by Theo Padnos
In the midst of one especially violent stretch of city driving, when it seemed to me as though explosions were causing the neighborhood buildings to collapse as we drove in front of them, the spokesman slammed on his brakes. Without a word to his assistants, he opened the driver’s door, strode to the rear door, opened it, climbed inside, then began to kick at my back and at my head. He kicked as if he had discovered a rabid dog in the back of his truck, as if he meant to stove in its head, then drop its body into the street. I might have lost consciousness during these moments. I remember that several minutes later, when we were again flying through the midst of a combat zone, one of his assistants murmured a question into the air: “What did the prisoner do?” There was silence, then more skidding through the corners, and eventually the spokesman spoke up from the front seat. “He uncovered his eyes,” he said.
By this point, the spokesman had wrapped the entirety of my face in a head scarf. He tied it down tightly enough to keep me from moving my eyelids. I was having trouble breathing.
As it happened, my first underground cell was in the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital. On the afternoon the spokesman dropped me off here, a cluster of foot soldiers met the spokesman’s SUV at a turnaround at the bottom of the hospital’s front stairway.
One of the spokesman’s assistants trundled me out of the luggage compartment. Other assistants removed the rope with which the spokesman had tied up my ankles, freed my hands from the handcuffs, loosened up my blindfold enough to allow me to grasp a water bottle, to drink, and to walk.
We hurried through a rock-strewn courtyard. They held my elbows. Somewhere in the air above us, rooms and walls and slabs of cement were exploding, then tumbling to the street. Streams of broken glass tinkled through the elevator shafts. A minute of brisk walking through this combat zone brought me to the edge of a gaping hole in the earth. Evidently, my captors understood the reluctance with which prisoners approached this void. “Slowly, slowly,” they murmured to me in English as they pushed me forward. “Take care. No quick. See?”
I stepped forward but did not see. Beneath my feet, I discovered, there were steps. I could feel that they were steep, that they led into an enveloping darkness, and that as we descended, a welcoming committee, led by a man with a flashlight, was climbing up out of the depths. There were greetings and salaams. My handcuffs were removed and then I was being ushered downward, through an M. C. Escher–like endlessness of stairs. Eventually we came to a landing. The landing led to a corridor, and the corridor to a closed wooden door. Standing in front of this door, I had time to make out the letters WC, in English characters, which had been scrawled across a panel at eye height. Presently, a hand was pushing a key into the door handle’s lock. The door swung open. “Get in,” said a voice. I stepped forward. The door slammed behind me. Expecting a blow, I froze for a moment, listened for the presence of other bodies, then removed my blindfold. I was by myself. I stood on the threshold of a large, barren room whose only window, a shoebox-sized rectangle high on the wall opposite the door, admitted a dull glow. Someone, I was surprised to see, had painted the walls a soothing pastel pink. It occurred to me that this shade of pink, the hanging fluorescent light trays, and the high ceilings were often found in state institutions in Syria. So was I in a classroom? An asylum? A military barracks? I couldn’t decide. My eyes fell on a small pile of dung that had been deposited some days earlier, apparently, on the floor in the center of the room. Wherever I was, the men who controlled the facility, I concluded, despised it.
During my first moments in this cell, I wandered along the walls in a haze of exhaustion. I was still frightened but I felt more relief then than fear. During that week, my tormentors had hovered about me. They had screamed at me for the pleasure of seeing me startle. They had insisted that I keep the blindfold on at all hours of the day and night. Now, I was free to look about. I had no handcuffs. My tormentors from the library, I hoped, had gone away in the car in which they delivered me. Now I am in an institution, I told myself. Here, some saner, or anyway, more official, more comprehensible dispensation holds sway.
In the late afternoon, three men opened the door of my cell. They pushed a hospital cart across the threshold. Without saying a word, one of them withdrew a round of bread from a plastic bag, then tossed this onto a blanket that had been lying on the floor. A colleague had me pick up the bread, kneel by the side of the cart, then hold the bread in the air, at his waist. He scooped two spoonfuls of halawa from a cardboard box on the cart’s bottom shelf. He deposited these spoonfuls in the center of the round of bread. He asked me to stand, to carry my dinner to the blanket, and to sit. “Eat,” he said, when I had done this, “then sleep.”
Later in the evening, these men returned with a pair of white pleather dress shoes for me, a clean T-shirt, a pair of hospital pants, and an empty soda pop bottle. I was to surrender the clothes I was wearing and to put on the hospital clothing. I was to keep the shoes and the bottle in a corner of the cell, next to the door. In the morning and in the evening, said a man in a tracksuit, I would be brought to a bathroom, outside my cell. I was to put on my shoes before leaving the cell. I was to fill the water bottle from a faucet in the bathroom. “Do you have a cloth?” he asked.
“A cloth,” he repeated. “For your eyes.” He turned on his heels, disappeared into the corridor, shouted inaudible words to people I could not see, fell silent, and when he returned, several minutes later, he held a pale green rag, about the size of a bandanna, in one hand. He tossed his rag to the floor. “When you leave the cell, you will put the shoes on your feet and the cloth on your eyes,” he said. “Understand?”
Over the following days, the pitch of the battle outside this hospital complex was so intense, the guards so often thrust their guns against my skull, and so cheerfully discussed my upcoming execution that I stopped hoping I might somehow survive. I must face facts, I told myself. Soon I would be killed. I assumed I would be shot in a courtyard somewhere or hanged from a pipe in an underground torture room. But when? At first, thinking about my execution paralyzed me. I felt myself too weak and too frightened to do anything but stare at the walls but as the hours passed, I decided that it was an abomination to sit around like a frog on a lily pad as my captors prepared to do me in. I must plead with them, I told myself. Why wasn’t I trying to seize one of their guns? I needed to discover who exactly was in charge of my execution. I didn’t imagine that begging for mercy with the orderlies who delivered food to my cell could accomplish much. These people seemed to be teenagers. Some of them were preteens. No, I needed to figure out who among my captors was the chief. I needed to throw myself at his feet.
When I asked the orderlies if I could speak to their leader, they screamed at me. “Shut up, Animal!” they yelled. “Put your face to the wall.” When I pressed my face to the wall, they thwacked my back and shoulders with electrical cables.
If I am to save my life, I told myself after about twenty-four hours of such treatment, I must acquire true information about how the execution is to occur. Who exactly will carry out the deed? When exactly?
The only way for me to acquire this information, I judged, was by means of sustained, careful, hypervigilant eavesdropping. Thus, during my first days in this prison, whenever voices could be heard in the vicinity of my cell, I tiptoed to the door. I crouched on the floor. I held my ear to the crack beneath the bottommost panel. Snippets of conversation came to me then, and much pattering of feet. There was screaming now and then, some singing, some solitary reciting of the Koran and much cocking and recocking of the Kalashnikovs. Not once did I pick so much as a shred of information concerning what was to become of me.
I need to see my captors in order to understand their plans, I told myself. At first, whenever a person who seemed as though he might be important came to my cell, I peered into his eyes. I weighed the tone of his voice. I read into his remarks as a literary critic would, attentive to double and triple meanings. This got me nowhere.
> For a little while, it seemed to me that I had discerned a pattern in the noises the war, which was occurring outside my shoebox-sized window, produced. Every night a few hours past midnight, it seemed to me, the firefights and the exchanges of artillery fire culminated in a grand, Fourth of July–like symphony of explosions. I imagined that the large explosions were caused by a wave of advancing regime tanks. When these explosions seemed to occur within a kilometer or so of my prison, as they did during my week there, I imagined that this advancing violence meant defeat for my captors and an imminent rescue for me. But if my captors were to abandon their stronghold, wouldn’t they shoot their captives first? And what if Bashar al-Assad’s military apparatus, the Syrian Arab Army, were somehow to overtake this al Qaeda redoubt? I wasn’t at all confident that they would be any sweeter to me than the al Qaeda men had been. Though I found the battle sounds entrancing, and did my best to weigh the meaning of every whistle and boom, it didn’t take me long to give up imagining that the racket outside my window might somehow bode well for me.
During this first week of my new life as a prisoner, I felt the lack of anything to read like a physical pain. I tried to read the scratches earlier prisoners had made on the walls. I tried to picture books I had read in the past, to open their covers with my mind’s eye, and to see what was written on page one. This exercise deepened my frustration. One afternoon, I begged a guard for a book. “Any book at all,” I said. He burst into laughter.
“You wish to read what, Filth?” he said, chortling. He named the two most famous compilers of the hadith, or statements of the prophet. I had in mind to read the compilations of the hadith?
“Ok,” I said. “Sure.”
He scoffed. No, he concluded for me, I was no scholar. “You are rather a spy,” he said. “Shut up. Put your face to the wall.” He slammed the door.
Eventually, of course, I despaired of being given a book. I abandoned my mission to sort out who would kill me and when. They’ll never tell me a thing, I concluded, and could knowing the hour of my death really save me? I doubted it could.
By far the softest, most comforting object in my world at the time was my blindfold. Because I could see through it, I Imagined that it was my ally. Because, for the most part, they didn’t hit me when I was wearing it, I thought of it as a magical fabric that warded away their blows. Because it was old and had been worn down to its threads by what processes exactly I could not tell, I imagined that it was rich in meanings.
During my first days in its company, I imagined that it had been salvaged from the corpse of a recently executed prisoner. But there was no blood on it. The fabric had been dyed to a pretty pea green and printed with tiny violets. It looked like no blindfold I had ever seen. Probably, I decided, I am the first to use this object as a blindfold. It had been worn thin at its center. It would have taken years for such fabric to wear away into the tissue of threads it had become at its center. Jebhat al-Nusra was much too young and way too brutal to have subjected my piece of fabric to such a gentle kind of wearing down. I told myself that the cloth had probably been retrieved from this building’s kitchen, which, I was beginning to see, had once belonged to a hospital. It would have been left there by a woman. She had been a cook or a cleaner, had sweated into her head scarf for years, I decided. In her affection for the patients in this place, and because she believed in her work, she brought them delicious, restorative coffees and baklava. When she appeared before these patients, I imagined, she always wore this headscarf.
It took me a week or so to warm to my blindfold. At first, I couldn’t bear it. It was another instrument in their arsenal of torture instruments. After a few days, however, I started to see the good in my blindfold. It was soft and translucent. If ever I could bring myself to cry, I thought, which I wanted to do but couldn’t, it would wipe away the tears. I liked to hold it to my face and to breathe in its scents. It didn’t smell like anything but must, but when I held it to my nose, I imagined that I was in the presence of the former owner. I felt like she was talking to me, and that the era of kindness in which she had lived when she worked in this hospital was still with us. For this reason, I pressed it to my face a lot. I took to hiding it beneath the blanket on which I slept, lest some crazed Jebhat al-Nusra guard should try to steal it away. There was no way that I could escape, but I knew there was nothing to prevent an innocuous object like the cloth to go sailing out into the world. After just a day of use, that blindfold was saturated with my sweat. It held tangles of my hair. If a well-disposed visitor were to carry it away or if, for instance, a gust of wind were to pluck it from the windowsill, it could find its way to a DNA expert. I wasn’t much up on the science of DNA identification, but I assumed the expert would draw the obvious conclusion: The residues in the fabric gave incontrovertible proof of my being alive. So I wanted to keep hold of the blindfold for this reason. I felt it was my last reasonable means of sending out an SOS.
* * *
About a week after my arrival in this cell, the prison manager came to me with a pen and sheet of paper. “Write out your name, your birthdate, and your mother’s and father’s names,” he said. He slammed the door. He returned after an hour to fetch his sheet of paper but forgot to retrieve the pen. A few days later, I offered to write out some English lessons for a teenage guard who felt the other guards were better at English than he was. When he came to pick up his lesson, he left me with two sheets of blank paper.
At the time, thoughts about the writer Paul Theroux were rumbling around in my head, probably because his Dark Star Safari was the last book I had had my hands on. In his books, I told myself, he often found himself stranded in rooms every bit as dingy and disconnected from the world as the one in which I was imprisoned. Theroux positively sought out dinginess and disconnection. Confronted with such qualities in a place, he didn’t agonize as I was agonizing. He invented characters, confected a plot, and plucked interesting dialogs from the air. Pretty soon—within minutes, I imagined—he had lost himself in the twists of a novel. It would bring out deep, hidden truths. Probably, it brought him loads of money, too. I wasn’t much interested in publishing success at this point, but I did envy real writers their ability to sweep themselves away into imaginary worlds. How hard can it be? I asked myself. Was this ability to invent not a human quality present in us all?
The idea that came to me that afternoon was a Paul Bowles–like tale in which a too-confident, oblivious American finds himself in a village, somewhere in the Central American highlands, surrounded by hostile natives. He has come to photograph them. In the tale I began to scribble in my cell, the villagers accosted the photographer. They draped his cameras around their necks, threw his notebooks into the air, and dashed his telephoto lenses on the rocks. Soon they had him blindfolded and trussed up on a stretcher like a mental patient. Drinking heavily and singing, they hoisted the stretcher into the air, then paraded it into a disused church. My plan for my story was to have these tribesmen sacrifice my tourist protagonist to their gods. First, however, they would torture him.
I wrote out the first few paragraphs of my story quickly, with great confidence, as if I were Paul Bowles himself. I was telling a tale of American hubris getting its comeuppance. I meant for the writing to pause over the details of the torture in a mood of methodical, first-this-then-that attention to detail. Since every night, bloodcurdling screams issued from a room somewhere outside my cell, I felt myself well enough acquainted with torture to give this important topic authoritative treatment. My torture descriptions, I imagined, would cause shivers of unease to run down my reader’s spine. He would feel himself in the presence of something unnameable but essential in human nature. Perhaps the New Yorker would be interested in my tale? Anyway, I wasn’t worried about where exactly it would appear. The important thing, I thought, was to give my readers a round of instruction in the darker, more invisible regions of the human spirit.
At first, I found the atmosphere and the plot of my story intriguing but w
hen I came to the point in the story in which the villagers were to begin their torture, I stopped writing. I reflected. Late at night in this prison, a kind of screaming arose from behind the steel doors at the end of the corridor, which made me think that my captors were murdering their prisoners, one by one, possibly with axes.
Had I meant to entertain an audience by tossing some true-sounding, fictional torture details at them? But I was the audience. I had not found real torture sounds entertaining. The idea of making up a torture in order to divert myself repelled me.
I did, however, believe that fiction can reveal the mysteries of human behavior as, for instance, news reporting never can. Didn’t I believe this? In the kind of story I was hoping to write, a putatively smart but actually dim person—a scientist or a journalist, for instance—finds himself wandering through a beguiling landscape. There are whisperings, signs, and uninterpretable languages. Soon, he falls into a trap. He sputters and gesticulates. As darkness gathers round, the story’s writer escorts the reader into a reckoning with all that the protagonist, who is revealed as a callow, feckless tourist, has failed to grasp about life.
As I tried to work my way through the writing of this tale, it occurred to me that somewhere in the background of such tales, there must be a knowing writer. The problem with my attempt, I felt, was that there was no such person on the scene. What understanding did I wish to bring to readers? I understood that a band of fanatics had risen up, taken over a state institution (possibly a hospital?), converted it into a prison, arrested their neighbors, and now the fanatics were torturing the neighbors. Why? What did my captors intend to do to me? What did they intend to do to the world? I suspected that the torturers themselves could not have shed much light on matters. I suspected that the world’s war correspondents had yet to guess at the most basic facts of the world into which I had stumbled. The world’s far-seeing novelists would have known still less than the reporters knew.
