Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  None of my informants believed the war to have been a means by which rebels sought to advance a political objective. Nor did anyone suppose that the revolutionaries, whom they called mujahideen, or men of the jihad, sought to defend human rights. Rather, in the early dawn of time, my informants believed, God had decreed that a generation of heroes should arise, just now, in the Syrian deserts. Summoned to their destiny by God, these men thought, would in turn summon the world’s truest, most devout Muslims to battle. In this battle, faith would oppose the disloyal, the inconstant, and the traitorous. In the fullness of time, the soldiers of God would erect the banner of their faith—the one that bore the legend “There is no god but God”—over every corner of the Earth.

  Such was the official doctrine in Syria’s east when I lived there. All my questions about the origins of the war led me into lectures that related this history. Yet my informants were opinionated, demonstrative, effusive people. Discussions about the deep causes of the war also brought us into the matter of the poverty in Syria’s East.

  The Syrian people were rich in oil, the Deiris believed. For too long, colonial administrators from Damascus had siphoned away the natives’ birthright, while treating the natives themselves likes slaves. At last, they felt, the slaves had risen up in revolt.

  Looking back now, it seems to me that as I was watching the road signs on the highway out of Aleppo, my captors were indeed whisking me away into the deeper, unknown, truer causes of the war. Here, the former slaves were dragging the colonists from their beds. Some were being hauled off to jail. Others were being put on trial in ad hoc courts, and many were executed on the spot. Later, the most hated colonists were crucified in village squares. Others were burned alive. Many never emerged from the rebels’ rapidly expanding prison system.

  * * *

  That night, it took us about seven hours of driving to reach the city of Asheyl, on the banks of the Euphrates. In eastern Syria, I learned later, it was thought that this city had sent more fighters into the war in Iraq than any other in Syria. Now, a wave of Iraqi jihadists, intent on coming to the aid of their former comrades in arms, had turned Asheyl into a sort of forward operating base for the campaign against Bashar al-Assad. Some of these jihadists were aligning themselves with the newly formed rebel army in Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Others arranged to join Jebhat al-Nusra. I know now that during this time, for everyone in Asheyl, there was instruction in the philosophy of jihad in the mosques. There were training camps in the school playgrounds. At the time, a stream of pickup trucks, new soldiers, arms, and ready cash was flowing into Asheyl. Everyone who was anyone was keen to get in on the action.

  Asheyl, a scattering of squat, single-story huts, sufficient to house a population of about ten thousand, was lit up by the moonlight when the driver of our SUV rolled his truck down the central boulevard. There wasn’t an electric light within sight. We coasted past shuttered shops and a mosque, then rumbled outward, into the fields beyond the settlement. After about ten minutes of potholed driving, we came to a stop in front of a walled compound. The pair of guards with whom I had been sharing a seat disembarked. A third guard, the front seat passenger, joined them.

  The three of them banged for a moment on an iron gate. They called out to friends inside. No one answered. After a minute or so, one of the guards scaled the wall. He opened the gate, admitted his comrades, then closed the gate.

  Alone in the moonlight, with only a silent SUV driver for company, I contemplated an escape. I might have been able to run a bit, I thought. I imagined breaking for the fields. It had been nearly a year since I had last run anywhere. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I watched the stars for a moment, gazed at the shimmering field to our right, marveled as the SUV driver lost himself in his cell phone, then lost my nerve.

  Instead of throwing myself from the car, I listened to dogs barking in the distance. I shifted a bit in my seat. “Is this my prison?” I ventured. The driver ignored me. I waited another minute. “Sheikh, please,” I said. “What happens now?”

  The driver sighed. He rested his cell phone on his thigh. “Maybe they’ll kill you,” he said. He returned to his phone. A few seconds later, boring his eyes into his screen, he added a thought: “Maybe they won’t. Dunno, really.”

  I abandoned my questions. I turned my eyes to the potholed stretch of dirt road in front of the SUV. I admired the shimmering fields. In places, it seemed to me, some of the grasses might have been twenty feet tall. What crops did the farmers grow in this region? I wondered. Sugar beets, I supposed, and acres of cattails.

  After several additional minutes of silence had gone by, the driver spoke up. Muttering again, he wondered if I had a phone number. “It’s in the US,” I told him. “Is that okay?” I gave him my mother’s number in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He asked for my name and the name of the city in which I lived in the US. He recorded my information in his phone. Was he noting down my contact info in preparation for my being killed later that night? I thought this remotely possible. If I am to be killed, I thought, and if the driver does mean to tell my mom about what has happened, I ought to thank him beforehand. “That’s my mom’s phone number,” I told him.

  He shrugged. He yawned. “So?”

  “If something happens to me,” I asked, “can you call her?”

  “Sure,” he said. I said that she spoke no Arabic. I mentioned that a phone call to the US would be expensive.

  “No problem,” he said.

  I murmured my thanks. He shrugged. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” I told him. “You can come visit me in the US anytime,” I said. I told him that he could have my car if he liked. Or money. “I have bicycles,” I said. “Do you like bicycles?” He turned to me. He smiled.

  “Keep your bicycles,” he said. “I’m staying here.”

  It took about a quarter of an hour for a pair of jailers, both of whom appeared to have been woken from heavy sleep, to emerge from the gate. One of the jailers brought me into a courtyard. My handcuffs were removed. I was admitted into a bathroom. I was allowed to pee and to wash. When I emerged, I was conducted across a children’s playground, up a short flight of steps, down a corridor, then into a large, airy classroom. A voice told me to sit. The door closed behind me. When I removed my blindfold, I found myself on a carpet, under a wide blackboard, facing two prisoners, who were seated cross-legged, as I was. We gazed at one another. One of them handed me a round of succulent Iraqi-style flatbread—tanoor, which are baked in clay ovens. “Welcome,” he said. I ate. The prisoner offered me a glass of water, then pointed me to a spot on the carpet, beneath the blackboard. “Sleep there,” he said. I rested my head on my blindfold, then fell into a long, dreamless sleep.

  In the morning, a jailer whose black head scarf had been wrapped around his face came to the cell with a kettle of tea. He greeted my cellmates in cordial tones. He left us three rounds of bread, and three hard-boiled eggs.

  Looking back now, I suspect that my desperation to find promising auguries in that prison classroom warped my perception of reality. One of the cellmates, a sad-eyed child of fifteen, had been a prisoner in this classroom cell for three months. He had been accused of theft. His father had declined to pay the ransom to get him out of jail. The father had, however, been allowed to provision the child with coins. The child used the coins to buy cigarettes from the guards. What a warmhearted prison administration there is here, I thought to myself, when I saw my cellmate slinking away to a window to puff his smoke through the bars.

  The other cellmate was in his twenties. He had also spent the summer in prison. An Asheyl neighbor, by his telling, had made a false accusation against him. In the days following his arrest, he said, the Jebhat al-Nusra jail staff had tortured him. “Was it bad?” I asked. He gave me a dark look, which I ignored. Now, several months after his arrest, he said, Jebhat al-Nusra had become convinced of his innocence. He expected to be released in the coming days. The news filled me with happiness. I r
elaxed into a pleasant, peripatetic discussion, focusing mostly on sexual behavior in America, with my two new friends.

  At that hour of the morning, when the sun was still casting long shadows over the fields outside our window, the temperature in our classroom was close to one hundred degrees. It is dry, desert heat, I told myself—and anyway, a slowly turning ceiling fan, operated by a switch within the cell, moved the air about. The heat, my fellow prisoners assured me, would kill the lice I had brought with me from Aleppo. Our Jebhat al-Nusra jailers did torture, the cellmates said, but as I had been arrested ten months earlier and had already been tortured in Aleppo, my case, my cellmates seemed to feel, had moved past the normal period for inmate torture.

  “Are you really a spy?” the fifteen-year-old asked me.

  “Of course not,” I replied.

  Both of my fellow prisoners greeted this news with smiles of relief. They shrugged their shoulders. Their good humor infected me. I made the elder prisoner promise to visit me in our classroom jail if he happened to be released before me. I assured the younger one that Americans did not, in general, have sex with one another in the street, as dogs do, as he seemed to believe. When our conversation dwindled away, I found a patch of sunlight, removed my shirt, then turned to hunting down the lice I had brought with me from Aleppo. Through the months, lice hunting had become an important kind of leisure activity for me. It brought tiny rewards. I could keep at it for hours. It was like reading in that I quickly lost myself in concentration. I looked forward to the hours in which I would have light enough and time to busy myself with my lice. Now, as I searched through the seams of my T-shirt, a wave of relief washed over me. Nobody’s killing anyone here, I thought to myself. Nor was anyone threatening me. The tanoor had been lovely.

  Later that morning, by holding on to a pair of bars in a window, I climbed to a sill, then peeked out over a cinder-block wall, a few feet beyond the window, that ringed the school compound. About half a kilometer from the school, a field whose grass was greener than any green I had seen since I left Vermont seemed to sway in a bend by a river. Inside this horseshoe curve, a cluster of farmers in straw hats walked through shoulder-high sun-dappled grass. From a distance, the hats looked like toy boats bobbing along on the surface of an undulating green lake.

  Around noon, a pair of jailers stepped into the cell. Without saying a word, they wrapped blindfolds around my fellow prisoners’ eyes. The prisoners rose and were led away. Later that afternoon, a jailer arrived bearing a heavy steel trucker’s chain. Without saying a word to me, he knelt, then wound it several times around my ankles. When my ankles were properly bound, he pulled at the ends of his chain, then locked them together with a padlock. He had me hold my wrists in the air, applied a pair of handcuffs, then ratcheted each of the collars down carefully. When he had finished binding me up, he took a step back. He stared at his handiwork for a moment, then turned to the windows. He shook their bars for a moment, found them to be immobile, then inspected the lock on the door and found nothing amiss. Having satisfied himself, he left the room in silence, his eyes avoiding mine.

  That night, I slept in the leg chains and the handcuffs. In the morning, there was no breakfast. Around noon the next day, four men in smock-like black shirts, with wild, unkempt hair, appeared in the doorway of the cell. The man who had bound me up in his chain the day before stood at their backs, poking his head over their shoulders. One of these visitors, an albino, strode to the blackboard like an angry schoolteacher. He squinted. “What is your nationality?” he demanded. I didn’t want to admit it. “American?” the albino wondered. I nodded.

  The resident jailer approached, unwound his chain from my legs, then unlocked my handcuffs. One of the albino’s assistants dropped an armload of nylon webbing at my feet of the sort that might be used to tow a boat or a broken-down truck. The assistant bound up my ankles in his webbing. He cuffed my hands behind my back. I was blindfolded, then hoisted to my feet. Several of these men—more than two, at any rate—carried me from the room. I was borne through the school corridors in silence. Emerging into the light of day, one of the men lost his footing on the school’s front steps. I heard him stumble, then mutter a curse. “Everyone, can you wait just a moment, please?” I said. For an instant, I was a thoughtful collaborator. I was at work on a project with colleagues. I wanted them to know that I was concerned for their well-being, so I uttered my little word of caution.

  I suspect now that I meant to show this new band of abductors, who might have been stealing me away to my grave, for all I knew, that I had become a docile, institutionalized prisoner. I knew the prison-transport drill well enough, I wanted them to understand, and so needn’t be dropped into the trunk of a car.

  They dropped me into the trunk of a car. A hand slammed the trunk lid shut. The darkness within the cargo area, the heat, which was powerful enough to impede my breathing, the smell of soil, which pervaded the trunk, and the way my forehead bumped into the trunk lid when I tried to move the handcuffs from underneath the small of my back—all of this made me feel as though I were being locked into a coffin. I wondered what might happen if I screamed. I worried the men would plunge knives into my stomach. I decided to hold my tongue. It took a moment for them to climb into the sedan’s forward compartment. As they settled themselves into their car, I told myself to keep my breathing even. I tried to let go of the tension in my neck. It seemed to me that I was close to suffocation, that if I were to allow the panic that was building in my throat to take over my body, things would get much worse, quickly. And so for the sake of my survival, I did not move.

  When my abductors had settled themselves in place, the sound of a steel gate swinging open—somewhere in the school courtyard?—drifted through the car. An engine turned over, and then we were rolling through the dust. The air in the trunk filled with unbreathable soot. In the front of the car, an abductor, speaking in a pensive tone of voice, shared a thought with a friend: “He’s a polite one, isn’t he?”

  “Well trained, rather,” a second person replied.

  * * *

  We drove for about an hour. When the car at last came to a stop, I was dizzy. I was desperate for water. Hands trundled me from the trunk. My body fell onto a vinyl floor. Was I in a garage? A warehouse? The light coming through my blindfold told me that I was indoors. When the nylon tow strap had been unwound, hands at my elbows escorted me to the base of a wall, at which I was made to sit. I pleaded for water. “Bring him a tea glass,” a voice said. A pair of hands undid my blindfold. A shot glass’s worth of water was brought to my lips. “Please,” I said. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Stay thirsty,” said the albino.

  The blindfold was returned to my eyes. Someone locked a pair of plastic zip ties around my ankles. A foot kicked me from my sitting position. I toppled to the floor. Anticipating further kicks, I curled myself into a ball. My abductors stepped away from me, and then I heard a door sweeping across the floor with a muffled snapping sound, almost as if it were a refrigerator door. I know now that this cell had once been a janitor’s closet in an employee gym on the site of Syria’s largest oil field. The gym was part of a residential compound which, in a former time, had housed the employees of a Syrian petroleum giant, the Omar Company. I know now that this compound sits in the desert, on the northern bank of the Euphrates, about ten kilometers outside the city of Meyadin. A year after my arrival, it became an ISIS headquarters. By 2017, it had become a US military base.

  During my first moments in the janitor’s closet, I found myself marveling at the modernity of its construction. The school in which I had spent the previous nights had been a slapdash pile of stone blocks. Its wavy floors and crack-filled ceilings made me wonder if I wasn’t, by any chance, being detained inside a ship.

  When my abductors shut the broom closet door, it felt to me as though they were sealing me away inside a morgue. Only after they had left me to my own devices—when I had scuffed my head against a wall enough to nudge the blin
dfold out of place—did I notice the heat. I assumed that they had chosen this cell because they knew its air supply could be cut off, understood that inside, I would have to gasp and struggle to breathe, and that they had brought me here because they wanted to watch as I floundered and flopped at their feet.

  In fact, this was no airtight box. I could breathe well enough. There was, however, no circulation. There was overpowering heat, as in a sauna. I was too frightened of the men who had deposited me in this cell to call to them. I curled myself into a ball on the floor. I tried to sleep. When I couldn’t sleep I made an inventory of all the people on Earth who might be capable of rescuing me. Who might come? I needed Rambo, perhaps, or the mutant Wolverine.

  Several hours later, around dinnertime, my abductors returned. I had rubbed and chafed the back of my head against a wall enough to cause the blindfold to lie in a knot around my neck. “Why? Why did you uncover your eyes?” the albino shouted. He prodded at my head a bit with his boot.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. There wasn’t a thing to see in this closet. It was an empty cube, about the size of the interior of a cargo van. A sliding window, as in a tollbooth, would have given a view into the room next door had it not been covered over, on the outside, by draperies. Such light as there was came through the draperies and slits between the door and its frame. “I wanted to see,” I told him.