Days of Fear

by Daniele Mastrogiacomo

  Sunday, March 18. The entire day passes without a single verbal exchange. Maulvi and the gang of jailors respect this mourning ritual we are observing, but they’re worried. The idea that we might fall ill, or perhaps even fall into depression and let ourselves go, troubles them. If we die it would mean a whole load of trouble for them, too. This idea has begun to tease our tired minds. We want revenge, we want to make things difficult for them. The only weapon we have is rebellion, to no longer play the role of submissive hostages, to begin a hunger strike.

  In the afternoon, the executioner arrives and mimes some stretching exercises, inviting me to get some exercise. I need to move; my leg muscles are weak and atrophied. I accept his invitation, but without much enthusiasm. I’m worried above all about Ajmal, who has finally emerged from the cell. His breathing has become labored, he holds his right hand against his heart, and his face is pallid. I ask him if he feels OK. He tells me, his voice weak, that he’s having palpitations. He leans against the wall, his legs fold beneath him, and he slides slowly onto the ground. I lift him up and tell him to walk, holding him up. I try to distract him, telling him he must do a little exercise to help his circulation. Fear, tension, the questions to which we must always give a measured response, the presumed or real secrets that we must be careful not to reveal, the effort needed to provide information that may or may not prove decisive, all these things have worn away what little strength we have left.

  Ajmal is agitated. In an urgent, strained whisper that conveys both enthusiasm and alarm he says: “I’ve discovered in­credible things. Now I know who the Taliban are, how they’re organized, how they move, where they live, where their bases are. I have listened to everything that our jailors have said.” Now I am alarmed, too. Ajmal could turn out to be a very inopportune witness. I ask him what he has discovered. I’m worried, very worried. He shakes his head: “Not now, I’ll tell you later.” Then, with a smile that is supposed to instill hope and courage, he says: “I’ll tell you everything when we get back home.” I insist: “I should know, too. I need to understand. We’re in the same boat and that boat is threatening to sink. It’s no longer a question of keeping your sources and their secrets to yourself. We have to keep studying our adversaries, develop a joint strategy. We have to stay unified. If they manage to separate us, to turn us against each other, it’s over.”

  In our new prison we sleep very little and poorly. We hear the squeaking of mice beneath the mountain of tools and sacks. When night falls and the room is in complete darkness they become brave and draw near. I feel their feet on my face and swat them away with little or only temporary effect. As if it were the most normal thing in the world, Ajmal tells me that the mice are running all over his body. “I cover myself well, feet and head included,” he explains. “And I let them do whatever they want. After a while, they go away.” I can’t do it. I cannot sleep knowing that rodents are free to frolic over my body. The injury on my head is healing, the wound has closed, but sections of the scab covering it fall away regularly leaving traces of fresh blood that attract the mice. The idea of waking up to mice licking or perhaps gnawing at the gash in my head terrifies me.

  Maulvi hasn’t been seen since he left with the information about my family’s wolves. The persistent and threatening request that I make a telephone call in order to avoid having my throat cut has been left in limbo. This waiting makes me nervous and Ajmal, with his hermitic silence, doesn’t help. The mullah returns right before sunset. He has brought us a small battery-powered table lamp, which we will use to keep the mice at bay, pointing the beam of light at the mountain of tools and buckets. Later, he bursts into our cell and shakes us from the sleep into which we had finally, mercifully, fallen and picks up the subject of the telephone call where he left off. He orders me to call an “important” person.

  I reflect for a minute, trying to think of someone who might be able to unblock the stalemate: Prodi, D’Alema, my wife Luisella, the newspaper. I point out that it’s Sunday, a day of rest in the western world; it will be difficult to find somebody, offices are closed, even the editorial offices of the newspaper stay closed until three in the afternoon on Sundays. Isolated from the rest of the world, I cannot even imagine the exceptional mobilization of people and resources that our situation has provoked. I don’t have my address book and because of the new technologies to which we are all slaves, I don’t remember numbers that should be familiar to me. All my important numbers are contained among the contacts on my cell phone, I explain. “You have it,” I remind the mullah. “You took it from me when I was abducted.”

  This is the word I use, abducted, and I repeat it, making sure my message gets through. The idea that they arrested us is a banal and absurd excuse that no longer has any basis. Even the Taliban leaders, who so carefully maintain their image of freedom fighters no longer accuse us of espionage. Ours is a classic kidnapping. We are nothing but merchandise to be traded and it is this trade, which by now has been decided almost down to the last details, that’s making our jailors skittish.

  Maulvi hands me the satellite telephone, something he has never done before—a gesture that demonstrates precisely how little time we have left. In large part our destiny hangs on this telephone call. The mullah is furious, his face and eyes brimming with pure hate. If he were entrusted with the chore of killing me, he’d do it without a second thought, and he would do it willingly. “Tell them that your ambassador in Afghanistan has to move,” he commands me, his face hard and uncompromising. “If he doesn’t put some pressure on Karzai’s government I will slay you, and you know how. Do you understand?”

  I remain silent, my throat dry. I swallow with difficulty. Death, by now, has become an obsession. I imagine the scene all over again: my severed head, my body, decapitated, left to rot in some godforsaken place. I see it all dozens of times. I hold tight to the hope, the only one I have, that I will be able to buy time with further telephone calls. I will call hundreds of people, thousands of numbers. I’ll call everyone, anyone. We must attempt to save ourselves at any cost.

  I take the phone from him, my hand trembling. Think, I tell myself. Who do I call? First, I phone my wife, at home, as if it were an ordinary call on an ordinary day. Nobody picks up the call. The answering machine clicks on and I hang up annoyed. “She’s always out,” I say. I try the hotel we own, which is managed by my brother Alessandro. The receptionist answers and when I ask for my brother she tells me that he’s not in. I fling a silent curse, then raise my eyes to heaven and ask God, to whom I have been clinging ever tighter, to forgive me. I’m getting nervous, impatient; I fear that I won’t be able to get through to anyone. But I try again. I call the newspaper. The telephone operator answers, and immediately puts me through to someone. I’m surprised that there are people at work this early on a Sunday morning. I haven’t the slightest notion that my imprisonment has provoked an incredible battle that my colleagues and friends at the newspaper are waging incessantly. Later, I will have occasion to learn more about this battle and to appreciate just how exceptional these colleagues and friends are.

  Somebody answers. I don’t even give him the time to identify himself. I start in on him immediately, my voice determined. “Listen to me. You have to call the Italian ambassador in Kabul and tell him to do everything possible to move the negotiations forward. I’m not exactly sure what the problem is, but the Taliban are not going to wait: we have one day left, then they kill us. Do you understand?” I roar, angry. On the other end of the phone I hear a weak voice asking me, “But how are you?” “Don’t worry about that. Call now.” I hang up. Maulvi has already snatched the telephone from my hands and is nodding, satisfied. Only after I have been released and have returned to Rome, will I learn that the voice on the other end of the line belongs to the managing editor, Angelo Aquaro. He kept the sheet of paper on which he wrote down my instructions and gave it to me upon my return. He confessed that he was shocked by my call. The stress and tension had been growing steadily over the
fifteen days of my captivity, involving an increasing number of people and my call had arrived at the height of it.

  Night falls. It is time for prayers and another dish of potatoes in sauce that I can’t even touch. Right then, news of our fifteenth transfer arrives. The Taliban keeping watch over us have been showing signs of both remorse and fresh concerns. Fragments of sentences, words in Pashto that I have learned to recognize . . . there is talk of a blitz. The idea alone is enough to terrify me. I’m against any kind of armed intervention in cases of kidnapping: the hostages always get caught in the middle. These men do not think twice about murdering or being murdered. For them death is synonymous with liberation, not mourning. They spend this mere flicker of earthly life waiting to die in battle and ascend to paradise—their reward for having participated in a jihad in Allah’s name.

  And yet the risk of a raid carried out by the special forces of some nation or another—perhaps British, for Her Majesty’s armed forces have long been active in this remote province of southern Afghanistan—inspires prudence in our warders. As soon as darkness covers the opium poppy fields we are on the move again. There are two vehicles in our convoy, the Toyota station wagon and Haji Lalai’s pickup. Four armed men join our group. One of them is older, around thirty. Our hands are bound again, mine in chains. We get up into the pickup’s cargo bed and head down a dirt road that runs alongside the two principal irrigation channels.

  As usual, the stereo plays strains of Taliban songs. The voices and the melodies are infantile, sentimental. Two tears fall down my face, signs of desperation. I am going to die, I say over and over again. I’m not going to get out of this alive. I think about my wife and kids, who are grown by now, but who remain, in my mind, defenseless babes to whom I have never given enough. They will be even more fragile and vulnerable following my death. I rebel in the presence of these thoughts and with all the strength left to me, all the accumulated weight of my desperation, I make a proposition to the commandant: if I must die, I want to die fighting.

  My request is serious, and I expect a serious reply. He laughs and in English, a language he knows well but pretends to have difficulties with, he says: “You will return home. You will see your wife again and your children.” I swear to myself that I will not let them cut my throat; I will revolt and they will have to shoot me. I will not give them the satisfaction, and when I see that terrible moment approaching, I will escape. I will be killed by a blast of machine-gun fire, maybe even shot in the back. They will be shocked and they will not be able to immortalize the scene that they are so looking forward to with their video camera.

  The convoy stops in the middle of nowhere. There is an intersection a hundred meters away. The commandant and his second in command get out of the truck and walk away from us. Once they have gone a certain distance they stop to talk with a man who apparently has been waiting for them. We remain where we are, in the middle of the road, the silence broken only by the croaking of frogs. The air is humid, heavy. The three men walk back together towards the truck and point a small flashlight in my face. The beam of light passes from my face to that of Ajmal’s and then back to mine. The new man has a limp. His face is covered by a light blue patu. He pulls it away from his face: long, messy black hair sticks out from the bottom of his turban. He has a bristly beard. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t speak. But he keeps staring at me. I only need to see his eyes to recognize him, for I have studied his photos for hours: it’s Mullah Dadullah, the real commander, the architect of our abduction, the rebel, the ruthless leader that we were supposed to interview, as many had before us, less than three weeks back.

  My heart skips a beat. Anger, not fear, swells in me. Rage at the plot against us, the trap into which we fell, planned and effectuated by someone who stays in the shadows and plays with our lives, pursuing objectives that we don’t know, that we cannot even begin to imagine. Something too big for us, in­significant hostages struggling for our lives.

  “Thank, thank you,” says the leader, extending a hand that I cannot bring myself to shake. Thanks for what, I really do not know.

  My blood boils. I interpret those words as yet another provocation aimed at bringing about my complete psychological collapse, another attempt to get a reaction out of me that would furnish them with an excuse to humiliate and hurt me further. My smile, which is closer to a sneer, is nothing if not a suppressed roar. I fill his face with insults and curses that echo inside my drained, exhausted body.

  Dadullah even tries to be funny, adding: “In the end, you have obtained much more than an interview. You have seen how we live and how we think. Do you think yourself capable of telling the truth about us? You journalists never do.” I don’t reply to this further provocation. His presence alarms me: I’m convinced that we’re on the verge of some kind of turning point. Ajmal is mute, his head hung. He raised his eyes for an instant, enough time to reach out and greet the mullah with the same deference he shows everyone. Nothing more than good manners on his part, certainly not fondness. He’s already understood whose company we’re in and the discovery is like a cold shower. We have been used, sold out, mocked, fooled. It fills us with bitterness and makes us feel impotent, almost ridiculous.

  Just as swiftly as he appeared, Mullah Dadullah vanishes in the maze of paths that cut through the fields of opium poppies, and is swallowed by the dark night. But before leaving us, he turns to me and adds in a voice that is almost a growl: “You owe your life to our supreme commander. It was Mullah Mohammed Omar himself who suspended your death sentence. He decided not to have your head cut off.” Ajmal is paralyzed by fear. We both are. His voice, as he translates, is barely audible. I think I understand what he said, but I ask for confirmation: “He’s talking about Mullah Omar?” My interpreter nods, his head lowered, his chin almost touching his chest and his hands tied behind his back. I reflect on this latest revelation while my heart beats hard. I wonder if this might be the latest in a long line of lies. If not, if it is the truth, then I have been had another reprieve. The damned knife that appears in my dreams every night is still in its sheath. But I have no way of knowing how long it will stay there.

  There is still a long stretch of road to travel, over bumps and small bridges, past dykes, clusters of houses, and workshops built with sheet metal, small villages of tents and huts made of straw, brushwood, and cardboard dotted along the edge of the desert, down paths that cut through the fields of opium poppies and lead God knows where. Everything is cloaked in darkness, submerged in the night. Electricity has not made it this far, not yet at least, although the Taliban do not suffer because of it. Their world remains shackled to the past. They dream of a society that follows in the footsteps of Mohammed, a great emirate that embraces the entire planet; an immense oasis of peace ruled by the sacred Book, the only one that can save humanity, they repeat often, and reward every pious man with Paradise.

  Around me I see only poverty, dust, dirt, and very few women, all of whom are covered in long black tunics. They move quickly down the village streets, as close as possible to the outside walls of the houses and buildings. I see children, boys, and men preparing for the opium harvest armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers.

  We stop in front of a large country house surrounded by high whitewashed walls. The entrance is nothing but a small narrow door, so low that one must bend down to enter. We pass through the door and emerge into a garden in full bloom. There is a tool shed, a stall, a pen and a central structure made up of two large rooms. There is a crowd here, maybe thirty people. Our jailors have been joined by twenty or so Taliban from other parts of the province. They’re all armed. Their control over us has been tightened once more.

  Ajmal is completely closed within himself. He has difficulty translating what our captors say. He tells me that his head hurts so much that it feels like it’s going to burst: he has gathered so much information, memorized thousands of details, discovered a world that he didn’t even imagine existed, one that is completely different from w
hat he thought he knew when he was in Kabul, a thousand kilometers away. I believe he has thought long and hard about what is happening to us, about errors he may have committed, about who might have laid this trap for us. He inspires tenderness in me: he is suffering, he feels as if he has been betrayed, and, perhaps, as if he is the victim of a game that is much bigger than us and that we don’t know how to get out of.

  We sleep. The morning wake-up call is the same as ever. Breakfast is the same. Morning prayers the same. We’re tired, awfully tired. At this point we are on the brink of a complete mental and physical breakdown. I ready myself for yet another day without books, pens, amusements of any kind, or friends. We are alone. We don’t even speak to each other anymore. We pass the entire day in a kind of daze, stretched out on the quilt we’ve been dragging around with us for two weeks. I prepare myself for another seven days in captivity. I don’t know if I can resist, but I must. I think of other kidnappings and make a few calculations: the average is about twenty-five days. We need more time, the people trying to save our lives are working on finding a solution. We don’t know who they are, but surely someone is on the other side of the negotiating table.

  The leader of this gang of jailors once indicated a virtual length of time by holding his hands about twenty centimeters apart. The distance between one hand and the other grows less every day. Towards noon, the distance is little more than a hair’s breadth. And at two in the afternoon, right after the collective prayer, nothing separates one hand from the other. Maulvi comes into the room where we are sleeping and for the first time ever he is smiling. “It’s done,” he announces. “We are very close to an agreement.” After half an hour Commandant Haji Lalai arrives at the compound. His presence troubles me: he is the bearer of tidings that will either decree our deaths or announce our release. We hear the roar of the Toyota, his voice in the garden, his footsteps on the concrete footpath in the courtyard. He pulls open the sheet of plastic nailed to the wall that is the door to our cell. I look at his shining eyes, his brilliant smile. He opens his arms. “Two hours. Get ready. You’re free, you’re going home.”