Evening fell. When the night was far advanced, a harsh voice could be heard.
“Listen, you people in this cave,” it said. “While you’re waiting for your regrets to ripen and ferment and for your repentance to result in pardon and forgiveness, why don’t you lighten your nights with some jokes and stories? When you want to have a good laugh and take the weight off your mind, the best ones are the dirtiest, the ones below the belt. So search your own repertoire so we can cancel our worries and kill the time. Be generous, all of you, and tell them well, or else you’ll all become depressed and time will kill you. In order to sharpen your talents and inspire you, I’ll start. Have you heard the one about the man from Marrakesh who was a homosexual? He used the mountains as his base and went on sex raids through forests and plains. His targets were young boys, teenagers, and even older men. This homosexual managed to outwit both the police and the national guard. One gorgeous spring day, a senior officer was walking across a mountain slope when about a hundred meters or so away he spotted three men praying, with their backsides in the air. He discovered that the three were some of his own men. When he asked them to explain what they were doing, they all stood up and saluted. They told him that, since every attempt to arrest the elusive homosexual had failed, they had decided to lay a trap for him by using the method he had witnessed. The officer told them all to get dressed again and ordered the detachment accompanying him to put them in prison and open an investigation into their sexual orientation.”
The entire wing burst into laughter, all of which encouraged the disgusting storyteller to move on to even worse jokes. I used pieces of bread to block my ears, anxious as I was to protect my own space which contained a copy of the Qur’an. I now ate a little bit of supper and hung my food bag on my crutch, which I placed horizontally between two holes at the back of my cell. Did I not say that my crutch had other uses?! I used the toilet and checked on the area before wrapping myself in my blanket and lying down on the bed. I whispered a few phrases to myself in praise of sleep, hoping that my eyes would be closed.
I was abruptly woken up in the middle of the night by a voice begging for help and groaning. I removed the bread from my ears and went over to the door.
“O God,” I heard from somewhere in the block, “I give witness that I’m being killed, I have not committed suicide. I witness that there is no deity but God and Muhammad is His Servant and Prophet. I witness. .”
The voice suddenly grew weaker, then disappeared completely. As loudly as I could, I begged the other inmates who were asleep to help the poor prisoner who was being murdered. There was no response. When I tried again — it still being pitch dark, a hand reached through my door-window and grabbed me by the neck. A voice now threatened to strangle me if I said another word. I found myself being pushed back to my bed, where I lay quivering.
After what I had heard and what had then happened to me, I did not sleep a wink. When the cackling of some winter birds announced the arrival of dawn, there was a din of voices in the block close to my cell. Some of them announced that the salafi preacher had committed suicide by slitting his left wrist, only confirmed by the fact that a bloody knife was still in his right hand, which proved the veracity of the findings. Peeping through the window I could see a doctor in a white apron, guards, and a number of the new prisoners.
“The salafi has committed suicide,” one of them said. “It’s a pre-Islamic kind of death, so we should not pray over him or ask for God’s mercy on him. To avoid any contamination he should be buried like an animal corpse.”
“His cell should be thoroughly cleaned of his blood,” another voice commented, “not only that, but his bed and sheets as well. Witnesses have given their testimony and the file is closed with official legal signatures. Break it up now and return to your cells.”
It occurred to me that I needed to pronounce the fourfold praise of God and say some prayer for the poor man who had been treacherously murdered. The facts of the matter were clearly the exact opposite of what the false witnesses had testified, but I found myself having to assess the consequences of reporting the matter when I was housed among a whole cluster of professional killers. With that in mind, I resorted to silence and said nothing.
After eating some breakfast, the inmates in the penitents’ wing were ordered to leave their cells and go to the exercise yard. I hesitated to come out, but a guard came into my cell, forced me out, and thrust me into the midst of my new neighbors whom I was now able to see in person for the first time, albeit without their knowing who I was. Every one of them had a paunch and bulging muscles, as though they were former boxing champions or Sumo wrestlers. The thin ones looked for all the world like giraffes in height and stride; some of them had long beards that hung down like poisonous stinging scorpions. They were wearing earrings, and their bodies were covered with tattoos in weird shapes. As I walked as part of their moving column, I looked like a monkey or a young boy. Some of them decided to have some fun, yanking my beard or cuffing me on the neck and head; they kept laughing at me and poking fun at my crippled gait. There was no way I could complain or protest, so I simply tolerated the whole thing as long as the exercise session lasted, something that now seemed even more taxing than usual.
When the group reached the wide yard, it broke up into separate groups, one to play basketball, another to wrestle, and a third to lift weights. It was members of this third group that took me and started using my body in various ways, as though I were one of the weights, tossing me around as they saw fit and exercising their bulging muscles.
I was not of a mind to let them use and insult me as they wished, particularly when I heard them negotiating as to who would be using me as a bags of skin and bones to toss around; anyone who failed to catch it (meaning me) would have to pay his dues, implying a round of drinks or hashish. I took advantage of this chatter and their rest time and slunk away. I ran around the courtyard, hither and yon, looking for somewhere to hide or escape. When some of the men I had run away from caught up with me, I managed to avoid them by slipping out of their reach and getting away. Just as my breath was beginning to run out, I hurled myself at a guard and told him my name and cell number. I begged him to protect me and take me to see the investigating judge. How I rendered praises to God when the guard ordered the men who were chasing me to go back to their exercise.
“You’re Hamuda!” he yelled at me. “What a lucky chance! The judge has been asking me about you. Let’s go to see him now. But first you need to shower, shave and put on some fresh clothes. Follow me.”
Duly amazed, I followed him. My only hope was that, now that I had escaped from the bulging-muscle brigade and was on my way to see the judge who would decide my fate, I was not simply going from the frying pan into the fire. To convince me that nothing worse could possibly happen, I obeyed the guard’s three injunctions. A few hours later I had washed my body and mouth, shaved my beard and head, and put on a black suit, white shirt, and red tie, keeping my Nike shoes to help me walk.
For hours, the guard kept me in a narrow room that was locked, but I did not mind; quite the contrary in fact, I was enjoying the quiet music that emerged from speakers in the ceiling, not to mention other services being offered by a beautiful, dark brown hostess: refreshing drinks, a splendid lunch followed by cups of decent tea, and a variety of delicious sweets. I tried to get the hostess to talk and gathered that she was Filipina and only spoke English. In a few broken phrases I communicated to her how grateful I was and that I did not know much English. I apologized for my awful accent.