by Theo Padnos
Abu Osama reflected. He gazed at me, grinned, then made a proposal: “Sleep with me. I’ll handcuff your hand to mine.”
I stared at him. “Really?”
“Like my wife,” he said. He smiled.
I protested. There was giggling.
I pointed out that they already had two guns. Handcuffing me to a sleeping body was overkill. “I’ll sleep next to you, but no handcuffs. Yes?”
There was more giggling. “You can have the sofa with the cuffs,” he said. “Or the bed. With the cuffs. Up to you.”
I chose the bed. It was decided then that Abu Osama and I would sleep on the bedroom floor, on a foam-rubber mattress. Mohammed would sleep in that room, on the bed with the bedspread and the pillows. Abu Dujanna and the Kalashnikov would sleep in the sitting room, on the sofa.
Moments after he pulled the cover over our bodies, Abu Osama began to snore. Mohammed’s snores were louder and came on just as suddenly. I lay at Abu Osama’s side. I felt the warmth of his body through his clothes. My mind reeled. I wanted to twist and gyrate and thrash on the foam-rubber mattress like a cat. But I had to be a considerate bedmate. Abu Osama had taken pity on me. I did my best.
During the first hour of their slumber, I pretended to myself that I was dead. I tried to recite the alphabet backward and to count sheep. After an hour of suppressing my urge to jangle the cuffs, it occurred to me that I could no more fall asleep than I could drift away to the last safe place in which I had slept—Ashraf’s hovel. I needed to pee. I wanted to scream.
Around two in the morning, the electricity in the neighborhood decided to turn itself on. The bedroom television flickered to life. A cartoon was playing. “I can’t sleep,” I announced. Mohammed rose from the bed, turned off an overhead light, turned down the TV sound, then twisted the TV stand so that I could watch from my mattress. “Watch this,” he said. I watched Tom and Jerry for an hour. I listened to my kidnappers snore. Once, in the small hours of the morning, I reached across my body with my free hand, found the handcuff with my fingers, held it, then wriggled the locked hand. Abu Osama had locked the cuff loosely, out of the goodness of his heart, apparently, but it wasn’t so loose that I could ease my hand out. I let the handcuff go. I watched another hour of television. When I could stand it no more, I jangled the cuffs. Abu Osama woke. “May I pee?” I said. A fit of graciousness must have overtaken him. With his free hand, he searched the pockets of a pair of pants he had discarded by the side of the mattress. He found the key, fiddled under the covers, then clicked the cuffs open. This bathroom was inside the bedroom. It had no window. I looked for an air shaft or a loose panel in the ceiling. Nothing.
When I was again lying next to Abu Osama, I held out my wrist to his. He felt for my hand, held the handcuff over my wrist, then closed the ratchet down. “Ouch,” I said. “Not too tight.”
He loosened the cuff by a single ratchet. Click went the cuff. “Better?” he whispered.
“Yes, better,” I whispered. The snoring returned. I wriggled my hand halfway through the cuff. I held it there—halfway in, halfway out. I didn’t dare move. In those moments, I remained a cooperating, amicable prisoner. This entente was going to save my life. I was much too frightened to hurt it. I wriggled my hand back to where it was meant to be. My heart thumped.
When the dawn prayer came, it was announced via cell phone alarms. The shutters on every window in that apartment had been locked down tight. Against flying shrapnel? To protect the occupants from sniper fire? To pretend that no one was home? That apartment, in any case, was like a cave at the center of the earth. There might have been a muezzin on the apartment’s front steps. We wouldn’t have heard him. We certainly would not have seen the dawning light. The cell phones, however, brought everyone to life. The kidnappers awoke shortly before four.
Again, Abu Osama brought the handcuff key under the covers. He unlocked the cuffs from both of our wrists. He made his ablutions, waited as the others made theirs, then invited me to use the bathroom. As they prayed, I waited on the mattress for Abu Osama. When he was again by my side and the lights were off, I again held out my hand to his. “Not too tight, okay?” I whispered to him as he closed the handcuff over my wrist.
“Shut up,” he said.
It took a few minutes for the kidnappers to put themselves to sleep. When their snores were again filling the room, I wriggled my hand until it was half inside the cuff and half free. If Abu Osama had woken then, I could have told him that I was trying to make myself comfortable, that I had been asleep, that I hadn’t realized where my hand had gotten to.
A moment later, I slipped my hand out of the cuff altogether. I let it rest by Abu Osama’s side. If my bedmate had woken then, it would have been harder to persuade him that I was a cooperative, good-natured kidnap victim. Still, I might somehow have managed to make him believe that I had wriggled free in my sleep. Even when I stood up and looked down on his slumbering body, I imagined that I wasn’t exactly putting myself in danger since I might have been able to insist that I only meant to pee. I had done it a dozen times already. I knew the rules. What was the big deal?
Imagining myself reciting some such lie, I stepped over Abu Osama’s sleeping body. I eyed the handgun next to Mohammed’s pillow. I paused by the bathroom. Then I floated across a tiled entry hall. I caressed the latch on the front door. I whispered to the doorknob. I floated down the stairwell.
At the bottom of these stairs, sunlight streamed from beneath a heavy steel door. I was certain it would be locked. In a panic, I thrashed at the bolt. I kicked at the base of the door. An ungodly din rose through the stairwell. I kicked again. The door popped open of its own accord, as heavy steel doors that are not locked sometimes do. I stepped into the dawn.
I was no longer my kidnappers’ friend then—no longer a cooperative, curious, wry prisoner who wanted to call up Al Jazeera because why not? I was, however, free. I began to sprint.
When I encountered a traffic divider about twenty meters from the apartment steps, the curb sent me sailing through the air. I experienced that crash in surreal slow motion, as people who fall from high places sometimes do. It was a sensation of soaring through golden sunbeams. I felt the pavement coming but also felt I could put off the impact, turn down alleys as I flew, and keep on flying, perhaps for several minutes.
The crash, as it happened, caused a pleasurable jolt to run through my body. I skidded on my palms for a moment, popped to my feet, then ran much faster than I had run before. Even if Abu Osama and his friends had been reaching their fingers around my shirt collar, which I thought faintly possible, I was certain my body had more agility to it and more power than theirs would ever have, so I ran like a real-life Jason Bourne, as if their catching me meant their killing me, as it might well have done. So I tore through the morning light. I raced down the central boulevard in Marat Misrin. I flew over the traffic dividers, dodged the parked cars, and rocketed through the center of the village’s clock-tower square. I did not stop until about four kilometers of village scenery had gone by—ample time and space, I hoped, to have lost my kidnappers for good.
CHAPTER 3 THE FALCONS OF THE LAND OF SHAM
Marat Misrin, October 2012
Later that day, the officers of the Free Syrian Army post to which I fled decided that a proper Guantánamo-like interrogation was in order. They hung me by my wrists from a sort of a scaffolding that had been erected over a cement irrigation pool. They poured water into my face as they beat my head and hands with steel cables. They wanted to know where I had been trained and which branch of the American government had done it. “How many people have you killed?” they yelled. Somehow, the sight of an American struggling to breathe under an ad hoc water torture struck these officers as comical. My interrogation, for these officers, was more of a comedy than it was an interrogation.
At first, however, they were the picture of chivalry. In the morning, when I presented myself at their door—it would have been just past six—they greeted me li
ke law-and-order men anywhere in the world greet a victim who comes to them for aid and protection. They were well aware that a tide of lawlessness was sweeping through the district. But when they heard what my kidnappers had done to me, and when I told them that the kidnappers had announced themselves to me as members of al Qaeda, they were indignant. As I talked, they shook their heads in silence. They promised that they would make things right.
I had introduced myself to them in a panic.
At first, imagining that Abu Dujanna and Abu Osama were breathing down my neck, I threw myself at the steel door of their HQ. A brigade of the Free Syrian Army had established itself in the police station in Marat Misrin. I shook the door and screamed. Abu Osama and his friends, I assumed, were hot on my heels. “Journalist!” I yelled. “American journalist!”
I’m sure I woke the neighborhood. Eventually, after a minute or so, a boy—about ten?—let me in.
I flew past him, tore down a hallway, then burst through an open door. I paused on the threshold of a spacious office, the perimeter of which had been lined with cots. A half-dozen soldiers were waking from sleep. They propped themselves on their elbows in their beds. They squinted at me.
I was incandescent with fear. I didn’t care who knew it. I assumed that the child who had opened the door had not had the wit to lock it again. If Abu Osama and Abu Dujanna were pursuing me, as I assumed they were, they would burst through the doors, level their guns, then open fire. I didn’t want to die in a hail of bullets.
So I searched the room for the safest, most bullet-resistant spot within it. In addition to the beds, the room contained a heavy desk, office chairs, a blackboard, and a conference table on which the soldiers had laid out their Kalashnikovs and their cigarettes.
Eyeing a dark corner, under a cot, I pushed my way past the conference table. I shoved a pair of boots and a stray Kalashnikov a soldier had stored under his cot out of my way. I tucked myself in under this soldier’s bed. Even if my captors had strafed the entire office with gunfire, they wouldn’t have been able to aim at my head, I felt, since it was well concealed behind the flap of an army blanket. I pressed my cheek into the floor. I didn’t move a muscle. I meant to wait for things to calm down out there, in the world beyond my hiding place.
It took at least a minute for the soldiers to reckon with my arrival. “What’s wrong with him?” one of them wondered, eventually, in a voice heavy with sleep. A hand lifted up the flap of the army blanket. A smiling face hovered over the floor. “Come out from there,” the soldier said. “You’re in safety. What’s wrong with you?”
The boy spoke for me. “He says he’s a journalist.”
“You’re in safety,” the soldier said. And then a chorus of men’s voices repeated versions of this assurance: “No one can hurt you here.” “You are with the Free Army.” “You’re safe.”
I decided that the voices were probably right. By cowering under a bed, I was making myself ridiculous. If I undo my mistake, I told myself, I might recover a measure of dignity before too many of the soldiers figure out what’s going on.
So I pushed the army blanket out of my way. I smiled at the soldier nearest me, crawled from under his bed, then sat on its foot. “Those people!” I stammered. “Kidnapped! They have guns! They were going to kill me.”
A half-dozen men, each face groggy but surprised and half-smiling, gaped at me. “Calm down,” the voices said. Was I okay? Had I been injured? Who were those people?
A half hour later, after the door boy had been sent out for breakfast—when he had returned with plates of falafel, hummus, plastic sacks of bread, and pickled vegetables, as I was drinking my fifth glass of tea—it seemed to me as though I had stumbled on a passageway that led back through time, into the Syria I had known before the war. All six soldiers in the room had a glass of tea and a mobile phone on the conference table in front of them. Each had a cigarette in his hand, and each seemed to feel that the time had come to draw deeply on a cigarette, to smile at the absurdity of life, and to wait for other, still more absurd things to happen. Nobody was in a hurry to do a thing. The men drew on their cigarettes and smiled as I told my story.
Even when I uttered neutral, unfunny phrases—“A half hour ago, I felt myself two feet from the grave,” “I ran like a lunatic,” “I can’t believe I am here with you,” and so on—the soldiers burst into appreciative laughter. They smiled at every sentence I uttered. An odd but delightful form of entertainment had come to them. It produced one hilarious phrase after the next. They smoked and giggled. Nobody in the room, it seemed, wanted the fun to stop.
Somehow, the flow of conversation took us to a fatteh and shawarma restaurant in my old Damascus neighborhood called The Goat’s Beard. I repeated a judgment I had heard once on the lips of a university student in Damascus: Given that their chicken sandwiches were made out of goat meat, lunch there ought to be cheaper than it was. I spoke of the Damascus pop band I used to listen to and of the mosque on the hillside above the city in which I used to study the Koran.
In the midst of my ramblings, a soldier whose bull-like neck and shoulders suggested a past as a professional weight lifter excused himself to place several nearly wordless calls. Yes, he said after he hung up. The higher-ups in this katiba, or battalion, were on their way to the police station now. In the meantime, did I need more tea? Did I know which branch of the Free Syrian Army I was dealing with? He pointed to an insignia that had been drawn over the office chalkboard. The group called itself “al Katiba Suqor as Sham Idlib” or the Falcons of the Levant, Idlib Battalion.
The weight lifter retrieved his mobile phone from the table, set it to play a Fairuz ballad I happened to know, then returned it to the breakfast table. “Remember the last time I saw you?” she crooned. “For so long I haven’t seen you and now I do. So how’re things?”
Since I was the first foreign journalist to turn up among the Falcons, the weight lifter told me, the leaders of the group would want to make sure I was okay. They would want to hear my story for themselves. I waited for him to say, “After which they will bring you to wherever you would like to go.” He did not say this.
Yet these soldiers certainly believed my story. I had related it in plain language, without contradicting myself. I gave the soldiers the names the kidnappers had given me, and offered a physical description of each one. I described the car, the apartment from which I had escaped, and the house in the olive grove from which Abu Osama’s cousin had emerged. “We’ll find them, don’t worry,” the weight lifter assured me.
As he was filling my tea glass, the katiba’s ten-year-old motioned for me to turn my ear to his lips. “They’ll be executed,” he said of my kidnappers. He grinned, then pushed a plate of roasted eggplant toward me. “One bullet,” he said. “That’s it.”
Around nine thirty in the morning, the weight lifter asked me in a friendly tone of voice to explain what exactly I had come to Syria to do. Was it normal, he wondered, that a journalist should come to Syria from America with nothing more than a cell phone camera and a notebook? “No press ID and by himself and fifty dollars in Turkish liras in his pocket?” he asked. “What newspaper do you work for?”
“I work for many newspapers,” I said, lying. I tried to explain about the difficulties of the freelancer’s life. “Most of the editors are pretty ignorant, if you ask me,” I said. “They don’t want anything to do with Syria because they can’t understand.” Their indifference was the reason I had to go it alone, and on a shoestring.
He sighed. He dropped the topic.
Another university-age soldier whose friendly, inquisitive eyes and flowing tresses reminded me of friends I had known during my earlier life in Syria wanted me to discuss the relationships I had had when I lived in Damascus. Had there been any girls? No, I lied. But I had had male friends with whom I studied and others with whom I had played sports.
He wanted to know where these people lived. I named a pair of rebel-friendly neighborhoods.
Before
the war, I said, I had been under the impression that Damascus was like a mosaic in which all the pieces came down from their places during the daytime, swirled around together, then went home again in the evenings. For me, living in that turbulence of religions and customs had been like living in a movie in which, every few minutes, the characters taught me new things about life.
I knew Syrians could get along, I said. I had seen it myself and had felt it. I wished that the warring parties could figure out a way to talk through their issues. The soldiers in the room stared at me.
“To be honest,” I said, “I had many friends. Some with the president. Some against him.”
The weight lifter gave me a skeptical look. “Two and a half years in Damascus,” he agreed after a moment, nodding. “And many friends. Good for you.” He checked his phone. He looked around the room. He wondered if I thought I would be able to find the apartment in which I had been held the previous night.
“Probably,” I said.
“In which case, we’ll fetch your friends right now,” he said.
“They have guns,” I told him.
He smiled. “Our guns are bigger.”
I looked around the room. Did everyone think this was a good idea? “I’m happy to be alive,” I said. It had been my mistake to surrender myself to bandits. “I didn’t lose anything of value,” I said. “I don’t care about the passport.”
“You will get your shoes back,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“And your money, passport, and phone. You don’t want these things?”
I did want these things.
“These criminals might well kidnap us, too,” he explained. “We need to find them for our own sake.” In any case, he said, before I went anywhere the leaders of the katiba would have to take my statement. Maybe they would want me to identify suspects. Nothing could happen without their signing off on things.
So I was caught within the workings of a Syrian bureaucracy. It was hardly the first time. In Damascus, I had come to know the central offices of the bureaucracy and the branch ones. I had come to know what they smelled like: military men, smoke, tea, sweat. I had come to feel that while no human could know the details of its inner workings, eventually, in the fullness of time, it would deliver the things I wished it to deliver.