Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  I know now that as some parts of the US government were coming to the aid of the opponents of the Assad regime in Syria and all parts of it were refusing to help the American hostage families, David Bradley was brainstorming with his hostage rescue team. It consisted of Atlantic Media’s in-house lawyer, Aretae Wyler, who helped the families understand the legal jeopardy to which a ransom payment might subject them; Atlantic Media’s publicist, Emily Lenzner, who helped the families field questions from the press; a subgroup of four full-time researchers, who chased down rumors of prisoner sightings; and twenty volunteers from Teach for America, a nonprofit organization for which James Foley had worked, who helped however they could.

  I know now that three indefatigable cousins of mine, Amy Rosen, Betsy Sullivan, and Viva Hardigg had already devoted their lives to pursing leads. By August of 2013, they had begun to coordinate their efforts with Bradley’s team’s efforts.

  Nowadays, when I think of this rescue project, it seems to me that the TFA volunteers, the cousins, and the Atlantic Media staffers were indeed a match for the terrorists. They badgered ambassadors. They recruited bighearted former FBI agents. They took long shots on characters in Antakya who promised to track down leads in the suqs. They sought out advice from an elder generation of Middle Eastern journalists.

  Over time, David Bradley emerged as a sort of foreign minister for the hostage families. I know now that during his two years of looking for us, he traveled to Beirut, Amman, Rome, London, and Istanbul, and three times to Doha—all at his own expense. In Doha, he waited in hotel lobbies for Qatari security officials, who were, as a rule, available for meetings only in the early hours of the morning. I suspect that these officials, the Qatari foreign minister, Khalid Al Attiyah, and his intelligence chief, Ghanim Al Kubaisi, regarded Bradley’s quest to rescue citizens to whom he was not related, who were neither employees, nor friends, nor notable personalities of any kind, as quaint. Somehow, the Qatari officials warmed to Bradley’s quaintness. Somehow, he passed his determination along to them.

  “I have a theory we’ve used in business called ‘wending,’ ” he told me when I asked him about the philosophy that guided this rescue project. “So, when you are walking across a field headed to an impenetrable forest, you worry that you can’t get through it. But when you are right up close to the forest, you say: ‘Well, I don’t know if I can get through the whole forest, but I can get around this first tree, and then the next one, and around the bush up ahead.’ ”

  During my time in Abdullah’s broom closet, I doubt I would have been able to believe in a tale about an American publisher who saw himself as a wender in a forest. I certainly wouldn’t have believed that a major figure in the magazine publishing world wanted to rescue me. I had internalized my captors’ contempt for me. I wasn’t altogether sure I was worth rescuing. I had been surrounded by hatred for America for so long that I had forgotten about the sort of citizen who brings out their best in his fellow citizens. Probably, such people are to be found on every street corner in America. In my prison cell, their existence slipped my mind.

  Now I think that as I was relinquishing my reasons to live, one such person was encouraging his team to drop everything, to track down every clue, and to seek out every conceivable ally in its effort to bring me back to life. The team refused to give in, though there was only bad news. It kept up its work for nearly two years. Its only real strategy was to cast pings into the emptiness. “Hello out there? Can you hear? Is there anybody there?”

  Looking back now, these seem to me like heartbreaking, beautiful messages to send, especially to vanished people. I suspect that in their cells, James, Steven, and Kayla were grasping at straws, as I was. Peter Kassig, who was arrested later, would have learned the routine in due course. Why is this happening to me? they would have wondered, and is anyone except my mom and dad actually looking for me? Had they known about them, those messages would have given the prisoners something lovely to daydream about. The thought of a team of idealists working under an idealist publisher would have helped them to keep on keeping on. Sadly, the four ISIS prisoners didn’t live long enough to hear messages from home. Only Austin Tice, from whom nothing has been heard since his disappearance in Daraya in August of 2012, might conceivably be in a position to hear such messages now. I hope he’s listening.

  * * *

  On the morning of my fourth day in Abdullah’s broom closet, after I had eaten a round of bread and a cucumber, he agreed to cuff my hands at my stomach rather than behind my back. He loosened the zip ties at my ankles. This allowed me to stand without difficulty. He brought me a liter bottle of water. Now, in the privacy of my cell, I could hunt down the lice in my hair and my clothing—an immense relief. I poured water down my throat. I massaged the spots where the lice had bitten me.

  That evening I strolled around my cell. I peered through a crack at the side of the door. A pair of sliding windows that had been covered over, on the outside, by a dark velvet blanket, gave on to the guards’ room. Late that night, it occurred to me that, by sliding one of the windows a few centimeters to the left, I could bring a faint but meaningful current of air into my cell.

  The purpose of the velvet blanket was to prevent me from seeing into the guards’ room, but when I had opened the window, it was obvious that the curtain also prevented the guards from noticing the openness of their window. That evening, I didn’t dare open the window wider than my finger, but the following afternoon, when the guards who normally lolled around on a carpet beneath the window had wandered away, I stuck my entire hand into the finger-width crack, then gave the window a solid shove. I pressed my nose through the bars, into the air-conditioned cool of the guards’ sitting room. I turned around, then pressed the back of my neck through the bars. Though I knew the guards would return to their carpet momentarily, I resolved not to close the window. Why should I have? They were scarcely human. They were depriving me of light and air, without a thought, apparently, for a human’s need for light and air. Part of me wanted to push it all the way to the side, to reach my hands through the bars, to seize hold of their hideous black curtain, and to dash it to the floor. Why should you breathe and see while I suffocate in the darkness? In my indignation, I wasn’t far from screaming such words at them.

  In the evening, after the guards had returned to their carpet, when they were drinking tea and chatting in quiet voices, one of them, a construction worker I subsequently came to know as Abu Qais, slipped into my cell. Crouching against a wall next to the door, he asked me if I was interested in having a chat.

  Was I aware, he wondered, that recently, after archeologists found a copy of the Koran in a cave in the Yemeni desert then sent it off to Germany for carbon dating, the technician who examined the manuscript in Berlin found himself so overwhelmed by the truthfulness of what he was reading that he converted to Islam on the spot, though he had never had so much as a minute of formal instruction in the religion?

  “No, not aware,” I said.

  He had a second question for me, he said, if I didn’t mind. How could it be that Christians said that there were really three gods? “There are not three,” he said. “There is only one. Why do you say three when there is only one?”

  We discussed the doctrine of the trinity for a moment. I’m sure I explained it poorly. He allowed me to speak for a moment or two, then interrupted: “But do you believe there are three gods?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God for that,” he said.

  Our discussion turned to a scientific demonstration whose details he wanted to share with me. Was I aware that when a man reading the Koran inside a glass room is photographed with infrared, temperature-sensitive cameras, the cameras show that an energy passes from the holy book, through the reader’s hands and into his body? “You can see the body changing colors,” he said. “The glass allows you to see that there are no other heat sources in the room.” The energy had to come from the
Koran, did it not? How could I say that the Koran was an inert object, like any other book, when over and over scientific demonstrations had established that it conveyed a quantifiable energy?

  Abu Qais’s bewildered tone made me think that our discussion had laid the groundwork for something that might turn out to be, if not exactly a friendship, then an awareness of shared experience. We shared in the mystery of life. This was a kind of kinship, I thought.

  The following morning, when I tried to get him to give me a whole rather than a half round of bread, he sighed. He pushed the half round of bread he was holding into my hands. “Take this,” he said. “Make do.” He didn’t know why these were the orders. “Maybe they’re trying to weaken you?” he guessed. He was as bound by the orders as I was. He shrugged his shoulders. He was sorry. That matter did not lie in his hands.

  Over the following days, during the hottest hours of the afternoons, I stood by my partially opened window. I pushed the crown of my head into the bars so that the air-conditioned cool of the guards’ room would splash through my hair. I tried to feel the air down my spine. Out of hatred, I reached my fingers through the bars, eased their velvet curtain to the left a fraction of a centimeter—enough, in any case, to give me a view of a door, which opened onto the desert—then watched the comings and goings in the guards’ room. In this way, I learned that every afternoon around five, the albino motorcycled to the guard room door, dismounted, pushed his motorcycle into the guards’ room, parked it on its kickstand, then joined the guards on their carpet for a round of tea. Often, at about this time, Abdullah would rise from the carpet, then climb a set of stairs I could not see. He would vanish for a minute or two, then reappear with orders for his lounging colleagues. “Get up,” he would say. “Path. Open the path!”

  The colleagues would rise in silent unison, then disappear. Thirty seconds of quiet would pass, and then a train of women in gauzy, diaphanous gowns with babes in their arms and toddlers clutching their hands would process through the guards’ quarters. The train would roll outside, into the stillness of the desert evening. Through my fold in the curtain, I could see the warmth of the setting sun in their gowns and on their faces. I watched currents in the air lifting their headdresses. Behind them, a field of desert scree glowed under a darkening sky.

  These women would squint for a moment, then disappear around a corner. The sun would sink and fifteen minutes or so later, the train would come floating past my window in the opposite direction. It never made a sound.

  * * *

  Of course, eventually, when about four days of life with a partially open cell window had come and gone, Abdullah discovered my climate control system. He happened across my alteration as he chatted with friends on his carpet. He was yawning. He reached his arm over his shoulder, then pushed his hand through the curtain. The hand felt for the windowpane. Finding nothing, it waved itself in the air, inside my cell. It withdrew.

  A moment later, in a quiet voice, Abdullah asked a comrade if the comrade had opened the window.

  “No,” the comrade replied. Had the comrade given me permission to open the window? Again, no.

  There was silence outside my cell and then came the sound of keys jangling in the lock of the cell’s door. Abdullah and a friend stepped into the cell. Abdullah spoke quietly, as if wondering over a mystery. “Animal, why did you open the window—oolak?” He raised his cable over my head. The friend made a similar gesture.

  Over the subsequent months, I came to know these two men well. I learned about the dream of one of them, Zakaria, to finish his math studies, to be married, and to run away to Turkey. I learned about Abdullah’s dream: He hoped to perish in the jihad. He was teaching his wife to drive, he told me one afternoon, so that when the time came, she could drive a suicide truck into a line of enemy troops.

  Over time, Abdullah and Zakaria became something like my friends. I had no one else to talk to. I needed news. I needed their food. I wanted conversation. Somehow, in that world, their approval improved my state of mind.

  On this particular afternoon, the two young men were my assailants. Their job was to make me pay for my crime. They flogged. I scuttled away from them. They pushed me into a corner. There were excruciating blows, especially to my hands and to my head. “Please!” I screamed, in English. I held up my handcuffs. There was much more violence.

  When they were done, after about a half hour, the two of them withdrew from the closet. They relocked the door. I ran my fingertips over the crown of my head. Blood was streaming down my face. It was dropping in clots onto the floor. The wounds on my head were not severe, I thought, but the force of the blows had caused the handcuff collars to ratchet themselves down over my wrists. The metal dug into my flesh. The cuffs seemed to cut off all circulation. When I twisted my hands, jolts of pain shot through my arms. Examining my feet, I saw that the cable blows had caused the zip ties to break into pieces. What to do? I feared that if I called my assailants back, they would return with their cables. On the other hand, I couldn’t bear the pain in my wrists. If I said nothing about the broken zip ties, several hours would pass, and then in the evening, perhaps, or on the following morning, Abdullah would beat me for having broken his zip ties. So I called him back. He did loosen the cuffs, but he was angry at me for having inconvenienced him. I was insisting on special treatment. I was spoiled. I imagined myself in an American prison, but this, he wanted to show me, was no American prison. In order to help me understand the treatment I deserved, he had me sit at his feet. This time, as he flogged, I held my wrists to the side. In order to keep the zip ties intact, I sat on my feet.

  The following morning, Abdullah returned to tell me that he had discussed my crime with a council. The council had determined that I was guilty of insubordination. In order to save myself from a second punishment, which was bound to be bloodier than the first, I was, in the first place, to repent. Second, I was to be deprived of food and drink. The period of repentance was to be twenty-four hours. During that time, I was to lie on the floor in a blindfold. I was not to touch the blindfold. I was not to speak. I would be permitted my normal trips to the bathroom. Did I have any questions?

  Somehow, I managed to sleep through the heat of the day. In the evening, in secret, inside my toilet stall, I drank from the hose with which I was meant to clean myself. During the night, when the guards were sleeping and the cell was cooler, I thought about waterfalls. I imagined myself swimming under a sheet of cascading water. As I swam, I drank from the pool in which I was swimming.

  By the time guards performed their dawn prayer, at about five in the morning, I felt I had their punishment under control. It seemed to me that my twenty-four hours of inertness on the floor of my cell had been like a flight in a glider, that I had been let go in the thin air, had been aware of the possibility of falling, had kept things under control, and now, in the early morning cool, it seemed to me that I could glide my way to an easy landing. Safety, for me, was ten o’clock. At ten o’clock a new liter of water would appear in my cell, along with a round of bread and a cucumber.

  At ten, an unfamiliar figure whose face was wrapped in a scarf deposited a jam-smeared round of bread on the floor. The figure watched me eat for a moment, stepped out of the cell, returned with water and a cucumber, retreated from the cell again, then locked the door. Settling himself on the floor, on the opposite side of my cell door, the person initiated a conversation. He greeted me with a salaam—not at all the normal way to greet a prisoner. He spoke in a warm, forgiving tone of voice, as if he understood that I was going through a rough patch, knew I needed a friend, and wanted to listen.

  “You were punished?” the voice asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You know why?”

  “Opened the window.”

  And why had I not asked to have the window opened? Did I not know that the mujahideen were generous in their hearts? I did know this, I said.

  “So the punishment was just?” the voice asked.
r />   “Yes, very just,” I said.

  In general, how were the mujahideen treating me?

  “Respectfully,” I said.

  Was the treatment here better than the treatment of the Muslims in Guantánamo?

  “Of course,” I said. The cell door opened a crack.

  A hand held out a half round of bread.

  I was grateful to God for the bread, I said, and for my life and my health.

  As I spoke these words, I knew I was reciting from Jebhat al-Nusra’s script. In this sense, I was mouthing lies to an enemy. But I was grateful for the bread and for my life. I had never been so grateful in my life. I wanted the person to believe in my gratitude, so I spoke quietly, from the heart, without hesitation. In this sense, I was sharing an intimate truth. The person outside the door was a confidante. We were on the same side of things, spiritually speaking, and allies.

  * * *

  A few days after this incident, when I was back on normal rations—when I had been given a sofa cushion to use as a pillow, and an extra water bottle with which to douse my head in the heat of the day—the albino brought me a new cellmate. Ibrahim was eighteen. He and his parents, whose fates Jebhat al-Nusra was sorting out elsewhere, were accused of flashing signs to passing fighter jets.

  Ibrahim had a speech impediment. Perhaps he had other conditions. Was he aphasic? Autistic? Perhaps he was just frightened. During his first hours in the cell with me, he lay on his side in a corner. Though we had been told not to make a sound, he emitted a continuous high-pitched kind of moaning. Now and then, there were words of prayer in his piping. I whispered to him. Did he need water? Was he hungry? He was meant to keep quiet, I said. If the guards heard his prayers, they were liable to punish him. “Shh,” I whispered. He moaned.