The Blind Man's Garden Page 17
He closes his eyes and the Military Police soldier shouts at him to open them.
‘If the powder does not belong to you, and was left there by someone else, you should tell us. We have done some tests and we think it could be anthrax. You must tell us what you know and tell us fast because the whole area might have been contaminated. The women and children in there must be evacuated. The only way we can get US chemical teams out to neutralise the stuff is if you tell us what you know. Don’t waste time, those women and children need your help. What is your name and what do you know about that powder?’
‘I don’t know anything,’ Mikal says. ‘I am not from the mosque. I am just a prisoner. At first someone else’s, now yours.’ He speaks Pashto, to keep them as far away as possible from his real identity.
‘What’s your name?’
‘I don’t know anything about the powder.’
‘What happened to your hands? How did you get the bullet wounds on your body? Did you fight with the Taliban against the Americans?’
‘The powder could be insecticide. I saw a large kitchen garden behind the mosque.’
‘We are sure it’s not, we have done initial tests. What’s your name? Did people in expensive Toyota SUVs ever visit the mosque?’
‘I am not from the mosque.’
He is very tired and his head nods and the Military Police soldier shouts at him to stay awake and David wants to know whether he had spent time in Sudan, whether he had fought in Kashmir, if he had any links with the man who planned to blow up Los Angeles airport in 1999, if he had been to Bosnia.
‘Say something. At least tell me we infidels will never win against the likes of you because we love life while you love death.’
As punishment for his silence David asks him to get out of the chair. He is made to lower himself onto his knees and hold out his arms at the sides. David and the interpreter leave the room, and he stays in this position for thirty-five minutes, the Military Police soldier shouting at him every time his arms droop or he slumps forward out of fatigue and the need for sleep.
When David returns he wishes to know whether he has met Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar or Ayman al-Zawahiri. Mikal refuses to speak and they take him to a bare windowless room, attach a chain to his wrists and, asking him to raise his arms above his head, fasten the chain to a ring on the ceiling. The room is filled with brilliant light. A sleep deprivation cell.
Every time he falls asleep the arms shackled to the ceiling wrench him awake.
*
The prison is an abandoned brick factory. In a vast warehouse inside the main building there are two rows of metal cages, filled with boys and young men, some with hoods over their heads, industrial white lights shining down on them at all hours.
After he loses consciousness in the sleep deprivation chamber, he awakens to discover that he has been stripped naked and is being washed with a hosepipe. A Military Policeman dries him and walks him naked to the tent that had smelled of balloons where his wounds are dressed again. They put him in a jumpsuit, put the metal back onto his limbs, and he is brought to one of the cages in the warehouse and he curls up on the floor.
‘Where are you from?’ the boy in the next cage asks.
Mikal doesn’t know whether he has reacted to the question, to the language.
‘My name is Akbar,’ he says to Mikal in Urdu and then Pashto.
As he lies on the floor the boy tells Mikal the nationality of the other people around them, pointing to each cage. Algerian. Sudanese. Russian. Saudi Arabian. His face is serious and beautiful, as is his voice, and he says he was a taxi driver in Jalalabad when he was kidnapped and sold to the Americans for $5,000.
‘What’s your name?’
Mikal closes his eyes, telling himself not to react. He has been placed in the next cage to make Mikal reveal information.
‘Where are you from? The man on my other side is from Morocco. See him, the one with his head bandaged? He is a bit unmanageable. He speaks English but his accent is terrible so he needs an interpreter, and always wants his answers to be translated precisely.’ Mikal hears the chains of the boy as he moves. ‘He hates America and feels it’s necessary to keep telling the interrogators that fact, becoming angry when the interpreter refuses to translate his full answers and says instead “and so on and so forth”. Or “Now he is prattling on about the Koran and the Crusades and the glory of Islam and the Day of Judgement,” or “And now he’s off again on his obsession with death.”’
The boy continues to talk as Mikal hears the noise of someone weeping in a nearby cage, the sound of someone praying, the barking of dogs. Though full of fatigue he focuses on everything in an effort to remain awake – fearful that he might talk in his sleep and reveal something. But the struggle to keep his eyes open is only intermittently successful. During sleep he sees someone rinsing a red garment in flowing water. Moving it around in the current. He approaches and sees that it is not a garment, but his blood, the liquid taken out of Mikal’s body as one article and entity, and being sluiced in the river, all his knowledge being extracted from it.
*
Three white men enter the interrogation booth – that smells of vomit – and begin to shout at him without the interpreter translating any of the words, just screaming into Mikal’s face for more than ten minutes. Then suddenly they stop and leave.
*
‘Did you get the women safely out of the mosque?’ Mikal hears himself asking David.
‘Tell me about Jeo.’
Mikal looks up from the table.
‘Jeo has told me everything about you two.’
‘You have Jeo?’
‘Stay in your chair.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘Impossible. Stay in the chair.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He has told us everything.’
‘There is nothing to tell. Where is Jeo? Is he all right?’
‘Tell us which escape routes the Arab fighters are using to get out of Afghanistan into Pakistan and Iran.’
‘I want to see Jeo.’
‘He says you took a bayt of loyalty to Osama bin Laden two years ago.’ He uses the Arabic word – bayt, a blood oath.
‘You are lying.’
‘Either I am or he is. I am telling you what he told me.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘So it’s a lie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would he lie to us?’
‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly a terrible possibility enters his head. ‘What did you do to him to make him confess to that?’
‘Stay in your chair,’ the Military Policeman says loudly from his corner. He stands up to his full height which is well over six feet, obscuring the poster behind him. Talking about the Moroccan and his bandaged head, Akbar said that a female interrogator had asked him how he’d felt when he heard about the attacks on the Twin Towers. The Moroccan said that he had been ecstatic, and when she told him that the first boy she had ever kissed had died in the Towers, he had said, ‘You kissed someone you were not married to? If you were in my family I would cut your throat and wipe the floor with the blood, you disgusting bitch.’ He had spat on her and the Military Policeman had become uncontrollable and beaten him savagely.
‘According to Jeo you have committed to memory the satellite phone numbers of several al-Qaeda lieutenants,’ David says. ‘Give them to me.’
‘Did you beat him? He’s so gentle. He’d say anything to stop the pain.’
‘If a person would say anything to stop the pain, then he would probably start with the truth. No?’
Mikal closes his eyes and incurs the wrath of the Military Policeman who bellows at him to stay awake and pay attention.
‘Let me tell you something,’ David says. ‘The reason the United States isn’t torturing you, hooking you up to electricity or drilling holes in your bones, as some countries in the world do, is not that torture doesn’t work. Torture most definitely does work. But
we don’t do it because we believe it is wrong and uncivilised.’
‘I want to see Jeo.’
Did Akbar say to him, while he was going in and out of sleep, that he must never give in to the temptation of grabbing the interrogator’s gun? ‘I think they wear it in the room because they want you to grab it and try to shoot them, so they can charge you with something.’ The soldiers wear them even when they are washing and dressing the prisoners, the prisoners’ hands and feet free of iron.
‘You are lying about Jeo. If you have him then go and ask him what my name is. Come back and tell me.’
‘So what he told us is a lie? Duly noted. We’ll have to make sure he knows what the consequences are for lying to us. Now tell me what your name is and where you are from.’
‘Ask Jeo.’
‘When we captured him he had thousands of Omani rials, American dollars and Pakistani rupees on him. Why do you think he had those?’
‘Ask him.’
‘Did you ever transfer money into Afghanistan from Pakistan – given to you by your al-Qaeda handlers in Pakistan?’
‘Ask Jeo.’
*
He dreams that his father and mother are travelling across land and sea, their path lit by a soul flame. They arrive and deliver him from his chains and lead him out of the cage. He dreams that he has turned into a boar and in mysterious happiness is rushing through the bright colours of various maps, an atlas, pursuing his female and when he finds her he becomes a man in a world so intense that the sound of a flower bud opening can kill and the bulbul is in the letters that spell the word bulbul. No longer bound to their flesh, the pair of them are among the ancient stars, enclosed in perfect crystals shaped like heroes and heroines and demons, true books and instruments of music. Outside his sleep, night has sealed all mirrors but in the clear glass of the dream both of them move fearlessly across the firmament towards knowledge not only of how the world began but of how it will end.
*
‘Did you try to count the teeth of a wolf?’ Akbar asks, pointing to the missing fingers.
‘Why are there pictures in the corridor?’ Mikal says. Their bright colours had pained his eyes. He passes them whenever he is taken to the medical tent where the dressings on his torso and hands are changed, to receive what he is told are antibiotic injections.
‘They are from children in America.’
Drawings of butterflies, flowers, guns shooting at men with beards and helicopters dropping bombs on small figures in turbans.
‘They are letters to the soldiers from schoolchildren. The words say, Go Get the Bad Men and I Hope You Kill Them All and Come Home Safely. I saw one that said, We are praying for you, and said the Rosary for you today in class.’
‘I am going to escape,’ Mikal says to Akbar.
‘Don’t. They shot and killed someone who tried.’
He will have to locate and free Jeo within the factory and then they will break out. Or will he escape and come back for Jeo later?
‘How many guards are there?’ Mikal counts the MPs gathered near the cages. All captured Arabs are eventually sent to Guantánamo Bay. The others must be assessed to see if they should be. A shipment will leave today and since noon yesterday the MPs have been making preparations, laying out new jumpsuits, manacles, leg chains and spray-painted goggles on the floor in plain view of the cages. They pull on the leg chains, and lock and unlock the shiny chrome manacles, to make sure everything is in working order. No one can remain unaware of the rattling, and no one knows who will leave.
Now suddenly it is time, and the MPs are having great difficulty in getting some of the prisoners out of the cages. One prisoner clings to the wire of the cage and sobs as they prise him loose. Another falls to his knees, howling and shouting something in English. ‘He’s imploring for mercy,’ Akbar says. ‘“You promised you wouldn’t send me, Andrew. You promised, Steve, you promised.”’ Kissing the hands of the white men. Others though are just walking out, resigned to their fate, reciting the verses of the Koran.
An MP moves towards Mikal but continues past and enters the adjoining cage, which contains a Nigerian called Mansur. From him there had been complaints that everything in Afghanistan was inferior to Africa, even the rain and wind here were of an inferior quality. A Christian who had converted to Islam, and in the interrogating booth was constantly trying to convert the Americans, he is now being readied to be put on a plane.
*
‘What is your name?’ David asks.
Mikal sits still.
Just then there comes the sound of screaming from the other side of the wall. Someone in terrible agony.
‘Who is that?’
‘Who do you think?’ David says. ‘Jeo lied to us, so now we are making him tell us the truth.’
The boy next door sounds like an animal in sacrificial torment.
It’s not Jeo. He must remain composed.
‘What is your name?’
It’s not Jeo. Does anyone in the world know where the two of them are? Is anyone searching for them?
‘What is your name?’
But he is unable to bear it and says at last, ‘Stop beating him.’
‘We are just making sure we know the truth. Stay in your chair.’
‘Please stop it. Don’t hurt him, please. You said you wouldn’t torture.’ He stands up and reaches for David with his hands, then in the same movement turns and rushes towards the door in disordered confusion, to go and help Jeo. As he falls to the floor – given a blow to the kidneys by the MP’s club – he is struck again on the shoulder and he hits the man with his handcuffed wrists just above the ear and once again below the ear with greater force, and the man leans over him and punches his face, once, twice, three times, Mikal’s neck pressed against the concrete under the man’s boot. He tastes blood and is not sure which of the screams are his and which from the next room. Then he is snatched back into the chair.
‘He’s telling the truth,’ he says, ‘he’s telling the truth. I did take the oath with Osama bin Laden. Stop hurting him, please, stop hurting him. I was the one who lied, not him.’ Drops of blood fall from his face onto the table, joining up and becoming a large blot with an amazing quickness.
‘What’s your name?’
Next door Jeo continues to scream, and there are other sounds, of him being slammed against the walls. The cubicle shakes with each impact.
‘What’s your name? Where are you from? What happened to your hands and body, and when were you shot?’
They could bring his brother here – they could bring all of them here from Heer – and, armed with suspicions and false accusations, do to them what they are doing to Jeo. Basie and Yasmin and Rohan and Naheed. They’ll put them in the cages next to him.
‘I am a prisoner. They sold me to you for money. I have nothing to do with this war.’ His ribs and face in agony from the strikes, the pain in the bullet wounds fully awakened.
Next door Jeo is whimpering.
‘What is your name? If you are innocent we will free you the instant you eliminate our suspicions. You must show us that you support justice by co-operating with us. All the people who were captured with you have already been released. You with your behaviour are going to end up in Cuba.’
‘I will tell you everything if you let me see Jeo.’
‘Impossible.’
He looks at the wall separating him from Jeo whose sobs have become fainter now.
Finally he says to David, ‘I will tell you everything, if you ask Jeo to tell you something only I would know.’
*
He is brought to a chamber whose walls, floor and ceiling are painted entirely black, and his raised arms are shackled to a ring overhead. After the Military Policemen leave the light is switched off, the room becoming a perfect vacuumed blank. It is like the shadow darkness of the grave after death. He is not sure when last he saw a star or the red dawn light pulsing like the bloodbeat of a living creature, but now time ceases to exist altogethe
r as he stands or slumps in the measureless void – for half a day, two, a week? He is sure that men have died in the chamber, and he sees their ghosts. At some point the light comes on and a white man Mikal has never seen before makes his entry. Nineteen keepers are appointed over Hell, according to the Koran. The man stands before him and suddenly bursts into laughter, and he doesn’t stop – the soulless glance fixed at Mikal and laughing loudly at him for having made the mess on the floor, for being worthless, for the disaster that is his love for Naheed, for not being able to help Jeo, for Pakistan and its poverty, a laughter tinged with contempt for him and his nation where the taps don’t have water, and the shops don’t have sugar or rice or flour, the sick don’t have medicines and the cars don’t have petrol, his disgusting repulsive country where everyone it seems is engaged in killing everyone else, a land of revenge attacks, where the butcher sells rotten meat to the milkman and is in turn sold milk whose volume has been increased with lethal white chemicals, and they both sell their meat and their milk to the doctor who prescribes unnecessary medicines in order to win bonuses from the drug companies, and the factory where the drugs are made pours its toxic waste directly into the water supply, into rivers and streams, killing, deforming, blinding, lacerating the sons and daughters of the policeman who himself dies in a traffic accident while he is taking a bribe, an accident caused by a truck the transport inspector has taken a bribe to declare roadworthy, a country full of people whose absolute devotion to their religion is little more than an unshakable loyalty to unhappiness and mean-spiritedness, and the white man continues to laugh with eyes full of hatred and accusation and hilarity and mirth at this citizen of a shameless beggar country full of liars, hypocrites, beaters of women and children and animals and the weak, brazen rapists and unpunished murderers, torturers who probably dissolved his father’s body in a drum of acid in Lahore Fort, delusional morons and fools who wanted independence from the British and a country of their own, but who now can’t wait to leave it, emigrate, emigrate, emigrate to Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, New Zealand, Sweden, South Africa, South Korea, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Chile, Hong Kong, Holland, Spain, Italy, France, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere but Pakistan, they can’t wait to get out of there, having reduced the country to a wasteland, their very own caliphate of rubble. Like a malevolent god the man pours his laughter into Mikal, his skin becoming red as he laughs, sweat welling from his brow, and even though he makes Mikal relive every shame, indignity, humiliation, dishonour, defeat and disgrace he has ever experienced in his twenty years, Mikal begins to whisper back at him now: ‘What about you? What about you? what about you what about you …’ He struggles against the chain and begins to shout. ‘What about the part you played in it?’ He wishes he knew how to say it in English. If I agree with you that what you say is true, would you agree that your country played a part in ruining mine, however small? He wonders if the man is real, despite the fact that his laugh is continuing to swell in the air of the room, roaring like a giant wave getting louder as it encircles his head. He remembers how after they had interrogated a prisoner for twenty-nine consecutive hours he was brought back to the cage hallucinating, was seeing people and things that were not there. And then suddenly the light goes off and the laughter stops, nothing in the room but his own breathing. The pain in his arms is so intense it is screaming at him in a real voice, using human words.