Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  As he knelt in the field, the men in the balaclavas would have prompted him to recite the opening lines of the Koran: “ ‘In the name of the compassionate and the merciful, the king of all the worlds,’ ” he would have said, “ ‘lead us on the straight path.’ ” These words are thought to stand a Muslim on the cusp of a departure from the earthly realm in the best possible stead. It is thought that any human at all who leaves planet Earth with these words on his lips earns a kind of paradise eligibility for himself, regardless of the creed by which he lived out his days. So his killers would have given him ample time to recite. They would have listened carefully, and only when the recitation was well and truly over would they have shot him in the back of the head.

  * * *

  In the wake of Abu Sofiane’s departure, Matt stopped his observance of Ramadan, which that year came in the second week of July. He ate in the open, as the sun shone, as I did. He did not, however, give up the performance of the five daily prayers. Though I had never asked him to share his religious ideas with me, I think we both understood that his conversion to Islam had been a lie, invented to ease his way out of jail. Yet it was a strange sort of lie. Something in the prayers, evidently, had grown on him. “I bet you’re wondering why I’m still doing the prayers,” he said one afternoon, as he was preparing to make his prostrations.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not my business.”

  Looking back on those moments now, it seems to me that he might have been living through a touch of Stockholm syndrome. He liked the moral authority that came with being a Muslim. He loved to legislate. For instance, it had been Abu Sofiane’s rule that an unbeliever mustn’t be allowed to touch the pages of the Koran, lest the corruption in his soul pass though his fingers, into the holy book. Now, in the wake of Abu Sofiane’s removal from our cell, this law became Matt’s law. He presided over the English-Arabic Koran the authorities in the eye hospital had given him like a dragon guarding a hoard. He refused to countenance the idea of my hands touching his book.

  What if I washed my hands before I touched it? I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  I promised to kiss the cover before opening it, as he kissed it.

  “Nope,” he said.

  One afternoon, I insisted. I hadn’t read a word of any kind since the previous October. I was seeing bookshelves in my dreams. “Give me the book,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Give me the fucking book,” I repeated.

  “No,” he said.

  I tried to tear the book out of his hands. We fought. In my many altercations with the Jebhat al-Nusra warriors, I had been afraid but never angry. Now I was in a rage. I wanted to tear Matt to bits. In our basement cell, as firefights echoed in the distance, he and I locked our hands around each other’s necks. We throttled each other for a moment, then fell, then wrestled on the floor, grunting and gasping and saying nothing. After several minutes of this, he had me in a full nelson. He was pushing my chin into my stomach. “Okay,” I whispered. “Uncle.” He let me go. With his defense of his Koran complete, he returned to his corner. I returned to mine, empty-handed.

  * * *

  In the third week of July, the authorities brought us a third cellmate, a veterinarian who lived in an Aleppo suburb, as-Safira, famous for its arms manufactories and for having been taken over lately by a group that wished to be called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The veterinarian spoke of this organization as “Daesh.” When they came to question him, the Jebhat al-Nusra authorities, learning that he was from as-Safira, asked him a series of questions about Daesh. Did Daesh preach to him? About what? What was his opinion of Daesh? He refused to utter a negative word, though it was obvious that the interrogators held Daesh in contempt. Instead of giving them what they wanted, he quoted a line of scripture to the effect that the casting of aspersions on other Muslims displeased God.

  The veterinarian, Mustafa, likewise refused to utter a negative word about Jebhat al-Nusra, though they had hauled him away to jail for no reason he could discern. He assumed that there had been a mix-up. He was desperate to explain himself, to whom he did not know. Trusting that the person who had ordered his arrest would turn up eventually, he spent his days fasting and praying.

  At first, on learning that Matt had converted to Islam inside a Jebhat al-Nusra prison, Mustafa betrayed not a hint of skepticism. He accepted. He behaved toward Matt as he would have toward any other Muslim. He prayed next to Matt and shook his hand after the prayers. But several days into Mustafa’s detention, as Matt and I were conversing, some remark or look in my eye or change in my tone of voice caused Matt to fly into a rage. Suddenly he was trembling with fury.

  Mustafa looked up from the Koran he was reading, then lowered it to his knee slowly, as if watching an event in a dream. He could speak only a few words of English. Still, there was so many versions of the word “fuck” in Matt’s exclamations that it would have been difficult for him not to catch the gist of what Matt was saying.

  “Nasser, my friend,” Mustafa said softly in Arabic. “What is wrong?” He turned his eyes to me, then back to Matt. He asked me to tell Matt that a Muslim who allows himself to be overcome with rage as Matt had done has invalidated his fast. God would refuse to accept it. Matt would have to make up for the failed fast by fasting an extra day, at the end of Ramadan.

  I relayed the message. Matt thought for a moment. He clenched his teeth. He waited for Mustafa to return to his Koran, then crept across the cell to where I was sitting. He cupped a hand around my ear: “Fuck you,” he murmured, “and fuck your mother.”

  Given the bitterness between us, the collaboration he and I fell into, at the end of July, in the hours after the prison authorities took Mustafa away, was itself a kind of Ramadan miracle. Matt hated me because I had refused to convert, because he felt I was more willing to find the good in an al Qaeda suicide bomber than I was to spend a moment in conversation with him, and because I knew the secret of his bad faith. I hated him because he refused to understand that it wasn’t me but the lunatics into whose clutches we had fallen who were driving him crazy, because he sometimes hit me as he held me by the scruff of my T-shirt, more or less as the Jebhat al-Nusra fighters had done, and because he inflicted Abu Sofiane’s Taliban-like notions of who was entitled to touch the Koran on me.

  The prospect of a jailbreak must have helped us put our differences aside. In undertaking it, we knew we were risking death. We could hear the snipers firing from nearby rooftops. The Aleppo quarter in which we were being held then, as Shaer, was a frequent target of the barrel bombers. Both of us believed that had Jebhat al-Nusra caught us in the midst of an escape attempt or had they detected signs of our preparations, they would have shot us. In this jail, the jailers allowed us pens and paper. Before our first escape attempt, both of us wrote out notes to our mothers. We folded the notes into envelope-like rectangles, then labeled these with our names and contact information for our parents so that, if the snipers cut us down in the street, the neighbors would have a means of sending the notes off to our mothers.

  Though in this jail the jailers gave us ample, often tasty food, both of us felt that, on balance, staying was more dangerous than leaving. The barrel bombs that were falling over as Shaer in those days might have killed us. We might have been given or sold away to a group that really did want to kill us, or the jailers might have decided, in a fit of pique, to execute us as the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, about whom we tried not to think, was executed. We dreaded an American attack on an al Qaeda outpost in Egypt or Yemen. We dreaded the coming of the September 11 anniversary. “When the holy months are over, surround the idolaters and slay them wherever ye find them, and seize them, and beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them.” So says the so-called Verse of the Sword, to be found in the ninth chapter of the Koran, the Surah of Repentance. I knew enough of this verse to recite it to Matt in English. I was aware of our captors’ prejudice in favor of literal interpretati
ons of holy writ. I discussed these circumstances with Matt.

  Looking back now, I suspect that even if we hadn’t felt that our survival depended on an escape we would have tried to break out anyway, because the collapsing iron filigree too much invited our attention and because the jailers, busy with Ramadan, had all but forgotten about us. An hour or so before dawn, they brought us a plate of sliced melon, labneh, and bread. Minutes before sunset, they returned to the cell to bring us tea, more bread, lentils, a salty white goat cheese called shanklish, and rice. During each visit, the jailers remained with us for a matter of seconds. After they had delivered us our meals, they locked the door, climbed a flight of stairs, and were gone. We had our iron filigree to ourselves for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day.

  After about two days of steady work, we had reduced the structural integrity of the iron grille in the window to that of a pile of twigs. We tried to conceal the damage we inflicted by propping bits of wire against the sturdiest parts of the grille. But we had turned the thing into a swatch of wiry lace. A sneeze would have caused it to collapse.

  The morning of our first attempt, Matt stood on my back, pushed the rusting iron mesh to the side, and then, holding the window frame with both hands, hoisted his head into the tunnel. He squirmed for a moment, got stuck, grunted, wiggled forward a few centimeters, then called out, in a whisper, “I’m stuck!” We had planned for him to rest his feet on my shoulders. I was meant to stand, and he was meant to thrust himself upward and forward, like an acrobat leaping from my shoulders, through the tunnel. When he was actually in the midst of the escape, his feet couldn’t find my shoulders. They waved and kicked at the air. I tried to guide his feet to my shoulders, but they were bicycling through the air so violently that as I approached, one of the feet struck me in the face. It sent me reeling backward into the cell. By this point, he was too exhausted to carry on. He scuttled backward, then dropped himself onto the mound of pillows we were using as a stepladder.

  Our failure left me shaken. I judged Matt too prone to panic to be capable of pulling off a stunt such as the one we were planning. If somehow he did manage to wiggle his way out of the cell, I didn’t trust that outside, in the free world, he would hang around long enough to help me wiggle my way through.

  Thus, over the following two days, we argued. I refused to try again. He insisted. I insisted that I be the first person out. He refused. He proposed that I allow him to climb away on his own, with no assistance from me. But the window was too high off the ground and the tunnel too narrow for this to be a realistic possibility. Anyway, I had no intention of allowing him to destroy our illusion of a grille as he scurried away to a new life, so I refused to allow him to try on his own. “If you do,” I said, “I’ll call the guards.” My threat sent him into a rage. I was a rat and a traitor and an al Qaeda accomplice.

  When this argument subsided, we argued over whether he should help me once he had squeezed himself through the tunnel.

  “Once I’m out, I’m gone,” he said. “Why should I wait?”

  “Courtesy,” I replied.

  “What’s a matter with you? This isn’t a fucking country club,” he said.

  In one of our arguments, he recalled for me a lesson he had learned during his days (in the recent past, I suspected) as a cat burglar on Long Island. He and a friend had managed to break into a restaurant after hours, he said. They had piled cases of liquor at the door. The alarm had gone off. They managed to destroy the alarm but had had to flee in a panic. Several days later, however, in a cooler state of mind, they broke in again. Now there was no alarm. They took their time. They made off with many cases of expensive alcohol. For Matt, the story showed that great determination married with nerves of steel would carry the day.

  “You should apologize to the restaurant owners,” I told him, “and give them back their liquor.”

  He gaped at me. “What the fuck’s a matter with you?” he said.

  Our second escape worked like a charm—for him. By the time he had wiggled his way through the tunnel, the dawn was coming up over a ruined factory I could see now, for the first time, looming in the wide-open window. Crouching outside this window, he whispered instructions at me. He waited as I scrambled over the pile of pillows, climbed up the ladder of T-shirts I had built, jammed my torso through the tunnel, then poked my head into the open air. I needed him then to pull me by the hands or the hair or by the scruff of the neck, but we were both panicking then and though he tugged on my right forearm for a moment, he tugged for only a moment. Then he let the arm drop. “You can’t do it,” he whispered.

  Again, we argued.

  “Pull!” I said.

  “I’m pulling,” he said.

  “Just one big pull,” I said, gasping. “Please!”

  “Shut your mouth!” he said. Somewhere above him, in one of the guards’ sleeping rooms, perhaps, a window stood open.

  “Just a few more seconds,” I said. “It’s working.”

  “I’m pulling,” he said. “It’s not working.”

  Inside the cell, my feet were flopping in the air. I kicked at the emptiness. I reached my hands forward toward a sandbag whose contents had spilled across the pavement. I searched through the sand for a handhold. “You’re making a fucking racket,” Matt said. “Would you shut your fucking mouth?” I sank my fingers into handfuls of sand. “I’ll go for help, okay?” he said. He turned on his heels. He sprinted across an expanse of pavement, then disappeared behind a half-destroyed cement wall. I never saw him again.

  * * *

  During the hours that followed Matt’s escape, I sat slumped against a wall at the back of our cell. Aleppo, to judge by the soundlessness of the world outside my window, was fast asleep. In the early morning quiet, I made myself climb through the window frame a second time, but I struggled to hoist myself off the floor. By the time I managed to poke my head into the open air, I was exhausted. I didn’t have the strength to wriggle forward. I couldn’t balance myself inside the window frame. I grunted a bit, then slid backward onto the cell floor.

  If only I had insisted that I be the first one out, I told myself, I could have saved myself. I felt I would have had the presence of mind to stave off the panic, to reach inside the cell, and to pull Matt to safety. That he would panic in the crucial moment had been, for me, a given. So why had I let him have his way? I had hoped to avoid a fight. I had assumed that even if he were to leave me in the lurch, as he did, I was lithe enough to scuttle through to safety on my own. My miscalculation, I supposed, was going to result in torture or death under torture. So it is in wars, I told myself. People who think themselves clever, as I had done, are crushed. I slumped deeper into the base of the wall. The room spun.

  For several hours that morning, as Aleppo slept, I reviewed the errors that had led me into this spot—far away from the world, it seemed to me, at the very edge of life. Of course, long before I had ever set my eyes on the grille in this basement window, there had been strings of miscalculations. Had I not sealed my fate months earlier? In my heart of hearts, I told myself, I had long since conceded my life to my captors. Now the final moments were at hand. I may be shocked, I told myself, but can I be surprised? I sank my fingers to the roots of my hair. I stared into my lap. I waited for the sun to pass through the sky. Soon, I told myself, I will be at peace.

  As it turned out, that evening, when the jailer who normally brought the evening meal discovered that Matt had fled, he gaped for a moment, withdrew, kept away long enough to pray and to break his fast, then returned in the company of a dozen angry, heavily bearded men. One of them—a leader, apparently—locked my head into the crook of his elbow. With a spare hand, he punched my face several times. As he held my head, he screamed questions at me. Why had I not alerted the guards as Matt was escaping? Had I helped him? After a minute or so, he released me. I sputtered answers at him through the blood that was dribbling into my mouth. I had not helped Matt, I lied. I intended to be “released with hono
r,” I said, using an Arabic phrase that often comes up among prisoners. I was innocent of all charges, I said, it was beneath me to sneak away like a rat, and I meant to vindicate myself before a judge. Yes, I had summoned the prison staff, I lied, as Matt was escaping. I had banged on the door like a lunatic in an asylum. I had been ignored.

  To my surprise, the Jebhat al-Nusra commander who had put himself in charge of this investigation seemed to listen as I spoke. This wasn’t at all the normal Jebhat al-Nusra way. I assume now that on this occasion, my visitors were genuinely curious. They had believed the cell to be an inescapable dungeon. One of the Americans, apparently, had waltzed away. The other one, for no obvious reason, had refrained from waltzing away. Why?

  Accordingly, that night, I did my best to cast aspersions on Matt’s character. He had made his preparations as I slept, I said, probably because he felt I would rat him out if he had shared his plans with me. I showed the commander the cut on my forehead I had sustained during my struggle with Matt over his Koran. “We disliked each other,” I explained. “Often, we fought.”