Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  In this prison, the visitors so often asked the Alawite prisoners to raise their hands, and so often stared in astonishment when they did, that I often thought the visitors had come to our cell to witness the fact of Alawites being rounded up with their own eyes. It was a dream. But no. It was a plain fact, witnessable all day long, every day, in the local grocery store.

  Many of the preachers who spoke to us during this period didn’t seem especially angry at the enemy army officers. They knew that a time of rounding up such people would come eventually. Now it had come. They weren’t much surprised. They weren’t even especially happy. Because other undesirables were being hunted down they felt a time of cleansing had come to Aleppo. It wasn’t bad and it wasn’t good, one visitor told us, of our imprisonment. He was equally sanguine about what was in store for us. “It’s coming,” he said, without saying what “it” referred to. “You can’t stop it and neither can I.”

  Most of our visitors in those days made a point of reminding us that the combat in Aleppo was really just a prelude to a wider war, which would soon spread across the earth. Soon, the visitors felt, all the enemies of God would be routed and an era of Islamic hegemony would dawn. For the time being, many millions on both sides were going to be killed. The Muslim dead would ascend to paradise. Everyone else would live in agony in hell.

  One afternoon about two weeks after our arrival in this prison, I met my old friend the Sheikh of Economic Science, in the hallway outside the grocery store toilet. He smiled as I was hurrying from the bathroom. He cocked his head at me. “Tell me about the girlfriend you have for me,” he said, under his breath. I didn’t reply. He smiled again. “Take me with you to America,” he whispered.

  I would have liked to have engaged this person somehow. He was the misfit of Jebhat al-Nusra, the terrorist who didn’t want to terrorize—at least he was so in my imagination. Anyway, he seemed in the mood for an adventure. I judged that he wouldn’t have objected to the kind that occurred in thirty seconds and came together with a wink and a flurry of believable-enough, true-seeming promises.

  In the hallway outside the toilet, I didn’t have the presence of mind to sketch out the fantasy he seemed to want, but during the following minutes, as I sat chatting with my neighbor prisoners on the floor of our cell, I whisked myself away.

  I felt like having a look around the town in which I grew up, so called up the field in front of my mother’s house in my imagination, then watched a troop of crows alighting from the crown of a venerable old maple. High off to the left, over the crest of a ridgeline, a bank of clouds was drifting in from the west. The temperature was dropping. Soon there would be snow.

  I wished for a way to explain to my mother what had happened in Aleppo. I felt she trusted me to tell her the truth and knew that she would not have minded if, during the course of my telling, I paused to describe the weather, to relate a colorful snippet of dialog, and to opine a bit about the food.

  The thing I most wished to discuss with Mom was the sleight of hand by which the Jebhat al-Nusra sheikhs had persuaded some significant portion of Aleppo that an era of killing had dawned, that this killing might somehow be good, and that in any case, it was an unstoppable thing, not so different from the rising of the sun. It felt to me as though now, in our neighborhood, the murders of a few dozen prisoners, even if carried out in front of the local elementary school—perhaps especially then—would be understood as a sad event, perhaps, but in harmony with the spirit of the times.

  How had we come to this point? Since God was in charge of everything and since God was good, the audience attending our murders, I felt, would hail the killers. It would make videos. Helpful municipal workers would cart our bodies away, probably to the dump.

  As I had observed the Jebhat al-Nusra sheikhs at their work over the previous six months and allowed their psychology to overwhelm mine, at least on occasion, it seemed to me that I had a basic grasp of what they had done to bring Al-Haydariya—and the many other neighborhoods and towns they controlled—to this place. I knew the affection they dangled in front of their acolytes. I knew the phrases they used to keep their underlings in check. I knew how they longed for their less religious neighbors to flee and what they did to those who wouldn’t flee and wouldn’t fall in line. Also, I knew about the lovely yesteryear in their imaginations. Not so long ago, they declared, in their speeches and anthems, there were no Alawites in Syria at all. Back then, according to their myth, the citizens of Aleppo lived in harmony with the earth and with one another like a sprawling family of farmers.

  A proper letter home from an Islamic state, I thought, would jolt an audience into new awarenesses, as I had been jolted. During my first months in Jebhat al-Nusra’s custody, it had seemed to me that powers that lived in the light and the shadows in this part of the world—forces beyond the reckoning of all journalists, all historians, and all scientists—coursed through the veins of the men with the guns. I had felt myself in the hands of something that operated through humans but wasn’t quite human. Any true letter from an Islamic state, in my opinion, would have to make this sensation real to a reader. A good letter writer would want to invite his audience into the twilight zone where fact and fantasy mingled.

  One doesn’t normally try to frighten one’s mother in letters home. Still less does one try to mess with her sense of what is real. What I ought to do, I told myself, is turn the empty hours here in jail to account. The right thing, it occurred to me, was to write out the script of a Hollywood blockbuster. When I got out of prison, I would hand the scribbles to an agent. Shortly thereafter, I would be rich.

  Since I had scarcely been able to persuade the editors of the New Republic website to take an interest in goings-on in Syria, I judged that I couldn’t set my blockbuster in Aleppo. But I had had quite enough of Syria by this point. Anyway, the phenomenon I wished to bring to life—the slide of a society into a little lake of blood—could happen anywhere. I decided to make my disaster take place at home, since I knew I could give an accurate accounting of how people talked at home and how certain kinds of weather wore on people’s brains.

  One of the less religious officers had hoped to take advantage of the empty hours in prison to learn English. He wanted to begin with the dirty words. In private colloquies, in a corner of the cell, with a pencil he kept hidden in the breast pocket of his flak jacket, I had written down the dirtiest ones I could think of. As the last moments of daylight drifted out of our cell, I asked this officer to lend me his pencil and his piece of paper.

  Stretching the paper out on my knee, I thought for a moment about what it would take for the social contract in the disregarded mill town in which I grew up to disintegrate. What if someone, or some group of people, wanted to see it die, had allies and weapons, and so campaigned, under the cover of darkness, to make it come apart?

  Wishing to be elsewhere, I stood for a moment on a bluff overlooking the disused woolen mill in this town. I was looking down through the early morning darkness. At that hour, I knew, most of the citizens in our town were either asleep or lost to a sleep-like state, thanks to alcohol or prescription drugs or a cocktail of the two. It seemed to me that anyone wishing to deal a blow to community cohesion in our low-self-esteem mill town would first of all do away with the Congregational church, since it was the tallest building, stood at the center of things, and really had, once, long ago, hosted meetings and dances and feasts.

  So as the neighbors dozed, I imagined a fictional person into existence, imagined her dousing the wooden joists under the wooden nave with gasoline, and then watched as the flames crept through the pews.

  I would have kept on scribbling in this manner—which is to say, whimsically, for the fun of being somewhere else—but the piece of paper my officer friend had given me was no bigger than a playing card. It took me about a minute to fill up the available space. Anyway, after a minute, the officer wanted his pencil back. I stuffed the chit in the pocket of my hospital pants. I’ll finish this tomorrow,
I told myself.

  On the following evening, just before dark, Abu Hajr came to the cell to announce that Matt Schrier, Abu Sofiane, and I were to be transferred. To a new prison? To the Turkish border? To the custody of some other branch of the rebellion? Abu Hajr didn’t say. He asked us to gather our spare T-shirts, to blindfold ourselves, and to stand in a line behind the cell door. Within seconds, we were being handcuffed. And then we were walking across a paved surface as a cluster of men pushed rifles into our ribs. These men brought us to the back seat of a waiting car.

  CHAPTER 7 MATT’S ESCAPE

  In our next prison, a warehouse basement ten minutes by car from the grocery store, Matt, Abu Sofiane, and I were the only prisoners. Abu Sofiane and Matt introduced themselves to the new prison manager as Muslims. I admitted that I was a Christian. Feigning outrage, at what I did not know, the manager, who turned out to be a reasonable fellow, screamed some curses at me, cuffed me across the side of the head, then attacked me with a heavy stick. Holding my elbow against the blows of his stick, I scuttled across the floor. When he caught me, there were more blows, some pleading from me, and a moment during which he held the butt of his stick over my head with both hands as if it were a pike he meant to plunge through my skull. “We are Jebhat al-Nusra!” he called out. “Who are we?”

  I replied as he wanted me to reply. Some curses followed and then some questions: Why wasn’t I a Muslim? What had I meant by coming to his country? How many Muslims had I killed?

  In Syrian prisons, such beatings are known as “welcoming parties.” The victims scream, the assailants scream, but these are strangers meeting for the first time. There isn’t much feeling in the beatings, and when the new prisoner has exhibited his terror before the new jailers the assailants usually leave off. By this point, I knew how the routine worked. I was frightened but not so frightened that I couldn’t be impatient at the same time. “Are you done yet?” I wanted to ask.

  In this instance, the manager had brought along two partygoers. One of them carried a polished gnarled branch that looked to me as though it might have been somebody’s walking stick once. A second assistant held his Kalashnikov on all three prisoners from a few paces away. After the first round of questioning, the manager had me crawl into a corner in which a used tire and a length of rebar waited. My hands were cuffed behind my back. My lower body was locked into the tire. I writhed on the floor like an overturned crab as assailants I could not see clubbed the soles of my feet. The Muslim prisoners, Matt Schrier and Abu Sofiane, watched from a pair of foam-rubber mattresses nearby. After about a minute, the manager ordered the beating to stop. I was released from the handcuffs. I unfolded myself from the tire. The manager issued some dark warnings against prisoner misbehavior, and then he and his assistants slipped through a steel door beyond which a staircase led upward to the warehouse’s ground floor.

  The following morning, the manager returned with a single armed guard by his side. Both of them were in a somber mood. The manager crouched by the side of the mattress on which I had slept. “I have done wrong by you,” he said with deep feeling, as if my forgiveness might have meant something to him, which it couldn’t have. Still, he was upset.

  He explained that he had been under the impression that orders had been issued to beat me. In fact, there had been no such orders. On the contrary, the orders were that the three of us were to be treated with respect. The orders had been given by a sheikh so powerful that only God could say no to him. The manager asked me to forgive him.

  So there had been a misunderstanding. Such things happen. Now all was well. “Of course!” I told the manager. I had forgotten the beating already, I said.

  “Very well,” the manager continued, “and soon perhaps they will let you go, all three of you.” He didn’t know when the release would happen or why. Probably, he said, we would be taken to Jarabulus, on the Turkish border, a city from which we could walk, if we liked, into Turkey. From the Turkish border, he said, we could walk straight into the office of the nearest American consulate. We pressed the manager for details. Abu Sofiane pointed out that he was not an American citizen. The manager shrugged. He knew nothing beyond what he had already told us. His advice for us was to comport ourselves, while in his custody, with dignity. “Respect yourselves,” he told us, by which he meant “if there’s any funny business from you, you’ll regret it.” We promised to respect ourselves. If all went well and if God was willing, the manager had every confidence that we would soon be sent back to our families.

  I doubt any of us much believed him. He didn’t seem in synch enough with the Jebhat al-Nusra command to know what it had in mind. I judged that an al Qaeda overlord somewhere was busy with more pressing matters. He would attend to the matter of his two American prisoners and their jihadi comrade whenever he felt like it.

  During the following days, as Matt, Abu Sofiane, and I waited for news, we quarreled. Matt and Abu Sofiane had long since fallen out over Matt’s devotion to Islam. At first, in the eye hospital, Matt managed to accommodate himself to his new life as a Muslim. He didn’t mind being called Nasser. At prayer times, Abu Sofiane would arrange himself on his blanket such that his upper body faced in the direction we presumed Mecca to be. Matt would stand at his side. Abu Sofiane would recite for a few moments. Matt would bow his head. There would be bowings from the waist, then a series of prostrations, and then silence. That was all. At first, Abu Sofiane didn’t insist on praying the dawn prayer at dawn. That prayer, in his opinion, could be prayed whenever he happened to wake. At the time, Abu Sofiane was pleased to have an acolyte. When the Jebhat al-Nusra fighters came to our cell, Abu Sofiane would trumpet the news of Matt’s conversion as if a miracle had occurred inside our cheerless little cell. Matt would be asked to recite the testament of faith. He would mumble an approximation of the Arabic words. The Jebhat al-Nusra fighters would gape. “Is he really a Muslim?” they would wonder—at first only to one another, but then, seconds later, they would put this question to Abu Sofiane in Arabic and to Matt in English. Pointing to Matt, sometimes with their guns, they would ask: “You… Islam?”

  “Allah akbar!” Matt would call out, mispronouncing this common affirmation of God’s greatness.

  Shortly after Matt’s conversion, one of the fighters brought a gift to the cell: an English-Arabic edition of the Koran. Now Matt was meant to carry out his own study of the religion. In fact, he did read from the book now and then. During the prayers, as Abu Sofiane recited in Arabic, Matt would follow along in his English edition.

  In the eye hospital, before relations between Matt and Abu Sofiane turned bitter, the arrangement suited everyone. By April, however, it was obvious to Matt that Jebhat al-Nusra was not going to free him because he had converted to Islam. Apart from flickers of interest at the news of his conversion, they didn’t seem to take any notice of his religious feelings at all. By mid-April, Matt had begun to feel he had fallen into a trap. He resented having to perform ablutions, over and over. He hadn’t dirtied himself. What was the point? He found the bowing and prostrating excessive.

  After six weeks as a Muslim, he was no longer trying to conceal his impatience. He groaned when he heard the call to prayer. He hurried through the prostrations. He declined to read from his edition of the Koran. As for the officers’ religious feelings: They enraged him. He felt that the officers were throwing themselves at God’s feet when they ought to have been throwing themselves at our captors’ necks. But Matt was in no position to defy the orthodoxies that reigned in our cell. Allegedly, he had lately fallen in love with these orthodoxies. If he had renounced Islam, the officers, some of whom he admired, would have thought him a fraud. The captors would have thought him an apostate. The punishment for apostasy, so the captors appeared to believe, was death.

  What could Matt do? The situation confounded him. He felt he had made his conversion in good faith, out of respect for Abu Sofiane and Jebhat al-Nusra. He had, however, expected something in return. Neither Jebhat al-Nusra, no
r Abu Sofiane, had made even a tiny concession to Matt. The longer the situation lasted, the more it infuriated him. By June, he was still speaking to Abu Sofiane, but only through clenched teeth. He had resumed his habit of sprinkling his sentences with curses. This brought out the scold in Abu Sofiane. A Muslim’s heart could not be clean, Abu Sofiane remonstrated, if there was filth on the tip of his tongue. If Matt continued to use foul language, Abu Sofiane warned, and continued to ignore his obligation to read the Koran, he would effectively cease being a Muslim. “Just because you pray, that doesn’t make you a Muslim,” he scolded. Islam was an affair of the heart, he said. There could be no concealing the contents of one’s heart from God.

  When Abu Sofiane wasn’t acting the part of the preacher in front of Matt, he liked to invite Matt to join him in reflecting on the sweetness of a martyr’s death in Islam. Such thoughts came naturally to Abu Sofiane. He knew the verses that justified suicide bombing. He knew the language by which charlatans persuade teenagers to volunteer for suicide missions. He knew that talk of a terrorist attack on New York would make Matt see red. “Ah, the greatest thing I could do with my life,” Abu Sofiane liked to say when he wanted to strike up an argument, “would be to walk into a café in New York—any one busy with Israelis—in a suicide vest. How beautiful would that be?” Abu Sofiane would pose such rhetorical questions to the air, inspect Matt’s narrowing eyes, then smile for the two of us. “Very beautiful, right? So effective, too, right?”