by Rafik Schami
He missed human company, and longed for it. By now he would rather have even the unbearable smell of the camp inmates than this room, which felt like a casket. For the first time in his life he recognized how precious human voices were.
“Rana,” he whispered, stretching his arms out in the darkness like a drowning man. He concentrated his mind on his lover, remembering her special fragrance, her soft skin. Soon he felt her closeness and warmth flowing through his body. He thought of her beautiful face and her neck, the neck he had always loved to kiss lingeringly when he lay close to her back. She was so sensitive just there … Farid smiled, and fell asleep.
256. Alphabet of Humanity
When he came out of solitary confinement after two months, he had aged by years. He washed several times, the other prisoners found him clean clothing, and everyday life in the camp went on again.
A week later a chance incident split the camp, bringing out the prisoners’ differences. A minor quarrel between Muslim Brothers and the communists developed into a bitter fight, with injured men on both sides. Garasi was delighted.
Ali Abusaid’s spontaneous idea of founding a reconciliation group developed into the proposal of electing a secret “committee” of the prisoners to settle quarrels, or if possible prevent them in the first place, but most of all to foster the cohesion of all the political prisoners. However, the election of the ten-man committee was a setback for the communists; only one of their number was chosen. Farid represented the independent Left.
The committee worked hard on projects for restoring to the prisoners what Garasi and the camp administration had taken from them: their human dignity. After some weeks, the committee put forward a plan, although its success was limited. Any contacts with the outside world, any attempts to get hold information and materials, were possible only through the soldiers who were forced to do their military service in the camp. A number of them did make tentative approaches to the prisoners at first, but then they took fright, or were transferred, for Garasi had his eyes and ears everywhere. A dense network of informers among the prisoners meant that any planned operation was like walking through a minefield. And hostility between the different political parties got in the way of any sensible resistance project even more than the informers. Farid lay awake for nights on end. He debated with the others, sought solutions, tried to bribe soldiers to procure medicaments and reading matter in Damascus. But most of the soldiers were afraid.
Reconciliation itself was difficult. The prisoners lay side by side in the huts, crammed together like sheep in a shed. Insect pests and lack of sleep turned them into bad-tempered beasts of prey who would attack each other for the least little thing, inflicting mental and physical pain, as if Garasi’s tortures weren’t enough. In despair, the committee recognized the limits of its moral authority. Yet it had achieved something: all the prisoners respected the tireless commitment of its members, who remained largely anonymous. That respect was the first common ground between all the camp inmates. It was a tiny seed, but it fell on fertile ground.
257. Autumn
The first harbingers of autumn came from the north; the sun no longer blazed so pitilessly down.
Garasi and his guards showed some restraint for several days. The food suddenly improved. The prisoners had real pieces of meat in their soup for the first time, and grapes for dessert. There was a rumour among the inmates that the grapes were poisoned, but no one could resist them all the same.
“There’s going to be an important visitor soon,” said the prisoners who had been in Tad for over ten years.
One afternoon they learned from the soldiers that the new head of the secret service, Colonel Badran, was coming. A troop of prisoners, under the supervision of armed soldiers, was sent out to the camp forecourt where the buses had brought them on their arrival. They were to whitewash everything. Flower pots were put outside the entrance, and a second troop of prisoners had to spruce up the inner courtyard. The guards who had so much enjoyed bringing their whips down on the prisoners’ backs suddenly acted quite peaceably.
“Hey, my skin’s just itching for the touch of your whip,” one of the criminals called out to a guard. “Are you all sick, or have you turned hippy? Make love, not war,” he chanted, hands to his balls. The guard was seething with rage, but he turned his back on the prisoners.
The huts and the earth closets were cleaned up too. A special squad of prisoners was told off to clean the administration building, and the soldiers had to attend to their own barracks. Tons of garbage were thrown on three trucks standing ready and dumped somewhere in the desert. A day later the camp looked neat as a new pin: that made it a truly repellent sight.
The visitor was late. Garasi told the prisoners to shave, wash, and behave well, because the new head of the secret service was an educated man who liked order and discipline. Badran was President Amran’s youngest brother, he added, and had played a considerable part in the latest coup.
Next morning the prisoners were summoned from their huts and lined up in the yard. A table laid with a white cloth, with a jug of water and a bunch of flowers on it, stood under the palm trees. There were two chairs behind the table.
Rumour went that Badran had been in the office for two hours already, examining the files, and that he was not pleased with Garasi’s chaotic approach. The camp commandant was said to be very upset, because he had thought his work was exemplary. And as if to confirm all this, the prisoners suddenly heard Garasi’s voice through the open window. “Why would we want to keep records of the interrogations? Isn’t it my job to help these poor devils return to the bosom of the Fatherland?”
Whereupon Badran was heard laughing heartily, and asking whether Garasi was a survivor of Noah’s Ark.
When they finally appeared in the yard, the commandant looked old and depressed beside the athletic young officer, whose bearing showed that he was full of energy. He wore a casual summer uniform emphasizing his muscular build but no cap, unlike Garasi.
The colonel sat down on one of the chairs. Garasi remained on his feet, inspecting the prisoners. The front row was only about five metres from the table. Soldiers with machine guns and expressionless faces were stationed to right and left of the table, with orders to shoot anyone who came closer to it than two metres; Garasi didn’t want to run any risks. Plenty of members of the Muslim Brotherhood were capable of an attempted suicide assassination.
Garasi addressed the prisoners stiffly, his voice hoarse with agitation. Perhaps it was his nervousness, or perhaps his brain was eaten away by drugs, but anyway he delivered a speech that unintentionally tipped over into comedy. The prisoners forgot the reward they had been promised and began first to chuckle, then to laugh louder and louder, until at last their mirth was unbridled. Garasi, utterly confused, was put off his stride so badly that all he could do was abuse the prisoners, flinging the worst insults he knew at them. They went on roaring with laughter, and Garasi was at a loss. He gasped for air, while the prisoners’ laughter rolled across the yard like a stormy sea.
Colonel Badran rose to his feet and left the camp without a word.
258. Development Aid
Towards the end of September, three officers of the State Security Service of the Democratic Republic of Germany arrived: blond men who always wore sunglasses. Intrigued, the prisoners wondered why the Germans had been brought to the camp. As observers? As experts on torture? The three of them were generally known only as “the East Germans”.
It was common knowledge that consultants from several Eastern European countries had been training the Syrian secret service in Damascus over the last year. The word was that, since 1960 at the latest, former Nazis had also been active in Egypt as armaments experts. A Palestinian who had already been in a Jordanian prison told Farid that the secret service there had tortured him under the direct instructions of Englishmen, and the British were angry because the Jordanians couldn’t keep their violence within bounds. You had to preserve your distance and keep cool
during interrogations and torture, they said.
One of the East Germans was astonished to find such modern instruments of torture in the middle of the desert. Tad even had its own generator. Garasi grinned. “We’re independent here. Even if the lights go out all over the country we can make our own electricity,” he explained. He had no idea that these foreign guests were soon to be his instructors. Their broken Arabic led him to underestimate them.
“I suppose we can’t afford better Germans,” he said to his adjutant regretfully, but there was a note of deep scorn in his voice.
On the fourth day, and to the surprise of their host, the foreigners brought six large German shepherd dogs with them as a gift for the guards. With the help of these well-trained animals, the camp could be cut off entirely from the outside world. They even built a dog run for them.
Soon the Germans, like all the officers in the camp, had been given nicknames by the detainees: they were Sausage, Potato, and Shanklish. Sausage was a tall, thin officer; Potato was short and fat; and Shanklish stank to high heaven. His name came from the only Syrian cheese that smells unpleasant. Shanklish was also the dog trainer. Out in the yard, he fed the animals with top-quality meat before the eyes of the hungry prisoners, and gave them clean water to drink. From then on the dogs prowled around loose all night, and now no one dared ignore the ban on leaving the huts.
The soldiers were reluctant to mix with the East Germans. They didn’t like the three blond men, considering them both mean and over-zealous, two mortal sins in the eyes of any Syrian.
Even at seven in the morning the three men were in Garasi’s office, shaved and in freshly ironed uniforms. At first Garasi himself didn’t stumble out of his service apartment until around nine, but when Colonel Badran, to whom the Germans had apparently reported this, phoned and spoke to him angrily, the captain told off two soldiers to be his alarm call. After that he was always in his office at six in the morning, and when the foreigners turned up he would pay them out by looking pointedly at his watch.
Garasi hated them, for suddenly he wasn’t sole lord and master of the camp any more. The prisoners became aware of that too. Garasi had to interrogate a prisoner in the presence of the Germans. The three of them might not be able to speak very good Arabic – they were always mixing up words of the masculine and feminine genders – but they understood everything. In silence, they noted down all that was said. Then, when Garasi had sent the prisoner away again, they taught him how to conduct a more productive interrogation. But the captain was as stubborn as a donkey, and didn’t learn fast.
The three Germans were polite and correct, and within a very short time they had more or less deprived Garasi of power. Their wishes were always backed up by phone calls from secret service headquarters. For the first time, the captain felt he had been hung out to dry. He was on the point of exploding daily, but at the last moment he controlled himself for fear of his superior Colonel Badran. He could rely only on his soldiers and officers, who confirmed him in his dislike of the Germans. To ensure the support of those who ranked below him, he slackened the leash slightly.
The prisoners and their committee took note of all this, and with the help of some of the more willing soldiers who were open to bribery they began bringing in news from outside, as well as more medicinal drugs, paper, ink, and pens. Towards the end of October the first camera was smuggled into the camp.
At the end of November Lebanese newspapers reported that East Germans in the service of Syria were torturing prisoners, but the general public couldn’t believe it. Surely men from the Eastern bloc wouldn’t do such things. In the camp, however, the situation of the socialists and communists became worse than ever. Jakob Daro, leader of the communist group, could find no answer to the growing contempt of the other parties.
“Those are your comrades!” the prisoners told him, and some even spat at him. Daro was an experienced polemicist, but words were no help to him now.
259. Helplessness
After only a week, the methods of the East Germans were showing results. In spite of all the efforts of their resistance committee, prisoners were changing their minds by the dozen and signing recantations. Some gave up because of injured pride, after suffering torture at the hands of foreigners. But Farid would never have expected such a tough character as Faleh to weaken. He was one of the boldest of the Muslim Brotherhood.
First Faleh was interrogated at length by Garasi, who asked questions that he had answered several times before. So he repeated those answers, and the Germans wrote down what he said.
Then the captain rose and left the room. The Germans stayed behind. Suddenly Faleh’s wife and three small children were led in. They were crying, and begged him to give in because they missed him and needed him. Faleh couldn’t withstand this pressure, and he signed his recantation. The administration gave him clean clothes and a little money, and took him and his family to Damascus in a Landrover.
The prisoners in Tad had not been prepared for this kind of thing. The innovation of the German experts was to use a man’s own family to prolong his torture. For many of the prisoners, the tears of their children, wives, or mothers struck more sharply than any whip.
Garasi’s fury at the East Germans and their methods knew no bounds. He swore, and drank more heavily than ever.
“Assholes! I treat the prisoners like my own children, but they all have to play the hero. And then along come these European weaklings, these half-men, no moustaches, not even any hair on their chests, and they manage to soften up the traitors,” a soldier heard him wailing.
It wasn’t until early November that the prisoners found out how to stand firm. One of the Muslim Brothers shouted at his wife and children that they should be ashamed of themselves, and they’d better clear out. He threatened his wife that if she wrote him another letter or came to visit him, she could consider herself divorced.
A week later it was known all over the country that East Germans were abusing the men’s love for their families.
Garasi heaved a sign of relief.
260. Silence
15 November 1968 was a warm day, almost like summer. Farid woke early. He had just been dreaming of Rana and the way she kissed his nipples. It had tickled, and he woke up.
He never celebrated his own birthday, but she always wanted to spend hers with him, and now it was November the 15th. He took a little candle out of its hiding place and lit it.
“Happy birthday, dear heart,” he whispered, smiling. He knew that wherever Rana was, she would be thinking of him today.
There wasn’t a soul in the courtyard. The German shepherd dogs were doing their rounds, and always glanced briefly at Farid as they passed his hut. “Rana,” he whispered.
At that moment he felt sure that he would live with his lover some day, and for a little while he was at peace with the world.
That same day, the committee had intended to discuss what the prisoners could do about the threat of those three blond men. They assumed that Garasi would have no objection to a rising against the Germans, but how could it be staged without offering provocation to the captain himself?
Farid was going to suggest a hunger strike, with the departure of the Germans as their sole demand for ending it. That way Garasi would realize that despite his own torture methods, the prisoners would accept him but never the foreigners.
Shortly before the planned discussion, however, two guards came to Hut 5 and took Farid away to be interrogated. They were civil enough, and Farid cursed his bad luck. He passed Hut 4, and exchanged glances with another committee member, who looked back at him with concern.
“Routine questioning,” whispered Farid.
“Shut your mouth,” shouted one of the guards. Farid walked on.
“Ah, good to see you. This is our strategist, the man who thinks himself Che Guevara leading an armed struggle,” Garasi greeted him. Farid glanced at the corner of the room, where the three blond men were sitting.
“What are these pimp
s doing here?” he asked the captain, who raised his eyebrows over the rim of his sunglasses.
“There now, our young friend shows no respect! These are experts helping me out.”
“And I’m not saying a word as long as those bastards sit there. Captain, we are citizens of a free country, and no foreigner may interrogate me in my own land.”
“Calm down, young man. I’m asking the questions around here, and you will answer them if you don’t want me to lose my temper. So let’s begin. We can always torture you, but we don’t want to do that.” Garasi spoke as calmly as if he were under the influence of drugs. Although Farid kept his eyes fixed on the captain, he noticed Sausage, the tall German, nodding with satisfaction. And as if that had been Garasi’s reward, the commandant now stepped up his friendliness. “Farid Mushtak, you’re trained in chemistry, your country needs you more urgently than ever. Let’s forget our differences. You are a decent man, you’ve fought for the people and made mistakes. Come, give me your hand and leave this place to continue the struggle and build the country up again.”
Farid did not reply. So this is how they’re doing it now, he thought.
Garasi went on speaking forcefully. “Farid, you are a member of the prisoners’ secret committee. Tell me the names of the others, and no lies, please. Tell me and you’re free.”
“Oh, come on, captain! You won’t get any names from me. You have enough informers. As you know, I don’t belong to any political party. I’m always ready to make a public statement of remorse and loyalty.”