Two Sisters

by Åsne Seierstad

  “Suleiman.”

  “What did you do?”

  The young man took a deep breath.

  “My parents have an olive grove…”

  He was silent for a time, then began to recount the story of the olive grove that his family had tended for generations. It was old; olive trees could live a thousand years. Their trees were hundreds of years old; if the trunk and the branches died, new shoots would grow, forming a new trunk, growing into new branches. The first olive trees took root right here in northern Syria, in the city-state of Ebla outside modern-day Aleppo. Thousand-year-old clay tablets show the boundaries of the farms, how many jars of oil were earmarked for the king and how many were allocated to the people.

  Some time ago his family’s olive grove had been divided by a road. Following the summer’s fighting, land on one side of the road had wound up in ISIS-controlled territory, while the land on the other side was held by the Kurds. ISIS had warned him about going there. They would shoot him. It was enemy territory.

  Summer passed. Suleiman tended only to the trees on the Islamists’ side of the Karasi road. Over on the Kurdish side, the olives ripened just as well from sun and a little rain alone.

  November was the harvest month. Last week he had cropped the olives on the ISIS land. When he was finished, he looked over at the other side. The trees were heavy with their fruit.

  It is not easy for a farmer to see his crop go to waste.

  At sunrise this same morning, he crossed the road. The crop was his and the year had been a good one. He placed a net on the ground and gave the branches a shake, before climbing a ladder with a basket around his waist to pluck the olives that had not fallen. On his way home he was discovered by an ISIS patrol, made up not of locals who knew him but of foreigners. They detained him, accused him of spying for the Kurds. He had grown angry, remonstrated, pointed at the olives. They had beaten him senseless. Now he was here.

  The young man burst into tears.

  “They took my sister and … she had come with me to help pluck today, to get it done quicker, since she is faster than any of us. My little sister … I’ve no idea where she is, where they took her, what they’re doing to her!”

  “Awlad al haram! Sons of bitches!” he shouted.

  He got to his feet and pounded on the door. Sadiq attempted to restrain him, but Suleiman was like a raging young bull.

  A gang of guards showed up.

  Light fell on Suleiman. Sadiq had pictured a typical northern Syrian like Osman, pale-skinned, with brown hair, but he was dark, dark like Sadiq. His hair and beard were black, sleek and shiny. He stood, bloodied but unbowed, ready to take on ten men.

  “Step aside,” they told Sadiq before grabbing hold of the young farmer, shoving him out and forcing him down the corridor.

  Sadiq was angry at himself. He should not have said anything about the death cell, or made the young man talk at all. Why had he done that?

  It had been so nice listening to him. He had quoted the Koran, a verse about olive trees. God’s light lit by the oil of a blessed tree, an olive tree … whose oil is well-nigh luminous though fire scarce touched it. Light upon light!

  A while later the door was opened again. They threw the young farmer on the floor. Sadiq ran his hand over him, felt his pulse. Was he alive? Yes. He continued to check his pulse at regular intervals. Is he alive? Yes. Sadiq tried to avoid his sewage-coated fingers coming into contact with the wounds. He must not do any more damage.

  The night passed. The door was opened wide. The terrible trio.

  They dragged Suleiman out.

  God’s light lit by the oil of a blessed tree, an olive tree.

  * * *

  Morning came.

  Abu Ahmed came in with tea.

  Sadiq looked at him. “Where is Suleiman?”

  Abu Ahmad made no reply.

  “What happened to him?” Sadiq persisted.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  It was several hours before Sadiq came to himself again. He lay on the filthy floor, sobbing. He had never wept for anyone as he wept for Suleiman. A person he had known for only the briefest time. A person who should have lived but no longer did. A person with a vitality and strength he had scarcely seen the likes of, a farmer who should have had sons and daughters, a whole flock of children. A voice in Sadiq’s head now took up and shouted what Suleiman had exclaimed upon being thrown into the stinking cell: What sort of hell is this?

  A few hours later he was kneeling in the backyard, blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back. Two men held him down.

  He felt the blade of a knife against his throat, the sharp edge pressed against his skin, barely cutting it. He was aware of a sharp pain, of blood trickling. He prepared himself mentally. He imagined the sensation of the knife edge slicing through skin, flesh, sinew, and finally the artery.

  Poor Sara. His poor old mother. They were the ones he thought of most. The children would manage.

  “We know you’re a spy,” a voice above him said. “Who are you working with here? Who’s given you information?”

  “I’m not a spy, I’m a father,” he repeated. “If you’re going to kill me, then kill me because I’m a father who refuses to abandon his daughters, but don’t kill me because you suspect me of being a spy.”

  Sadiq thought that if he admitted to spying, they would kill him. He told himself, No matter how much they beat me, I must never say yes.

  The knife was taken from his throat. They began to beat him instead. He was still blindfolded. The worst beatings were when you could not see what was happening. You had no chance to tense your muscles before the blow landed, you were unprepared. He could easily take a beating with eyes open after this.

  They threw him back in the cell. A little later Abu Ahmed came in. He brought water. Sadiq gulped it down. Then he got diarrhea. He dragged himself back and forth the few steps to the hole in the floor. I cannot be sick now, he thought. My situation is desperate, I am soon to be beheaded.

  The following day his diarrhea was gone. He and his body were attuned.

  In the afternoon, a new prisoner was tossed into the cell. He could tell by the coughing, and by the voice, that he was an older man. Sadiq did not ask him anything. He did not want to know. The sorrow over Suleiman was too great.

  Even so, unbidden, after a while the man began to speak in the darkness. He was a truck driver, his routes taking him all across Syria. He crossed the front lines and back several times a week. On his last trip he had been transporting a consignment of freshly plucked olives to be brined, preserved, or pressed into oil. He had driven from al-Nusra’s area of control over to ISIS territory and had been stopped at a roadblock, where his vehicle had been searched. They had found several cartons of cigarettes among the freight. “I had no idea they were there, no idea at all,” the man insisted.

  Although cigarettes were not forbidden in the Koran, they were deemed haram by ISIS and looked on as a form of “slow suicide” and pure pleasure. ISIS came down hard on people smoking on the sly, even in their own homes, and flogging was the usual punishment. Selling or smuggling was worse.

  The next morning the older man was gone. Sadiq did not ask Abu Ahmed what had happened.

  * * *

  The trio returned.

  “We know you’re shabiha,” the bearded one said.

  “My son, this is the first time I’ve heard that word, what is it?” Sadiq replied.

  He had actually learned the word at Osman’s. It meant “ghost” in the Syrian dialect, and was used to refer to men in Assad’s intelligence service. They appeared out of nowhere, capturing people, brutalizing and killing them before disappearing again. If the ghosts got hold of you, it was unlikely you would see the light of day again.

  The bearded one got to his feet. “Who’s paying you? What did you tell them?”

  “I’m just a father.” Sadiq kept to his mantra. “I swear to you, if I was a spy I would tell you. I’m here as a father, I want t
o fetch my daughters home…”

  “We’re very fond of your daughters, they’re good Muslims,” the younger one said. Sadiq gave a start. Did this guy know his daughters?

  “And because we are fond of them, I’ll make your last night taste that little bit sweeter, because tomorrow we’re going to kill you.”

  They tossed a bag of sweets to him.

  Sadiq just stared at him.

  “The sweets are from your son-in-law,” the one with the beard added. “He asked me to give them to the old man. I promised to send his regards.”

  He kicked a water bottle across the filthy floor. Sadiq shuddered. They left.

  He did not drink the water. He did not touch the sweets. He had no desire to taste his own death sentence.

  * * *

  That night a young boy was thrown into the cell. Sadiq glimpsed him in the scant seconds the door was open and the light from outside came in—the silhouette of a boy not yet fully grown, with the face of a child. Sadiq did not utter a word. He could not bring himself to. He waited. And kept watch. And waited. He could not sleep when he knew one of them would be killed during the night. They came again just before dawn, pausing in the doorway for a moment before they hauled the boy out and disappeared.

  Sadiq laid his head on the filthy floor. He had gotten used to the stench, the shit, the dankness. He thought about the guards, soldiers, torturers, and executioners he was surrounded by. What kind of people were they? How did their minds work? Sadiq believed himself a man who respected others, almost without exception, but he could not understand the men in this al-Dawla al-Islamiya. This had nothing to do with Islam, nothing to do with jihad. Least of all had it anything to do with God. Because God was merciful. They had forgotten that.

  The next night he was the one they took out. He was handcuffed and blindfolded. Soft rain fell on his sweaty brow. Followed by a fist. He fell down, got mud on his face, in his mouth, all over. Then the blows ceased. Sadiq wondered what was coming. They removed his blindfold and turned him over.

  “My father hasn’t come here looking for me,” the fat one said. He pointed at the two others. “Neither has the father of my brother from Eritrea, or my Libyan brother. Nobody comes here to fetch anyone. You’re lying!”

  He ordered Sadiq onto his knees. Drizzle was falling. The knife the man had pressed to his throat was wet.

  They wanted a confession.

  Sadiq answered on autopilot: “I’m just a father.”

  The knife was removed. While he kneeled in the mud, his hands tied behind his back, they debated whether or not to kill him there and then or let him live.

  The rain continued to fall.

  They forced him to his feet and back to his cell.

  I have a small spark named Sadiq, he thought, as he lay dazed. The rest of me is dead. So far four people had shared the cell with him. All of them were gone.

  He tried to put thoughts of them out of his head, empty his mind. He got to his feet, then slept in the fetal position, woke up, and got back to his feet. He did push-ups, knuckles resting on the wall, and performed squats to keep his blood circulating.

  He had tried to keep count of the days, but become mixed up. Slowly, he grew accustomed to an existence in an area four yards square.

  Occasional occurrences made life a little better. One day Abu Ahmed appeared with an empty bottle. Turned upside down and jammed into the hole in the floor, it reduced the stink.

  One morning his warder brought him out into the backyard.

  “They don’t work on Fridays,” he said.

  Friday. Day off. No beatings.

  It was the first time he had seen the yard in daylight. Small light-pink flowers climbed up a wall, growing out of the compacted sandy earth. There were a few chairs and a lopsided table. A couple of cars took up the rest of the space. Beyond the wall, scattered olive trees grew. Sorrow welled up inside Sadiq. The thought of the vigorous young farmer. Syria was being drained of its best men.

  A black flag with the seal of Muhammad flew above them. On a sign that no one had bothered to take down he saw where he actually was: Al-Dana Water Supply and Sewerage Treatment Plant. The Islamists were experts at making prisons of everything.

  Sadiq swung his outstretched arms back and forth, enjoying the space and air around his body, the sun, the gentle breeze. “I’ve spoken to someone…” Abu Ahmed said. “I told them about you. If you’re lucky, he’ll be here today.”

  In the middle of the yard a group stood chatting. They had reddish beards and were light-skinned. Chechens, Abu Ahmed told him. They were reputed to be the best soldiers, brutal, disciplined, practiced in guerrilla tactics cultivated over centuries of warfare against the Russians.

  “They want to see combat,” Abu Ahmed said, “like everyone else who comes. A lot of people are disappointed when they are assigned to watch prisoners. They didn’t enlist for that, not to hang around this shithole.”

  Sadiq wanted to ask Abu Ahmed how he wound up here, what he was doing working for ISIS, but he did not. He remained stuck in his own thoughts, lacked the energy to contemplate those of others. He looked around. Prisoners and guards, executioners and victims. He drew in deep lungfuls of the autumn air. Oh, for a cigarette now!

  A man came over to Abu Ahmed. He had a slight limp and stood resting his weight on one foot. The guard straightened up and pointed toward Sadiq. The man motioned him to follow and led Sadiq and Abu Ahmed inside the building. He showed them into one of the treatment plant’s offices and introduced himself as Abu Sayaf.

  “What brings you to Syria?” he asked Sadiq.

  When he had heard Sadiq’s story, he stood up and paced back and forth in the room, mumbling some verses from the Koran.

  He turned and looked straight at Sadiq. “If you remain in that cell, sooner or later you’ll be killed.”

  He left the room; Abu Ahmed and Sadiq sat and waited. When he returned, he had two of the Chechens with him. He instructed Sadiq to accompany them, and Sadiq found himself being led across the yard to another building, through a door, and down a corridor. He was shown into a large room with mats on the floor. “Find an empty spot,” a guard told him.

  A mattress! What bliss. He lay down on one of them. Just as he was stretching to his full length, the muezzin rang out: “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!”

  Voices from the minarets and mosques across the whole town mingled. It was beautiful, it felt sacred. Even in this hellhole, the call to worship was beautiful.

  The afternoon prayer of asr was to be recited at a time defined by the length of any object’s shadow. While in the toilet cell, Sadiq had not been able to make out the calls to prayer. Now they sounded like cries of freedom. He prepared to pray.

  I bear witness that there is no god but Allah

  I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

  Hasten to prayer

  Hasten to success

  God is greatest, God is greatest

  There is no God but Allah

  When the calls died away, Sadiq made himself comfortable on the mattress. Beside him a man lay groaning. Sadiq looked around. The occupants of the room varied in age—there were boys and grown men—and several others were moaning and writhing in pain.

  “What happened to you?” he asked the man beside him, who was trying to stifle a groan.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  But Sadiq always wanted to know.

  “They roasted our balls,” the man said, “charred them.”

  They had burned them black with a lighter, he told him. The pain had been out of this world. Several men had passed out. They had awoken to hellish pain. “The agony!”

  “What are you accused of?” Sadiq asked.

  “I was guiding a man across the border, an IS fighter, he was killed and they accused me of betraying him … Wallahi, I’m innocent!”

  Sadiq looked around. Again, the Syrians were the ones suffering the most, all those he had shared the death cell with were local Syria
ns. They were the ones dying.

  The night seemed interminable. The mattress provided no succor. It was as though everyone in the room was inside his head wailing and crying.

  * * *

  The next morning Sadiq was taken to an office. When he saw the flags and placards bearing the seal of Muhammad, he lost hope.

  There is no way out of here. They have already decided who will live and who will die.

  Sadiq was told to sit and wait for the judge. An imperious man with a long gray beard entered. Abu Hafs an-Najdi was Saudi Arabian and responsible for the sharia court in al-Dana. He began the hearing.

  Sadiq endeavored to use the correct words and phrases, as he had learned them in Saudi Arabia. He was careful to offer precise details in his story. The account of two daughters journeying to Syria without his permission. Of a father traveling after them.

  The judge turned to some men and asked for the evidence in the case. Sadiq heard the words “spy,” “intelligence,” “Norway,” “Turkey.” One of the men held up Sadiq’s mobile phone for the judge to see.

  “This contains texts from his employers,” they said.

  The accused was here on a mission at the behest of Western intelligence and this supposed search for his daughters was a cover story.

  Abu Hafs asked to see the phone. He scrolled down the screen.

  “What language are these texts in?” he asked.

  “Norwegian.”

  “Who here speaks Norwegian?”

  There was a general shaking of heads. A Moroccan working at a garage was mentioned.

  “Find him.”

  Coffee was brought in for the judge and his men.

  The Moroccan was finally tracked down.

  “Do you understand both Arabic and Norwegian?” the Saudi Arabian asked when the court was again in session.

  The man nodded. He was instructed to translate the messages on Sadiq’s phone.

  Sadiq knew that his fate depended on what the man said. He had to convince the Moroccan that he was telling the truth without using his voice. I am just a father, I am not a traitor, I am just a father, he said in his mind, hoping the message would reach the man, who suddenly turned to him.