Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

“I can’t do that,” he whispered in reply, “until my mistress allows me to do so. Otherwise my head and beard will be consigned to the devil.”

I gestured to him in other ways, but his response was to the effect that his mistress could see and hear everything, even if she were asleep; I needed to say nothing and go to sleep. With that, he fell into her arms, and they both let out a series of pants and groans. .

O Lord, what crimes and misdemeanors can I have committed against You or Your servants that I find myself being tortured and kept awake by two such utterly disgusting creatures? Now their foul deeds are followed by thunderous snoring, the female ghoul herself and her compliant, debauched midget. O Lord, are You testing me with enforced drunkenness, migraine headaches, and a veritable cascade of hallucinations and dark visions?

I remained in this state, asking my Lord about myself and projecting my pains and agonies to Him, till the first light of dawn appeared. The whole place rang with the sound of the ghoul’s voice, objecting to the smell of urine in her bed and cursing the mother and father of the perpetrator. The midget leaped out of the bed, his mouth showing through his quaking beard as he swore a solemn oath that he was not the culprit. She ordered him to send for the black guard and shoved me away after untying my bonds. She then removed the sheet, blanket, and counterpane from the bed and tore up the phony marriage contract, threatening me with a humiliating punishment at the hands of the giant black guard.

When the guard arrived, she ordered him in a gruff tone to throw me back in my hole and do with me as he wished. She described me as a drunkard and said that I was now divorced. She specifically noted that her status as an unmarried mother had made the prospect of marriage to male excrement like me seem attractive.

The guard took my crutch, picked me up, and carried me rapidly out of the room, as though he were eager to get away from his boss and her foul tongue. He stopped by the toilet and indicated to me to go in, hand him my cloak, and wash; he would come back after a while. And that is what happened. Once I had cleansed myself after such a night of debauchery, he returned, wrapped me in a warm blanket, and carried me back to my cell, where he put me down on my bed along with my crutch and two bags. He then went away, although I could see that his bloodshot eyes were welling with tears of sympathy.

My fears and hallucinations, combined with the effects of dizziness and exhaustion, all came together to make me feel so drowsy that it felt like a swoon or even entry into some black hole or deep trench.

When body and soul are both in the furthest possible stages of decline, the only stratagem available to the person so afflicted is to replicate the dead by remaining still and training mind and senses to be as self-denying and abstemious as possible. I listened as two guards standing close by my bed speculated as to whether I was actually dead or merely close to it. They were on the point of laying bets on it when a nurse arrived to feel my pulse. The two guards asked him to tell them which one of them was right, but he replied that neither of them would win the bet because I was half-alive and half-dead. He then gave me an injection which he told them might keep me alive rather than dead, if only for a while. They all left suddenly, and there was an all-pervasive silence in the block, as though either the cells had no one in them or else the same thing had happened to them as to me, although the modes and circumstances might be different.

I have no idea how long I spent in this drink-induced compulsory slumber: a few hours, or a couple of days and more. The effects of the wine the ghoul had forced down my throat were still making me dizzy and giving me terrible headaches, but even so I began to feel myself getting gradually better and recovering both breath and clarity of thought. As far as I could make out, it was close to midday. While I had been asleep, the food on the platter had obviously long since disappeared inside the various members of the insect population, but the other platter still had the copy of the Qur’an, the thurible, and perfume bottle on it. There were also the two bags that the kind black guard had left for me. I checked on their contents and found one full of bread, olives, dates, boiled eggs, and bottles of water, while the second had clean underwear and a fresh blue suit. Dear God, be kind to this servant of Yours and liberate him from the clutches of the corrupt people of this earth and the battalions of rogue criminals.

As a way of testing how awake I really was, I put my hand in the food bag and ate some of it with all due deliberation. After taking a few swallows of water, I got to my feet, still wrapped in my blanket, and tried walking on my leg without the crutch. To my delight, I noticed a distinct improvement in my bad leg and made myself walk up and down the cell a few times. I concentrated my mind on a variety of ideals and lofty values, using them as an antidote — or rather, a total block — to the specter of the female ghoul and the evil physical and psychological abuse to which she had subjected me. As I sweated and panted profusely, I was purging my body and faculties of the pollution caused by her barbaric actions, foul tongue, and disgusting odor. .

When I felt tired, I lay down again on the bed panting heavily. Just then a thought occurred to me: I remembered the hole in the floor by which I was connected to my neighbor. I removed the earth with my crutch and started sending some muted messages down the tube. Once I had repeated them several times, it became clear that there was no one there to listen. I looked down the tube in case I could see a shape of some kind — a foot moving or standing still, but there was nothing. My neighbor had either been killed or transferred somewhere else, and the same might be true of the other people in the block, whether close to me or further away — God alone knows!

So was I now alone in this cellblock, with no one else living there?

Previously, people had envied me for having my own private cell; some people regarded it as a boon, a kind of preferential treatment. However, the torturers themselves adopted it as a form of revenge that they used on people when they wanted to drive them crazy through a crushing total isolation. If I was now the only inhabitant in a cellblock that had previously housed some one hundred prisoners, then that was undoubtedly something much more sinister. But they could dump me down a well or in the desert, and yet — by the God who has created and trained me so well to mention His name and call on His familiar saints — I shall never allow myself to give in to hallucinations and delirium, nor will I plunge into a bottomless labyrinth.

In a spontaneous gesture of defiance, I went over to the door and looked out through the iron-framed aperture. There was not a soul to be seen or heard, merely a profound silence steeped in humidity and a graveyard atmosphere. The whole situation seemed highly problematic and augured ill. I was utterly amazed when I pushed the door and it opened. Perhaps the kindly black guard forgot to lock it, I surmised, or he left it that way as an act of generosity and release for me. I wrapped myself up in my blanket, grabbed my crutch (for which I now had other uses), and leaned on it as I entrusted myself to God’s care. I made my way out into the dimly lit corridor and made a quick tour of inspection. I was shocked, or rather shocked and saddened, to see that all the walls were coal-black, as though they had been eaten away by a roaring fire. The cell furniture and people’s possessions had all been reduced to piles of ash, which gave off a few wafts of smoke from time to time.