“Your worshipfulness has enjoyed a long, deep sleep,” he told me in a disgusted tone. “Meanwhile poor me has a stopped-up toilet. So empty this in yours and then give it back after you’ve washed it. There has to be. .”
I was loath to respond to his request.
“Take it, and may God have mercy on your father!” he pleaded. “It’s a whole week’s worth, and that’s a lot! One neighbor should look after another, as the saying has it. .”
I tottered over to my toilet with the bag, holding my breath as I did so. All I could find in my own cell was a narrow-diameter hole covered with a brick and a water tap. I decided that the whole thing was impossible, not only because the bag was so heavy but also because I was afraid that the stench would foul the air and expose me to disease. With that in mind, I wrapped up my bedcover and put it over all the furniture I could find. I then climbed up with the intention of emptying the bag through a skylight next to the roof. However, it fell out of my shaking hand and disappeared into some unknown vacuum.
I climbed down again and rearranged the furniture, then lay down to recover my breath. Focusing on the skylight, I kept trying to ignore the foul stench all over me and reassemble the various thoughts and ideas inside my head. I could recall that, before my profound period of sleep, I had been subjected to a concentrated period of vicious torture administered by Mama Ghula and her muscle-bound gorilla assistant. I kept seeing the lovely image of Na‘ima, both during the torture session and afterwards in the health clinic, and the Christian female doctor who had subjected me to examinations that I now preferred to regard as special techniques rather than assuming the worst about them. That was particularly the case in view of the kindness and excellent treatment that I myself had received from her.
I automatically searched my pockets, and there I found the two sprays with Fontoline written on them as prescribed for asthma sufferers. She had given them to me at the time, along with empty plastic containers that she had said were a gift to me from Na‘ima. While I was wondering about the meaning and purpose of such a gift, my neighbor asked me to give him back his bag. When I told him what had happened, he started yelling, banging the bars of his cell with his crutch, and threatening me with all kinds of perdition and misery. Many voices now rose from neighboring cells all along the hall, some of them demanding that I get the poor man his bag back and promise him a newer and cleaner one the next day, while others begged him to shut up, go to sleep, and consign my particular case to the Day of Judgment. As the din got louder and louder, my neighbor’s hysteria intensified even further. Now he claimed that I had taken his property and deprived him of it, and all for a sinister purpose I had in mind. He proceeded to pronounce all kinds of foul and disgusting oaths against me, and with each oath the prisoners all yelled “Amen.” This went on intermittently until early morning.
So here was yet another category of torture being imposed on me in this particular cellblock, one that was undoubtedly reserved for lunatics and the insane. I had either been put here on purpose, or else — as I dearly hoped and wished — by mistake or oversight.
I did not sleep for the rest of the night. Dogs kept barking, and the bedbugs were biting and sucking my blood. My only distraction was the thought of my Na‘ima, the possible significance of her gift, and the last thing that the doctor had whispered into my ear: “If you spit blood. .”
What is amazing is the way that, in spite of all the torture and suffocation I have been going through, my heart insists on beating and involving itself in life. The message that Na‘ima sent me and the signs of her hidden affection have undoubtedly played a major role in reinforcing my resistance.
As morning dawned, I sat cross-legged, observing a guard who brought me some food or walked past my cell. I obviously had to inform the authorities that I was not in the right place, scratching my skin and pulling bedbugs off, warding off the effects of asthma by spraying my mouth, and waiting. .
I was not disappointed, in that half way through the morning I heard the voices of guards by my neighbor’s cell. I crawled over to the door and used the bars to stand up. Wearing masks, they were wrapping up my neighbor in a white shroud and preparing to take him away. The other prisoners meanwhile launched into the fourfold takbir and prayers for the dead. I joined them in this religious obligation as best I could. When things had died down somewhat, I drew a guard’s attention to the fact that I had been brought here by mistake and asked to be taken back to cell 112. Raising his eyebrows in surprise and derision, he put his key in the lock, handed me my dead neighbor’s crutch, and told me to follow him. Thus it was that I tramped behind the three men who were carrying the corpse while the other prisoners poked their hands through the bars in the block and poured all kinds of abuse and curses on me.
“You’ve killed someone unjustly,” some of them repeated, “and now you’re walking in his funeral procession? May God challenge you and consign you to hell for everlasting!”
When we reached a large space where a number of corridors met, my escort suddenly stopped me.
“How did you come to be in the lunatics’ wing?” he asked.
I told him what I knew, but then he asked me what they all meant by accusing me of killing my neighbor. I told him about the bag and its contents.
“But they’re all saying the same thing,” he said after a pause for thought. “What’s your response?”
“Officer, Sir,” I replied, “I never even entered the dead man’s cell. In law, the consensus of a group of lunatics has no validity.”
He rubbed his neck as he gave the matter some more thought. Consigning the corpse to his assistants with instructions to take it to the gravediggers, he took me over to a door in a dimly lit block. Locking it behind me, he advised me to wait along with the people whom he called “people practicing for Judgment Day.” Meanwhile, he would look into my case and the whole matter of the bag.
The shop where I now found myself consisted of a meeting hall with a high tin roof supported by wooden pillars planted in sandy soil. The whole place was teeming with people, young, middle-aged, and old. Some were standing in line while others — the handicapped and decrepit — were sitting down. I stayed close to the door, waiting for the officer to come back. An old man invited me to sit in his place, but I thanked him and pointed to the crutch I was relying on for support. When I asked him how he was and about this teeming mass of God’s servants, some of them took turns in answering.
“Dear brother in God,” one of them told me, “people here have been just as you see them now. For almost a month the weak ones have been sitting on the ground, and the sick have simply been laid out there. .”
“Once a day,” a second one added, “they throw us down some pieces of bread, dates, and bottled water from the roof. So we eat what we’re given and wait here to be released by the One who is the only victor.”
“Anyone who needs to relieve himself,” a third one continued, “has to plough his way through the ranks and get to that facility with wooden screens and cloth awning around it. There’s no water for ablutions, only stones. The prayers we perform fall far short and only involve fear. Those murderous tyrants make false claims about us: they say we’re all heretical extremists. Their torture methods go so far as to train us for the Day of Judgment — that is, in accordance with their own hateful expression and their sickly imagination. .”