he’s in Switzerland, a euphemism used in Syria to designate that penitentiary in the middle of the rocks a few feet away from one of the most famous ancient sites in the Middle East, so beautiful when the saffron dawn illumines the white columns and the Arab castle like their shepherd on its hill, Palmyra-Tadmor caravan city today peopled with caravans of tourists and prisoners, city of sheep butchered in the middle of the street in front of the terrified eyes of passing Europeans, capital of the Syrian steppe where that same Rabia whom I never saw must still be rotting if he survived, in Switzerland, that’s to say in Tadmor in Sadnaya in Homs or formerly in Mezzeh in one of those military prisons Meccas of torture and summary executions where all throughout the 1980s and ’90s the Syrian members of the Muslim Brotherhood were hanged, by the dozen, by the hundreds, their corpses buried in mass graves nestled in desert valleys, along with the bodies of those dead from torture or disease, tuberculosis, all kinds of abscesses, blood poisoning, malnutrition, piled up hundreds to a barracks, no visits allowed, Muslim activists were rounded up in Hama, in Aleppo, in Latakiyah and sent, blindfolded, to Palmyra in Arabic Tadmor the well-named, where they stagnated for ten, fifteen years until they were set free, paranoid, delirious, malnourished, or crippled, I met one of them in Jordan, one more source in my Zone, fourteen years in a Syrian prison, between 1982 and 1996, from sixteen to thirty, his youth tortured, broken, one eye missing, a leg lame, he told me that his main pastime in prison was counting the dead, he kept track of the hanged men in the prison yard, the ones who disappeared amid shouts in the middle of the night, in the beginning I tried to remember their names, he said, but that was impossible, so I just kept count, I clung to that as if it were my life, to know if I died what number I’d be, day after day, in fourteen years I counted 827 dead over half of them by hanging, usually by a chain, at night — I was arrested in front of my house in Hama during the events of 1982, I knew nothing about Islam or the Koran, I was an ignoramus, they arrested me because one of our neighbors was with the Brotherhood, I had just turned sixteen, they put a blindfold over my eyes and they beat me, I don’t know where I was, in a barracks I guess, I spent two days without drinking a drop of water and I was transferred to Palmyra in a truck, no one knew where we were going, we arrived at night, they made us get out with blows from a cudgel — the soldiers tortured us until dawn, that was the custom for newcomers, they had to break us, make us understand where we were, they broke my leg with an iron bar, I fainted, I woke up in a barracks like a giant dormitory, my leg was purple all swollen I was thirsty, I didn’t know what was more painful, if it was the thirst or the fracture, I couldn’t speak, one of the prisoners gave me some water and made me a sort of harness with an old crate that’s the only medical care I got, the bone didn’t reset right and ever since I’ve limped I can’t run anymore, no more soccer but in prison you didn’t think about soccer, the yard was mostly for hanging people, thank God I got out, I learned the Koran by heart, books were forbidden, pens too, but the Koran circulated by word of mouth, whispers, I learned sura after sura beginning with the shortest ones, I learned them from the mouths of the older prisoners, in the dark, a continuous almost inaudible flow pressed against each other we all prayed together, so the guards didn’t notice anything we bowed down to God by bending just the pinky finger, as is permitted for the ill, God willed that I survive, when I counted the 492nd death one of my eyes got infected it turned into a big suppurating painful ball and never opened again, I had a good constitution I was young, time passed in Palmyra they never called you except for one reason, to hang you, the guards hardly ever spoke to us, sometimes after midnight they called out names, that was the day’s list of men to be hanged, we saluted them everyone was used to executions, the first thing I did when I arrived in Jordan was go to the mosque to pray standing up, finally, to be able to kneel down even though my leg hurt, to thank God for having gotten me out of that hell, he ended his story and I thought he should have thanked God too for having put him there, in that hell, but for him the Baathist Alaouites in power in Syria were infidels, agents of the devil, Hasan (we’ll call him Hasan) readily informed me about the Syrian opposition and their clandestine activities that he still followed closely but was much more reluctant to talk about the Jordanians or the Palestinians, he ended up being killed by the Mossad in 2002, during the Great Purge, when the CIA sent endless lists of “individual suspects” all over the world the luckiest of whom ended up in Guantánamo their eyes blindfolded tortured once again for many of them had already fallen into the clutches of the Jordanians the Syrians the Egyptians the Algerians or the Pakistanis for different reasons but with the same results, they ended up on the island of rum and cigars and mulatto women sculpted by the sun and by dictatorship, they sweated in Cuba in their high-security orange jumpsuits much more visible and pleasing to the guards’ eyes than the striped or plain pajamas of Palmyra the magnificent: Hasan didn’t have that luck, if you can call it that, he died hit by a little radio-controlled Israeli missile that completely destroyed the vehicle in which he was traveling along with his young wife and their two-year-old daughter, he died because of information I’d supplied, I’m the one who sold him to Nathan Strasberg in exchange for information about American civilian contracts in Iraq, as proof of good will I sacrificed a source that was in any case a little outdated by then, Hasan the lame had taken part in organizing two attacks on Jerusalem and another one against Israelis in Jordan, he was becoming less and less communicative, lied too often, farewell Hasan survivor of Tadmor, farewell Rabia the son of the dignitary fallen in disgrace after the death of Hafez al-Assad the old lion of Damascus who had managed, against all expectations, to die in his bed, or rather on the telephone, on the day of his death you couldn’t find a single bottle of Champagne in Syria, Beirut, or Jerusalem, the Old Man of the Mountain had played Middle-Eastern poker for thirty years and he was unbeatable, he had played with Kissinger, with Thatcher, with Mitterand, with Arafat, with King Hussein, and many others, always winning, always, even with a pair of sevens, because he was clever possibly but above all because he didn’t have any useless scruples, ready to sacrifice his pieces to go back on his alliances to murder half his compatriots if need be, Hasan the lame owed fourteen years of prison to him, lucky compared to the perhaps 20,000 dead from the repression in the 1980s, lucky Rabia, his dignitary father an Alaouite minister let him get rich off his fellow citizens and experience a few years of abundance before he ended up in the slammer for a while: whenever I went to Damascus, Aleppo, or Latakiyah I always felt as if I were putting my head in the wolf’s mouth, in that country of informers where half the population was spying on the other half you had to be twice as careful, the only advantage being that the other half was by the same token perfectly willing to work for foreign countries, in return for cold hard cash, I went to Damascus “as a tourist” and so as not to blow my cover too quickly I had to see the sights, in Palmyra, in Apamea, visit the museum in Aleppo, go see the Church of Saint Simeon Stylites the saint chained on top of his pillar the base of which still exists today, explore the old city of Damascus, marvel inside the