Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  At one point that evening, the crowd got hold of an air rifle. Its members played at pressing the barrel of the gun against my heart, then pulling the trigger. Puff! said the gun. I startled. The crowd laughed. There really was some dried blood in my hair and on my face. This attracted the flies. I shook my head to shoo them away. This caused my forehead to smack into the post. More laughter. “Wait!” said a voice. “Flies bothering you?” A person approached with the air rifle. He shot it at my temple, at my throat, and thrust it under my ribs, then pulled the trigger. Puff! Puff! Puff! went the rifle. Each member of the crowd wanted to have a turn hunting the flies. Some of the hunters spoke warm, mocking words into my ears as they pretended to pick off the flies. Some whispered insults. It seemed to me that the flies belonged to my tormentors and that the flies, the screaming voices, the laughter, and the darkness were all part of a single, encroaching malevolence.

  At first, during my first moments attached to this pole, I had it in mind that I might speak to this malevolence. Now I knew this to be impossible. I felt that only one person I had seen that day—the judge—was capable of holding a rational conversation. My mind fastened itself to the judge. I was certain that I had said all the wrong things to this reasonable figure and that if only they would let me speak to him again I could persuade him that I really was a journalist.

  “Please,” I told them. “I need to see the judge.” Now, as the flies and the laughter swirled around my head, I decided that this judge, who had had a serene, even a kind demeanor, had been my last hope. He had had an office. He lived in an official world. He had been willing to hear me out. But he had washed his hands of me. Now I had been dispatched out onto the plains, into the darkness, where the forces of nature held sway. Out there, a black, inscrutable savagery—something that set upon me as the flies had done and meant to savor my death—was going to kill me. It spoke no language. It took pleasure in killing. My tormentors belonged to this power but didn’t control it any more than I did.

  Sooner or later, I felt, the government would come with its attack helicopters. It would raze these men’s houses. It would burn the fields and shoot the men full of holes. But it wouldn’t lay a finger on the power, since the power dwelled in the fields and in the orchards. It fell from the nighttime fog. In trying to explain myself to this force—in speaking about my life as a journalist, then begging to be allowed to revisit the judge—I imagined I was talking to human beings. Really, I had been talking to the night.

  A wise person, confronted by a wickedness such as this, I told myself, would understand that it meant to kill him. The wise person would know that resisting could only make his suffering worse. He would submit. I understood this instinctively, at first, in my first moments inside the pit, and then knew it consciously, in a way I might have articulated in speech, as I sat by the side of their pool, waiting for one of them to slit my throat. The men seemed to be drawing the thing out for their own pleasure. This, I felt, was a hideous, indecent way to die. I wanted decency. I wished that they would get on with it.

  Later, perhaps around three in the morning, footsteps climbed a set of stairs. They approached the pole to which I was handcuffed, then stopped. A voice ordered me to stand. I stood up. The voice ordered the guards to see that I remained on my feet until the morning. The footsteps walked away.

  During the following hours, the guards made sure that I did not sit, but after the prayers, as the first light appeared in the sky, the man in charge of this vigil relented. I was allowed to remove the blindfold for a moment, to clasp a glass of tea, and to guide it to my lips. I needed to pee. One of the men unlocked my cuffs, escorted me to the bathroom without violence or curses, and when I was again locked to the pole, the person told me to sit. Someone tossed me a blanket. “Sleep,” said a voice. I must have slept for several hours. When I woke, under strong sunlight, I had no idea where I was. I remembered that something disastrous had happened to my life, but what the disaster consisted of, I couldn’t recall. With a start, I thought: Yesterday, I committed suicide. I tried to bring the reasons for my suicide to mind. The silence with which editors in New York and London had met my efforts to kick-start my career must have affected me more than I wanted to let on. So had my downward social trajectory in Antakya. Yes, I had been depressed there, and hadn’t realized. I had been in a dangerous state, I concluded, and hadn’t known a thing about it. In fact, the condition had been dangerous enough to cause me to want to end my life. Without being aware of it, I surmised, I had resolved to commit suicide, had wandered off to Syria to get the job done, had botched it somehow, and now here I was, in the midst of my suicide attempt but somehow not dead. How has this happened? I wondered.

  CHAPTER 4 INTO THE DARKNESS

  Aleppo, Winter 2012–2013

  The actual al Qaeda men came for me about ten o’clock in the morning. By this point, Abu Osama’s amateur al Qaeda gang had cinched my blindfold down tight. They had chained my ankles together and cuffed my hands behind my back. Someone in this group must have wanted to exhibit his zeal to the coming al Qaeda squadron. This amateur lashed a rope to the chain that bound my ankles. He threw one end of the rope over a branch above me, then hoisted my feet into the air until I hung, half-suspended by the rope, half-slumping on my right shoulder. I couldn’t keep myself from flopping and twitching. I felt like a prize marlin or a tuna—pulled from the ocean, suspended from a hook, then left to gasp and bleat under the gaze of hostile onlookers. I wasn’t allowed to say a word. I grunted. It began to rain.

  The commander of the actual al Qaeda men discovered me in this attitude of helplessness. He ordered that I be let down from the rope.

  This new group of captors had no use for the head scarf the Falcons of Marat Misrin had been using as a blindfold. They tossed it to the ground. They replaced it with an extraordinary-rendition-appropriate black hood. They replaced the Falcons’ handcuffs with two pairs of their own, then locked my hands behind my back. A commander seized my arm from behind, locked my neck into a half nelson, then pushed my head to the floor. He asked for my complete name, and for any aliases I had used. “If you lie to us, we will kill you,” he murmured. He wanted to know where exactly in the US I was from and whether or not I held citizenship from a country besides the US. I did not. As he trundled me down the stairs beside the irrigation pool, he lifted up my hands and pushed my face downward, so that I stumbled forward, half–doubled over, like a felon paraded before a line of cameras. “This is how the Americans themselves did it,” he whispered in Arabic, to whom I do not know.

  Somewhere near the bottom of these steps a covered pickup or van was waiting. The members of this squad lifted me into the back of their truck without a word. It seemed to me as though a tactical assault squad, from some rarefied, high-performance branch of the Syrian rebellion, had come to push the plebeian Falcons and their friends aside. A half dozen of these professionals climbed in behind me. I lay at their feet on a metal floor. One of them allowed me to rest my head on his boot. For a few moments their truck rolled at walking pace, making many turns. Nobody spoke.

  When we had driven for a few kilometers, the truck slowed to a stop. I happened to overhear a checkpoint dialog. The checkpoint man, I guessed, would have seen that our truck carried overwhelming firepower. His voice faltered. The checkpoint checking that occurred then sounded like this:

  Guard: Where are you from?

  Driver: From here.

  Guard: Who are you with?

  Driver: With the Front.

  Guard: [Pause. Silence.] Off you go, boys!

  On the far side of the checkpoint, when we had picked up speed—when it was clear that we were sailing through the open countryside, with the engine at full throttle and the wind kicking the dust in our faces—the soldiers, as if obeying an unheard, invisible cue, began to sing. It wasn’t normal singing. It was joy. It was love of God.

  When they came to the end of one song, a moment of whispering took place and then they launched themselves in
to a new song. Everyone knew the words to every song. “Our leader, bin Laden,” they sang. “The Terrorizer of America. All the soldiers have sold their hearts to the Mullah. Their souls are with God.”

  These were showmen. This was a performance. I was the audience. Looking back, it’s easy enough to see that these men were performing their solidarity for me—and for themselves. At the time, I hadn’t slept much during the previous forty-eight hours. I had been arrested, had escaped, been buried, then unburied, then tortured. Now I was flying away to the country in which bin Laden’s men lived. I was too shocked and too terrified to feel sorry for myself. What a newsy magazine article a narrative of this voyage would make, I thought to myself, since it is a voyage into death. It felt to me as though the music were carrying me away, that we might well be flying in a literal sense, and that when we touched down, the country in which we alighted would ring with al Qaeda singing. No one was performing a thing, I thought. This was how things happened in al Qaeda land—their state of nature. In a way, I thought, I am making a discovery, since no outsiders know what this nature is like. Whenever we actually touched down at our destination, I would be, I assumed, torn limb from limb. So I was grateful for the flying sensation. I didn’t want our excursion to end.

  As it turned out, a kind of harmony really did reign in the house to which these men brought me. At first, I saw nothing of it. They carried me up a flight of stairs, then had me kneel on a carpet. I was aware of a sharp blow to the back of my head. “Oof,” I said. I tumbled forward. When I woke, I was seated in a chair. I couldn’t see. A man had wrapped his fingers around my throat. He was throttling me. I was trying to answer his questions. Others had sunk their hands into my hair. Someone was clubbing the side of my head, possibly with an open palm, according to the rhythm of my interrogator’s shouted questions.

  “I sent myself,” I was saying. “No one knows I’ve come. Not even my mother.” There came a crashing blow to my head, then another shouted question, then another crash.

  It seemed to me that somewhere on the surface of the earth, a person vaguely connected to me—a childhood friend, perhaps—was sitting in a chair, in a bloodstained white T-shirt. His head lolled back and forth. The old friend in the T-shirt was being strangled to death. I myself—Theo—wasn’t much concerned. I was moving on. It disturbed me that I wasn’t moving on fast enough.

  After the interrogation, if that’s what this was, I was made to lie in my cuffs and a blindfold, in a corner of the room. “Press your face to the wall,” voices told me. “Do not move.” It pained me to lie on my side. Perhaps a rib had been broken. “May I lie on my back?” I asked. A rain of kicks to the head descended over me. “Shut up your mouth!” voices screamed in English. “Not a word, not a single movement, not so much as a breath!” they shouted in Arabic. So I pressed my face to the wall. I slept.

  When I woke, early the following morning, a Koran lesson was underway in the room at my back. Somewhere in my vicinity, a teacher with a fluid, melodious command of the verses recited a passage. Then came a less fluid, less confident voice on the far side of the room. The French-accented students bumbled through their lines. There were other beginners among the students, and some experts who recited beautifully, as if they’d been practicing just these verses all their lives. The teacher was the best by far. He was mournful when the text required this quality in his voice and foreboding when he was meant to warn and threaten. He made his voice hover over the long vowels, drew his breath, then paused for an age at the ends of the lines. When a new line came to him, he struck out along a new melody, in a new tone of voice. At the end of his recitation, the room fell into the sort of silence no one wished to break.

  After the lesson, there was tea. The students chatted, as in any normal classroom. I kept waiting for the students or the teacher to acknowledge the blindfolded, handcuffed body lying in a corner of the schoolroom. I didn’t exist. Soon a general running away into the outdoors occurred, as in any normal school.

  When the students had gone, I nudged the blindfold upward—just enough to open up a thumbnail-sized field of vision. I turned my face from the wall. The young men had scattered their Kalashnikovs across a sun-dappled carpet. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, stuffed with gold-embossed biographies of the Prophet, commentaries on the Koran, and legal rulings towered over the guns. The bookshelf was the room’s only furniture.

  Somewhere in this house, a cook or a group of cooks were at work. I could hear the clinking of pots. A stove emitted the smell of roasting onions. Outside, sheep bleated. Traffic droned on a distant highway. In a field or driveway not far from my room’s window, young men began to kick a soccer ball. Now and then, helicopters buzzed through the air above us. Presumably, they were looking for us.

  My interrogator in this house wanted me to know that only he, among all the mujahideen in Iraq and Syria, was entitled to speak on behalf of al Qaeda. In describing his position, he used a word, “spokesman”—mutakallem—that made me think of government officials delivering pronouncements on Al Jazeera. This person screamed more than he spoke. During the interrogations, it was all he could do to keep from throttling me to death. Somewhere on the high plains north of Aleppo, a David Koresh–like lunatic had risen up, I guessed, declared himself the local Syrian al Qaeda oracle, recruited a dozen village youths to help him, and now a band of homeless young men, one or two of whom might have come from Europe, had taken shelter here. Perhaps, I thought, terrorism experts would have heard of him. Perhaps not. For my part, when I heard his voice outside the room in which I was being held I knew that someone would be wrapping his fingers around my throat soon. The interrogator seemed to me like the type who was inclined to murder his victims as he questioned them. During one of his interrogations, he pressed a knife into the soft flesh under my chin. “Do you know what this is?” he cooed as he breathed into my ear. He made me say the word sakeen (knife) out loud. “What will I do with this knife?” he asked.

  “You will kill me. You will kill me!” I was meant to scream. I did scream this.

  From the handful of interrogations he conducted with me, I understood that the spokesman felt that wherever on Earth Islam was growing strong, there the US government sent out its agents to kill.

  The spokesman believed that the CIA had lately become aware of a growing power in northern Syria and so dispatched a team of undercover agents that consisted of English teachers, doctors, and journalists. He felt the agents would be equipped with high-tech hidden listening devices. He had his assistants lower my trousers, then search inside my underwear. They searched through my hair and in the back of my mouth. The spokesman wanted to know if I had had any surgeries lately. When he had satisfied himself that I carried no CIA spying devices on my person, he set about identifying the Syrians I meant to bribe or otherwise induce into my spying scheme. “I don’t know anyone here,” I told him. He wanted to know what I knew of the people who had brought me into Syria. “They gave me fake names,” I said. “Maybe they were smugglers?”

  When this line of inquiry ran dry, the spokesman turned to the network of agents he believed to have been dispatched into Syria. He asked me to write out a list of all the American journalists currently working in Syria. I wracked my brain for the name of the New York Times correspondent. I couldn’t bring it to mind. What other American journalists did I know in Syria? Austin Tice had disappeared in the Damascus suburbs weeks earlier. I put his name on my list. I filled out the rest of my list with American journalists whose names I could recall. TV personalities came to mind. Wasn’t Peter Jennings a Canadian? I put down Dan Rather instead. I invented some names. “I’m not sure all of these people are in Syria now,” I said to the spokesman as I handed him my list. He shrugged.

  The next time the spokesman came to me—a day later, possibly two days—his questions were about Islam. I was not a Muslim, yet I had been studying Islam for years. Why?

  “In order to understand?” I replied. He wanted to know where I had studied, un
der whom, and which books I had read. I could answer these questions, unlike the ones about my CIA network of agents. The answers led into something that felt like a conversation. I wanted my captors to see my respect for their religion and to understand the lengths to which I had gone in order to understand. So I babbled. I rambled about medieval philosophy, the origins of Salafism, the Muslim Brotherhood, my struggles with Arabic grammar, and my interest in learning to recite the Koran.

  In the midst of my speech, it occurred to me that I was establishing myself as a CIA specialist in extremist thought. I had studied founders of the philosophy in order to track down the contemporary exponents. By the time I realized my mistake, I had recited a half-dozen lines from the Surah Ar-Rahman and boasted of having studied “Milestones,” a poetical work by the al Qaeda patron saint, Sayyid Qutb. “It was long ago. I don’t remember,” I told the spokesman, after it was too late, when he asked why I had studied Sayyid Qutb. “I read the book because I was curious?” I told him.

  “Yes, and because you’re a spy,” he replied.

  One morning, after I had been lying in his living room library for about a week, the spokesman threw open the door, marched across the room, then wrapped a rope around my ankles. He took off the handcuffs I had been wearing, had me put my hands behind my back, then cuffed my hands together. He cinched down my blindfold. A half-dozen assistants carried me into the sunlight. The assistants dropped me into the back of a waiting car. On the passenger bench in front of me, men were cocking their Kalashnikovs. No one spoke. Probably the library is too clean a place for an execution, I thought.

  I knew that messing with my blindfold would bring trouble. On the other hand, I felt I couldn’t allow myself to leave the world without a glimpse of clouds, trees, civilians—planet Earth. So in the back of the spokesman’s SUV, as he roared through the countryside, I propped myself up on one elbow, rubbed the side of my head against the upholstery like a cat, writhed, nudged, and shoved, and at last managed to remove an edge of blindfold from the corner of an eye. Through a side rear window, I watched the world go by. There were highway road signs, pretty tree branches, and alternating patterns of sun and shade on the upholstery. When we arrived inside Aleppo I could see the topmost stories of destroyed apartment blocks.