“Two,” I replied.
“One divided by one?” he asked.
“One,” I replied.
Addition or division, he seemed to be giving me a choice.
“From now on,” he said, almost as though he were naming a child, “your identity is going to be Cell Number 112.”
Handing me a pair of rubber shoes that I put on, he told me to follow him. We were accompanied by two guards and went to an interior room close by, with a sign on the door saying “Leftover lies.” The warden sat me down in front of a flickering screen with lines and dots. Placing my right hand on the Qur’an, he told me to swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
At this point I started to panic, especially when the orderly turned the light off. I heard a mechanical voice of some unseen speaker asking me questions: my name, date and place of birth, names of my parents, job. I gave them all the information I knew. When he asked me about my membership of a secret political party or a jihadist cell, whether active or sleeping, I said nothing in an automatic gesture of resistance. However, as soon as I felt a sharp razor touching my neck, I felt compelled to say something. What I said was that for a limited time I had belonged to a Sufi group. When they asked me what it was called, I replied the Yaqtin group. Asked about the shaykh who led it and his disciples, I paused for a moment and then told them that I could not remember.
The screen now went blank as though it had broken down. The orderly behind me turned on the light again and ordered the two guards who were yawning sleepily to take me to cell number 13 until the problem with the computer could be fixed.
That cell — how can I ever forget it?! — consisted of a flat storage space, parts of it illuminated by bright neon lights. Individual iron cages were strung along the walls facing each other; all prisoners inside them could do was either sit down or stretch out. No sooner had the orderly pushed me into one of the cages than my companion in the next cage greeted me with a blessing on the advent of the holy month of Ramadan the next day, and welcomed me to the shock and terror cellar — to give it its official name. The other people in cages greeted me in the same fashion. Some of them assumed that I was either a long-term prisoner on whose cooperation they had given up hope, or else a new arrival who was in the cellar either because of a mistake or else so as to make abundantly and powerfully clear to me that I was not in this detention center for some kind of outing or in order to consort with guards and managers who were playing jokes and having a bit of fun.
The cellar was just like an oven, and the people incarcerated inside had no way of knowing if it were night or day or hot or cold. That is what my neighbor told me, and he went on to explain that people who did not get sick usually passed the time either describing the reasons why they were at the prison, telling whatever stories and jokes they happened to remember, or playing cards or chess. All that was in addition to whatever time was spent praying by those who wished to do so and reciting the Qur’an and other liturgies. Sick and elderly people, some of whom had been there for more than a decade, had simply surrendered the keys to their life to their Maker. Some of them had been there for so long that their skin had swollen and festered so much that they could hardly move; others were doing their best to hasten their end by fasting all the time or refusing to eat.
On the evening of the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, people came to distribute the fast-breaking food; like the guards, they were wearing medical masks. As they made their rounds, we all put out our plastic bowls, and they poured a lentil broth into them, along with pieces of bread. Even though the light was very dim, I managed to make out two parts of an insect in my bowl. When I inserted my finger into the liquid, I came out with a dead cockroach. When I rushed over to show it to my neighbor, he congratulated me on my sharp eyesight. By way of information he told me that the majority of prisoners who were not fasting never looked at what they were eating. That led me to express my utter disgust at the inhumane conditions involved in this imprisonment, which were not only contrary to religion and morality but also against all known legal requirements. I accused the perpetrators of criminal behavior and swore that they would incur God’s wrath and punishment. My companion advised me to shut up and say nothing, all in anticipation of heaven’s verdict falling on the wrongdoers, something from which there was no escape. He went on to tell me that of all insects cockroaches were the least harmful; not only that, but they are useful for prisoners because they eat the bedbugs, lice, and daddy longlegs that crawl all over bodies day and night. He absolutely forbade me to flick them away if I ever felt them on my bodily extremities.
That made me feel even more disgusted; I almost threw up into my bowl, so I put it all aside. I now told my companion that I needed to relieve myself. He frowned and paused for a moment. When I asked him again, he replied that, if it was my bladder I needed to empty, that could be easily arranged with the orderly; but if it involved excretion, then that involved particular procedures that the orderly and his myrmidons could explain. Without further ado, I yelled for the duty orderly and told him my needs. Night had not yet fallen when he took me out of my cage; after obtaining the chief warder’s permission, he took me to a platform with upright tin sheets. He showed me the way prisoners were taking turns walking across it. Every time it opened, they would spread their legs a little and excrete standing up. I watched as one of them lost his balance and fell headlong into the bottomless cesspool.
“So have you made up your mind?” the orderly asked me gruffly.
I had no choice but to take the risk and test my gymnastic talents. He inquired of me as to whether I wished to avoid exposing myself to danger or even death, and, without even waiting to hear my reply, advised me to avoid looking at what lay below and ignore the soldiers and foreign female troops who were taking pictures of people excreting from a nearby building. After succeeding in this utterly humiliating and foul test, I made my way back to my cage, frowning and downcast. My immediate companions congratulated me on my survival; it was as if I had traversed some difficult causeway or scored some colossal success in the Olympics. When I asked them what happened to people who failed this dreadful exercise, one of them replied that in most cases they would fall into a deep sandpit, particularly if the person wanted to put an end to his life. One of the others gave an answer to a question that I was on the point of asking: people who were either too weak, sick, or impaired to perform this exercise would be hosed down and cleaned by volunteer colleagues, whose reward would be in God’s hands. When I said that I wanted to be one of those volunteers, they readily accepted my offer, but only on condition that the warden agreed. Accompanied by a guard, I went to see the warden. When I discussed the matter with him, his reply came from behind his face-mask, which reeked of wine.
“So who’s stopping you?!” he yelled in a gruff tone, which said everything there was to say about his mean, sloppy demeanor. “Take the bucket, mop, and sackcloth, and make sure you don’t use too much water. Now get out!”
I now set about my hard and dismal task, cleaning the cages I was assigned. You might have thought that the people in them were alive, but in fact they were not. Every feeling had been ruthlessly rubbed out; some of them seemed to be in a kind of perpetual stupor; others would smile at you as you were cleaning things out and mutter words of gratitude. By the time I had finished, I felt like vomiting. Had I not concentrated my entire attention on reciting a prayer to God and calling down curses on the evil and murderous tyrants who were perpetrating such things, I would have burst into tears. I went to the warder and informed him that the majority of inmates in the prison needed to be transferred to hospital.