The Prince of Bagram Prison (19 page)

“There are many boys here. Many who come and go. It will be difficult, I think. You can tell me how he looks?”

Manar shook her head. “I would know him if I saw him,” she said, not certain whether she believed this.

There must have been other women like Manar who had come asking the same question, who had said this very same thing, for the boy suddenly seemed to understand. “Sister,” he said, turning back toward the hallway and motioning for Manar to follow. “There is something you must see.”

W
E ARE BOTH SAFELY ACROSS
and well cared for, thanks be to Allah and our new friends here in Spain,
Jamal had written on a postcard sometime after his arrival in Algeciras. It was the only letter he had ever posted in his life, and he had needed the help of one of Abdullah's older boys. What he wrote was a lie, and he knew it. But he also knew it was what those he'd left behind were waiting to hear. Not only that their friends were safe but that the way out existed for them as well. Jamal did not want to be the one to tell them otherwise. Besides, the truth was too humiliating to convey.

In fact, he had not seen Nordine for over a month, since they'd separated from each other in Tangier. The journey north had taken them nearly a week, begging or stealing rides, walking a good portion of the way, and they were desperate and starving long before they arrived in Tangier. Jamal had wanted to turn back before they even reached the city, but Nordine had insisted that they continue on.

“You are always imagining the worst, little brother,” he'd chided Jamal. “We are so close now. What could go wrong?”

A lifetime of hustling to survive at the orphanage had done little to prepare either of the boys for the bottleneck of desperate humanity they encountered in Tangier. All Africa appeared to have converged on the city, all with the same suicidal purpose in mind—that of crossing the narrow yet deadly strip of water that stood between them and the European continent.

On the spectrum of hunger, there is really only one moment that matters: the instant when one's loyalty shifts irrevocably from pride to survival. For Jamal, that moment came on his fifth night in Tangier, when, while hustling tourists on the street outside the CTM bus station, he and Nordine unknowingly infringed upon the territory of some older boys and were beaten almost unconscious for their mistake. Later, as they huddled in the doorway of a mosque in the
ville nouvelle,
Jamal realized that if he didn't eat soon he would lose all will to do so, and would eventually die.

The next morning, while Nordine slept, Jamal left his friend and walked up into the old city, to a café on the Petit Socco, where, he had noticed, a certain kind of European man liked to take his morning coffee. Two hours later, in a one-room flat overlooking the Church of the Immaculate Conception, in return for a fifty-dinar note, he had done with his body things that, just a few days earlier, he would have deemed unthinkable.

In this way he had survived.

T
HE MORNING WAS BRIGHT
, the breeze cool, even here, miles from the sea, among the city's derelict factories and sprawling apartment blocks. It was a day Jamal had imagined many times. The hero's return. Money in his pocket and more on the way. Lambs for the slaughter. A feast in the courtyard. A flurry of candy and sweets. And now here he was, coming back not as a prince but as a beggar.

Encumbered by the weight of his shame, Jamal paused briefly in the shadow of the orphanage and contemplated the place from which he had fled so many years ago. There was the second-floor window, five from the front, from which he had seen the world for his first fifteen years. And there, beneath it, the director's office, where Jamal had had his first lessons in humiliation. He told himself that it should not have been this way. But it was.

In his gut he wanted to run, and for a moment he considered doing so. Then the image of the dead American sprawled across the bed at the hotel in Lavapiés came back to him. He heard the man's voice once again from the bottom of the stairs, that awkward Arabic that he would never be able to forget.
We're your friends, Jamal.

No, he thought, moving forward toward the gate, with its weathered inscription—“Ain Chock Charity House”—it should not have been this way. But surely if there was one place the Americans would not think to look it was here.

The courtyard of Ain Chock had always been home to a rambling squatters' camp. The home was not officially allowed to keep boys after they reached the age of sixteen, but prospects were few and many boys chose to stay on nonetheless, living off the scraps of the orphanage's scraps, squeezing what little they could out of the younger boys in exchange for certain protections. But the settlement had grown considerably in the years since Jamal had left. It now had the look of something permanent, more like the city's larger bidonvilles than the haphazard collection of tarps and boxes it had once been.

Just inside the gate, Jamal was greeted by an old woman in a stained cotton djellaba. “Brother,” she rasped, holding out her withered hand and rocking forward on mere stumps of legs.

Not just lame but blind, he thought, watching the gray orbs of her eyes. He reached into his pocket, letting the coins he carried jangle against each other.

“
Teta,
” he crooned affectionately.
Grandma.
“What has happened here? Where have all these people come from?”

“Where else would you have us go?”

“But the director,” Jamal asked. “He allows you to stay?”

“Haven't you heard, brother? There is no director now.”

“And the boys?” In coming back to the orphanage, Jamal had foolishly assumed that he would take up the thread of his old life. He could see now that this would be impossible. And yet he knew that he would not survive on his own.

The woman shrugged. “Some are here still, but many have gone. Many are dead.”

“There was a widow who worked in the kitchen,” Jamal said, remembering the small kindnesses the cook had shown him. “Her name was Rachida.”

Another shrug, this gesture more final than the last. She had told him everything she knew.

Jamal took a euro coin from his pocket and slipped it into her outstretched palm. “
As-salamu alaykum,
” he told her.
Peace be upon you.

She ran her weathered thumb across the strange money, then closed her fingers around it. “
As-saluma alaykum
,
wa rahmatullahi.
”
And mercy as well.

“
Wa rahmatullahi,
” Jamal agreed, then started forward into the courtyard.

S
HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
, Manar thought, looking at the faces on the wall in front of her, feeling the suffocating grip of her own failure. She should have been certain, should have been able to point to each photograph and say with confidence: mine, not mine. A real mother would have been able to do this, but she could not.

In each boy, in each set of features, Manar could see both her own child and the impossibility of such an idea. If only she could smell them, she told herself. If only she could push each brown lock of hair aside until she found the single blessed mark. Then she would know.

“Who are they?” she asked her young guide.

“The ones who have gone,” he said.

Manar was puzzled. “Gone where?”

The boy made a skyward gesture. For a moment Manar thought that this was his way of telling her they had died.

“To the North,” he said at last.

“To Europe, you mean?”

The boy nodded with enthusiasm. “In a year or so, I will go, too.”

“It's dangerous,” Manar warned him. “You know that, don't you?”

But the boy only shrugged.

Manar took a deep breath and let her eyes wander back over the faded photographs. Many had messages scrawled on them, parting words of encouragement for those left behind, or inside jokes—the bravado of children whose sense of humor appeared miraculously, unfathomably intact.

And how many of them, Manar wondered as she took in the lopsided grins and unnaturally old eyes, had made it? A few, if they were lucky. A number, out of the wall full of photographs, so small that Manar could no doubt count it on her fingers.

“Do any of them ever come back?” she asked.

The boy laughed at the absurdity of this idea. “Why, sister? Why would they come back?”

J
AMAL STOPPED IN THE DOORWAY
and peered into the building's dark interior, letting his eyes adjust to the sudden change in light. The stench from inside was worse than he remembered, the smell utterly human in its depravity. He could not bring himself to go inside.

Five years of degradations, he thought, suddenly exhausted, unable to go on. Five years of whoring himself in one way or another, of allowing himself to be swept across three continents. And now here he was, a stranger in the place that had once been his home.

He felt as he had that night in Tangier, caught between despair and self-preservation, only this time he feared he would not have the strength to act. He put his hand in his pocket and felt what remained of the money the American had given him, calculating just how long it would last, how many more days of food and shelter he could buy. Three, maybe four, he decided. And then what? He did not think he would be able to bring himself to do what was necessary.

“Jamal?”

The voice, almost familiar, came from behind him. Jamal turned to see two young men, one in a soccer jersey and track pants, the other in blue jeans and a worn leather jacket.

The man in the soccer jersey motioned to his chest. “It's Adil.”

“Adil?” Jamal squinted, trying to match the boyish features he remembered to the adult who now stood before him. “The professor!” he exclaimed. It was a nickname Adil had earned by being the smartest of the boys.

Adil came forward and put his arms around Jamal.

“What are you doing here?” Jamal asked after they had embraced.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Yes,” Jamal conceded. “But I asked you first.”

Adil smiled warmly. “God willing, it is only temporary. I will finish university at the end of this year. But for now this place is cheaper than the dorms. And you? I thought we would not see you again.” And then, in an aside to his companion, “Jamal made the crossing to Spain several years ago.”

The young man in the leather jacket nodded. It was a gesture not of understanding but of scorn. “Did you get tired of the European women?” he sneered.

“Mahjoub is from Rabat,” Adil said, as if this explained everything, and in a way it did.

Jamal nodded. He had known more than his share of Mahjoubs in his life, and he understood everything he needed to about the young man: namely, that he was not to be trusted.

They stood there awkwardly for a moment, exchanging wary glances, then Adil clamped his arm around Jamal's shoulder once again. “But you must be hungry,” he said. “Come, we will find you something to eat.”

M
ANAR SLIPPED THE TWO PROMISED COINS
into the boy's hand and watched him scamper away down the long corridor. Past his retreating figure, three sun-smeared shapes, like figures on an Impressionist's canvas, were visible in the bright rectangle of the doorway.

Breathing through her mouth, picking her way around the rafts of debris, Manar moved forward toward the promise of daylight.
It is for the best, sister.
She could hear the old woman again.
If your son was at Ain Chock, it is better not to know.

The boy reached the doorway and stopped briefly to look back at Manar before disappearing into the glare of the courtyard. A survivor, she told herself, wondering if the same was true of her son. If he was, his instincts would have had to come from someone other than her. She had known strong people, and she knew with certainty that she was not one of them.

Her guide slipped away and Manar saw the three figures turn as if to go, one slightly apart from the others. For an instant, just an instant, it was as if Manar's heart had been yanked violently from her body. He turned and the gesture did not belong to the figure before her in the courtyard but to Yusuf. And in this single, ordinary movement Manar was momentarily reconciled with everything from which she had been separated.

In that instant it was Yusuf's torso in the doorway, his shoulders slumping slightly forward as if burdened by some unseen load. Yusuf as he had been so many times in their tiny borrowed flat near the university. As he had been that last time, when she had wished to tell him about the child but hadn't.

“Wait!” she called out, but the figures were already gone.

She stumbled forward, moving as quickly as possible. By the time she managed to reach the doorway, the three had disappeared altogether and she was no longer certain of what she had seen.

Perhaps there had been nothing, she told herself as she stood there blinking in the light, scanning the chaos of the courtyard, the collapsing façades and the alleys twisting back into darkness. Perhaps, in her desperation to find something, she had imagined it all. In fact, she knew. There could be no other answer.