Escape from Saddam (24 page)

She hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and pointed at a door a little farther down the corridor. “Okay,” she said. “Toilet’s over there.”

I hurried through the door. The room was empty, so I shoved one passport into each of three toilets and flushed them away, this time not bothering to shred them as I had done to my own passport several years before. There wasn’t time for that, and as a result I watched in horror as the toilets backed up. I couldn’t worry about that, though, so I took a couple of moments to regain my composure, then headed back to my family and their armed guard. We walked on in silence.

My mind was churning. Surely there was something I could do, something I could say to get us out of this mess. Eventually I turned once more to the woman and said, “Look, please, I need to talk to you alone for ten minutes.”

“All right then.” She nodded and took me to one side.

We took a seat together by a large observation window, through which I could see planes taking off as if to taunt me. “What’s the matter?” I asked the woman. “Why are we being held?”

She indicated the Spanish passports that she had in her hand. “Do you speak Spanish?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Then why does your family have Spanish passports?”

“My mum married a Spanish man.” I recited the lie as smoothly as I could. “She has citizenship.”

The woman acted as if she had not heard what I’d said. “Where did you get these passports from?”

“I told you,” I insisted. “They’re naturalized Spaniards.”

“No they’re not,” she almost spoke over me. “These passports are counterfeit. They are very, very bad copies. I see them all the time—they’re made mostly in Thailand. How much did you pay for them?”

She looked me straight in the eye, and I saw in that moment that I wasn’t fooling her. But I couldn’t bring myself to answer.

“Did you pay a lot for them?” she insisted.

I nodded.

Her face assumed an expression of something approaching pity. “Well let me just tell you,” she continued, “that these things are produced in Thailand for between a hundred and two hundred dollars. They are the worst I’ve ever seen, and you are unbelievably lucky to have come through immigration with these.”

As I listened to her words, my blood ran cold. How could I have been so foolish? Within seconds my plan to rescue my family had been revealed for the ill-conceived scheme that it really was, and I had no idea what would happen to any of us now. The woman stood up, smoothed down her suit. “Come with me,” she said abruptly as she walked back to where the others were waiting, a look of expectation on their faces that I had to dash with a single glance and a shake of my head.

We were led to a processing area. Full of desks and computers and phones, it looked more like a call center than anything else, and quite out of place in the environs of the airport. Each desk was covered with piles of passports and other documents, and we were given seats and told to wait. We remained there for a couple of hours, our hearts heavy, the knowledge that we had failed bearing down on us like a crushing load. Overcome by emotion, my mother started shouting at me, and I argued back but only half-heartedly because I knew that what she was saying—this was my fault, I had been too hasty, didn’t I know what was at stake here?—was right. Rachel calmed us both down. How she did so I can’t think, because she must have been as sick with nerves as the rest of us. But I thanked God that she was there to exert her calming influence on us all as we fell once more into oppressive silence.

We were searched, our luggage was claimed as evidence, and then we were led around the corner from the processing area. I had noticed a few people being taken that way and the guards who accompanied them returning alone. As the same happened to us, I realized why.

In front of us were two enormous cells, one facing the other. Fronted by thick iron bars, one of the cells contained men, the other women, and between the two cells, sitting down, was a fat but threatening Malaysian guard. Along the back wall of each cell was a series of doors, and in the corner was some sort of receptacle that I assumed was the toilet. Around it was a thick, dirty puddle that encroached into the main area of the cell, contaminated with something I could not quite make out, though the stench of human feces and urine gave me a good idea what it was. The part of the floor that was not wet with water and human excrement was black with dirt and covered with a ghoulish human kaleidoscope of prostrate bodies, perhaps three or four hundred of them in each cell. There was not enough room for them all, so they overlapped each other as they lay there, unmoving. None of them seemed perturbed by the flies that were swarming around the room. Maybe, like horses on a hot day, they were used to them.

I couldn’t bear to look at Rachel or my family. Suddenly, from behind, I heard screaming. It was my mother. “
La! La! Bidoun Sijan!
No! Not prison!” she shouted hysterically. I watched helplessly as two guards dragged her toward the prison doors; she collapsed herself onto the floor to make it more difficult for them, then continued her terrible weeping. The faces of my brother and sister were stricken too. To have escaped the horrors of Baghdad prisons and undergone all the dangers they had put themselves through only to end up in a stinking cell in a strange country: I couldn’t imagine what was going through their minds. Wordlessly the women were segregated from the men.

I could think of nothing to do other than try to get a message to somebody, to let people know what was happening to us. The only people I could think of were Rachel’s parents: it would devastate them to think of their little girl in such a horrific situation, but they had the right to know, and maybe they could help. I had placed my mobile phone in one of my bags, but these had been checked in. Suddenly, however, I saw them arrive and be placed a few meters away from us. Quickly I moved toward my bag to get the phone; but as I did so, one of the officials saw me, a Sikh man wearing a turban. As I lunged for my bag, he grabbed me by my arms, pulled me away, thrust me against the wall, and lifted me up by my neck. He made as if to punch me with his free arm but clearly thought better of it at the last moment.

“Who do you think you are,” he spat at me, “doing all this hero business? You think you’re Robin Hood?”

I hardly knew what to say. I had only been there a few minutes and already I had marked myself out in their eyes as a troublemaker. Shocked into silence, I looked him up and down as he held me there against the wall. On his jacket he wore a badge with a grotesquely happy, yellow smiling face and the slogan “Service with a Smile.”

Eventually the unsmiling official put me down, but his eyes stayed on me. I didn’t try to grab my phone again.

I watched as Rachel, my mum, and my sister were pushed into the cell, somehow retaining a sense of dignity—despite my mother’s tears—as they stepped over the carpet of human traffic to find themselves somewhere to sit. Rachel turned and managed to force a smile at me that I could not reciprocate as my brother and I were forced into the main cell.

Silently we picked our way to the back of the cell, receiving grunts of discontent from a few of the people whose limbs we accidentally nudged against but who otherwise treated us with complete indifference. We examined the three doors at the back of the cell. Scrawled into the dirty paint on each door was a label: “The Turkish Embassy,” “The Iranian Embassy,” “The Iraqi Embassy.” I opened the Iraqi door and looked around the corner. The room was no cleaner or more welcoming, but it was filled with Middle Eastern faces who as one looked up to see who the new arrival was.

“Salam,”
I nodded at them.

They greeted me in return, so I gestured to my brother and we both walked inside.

The Iraqi Embassy was no more than three meters by three meters. Right away I could tell that its eight or nine occupants were shady characters—no doubt they thought the same of me and my brother—but they were welcoming enough, given the circumstances. We found ourselves an empty area and sat down, shocked into silence with disbelief at what had happened to us. There were single sheets of newspaper on the floor, the only protection between us and the hard, cold concrete. The strip lighting above us was intolerably bright, and the air conditioning was on full blast, no doubt to battle feebly against the disgusting stench, though in reality all it did was make the place uncomfortably cold. No matter how many cells you’ve been in, you never quite get used to being treated no better—and often worse—than animals; but my brother and I did our best as we settled down and started waiting.

After a few hours, we were given food. Its arrival was announced by the sound of someone shouting outside the main cell, followed by a melee as some of the inmates scrabbled to get their share. My brother and I were hungry, so we stood up to go and claim our food, but one of our fellow Iraqi prisoners told us to wait. “There’s always enough to go around,” he said, “but it’s filthy food. You probably won’t want to eat it even when you get it.”

He was right. When our turn came, an official handed each of us, through the bars, a small polystyrene box. We opened it up to find a mound of crusty, dried-out rice with a suspicious smell—the remnants, I later found out, of what they had fed the Malaysian staff at a previous meal. Laid on top was a pile of fish bones. There was no meat attached to them, just the skeleton, as if we were being presented not so much with a meal as with an insult.
The fish was enjoyed,
the carton seemed to say,
by important people. The bones are for you.
We also were handed a nylon bag full of lukewarm water to drink.

The agonizingly slow minutes turned into hours, which turned into days. Indeed it was difficult to keep track of time in that terrible place. In the main cell, where people had been languishing for who knows how long, certain individuals had become so ill from the conditions that they were hallucinating, shouting out at shadows, laughing hysterically, or causing violent fights because of an imagined slight. Back in the Iraqi Embassy we fell into conversation with our fellow Middle Eastern prisoners—Syrians, Palestinians, Iranians, a true melting pot of Arab culture—and I was astonished by the lengths to which some of them had gone to get themselves to a place of safety. A couple of them had had huge tattoos drawn on their arms and backs in an attempt to make them seem Westernized. Many of them had been trying to get to Australia, New Zealand, or Japan—Japan in particular, because at that time, I soon learned, a large mafia organization there was dedicated to the dirty business of people-smuggling. These people asked me questions about the UK, awed that I had made it there and astonished that I had risked coming back. To kill the tedium of the passing hours I told them about the geography and history of Britain, drawing crude maps in the dust on the floor and even at one point telling them the story that Rachel had told me about how William of Orange had fought in Ireland. It was a surreal moment, seeing these rapt Middle Eastern faces being taught British history in a Malaysian jail by one of their number, their faces a picture of concentration like a group of children hearing a fairy tale.

Occasionally I went to the front of the main cell, treading over the human carpet of Bengalis and Sri Lankans, and Rachel did the same in the opposite cell. The first time we did this, she smiled across the corridor that divided us and, as cheerfully as she could, called, “You take me to the nicest places, Lewis!” Then she removed something from her pocket: it was the restaurant menu from the hotel where we had been staying. “Now then,” she called, “what shall we have for lunch? Lobster?” And so we carried on, doing our best to crack jokes, to make light of the situation and raise each other’s spirits; but we knew it was an almost impossible task.

Neither Rachel nor my brother mentioned it, but we were all aware that the long-term consequences for us all could be very severe indeed. And I felt responsible for everything. I had no idea at this stage what would happen to my family, but I suddenly felt a renewed sense of fraternal responsibility for my younger brother. I remembered how I felt when, not much older than he, I was cast into that Iraqi jail on the road north from Basra; I remembered how I felt when I heard that my mother had been imprisoned in Al-Haakimiya. He would be having the same feelings now, albeit with his brother by his side, and I suddenly felt the urge to give him some words of advice for the difficult times ahead.

“Ahmed,” I said, “I need to tell you something.”

“What is it, Sarmed?”

I searched for the words. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you need to be strong, for your mother and your sister. Remember, this life is a test of your strength. There will be people you encounter who will try to beat it out of you, but you must never let them. You can’t fold and give up. So we’re in prison. So what? It’s just going to make you stronger. At least we aren’t dying. Hold your head up high, puff out your chest, be strong, and don’t let anyone treat you badly.”

He looked straight into my eyes. “I know what you’re saying, Sarmed,” he replied. “And I’ll try. I really will.”

As the time ground slowly on, we became aware of how the place worked. We couldn’t bring ourselves to eat the food, but thankfully in my back pocket I had a little money, which I would dole out to one of the less ferocious guards outside the cell. He would go and buy food at McDonald’s in the airport—skimming a little money off the top for himself, of course—and deliver the food back to us. I had to buy enough to hand around something to everybody in the Iraqi Embassy, but it felt good occasionally to have some hot food in our stomachs.

Time passed. Other prisoners arrived; a few left. After about three days, an Oriental-looking man, reasonably well dressed, arrived in the cell. Something about his demeanor suggested to me that he was a bit different from the ragtag collection of unfortunates whom he had joined, so more to pass the time than anything else I went up to talk to him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him after we had made our introductions.