by Ahmet Altan
On the morning I was taken to hospital for an X-ray, the gendarme handcuffed me. Three other inmates came along.
They put all four of us on the prison’s transit vehicle. Because we had a hard time climbing into the bus with our hands cuffed together, the gendarmes held our elbows and pushed us up.
They had built iron cells in the bus. They were five feet long and five feet wide. In each cell there were two rows of iron chairs, three at the front and three at the back. The chairs didn’t move, they were secured to the floor.
The only window was at the top of the cell, a hand span across, with thick glass and iron bars. You couldn’t see outside.
They made the inmates sit in the iron chairs, side by side. Our shoulders brushed against one another.
Then they pulled the iron door shut and locked it.
If there was an accident, no one could rescue us.
A few years ago, one of these buses had turned over and caught fire and the handcuffed inmates locked inside the cells burned to death.
Perhaps because we knew about this incident we all felt, as the door was being locked from the outside, as if we were being shut into an iron coffin.
The bus moved. It was a bumpy ride. At each bump the handcuffs tightened a bit more. Our shoulders kept hitting each other.
The three men coming to the hospital with me were all former judges going to see a psychiatrist. They were around forty to forty-five years of age.
We started talking.
They had been arrested in various cities on the charge that they had participated in the military coup.
One of them spoke:
“There is nothing in my file, no evidence whatsoever. The judge who arrested me was my close colleague. We worked side by side. After he ordered my arrest, he hugged me and sobbed. ‘If I hadn’t arrested you, they would have arrested me,’ he said.”
They couldn’t fathom what had brought this disaster upon them. They themselves had arrested hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people during their careers. It had never occurred to them that a similar fate might befall them someday.
The judge who was sitting in front of me turned around.
“I didn’t know the prison was such a place.” He stopped for a moment, then added, “In fact, I never thought what kind of a place prison was.”
The one near me spoke with almost childlike naiveté:
“I wouldn’t have arrested so many men had I known prison was like this.”
They spoke with a surprising degree of candor. They had been struck by a disaster they had thought only happened to others, certainly never to themselves, and so were totally unprepared and devastated when it came.
I saw that those who had great power and impunity were less resilient when faced with the jarring blows of life. Now that they had been cast from the pinnacle on which they had once ruled over other people’s destinies, they suffered more than the rest as they hit the ground. The severity of the impact shattered their souls.
They told me that the inmates who went to see the psychiatrists most often were the former prosecutors and judges.
One of them was leaning his head against the iron door. He was almost in tears:
“I can’t take this place any longer. I miss my family.”
His pain was so grave that it drained all his energy, and he lacked the strength to hide it. Then, perhaps, he didn’t want to hide his pain. In fact, he wished only to talk of it, nothing else mattered to him. It was as if all that was left of him was the pain he felt. Like a person waving furiously to shake off something stuck to his hand, he was shaking his very being to free himself from the pain affixed to his consciousness.
I was afraid he would begin sobbing.
At that moment, the bus stopped. We had arrived at the hospital.
They opened the cell door.
We got down off the bus, taking careful steps so as not to lose our balance. By now the handcuffs had begun squeezing my wrists.
A gendarme took me by the arm.
The judges were escorted to the psychiatrist. The gendarme and I went to the X-ray department. We waited in the corridor for our turn.
A hospital worker passed by and said, “Get well soon, Ahmet Bey,” almost without moving his lips. A friendly voice. I smiled only slightly so the others wouldn’t notice.
When it was our turn, we went into the X-ray room.
The gendarme held my wrists ready to remove the handcuffs. Then we heard a voice:
“There is no need for the handcuffs to be removed.”
I turned to look. It was a petite young woman wearing a headscarf, loose clothes and no makeup. She was the X-ray technician.
She knew the handcuffs were hurting my wrists and making it difficult for me to move, yet with a voice like ice she stopped their removal.
There was no anger, no irritation, no sign of enmity on her face.
Neither was there compassion, grace or mercy.
Her face was dispassionate, as empty as a frame.
She had eyes, eyebrows, a mouth, a nose and a chin, but no expression.
I had never seen such an impassive face before, it had no trace of emotion.
Here was pure evil neither nurtured by nor derived from or mingled with any kind of emotion. She was evil just to be evil and you couldn’t even tell whether she took pleasure in it or not.
She wanted the old man who was standing before her with his white beard to suffer even more, the handcuffs digging ever deeper into his skin.
This young woman’s faith was strong. She expressed her devotion in her manner and her attire. Presumably she never skipped a prayer and performed her devotions five times a day. She pleaded with God to “guide us to the straight path” each time she prayed.
The holy book of her faith said: amr bil ma’rouf wa nahi anil-munkar.
God commanded his servants to do what is right and prevent what is wrong. The Qur’an emphasizes that people were created to do good. The Prophet Muhammad teaches that heaven belongs to the merciful.
This young woman knew all this. She clearly wished to go to heaven, but she acted from malice and not mercy. Why? Did she think what she was doing wasn’t evil?
Yet that wasn’t possible.
This X-ray technician would have described it as “heartless and evil” if an irreligious young woman had treated an imam of my age the same way she was treating me.
So why, then, did this young woman commit evil despite the clear commands of her faith?
Clearly she did not see me as a human being; for a reason unknown to me she had cast me out of her circle of good and evil.
Concepts like sin and merit, goodness, evil and morality did not apply to me. She felt no need to treat me with kindness or consideration.
I was a nothing for her, a nonexistence, and far beyond the reach of religion or ethics.
It was as if in that young woman’s mind a curtain invisible to me had been drawn tight around religion, ethics, intelligence and emotion, outside of which was a vast emptiness reserved for handcuffed people like me.
Evil occupied that emptiness.
I had no doubt that outside the prison hospital this young woman behaved as a pious, moral and compassionate person. Those values were not all gone, but the space they occupied was greatly reduced.
With handcuffs around my wrists, I stood before the X-ray machine. She told me how I had to stand in an expressionless voice.
As she X-rayed me I thought about her.
Like anyone, I am accustomed to evil. But I have found that sometimes anger, sometimes wit and sometimes even kindness can be added to evil, or sometimes revenge or an anxiety to reap the rewards of a situation. An evil that stood alone in such emptiness struck me as a travesty lacking anything inherently human.
She X-rayed me, and then she recorded my data in
her book with the same expressionless face.
The gendarme and I left the hospital and got onto the bus.
The judges came too.
Again, they put us in the iron coffin and locked the door.
The judges’ “therapy” had been shorter than I expected.
“What happened?” I asked.
The psychiatrist they saw didn’t let them have their handcuffs removed, either. The judges, suffering from the psychological trauma of being incarcerated and handcuffed, described their affliction to the “doctor” with handcuffs around their wrists.
A psychiatrist who treats his patients without having their handcuffs removed.
This baffled me even more than the X-ray technician.
“Are all consultations with patients at the prison hospital conducted with handcuffs? Is this the rule?” I asked.
“Not at all,” the judges answered. “It depends on the doctor. Some have them removed and some, like the psychiatrist today, have them left on.”
Piety without mercy, doctoring that makes a sick patient worse: the treatment we received did not fit well with the standards of either religion or medicine.
There must have been an explanation for the similarities between the attitudes of the X-ray technician and the psychiatrist. Was it working in a prison hospital that made them so callous and caused them to forfeit all decency?
But the man who wished me well and the previous doctor who had the judges’ handcuffs removed also worked at the prison hospital.
Not everyone behaved the same – the effects of the prison hospital were different on different people.
I recalled the strikingly simple finding by Viktor Frankl, the man who endured much suffering as a prisoner in Auschwitz and who later founded the logotherapy method of psychiatry. After observing the different reactions of the prisoners and guards at the camp, he concluded that some people were noble and some were ignoble. There might be ignoble ones among the prisoners and there might be noble ones among the guards.
The doctor, who dedicated his whole life to seeking a remedy for the turmoil of a human soul, arrived at this judgment after having been subject to gruesome cruelty – a judgment which, when I first read his book, took me by surprise.
Could the attitudes we encountered have such a simple explanation?
There was doubtless an element of truth in the words of this scientist whose knowledge and experience of pain went far beyond my own.
It seems that, given the right climate, ignobility is able to grow and flourish, regardless of how it is dressed up. Such people let their ignobility emerge when they find the opportunity and power to do evil.
Of course, this kind of ignobility is not punished, but rewarded. No one would get angry because they treated us that way; perhaps they would even be given a pat on the back.
When the bus bumped and lurched around a curve my back slammed against the iron chair and the impact made me raise my hands in the hope of holding on to something. This made the handcuffs tighten even further around my wrists.
Suddenly, I realized that what I had been feeling was all wrong. I should have been angry, furious or even sad. Instead, I had forgotten about those feelings and, like a botanist coming across a new species of plant, had busied myself examining those whose behavior went against their religious beliefs and professional ethics.
I suppose this was my defense mechanism. I didn’t feel an emotional attachment to the petty acts of evil and humiliation I encountered. Instead, I classified each attitude and tried to understand the reasons behind it so that I could store it in the drawers of my memory, to take it out and write about it someday.
This method served its purpose.
Although not quite conscious of having made such a choice, I had succeeded in building an invisible wall to protect myself against all that was happening.
When they treated you like you were nothing, you could counter it by acting as if they were a topic of research.
The bus stopped and we got off.
At the prison entrance they removed our handcuffs.
My wrists had purple bruises around them.
I had set out to get better, but had come back scarred by evil.
I did not go to the hospital again.
The Bird
Each cell in the prison has a stone courtyard in front that is six steps long and four steps wide, with an iron drain in the middle for the rainwater to flow away.
The high walls of the courtyard have barbed wire on them. A steel cage covers the top.
To use the title of the novel my father wrote in prison, “a handful of sky” is what you see when you look up, but even that is divided into the small squares of the steel cage above.
When spring arrives, birds of passage fly in through the cage and make nests on the barbed wire.
The inmates pacing in their adjacent courtyards don’t see each other but they can talk by shouting. We recognize one another from our voices.
On occasion, my young cellmate Selman chats with our neighbors whom we don’t know.
What they talk about doesn’t matter.
What matters is knowing there are people present beyond your cell walls and letting them know of your existence.
For us, the world is the neighboring courtyards that our voices can reach. Shouting is our way of communicating with the world.
One spring day, Selman was talking to the voice in the courtyard next to ours.
“The birds have started migrating here,” Selman said.
“I am looking after a parakeet,” the voice answered. “He was born in the prison, then his mama died and I raised him.”
“I’ve never seen your parakeet flying about,” said Selman. “I guess I am never there at the right time.”
“He doesn’t fly,” said the voice in the next courtyard.
Then, with the compassion of a father feeling sorrow for a child, the voice added:
“He is afraid of the sky.”
The Writer’s Paradox
A moving object is neither where it is nor where it is not, concludes Zeno in his famous paradox. Ever since my youth I have believed this paradox better suited to literature or, indeed, to writers than to physics.
I write these words from a prison cell.
Add the sentence “I write these words from a prison cell” to any narrative and you will add tension and vitality, a frightening voice that reaches out from a dark and mysterious world, the brave stance of the plucky underdog and an ill-concealed call for mercy.
It is a dangerous sentence that can be used to exploit people’s feelings, and writers do not always refrain from using such sentences in a manner that serves their interests when the possibility of touching a person’s feelings is at stake. Even understanding that this is their intention may be enough for the reader to feel compassion toward the writer of that sentence.
Wait. Before you start playing the drums of mercy for me, listen to what I tell you.
Yes, I am being held in a high-security prison in the middle of a wilderness.
Yes, I am in a cell where the door is opened and closed with the rattle and clatter of iron.
Yes, they give me my meals through a hatch in the middle of that door.
Yes, even the top of the small stone-paved courtyard where I pace up and down is covered with a steel cage.
Yes, I am not allowed to see anyone other than my lawyers and my children.
Yes, I am forbidden from sending even a two-line letter to my loved ones.
Yes, whenever I must go to the hospital they pull handcuffs from a cluster of iron and put them around my wrists.
Yes, each time they take me out of my cell, orders such as “Raise your arms, take off your shoes” slap me in the face.
All of this is true, but it is not the whole truth.
On summer
mornings, when the first rays of the sun come through the naked window bars and pierce my pillow like shining spears, I hear the playful songs of the birds of passage that have nested under the courtyard eaves, and the strange crackles prisoners pacing other courtyards make as they crush empty water bottles under their feet.
I wake up with the feeling that I still reside in that pavilion with a garden where I spent my childhood or, for whatever reason (and I really don’t know the reason for this), at one of those hotels on the cheery French streets of the film Irma la Douce.
When I wake up with the autumn rain hitting the window bars, bearing the fury of northern winds, I start the day on the shores of the Danube River in a hotel with burning torches out front, which are lit every night. When I wake up with the whisper of the snow piling up inside the window bars in winter, I start the day in that dacha with a front window where Doctor Zhivago took refuge.
I have never woken up in prison – not once.
At night, my adventures are filled with even greater activity. I wander the islands of Thailand, the hotels of London, the streets of Amsterdam, the secret labyrinths of Paris, the seaside restaurants of Istanbul, the small parks hidden in between the avenues of New York, the fjords of Norway, the small towns of Alaska with their roads snowed under.
You can run into me along the rivers of the Amazon, on the shores of Mexico, on the savannahs of Africa. I talk all day with people who are seen and heard by no one, people who don’t exist and won’t exist until the day I first mention them. I listen as they converse among themselves. I live their loves, their adventures, their hopes, worries and joys. I sometimes chuckle as I pace the courtyard, because I overhear their entertaining conversations. As I don’t want to put them on paper in prison, I inscribe all of this into the crannies of my mind with the dark ink of memory.
I know that I am a schizophrenic as long as these people remain in my head. I also know that I am a writer when these people find themselves in sentences on the pages of my books. I take pleasure in swinging back and forth between schizophrenia and authorship. I soar like smoke and leave the prison with those people who exist in my mind. Others may have the power to imprison me, but no one has the power to keep me in prison.