by Rafik Schami
“A clever fellow. But you’re not tricking Garasi that way. Your Radicals couldn’t care less about remorse …”
“I was expelled from their group because I wouldn’t take up arms,” Farid interrupted.
“Hold your tongue!” shouted the captain, and Farid saw Sausage, in the distance, signing to him to play it down. Garasi immediately spoke more calmly. “We’re not interested in your signature. Tell us three names of your secret committee and you’re free. How’s that for an offer?” Farid saw Sausage and Potato turning their thumbs up approvingly. Shanklish remained deep in thought.
So that was it. He was to be destroyed piecemeal. Nausea rose in him. “Right, here’s my plain answer,” he said calmly. “I will never give you names, not if it costs me my life.”
The commandant beckoned to two guards who were sure to be standing somewhere behind Farid. He mustn’t turn around, he had quickly learned that, for he did he would be hit in the face.
The guards put leather straps around Farid’s arms and legs and tied him to a chair. Then they applied metal clamps to his fingers.
“I’m still listening. Isn’t there anything you’d like to say to me?” asked Garasi. Farid just looked at him steadily. What an asshole, he thought. If stupidity could make a man sick he’d be dead by now. The captain gave a signal for the torture by electric shock to begin. A young officer pushed a button on a console. At the first shock Farid felt as if his soul had left his body. He tried to scream and opened his mouth, but his voice failed him. He felt as if he had exploded and fallen apart, but he was still strapped tight to the chair, writhing in pain.
The electric shock had dried up Farid’s tongue, lips, and gums. They were all as dry and rough as wood. The electricity jolted through his body again.
“Farid, you can talk and then we’ll stop.”
Burning thirst tormented him. Shanklish, the German with the terrible body odor, rose to his feet and poured water from an earthenware jug into a glass with ice cubes in it. The sound of the ice cubes clinking made Farid’s eyes pop out of his head. “Talk, and you can drink all you like,” said Garasi.
Farid’s refusal made the captain even angrier. It was obvious how hard he was having to work to control himself. He signalled to the guard again.
“Open your mouth,” said the man, and when Farid did not react he took his jaw in his powerful hand. Terrible pain caught Farid’s face, as if it were wedged in a vice. He was afraid his lower jaw would break. Resistance was useless. The guard put a piece of bare wire in his mouth, and the officer at the console started the device. Farid felt the strength of the current increase, and his throat, jaws, face muscles, and eyelids all twitched in painful spasms.
“Let go of the wire,” said Garasi, “it will hold of itself now.” And indeed, Farid’s upper and lower jaws were numbed by the current, biting down on the piece of copper wire. He wanted to spit the diabolical thing out, but his jaws would not obey him.
The burning elm danced in the firelight, crackling as it sent out sparks that painted dazzling geometrical patterns in the air. Jagged green lightning kept emerging from the darkness and striking his eyes.
To end his torments, and with a huge effort of will, Farid threw himself backward with all his might. His head hit the floor, and he immediately felt relief as consciousness left him.
261. The Guardian Angel
When he came back to his senses he was still strapped to the chair in front of Garasi’s desk. The room was empty. His mouth and the back of his head hurt. He tasted blood; the bare wire had cut his gums as he fell.
There was complete silence, as if the entire camp had been abandoned. To his surprise, the clock on the wall showed that it was one in the afternoon. Had the torture lasted that long, or had he been lying unconscious all those hours?
He heard the door opening, but he did not turn. His heart was thudding. Then he felt a hand on his head.
“What have those bastards done to you?” whispered Samih, moving in front of Farid so that they could see each other. He was carrying an earthenware water jug. Farid sucked from the spout. The water sizzled in his hot, dehydrated body. He drank and drank, feeling Samih’s cool hand on his forehead, and as if the water were running over, tears came to his eyes.
“Darwish sends you greetings. And I’m to tell you, laddie, Darwish admires you!”
Farid smiled and moved his head away from the jug. Without any word of goodbye, swift and soundless as a cat, Samih disappeared again.
Farid wondered why he never thought of death under torture: not of dying and going to Paradise, like the Muslim Brothers, nor of a heroic death for the communist cause. Many prisoners sang the Internationale or recited from the Koran while they were being tortured. He felt almost ashamed of it, but under torture he always thought of Rana’s beautiful hands, and how she laid them on his forehead when he was sad. He longed for those hands now.
He heard steps in the stairwell. Garasi, followed by the Germans, entered the room. “Take him away and fetch me Muhsin Abu Khal from Hut 9,” he said, sitting down at his desk.
“And as for you,” he told Farid as the guards undid the straps, “I’m going to crush you like a cockroach, and no Guevara or Castro will be able to save you.”
262. The Rising
January 1969 was icy cold. Snow had fallen all over the country for the first time in forty years. The prisoners were freezing in their unheated, open huts.
At the end of January Hamid Tabet, a teacher with heart disease who was one of the Muslim Brotherhood, died under torture. During a raid the evening before, the guards had found the unfortunate man’s secret diary in which he had been carefully recording life in the camp in detail. Captain Garasi regarded the mere possession of paper and pencil as an unforgivable personal attack on him. A knife, and even a pistol and a kilo of hashish were discovered in the same raid, but the owners of these items got off lightly, just a few punches in the camp commandant’s office. But the diary infuriated the captain, and when the timid teacher, with unexpected courage, called Garasi an enemy of Islam and a lackey of the unbelievers, the commandant’s rage knew no bounds.
Beside himself with anger, he went over to the young officer operating the electric shock button, pushed him abruptly aside, cursed the prisoner, and turned the current up to maximum. No one stopped him. One of the Germans had leaped to his feet, and tried to revive the teacher, but Hamid Tabet was no longer reacting. The Germans went straight off to Damascus and didn’t come back until next day, after the corpse had been smuggled into the hospital there. The camp commandant received a medical certificate stating that Hamid Tabet had died in the military hospital after a long-standing history of heart disease.
Such a false certificate was nothing new either to Captain Garasi or the doctors. A routine case, but just as no one life is like any other, so no death resembles another. Hamid Tabet had not, perhaps, been a charismatic and eloquent leader, but his friends loved him for what he was.
He died at a time when the prisoners needed little more to overcome their fears at last. Hamid did more by his death than he had ever done in life. He gave the others the final incentive to free themselves from the pit. There was no going back now. And Captain Garasi, with his bulldog’s nose, soon scented it.
He panicked, for he had much at stake. His promotion to the rank of major was to be the culmination and end of his military career, and at the same time the basis for his pension. Nothing else must happen in his camp until he got that promotion. So he set his informers to work, and talked to some of the prisoners himself, deploring the unfortunate slip-up. He tried to pacify the communists and Satlanists with the argument that the dead man had been only an insignificant Muslim Brother. Garasi also put a stop to the torture, and even the food was slightly better again. But the prisoners’ committee saw their one and only chance, and undeterred they called for a hunger strike. That was on 14 February 1969.
The camp commandant didn’t understand the reports of his informer
s in Huts 1 and 3, who went to see him early in the morning and told him about the hunger strike. “Then let them starve!” But his smile died away when the guards said that not just one or two but all sixteen huts were refusing food.
Around ten o’clock, one of the officers came and put a sheet of paper in front of Garasi. The prisoners’ missive addressed neither him nor the Syrian government, but world opinion. And in succinct, but clear language, they demanded: 1. The immediate removal of the East German torture experts.
2. The cessation of all torture and degradation of prisoners held at Tad.
3. The cessation of slave labour in the basalt quarry.
4. A public inquiry into the wrongs that have already been suffered.
5. The free choice of a legal representative.
6. Better provision of food and medicaments.
7. The release of all young offenders under twenty.
8. More freedom to exercise in the yard.
9. Weekly visits from family members.
10. Medical treatment of the sick by doctors whom the prisoners trust.
Garasi grinned. “Where do they think we are, Switzerland?” But his voice sounded uncertain.
At midday all the officers met in his office. Even the three Germans looked paler than they were anyway. Such an oppressive silence had never lain over the camp before. Over one and a half thousand prisoners had united to make demands in language that sounded as determined as if they hadn’t had enough of a taste of hell yet. For the first time in their lives, the officers felt curiously afraid. One false step, and they knew there would be no stopping a catastrophe.
Garasi sought a solution similar to the one the Interior Minister had once explained to him. “Our policy is to kill the Muslim Brothers, the Satlanists, and the communists, while at the same time staying friends with Saudi Arabia, Satlan of Egypt, and the Soviet Union.”
After some thought, he announced a three-point plan. “First we keep quiet and cut off all information going out of the camp. Second, we arrest the leaders of the strike and put them in solitary confinement until they die. Third, we tempt the prisoners with better food and at the same time show them, quite calmly, that we’re not impressed by their strike, they’re only risking their own lives, and they can’t overcome the state with such silly tricks anyway.”
The officers nodded. Even the Germans suddenly seemed to respect the old commandant.
263. The End of the Tunnel
Garasi had declined to enter into any kind of negotiation with the prisoners, but when the hunger strike had gone on for two weeks he was baffled. The officers advised him to make concessions, and he gave way.
That step put the prisoners’ committee in a very dangerous situation. Up to this point, only Farid was known to the informers as a member of it. If the members of a whole delegation now revealed their identities, it could mean death for them all. So they decided to send only three men. The seven others would stay under cover so that they could continue the struggle if all three delegates were killed. Salman the Muslim Brother and the journalist Ali Abusaid volunteered to accompany Farid.
The camp commandant, gracious as a pasha, offered them tea. The prisoners politely declined. Farid could not say for certain whether hunger had sharpened his senses, but he suddenly smelled the captain’s fear. Garasi had his mind on just one thing, getting his major’s pension. And that in itself made him vulnerable.
“Listen, Captain,” Farid opened the conversation, turning on the camp commandant the eyes of a hungry panther sure of its prey. “You and the Germans between you killed Hamid Tabet, and you will have to answer for it. The Germans can disappear again without trace, but you’re in a trap.”
In the following five seconds it became clear to him that he had won the battle. He didn’t yet know whether he would survive the victory himself, but he saw that Hamid Tabet’s murderer was paralysed by fear. Garasi knew that if he didn’t nip that accusation in the bud here in the camp, by going along with the prisoners’ demands, he could expect assassination by one of the Muslim Brotherhood any time after the first day of his retirement. The captain’s face fell. Panic seized hold of him. He did not reply coherently, just stuttered, “What? Tabet? What Tabet?” only to fall prey to even worse panic next minute. He didn’t hit out, but he shouted, like a man demented, that the state would rather see dead men than renegades. Suddenly he fell silent. He was obviously trying to smile. Then he spoke quietly, adopting a paternal manner. He would go to meet them and reward them for keeping quiet. He was not a monster. They could talk to him.
Work in the quarry, interrogations, freedom to exercise, those were all matters in which he had some influence. The food would be better in future too, and a doctor whom they trusted would treat the sick prisoners every day. However, he would have to discuss all the other demands with the Ministry. The presence of the Germans was a delicate strategic matter, and only the Ministry could permit family visits. But he, Commandant Garasi, swore by his military honour to do what he could for the prisoners’ demands. But first they must restore order and end the hunger strike.
“The Germans must go at once, don’t you understand yet?” cried Salman the Muslim Brother, standing up. The others followed suit.
“It’s now or never!” said Ali Abusaid the journalist. For it was clear to them all that even the criminal fraternity among them – and so far it had been difficult to persuade those men to do anything – would react if they discovered that they had been sent to a special camp designed for studies in interrogation. So the committee let it be known that the secret service HQ was holding on to the Germans because they were carrying out long-term experiments. All the detainees at Tad would die, because the authorities were interested only in experimenting with their lives in every imaginable way. In other words: the prisoners were raw material for the testing of new torture methods, and President Amran was the first in Arabia to be introducing such methods and recording their effects.
The prisoners’ committee exaggerated, but there was no other way of convincing the criminals. Now they too joined the political prisoners in insisting that the Germans must go unconditionally, and at once. They wouldn’t go along with the other demands, but agreement on this one point was a breakthrough, and meant the end of total isolation. It was the criminals who sent the first secret message through to Damascus with news from Tad. How they did it they weren’t saying.
“We have our own pigeon post,” said one of the big gangland bosses when Farid tried questioning him.
264. Last Attempt
Garasi was no longer in control of the camp, and that evening the officers knew it. An anxious first lieutenant broke his word and phoned Colonel Badran. Low-voiced, he told him about the mood among the soldiers. The colonel listened quietly, so quietly that the young officer asked from time to time, “Are you still there?”
Unlike the European and American newspapers, it took the Arab press a long time to react to the hunger strike at Tad. The Lebanese were first to report it, then the Jordanians and Iraqis, who traditionally did not have good relations with Damascus.
On 1 March the Syrian government newspaper also published a short report of certain differences of opinion at Tad. Half-heartedly, it called for explanations and the punishment of those responsible. However, the place was still described as a prison for serious criminal offenders and terrorists.
Garasi was cracking up. He set his guards on the prisoners, and ordered raid after raid. But neither the “Tad Printing Press”, with its logo of a pencil and three pieces of barbed wire, nor the camera which had taken the pictures of all parts of the camp could be found.
Colonel Badran was extremely displeased. What annoyed him most was the steady trickle of news and photographs getting out of the country. He summoned Garasi.
On his return, the commandant told his officers that it had felt like an interrogation. The cold demeanour of young Colonel Badran, who hadn’t even returned his military salute, had been alarming. He had wordl
essly slammed a French newspaper down on his desk in front of Garasi. “How did Le Monde get to know these criminals were in your camp? I’ve checked the list. It’s correct in every particular, and it must have been smuggled out only a few days ago. Don’t you see what’s going on? The Jews will finish us off. First they occupy the Golan Heights, now they’re spreading lies about human rights in Syria. What are cameras doing in a camp? Captain Garasi, you are treating those prisoners as if they were on vacation at Tad. When are you going to wake up?”
The colonel had laid particular emphasis on the word “captain”. Badran had been an army captain himself before the coup. He was seething, for France was demanding an official explanation from the Syrian government: was it true that torture camps existed, and were Germans and Russians working there? Development aid and negotiations on arms deals had been put on ice.
Colonel Badran demanded a firmer hand with the prisoners and no leave for anyone working at the camp until the leak had been tracked down.
“You want a firmer hand with the prisoners, but suppose there are deaths?” asked Garasi.
“Then come to me. I’ll shoulder the responsibility.”
This was something new to Garasi. He had never heard anything like it in thirty years. “Can I tell you something in confidence?” he pleaded.
Badran sensed that this experienced officer was carrying another secret around with him. “Go ahead.”
“The Germans imposed on us,” said Garasi in a hoarse tone, “have offended the national sensibilities of the prisoners. It was the only thing that let the politicals build a bridge with the criminal fraternity. All of a sudden the Muslim Brothers and the pimps are united against us. There’s never been any such thing before.”
Colonel Badran was thoughtful, and remained silent. Garasi secretly smiled behind his smooth mask of concern.