‘She knew him by his smile.
‘He, too, failed to recognise himself one day when he looked at himself in the mirror in the guard’s room. He said, “Reflected in its surface I saw someone I didn’t know. I turned to look behind me, but found no one.
‘ “I had spent ten years in prison. The teacher Abdallah Hamza, on the other hand, was there only three weeks. They hung him on the ‘hanging rod’ and kept beating him and pouring cold water on him (this was in February) until he died. For two and a half years Fayrouz, his wife and the mother of his three children, continued to visit the prison, travelling the fifty kilometres from her village to Al-Khiam, bringing her husband clothes and food, which she would leave with the guard and then go home. For two and a half years she was unaware that she was a widow; unaware, for two and a half years, that her children were fatherless.”
‘The stories of Ali Qashmar and Abdallah Hamza were told to me by the guide who conducted me through the prison. He, too, was a former prisoner. He did not tell me his own story. He spoke of himself only as one member of a larger group, as he led me from cell to cell, from the interrogation chambers to the “hanging rod”, explaining everything, exhaustively.’
At the end of the letter, I told Hazem, ‘In my book about prison, I’ll devote a chapter to Al-Khiam, which, unlike the other chapters, will discuss the moment of liberation. Perhaps I’ll devote two chapters to it — one to be the focal point in a book about life in prison, and the other, with which I’ll conclude, on liberation.’
Chapter twenty-two
Novelty
Nadir was training me to use the computer. I found it confusing, and felt completely stupid at first, then less so. I groped my way as timidly as someone taking up a pen for the first time, or someone expected to be responsive in a language of which he has learned only the rudiments. Losing patience, I would say, ‘I get it now. Let me figure it out.’ He would leave me alone to flounder for a bit, and then I would call for help, demanding explanations every few minutes. Nadir would come and sort me out, but he would overdo the explanation, going on and on until I protested, ‘What, do you think I’m an idiot?’ He would go away again, and things would seem simpler for a bit, then get complicated again. Then I would summon Nadeem.
For the first week, working with the programmes and files and windows and message boxes that jumped on to the screen in front of me — to which I didn’t know whether I should answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ — I felt I was wandering a maze in the streets of an unknown city. I would stop. Then I would make up my mind and say, ‘This is the way,’ and proceed with some degree of confidence, but this would gradually fade, until I became convinced that I was simply lost, with no idea how to get to where I wanted to go, or how to go back the way I had come. I said, ‘Teach me how to work with just the documents.’ I was good at writing quickly on the keyboard; now I wanted to learn how to open a new document, how to close it, how to get back to it, and how to organise what I’d written and edit text by adding to it or cutting from it. He taught me.
The following day, I opened a new document, and began translating. I put the text on my right and looked at the Arabic sentences, moving my fingers easily on the keyboard, as the French sentences took shape on the screen before me. I usually translated quickly, and as a rule I would go back over the draft of what I had translated at the end of each paragraph. Now the emendation process was simpler and faster: I could delete a letter or a word or a line and substitute another. No need to draft text only to white it out and then go back to it for the final adaptation, to be copied for the third time. I worked assiduously on the document for four days, during which I translated fifty pages.
I was happy, as I generally was, when my translation of a text pleased me, and happier still about my success in working with a device that, only one week earlier, had seemed like an insoluble puzzle.
What had happened? Some keystroke resulting in some action or other. The document had disappeared. For two hours, I tried to get it back, but I got nowhere. I was certain it was hiding somewhere in the depths of the machine, so I sat waiting for one or the other of the boys to return and find it.
Nadir came home and as usual declared that he was starving to death, that if he didn’t eat immediately we would have to summon an ambulance, and that before the ambulance could get there the doctor would have pronounced him dead!
I took him by the hand and sat him down before the computer. ‘The document first,’ I told him, ‘and then you can perish at your leisure, I won’t stop you!’ Hamdiya stared, astonished, but held her tongue.
Nadir sat at the computer and asked me the name of the document, the date it was created, and the last time I had worked on it. He searched. ‘It’s not there,’ he said. Then his fingers began a series of rapid clicks on the mouse. Boxes and lists appeared, while he indicated ‘no’ or ‘yes’, closing this, opening that, closing the other. At last he announced, ‘I have a right to eat now. I worked for my snack. You’ve lost the document, Miss Nada!’
‘That can’t be! How did it go missing?’
‘You must have needed to press “save”, but…’
‘What do you mean, “press ‘save’”?’
‘That means you preserve the document. That’s computerese: “Saving” means preserving your work.’
‘And?’
‘The document got lost because you shut down the computer without saving it.’
‘That’s not what happened.’
‘Then tell me what happened. But let me eat first, and then I’ll listen.’
I sat next to him while he had his dinner. I told him, ‘The power went out, and the computer turned off. Then the power came back, I turned it on, and the document was there — no problem. I worked on it for four hours, and when I decided to stop the message box for me to save it came up, so I pressed “Yes” as usual, and the same box came up a second time, and then a third and a fourth. I did the same thing twenty times, then decided that the “Yes” button was useless. It seemed as though pressing “No” would solve the problem, so that’s what I did. After that I closed the document, shut down the computer, and went into the kitchen. Then this afternoon when I turned it on I couldn’t find the document.’
‘Brilliant! Fantastic! I’ve got to hand it to you, by God! When the electricity went out, the computer saved a temporary copy of the document. You simply had to change its name or save it with the same name by substituting the temporary document with a permanent one. Every time you gave the “save” command, the computer was waiting for you to tell it under what name you wanted the document saved. What you were supposed to do was…’
I wasn’t listening anymore. I was thinking about how I had lost four days’ worth of work.
‘From now on,’ I announced, ‘I’m not going anywhere near the computer.’
Nadir shook his head, shrugged, and said, to goad me, ‘ “Scared to get into the water, Nadir? Shame on you!” ’
He was mimicking what I used to say to him when he was little and fearful of swimming.
When Nadeem came back, Nadir turned the loss of the document into a stage comedy.
‘I come home and find Nada raising a lament, wailing, “My document, my document!” I tell her I’m about to die of hunger. “My document, my document!” she says. The telephone rang, and she answered it, “My document, my document!” There was a knock on the door. It was a grocery delivery-man. She said, “My document, my document!” ’
For weeks I didn’t go near the computer. Then one Friday after breakfast the boys pulled me over to the machine and sat down, one on either side of me and each with a newspaper. ‘We’re not moving,’ they said. ‘Turn on the computer and work with it.’ Every time I tried to move from my place they prevented me. Finally I said, ‘I want to go to the toilet.’ They didn’t believe me. ‘I swear,’ I told them, but they still didn’t believe me. I said to them, ‘Look, lads, I’ll work on my own!’ They let me go. They stood by the bathroom door, and shouted, one after the other, ‘That’s it!’ And they dragged me back from the door of the bathroom to the computer.