Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  One afternoon, after a trip to the bathroom, the Turks followed me into my cell, then shut the door. I crouched on my haunches in a corner. One of the young men carried a weapon. A knife? A piece of shrapnel? He concealed it in his hand, but after he had slapped the crown of my head a few times, blood began to trickle down my forehead. It leaked in strings, onto the floor. I screamed at this person. He screamed back at me. The prison manager must have heard that a hullabaloo was underway inside my cell. He strolled through the door, folded his arms, then took up a position a few feet from where I lay. I crawled to his feet. “Please,” I said. “Please!” The manager ordered everyone out of my cell. An hour or so later, he returned by himself. He crouched by my side, withdrew a child-sized toy like a handgun from the rear pocket of his jeans, then tapped its butt on my head.

  “Anyway, you needn’t worry about the Turks,” he said softly, like a snake. “If anyone here is going to kill you, it will be me.”

  In the hours after this episode, I began to think that my captors wished me to see deeply, into the truth of things, just as they did. They felt, correctly, that I didn’t want to see. So they had decided to play a game, the purpose of which was to present my fate to me in the form of torture sounds, the songs I heard in the corridor, and the tapping of the pistol butt on my forehead. The fun of it was to lead me into the most intimate, undeniable contact with the truth, to watch as I refused to look at it, to laugh at my blindness, and then one day to present the truth to me in the form of a row of masked men, a camera, and a man with a knife. I had lived through their drama’s initial acts. I understood where the crime would happen (their torture room) and who would commit it (the prison manager). I knew about when it would happen (late at night) and who would witness it (the Turks, the teenagers).

  One evening during this phase of my ordeal, the prison manager entered my cell with two companions. The electricity had gone out in the hospital. The visitors carried flashlights. The manager stepped forward, seized my head by the hair, and then aimed his flashlight into my eyes.

  “Why do you fear?” said one of the men. He promised not to hit me. “Only looking,” he said. “Okay?”

  The prison manager explained that the men had lately arrived from Iraq. He shook his fistful of hair. My head bobbled on my shoulders. “This,” he said, “has lately arrived from Washington.”

  One of the visitors bent over, shone his flashlight into my eyes like a doctor, pondered me for a moment, then stood up. “He is certainly one of them,” he agreed. He felt that I had their eyes and was just as frightened as—by which he meant the American soldiers he had encountered in Iraq, I presumed—they had been.

  After a moment, the visitor addressed the prison manager: “I just want to step on his head. May I?”

  “Of course,” the manager replied.

  The manager had me lower my head to the floor. The visitor put the sole of his boot on the back of my head. He scuffed off the grit and mud into my hair. “We’re going to step on all the Americans,” he said. “Do you know we killed thousands of them in Iraq?”

  “A bit too late for regrets, isn’t it?” said another voice. “You came for information? I hope you found what you were looking for.”

  In the darkness, after these men had left my cell, it seemed to me that my tormentors had exposed a new angle of attack. I felt I could defend the US government’s involvement in Syria. The American government, I thought, might well have been provisioning at last some of the rebel groups in Syria with training and guns. Apart from this, however, America really had nothing to do with Syria at all. The American government’s involvement with Iraq, however, was a different matter.

  Now it seemed to me that in the wake of the US military’s evacuation of Iraq, the insurgency there had not melted away, as I had assumed, but had gone underground, dug tunnels, crawled away into Syria, then popped up in the Aleppo eye hospital. The American media hadn’t reported on the seeping into Syria because the members of this media corps were back in Antakya, lounging by their swimming pools.

  Reflecting on my encounter with the Iraqis, it seemed to me that they had been on their best behavior. They meant only to act out a simulation of revenge. Whenever the less-well-behaved Iraqis caught up with me, I supposed, there would be less acting. There would be more revenge. How far behind could they be?

  * * *

  In the minutes before each of the five daily prayers in this hospital, the heavyset, grenade-laden father figures would trample through the corridors. It sometimes happened that I would find myself in the communal bathroom as these men prepared themselves for their prostrations. They leaned their Kalashnikovs against the wall, removed their boots, then showered their feet with cold water. They splashed their faces, caused streams of water to trickle through their beards, then ambled dripping into the hallway. As they walked, they called out to their children, “Prayer, boys. It’s time for the prayer!” The hospital corridor filled with footsteps and the sound of cheerful, burbling voices.

  As December turned into January, it began to seem to me as though my captors were praying to be allowed to kill me. Their prayers were their time to make evil deeds holy. In their prayers, the sadists transformed themselves into avenging angels of God. The sex obsessives became saintly soldiers. They gazed at the purity within. They would live forever, they told themselves. I would die as God wished for me to die, in the dirt, on my knees, probably soon.

  I started to despise the hospital muezzin, a Turk who had fallen in love with the power in his voice. His call was their summons to a collective psychosis, it seemed to me. Their psychosis couldn’t be reasoned with, couldn’t be seen, and couldn’t be escaped. Since I had no books and no way to write, I couldn’t crawl away to a sanctuary in my head.

  After about six weeks in prison, I found myself turning my attention more and more to my cell’s window. It gave out on ground level, flush with the pavement. I had ignored it at first, because the soldiers kept a stack of sandbags piled in front of this window. They draped a blue plastic tarp over the sandbags, then tossed bits of broken office furniture and old ventilation fans over the tarp. It permitted a view, I thought at first, of precisely nothing. Yet there were times when the wind kicked the tarp away. Sometimes soldiers busy with construction projects borrowed a sandbag or two. When fate arranged the pile of debris just so, I found that I could peer out through a tiny channel in the stack of sandbags to a spot high on the facade of a building across the way. In the early evening, just before the Maghreb prayer, pretty, coppery light glinted off a broken window on that building’s topmost floor. I had no idea where in Aleppo this hospital was, but one night around Christmastime, gazing into what remained of the windowpane, I decided that that hue of sunset light meant that the window commanded a view over the western horizon.

  No traffic noises drifted into my cell. It occurred to me that the incoming shells whistled in the air for an age before they crashed into the floors above me. These clues, I told myself, meant that our hospital had been built far from the center of things, on an eastern ridgeline perhaps, or a plateau, high above the city, as sanitaria sometimes are.

  If only they would let me climb up to the shattered window across the way, I thought, I would stand behind it, shield my eyes, then peer out into the setting sun. The vastness of the Aleppo slums would roll away at my feet. I would watch the birds arcing over the rooftops. The Aleppo citadel would hover over the city. I would hold my gaze on the dark silhouette of the Syrian coastal mountains in the distance, look above it into the sky and below it into the middle ground where traffic rolled along a distant highway.

  They wouldn’t allow me such an excursion? Fine. If somehow I could climb to my own window, I would clasp its bars, hold my eye at my channel in the sandbags, then take in whatever view presented itself. Perhaps the parking lot sloped away into banks of clouds. Perhaps, beyond the parking lot, grasses waved in the winter rain. It was possible. Why not?

  The windowsill in my cell was ab
out ten feet off the floor. If I had had a desk or a radiator to stand on, I might have been able to reach the sill, hold myself steady for an instant, then lunge at the bars. As it was, in the mornings, when I had energy, I leapt at the wall. I tried to run my feet up it, then tried to stand on a water bottle, if there was one in my cell or a blanket. When I leapt, the bars I wanted to clasp were only about twenty inches beyond my fingers—close, but far. My view might as well have been on the moon.

  There was a radiator in the bathroom. There were sometimes buckets and plastic sacks full of trash in this bathroom. If only the guards would leave me alone in the bathroom, I thought, I could clamber over the trash bags. I could leap at the bathroom window. But the guards never left me alone in this room, nor, for that matter, did the window, when I examined it up close, appear to give out on anything but a wall.

  One morning that December, I woke, walked to the spot in my cell from which I could look at the building across the way, and happened to notice a shower of ashes—no, snowflakes—drifting into the war zone.

  A few hours later, a guard came with breakfast. “Take me into the snow,” I told him.

  He put a bowl of olives and a round of bread on the floor for me. He smiled. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Bring me a snowball,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. He shook the snow off the collar of his jacket. It fluttered to the floor. “That will do?” he asked. No, it did not do.

  Later that night, this guard, some of his friends, and the prison manager at last took me into their torture room. I was in my blindfold. Though I had walked by this room dozens of times and knew well enough what went on inside, I was too disoriented and too terrified to realize that I was being tortured. It didn’t occur to me that I was meant to pour out a confession.

  They had locked my body into a truck tire. They did this rather gently, without shouting. Then they cuffed my hands behind my back. They flipped me over so that the weight of my body rested on my knees and my forehead. My hands and feet writhed in the air. I flopped around on the floor, like a trout that’s been pulled from a brook. When the pain began, I guessed that they were hacking at my hands and feet with hot knives. My clothes filled with warm liquid. They had begun their hacking at the feet. They were going to work their way upward. Soon they would be slashing their knives into my skull.

  In fact, the liquid was water. The knives were only steel cables. They hit only my feet and my hands. Their kind of cables didn’t break the skin. Because I couldn’t see with my eyes and because I seemed to be squirming in a pool of blood, I guessed that I was being murdered. I screamed. After a few seconds, the hacking subsided. In the silence after the pain, the manager put a question to me. I answered it. The hacking began again. Our dialog proceeded like this:

  Manager: What are you?

  Me: Please! What?

  The knives cut into my feet. I screamed. The knives stopped cutting.

  Manager: You are not a journalist.

  Me: No?

  The hacking started again. At last it stopped.

  Manager: Not a journalist, no. What are you?

  Me: An American? An unbeliever?

  Manager: You are a liar.

  Me: Yes, yes! A liar!

  Manager: Do you want to live?

  Me: Yes!

  Manager: If you want to live, you will speak with sincerity. Why did you come to Syria?

  Me: Writing! I am a journalist. Please!

  There followed more hacking and more screaming. At last I cottoned on. By the end of this torture session, I had confessed to helping the CIA kill Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, to being gay, to wishing to rape Syrian women, and to having coordinated my attack-Islam campaign with the Syrian government’s plan to do the same. I had volunteered myself to the CIA because my journalism career had foundered. The CIA had paid me $1,000 in order to get the goods on al Qaeda in Aleppo. “You came to uncover us. We uncovered you. Is that it?” the prison manager explained.

  “Yes!” I screamed.

  When I had said all—or most of—the things the manager wished me to say, he ordered me released from the tire. I lay on the floor. He seized a fistful of my hair, then brought his face down to the level of the floor. He looked into my eyes: “If so much as a single letter in this confession is untrue, we will kill you. Under torture, we will do it. Did you lie to us tonight?”

  “No, I swear to you by God,” I said.

  The following morning, the assistants brought bread and labneh to my cell. Why are they wasting their food on me, I wondered, when I will be dead in the evening? The manager didn’t bring me into his torture room that night, but he did the next, and on the following afternoon he did it again.

  As he was leading me to the torture room for the third time, he paused at the bottom of the staircase down which I had been escorted about eight weeks earlier. Now, when the manager lifted up my blindfold, sunlight from a door or window at the top of the stairs streamed into my eyes.

  “Do you know what this is?” the manager asked about the sun. “This is the last time you will see it. Do you understand?” He brought me into the bathroom. He made me stand in front of the mirror. Again he lifted up my blindfold. “This is the last time you will see your face,” he said.

  Inside the torture room, the blindfold held itself in place for several minutes. Eventually, a combination of their kicking and my writhing knocked it loose. I’m sure my eyes were rolling in my head as they hit me. But when they stopped hitting, when I was meant to carry on my dialog with the manager, I could see well enough that a crowd had assembled, that Yassin was holding a cable over his head like an axe, that the teenagers who fed me and escorted me to the bathroom twice a day and sometimes spoke kind words to me were now torturing me, also with cables, and that the elderly, long-bearded visitors with whom I had discussed organ harvesting had collected in a corner. They watched like figures in a tableau—silent, rapt, motionless. For their part, the Turks had kitted themselves out in their finest war regalia. They wore combat vests and military-style cargo pants. At least two of them had gone to the effort of tying bandannas over their faces. I knew who they were because I recognized their silhouettes and their expensive-looking basketball shoes.

  There were no windows in this room. Someone had strewn a line of candles across the floor. Emergency LED lamps hung from pipes beneath the ceiling. The manager had laid out his instruments across a corner of the floor in rows, like items in a museum display: three pairs of handcuffs, screwdrivers, a pair of work gloves, a neatly coiled chain, jumper cables, and a car battery.

  During an interval of calm toward the end of this session, it occurred to me that someone was brushing the fronds of a broom over the soles of my feet. I managed to twist my upper body enough to see a pair of eight-year-old children standing as if in a trance. They held out their cables over the soles of my feet like fishing rods. They were doe-eyed children waiting for something interesting to bite.

  “Don’t you want to hit him?” a man’s voice wondered. The boys stared but did not hit.

  In this session, the manager began with questions about paradise. Did I understand I would never be taken into jenna? Did I understand I would soon be in hell? Next, he moved on to sex. He wanted to know that I had been a libertine in America and that wherever on Earth I went, I went for sex with the women in my address book. By nature, however, I was gay. Also, sick with sexually transmitted diseases. In Washington, the CIA had planned for me to infect the Muslim—not the Christian or the Alawite—women I came across in Syria. My diseases would sterilize these women, thus advancing the CIA’s program of attacking Islam through population suppression.

  Halfway through the interrogation, the manager picked up a line of inquiry related to my CIA controllers in Washington. They knew perfectly well where I was, he seemed to think. Yet they had made no effort to come get me. Why not? I didn’t know anything about CIA controllers. It turned out that he knew: The CIA had abandoned me to this hospital basement because
it had so many cleverer uncaught agents crawling through the city, because it knew that in the past the information I brought them had been a confection of lies, and because the CIA was in the habit of using its agents for a while, then kicking them to the side of the road. So people behaved when their only law was money.

  Toward the end of this interrogation, the manager wanted to speak about the vanished American journalist Austin Tice. He couldn’t recall Tice’s name. I reminded him. “Yes,” he said, “and he, too, was a CIA agent. They sent you to bring him back, yes?”

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  “No, no,” the manager said. “He isn’t dead. He’s with us.”

  * * *

  About a week later, when I was recovering from this torture session and bracing myself for the next—when I was hiding under the quilt on the floor of my cell—a scene came to me out of which I probably could have made the beginning of a short story, not that I was thinking about writing then. It seemed full of news about myself. It seemed to tell the truth about the past and to disclose the future. I didn’t want to look at it because it frightened me but did want to look because it explained.

  The scene took place on a winter afternoon, at dusk, in Vermont. A young woman in a summery dress stood on the heights of a ruined dam. Heavy snow showers tumbled down from the mountains above her. Snowflakes settled in her hair.

  Climbing upward, over rotting planks, her sneakers slipped on the rime frost. She paused, tossed them into the river, then kept on. A few seconds of clambering brought her to a single plank, fixed over the void like a diving board. She listened to the roar of the river for a moment, looked downstream, over village rooftops, then leapt.