by Laura Aslan
***
The guards burst into my cell one morning and announced it was wash time. They told me they had noticed that I had begun to smell and were more than aware that my clothes hadn’t been near a washing machine for many weeks. They ordered me out into the main room and told me to strip and to throw my clothes into a plastic bin which they said would be incinerated. I had no choice but to comply. I stripped down to my bra and knickers.
One of them stepped forward.
“Everything.”
He pulled out a flick knife and snapped it open, slicing the strap of my bra with the razor sharp blade.
“Next time it will be your fucking face, now do as you’re told.”
I had no choice but to remove my underwear and tried to conceal my modesty with my hands, as I stood stark naked in front of the two guards who by now couldn’t take their eyes off me. They ordered me to start walking and pointed me in the direction of another door about twenty metres from the toilet. It was locked and one of them opened it with a key. We walked through the door and down a short corridor to another one, which he also unlocked. I took note of everything around me and couldn’t help noticing that there were no windows anywhere. There were no windows in my cell or the large room it opened onto, nor were there any windows in the toilet and no windows in the corridors either. But why would there be? It was a farm and cows and sheep didn’t need windows.
We walked about thirty metres and the corridor turned sharply to the left. There was a white tiled area with what looked like a series of showerheads. I supposed this was where they cleaned the animals prior to a market sale or another purchase. Did they even wash animals? I didn’t know.
They told me to step forward and stand under one of the shower taps. One of the guards walked back around the corner and within a few seconds water started to pour out. It was icy cold and my immediate reaction was to jump to the side to get out of the way. The guard slapped my backside hard and forced me back under the water but to my amazement the water gradually started to heat up. It was so good, the warmest I had been in a long while and for a brief moment I forgot the guards were even there.
They soon made their presence felt. I noticed one of them had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He had a bar of soap in his hands and he ordered me forward. I did as I was told. As his colleague stood by grinning he soaped my body all over paying special attention to my breasts. He was clearly enjoying himself and I feared the worst. I fought against Kupi’s gang when they were going to rape me but I had already conceded defeat in here. As much as I hated to admit it there was no fight left in me.
After five minutes or so he was finished and pushed me back under the shower and I rinsed the soap away. I was ordered out again and this time it was the other guard’s turn to have his fun. Bizarrely he spent more time washing my hair than any other part of my body and I’m ashamed to say I enjoyed it because I was clean and warm.
They then dried me gently with clean towels. I felt as if I was going crazy. Were these the same men who beat me every time I needed to leave my cell to go to the toilet? I even wondered if I had imagined those beatings, if they had been bad nightmares. They walked me back towards the cell. I expected a sting in the tail, a beating or worse. Outside the cell door was a pile of clean clothes, socks, a pair of very large panties, a t-shirt, jumper and some jeans and they ordered me to dress. The clothes smelled fresh, they were even a little warm and I guessed they’d been freshly laundered. When I had dressed they turned me around and inspected me much like a soldier on parade. When they were happy they pushed me back in the cell and locked the door. As incredible as it may seem I felt happy and I felt strong and clean.
I looked forward to my shower days but they were very much sporadic. At first they happened every few days and then perhaps once a week but then they were very irregular indeed, when the guards decided I supposed. And each time they stripped and washed me and the same guard spent time on my hair. Whilst they covered every part of my body with their hands there was never any suggestion of anything more than that. Those first few showers I feared the worse, feared I would be thrown to the ground and raped but it never happened.
The toilet beatings and running the gauntlet continued. They took their fun that way but apart from an occasional slap across the backside and groping my breasts it came to no more than that.
One day I made the mistake of requesting the toilet on the way back from the shower. I was clean and warm and dressed but off guard as I walked into the W.C. I did what I had to do and walked back out never suspecting that they were going to start. They had been so gentle with me in the shower but as soon as I walked back out it was as if two completely different men were waiting for me. The guard who had caressed and washed my hair just a few minutes earlier punched me hard in the stomach and I collapsed in a heap on the floor. I had the presence of mind to know what was happening and scuttled quickly between his legs as the other one aimed kicks at me. I was up on my feet and sprinting towards the door but I was too slow as one of them gripped my hair and hauled me backwards. I crashed onto the floor and curled up in a ball in a vain attempt to shield myself from the kicks and slaps and punches that rained down on me. They beat me until they were out of breath, they kicked me until I lapsed into unconsciousness and I awoke to find I was back in the cell once again. I ached all over. I had never been beaten like that for some time. They had certainly won the battle that day and I learned a valuable lesson to never to trust them again.
I would lie awake trying to figure out what made these men tick. I suspected they were bored too but couldn’t work out how they could be so gentle one minute and so vicious the next. They were sadists, of that there was no doubt, unpredictable, possibly even schizophrenic, though what were the chances of two guards on the same duty being that way? No, these men were not ill, they were just men in a conflict and as I’d discovered with the Kupi gang, when there is conflict and war, all reasoning is pushed to the furthest recesses of the human brain, as if someone grants a special licence to turn men into twisted, multi personality monsters.
I would lie awake and daydream. I’d imagine I was a small girl again and dream of the good times I’d had, the walks in the mountains with my parents, the grand feasts and family reunions at Uncle Demir’s and the family holidays we’d spent on the beach at Montenegro called Ulcinj. I worked hard at daydreaming and I’d work hard at the colours in the darkness because it transported me away from the nightmare I was in and I became quite good at them both.
For hours and hours I would be lost in another world, my own personal moving picture with my good friends from my childhood as the co-stars. My cell didn’t exist, the beasts outside my cell door forgotten about, the beatings and abuse a distant memory, as I’d take myself down memory lane. I’d walk back and forward in my cell with my eyes closed, one two three steps turn... one two three and I’d take myself back to the past. I was no longer in that cell I was on a beach, a mountainside, driving a car or just sitting at the kitchen table with my beautiful parents. We’d be eating Sarma or Suxhuk, a delicious Turkish style sausage or pite, a meat and potato pastry pie and of course I would always finish with baklava, my favourite desert. Sometimes I’d sing to myself or recite a poem I’d been taught at school. It was quite incredible the power of recall and the more I remembered the more I convinced myself that perhaps I wasn’t losing my mind after all.
I studied Romeo and Juliet and I studied my favourite quotes, quotes that I’d read over and over again as a teenager so that they were lodged deep in my brain, so deep that no one could ever take them away from me and despite the fact I had no books I could still study. One quote came to me over and over again and it somehow gave me comfort during my darkest hours of despair.
Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost. Upon the sweetest flower
of all the field.
I loved my Nani and Agi, they were my super heroes, they made me what I was and at times when I wanted to give up I’d think of them. I’d dare to believe that they may just have survived and I owed it to them to fight through the torment. So I’d get up and start my walk again, one, two, three, one, two, three and I’d fill my head with the images of their faces from happier times and I’d be alive again, cocooned in my own perfect world.
But all too often my daydreams would be ripped apart, reality would come crashing through the cell door as regular as clockwork. I hadn’t been showered for some time. I didn’t know how long because one day, one week, one month merely blended into another.
I recollect one particular day, perhaps three months into my captivity, when one of the guards brought the food in and stood at the door with a strange look on his face. The only light that reached me was when the cell door was opened, otherwise I was always alone in the cell in the darkness. I could only see his silhouette at first but then the features of his face came into focus.
“What wrong?” I asked.
“You fucking stink, that’s what’s wrong.”
And almost immediately I knew what it was that smelt. I hadn’t had a period for some months but a few nights back I’d awoken with familiar feeling stomach cramps. I thought nothing of it. The next morning I thought I’d felt a dampness between my legs but put it down to urine. My bladder control was weak owing to the fact that my body clock was all over the place and my internal organs battered and bruised because of the numerous beatings at the hands of the brothers Grimm. There were many occasions that I’d ended up lying in my own urine or faeces before I’d managed to make it to the sanctuary of the toilet.
“Over here you dirty bitch. Let me take a look at you.”
I shuffled over to the door and he pulled me into the light by my hair. I looked down between my legs. My jeans were stained a reddish brown colour and immediately we both knew what had happened. I was mortified, so ashamed, so embarrassed that a stranger had witnessed me this way.
The guard was furious as he screamed for his friend.
“You filthy bitch,” he spat.
As if I could help it.
“If you can get me some towels or tissue paper it won’t happen again.”
“Take your clothes off,” he barked.
The soldier rived at my jumper and blouse and then tore my bra from me throwing it to the ground. He graciously allowed me to remove my soiled jeans and knickers myself and pushed me against the outside wall of the cell.
His colleague arrived and he told him to prepare the shower and some clean clothes. He made me stand naked for some time until his friend returned and they frogmarched me to the showers. I felt dirty and looked forward to the warm shower and the sweet smelling soap, it had been a long time and a change of clothes would be welcome too.
I was to be sorely disappointed as they pushed me into the corner and produced what looked like a powerful length of hose. They connected it up to a large tap that stood a metre from the floor and turned it on. The powerful jet hit me in the chest and knocked me over onto the shiny tiled floor. The water was freezing cold at first but like the showers I expected the hot water would soon kick in. I wasn’t to be so lucky this time as the hose was only connected to a cold water outlet.
They laughed and giggled and squealed like tormented schoolboys as they tried their hardest to hose the flesh from my bones. At first the jet of cold water was painful and stinging but within minutes my whole body was numb with the cold and I felt no pain. They aimed the powerful jet at my head and the force of it cracked my cheekbone into the tiles. I could do nothing but crawl into a corner and curl up in a ball with my back to them. They swore and cursed at me and it became like a language of its own, every other word a foul mouthed expletive and whilst at first it bothered and hurt me I was beyond caring and expected no better from these animals. The hose stopped and I felt two hands grab me roughly as they turned me around and pulled me into the centre of the tiled area. One of them prised my legs apart and then they turned the hose on and aimed the cold jet between my thighs. Although I had my eyes closed I sensed one of the guards was quite close to me. He was telling his colleague how much I was enjoying the experience. I had lived in fear of being raped for months, surely this was it? But within a few seconds I made it back into the corner and curled up in a ball while they laughed and giggled.
It’s hard to tell how long I was abused in the shower unit, probably no more than ten minutes but it was ten minutes that lasted an eternity. All the while they taunted me calling me the vilest, filthiest names they could dream up. Eventually they turned off the hose and lifted me to my feet. I tried to stand unaided but the signals transmitted from my brain to my lower limbs went unanswered and if they hadn’t held on to me I would have collapsed in a heap. My teeth chattered and banged together which was a great source of amusement to them as they made comments about how a woman could never keep her mouth closed.
I don’t know how I managed to walk back to the cell as my feet felt like two blocks of ice. They threw me back into my cell with a towel and my clean clothes. As I slowly began to thaw out my whole body seemed to tingle and burn and both hands were fixed like claws which meant I couldn’t even hold the towel let alone dress myself. Thankfully it was summer now and the cell wasn’t particularly cold. If it had been winter or even early spring, I wouldn’t have survived the night. The pain was excruciating, my whole body cried out for release and my head ached like it had never ached before, like someone had squeezed a big bass drum in there, pounding away as if their life depended on it. The headache was the worst, relentless; I thought it would never end. I remembered my father telling me that if I was in pain to squeeze hard on a pressure point between my thumb and my forefinger. I tried the process for several minutes but it didn’t take the pain away.
It was many hours before I was able to dress fully and the pain in my head eventually subsided. I wrapped myself up in the blanket and tried to fall asleep as I heard the cockroaches making their nightly expedition across the stone floor.
Why Do They Not Come for Me?
The days and the weeks rolled into one. I knew that I had been in my own personal tomb for many months now. The general change in the temperature of the cell told me that, as it turned from freezing cold to bearable and then week by week gradually started to warm up. As mid-summer took hold, at times it was stiflingly hot in there. And yet I longed for that sun, to see it rising up from a mountainside gradually casting light over the valley. I had forgotten what the sun looked like. I craved the warmth, the way it made you feel when you were able to sunbathe to the point of perspiration and then cool off in the sea or in a crystal clear blue swimming pool.
But I knew there was no hope of escape and by now I had given up the thoughts of anyone coming to rescue me, of ever seeing the sun again. I was lost in my mind that was by now playing strange hallucinogenic tricks on me and wondered if I could ever find myself again. I fought on and tried to complete everyday tasks that other people would take for granted. My fingernails were claw like and ugly and so I took to sanding them on the concrete floor but left them long enough so that I could scrape in-between my teeth. Keeping my teeth clean without a toothbrush was almost impossible but I tried by best with my fingers and my nails. I forget how many times I asked my guards for a toothbrush and toothpaste, for period pads and even a hairbrush but nothing ever materialised. It was probably as well they didn’t bring a hair brush as by now my tangled, matted hair was falling out in clumps. I’d only have to drag my fingers through my scalp and the hair would come loose in my hands. My scalp was raw and tender, painful to the touch and my skin was dry and flaking off like talcum powder.
I cried myself to sleep many nights as I thought about my parents and because they’d never come to get me I assumed they had been murdered. It was the only logi
cal explanation. Agi would never have allowed me to stay there so long.
I started to bite myself, sometimes as hard as I could and at times managed to puncture the skin and draw blood. It felt good. It felt that at least I was in control of the pain. It was different to the pain and torture my captors inflicted on me because it was my pain not theirs. I bit my fingers and my forearms and even my shoulders and my knees if I pulled them up towards my chin. On one occasion I remember biting my shoulder so hard that I could feel the sensation of the blood trickle all the way down to my hand. I waited and guided the blood stream using gravity and felt so pleased as it reached my wrist and then licked the trail all the way back up to my shoulder. I sat in the darkness grinning with blood smeared all over my face. At that point in time I knew I was dangerously close to becoming a psychotic, deranged lunatic. I wondered what my captors would have thought if they had walked in on me at that moment.
And yet I had moments of rational normality and lucid thoughts. I asked myself why I had never been questioned or interrogated again, analysing every little detail. It made no sense. If they really thought I was a spy then surely that one day of interrogation was not the first and the last time. And yet the more I thought about it the more it made perfect sense. They would never question me again because they knew the answers would always be the same, they knew I had told the truth, knew I wasn’t a spy, just like Kupi and his gang, the truth had no relevance. The only thing I couldn’t quite understand was why they were keeping me alive, why were they bringing me food every day?
My mood swings told me that I was heading towards the thin line where sanity ends and madness begins. It was incredible the emotions I went through in such a short time. I became aggressive, ready and willing to attack the guards as they opened my cell door and more than happy to fight the monsters I faced as I ran the almost daily gauntlet to the toilet. I’m ashamed to admit that sometimes I even enjoyed the confrontation.