Bread heap and a dreamer - Imprisonment in Syria

This powerful first-person piece from Hassan, written in 2008, tells the perspective of a political prisoner in Syria.

He was putting together a number of the hardened bread balls. His movements were sluggish but careful. The faint light dimmed everything, but it was clear that he was determined in what he was doing.

He heaped them together against the wall behind himself, folded up his military blanket, placed it over the pile, and with painful convulsive movements he pressed his back against that structure. The packed balls pressed back against his lower back and shared his pain.

Everything around was silent, except the fragmented groaning and moaning that pierced the thick walls, and ran around the complex labyrinth of narrow corridors.

He was swallowed deep in his thoughts:

What to do? What’s next? 

Three weeks had now passed since he was pushed into this room, a little wider than a pauper’s grave. 

It was underground. He counted thirty-two steps down when they led him here, handcuffed and with a blindfold over his eyes.

There was a small, square gap in the ceiling. It had been barred with iron bars, but the light came through. It was a faint light, radiating from 30 watt bulbs scattered throughout the space above the cells.

On the cell floor there were a dirty mattress, a military blanket and many balls, balls of bread, very hard and old. Who had left them behind, and why? Had they given him extra bread, and why? Were they trying to bribe him with the extra? Or was he just a refusenik who decided to go on a silent hunger strike?…   

The next day when the gaoler hustled him back into the cell after the ‘party’, as the interrogation session was called, and shut the thick iron door behind him, he played back the whole session and thought about what he had said and what he thought they knew. 

- Use your head! Tell them what you think they know already. Never say an extra word; it’s a dangerous game and you are the weaker one...

Somebody shouts:

‘Number 14, take your food!’

A plastic bowl is pushed underneath the door.

Two or three chunks of unpeeled potato floated in thick concentrated tomato soup. Everything’s dirty, even the bowl...

- Stop thinking about food and your stomach! Whether it’s good or bad, eat it all! Don't give them a chance to subdue you through hunger.

When he had finished that day’s delicious feast, he began anew his foraging expedition over the walls and the floor, hoping to find traces of the men who had carried the name ‘Number 14’ before him. He felt this cell was like a mother to the Number 14s. After their ordeals in the interrogation yards, they told their stories, and shed tears against its walls.

On the lower part of the right hand wall he found some kind of hieroglyphic script. He looked at it round-eyed, trying to find a clue. He managed to decipher the first real name among the Number 14s: ‘Tarek’ was the name. Tarek was a lover. He had drawn a heart and arrow, and written the name ‘Seham’ on the other side of the heart. But more importantly, Tarek drew something like a calendar on the wall, putting marks for days, weeks, then months, on the chart. He had spent more than a year in this place.

- ‘I’m sorry for you, my Brother!’

Underneath Tarek’s chart many others had left their names and drawn their time lines on this wall. He looked round wondering how they had drawn all this, what kind of pencils had they used? Every ‘guest’ in this place would have been deprived of everything on him, except his own clothes, without a belt, and cigarette packets without a lighter or matches. 

He read all the stories again and again. At first there seemed to be no important information in them, just names and loved ones, and plenty of ideological symbols, from sickles and hammers to crescents. Every brother distinguished his identity by writing down his name and what he stood for.

But what struck him was that after they spent weeks in this place, their different identities started to wither away. In the end one identity united them, human fear, and a cry for freedom and life.

He turned his eyes quickly away from his brothers. He did not want to be just a few lines and an unknown name left on an unknown surface in an underground cell, trying to resist sliding into oblivion. 

He couldn't resist. His hands continued eagerly searching the mattress and the floor for other clues.

In one corner of the folded mattress, he felt something intriguing, hard and long. 

Quickly he unfolded the edge of the mattress to find three things: a knife made of bone, white and sharpened, and a needle, something unbelievable! How had it arrived here?  The third item he couldn't identify straight away. A roll of metallised papers, compressed together in the form of a cigar, tapered at one end.

He held the knife and the needle in his hand, tried them on his bare skin. It gave him a kind of secret fear. A gloomy idea of committing suicide always haunted him. He put them back in the folded end of the mattress, hoping he might forget their whereabouts.

He picked the roll of paper up, turned it in his hands several times and drew a line with it on the wall. A trace was left, as if drawn with a clumsy pencil, and then he understood how the Number 14s had left their lives on the wall. 

He found himself writing his name on the wall, at the end of the queue. He smiled and shook his head: anyone would do the same.

He kept the paper pencil handy. After that, he used it to add a stroke and a number every day. He felt in control of the chain of time. Every stroke meant a day had passed by. 

A few days later, he heard a quiet knock on the opposite wall. He knocked back. The other’s knocks were somehow rhythmic. Several knocks, pause, then more knocks.

It was Morse code, he knew that. He wasn't able to answer. He remembered reading about it before. A former ‘guest’ of a similar place had written about it, written how cell-dwellers exchanged information using this language. But everything from that time was murky in his mind now.

He spent most of that night trying to remember how it worked. The next day on his way back from the interrogation yard, where they had asked him again about his friends and his activities, suddenly a light flooded through his mind, and the whole riddle of the knocking language was solved.

As soon as the door was shut behind him, he took a deep, very deep breath. Then he repeated the whole knocking code to himself. He recited the alphabet of this language, and then the seven groups formed by regrouping the alphabet into subgroups, each subgroup containing four or five letters. 

He started practising straight away, tapping out the code with his fingers on his knees. His right hand tapped out the group number, and his left-hand the number of the letter within the group. 

He spent all his spare time that day practicing typing his name, his city’s name, and why he was in here, with a view to telling all to Number 15 that night. He had great hopes, and serious things to achieve. The coming hours would bring more than whips and dirty food.

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The night was slow to come, and when the shadows of silence reigned, he could not bear to wait for Number 15 to tap. He knocked twice on the wall.. Soon the answer came back. The other was eager to speak, and he spoke so quickly that Number 14 couldn't understand. But he assumed that as in ‘real life’ and with normal people, Number 15 was asking him to introduce himself, his name and the charges against him,

He began knocking out slowly, but with great precision, all the information he assumed the other had asked him for. Number 15 was listening silently. When he finished, the other was vehement in his answer, but Number 14 couldn’t understand …. Despite this one-way exchange of information, he exulted in his cell and his soul was revived. For the first time he flew in his dreams, hugged his mother, stood in a deep valley in his village and yelled out a long shout, listened to the echoes of those shouts rebounding again and again…. 

He woke up with new hope and a strong determination to beat the interrogator. Every spare moment he recited the new language; he had no time to think about anything else, he even forgot to mark that day’s passing. 

He began to understand Number 15 and his ‘talking’ speed improved quickly. Every night there was something to discuss. 

Until that day when he knocked, but nobody answered. 

He felt lonely, but he consoled himself, saying:

- Maybe they released him! This means I will not be here forever, either. Some day… ‘

The next night he knocked again. His knocks were answered. A new guest, but he was illiterate and several days passed before Number 14 could talk with him easily.

A new prisoner made a difference, and he felt better. Number 14 asked him about Number 16 and the other numbers. Soon he had a whole picture of his neighbours and what they had been charged with. He drew a portrait in his mind of every guest, composing each one with the features of somebody he knew from before, when he still could walk in the street and ride the bus. In his dreams he met them in imagined cities. Sometimes he carried his cell with him, at other times the cities were inside the prison. He met long-dead relatives. He met women without names; flirted with them and even lived whole sexual adventures with some. His mood in the morning came to depend on these imaginary escapes.

He pushed aside the heap of bread balls from behind him, lay on his side and tried to seduce the sleep to come.

That night he dreamed of another woman. She was exotic, assembled from many women he had met in his life. He tried to touch her, but every time he felt she was close enough to touch she eluded him with grace and mystery. The two of them were walking in a city very similar to cities he had known, but it wasn’t any one of them. They ran through a long empty street, dimly lit. They entered a shop. Its entire staff were gaolers he had met in the prison. Gaolers as cashiers, gaolers as assistants and on security. All of them raised their eyebrows, slowly, even mischievously. He turned back, took his girl’s hand, and they ran. The shop workers ran after them. Suddenly the street ended in a sheer drop so deep that he couldn’t see down to the bottom. The girl disappeared, and he stopped, the gaolers right on his heels….

He woke up, sweat on his forehead and a heavy thumping inside his chest.

- ‘Why didn’t I jump, stand my ground, push through to the end…. This time, come what may, I won’t retreat’

Next morning in the interrogation yard he took a stand, as if he were continuing his grotesque nightmare. He was clear in what he told them, strong in the presence of the gaoler with the whip, his head was higher this time and his eyes were blazing with pride. When they led him back to the cell, he was quick to strike out that day with a slash on the wall. This slash was darker and longer than the other ones.         

Sometimes the fear of pain pushes us to give up some of our convictions. We compromise them with betrayals, hoping to escape the physical pain. But that never works, and behind it arrives the pain of conscience, which is often more of a torment than the other.

So the mark on the wall declares: 

‘No more retreats. Physical pain will fade, but remorse lasts. I will stand for what I believe.’

His journey of defiance had begun. He would bear the consequences.

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