Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

And that is in fact exactly what I saw: those men, the majority of whom had paunches and never did so much as break into a run, walked and strutted about slowly, smoking and quaffing beer. If the ball happened to come near one of them or they happened to collide with it by mistake, they would either get rid of it or, as happened most of the time, pass it to one of the opposite team in a scandalously obvious way. Some of them even clustered near the other team’s goal. Even if the ball had been presented to them on a golden platter, they would have simply toyed with it for a while, then got rid of it somewhere far from the goal itself. Meanwhile, a newspaper correspondent kept yelling into a megaphone, something that had been mostly inaudible up till now; he was spouting a lot of stuff that made no sense, but — by God! — it had not the slightest connection with the game.

With the sweat pouring off me from the heat and my own emotions, I rushed over to the referee — the bitch — who had moved over to the sideline and was lounging there smoking and showing off her stunning backside. She seemed to have forgotten what she was supposed to be doing and had either lost or swallowed her whistle. I told her about the way the other team had committed so many infractions and violent assaults on our players. She proceeded to twist the tie that I had forgotten to take off, slapped me on the head, and told me (as I understood from the French) that I was to get my stinking body out of her sight and take over from the goalkeeper who had fallen asleep in our goal. Failing that, she would issue a severe report against me, documenting my defiant attitude and contravention of the rules of the game.

I now headed straight for the goal, where I did my best to staunch the bleeding from the at least thirty wounds and cuts that the man in the goal had received. Once I had made sure that he was still alive, I took up position between the two goal posts, ready to fend off attacks. I saved two goals, but managed to lose my rubber sandals, which by now were in shreds. However, the third shot, kicked from very close range and with all the force of a rocket, hit me square in the face. I collapsed to the ground, feeling dizzy. Some of their players now rushed over and started poking fun at me because the ball had gone in. They kept on patting their backsides and stomachs in clownish gestures.

With a few deep breaths I managed to recover somewhat and once again stood in the goal, but without any shoes. I watched as those of my teammates who were still on their feet would receive a pass but be prevented from passing the ball on. Instead, they would be felled to the ground. This time, one of the other team got hold of the ball through sheer violence and moved in my direction. He stopped about a meter away from me.

“With this shot,” he threatened, “I’m going to fuck you! Here’s a finger to your mother’s religion!”

I looked at his face.

“Ilyas,” I yelled. “By God, you’re Ilyas! How are you, my friend?”

“No, I’m ‘Abbas ibn Firnas!” he replied.*

He now proceeded to do some clownish stunts, his hope being that, by kicking the ball between my legs, he could make me look stupid. But, to save face, I flung myself at the ball and managed to stop it going into the net. I stood up with the ball in my hands. He now hit me so hard that I fell to the ground, then shoved both me and the ball into the net. He started kicking me hard enough that I eventually lost consciousness.

My sunny cell!

Here I lie, after being subjected to that slugfest yesterday that masqueraded as a soccer game. I’m stretched out under the bedcover, doing my best to keep my bruises and wounds to myself, and occasionally taking a bite from the meager portion of food on the table. I keep turning over my current situation in my mind and thinking about what might happen next. That is the way I stayed until my eyes eventually surrendered to a deep but restless sleep.

I was jolted awake by the sounds of loud footsteps and started to panic. The gigantic guard appeared, pointing the wavering beam of his flashlight in my direction. Forcing me to get up, he pushed me towards the door of my cell. I was eager to chat with him and so I asked where we were going, sharing with him my opinion that the weather was very nice. I had hardly opened my mouth before he showed me his semidetached tongue and pointed to his ears as a way of showing me that he was both deaf and dumb. When the air turned moist and foul-smelling, I assumed that we were now in some kind of cavern where foul and obscure purposes were being fulfilled. My intuition was confirmed when the guard made me sit in a corner alongside a row of other people. Now I was stunned to be confronted with a scene that beggars description. There was this female ghoul about whose barbaric cruelty I had heard so much, the woman I had seen close up at yesterday’s soccer game. This time, she was semi-naked, pouring with sweat and devoting herself to torturing a man strung up by his feet. She was beating him savagely and hurling all sorts of foul abuse at him as he hung there upside down — disgusting expressions peppered with phlegm-encrusted spit. She kept raking his skin with a sharp brass instrument that tore away at his body and made it bleed profusely.

Behind her stood three armed guards who looked totally repulsed by the whole thing. She kept on repeating the same question over and over again.

“What I want is the names of the people in your sleeper cell.”

One of the guards came up to her and whispered in her ear. At that she threw a fit.

“These cowards are all one and the same,” she yelled in French. “Once you get serious with them, they all faint. Take this wreck back to his cell. Tomorrow, by all that’s holy, he’s going to talk.”

She indicated to the gigantic guard to take him away and sank into her chair, panting and exhausted.

For a few leaden moments I found myself looking around in sheer panic, not least because I and the other man with me could hear the groans and screams emitted by prisoners in neighboring rooms, along with the barking of dogs. Once things had died down a bit and the woman had had a chance to recover, she yelled: “Next one!” (the French “ au suivant ” echoing the title of a Jacques Brel song in which a prostitute is calling in her customers who are waiting in the hallway). But in Mama Ghula’s case the same phrase implied the next person to be tortured. A guard pointed his finger at me and thrust a bowl in my face; it was filled with lentils and butter paste, all mixed in with bits of sausage and bits of meat of indeterminate kind. A genuinely satanic brew — may God never inflict it on anyone! The guard cautioned me that I had to kneel down and consume the entire contents of the bowl immediately. He explained to me that his boss would never deal with me unless and until my stomach was completely full. I had no option but to do as he said, although, once I had finished it, I plucked up enough courage to ask him what kind of meat I had just swallowed.

“Pork,” he told me with a dry laugh, “pig-meat. That’s all pigs like you get to eat here, pig-meat mixed with salt sea-water. Next time you come, if you’ve been stubborn, it’ll be mixed with the piss of his excellency the director and his wonderful assistant in whose presence you happen to be at this moment. .”

“But my religion,” I interrupted, “forbids me to eat pork.”

“Your religion, you say?!” he replied. “God curse your mother’s religion! If you belonged to a religion, we wouldn’t be seeing your dirty face here. But enough nonsense. Get up, the boss is waiting for you!”

I thrust my fingers down my throat, hoping to make myself vomit, but I failed. With that I stood up and went over to the woman. I gave her a searing look, intending to save face.