by Rafik Schami
The soldier’s face was scarred, but even the scars couldn’t hide its kindness. Farid picked up the can. The hot soup tasted good. It was made of carrots and potatoes.
He ate quickly, wrapped in his blanket, and then put the can down beside the grating. When he woke up again hours later, it had gone.
In the evening the others came back, worn and weary, but as soon as they were sitting down they began to laugh and crack jokes about Garasi the bulldog. When Farid told the old communist Zachariah about the soldier and the soup, he smiled. “That’s not a soldier, that’s our guardian angel Salih. He’s been in here forever. He killed seven men in a single evening,” he added, passing the side of his hand across his throat to show how.
251. Dawn
Next morning Farid woke just as dawn was approaching. He felt weak. In the past, early morning had his favourite time of day. He liked to be alone with the silence, and hadn’t slept more than six hours a night since he was ten. Sometimes he was up at four, listening to the world as it woke. He had discovered that of all times of day, early morning dawn retained its innocence best. It was as still as it had been ten thousand years ago: the moment of calm before the storm.
Ever since he fell in love with Rana, his first thought in the morning had been for her. It was a time when he could talk to her, even though, as she admitted with some shame, she was still fast asleep then.
Early morning in the camp was grey and mute, stinking of sewers and tasting bitter like rotten teeth. It was the end of rest and the beginning of torment. Water was laid on in the huts for only an hour in the early morning, and without previous warning. So as not to lose a drop, the prisoners always stood three large plastic buckets under the taps in the washbasin the evening before. All other available buckets, bowls, and mugs stood very close, for the water flowed at a different pressure every day, and sometimes the guards forgot to turn it off again. On such days the prisoners drank all they wanted and rejoiced, splashing each other like children and fooling around.
Farid sat up and drew his blanket around his shoulders. He still felt shaky on his legs, but he wasn’t so dizzy now. He felt hungry, always a sign that he was getting better.
He tried to stand up, but then he felt sick again and dropped back on his mat. He didn’t wake again until midday. The camp was empty; Garasi seemed to have forgotten him. He left Farid alone for the next three or four weeks. During that time he was trying hard to catch some very big fish from the ranks of the communists and the Muslim Brotherhood in his net. And his brutality and the hopelessness of life in the huts soon brought him success. At the end of September about ten Muslim Brothers and as many communists broke, signed their recantations, sang hymns of praise to the government, and were released. Garasi was in an excellent temper for a few days, for the Interior Minister had praised him.
252. Milhelm
The criminal fraternity formed a state of their own in the camp, with rulers, servants, an upper class and a lower class, winners and losers. There were about three hundred of them, including over sixty young offenders.
They ran a market that functioned by the same laws of supply and demand as markets in the outside world. Anything could be ordered, from food and clothing to medicaments, hashish, and liquor. Services of all kinds were on offer too, from working in the basalt quarry in another prisoner’s place to administering physical punishment, strictly observing those humiliations, injuries, and broken bones that had been ordered. Everything had its exact price.
The criminal state worked efficiently and without any bureaucracy. Orders were taken and carried out with few words; accounts were paid without a murmur. Bargains were sealed with your word of honour, and breaking your word was harshly punished. The overlord of this state was a long-stay resident in the hospital, which was known to the prisoners as the Mafia Lodgings. His name was Milhelm Badri, and he was very tall. He seldom spoke; words emerged from his mouth with difficulty, every one of them a forceps delivery. His eyes were always clouded, looking past his interlocutors into space. They reminded Farid of the eyes of dead fish.
Milhelm’s world was not our five continents but this specially subdivided camp, and he had been in it for a very long time. Other groups of prisoners formed the neighbouring states of his domain. He called communists Russians, the Muslim Brothers Saudis, the radicals Cubans, the Satlanists Egyptians, but the criminals were “my men ”.
He paid wages and gave presents to his supporters on religious festivals. Sometimes it was only a packet of bad cigarettes, but for his subjects they meant a great deal, particularly as other prisoners got nothing at all.
Garasi harassed all the other prisoners without distinction, but he spared the criminals. As he saw it, they were already well-disciplined members of his flock, and he had regarded Milhelm as a trusty sheepdog for twenty years. The fact that he in turn often obeyed Milhelm’s orders was in the nature of the relationship between a dog and his master.
253. Darwish
Farid was on the way to the kitchen when two notorious thugs jostled him. They were crooks ready to beat up anyone for a cigarette. Farid ran to safety in the kitchen as fast as he could, but he knew they were waiting outside. It seemed like someone’s order.
And he had been looking forward to today. He liked being on kitchen duty, where the agreeable Samih was responsible for everything. Samih sensed Farid’s nervousness when it was time for him to carry the food out. At first Farid hesitated, then he told him about the two thugs outside the door.
“We’ll see about that,” said Samih calmly, and shouted through the door between the kitchen and the bakery for someone called Darwish. In came a hulk of a man with a bare, hairy torso. His chest was sprinkled with tattoos and scars, and several chunks of silver hung from a heavy chain around his neck, clashing noisily as they moved. A powerful colossus. Samih explained about the two characters lying in wait.
“So who’s this laddie?” asked Darwish, without deigning even to look at Farid. His voice conveyed morose displeasure, as if he had been interrupted in important work for no good reason.
“A decent man,” said Samih briefly.
“Then let’s take a look,” grunted the hulk, and watched Farid picking up two of the thirty-two buckets of soup that he would have to carry to the huts. He hadn’t gone three paces before the two thugs emerged from the shadows. He knew they couldn’t have been standing so close to the kitchen for a second unnoticed by the guards. You were severely punished for being outside the huts without permission. The two thugs grinned at him, and Farid saw the glint of something that might be a knife or a screwdriver in one man’s hand.
“Stop!” That was Darwish, or more accurately it was a thunderbolt that could speak Arabic. Farid stopped dead. So did the two thugs.
“Keep on walking, what’s this to do with you? The soup will be getting cold,” Darwish told Farid, passing him and seizing the two thugs, who suddenly looked pitifully weedy. When Farid put the buckets down beside the guard in Hut 1 and turned back, the thugs were lying on the ground.
He picked up the next two buckets in the kitchen, and as he set off again he saw Darwish knocking the two men’s heads together. There was a frightful sound as they crashed together. Farid handed over the buckets and went back. Now they were on their knees, begging for mercy.
“Take a good look at my friend here,” said Darwish. “And whenever you set eyes on him, think of yours truly. Do we understand each other?”
When Farid was on his way with the buckets for the third time, the hulking figure stopped him and put out his hand. It was holding a cobbler’s knife. “Here,” he said, “one of those guys was very keen to give you this. It could be useful, but hide it well.” Then he set off back to the bakery. Farid delivered all the other buckets of soup. Then he had to wheel a handcart of bread from the bakery to the huts. Meanwhile, Darwish was silently drinking his tea. When Farid was through with the buckets, he sat down on a stool in the bakery. His shift left him on duty until midnight.
“Nothing. I guess someone was paying them,” Farid replied. However, he couldn’t think who might be behind it.
Darwish, so Farid learned that night, was a pimp and a multiple murderer thirty-three times over. He had killed an entire criminal clan in a single day, overpowering his enemies at a wedding. The prisoners called him “Darwish with the brand”. He had a triangular mark on his forehead, with two lines roughly suggesting an X in the middle of it. As a twelve-year-old in Jordan, he had been arrested for burglary and thrown out of the country, and the police had branded him on the forehead with a red-hot iron so that he couldn’t hide anywhere.
“Those Jordanians were prophets. They knew back then what a crook you’d turn out to be,” said Farid, joking with the kindly giant.
“They’re assholes. They knew damn all! But what else can a man be with this mark on his face? An imam, a teacher, principal of a girls’ school, eh? No, he can only be a pimp, and then no one will look at him because all that interests them is his girls’ bums and breasts. That’s what those assholes made me with that stamp of theirs, my boy!”
254. Solitary Confinement
The chink of keys woke him early in the morning. He sat up, but a kick in the chest sent him flying back again.
Two guards were standing over him. He recognized the one who had kicked him, a thin little man whose skin was sprinkled with warts and wrinkles, and who was notorious for his brutality, which he used to compensate for his small stature. He was nicknamed “Crocodile”, and he liked the name. The second man was tall and even-tempered.
“Get up, son of a whore, you’re to be interrogated,” shouted Crocodile. The tall guard was going to handcuff him, but the ugly gnome waved the cuffs aside. “Where’s he going to run? Into the barbed wire?” He laughed. Farid staggered out of the hut. The sun outside was dazzling. He saw the prisoners staring at him, and hated this humiliation. When the occupants of Hut 3 gave him a cheerful greeting he realized that they were trying to encourage him, and waved back.
“Traitor to the Fatherland!” shouted Crocodile behind him, hitting Farid’s neck with the flat of his hand so hard that he tumbled forward. He scrambled up again as fast as he could and did what he had repeatedly trained to do with the Radicals: he kicked the gnome in the balls. It all happened very fast, and before the tall guard walking ahead realized what was up Farid had punched Crocodile in the face as well. The small man doubled up with pain, holding his hands in front of his genitals.
“I’m no traitor, you son of a pimp,” cried Farid, before everything went dark before his eyes.
As he slowly regained consciousness he heard whispering in the darkness. He was lying on the floor trussed up like a chicken. His punishment, fifty lashes and two months’ solitary confinement, was for resisting guards.
The heroic conduct that Farid had intended to show was gone at the first lash. In the brief moment before the second came, all he could do was writhe in fear. The second lash confirmed his fears: it hurt even more than the first. Farid wanted to stay strong, but the pain consumed all his strength, and he heard himself screaming. A time came when he felt nothing any more. When he came back to his senses he was lying in complete darkness, and his body, woken by the pain, was returning to life.
He realized that he was in one of the solitary confinement cells. The floor was concrete, the walls massive stone. He didn’t know whether it was day or night, for the cell was pitch dark. No light came through the spyhole in the door, and when he heard cicadas in the distance he assumed that it was night and went to sleep.
For the first time in his life he felt that light was magic. A ray of sun forced itself through an opening in his pitch dark cell and danced over the wall. Slowly, the light moved through the cell, filling it with a muted radiance that filled Farid’s heart with longing. He felt unutterably lonely, and began to weep.
“You only get to eat every other day in here, and it’s always at noon,” said the guard who pushed a large, battered tin bowl in the cell. A lump of mashed potato filled half the bowl, and there was a flatbread on top of it. The potato tasted of rancid fat, but the bread was good.
For the first few days in solitary confinement, Farid felt it was almost pleasantly restful. The cell was small, but clean and dry. The hut had to be shared with a hundred and twenty other prisoners, and it always smelled of dirt and decay and was horribly noisy.
But after a few days Farid noticed lethargy affecting his thoughts. He began asking himself questions to occupy his mind. First he enumerated everything that he missed. In the process, he realized that in the camp he had lost those small moments of pleasure in daily life that had once seemed so natural: light, movement, warmth, open doors, going for a walk, shaving, drinking a glass of tea, singing when he felt like it.
The darkness was oppressive today; the air seemed to be boiling. Not a breath of wind came through the crack under the iron door of his cell. It must be cloudy outside, or else a sandstorm had covered the sun, and no ray of light penetrated the cellars. Farid’s thoughts lapsed into apathy once more. He tried singing again, and three times the songs died away after a few pitiful verses. He switched from the melancholy ballads of Um Kulthum to the cheerful dance rhythms of his favourite singer Feiruz, but his singing was still no good.
Was it night outside? He listened, but he couldn’t hear any cicadas. When the guard brought his food he added two large, crisp rolls to the bowl of beans. “From Darwish,” he vouchsafed dryly.
So it was only midday. Farid had been thinking it was night. A few hours later he felt fresh air coming in under the door. Gradually the cell grew cooler, and he could sleep.
Darkness swallowed up his thoughts, erased them. He couldn’t think any idea out to its logical conclusion. At some point he always lost the thread. He wondered what he could do about it, and thought the best thing would be to wake his brain up by walking while he thought. He went up and down in his cell, brushing the palm of his hand over the stone masonry, doing ten or twenty push-ups, and repeating this exercise several times a day.
It was only gradually that he understood the full cruelty of solitary confinement. Time was the worst of it. Time didn’t seem to pass at all. If you didn’t defeat it first it would break you, that was to say if you stopped thinking, if you stopped expressing what you had thought.
“They shut us up crowded close together,” he said to himself in an undertone, taking care to pronounce the words clearly, “until we don’t just feel like sheep in a shed, we really are sheep. Ali Abusaid told me that one of Garasi’s officers hit him and kept saying, ‘Go on, admit it, you’re a sheep!’ And he went on hitting Ali with a stick until he bleated, and then the officer laughed and left him in peace.”
Farid took a deep breath. “Left him in peace,” he repeated out loud, because for a moment he didn’t know how to go on, but then his thoughts continued to flow. “On that point,” he said, laughing at the idea, “Garasi and the Communist Party leadership are very like each other. The Party leaders too treat their members like castrated sheep. They have to obey and be shorn, milked, and slaughtered, but they must never want anything for themselves. That’s not what matters to Garasi. He doesn’t care a bit what his tortured sheep and wethers want, just so long as they behave like part of his flock.”
He concentrated on following this train of thought to its end, and before he spoke the next words out loud he suddenly saw the patch of sunlight fall on the wall. With it, a cool breeze blew into his cell. Farid sat on the floor, delighted by his victory over the darkness.
255. Time Drags By
“Rana,” said his lips, although he wasn’t thinking of Rana. The heart is related to the tongue, he’d read that years ago somewhere, they have the same muscular structure. “Rana,” he whispered again. It was like a prayer. He was close to her now. When he arrived in Tad, one of the old prisone
rs had told him that if he wanted to survive he must leave all the people he had loved outside and forget them instantly, for they would only be a burden to him here. But whenever Farid realized that he was in danger of becoming an animal, and his thoughts were beginning to revolve around nothing but naked survival, he clung to Rana, and in his imagination he built a future full of warmth, love, books, and music with her.
“Rana,” he whispered again, “if you only knew what they do to us here.” He was fighting back his tears when he heard a soft, barely audible knock on the door.
“Some bread for you.”
It was unmistakably Samih’s voice. He pushed a flat package under the door into the cell, and left his fingers there for a moment. Farid stroked their tips.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
The bag of bread contained a scrap of paper too. Farid held it in the ray of sunlight. There wasn’t much written on it, just, “We’re thinking of you. Be brave. We love you.” And there were several signatures underneath. He folded the paper into a tiny square and hid it in the lining of his trousers. The bread tasted wonderful. Darwish had painted it with olive oil and thyme before he baked it.
Farid felt better once he had eaten it. His thoughts went back to his comparison of the leadership of the Communist Party with Captain Garasi. “Yes, and when it comes to sexuality,” he went on out loud, “Garasi’s purely animal nature makes him better than the communist leaders. They’ve domesticated the brute beast in themselves.”
As he spoke the word “sexuality”, which in Arabic is gins, Farid realized that he could make it into two anagrams: sign, meaning “prison”, and ngis, meaning “impure”. He tried forming variants of both those words, but it didn’t help for long.
He felt more desperate every day, for it wasn’t just his attempt to conquer isolation by speaking his thoughts out loud that failed. Whatever he tried to think about was defeated by the darkness. He tried mind games, he tried imaginary love-talk with Rana, arguments with Laila, complex experiments in the natural sciences – all of it just flared briefly like a firework, and then the darkness swallowed it up.