When the barrage of sound finally ended, he took his hands from his ears and could feel his body release the tension that had seized it, the silence freeing his muscles to relax back into their normal state.
Amir’s reprieve was short-lived. The door to his cell was thrown open, and he was blinded by a bright light shining in from the passageway. Two men entered the room and took hold of his manacled hands, raising his arms painfully above his head and shackling them to the ceiling. Both of the guards drew knives, and Amir’s heart froze as they moved toward him. In seconds he was stripped of the coveralls he’d been transported in, to hang naked, his feet barely able to touch the ground.
A third man then entered the room. He was different from the other two, who were dressed informally and seemed to have taken pleasure in their work. The gray-haired man stood silently staring at him while the two younger men laughed and exchanged comments in a language Amir thought he recognized as Arabic. The older man’s skin was ruddy and of olive complexion, the look on his face all the more hardened for the detached gaze of his eyes. When he spoke, he addressed Amir in a precise and clear, though accented, English.
“Speak only when I tell you to,” he commanded coldly and without emotion. “You are in a place that doesn’t exist. There is no law here. Nobody knows where you are or even that you are being held.” Pausing, the man looked into Amir’s eyes to give his words weight and see his prisoner’s reaction. Satisfied by the fear he saw clearly written on the boy’s face, he continued, “You can make this easy or difficult. It is of your own choosing. It matters neither way to me. If you die, we will bury you in the ground, and no one will ever know. Do you understand?”
Amir nodded as though in a trance. He wanted to ask if his mother knew he was being held. Of all that he’d suffered in his captivity, that was what had caused him the most anxiety.
“Now tell me about the people you worked for,” his interrogator commanded. “Start from the beginning. And I warn you, do not leave anything out.”
Amir caught his breath, and despite the cold he began to sweat. With his unclothed body chained to the ceiling, a guard at each side, he’d never felt more vulnerable. The gray-haired man began with the same questions that had been put to him in the motel room but then switched to questions of more technical nature: questions about making videos and placing them on the Internet. Amir was relieved to be able to speak of something about which he knew, and he eagerly answered.
“So you are an expert about these things then, are you?” the gray-haired man asked, as if impressed.
“No,” Amir answered weakly, swallowing his breath. “I mean, I know the basics, but I’m not really an expert.”
Smiling, his interrogator moved behind Amir so that his prisoner could not see him. He asked Amir about Zakariyya Ashrawi, about whether he had taught his professor the technical media skills to pass on to terrorist groups or whether Amir himself had passed them on directly to Ashrawi’s operatives. When Amir answered truthfully that he had done neither, the gray-haired man nodded to one of the guards, who took a short length of electric cable from his belt and struck Amir several times behind his knees and on his buttocks.
The questioning seemed to go on endlessly. After a time, Amir felt the places where he’d been hit go from a white, searing pain to a dull throb, and the tears and saliva that had flowed down his face dried, leaving a thin crust from their trail. This interrogator had not been so easily pleased as the previous ones, who were happy to accept the simple parroting of the prompts they had provided. This man wanted specific information and names that Amir had no way of giving. The man eventually announced he was leaving to go eat, an act he knew the prisoner himself had little opportunity to partake in. As the gray-haired man left, he nodded to the two men standing beside Amir and said something to them in their native language. Turning back to Amir, he spoke in a voice that didn’t hide its irony, telling him not to worry, that he would return soon to see him again.
Months after having first arrived, Amir was led out of the prison, hooded, shackled, and once more readied for transport. Loaded into the back of a truck, he rode for nearly an hour along a bumpy, dusty road with his feet and hands chained to the bed of the vehicle. As uncomfortable as the ride might have been, he nevertheless drank in the trip’s impressions like a parched traveler coming upon a stream. Even the air, choked with grit and exhaust, felt to him like a refreshing breeze after endless days of the stale, dank atmosphere of his subterranean cell. The sounds of life, distant and nearly drowned out by the truck’s engine and spinning wheels, were to him like the warbling of a songbird announcing a long winter’s end.
When the truck stopped, Amir’s chains were released and he was pulled from the truck, his hood removed, and his clothing cut off with scissors and razors by the guards who had accompanied him from the prison. It was daytime, and though he stood in an empty airplane hanger and was shielded from the sun’s glare, the light from the open entrance was enough to blind his eyes. It had been months since he’d last seen the light of day. His eyes squinted as he took in the scene.
A group of hooded men stood to the side, chatting among themselves. Nearby, talking with another man dressed in civilian clothes, was his interrogator of the past few months, the one he’d come to know as “the gray-haired man.” Neither of the men appeared happy in their conversation, his interrogator lifting his hands in what seemed a dismissive gesture of both the prisoner and the person with whom he was speaking. The other man was clearly a westerner, dressed very much in American style. His demeanor and the way he held himself seemed to confirm this. Amir felt a surge of hope, despite himself.
“Disappointing, very disappointing,” the American said as he took the file from the gray-haired man who held it out to him. “It’s basically nothing more than a rehash of what we already had.”
“I told you, my friend, you could come and ask the questions yourself anytime you wanted if you thought you could do the job better,” the gray-haired man responded.
The American replied silently with a sardonic look. The operative words were “plausible deniability”; his foreign colleague knew that as well as he did. If the American official didn’t actually see what went on in the prison, then he was free to believe the promise that everything had been handled according to international standards. After all, nothing in the conventions prohibited a wink, a nod, and a turn of the head in the other direction.
“Anyway, you have him now,” the gray-haired man said in conclusion. “You can see for yourself. There is no more juice to be squeezed from this lemon. It is dry. Worth nothing, I’m afraid.”
The American agent sighed and shook his head. Just another day at the office, his look spoke. He turned to one of the men standing ready and signaled him toward the prisoner. Two of the hooded men walked over to Amir and escorted him onto the plane.
Although he had known better than to allow himself the illusion of hope, Amir hadn’t been able to keep its presence from arising and taking hold of his thoughts. Despite the intensity of his experience, he was still a novice at the game, the learning curve of a prisoner not so simple as most might think.
On his newest journey, Amir succumbed to hope’s emotion not once, but twice. Its first arising had been dashed by the time he arrived at his new destination: a place of dark, dank passageways and crumbling walls, a gloomy, third-world prison that would have served a filmmaker as a perfect setting of despair. He had not been transferred back home to the United States. When he saw American soldiers, though, hope sprang up within him like a dog greeting its master’s return. Amir had no more power to stop his involuntary reaction than the animal had to curb the spontaneous wagging of its tail.
The second collapse came not by the visual but by the purely physical, when Amir attempted a sputtering greeting, to speak his relief and implore his countrymen’s help. In response, the soldier nearest him stepped forward and swung his open palm across Amir’s cheek, the stinging slap striking away Amir�
�s words just as emphatically as it did the look of hope written on his face. Tears began streaking down Amir’s cheeks, and after recovering from the shock of the blow, he cried out that he was an American, the physical pain nothing compared to his emotion’s despair. A second soldier responded by grabbing Amir’s shirt and then repeatedly slamming him into the wall. Spitting in Amir’s face, he shouted at him that they knew all about him, knew that he was a traitor to the country that had taken him in, saved and sheltered him, and that he, Amir, had responded to their compassion with treason.
“So don’t fucking tell me you’re an American,” the soldier yelled, slamming Amir’s head against the concrete one more time for emphasis. “You ain’t one of us, motherfucker.”
After a time, the bleeding from his face and head congealed and dried, the surrounding hair matting into a hardened clump. Amir’s new cell was bigger than the previous one, though not by much. The air was as damp and cold, and his body shivered. His thoughts were confused and disoriented, and it took him a few seconds to realize that, wherever he was, it was in a colder climate.
The memory of sunlight lay like the thread of a dream, the touch of a loving hand, a sensation of beauty too painful to recall. Those images belonged to a world that was no longer his to enjoy. Like Alice in Wonderland, he’d somehow fallen into a hole leading to a hidden realm, though not a surreal journey upon a brightly colored path, but a place of terror along a dark road of despair. He wasn’t shocked at the netherworld’s existence, only that he had fallen into it for a second time in his life. It was, he knew, a place much closer to the surface of things than most would care to believe.
The emotional dejection Amir felt at the hands of the soldiers was far more painful to him than his physical suffering. He hadn’t cried out that he was an American in attempt to proclaim his innocence. In fact, he was no longer sure that he was completely free of guilt.
Had he crossed over the line somewhere along the way, heedless or indifferent to its existence? He had felt driven to help those who suffered as he had, yet he knew that, as with the soldiers that hit him, there had been anger within him as well. The other prisoners in his previous place of incarceration often whispered their wrath against the Americans, swearing to revenge themselves against their tormentors, in order to bolster their spirits and persevere, but Amir found himself unable to summon those emotions. Something within him understood that the marriage of anger and vengeance could beget only more hate and suffering.
There were those among the prisoners who sought no other way of life but that. These men were misanthropes at heart—tyrannous, nihilistic people who could speak only of death and violence and sought to herd the other prisoners’ thoughts into places of dark and oppressive beliefs. A number of his fellow prisoners, however, if they were enemies of the United States, were ones of more benign nature who had never taken up arms against the invading forces. Since their imprisonment, however, many of them had become radicalized and were now more inclined to follow in a violent path.
The prisoner held in the cell next to his had owned a small electronics business in Kabul. He called himself Abdul Raouf, and he had lived in London for a number of years prior to returning to his homeland. He had been secretly turned over to NATO forces by a former business associate, who claimed Abdul had supplied the Taliban with communication devices. He and the associate had been in a longstanding dispute over a debt. “Of course I gave the Taliban what they wanted,” Abdul had whispered during a lull in the guards’ watch. “If I hadn’t, they would have killed me and taken what they wanted anyway.”
Though Amir had once hoped of eventually escaping his ordeal, he no longer had any illusions that his keepers might come to understand he wasn’t their enemy. And even if one of his captors sensed the truth, they could do little or nothing to help. They were as much subject to the force that dictated his captivity as he was. The faces of his current guards blurred into those of the men who long ago had burst into his home and descended upon his family in Bosnia. There had been no sign of any pity, no less compassion, in the eyes of the men who had set upon him and his mother, father, and sister. The psychosis that had ignited their blood lust, that dismissed the individuality of their victims, had at the same time consumed their own individuality along with it. Any conscience they might have had to question their acts was lost to the greater cause. There was no “I” in the affliction of any harm done to “her” or “him,” but rather it was the “us” doing unto “them.” Self was abdicated to the mind of a communal consciousness, one that made no fine distinctions of identity outside the circle it drew around itself. It was a line meant to enclose those within its bounds, close off those on the outside, and redefine the laws of civilization accordingly.
Some of the jailors were better than others. Some participated in his suffering only when they were called upon to do so. Others, though, clearly engaged in it for their own pleasure and amusement. If the conditions of war changed certain people’s natural moral inclinations, such that they would act in ways they ordinarily might find abhorrent, there were others who found their way to war because, within its rules, they could find safe haven for their natural predilections without fear of law or punishment. It was a realm where sociopath and good citizen could mix in common purpose.
Amir sometimes wished he could find it in himself to rail at the injustice of his imprisonment, if not externally, then at least internally. It wasn’t, however, the futility of it that kept him from trying. Rather, he had been overtaken by an overwhelming sense of sadness, one whose source he was unable to place solely on the fact of his imprisonment and separation from Jadranka and his family. Over the months of being locked in small, dank spaces, shut off from the world of people and light, he had come to understand that the greatest challenge facing him wasn’t enduring the physical and psychological abuse his captors inflicted upon him. The abuse was by no means easy to handle, but after a time the purposefully erratic nature of its delivery, designed to disorient him, became a kind of norm. The physical pain took on characteristics of chronic suffering brought on by a disease, such as an arthritic person learning to live with joint pain or a cancer patient coping with the ordeal of chemotherapy treatments.
No, what most challenged Amir was the sense of hopelessness that lived within him, that had entered him like a virulent infection on that last day of his life with his birth family in Bosnia. His imprisonment made an easy pathway for hopelessness to reenter into the seat of his emotions, its false view of life painting a bleak and futile future, a malarial swamp of negativity and poisonous hate. It was not the way his father and mother would have wanted him to live. Asaf would have wished more strength from him than to succumb to the hopelessness that fed evil’s purpose. Nor would Jadranka find pride in his giving up, in allowing his silence to once again become nothing more than a rabbit’s hole from which to hide from the world. Margaret, who had taken him in, who loved him as her own, deserved more from him than that.
Amir forced himself to think of these things every time hopelessness arose and tried to take over his being, leaving him awash in sadness and despair. When he felt he could bear no more, he thought of the people who loved him, those whose hope for him would be life, not death of either body or spirit. With their image in mind, he would struggle back, force the despair from his heart and mind. He would survive. He would somehow overcome his ordeal and return to those he loved. In the dark, solitary confinement of his cell, when despondency came inching forward into his thoughts, he made movies in his mind, shooting scenes of his loved ones, brief remembrances of home, of school, of going out to get an ice cream, of walking in the woods, of looking into the sky to the bright hope of a sunny day or to the mystery of a starry night. He scripted easy, sweet dialogues, linking the scenes into a documentary of normalcy, a life he might someday live again. The fantasies helped him get through the days—or perhaps they were the nights, he had no way of knowing which—as they blended one into the other in slow, torturou
s progression.
Chapter 33
If Amir had been disheartened by the animosity of the greeting shown him by his new keepers, he expected that at least the physical tortures he’d undergone at the previous prison would abate in this new one under direct American control. In this, he was only partially correct. There was, it was true, an abeyance of the more overt physical treatments. Yet he found that the psychological and emotional tortures practiced were in many ways more difficult to handle than the physical abuse his previous jailors had inflicted upon his body.
Amir had no reason not to believe the new guards’ taunts that they could do to him what they wanted to because he was no longer an American, in fact, never had been. His citizenship, they had told him, was stripped back to the moment it had been awarded, nullifying any claim he’d ever had to its protection. They laughed when he cringed in terror at the snarling dogs let within inches of his naked body, and though they never struck him with closed fists, open-handed slaps seemed to be within the guidelines of their rules.
The interrogations began two days after his arrival. That they were having another go at him surprised Amir. He had already been conquered, had signed whatever paper they’d put in front of him, had told them whatever they wanted to hear. It should have been apparent that he hadn’t anything of use for them. Amir couldn’t understand why they would go on asking questions he couldn’t answer, continue to fracture him into ever-smaller slivers of self in search of what clearly wasn’t there.
The Solace of Trees Page 32