by Anna Perera
So Khalid stands there, tray in hand. Waiting for the man to come back. Refusing to sink into the white space or listen to the voices until after—yes, after the sound of footsteps disappears down the corridor. Refusing to believe in the white space that he’s already in. Seeing it over there. Not here, next to his shadow.
When the prayers begin from every corner of the camp, Khalid’s mind starts up for a second with the thought that maybe they’ve given him the wrong number.
Rubbing his forehead with his free hand, he bursts into tears.
His number is 256 and he knows now they’ve given it to someone else, because no one’s called his number for a long time. So something must have happened. They used to call his number for showers. A soldier would shout, “256! 256!” Khalid would know then they were coming for him. Then it all stopped. Or did it?
“256!” Khalid yells to remind them, just as the beany hole slams open and another man, not the one with the kind eyes, grabs the tray.
“You’re stinking the place out!” he barks at him. The beany hole snaps shut. Khalid listens to black boots march on. Holes banging open and shut, on and on down the corridor. The sound of plastic trays clattering on the trolley. Then it all stops and the smell of urine takes over.
Suddenly the air conditioner starts up, blowing out freezing-cold air. Khalid moves back to the small bed, covering his shoulders with the blue blankets. Placing a white towel on his head, he sinks into the white space that opens up after the last of the prayers die away. Unable to resist anymore.
His empty brown eyes rest on the empty gray floor. There are only a few gravy stains and dead flies and his bare feet, but a less earthly realm takes over the moment he closes his eyes and makes space for the jinn, the genie man with the purple hat and big wide grin who slides him into his playground. Others come too, trailing behind Khalid, yes, behind him, if he meets their gaze. Shivering. Shivering. There’s no need to run when the jinn come calling, because they live in a world where all Khalid’s thoughts are acted out right in front of him. Some have wings, others have swords. Some have unfathomable powers. One has a wife by his side. Another has an army dressed in black.
You never know with the jinn.
Anything can happen with them.
Only when he hears the air conditioner click off does Khalid blink himself back to sitting on the bed. The blue blankets are on his shoulders. White towel on his head. Watching the jinn fall down.
“Go on, take everything with you,” Khalid says. Leaving him with only the ash-colored walls, plus the sound of someone being dragged past the door, shackles scraping the floor. And then the unbroken noise of a man screaming, which has been going on for hours and is beginning to make Khalid feel he should join in.
There’s something strangely soothing about the thought of screaming his head off. Anyway, it’s better than listening to the yelling. That gets on his nerves. His mind becomes a flickering video camera, recording the screamer’s pain, hunger, desperation. He can see him pacing the room, banging his head on the wall, biting his arm. Waiting for something to happen to break the monotony of wondering how everything went wrong. Of wondering how anyone can spend their time making other people unhappy. Kicking their heads in for saying the wrong thing. Smiling at the wrong time. Being other, not like, separate—them—they—demons—Muslims—insurgents—enemy combatants—extremists—terrorists—whatever. It’s one big scam. And then go home and have a chicken dinner in front of the TV.
“Watch it, or we’ll hang you up by the wrists to a wall. Be careful, dude, or we’ll pour water down your face until you drown. No mistake, we’re the good guys. We don’t hit our kids but we’re happy to kick you about. Next one, please.”
More crap. How can you fight for peace? Peace doesn’t understand war. Khalid shakes his head angrily. Why don’t they get it?
“War doesn’t work, you jackasses!” Khalid screams. Screaming high and wide until his throat rattles and throbs. The word “they” comes back to him in a flash of inspiration. The word “you” cracks his spine like a mugger’s fist, making him jump out of his skin. Then Khalid sees—there is no “they”—there is no “you.” Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are just as bad. Look at the killing they’ve done and the hatred they’ve spread, because in the end there’s just “us”—just “us.” He stops yelling. Stops banging the door and falls back on the bed to wonder at the powers of the jinn.
The blue blankets are in a heap on the floor. The white towel is on the bed. The gray walls, though, are in the right place in front of his eyes.
Any minute now it will be dinnertime. Khalid can always tell when it’s dinnertime. By now he knows the noises that come before the sound of the trolley wheels hitching up on the concrete to begin the round.
First there’s the guards marching up and down twice in two minutes instead of once every three minutes. Sixty seconds—more than just a number—Khalid’s counted them out a billion times. The slamming begins, getting nearer as the holes open and shut, and this time Khalid’s ready for them. He’s hungry now and he’s hoping it might be sweetcorn and chicken lumps in a half-cold tomato sauce, because that’s the only meal he can eat without wanting to gag. And the bananas are always nice. Even the ones with the black skins are much tastier than any of the food on the tray.
Khalid’s mouth begins to water as the metal flap of the hole next to him slams shut. Arms ready to grab the tray. A whiff of putrid sardines lands on him but, hey, there’s a sprig of parsley on top. No banana today, though. Chewing the parsley, he lines his mouth with the sharp taste before bracing himself for the slices of gray-sided fish in yellow gloop. Swallowing it anyway and saving the wrinkled peas for after, he pushes the four canned potatoes to one side.
At least the screaming guy has shut up for a bit. All he can hear is the sound of lots of plastic spoons scraping the last peas from the plastic trays, echoing down the row.
That’s it for another day, until the volunteer prisoners come to slop out the rooms. One of them, Shafi, sometimes whispers to him from the Qur’an. Yesterday he said, “They claim that He has kinship with the jinn, yet the jinn know they will also be brought before him.”
Khalid likes it when Shafi comes. With big, mad eyes, he looks something like 50 Cent but he doesn’t rap. Khalid wishes he would rap, but no, his head is somewhere else entirely. Quoting from the Qur’an is his thing.
Soon it’s slop-out time again and the door’s unlocked. Two men point their guns at Khalid in case he goes crazy, like the man last week who rammed himself in the stomach with the mop handle. Keeping it there in a frenzied grip, sniveling and yelling until the soldiers dragged him away. Shafi had calmly carried on, going about his business without the mop, and washed the floor by hand with the man’s white towel, he said.
“Two men they keeeksh.” Shafi draws his fingers across his neck like a knife.
Khalid gasps, nodding, “They killed themselves?”
“Yes. Also five they going starving death. Nearly killed,” Shafi says. “Don’t do this.”
“No, I won’t.” Khalid feels sorry for Shafi, because he’s not quite right in the head. Not quite here. A good reminder you have to keep your feet on the ground in this place or the jinn will take over.
Shafi stares at the bucket. Looks at Khalid. Rolls his eyes a bit. Then whispers, “Signs are in the power of God alone!”
“What signs?” Khalid says, watching Shafi dunk the dirty mop in the dirty water.
“Signs.” Shafi runs off with dripping mop and filthy bucket, leaving Khalid thinking about signs, wondering if rainbows are signs, because he used to like rainbows whenever they appeared in Rochdale—which wasn’t often.
The expressions on the faces of the watching soldiers are ones of utter boredom until Shafi comes back with a bucket of clean soapy water, when they nod to him, then chat to each other in low voices.
“Eight more days and I get to go home,” the first soldier says, scraping around for something to talk about.
“Twelve for me if you don’t count today,” his mate answers.
A foul smell of disinfectant drifts suddenly from the corner of the cell. Shafi pads off. The beany hole slams shut, leaving Khalid alone again, always at the mercy of these small interludes to provide a few minutes’ company, entertainment and food for thought.
And sometimes his thoughts settle down. Settle down to ordinary things.
This time it’s rainbows occupying his mind, plus the science of the color spectrum they learned in primary school, remembering the colors from the rhyme they were taught: “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain.” Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Rainbows are signs of the power of good, he decides. Bored enough to try and see good in whatever’s left in his brain, he battles hard to come up with something else. But nothing wraps itself around him like the vision of the last rainbow he saw over the oak trees in the park.
He’d just spotted the perfect semicircle of radiant color over the high branches and when he turns round, there—tipping backwards on the bench—is Niamh, with her hair in a twist on top of her head. She smiles up at him. Did she smile up at him? Now she does. The biggest smile in the world. Her perfect face, beautiful mouth, made him feel like a million dollars for the rest of the week. A million dollars until the smell of disinfectant evaporates and the smell of urine returns.
Her face fades suddenly with the fatal realization she’s not here. Curling up on the bed like a baby, Khalid reaches for the blue blankets to cover himself. Pulling the white towel over his face to stop the jinn from bothering him.
20
EXERCISE
After six days of yelling and screaming, shouting at himself, listening to the silences and the pauses between them, things improve slightly when the library man, Will, comes with a cardboard box of old Reader’s Digest condensed books.
“Any books, man?”
“Books?” Khalid can’t see them at first. Where are they?
“Yep, books.” Will smirks. “You want them?”
Khalid nods in the belief they’re not actually being poked through the hole at him. “Yes.” He carefully squeezes the word out and three small books tumble to the floor. Will’s soft footsteps stroll away. Khalid listens to him saying the same thing to each man as he saunters from cell to cell.
Then, flicking open a yellowing book, Khalid puts it to his nose to smell the dusty pages and runs his fingers over the smooth covers. He uses them as playthings by lining them up in a tidy row on his pillow, then stacks them on the floor to enjoy the small footstool they provide. He even tries to walk up and down with a book on his head.
Over the next few days, Khalid reads the three condensed stories in each book over and over again to himself until the characters become his friends.
“Come out, you Dam Busters. I know where you are. You want the rest of this bread roll, Atticus Finch? Well, too bad.”
Everyone, prisoners and soldiers, sigh with relief at the sound of relative normality coming from Khalid’s cell, and Khalid sighs, because the words spark a tiny flame of pleasure in his broken heart and mind. Bit by bit the white noise shrinks and the characters in the stories take over. Khalid finds himself poring over the words and thinking about the passages he’s read for hours and hours, and some of the emptiness he feels dies away because the books become his family.
Until . . .
“Time to go,” the guard yells just as Khalid opens To Kill a Mockingbird for the fourth time. It was one of the books on his English GCSE list but they hadn’t read it before he left.
“Not now,” Khalid says, but the door swings open and a bunch of tinkling shackles catch his eye. Forced to drop the book on the floor, Khalid’s desperate to have the story back in his lap. Desperate for the special feeling of peace reading brings him, but the guards clamp his wrists and ankles tight and seem to enjoy leading him outside the moment the rain starts. They walk him through endless small puddles on the path towards the building next to Camp Delta and all Khalid can see is the face of Boo Radley in the reflections in the water.
The waves of hissing, cold rain do their best to stretch the cracks in Khalid’s flip-flops to the limit. He slips and slides past the limp wet American flag hanging from the pole and is transported to another time, the 1930s, and another place, a small town in Alabama, and Scout, the six-year-old girl, and her brother, Jem, and the story waiting for him on the floor of his cell.
Where are the showers? Khalid’s not sure. Everything looks different in the rain. There are no shadows for a start and a tingling freshness fills the air when, like magic, the rain suddenly stops. There’s a smell of damp earth underfoot and, reaching the line of showers and their weak trickle of watery disinfectant, he’s already soaked to the skin and aware this is going to be a pain in the neck.
Looking around routinely to see if any of the men are as young as him, Khalid glances briefly from one to the other. No one seems to be under the age of twenty.
Unless that man over there with his back to him is younger than he looks? Khalid tries not to stare. It’s bad enough he’s looking at all. Instead, he concentrates on washing his feet for a moment, but the smell of soap makes his nose tingle and he starts sneezing.
“Time’s up, 256,” someone shouts. But he’s only half washed. Why is he ordering him to get dressed when he’s covered in suds? The next man steps hurriedly under the trickle to take Khalid’s place. A man who requires not one but two guns on him. Why two, when everyone else has one?
Khalid glances at him: a tall man with a firm, quiet look. There’s nothing to mark him out from the crowd apart from a disfigured left hand with stunted fingers the size of a child’s. He’s standing proudly even though he’s naked, so Khalid reckons he’s someone important. The kind of bloke who holds his own in every situation, no matter what. His natural stance is dignified, almost regal, while Khalid knows his own is more like a beggar these days. Lost. Pathetic. Weedy.
Suddenly feeling worse, Khalid turns away embarrassed. Cross with himself for staring, even though he was only trying to work out why the man warranted two guns pointed at him. Maybe he’s a suicide bomber or a real terrorist? A leader of some crazy group? Whatever he is, he stands out from the crowd.
Without warning, instead of going back to the cells, they march Khalid with dried soapy skin to a new recreation area which is nothing but a large open cage in the middle of a concrete yard. A yard surrounded by razor wire, enclosed by wire fencing, open to blossomy clouds and smelling of rain. They undo the shackles and lock the wire door.
Khalid stares at the shimmering wet concrete space which is about twenty steps wide. He’s never been here before, although he’s been in the camp for, he thinks, about—how long is it? They brought him here autumn 2002, he knows that much. He was fifteen then. The festival of Eid came and went without any celebrations and Tony Blair joined Bush and went to war in Iraq. When was that? Ages ago. He was sixteen at some point, March 11, although he doesn’t know exactly when that was, because no one told him it was his birthday. And now, with Ramadan over, it’s nearly December, so he’s been here about a year. At this rate he’ll be an old man and in a coffin before he gets out. Before he can run and jump and yell and do all the stuff he used to do without anyone making a fuss.
The thought makes his heart sink.
He walks to the end of the fenced yard, testing out his new-found space, and the sun suddenly peeps out from behind a sparkling spider’s web criss-crossing the wire. The gray clouds part and a wide-open soft blue sky opens up. In that moment the vast space takes Khalid out of the yard and into the source of a bigger, deeper blue that’s more blue than anything he’s ever seen. So perfect a sight he can almost touch it.
A sudden whiff of wet grass lingers for a moment as Khalid imagines hours of walking round here, gazing at the light, and his heart skips a beat at the deep, sudden peace breathing fresh air gives him.
Two minutes later, the sound of padding footsteps breaks his tra
nce. Khalid widens his eyes as the guards bring two men through the gate. Both are as surprised as Khalid to be here. Their shackles are undone and, smiling from ear to ear, the men gaze round the yard as if it’s a football stadium or something.
For a minute, Khalid’s annoyed. Why did they have to come? He was enjoying having the place to himself.
The guards lock them in and wander off to one side. Leaving the three of them staring at each other, all wondering if they’re allowed to talk or not. Unaware what the rules are and bewildered by the sudden freedom to move about as they like.
“As-salaamu alaikum.” The black guy speaks first.
“Wa alaikum as-salaam,” Khalid and the smaller man quickly answer.
Luckily, the first guy also speaks English.
“My name’s Ali Abaza. I come from Ghana but live in Saudi Arabia most of my life.”
“I’m British,” Khalid replies. “I’m sixteen.”
Ali widens his smile to show off a row of perfect sugar-white teeth. “Only sixteen?”
“Yeah, the name’s Khalid Ahmed.”
“Balendra Varshab,” the smaller guy butts in. “Bengal, Bengal.” Unable to understand a word of English, he nods while repeating his name and country until eventually Khalid turns away. Then Balendra walks a few steps to the end of the wire and lies down on his back. Arms behind his head, he does a few sit-ups. The sudden panting and thudding are an unwelcome addition to Ali and Khalid’s conversation as they pace the perimeter of the fence.
Eyes on the ground, talking non-stop, Ali quickly explains he’s twenty-seven and was working as a lawyer when they picked him up for questioning. Because he speaks four or five languages and has traveled in the West as well as the Middle East, he aroused their suspicions after 9/11. A devout Muslim, he was accused of helping fundamentalists and Islamists working on dirty bombs. Men they refused to name.
“How can I defend myself when I don’t know what I’m accused of? Tittle-tattle, gossip, lies, that is what has brought me here. If I told you what they did to me in Bagram you would weep.” Ali shakes his head with the same disbelief that Masud, the necklace-seller, had shown.
