The Devil Couldn't Break Me (19 page)

To Die or Not to Die; That is the Question

As the weeks turned into months I'd lie on my blanket for hours hoping they'd come to get me and take me somewhere. I didn't care where. They could come to execute me, they could come to question and interrogate me. I didn't mind. Anything was better than the darkness and the sheer boredom. I couldn't say at that point that I felt any fear, only the fear of the unknown and because I was never told what was going to happen it was impossible to feel real fear. Kupi was different. He had terrified me because Kupi told me everything that was going to happen to me and it was like something from a horror movie.

The cell was freezing, we were in the mountains somewhere, I knew that and although it was springtime I knew how cold spring could be outside of the towns and villages. The cell was draughty, the wind whistled through the dilapidated farm building and cut under my cell door causing a vacuum and at times my teeth chattered for so long I'd convince myself that even if I did get out I'd do my teeth permanent damage. At times, generally in the early hours of the morning, the cold would wake me and it was nigh on impossible to get back to sleep.

Apart from the cold, the boredom was the worst. The only thing to keep my mind occupied was my own imagination. The little decisions became the biggest part of my mind's occupation. When the food and bread and water came I'd take an age to decide what went down my throat first. Some days it was the water, other days it was the soup, especially if it was warm. That would be a real treat. Some days I'd test myself to see how much dried bread I could eat before washing it down with the water or the soup. Everything became a game and I wondered at what point if I would start to lose my mind. Surely being kept in solitary confinement in constant darkness would make it only be a matter of time.

Going to the toilet in the corner of my cell or running the gauntlet of fists and boots became another big daily decision and I learned to somehow limit my bowel movements. Most days I decided to pee in the cell, sometimes I felt brave and in need of a little exercise so I took them on. The punches and the kicks no longer hurt. They couldn't possibly hurt me because there comes a time when you have been hit so many times it stops hurting. Parts of my face were almost numb, certainly my cheekbones and my lips, they were almost permanently swollen. I counted my blessings convincing myself that my swollen lips would at least protect my teeth.

I'd listen at the door for the guards entering the room and I'd psyche myself up until the adrenalin was pumping around my body. The conversation was always the same... short.

I'd bang on the door.

“I need to go to the toilet,” I'd shout.

“Are you sure?”

It was the fair skinned soldier. He had a high-pitched squeaky voice and at times he sounded like an old woman.

“Yes.”

“You know what that means?”

“Yes.”

One of them would walk forward and unlock the door and they'd stand back to let me run out. It was a game for them and a game for me. I'd wait a few minutes in the hope I'd catch them off guard and I'd sprint out and either turn quickly to my left or to my right depending where they stood, desperately trying to avoid the initial onslaught. Sometimes they'd miss me and it was an all-out sprint to get to the toilet first. Because of the condition I was in I'd invariably get hit or tripped before I reached the safety of the toilet door but now and again I'd make it without getting touched. They'd allow me up to fifteen minutes and I'd enjoy every delicious, peaceful second as I stripped off and washed but knew it would begin again as soon as I left the sanctity of the small W.C. It was all rather sad. They could have beaten me anywhere they liked, in my cell or in the toilet, but they never did. It was bizarre, the sadists unwritten rule that was never ever broken during the course of the six months. They were playing mind games with me and it was taking its toll.

To be or not to be, that is the question
. It was a quote from Hamlet and it came to me in the middle of the night as I listened to the cockroaches in the corner of my cell. I remembered studying Hamlet at school, remembered my teacher analysing the quote and discussing what it was all about. Hamlet was musing about the conundrum of suicide. It was a poignant subject to be thinking about in my present predicament. Hamlet wondered if it was a noble way out. He was unable to act upon his motives for revenge and it frustrated him. Was it better to suffer or better to end it all? Hamlet related his personal struggle to the struggles that all men suffer from at some point in their lives. But Hamlet didn't know what happened after death so therefore realised that death wouldn't be the ideal escape he craved.

***

The guards burst into my cell one morning and announced it was wash time. They told me they had noticed that I had begun to smell and were more than aware that my clothes hadn't been near a washing machine for many weeks. They ordered me out into the main room and told me to strip and to throw my clothes into a plastic bin which they said would be incinerated. I had no choice but to comply. I stripped down to my bra and knickers.

One of them stepped forward.

“Everything.”

He pulled out a flick knife and snapped it open, slicing the strap of my bra with the razor sharp blade.

“Next time it will be your fucking face, now do as you're told.”

I had no choice but to remove my underwear and tried to conceal my modesty with my hands, as I stood stark naked in front of the two guards who by now couldn't take their eyes off me. They ordered me to start walking and pointed me in the direction of another door about twenty metres from the toilet. It was locked and one of them opened it with a key. We walked through the door and down a short corridor to another one, which he also unlocked. I took note of everything around me and couldn't help noticing that there were no windows anywhere. There were no windows in my cell or the large room it opened onto, nor were there any windows in the toilet and no windows in the corridors either. But why would there be? It was a farm and cows and sheep didn't need windows.

We walked about thirty metres and the corridor turned sharply to the left. There was a white tiled area with what looked like a series of showerheads. I supposed this was where they cleaned the animals prior to a market sale or another purchase. Did they even wash animals? I didn't know.

They told me to step forward and stand under one of the shower taps. One of the guards walked back around the corner and within a few seconds water started to pour out. It was icy cold and my immediate reaction was to jump to the side to get out of the way. The guard slapped my backside hard and forced me back under the water but to my amazement the water gradually started to heat up. It was so good, the warmest I had been in a long while and for a brief moment I forgot the guards were even there.

They soon made their presence felt. I noticed one of them had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He had a bar of soap in his hands and he ordered me forward. I did as I was told. As his colleague stood by grinning he soaped my body all over paying special attention to my breasts. He was clearly enjoying himself and I feared the worst. I fought against Kupi's gang when they were going to rape me but I had already conceded defeat in here. As much as I hated to admit it there was no fight left in me.

After five minutes or so he was finished and pushed me back under the shower and I rinsed the soap away. I was ordered out again and this time it was the other guard's turn to have his fun. Bizarrely he spent more time washing my hair than any other part of my body and I'm ashamed to say I enjoyed it because I was clean and warm.

They then dried me gently with clean towels. I felt as if I was going crazy. Were these the same men who beat me every time I needed to leave my cell to go to the toilet? I even wondered if I had imagined those beatings, if they had been bad nightmares. They walked me back towards the cell. I expected a sting in the tail, a beating or worse. Outside the cell door was a pile of clean clothes, socks, a pair of very large panties, a t-shirt, jumper and some jeans and they ordered me to dress. The clothes smelled fresh, they were even a little warm and I guessed they'd been freshly laundered. When I had dressed they turned me around and inspected me much like a soldier on parade. When they were happy they pushed me back in the cell and locked the door. As incredible as it may seem I felt happy and I felt strong and clean.

I looked forward to my shower days but they were very much sporadic. At first they happened every few days and then perhaps once a week but then they were very irregular indeed, when the guards decided I supposed. And each time they stripped and washed me and the same guard spent time on my hair. Whilst they covered every part of my body with their hands there was never any suggestion of anything more than that. Those first few showers I feared the worse, feared I would be thrown to the ground and raped but it never happened.

The toilet beatings and running the gauntlet continued. They took their fun that way but apart from an occasional slap across the backside and groping my breasts it came to no more than that.

One day I made the mistake of requesting the toilet on the way back from the shower. I was clean and warm and dressed but off guard as I walked into the W.C. I did what I had to do and walked back out never suspecting that they were going to start. They had been so gentle with me in the shower but as soon as I walked back out it was as if two completely different men were waiting for me. The guard who had caressed and washed my hair just a few minutes earlier punched me hard in the stomach and I collapsed in a heap on the floor. I had the presence of mind to know what was happening and scuttled quickly between his legs as the other one aimed kicks at me. I was up on my feet and sprinting towards the door but I was too slow as one of them gripped my hair and hauled me backwards. I crashed onto the floor and curled up in a ball in a vain attempt to shield myself from the kicks and slaps and punches that rained down on me. They beat me until they were out of breath, they kicked me until I lapsed into unconsciousness and I awoke to find I was back in the cell once again. I ached all over. I had never been beaten like that for some time. They had certainly won the battle that day and I learned a valuable lesson to never to trust them again.

I would lie awake trying to figure out what made these men tick. I suspected they were bored too but couldn't work out how they could be so gentle one minute and so vicious the next. They were sadists, of that there was no doubt, unpredictable, possibly even schizophrenic, though what were the chances of two guards on the same duty being that way? No, these men were not ill, they were just men in a conflict and as I'd discovered with the Kupi gang, when there is conflict and war, all reasoning is pushed to the furthest recesses of the human brain, as if someone grants a special licence to turn men into twisted, multi personality monsters.

I would lie awake and daydream. I'd imagine I was a small girl again and dream of the good times I'd had, the walks in the mountains with my parents, the grand feasts and family reunions at Uncle Demir's and the family holidays we'd spent on the beach at Montenegro called Ulcinj. I worked hard at daydreaming and I'd work hard at the colours in the darkness because it transported me away from the nightmare I was in and I became quite good at them both.

For hours and hours I would be lost in another world, my own personal moving picture with my good friends from my childhood as the co-stars. My cell didn't exist, the beasts outside my cell door forgotten about, the beatings and abuse a distant memory, as I'd take myself down memory lane. I'd walk back and forward in my cell with my eyes closed, one two three steps turn... one two three and I'd take myself back to the past. I was no longer in that cell I was on a beach, a mountainside, driving a car or just sitting at the kitchen table with my beautiful parents. We'd be eating Sarma or Suxhuk, a delicious Turkish style sausage or pite, a meat and potato pastry pie and of course I would always finish with baklava, my favourite desert. Sometimes I'd sing to myself or recite a poem I'd been taught at school. It was quite incredible the power of recall and the more I remembered the more I convinced myself that perhaps I wasn't losing my mind after all.

I studied Romeo and Juliet and I studied my favourite quotes, quotes that I'd read over and over again as a teenager so that they were lodged deep in my brain, so deep that no one could ever take them away from me and despite the fact I had no books I could still study. One quote came to me over and over again and it somehow gave me comfort during my darkest hours of despair.

Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost. Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.

I loved my Nani and Agi, they were my super heroes, they made me what I was and at times when I wanted to give up I'd think of them. I'd dare to believe that they may just have survived and I owed it to them to fight through the torment. So I'd get up and start my walk again, one, two, three, one, two, three and I'd fill my head with the images of their faces from happier times and I'd be alive again, cocooned in my own perfect world.

But all too often my daydreams would be ripped apart, reality would come crashing through the cell door as regular as clockwork. I hadn't been showered for some time. I didn't know how long because one day, one week, one month merely blended into another.

I recollect one particular day, perhaps three months into my captivity, when one of the guards brought the food in and stood at the door with a strange look on his face. The only light that reached me was when the cell door was opened, otherwise I was always alone in the cell in the darkness. I could only see his silhouette at first but then the features of his face came into focus.