He picked up the next two buckets in the kitchen, and as he set off again he saw Darwish knocking the two men’s heads together. There was a frightful sound as they crashed together. Farid handed over the buckets and went back. Now they were on their knees, begging for mercy.
“Take a good look at my friend here,” said Darwish. “And whenever you set eyes on him, think of yours truly. Do we understand each other?”
When Farid was on his way with the buckets for the third time, the hulking figure stopped him and put out his hand. It was holding a cobbler’s knife. “Here,” he said, “one of those guys was very keen to give you this. It could be useful, but hide it well.” Then he set off back to the bakery. Farid delivered all the other buckets of soup. Then he had to wheel a handcart of bread from the bakery to the huts. Meanwhile, Darwish was silently drinking his tea. When Farid was through with the buckets, he sat down on a stool in the bakery. His shift left him on duty until midnight.
Darwish pushed a glass over to him. “So what did you do to them, laddie?” he asked quietly. “Those are dangerous bastards.”
“Nothing. I guess someone was paying them,” Farid replied. However, he couldn’t think who might be behind it.
Darwish, so Farid learned that night, was a pimp and a multiple murderer thirty-three times over. He had killed an entire criminal clan in a single day, overpowering his enemies at a wedding. The prisoners called him “Darwish with the brand”. He had a triangular mark on his forehead, with two lines roughly suggesting an X in the middle of it. As a twelve-year-old in Jordan, he had been arrested for burglary and thrown out of the country, and the police had branded him on the forehead with a red-hot iron so that he couldn’t hide anywhere.
“Those Jordanians were prophets. They knew back then what a crook you’d turn out to be,” said Farid, joking with the kindly giant.
“They’re assholes. They knew damn all! But what else can a man be with this mark on his face? An imam, a teacher, principal of a girls’ school, eh? No, he can only be a pimp, and then no one will look at him because all that interests them is his girls’ bums and breasts. That’s what those assholes made me with that stamp of theirs, my boy!”
254. Solitary Confinement
The chink of keys woke him early in the morning. He sat up, but a kick in the chest sent him flying back again.
Two guards were standing over him. He recognized the one who had kicked him, a thin little man whose skin was sprinkled with warts and wrinkles, and who was notorious for his brutality, which he used to compensate for his small stature. He was nicknamed “Crocodile”, and he liked the name. The second man was tall and even-tempered.
“Get up, son of a whore, you’re to be interrogated,” shouted Crocodile. The tall guard was going to handcuff him, but the ugly gnome waved the cuffs aside. “Where’s he going to run? Into the barbed wire?” He laughed. Farid staggered out of the hut. The sun outside was dazzling. He saw the prisoners staring at him, and hated this humiliation. When the occupants of Hut 3 gave him a cheerful greeting he realized that they were trying to encourage him, and waved back.
“Traitor to the Fatherland!” shouted Crocodile behind him, hitting Farid’s neck with the flat of his hand so hard that he tumbled forward. He scrambled up again as fast as he could and did what he had repeatedly trained to do with the Radicals: he kicked the gnome in the balls. It all happened very fast, and before the tall guard walking ahead realized what was up Farid had punched Crocodile in the face as well. The small man doubled up with pain, holding his hands in front of his genitals.
“I’m no traitor, you son of a pimp,” cried Farid, before everything went dark before his eyes.
As he slowly regained consciousness he heard whispering in the darkness. He was lying on the floor trussed up like a chicken. His punishment, fifty lashes and two months’ solitary confinement, was for resisting guards.
The heroic conduct that Farid had intended to show was gone at the first lash. In the brief moment before the second came, all he could do was writhe in fear. The second lash confirmed his fears: it hurt even more than the first. Farid wanted to stay strong, but the pain consumed all his strength, and he heard himself screaming. A time came when he felt nothing any more. When he came back to his senses he was lying in complete darkness, and his body, woken by the pain, was returning to life.
He realized that he was in one of the solitary confinement cells. The floor was concrete, the walls massive stone. He didn’t know whether it was day or night, for the cell was pitch dark. No light came through the spyhole in the door, and when he heard cicadas in the distance he assumed that it was night and went to sleep.
For the first time in his life he felt that light was magic. A ray of sun forced itself through an opening in his pitch dark cell and danced over the wall. Slowly, the light moved through the cell, filling it with a muted radiance that filled Farid’s heart with longing. He felt unutterably lonely, and began to weep.
“You only get to eat every other day in here, and it’s always at noon,” said the guard who pushed a large, battered tin bowl in the cell. A lump of mashed potato filled half the bowl, and there was a flatbread on top of it. The potato tasted of rancid fat, but the bread was good.
For the first few days in solitary confinement, Farid felt it was almost pleasantly restful. The cell was small, but clean and dry. The hut had to be shared with a hundred and twenty other prisoners, and it always smelled of dirt and decay and was horribly noisy.
But after a few days Farid noticed lethargy affecting his thoughts. He began asking himself questions to occupy his mind. First he enumerated everything that he missed. In the process, he realized that in the camp he had lost those small moments of pleasure in daily life that had once seemed so naturaclass="underline" light, movement, warmth, open doors, going for a walk, shaving, drinking a glass of tea, singing when he felt like it.
The darkness was oppressive today; the air seemed to be boiling. Not a breath of wind came through the crack under the iron door of his cell. It must be cloudy outside, or else a sandstorm had covered the sun, and no ray of light penetrated the cellars. Farid’s thoughts lapsed into apathy once more. He tried singing again, and three times the songs died away after a few pitiful verses. He switched from the melancholy ballads of Um Kulthum to the cheerful dance rhythms of his favourite singer Feiruz, but his singing was still no good.
Was it night outside? He listened, but he couldn’t hear any cicadas. When the guard brought his food he added two large, crisp rolls to the bowl of beans. “From Darwish,” he vouchsafed dryly.
So it was only midday. Farid had been thinking it was night. A few hours later he felt fresh air coming in under the door. Gradually the cell grew cooler, and he could sleep.
Darkness swallowed up his thoughts, erased them. He couldn’t think any idea out to its logical conclusion. At some point he always lost the thread. He wondered what he could do about it, and thought the best thing would be to wake his brain up by walking while he thought. He went up and down in his cell, brushing the palm of his hand over the stone masonry, doing ten or twenty push-ups, and repeating this exercise several times a day.
It was only gradually that he understood the full cruelty of solitary confinement. Time was the worst of it. Time didn’t seem to pass at all. If you didn’t defeat it first it would break you, that was to say if you stopped thinking, if you stopped expressing what you had thought.
“They shut us up crowded close together,” he said to himself in an undertone, taking care to pronounce the words clearly, “until we don’t just feel like sheep in a shed, we really are sheep. Ali Abusaid told me that one of Garasi’s officers hit him and kept saying, ‘Go on, admit it, you’re a sheep!’ And he went on hitting Ali with a stick until he bleated, and then the officer laughed and left him in peace.”