I begged my Lord to give me the fortitude to withstand the violence and torture that were certainly to follow in view of my one and only response to her questions and threats. She gave another signal, and Na‘ima came over to me, looked straight at my brightly illuminated face and repeated the question in a gruff voice totally unlike the one I had heard before.
“I’m delighted to see you here, lovely visitor,” I said once again. “Weren’t you scared of the guards on the way? By the true word of Him who created you in such a perfect form, I know nothing about my cousin’s whereabouts, where he is, or who his companions are.”
Na‘ima gave me a slap on the face, and I enjoyed it. I turned my other cheek to her, asking her to do it again. She slapped that cheek too, not without a certain gentleness of touch. I really wanted her to keep on slapping me so I would forget this room and the people in it. I could imagine that the person slapping me fitted the old proverb that says: “One who loves a lot punishes a lot.” However, my wishes were soon curtailed when the muscle man grabbed hold of me, dragged me to a dark circle, laid me down on my back close to a water bowl, and proceeded to stuff my mouth full of bits of wool and toilet paper. He then waxed it with a binding paste.
“Now, my stubborn fellow,” he whispered in my ear, “warm suffocation is going to make you spit out the truth!”
Warm suffocation! What on earth was that?
The female ghoul now came over and sat cross-legged on my face. I could feel her press one of her orifices over my nose which prevented me from breathing and forced me to smell her foul gases and disgusting body odors. She only relaxed her revolting grip a little in order to ask if I was ready to cooperate yet. Once she realized that I was still maintaining my stance, she simply resumed her position. Her portable phone rang.
“Yes, Sir,” I heard her say, “the dog’s in our hands now. He’s bound to talk. Yes, Sir.”
When she felt my breathing slow down and my legs stop moving, she got up and went back to her place to continue eating and drinking. I stayed on the floor, groaning and spluttering.
Na‘ima now came over, either prompted by a signal from the ghoul or on her own initiative. She took the stuff out of my mouth and untied my legs. I started coughing as never before and vomited up the entire contents of my stomach. I apologized to my rescuer, who moistened a towel from the water bowl and leaned over to clean my face and neck. Thanks to the attention of this sympathetic woman and her pure breaths so close to me, I gradually calmed down.
A few moments later the female ghoul came back, felt my neck vein and pulse, then signaled to the gorilla, who dragged me and sat me cross-legged in front of the water bowl.
“Now it’s time for waterboarding!” he yelled. “The time has come. Either you confess, or else it’s curtains for you.”
So now it was time for the infamous waterboarding. People say that, as the person being tortured is deprived of oxygen, he can look upon his own death time after time until he confesses and cooperates or else dies without doing either. That is precisely what the boss now did with me, and in the most barbaric fashion. If she felt hungry or thirsty, or if the phone rang, she would hand things over to Na‘ima, who started lessening the amount of time I was under water and pretend she was not good at it. The muscle man noticed the way she was behaving and told the female ghoul who was busy eating or answering the phone. As soon as she had finished what she was doing, she gave Na‘ima a resounding slap that completely knocked her out. She kept complaining about the incompetence of these young female assistants and their lack of experience and knowledge. She gave instructions that her now-unconscious assistant be taken to the health clinic and then reprimanded for her conduct. That done, she set about subjecting me to more water torture and only raised my head out of the water in order either to heap all kinds of foul abuse on my father and my religion or else to threaten me with death by drowning if I did not open my heart to her and reveal all my secrets. As I struggled underwater, I had Na‘ima‘s lovely face in my mind; as I strived to hold my breath, I kept asking for God’s aid and hers. Then I started to feel a certain weakness creep into the female ghoul’s curses and threats, also in the way she was holding my head under the water. I told myself that she was getting drunk. God willing, that would be my means of escape from this torment. My hunch proved to be correct, in that the guard came rushing in, looking very worried and helped his boss stand up and head for her bench. All the while she kept muttering snatches of incomprehensible nonsense. He returned to where I was and took me out of the room. He had to carry me to the health clinic on his shoulders, not only out of sheer sympathy but also because he did not want me to die in his custody. He could easily see how bad my condition was and that I could not walk on my own. In the waiting room he sat me on a seat fixed to the floor, tied my hand to it, then left to perform some function or other.
I was left on my own, waiting for the door next to me to open. Once the silence became pervasive, I could hear groans behind the door, noises that I assumed came from a wounded person being treated. However, those assumptions were shattered when my curiosity led me to take a peep through the keyhole. What I saw almost made me collapse on the floor. There was a doctor with her brassiere fully open leaning over Na‘ima, hugging her, touching her naked breasts, and giving her deep-throated kisses on her mouth, exactly the way a man does with a woman. Seeking refuge in God, I went back to my seat, not least because I heard some footsteps in the hall nearby.
The guard appeared, removed my hand constraints, handed me over to the doctor, and asked permission to leave. Of Na‘ima there was no sign! For that reason I refrained from showing any surprise by asking questions.
A middle-aged woman, foreign-looking, thin and flat-chested, with short hair and no makeup. She looked remarkably masculine. After giving me a smiling, self-assured welcome, she proceeded to conduct a variety of detailed tests with remarkable attention. With both a physical examination and through x-rays, she focused in particular on my chest and lungs and finished by taking for analysis a sample of my blood in a small capsule. She told me that Na‘ima had specifically asked her to take good care of me, and then handed me a spray and some pills with a form telling me how to administer them. She also gave me a set of empty plastic containers that she told me were a present from Na‘ima. I asked her how Na‘ima was, and she gestured to me that she was fine. With regard to our next appointment, she put her finger to her mouth and whispered: “If you start spitting blood. .” She then escorted me to the door where the guard was waiting.
15. From the Crazy Block to the Shop for the People Practicing for Judgment Day
Can it really be true that I was carried asleep, put down on my bed, and then slept without waking for two solid days? That at least is what a voice emerging from a neighboring cell is telling me.
It was excruciatingly difficult, but even so I managed to stand on my two feet. As I did so, I noticed they had sores festering. I staggered my way over to the door, and it was then that I realized that I was in a different cell from the one I had been in. The proof was that this cell had iron bars on the door, through which I could make out a dark corridor and walls crisscrossed with cracks and a number of damp patches. Looking to the left I could see a dark hall whose precise dimensions were unclear, while to the right I found myself face to face with a man whose primitive appearance put me in mind of cavemen. Using his cane, he handed me a full bag.