by Theo Padnos
“Yes, fear,” I agreed.
He shrugged. He looked at Abu Dujanna. Abu Dujanna looked at the handgun. Eyebrows were raised, but no one moved. I was allowed to walk to the bathroom on my own. Inside the bathroom, I ran my eyes around the window’s frame. I might have been able to yank it, then crawl through, I thought, but it seemed to open only onto an air shaft. In the corridor outside the bathroom, however, I was alone. The front door, I could see, had been left ajar. Beyond the front door, a public highway beckoned to me, and beyond that was an olive grove. The bathroom, I told myself, is my friend.
During the postprandial drowsiness that settled over the kidnappers, Abu Osama busied himself with his laptop. Abu Dujanna retreated to a corner. He fingered the handgun but did not point it. Mohammed announced that he needed to sleep for a few hours as he had stayed up late with his friends the previous night. It was decided that there were too many helicopters about at the moment for the five of us to go off in search of a phone or an internet-connected computer on which I could initiate whatever procedures were required to bring Mohammed and his friends their $400,000 of ghanima within seven days. We would set off in the evening, Mohammed said. In the meantime, he needed a nap.
Abu Said decided to fill the time by emptying the contents of the backpack I had brought from Antakya onto the floor in front of the divan. He pushed a paperback edition of the Paul Theroux book Dark Star Safari around on the floor with his toe. He bent over the white cycling jacket. He held it in the air. “What is the cost of this?” he asked. I told him. He ran his fingers over a pair of New Balance running shoes. “And these?” he asked. I named a price. He shrugged.
He collected my passport, my driver’s license, and my phone, then retreated to a corner, next to the door. There followed the gentlest of all interrogations that have ever occurred in Syria. Surely, he had never been on either side of one before. He sat. I sat. There were no weapons. My hands were cuffed in front of my body. A conversation ensued. Why were there Yemeni stamps in my passport? Because I had been a journalist there.
“You worked there for the CIA there?”
“No. For the Yemen Observer.”
There were entry stamps from the Damascus airport in my passport.
“The CIA sent you to Damascus?”
“No. I sent myself.”
He examined the passport’s remaining pages, asked me to confirm the dates on which I had entered and left Syria, then put the passport aside.
We moved on to the driver’s license. He passed it to Abu Osama, then on to Abu Dujanna, and then Abu Said brought it to where I sat, on my divan. He held it under my nose. “We know who you work for,” he said.
“That’s my driver’s license,” I said.
He shook it at me. A flash of anger passed through his eyes. “Don’t tell me this is a driver’s license,” he said. I insisted. He shook it again. “We know exactly who you work for,” he said.
“I don’t work for anyone,” I said. Each state gave out driver’s licenses, I said. The state that had given me mine was called Vermont. The letters on my document spelled out this word. “The CIA is in Virginia,” I told him. Virginia was not Vermont.
A moment of wonder followed, then silence. Slowly, Abu Said returned the license to his pocket. He retreated to his corner by the door.
This interrogator was my angel, it turned out. He pursued his CIA theory for an instant, lost interest, then abandoned the interrogation altogether. Later that evening, he disappeared with the phone, the passport, and the driver’s license. In the absence of my documents, I could be whoever I wanted to be. “I am an English teacher,” I told subsequent interrogators. I gave them my mother’s name, Curtis. “I am half-French,” I said. The al Qaeda interrogators didn’t much care about my name, but they did want to know about my work. “I teach poetry,” I told them. “For years I have been living in Damascus.” I mentioned the names of the regime-loving neighborhoods in which I had lived. “Every day, I ate under their noses. I know the worshipers of Bashar better than you do. I taught them Shakespeare.” Perhaps this line of talk helped a bit. It couldn’t have hurt me. I hoped that the secret that could have hurt me—that I had published a book, under the name Padnos, about my life in the religious academies of Yemen called Undercover Muslim—had disappeared with my IDs. The title of that book would have made them think I had spied on the religion itself. I despaired when I thought of the title. They could not have overlooked a crime like that, I thought—even if they managed to persuade themselves that the American government would give them millions in exchange for my life.
After Abu Said lost interest in the passport, he turned to my bank card. I gave him the PIN. I told him that there was less than $200 in the account and that he was welcome to it. He shrugged. He returned to the phone. He pulled up an email I had sent to an editor. Letter by letter, he sounded out a sentence in which I had mentioned a region in northern Syria called the Kurdish Mountains, then under the control of rebel forces. “You have contacts there,” he said. “Who are they? Regime spies?” I was in touch with regime spies, he concluded, currently undercover among the rebel brothers in the Kurdish Mountains. What was the CIA planning to do to the brothers in the Kurdish Mountains?
“It’s a letter to an editor,” I explained. I had hoped to go to that region in order to write about the war. The editor had not replied. “I am here, in this region, on this trip, with you,” I explained, “because nobody wanted me to go to the Kurdish Mountains.” They had not paid me a red cent to go anywhere. They hadn’t even replied to my emails. “You see?” I said.
Abu Said did not look at me as I spoke. He found further suspicious emails. He wondered what eBay was and what Audible might be. He wanted to know if the phone’s GPS function could be turned off and on. I wasn’t sure. He examined the photo archive. The greenery in Vermont impressed him, but not for long. He tapped for a few minutes more, then sighed, then returned the phone to his pocket.
All in all, it took about ten minutes for Abu Said’s curiosity about me to exhaust itself. After the last of his questions had been answered, he retrieved the running shoes from the pile of backpack contents. He put these by his side. He tilted his head against the wall. He began to doze.
I looked out the windows of the child’s bedroom. Olive branches fluttered in a gentle breeze. It seemed to me then that I had been out for a lark in the Syrian countryside, had driven much too fast, overshot a corner on a mountain road, crashed through a barrier, nearly died in a fiery wreck, but somehow, by the grace of God, I had managed to stagger away with only a cut on the back of my head. I’ve been an idiot, I told myself. I was by no means out of the woods. I remained in a dangerous fix. Yet it wasn’t so dangerous, I felt, that it couldn’t be remedied by some smooth talking and maybe, if it came to that, decisive action in a moment of need.
I must tiptoe away from this trap, I told myself. Whenever I managed to tiptoe to within reach of a thoroughfare, I thought, decent citizens—rather than the loons I had stuck myself with—would see my distress, wrap their arms around me, then whisk me away to safety.
In fact, as these thoughts were passing through my head, a stream of traffic, about a hundred meters from where I sat, was flowing along the Binnish-Taftanaz highway. I could hear the whoosh of the trucks. Now and then, the wind carried the voices of distant children at play.
That highway is safety, I told myself. A motorist, a shopkeeper, a housewife, a strolling family—all such people were safety, I thought. I needed to bring myself into contact with any such citizen of Syria, I imagined. If only I could make contact with a human being, I thought, I would make my truth known in an instant in plain declarative Arabic sentences—or in sign language, if need be. The goodness of the Syrian people would take care of the rest.
There came a moment after Abu Said began to doze when Abu Osama announced to me, in his own version of bold Arabic sentences, what exactly was going on out there, beyond the windows to which I kept turning my eyes.
“We will put the black flag on the White House,” he announced.
“Okay,” I said.
“For every one of your George Bushes, we have an Abu Musab.” This, I knew, even then, was the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, killed in action in 2006.
“Okay,” I said.
“We are a nation,” he said. “The leader of our army is God. The constitution is the Koran.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Bashar al-Assad is nothing,” he said. “He is filth. When our armies finish with him, we will attack the real enemy. First Damascus,” he said, “then Jerusalem.”
“Good for you,” I said.
“You don’t think we can do it?”
“No, I don’t think you can.”
He shrugged.
A week later, when I had had further glimpses into their Islamic state, the memory of my incredulousness made me want to pull out my hair by the roots. I held my face in my hands.
I assumed Abu Osama to be bragging about a fairy realm in which sane people did not believe. I suspected that he himself didn’t much believe in it. He meant to intimidate and to impress, nothing more.
“The mosques here are full as never before,” Abu Osama told me that afternoon. There were morning study sessions for women, afternoon study sessions for children, and everyone, everywhere, loved the heroes, the sons of the land—the mujahideen. “Every man in every family,” he said, “is a mujahid on the path of God.”
I scoffed. A week later, the shimmering olive leaves beyond the window of the child’s bedroom kept coming back to me. I saw them in my sleep. I could not get them out of my mind. If I had been capable of taking this person’s ranting seriously, I would have known that safety for me lay out there, in the thistle and prairie grass, between the lines of trees. Instead, I dreamed about a random encounter with Good Samaritan housewives. In an Islamic state, Good Samaritan housewives exist, I know now, but they do not leave their houses. They will make food for a prisoner if they are so ordered. But they cannot speak to him. They certainly cannot help him. As for being rescued on the public way: I know now that a foreigner in an Islamic state who comes running along with a bee in his bonnet about being a journalist (“Help me! Help me!”) must be presented to the authorities. The foreigner could be a spy. He could be a Jew. He could be spying on behalf of that Elders-of-Zion-esque fraternity that, it is thought, works out its purpose through its figurehead, Bashar al-Assad. In an Islamic state the learned men know exactly how to find out who the stranger is. The man with the bee in his bonnet must be brought to them. If the Good Samaritan fails to do this, it is probably for a reason. What is this reason? The men of learning will want to find out for themselves.
As it happened, Abu Osama’s threats meant nothing much to me. Such nonsense he talks, I told myself. Eventually, he himself lost interest in issuing his threats. He had begun a computer project. Cables had to be removed from backpacks. None of the cables wanted to connect his camera to his laptop. The tripod had to be folded, then returned to its case. There were fresh batteries to remove from backpacks and notes to be typed into his laptop.
That afternoon, Mohammed must have slept for hours. No one wished to disturb him. Anyway, no business pressed. I understood that we were to set out in the evening in search of the $400,000 in cash. For the time being, an afternoon of sunlight pouring through the trees, then splashing on the carpet, stretched out before us.
During the early part of the afternoon, Abu Dujanna and Abu Osama were vigilant kidnappers. Abu Dujanna, the sentry, held the gun. Abu Osama played with his computer cords. Every twitch of my knee or sigh caused Abu Dujanna to turn his eyes on me. As they were preparing for the Asr prayer, which comes at about three o’clock, it was decided that two of the kidnappers would make their prostrations while a third, Abu Dujanna, would watch me. Only after his friends had made the last of their prostrations did Abu Dujanna rise, hand the gun to Abu Osama, and begin his prayers.
Later in the afternoon, however, a different prisoner-guarding strategy emerged. The lot of them appeared to drowse. One by one, without a word, they slipped from the room.
Alone in the child’s bedroom, I pulled on the bars of the windows. I stared at a farmhouse across the lane. I padded around the perimeter of the room. I am a panther in a cage, I told myself. The bedroom door was closed but not locked. I sat for twenty minutes, rose to try the door, then stopped myself. I could see the kidnappers in my mind’s eye. They sat in the shadows, at the end of the corridor. They wanted me to try the door. They were begging me to do it. They would have had the gun trained on the bedroom door. Probably, I thought, they would have allowed me to run, at least a few feet. I had no intention of falling into their trap a second time.
So I sat under a window in the bedroom. I gazed into my lap. I pondered the pattern on the absent child’s bedspread, then stared for a while at my shoes. I sat in this attitude of bewilderment for an hour. Later, I rose to watch the sun sinking, then stared at the shadows on the carpet, then sat. I plunged my face into my hands.
By the time Mohammed woke from his nap, shortly before sunset, I was afraid. I was lonely. It was late on Sunday morning in Cambridge. I felt that if only I had been allowed to speak to my mother, she would have warned me. I would have heeded her admonitions. All would have been well. Why hadn’t I tried harder to make the call? My regret and my inability to help myself brought me to the verge of tears. Perhaps they themselves will not kill me, I thought, but I didn’t doubt that other, more malevolent people nearby would be happy to do the job. I wanted to stay with these kidnappers, particularly with the baseball cap–wearing Mohammed. During my afternoon reveries, I managed to convince myself that he and I could talk, that he didn’t have any reason to want to kill me, and that the passage of a few days in his company would cause him to see reason and so to abandon his absurd your-money-or-your-life highway robbery project.
So I was pleased when he padded into the bedroom in his socks. He was wearing my white cycling jacket. He removed the iPod mini I had hidden away in a breast pocket. An expression of warm appreciation fell over his face, as if I had brought him a gift. “An MP3 player?” he wondered.
I lifted my face from my hands. “Yes, it is,” I said.
He tilted his head. He pretended to be flattered. “Thank you,” he said.
“No problem at all,” I said. For a moment, he seemed genuinely moved. I was his friend. I had brought him an expensive toy from America. “A thousand thank-yous,” he said, winking.
“Where have you been?” I wondered.
He smiled. “You’re angry. Don’t be angry.”
I denied being angry. Or rather, I was angry, yes, but only at myself.
“Because you trusted me?”
“Yes, yes, trusted you,” I said.
He sighed. He sat down on the mattress next to me.
When the regime had arrested him earlier that year, he said, on charges of using Facebook to organize demonstrations, he had also been angry. Like me, he had had difficulty eating at first. “That will pass,” he said. He felt I could take comfort in being the prisoner of a just cause. The regime officers in his prison had been beasts. Their highest ideal had been Bashar al-Assad, an animal. Whereas his cause was Islam. As a prisoner, I would be treated according to the rules laid down in the Koran. “We are Muslims,” he said. “Everything we do, we do under the eyes of God.”
After a few moments, he rose from the mattress, wrapped his fingers around the iron filigree I had been holding a moment earlier, then stared out into the dying light. Distant trucks rolled along the Binnish-Taftanaz highway. “Is four hundred thousand dollars a large amount for an American family?” he asked in a voice that resonated, he seemed to want me to feel, with academic rather than personal interest. “It isn’t really, is it?” We discussed the budgetary realities of typical American families for a few minutes. He felt $400,000 would be easy to raise. I wasn’t so sure. I wondered what he meant to do
with his $400,000. “Buy me a Doshka,” he said—a high-caliber Russian machine gun.
“Good for you,” I said. He wanted to mount his Doshka onto the back of a pickup truck, then drive it hither and yon across the countryside. When an airplane appeared in the sky, he would shoot it down. “Good for you,” I repeated.
I was curious about how he had gotten on during his three months in his Damascus prison. He had been terrified, especially at first, he said. His family had no idea what had become of him. Inside the prison, he had to contend with savage overcrowding, hunger, and lice. But there had been moments of fellow feeling and collective passion for God. He had wept in the arms of his parents when he was released. The following day, he said, he set out for Idlib Province.
I was curious about the fate of his fellow inmates. Some had been tortured so badly they could no longer see, he said. Some had been released. Others had disappeared. “The regime is stupid,” he said. It had created the rebellion on its own, inside the prisons. The prisons had taught the soldiers in the opposition how to hate and had given the revolution’s leaders time to study the Koran, to fall in love with it as if for the first time, and, by the way, to split up the country into areas of revolutionary command. As for his own experience inside the prison, it had been painful but good, since he had learned to give himself to God entirely. Now, as a free man, this was how he meant to live out the remainder of his life: by walking, in every moment of every day, on the straight path of God.
“Masha’Allah,” I said.
“Masha’Allah,” he agreed.
The other kidnappers drifted back into the child’s bedroom shortly before sunset. They, too, appeared to have been drowsing and chatting the afternoon away. They listened as Mohammed finished his tale of having been imprisoned for a handful of Facebook postings. They shook their heads in sadness.
At last the time for the sunset prayer came. There were ablutions, then prostrations, then handshakes among the believers on the child’s carpet.
