Behind Bars - Part 3: Nine Nights in a Solitary Cell, Torture Heard Nightly, and an Officer's Suicide Attempt

8. Transfer to the Cell

After close to a week in the dormitory, Sergeant Suleiman, who never came to us with anything but unpleasant news, appeared once more, standing behind the door's own bars, reading out the names of certain detainees, myself among them, ordering each of us to gather our own belongings, per orders.

We exchanged glances with those whose names had not been called, wondering: where to now?

Those "wanted" rose, bid their own fellow dormitory-mates farewell, and made their way to the door, carrying nothing at all in their own hands, since most of them had been arrested away from their own homes, brought in with nothing but the clothes on their own backs.

As for me, I had a bag of clothes, some soap, a face towel for my own ablutions, a pair of slippers, and some underwear. My own razor and its blades, along with whatever money I carried, had been confiscated when I first entered the prison director's own office, for their own perceived danger, the blades, like shoelaces, being tools a man might use to take his own life, and the money no less dangerous, since it might be used to buy off a guard's own conscience, though it would have done its own owner little good in any case, since we were never permitted to purchase anything from outside the prison at all.

By the "familiar" rules of law, we were innocent until proven guilty of some crime. But "those in charge" had already decided we were criminals, accursed men with no right to enjoy a single one of the rights owed to any human being.

I confess a real hope stirred in me, that I was being led toward freedom, a hope only strengthened by the sound of the great locks being opened with their own enormous keys, as I passed through one iron gate after another, my own "trusted guard" leading me toward the prison's own courtyard. But this hope was finally shattered, once my guide veered left, and I found him stopping before a small door, another guard stationed before it, ordering him to open it, and ordering me to go inside, before closing the door behind me and turning the lock.

This, then, was the cell, not release at all.

The cell resembled nothing so much as a grave. It measured two meters by one. Its own floor had been "decorated" with a bed of straw, whose own filth required no sharp eye at all to detect, a stench of decay rising from it. Its own walls had never once known a painter's hand since the French first built this prison, some forty years earlier. They bore inscriptions, some carved into the stone like deep, festering wounds, others written in a dark red I judged to be human blood, the blood of someone who had grown weary of life itself within these very walls.

Yet every word on them belonged to "the literature of sorrow," most of it pleas for forgiveness and supplication.

I took off my own suit and put on my pajamas, a habit by now, since sitting cross-legged on straw left little use for a proper suit, neither in taste, color, nor scent. A few hours later, the guard brought me a blanket and a pillow, tossing them in to me before locking the door once more.

It is perhaps better that I say nothing at all of this blanket, whose own warp threads showed plainly through, its own weft having long since worn away, so that it looked like the abandoned dwelling of some departed beloved, "the faded tattoo-marks still visible on a wrist," long after its own people had left and moved on.

What genuinely alarmed me, though, was how stuck together its own pieces were when I tried to spread it out over the straw. I pulled at it with both hands, corner after corner after corner, until its own folds finally came apart, revealing their own filth in the ugliest possible way. I could find no explanation for this stickiness except that blood must once have soaked into it, left in some abandoned corner of a room until it dried entirely. Even so, once night fell upon me, the dawn's own cold forced me to wrap myself in it regardless, for "your own brother forced into it is no less a hero for it."

I laid my own head upon the pillow, having first draped it with my own towel, and tucked the small radio, which I kept hidden among my clothes, beneath it, pretending to be asleep so that I might listen to the broadcasts. There was no other way for me to listen to this radio at all, since the guard kept the door's own small peephole open, to watch whatever I was doing, a task made easy enough for him by the electric bulb fixed high in the cell's own ceiling, kept burning all night long, its own switch mounted outside the cell where only the guard himself could reach it.

I found myself listening to telegrams from the era's own supporters. Such is the way of many people, for they are "one thing on the inside, and quite another once outside." I laughed at one telegram, sent from al-Jazira, its own sender writing: "We offer ourselves as sacrifice for our own Arab nationalism, and for our glorious nation, the eternal offspring of Arabism." It was signed, if I recall, by a certain Badros Badrosian, or something along those lines.

I recalled the words of the poet whose own thoroughbred mare had grown so emaciated that he took her to the animal market to sell her, only for none but paupers to even ask her price. He wept, and led her back home, reciting:

She grew so emaciated that her own hocks showed clean through her emaciation,

until even the poorest of paupers priced her too dear to buy.

Another telegram left me genuinely saddened.

Its own sender was an official at the Ministry of Interior, a distant relation of mine, one who had always shown me a warmth and affection that once brought me real joy and comfort. Yet now that fortune had turned against me, his own telegram read:

Slaughter them down to the very jugular, and smash their skulls and their bones.

Yet he never managed to convince the new era's own men of his own sincerity, nor did his own plea to be restored to the post he had been dismissed from, none too gently, over ugly suspicions surrounding his own integrity, ever succeed. He remained out on the curb, licking the red flush of his own shame, an outcast, and a filthy one at that.

The moment the clock passed midnight, the nightmares would begin. Though "nightmares" is hardly the right word, for these were the sounds of real human beings, being tortured. I strained my own ears, and, to my own misery, what did I hear? Screams, cries for help, groans... "hand over your horse"... and curses "from below the belt," the gentlest of them being: you dog, you traitor.

These "interrogations" would continue until the first signs of dawn, and I lived through them every single night I spent in that cell.

I often asked myself: from what dark ore were the hearts of those who carry out torture forged, night after night, without ever tiring or growing weary of it? And what black consciences must belong to those who order such atrocities carried out at all?

I was later told that "interrogators" trained certain prisoners themselves in the use of electric torture instruments, threatening to subject them to the very same treatment, should they refuse to carry out orders to torture and beat their own fellow prisoners.

It happened once that an interrogator ordered a prisoner, tasked with torturing his own fellow inmates, to increase the strength of the electric current, and he did so, and the man being "interrogated" began screaming hysterically, until he lost consciousness entirely, no longer feeling any pain at all. The interrogator assumed he had died, and signaled the torturer to stop, though the man had, in truth, only fainted, from what his own fellow prisoners had inflicted upon him, against his own will.

God wrote his own survival, and circumstance later brought us together in the prison hospital, under painful conditions of their own. His own eyes would well up with tears, in shame and grief, whenever the events of that torture were mentioned. During the day, I would enjoy the sight of the prison's own garden, whenever the jailer forgot to close the peephole. Among my own memories from the cell, during the nine nights I spent there, I pick out the following stories, carved as they are into the very cells of my own brain:

a. My Neighbor, Farouk al-Quwatli

In the guard's own absence, I exchanged a few words with my own neighbor in the adjoining cell. He knew who I was, and told me he had been one of my own students at the Faculty of Law. He said no more than that, fearing some hidden recording device might be listening in on us.

But one night, he called out to his own Lord in a raised voice, and the guard scolded him, telling him to be quiet. He answered him: I am only calling upon God, nothing more, to grant us relief. The guard said: call on Him quietly, then. He answered: He does not answer me when I do, and I am calling on Him now in my own full, resonant voice. Would you have Him answer me when I call on Him in a voice no one can even hear? It seemed to me the guard, himself a man of faith, feared coming between God and whoever called upon Him, and so he stepped instead toward my own neighbor's cell and told him: please, call on God in a way that doesn't get me assigned to share a cell with you.

My neighbor took pity on him, and confined his own supplication to God, glory be to Him, to a mere murmur from then on.

2. Summoned to the Bath

Suleiman came to me once, around three in the morning, and asked me to get up for a bath.

I found this invitation genuinely strange, since I had never once been called for a bath since first entering detention.

I had come to feel that Sergeant Suleiman, the assistant prison director, was somehow "one of us, and with us," or so, at least, he made us feel. I asked him: a bath, or an interrogation? He said: a bath. What's the difference? I told him: for an interrogation, I put on a few extra shirts under my pajamas, to soften the sting of the whip, should the interrogator decide to "bring me to tell the truth" through his own well-known, gentle methods.

The invitation was, indeed, to bathe.

Each man being bathed stood naked beside his own neighbor, waiting for the guard to turn the tap on from outside. The moment the water finally trickled out, as though straight from the depths of hell itself, he would work up a lather of soap over his own head and body, and no sooner had he finished than the water would turn to ice, as though freshly melted from some polar glacier.

I confess I simply wiped the soap from my own body with my own towel, since I could no longer bear this succession of boiling water followed by water from the North Pole itself. And so I lost out on this "blessing of earthly paradise," the bath, as the popular saying goes.

3. Meat in the Cell

The doctor passed by me once, and asked what was wrong. I complained to him of "hunger." I was not exaggerating in the slightest, for I ate nothing but the outer crust of the bread, since the broth the white beans swam in reeked of diesel fuel, unacceptable even to the most "undiscerning" of stomachs. Nor do I know why so many small stones were scattered among the grains of bulgur in the second bowl.

The doctor judged that I needed "a meal of meat every day," and wrote this down on a piece of paper, and the prison director did not disappoint this request, for the guard came to me the next day with a piece of black meat he pulled straight from his own jacket pocket. When I asked him what this was, he said: "Your own meat ration," a special honor granted to me, outside the usual routine of prison fare.

4. Cigarettes Instead of the Quran

The deputy prison director once asked me, with real courtesy, what I might like to have. I felt a real unease, for it is customary to ask a man about to be hanged for his own last wishes. Some condemned men ask for a cup of coffee, others for a cigarette, some ask to sing a folk verse, others to write a will for their own family.

I feared his question belonged to this very same category, and so I told him: I would like a copy of the Holy Quran. He said: very well, and left, never to return. Instead, he sent a soldier to me, carrying a pack of cigarettes and a few matches.

At the time, I had already quit smoking, but the cell's own peculiar blessing took hold of me, and I returned to it, indulging once more, until I quit it again, this time for good.

Having suffered, in both my own chest and my own health, everything I have suffered from smoking, I now feel a real, overflowing joy whenever I manage to convince a friend, a relative, or even, at times, a stranger, to give it up, and he does. I once had occasion to present myself to a professor of medicine in Paris, chosen at random from the phone book, complaining to him of digestive trouble. He examined me, then asked whether I smoked. I told him yes. He asked: can you give it up? Without waiting for my own answer, he told me: sir, if you don't give up smoking, no medicine on earth will do you any good.

I did not heed his own advice at first, not until I became convinced that the medicines I had been taking had done me no good at all, while quitting smoking helped me, without any medicine whatsoever.

I do not know why no real campaigns are ever organized, to convince young men, who imitate one another or follow their own peers out of sheer embarrassment, of the harms of smoking, and that it is no true measure of "manhood" at all. I know better than most exactly how much revenue tobacco brings into the state's own treasury. But what families and the state alike end up spending to repair the health smoking itself destroys, in the end, is far graver and far more bitter still. Shall I go so far as to say that smoking itself is a disguised gateway into drug use?

5. A Letter to Umm Ghassan

I was never entirely sure of the "nobility" of this sergeant, a military rank, who began showing me a warmth beyond what either his own position as a soldier or mine as a prisoner really allowed.

Even so, I grew fond of his own company, whenever he stood behind the cell's own door, his own mouth pressed to its opening to speak with me, risking exposure to questioning he had no real need to invite upon himself.

For the sake of full disclosure, I admit I remained wary of his own company. On one occasion, he asked me whether I wished to send a letter to my own family.

My own mouth fell open in astonishment at this touch of humanity, one capable of tempting even the most ascetic of men, for my own family had known nothing at all of me since "I surrendered myself to the authorities," save whatever they could guess or imagine, hearing the radio's own reports of executions, and hearing all of us described as lackeys, hirelings, criminals, and grovelers, descriptions hardly likely to reassure any family or friend about our own fate, especially in a country living under a military martial-law occupation with no room left in it for either decency or law.

I turned the matter over in my own mind: what if he simply handed the note to the prison director, to win himself some favor?

But what if he was truly sincere in this "noble" offer of his? Would a single word reaching my own wife and family, from within this very detention, not bring their own hearts some real peace and comfort, easing their own pain and anxiety over my own unknown fate?

I decided to send a brief note, saying I was well, and alive. I asked my own wife to look after the children, and to see to their own upbringing, saying, in other words, exactly what any father in my own position would say. There was nothing in it that could possibly endanger the security of the state. This was simply my own natural right, one I should never have had to beg for through such roundabout means in the first place.

Two days later, the soldier told me he had delivered the letter, and that my own family was well. No one ever summoned me for questioning over this letter. But I decided never to send another one like it again.

For a neighbor of mine had handed the soldier a similar letter to his own family, and it ended up in the prison director's own hands. The prisoner was summoned, and the officer showed him the paper, then struck him across the face with a blow that very nearly shattered his own jaw. Once I was finally released, I learned from my own wife that my own letter had in fact reached her in due course.

Given that the soldier handed my own neighbor's letter over to the prison director, earning him such harm, he must surely have shown my own letter to his own superior as well, and they must have decided to extend me a little more "courtesy," hoping perhaps that I might write, in some future letter, something that could serve as evidence against me, or against someone else.

6. An Officer's Attempted Suicide

There were four cells adjoining my own. Of their own occupants, I knew only Mr. al-Quwatli. The rest remained mere shadows in my own imagination.

One night, I heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by an utter stillness. Early the next morning, I saw, through my own door's peephole, a number of soldiers running, carrying a stretcher, the kind used to transport the sick. They went into one of the neighboring cells, and came back out carrying the stretcher, a prisoner stretched out upon it, his own intestines spilling out of his own belly.

It turned out he was one of the officers who had taken part in the assault on the General Staff, and could no longer bear the torture he had already endured. Perhaps he had come to realize his own fate was already sealed, standing bound to the execution post, blindfolded, to receive a volley of bullets from the firing squad, and so decided to end his own fate himself, rather than leave it to another. He climbed the cell's own walls, reaching the high window above the door, broke its own glass with his own hand, and took a sharp piece of it to slash open his own belly, then sat calmly, hoping the flame of his own life would go out just as quietly. But fate had other plans for him, for the guard saw blood flowing out from beneath the cell's own door, and raised the alarm. They brought the stretcher and carried the man who had tried to take his own life away, to wherever his own fate led him next, beyond my own knowledge.

And indeed, all news of him was lost, amid the flood of events. I never learned anything more of him. Nor did "my own guard" know anything of his own fate either.

Suicide is, in itself, a flight from facing life, one religion forbids, and true manhood rejects. And yet I found myself sympathizing with this man, for he was certainly doomed to execution regardless. Why, then, cling to false hope, and endure nights of torture with not a single glimmer of light on their own horizon?