“What’s happened?” he muttered as his eyes opened slightly.
“My friend,” I told him, “what really needs to happen is for you to give up your hunger strike and eat some food. .”
He pulled my ear close to his mouth. “I’ve been through so much,” he told me, “that my breathing makes it hard to talk. What’s more, if I eat anything, I’m afraid I’m going to throw up or foul myself in my bedcovers. No way!”
I did my best to reassure him. “If that happens,” I said, “I’ll carry you on my back to the pit over there in the corner. Everything will be fine.”
The young man gestured his agreement and even gratitude, so I propped his head up on my cushion as best I could and started using my wooden spoon to feed him what was in the bowl. I kept encouraging him to keep eating, and eventually he managed to consume it all. I congratulated him and then listened carefully as he thanked me profusely. Now I was feeling even happier: he had eaten something, and there was a real hope of saving him. God be blessed!
He now asked me to let him lie back, so I cleaned his mouth, wiped the sweat off his brow, and put a cover over him so he could relax and get some sleep. I promised to stay close by, ready to help him, and not to doze off. He pulled my head towards him and kissed it.
“Did the judge ask you the same thing as me?” he whispered in my ear. “I’ve refused to compose any statements about you.”
“Yes,” I replied, “he gave me pencil and paper. I don’t know where I’ve put them. In any case, I’m not going to do it.”
“My dear friend,” he said, “you should do it. I would advise you, in fact, I would beg you, to carry out his instructions immediately. Otherwise you’re going to suffer the same fate as me or even worse. They’ll hand you over to the professional torturess, who’s an expert in all kinds of degradation. The worst of them she’s learned in specialized foreign centers, but she’s also invented others of her own that she delights in testing on imprisoned suspects like you and me. Compared with the torture she inflicts, the torments of the grave are a joke, child’s play. I don’t want you to fall prey to the woman they call Mama Ghula — and may God protect you from her barbaric madness! I’m begging you from the very bottom of my heart to do what the investigating judge says so you won’t make him angry. That way you’ll be able to avoid his revenge just as you would avoid AIDS and other contagious deadly diseases. Beware, I tell you! As the proverb has it, ‘He who warns is thereby excused’. .”
He was so insistent in offering me counsel that he collapsed; I was worried that he might have had a sudden heart attack or a life-threatening brain hemorrhage.
“I fully sympathize, my friend,” I told him. “But think of yourself and of me, and stop talking. Tomorrow morning we can talk some more about this topic and others as well.”
“I need to piss, damn it!” he said. “Help me up.”
I carried him over to the corner, helped him relieve himself, then carried him back to his bed.
“My friend,” he said, “let what I’ve been through have some benefit for you. Mama Ghula was not satisfied simply to put me through all kinds of torture. She handed me over to that enormous black man. He took away my honor and subjected me to anal buggery of the worst kind, all because of my stubborn resistance. Promise me you’ll write those statements for the investigating judge and lay out things with crystalline clarity. That way you’ll save yourself from unbelievable torture and all kinds of degradation.”
I gulped in sheer panic and horror when I heard what he told me about the buggery.
“May God fight them all,” I managed to say, “and place them in hellfire for evermore! And I’ll do my best, my friend, particularly since I’ve nothing to hide.”
He gestured his approval.
“I may not make it through the night,” he managed to get out. “O God, I hereby testify that I have passed on the information to this poor servant and have offered advice. .”
He pulled me head close and kissed my forehead with tears in his eyes. I in turn kissed his bandaged head and wished him a restful night. I lay down on my own bedcover; as I tried to get some rest, I was thinking about what my companion had told me.
5. How Can I Write My Report about Myself?
I slept very badly and woke up abruptly to the sound of the guard yelling at me to get up because, as he put it, exercise is better than sleep. I got up at once and looked for my companion under his bedcover, but there was no sign of him. I asked the intruder into the cell, but he refused to say anything. My mind in a whirl, I had no choice but to stumble my way behind him. He brought me to a courtyard enclosed by high walls on the top of which were watchtowers. The guard told me to start walking in a circle along with all the others and not to talk; he warned me that his eyes and those of the other guards would be on me all the time. I obeyed his instructions, but, whenever I could, I asked the people near me if they knew where we were being held and if they had any information about a prisoner called Ilyas Bu Shama. The only reactions I got back from my fellow sufferers in this prison were reluctance and denial. Once this “exercise is better than sleep” period was over, everyone went back to his cell; I found myself yet again facing the guard who locked the door and went away. I decided to keep exercising and started pacing around the cell, although my mind was preoccupied with questions and doubts and I continued to be deeply worried by my situation.
My routine inside the cell now continued unchanged. The time I had spent with the prisoner named Ilyas Bu Shama had left a whole series of questions that I was anxious to clear up and finally resolve — the time had gone by so quickly and with such bitter consequences. Maybe there was nothing to it, but I was eager to know how those crafty monsters had managed to come in and take the sick man out without his yelling and protesting or my hearing a thing. Had they drugged him or put something over his mouth?
And now was I supposed to respond to my companion’s insistent pleas to write reports about myself and my contacts, all in order to accede to the investigating judge’s demands? Yes indeed, I had to do it, if only to avoid adding recalcitrance to the list of crimes in my file or, at the very least, to find something to pass the time and relieve the endless pressure on my nerves.
My stomach may have been empty and my mind distracted, but even so I took the pen and pencils out from under my pillow. First I did some breathing exercises and set my mind to concentrate, then I sat down to write. I composed the paragraphs that now follow as requested. After some editing and finishing, this is how they came out:
I, the undersigned, currently under provisional incarceration in an unknown location, hereby testify that I am innocent of the array of charges laid against me. I deny them completely and in detail and without the slightest reserve or hesitation. Here is my account:
I was born in the desert region outside the small city of Ouad-Zem, a few kilometers from Khouribga, center of the Moroccan phosphate region. The land around there is low level and open all the way round. But, however open and welcoming it may have seemed, I found it confining; to me it felt like a spacious prison with no bars, an endless marsh with stagnant pools.
Even now, I can still see myself sitting in various parts of the plot of land (less than a hectare) where my father worked as a sharecropper. As I watched my father, whose wrinkled face reflected the hard work he had to do and the ongoing worries about seasons of drought, my facial expression became permanently depressed. When the sun went down each day, we used to sit around a table with some bread, lard, and tea prepared by my ever patient mother for us to eat. Once in a while we would look at a cow, the chickens, or the walls of our tiny house; at other times we would stare at the poor, dun-colored soil or the insouciant distant mountains. Many, many times I watched as my father would do his best to control his temper as he shuddered, removed his turban, and offered up a prayer to the ever observant heavens which were always cloudless and tediously blue. “I’m the one who’s worked it!” he used to yell over and over again. “I cleared it, ploughed it, and sowed it. For heaven’s sake, have pity on us, set us free!” He would finish by muttering angrily: “We’ve defied the heavens so much that now they’re treating us so cruelly. Hamuda, get up and fetch some water, and tell your mother to heat up yesterday’s harira.”