Edited by: Maggie Rosenau
Artwork by: Georgiana Luiza Nicolae
It is all in your mind. It’s all in your head. Wake UP my friend!
Yes I knew that! I knew that I was dreaming! I woke up already knowing that everything I thought I had seen was a dream. I am not back home and my mom is not in the kitchen. I was, instead, leaning on Khaled and sleeping with my head on his legs. I don’t know how long I was sleeping. It’s dark here and my face is full of tears. Why am I begging the others to stop fighting? I can’t even see who is fighting whom. I can just hear them. What really happened? Why am I still crying on Khaled’s legs? What really caused this? The moment when my mother said “not yet” and started to cry and repeat it? “Not yet my son, not yet.” Or because voices arguing about stealing a piece of bread got merged with her voice in my head, causing me to realize where I actually was, blending the dream reality?
But her voice is all I wanted to hear again. Please shut up and stop arguing stupidly. Please stop fighting. It’s not worth it. I need to talk to her.
I remember saying these things to myself because I really didn’t want to wake up from that dream. I was crying so hard when Khaled held my head between his legs and hugged his arm around me softly, whispering in my ears. My head was covered by the blanket he kept under himself to form a chair.
Khaled: It’s all a dream my friend, stop crying, please! You are a man. Please pull yourself together and don’t give up. They can’t see you, but they can hear you, so please stop crying.
Ah. I am covered by a blanket. That’s why I can’t see anything. Not because my eyes are full of tears. I am also laying down and leaning on Khaled’s legs and he is trying to calm me down by comforting me with a hug. I am fighting myself to stop crying and take in reality. The prisoners will keep fighting. Her voice is gone. I try to hold on to it in my mind.
People who know deep loss will understand the feeling of forgetting the voice of the people who are gone. When we have no access, or when there are no records of those voices. The feeling of forgetting facial expressions of loved ones, or even the shape of their face when we have no pictures of them. I had recently complained to Khaled and Aamer about how I am starting to forget my mother’s voice and the outline of her face. I wonder if I am going crazy or mad to forget the details of my own mother! But they shared how they are also starting to forget many details of their parents. I felt scared to forget her in any way—to not be able to recognize her if I were able to see or hear her ever again. I was afraid of going that mad. But tonight I saw her and heard her voice in my dream. She didn’t say much, but her voice was still the way I thought I remembered it. I got myself together, wiped my tears, and went silent for a couple of minutes while Khaled massaged my head and helped me calm down. When he felt that I was calmed down, he asked me:
Khaled: What did you see?
Me: “The first thing I remember is standing on the sidewalk at my university and hearing people happily calling my name. The next thing I saw was my best friend Moaz and his brother. They were congratulating me on my sudden freedom. Moaz said to me, ‘come on, let’s go! Your father is waiting for you over there.’ He pointed down the street and then, all of a sudden, I saw my father’s car.
We went toward the car, but it seemed empty. No one was inside. When we got closer, Moaz opened the door for me and I got in. I asked him ‘Where is my father?’ He told me to wait and that he would come soon to take me home.
So many people stared at me while I waited for my father. They circled the car and kept staring at me. Then, my father appeared among all these people and walked towards me. He got into the car and sat next to me. I looked at him and he looked at me. I wanted to hug him and tell him that I missed, but for some reason, I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t do it. I sat silently next to him, as if I were a marionette being controlled by someone from above. I sat there with nothing to say except, ‘father, where is mom?’ He said, ‘she is waiting for you at home, let’s go.’ We started driving and suddenly we were home.
The front door opened wide and my sister stood in the threshold. She just stood there, looking at me pityingly, as if I were an old homeless person who had been living on the street for 20 years and hasn’t had a shower in a long time. She would not touch me. I asked her ‘where is mum?’
She said very quietly, ‘She is in the kitchen waiting for you.’
I called out to her, ‘Mum, mum!’
She replied, ‘Here in the kitchen, come here!’
I ran into the kitchen and saw her standing by the cooker, cooking something, with her eyes on the pot. I looked at her face as if I was trying to remember her gestures. Then I moved closer to her and looked into the pot to see what she was cooking.
I asked her, ‘What are you cooking, mum?’
She said, ‘Something you love, it’s fasulye bil zeit!’
I looked into the pot and said, ‘Yes, I love it, I would like to eat please, I am so incredibly hungry and exhausted!’
She started crying and said, ‘Not yet my son, not yet!’
I looked into her crying eyes and started crying too and said, ‘But I am so hungry, please let me eat!’
She cried even more and said, ‘Not yet, my son, not yet!’
That was pretty much it, and then I heard people fighting about stealing each other’s bread. I realized that I was crying both in the dream and in real life, but that it was all a mirage and I was never back home—not even free. Instead, I was still trapped in this cell where people are fighting over a piece of bread. Maybe reality made my mother cry in my dream. Maybe even she knew it wasn’t real and that I couldn’t eat what she was cooking. That’s when you woke me up, Khaled! ‘Not yet, my son, not yet!?’ How much longer do we have to wait in this grave, my friend?”
I should have stayed trapped in that dream and never woken up.
I wanted so much to be in a coma from which there was no return. Where I could stay lost in a world that was mine and that I knew. Whose inhabitants knew me, whom I loved and who loved me. People with whom I was happy to share my bread and salt, without envy or expectation of anything in return.
Nobody is fine here. The people here are either rotting from the inside out, or they came here and were already rotting.
Some are waiting for relief, some are waiting for others to sleep so they can steal some of their food.
Some of them are looking for a free space in the wall, in the ceiling, in the door, among all these people. For a place that will help them escape from their reality through delirium. And some of them are looking into the eyes of other prisoners to find an excuse to start a fight, to prove that they belong to the elite who have a surplus of testosterone and need to empty it. By hitting someone, for example.
In short, no one can stand each other. The people here are full of hopeless depression and hatred for each other. They have nothing in common except that they are all the same, sitting here, trapped in this ward.
There was only one time I saw these people in harmony—a few weeks ago, when the prison guards decided to clean all the wards in this prison. They had to empty the wards one by one and let us out in the “tashmisah” section. This is a room without a roof, so you can see the sky, the birds and the clouds. When it was ward number 12’s turn to be cleaned, they told us to empty the floor of our things and get ready to go outside to the tashmisah room.
Some of us had not seen the sky or smelled the fresh air for over a year. For some, it had been less. For others, it had been far more than a year.
The tashmisah wasn’t particularly big. It was even narrower than our cell, but as it had no roof, it was the largest prison room I’d been in. The fresh breeze flowed through our souls and we breathed it all in with one deep breath. The afternoon’s beautiful weather gave us an amazing energy and we started playing and pushing each other with joy. We even started throwing each other in the air. Eight of us linked our arms together so that others could throw themselves onto our arms. And in one motion, after counting to three, we would throw that person into the air and catch him as he fell.
The daylight washed the pale gray color from our faces. I looked at Salah and Aamer with fresh eyes. We each looked at each other as if for the first time, face to face, after 5 months of getting to know each other.
It’s strange how faces can wither without sun, or at least without daylight. It was fascinating to see how these pale faces regained their natural color under the sun’s rays again.
We were really happy and enjoyed every second spent in that roofless room. I was most pleased to see that the older prisoners also joined in the games and cheered. Some even tried to match the energy of the younger prisoners, showing the purest happiness I have ever seen or witnessed. They cheered joyfully, hand in hand with the other younger prisoners, throwing whomever was in their arms into the air and catching them with unforgettable laughter.
Suddenly, the call to prayer came from the nearby mosque and calmed everyone down. When we heard it, everyone automatically stopped. Some sat with their backs against the wall, faces still happy with a small smile, but with even greater joy, now that they had the opportunity to listen to the call to prayer.
Others sat on the floor with sad faces. Joy left them as they turned back and remembered where they were. The moment seemed to cause a longing to hear the call to prayer in the fresh air of freedom.
We listened to every word and breath coming from the mosque’s speakers. Without any declared agreement, there was absolute silence and calm. The positive energy disappeared in the silent serenity, and sad faces denounced whatever state they were just in.
As for me, I didn’t know how much more I could take. I used to sometimes draw strength from the old prisoners—believing that their patience, endurance, and trust that God might rescue them from this quagmire. But even they are human beings with a tolerance that varies day to day and expires differently.
When they finished cleaning the prison room, we were ordered back to the never ending nightmare called ward No. 12. Sadness fell away from our faces and was replaced by misery. Everyone began to exit the door of heaven and enter the gate of the underground grave that has been saturated with our blood and meager belongings.
I don’t think our stay in the tashmisah lasted more than two hours, at most. When we entered the dormitory, the floor was cleaned of blood, and a new smell of air fresheners and detergents mixed with the smell of stale death.
That day is my last memory of seeing those faces full of happiness. Everything after that was just repetitive misery and no one had any patience anymore. Since that day, we had lost two elderly men over seventy years old, along with two young men to skin diseases and severe mental breakdown. The reasons are many but the death is the same.
Later, as I watched sleeping faces and thought of the surreal vision of my mother, I completely lost the desire to sleep. All the misery and sadness inside me materialized in their faces.
Me: “Nothing else matters, Amer. I have exhausted all my remaining hope. I don’t know how much time I have left here. I don’t know if I will soon walk out of that door alive or dead.”
Aamer: “Don’t despair. Know that Khalid and I are with you until the end, and if we die here, we will testify together before God about what they have done to us. Our account will be with them on the Day of Judgment. Get up and wash up, the dawn is approaching, let’s pray and ask God for relief.”
I nodded my head in agreement and got up, heading to the restroom stall for ablution. When I returned to my seat, I paused, looking at the sleepers with one sentence in mind: For how much longer?
As I started to pray, I heard the jailer’s voice from outside. He opened the door of the neighboring dormitory and called out the surveyors’ numbers. They always did this early in the morning when they wanted to release a prisoner or transfer someone to another prison. The warden had already called out two names from dormitory number 11.
I was in the middle of my prayer when the warden opened the door to our dormitory. I was the only one standing up to pray when he came in, so I lowered my hands so he wouldn’t realize I was praying because they don’t like it. I continued my prayer with my heart and my eyes focused on him. He was holding a small square piece of paper in his hand, and when he looked at it, he shouted loudly: Prisoner No. 52!
With incredible speed, Prisoner No. 52 stood up, rushed to the door, and walked out.
The jailer stood looking at the paper in his hand and it seemed that this was all for this dormitory. But then he turned the paper over, looked again, and then shouted: Prisoner No. 78!
At first, I didn’t realize he shouted my number. I couldn’t believe what I heard. Did he shout 87 or 78? I’m not sure what I heard. Did he really shout my number? I stood confused between the prayer I was in and what the warden had shouted. Only two or three seconds had passed and I was sweating, standing there thinking about number 7 and number 8 before he shouted angrily at the top of his voice, “The animal, prisoner number 78!”
At that moment, Khaled stood up quickly and hugged me, saying, “It’s you. Go tell my mom that I am okay and that I’m fine.”
I offered a look of goodbye to Khaled and Amer and rushed to the door where the jailer was standing, waiting to let me out of the dormitory. When I took my first step out, the jailer kicked me with all his might towards the opposite wall and said, “This is because you were late to respond to the call!”
Then he noticed that I had come out barefoot. He ordered someone inside to throw a shoe at me for going out barefoot. I felt a shoe hit my foot, so I turned to pick it up and looked at where Khaled and Amer were sitting. They looked at me with a sad smile. I returned the same smile and nodded my head, silently telling them, while looking into their eyes, that I would go to their families and tell them everything. I kept looking at them until the grave’s door closed behind me and they disappeared from my sight.
I stood waiting for the jailer’s order to follow him. To my right stood prisoner number 52 who had touched my hand in a joyful manner to express a shy congratulation. The jailer brought out two others from dormitory No. 13 and ordered us to follow him. We walked behind him as he led us like frightened sheeps. He was the shepherd until he brought us to the same roofless room – The Tashmisah. He opened the door and ordered us to enter and wait for someone to come and complete the procedures to leave the detention facility.
When he closed the door and left, the five of us gathered to congratulate each other on our imminent release. Then, one of us noticed some food on the floor in the inner corner of the tashmisah. They had left a lot of bread, cheese, and fresh cucumbers for us. We ate until everything that had been left there was gone.
When I finished, I sat down in the same spot I sat in on the day I entered the prison six months ago and thought, “Have I really been here for six months? Or has it been a lifetime?” I feel like I’ve aged at least fifty years in this tomb.
I have crossed the threshold of pain. This misery has made me much older than my true age. Torture, lack of dignity and dehumanization, disappointments, diseases and death—all these factors made me think of the threshold of pain in my last moments here in this place that does not know the meaning of life and human dignity.
I looked up at the sky. The morning was breaking. It was probably six o’clock in the morning. I thought to myself, “What in the world was this night I spent? What was the dream I saw? What was my sudden impatience? Would I have lasted much longer knowing that I had crossed the threshold of pain and patience?”
I felt surreal in that moment. Was this a test for me from life? Is my exit from this place my reward or my punishment? Is death after such an experience the best option, or is it our clinging to life that overcomes all that darkness? I don’t know what it was and I don’t know how and what will be after now. I don’t know where I will end up today, but I know that anywhere else is better than here, even if death itself is better.
Less than an hour later, at about seven in the morning, a guard I had never seen before came in and said:
The jailer: “Good morning to all of you. Today we will say goodbye to each other. But first I want you to wear long pants. I will give them to those of you who wear shorts. You have to hide the bruises and wounds on your legs so that no one can see them until you reach your homes. If you reach them at all. Now follow me out. In a little while, each of you will pick up your personal belongings that you put in a safe deposit box when you came in, and then we’ll talk about what will happen next.”
We stood at the checkout counter. A policeman behind him had already prepared our personal belongings and began handing them to us, this time, calling us by our names and not by our prisoner numbers. It was the first time they called us by the names our parents gave us. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said to the security guard: “Sir, a few weeks ago you raided my house and took two computers, how about that?”
He looked at me contemptuously and said: “Did you give them to me when you came in?”
I said no, and he said, “Then fuck off and forget about those things.”
I grabbed my personal belongings and walked away from his window, waiting for what was coming next.
The jailer continued, “Now that you’ve taken all your things, let’s continue. I hope you’ve learned from the time we hosted you here, and that you won’t do it again, no matter what you’ve done. Some of you may see your family today or tomorrow, and some of you may not, depending on where you go next. In any case, I want you to know that we are watching you closely. Your phones are being monitored, your parents are being monitored, your whole life is being monitored. I know that many of those inside have entrusted you to deliver the news to their families. Now I tell you not to do that or to contact the family of any detainee. We can see and hear you. Learn from your time here and hope you don’t come back again. Now follow me.
We walked down the corridors leading to the exit door, the same black door through which I entered this place ages ago.
He stopped us at the open door and ordered us to wait, saying, “Stand in a line, one behind the other, and wait for the coming bus to pick you up.”
I stood there waiting in line looking at the vast sky for the third time in the duration of my stay in this tomb. I had nothing else to do but to wait.
I’m no stranger to waiting. In fact, I am well practiced in waiting. Sometimes it seems to me that my whole life has been nothing but waiting.
But what exactly have I been waiting for?
I don’t know.