Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

I was left on my own, waiting for the door next to me to open. Once the silence became pervasive, I could hear groans behind the door, noises that I assumed came from a wounded person being treated. However, those assumptions were shattered when my curiosity led me to take a peep through the keyhole. What I saw almost made me collapse on the floor. There was a doctor with her brassiere fully open leaning over Na‘ima, hugging her, touching her naked breasts, and giving her deep-throated kisses on her mouth, exactly the way a man does with a woman. Seeking refuge in God, I went back to my seat, not least because I heard some footsteps in the hall nearby.

The guard appeared, removed my hand constraints, handed me over to the doctor, and asked permission to leave. Of Na‘ima there was no sign! For that reason I refrained from showing any surprise by asking questions.

A middle-aged woman, foreign-looking, thin and flat-chested, with short hair and no makeup. She looked remarkably masculine. After giving me a smiling, self-assured welcome, she proceeded to conduct a variety of detailed tests with remarkable attention. With both a physical examination and through x-rays, she focused in particular on my chest and lungs and finished by taking for analysis a sample of my blood in a small capsule. She told me that Na‘ima had specifically asked her to take good care of me, and then handed me a spray and some pills with a form telling me how to administer them. She also gave me a set of empty plastic containers that she told me were a present from Na‘ima. I asked her how Na‘ima was, and she gestured to me that she was fine. With regard to our next appointment, she put her finger to her mouth and whispered: “If you start spitting blood. .” She then escorted me to the door where the guard was waiting.

Can it really be true that I was carried asleep, put down on my bed, and then slept without waking for two solid days? That at least is what a voice emerging from a neighboring cell is telling me.

It was excruciatingly difficult, but even so I managed to stand on my two feet. As I did so, I noticed they had sores festering. I staggered my way over to the door, and it was then that I realized that I was in a different cell from the one I had been in. The proof was that this cell had iron bars on the door, through which I could make out a dark corridor and walls crisscrossed with cracks and a number of damp patches. Looking to the left I could see a dark hall whose precise dimensions were unclear, while to the right I found myself face to face with a man whose primitive appearance put me in mind of cavemen. Using his cane, he handed me a full bag.

“Your worshipfulness has enjoyed a long, deep sleep,” he told me in a disgusted tone. “Meanwhile poor me has a stopped-up toilet. So empty this in yours and then give it back after you’ve washed it. There has to be. .”

I was loath to respond to his request.

“Take it, and may God have mercy on your father!” he pleaded. “It’s a whole week’s worth, and that’s a lot! One neighbor should look after another, as the saying has it. .”

I tottered over to my toilet with the bag, holding my breath as I did so. All I could find in my own cell was a narrow-diameter hole covered with a brick and a water tap. I decided that the whole thing was impossible, not only because the bag was so heavy but also because I was afraid that the stench would foul the air and expose me to disease. With that in mind, I wrapped up my bedcover and put it over all the furniture I could find. I then climbed up with the intention of emptying the bag through a skylight next to the roof. However, it fell out of my shaking hand and disappeared into some unknown vacuum.

I climbed down again and rearranged the furniture, then lay down to recover my breath. Focusing on the skylight, I kept trying to ignore the foul stench all over me and reassemble the various thoughts and ideas inside my head. I could recall that, before my profound period of sleep, I had been subjected to a concentrated period of vicious torture administered by Mama Ghula and her muscle-bound gorilla assistant. I kept seeing the lovely image of Na‘ima, both during the torture session and afterwards in the health clinic, and the Christian female doctor who had subjected me to examinations that I now preferred to regard as special techniques rather than assuming the worst about them. That was particularly the case in view of the kindness and excellent treatment that I myself had received from her.

I automatically searched my pockets, and there I found the two sprays with Fontoline written on them as prescribed for asthma sufferers. She had given them to me at the time, along with empty plastic containers that she had said were a gift to me from Na‘ima. While I was wondering about the meaning and purpose of such a gift, my neighbor asked me to give him back his bag. When I told him what had happened, he started yelling, banging the bars of his cell with his crutch, and threatening me with all kinds of perdition and misery. Many voices now rose from neighboring cells all along the hall, some of them demanding that I get the poor man his bag back and promise him a newer and cleaner one the next day, while others begged him to shut up, go to sleep, and consign my particular case to the Day of Judgment. As the din got louder and louder, my neighbor’s hysteria intensified even further. Now he claimed that I had taken his property and deprived him of it, and all for a sinister purpose I had in mind. He proceeded to pronounce all kinds of foul and disgusting oaths against me, and with each oath the prisoners all yelled “Amen.” This went on intermittently until early morning.

So here was yet another category of torture being imposed on me in this particular cellblock, one that was undoubtedly reserved for lunatics and the insane. I had either been put here on purpose, or else — as I dearly hoped and wished — by mistake or oversight.

I did not sleep for the rest of the night. Dogs kept barking, and the bedbugs were biting and sucking my blood. My only distraction was the thought of my Na‘ima, the possible significance of her gift, and the last thing that the doctor had whispered into my ear: “If you spit blood. .”

What is amazing is the way that, in spite of all the torture and suffocation I have been going through, my heart insists on beating and involving itself in life. The message that Na‘ima sent me and the signs of her hidden affection have undoubtedly played a major role in reinforcing my resistance.

As morning dawned, I sat cross-legged, observing a guard who brought me some food or walked past my cell. I obviously had to inform the authorities that I was not in the right place, scratching my skin and pulling bedbugs off, warding off the effects of asthma by spraying my mouth, and waiting. .

I was not disappointed, in that half way through the morning I heard the voices of guards by my neighbor’s cell. I crawled over to the door and used the bars to stand up. Wearing masks, they were wrapping up my neighbor in a white shroud and preparing to take him away. The other prisoners meanwhile launched into the fourfold takbir and prayers for the dead. I joined them in this religious obligation as best I could. When things had died down somewhat, I drew a guard’s attention to the fact that I had been brought here by mistake and asked to be taken back to cell 112. Raising his eyebrows in surprise and derision, he put his key in the lock, handed me my dead neighbor’s crutch, and told me to follow him. Thus it was that I tramped behind the three men who were carrying the corpse while the other prisoners poked their hands through the bars in the block and poured all kinds of abuse and curses on me.