Behind Bars - Part 4: A Guard's Rose in a Tea Cup, and a Confession Naming Him Foreign Minister

7. A Rose in a Cup of Tea

This is the sweetest memory of my own time in the cell. One night, I asked the new guard to accompany me to the bathroom. Once he agreed, I spoke with him, and could tell from his own accent that he was, like me, from Aleppo, serving out his own military duty. Once I returned to the cell, I asked him which quarter of Aleppo he came from, and he said the al-Sharaasous quarter. I recalled having a friend from this very quarter at Aleppo's own secondary school, when I was a student there, from the al-Ward family. I mentioned his own name, and the guard's face lit up. "That's my own uncle, my father's brother," he said, and the guard warmed to me at once.

I told him: you can see for yourself that I'm advanced in age, and that the prison's own walls are far too high for someone like me to even dream of climbing, crowned as they are, besides, with electrified barbed wire. And beyond the walls lies an open stretch of ground, itself ringed with guards, barbed wire, and trained dogs. No madman, then, would ever think of escaping.

He said: so?

I said: I'll ask you for a favor. He said: what is it? I said: the heat is fierce tonight, it being August, and the "fasfas," as we call it in Aleppo, "bugs," as the Damascenes call it, crawls all over the straw like rabid, mad dogs, gnawing at my face and limbs the way the starved and merciless gnaw at their prey. If you could just leave the cell door open, some fresh air might reach me, and let me settle down and sleep a little. He agreed, after some hesitation.

I fell into a deep sleep, one not even the screams of those undergoing their own routine torture could break through. When I woke in the morning, I found the tin tea-mug sitting in its own spot, filled to the brim, and beside it a small tin cup, filled with water and a single yellow rose, one the guard had secretly plucked from the prison's own garden.

I have never, in my whole life, felt such joy from any gift more beautiful than this one, and I lived alongside this very rose for the rest of my own time in that cell.

I would look at it as though it were some spiritual breath itself, telling me: this world can never be filled with monsters alone.

8. Four Days with the Secessionists

After nine days spent in the cell, a young officer came, ordering me to "pack" my own bag, to bring me along with him, our destination a side dormitory.

When he opened its own door for me, I found myself among the secessionists. Dr. Maarouf al-Dawalibi and his own brother, Brigadier General Mustafa, Haitham al-Mahayni, Muwaffaq Assasa, Fayez al-Rifai, and others besides.

Once they had confirmed who I was, they "objected" to my own presence among them, receiving me with plainly sullen looks. They considered me "Abdel Nasser" himself, whom they blamed for orchestrating the coup against them, the very one that had landed them where they now found themselves.

What I learned from them, after "enjoying" four days in their own company, was that Salah al-Dalati had tasked Sergeant Suleiman with bringing them before him, to try them for the "crime" of the secession. The sergeant pointed out to him that they had been detained for a matter entirely outside the martial-law tribunal's own jurisdiction, but al-Dalati snapped at him and ordered him to bring them at once. Who knows what might have happened to them, had the sergeant actually carried out this order. He instead contacted his own superiors, who told him not to comply, until they managed to inform the Deputy Martial Law Administrator of the tribunal president's own orders. He then telephoned al-Dalati directly and forbade him from touching the secessionists at all.

One of them remarked: and so Sergeant Suleiman's own courage was what truly saved us.

Dr. al-Dawalibi was reading Michel Aflaq's book In the Path of the Baath, drawing red lines under the passages that displeased him.

He tried to discuss what he had read with me, as though I myself had written the book. "What does Aflaq mean, saying Islam is a socialist experiment? Is Islam God's own religion, or merely one of the Prophet's own experiments?" I told him: if you can reach the author himself, he can explain his own view to you. As for me, I had read the book once, but no longer recalled it.

I sent for the prison director, and he came to me, plainly disgusted, and I asked him to move me elsewhere, since I could not bear remaining with these men, with whom I shared no bond whatsoever.

He granted my own wish, and moved me, temporarily, to the infirmary.

I found rest from them, and they from me, since whatever little conversation passed between us amounted to nothing but veiled jabs and provocative questions, each answered with some cutting reply of its own.

The infirmary room was the very first place from which I saw the world again exactly as I had left it, since it overlooked the nearby village of Mezzeh, the Ghouta of Damascus, and part of the capital itself. I let my own eyes linger over the view, feeling like one of the Sleepers of the Cave, restored to life after three hundred years, and nine more besides.

On this infirmary's own balcony, I let my own gaze feast on the beauty of God's own creation, light and mankind alike, when suddenly a colonel approached me, introducing himself as commander of the military police, with the prison's own command falling under his own authority. He told me he had been one of my own students in Aleppo, when I taught Arabic literature at its own secondary school. He expressed a keen wish to grant me some request of my own, and I asked whether he might bring me a mattress from my own home to sleep on, one I would then leave behind for them as a "gift." He promised to do so, but was never able to keep his promise.

It was as though my own conversation with him had been an ill omen for him, for we had been speaking on this very balcony, beside a sign posted at the prison's own gate bearing the Baath Party's own slogan: Unity, Freedom, Socialism. I pointed at the sign, and teased him, saying: why not write, on this very sign, the noble verse: "And there is none of you except he will come to it. This is upon your Lord an inevitability decreed"? He looked genuinely embarrassed, and took his leave.

Time turned its own wheel, and his own comrades soon threw him into the very dormitory we had been kept in ourselves. Even so, he saw to it that I be transferred to "the rooms," alongside my own Nasserist friends. In Mezzeh prison's own terminology, "the rooms" refers to four rooms in a wing overlooking its own courtyard. The moment they brought me into one of them, I rejoiced at seeing my own brothers again, though I soon realized that living in these rooms amounted to a slow form of suicide.

One of these rooms was reserved for Colonel Muhammad Nabhan, one of the leaders of the failed coup. What caught my attention was that his own room had two windows, one facing south, the other west, was decently furnished, and had newspapers delivered to it every single morning.

As for our own room, it held Nihad al-Qasim, Abdel Samad al-Fatih, and myself, along with a "Nasserist" officer from Idlib, a brigadier general named Mu'ayyad al-Hakim.

He took real care to "give us the good news," with a gesture of his own hand across his own throat, that our own hour had drawn near, and his hour too, for he considered himself one of the movement's own leaders, and was later transferred elsewhere.

In the adjoining room were General Rashed al-Qatini and Lieutenant General Muhammad al-Sufi. Once General Muhammad al-Jarrah was arrested and brought to the fourth room, we felt the danger to ourselves had grown a great deal, for it is no easy thing for any human being to keep refusing, for very long, the "confessions" interrogators wish to extract from him, and General al-Jarrah was one of our own secret leadership's own members.

His own words would carry real weight in the scale of our own conviction. But he endured the harshest kind of beating, he and Colonel Jasim Alwan, the hero of the assault, and refused to say anything but what he actually knew.

We ourselves wanted nothing but to tell the truth, since we genuinely knew nothing at all about the matter. Given the room's own dampness, and the sun never reaching it, my own colon began to act up, and I suffered a great deal, until I finally complained of it. My own colleagues informed the officer overseeing our own section of what had befallen me, and I heard him tell them: when a doctor comes to the prison, we'll let him know. And when they told him my own pain had become unbearable, he told them: if he dies, we'll bury him. Don't worry about it. And indeed, we were reassured.

This same officer's own mind then hit upon the idea of transferring me to a dark room, to be kept there alone. But I was startled when a giant of a prisoner was brought in to join me, greeting me politely before stretching out on the other iron bed. Some of my own colleagues rushed to warn me to be careful of him, since he "suffered from a biting affliction," and might well "seize" me with a sudden bite, to my own neck, say, tearing out a piece of flesh with it. A real fear of him took hold of me as sleep began to overtake me, and so I remained, colon pain and all, stretched out on my own back the whole night through, watching him laugh to himself one moment, curse the next. Whenever he stirred and I heard the iron bed groan, I would ask him if he needed anything, so that he would know I remained fully alert and awake, and he would settle down a little, before returning once more to his own laughing or weeping. He was summoned for interrogation in the morning, and I never learned what became of him after that, in God's own hands.

The supervising officer returned me to my own companions, in the first room.

In this room, I once again saw the sun, which entered our own room through a modestly sized opening. We agreed to "share" the blessing of its own warmth fairly among us, each man given the right to stand beneath its own rays for half an hour, before yielding his own spot to the next, taking turns in this way. An order then came that the four rooms' own doors need not be kept locked, and so we began "visiting" one another.

Every evening, all the prisoners would gather around General Muhammad al-Jarrah, who would explain to them certain rulings of our own noble religion, interpreting verses of the Wise Reminder, before stepping forward to lead us in prayer, and we would perform the sunset and evening prayers together, in congregation.

I reflected at length on these officers, transformed into pure, devout men, standing in rows for prayer, raising their own hands in supplication to God, none of them having ever done so before. What struck me as strange, though, was one of our own brothers' own reluctance to join us in our prayers and supplications. We all knew he had once been counted among the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, before embracing "the Nasserist creed" instead, the two creeds being, in any case, entirely complementary to one another.

I asked him quietly why he stood apart from the rest of us in this way. He said: God knows I never used to pray, and I have no wish to deceive Him now, under the weight of this ordeal. I will resume my own religious observances once I am released, should God write my own salvation from all this.

General Rashed al-Qatini was once summoned, and came back to tell me of "how it had gone." The officer interrogating him told him: "General, sir, look closely at the bone of my own left hand.

It was broken while I struck a criminal I was interrogating. I would ask you not to be the reason the other hand gets broken too."

He handed him a sheet of questions, and left him alone in the room to give his own statement, and he wrote four full pages, though he never told us what was in them.

But our own "colleague" Muhammad al-Nabhan, from Salamiyah in Hama, came back laughing one evening, telling our own friend Jihad Dahi to pass on to us "the good news of his own full confession to everything," and so: "tell our brothers to look after themselves."

Among what he told the interrogator, God preserve him, was that we, meaning the conspirators against the safety of the state, had met in the Bab al-Musalla district, and agreed on a ministerial list including AbdulWahab Homad as Foreign Minister and Abdel Halim Suwaidan.

Under ordinary circumstances, there would be nothing in this "confession" to harm me, since the "confessor" never claimed we had actually met with him, or that he had asked my own opinion, or obtained my own approval.

But these were no ordinary circumstances. We were in a slaughterhouse, where the very smell of blood whets the butcher's own appetite.

On one of the days we spent in "the rooms," the prisoners were honored by a visit from Lieutenant Colonel Salah al-Dalati himself, president of the judicial council. I was not present at the time, for a reason I no longer recall. He sat with them, speaking of his own "glories." Among what he told them, boasting: "History will record my own name in letters of light. The command handed me a list of three hundred names, to sentence them all to death, but I contented myself with executing only thirty-one of them."

He forgot to add that history will likewise record, against this very command and this martial-law tribunal, a curse that will forever cling to their own black page, for as long as even the smallest sense of justice remains among the people of our own wretched lands.

Throughout my own university career and my own political life, I have stood opposed to every kind of exceptional criminal court, whatever name it goes by.

Juvenile courts alone are the exception, for though exceptional by their own nature, they remain permanent institutions, dealing with a specific category of crimes requiring real skill and expertise to handle properly.

One morning, having spent nearly a month in Mezzeh prison, moved, according to the prison director's own passing whims, from dormitory to cell, and from sharing quarters with the secessionists to the damp, dark rooms, a non-commissioned officer came to me and "ordered" me to get dressed.

I bid my own brothers farewell, without knowing, any more than they did, where I was being taken. I say "taken," for I had become nothing more than a number, stripped of his own will, no longer master of his own choices, an illiterate soldier now standing in for that very will, himself moving only within the bounds of whatever orders he was given.

I carried my own bag, considerably lighter now, since every book I had brought with me at the time of my own "surrender" had been confiscated. I had once taught my own students, at the universities where I taught law, and had myself been taught in turn, that prison is meant to be "a house of reform and rehabilitation," and that a political prisoner enjoys a sanctity the constitution itself sets out, one the penal code affirms without ambiguity or evasion.

We were driven off in a jeep, passing through Mezzeh's own market, and by the time we reached its own far end, I found myself torn between hoping we were headed to my own house, or to some meeting with an official. But once the car turned left, onto the road leading to the military hospital, I realized I was about to become a guest in one of its own wings, quite possibly the very same wing we had once been held in, when Adib al-Shishakli had us arrested back in 1951. My own instinct proved correct.

The guard opened the "wing's" own door, and handed me over to another guard, and the one who had delivered me, "cheap goods" that I was, took his own leave.

I found myself rescued, at just the right moment, from the darkness and dampness of "the room," though I carried away from it a painful memento, in the form of rheumatic aches.