Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

Voices were now raised in support of the shaykh, while others cursed the informer. It was only when a unit of the rapid response force arrived that things calmed down. They went around brandishing their truncheons and threatened the inmates, all to the accompaniment of their barking dogs. Some of them stayed behind for several hours to reimpose order, keeping prisoners on their toes with unexpected probes. I myself had my share and more. There can be no doubt that the state they found me in, lying on my bed, was enough to convince them that I was behaving properly and had no evil intentions; that made them stop observing me and flashing lights into my cell. They simply left me in peace.

I took advantage of the fact that they left me alone to remove the earth from the hole in the floor and whispered through the tube to my new neighbor. I was delighted when he responded. I rapidly gave him my name and the principal details of the accusations leveled against me, swearing to God that I had no part in them. He did exactly the same, with the fundamental difference that in his case the charge was correct and there was no question of appeal or invalidation. When I asked him to explain, he counted off for me the number of murders he had committed, including his mother and daughter, both whores, a pimp, and three of their customers. He told me that all the inmates in the penitents’ wing had committed similar or even worse crimes — robbers, con men, and murderers, drug dealers, sex-and wine-retailers. He made an exception when it came to the salafi counselor about whom he knew nothing and whom he had never set eyes on before. He went on to say that public law criminals such as himself were being asked to join the secret services and to work as contract killers, all in return for pardons, cancelation of indemnity, and payment of a paltry salary. Before his voice completely disappeared, he warned me to be careful when it came to the other prisoners in the wing.

Evening fell. When the night was far advanced, a harsh voice could be heard.

“Listen, you people in this cave,” it said. “While you’re waiting for your regrets to ripen and ferment and for your repentance to result in pardon and forgiveness, why don’t you lighten your nights with some jokes and stories? When you want to have a good laugh and take the weight off your mind, the best ones are the dirtiest, the ones below the belt. So search your own repertoire so we can cancel our worries and kill the time. Be generous, all of you, and tell them well, or else you’ll all become depressed and time will kill you. In order to sharpen your talents and inspire you, I’ll start. Have you heard the one about the man from Marrakesh who was a homosexual? He used the mountains as his base and went on sex raids through forests and plains. His targets were young boys, teenagers, and even older men. This homosexual managed to outwit both the police and the national guard. One gorgeous spring day, a senior officer was walking across a mountain slope when about a hundred meters or so away he spotted three men praying, with their backsides in the air. He discovered that the three were some of his own men. When he asked them to explain what they were doing, they all stood up and saluted. They told him that, since every attempt to arrest the elusive homosexual had failed, they had decided to lay a trap for him by using the method he had witnessed. The officer told them all to get dressed again and ordered the detachment accompanying him to put them in prison and open an investigation into their sexual orientation.”

The entire wing burst into laughter, all of which encouraged the disgusting storyteller to move on to even worse jokes. I used pieces of bread to block my ears, anxious as I was to protect my own space which contained a copy of the Qur’an. I now ate a little bit of supper and hung my food bag on my crutch, which I placed horizontally between two holes at the back of my cell. Did I not say that my crutch had other uses?! I used the toilet and checked on the area before wrapping myself in my blanket and lying down on the bed. I whispered a few phrases to myself in praise of sleep, hoping that my eyes would be closed.

I was abruptly woken up in the middle of the night by a voice begging for help and groaning. I removed the bread from my ears and went over to the door.

“O God,” I heard from somewhere in the block, “I give witness that I’m being killed, I have not committed suicide. I witness that there is no deity but God and Muhammad is His Servant and Prophet. I witness. .”

The voice suddenly grew weaker, then disappeared completely. As loudly as I could, I begged the other inmates who were asleep to help the poor prisoner who was being murdered. There was no response. When I tried again — it still being pitch dark, a hand reached through my door-window and grabbed me by the neck. A voice now threatened to strangle me if I said another word. I found myself being pushed back to my bed, where I lay quivering.

After what I had heard and what had then happened to me, I did not sleep a wink. When the cackling of some winter birds announced the arrival of dawn, there was a din of voices in the block close to my cell. Some of them announced that the salafi preacher had committed suicide by slitting his left wrist, only confirmed by the fact that a bloody knife was still in his right hand, which proved the veracity of the findings. Peeping through the window I could see a doctor in a white apron, guards, and a number of the new prisoners.

“The salafi has committed suicide,” one of them said. “It’s a pre-Islamic kind of death, so we should not pray over him or ask for God’s mercy on him. To avoid any contamination he should be buried like an animal corpse.”

“His cell should be thoroughly cleaned of his blood,” another voice commented, “not only that, but his bed and sheets as well. Witnesses have given their testimony and the file is closed with official legal signatures. Break it up now and return to your cells.”

It occurred to me that I needed to pronounce the fourfold praise of God and say some prayer for the poor man who had been treacherously murdered. The facts of the matter were clearly the exact opposite of what the false witnesses had testified, but I found myself having to assess the consequences of reporting the matter when I was housed among a whole cluster of professional killers. With that in mind, I resorted to silence and said nothing.

After eating some breakfast, the inmates in the penitents’ wing were ordered to leave their cells and go to the exercise yard. I hesitated to come out, but a guard came into my cell, forced me out, and thrust me into the midst of my new neighbors whom I was now able to see in person for the first time, albeit without their knowing who I was. Every one of them had a paunch and bulging muscles, as though they were former boxing champions or Sumo wrestlers. The thin ones looked for all the world like giraffes in height and stride; some of them had long beards that hung down like poisonous stinging scorpions. They were wearing earrings, and their bodies were covered with tattoos in weird shapes. As I walked as part of their moving column, I looked like a monkey or a young boy. Some of them decided to have some fun, yanking my beard or cuffing me on the neck and head; they kept laughing at me and poking fun at my crippled gait. There was no way I could complain or protest, so I simply tolerated the whole thing as long as the exercise session lasted, something that now seemed even more taxing than usual.

When the group reached the wide yard, it broke up into separate groups, one to play basketball, another to wrestle, and a third to lift weights. It was members of this third group that took me and started using my body in various ways, as though I were one of the weights, tossing me around as they saw fit and exercising their bulging muscles.