The Dark Side of Love (113 page)

A bell rang at six in the evening.

Two officers and several NCOs stood beside the palm trees. The guards walked past the huts and called out numbers, upon which the prisoner inside whose number it was would reply “One hundred and ten, sir!” or whatever his number happened to be, without looking up. The NCOs noted the numbers down.

At seven prisoners carried large pans out to the huts. They contained a nauseating soup made with beans and pieces of potato mixed with lentils. Countless dead beetles floated on top. But Farid's hunger was tearing at his stomach, so he fell on the food, shovelling the hot soup into his mouth and swallowing it without chewing, to avoid biting into one of the beetles.

He was sweating after getting it down in such a hurry, but he enjoyed the piece of bread he was given. It tasted fresh and smelled of sourdough.

Later, some of the inmates of the hut took tea and sugar out of a hiding place. A primitive boiler was also produced. It ran on heating oil abstracted by prisoners from the kitchen, and the tea was made in an old tin can.

Farid had a single sip from the mug being handed around. The tea tasted sweet and bitter, and smelled of diesel oil, but it was his first illicit drink here, and the fact filled him with a strange kind of pleasure.

Lights went out at eight. Farid wearily lay down on his mat, but he couldn't sleep. The darkness was a hole, and he was falling deeper and deeper into it. The world was alien and far away. Who was he? What was he doing here? This was Tad prison camp, and he hadn't been brought here by colonialists or such people, but by his own countrymen, men who called themselves socialists too, who even included communists faithful to Moscow in the government, although the Communist Party had to remain illegal. This state of affairs was known as “doing the Syrian splits”. Amran maintained excellent relations with all the socialist countries, so no one at all was going to ask questions about a prisoner. Farid was abandoned to his misery.

That night Rana faded to a memory, and his mother appeared before his mind's eye only briefly, then sinking back into the darkness again. At last sleep came.

For the first few days sheer chaos ruled in the camp, for an unprecedented wave of arrests was sweeping across the country. The huts were suffocatingly overcrowded. They stank of shit and decomposition, sweat and ammonia. Then, after a while, the days lost their distinguishing marks and names. Time merged into a shapeless chain of boredom, loneliness, and pain.

Tad held not only dangerous political prisoners of all parties, but also the worst kinds of criminals: pitiless murderers, pimps, rapists, and dangerous youths who had been practicing butchery at the age of fourteen and were ready to kill anyone. Human life meant nothing to them.

Conscientious objectors and deserters suffered worst of all. They were mercilessly tortured, first when arrested, then during interrogation, and finally in the camp. Every one of them was to be made an example. They were regarded as dangerous because they were hostile not only to the government but also to the army.

It was in Tad that Farid saw the first conscientious objector of his life. The young man wasn't twenty yet, but you could tell what he had been through just by looking at him. Garasi hated him and called him a pansy and a cowardly traitor. His name was Nagi Salam, and he had been condemned to twenty years in the labour camp, followed by five years of military service at the front. If he refused to serve at the front, which, being Nagi, he obviously would, he would then get life imprisonment. The state didn't want to kill him, just to torment him all his life.

The political prisoners avoided the boy, because for all their ideological differences they were united on one point: they advocated violence, and to many of them, Radicals, communists, and Muslim Brothers alike, armed struggle seemed the only possible way.

Garasi put Nagi in Hut 12 with the worst criminals, who tormented and pestered him without mercy. He bore it all in silence, and didn't defend himself even when a criminal of small and weedy build slapped his face. A time came when the criminals themselves found it no fun any more to tyrannize over him, because a tormentor needs some kind of reaction from his victim. You get no kick out of torturing a stone.

Captain Garasi was absolute lord and master over this island of men deprived of their rights in the middle of a desert of sand and oblivion. Compared to him, a government minister was no more than a factotum. He was God in person, deciding on the life or death, happiness or misery, hunger, pain, and loneliness of every single prisoner. He was a dangerous mixture of ignorance and arrogant self-confidence. Garasi felt no particular hatred for Muslim Brothers, communists, or Radicals. He wasn't capable of it; he neither hated nor loved anyone at all.

At twenty he had married a woman, given her three children, and took no further notice of her. When his wife fell sick with a strange fever, he never visited her for fear of infection. At a safe distance away in the camp, he waited for her to die.

There were rumours that he smoked large quantities of hashish in secret, and sometimes wept all night in his Spartan apartment over the interrogation cells and the offices. Garasi didn't like the soldiers, and he was too rigid and hard-hearted for their taste. Unlike the prison guards, the soldiers were not in this camp of lost souls by their own choice. Many of them suffered even more than the prisoners from the captain's harsh punishments. Garasi reacted with a sense of injury to every lapse of discipline, as if it threatened him personally with failure, and responded with corresponding brutality.

He thought little of his military rank; only his social task mattered to him. His idea of the world since childhood had comprised only
shepherds and sheep. “Like the President of the Republic, I'm a shepherd,” he would say, “except that his flock is larger.”

Garasi was proud of having so many intellectuals and educated men in his flock. He, who had had reading and writing literally beaten into him in the army, now determined the fate of twenty professors, twenty-five doctors of medicine, ten architects, thirty-five lawyers, a hundred and thirty journalists including five editors-in-chief, over thirty writers, and forty engineers, chemists, and teachers. Not the finest quarter in all Damascus, Cairo, or Beirut could boast so many men with university degrees.

He called those who obeyed him, “my boy, my son.” Those who would not accept this humiliation were physically punished, and Garasi helped out with the torturing himself, not for pleasure but out of a feeling that, as a shepherd, he had to care for his sheep. And apart from a few rich and privileged political prisoners, and the criminal gang leaders whom he spared, there was not a single camp inmate who hadn't been beaten by Garasi in person at some time. Worst was the rage that made him blind, for then he struck out like a brute beast. Sometimes he actually injured himself in the process, staggering about and smashing everything around him. Farid once saw Garasi whipping four prisoners with his own hands, until he was in such a rage that he turned the whip on the soldiers and NCOs around him too. The officers, standing a little further off, sent for Istanbuli, who was in the kitchen at this time of day. He seized the commandant from behind, picked him up, and whirled him around fast in a circle until the captain dropped his whip and hung there in the old soldier's arms like a limp sack.

Since Farid hadn't yet discovered the true reason for his arrest, he thought his really bad luck was that he was regarded not as a former communist but as a Radical. Muslim Brothers, nationalists, and communists hated each other like poison, but they were united on one
point: if they fell into the hands of the government they would never sign a declaration saying they recanted. That was considered cowardly treachery. Farid would have signed anything to get out of this place, but no one was asking him to. The secret service knew that the wily Radicals allowed their members to sign anything, just so long as they were freed to carry on with the armed struggle underground. Radicals regarded dictators and their adherents as criminals, and considered any statement made to criminals invalid.

Farid remembered communists who had committed suicide after they had been freed, unable to bear the scorn of their own comrades. The Communist Party no longer offered aid to a prisoner who had broken under torture; it became a second punitive authority. Only your own failure was still your loyal companion.

But Farid would have been prepared to accept any humiliation. He knew that political prisoners who recanted were brought out for the media. Former high-up functionaries had to declare their shame and remorse on television, rather less important men on the radio, and third-class politicals in one of the governmental newspapers, all vowing allegiance to the Fatherland and its President.

Much worse than this dreadful media show was humiliation in front of your friends and family. By signing you admitted that your entire career up to this point had been a failure.

Amran's government needed repentant sinners, you could sense that in Tad. Prisoners weren't asked about what they had done any more, they were tortured at once
en masse
to get recantations.

The Interior Minister was putting pressure on Garasi. The captain stepped up the tortures and made the already near-inedible food even worse, but only very few abandoned their resistance and signed. Gradually, Garasi came to realize that he was dealing with a particularly tough, battle-hardened generation. He had never before had so many prisoners who still defied him, some of them even after years, and refused to be his flock. He was often near tears in his fury to find that some bleeding, trembling thing lying on the floor was still morally superior to him and the state.

Night hung like a black cloak over him, and the moon was the slit cut by a sharp knife in that garment. Farid stood at the grating for a long time, listening to the silence. At last he lay down on his mat and fell asleep.

In the middle of the night he was woken by a kick. “Get up, you bastards!” two guards were shouting. The light was glaring. Farid saw the others already standing with their faces to the wall, and he turned to it too. A whiplash intended for his neighbour struck his own back as well, burning like fire. The guard shouted, “Hold your tongue!” Evidently the man next to him had said something before Farid himself woke up. Within minutes all the prisoners in Hut 5 were on their feet.

Now Garasi appeared in full uniform. Out of the corner of his eye, Farid could see him striding past. “No heroes are going to survive here, only sensible men,” roared the captain. “I warned you, and now what do I hear? One of you has smuggled in a newspaper.”

Four guards and three soldiers spent a long time searching for the alleged newspaper. Finally they found it underneath the straw mat where a man called Marwan slept. He was well known as one of the Muslim Brotherhood. Garasi was fuming with anger. He hit, kicked, and shouted abuse at the prisoner, who just kept repeating, “God's punishment of the unrighteous will be great!”

By now the captain was in such a rage that as he swung his foot back to deliver a kick, he slipped and fell right beside his victim. Marwan saw this as aid from heaven, summoned up all his strength, shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” and spat his own blood into Garasi's face. Farid saw some of the inmates laughing soundlessly as they faced the wall.

The commandant swiftly got to his feet and left the hut, his face smeared. His soldiers followed him with his victim, and did not allow the other prisoners to stand easy, as they usually did after such nocturnal raids. But as soon as the last guard had left, they burst out laughing. Everyone claimed to have seen yet another detail of Garasi's humiliation.

Marwan didn't come back for two weeks, and then he was only a pale shadow of himself, encrusted with filth. He could hardly keep
on his feet, and he stank horribly. A week later he had to be taken to the military hospital in Damascus, and never came back. Contradictory rumours were in circulation, varying between a heroic death and freedom dearly bought.

The guards came at six in the morning. Huts 4, 5, and 6 were due for punishment. Some three hundred prisoners were made to run in circles, calling out, “Left, right, long live the Fatherland! Left, right, unity, liberty and socialism! Left, right, long live the Arab nation! Left, right, we are a nation with an eternal mission!”

About twenty guards were lined up, and the column of prisoners had to run the gauntlet past them. They made very sure that everyone was shouting at the top of his voice. Farid was running in silence when a guard's whip suddenly caught his ear. After that the man fell out of line with the other guards, caught up with Farid, and kept whipping him until he finally heard this stubborn prisoner shouting. As a punishment, all the prisoners had to run five more rounds that morning. Farid realized that it was best to go along with orders from the first, to spare yourself and the others pain.

After that the three hundred prisoners had half an hour to go and use the earth closets. Only now came their real punishment: they were to work in the basalt quarry. The reason for their punishment remained Garasi's secret. In double quick time, they went through the east gate, where they were handed hammers, shovels, and iron bars. A broad path with barbed wire on both sides led to the quarry. Once there it narrowed and wound its way down into the depths, which resembled a landscape from old science fiction movies, with bizarre, sharp fractures in the rock. The prisoners had a steep downward climb of twenty metres. Slowly, the yellow of the desert gave way to a greyish black colour, darker the further down they went, until they were surrounded by a ghostly nocturnal black at the bottom of the quarry. Now Farid knew the source of the dark gravel covering all
the roads around the camp a metre deep: it was the volcanic basalt from the quarry.