Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

I pointed at the sky above.

“God alone created me,” I replied. “He’s the one who gave me straight teeth.”

“But Mama Ghula will make them level with the ground,” he yelled at me as the phone started ringing again.

In the secretary’s office, Miss Na‘ima thrust a piece of paper into my pocket, then took me to the door and handed me over to the guard, who immediately bound my wrist to his. He was furious and vowed a solemn oath that in future this would be the only way I would be allowed to walk anywhere with him. I paid no attention to his rants, but used my free hand to check on the piece of paper in my pocket. I was looking forward to the opportunity to open and read it once I was left alone.

Back in my cell, I searched high and low to see if there were any hidden cameras or concealed microphones and made sure that at the very least nothing like that was visible to the eye or tangible to the hand. Even so, I decided to wrap myself up in my thin wrap and huddle up to read the contents of the thin sheet of paper.

And how amazing and wonderful were the things I read!

“My dear Hamuda,

“I have sensed in you the scent of my beloved homeland, coupled with your innocence of the charges leveled against you, charges in which you have no part. There is neither time nor need for me to tell you my own story. Yours is more noteworthy because it is more painful and bloody. Take great care. Every heroic act of defiance you perform, every resistance to torture, makes you a candidate for their designs: that you become a double agent to be inserted by the Americans and other Western secret service agencies into groups that they consider to be extremist or terrorist. Every single investigator at this center and its multinational directors have one aim, to create cooperative and well-programmed agents, and then to bump them off with deadly weapons if they should happen to go astray or resist in any way. It does not matter whether or not you reveal things to them; that’s just a means whereby they can get you to be compliant and turn you into a convinced tool in their hands ready to perform specific designated functions for them. Then they have you trapped in a deadly vortex from which the only escape is death. Through suffering and bitter experience, the woman writing these lines to you is well aware of what you’re saying. I had no choice but to enter this service — God curse poverty and unemployment!! At this point I see no way of getting out of it alive. .

“So, my dear Hamuda, If you find it difficult to become what they want, a willing servant of their devilish designs, then you need to come up with a solution that may help you escape if you can do it right: you need to pretend to be crazy and sick. Shower your interrogators with every conceivable kind of ridiculous and crazy talk; threaten your torturers with your hacking cough and the risk of contagion from your illness. Maybe they’ll eventually give up and send you back to your homeland or somewhere close to it. You may well be drugged again, and, when you finally wake up, you’ll find yourself tagged with an electronic monitor and permanently at risk of a bullet to the head, which may hit or miss if you so much as tell your story to anyone else or raise a complaint against some unknown entity.

“Time is short, and the danger is immense.

“Make sure you don’t look for me or ask any questions. If you should happen to appear before this same judge again and I still happen to be in his service, bear with me in silence if I’m forced to curse you and even hit you.

“This letter that I’ve written to you places my life in your hands. By God, if it were to fall into their hands, they’d tear me limb from limb. Hide it where no one can find it or else destroy it completely. I pray that everything will eventually turn out well for you. .”

I mouthed a prayer of fervent thanks to my fellow countrywoman, who had shown me such kindness, and immediately started looking for somewhere to hide the letter. While I was searching and assessing the situation, the guard yelled to me to get my food. With that, I ripped the letter into tiny pieces, shoved it all down my throat and under my tongue, then took the broth and swallowed it all, along with everything I’d stuffed into my mouth.

“So, Na‘ima,” I told myself, “your letter’s now become its own blessing!”

Yes indeed, a blessing that I had literally ingested, so there was no need to worry about its being discovered or disseminated. I’ve nourished myself on it so that I can now gain strength from its valuable advice. Now my path ahead is illumined.

Thanks to this short message from Na‘ima — a kindred spirit who resides inside my heart and mind, I can now begin to make out some of the principal features of this cryptic labyrinth in whose infinite recesses I find myself wandering helplessly.

I’ll confess that I once had a nagging suspicion, a devilish thought, one that made me think of that message as a poisonous ruse or trap. But I rapidly squelched the very thought and put it out of my mind, not least when I thought about the woman who had risked her job and even her very life in order to offer me some help. Her behavior and the message she had given me seemed to be totally truthful and trustworthy. And, if that were not the case and the opposite were true, then there was no hope for mankind nor anything else I could lose. A life of complete futility and death itself would be one and the same.

In my inner soul and being then, Na‘ima was indeed my gleaming light and my support. Through God’s power, the road to salvation lay with my own mind and its ability to come up with some cunning ploys, things that would involve concealment, deceit, duplicity, ambiguity, and outright distortion. Fair enough, then! Let heart and slate remain open to all eventualities, adjusting to the subtleties of circumstance and situation as may be necessary — and all following the dictates of mind and insight and the intuitions of the heart.

Some of the strands in this maze were now becoming clearer. What I had to do, but very gradually, was to uncover other strands that were still hidden or obscure. However, what was now completely clear and not subject to the slightest doubt was that this secret prison of unknown location was being directed by unknown foreign agencies. The policies were being implemented by people of a variety of nationalities (I had also encountered Arabs up close). Within that system I had been programmed to go through a variety of trials and examinations, duly labeled torture, abuse, and brainwashing. Once I had managed to survive the worst of these dreadful processes through my own endurance, I would then be a candidate for one of a number of disgusting positions that were in hot demand from the spy agencies that were clearly in charge. Those positions included agents who would infiltrate opposition groups, some who would collect valuable information, others who would become hired assassins, and still others whose functions I neither knew nor could even conceive.

The designers of this fiendish scheme can undoubtedly rely on a reserve army in the millions, one that only grows larger with time and is reinforced by the unemployed and people in search of a morsel to eat. The misery of such people is a positive boon for these forces; their misfortunes become the dung and poison needed to tame whole nations and terrorize their peoples.

So here I find myself facing one branch of a worldwide network, pyramidal in structure, and with tentacles that reach in every direction to grasp all kinds of false gods in their clutches and dogs of various breeds and specialties to implement their policies.