers strung up on buildings. As I moved away from one speaker, the Leader’s voice drifted away from me, but then I moved closer to another one so that not a single word of what he was saying got away from me. In order to escape the roar I retreated into my inner world and started thinking about what Nooh had told me: they want me to work for them in the propaganda workshop located in the basement of the Party building.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEY WERE EXPECTING ME at the mukhabarat branch. The guard directed me to a small room located near the main entrance to the compound where a man with a frightening moustache asked for my name and then skimmed through a long list until he found it, which allowed me to enter. He pointed inside and ordered me to head up to the second floor of a nearby building. There I found myself in a waiting room large enough to accommodate a great many people but with only ten men and two young women sitting on plastic chairs. I said good evening and sat down at the far end, next to a young man about twenty years old. He couldn’t decide whether to sit still or get up and walk around as his two powerful lungs pressed air through his nostrils.

  The room was incredibly ugly and filthy. The blue paint on the walls was peeling in many places near the ceiling and had turned black along the bottom half from the thousands of hands that had rubbed along it. There were twenty dated pictures of the Leader covering the windows and the walls and a sign warning that smoking was forbidden “on the honor system.” I would have taken out my pipe and lit it up but the sign deterred me; I didn’t want to be held accountable for any more wrongdoing than I had already been saddled with.

  The two young women were dressed stylishly, wearing clothes that weren’t at all appropriate for the place. What did fit was the extreme anxiety that was visible in their eyes even as they tried to cover it up. Meanwhile, the men in the room expressed their unease more honestly, silently bowing their heads toward the ground or sighing loudly or muttering some things they wished God would grant them: protection and mercy.

  A door opened and a security agent with a face that had gone unshaven for several days came in wearing rumpled, grubby civilian clothes. He pointed at a man who sprang up to go with him. The man disappeared behind the door and the agent followed him but turned around before he disappeared, throwing an interrogative glance my way and then shutting the door behind him. I anxiously stood up as the young man beside me had been doing and went outside the room and started slowly pacing, pausing to lean against the wall. A wall clock indicated nine thirty as security personnel moved between rooms, toting files that were all the same shape and color. I tried casually strolling down the hallway to cast a glance through the open doors but a goon I hadn’t seen at first because he was lying down on a military bed placed in the hallway sat up and ordered me to turn around. I returned to leaning against the wall outside the waiting room. Just a moment had passed when a nearby door opened and the same man who had been waiting with us and then got called in by the officer came back out once again. I noticed he was all relaxed, smiling, so his problem must have been resolved the way he had hoped it would be. A few minutes later one of the two young women came out holding a cigarette and asked me for a light. After I gave it to her she stood there and started puffing away nervously. I was about to say something when two goons brusquely appeared, intentionally making a lot of noise as they walked through the nearby door, and then came back out again holding another man who had been with us in the waiting room. His face was yellow as they escorted him down the stairs. I turned toward the young woman to see her crush out her cigarette without finishing it. The scene had made her so nervous that she went back inside.

  At ten thirty I was the only one left in the waiting room. The same agent had come to summon the others one by one. They must have all then gone out through the other door, either with their fear and anxiety erased or else escorted by agents, as had been the case with that man who was all yellow in the face. From where I sat I could predict the outcome just by the sound the agents made when they called the next person’s name. Then the goon opened the door and peered out. He pointed at me to come so I stood up. He waited for me to enter, then followed me and closed the door behind him.

  The room was as wide as the waiting room but not quite as long. The furniture was limited to a metal desk with one chair placed behind it and two chairs in front; a window and another door for people to leave through once the meeting was over; a television set that was on with the sound muted (the video of the Leader’s address had ended and they were now airing enthusiastic nationalist songs); two pictures of the Leader on the walls to the right and the left. In a husky voice the goon asked me to have a seat in one of the chairs. After I did he just stood there gawking at me.

  The picture of the Leader in front of me seemed strange because I had never seen it before. It showed the Leader driving a Rolls Royce and resting his left arm on the window, gazing straight at the camera and smiling. Maybe he wasn’t actually driving the car but just wanted to have his picture taken in that pose; whatever the case, the picture looked completely natural. I stared at it for a long time to avoid making eye contact with that goon, who did not take his eyes off me the entire time. A bureaucrat aggressively opened the door but turned out, oddly enough, to be a frail little man; his face unmistakably betrayed his peasant background. He wiped his hands on a towel as though he had just washed them. Then he handed the towel to the goon and settled into his seat behind the metal desk. I had stood up after a gesture from the goon. The bureaucrat indicated for me to sit down, which I did even as the goon moved over to stand sentry beside the door.

  The bureaucrat opened a desk drawer and took out a thick folder that was the same shape and color as all the other folders I had seen the goons walking around with in the hallway. He placed it in front of me on the table, opened it and threw me a glance I couldn’t decipher. I saw my ID in the folder and the bureaucrat took it out and placed it next to the folder. So this was my file. The bureaucrat scanned through sections of the reports, all of which were computer printouts. Without raising his eyes toward me, in a measured voice with a distinct rural accent, the bureaucrat said, “You’ve been warned more than once to shape up. As you know, in this country we punish anyone who doesn’t respect himself, anyone who doesn’t respect the laws of the country. As long as you continue to disrespect the symbols of the country, we will remain determined to put a stop to it. We have our own methods, which we are quite good at, effective techniques we know the outcome of in advance. You were meant to teach yourself to become a good citizen, but instead … We used to respect you and even liked you for being a talented writer who once had a future ahead of him, but thanks to your lack of respect, your talent and your future are no longer of any concern to us, and therefore …”

  I was amazed by the monotony of this bureaucrat’s voice, the simplicity of his language. His self-confidence was so incongruous with his small stature that I almost burst out laughing. If those expressions had come out of somebody with a different build they might have been convincing, but coming from this puny excuse for a human being who was so afraid of being alone with me in his office that he needed his lackey to stay behind to protect him, they seemed funny and failed to intimidate me at all. I smiled, staring right back into his eyes and waiting for the conclusion he had begun with the word therefore.

  “Therefore �
� what?” I asked.

  He raised his eyes toward me, unsure of what to do next because I showed no fear and was not trembling from his implied threat. He stopped flipping through the file and let his arms fall to his sides.

  “Therefore what?” he demanded. “You’re asking me, therefore what?”

  “Just finish what you were going to say, please.”

  “All right, so you don’t care what’s going to happen to you, then?”

  “All I want to know is what’s going to happen to me.”

  “But you’re not afraid?”

  “Why should I be afraid?”

  “You must be afraid.” Saying that, he glanced over at the goon standing by the door, who moved a bit closer to the table. He really was trying to frighten me but I sharply rapped on the table in order to get him to continue and to make him realize that I wasn’t afraid. Taking out my pipe and my lighter, I asked him, “Please, tell me, why should I be afraid?”

  As he got up from his seat, he gestured to the goon and said, “Anyone sitting where you are should be afraid. No exceptions.”

  The bureaucrat had turned around to face the window as he lit a cigarette when the goon grabbed me with both hands and violently lifted me up out of the chair, shaking me this way and that in order to intimidate me. He jerked me toward the door and then threw me back at the chair, forcing me to sit down again, but before I even touched the seat he picked me back up again. It went on and on like this for several minutes. My shirt got torn under the left armpit. This poor shirt that had been splotched with blood in the morning now got torn under the armpit in the evening. He pounded on my left hand that was hung in a sling wrapped around my neck, which put me in excruciating pain. I grabbed at him and tried to push him off but the bureaucrat turned around and sat back down so the goon sat me down as well. Forcing myself to look up at the goon, I saw that, strangely, he was panting from the struggle I had put up. My losses were no more than a torn shirt and some pain in my left hand that quickly died down. I knew that the bureaucrat was watching me so I smiled at the goon, mocking him, and then turned back to face the bureaucrat. He was visibly irked when he noticed my smile—this was nothing less than insubordination as far as he was concerned—so he reached under the desk and pushed something, an electrical buzzer I think, and then took a hard drag on his cigarette. He was angry that I had won this round and was still not scared. Only a few seconds passed before another door opened with a roar and the two men I had seen taking the yellowish man away came in. Now there were three goons. The bureaucrat waved for them to take me away and they all started grabbing at me in unison (just try to imagine, dear reader, three people clutching one person at the same time even as his left hand hangs in a sling from around his neck) and dragged me (or possibly carried me) outside. I was unable to get my bearings until they had taken me downstairs. They were squeezing me painfully and savagely barking monosyllabic words. Because I was not putting up much of a fight one of them had to hold my legs under his arm and follow behind the others. As they descended below the ground floor I realized they were taking me to the basement, into custody. A metal door opened and we passed through it into a wide corridor lined with cell doors. A guard had opened one and stood there holding it until they stopped and shoved me inside. The metal door slammed shut with a horrible clang.