Lights went out at eight. Farid wearily lay down on his mat, but he couldn’t sleep. The darkness was a hole, and he was falling deeper and deeper into it. The world was alien and far away. Who was he? What was he doing here? This was Tad prison camp, and he hadn’t been brought here by colonialists or such people, but by his own countrymen, men who called themselves socialists too, who even included communists faithful to Moscow in the government, although the Communist Party had to remain illegal. This state of affairs was known as “doing the Syrian splits”. Amran maintained excellent relations with all the socialist countries, so no one at all was going to ask questions about a prisoner. Farid was abandoned to his misery.
That night Rana faded to a memory, and his mother appeared before his mind’s eye only briefly, then sinking back into the darkness again. At last sleep came.
For the first few days sheer chaos ruled in the camp, for an unprecedented wave of arrests was sweeping across the country. The huts were suffocatingly overcrowded. They stank of shit and decomposition, sweat and ammonia. Then, after a while, the days lost their distinguishing marks and names. Time merged into a shapeless chain of boredom, loneliness, and pain.
246. Nagi
Tad held not only dangerous political prisoners of all parties, but also the worst kinds of criminals: pitiless murderers, pimps, rapists, and dangerous youths who had been practicing butchery at the age of fourteen and were ready to kill anyone. Human life meant nothing to them.
Conscientious objectors and deserters suffered worst of all. They were mercilessly tortured, first when arrested, then during interrogation, and finally in the camp. Every one of them was to be made an example. They were regarded as dangerous because they were hostile not only to the government but also to the army.
It was in Tad that Farid saw the first conscientious objector of his life. The young man wasn’t twenty yet, but you could tell what he had been through just by looking at him. Garasi hated him and called him a pansy and a cowardly traitor. His name was Nagi Salam, and he had been condemned to twenty years in the labour camp, followed by five years of military service at the front. If he refused to serve at the front, which, being Nagi, he obviously would, he would then get life imprisonment. The state didn’t want to kill him, just to torment him all his life.
The political prisoners avoided the boy, because for all their ideological differences they were united on one point: they advocated violence, and to many of them, Radicals, communists, and Muslim Brothers alike, armed struggle seemed the only possible way.
Garasi put Nagi in Hut 12 with the worst criminals, who tormented and pestered him without mercy. He bore it all in silence, and didn’t defend himself even when a criminal of small and weedy build slapped his face. A time came when the criminals themselves found it no fun any more to tyrannize over him, because a tormentor needs some kind of reaction from his victim. You get no kick out of torturing a stone.
247. Garasi
Captain Garasi was absolute lord and master over this island of men deprived of their rights in the middle of a desert of sand and oblivion. Compared to him, a government minister was no more than a factotum. He was God in person, deciding on the life or death, happiness or misery, hunger, pain, and loneliness of every single prisoner. He was a dangerous mixture of ignorance and arrogant self-confidence. Garasi felt no particular hatred for Muslim Brothers, communists, or Radicals. He wasn’t capable of it; he neither hated nor loved anyone at all.
At twenty he had married a woman, given her three children, and took no further notice of her. When his wife fell sick with a strange fever, he never visited her for fear of infection. At a safe distance away in the camp, he waited for her to die.
There were rumours that he smoked large quantities of hashish in secret, and sometimes wept all night in his Spartan apartment over the interrogation cells and the offices. Garasi didn’t like the soldiers, and he was too rigid and hard-hearted for their taste. Unlike the prison guards, the soldiers were not in this camp of lost souls by their own choice. Many of them suffered even more than the prisoners from the captain’s harsh punishments. Garasi reacted with a sense of injury to every lapse of discipline, as if it threatened him personally with failure, and responded with corresponding brutality.
He thought little of his military rank; only his social task mattered to him. His idea of the world since childhood had comprised only shepherds and sheep. “Like the President of the Republic, I’m a shepherd,” he would say, “except that his flock is larger.”
Garasi was proud of having so many intellectuals and educated men in his flock. He, who had had reading and writing literally beaten into him in the army, now determined the fate of twenty professors, twenty-five doctors of medicine, ten architects, thirty-five lawyers, a hundred and thirty journalists including five editors-in-chief, over thirty writers, and forty engineers, chemists, and teachers. Not the finest quarter in all Damascus, Cairo, or Beirut could boast so many men with university degrees.
He called those who obeyed him, “my boy, my son.” Those who would not accept this humiliation were physically punished, and Garasi helped out with the torturing himself, not for pleasure but out of a feeling that, as a shepherd, he had to care for his sheep. And apart from a few rich and privileged political prisoners, and the criminal gang leaders whom he spared, there was not a single camp inmate who hadn’t been beaten by Garasi in person at some time. Worst was the rage that made him blind, for then he struck out like a brute beast. Sometimes he actually injured himself in the process, staggering about and smashing everything around him. Farid once saw Garasi whipping four prisoners with his own hands, until he was in such a rage that he turned the whip on the soldiers and NCOs around him too. The officers, standing a little further off, sent for Istanbuli, who was in the kitchen at this time of day. He seized the commandant from behind, picked him up, and whirled him around fast in a circle until the captain dropped his whip and hung there in the old soldier’s arms like a limp sack.
248. Loyalty and Recantation
Since Farid hadn’t yet discovered the true reason for his arrest, he thought his really bad luck was that he was regarded not as a former communist but as a Radical. Muslim Brothers, nationalists, and communists hated each other like poison, but they were united on one point: if they fell into the hands of the government they would never sign a declaration saying they recanted. That was considered cowardly treachery. Farid would have signed anything to get out of this place, but no one was asking him to. The secret service knew that the wily Radicals allowed their members to sign anything, just so long as they were freed to carry on with the armed struggle underground. Radicals regarded dictators and their adherents as criminals, and considered any statement made to criminals invalid.
Farid remembered communists who had committed suicide after they had been freed, unable to bear the scorn of their own comrades. The Communist Party no longer offered aid to a prisoner who had broken under torture; it became a second punitive authority. Only your own failure was still your loyal companion.
But Farid would have been prepared to accept any humiliation. He knew that political prisoners who recanted were brought out for the media. Former high-up functionaries had to declare their shame and remorse on television, rather less important men on the radio, and third-class politicals in one of the governmental newspapers, all vowing allegiance to the Fatherland and its President.