“Where is your brother? Who are his friends?”
I feel myself break, and I begin to speak.
The plane began its descent. Dared could feel the pressure on his eardrums. He opened his eyes.
“Are you all right, sir?”
The flight attendant, an attractive woman in her midtwenties, was leaning over him.
“I’m fine,” he assured her, checking his watch. “How much longer until we land in Amsterdam?”
Her brow furrowed. “You didn’t hear the captain’s announcement?”
He looked up at her, not understanding. He hadn’t heard an announcement. He had slept and dreamed — the usual terrible nightmare.
“Schiphol is closed,” the flight attendant told him.
“Schiphol?”
“Sorry, sir. The Amsterdam airport.” She smiled apologetically. “Heavy fog and sleet. We’ve been rerouted to Paris. There’ll be a ticket and a voucher waiting for you at the customer service desk. The ticket’s for this evening’s flight to Amsterdam, and the voucher’s for a hotel room in the city center. You can spend a few hours in Paris, get some sleep if you like, and still make it to your destination today. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, sir.” She showed him her lovely smile again.
“I, ah...”
He needed time to process this new information. The medical conference didn’t begin until tomorrow. A few hours in Paris. He had never been to the City of Light. Obviously he’d take the hotel room. With any luck, he’d have time to explore the place a bit, perhaps visit a museum, find something good to eat, and...
Do you have plans for today?
The question perched on the tip of his tongue.
He swallowed it.
“Thank you, miss,” he said.
The rumor has been going around the red building for days. Saydnaya is overcrowded, and fifty prisoners are being moved to some other facility. One of the two affected cells is mine. Can it be true?
“Line up!”
Shortly before midnight, Thur and a platoon of guards haul us out of our cell.
“Faster,” Thur orders, complacently stroking his mustache.
They herd us through the corridor, down the stairs to the cellar. The occupants of the other cell are already there. They stand in a circle, and their guards are beating them with whips, sticks, batons, anything capable of inflicting pain. It is an orgy of violence. Then the kicking begins. In the face, the stomach, the back.
And we stand there, watching.
“Second group!”
With the first kick, it feels as if my spleen has ruptured. The second is worse. Please, kick me unconscious. But Thur and his goons know exactly how far they can go. They take turns. Kicking, punching, spitting, pulling my hair. It goes on for an hour, maybe two. I lose all sense of time and place.
Finally, they force us to our feet and drive us outside. It’s the middle of the night. The Big Dipper is bright in the sky. If I’m seeing properly, that is, for one of my eyes is swollen shut and the other is bleeding. I breathe in the cool desert air and am surprised to be alive.
We’re shoved toward a large structure.
“The white building,” one of my cellmates whispers.
I’ve never seen it before, but I know the stories. The white building is where they keep the officers and enlisted men who have refused to support the Assad regime. The tortures to which they are subjected are far worse than what we’ve experienced.
“Let’s go, move it!”
Down in the cellar, we find ourselves in a huge space that looks like an underground parking garage. Dozens of nooses hang from the stone ceiling. Some of the prisoners begin to weep, others pray.
I feel more relief than anything else. In the name of Allah, let it be over quickly.
Chairs are brought out and set beneath the nooses. Fifty chairs for fifty hangings. Before they order us up, they roughly pull a burlap sack over each of our heads.
Someone helps me onto a chair.
I can barely stand.
Yes, I think, it’s about time.
A noose tightens around my throat.
Dared gazed out the window. It was hard to get comfortable; he was squeezed between two big-boned women, but even that failed to dampen his good mood. The flight to Amsterdam would be a short one. He looked forward to the city, to the conference.
His interlude in Paris had been a success: a visit to the Louvre, a delicious meal, a stroll along the Seine. He’d even had time for a brief nap in the hotel room they’d given him — and, for the first time in years, he had slept soundly, undisturbed by nightmares and panic attacks. This trip, the interruption of his normal routine, was doing him good. For the last few years, he had worked like a madman, taking better care of his patients and colleagues than he took of himself. But he couldn’t go on like that forever. He had to think of himself too. He had to live the life he had been given.
He glanced at his watch. KL 1244 had been scheduled to take off at 6:40 p.m., but the plane was still parked at the gate. From his vantage point, it looked like the entire cabin was occupied, with the sole exception of the window seat three rows in front of him. Low voices came from the front of the plane. It sounded as if someone was being welcomed. A delayed passenger?
Then a man walked through the curtain separating the first-class and economy cabins.
Dared felt as if a knife had been plunged into his heart.
It’s the morning after the mass execution. I’m sitting in an office far from the cells and the torture chambers. The treatment to which I’ve been subjected has shattered me. I can barely sit or stand, but my mind is clear. Through the window, for the first time in months, I see the sun.
“Sign it,” grins Thur, “and you’ll be rid of us forever.”
The other men in the room — the general, the lawyer, the guards — all laugh.
Before me on the table lies a statement that begins with the words: I, Dared al-Saeed...
Once I sign it, I’ll be a free man.
I read through the statement. During my incarceration at Saydnaya, it says, I have been treated well, never tortured, never insulted. I have received all the necessary medical care. That’s what it says.
Bullshit.
As is the reason given for my release: General amnesty.
What a joke.
The truth is, they are letting me go because my father, who maintains a close connection with the Assad clan, has paid them a very large sum of money. Should I be grateful? My father and I have never agreed about politics. Now I’ll have to thank him for his intervention. The prospect is unwelcome. In my fourteen months at Saydnaya, I have lost everything I lived for, everything I believed in: my pride, my faith in humanity.
Worst of all, I have betrayed my brother Mustafa. I am deeply ashamed.
One stroke of the pen and I will be free.
Thur and the other men sniff impatiently.
My hand trembling, I pick up the pen. Every muscle in my body hurts.
I sign the statement.
The few seconds Dared was able to see him were sufficient. The limp, the expression, the hooked nose, the way he stroked his mustache before asking the passengers in the aisle and middle seats to let him by. Dared was absolutely certain: in the window seat three rows before him sat Karim al-Zaliq, alias Thur, the Bull.
Dared broke out in a cold sweat, and his mind raced with the images that had tormented him ever since his release: the torture, the humiliation, the dehumanization. There were no words to describe what had been done to him in Saydnaya.