I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  Meanwhile, the search for the escape plotters continued. The investigators weren’t getting the information they wanted, so they called us all back to the courtyard. One commando pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and read off three names, including mine.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  As we followed him toward the warden’s office, the rest of the prisoners went berserk, yelling and screaming and shaking the doors to their cells. I found myself in the same room where I’d been tortured. This time I faced the wall before they had to tell me to. For the next half hour, several interrogators whaled on me with the same whips made from high-voltage cables that they had used to beat the old man to death. This time I wasn’t stoic; I covered my head and screamed as my shirt ripped open and my back swelled into a topography of red and purple welts. In the brief moments when the tormentors stopped to catch their breath, I could hear men being beaten in the adjoining rooms. The prisoners outside were still roaring in outrage, pounding on walls.

  “Confess,” the commandos demanded. “Tell us which prisoners and guards were working together.”

  I was on all fours now, heaving and gasping for air. The men stopped hitting me and waited for my answer.

  “I don’t know anything,” I said.

  If only I knew something, anything, to make them stop. I could have told them which guards brought in opium, or more sugar cubes, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were the same ones who were involved in the escape plan. If there even was one. People flapped their mouths all the time in prison. I could see how a wish to escape through the sewers could become a boast, then a faint idea, then an unfettered rumor that solidified into almighty truth. I could have given a name, any name, just to stop the pain. But the prisoners trusted me as their leader, and I had promised never to let them down. Only I had failed, and an old man was beaten to death. Now I accepted each whip to my body as payment for each strike to his.

  Four times they asked me. Four times I answered the same. Disgusted, they dispatched me and I hobbled back to the courtyard and collapsed. The men rushed forward and carried me back to our room.

  “There are more of us than them, Arshad,” whispered the prisoner who was pouring cold water on my wounds. I looked up at the gun towers.

  “We are unarmed,” I said. “Think of the frail and elderly among us. For their sake, we will not riot.”

  THIRTEEN

  CAPTIVITY

  Days after I was captured, the war ended. I heard the news over public loudspeakers while I was riding in the back of an Iraqi army truck, squeezed in with a dozen other prisoners of war. We had to sit there quietly, our hands tied together with our shoelaces, as the two armed soldiers guarding us waved to cheering Iraqi crowds, as if their country had won the war or something and we were the spoils. But that was bullshit, and the whole world knew it. After eight years of fighting, neither side had gained a thing: no borders had changed, Saddam had not stepped down, and nobody grabbed anyone’s oil fields.

  I was more lost now than when I ran away to the join the Basij almost seven years before. I’d tried my best to avenge Mina, but I had failed. The war was over but not for me. Iran and Iraq had signed the ceasefire, but they were going to keep fighting with politics, using POWs as human bargaining chips.

  I bounced in the bed of the truck, choking on dirt and exhaust, exchanging glances with my fellow prisoners, trying to get a sense of what this meant for us. If the war was over, they couldn’t keep us in Iraq, could they? What would be the point?

  The soldiers kicked us out of the truck and I landed ass-first in a desert, where the view was beige in every direction, a blank sand canvas for the wind to sculpt into shapes. I had envisioned a hulking fortress of a prison, with a spiked iron fence all around it, floodlights and gun turrets, tanks parked all around. But instead the soldiers herded us into what I swear must have been an abandoned cattle pasture, an area about the size of ten soccer fields surrounded by a crude barbed-wire fence. In the distance, I saw a collection of one-story cinder-block buildings with broken windows that seemed to be listing in the sand. To the left of them, about fifty shipping containers, some red, some blue, scattered around like a child’s toys left on the floor. I stepped over bricks and broken glass and garbage and came up with a new theory—maybe this place used to be a dump. I figured they had selected us for slave labor, and we were going to have to unload whatever was in those shipping containers. I felt faint just at the thought of it, standing under a punishing sun with only bread and water for the last three days.

  A tree of a man emerged from the one building, growing taller with each step as he approached. He moved as if he had an invisible entourage, almost high-stepping with thighs that were bigger than both of mine put together. His perfect nose came to an arrowhead point over a thick mustache that hid his upper lip. If God made man in his image, he must have used this guy for the mold. The man drilled his eyes into us from beneath his red beret, glaring down from more than six and a half feet. He said nothing as he paced before us. What frightened me even more than his size was his personality. This man was so . . . still.

  One of the prisoners couldn’t stand the silence any longer. In a trembling voice, he shouted, “Where are we? What are you going to do to us?”

  Red Beret’s eyes snapped. An interpreter translated into Arabic, and in one fluid movement, the silent man removed his gun from his holster, pressed it to the questioner’s temple, and squeezed the trigger. The prisoner fell like a sack of rocks. Nobody moved while his blood spread toward our feet.

  “I am your commander, Mira Sahib,” the tall man said, letting us know that he expected us to use the respectful term “Master” when addressing him. His voice was toneless, preprogrammed. “If you obey me and don’t give me any problems, you will all go back to your homeland—alive.”

  Then he gave his first command.

  “State your names. And your skills.”

  When it was my turn to answer, I left out some stuff. “I am a medic. I can also make tea,” I said.

  I thought I saw one edge of that mustache lift, as if he was smirking under there, like my answer amused him. Good. He didn’t need to know about my talent aiming a rifle from very, very far away.

  Once we were all recorded and categorized by abilities, the guards passed out black-and-white-striped pants and shirts. Sewn into the back of the shirt was a brown cloth patch with the letters PW drawn in black ink. An officer dug into a box of plastic slippers and handed us two apiece. I noticed my left slipper was a size forty-four and my right a forty-three. The boots they confiscated from my feet were size forty-one. Next they separated us into groups of about thirty and led us toward the cargo containers. The guards opened the creaking double doors on one end of the long steel box, and it was empty inside, except for two buckets. There were two jagged holes about the size of shoeboxes that had been cut with a blowtorch at the roofline on either end of the forty-foot container. They had welded rebar over the holes. With a sudden horror, I realized those cutouts were for ventilation. I hadn’t seen our barracks because they were hiding in plain sight. They were going to lock us in these airless cages.

  I could already feel waves of heat floating out of the container. We were going to be cooked alive in there, and I opened my mouth to say this and then remembered what had happened to the other guy who spoke his mind. I shuffled in with everyone else like dejected sheep. One of the guards picked up one of the buckets and pointed to a red line that was painted on the inside, a few inches from the rim.

  “Do not let your piss rise above this line,” he said. Then he stepped outside and slammed the doors with a dull clank, plunging us into darkness. I found a small bit of space on the floor and sat, resting my head against a hot wall, not caring if it left a burn. To survive I would have to become a stone at the bottom of a river, without sensation and of no worth to any living thing. I passed the hours by concentrating on the temperature of the metal wall behind my head, feeling the heat sl
owly leave it as day turned into night. I tried to stay awake, but at some point exhaustion won the battle.

  The wake-up whistle came at six in the morning, but it was unnecessary. The sun was already out and the heated stench of infection and blood and our two “toilets” had assaulted all of us out of sleep. There was also a smell of death. Agha-ye Ahmadi, a former doctor who had been captured with me in Sumar, knelt over the bodies of two of the most severely wounded in our container and felt their necks for a pulse. He dropped his head and sighed.

  When the guards opened our container and we showed them the two bodies, they dragged the dead men out by their feet. Agha-ye Ahmadi and I followed at a safe distance to see what would happen. The guards pulled the corpses outside the fence and walked a ways into the desert, then just dropped them out in the open, for the wild dogs to find.

  Agha-ye Ahmadi spat on the ground. “Barbarians,” he hissed.

  Behind us, a group of prisoners had gathered in one corner of the yard. In the light of day, I could see a sea of yellow jumpsuits—prisoners from the other buildings. We walked closer and saw guards dragging an industrial-sized stew pot toward the crowd, sloshing and spilling a brown liquid inside. The emaciated prisoners stood quivering, staring at the pot. On a whistle, they all ran for it, like horses out of a starting gate. They elbowed to get to the food, pushing and kicking and shouting. The ones who made it to the pot thrust their hands into the slop and scooped as much as they could in their mouths before being knocked out of the way by other prisoners. As hungry as I was, all I could do was watch men morph into animals, while the guards cackled and looked at their watches. When a minute passed, a guard blew a second whistle and held up one finger. The prisoners pressed on, some pairs even peeling out of the melee to throw punches at each other. A third whistle, and the guard raised two fingers. Now the jostling was more desperate, and then men tore clothing and bit each other to clear a path to the food. After whistle four, the guards yanked the pot away and ran it back to the officers’ building, where the kitchen was. The prisoners dispersed, not even wiping themselves off, and went back to normal, talking to one another like nothing had just happened. I glanced over at the doctor, who looked aghast.

  “Agha-ye Ahmadi, they make us fight to eat?”

  “We’re going to have to design a system,” he said under his breath.

  That first day, trucks arrived with construction materials and tools. Mira Sahib gathered us together and gave us an insincere apology for the uncomfortable sleeping quarters but promised our accommodations would be changing. As soon as we built our own cells. We should be grateful for the opportunity to expand Ramadi prison camp, Mira Sahib said, because productivity would give us purpose and keep away boredom. But first we had to build living quarters for our captors. And, of course, their rooms were large and comfortable, with tiled floors and flushing toilets, lighting, and lots of windows. We worked from first light until we couldn’t see anymore. I was assigned to do electrical. And I’d be lying if I said I did not forget to ground a wire here and there so that someone might get a shock when he flipped a switch.

  Meanwhile Agha-ye Ahmadi came up with a way we could all eat during our three-minute meals. We were fed a rancid mystery stew made from the leftovers of whatever the officers ate, twice daily, at six in the morning and six in the evening. Dr. Ahmadi divided us by height. The shortest among us crouched shoulder to shoulder around the slop pot. The tallest men stood in a circle around them and reached over their heads into the stew. These two rings of men were the food servers. They grabbed fistfuls of food with bare hands or sopped it up with chunks of bread, and handed it back to the rest of us. They fed others this way for the first two minutes. For the final minute, the servers fed themselves, cramming food into their front pockets and their mouths. When the pot was taken away, they walked the camp looking for the frail and ill who couldn’t rise for the meal and fed them what was in their pockets. The food was a step above compost, a revolting mess of rotting vegetables, moldy rice, and gristle that looked like it was mixed with snot and vomit, but I forced it down to stay alive. I once found bits of a shoe in it and simply picked them out and kept eating.

  One afternoon I was making cinder blocks, pressing them into shape by hand, when a prisoner next to me clucked his tongue to get my attention. I looked up and Mira Sahib was coming directly for me—smiling. Never a good sign. When he was grinning, that meant he had come up with another game. When he was in a mood, he devised amusements such as making us stand in two parallel rows and slap each other until he grew tired of it. He leered at me when I stood to face him.

  “So. Today’s your twentieth birthday.”

  The Iraqis had stripped us of our dog tags when we arrived. He must have read the date on my ID. For a brief moment, I felt flattered. It’s amazing how birthdays are special, no matter where you are. Everyone has one, and everyone can relate when it’s your day. I looked up, making sure to deferentially avoid his gaze, hoping he might give me the day off from work.

  “It is, Mira Sahib.”

  He snapped his fingers, and four burly guards appeared like out of a genie’s lamp. They encircled me, and I nearly wet myself when I saw they were carrying green bamboo switches, flexing them with both hands so that I could see they had been softened in saltwater to make them better whips. One held a three-foot section of copper telephone wire. They took off their berets and handed them to Mira Sahib, who stepped aside as the thugs lifted their weapons.

  “Why?” was the only word I had time for before their whips whistled through the air and struck me from all sides, and I toppled right there in front of the construction site, while the rest of the prisoners pretended not to see. The guards kicked me with their boots, and I curled into a ball and tightened all my muscles to try to blunt their blows, but it was no use. I heard one of my ribs crack. As I rolled on the ground, shielding my head with my arms, I vowed revenge. I didn’t expect to make it out of Ramadi alive, but in the days I had left, I had only one goal: to get back at Mira Sahib. It didn’t matter if I died trying because I had no reason to live anymore—the love of my life had been killed. I had no one waiting for me if I survived prison, so in a sense I was already dead, which meant I’d risk nothing if I were to attack Mira Sahib. So before I was smote from this earth, I vowed to complete one last errand: kill that man.

  My cries pierced the sky as they dragged me across the courtyard to the flagpole, where they looped a length of copper telephone cable through an eyehook sticking out of it. Someone wrapped the ends of the wire many times around my thumbs, until just the tips of my thumbnails were exposed. Then they hoisted. Daggers of pain shot through my thumbs all the way down to my shoulders as the devils lifted me until I was a foot above the ground, dangling there like a fish caught on a hook. I didn’t know pain could be like that, worse than being scalded with a skewer, beaten with fists, or shot in the leg. It felt like a million knives were slicing me from top to bottom, in slow motion.

  “Let me down, I beg you!”

  I felt my joints stretching beyond where they should, and my mind unhinged. A fusillade of curses roared from my throat; everything I’d ever been angry about in my entire life poured out in a bitter vomit of hate. I swore at the sun and the earth and Allah and my parents as the men kept whipping me with the bamboo switches.

  “Fuck you!” I roared, trying to spit on their heads. “Baba! Fuck you too! Fuck me! Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”

  My torturers called me trash and a traitor, and blamed me for something that I only caught a snippet of, something about faulty wiring that had injured Mira Sahib’s nephew. My eyes rolled back in my head and their voices were lost to the ringing in my ears. I didn’t know how long it would be before my body weight would tear me from my thumbs. I just hoped it would be soon.

  “Just kill me!”

  Then I passed out. I floated in and out of consciousness for several hours, and each time I awoke I let out another torrent of curses that went ignored. The guards had mov
ed on, and the prisoners were still laboring a few hundred feet from me, slathering mortar on cinder blocks to make a wall. But one, the old prisoner we called Uncle, sixty-eight-year-old Amu Safar, moved a wheelbarrow closer to me and put his fingers to his lips. Amu was the only prisoner who had the guts to approach Mira Sahib, and had some sort of magic touch because Mira Sahib never hurt him. Old man Safar was planning something. I shushed, and waited.

  Amu Safar scurried away from the construction site and, not long after, returned with Agha-ye Ahmadi and Daryoosh to cut me down. I shook uncontrollably as they carried me to the shipping container and removed the wire from my thumbs. My tendons had been sliced, and I couldn’t move my thumbs, my right index finger, or the first two fingers on my left hand. My remaining fingers had curled into claws.

  “Drink,” said Agha-ye Ahmadi, pouring water between my lips.

  “It’s over now,” Daryoosh said, wiping my forehead with his sleeve.

  I stayed in that shipping container and out of Mira Sahib’s sight for nearly two months, as the doctor nursed me back to health by bringing me food and water and making a cast for my wrists from plaster stolen from the construction supplies. I learned that Amu Safar had saved my life by telling Mira Sahib that I was almost dead and not worth the commander’s important time to cut down, convincing him that the prisoners could do the errand for him.

  When the casts were removed, my hands refused to unclench. And there was nothing Agha-ye Ahmadi could do to stop my trembling, which had developed into a permanent tremor that made me slur and drool when I tried to talk, and stumble when I walked. I’d been kicked too hard in the head, Agha-ye said.