Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  During this period, the torture of my neighbors eventually wore me down. I found that I could live peaceably enough, provided I wasn’t tortured. If I survive, I told myself, I will mount a crusade against torture. I thought, I would hold the memory of my neighbor prisoners’ screams in my heart, like a hot sliver of hatred. If I should live, I told myself, for as long as I would live, I would make it my business to bring these sadists to justice.

  One afternoon in January, the members of this Jebhat al-Nusra cell admitted a mokhtar, or mayor, to the cell next to mine. Through the three-inch gap between the floor and the bottom of my cell door, I watched as his velvety robe swept across the cement in the corridor in front of my cell. I took note of his expensive-looking leather sandals. He first spoke to me shortly before the evening prayer.

  “Where are we?” the mokhtar wanted to know. I didn’t know, I told him.

  “Are we with Daesh or Jebhat al-Nusra?” he whispered.

  “Jebhat al-Nusra,” I whispered back. “What’s the difference?”

  “No difference,” he replied. “Just curious.” He thought matters over for a moment. He asked me if I had been allowed outside, into the prison courtyard. In fact, every fifteen days or so, Abdullah allowed me a fifteen-minute stroll, within a parking area, inside the farmhouse gates. My strolls occurred in handcuffs and a blindfold, under armed guard. Yes, in fact, I had seen the prison courtyard, in a manner of speaking, I said.

  “The soil outside out there,” the mokhtar whispered. “Is it fine like sugar or brittle like charcoal?” I hesitated. I thought the matter over. “Is it red, do you happen to know, like clay, or is it more gray like the clouds?”

  “I don’t know,” I stammered. He was a cotton farmer, he explained. He had lived in the river valley his entire life. He was fifty-eight years old. He knew from soils. Had I been able to see any vegetation? he wondered.

  “Sadly,” I said, “no.”

  Over the ensuing hours, I learned that Sheikh Hussein, as he preferred to be called, was the mayor of the city of Marat (population ten thousand), across the river from Deir Ezzor, that he had been accused of helping the Syrian government in its effort to conscript the young men in his city, that he had eleven children, the eldest of whom was studying law in preparation for becoming a mokhtar himself, and that his father and his father’s father had been mokhtars.

  He mentioned the family occupation to me in the afternoon, on the second day of his imprisonment. Now the distinguished-looking robe and the expensive sandals made sense. I stared into the cement blocks separating his cell from mine. In Jebhat al-Nusra’s jails, all the guards, regardless of age or accomplishment, were to be addressed as if they were men of great learning. “Yes, my sheikh,” we were to say to them, and “If you please, my sheikh,” and so on. “For me,” I whispered to my cell neighbor, “you are the real sheikh and everyone else here is a fake.”

  He did not reply, but a few minutes later, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, he cleared his throat. Sadly, he said, he had not had the opportunity to learn English. His eldest son, the mayor-to-be, spoke excellent English. He, however, did not. Yet there was one phrase he knew well, he said. “Do you want to hear me speak English?” he asked in Arabic.

  “Of course,” I whispered.

  He took a deep breath. “I love you,” he said. He spoke in clear, carefully pronounced syllables. In the silence after his declaration, he giggled.

  I congratulated him on his pronunciation. But we were getting carried away. The prison guards had a tendency to press their ears into the keyhole in the door between the block of cells and their living quarters. “Your English is excellent,” I told him. “Now, shh.”

  We lapsed into silence. About twenty minutes of dead air floated by, and then, out of the blue, again, as if struck by a burst of confidence, the sheikh tapped on the wall of his cell.

  “Neighbor,” he whispered. “Hello?”

  “Shh,” I told him.

  “Neighbor of mine,” he said in Arabic, “I have something to tell you.”

  I knew what he was going to say. The joke had been funny the first time. “Shh,” I told him.

  “I love you, neighbor,” he said again, trying to whisper. Yet his whisper came out at conversational volume, as if he thought the stricture against inmate speech in our jail was to be taken with a grain of salt, like the other rumors and tall tales that floated through our cell block. Perhaps he felt whispering was beneath him. Perhaps he just wasn’t good at it.

  For several hours that night, as he sighed and adjusted the little mound of blankets with which each cell was equipped, he stage-whispered the thoughts that happened to be passing through his head into the air above his cell. His central theme was his innocence. “There isn’t a thing upon me, thank God,” he would say to no one in particular. He would sigh, nap for fifteen minutes, and then his voice would return. “Thank God, not a thing,” or, “Perfectly innocent, praise be to God.” Toward midnight, new thoughts occurred to him. He was neither on the regime’s side, nor on the rebel’s side, he declared. “Neutral,” he said into the air. “As neutral as neutral can be.” He lapsed into silence for a while, and then, about an hour later, speaking in a casual, friendly voice, as if idle curiosity had jolted his mind, he asked if there was torture in our jail.

  I didn’t see any point in telling him the truth. “I don’t think so,” I lied.

  Really, it was his wife he worried for, he whispered to me. “She doesn’t know where I am.” During thirty years of married life, she had always known how to find him. Now she was on her own. “Naturally, she’s frightened,” he said. He, however, was not frightened, since he knew that there wasn’t a thing upon him.

  After Sheikh Hussein’s torture, which occurred on his third night with us, his body was dragged back to his cell. It left a streak of blood on the cement in front of my cell. At first, in his first moments in the safety of his cell, he spoke, in a weakened voice, to God: “Please, God. Oh God. Please. Please!” He, being a diabetic, had been unable to eat the potatoes and apricot jam we had been served over the previous days.

  The torture had soaked his clothing in blood and water. That night, January 13, 2014, the temperature in our cell block would have been well below zero. In order for him to survive, I felt, he would have had to eat. I knew he had no food in his cell. To stave off the hypothermia, he would have had to remove his wet clothing. He would have had to bury himself under a mountain of blankets, as the rest of us did. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking straight. Perhaps he felt that now, only God could help. “Please, God!” he whispered. “Please!” Yet he did not remove his wet clothing. I would have heard him shifting his weight inside his cell. I would have heard him pulling his undershirt over his shoulders.

  That night, his pleadings to God eventually roused the torturers from their TV room. They must have felt he was carrying on. They returned to his cell with their cables. When they had finished kicking him, they screamed at him. He was an animal. He was filth. He was an enemy of God. After this round of insults, they flogged him. This took several minutes. Only when the sheikh was totally quiet—when he pleaded neither with his attackers nor with God—did they slam the door of his cell.

  One of these assailants must have been aware, at least on some level, that Sheikh Hussein’s life was in danger. This guard made the effort of opening the food hatch in my cell’s door, of taking a spare pair of sweatpants and a clean T-shirt from me, and of flinging these into Sheikh Hussein’s cell. “Cover yourself—oolak,” the torturer said, as the clothing fell to the floor.

  None of the torturers stuck around long enough to see if Sheikh Hussein was capable of removing the wet clothing. They certainly gave him no food. As they strode out of the cell block, they banged their fists against the doors of all four cells. The prisoners were to shut their mouths, they shouted. We were animals. We were enemies of the Syrian people. “Sleep, animals,” a voice called out.

  That night, we, the animals, were much to
o afraid to move, let alone speak. For a few minutes, after the Jebhat al-Nusra men had retreated to their room, I listened for the sheikh’s breathing. I heard him coughing, I thought. When ten minutes of silence had come and gone, he seemed to sigh. If I could have, I would have climbed into his cell. I would have stripped away his wet clothing. I would have wrapped my body around his. I wanted to whisper reassuring words to him. I’m sure the other two prisoners did, too.

  Of course, by that point, the sheikh was beyond our reach. The next morning, when the guards came to check on him, they found that Sheikh Hussein, who missed his wife, held a library of the region’s soil types in his head, knew himself to be innocent and so did not doubt that things would work out well in the end, was dead.

  * * *

  That morning, our jail lived through a brief kerfuffle. The guards radioed news of the sheikh’s death to a commander. As they waited for the commander to turn up, there was much whispering among the guards. There were hurried remarks and angry, whispered rejoinders. A further kerfuffle ensued when a troupe of commanders dragged the corpse from the cell. Then the cell had to be scoured and squeegeed. The sheikh’s bloody robe had to be deposited in a bucket in the prison toilet. The other prisoners had to be screamed at and made to press their faces into the wall at the back of their cells, lest they guess that the sheikh had been murdered by accident, out of brutishness and stupidity, then left to die in the cold, in a heap of bloody clothing.

  For most of that day, I was livid. I spoke to the sheikh in my imagination. I spoke to his wife and to his children. I promised to see the culprits brought to justice. I knew the excuses they would invent for themselves and how transparent the lies they would tell really were. “I will see them punished,” I told the sheikh. I will never forgive, I told myself. I will never forget.

  But later that day, Abu Qais brought a package of dates—almost a kilo’s worth—to my cell. In the late afternoon, the two prisoners who had heard what I had heard of Sheikh Hussein’s killing were removed from their cells, then driven away in a car. In the evening, three new prisoners arrived. I hardly spoke to them. I reiterated the prison rules. I ignored their whispered questions.

  Several days later, a person who might have been a military commander, a civil authority, or a mixture of the two invited me to step out of my cell and to sit with him, in my blindfold, on a retaining wall in front of the prison. This man’s voice had a warm, just-between-us frankness to it. Was I well? he wanted to know. Were “the shabab”—the youthful guards—allowing me to walk in the prison courtyard now and then? They were, I said. Was I being given enough to eat? I was. Was there any special kind of food I wanted? Not really, I said. He wanted to know what I had seen or heard during the previous week.

  “Nothing much,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. He spoke for a moment about mistakes. There was a war on. Mistakes were inevitable. If I were to talk about the mistakes I had witnessed, the young men of Asheyl, those who had fed me and cared for me over the previous months, could well find themselves in trouble. Indeed, all the Asheylis I had come to know, and others, too, from surrounding villages, would be put in a difficult situation. These citizens had devoted their lives to the struggle against Bashar al-Assad. Did I wish to make trouble for them?

  I did not. The commander gave me his name. I had never met him before. I don’t think I met him again. The name has slipped my mind.

  “I can trust you to come to me if you have any problems?” he asked.

  “You can,” I said.

  As he was bringing me back to my cell, he thrust a handful of sugar cookies into my palm. “You are a respectable prisoner,” he murmured.

  “I respect you,” I told him. He clanked the lock on my cell door shut.

  In that moment, as these words were leaving my lips, I was thinking, I despise you. I will never forgive and never forget. His overseeing of a torture farmhouse, his drowning and electrocution of the deaf man, his torture of the father whose son was in the army—I wanted to see him and his friends hanged for these crimes. I meant to see even the peons punished. In the minutes after Sheikh Hussein’s torture, the guard, Zakaria, had been dispatched to squeegee away the streaks of blood the sheikh’s injured body had left in the cell block corridor. Zakaria took to his task without a thought in his head. He might have been wiping down a table after a meal. The following morning, when the sheikh’s body was being dragged from his cell, Abdullah was in the guards’ room, chuckling over a cartoon show on TV. I longed for the day when all of these brain-dead killers were made to reckon with their crimes.

  Such were my feelings, after my meeting, as I was being locked into my cell. A few minutes later, however, I was alone with the sugar cookies. It seemed to me the organization wished to entrust me with a secret. It had spoken to me, for the first time in more than a year, as if it understood me to be an observer—and so a human being. Moreover, it was giving me cookies and dates. I decided that it would do to remember the date on which they’d killed Sheikh Hussein. No one else would have done the sheikh this courtesy, I knew. I tried to make a mental note of the things he had said to me. I meant to push these memories down, into a nook in my consciousness. Perhaps I would dig for them later. For the time being, Jebhat al-Nusra seemed to have made, if not an apology, then at least a kind of a self-justification. They wouldn’t have done this, I thought, if they didn’t value my opinion. I wanted to be valued. I wanted more of the Jebhat al-Nusra men to seek me out and to trust me. I was keen for their cookies. I was keen to be taken into the out-of-doors, to be planted on a retaining wall like a flowerpot, and to peer at shadows through my blindfold. Above all, I didn’t want the men with the guns to suspect me of disloyalty. Perhaps Sheikh Hussein really had been a regime agent all along, I thought. In which case, he had reaped what he had sown. Anyway, his death wasn’t my business. My business, I told myself, was to live in compliance with the prison rules, to greet the citizens of Asheyl with salaams when they opened the food hatch door of my cell, and to keep my nose from poking into places in which it did not belong. Deep down, I wondered, am I a bit of a collaborator? If so, I decided, I am fine with collaborating. I wanted the men with scarves around their faces to smile at me when they popped open the food hatch door in my cell. I wanted them to push triangles of baklava into my hands and to ask me, as they sometimes did, in their joking way, when they wanted to make light, “What is the news with you, American friend? When you are released, will you tell lies about us?”

  When they put questions like this to me, I knew that all was well between me and Jebhat al-Nusra. I knew the answer they wanted to hear. “My sheikhs,” I would tell them. “I will speak, of course. How could I not? But I will not lie.”

  CHAPTER 10 THE CALIPHATE LIVES

  In those days, in that place, we lived at a distance from the world. My cell permitted me inklings of life out there, on planet Earth. For instance, the window that had been knocked into the wall above the bank of cells allowed me a view of passing clouds. Abdullah had welded a chain-link fence that sat like a ceiling over my cell’s side walls. This prevented me from climbing up to touch the windowsill, which was about eight feet off the ground. Still, at night I could see the moon. In the daytimes, I sometimes caught glimpses of desert birds.

  I had a few possessions. Abu Qais had given me an English-Arabic copy of the Koran, an English-Arabic dictionary he had found in his family’s library, and a Berlitz phrase book written for the Arabic-speaking visitor to the UK. I owned a toothbrush, a pee bottle, and a tin dish.

  From whisperings among the prisoners in our jail, I understood that Jebhat al-Nusra was the reigning power in the region, that there were traffic police in the streets, order in the suqs, and that Islamic law, administered by Jebhat al-Nusra judges, ruled over the entirety of Deir Ezzor Province.

  What exactly Jebhat al-Nusra did to maintain its power I did not know. I didn’t have more than a hazy understanding of what Deir Ezzor Province might look like on a map, n
or did I have an inkling of how many soldiers fought in its army. Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand? Abdullah wanted me to believe that in the mighty Islamic state Jebhat al-Nusra had brought to life, a million-man army stood at the ready. More soldiers were coming in every day, in his telling. I doubted him but because I had yet to be taken outside without a blindfold, and so hadn’t glimpsed so much as a blade of grass, the scope of Jebhat al-Nusra’s power had to remain, for me, a mystery. In any case, I knew that Jebhat al-Nusra was powerful enough. It had driven away the Syrian government. At the time, no one else was interested in attacking the region.

  Thus, we were a kingdom unto ourselves. I understood that to the citizens in this kingdom, the world beyond was about as distant as Deir Ezzor Province was to me—and had been so for about two years. I understood that everything had to be smuggled in to us, even the tomatoes. According to the rumors I was hearing in those days, only a trickle of outsiders, most of whom were European mujahideen, had been permitted in to our kingdom. The roads out were thought to be too subject to aerial attacks to allow the citizens of this river valley, of whom there were thought to be about five million, to leave. Anyway, most did not want to leave. Those who did had nowhere to go.