I got up and washed my hands with the meager supply of water that was available so that I could handle the Qur’an, even though the process was hardly adequate. When I opened the cover and looked at the title, I was totally shocked: The Perfumed Garden for the Heart’s Delight by Shaykh Muhammad al-Nafzawi.* My entire body convulsed, and I shivered at the thought of this utterly malicious and disgusting act aimed at me.
So, who had been responsible for sending me these “generous gifts,” I wondered.
If it had not been for the lewd materials included with the rest, I would have assumed that they came from Na‘ima, who still retained her place in my heart and mind. But, since I knew her own beliefs, I came to the conclusion that it had to be the investigating judge. It was a down payment on a pact between the two of us, something required to fulfill a need he had in his own vicious and evil heart. But I vouched to myself, by the Creator of the heavens and earth and in the name of my plan to resist and hold fast, that this judge, wallowing in his foul slime, would never be able to catch me in his snares or get the things he wanted. Praying on his prayer mat, I decided, would be corrupt and invalid; using the bowl to perform the ritual ablutions would not cleanse, just the opposite; and, as for reading The Perfumed Garden in my current situation, that would be the worst of all. Except for the Nike sneakers that I needed so badly, I tossed everything else — even the newspapers — into the corner where I had already thrown the pornographic magazines.
The next morning I helped clear and sweep the cafeteria along with a group of other prisoners. I was then escorted by a masked guard to a secret room in a cellar, one that I had not seen before. He tied my hands behind my back and sat me down on a seat facing a table and chair. After a few terror-laden moments, a huge, muscular man came in, clearly one of the detention center’s major gorillas. Along with the guard, he stationed himself behind my back. Mama Ghula now came in, followed — what a nice surprise! — by Na‘ima. The two women could hardly have seemed more different: one was like a compliant gazelle, while the other looked like a savage beast. There was Mama Ghula in all her proverbial ugliness and bestiality, while Na‘ima was also there, infinitely attractive and supremely gentle.
Na‘ima’s boss instructed her to shine a light beam directly at my face. I now decided to show how crazy I had become, part of my plan that I’ve described earlier. I expressed my admiration for Na‘ima, but without mentioning her name or referring in any way to her message.
“I’m delighted to see you here, lovely visitor,” I declared. “Weren’t you scared of the guards on the way?”
Instead of getting any reply from her, I received a blow to the neck from the gorilla standing behind me. That shut me up.
“No questions allowed,” came a threatening voice as though coming from a machine. “No sexual harassment either.”
He moved over and stood beside Mama Ghula, who was busy eating sandwiches and drinking bottle after bottle of beer. Every so often she would open her mouth, stuffed full of food, and whisper something in the gorilla’s ear. He would then convey it to me as a terse question.
“The boss is asking,” he would say in his mechanical tone of voice, “about the things you haven’t talked about so far.”
“Every arrow in my quiver I’ve told you about,” I replied, my eyes watering because of the intense light focused on my face. “Prayers to God are all that’s left.”
“You’ve emptied one quiver, you son of a bitch,” the gorilla replied menacingly, “but you’ve hidden another one. Empty it now, or else I’m going to empty your veins of blood. In your home city of Oujda, you were involved with books. Fine, but you also got involved in other things, too. A woman named Fatima al-Lozi, for example. You installed her in your bookstore. The boss wants to know about your relationship with her.”
“Fatima was a widow with little money;” I replied immediately. “She was left alone and had had no children. Her life was utterly miserable. I gave her shelter and offered her as much help as I could in return for cleaning the bookstore and occasionally acting on my behalf. .”
“The boss is asking if you had sex with her,” the muscle-bound man demanded.
“Good heavens, no!” I replied. “She and I were both nursed by the same woman. That’s totally forbidden.”
That made Mama Ghula cackle.
“Your nursing sister, you fornicator?” she yelled, using a genuine or phony foreign accent. “My ass! Where is she now?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “She disappeared two months before I did.”
“No, no, you son of a bitch! Tell it right. She joined the maquis* in the mountains, along with her other suckling brother, your cousin, al-Husayn al-Masmudi.”
The gorilla now received some more whispered questions from his boss.
“In previous interrogation sessions, you’ve never mentioned Fatima al-Lozi. Why not?”
“Because there was nothing to be gained from talking about her.”
“Oh yes, there is! The boss is asking about your own sexual orientation.”
“My sexual orientation? I don’t understand. .”
“In sexual matters,” he interrupted, “do you favor women or men?”
“Women, of course,” I replied, “because I’m a man. But not just any woman. If I could marry the lovely woman standing in front of me here in accordance with the practice of God and His Prophet, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. But, if we’re talking about this torturess, for example, death would be a preferable option. The gentler sex is totally innocent of her as a model.”
With that, the female ghoul stood up and spat the entire contents of her mouth in my face, then sat down again and suppressed her fury with another bottle of beer.
“Your relationship with Fatima al-Lozi is of great help to the inquiry,” the gorilla went on. “The fornication charge can be based on firm evidence and the dictates of the law. But that’s not all you’ve kept hidden. There’s also something far more serious: trading in gasoline smuggled across the Algerian-Moroccan border using different kinds of containers. At first, you were doing it on a motorbike, but later you used a car. It was butane gas which is highly flammable and could well have killed innocent people. Why have you kept that hidden?”
I did my best to conceal my alarm and responded slowly and deliberately.
“Had I been questioned about this information,” I said, “I would have told you the following: It’s true, I smuggled gasoline in small amounts from Algerian villages to Oujda and its environs. But I soon stopped, both because the dangers involved far outweighed the profits to be made and because there was an ever increasing number of ‘withouts,’ that being the term used to describe unemployed people who could only find work smuggling cans of gasoline. The only reason I used gas for my car was that it was fairly cheap and thus suited my meager budget. That’s all.”
Mama Ghula now signaled to Na‘ima to turn the light up full. My eyes were so dazzled and disturbed that I kept seeing shadows and visions behind it. I looked away to give them a chance to recover and noticed that the guard was no longer behind me. She told me to look straight ahead.
“It’s the boss’s opinion,” the gorilla’s voice intoned, “that what you’ve told us is a pile of rubbish. So, for one last time, she’s asking you the whereabouts of your cousin nicknamed Abu al-Basha’ir or even some of his men. If you cooperate, the charges of fornication, smuggling, and using a booby-trapped car will be dropped. You can add to all that the murder of your mother’s husband as well. What do you have to say?”