Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  I made Gypsy fall sleep in her pool of blood since this is how victims of torture in Syria often pass the nights after their trials. Toward dawn, I made the dim-witted driver come to check on her. Wondering at her breathing, which was carrying on smoothly enough at that point, he asked her if she was asleep. She did not move. “Want some potato chips, Gypsy?” he asked. I knew this guard well enough. I had conversed with dozens of such people during my eighteen months with Jebhat al-Nusra. The foot soldiers are often zealous torturers but I’m not sure they mean anything bad by it. Afterward, when they see what they’ve done, they don’t always know how to behave. Some regret. Some would like to make things right. But how? They don’t know and so they chat with their victims as if the victims had been a little bit in on the game, as if a round of fun had been had by all.

  I know now that at about the time in which I was writing out my scene killing Gypsy, my former captors in the eye hospital in Aleppo were putting an actual woman to death in an actual trial. Naturally, they filmed the proceedings, which eventually went out in video form over the social networks. Thus, I can see now, as I could not see when I was writing, exactly how the trials occur. I can hear every word of dialog. When I miss an unfamiliar phrase or quotation, I can play the voices back for myself, as I could not do when I was listening to the sheikhs in the villa basement, for instance, or in the eye hospital, as they brought out their truths. Here is a still from the videotape one of the onlookers made of that trial.

  These men were frequent visitors to our cells in and around Aleppo.

  Now I know that the scene in real life corresponded in all the important elements to the one I was seeing in my imagination, inside my cell. Naturally, the woman does not want to kneel. Her hands have been cuffed behind her back. The men who used to come to my cell in the eye hospital have surrounded her. They have accused her of seeking to spread filth, corruption, and enmity for Islam through their sacred space—roughly what these men accused me of doing. She is an enemy of God, they have told her, as they told me. In her case, the crime for which these sheikhs wish to hold her to account is prostitution. She doesn’t appear to understand.

  “Please,” she says. “What?” Perhaps she’s a bit disoriented. I know that when I was in such situations, I was badly disoriented.

  “On your knees,” replies one of the Jebhat al-Nusra authorities.

  “I want to see my children,” she says. “Please!”

  “Sit,” says a man.

  “What?” she says. “Please, for the sake of the Prophet.”

  Having pleaded with these assassins myself, I know how little interest they take in listening. They know what is to happen next. You can talk all you like. Talking cannot help. It might make matters worse.

  At the end of the video, one of my jailers shoots the woman in the back of the head. The onlookers raise their Kalashnikovs into the sky. “Allahu Akbar!” they cry. The woman’s blood leaks across the pavement.

  Nowadays it seems to me that my writing out my version of such a killing in my cell more than a year after I knelt at these men’s feet was my way of coming to terms with what had happened to me. My brain was sifting through the facts. It was storing some of the details away. Other bits seemed useful to me at the time, and so they poured out of my memory. I hadn’t been aware of their presence at all.

  In the end, of course, in my case, there was no killing. Matters for me culminated in an imaginary trial, in a made-up birch grove, among fictional beings. To be sure, there was an imaginary killing. I made Gypsy cling to a thread of life, as the Arabic phrase has it, for a day and a half, as I suspected some of my fellow prisoners clung to life after their trials. She died in the early morning, on the forest floor, as her dim-witted driver fed himself from his bag of potato chips. Because this killing told the truth about my captors, I felt there was justice in it. In a way, I was proud of it because I felt that it showed the power that make-believe held over my world. In fact, it isn’t so easy to believe that God’s law has at last come to earth, that one’s handgun is an instrument of God, and that in murdering a helpless woman in the street, one is bringing justice to Syria. Yet since the beginning of the war in Syria—and even now, under a different name, Hayat Tahrir as Sham-Jebaht al-Nusra has been making such lies come true. When I was writing my drama, it seemed important to me to explain just how such wicked fantasies come to life. What words are spoken exactly? What is it like to witness such dramas and to play a role in them? I wanted to five the world my answers to these questions though of course I had no reason to suppose I would live long enough to have readers. I didn’t care about this fact. I conjured imaginary readers into existence. In my mind, I spoke to them. I was keen for this public to see what I had seen of my Islamic state.

  * * *

  In those days, at the end of the day, when the light was dying in my cell, I would tuck my pen away, in a safe spot, underneath a blanket. The feelings that came to me after a day’s writing weren’t of satisfaction exactly, but I felt myself on a mission. I had a provisional sort of plot. I was sure that it was going to disclose important truths. Seeing the plot through gave purpose to my life, though of course I had no prospects, couldn’t move much, wasn’t allowed to talk to my neighbor prisoners, and could not press my face to any window. I didn’t want to be killed, of course, but if destiny had written out a killing for me, I hoped it would be quick. And a long time from hence. In the meantime, I wasn’t going to gnash my teeth over the matter. I felt I was living well enough, in a way, inside my cell. So during this period of my imprisonment, after my work was over, I sang to myself. I sang lots of songs. Sometimes, they were American folk songs. I liked to sing “Day by Day” from Godspell because it expressed sentiments of which I thought my captors would approve if they happened to hear me and because the words happened to have been stored, in a complete packet, in my memory. In those days, I especially liked to sing a song I listened to over and over the summer after my high school graduation. That song, “The Swimming Song” by Loudon Wainwright III, brought me back to time when everything in life stood before me. Death was a thousand years away. In my cell, the song made me smile. It buoyed my spirits and cooled me down. I had to trill and warble it to myself since, strictly speaking, I wasn’t allowed to sing. “This summer I went swimming,” I warbled:

  This summer I might have drowned

  But I held my breath and I kicked my feet

  And I moved my arms around

  I moved my arms around.

  CHAPTER 11 A VOYAGE WITH JEBHAT AL-NUSRA

  One night in July of 2014, one of the two high commanders for al Qaeda in Syria, Abu Maria al-Qahtani, summoned me from my cell. He brought me to the Omar Company, in the desert outside of Meyadin, where he had established a training camp and an ersatz headquarters. “You will travel with us,” he told me. He gestured at a crowd of fighters milling about in the darkness. They were to be my protection. We were soon to drive two hundred miles, at least, across the breadth of Syria, to the southern city of Deraa. After we arrived, he said, he would send me home.

  During the subsequent voyage, which Abu Maria and I undertook in the company of some sixty pickups, two hundred fighters, and a dozen or so spiritual advisors, we drove overland, under the cover of darkness and without headlights. Allegedly, ISIS was pursuing us, though I suspect the commanders of the groups, who had been friends in childhood and maintained cell phone communication, had struck a deal.

  During this voyage, our biggest danger was the Syrian Air Force. In the early mornings, after the prayer, when the planes began to appear in the sky our caravan blended into a village or a town. When there were no villages about we hid the trucks in caves or covered them in brush and parked them in drainage ditches or abandoned roadside shacks.

  When we were moving, my attention fell on the countryside’s new road signs. They appeared to have sprung up by chance: on the outskirts of the villages, on empty street corners, and sometimes all alone on a stretch of farming road.
“All Muslims shall go to heaven. Happy is he who goes in the full flush of youth—Jebhat al-Nusra,” read one. Other signs reminded people to turn off the lights on account of the Nusayri (Alawite) planes in the air and still others announced that a religious police enforced submission “to all things known”—which is to say, to the givens, the essential, universally agreed-upon framework of life under a Koranic dispensation.

  In the mornings, at the end of our nightly voyage, as we arrived in a village, locals escorted the scholarly men in our caravan, the high military commanders, and me, their high-value prisoner, to a noble house. Here a man in a robe and slippers greeted the scholars with courtesies. Kisses were exchanged and then the host brought our group to the house’s reception room. Usually, the curtains had been drawn. Usually, an immaculate, thick carpet such as one might find in a department store showroom stretched at our feet. There were stacks of pillows. Every divan we visited had a flat-screen television.

  It was Ramadan then, but tradition allows for the traveler to eat during daylight hours, provided he makes up for his missed days later, so as the fighters laid their weapons across the carpet, bowls of a milky-lemony soup called mlehi appeared, and then came platters of chicken that had been decorated with sprinkled cashews and fresh coriander. Afterward, there were bowls of fruit, then tea, then sleep. We slept like hard-partying teenagers—everyone in his clothes, everyone sprawled on the floor, everyone out cold the second the hosts closed the sitting room door.

  In the afternoons, there was more tea and the scholars received delegations of local sheikhs and the bodyguards of the sheikhs. The delegations appeared at the door of the sitting room in a single-file line. The travelers stood above their sitting cushions, at the periphery of the room. The delegation passed from traveler to traveler. The local sheikhs whispered pleasant words to the travelers. The bodyguards followed their bosses. God should give us health, they told us, and victory. He should guide us, and he should defeat the enemies of Islam, particularly the Jews and the Americans. After the greetings, the al Qaeda chief, Qahtani, made a speech. His speeches tended to say that ISIS exploited people’s emotional connection to Islam, that ISIS was bound to come this way, and that when they did, they would lie about their intentions and lead the populace astray, as they had done in Deir Ezzor Province. The sheikhs must guard against the infiltration to come, he warned.

  In one such house, after Qahtani had made his speech, a college-age fighter from Saudi Arabia came to pour my tea. Somehow, the jihad had brought him to this house in the desert. He poured the tea by tiptoeing to the sides of his guests, kneeling, holding out his platter with one hand, pouring from a teapot with the other, saying nothing, smiling not at all, then lowering his head. He held himself in this attitude until his guest decided to reach for his glass of tea.

  I recognized this young man’s head scarf as a Yemeni head scarf. Now we had the basis for a conversation. He spoke formal, well-educated classical Arabic and, by the way, excellent English. His two brothers, he said, had set out for the jihad in Syria some time ago. They had already been martyred. In his opinion, his parents in Saudi Arabia had been delighted by this news. The mujahideen were winning in Syria now, he said, and his generation of fighters was a charmed, destined generation.

  I had been told to introduce myself to people we met along the way as an Irish fighter, Abu Mostafa al-Irlandi, who had come to Syria to seek martyrdom. Before our group left the house that evening, I sought out the Saudi fighter. I volunteered a bit of my Irish cover story. I doubt he believed me. My Arabic isn’t drenched in religious locutions as is usually the case with the foreigners in the jihad. I would have stood out for my secular, informal way of speaking and for my questions about car racing in Saudi Arabia, the unchaste TV channels there, and the subjects he had studied at his secular English-language university.

  Perhaps he had been an economics student? I can’t remember. Anyway, he had hoped to pursue his studies in the West. Yet the jihad had intervened. Fighting now was an obligation. He thanked God for allowing him the steadiness of mind and body to carry on the jihad. It was a joyful time in his life, he said, and he had come to know the Syrian people as he never had before. Also, he had come to know brothers from all over the Earth, and this was a blessing. I was the first Irish brother he had encountered.

  I half-hoped then to exchange email addresses or Facebook pages with this young man, but there was an unspoken rule against such exchanges, at least for me, and anyway, I had given him my cover story. It rhymed with the tenor of the time and place, even if the details would not have withstood much questioning. He had given me his. That was that. One doesn’t probe for deeper truths in these sorts of situations, probably because the scholars know that the delusions the young men are asked to build for themselves in the jihad crumble like sand castles the moment two rational beings begin discussing them. So we shook hands. He wished for God’s guidance for me and I wished it for him. In this way, nothing disturbed the fiction we had agreed on without speaking a word about it: that death was delightful, that we would both be martyred soon, that the sheikhs around us were wise, and that a benevolent God was guiding our jihad and so sowing victories across the land.

  In the evening, an hour or so after we left the house in which this Saudi was employed, our caravan came to a crossroads in the desert. I happened to be riding at the head of the caravan, in the rear jump seat, in Qahtani’s pickup cab. The last glow of daylight was leaving the sky. At the crossroads, Qahtani drew his pickup to a stop then asked me to get out of the car. For a moment, I stood in front of his pickup in my bare feet gazing into his face. What did he have in mind? His eyes smiled. Islam imposed upon him, the leader of this expedition, he explained, a solemn obligation: During the course of a voyage, it was his duty to ride at the front of his army. I nodded. The wind blew his curly black locks, which he wore at shoulder length, across his face. He pointed down the crossroad that led into the South. “Down there is Daesh,” he said. He pointed into the North. “Up there is the regime”—the Syrian Arab Army. We were to follow the road leading into the West. In order to ensure that the sixty-odd vehicles behind us, some of which were trailing at a distance of several kilometers, followed the correct path, I was to plant myself here, at the crossroads. I was to indicate the proper path. “You can do this?” he asked.

  “Happily,” I replied.

  The final pickup in the column of pickups was driven by Qahtani’s nephew, an Iraqi from Samara, who went by the name Hud-Hud. In the Koran, Hud-Hud is a wise, all-seeing bird. I was to wait until I saw Hud-Hud’s truck, then climb in with him. “You can do this?” Qahtani asked me.

  “Happily,” I said.

  At first, when the first pickup trucks rolled by, I leveled blank-faced stares at the drivers. I pointed into the West. I had a job to do. I meant to do it well. Yet so many of the drivers seemed to know me, no doubt from visits to my cell block during the previous ten months, so many of them tooted their horns as they passed, and so many of the passengers waved merry greetings to me from their pickup beds that I found it hard, after a moment, to stand like a post beside the crossroads. The sheer zaniness of this Jebhat al-Nusra army made me smile. The first two dozen trucks in its column of fighting vehicles were regulation late-model white Toyota Hiluxes. After that the army became a circus caravan. There were doddering Syrian army troop carriers, a pair of Chevy pickups, possibly from the eighties (or seventies?), a little flock of Kia Rios (the Kia Rio was thought to be nimbler than other cars and so useful for urban combat), and toward the rear a fuel truck that tinkled the contents of its tank across the desert floor. When a merchant in an Arab souk wishes to welcome a group of customers into his shop, he will step aside, then sweep his hand over the path before him like a performer bowing on a stage. “Tafadaloo,” he will say, meaning “Right this way, please.” And also, “Welcome!”

  “Tafadaloo!” I called out to the passing drivers. They wouldn’t have been able to hear me. There was too much wind
, too many tooting horns, and the truck engines were making a racket. They could, however, see me yelling. They flashed their headlights at me. They tooted their horns.

  In some of the Damascus neighborhoods, the merchants call out to passersby in Farsi, since the Damascus tourist trade relies so heavily on revenue from Iranian pilgrims. “Bi farma!” I called out to the drivers, using the Farsi phrase the Damascus merchants used to welcome these passersby. So I was calling out in an enemy language. What did I care? I was feeling the wind in my hair. I was enjoying the wildness that is a Jebhat al-Nusra caravan. Probably, I thought, I could get used to this sort of life.

  * * *

  For reasons I did not understand or inquire into, our route took us through the eastern outskirts of Damascus. Out there, we passed through neighborhoods that looked like a film director’s notion of the apocalypse. The director had clearly overdone it. Cement chunks hung from the upper stories of apartment buildings like slabs of frosting from a crumbling triple-decker cake. Lampposts flopped into the street. Balconies drooped; entire facades of buildings slid away from their foundations and sagged into the street. It wasn’t one or two blocks that made you marvel at the destruction but the way it went on, mile after mile, each ruin leading into another, every street strewn with rubble, everything abandoned, and everything a live target. There were Jebhat al-Nusra rebels about. Why wouldn’t they bomb more?

  We drove through some streets that hadn’t been inhabited in years. Greenish-yellow leafy stalks like Syrian goldenrod climbed the front stairs of the apartment blocks. Dead cars sat in front of chained-up gates. Everywhere, phone wires lay like loops of spaghetti salad over the property dividers.

  In other neighborhoods, there were signs of life. Laundry fluttered. Children sold gasoline from oil drums. Now and then, beneath the bridge abutments or behind a crumpled roll-up storefront gate a circle of chairs had been arranged around a teakettle. Often, turning down a street, we came across little knots of resistance fighters. They lounged in the shade of a tank or milled about next to an artillery piece. We asked them about the state of the roads ahead. They consulted their radios, waited a few seconds for news, then waved us on.