His new interrogators asked the same questions as had all the others. Amir explained to them that he wasn’t in fact a computer expert on Internet technologies, that he was a student filmmaker and hadn’t been aware that the groups Zakariyya Ashrawi had been working with had been designated as terrorist organizations. Yes, he had sympathy for the Palestinian people. Yes, he had wanted to do something to help them. No he didn’t hate the Israelis, didn’t wish to see them harmed or killed.
As in previous interrogations, he started out by telling the truth. When his jailors asked him questions whose answers were not to their liking, they declared that he was lying. But unlike what he’d done in his previous interrogations in the other prisons—waiting until he could tell by the interrogators’ accusations what it was they wanted to hear and answering accordingly—Amir began to challenge their assertions. He told them he would no longer sign any papers or acquiesce to their portrayal of him as a willing supporter of terrorist causes, a tech expert who was helping the enemy with their war of propaganda and secret web of communications.
A week after his arrival he once again found himself shackled to the ceiling of a room, his clothing stripped from his body. This time there were no electric probes, no striking of his body with a length of electric cable. Instead his interrogators shouted at him, kept him from sleep, and played music at a volume whose decibels were ear shattering. They doused him with water so that his body began to shiver in the damp cold of the cell.
One of the soldiers questioning him, the one called Berger, finally said that it was late, he was tired and wanted to eat dinner. His partner, Wallace, suggested they let nature do their job for them.
“I don’t know,” Berger responded. “Let’s just go eat and come back. It’s late. The temp’s dropped.”
“What the fuck, man,” Wallace replied. “Who gives a shit? He can turn into a freakin’ popsicle for I all care. C’mon, don’t be a wuss.”
“Whatever,” Berger said, his tone of voice sounding unconvinced.
The two soldiers released Amir’s chains from the ceiling and led him outside into a small, barren courtyard, where they secured his shackles to two iron rings bolted into a wall. Wallace poured one last bucket of water over Amir’s head, and the two men left for the mess hall.
The temperature outside hovered just above 45 degrees Fahrenheit, and though the guards who walked the perimeter of the compound were comfortable enough without gloves or heavy winter coat, Amir’s naked body began to tremble. To distract himself from his physical discomfort, he forced himself to look up into the evening sky. After a time, he became mesmerized by the stars’ glittering light. It had been months since he had been able to gaze into the heavens, and he was amazed by its beauty. Colored by the deepest of blacks, the clear, moonless evening sky reminded him of his childhood home high in the mountains of Bosnia. There, the starlight sparkled through the thin, crisp air unimpeded by illumination of city or town, and he could look upward and feel its touch upon him like the waves of a calm ocean gently lapping at his feet.
Amir’s reverie was interrupted by the sudden and uncontrollable shivering of his entire body. He attempted to move in an effort to warm himself, though he was hindered by his chains, which were bound tight to the wall. He tried to hop up and down in place, but his movements were uncoordinated and caused him to pull painfully against his restraints. He felt weak and fatigued. He tried to speak, just to hear himself talk, so that he might gauge whether he was dreaming or awake. Amir heard his words exit his mouth in lazy, slurred monotone, as if spoken in an inebriated babble. His eyes scanned the courtyard with a weak sweep of his head.
The ground in the courtyard was barren, its earth compacted and lifeless. The only thing growing upon it was a scrawny, leafless tree, and even it seemed dead. But as Amir stared at its stunted growth, he began to see it bloom and grow. His body had stopped shivering, and his breathing slowed until it was nearly as still as the air about him. Amir felt his chains give way, as though they had been nothing more than a hologram of their material self and as easily shed as shade by stepping into sunlight. He walked over to the tree and touched its bark—he felt the pulse of its life beating in rhythm to that of his own. He reached up to its lowest branch and effortlessly pulled himself up, as though his body had been freed of its weight and thought alone allowed its movement. He began to climb, and as he moved among its branches the tree grew taller, so that it seemed he might never reach its end. Yet he was glad for the journey and had no wish for it to stop.
After some moments, Amir realized he had reached the tree’s highest branches, where it seemed his view was endless. Looking out upon the world, he smiled. Its beauty was stunning. His gaze turned downward to look upon nature’s wonders: hills and mountains, streams and rivers, fields and forest floor. His eyes drew closer focus and bore down on the landscape. There was movement in the trees and grass, among the bushes, and in the streams. Deer and squirrels, birds and fish, crickets and bees, ants and insects wandered about. It was endless life. The sound of it all came together in chorus…a song that hummed through the air like wind through the trees. The earth teemed with living things, and it was amazing to behold.
He suddenly found himself on the ground again, and the image of a life form suddenly came to his mind, one he realized had been missing from his view from above—that of his own kind. At first there was only the vision of bodies beginning to appear in nebulous form, their faces too indistinct to clearly discern. Then, as though a breeze shifted the air free of a fog, the features of the faceless people began to reveal themselves, causing Amir to smile. In front of him stood his father and mother, Asaf and Emina. Next to them was his sister, Minka. Their eyes were happy and filled with love for him. Coming up behind them was Margaret, and then came Jadranka, who caught his eyes and held them, pouring her love into him with a joyous laugh.
He could see that in the background were yet more eyes looking on. The faces appeared in a patchwork of differing shades of light, some brighter and clearer, others darker and more obscure. Yet the visage of each seemed caught and frozen upon them, as if framed in still photo. He paid little attention to their features but, rather, was drawn to the light that emanated more strongly from the few who, spotted about here and there, helped illuminate the whole.
Amir woke with a start, the vision still lingering in his mind. Lifting his head, he looked around the empty, lifeless courtyard. After a few moments, his gaze lowered and he saw that he was naked. He wondered why he should be without clothing but soon let the question go. He tried to move his arms but found he couldn’t; his body was rigid.
Raising his head with difficulty, he looked at the singular, stunted tree clinging to life in the center of the lonely courtyard. Closing his eyes, Amir wished only to sleep, to dream of his family and leave that place of sorrow. He saw Margaret’s face. It was filled with love yet lined with worry. Had he disappointed her? He was so sorry to have caused her anxiety and pain. Asaf appeared in his vision and looked at him silently. His father’s eyes told him to be strong. Amir heard his father’s message as if it had been spoken out loud. One part of him struggled to persevere, but another wanted nothing more than to let sleep carry him away. A noise that sounded like the flutter of wings interrupted his father’s exhortation. It started out like a distant and soft vibration but soon grew in volume and intensity: at first like the wings of a bird hovering by his ear…and then like a moth trapped within the recess of his inner ear, beating wildly to free itself from the walls of its prison. The sound turned to a drone before changing to a distant hum of consonance, as though emanating from a chant or prayer. His father’s face began to fade from view, and Amir’s eyes were drawn inward to a blank screen. There was now only a mist of gray light, the sound drawing him deep into a darkness where he found a silence of extraordinary proportion. And in that precarious moment, when the final sleep called out to him to venture forth into it, the surge of a force, primordial and grown from love, from hope
, from all the good he had found in life, awakened in his chest. And his heart, which had slowed, reinvigorated, expanding and contracting in urgent, determined movement, pumping and pushing his blood along the pathways of life.
The chains that held him to the wall fell from his wrists. Amir fought the return of the hallucinations, knowing he wouldn’t have the strength to come back from them again. As hands took hold of him, took control of his body, he was confused. It took some seconds for him to realize that his body being freed from its restraints wasn’t an illusion this time but was an act taking place in real time. Along with the hands taking his body, there were also voices, people speaking words, people who existed not as figments of his imagination, but were real, corporeal, and present.
“Jesus. Fuck,” Berger muttered, bending down to take a pulse after having released the detainee from his shackles and lain him on the ground.
“Is he alive?” Wallace asked.
“I don’t know,” Berger replied, shaking his head. “I don’t have a pulse. Call a medic. Tell them it’s an emergency, get ‘em here quick. I’ll get a blanket. Shit…”
Berger was wrapping a blanket around the detainee when the medic arrived from the compound’s sick bay. PFC Scooter Landon bent down over Amir, searching for a pulse. “What’s the deal here?” he asked, although, taking in the shackles lying next to the naked detainee, he had a good idea of the reason for which he’d been called.
“Fucked up,” Wallace shrugged. “Left him out a little too long.”
Scooter Landon raised his eyes from the prone patient to the two soldiers. His look was hard as he met Wallace’s eyes. The medic held Wallace’s gaze and then looked to Berger, not even a single blink of his eyelids, as they spoke an accusation stronger than any word could muster. Berger felt queasy. Wallace covered his guilt with a macho uncaring, which a second later turned to anger—a fuck-you, who-gives-a-shit, silent retort.
“Go get a stretcher,” Scooter said pointedly in Wallace’s direction. The medic had found a weak pulse, but he wasn’t hopeful.
Later, when Berger went to the sick bay to check on the detainee, Scooter Landon told him the kid had come as close to death as you could get and still come back whole. Berger took the news with an appearance of more self-possession than he really felt. Wallace had been worried that the event would be reported. Everyone knew, though, there wouldn’t be any serious repercussions even if the incident were written up—even if, in the worst case, the detainee didn’t pull through. Still, it would be a pain: a likely transfer to another base, a negative on the record that might slow down a future promotion. But this wasn’t what had bothered Berger and had caused him to check on the detainee. It wasn’t even Scooter Landon’s look at seeing what he and Wallace had done to their prisoner. The medic’s gaze had been but a mirror, one Berger had already been looking into of late.
The reproof he’d seen in Landon’s eyes had meant something. It had focused the self-questioning Berger had been experiencing these last few weeks leading up to the end of his tour and his return home. There wasn’t anyone he held in more esteem than Landon. The young medic had proved his mettle on the battlefield more than once. He had run through enemy rifle fire and mortars, taken a piece of shrapnel in his back, and saved two men who’d been caught in a crossfire. He had refused to be evacuated until the engagement was over. Scooter was a southern boy who took his religion seriously. As far as he was concerned, the golden rule applied to everyone, not just the chosen few.
It was just this that had been eating away at Berger lately. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” had turned into something altogether different. “Do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you” had become the twisted maxim Berger now lived by. Who had he become? He’d nearly killed the kid, not for any purpose, not for intel that would make a difference, but simply because he didn’t care anymore. His view of humanity had been altered. The people he’d been willing to risk his life for, had flown halfway around the world to liberate, he now saw as insects, as lice-ridden, feral dogs, as well put out of their misery as left alive—a discretionary toss-up.
He had enlisted to make a difference, to stop the killing, not to become one of the killers. Yes, there had been some pride in it, some ego, something to show off to the world. He would be a warrior, a patriot. But he hadn’t signed on to this war just to become like one of the bad guys. Would this war even make a difference? Would they rid the world of these terrorists, or would the terrorists just return, like cockroaches in the night, after the allied forces pulled out? Would it be like Vietnam, where fifty thousand lives and a few decades later the US was trading with the very enemy they’d said would deliver all of Asia into Communist ruin?
When Amir had been released from the sick bay and returned to his cell, there’d been nothing said about his nearly having died. The guards had given him an extra blanket—that was all. But Amir didn’t need anyone to tell him how close he’d been to death. He’d felt his near passage into oblivion, the journey into the void.
Since the event in the courtyard, there hadn’t been any more interrogations. The guards came by to check on him and to deliver meals, but nothing more. There had been no apologies, nothing said. The guards didn’t talk to him. In a bizarre way, Amir felt himself missing their verbal abuse during the interrogations. It had at least been some form of human contact. The two soldiers who had left him out in the cold rotated in and out with the other guards in shifts that could be four hours or fourteen…he had no way of knowing. Time as he’d once known it, measured and ordered in a linear sequence, had disappeared.
Berger was on his very last shift before beginning his journey home, his tour completed. He was returning to Boston. Amir heard the other guards talking with him in the passageway, congratulating him, joking, giving the departing soldier a comradely hard time about leaving them behind. Amir listened intently, as one might listen to a compelling story on a radio show, the opportunity to hear another human voice a rare occurrence for the prisoners held in isolation.
Amir could hear cell doors opening and closing. After some minutes, the hinges of his own door sounded their awakening, and he saw Berger looking in. Amir was in the corner, his head looking out from the blankets that covered him, the cold from the hypothermia feeling as though it still lingered within, there to stay. Normally, the door would have closed soon after it opened, the guard having seen that things were in order, the detainee not having hung himself with his blanket or with torn strips of clothing, his food eaten, no hunger strike requiring intervention. But Berger paused, and in the moment’s lull Amir could see that another door had opened, this one not of physical manifestation. Why Berger lingered, Amir had no idea, but in the measure of those few seconds, the time it took to inhale a single breath, Amir found himself speaking. The words came from his mouth as if of their own accord, without thought to the punishments that would likely follow.
“You’re going to Boston,” Amir said.
Berger’s face blinked a brief surprise and then went hard. The music had been turned off; the slip of the guards’ conversation had been overheard by the detainee. Amir could see the response in Berger’s eyes, its message intense and angry. A physical blow, confiscation of his blankets, a reactivation of the interrogations—any or all of those things were the likely result if a prisoner dared so personal a remark to one of the guards.
“My sister lives in Cambridge,” Amir continued. “Her name is Alice Morgan. She’s a doctor.” Amir went silent then, but he didn’t cower.
The soldier’s lips parted, as though he might spit out something in derision. His shoulders shifted as if turning back in the direction from which he had come. But his body held in silent deliberation a moment longer. He detected no plea in his prisoner’s words. Neither was there challenge, falsehood, or attempt to play on his sympathy or guilt. The kid had dealt the only thing left him: his dignity. Berger knew the young detainee had been “disappeared” and that no one knew
where he was or what had really happened to him. Berger knew that Amir had been removed from life as if he were dead, to live in a limbo of justice, a purgatory of righteous vengeance—his family left to wonder whether he was alive or his bones lay scattered and sun-bleached on desert sands or buried in some hidden, godforsaken hole.
Berger observed the detainee without prejudice, a calm finding him between the push and pull of opposing forces within. He’d been staring into the mirror too much lately. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t what soldiers were meant to do. In his own reflection, he could see others. He could see the boy huddled in the corner of the cell. He could see his own eyes looking back from the kid’s face.
“No promises,” Berger said.
“No promises,” Amir acknowledged, his eyes holding the moment.
Berger nodded once, turned, and pulled the door closed behind him, the clang of metal echoing in the room. For Amir its sound was not one of finality, but rather one of hope, its reverberation a prayer for the future, for all of those who believed that, one day, humanity would fulfill the promise of its great privilege.
A Conversation with Robert Madrygin, author of
THE SOLACE OF TREES
Due to your father’s military career, you traveled throughout your childhood, living both in the United States and abroad. Much of your adulthood has been spent internationally as well. What did this experience bring to you in writing of a child fleeing war?
One of the things you learn early on as a kid moving from home to home and culture to culture is that there is an underlying commonality between all people that gives lie to stereotypes of race and culture. A child is still a child, whether from the US or from Bosnia. This is the simplest, clearest example of our shared humanity. Horrific acts visited upon people in far-off lands are, in truth, not such distant happenings at all. The physical world itself hasn’t shrunk, it is the same size it has always been, but the boundaries between the societies and cultures that mark our human presence on the planet have diminished in an extraordinary way. In this sense, the book isn’t just about a child from a foreign land, but it is the story of a boy who could as well be living next door. This is, in fact, a scenario that occurs in the story when the main character, Amir, is relocated to the US and in effect becomes the boy next door.
The Solace of Trees Page 33