“Hey, my skin’s just itching for the touch of your whip,” one of the criminals called out to a guard. “Are you all sick, or have you turned hippy? Make love, not war,” he chanted, hands to his balls. The guard was seething with rage, but he turned his back on the prisoners.
The huts and the earth closets were cleaned up too. A special squad of prisoners was told off to clean the administration building, and the soldiers had to attend to their own barracks. Tons of garbage were thrown on three trucks standing ready and dumped somewhere in the desert. A day later the camp looked neat as a new pin: that made it a truly repellent sight.
The visitor was late. Garasi told the prisoners to shave, wash, and behave well, because the new head of the secret service was an educated man who liked order and discipline. Badran was President Amran’s youngest brother, he added, and had played a considerable part in the latest coup.
Next morning the prisoners were summoned from their huts and lined up in the yard. A table laid with a white cloth, with a jug of water and a bunch of flowers on it, stood under the palm trees. There were two chairs behind the table.
Rumour went that Badran had been in the office for two hours already, examining the files, and that he was not pleased with Garasi’s chaotic approach. The camp commandant was said to be very upset, because he had thought his work was exemplary. And as if to confirm all this, the prisoners suddenly heard Garasi’s voice through the open window. “Why would we want to keep records of the interrogations? Isn’t it my job to help these poor devils return to the bosom of the Fatherland?”
Whereupon Badran was heard laughing heartily, and asking whether Garasi was a survivor of Noah’s Ark.
When they finally appeared in the yard, the commandant looked old and depressed beside the athletic young officer, whose bearing showed that he was full of energy. He wore a casual summer uniform emphasizing his muscular build but no cap, unlike Garasi.
The colonel sat down on one of the chairs. Garasi remained on his feet, inspecting the prisoners. The front row was only about five metres from the table. Soldiers with machine guns and expressionless faces were stationed to right and left of the table, with orders to shoot anyone who came closer to it than two metres; Garasi didn’t want to run any risks. Plenty of members of the Muslim Brotherhood were capable of an attempted suicide assassination.
Garasi addressed the prisoners stiffly, his voice hoarse with agitation. Perhaps it was his nervousness, or perhaps his brain was eaten away by drugs, but anyway he delivered a speech that unintentionally tipped over into comedy. The prisoners forgot the reward they had been promised and began first to chuckle, then to laugh louder and louder, until at last their mirth was unbridled. Garasi, utterly confused, was put off his stride so badly that all he could do was abuse the prisoners, flinging the worst insults he knew at them. They went on roaring with laughter, and Garasi was at a loss. He gasped for air, while the prisoners’ laughter rolled across the yard like a stormy sea.
Colonel Badran rose to his feet and left the camp without a word.
258. Development Aid
Towards the end of September, three officers of the State Security Service of the Democratic Republic of Germany arrived: blond men who always wore sunglasses. Intrigued, the prisoners wondered why the Germans had been brought to the camp. As observers? As experts on torture? The three of them were generally known only as “the East Germans”.
It was common knowledge that consultants from several Eastern European countries had been training the Syrian secret service in Damascus over the last year. The word was that, since 1960 at the latest, former Nazis had also been active in Egypt as armaments experts. A Palestinian who had already been in a Jordanian prison told Farid that the secret service there had tortured him under the direct instructions of Englishmen, and the British were angry because the Jordanians couldn’t keep their violence within bounds. You had to preserve your distance and keep cool during interrogations and torture, they said.
One of the East Germans was astonished to find such modern instruments of torture in the middle of the desert. Tad even had its own generator. Garasi grinned. “We’re independent here. Even if the lights go out all over the country we can make our own electricity,” he explained. He had no idea that these foreign guests were soon to be his instructors. Their broken Arabic led him to underestimate them.
“I suppose we can’t afford better Germans,” he said to his adjutant regretfully, but there was a note of deep scorn in his voice.
On the fourth day, and to the surprise of their host, the foreigners brought six large German shepherd dogs with them as a gift for the guards. With the help of these well-trained animals, the camp could be cut off entirely from the outside world. They even built a dog run for them.
Soon the Germans, like all the officers in the camp, had been given nicknames by the detainees: they were Sausage, Potato, and Shanklish. Sausage was a tall, thin officer; Potato was short and fat; and Shanklish stank to high heaven. His name came from the only Syrian cheese that smells unpleasant. Shanklish was also the dog trainer. Out in the yard, he fed the animals with top-quality meat before the eyes of the hungry prisoners, and gave them clean water to drink. From then on the dogs prowled around loose all night, and now no one dared ignore the ban on leaving the huts.
The soldiers were reluctant to mix with the East Germans. They didn’t like the three blond men, considering them both mean and over-zealous, two mortal sins in the eyes of any Syrian.
Even at seven in the morning the three men were in Garasi’s office, shaved and in freshly ironed uniforms. At first Garasi himself didn’t stumble out of his service apartment until around nine, but when Colonel Badran, to whom the Germans had apparently reported this, phoned and spoke to him angrily, the captain told off two soldiers to be his alarm call. After that he was always in his office at six in the morning, and when the foreigners turned up he would pay them out by looking pointedly at his watch.
Garasi hated them, for suddenly he wasn’t sole lord and master of the camp any more. The prisoners became aware of that too. Garasi had to interrogate a prisoner in the presence of the Germans. The three of them might not be able to speak very good Arabic — they were always mixing up words of the masculine and feminine genders — but they understood everything. In silence, they noted down all that was said. Then, when Garasi had sent the prisoner away again, they taught him how to conduct a more productive interrogation. But the captain was as stubborn as a donkey, and didn’t learn fast.
The three Germans were polite and correct, and within a very short time they had more or less deprived Garasi of power. Their wishes were always backed up by phone calls from secret service headquarters. For the first time, the captain felt he had been hung out to dry. He was on the point of exploding daily, but at the last moment he controlled himself for fear of his superior Colonel Badran. He could rely only on his soldiers and officers, who confirmed him in his dislike of the Germans. To ensure the support of those who ranked below him, he slackened the leash slightly.
The prisoners and their committee took note of all this, and with the help of some of the more willing soldiers who were open to bribery they began bringing in news from outside, as well as more medicinal drugs, paper, ink, and pens. Towards the end of October the first camera was smuggled into the camp.