Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  Toward the end of this afternoon, he stood up, walked to a corner, then plunged both palms into his crotch. “If you need to pee,” I whispered, “you must ask the guards to bring you to the bathroom. Do you need to pee?”

  He didn’t need to pee, he said. A half hour later, when I was lying on the floor in my corner and not looking at him, I heard the sound of pee tinkling into a corner of the cell. I scolded him. I splashed some water over his urine. I returned to my corner.

  Later, when the heat of the afternoon had passed, we had a discussion. I asked him where he had been arrested.

  “On the road,” he said.

  “At a checkpoint?”

  He did not answer.

  “What for?” I asked. Again, a silence. Did he know who had arrested him?

  No, he said. They had guns. “Was it Jebhat al-Nusra?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  “Was it Daesh?”

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  “Is your health okay?” I asked at last.

  “I praise God for my health,” he murmured.

  “Is your family okay?”

  “I praise God for their health,” he murmured.

  I resolved to leave him to his thoughts. In the latter part of the evening, his moaning brought the albino into our cell. We had been told to keep our mouths shut, the albino said. If he heard a word from either of us, he promised, he would make sure that both of us paid a heavy price. Did we want to play games with him?

  “No, sheikh,” I said. The albino slammed the door.

  Almost right away, Ibrahim returned to his moaning. It was a sad, helpless kind of trilling—the sound a schoolboy makes when he’s been set upon by bullies. Either he couldn’t control himself or didn’t want to. After the albino gave us his warning, he disappeared. The guards in the adjoining room, however, were on the case. At first, it seemed to me that they were too lazy to force Ibrahim to shut up. Instead of beating him or me or both of us, they called to Ibrahim from their side of the cell door: “Shut up, Animal,” they yelled, in bored voices, or, more often, simply, “Hey, Animal! Your mouth!”

  I knew they would come with their cables eventually. It happened in the evening of Ibrahim’s second day in the cell with me. The guards appeared before us in bare feet, their faces wrapped in black scarves. This combination is an ill omen, I know now. The masked faces represent the impersonality of the state. The bare feet express the humility of the state’s officers. There were three guards that evening. One of them watched from the cell’s doorway. The other two strode into the cell.

  There was a moment of quiet as the guards stared at Ibrahim. He raised an elbow to them. One of them kicked him in the head. Blood splattered across the floor. Ibrahim toppled to the ground.

  During the ensuing scuffle, the guards screamed in anger and in order to encourage themselves. Ibrahim whimpered but did not scream. Probably, the guards knew they were committing a crime. Probably, they weren’t as happy about it as they made out to be.

  Eventually, a battery cable was attached to Ibrahim’s toe. The guards wanted Ibrahim to count down from five. At zero, they would attach the second cable to a toe on the other foot. A voice called out. “Ready, Ibrahim?” Ibrahim was unable to count. Instead, he screamed: “Allah! Allah!”

  Eventually, the guards agreed to count for him.

  When they had shocked him several times, Ibrahim’s body was writhing and fluttering against the flooring. “Shut up, Pig,” the guards said to him as they left the cell.

  Later that afternoon, when the guards were again chitchatting on the carpet outside the door of our cell, a thin piping, more like the mewling of a puppy than like a human cry, rose from Ibrahim’s corner of the cell. He seemed to battle against this voice inside himself, to choke and cough, and finally, after several minutes of struggle, to give in. A louder, more uncontrollable kind of sobbing filled our cell then. Somehow, the guards allowed him this indulgence. By evening, he had calmed himself down. Somehow, both of us slept. In the morning, I noticed that Ibrahim had slept in a pool of urine. The odor of feces drifted from a pile of rags in a corner. I tossed my spare T-shirt to him. If the guards found out about the shit, I told him, they would make him clean it with his tongue. He didn’t seem to understand. He put the T-shirt aside. Slowly, like a cat drawing in on himself, he curled into a ball.

  Later that morning, when Abdullah discovered the urine and the feces, there was indeed another beating. I was told to look away. I listened as a cluster of guards kicked Ibrahim in the head and shoulders. Again, Ibrahim’s blood went spattering across the floor. Again, he called out to Allah. At the end of this beating, however, there was a visit to the bathroom for Ibrahim. He returned with a clean set of clothing.

  In the evening, Ibrahim lay in perfect silence as Abdullah deposited a round of bread and a bowl of soup on the floor in front of Ibrahim. Ibrahim refrained from whimpering. He did not speak. He hardly moved.

  In the middle of the night, when a night-light in the guards’ room was sending the faintest glimmer into our cell, my eye happened to fall on Ibrahim’s partially eaten crust of bread. He had scarcely touched the soup. I knew he needed to eat. For all I knew, he was dying. I knew what I ought to have done. Eat, Ibrahim, my brother, I should have said. Drink. But I was hungry. I was frightened. They’ll probably kill him anyway, I told myself.

  As Ibrahim napped in front of his bowl of soup, I prodded his shoulder with a knuckle. I nodded at his bowl. “May I?” I said.

  “Be my guest,” he murmured. I devoured the remains of his bread and his bowl of soup.

  * * *

  Toward the second week in September, the weather turned. There was heat in the afternoons, as always, but I didn’t have to fight against it. The nights were a fraction of a degree cooler. The dawns were positively enjoyable. In the mornings, when daylight trickled into the cell, I hunted down the lice I had brought with me from Aleppo. In the afternoons, I tried to sleep.

  The cooling off was visible in the attire in the women’s procession. Now, in the afternoon, the women wore shawls over their shoulders. Earlier, they had walked in bare feet or in sandals. Now the younger women wore sneakers. When I washed my face in the bathroom sink, I felt the cooling off in the water that was piped in from a cistern on the roof. I saw it in the rainclouds that happened to drift past the toilet stall window as I peed.

  So Earth was moving through its orbit. Now and then in the Deir Ezzor sky, there were fighter jets. They did not bomb—at least they didn’t bomb nearby, as they had done in Aleppo. It seemed to me that my captors were not on the verge of killing me. It seemed to me that my being alive for the coming winter was a likely happening, and that if I saw the winter, I would be alive for the spring and the following summer, too. Maybe I will come through, I told myself.

  * * *

  Toward the end of September, a commander who liked to tease me about how typical an American I was brought a genuine hamburger and a cool can of soda pop to my cell. He delivered these gifts in a brown paper bag. Opening the bag, I beamed at him.

  “Tasty?” he asked, in English.

  I nodded.

  Soon, he said, I would be moved to a new prison.

  “Will I be with other prisoners?” I asked.

  “Of course!” he exclaimed. His eyes twinkled.

  “Will there be light in the cell?”

  “So much light,” he said.

  “Will the cells be small?” I asked.

  “Big, spacious, gorgeous cells,” he replied.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw a captured Syrian government prison. Shafts of light poured through towering windows. Crowds of prisoners milled in a refectory. I knew I was getting ahead of myself. But my hamburger commander was inviting me to fantasize. I felt he understood that six weeks in handcuffs in Abdullah’s broom closet had been extreme.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” I told him.

  “Big rays of light,” he promised. “Windows, too.”r />
  * * *

  That night, when Ibrahim and I were sleeping, this commander opened the door of our cell. He blindfolded us, handcuffed my right hand to Ibrahim’s left, then led us in bare feet to the trunk of a waiting car. Ibrahim climbed in. I climbed in. The trunk slammed shut. We drove for a half hour or so. The car came to a stop on a street busy with voices. Pedestrians strolled. A driver emerged from our car, exchanged greetings, then ambled away. On the street, passersby chatted. Someone rested a haunch against the side of our car. I whispered to Ibrahim: “All okay?”

  “Yes. You?”

  Another fifteen minutes of driving brought us to a stop in front of a steel gate. It groaned as it opened. The car advanced a few feet, and then the door clanked as it swung shut. Hands pulled me and Ibrahim from the trunk. We were trundled through a doorway, escorted by flashlight down a short corridor, then deposited on the floor of a construction site. Cement blocks littered the ground. Four cinder-block stanchions, like the side panels in a line of toilet stalls, were rising from the back of what appeared to be a windowless room. A flashlight pointed me to a spot on the ground. “Sleep,” said a voice. The flashlight brought Ibrahim to a nook under a heap of cinder blocks. He was told to sleep. The flashlight stepped out of the room. A door slammed shut.

  When I woke the following morning, I was surprised to discover that a tennis ball–sized hole in the ceiling did indeed cast a beam of light into the midst of the construction zone. The shaft lit up the dust in the air. It caused a dull refulgence to hang over the trowels and the half-built walls of the solitary confinement cells. Later that morning, the hamburger commander came with a pile of dates, two rounds of bread, and tea. I breakfasted in silence with Ibrahim. When the commander came to take away his kettle, he asked me how I liked his prison. “Very nice,” I told him.

  He pointed to a spot high on the wall above one of the partially built cells. “You asked for a window?” he said, smiling. He promised to make me one. “Birds. Wind. The moon!”

  I doubted him, but that afternoon the sound of a pickaxe pounding against the outside wall of our prison woke me from a nap. Soon, the tip of the pickaxe was kicking little volleys of gravel into our cell. It sent plumes of cement dust through the air.

  I joined Ibrahim in his half-built cell. Together, sitting at the base of a wall, we watched the making of our window as if we were moviegoers in a cinema. At first there was pale, lugubrious light, and then pebbles flew through the air, and finally the point of the axe was crashing through the wall. The opening allowed a broad beam of daylight to settle on a sack of powdered cement.

  Ibrahim smiled. “Soon, insha’llah,” he whispered, “you will be sent to your family, safe and sound.” I wished the same thing for him.

  CHAPTER 9 THE FARMHOUSE PRISON

  The next part of my story is the happier bit. It starts in the early spring of 2014, in a solitary confinement cell, in the back of a farmhouse somewhere near the Euphrates, in the oil-producing regions of eastern Syria. Ibrahim, the companion with whom I spent my first days in this farmhouse-cum-prison, had long since been taken away. Whether he was sent to another prison, to his family, or to the grave, I cannot say.

  Abu Qais, Abdullah, Zakaria, the albino, the commander who had brought a hamburger to the broom closet—these men had become my companions. They brought food to my cell. They brought me out of the cell when I needed to use the bathroom. Sometimes, when they were not busy, they flipped open the food hatch door in my cell, propped an elbow on its lower edge, and smiled at me. “What is your news?” they would say. I had a vague sense of what their lives had been like before the war. The albino, who was in his forties, had lived for many years in a regime prison. The friendly hamburger commander had been a laborer in Beirut. All of my jailers had grown up in and around the city of Asheyl, which was famous (in the region) for having been the cradle of the Syrian revolution. The townsfolk were frequent visitors to this jail.

  By the spring of 2014, I had myself become something of an Asheyli, as the citizens of this place referred to themselves. Even the school-age children who occasionally toured the facility with their fathers and elder brothers seemed to know me. Everyone understood that I had been arrested some time ago, in Idlib, and that my case was now in the hands of the competent local authorities. I was not hated.

  Our farmhouse prison consisted of a guards’ room, a kitchen, and four two-by-six-by-six single-occupancy cells. By the spring of 2014, I had become the elderly jailbird in this facility. My fellow inmates were birds of passage. They came, were tortured, confessed, and were sent away. In this part of Syria, the part of the judicial process that occurred within my hearing range lasted about two weeks. By the spring of 2014, I had eavesdropped on an uncountable quantity—dozens, possibly a hundred—of such processes.

  Though I knew what went on during their torture and their interrogations, I was not allowed to speak to my fellow prisoners. We communicated, of course—through whispers and taps on the wall—but we did so at the risk of being flogged, then deprived of our clothing and the blankets on which we slept for a twenty-four-hour period. Thus, on most days, our cell block was silent enough to allow us to hear the mice scurrying through our bathroom. I listened to the other prisoners grinding their teeth. Before they slept, I heard them praying. During the night, as they muttered to themselves in their sleep, I worried that the guards would mistake their dream-talking for conversation. In this prison, whenever one of the prisoners was caught whispering to a neighbor, all four of us were punished.

  * * *

  By March of 2014, I was confident that my case had moved past the torture stage. It had drifted into an intermediate realm—beyond torture, short of release, within range of abuse. Some of the guards seemed to feel that I was serving out a sentence. In due time, they said, I would be released—perhaps into the street in front of the prison. “Where else would you go?” one guard wondered. Others felt that I would be released, possibly into the arms of a US official across the border, in Iraq, but only when the US government had released its Guantánamo prisoners. Still others hinted that negotiations for a ransom were underway, though who was negotiating with whom they did not say. With these guards, I had a conversation that varied only in tiny particulars as the weeks passed. I would ask for news of the negotiations. No news, the guard would say. I would ask the guard if he, personally, believed in the existence of the negotiations. Personally, he would say, he did not know. I would ask the guard to tell me if any news about the status of the negotiations—even the faintest hint of news—came to him. He would assure me that he was no negotiator, that other people elsewhere were in charge of such matters, and that if there was news, it would be brought to me in the fullness of time.

  By this point, I had come to know most of my jailers well. Abu Qais, one of the jailers who had slept on a mattress outside my janitor’s closet cell at the Omar Company, had taken to revealing confidences to me. There were no major disclosures. Yet during the previous eighteen months, I had seen almost nothing of the outside world. Everything he told me about this place and the people who lived there fascinated me. Before the war, he said, he had dreamed of emigrating to Montreal. Currently, his father, a civil servant, was drawing a salary from the Syrian government, though its police and military forces had not been seen in the region in years. Abu Qais’s father did not know of his job as a fighter and part-time jailer for Jebhat al-Nusra. “Why don’t you tell him?” I once asked Abu Qais.

  “He knows but he doesn’t like knowing,” he explained. Thus, when he was at home, Abu Qais did not discuss his work.

  Abdullah and I had come to an entente, if not exactly a friendship. He wanted me to obey the prison rules, the most important of which was the prohibition against speech among prisoners. I submitted to the rules—as much as I could manage. He refrained from punishing me—as much as he could manage.

  Now and then Zakaria spoke of a wish to return to civilian life, perhaps in Turkey. He and his family had suf
fered enough in this war to date, he often told me, without going into details. Though he was still in his early twenties, and though the war was far from won, Zakaria cherished a dream of living as a retiree, possibly in a refugee camp in Turkey.

  Every once in a while in this prison, the commander who had delivered me a hamburger when I was locked into the closet at the Omar Company brought pieces of sweet, sticky baklava to me. He passed them through the food hatch on slips of old newsprint. I smiled at him. As soon as he had closed the hatch, I would slink into a corner of my cell. I would consume the baklava in tiny bites, over the course of hours, as if there might never be another piece of baklava, at least not for me.

  It had taken some weeks for me to arrive at an entente with this Jebhat al-Nusra cell. At first, in the depths of the winter, when I was learning to accommodate myself to the rhythms of life in this prison, I vowed to myself that if I were to survive, I would make it my mission in life to bring the members of this cell to justice. I couldn’t forgive them their torture of my neighbor prisoners. A deaf man whose hearing aid had run out of battery power and so couldn’t hear the questions his interrogators screamed at him, a father whose wallet contained a photograph of a son wearing the uniform of the enemy Syrian Arab Army, a headmaster thought to have pressured the female teachers in his school for sex—these were the first prisoners whose torture I overheard.

  Their torture occurred in the guards’ TV room, about fifteen feet from my cell. The deaf man was tortured several times, over successive nights. After his final torture session, he was not returned to his cell. The schoolmaster was electrocuted, sometimes inside his cell, sometimes in the corridor, outside the guards’ room. The bitterest, most drawn-out episodes of torture seemed to involve a simulated drowning. This portion of the torture occurred in the vicinity of the guards’ bathroom. Were they stuffing the victim’s head into a toilet? I assumed so, at first, but later, when a guard allowed me to shower in that bathroom, I saw that there was no water in the hole in the ground the guards used as a toilet. So the drownings occur in a bucket, I told myself. Perhaps the prisoners weren’t being drowned so much as revived after fainting spells. I never discussed the matter with my fellow prisoners, nor with the guards. Thus, though they occurred several times a week and always within a few feet of my cell, I could never understand the meaning of the drowning sounds. Were real drownings occurring? Humiliations? Reanimations? I never knew.