I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  “Your side kick is your longest weapon,” I said, leaning all my body weight on my right leg and flicking my left leg high into the air like I was going to kick someone in the chin. “But you must be fast. If you think about it, you’ve already lost too much time.”

  We paired off and performed imaginary duels, stopping our punches just inches away from each other as I critiqued everyone’s form. We put moves together into katas, sidestepping and thrusting our arms left and right into a sequence of ferocity, turning, shouting, and stomping like warriors. The guards were amused by us, at first gathering on the sidelines to snicker and point, but eventually the novelty wore off and they let us be.

  I’d never taken a class in karate or kung fu or tae kwon do, but I was a star pupil in the Bruce Lee Film School. I had one of those memories that wrapped itself around words and fused itself to song lyrics and movie dialogue. I remembered what Bruce Lee said, and all his fight scenes were cataloged in my head, so I just brought them to life, with a confident voice. My pupils began calling me Arshad, which means “wise one.” Generally it’s a word meant for seniors, but I have to admit it was a little flattering even at the ripe old age of thirty-four.

  “Empty your mind,” I instructed one afternoon, crouching and holding one fist close to my chest and the other straight out like an arrow. “Be formless, shapeless, like water.” I switched my fist positions, throwing a lightning punch and expelling all my air in a loud “Hunh! ”

  Normally, this would be the moment when my students would copy my movement. But they stood still, fixed on something behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw the prison commander accompanied by a mullah wearing robes and a turban. The clergyman was there to inspect conditions, Sarhang said. He wanted to address the whole prison population, and Sarhang asked me to translate for our visitor.

  When we were all gathered in the courtyard, the mullah smiled at me and in Farsi said he had an offer for the men. If they would disown their Iraqi government and join the Iranians, they would be treated nicely and fast-tracked to the top of the list of prisoners to be exchanged with Iranian POWs.

  “When the time comes,” he added.

  It was the worst non-offer I’d ever heard, and I thanked Bruce Lee for all the lessons in mental strength that kept me from bursting into laughter. Just the previous week some new prisoners had joined us and told us that our government was aware of where we were imprisoned, had mentioned Arak by name on the news, and promised to support us 100 percent. They were already working to get us out.

  The mullah was waiting.

  “Tell them,” he said. “Tell them to be smart about this.”

  I faced the crowd and repeated the mullah’s offer in Arabic, which landed like a slap. The men clicked their teeth and curled their lips in disgust. They’d been through brainwashing countless times before at other prisons, and were outraged at the audacity of this stranger to think he could rip our nationality from us in a matter of seconds, just by being friendly.

  I asked the crowd, “Can I answer this clergyman on your behalf?”

  “Yes! ” they roared.

  The mullah’s eyes became worried, as he flicked them between the prisoners and me, likely sensing the deal was souring on him.

  “I’m going to tell you a fable,” I said to him. “A poor man wearing flip-flops approaches a prostitute and tells her he would like to take her out on the town. He has no money, no car, and no place of his own where he can take her, but he tells her he’s a really nice guy. She says, ‘Why would I go with you when you have nothing for me? Even customers who pay haven’t been good to me overall, and now you want me to join you simply because you are being nice and courteous?’  ”

  The mullah’s lips flattened into a thin line.

  “Is this what you are saying, or what the captives are saying?” he asked.

  “They gave me permission to speak on their behalf.”

  The last of his politeness flew out of his finger as he shook it at me.

  “Tell them exactly what you just said to me,” he fumed. “Maybe they don’t agree with you.”

  When I repeated my homemade parable, the prisoners stood up and cheered. I glanced at the guards and saw them holding back smiles. Even Sarhang stood off to the side, suddenly very interested in his shoes, letting the mullah fend for himself. Our “guest” sputtered through the rest of his prepared religious speech while the prisoners talked among themselves, then he stomped off to wherever he had come from.

  That night, long after everyone had fallen asleep, Sarhang summoned me to his office. He was sitting with his elbows on his desk, holding his fingertips together in a triangle in front of his nose with a look like he had just swallowed milk that had gone sour. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, took a seat, and waited for the bad news. His triangled fingers closed into a two-palmed prayer.

  “Son, I thank you for what you said to the mullah today. I don’t like them coming here and meddling with my prisoners, and what you said will discourage them from coming back.”

  My shoulders lowered an inch. This wasn’t so bad. But couldn’t he have waited to tell me this in the morning? Then he cleared his throat, and I could tell he wasn’t finished. The worst was yet to come, and I gripped the armrests. Reflexively, my shoulders clenched again.

  “The mullah gave me orders to punish you. He is going to write a report to the government about his visit, including that you were tortured for what you said to him.”

  I wasn’t sure if Sarhang was conspiring with me or warning me. I bored my eyes into his mouth, waiting for his lips to move again.

  “Stay firm.”

  “Thank you” was all I said.

  New guards I hadn’t seen before, four agents from Iranian military intelligence in dark green uniforms, were waiting for me outside Sarhang’s office, and guided me toward a bank of empty solitary-confinement rooms down the hall. I felt no fear but a surge of courage as I walked, proud to be taking a beating for my men. Their support was the solid ground under my feet as I walked, and I would gladly suffer pain to spare them the same. The agents steered me into one of the rooms and locked the door. I noticed they were all wearing name badges and told myself I would memorize each name before this was over. One was chubby and short, one had a long neck with a protruding Adam’s apple, and the one in glasses kept staring at the floor. The fourth had a small frying pan in his hand. All had beards.

  “Go face the corner,” the short one said.

  I imagined they were going to hit me with the pan, and I tensed my muscles to prepare. I heard them rustling and banging the pan on something, and then silence. Five minutes passed, and still they weren’t doing anything. It was like they had sent the amateurs, and maybe they’d lost their nerve. It was almost comical. Then I smelled cooking oil. The short one grabbed my shoulder and flipped me around. Behind him, the frying pan sat atop a portable kerosene burner, smoking with hot oil.

  “You son of a bitch,” he hissed. He reached up with his cigar fingers and slapped me, or at least he tried to. He wasn’t that strong, and I was able to silently make fun of him by standing so still that I didn’t even blink each time he slapped me. The other three men got a big kick out of this, laughing at his flailing attempts to hurt me. Adam’s Apple stopped chortling and picked the pan of hot oil off the flame. He pushed the fat guy aside and stood facing me.

  “How do you like this, donkey?”

  He looked directly into my eyes as he tilted the pan and the sizzling oil fell in a molten stream through my socks and singed the tops of my feet. I could feel my skin peel back and blisters rising, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of grimacing. I held his gaze, bent it, and aimed it right back at him.

  The torturers then looked at one another, as if to ask themselves what they were supposed to do next. They set the pan back down and filed out. As soon as they were gone, I allowed myself to look down. My feet were swelling up like potatoes, and the socks had melted into my skin where the oil had
landed. It still felt like I was standing in a pot of boiling water. I didn’t dare move, in case they were coming back. About ten minutes later, I heard footsteps and stopped myself from trembling. I stood at attention and braced myself for more.

  One of my tormentors entered—the quiet one in glasses. He came so close I could smell his stale breath, then he reached into his pocket and held out . . . a cigarette.

  “Here,” he said. “Don’t hate us; we’re just doing our job. We had orders to torture you.”

  He lit the cigarette for me, while Tubby came in with a chair and offered it to me.

  “Sit, rest,” Eyeglasses said. “When you see the other prisoners, exaggerate how much you were tortured, OK? Same with the warden; if he asks, tell him it was a lot worse.”

  I nodded and eased myself down slowly onto the chair.

  Tubby sighed heavily.

  “We love Iran, but we don’t like our government,” he explained.

  If only he knew how much I understood.

  “Forgive us?” Eyeglasses said.

  I drew the cigarette smoke into my lungs and held my breath as long as I could before I let it out in a blue-gray stream toward the ceiling, contemplating my answer. I was starting to believe that nobody, no matter which side of the border he lived on, had free will anymore.

  “If I were in your position, I would have done the same,” I said.

  And I meant it.

  The Arak guards became even more sympathetic toward us after I was tortured. If the men asked for extra soap or sugar packets, they got them. If the guards saw a prisoner who seemed gloomy, they’d take a walk with him in the yard to try to cheer him up. After taking me to a doctor, they made sure I had enough burn cream and bandages for my feet. The guards liked the necklaces and bracelets the inmates carved, and began trading things for them, such as pens and nail clippers and multivitamins. It seemed important for the guards to show they respected us. But their generosity came with an implied price: that they could loaf around and listen to music and smoke cigarettes. But it was a little unsettling, because nothing is ever truly free, especially in a prison. I needed to keep my eyes open.

  One day a guard put a small aluminum packet in my hand, and inside I found a small plug of green-brown opium, a sticky roll about the size of my pinkie that looked a lot like tamarind paste. I had never tried the drug before, and I quickly squirreled the gift in my slippers, and shared the news with a handful of my closest friends. We met by the palm tree in the courtyard and cut the roll into tiny pieces, held a match under the aluminum foil, and smoked the opium through the tube of an empty Bic pen. I leaned back into the sturdy trunk, and within a few minutes my body felt buoyed, like I was on an inflatable raft in the sun, and I could hear Alyaa laughing at something I’d said. I floated on the tide of her tinkling voice and thanked her for loving me. She rested her head on my shoulder and placed Amjad on my lap, his pudgy hands pressing into my chest as he tried to crawl up to me. He had a full head of hair now, and a fierce gaze, like mine. She whispered something in my ear, but I didn’t catch it. Didn’t matter, just feeling her skin again I knew that everything was going to be all right. The opium smoke curled around my cells and for the first time since I’d been captured, I thought of Alyaa and Amjad without becoming sad. They were waiting for me, and all I had to do was stay calm like this, and one day we’d be together again. I felt so certain of this now, now that the opium had given me permission to believe it. I was giddy with the sudden realization that I had free will to assume the worst, or the best, outcome for my life. I rested my head against the tree for the next six hours and meditated on faith.

  I was thankful for the opium because it gave me a way to check out, but it was a rare experience because the guards never brought enough drugs into the compound for addictions to form. But the drug hazes caught the attention of some of the older, more educated prisoners, who were becoming increasingly concerned about the sharing between captors and captives. They warned such openness could only lead to trouble. I told them not to worry, that it was innocent enough.

  But I should have listened, because not long after, things went from chummy to alarming.

  Some of the Iranian guards began providing the prisoners with tools to dig holes. They brought steel spoons, shaving razors, and scraps of metal, and the prisoners hid them around the yard. Soon after, rumors swirled around that some of the high-ranking POWs in the neighboring prison were planning to escape through the sewer pipes and some of the guards were going to help them. I wanted no part of it. There must have been a reason that the Iranian boy snatched me out of death’s clutches, and it wasn’t so I could get gunned down in a sewer tunnel underneath a prison. Eventually, when I returned to my homeland, I thought, it would be as a hero, not as a war casualty.

  I was trying to fall asleep, wondering what I should do about all this, when whistles and sirens blared from all directions. Floodlights clicked on and special forces soldiers, dressed all in black like commandos, tore through the prison, unlocking all the doors and ordering everybody into the courtyard, where they had us lie facedown with our hands on our heads. They demanded to know which one of us was the interpreter, and then I felt a boot press down on the back of my head.

  “If you don’t tell the truth, you will be the first one executed! Give me the names of the guards who were collaborating with you!”

  I could hear similar shouting from outside the compound walls and knew that identical interrogations were happening at all three prisons. I rolled to my side so I could free my mouth to speak, then told the boot that I didn’t know. He pressed harder on my head, and I prayed that he wouldn’t snap my neck.

  “Boland sho!” he said, kicking me in the side.

  They ordered us to stand and strip so they could search our bodies and clothes for weapons. Meanwhile, they took everything out of our cells and dumped it on the ground, separating all the contraband into a small hill of razor blades, rope, metal shanks, and pieces of heavy wire with filed points. The search took about four hours, during which time we had to stand there without water or a bathroom break, until finally they put us back in our cells sometime after midnight. We huddled close together without our blankets, and one of the older prisoners in his sixties approached me. His face was red and his eyes were watery, like he had been holding his breath too long.

  “Arshad, they took our bucket.”

  I looked in the corner, where the bucket we used as a toilet during the night was gone. The man tugged on my arm.

  “Please, I need to go outside to the washroom.”

  I banged on our door, and a guard came. One of the new ones clad in black.

  “Sir, we have an elderly man here who really has to use the bathroom.”

  “He can piss himself,” the guard said, slamming and locking the door.

  I banged again, harder this time. The guard returned, whipped open the door, and put his nose an inch from mine, so close that I could feel his breath on my face. Spit flew as he cursed me. “Listen, you fucking Arab, nobody’s leaving until we find out who the traitors are. Bother me once more, and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  When the old man saw the door close a second time, he clutched his stomach and groaned. He bent forward, and his legs jiggled uncontrollably. The indignity of it seized my hand and I slammed my fist over and over into the door and the windows. Now a few of the men in the cell were shouting with me.

  “Animals, have you no decency? Let this man out!”

  This time three commandos came to our cell, each one carrying an inch-thick cable sheathed in rubber, like a section of telephone wire.

  “Who has to go to the bathroom?” one demanded.

  Nobody answered, but nobody needed to. They stomped in lockstep toward the man with white hair cowering in a puddle of his own urine, grabbed the back of his shirt, and dragged him into the courtyard. It took only one blow to the head to knock him down. He writhed in the dirt as they pummeled him and we screamed in horror, begging the
m to stop. That man could have been my father; he was gentle and had barely the strength to hold his arms in front of his face to try to block the blows. When he gave up and let his arms fall to his sides, I felt a rage like nothing I’d ever experienced, not even during my own beatings. This man was nothing to these guards but a prop to remind us that we were powerless.

  “Hey! Beat me, beat me instead!” I shouted. “For the love of God, beat me in his place!”

  My heart rate rocketed as I realized I was running out of time to solve this. I screamed louder, reminding the guards that they had grandfathers, that this man deserved mercy. Blood spattered their uniforms and they kept going, stopping only when they were sure he wasn’t twitching anymore. Then they left him there for the buzzards to eat his eyes.

  They left his corpse there for two days as a reminder that Arak was under new management. We were on lockdown, but we could see his crumpled body from our cell, and whispered prayers to him, asking forgiveness and blessing his soul. I was in a stupor, for once at a loss for words, unable to stop blaming myself for his death. I didn’t want the men to call me Arshad anymore—I wasn’t wise; I was a failure. If I had been a more capable translator, I could have said the right thing to get those guards to back down. I could have saved his life, if only I’d known how to negotiate. Now I was too afraid to open my mouth, for fear I would cause more trouble. I sat with my back against the wall and refused to eat, punishing myself.