The Prince of Bagram Prison

by Alex Carr

  “SISTER! WAKE UP!”

  Manar rolled over on her side and drew her knees into her chest, trying to ignore the urgent pounding on her door and the housekeeper's frantic voice.

  “Please, sister! Please, you must get up!”

  “Go away!” Manar rasped, reluctantly opening her eyes. The shutters on her bedroom window were closed, but bright daylight was visible through the slats. Afternoon or perhaps even morning, Manar thought regretfully. She could not say how long she had been asleep, only that the prospect of waking was unbearable.

  For a moment all was quiet, then Asiya's voice came again, a whisper this time: “If you do not let me in, I will call for your mother.”

  Manar pushed the sheets aside and swung her feet to the floor. “Leave me in peace or I will find a reason to have you dismissed!” she called angrily, making her way across the room and flinging open the door. “Have you forgotten your place in this house?”

  Asiya stared defiantly at Manar, then grabbed her arm and forced her toward the window. “Quickly!” she barked.

  Manar tried to free herself, but the housekeeper's grip was painfully, stubbornly strong. They reached the window and Asiya undid the latch with her free hand.

  “There!” she exclaimed triumphantly, pushing open the shutters, motioning to the front gate. “He has come. The boy has come!”

  Manar looked down at the garden wall and the street beyond. On the sidewalk just outside the gate stood two figures, a woman in a blue head scarf and a young man—a boy, really—with Maghreb coloring and a slight build.

  “Do you not see?” Asiya asked, incredulous.

  Manar did see. The boy turned and it was the same gesture she had seen through the doorway at Ain Chock. His shoulders swinging as she had seen Yusuf's do so many times, the movement perfectly duplicated.

  “Do you not see that he is your son?”

  “It's Comfort, sir.” Kurtz's voice was preemptively defensive. Careful to take his own fault out of whatever equation was at hand.

  “What is it?” Morrow set aside the glossy brochure the man at the funeral home had given him to study, with its silk-lined twenty-year caskets and its gold-filigreed urns. Susan had always been clear about the way she wanted her burial handled. During the early stages of her illness, she'd made Morrow promise that it would be done as simply and as inexpensively as possible. He had agreed with her then, but now the thought of her naked body in a cardboard box made him physically ill.

  “He wants to talk to you. He claims he knows where Bagheri is.”

  “You have him there now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good,” Morrow said. “Put him on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a jarred handover of the phone, then the sound of uneven breathing on the other end of the line.

  “It's a little late for a pardon, isn't it?” Morrow said wearily.

  “I don't want a pardon. I want you to leave the boy out of this, and the woman as well.”

  “Oh, redemption,” Morrow corrected himself. “Too late for that as well.”

  “They don't know anything.”

  “You've said that before.”

  “Yes,” Harry agreed, “and I was right. Bagheri was never in Madrid, or anywhere else for that matter. The boy made the whole thing up. That idiot they sent to replace me threatened to cut him off if he didn't produce something spectacular. So he did.”

  Morrow didn't say anything. Harry was right, no doubt, and Morrow believed him. These things happened, but the lie had outrun itself now. “What about the woman?” he asked. This was the real worry.

  “She won't be any trouble,” Harry said.

  “I met her,” Morrow reminded him.

  “She doesn't know anything,” Harry insisted. “I've made sure of that.”

  “No? But you do, don't you? That's the problem.”

  They were both silent, each contemplating the truth of this last statement.

  Morrow glanced at the brochure on his desk. What did it really matter, he wondered—two more living, two more dead—when at the end it all came to this?

  “Susan's dead,” he said wearily. It was a relief to speak the words to someone who would understand what they meant. Like an act of confession, Morrow thought, each man able to offer the other absolution.

  Harry cleared his throat, as if he were about to speak, but didn't.

  “She was ruined at the end, you know,” Morrow said. “The cancer ruined her.”

  “WAIT! PLEASE, WAIT!”

  Jamal stopped and looked back at the house.

  A woman, a dark figure in a cotton abaya, stood in one of the upper windows. She waved her arms and pointed to the front gate. “She is coming!” she called. “Please, do not go.”

  Jamal glanced at Kat.

  She nodded encouragingly.

  “She is coming!” the woman called from the window once again.

  The villa's front door opened and a woman appeared. She was small and thin, dressed in a simple brown burnoose. Her feet and head were bare; her hair long and loose around her shoulders, matted on one side, as if from sleep. Moving quickly, she came down the steps and crossed the small courtyard, then stopped just inside the gate, fumbling with the lock.

  “It's okay,” Kat said, putting her hands on Jamal's shoulders, urging him gently forward.

  But Jamal did not move. He had rehearsed this moment so many times, in so many ways, but now that it was upon him he did not know what to do.

  My mother, he told himself, knowing it to be true without question. Yet she was not as he had imagined. She was tiny and small-boned, delicate as a bird, her hair shot through with gray, her bare feet long and slim, as were his own.

  The gate opened then and she was through it and upon him, pushing his head down, probing his hair with her fingers, searching for something. He could feel her lips on his ear, her breath as she spoke:

  God is great.

  I testify that there is no god except God.

  I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

  Come to prayer.

  Come to salvation.

  And the second prayer, this one in his left ear:

  There is no strength nor power but in God.

  When she had finished, she released him and took a step back. “Your name, my son,” she said. “What is your name?”

  Silence.

  Then, at last, the American spoke for him. “His name is Jamal.”

  HARRY CLOSED HIS EYES AND TRIED, as he had so many times before, to conjure that first afternoon at the Hotel Duc. It wasn't the act of sex that he wanted to remember, for even he could not have sentimentalized that first awkward coupling. What Harry was hoping to re-create were the moments in the bar before intimacy altered everything, and which he now understood to have been the most, and perhaps the only, authentic moments he and Susan had shared.

  There was Susan, her eyes raw from crying, her cotton sundress just skimming her tennis-club thighs, the eyelets hinting at what was beneath. Brown skin and white slip. And everything else—the fine blond trail that led downward from her navel, the two small hollows at the base of her spine—as yet unimaginable.

  Sometimes, he thought, intimacy is the worst of saboteurs. Though other times, as with Char, the opposite is true; one comes to love a person not in spite of her faults but because of them. And this not out of pity but out of awe—a kind of reverence for the human condition, a reverence for one's own condition.

  “Yes, sir,” Harry heard Kurtz say, in response to whatever Morrow had told him. His tone was one of disappointment, that of a bully whose plans have been thwarted by someone more powerful than he. “No, sir. It won't be a problem.” Then the call was over.

  They would live, Harry understood. Jamal and the woman would live, though he would not.

  Funny, he thought, that after all these years of anticipating the end he could have been so wrong. His awareness at the moment was not logical but personal. Instead of b
ecoming a part of something larger than himself, it was as if he was returning to a place he knew well. He could feel Char's warm thigh against his cheek, the thick mat of her pubic hair on his forehead. Her skin smelled of its usual anointment of oils: sandalwood, clove, cinnamon, jasmine. Like a body perfumed for death.

  There was a single soft click as the Beretta engaged, but the sound was distant, almost incidental. The sound of a twig breaking underfoot. An inevitable consequence of our presence in this world.

  IT WAS MORNING, but just barely, the moon still bright overhead, its hammered face a near-perfect circle, like a nickel coin, thumb-worn on one edge. In the distance, Taza and its ramparts hung against the high plateau of the Rif foothills, a watchman's tin lamp flickering in the darkness.

  City of the conquerors and the conquered, Kat thought, recalling the history of the Taza Gap. This barren and forbidding place through which countless armies had passed on their way to the towns and cities of the lowlands. First the Romans and then the Arabs. Later, the great Moroccan dynasties: the Almohads and the Merenids and the Alawites. Later still, the French.

  They had been on the road for more than six hours, moving slowly eastward across the dark countryside, toward Oujda and the Moroccan frontier, toward the vast and, Kat knew, unpoliceable desert borders of the African north. Algeria. Libya. Egypt. Nations in name only. Divisions on a map where none could truly be made. Ahead of them, the ragged earth curved upward to embrace the first, paltry smudge of dawn. Black land against blue-black, star-stippled sky.

  Soon the bus would stop for the day's first prayers. The other passengers would file out into the cold and darkness. And Kat, having chosen to come this far, would be obliged to join them.

  In the window beside her, Kat's reflection blinked silently back. Two eyes and nothing more. The space once defined by her head and face now black and formless behind her niqab. It was, Kat thought, as if she had ceased to exist. And, in a way, she had.

  She had not gone to the mosque the night before, as she and Harry had agreed they would, but had made her way from Anfa to the medina instead, to the dress shop on the Rue Centrale, where she had stopped that morning to watch the young girl and her mother.

  She had thought it unlikely that Harry would return, had taken the nature of their last encounter as tacit acknowledgment of this fact. But her choice had been made without Harry in mind. She would not be going home, at least not now, not yet. Not until she had completed the journey she had begun three years earlier.

  Kat's decision to cover herself had been a practical one. As terrifying as the prospect of wearing the full veil was, she knew the niqab would allow her to travel unmolested. When she finally did put it on, she had felt not defeat but relief. There was, she realized, an unexpected power in anonymity, a freedom that came with the camouflage of the veil, as if she were neither in the world nor of it but something else entirely. A ghost among the living. A silent witness.

  Kat checked herself in the window, pulling her black gloves tight across her forearms, bringing the heavy fabric of her abaya down over her forehead and shoulders. Up ahead, where the bus's headlights swept forward, illuminating the shoulder of the road, Kat could see two figures, two women dressed as she was, moving gracefully through the salat.

  Not an obliteration of self, she thought, watching them kneel and bend forward, touching their heads to the earth, but self in its purest and most potent form, unencumbered by the hallmarks of identity. One as an expression of all.

  The bus slowed, then pulled to a stop just in front of the women's car. The driver popped the door and the other passengers stood, shuffling forward with their kilims. Yes, Kat thought, she had made her choice, just as Harry had made his, and Colin his.

  She was still not certain what had happened between him and Kurtz that last night in the Special Forces camp, what, exactly, Colin had agreed to. She had reconciled herself with the fact that the details of the Iranian's death would always be a mystery to her. But this she did know: that whatever lies Colin had told he had told out of loyalty to Stuart, that his allegiance had been not to cause or country but to his friend. Any other explanation, Kat knew, would have required him to be someone he was not.

  “Sister?”

  Kat lifted her head to see a young Moroccan woman standing over her. She was tall and unexpectedly beautiful, wearing snug designer jeans and an elegant jacket. Her face was bare, her hair loose beneath her casually pinned head scarf.

  She motioned toward the front of the bus, which was empty by now. “You will not join us?” she asked, looking slightly puzzled.

  Kat nodded her thanks and stood, shuffling forward down the narrow aisle. Outside, the passengers had gathered together on a dusty patch of earth. Several of the men were busy filling buckets of water from a large plastic barrel in the bus's hold. The two women were still praying, dipping like dancers through each rakat, their black robes flapping like nationless flags in the wind.

  Kat reached the doorway and stopped on the threshold, contemplating the long step down, the distance to be traveled into the cold and the wind and the darkness. An obligation, she told herself, thinking about her brother and that long, weightless, graceless fall. Fard, the Arabic word for those things to which we are duty-bound. And for a brief moment she understood: that love itself is an obligation, one to which we must submit, and that in order to do so we must abandon the larger part of our self. Then she stepped, and felt the gravity of descent, the earth pulling her down.

  “Sister!” one of the women called, motioning for Kat to join them. “Here, sister!”

  She moved to them and then among them, pulling off her socks and gloves, unsheathing her hands and feet, baring herself as if for a lover. Their breath hung thick in the bitter morning air, an intimacy of odors: saffron and coriander, damp wool, and sweet perfume. And the smells of the female body: blood and sex, sour milk.

  Kat bent over the bucket with the others and plunged her hands to the wrists in the icy water, readying her body for the act of worship, preparing herself, as we all must, to receive whatever grace might be given.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My sincerest thanks to all the usual suspects: Simon Lipskar, Dan Conaway, and the whole crew at Writer's House; Mark Tavani, Jane von Mehren, and all the immensely talented people at Random House who have had a hand in this book; Bill Massey and everyone at Orion. Thanks also to my family and friends, especially my husband, Keith, who has always encouraged me to trust myself, and my dear friend and fellow exile, Julie Tisone, without whom I might not have survived to write this book.

  THE YEARS OF LEAD

  Characters rarely spring fully grown from my imagination. In general, the people who inhabit my books have inhabited my real life in some form or other. Often they are products of my research, individuals whose identities I have borrowed and shaped to fit my needs. Sometimes they pass opportunely into my world, the template for a hero or a villain when I need one. Occasionally they are modeled on people I met years ago and have been unable to forget, passing acquaintances whose stories were so gripping that they refuse to be silenced. This was the case with the character of Manar Yassine, in The Prince of Bagram Prison.

  In the late 1980s, while bumming my way across Europe, I had the extreme good fortune to share a house in the French Pyrenees with a group of young Moroccan men. As an undocumented worker, my employment options were limited, and one of the first jobs I had was working the grape harvest, or vendange, in a remote village near the Spanish border. It didn't pay much, but food, lodging, and a generous ration of cheap wine were provided. I was barely nineteen at the time, and living with the Moroccans was my first intimate brush with a non-Western culture. In many ways, the experience was surprisingly unremarkable. Most of the men had come to France on student visas and were studying at the regional university. The atmosphere in the house was not unlike that of a college dorm. During the day we worked; in the evenings they cooked and we ate and drank together. For the most part, the m
en treated me like a younger sister. They were open and friendly yet respectful, certainly more respectful than the European men I had encountered up to that point. But there was one man in particular, Bernoussi, who seemed, if not disapproving, at least wary of me, and to whom the others showed a solemn deference. Eventually, I would come to learn that he had been a political prisoner in his native country. A victim of the brutal regime of Morocco's King Hassan II, Bernoussi had been arrested at a student protest and detained for several years. Upon his release, he fled Morocco for France.

  Sadly, Bernoussi's experience was not an unusual one. The reign of Hassan II, which lasted from 1961 until his death in 1999, is commonly referred to by many Moroccans as the Years of Lead, for the violent state repression of various dissident groups that characterized it. Though Hassan was a staunch ally of the West, like many of his counterparts in the region he maintained power through intimidation, using a vicious network of security and interior ministers and secret police to silence his critics. So fierce were his tactics that, in a chilling demonstration of his ruthlessness, he regularly ordered his own sons beaten in front of his court. Prominent dissenters and political activists, including many pro-democracy activists, were routinely “disappeared.” Hundreds of antigovernment protesters were killed and thousands imprisoned and tortured for their participation in demonstrations or labor strikes. Independence movements in the Rif Mountains and the Western Sahara were brutally crushed. Secret detention facilities, like the notorious Tazmamart, in which prisoners were held for years in coffinlike underground cells, were constructed clandestinely in the desert, out of view of international human-rights groups. Like Bernoussi—and the character Manar Yassine—many of those detained or killed during this time were students.

  To call Bernoussi's presence in my life fleeting would be to vastly overstate our relationship. I can say with confidence that he probably has no recollection of me. Yet the impression he made was great enough that, two decades on, I felt the need to tell a version of his story through Manar. Curiously, what has stayed with me all these years, what I have gone back to again and again, is not Bernoussi himself but myself as seen through his eyes.