A Woman in the Crossfire (14 page)

A hand undid the blindfold from my eyes. I hadn't expected what awaited me to be so dreadful, despite the fact that everything in front of me was dark. Prison, everything I had heard and imagined, everything I had tried to write about – none of that meant anything compared to that moment when my eyes opened: It was a long corridor, I could just barely make out the cells on either side and I almost felt like it wasn't even a real place, just some kind of void in my head that was sick from too much writing. But it was real. A hallway just wide enough for two bodies side by side. Blackness surrounded its edges. A corridor separated from being. I looked behind me but couldn't see anything. In front of me… pitch black. A corridor with no end and no beginning, suspended in the void; I was in the middle of it and the doors were shut.

The man standing in front of me opened one of the doors, a sharp creaking that began quickly and ended with slow, sad beats that reminded me of a melody I once heard in a Greek bar. The man took me by the elbow and I saw three people inside. He continued holding my arm as the door opened, and in there I saw them: two or three people. I couldn't tell, but I am pretty sure I saw three bodies hanging in the middle of nowhere, but I couldn't understand how. He moved me even closer. I was dumbfounded. My stomach started to seize up. The three bodies were almost naked. A faint light seeped in; I didn't know it was from a hole in the ceiling but it produced dim lines of visibility that allowed me to see young men who couldn't have been more than twenty years old, or maybe in their early twenties, their tender young bodies clear under all the blood, their hands hanging from metal clamps, and the tips of their toes just barely touching the ground. Blood coursed down their bodies: fresh blood, dried blood, deep wounds carved all over them, like the strokes of an abstract painter. Their faces hung downwards, in a state of unconsciousness, swinging there like sides of beef. I recoiled backwards, but one of the men held me there, as the second pushed me forward in absolute silence. Suddenly one of the young men sluggishly tried to lift his head and I saw his face in those dim rays of light. He didn't have a face: his eyes were completely shut. I couldn't discern any gleam in his eyes. There was a blank space where his nose should be, no lips. His face was like a red board without any defining lines – red interspersed with black that had once been red.

At that point I collapsed onto the floor and the two men picked me up again. For a moment I was swinging in a sticky place, floating, and I hung there for a few minutes until I regained my footing on the ground. I heard one of them say to the others, “Come on man, she couldn't even handle one slap. She'd just die if we gave her the tire!”

Then that smell rushed in: the smell of blood and piss and shit; the smell of rusty metal; a smell like disintegration; a smell like the mouth of a cell, that had to be it.

Suddenly they took me out of that cell and opened another one. The sounds of screaming and torture rang out somewhere, somewhere both far away and nearby. I was trembling. I had never heard such sounds of pain, coming from some place deep inside the earth, burrowing into my heart. The sounds didn't stop until we left the corridor. The second cell opened and there was a young man inside whose spine looked like an anatomist's sketch. He also appeared to be unconscious. His back was split open, as if a map had been carved into it with a knife.

They closed the cell. And that's what it was like, cell after cell, holding me up by my elbows, shoving me inside, then bringing back me out again. Bodies strewn behind stacked bodies – it was Hell. It was like human beings were just pieces of flesh on display, an exhibition of the art of murder and torture that was all for show. Just like that, young men who weren't even 30 reduced to bits of cold flesh in cramped, dank cells. Heads without a face, bodies with new features.

As they were tightening the blindfold over my eyes again, I asked one of the two men, “Are those guys from the demonstrations?”

One of them rudely replied, “They're traitors from the demonstrations.”

Annoyed by my question, he grabbed my elbow and squeezed it so hard I felt like he was going to crush it. I didn't know what was going on in their minds but my stomach started growling again. Holding onto me the man pulled me along and though I tripped and fell he didn't wait for me to get up, but continued to pull me after him. My knees were all scraped up on the stairs and then he started becoming even rougher, finally just dragging me along like a sack of potatoes. The pain in my bones was searing as I thought about the young men who had gone out to demonstrate. I shuddered a second time and the quaking was centred deep inside my gut. The stenches were in my mouth, the images of the cells coating the darkness in front of my eyes. When we stopped and they took off the blindfold, I saw the officer sitting behind his neat desk and that's when I realized this wasn't a nightmare. He looked at me contemptuously and said, “What do you say? Did you see your traitor friends?”

At this point something rapidly started rising up out of my bowels, as though I was trying to jump out of my skin. In real life, I tell my girlfriends, “A man's touch doesn't make you shed your skin like a snake, not a loving touch.” I can say that there are other things that make our skin crawl – unravelling towards death, hurtling toward the abyss. In that moment, instead of soaring, I threw up. I fell down on my knees and they were furious. The officer stood up and looked in astonishment at the fancy furniture that had been soiled but I continued vomiting. My eyes were wet with some kind of liquid, they weren't tears, of that much I am certain, tears fall in droplets and what was coming out of my eyes wasn't like that. I kept having the same thought: Anyone here who goes out to demonstrate in the streets is shot, has to live on the run and in hiding, or else gets imprisoned and tortured like they were.

What kind of courage sprouts so spontaneously, seemingly from nowhere?

My voice was weak but I heard it say: “You're the traitor.” I knew he had heard it too, because he bent over and slapped me hard and I fell down onto the floor once and for all. Then things started to fall apart and, before I lost consciousness, I was able to feel that my mouth was open, and warm blood was oozing out onto the ground. In that moment I knew the meaning of the expression, “I swear to God I'll make you spit up blood.”

After they hauled me out of there, I went home. I wasn't the person I had been before. I observed myself going into the house, a woman caught somewhere between life and death. I saw her toss a bunch of keys on the table and then light up her cigarette. The woman closed her eyes and put the blindfold back on, as though she were on stage, and those images of the mutilated bodies returned. The laughter of her little girl and her mother's beautiful eyes flicker in front of her, a furtive glance of fleeting hope as she squeezes the blindfold hard enough to blind herself. She feels that deep horrible hole starting to form inside her heart, and as the hole grows, this woman reaches her fingers deep inside, all the way to her neck. The woman becomes a chasm of blisters and pus.

Two days after the incident, one of their websites described me as a traitor and a foreign agent. Then a few days passed and leaflets were thrown in front of the houses in Jableh and the surrounding villages, about my being a foreign agent and a traitor, inciting people to kill me.

What do they want from me now? I have already fled my house to live in secret. I no longer publish articles. Do they know about my activities with the young men and women? I don't think so. I was really scared for my daughter. I didn't go to my summons, I thought maybe they would forget about it amid everything that was happening, but I got a phone call. It was him, and in a raspy voice he said, “You bastard, even if you go to the ends of the earth, we'll get you.”

Trying to buy myself some time in order to catch up with what was happening in real life, I said, “I haven't done anything.”

“This is your last warning,” he said.

I was about to explode with rage. I had tried to hide. I refused to enter into any dialogue session with the authorities, even as some lines of communication were opened between them and some of the opposition. I even disappeared from Facebook. What did he mean? Was it just to frighten me, to scare me into madness?

It is as if I am living in a real-life novel. The characters and events need to be fleshed out and the plot needs work if I am going to be able to pull myself together, be strong and take up the strands of my life once more. That's how writing toughens me against the hardships of life. As a novelist I can be more accommodating with myself and with the interlocking strands of my life that are so hard to separate. I am untying a knot the way I would animate a puppet, but the difference is that I am the puppet and the strings and the big, mysterious invisible hand.

I tried to focus during those ten days when they came to my house, three or four men, and placed a blindfold over my eyes so we could all go back to the same officer's room. I didn't know whether that was really his office and whether we were actually in the al-Jisr al-Abyad neighbourhood in Damascus or in Kafr Sousseh. Distances had become meaningless to me ever since I moved. As the car went round turn after turn and then stopped, I would lose my concentration. The fourth time I went down to the cells, they didn't arrest me and they didn't leave me there. I just wandered around. One day I'll write all about those hellish journeys. I'll try to recall all the details of what happened, how I would come out of the house and they would place the blindfold over my eyes as soon as I sat down in the car and in that moment the world would turn into a black hell. My soul suffered in silence as I was stuffed between two strange bodies, smelling their odours and becoming increasingly panicked. With the blindfold on, I would imagine I was being forced into blindness, as I waited for hands to run all over me. In that pitch-blackness I would take courage in similar situations I had read about as images rolled by in front of my eyes. One time, and here I knew I had lost my wits, I believed blindness could be like a window shutting out the outside world, a secret door through which to enter the gloom, an opportunity to meditate upon the furthest reaches of the soul; blindness became philosophical justice. And that's how I would fight back against the black blindfold covering my eyes. I would pretend I was a character on paper, not made of flesh and blood, or that I was reading about a blindfolded woman forcibly taken to an unknown location, to be insulted and spat upon because she had the gall to write something true that displeased the tyrant. At this point in my fantasy I would feel strong and forget all about how weak my body was, about the vile smells and the impending unknown.

..............................

Syrian tanks shell the Baba Amr neighbourhood in Homs. Security forces invade houses and rob them. The shelling lasts for hours; nineteen martyrs are killed. The regime is going to announce that it is in the process of putting together a committee in order to draw up an election law.

Damascus is calm now, but it is the result of a plot by the security forces. Today international pressure on the regime is building. Catherine Ashton says, “The Syrian regime has lost its credibility.” Ban Ki Moon calls on the president to have a dialogue with the demonstrators and expresses his disappointment at what the regime is doing to its own people.

Baniyas regains its electricity, water and telecommunications and 300 prisoners are released there. There is a report that around 11,000 prisoners are still in jail.

My morning begins with news of killing and bombing in Homs. I have barely opened my eyes, made my coffee and turned on the television when I see the news: a researcher from Homs is talking about the Baba Amr neighbourhood, where poor peasants live. News is coming in from all directions. How can the tanks shell the houses of Syrians? Once again the murderers are being murderers. Last night I had fallen asleep transcribing the testimony of a journalist who sneaked into Dar‘a during the siege and woke up with tears on my cheek, the lines burning my eyes. I had got used to crying fits but I cannot take it anymore. I feel like I want to die, that I will never finish meeting all these people and recording their testimonies and that I should just leave my daughter with her father and go into hiding. The insanity of all this blood is marching me towards madness. The bouts of agony in my head do not stop without the Xanax tranquilizers that knock me out.

Last night at midnight I got threatened, yet another threatening phone call. It was a young boy. I don't know exactly how old he was. It had been two days since my last threat.

I secretly planned a trip with one my girlfriends to Jableh, my city; I am not supposed to set foot there right now because security forces and Ba‘thists have decided it is off-limits for me. We decide that we will take a friend's car and that I will conceal my identity. It is enough for me to put on a headscarf and thick glasses and to wear a long dress. I need to get into al-Dariba – supposedly the anti-Alawite neighbourhood as the security forces tried to describe it to the Alawites – in order to meet with people. But the truth of the matter is that it also is also the neighbourhood where the protest movement began.

O great sky, support me against this recurring death. It's not going to be easy for me, the daughter of a well-known Alawite family in Jableh, to get into that neighbourhood. Any group might try to kill me, perhaps a Sunni fundamentalist out of revenge for a death in his family or one of the Alawites who thinks I am a traitor, or a sniper, or maybe somebody else? So many questions. I recall the scene in Baniyas back at the beginning of the crisis, when some extremist Alawites showed up in trucks wanting to demolish Shaykh Abboud's house, despite the fact that he was one of the oldest residents of the city, just because his son was aligned with the demonstrators. His son had been arrested and kept in jail for three days, but that wasn't enough for them. Salafism isn't only a Sunni phenomenon; there are Alawite Salafis as well.