“He called,” Farid managed to say with great difficulty, “he called my mother a whore. I contradicted him. That’s all.”
The old man nodded.
198. The Chinese
Not a day passed without someone being taken out of his hut and brought back hours later, an almost lifeless bundle. There was no need for any particular reason. The camp guards had a free hand to torture prisoners as and when they liked.
One of the prisoners in Farid’s hut was a well-known composer who was always beating out rhythms with a spoon or a stick. One day he played an exacting composition on the bars with two spoons. The guard Abu Satur came along and asked, “Who’s that telegraph message for?”
“My mother,” replied the prisoner, startled. Everyone laughed, and the crestfallen Abu Satur walked a couple of steps further, but then stopped, came back, hauled the musician into the yard and whipped him. The whip cut his skin like a razorblade.
“That damned Chinese,” swore another prisoner, who was standing beside Farid at the fence near the way into camp. Farid had heard a few days earlier that two or three of the guards liked to lick fresh blood from their whips. Abu Satur, nicknamed “the Chinese”, was the worst of them. He was a tall, sturdy man with Asiatic features, and enormously strong. The sight of blood when he was whipping a man intoxicated him, and then his anger gave way to a smile that smoothed his face into a Chinese mask. Abu Satur felt exhilarated when he could torment prisoners until the blood flowed. He knew he was one of the lowest on the social scale; like a pimp or executioner, he could never mention his job out loud. Yet he didn’t want to be anything but what he was, for here in the camp others feared him. Here he could be revenged on all the distinguished men who were now just miserable, stinking wrecks. Abu Satur felt boundless satisfaction when he, formerly a starving boy who spent every other year in jail, heard them begging him for mercy. How often had he himself been whipped in the past? Now he relished his revenge, particularly when his victims were the educated men who had once been so infinitely far above him: professors, journalists, doctors, ministers, parliamentary deputies, even police chiefs. Now he whipped them.
Abu Satur was happy in this camp. He saved all his wages and gave his wife more presents every other week than she had ever seen before. The prisoners would give anything for a little hashish, a bottle of arrack, or some bread. Captain Hamdi was an experienced man, and let the guards do these little deals so as to keep them sweet in their bleak surroundings.
On the afternoon when Abu Satur whipped the composer in the yard, his victim lost consciousness. The Chinese left him lying there in the blazing sun and went away. Later, two soldiers picked the man up, dragged him to the hut, and asked, “What did the poor devil do?”
“He was composing a love song,” said old Said.
“I can’t make these people out,” said the smaller of the two soldiers. “Here they are in the middle of hell, and they still have just that one thing on their minds.”
199. The Children of Job
Five hundred prisoners were terrorized night and day by over a hundred armed soldiers and guards. Farid realized that the aim of the camp administration was to make intelligent men into animals by beating, starving, and above all deliberately humiliating them. The prisoners might be forced to imitate a donkey, a dog, or a sheep. Farid was bewildered by the sight of a professor of mathematics being made to follow Abu Satur about the yard on all fours, barking like a dog.
Apparently the imitation of animals was an established part of camp discipline, for he noticed that the guards were always demanding this exercise. They would sit under a sun umbrella humiliating their prisoners, and woe to anyone who refused to do as he was told, or stopped before the guards said he could. These were deeply degrading scenes.
When Said was the chosen victim, Farid wept at the sight of the old man, who couldn’t follow a guard fast enough on all fours, being dragged across the entire yard by a leather collar around his neck. Said slid over the ground on his stomach, gasping for breath. The guard kept kicking him in the side and mocking him.
That evening all the prisoners from Farid’s hut gathered around the old man to discuss their situation. A man called Farhan said, “They don’t mean to kill us, or they’d have shot us by now. They want to turn us into animals, make us forget that we are fine, valuable human beings with eight thousand years of culture behind us.”
The humiliation of old Said suddenly put an end to all hostility between the Muslim Brothers, the communists, and other groups. Everyone was now determined to resist the plans of the camp authorities. Word was passed on to all the other huts. It was on 15 August that the “Humanity” programme of what, at Said’s suggestion, they called the University of Job was set up, under the secret leadership of some ten prisoners. It was all done by word of mouth, for there were no pencils or paper in the camp.
Anyone who knew a subject gave lectures on it, and the others, whatever their own education, were the students and could learn anything. In Farid’s hut, they had lectures on history, religion, chemistry, car repairs, nutrition, first aid, philosophy, chess, backgammon, card games, and geography. In another hut a famous expert lectured on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, in yet another there was an authority on Persian miniatures. Professors and men of letters in the hut next to the kitchen taught the works of Shakespeare, Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Pablo Neruda. The prisoners were moved to tears by Gorki’s Mother, and laughed heartily at the books of the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.
Some of the men told the stories of Tolstoy’s novels, and recited Nazim Hikmet’s poems on freedom. A young student from Hut 4 knew the plots of several novels by Balzac. An older man presented Scheherazade’s tales from the Thousand and One Nights in a lively, graphic style that captivated his audience.
One of the most brilliant storytellers among them was a criminal, a former pimp and multiple murderer. He had landed in this camp because one of his victims was a high-ranking secret service officer who was his competitor in Damascus.
Farid was astonished by this man, whose behaviour to the other inmates of the camp was always charming. He was a fanatical film buff who had spent most of his time in the cinema in his days as a pimp; he used to go from cinema to cinema in Damascus, from morning to early evening, and then he took his stable of three whores out to eat and then cashed up his accounts that night. Sometimes he had paid a cinema proprietor for all the seats in the place, asking the owner to show Casablanca or Gone With the Wind just for him, when he sat in the exact middle of the auditorium and sobbed like a desolate child at the dramatic scenes.
Because he had seen all the films so often he was able to perform them in the camp, complete with dialogue, mimicry, gestures, and sound effects. He had a divine voice, and used it to imitate up to ten characters and an endless variety of natural noises. His audience could feel the heat and dust of Westerns, or dance and sing with Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush.
There were evenings of satire, song, and recitations, but serial stories were the most popular of all. Many prisoners could spin out a single story for twenty evenings, some even for fifty, without ever losing the thread.
The random transfer of prisoners from hut to hut, a systematic method of punishment in the camp to prevent them from forming friendship, was all to the good for the University of Job, because it brought variety into the cultural programme.