Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  Which was just fine with almost everyone I spoke to in those days, since it was clear to them that we were living on the cusp of an ancient, much-loved Islamic dream. The dream was of a society cleansed, perfect equality for everyone, invincibility before the enemies of Islam, and oneness with the Koran. Everyone acknowledged that certain lingering ideas from the former way of life were blocking a perfect realization of the dream, for all 5 million inhabitants of this river valley. Still, much had been accomplished to date.

  The outside world, I knew, would have referred to our society’s leaders as “terrorists” or “extremists” or “fanatics.” In our society, they were called “emirs”—or, in English, “princes.”

  These princes controlled the region’s oil wells, the banks, the museums, the mosques, and five hundred or so Toyota Hilux pickup trucks. The Euphrates River Valley is Syria’s breadbasket. The princes controlled the farms, too.

  There was beauty in this society. It was generally held that the dream would come more quickly and more totally if everyone read a melodic early medieval poem called The Reading or The Recitation as often as possible. Military power, family happiness, and advancements in science were thought to flow from this poem. It predicted the future. It warded off danger and instructed the community, even in the minutest particulars of everyday life, in how to live as God wished people to live. As it happened, the poem wasn’t so much read as it was sung. Thus, inside the dream, it was in the air, all day, in every room and conveyance.

  The leaders of this society sang with great self-confidence and attentiveness to the meaning of the lines. In this respect, they were artists. In their conversation, they exhibited masterful control over the details of the poem, which was hundreds of pages in length and, because of its arcane idiom, no easy thing to master. In this respect, they were professors. In honor of their accomplishments, they were to be addressed by the title “Sheikh.” In Arabic, “sheikh” implies a pastoral function. Also, lifelong scholarship. It might be translated as “man of learning.”

  Though the men of learning were busy, in the daytime, with soldiery, their chief occupation was to usher humankind outward along a spiritual progress. The straight path we were traveling then began in the City of Destruction that was Assad’s Syria—which is to say, in a wasteland ruled by misdeeds and corruption. At first little bands, and then all 5 million inhabitants of this river valley, and then all of humanity, were meant to set out for a new way of life, to find themselves in a strange land, there to pass through tests, to triumph over inner division and finally over all enemies everywhere. In this way, in theory, eventually the men of learning would usher planet Earth—and not just the bits of it that happened to have been born into Islam—into harmony with God.

  Such was the theory. In practice, of course, in the spring of 2014 every settlement in our river valley remained a city of destruction in the most literal sense. The enemies who kept us in this condition were too far away to vanquish. The citizens couldn’t be led anywhere because the highways were much too overrun with bomb craters and haunted by bandits and drones.

  Thus the real work of the men of learning was to select citizens from within our society who might plausibly be taken as representatives of the enemy, to bring them before something or someone that might plausibly be taken as an instrument of God, and then to stage an event that might be taken as an instance in which the people of God triumphed over wickedness.

  The carrying out of these selections was a prodigious labor. Because the entirety of the society had lived so long under the psychology of the Assads, the moral condition of that family was thought to have sunk itself into the collective psyche. Even the men of learning had, in earlier times, succumbed to it. They admitted this openly. But they had kept the dream alive within themselves, too, had kept the evil at bay, and at the first sign of the dream’s dawning over the landscape they knew right away what was happening. Some were away at work in the oil fields in the Gulf. Others had exiled themselves to Beirut and Jordan. They all hurried home.

  Arriving in our river valley, they discovered that their work was to fan out across the society, to identify the agents of the Assads, along with all others who had allowed the psychology of the Assad regime to infect their thinking, to roust these enemies from their beds and to chase them across the rooftops, if need be, then bring them to jail. Because the Assad family had ruled since the early seventies, everyone had been infected somehow. The men of learning couldn’t very well arrest the entire society. Their task was to target the unrepentant, the unreformed, and all those who pretended to have extinguished the old ways of thinking but secretly, in their hearts, kept a candle burning for the Assads. There was no way to know how many such covert agents the society contained. The number might have been in the millions. Thus the prodigiousness of the labor before the men of learning.

  It was understood that in the chaos of an arrest, errors could occur. “If there is nothing upon you,” the sheiks would tell the new prisoners, “we will let you go.” The new prisoners longed to believe. When the sheikhs had left the cell block, the new prisoners would whisper their thoughts into the air. “Praise God,” they would say, “that I am as innocent as a child.”

  In the evening, the sheikhs would return with their lead investigator. The word for investigator—muhaqiq—means “bringer out of the truth.” The muhaqiq’s job was to torture the prisoners until they confessed to whatever the sheikhs wished to accuse them of.

  In our prisons, a prisoner could be a foreign agent or he could be a street criminal. The agents had slipped into the river valley in order to transmit bombing coordinates back to enemy air force bases. Or they disseminated lies and dissension within the dream and so sabotaged it from within. Street criminals lusted after money or sex or practiced witchcraft. Sometimes they insulted God.

  In theory, it was better to be an agent, since agents could be ransomed away, whereas the criminals, especially when they were thought to have persisted in their crimes despite warnings, were irredeemable. I had not, however, heard of anyone being ransomed away. I certainly didn’t think anyone would pay for me.

  The distinction between the agent and the street criminal was a subtle matter. In theory, it was possible to be both at once. Practically speaking, the distinction didn’t matter much because it was thought that all prisoners amounted to a form of corruption. Thus, it would have been unthinkable for the prisoners to be left, in their idle hours, to chitchat among themselves. Many of the mid-level sheikhs had done time in regime prisons. Almost all of the higher sheikhs had been locked away for years. They knew what happens when prisoners whisper among themselves. The whisperings lead to plots. The badly infected among the prisoners spread their sicknesses to the not-so-badly infected.

  Accordingly, all prisoners in our society, except those so far beyond the pale that no hope could remain for them—rapists, for instance, and Alawites—were given copies of The Recitation. They were told to pray and to repent.

  When a hint of chitchat emerged from the cell block, the men of learning would come crashing through the steel door that separated the cell block from the guards’ living quarters. “Who spoke?” they would shout. “Who?” Within a minute, the prisoners would be lying on their stomachs in the corridor outside our cells. Our hands would be zip-tied behind our backs. The sheikhs with whom I had been trying to establish a rapport would use their galvanized steel cables to beat the contamination out of their dream.

  “You will know who we are!” the men of learning would shout. “Who are we?”

  “You are those who bring victories to the Muslims,” we would reply, or, simply, “You are men of the religion.”

  “And who are you?” they would ask.

  “We are filth,” we would reply, or, “I am an animal,” or, “I am an ass.”

  Once you knew the rules, life in our society, even in its worst places, in which, I’m pretty sure, I lived, was bearable.

  The Syrian Air Force bombed occasional
ly. Most of the time, at this point in the war, in this river valley, the airplanes left us alone. The nearest enemy troops were hundreds of kilometers away, confined to redoubts in the desert, and in any case, vastly outnumbered by the defenders of our Islamic state.

  Thus, inside the state, our days unfolded as follows: In the early morning darkness, there was prayer. The young men fighters liked to watch cartoons when they woke up, around noon. There were more prayers, then lunch, then shooting of the Kalashnikovs into adobe walls and into the sky. In the evenings, for the new prisoners, there were “welcoming parties” or “investigations”—which is to say, there was torture. When there was no one to torture, the commanders sometimes led the younger men in the singing of war hymns, many of which were addressed to the martyrs as they looked down on us from heaven. Though it wasn’t strictly allowed, some of the guards didn’t mind when I sang, to myself, in my cell.

  I found it odd, at first, that the people who inflicted such a regime of violence and whisper-punishment on their brother humans also loved to play at make-believe, but all the sheikhs in all the prisons in which I lived in the eastern part of Syria (there were six, all told) were much more devoted to their imaginary worlds than they were, for instance, to looking after their rifles or filling up the tanks of their pickups with gas.

  I noticed this quality of theirs many times a day. It was in their habit of dressing sometimes as black-robed avenging angels of death, sometimes in tracksuits, sometimes as MTV rappers, and sometimes as everyday citizens, out for a stroll in the sunshine. Of course it was in the sound of their voices as they sang to their friends in paradise. I experienced it most vividly during the “you shall know who we are” call-and-response dramas they staged for the new prisoners.

  Of course, in Islam, the collective prayer invites practioners into the magic of the theater five times a day.

  It happened that our prisons often lay outside the broadcast range of the nearest minaret. And so what? In Islam, a swatch of carpet may be your mosque. When you are far from an actual muezzin, you, the believer, should imagine yourself on a balcony, high over a city. You are to raise the right index finger to the right earlobe and the left finger to the left. “Come to the prayer,” you say to yourself, twice, and also twice “come to the flourishing.” The believer might not have any water on hand. Fine. Sand is like water. But if there is no sand, air is like water. You may bathe your face and arms in handfuls of air.

  In this way, you wash the sins from your soul. The important thing is to extract oneself from the hurly-burly of everyday life, to cleanse oneself in an inner sense, and to bring oneself into alignment: with oneself, with one’s community, and with God.

  In this frame of mind, you turn yourself to the holiest spot on Earth. You sing from the poem, in rows with the young and the old, the poor and the rich, the sinful and the righteous. Elsewhere in the city and across planet Earth, following the arc of the sun, other believers are singing these lines with you. It is a dream of harmony come to life.

  The purpose of this simultaneity is to cause the community to drift, just for a moment, out of earthly time. I realize this is not the sort of excursion that can be seen. No instruments can measure one’s progress. That doesn’t mean the voyage isn’t a fact. In our river valley, it was the clock by which the society lived. It was its theater. It was as factual as the flooding of the riverbanks in the spring and as marvelous.

  At the time, the prayer was hardly the only instance in which things that couldn’t be explained by science intervened in daily affairs. Now and then, the airplanes that came to bomb us dropped out of the sky. The pilots turned up in the hands of the sheikhs. How had this happened? By accident? By a mechanical failure? Not a soul among the 5 million inhabitants in our valley could have believed this. Meanwhile, kindred spirits, which is to say dreamers from across the world, were slipping through the grasp of one police force after another, then trickling into our river valley. Somehow, American laser-guided surface-to-surface missiles were also falling under the control of the men of learning. Though they didn’t all of them own shoes and often ate only a round or two of bread per day, somehow these men were conquering enemy military airports. This was also a dream come to life. The victories brought further weapons and new prisoners.

  When the new arrivals turned up in prison, the sheikhs warned them in the starkest terms not to chitchat. But they were frightened. They were all badly disoriented. So late at night, long after their plastic zip-tie handcuffs had been cut from their wrists and their ankles—when they had prayed, eaten, tried to sleep, when it would have seemed to them as though everyone in the prison was sound asleep—they would tap at the cinder-block wall that separated our cells. “Neighbor. Hey, neighbor,” they would whisper. “My brother. Where are we?”

  I didn’t know. I was too afraid to talk. But I was not capable of not talking. Eventually, of course, that night, or some night soon thereafter, as we were whispering, the steel door that separated the cell block from the sheikhs’ TV room would emit a click. In the two inches of space between the bottom of my cell door and the floor, a half-dozen pairs of sandaled feet would appear. The hems of their black robes would hover over the floor. You could hear the motionlessness of the other prisoners then. We scarcely breathed. “Who spoke?” a voice would wonder. “Who? For the sake of God, tell the truth.”

  After the beatings, the sheikhs would prohibit all the prisoners from food or water until the following morning. So I would sleep. The mornings would be calm, a week or so would pass, and eventually, late at night, a newly arrested person would be brought into the cell next to mine. I was lonely. I was frightened. I needed friends. “Tap tap tap,” I would say to the wall next to me. “Neighbor,” I would say. “Hey, neighbor. What is your name?”

  One afternoon late that spring, long after I had stopped wondering at the way of life in our river valley—when I was bored as I always was and longing to talk, as always—a mid-level commander called Abu Marouf al-Homsi stopped by my cell to chat. He had himself spent many years in a regime prison. I’m not sure the sentences in his prison would have had expiration dates. We certainly had no such things in our prisons. So he would have known what the passage of time feels like to prisoners in Syria. It is more a circular thing there than a linear thing. “Would it be possible for you to bring me a pen and a paper?” I asked him. He thought about it for a moment. “I don’t see why not,” he said.

  During my first nights with the pen and paper, I decided to write a diary. I recorded a few thoughts. They had to do with the frequency with which the poem encouraged its readers to disengage from the details of life here on this plane, in favor of thoughts about the life to come. In the poem, dying was good, since it marked the beginning of eternal life.

  That spring, disagreements between al Qaeda and ISIS over how to split up the proceeds from the river valley’s half-dozen oil fields broke out into open warfare. When the al Qaeda men of learning captured ISIS princes, they brought these enemies to our jail. The ISIS princes, it turned out, were almost always talktative, genial types who had done years in prison in Iraq, under the Americans, or in Syrian jails, under the authority of the Syrian government jailers. I found my ISIS neighbors to be far more pious than my earlier, civilian neighbors had been. Sometimes, when the ISIS neighbors were feeling comradely, they invited me to follow along with them as they sang from the poem. “Following,” in this instance, meant reading the line the ISIS prince was reciting in my copy of the Koran, listening for the vowels he elongated and the consonants he struck, then having a go at reciting the lines myself. If my recitation satisfied the prince, he moved on to the next line. As I recited with these ISIS princes, the poem’s infatuation with romantic death began to seem to me its salient characteristic. This quality seemed to leap from every page. In earlier readings, the theme had escaped me. Now, in the company of the ISIS princes, the poem’s authors seemed like dreamy, Thanatos-driven cultists to me, and the poem’s modern admirers seemed l
ittle different. I wished for books that embraced life. But our prison had no library. We made do with the materials on hand.

  Probably, for the ISIS prisoners, some of whom had been told they would soon be executed, the poem’s loving way of speaking of the afterlife brought consolation. It promised and soothed.

  The poem did not, however, soothe me. It made me feel that the powerful men in this society were resigning themselves to a world in which everyone killed everyone else.

  The poem’s contempt for humans who would not or could not reconcile themselves to Islam also discomfited me. In the poem, such refuseniks were called kuffar. The more carefully I read it, the more obvious it was to me that the poem considered the kuffar to be ingrates who deserved whatever fate befell them. Often, in the Koran, the kuffar were slaughtered en masse. Such killings brought the believers closer to God.

  So much power did the poem have in this society that, as May wore on, it began to seem to me that the most unlikely outcome, for me, would be to emerge from this quiet river valley with my head. The poem, I sometimes thought, was my enemy.

  You’re meant to record private thoughts, even if they’re improper, in a diary. So I told myself when I began writing. I wrote in English. No one in our river valley, as far as I knew, would have been able to decipher my English-language scribblings. So my diary and I were safe. So I told myself, but after that first night with pen and paper—when I had slept, picked up my diary, and reread—I knew that if they knew that I was having bitter thoughts about the poem, then setting these thoughts down on their paper, in the midst of their dream, they would have burned the paper. Then they would have cut my throat. I tore my diary into shreds.

  Okay, I thought. Fine. A novel. I wanted to be home anyway. I wanted to revisit the spring storms I had written about a year earlier, in the grocery store in Al-Haydariya. At first, in my opening chapters, I found myself thinking a lot about a particular young woman called Gypsy Phelan. She had blond hair, glasses. I saw her in the Vermont spring. She was about to graduate from high school. I could see every detail of the village in which she had grown up because it was the village in which I grew up.