Human Cargo (39 page)

Aida knew all about torture. As an Armenian from a vocal and politically active family in Teheran, she had seen her father imprisoned and lose his sight, and her brother and several cousins executed. Iran in the late 1970s and the 1980s was a brutal and terrifying place, with revolutionary courts and committees presiding
over a regime of torture and summary
⁷
executions, many of them carried out in Evin prison. When I was writing about human rights for
The Times
of London, I spoke one day to an Iranian physicist who had escaped to London. We met in secret; he was too frightened of the long arm of the Iranian secret services to tell me his name. Talking about the months he had spent in Evin prison, he described being taken one day by a guard along a corridor toward the torture rooms. On the way they passed an open door. I have always been haunted by what he said next: “I looked into the room. It seemed to be a hall, stretching for many meters in all directions, with a high ceiling. All I could see were legs and feet, hanging from hooks in the ceiling, rows and rows of them. Men’s legs, with trousers; women’s bare legs; children’s legs and tiny bare feet. Bodies, hanging, dead, dozens of them. I realized that this was where the torture ended.”

When her daughter was four and she was heavily pregnant with her second child, Aida was arrested and taken to Evin. She was tortured. Her guards wanted the names of Armenian activists. When the time came for the baby to be born, nothing happened. She laughs now, sitting in north London, as she recounts her story. “A month passed, and then a second. Still no baby. This is medically extremely rare in human beings, but it happens in bears. When there is danger, they simply hang on to their unborn cubs. When I reached the end of the eleventh month, one of Evin’s doctors took pity on me. He was a young man, and he was terrified of the system himself. They were still torturing me, and I begged him to help me die. Instead, when at last it was clear that my son was going to be born, he diagnosed me with puerperal fever and transferred me to a hospital outside the prison. A guard accompanied me, but he was not allowed inside the women’s ward. The young doctor [from the prison] told me to pretend that I was Turkish, from a village far from Teheran, and that I was a simple peasant girl. When the [hospital] doctors discharged me, I telephoned my sister from the hospital telephone and she came to collect me and the baby from the back. The guard never knew that I had gone.”

After this, heavily veiled and living in hiding with her two children, her mother having forfeited her house on account of Aida’s disappearance, Aida returned to her underground work with refugees and dissidents, until it was finally just too dangerous for her to stay in Teheran. With the help of friends, she and her children escaped to Turkey—she had parted by now from her husband—but as an Armenian in Istanbul she was again suspected of having dissident connections, and again arrested and again tortured. A United Nations commissioner heard about her and secured her release. The family now moved on to Holland, and then, in 1991, to England, where they were given refugee status and where Aida started work with HIV patients and asylum seekers.

By 2001, Aida and Josephine had gathered enough funders and enough volunteers to open the Refugee Therapy Center. They found therapists able to work in seventeen different languages. Both are practical, realistic women and they share a similar vision of the effects of torture. Terrible experiences, they agree, can and do lead to trauma; but trauma is cloudy, not solid like measles, and how it will be experienced owes much to how an individual perceives himself and how resilient his past has made him. Good parenting, they say, that leaves children feeling loved, with a strength that lies beyond words, will make a vital difference to the way a person is able to process torture. For Aida, the help she seeks to provide is all about trust, the breaking of isolation, and allowing people to feel safe. “We provide,” she says, “a space in which people can be while they learn to trust again.” As she sees it, not all people who have been tortured need to or can or want to relive the experience; rather, they need to be helped to build up structures that contain and imprison it. Then they need to learn to live. “Until recently,” she argues, “the accepted view was that in order to get better, people have to talk about what has happened to them. But for some people, the best thing is to build a wall around that particular moment in their past, and then move on.” Aida, too, like Helen, “accompanies” her clients. And they know, she says, when the time has come for them to end their therapy. They get bored and they simply stop coming.

The image of victim and survivor is always present in this field. Doctors who work over long periods of time with people who have been tortured marvel at the spirit and dignity of their clients, and at their enormous powers of self-regeneration. Much, they note, depends also on the expectations of torture victims. “When people come from societies where repression is severe and where torture is routine,” says Dr. Michael Peel at the Medical Foundation, “where they have witnessed others disappear and heard stories of torture, these people tolerate it better. It is not a catastrophe, striking from nowhere. It is part of their map. They assimilate it because it does not shatter their feelings of what is predictable.” Cultural differences have become important to him, as has the need to gauge, person by person, what works best. For many, it is a question of reducing the traumatic past into “bite-sized chunks,” which can be absorbed and, one by one, assimilated.

And people find their own strategies to survive. Helen told me about a man in a Middle Eastern country who had been arrested and severely tortured. One day, he was made to watch a friend being tortured. Afterward, he tried to comfort the friend. “Old man,” he said, “we cannot strike them back now. But while we are here in prison I shall teach you to read and write, and that will be our victory over them.”

•   •   •

THE FIRST TIME
Michael Korsinski saw Lamine, he was lying on the floor of Korsinski’s office at the Medical Foundation, scrunched up like a fetus, racked with pain. He could neither sit in a chair nor walk normally around the room. That day, the two men, Lamine an Algerian former military cadet and refugee in his mid-forties, Michael an American therapist some ten years younger, embarked on what would become a very long and very arduous program of work, the therapist, a tall, thin, gangling man who uses his hands a lot, lounging in his chair, his client crouched over and cramped, or shuffling around the room, looking at his feet, unable to meet the therapist’s eye. In prison, as Lamine would tell me, there is no horizon,
and to look into people’s eyes is to invite trouble. Michael is an ideal example of the Foundation’s eclecticism: he is a dancer, who learned about physical pain through a bad accident; a practitioner of the Alexander technique who came to Jungian analysis through his need to bridge what he saw as an uncomfortable gap between his own mind and body; a somatic psychotherapist who came to the work not through the theories of earlier doctors and analysts treating functional disorders as Reich and Charcot did, but through his own interest in the body. At the Medical Foundation, among people stunned into chronic pain and despair by torture, Michael discovered the setting he needed in which to do his work. In the early 1990s, recruited by Helen, he began to listen to people’s bodies.

In many ways, Lamine was also Michael’s ideal client. He was a clever, articulate, reflective man who had reached a moment of such profound desperation that the vast edifices of his defenses were weakened just enough to allow them to be breached. Safe, at last, from threat and danger, he could permit himself to collapse. He was caught, as Michael saw it, in that quasi-world familiar to all who work with tortured refugees, in a state of pain that is neither all physical nor all mental but some complicated amalgam of both, trying to dissociate himself from his body so that he might survive as a psychic entity; the two, the mental and the physical, needed to be brought together again. While Lamine rocked and groaned, Michael got down on the floor next to him and did exactly what his instincts told him to do: he took hold of Lamine’s head and supported it. “I could feel this huge tension,” Michael says. “I had to do something to release this unbearable physical pain.” For Lamine, the moment was both shocking and intensely moving. He felt humiliated; but he also felt comforted. Never, he says now, had he lain on the floor in this abject fashion, not even during the worst of the torture. However, lying on his bed in his bleak hotel room in King’s Cross, he had decided against suicide and he knew that he needed help: medical help, for his old injuries, and above all mental help, though he could not imagine that he would ever meet anyone he could trust. Particularly not in this alien country, where he could
not speak to anyone and where he felt permanently cold. Through Michael’s hands, in a room full of the brightly colored rubber balls and odd objects that are among the tools of his trade, with a translator looking on, Lamine wondered whether he had found his man.

Nothing happened quickly. It had been luck that had taken Lamine to the Medical Foundation, luck in the form of a perceptive nurse at his local doctor’s office in King’s Cross: she remarked on his wounds and suggested that he try the place up the road, which she believed looked after people who had been tortured. It took great courage to go there. Helen’s flash of humor helped release Mrs. M.’s story: now it would be Michael’s willingness to stick by him until he got better that would open Lamine’s first door. “He promised me something. And he kept his word.” Lamine did not expect people to keep their word. He had been betrayed since early childhood. That sudden feeling of trust became his key.

Although the doors opened only very gradually—and not all are yet open—Lamine returned week after week to see Michael, longing for the day when he would not need a translator; and, slowly, the pain began to ease. “There were two aspects to talking,” he says. “One was talking or not talking. The other was really talking.” It was his whole, painful life of lovelessness and violence that Lamine was forcing himself to face, of which torture was just a part. Michael knows that doors cannot be forced open, just as he knows that torture may do many different things to people, but that one thing it always does is alter them. Lamine was looking for the person that he had been, Michael for ways to help him metabolize his experiences, to face up to and question his own carefully constructed defense mechanisms and find the strength to let them go, and then move on. As he saw it, his job was to decide when Lamine was ready to confront the past, when he was sufficiently strong to start rebuilding. He was listening for the signal. “You need a very broad palette to work in this field,” he says.

When I went to see him, Michael, like Helen, told me a story. “There was an Asian man who was blind. One day, he found himself by an elephant, but did not know what it was. ‘This,’ he said to himself,
stroking the trunk, ‘must be a snake.’ Then he felt the elephant’s body. ‘And this is a breathing mountain.’ After this, he ran his hand along a leg. ‘And this is a tree.’“ No one, Michael says, “knows the whole picture. All we have are the pieces of a complex puzzle which says that people don’t react well when they are badly treated.”

•   •   •

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOONS,
over several years, I have listened to refugees at the Medical Foundation talk about what torture has done to them, and about their sense of exile. I have heard about rape, about burns and electric shocks and what it is like to watch children and parents die; often, describing what has happened to them, people cry; sometimes, they barely speak. I have come to learn that rape, of both men and women, and betrayal, both real and perceived, cause a particular kind of pain and grief neither easily conveyed nor ever eradicated. In Muslim societies especially, the shame of rape is so profound that many women so victimized have never told their families, or mentioned the rape to the immigration authorities when asking for asylum. Easier, by far, to describe survival, the steps to safety, than to confess.

There is Mary, a neat, contained Ugandan girl, who speaks good English from her days in missionary school in Kampala. Mary is twenty-two. Her mother died of AIDS when she was a child. During her first holidays from university, Mary volunteered to take some food and clothes to northern Uganda, to distribute in a camp for displaced people. One night, asleep alone in a tent, she was attacked by fighters from the Lord’s Army. They raped her, took her away with them to their camp, and held her prisoner. Every night she was raped, often by several different fighters. She was also beaten. Three months later, the camp was attacked by government forces. Mary was freed, but then taken back to a military barracks. Here she was kept for two months. She was again raped. One night, she managed to escape and make her way back to Kampala. She found that her widowed father had died. An uncle bought her a ticket and put her
on a plane to London. She arrived in England six months pregnant, too late to have an abortion, and when she came to the Medical Foundation she showed me her swollen stomach, disfigured by the blotchy scar of a huge burn: the Lord’s Army fighters had poured boiling water and porridge over her. Mary, too, cried, when she first came to see me on a Friday afternoon at the Medical Foundation; she cried because she was alone, with no friends, and because she could not get in touch with her sisters and brother in Uganda, and because she had just been refused asylum in Britain and didn’t know what would become of her, and she cried because she did not know whether to keep her baby after the birth.

There is Luis, who arrived in London in 1976, on another cold gray December day, from Chile; a rare survivor of Pinochet’s death squads and torture centers, he had been a young political supporter of Allende. Luis’s friends and pregnant wife had been murdered in secret detention. For many years, he had pressed on with his life, held the memories at bay, laughed when strangers told him he needed psychiatric help. He couldn’t sleep and he ached and coughed, but he studied for a sociology degree at Middlesex Polytechnic and earned his living washing up, cleaning, repairing refrigerators and washing machines, and selling shoes in Camden Market. At night, he became a cleaner in a department of the civil service, where he fantasized that refugees were only permitted to clean during the night so that the staff would not be forced to meet their eyes, and when in people’s offices he saw combs and boxes of Kleenex, cigarette packets, hats, or pairs of shoes, he would try to imagine their lives, and their families, picture them in the pub or at home after work, cooking dinner with their children. When the agency that employed him sent him to clean people’s homes he would feel their beds and their half-empty cups of tea to see if they were still warm. In the little time that he wasn’t cleaning, or mending people’s stoves and refrigerators, or writing essays for his classes, Luis busied himself helping other Chilean refugees. Like Lamine, he has thought a great deal about exile. In this period, he says, he was running very fast to keep thought at bay; but inside, he was falling apart, “atomized, shattering.”