Most of the detainees had been woken by the squealing brakes, and thought they had arrived, but a little later the column continued on its way. After a while they drove past a double fence. The camp was visible now and then through the sand dunes. Farid saw two large rows of huts with metal roofs. Finally the road described a sharp right bend, and the trucks stopped. A cloud of very fine sand trickled down on the prisoners.
“We’re there,” someone said softly.
The camp was in a hollow. No one driving a car on the main traffic routes through the desert to Palmyra, Homs, or Iraq would see that a prison with over two thousand inmates and guards was hidden here.
245. Reception
It was just after seven when Farid jumped down from the truck. He saw a horrific panorama before him. How could such a huge camp exist in this wilderness of sand and stones?
From the square where the trucks and vans had stopped, he could see both gates. The main gate faced north, the other gate east to a low-lying stone quarry that yawned open like a black muzzle. The rock here was basalt. Farid’s eyes went in alarm to the double fence of dense barbed wire, with a death zone several metres wide in the middle.
Armed soldiers stood behind weather-beaten windows in the tall watch towers at the four corners of the camp. Each of them had a platform with movable searchlights on it.
Beyond the large main gate there was a low, two-storey, grey concrete building on the right. Farid counted sixteen large huts in two rows behind it. The two palm trees on the exercise ground were a strange sight; their leaves were the only green thing as far as the eye could see.
The camp commandant, Captain Garasi, received them at the gate. He was surrounded by officers, soldiers, and civilians, and he had a face like a bulldog’s. Later, Farid found this first impression of his confirmed; he was known as Bulldog to the inmates who had been here for some time.
The captain’s bearing was stiff, as if he were under the influence of drugs. His grey hair together with his low officer’s rank showed that he had joined the army as a private soldier and worked his way up. Anyone who joined with a high school diploma was a captain by the age of twenty-eight at the latest. The Bulldog must be in his late fifties.
For some reason the officers kept the new prisoners waiting a long time. Farid was freezing in the cold dusk of dawn, and felt how empty his stomach was.
“It is my duty,” the camp commandant began after an eternity, “in the name of His Excellency President Amran, to drain the poison with which you injure the Fatherland and its people, you … you damn mangy dogs.”
They could hear how difficult he found speaking publicly, how bad his articulation was, and how stiff the sentences he had learned by heart sounded. Only the abuse, uttered in a southern accent, carried complete conviction.
“If one of my officers, soldiers, or guards gives you an order I expect unconditional obedience, or you’ll rue the day your mothers bore you a thousand times over. His Excellency has given me a free hand to do anything I like with you.”
As if at a word of command the guards, who until now had been looking bored, made for the prisoners. Soon after that the air was full of dust and screams.
Farid particularly noticed one of the guards, an old man of about seventy. He had been standing close to the commandant all the time, leaning on a stick. Farid had taken him for a medical orderly or the captain’s factotum. But the old man was the first to attack the prisoners, hitting out mercilessly and with sadistic delight. Whenever Farid raised his head he caught sight of him again. A time came when he himself was in the terrible old man’s reach, and could see him salivating and whinny with pleasure as every blow went home.
Bleeding, and with the last of his strength, Farid reached the hut allotted to him. It was Number 5, in the front row of huts and level with the palm trees. He had a place near the east-facing entrance. The huts had only metal gratings over them at both ends, so that the inmates could be checked any time.
From his place, he could see the east gate leading to the basalt quarry, the soldiers’ barracks, and the kitchen directly opposite the administration building, as well as part of the monastery ruins. Apparently the solitary confinement cells were in their cellars. Close to the ruins stood another small, grey building. That, Farid soon found out, was the former death row, where condemned men used to spend their last night of life. But after a prison riot in 1960, executions at Tad had been banned. The building contained six large cells, the only ones to contain two comfortable plank beds each. Farid was told by Ali Abusaid, a Satlan supporter who had been in Tad for four years, that Garasi put his favourites in there, so the inmates called the place Garasi’s Hotel.
Farid’s eyes wandered to the hospital. “How many doctors work there?” he asked, leaning on the grating.
Ali Abusaid laughed. “One. Dr. Josef Maqdisi.”
“Only one doctor for two thousand people?” Farid was indignant.
“If only he really were,” replied Abusaid. “He’s a swine, not a doctor. But the hospital’s another story. I’ll tell you later.”
Farid was glad to have a place to sleep in the fresh air, for many of the new arrivals were accommodated at the other end of the hut, where there were two earth closets and a large washbasin with three faucets. But he felt less happy about it when every gust of wind blew sand into his face and he was freezing cold at night.
“And who’s that crazy old man who was beating us so hard?” Farid asked.
The man was a fossil. No one in the camp knew what his real name was, but they called him Istanbuli, because he larded his speech with so many Turkish words. At the age of twelve he had been a kitchen boy in the barracks under the Ottoman occupation, and he had gone on to serve every new master of the camp. He had never risen beyond the rank of a private soldier. Wherever the camp commandant went, Istanbuli followed like his shadow. And when Garasi gave the order to beat the prisoners, Istanbuli was first in line.
He had been retired in 1962, but after a week he was back asking to be reinstated. He couldn’t cope with the chaos of modern life outside the camp. Captain Garasi liked the old man. He backed his request and was allowed to give him his job back, although now Istanbuli was paid only his pension instead of normal wages. But that made no difference to him. He lived very well on the bribes he got, which amounted to more than a general’s official salary.
A bell rang at six in the evening.
Two officers and several NCOs stood beside the palm trees. The guards walked past the huts and called out numbers, upon which the prisoner inside whose number it was would reply “One hundred and ten, sir!” or whatever his number happened to be, without looking up. The NCOs noted the numbers down.
At seven prisoners carried large pans out to the huts. They contained a nauseating soup made with beans and pieces of potato mixed with lentils. Countless dead beetles floated on top. But Farid’s hunger was tearing at his stomach, so he fell on the food, shovelling the hot soup into his mouth and swallowing it without chewing, to avoid biting into one of the beetles.
He was sweating after getting it down in such a hurry, but he enjoyed the piece of bread he was given. It tasted fresh and smelled of sourdough.
Later, some of the inmates of the hut took tea and sugar out of a hiding place. A primitive boiler was also produced. It ran on heating oil abstracted by prisoners from the kitchen, and the tea was made in an old tin can.
Farid had a single sip from the mug being handed around. The tea tasted sweet and bitter, and smelled of diesel oil, but it was his first illicit drink here, and the fact filled him with a strange kind of pleasure.