The Dark Side of Love (112 page)

Josef mourned at length for the frail little poet, and pinned the poem to the wall beside his bed. Religions were works of art, and should not be practised but admired in museums, Nuri Hakim had written. He was condemned to fifteen years in jail.

Munir was a born mathematician. He shone in his department at the university, and if his professors respected anyone, they respected him.

He was always coming into the cafeteria telling people things he had found out, and Farid had discovered then, for the first time, that maths was not a dry subject. When Munir proved mathematically why something in politics or the economy didn't work, you were soon in fits of laughter.

One day he came in with a thick exercise book, looking as if he hadn't had much sleep.

“Look at this,” he said. “I've just been working it out: our country loses as many working days a year because of Ramadan alone as Britain has lost in all its strikes since the Second World War.”

No one could believe that, but Munir set out all his statistics and calculations. It was obvious that during Ramadan the entire country was operating on the back burner. A Muslim Brother waxed indignant and attacked Munir, but they confined themselves to verbal fencing, to the amusement of the students in the cafeteria.

But one day Munir had worse on his mind. He used to listen to the news every morning before coming to the university, and one day he began meticulously writing down the losses allegedly suffered by Israel in its military confrontations with the Arab countries or the thirteen groups of Palestinian freedom fighters. Since January 1965 the Palestinians had been plastering the walls of the city of Damascus with reports of their huge successes, never guessing that Munir was carefully writing it all down.

One April morning in 1967 he came into the cafeteria, climbed on a chair and asked for silence. Because it was Munir the students did
fall silent at once, although they wouldn't usually even in the lecture hall.

“Dear friends and comrades,” he began, almost inaudibly.

“Louder!” shouted his fellow students at the back of the big room. Munir cleared his throat. “Dear friends and comrades!” he repeated. “It is my privilege to announce that Israel has finally been defeated. According to the casualty figures of the dead on all fronts, there isn't a single Israeli left capable of bearing arms. Any survivors are severely injured and lying in the ruins of bridges, buildings, and the burning remains of their military vehicles, helicopters, and tanks, all destroyed by our brave men, so now we must allow humanitarian aid to get through to those poor wounded Israelis, as we've been in duty bound to do ever since Saladin's time.”

A day later he disappeared. His father made valiant efforts on his behalf, and was even willing to sign a statement saying that his son had been crazy from childhood on. He thought it would be only a formality enabling the state to save face if it let Munir go after accusing him of disseminating pro-Israeli propaganda.

But his father was wrong. Munir really had gone crazy.

TAD, 200 KM NORTH-EAST OF DAMASCUS, APRIL 1968 – APRIL 1969

From Damascus they drove along the main road as it wound north through the bleak landscape like a black snake in flight. After about twenty kilometres the column of trucks turned off along into the road going east. When the camp of Gahan was left behind, they all knew their destination: Tad.

Night fell like a heavy cloak on the earth, and the trucks jolted over potholes and rocks. The light of the headlamps danced wildly across the plain.

They were a hundred and fifty prisoners in four trucks, accompanied by several small transporter vans each carrying ten armed soldiers.

Farid crouched on the floor of the truck with his eyes closed. Those terrible days passed through his mind again: the shock as he sat in the kitchen reading the newspaper, and suddenly heard the noise of the police wrenching the front door of the apartment off its hinges. Then being handed over to the secret service next evening, an elaborately staged performance. They acted as if he were an Israeli general. He sat at the back of the police car with his hands and feet bound, with an officer on each side of him.

Through the windshield he had seen people bound for home, laden with shopping bags, laughing and gesticulating. It was still chilly outside, but you could already feel that spring was coming. People walked with a livelier step, took their time, strolled for pleasure.

“See that, you bastard?” asked the officer to his right, in a strong southern accent. “Any of them interested in you? You want to liberate those donkeys? They'd sell their country and their honour for a bag of candies.”

“And their mothers into the bargain,” agreed the man on Farid's other side. He had a scarred, fleshy face, like a crook in a bad caricature. The driver cast a nasty glance at the pair of them in the rear-view mirror.

“Yes, right,” said the first secret service man, returning to the subject. “And back home they'll get under the shower, stuff their bellies, goggle at a crime movie on TV, and screw all night. And you'll be executed before you've had any fun out of life at all.”

Farid felt desperate. He longed for Rana, and was ashamed of himself for not listening to her in time.

After torture and interrogation, he was finally tried by a military tribunal in the cellar of the secret service building, and was condemned to life imprisonment in a labour camp. His crime was described as conspiracy against the Fatherland. He had not been allowed a defence lawyer.

When he woke up again on the flatbed of the truck, day was beginning to dawn. It was cold. The trucks were still driving with their headlamps on. They were just coming to a hilly region, and they stopped briefly at a barrier. Brakes squealed. Beyond the rusty barrier the road ran on through the endless sand like a dark and broken thread.

Most of the detainees had been woken by the squealing brakes, and thought they had arrived, but a little later the column continued on its way. After a while they drove past a double fence. The camp was visible now and then through the sand dunes. Farid saw two large rows of huts with metal roofs. Finally the road described a sharp right bend, and the trucks stopped. A cloud of very fine sand trickled down on the prisoners.

“We're there,” someone said softly.

The camp was in a hollow. No one driving a car on the main traffic routes through the desert to Palmyra, Homs, or Iraq would see that a prison with over two thousand inmates and guards was hidden here.

It was just after seven when Farid jumped down from the truck. He saw a horrific panorama before him. How could such a huge camp exist in this wilderness of sand and stones?

From the square where the trucks and vans had stopped, he could see both gates. The main gate faced north, the other gate east to a low-lying stone quarry that yawned open like a black muzzle. The rock here was basalt. Farid's eyes went in alarm to the double fence of dense barbed wire, with a death zone several metres wide in the middle.

Armed soldiers stood behind weather-beaten windows in the tall watch towers at the four corners of the camp. Each of them had a platform with movable searchlights on it.

Beyond the large main gate there was a low, two-storey, grey concrete building on the right. Farid counted sixteen large huts in two rows behind it. The two palm trees on the exercise ground were a strange sight; their leaves were the only green thing as far as the eye could see.

The camp commandant, Captain Garasi, received them at the gate. He was surrounded by officers, soldiers, and civilians, and he had a face like a bulldog's. Later, Farid found this first impression of his confirmed; he was known as Bulldog to the inmates who had been here for some time.

The captain's bearing was stiff, as if he were under the influence of drugs. His grey hair together with his low officer's rank showed that he had joined the army as a private soldier and worked his way up. Anyone who joined with a high school diploma was a captain by the age of twenty-eight at the latest. The Bulldog must be in his late fifties.

For some reason the officers kept the new prisoners waiting a long
time. Farid was freezing in the cold dusk of dawn, and felt how empty his stomach was.

“It is my duty,” the camp commandant began after an eternity, “in the name of His Excellency President Amran, to drain the poison with which you injure the Fatherland and its people, you … you damn mangy dogs.”

They could hear how difficult he found speaking publicly, how bad his articulation was, and how stiff the sentences he had learned by heart sounded. Only the abuse, uttered in a southern accent, carried complete conviction.

“If one of my officers, soldiers, or guards gives you an order I expect unconditional obedience, or you'll rue the day your mothers bore you a thousand times over. His Excellency has given me a free hand to do anything I like with you.”

As if at a word of command the guards, who until now had been looking bored, made for the prisoners. Soon after that the air was full of dust and screams.

Farid particularly noticed one of the guards, an old man of about seventy. He had been standing close to the commandant all the time, leaning on a stick. Farid had taken him for a medical orderly or the captain's factotum. But the old man was the first to attack the prisoners, hitting out mercilessly and with sadistic delight. Whenever Farid raised his head he caught sight of him again. A time came when he himself was in the terrible old man's reach, and could see him salivating and whinny with pleasure as every blow went home.

Bleeding, and with the last of his strength, Farid reached the hut allotted to him. It was Number 5, in the front row of huts and level with the palm trees. He had a place near the east-facing entrance. The huts had only metal gratings over them at both ends, so that the inmates could be checked any time.

From his place, he could see the east gate leading to the basalt quarry, the soldiers' barracks, and the kitchen directly opposite the administration building, as well as part of the monastery ruins. Apparently the solitary confinement cells were in their cellars. Close to the ruins stood another small, grey building. That, Farid soon
found out, was the former death row, where condemned men used to spend their last night of life. But after a prison riot in 1960, executions at Tad had been banned. The building contained six large cells, the only ones to contain two comfortable plank beds each. Farid was told by Ali Abusaid, a Satlan supporter who had been in Tad for four years, that Garasi put his favourites in there, so the inmates called the place Garasi's Hotel.

Farid's eyes wandered to the hospital. “How many doctors work there?” he asked, leaning on the grating.

Ali Abusaid laughed. “One. Dr. Josef Maqdisi.”

“Only one doctor for two thousand people?” Farid was indignant.

“If only he really were,” replied Abusaid. “He's a swine, not a doctor. But the hospital's another story. I'll tell you later.”

Farid was glad to have a place to sleep in the fresh air, for many of the new arrivals were accommodated at the other end of the hut, where there were two earth closets and a large washbasin with three faucets. But he felt less happy about it when every gust of wind blew sand into his face and he was freezing cold at night.

“And who's that crazy old man who was beating us so hard?” Farid asked.

The man was a fossil. No one in the camp knew what his real name was, but they called him Istanbuli, because he larded his speech with so many Turkish words. At the age of twelve he had been a kitchen boy in the barracks under the Ottoman occupation, and he had gone on to serve every new master of the camp. He had never risen beyond the rank of a private soldier. Wherever the camp commandant went, Istanbuli followed like his shadow. And when Garasi gave the order to beat the prisoners, Istanbuli was first in line.

He had been retired in 1962, but after a week he was back asking to be reinstated. He couldn't cope with the chaos of modern life outside the camp. Captain Garasi liked the old man. He backed his request and was allowed to give him his job back, although now Istanbuli was paid only his pension instead of normal wages. But that made no difference to him. He lived very well on the bribes he got, which amounted to more than a general's official salary.