The Solace of Trees

by Robert Madrygin

  Amir had lost track of the days. How many weeks had it been, two, or maybe three? He wasn’t sure. He felt so weary, so tired of not being allowed sleep, constantly interrogated with the same questions over and over. “Who is Zakariyya Ashrawi?” the interrogator asked him. The question confused Amir. Why would they ask him that again and again? They already knew the answer. When he told them for the hundredth time that he was a professor at his college, they asked, “How do you know him?” Amir answered, “He was my professor.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t understand. You know his name. You just spoke it.”

  “What did you call him? How did you address him?”

  “By his name, of course. Zack.”

  “Zack? You call him Zack. Then he was a friend of yours?”

  “No….Yes, I mean a little. He was friendly with all of his students,” Amir responded, feeling confused.

  “So Zack is your friend, then?” the interrogator continued. “One does things for their friends, yes? What sort of things did you do for Zack?”

  “Nothing, really,” Amir answered, his eyes wanting nothing more than to close and be carried off into dream.

  “Nothing? You did not help make Internet sites for him?”

  “Yes, but…”

  His interrogator didn’t allow Amir the explanation his mind was attempting to summon, but interrupted him by holding up a photograph of a man and asking, “Who is this man?”

  “I don’t know,” Amir said. “He’s a friend of Zack’s. I can’t remember his name. It’s Arabic. He was from Lebanon, I think. He came to school to visit Zack.”

  “But you made an interview of him. And then put it on the Internet. What do you mean, you can’t remember? Of course you can remember. Why do you lie to me?”

  The questions continued coming in small, random probes; the questions had been designed to disorient and trip Amir up on small, inconsequential errors that the man would then use to punish him. After a time, as the men watching him grew tired and bored with the little substantive information they were able to get out of their prisoner, the pattern of questioning changed. The guards worked in twelve-hour shifts, and at the end of one of them the man who was Amir’s chief interrogator took the sheets of paper containing the list of questions supplied by the Americans and threw them in the waste can. “I’m tired,” he said. “Now we’re going to do it the easy way. Not so easy for you, though. But easier for us.”

  The questions continued, but instead of being punctuated by endless psychological tricks to disorient and demoralize him, they were marked by physical blows and fear tactics that put Amir constantly on edge, never knowing whether or not the moment might be his last. After a time, not able to obtain the information they had been asked to get from their prisoner, the questions began to come with the answers already supplied. Amir had only to agree.

  Just the day before, they had him sign a paper they said was unimportant and that he didn’t need to bother reading. Now they wanted him to sign another. In the beginning Amir had refused to sign anything. But he had grown so weary, so tired of not being allowed sleep and being constantly interrogated with the same questions over and over that he told himself it didn’t matter. The document they now placed in front of him was titled in bold print “Release Form,” but his captors had said nothing about his being freed when they had handed it to him. When he asked, they had laughed and said of course it was so, why else would he be signing it? Taking the pen, he signed the document, knowing that in any case, he had no real choice in the matter. He had grown weary of his captors’ lies and had little faith that the paper would bring his freedom. When they prepared to lead him outside the motel room, however, he wasn’t able to stifle his hope. He felt emotion well up inside him for the first time since his imprisonment. But as he was about to pass through the threshold to the outside, the men pulled his hands roughly behind him, cuffed them, and then placed a hood over his head.

  “What are you doing?” cried Amir. “Please, let me go. Please.”

  A small delivery van was parked just outside the room, its rear wheels snug to the curb. As soon as Amir’s jailors had opened the motel room door, the vehicle’s rear doors swung outward, pushed opened from the inside. A man stepped out from the back and stood guard as another joined the two holding Amir, hustling their prisoner quickly from motel room to van. There was no one to witness the act, and even if there had been, the men’s movement had been quick and their blindfolded prisoner shielded from sight by the guards’ bodies. Amir was being driven back to the place from which his ordeal had started, a fact he didn’t realize until he was dragged from the van and could hear the sounds of planes landing and taking off. He began to ask where he was and what was being done to him when he received the first blow. More followed. He heard a man say something about softening up the package, but the rest was lost to his pain and the laughter of men his blindfold prevented him from seeing.

  His body wanted to fall to the ground but was unable to because it was being supported on each side by hands that refused to let it collapse. Amir felt yet another set of hands taking hold of the hood that covered his head, and then a sudden rush of light momentarily blinded him. What he saw frightened him yet even more. There were half a dozen men, perhaps more, all dressed in black, their faces covered by military balaclavas of the same color. The specter-like sight terrified him. A pair of scissors appeared in one of the masked men’s hands, and he watched in panic as the man approached and began to cut away his clothing.

  Standing naked, Amir’s body could be seen visibly shaking. Suddenly, everything went black as the sack was once again placed over his head. A voice spoke out to him in English, telling him not to move, and he felt the sharp stabbing pain of a needle pierce his skin. The voice that had spoken to him was, he felt sure, American. Without thought he had cried out to the invisible speaker, imploring him for help. The blow to his kidney caused him to gasp. Everything began to grow confused as the injection took hold. He was grabbed and made to bend over. His legs were spread apart and he felt a searing pain as something was inserted into his rectum. His bowels began to expand as though they were a balloon being filled with air until the point of explosion. Afterward, it felt as if they were placing a diaper on him. None of it made sense. He tried to speak once more but could manage only a mumble and began to lose consciousness.

  Amir felt his feet walk up a short set of stairs, as if the legs that guided them were not his own but belonged to someone else. There was a familiar noise. The sound of jet engines and then the feeling of being lifted into the air. It was the last thing he remembered before slipping into unconsciousness.

  Days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months of tortuous dimension, though of different order for Amir than for his family and Jadranka. Their suffering lay in the agony of unknowing, while for him it lay in understanding exactly what awaited him from one day to the next. When Margaret had first gotten the news of Amir’s detention and subsequent disappearance, at Alice’s urging, she had immediately called the State Department, who promised they would look into it.

  “Look into it?” Margaret had asked incredulously. “It’s not a matter to be looked into. My son was detained by Bosnian immigration agents at the Sarajevo airport. And now he’s disappeared. This is an urgent matter. Don’t tell me you’ll look into it. You need to have the ambassador contact the Bosnian government immediately.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Morgan,” the calm voice on the other end of the line replied. “I assure you we’ll contact the embassy in Bosnia right away.”

  Not at all reassured by her conversation with the State Department official, Margaret, along with Alice and Paul, called their congressmen and senators, imploring them for help in finding Amir. They kept up the pressure by calling in for daily reports, though they never received anything but proclamations of sympathy and assurances that the authorities were doing all they could to find Amir.

  Jadranka stayed in Bosnia in
an attempt to discover anything she could about Amir’s disappearance. She worked whatever channel she was able to access, both official and unofficial. In the end it was the public outcry, small though strident, that she’d gathered in her support and, most surprisingly, the help of the police that had brought to light the truth of what had happened. The police investigation confirmed that Amir had been taken into custody by Bosnian intelligence agents immediately after being released by Customs. Jadranka felt some hope then, a thread of something that might be followed to find Amir.

  Yet in the end, after dragging their heels for weeks, Bosnian intelligence officials, pressed by public and political pressure, came up with another signed release form, which stated that the subject, after his interrogation, had been freed from custody. The form had been filed away, they said, with a number of other inconsequential interviews that had led nowhere and then been relegated to storage, hence the delay in unearthing it. They believed, a spokesman declared, that Amir had left the country, and though they had no exact knowledge of where he might have gone, they had received intelligence saying he’d joined the jihad against the Americans, either in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  Jadranka made plans to return to the United States when it became clear that Amir was no longer in Bosnia and she learned through unofficial channels that the Bosnian intelligence agents had been working on behalf of the Americans all along. She was informed, however, that her visa to the US had been revoked and that she was denied entry back into the country. She was given no further explanation.

  When Margaret heard the news that Jadranka would not be allowed to return to the US, she was devastated. In the beginning there had been an initial rush of support, both in the press and from her elected representatives, in her efforts to find her son. Very soon, though, the media articles that had been following the story began printing bits and pieces of the same insinuation and innuendo that Margaret was receiving from the government offices. Lead articles such as “Missing American Student” slowly morphed into back-page paragraphs such as “Bosnian-American Disappears From Homeland,” “Anti-War Activist Goes Missing in Homeland,” and “Missing Student Tied to Terrorist Professor.” There began to be mention of rumors from reliable sources that the missing student might have attempted to join up with jihadists fighting the Americans in Iraq.

  Meanwhile, after the US invasion of Iraq, the forces of good, in their stirring and successful victory against the forces of evil, were beginning to show signs of trouble in winning the peace. After having easily conquered Iraq, it was being widely reported that hordes of foreign fighters were flooding into that country to make it the staging ground of the war against the West. The story of Margaret Morgan’s missing son had become less than a minor footnote to the larger story, and also one that highlighted the dangers now looming from every direction: Sleeper cells, made up of foreign nationals such as Amir, were reported to be planted about the United States, awaiting the right moment to strike.

  Amir’s mother began to be overtaken by a hopelessness that seemed to wither her body at the same pace it did her spirit. She had come to feel that there was little, if any, difference between the government party line and that which was being presented to the public by the news media. She was being stonewalled by the one, and her only recourse to discover the truth had been the other.

  “Alice, I don’t know what to do,” Margaret said in one of her daily phone calls to her daughter. “Do you think I should fly to Sarajevo? Maybe he’s still there.”

  Alice could hear the tears in her mother’s voice, could feel the heavy sadness of her heart. “No, Mom,” she replied, “Jadranka says she’s sure he isn’t there anymore. She’s heard Amir was taken elsewhere.”

  “Oh, god,” Margaret said, her voice colored with despair. “I just can’t believe it. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Alice’s concern for her mother grew as summer and fall passed, bringing in the first snows of winter without any new word of Amir. Her mother had become depressed as the State Department continued to deny any knowledge of Amir’s whereabouts. When the Christmas holidays came, Alice and Paul canceled their plans in Cambridge and spent the week with Margaret, hoping they and the girls could help her break through her despondency.

  “Mom,” Alice said, “I want you to come back to Cambridge with us. I mean it. I won’t take no for an answer. Paul’s spoken to your neighbors, and they’ll look after the house. You can come for the winter. In the spring, if you want, you can return. Living here alone isn’t good, Mom. And besides, the girls are really looking forward to having their grandmother coming to live with them.”

  “Oh, Alice,” Margaret sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think I could live in the city again. This is my home.”

  Alice looked at her mother with sympathy. She had grown frail. In the last six months she had seemed to age a decade. The rounding of her shoulders had become pronounced, pulling the whole of her inward, like a building whose main support beam had fallen, caving the structure into its center.

  “Mom,” Alice said, and then paused. “I know it’s been hard.”

  “Oh, I miss him so much.”

  “I know, Mom. I know. I do too.”

  “I remember the first time I ever saw him. There was this little boy looking at me from across the table. There was something so sad in his eyes, yet so beautiful.”

  “Yes, I know, Mom. But what do you think Amir would want you to do now? You know he’d want you to go to Cambridge. Come back with us. Just for the winter. Hopefully, we’ll have some news by spring.”

  “But what if he calls? What if he’s able to get to a phone and there’s no one here to answer?”

  “Mom, he knows my phone number just as well as yours. He would call me,” Alice said, forcing a positive look upon her face. “We will find him and bring him home from wherever he is. We won’t give up until we do.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” Margaret answered, her mind closing down under the weight of her sadness.

  Chapter 32

  Amir awoke from his drug-induced slumber only to find himself in a place of even greater darkness than the color of his sleep, his half-conscious mind unable to recall that his captors had tied a hood around his head. At first he panicked. He could hear nothing but muffled sounds, and he thought that he was dreaming he was once again deaf. His hands and legs, which tried to move, jerked against the manacles that held them, but before he could register their restraint a sharp blow to his legs stung him, bringing his mind back into focus and reminding him of where he was. Or rather of what had happened to him, because in truth he had no idea where he might be. He lay still then, and there were no more painful reminders not to struggle against his bonds. After a short time he could feel the airplane begin to descend and his ears pop under the headphones that covered them and had been placed over his hood.

  As the plane touched down, his mind struggled to find some solid footing upon which to stand, while another part of him simply wished for the plane to accelerate, to take off into the sky and resume his journey into oblivion for as long as it might take the nightmare to find its end. He was extraordinarily confused—a state of mind purposefully and skillfully contrived by his captors to rob him of any sense of self or safety. When the plane came to a halt, Amir felt his body being pulled upward. As he attempted to stand, a second pair of hands joined in to help raise him, roughly grabbing his right shoulder and yanking it painfully back at the same time it lifted him.

  Amir had no idea where he was. Logic, what little of it was functioning in his mind, told him that he must have been taken back to the United States. He thought he could hear the muffled sound of people speaking in English, and after all, where else would they be transferring him? He felt himself being passed to other sets of hands, and it was no longer the English language being spoken but another he couldn’t recognize. The men who had taken hold of him dragged him from the plane, then lifted and threw him onto the floor of a covered truck bed.


  The vehicle traveled along a rough road, Amir’s body jolting up and down as he made his way toward an unknown destination. Amir’s senses could register cool air, dust, and the clang of metal on metal. When he was taken from the truck and his blindfold finally removed, he found himself in a cold, dirty room, barely large enough for him to lie down in. He had been led along a dark passageway and then down a set of stairs, so he guessed that he was below ground level. With one glance at his surroundings, any small, remaining hope that he was back in the United States quickly dissipated. Before his captors closed the door to his cell, he could see several other metal-clad doors across the narrow corridor.

  There was no light in his room, and when his door slammed shut, he was left in darkness. Feeling about with his hands, he found nothing in the room but a thin blanket and a plastic bucket to be used as his toilet. He could tell by the blanket’s smell and feel that the cloth was filthy, but he was nevertheless thankful for it. In his mind’s calculation he thought that it must still be summer, but the room felt cold and damp. He shivered and sought a corner to cradle into, huddling within the foul, threadbare blanket that was his only warmth.

  During the long hours of his journey, Amir had done nothing but sleep, yet now he sought sleep’s solace once again. His back pressed against the cold, hard surface of the concrete wall, Amir leaned his head back to rest between his shoulders. It was then that he heard the whisperings of other prisoners. Before he could make out the words of the hushed utterings, however, they were drowned out with loud, strange, and discordant music that did not cease for hours, making it impossible not only to hear the other prisoners’ whisperings but to retreat into dreams as well.