The Dark Side of Love (93 page)

Anyone who knew a subject gave lectures on it, and the others, whatever their own education, were the students and could learn anything. In Farid's hut, they had lectures on history, religion, chemistry, car repairs, nutrition, first aid, philosophy, chess, backgammon, card games, and geography. In another hut a famous expert lectured on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, in yet another there was an authority on Persian miniatures. Professors and men of letters in the hut next to the kitchen taught the works of Shakespeare, Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Pablo Neruda. The prisoners were moved to tears by Gorki's
Mother
, and laughed heartily at the books of the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.

Some of the men told the stories of Tolstoy's novels, and recited Nazim Hikmet's poems on freedom. A young student from Hut 4 knew the plots of several novels by Balzac. An older man presented Scheherazade's tales from the
Thousand and One Nights
in a lively, graphic style that captivated his audience.

One of the most brilliant storytellers among them was a criminal, a former pimp and multiple murderer. He had landed in this camp because one of his victims was a high-ranking secret service officer who was his competitor in Damascus.

Farid was astonished by this man, whose behaviour to the other inmates of the camp was always charming. He was a fanatical film buff who had spent most of his time in the cinema in his days as
a pimp; he used to go from cinema to cinema in Damascus, from morning to early evening, and then he took his stable of three whores out to eat and then cashed up his accounts that night. Sometimes he had paid a cinema proprietor for all the seats in the place, asking the owner to show
Casablanca
or
Gone With the Wind
just for him, when he sat in the exact middle of the auditorium and sobbed like a desolate child at the dramatic scenes.

Because he had seen all the films so often he was able to perform them in the camp, complete with dialogue, mimicry, gestures, and sound effects. He had a divine voice, and used it to imitate up to ten characters and an endless variety of natural noises. His audience could feel the heat and dust of Westerns, or dance and sing with Charlie Chaplin in
The Gold Rush
.

There were evenings of satire, song, and recitations, but serial stories were the most popular of all. Many prisoners could spin out a single story for twenty evenings, some even for fifty, without ever losing the thread.

The random transfer of prisoners from hut to hut, a systematic method of punishment in the camp to prevent them from forming friendship, was all to the good for the University of Job, because it brought variety into the cultural programme.

Two journalists started the first and probably the only paperless magazine in the world. They called it
The Rose of Jericho
, because that desert plant curls its dry stems into a ball and rolls back and forth over the steppes, dry and lifeless, until the rains come, when it revives and turns green again.

There were leading articles, interviews, news stories, readers' letters and editorial answers, satire, caricatures, poetry, but all orally transmitted. And the prisoners in Hut 9, where
The Rose
was published, enjoyed it page by page.

Some men with particularly good memories had the job of learning
the newspaper by heart. Then they could quote from the latest edition to prisoners from other huts, who in turn passed sections of it on. Not a week went by without more than ten different copies of the same edition being in circulation.

Two former radio presenters put on a satirical radio programme, calling their station “Radio Earth Closet”. The programme went out at night, and contained news, advice, quizzes, and songs.

One of the presenters was a Palestinian, the other a communist from Damascus, with whom Farid quickly made friends. Torture had left this man blind in his right eye. The two presenters collected news all day. Some of the soldiers would tell them what they had read in the daily papers. Then, in the silence of the night, the two men broadcast the news to the sky. It was in this way that Farid learned about the civil war in the Congo, the suicide of the American writer Ernest Hemingway, and the bombing attacks in Paris linked to the Algerian war.

Of course there were even more punishments next day, even more pointless hard labour, but that was not what mattered.

Some time around the end of December 1960, Captain Hamdi couldn't help but notice that his regime of torture and humiliation was getting him nowhere. He was left with a choice between murder or toleration. He was not allowed to murder his prisoners, so he decided to tolerate their apparently harmless eccentricities, never realizing that he had suffered a severe setback.

At the end of January the first rumours of the imminent collapse of the union with Egypt reached the camp. A considerable amount of discontent against their Egyptian superiors had built up among the Syrian army officers. The prisoners laughed out loud when they heard the report on Captain Hamdi broadcast by Radio Earth Closet; Hamdi, it said, had only just noticed that his bosses in Damascus were Egyptians to a man.

But by now Hamdi had far more to worry about than the prisoners
guessed. For the first time he was asking himself what would happen later. His prisoners included not only many scholars and influential civilians, but more than fifty army officers from all parts of the country, including two generals. These were men who had been discharged for sympathizing with the communists or the Muslim Brotherhood, and had ended up in Gahan.

He decided to use torture only in extreme cases in future, and gave his men a vague explanation to account for this sudden change of policy. By the middle of February torture had been practically discontinued at Gahan. Even Abu Satur wasn't allowed to whip prisoners any more, and he went around the camp looking dazed. He asked for a transfer, but Captain Hamdi pretended not to hear him, and consoled him by saying that they'd have to wait and see.

As time went on Abu Satur turned yellow in the face. He was said to have hepatitis, and soon after that he disappeared.

Rumours were rife: it was said that there had been a severe crisis in Damascus, with the dismissal of increasing numbers of high-ranking Syrian politicians from their posts. The prisoners celebrated such rumours as a victory over Hamdi, and threw themselves into yet more cultural activities. A number of the criminal fraternity began learning to write.

In the middle of all this good news, however, came one report that struck Farid to the heart. A government newspaper of early December, stolen from the captain's office, said on the front page that President Satlan had praised the USSR for saying nothing in condemnation of the wave of arrests which was systematically destroying the Communist Parties of Egypt and Syria. For the first time in weeks, there was disagreement among the camp inmates again. Three high-up Communist Party functionaries tried to explain away the silence from Russia as a wise move; everyone else deplored it. The three talked wordily on about tactics that were necessary if socialism was to continue its victorious progress around the world.

Farid couldn't get his head around that. He lay awake at night, wondering what kind of socialism it was whose superpower knuckled under to a small-time dictator, leaving its own supporters to fend for themselves. Did it really want to change the world for the better?

A report in an anti-Satlan Lebanese newspaper set off the next quarrel in the camp. It had been smuggled in from Beirut in mid-January, and described an international campaign for the freedom of Basil Omani, who was said to be mortally sick.

Basil Osmani was the highest communist functionary ever to fall into the net of the Syrian secret service. The first General Secretary of the Party, Khalid Malis, had escaped the police and was now in Moscow, where he had to keep his mouth shut, since the Russians were linked to Satlan by the arms trade, the building of the Aswan Dam, and other major but secret projects which they didn't want spoiled by an asylum seeker.

The second in command, Basil Osmani, had been in Hut 7 of the Gahan prison camp. He was treated with special courtesy by the camp commandant, Captain Hamdi, out of fear rather than respect, for his prisoner was one of the Osmani clan, which owned great tracts of land and whole villages on the Euphrates. Hamdi himself came from one of those villages, and his ancestors had always been serfs of the Osmanis. After forty years, his father had risen to the point where he could lease a small farm from the clan. Hamdi was absolutely convinced that the Arab clans would survive all political parties and all states, so he considered himself the sheikh of the camp and treated Basil Osmani as a sheikh of equally high birth who just happened to be visiting him.

Farid had disliked Osmani from the first. The functionary had been jovial when they met, like a sheikh to his children, authoritarian and arrogant – a patriarch from the country facing a self-confident young man from the city.

His family had more or less openly sent Osmani plenty of money in the camp, and he used it to bribe the guards and soldiers and to lavish presents on Commandant Hamdi. The other inmates of his hut, which the prisoners nicknamed “The Euphrates”, did not go short of food, cigarettes, and medicaments.

But now this Lebanese newspaper had come to light, saying that the whole world was demanding the immediate liberation of Basil
Osmani, who was being held in the camp at Tad and severely mistreated. He had a weak heart, said the paper, and doctors said that Osmani was on the point of death.

Not a word about the murders that really had been committed in the camps. Nothing about the beatings given to the prisoners by the guards when they arrived, and certainly nothing about torture and inhuman degradations. The great pro-Osmani campaign was taken up in Western Europe. Churches, trade unions, political parties and intellectuals from Paris to London were firmly backing the cause of the Syrian functionary who was said to be mortally sick. But he was not in the death camp of Tad, he was in Gahan, enjoying the best of health, although he had put on rather too much weight for lack of exercise.

This news report with all its false claims hurt, and when Farid cautiously asked Osmani how such lies had arisen, he laughed smugly. “Young Comrade, our class enemy tells lies all the time. We have to pick up their weapons and turn those weapons against them ourselves.”

Farid felt like throwing up. When Radio Earth Closet courteously corrected the newspaper report that evening, congratulating the functionary on his present state of good health, Osmani was furious. Immediately after that, it was clear that the witty radio reporter was being ostracized by the communist faithful in the camp. One man whispered to Farid, “I'd advise you to keep away from that viper. He's a Trotskyite.” Such an accusation amounted to a death sentence in the Communist Party.

“And I would advise you,” replied Farid, “to use your brain and not your backside when you have something to say.”

Next day Farid himself was taken away and put in solitary confinement for two weeks. It may be mere coincidence, he thought, but if so then it was mere coincidence that he hated Basil Osmani.

Solitary confinement wore you down. The commandant had his most unpleasant soldiers and guards keeping watch on you. To overcome the absence of sound, which filled his brain with a strange void, Farid began constructing chemical reactions in his head. He carried out processes synthesizing simple elements into complex compounds, and once he had achieved a substance he gave it a name and then, three days later, tried dismantling it again step by step, until he was back with the simple elements.

The bucket for faeces and urine sometimes wasn't taken away for days, on purpose, and then the isolation cell stank horribly. And in the midst of this wretchedness, Farid's body asserted itself. When he closed his eyes he had erotic dreams. He wondered where his mind found these fantasies.

In the camp all days were alike, in solitary confinement even the time of day was lost in everlasting darkness, but it must have been mid-April when a soldier – a Damascene, judging by his accent – said that Farid's friends (he meant the Russians) had sent a man called Gagarin flying around the earth. Farid didn't understand. But the soldier was talkative that day, and told him about a party to which Osmani had invited all the officers, guards, and soldiers. They had enjoyed a great many delicacies from Damascus in his hut: roast meat, pistachios, fruit. But the soldier, he said, had drunk too much, and his head was still spinning. “Gagarin went around the world in a rocket, I do it with alcohol,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

When Farid was let out of solitary confinement again, the radio presenter had disappeared.