by Rafik Schami
A few metres away a man was standing outside his door, drying his hands on a towel. When he saw the truck he called to someone in the house. A woman joined him, barefoot, and they both looked at the truck. Farid would have liked to call out to them, but he knew it was useless.
After a while they went on. The truck drove out of the city and set off north. Farid knew this road; it was the way to Mala. Soon, however, the driver turned right. One man knew this route. “It’s the way to Gahan,” he whispered, “Gahan.” Most of the prisoners were relieved that they were not bound for Tad, but their relief was of short duration.
About an hour later the truck stopped. An NCO opened the tailgate and told the prisoners to get out and squat on the ground.
They were in the middle of the steppes. The sight of the guards made Farid feel sick. They stood in two rows, forming a corridor to the camp gate, and they did not carry weapons, but were armed with heavy branches and stout twigs.
The guards laughed. Farid desperately looked for a face containing at least some spark of humanity, but they all wore the same sadistic grin. The prisoners were told to go down the corridor two by two to the gate, where a high-ranking officer, flanked by two others, sat at a large table. The first two prisoners started walking past the rows of soldiers, and the branches and twigs whipped down on them. Anyone who fell was beaten even harder. One of the NCOs kept calling out, “Next two!”
Many of the prisoners collapsed, blocking the way for the men coming after them. The guards rained blows down more and more harshly.
Farid’s first blow hit him when he had gone one-third of the way. He stumbled over another prisoner, but quickly got up and ran on towards the table. More blows kept striking him, and at last he fell to the ground. The prisoners were leaping back and forth as if in a wild dance, coming together and scattering again. Farid’s back was burning from the blows. His hands, arms, and knees were grazed by the gravel.
When they had all reached the gate they had to undress. Many of the guards laughed, grabbed their own balls, and pointed at the prisoners’ backsides.
Human beings are repulsive, thought Farid at the sight of them. Dirty as the guards themselves were, stained and scarred, they were laughing at the prisoners. One of the officers at the table grinned cynically and said, “Those aren’t noble Syrians, they’re American Indians.” And he pointed to the coloured stains on them.
Two of the camp staff shaved the newcomers’ heads in turn, doing it so brutally that many of them bled. One prisoner cried like a child, calling out, “Mama, Mama, I need you, Mama!”
It was heart-rending. Even the soldiers stared in bewilderment at the man, who must have been sixty. Other prisoners suddenly began weeping too. The officers laughed at the crazy old man, and the guards obediently joined in their derision.
A pharmacist who was a cultural functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood whispered incredulously, “This can’t be true. We’re not in Syria, we’ve been abducted and taken to Israel. It’s not possible for us to be treated like this in our own country. I swear by Allah, these are unbelievers! How could Muslims torment their brothers in the faith like this?”
A blow struck him in the face, and he fell silent. Yet again, the officers asked each prisoner whether he was ready to repent and sign the statement. Three men agreed to sign. One called out aloud, “Forgive me, comrades, I can’t take any more of this.” The other prisoners stood there in silence with their heads bent. They were driven through the gate into the camp, naked and with their heads shaved.
Suddenly they heard the old man who had been crying and calling out for his mother laugh. “Is the party still going on?” he kept calling. Soon after that he and the three repentant sinners were sent back to Damascus in a minibus. A rumour spread among the prisoners that they were taking him to the al-Asfuriye mental hospital.
Farid and the other newcomers were alone in the yard now. A prisoner who seemed to have been here for some time pushed around a large handcart piled with items of grey camp clothing. When he reached the middle of the yard he tipped his cargo out on the ground and went slowly to a long building behind the huts. Farid suspected that it was the kitchen and clothing depot, since he saw smoke rising from the building. The man came back several times with his handcart and added more clothes to the heap.
That night, unable to sleep, Farid tried to think of Rana, but she appeared only briefly before his mind’s eye and then sank back into deep darkness. Laila escaped him too.
Then he saw his mother wiping away a tear, smiling awkwardly, and finally running away. He ran after her, she went faster and faster, at last he caught up and took her by the shoulders. She turned, and he was shocked to see a strange woman. He woke up, and all was quiet except for a barking dog.
Days in the camp, like the prisoners themselves, lost their names. By chance he heard one of the guards saying he was looking forward to tomorrow because he liked Thursdays best.
In another, distant life he used to study physical chemistry on a Thursday, then mechanics, then two hours of algebra with long, long equations, the calculation of differentials, and logarithm tables. They were difficult subjects. Farid loved organic chemistry, and given a choice would have spent all his time in the laboratory where, synthesizing new compounds, he felt like a real chemist.
They’ll be doing their finals around now. His friends wouldn’t be thinking of him but of the questions they’d be asked. It was strange; he himself had never wondered about the students who suddenly stopped coming to lectures.
He turned over and fell asleep.
197. Said
Next day he was taken to the camp commandant. Captain Hamdi was over fifty, and seemed too old for his low rank. He put the usual questions again. Farid despised them, and did not reply. But when the officer called him a son of a whore he lost the last vestiges of his fear.
“I am not the son of a whore. I suppose even your own mother isn’t a whore either.”
This answer paralysed the officer for a moment, but then something seemed to snap in him. He leaped for Farid, hitting out and kicking him. As if thousands of years of civilization had been extinguished, he was suddenly an ape crouching on the bound prisoner’s chest, letting out yelps.
When Farid came back to his senses he was in the hut, surrounded by prisoners who were all looking at him with concern. He could hardly move.
“What did they do to you, my boy?” asked an old man. His name was Said, and he had been arrested as a hostage in his son’s place, to induce the son, a Muslim Brother, to turn himself in. Said was over seventy and, surprisingly, a complete unbeliever, but now he was imprisoned for his son’s erroneous and extremist beliefs.
Farid couldn’t move his mouth, and his jaw hurt.
“Sometimes,” said Said, shaking his head, “there’s a blasphemous voice that speaks up inside me, addressing God. If you exist, God, it says, then turn the camp commandant into a rat in front of everyone. But it won’t happen.”
“You’re right, it is blasphemy,” a bearded young man shouted at him.
“To be honest, I don’t think much of any Almighty God who leaves his worshippers in the lurch to face such a miserable enemy,” replied Said, with a bitter laugh. He stroked Farid’s forehead.
“He called,” Farid managed to say with great difficulty, “he called my mother a whore. I contradicted him. That’s all.”
The old man nodded.
198. The Chinese
Not a day passed without someone being taken out of his hut and brought back hours later, an almost lifeless bundle. There was no need for any particular reason. The camp guards had a free hand to torture prisoners as and when they liked.
One of the prisoners in Farid’s hut was a well-known composer who was always beating out rhythms with a spoon or a stick. One day he played an exacting composition on the bars with two spoons. The guard Abu Satur came along and asked, “Who’s that telegraph message for?”
“My mother,” replied the prisoner, startl
ed. Everyone laughed, and the crestfallen Abu Satur walked a couple of steps further, but then stopped, came back, hauled the musician into the yard and whipped him. The whip cut his skin like a razorblade.
“That damned Chinese,” swore another prisoner, who was standing beside Farid at the fence near the way into camp. Farid had heard a few days earlier that two or three of the guards liked to lick fresh blood from their whips. Abu Satur, nicknamed “the Chinese”, was the worst of them. He was a tall, sturdy man with Asiatic features, and enormously strong. The sight of blood when he was whipping a man intoxicated him, and then his anger gave way to a smile that smoothed his face into a Chinese mask. Abu Satur felt exhilarated when he could torment prisoners until the blood flowed. He knew he was one of the lowest on the social scale; like a pimp or executioner, he could never mention his job out loud. Yet he didn’t want to be anything but what he was, for here in the camp others feared him. Here he could be revenged on all the distinguished men who were now just miserable, stinking wrecks. Abu Satur felt boundless satisfaction when he, formerly a starving boy who spent every other year in jail, heard them begging him for mercy. How often had he himself been whipped in the past? Now he relished his revenge, particularly when his victims were the educated men who had once been so infinitely far above him: professors, journalists, doctors, ministers, parliamentary deputies, even police chiefs. Now he whipped them.
Abu Satur was happy in this camp. He saved all his wages and gave his wife more presents every other week than she had ever seen before. The prisoners would give anything for a little hashish, a bottle of arrack, or some bread. Captain Hamdi was an experienced man, and let the guards do these little deals so as to keep them sweet in their bleak surroundings.
On the afternoon when Abu Satur whipped the composer in the yard, his victim lost consciousness. The Chinese left him lying there in the blazing sun and went away. Later, two soldiers picked the man up, dragged him to the hut, and asked, “What did the poor devil do?”
“He was composing a love song,” said old Said.
“I can’t make these people out,” said the smaller of the two soldiers. “Here they are in the middle of hell, and they still have just that one thing on their minds.”
199. The Children of Job
Five hundred prisoners were terrorized night and day by over a hundred armed soldiers and guards. Farid realized that the aim of the camp administration was to make intelligent men into animals by beating, starving, and above all deliberately humiliating them. The prisoners might be forced to imitate a donkey, a dog, or a sheep. Farid was bewildered by the sight of a professor of mathematics being made to follow Abu Satur about the yard on all fours, barking like a dog.
Apparently the imitation of animals was an established part of camp discipline, for he noticed that the guards were always demanding this exercise. They would sit under a sun umbrella humiliating their prisoners, and woe to anyone who refused to do as he was told, or stopped before the guards said he could. These were deeply degrading scenes.
When Said was the chosen victim, Farid wept at the sight of the old man, who couldn’t follow a guard fast enough on all fours, being dragged across the entire yard by a leather collar around his neck. Said slid over the ground on his stomach, gasping for breath. The guard kept kicking him in the side and mocking him.
That evening all the prisoners from Farid’s hut gathered around the old man to discuss their situation. A man called Farhan said, “They don’t mean to kill us, or they’d have shot us by now. They want to turn us into animals, make us forget that we are fine, valuable human beings with eight thousand years of culture behind us.”
The humiliation of old Said suddenly put an end to all hostility between the Muslim Brothers, the communists, and other groups. Everyone was now determined to resist the plans of the camp authorities. Word was passed on to all the other huts. It was on 15 August that the “Humanity” programme of what, at Said’s suggestion, they called the University of Job was set up, under the secret leadership of some ten prisoners. It was all done by word of mouth, for there were no pencils or paper in the camp.
Anyone who knew a subject gave lectures on it, and the others, whatever their own education, were the students and could learn anything. In Farid’s hut, they had lectures on history, religion, chemistry, car repairs, nutrition, first aid, philosophy, chess, backgammon, card games, and geography. In another hut a famous expert lectured on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, in yet another there was an authority on Persian miniatures. Professors and men of letters in the hut next to the kitchen taught the works of Shakespeare, Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Pablo Neruda. The prisoners were moved to tears by Gorki’s Mother, and laughed heartily at the books of the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.
Some of the men told the stories of Tolstoy’s novels, and recited Nazim Hikmet’s poems on freedom. A young student from Hut 4 knew the plots of several novels by Balzac. An older man presented Scheherazade’s tales from the Thousand and One Nights in a lively, graphic style that captivated his audience.
One of the most brilliant storytellers among them was a criminal, a former pimp and multiple murderer. He had landed in this camp because one of his victims was a high-ranking secret service officer who was his competitor in Damascus.
Farid was astonished by this man, whose behaviour to the other inmates of the camp was always charming. He was a fanatical film buff who had spent most of his time in the cinema in his days as a pimp; he used to go from cinema to cinema in Damascus, from morning to early evening, and then he took his stable of three whores out to eat and then cashed up his accounts that night. Sometimes he had paid a cinema proprietor for all the seats in the place, asking the owner to show Casablanca or Gone With the Wind just for him, when he sat in the exact middle of the auditorium and sobbed like a desolate child at the dramatic scenes.
Because he had seen all the films so often he was able to perform them in the camp, complete with dialogue, mimicry, gestures, and sound effects. He had a divine voice, and used it to imitate up to ten characters and an endless variety of natural noises. His audience could feel the heat and dust of Westerns, or dance and sing with Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush.
There were evenings of satire, song, and recitations, but serial stories were the most popular of all. Many prisoners could spin out a single story for twenty evenings, some even for fifty, without ever losing the thread.
The random transfer of prisoners from hut to hut, a systematic method of punishment in the camp to prevent them from forming friendship, was all to the good for the University of Job, because it brought variety into the cultural programme.
200. The Power of Words
Two journalists started the first and probably the only paperless magazine in the world. They called it The Rose of Jericho, because that desert plant curls its dry stems into a ball and rolls back and forth over the steppes, dry and lifeless, until the rains come, when it revives and turns green again.
There were leading articles, interviews, news stories, readers’ letters and editorial answers, satire, caricatures, poetry, but all orally transmitted. And the prisoners in Hut 9, where The Rose was published, enjoyed it page by page.
Some men with particularly good memories had the job of learning the newspaper by heart. Then they could quote from the latest edition to prisoners from other huts, who in turn passed sections of it on. Not a week went by without more than ten different copies of the same edition being in circulation.
Two former radio presenters put on a satirical radio programme, calling their station “Radio Earth Closet”. The programme went out at night, and contained news, advice, quizzes, and songs.
One of the presenters was a Palestinian, the other a communist from Damascus, with whom Farid quickly made friends. Torture had left this man blind in his right eye. The two presenters collected news all day. Some of the soldiers would tell them what they had read in the daily papers. Then, in the silence of the night, the two men broa
dcast the news to the sky. It was in this way that Farid learned about the civil war in the Congo, the suicide of the American writer Ernest Hemingway, and the bombing attacks in Paris linked to the Algerian war.
Of course there were even more punishments next day, even more pointless hard labour, but that was not what mattered.
Some time around the end of December 1960, Captain Hamdi couldn’t help but notice that his regime of torture and humiliation was getting him nowhere. He was left with a choice between murder or toleration. He was not allowed to murder his prisoners, so he decided to tolerate their apparently harmless eccentricities, never realizing that he had suffered a severe setback.
201. The Rift
At the end of January the first rumours of the imminent collapse of the union with Egypt reached the camp. A considerable amount of discontent against their Egyptian superiors had built up among the Syrian army officers. The prisoners laughed out loud when they heard the report on Captain Hamdi broadcast by Radio Earth Closet; Hamdi, it said, had only just noticed that his bosses in Damascus were Egyptians to a man.
But by now Hamdi had far more to worry about than the prisoners guessed. For the first time he was asking himself what would happen later. His prisoners included not only many scholars and influential civilians, but more than fifty army officers from all parts of the country, including two generals. These were men who had been discharged for sympathizing with the communists or the Muslim Brotherhood, and had ended up in Gahan.
He decided to use torture only in extreme cases in future, and gave his men a vague explanation to account for this sudden change of policy. By the middle of February torture had been practically discontinued at Gahan. Even Abu Satur wasn’t allowed to whip prisoners any more, and he went around the camp looking dazed. He asked for a transfer, but Captain Hamdi pretended not to hear him, and consoled him by saying that they’d have to wait and see.