The Dark Side of Love (114 page)

The prisoners had hardly arrived before armed soldiers followed and took up their position at the top of the ravine. The NCOs sat under large sun umbrellas and kept watch from that vantage point. Down in the basalt ravine there were three umbrellas for the guards too.

As soon as the sun was out the black rock quickly warmed up, and the higher it rose the more unbearable the heat became. “No one's ever managed to escape from here,” whispered one of the prisoners when he saw Farid's questioning glance.

Large pieces of rock had to be broken out with hammers and iron bars, then reduced to gravel, and pushed all the way up again in rusty wheelbarrows. It was dangerous work, for the fractures in the basalt were as sharp as razor blades. Splinters stuck up everywhere, piercing the prisoners' bad footwear. By midday the entire place was a huge oven, and the air flickered with heat. The guards kept whipping the prisoners for no reason. It was hell on earth. Everything blurred before Farid's eyes, and his movements were purely mechanical.

At some point they could break for half an hour, but they got nothing to eat. The guards just distributed water, half a litre for everyone. The water tasted of rubber, but it quenched the fire in Farid's throat.

His hands hurt. As the day wore on he couldn't feel his feet any more. He was feverish that night. One of the prisoners gave him a bitter-tasting pill that he had taken from a hiding place. It was supposed to bring his temperature down, but after an hour he felt so bad that his neighbours called the guards. They just grinned derisively. “If he snuffs it we'll save on his food. But rats don't die that easily.”

Farid threw up several times. His temples were thudding and there was a roaring in his ears. Only at dawn, exhausted, did he fall asleep. When he woke up he was alone in the hut. He heard someone weeping, and another man comforting him.

Farid was sweating. He felt cold inside, and he had stomach cramps. He threw up again; his fellow prisoners had left a bucket beside him. All he vomited was yellow, bitter fluid.

Garasi stopped briefly by the entrance to the hut. “That dog will die soon. He has sunstroke, he's spitting blood,” said the man with the commandant.

“Oh, they don't die. The Devil himself got their mothers pregnant. I'll bet you this one's only playing sick. If he's not in the quarry tomorrow bring him to me, and I'll soon get him on his feet again.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the other man. Farid lay motionless under his blanket. Had he really been spitting blood? He began to feel his life would end here in this camp, and he longed so much for Rana. He began shedding tears under the blanket.

Around midday, in his sleep, he heard a quiet knock. He woke up. There was a man behind the grating. He wore a soldier's uniform, but no cap. The man beckoned him over and pushed a can through the grating. “Here, this is for you. Eat it and then put the can down close inside the grating,” he said briefly, and went away.

The soldier's face was scarred, but even the scars couldn't hide its kindness. Farid picked up the can. The hot soup tasted good. It was made of carrots and potatoes.

He ate quickly, wrapped in his blanket, and then put the can down beside the grating. When he woke up again hours later, it had gone.

In the evening the others came back, worn and weary, but as soon as they were sitting down they began to laugh and crack jokes about Garasi the bulldog. When Farid told the old communist Zachariah about the soldier and the soup, he smiled. “That's not a soldier, that's our guardian angel Salih. He's been in here forever. He killed seven men in a single evening,” he added, passing the side of his hand across his throat to show how.

Next morning Farid woke just as dawn was approaching. He felt weak. In the past, early morning had his favourite time of day. He liked to be alone with the silence, and hadn't slept more than six hours a night since he was ten. Sometimes he was up at four, listening to the world
as it woke. He had discovered that of all times of day, early morning dawn retained its innocence best. It was as still as it had been ten thousand years ago: the moment of calm before the storm.

Ever since he fell in love with Rana, his first thought in the morning had been for her. It was a time when he could talk to her, even though, as she admitted with some shame, she was still fast asleep then.

Early morning in the camp was grey and mute, stinking of sewers and tasting bitter like rotten teeth. It was the end of rest and the beginning of torment. Water was laid on in the huts for only an hour in the early morning, and without previous warning. So as not to lose a drop, the prisoners always stood three large plastic buckets under the taps in the washbasin the evening before. All other available buckets, bowls, and mugs stood very close, for the water flowed at a different pressure every day, and sometimes the guards forgot to turn it off again. On such days the prisoners drank all they wanted and rejoiced, splashing each other like children and fooling around.

Farid sat up and drew his blanket around his shoulders. He still felt shaky on his legs, but he wasn't so dizzy now. He felt hungry, always a sign that he was getting better.

He tried to stand up, but then he felt sick again and dropped back on his mat. He didn't wake again until midday. The camp was empty; Garasi seemed to have forgotten him. He left Farid alone for the next three or four weeks. During that time he was trying hard to catch some very big fish from the ranks of the communists and the Muslim Brotherhood in his net. And his brutality and the hopelessness of life in the huts soon brought him success. At the end of September about ten Muslim Brothers and as many communists broke, signed their recantations, sang hymns of praise to the government, and were released. Garasi was in an excellent temper for a few days, for the Interior Minister had praised him.

The criminal fraternity formed a state of their own in the camp, with rulers, servants, an upper class and a lower class, winners and losers. There were about three hundred of them, including over sixty young offenders.

They ran a market that functioned by the same laws of supply and demand as markets in the outside world. Anything could be ordered, from food and clothing to medicaments, hashish, and liquor. Services of all kinds were on offer too, from working in the basalt quarry in another prisoner's place to administering physical punishment, strictly observing those humiliations, injuries, and broken bones that had been ordered. Everything had its exact price.

The criminal state worked efficiently and without any bureaucracy. Orders were taken and carried out with few words; accounts were paid without a murmur. Bargains were sealed with your word of honour, and breaking your word was harshly punished. The overlord of this state was a long-stay resident in the hospital, which was known to the prisoners as the Mafia Lodgings. His name was Milhelm Badri, and he was very tall. He seldom spoke; words emerged from his mouth with difficulty, every one of them a forceps delivery. His eyes were always clouded, looking past his interlocutors into space. They reminded Farid of the eyes of dead fish.

Milhelm's world was not our five continents but this specially subdivided camp, and he had been in it for a very long time. Other groups of prisoners formed the neighbouring states of his domain. He called communists Russians, the Muslim Brothers Saudis, the radicals Cubans, the Satlanists Egyptians, but the criminals were “my men ”.

He paid wages and gave presents to his supporters on religious festivals. Sometimes it was only a packet of bad cigarettes, but for his subjects they meant a great deal, particularly as other prisoners got nothing at all.

Garasi harassed all the other prisoners without distinction, but he spared the criminals. As he saw it, they were already well-disciplined members of his flock, and he had regarded Milhelm as a trusty
sheepdog for twenty years. The fact that he in turn often obeyed Milhelm's orders was in the nature of the relationship between a dog and his master.

Farid was on the way to the kitchen when two notorious thugs jostled him. They were crooks ready to beat up anyone for a cigarette. Farid ran to safety in the kitchen as fast as he could, but he knew they were waiting outside. It seemed like someone's order.

And he had been looking forward to today. He liked being on kitchen duty, where the agreeable Samih was responsible for everything. Samih sensed Farid's nervousness when it was time for him to carry the food out. At first Farid hesitated, then he told him about the two thugs outside the door.

“We'll see about that,” said Samih calmly, and shouted through the door between the kitchen and the bakery for someone called Darwish. In came a hulk of a man with a bare, hairy torso. His chest was sprinkled with tattoos and scars, and several chunks of silver hung from a heavy chain around his neck, clashing noisily as they moved. A powerful colossus. Samih explained about the two characters lying in wait.

“So who's this laddie?” asked Darwish, without deigning even to look at Farid. His voice conveyed morose displeasure, as if he had been interrupted in important work for no good reason.

“A decent man,” said Samih briefly.

“Then let's take a look,” grunted the hulk, and watched Farid picking up two of the thirty-two buckets of soup that he would have to carry to the huts. He hadn't gone three paces before the two thugs emerged from the shadows. He knew they couldn't have been standing so close to the kitchen for a second unnoticed by the guards. You were severely punished for being outside the huts without permission. The two thugs grinned at him, and Farid saw the glint of something that might be a knife or a screwdriver in one man's hand.

“Stop!” That was Darwish, or more accurately it was a thunderbolt that could speak Arabic. Farid stopped dead. So did the two thugs.

“Keep on walking, what's this to do with you? The soup will be getting cold,” Darwish told Farid, passing him and seizing the two thugs, who suddenly looked pitifully weedy. When Farid put the buckets down beside the guard in Hut 1 and turned back, the thugs were lying on the ground.

He picked up the next two buckets in the kitchen, and as he set off again he saw Darwish knocking the two men's heads together. There was a frightful sound as they crashed together. Farid handed over the buckets and went back. Now they were on their knees, begging for mercy.

“Take a good look at my friend here,” said Darwish. “And whenever you set eyes on him, think of yours truly. Do we understand each other?”

When Farid was on his way with the buckets for the third time, the hulking figure stopped him and put out his hand. It was holding a cobbler's knife. “Here,” he said, “one of those guys was very keen to give you this. It could be useful, but hide it well.” Then he set off back to the bakery. Farid delivered all the other buckets of soup. Then he had to wheel a handcart of bread from the bakery to the huts. Meanwhile, Darwish was silently drinking his tea. When Farid was through with the buckets, he sat down on a stool in the bakery. His shift left him on duty until midnight.

Darwish pushed a glass over to him. “So what did you do to them, laddie?” he asked quietly. “Those are dangerous bastards.”

“Nothing. I guess someone was paying them,” Farid replied. However, he couldn't think who might be behind it.

Darwish, so Farid learned that night, was a pimp and a multiple murderer thirty-three times over. He had killed an entire criminal clan in a single day, overpowering his enemies at a wedding. The prisoners called him “Darwish with the brand”. He had a triangular mark on his forehead, with two lines roughly suggesting an X in the middle of it. As a twelve-year-old in Jordan, he had been arrested for burglary and thrown out of the country, and the police had branded him on the forehead with a red-hot iron so that he couldn't hide anywhere.

“Those Jordanians were prophets. They knew back then what a crook you'd turn out to be,” said Farid, joking with the kindly giant.

“They're assholes. They knew damn all! But what else can a man be with this mark on his face? An imam, a teacher, principal of a girls' school, eh? No, he can only be a pimp, and then no one will look at him because all that interests them is his girls' bums and breasts. That's what those assholes made me with that stamp of theirs, my boy!”

The chink of keys woke him early in the morning. He sat up, but a kick in the chest sent him flying back again.

Two guards were standing over him. He recognized the one who had kicked him, a thin little man whose skin was sprinkled with warts and wrinkles, and who was notorious for his brutality, which he used to compensate for his small stature. He was nicknamed “Crocodile”, and he liked the name. The second man was tall and even-tempered.

“Get up, son of a whore, you're to be interrogated,” shouted Crocodile. The tall guard was going to handcuff him, but the ugly gnome waved the cuffs aside. “Where's he going to run? Into the barbed wire?” He laughed. Farid staggered out of the hut. The sun outside was dazzling. He saw the prisoners staring at him, and hated this humiliation. When the occupants of Hut 3 gave him a cheerful greeting he realized that they were trying to encourage him, and waved back.

“Traitor to the Fatherland!” shouted Crocodile behind him, hitting Farid's neck with the flat of his hand so hard that he tumbled forward. He scrambled up again as fast as he could and did what he had repeatedly trained to do with the Radicals: he kicked the gnome in the balls. It all happened very fast, and before the tall guard walking ahead realized what was up Farid had punched Crocodile in the face as well. The small man doubled up with pain, holding his hands in front of his genitals.