A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  In one sense, they are right: I am their enemy. A couple months ago, there were huge protests throughout Iran. At the time, I was in Sweden visiting my brother. Stockholm’s sizable expatriate Iranian community protested in solidarity with the uprising in their home country. My brother, Alex, and I documented the anti-Iran rally in Sweden. I’ve been praying in my cell that Alex doesn’t e-mail me about it. If he doesn’t know I’m detained, he may send me his next version of the video.

  “Why did you come to the Middle East?” the interrogator asks.

  “I came to visit my friends.”

  I give that answer, doubting it will suffice for my interrogators. It didn’t even satisfy my parents. When I told my father that I planned to visit Syria, he asked sarcastically, “Are you going to meet Hamas in Syria? Hamas’s leadership is in Damascus.”

  He was prodding me. My father interprets my pro-Palestine stance as a personal rejection of him. We can argue logically about the Israeli occupation, and he’ll even agree with me at times. In the end, it always comes back to his fear that I don’t love him and his side of my family enough. We’ve ruined too many family outings debating Israel/Palestine, and I wanted him to know my trip to Syria wasn’t meant to hurt him.

  “Dad, I’m not going to Gaza—I’m just visiting Syria. You know I don’t care for Hamas, just like I don’t care for the Israeli government.”

  “Okay, Josh, just tell me: are you going to Syria to spite your father?”

  “Dad! A part of me is going there because of you, not in spite of you. It is through you that I’ve been interested in the Arab world.”

  He was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1948 and was airlifted to the new State of Israel in 1951. These airlifts—known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah—relocated my father as a toddler, along with 125,000 others, 95 percent of Iraq’s ancient Jewish community.

  His childhood memories took place in Israel, but they smell like home-cooked Iraqi food, and they sound like classical Arabic music. By age sixty, he now has lived in America most of his life, but he wants to be buried in Israel when he dies. One of the reasons I liked the idea of visiting Iraq was to see the country where my father was born.

  I heard him take a couple deep breaths over the phone before responding, “Okay, okay. You know . . . Damascus is supposed to be very beautiful. You’re going to have a great time. But please keep in touch. You must tell me about it—the music, the parties, everything. I would probably love Syria, but I’m not allowed there. You know, I grew up with a lot of Arab Jews from Syria, Halabis. Be sure to visit Halab and send me some photos, would you?”

  “I’d love to, Dad.”

  The interrogators want more from me. They press, “So, you visit your friends even if they are in Syria? Don’t you have friends in America?”

  My mother similarly questioned traveling to Syria.

  “Mom,” I told her, “Shane and Sarah have been there for a year. It’s safe.”

  “But you’re Jewish!” my mother chided me over the telephone.

  “Why do you think that Syrians are anti-Semitic?”

  “They are not Jewish! Sarah is not Jewish, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly!”

  My mother is probably freaking out right now. She expected to hear from me every few days while I was in the Middle East. I didn’t even tell her I was traveling to Iraq. I figured I would mention the trip after I safely returned to Syria. I wish this weren’t happening to her.

  To my translator, I explain why I was traveling abroad. I want them to understand me. If they can see who I really am, maybe they’ll release me. At the least, they’ll have sympathy for me even if they don’t have the power to free me. Hoping to ingratiate myself with them, I also emphasize my critical views of the United States.

  “I was teaching for an undergraduate study-abroad program for American students during the spring semester. I traveled and taught about public health in Switzerland, India, China, and South Africa. I encouraged my students to be critical of the medical establishment and to analyze the links between capitalism and illness. The program focused on the social determinants of health, not just germs. We discussed lifestyle choices, diet, alternative medicine, and environmental quality as ways to promote public health. When the job ended in May, I wanted to visit friends abroad before returning to America.”

  I don’t want to talk about my interest in the Arab world because I want to avoid talking about my father and international politics. I’d rather not mention the word Israel, which I’ve visited a handful of times, even if I’m criticizing it. I avoid my heritage. It feels like my original sin.

  My interrogators leave me alone for a moment as they converse. I cannot attach any meanings to their Farsi words, but I remain attentive, hoping for a clue to what they’re saying. One interrogator repeats my name slowly. “Jo-shua Fat-tal, Yo-shua Fat-tal.” Damn my name! Yoshua was an Israelite spy in the Bible. Fattal is Arabic. One interrogator concludes, “Josh Fattal, Yahudi Arabi.”

  Now they know. They ask me, “What’s your religion?” I knew the Christian façade wouldn’t last. But am I really Jewish? I don’t believe in the Torah, in Adam or Eve, or Noah or Moses. I don’t keep kosher, and I don’t obey the Sabbath. Judaism is a religion; it is a choice. It doesn’t run in my blood or anything tribal like that. Sarah and Shane don’t consider themselves Christian. Why should I consider myself Jewish?

  But I can’t help it. I feel Jewish. Maybe I shouldn’t hide it. It’s the truth. But I feel like I’m confessing when I answer their question: “I am Jewish.”

  11. Shane

  My hunger is my strength. Three times a day, the slot on my door opens and a tray of food is handed in. I take it and hand back the full tray of food from the last meal. At first, I try to block the entry of meals with my hand, but the guards always insist, so I eventually submit. But they can’t make me eat it. Today is the third day, and I’ve decided to start hiding the food from myself in my bathroom. The smell makes me hungry, not just in my stomach but in my bones. But I can tolerate that hunger. I can tolerate the dizziness. I can handle the momentary blackouts when I stand up too quickly. Whenever I hear, or think I hear, the guards’ footsteps, I rush into my bathroom, grab the food, set it by the door, lie on the floor, and suck in my stomach to accentuate my ribs.

  The hunger gives me something to focus on, a purpose. Everything I do is a strategy, to beat the hunger and to beat them. I focus my attention on not walking, on conserving every bit of energy I can. I keep my stomach full of water at all times. I refuse to take even a nibble of the food, because I think it will bring my stomach back to life.

  I spend my time on my back, surrounded by the objects of my entertainment. I turn a two-liter bottle from side to side, watching the water flow from one end to the other, making little waves. I open and close the cap of my toothbrush. Click, click-click, click-click-click-click. I fold up bits of paper cup and shoot them at the window with a rubber band.

  I eagerly await mealtime so I can have the satisfaction of noncompliance, the little feeling of victory to carry me through the following hours. Sometimes after refusing, I can’t help pacing laps around the cell. The refusal brings me to life, makes me feel the strength in my slowly weakening muscles. I know deep inside I can’t beat them, but I need the fight itself to keep me going.

  12. Shane

  I’m back in the interrogation room. As I sit, waiting for the interrogator, I hang my head dramatically to suggest I am fading from hunger.

  “I suggest you cooperate with them,” the translator says to me. “They are being nice now, but they can use other methods to make you answer their questions. They say you should not complain—your situation is easy. Do you know that there are five Iranian diplomats being held by the Americans in Iraq? Diplomats! They have been holding them for more than two years.”

  The interrogator enters and immediately asks me, again, for my e-mail address and password. I immediately give him the password for m
y two accounts. I want this to end as soon as possible. I have nothing to hide anyway, so why not be an open book?

  Q: We have proof that you have connections with U.S. intelligence agencies. You have been in contact with groups like the Center for Defense Information and the Council on Foreign Relations. These are very secretive organizations. What is your relationship to them?

  A: These groups are not intelligence agencies. They are think tanks. I interviewed them for articles that I wrote. I don’t have any special relationship to them. I simply went to their websites and clicked on the “Contact Us” tab.

  “These articles were only a cover-up,” the translator scolds. “This is a very common strategy with the CIA.”

  Q: If you are such a peace-loving journalist, would you be willing to write an article that we assign you?

  A: I could not do anything for you while you are keeping me in prison.

  I want this to be over. I want to go home.

  “We know that you had connections to Palestinians in Damascus,” the interrogator says. “We know you met with Hamas. We know you have made phone calls to officials in the Israeli government.”

  “Yeah, I interviewed them for articles during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza,” I say. I am getting exasperated. “Go online. You can find them.”

  Questions follow questions. He tells me to list every Palestinian I have ever met. I name a few officials of Hamas, and leave it at that. I want to stay focused, but this has been going on for so long, it’s getting hard for me to stay sharp enough to think through the possible implications of every answer before writing it down. I don’t know how to engage with them anymore, especially when every aspect of my life in the Middle East is being formed into evidence of espionage.

  Q: We know you lived in the Palestinian neighborhood Yarmouk. Why did you live there?

  I moved to Yarmouk because the falafel there was like nowhere else in Damascus. I loved how the streets felt lived in—how they filled every night with scraps of fruit rinds and newspapers and plastic bags yet were clean by the morning. I loved how Ahmed cooked. I loved how Omar talked about poetry and books. I loved how Yamen could listen like no one else and had wisdom beyond his years. I loved the nights at Mazen’s—the dancing, the discussions of war and justice, the laughs, the sound of ice cubes in glasses, and the sweet, anise sting of araq. Mazen did five years as a political prisoner, but he didn’t talk about it unless asked.

  I loved that hour in Yarmouk, which I’ve found nowhere else, at about 4 a.m., when pious old men shuffled to the mosque to begin the day and clutches of young people walked home with a swagger to end their night. I loved that everyone lived so close together—more than 112,000 people in 0.8 square mile!—that the sounds of music blended with the sounds of gossiping women and kids playing soccer in the alley and pigeons cooing in our windows. I loved to sit and type my articles about Iraq or Palestine or Syria to the accompaniment of those sounds.

  I loved the daily conversations. Is Obama better than or the same as Bush for the Middle East? Is Faulkner better in Arabic translation than in English? Should secular Palestinians back Hamas and Islamic jihad—groups they despise—in the face of Israeli bombardment?

  If only you could have seen our last night in Yarmouk, before we left for Iraq, then you might understand why I lived there. If you could have seen Emily and Basel’s wedding, the way we all paraded down the streets—Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Americans, Italians, Brits, Nigerians, Poles—from the ceremony to our apartment. We poured onto Yarmouk Street and our Palestinian friends jubilantly chanted “Down! Down with Hamas!” as bearded onlookers watched, discomfited, from the sidewalk. I know if I told you this, you would say these particular Palestinians were obviously agents of the West, influenced by their Western friends, but the chants were their own and they despised the U.S. and Israeli governments at least as much as anyone else in the camp.

  If only you could see into our apartment that night—the way Magda and Abu Hashish’s hips cut sideways into the music and the sweaty air as their hands drifted above their heads. The way the smoke hung on people’s skin. The bowls of hummus and lentil soup. The way that, after everyone left or drifted off to sleep, Shon and Yamen and I couldn’t let the night end. “You don’t need to go,” I told Yamen. “I know. I know,” he said, patting my knee. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s just enjoy this moment.

  The mournful notes of Umm Kulthum drifted in from a courtyard across the alleyway. We listened and smoked in silence. She was telling us that the night was over and that we should mourn it as endings deserve to be mourned.

  I moved to Yarmouk because it was so wonderfully gray. The buildings were gray. The alleys gray. The blacks and whites—the tones that you hold so dear—dissolved in Yarmouk. I loved Yarmouk because it was the antithesis of people like you.

  A: We lived in Yarmouk because it was cheap and because Sarah’s Arabic tutor lived there.

  Without skipping a beat, he hands me a piece of paper with a picture of a crowded street. There is an arrow pointing to one random person’s head in the crowd.

  “Where is this and who is that person?”

  “This is one of Sarah’s pictures from Sulaimaniya. I have no idea who that person is.”

  It feels like we are enacting some kind of cheap spy movie. He has looked over the pictures on Sarah’s and my cameras and is acting like they hold the secret to an extensive plot.

  “What is happening in this picture?”

  “That is Sarah and her friend walking to a mosque in Damascus.”

  He hands me another picture.

  “That is Sarah with her students.”

  “That is Sarah having a picnic with her friends.”

  “That is me, Sarah, Josh, and Shon at the Iraq-Turkey border with the sun setting behind us.”

  He hands me another picture of a bunch of young-looking shoulders with guns hanging off them. Oh God. That’s Tel Aviv. Shit. They know we’ve been to Tel Aviv. The image is from Sarah’s camera. She had erased the pictures from our Israel trip, but they must have recovered them using special software. Suddenly, I feel like I’ve been caught hiding a real crime. I’ve been hoping to keep it secret that any of us have ever been to Israel. Even in normal circumstances in the Middle East, like living quietly in Syria, a visit to Israel is grounds for permanent expulsion from the country. I can only imagine what it could mean in our current context.

  “Those are Israeli soldiers at a bus station in Tel Aviv. We went there to visit our American friend Tristan Anderson, who the Israeli military shot in the head with a high-velocity tear gas canister while he was protesting with Palestinians in the West Bank. He was in the hospital.”

  “Write it down,” he says.

  I write for what seems like an hour. Then he hands me another picture that is slightly blurred. It is a picture of a missile. We’re fucked. Sarah took this picture out a bus window in Israel, somewhere between Haifa and Tel Aviv. “What?” I remember her saying as she snapped the monument. “They have a missile on the side of the road?” This image is the perfect piece of spy evidence for our captors: the Americans were in Israel, doing their military work; then they came here to spy on us.

  It’s hard for me to remember that I don’t actually believe that talking to Palestinians or visiting Israel or Palestine is a crime. I am starting to feel actually guilty.

  13. Sarah

  One evening four days after we arrived at this prison, the guards lead me to the interrogation rooms. They tell me to take off my blindfold. I see Shane seated in a tiny room dominated by a large mirror. On a small table next to him sit two plates of beans and rice.

  “Where’s Josh?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “They just told me to sit here and wait.”

  “He’s already eaten,” says a voice behind the mirror. It’s our translator.

  “That’s a lie. Where is he?” Shane asks.

  “We’re not eating until we see him,” I say.

>   “It’s too late for us to bring him tonight—we need to go home to our families, Sarah. If you eat now, you will see Josh after the weekend. If you don’t eat, you won’t see him at all.”

  Shane looks exhausted, slouched over in his ugly, light blue prison uniform. Neither of us has eaten in four days, but I know I’m over the initial hump and can keep going. Faced with this cruel, unnatural choice, I don’t know what to do.

  “We’ll see him tomorrow?” Shane asks.

  “Yes, if you eat,” the voice answers. Shane and I pause, looking into each other’s eyes for the first time as prisoners. Reluctantly, we agree, but we tell the translator we’ll stop eating again if he reneges on his promise.

  I push down the nagging fear that we’ve made the wrong decision and fall limp into Shane’s arms. My lips find his lips, his hands grab my hands, and our foreheads come together like two palms in prayer. That’s what I think of—prayer. His touch feels sacred.

  “I love you,” I say.

  I glance at myself in the large mirror next to us. God, I think briefly, I look as bad as Shane does. My black hijab makes me look severe. The dark circles under my eyes seem to cut into the dry, splotchy skin around my cheeks. How could I have already changed so much? Suddenly, I hear a brief scraping sound like the hard soles of men’s dress shoes against concrete. The sound is coming from behind the mirror.

  “Why are you watching us?” I ask. “Can’t you give us some privacy?”

  “Sarah, you have three more minutes. Please hurry.”

  Two days later, back in my cell, I glance toward the window and note the gray-blue sky. It’s almost dinnertime. I hear Shane cough in the hallway—the signal we send to each other when one of us is taken out of our cell. My head jerks up and I look around, wondering how long I’ve been sitting in a semi-catatonic state, staring at the wall with unfocused eyes.