Behind her stood three armed guards who looked totally repulsed by the whole thing. She kept on repeating the same question over and over again.
“What I want is the names of the people in your sleeper cell.”
One of the guards came up to her and whispered in her ear. At that she threw a fit.
“These cowards are all one and the same,” she yelled in French. “Once you get serious with them, they all faint. Take this wreck back to his cell. Tomorrow, by all that’s holy, he’s going to talk.”
She indicated to the gigantic guard to take him away and sank into her chair, panting and exhausted.
For a few leaden moments I found myself looking around in sheer panic, not least because I and the other man with me could hear the groans and screams emitted by prisoners in neighboring rooms, along with the barking of dogs. Once things had died down a bit and the woman had had a chance to recover, she yelled: “Next one!” (the French “au suivant” echoing the title of a Jacques Brel song in which a prostitute is calling in her customers who are waiting in the hallway). But in Mama Ghula’s case the same phrase implied the next person to be tortured. A guard pointed his finger at me and thrust a bowl in my face; it was filled with lentils and butter paste, all mixed in with bits of sausage and bits of meat of indeterminate kind. A genuinely satanic brew — may God never inflict it on anyone! The guard cautioned me that I had to kneel down and consume the entire contents of the bowl immediately. He explained to me that his boss would never deal with me unless and until my stomach was completely full. I had no option but to do as he said, although, once I had finished it, I plucked up enough courage to ask him what kind of meat I had just swallowed.
“Pork,” he told me with a dry laugh, “pig-meat. That’s all pigs like you get to eat here, pig-meat mixed with salt sea-water. Next time you come, if you’ve been stubborn, it’ll be mixed with the piss of his excellency the director and his wonderful assistant in whose presence you happen to be at this moment. .”
“But my religion,” I interrupted, “forbids me to eat pork.”
“Your religion, you say?!” he replied. “God curse your mother’s religion! If you belonged to a religion, we wouldn’t be seeing your dirty face here. But enough nonsense. Get up, the boss is waiting for you!”
I thrust my fingers down my throat, hoping to make myself vomit, but I failed. With that I stood up and went over to the woman. I gave her a searing look, intending to save face.
“What you’re doing here,” I told her, “is evil.”
She pulled me towards her with a laugh. She started squeezing me in her tattooed arms and her ample bosom, just like a mother with her suckling child. I felt completely helpless and stunned as I found myself forced to rub up against her vile body, confronting her lewd and distracted expression, and smelling her sweat and her cheap and nasty perfume. I had to listen as she used a tone of apologetic complaint to whisper things in my ear in a mixture of languages, covering my face with tears blackened by the kohl she was wearing on her eyelids. The gist of her remarks was that the man I had seen hanging upside down was an evil person, an uncouth egomaniac who had made up his mind to keep his particular game a secret from her and stick to his own brand of truth. However, what she needed was to have him open his heart to her and share his secrets. If he refused to do that, he would make her unemployed and ruin her life. With a phony lust and coquetry she then proceeded to carry on her chatter in French, but this time I made it clear that I could not understand her. She then started talking in Arabic to the extent that she could, albeit it with a foreign accent that was partially fabricated but mostly natural.
“Listen, Cheri,” she told me, “this breast isn’t just a piece of bandage. What do you think of it? Do you like it? Tell me the truth. It’s yours; you’re going to suckle from it and kiss it. But if you bite it, like that dog who came before you, then I’ll castrate you with no mercy. You can still ejaculate, I trust. .”
With one hand she thrust her breast into my mouth, and with the other she grabbed my penis as though it were a piece of dough. She started feeling and squeezing it as though to measure and weigh it. I started moaning, and that led to her to interpret things in her own debauched and perverted fashion.
“Not bad,” she yelled, “not bad.”
All of a sudden her tone became threatening and coarse. “But if you start playing fainting games on me,” she went on, “I’m going to feed you your own shit. So which cell do you belong to, whether active or sleeper?”
“I don’t belong to any cell,” I replied in a panic.
“Oh really!” she said. “Then how come you confessed to the lie detector that you joined an active cell?”
“I never did. It’s lying!”
“The lie detector’s lying! Damn you!”
“Or maybe I told a lie because I was being threatened. .”
“OK, but here you are now in my warm embrace. So tell me the whole unadorned truth. Whisper it in my ear if you like. What’s your cell?”
“Oh yes! Now I remember. In the past I used to belong to a small group that called itself the Yaqzin group or something like that. .”
“An awake cell!* Bravo, sweetheart! Tell me about its activities.”
“A mystical ceremony, Madame. .”
“A mystical ceremony?”
“A kind of ecstatic dance. Members of the group shake their bodies in an increasingly frenzied movement so as to achieve a state of exhaustion and oblivion aimed toward the transcendent.”
“You’re talking in riddles. Tell me what the members discuss.”
“Nothing, Madame. They only recite a single word, no other. .”
“What’s that word?”
“God lives, God lives! It’s a phrase that emerges from the very depths of the devotee’s inner being and continues till he loses all consciousness and finds himself living in the realms of worshipped God. .”
“God lives?” she asked impatiently. “Is that some kind of code? A secret password?”
“No, no, God forbid! It’s an expression of the unity and mention of the One Creator. It demands that indifference and forgetfulness be banished in order for true thought to be aroused in the presence of the Merciful One.”
At this point her face turned red in anger and her voice cracked.
“That’s all gibberish,” she yelled, “Who’s the leader of the group?”
I came up with a name on the spur of the moment.
“Musa ibn Zulayqa, Madame,” I told her, “if my memory serves me right. But he died a while ago.”
She now started reciting a whole list of names to me, slowly and with obvious tension in her voice. When I responded with a whole series of “no’s,” sometimes softly, other times out loud, she rounded on me in fury.
“And what about Ilyas, your former cellmate?” she screamed at me. “That nasty little catamite!”