The Dark Side of Love (115 page)

“I'm no traitor, you son of a pimp,” cried Farid, before everything went dark before his eyes.

As he slowly regained consciousness he heard whispering in the
darkness. He was lying on the floor trussed up like a chicken. His punishment, fifty lashes and two months' solitary confinement, was for resisting guards.

The heroic conduct that Farid had intended to show was gone at the first lash. In the brief moment before the second came, all he could do was writhe in fear. The second lash confirmed his fears: it hurt even more than the first. Farid wanted to stay strong, but the pain consumed all his strength, and he heard himself screaming. A time came when he felt nothing any more. When he came back to his senses he was lying in complete darkness, and his body, woken by the pain, was returning to life.

He realized that he was in one of the solitary confinement cells. The floor was concrete, the walls massive stone. He didn't know whether it was day or night, for the cell was pitch dark. No light came through the spyhole in the door, and when he heard cicadas in the distance he assumed that it was night and went to sleep.

For the first time in his life he felt that light was magic. A ray of sun forced itself through an opening in his pitch dark cell and danced over the wall. Slowly, the light moved through the cell, filling it with a muted radiance that filled Farid's heart with longing. He felt unutterably lonely, and began to weep.

“You only get to eat every other day in here, and it's always at noon,” said the guard who pushed a large, battered tin bowl in the cell. A lump of mashed potato filled half the bowl, and there was a flatbread on top of it. The potato tasted of rancid fat, but the bread was good.

For the first few days in solitary confinement, Farid felt it was almost pleasantly restful. The cell was small, but clean and dry. The hut had to be shared with a hundred and twenty other prisoners, and it always smelled of dirt and decay and was horribly noisy.

But after a few days Farid noticed lethargy affecting his thoughts. He began asking himself questions to occupy his mind. First he enumerated everything that he missed. In the process, he realized that in the camp he had lost those small moments of pleasure in daily life that had once seemed so natural: light, movement, warmth, open doors, going for a walk, shaving, drinking a glass of tea, singing when he felt like it.

The darkness was oppressive today; the air seemed to be boiling. Not a breath of wind came through the crack under the iron door of his cell. It must be cloudy outside, or else a sandstorm had covered the sun, and no ray of light penetrated the cellars. Farid's thoughts lapsed into apathy once more. He tried singing again, and three times the songs died away after a few pitiful verses. He switched from the melancholy ballads of Um Kulthum to the cheerful dance rhythms of his favourite singer Feiruz, but his singing was still no good.

Was it night outside? He listened, but he couldn't hear any cicadas. When the guard brought his food he added two large, crisp rolls to the bowl of beans. “From Darwish,” he vouchsafed dryly.

So it was only midday. Farid had been thinking it was night. A few hours later he felt fresh air coming in under the door. Gradually the cell grew cooler, and he could sleep.

Darkness swallowed up his thoughts, erased them. He couldn't think any idea out to its logical conclusion. At some point he always lost the thread. He wondered what he could do about it, and thought the best thing would be to wake his brain up by walking while he thought. He went up and down in his cell, brushing the palm of his hand over the stone masonry, doing ten or twenty push-ups, and repeating this exercise several times a day.

It was only gradually that he understood the full cruelty of solitary confinement. Time was the worst of it. Time didn't seem to pass at all. If you didn't defeat it first it would break you, that was to say if you stopped thinking, if you stopped expressing what you had thought.

“They shut us up crowded close together,” he said to himself in an undertone, taking care to pronounce the words clearly, “until we don't just
feel
like sheep in a shed, we really
are
sheep. Ali Abusaid told me that one of Garasi's officers hit him and kept saying, ‘Go on, admit it, you're a sheep!' And he went on hitting Ali with a stick until he bleated, and then the officer laughed and left him in peace.”

Farid took a deep breath. “Left him in peace,” he repeated out loud, because for a moment he didn't know how to go on, but then his thoughts continued to flow. “On that point,” he said, laughing at the idea, “Garasi and the Communist Party leadership are very like each other. The Party leaders too treat their members like castrated sheep.
They have to obey and be shorn, milked, and slaughtered, but they must never want anything for themselves. That's not what matters to Garasi. He doesn't care a bit what his tortured sheep and wethers want, just so long as they behave like part of his flock.”

He concentrated on following this train of thought to its end, and before he spoke the next words out loud he suddenly saw the patch of sunlight fall on the wall. With it, a cool breeze blew into his cell. Farid sat on the floor, delighted by his victory over the darkness.

“Rana,” said his lips, although he wasn't thinking of Rana. The heart is related to the tongue, he'd read that years ago somewhere, they have the same muscular structure. “Rana,” he whispered again. It was like a prayer. He was close to her now. When he arrived in Tad, one of the old prisoners had told him that if he wanted to survive he must leave all the people he had loved outside and forget them instantly, for they would only be a burden to him here. But whenever Farid realized that he was in danger of becoming an animal, and his thoughts were beginning to revolve around nothing but naked survival, he clung to Rana, and in his imagination he built a future full of warmth, love, books, and music with her.

“Rana,” he whispered again, “if you only knew what they do to us here.” He was fighting back his tears when he heard a soft, barely audible knock on the door.

“Some bread for you.”

It was unmistakably Samih's voice. He pushed a flat package under the door into the cell, and left his fingers there for a moment. Farid stroked their tips.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The bag of bread contained a scrap of paper too. Farid held it in the ray of sunlight. There wasn't much written on it, just, “We're thinking of you. Be brave. We love you.” And there were several signatures underneath. He folded the paper into a tiny square and hid it in
the lining of his trousers. The bread tasted wonderful. Darwish had painted it with olive oil and thyme before he baked it.

Farid felt better once he had eaten it. His thoughts went back to his comparison of the leadership of the Communist Party with Captain Garasi. “Yes, and when it comes to sexuality,” he went on out loud, “Garasi's purely animal nature makes him better than the communist leaders. They've domesticated the brute beast in themselves.”

As he spoke the word “sexuality”, which in Arabic is
gins
, Farid realized that he could make it into two anagrams:
sign
, meaning “prison”, and
ngis
, meaning “impure”. He tried forming variants of both those words, but it didn't help for long.

He felt more desperate every day, for it wasn't just his attempt to conquer isolation by speaking his thoughts out loud that failed. Whatever he tried to think about was defeated by the darkness. He tried mind games, he tried imaginary love-talk with Rana, arguments with Laila, complex experiments in the natural sciences – all of it just flared briefly like a firework, and then the darkness swallowed it up.

He missed human company, and longed for it. By now he would rather have even the unbearable smell of the camp inmates than this room, which felt like a casket. For the first time in his life he recognized how precious human voices were.

“Rana,” he whispered, stretching his arms out in the darkness like a drowning man. He concentrated his mind on his lover, remembering her special fragrance, her soft skin. Soon he felt her closeness and warmth flowing through his body. He thought of her beautiful face and her neck, the neck he had always loved to kiss lingeringly when he lay close to her back. She was so sensitive just there … Farid smiled, and fell asleep.

When he came out of solitary confinement after two months, he had aged by years. He washed several times, the other prisoners found him clean clothing, and everyday life in the camp went on again.

A week later a chance incident split the camp, bringing out the prisoners' differences. A minor quarrel between Muslim Brothers and the communists developed into a bitter fight, with injured men on both sides. Garasi was delighted.

Ali Abusaid's spontaneous idea of founding a reconciliation group developed into the proposal of electing a secret “committee” of the prisoners to settle quarrels, or if possible prevent them in the first place, but most of all to foster the cohesion of all the political prisoners. However, the election of the ten-man committee was a setback for the communists; only one of their number was chosen. Farid represented the independent Left.

The committee worked hard on projects for restoring to the prisoners what Garasi and the camp administration had taken from them: their human dignity. After some weeks, the committee put forward a plan, although its success was limited. Any contacts with the outside world, any attempts to get hold information and materials, were possible only through the soldiers who were forced to do their military service in the camp. A number of them did make tentative approaches to the prisoners at first, but then they took fright, or were transferred, for Garasi had his eyes and ears everywhere. A dense network of informers among the prisoners meant that any planned operation was like walking through a minefield. And hostility between the different political parties got in the way of any sensible resistance project even more than the informers. Farid lay awake for nights on end. He debated with the others, sought solutions, tried to bribe soldiers to procure medicaments and reading matter in Damascus. But most of the soldiers were afraid.

Reconciliation itself was difficult. The prisoners lay side by side in the huts, crammed together like sheep in a shed. Insect pests and lack of sleep turned them into bad-tempered beasts of prey who would attack each other for the least little thing, inflicting mental
and physical pain, as if Garasi's tortures weren't enough. In despair, the committee recognized the limits of its moral authority. Yet it had achieved something: all the prisoners respected the tireless commitment of its members, who remained largely anonymous. That respect was the first common ground between all the camp inmates. It was a tiny seed, but it fell on fertile ground.

The first harbingers of autumn came from the north; the sun no longer blazed so pitilessly down.

Garasi and his guards showed some restraint for several days. The food suddenly improved. The prisoners had real pieces of meat in their soup for the first time, and grapes for dessert. There was a rumour among the inmates that the grapes were poisoned, but no one could resist them all the same.

“There's going to be an important visitor soon,” said the prisoners who had been in Tad for over ten years.

One afternoon they learned from the soldiers that the new head of the secret service, Colonel Badran, was coming. A troop of prisoners, under the supervision of armed soldiers, was sent out to the camp forecourt where the buses had brought them on their arrival. They were to whitewash everything. Flower pots were put outside the entrance, and a second troop of prisoners had to spruce up the inner courtyard. The guards who had so much enjoyed bringing their whips down on the prisoners' backs suddenly acted quite peaceably.

“Hey, my skin's just itching for the touch of your whip,” one of the criminals called out to a guard. “Are you all sick, or have you turned hippy? Make love, not war,” he chanted, hands to his balls. The guard was seething with rage, but he turned his back on the prisoners.

The huts and the earth closets were cleaned up too. A special squad of prisoners was told off to clean the administration building, and the soldiers had to attend to their own barracks. Tons of garbage were thrown on three trucks standing ready and dumped somewhere in
the desert. A day later the camp looked neat as a new pin: that made it a truly repellent sight.

The visitor was late. Garasi told the prisoners to shave, wash, and behave well, because the new head of the secret service was an educated man who liked order and discipline. Badran was President Amran's youngest brother, he added, and had played a considerable part in the latest coup.