Fariba Hachtroudi - The Man Who Snapped His Fingers

My brain is overheating. I translate the Colonel’s words with sickly slowness. My tongue is furred, my mouth is dry. I had him repeat the last sentences, wondering how I myself got out of there. Who helped me escape from Ravine, since no one paid for my escape? No one had the means to pay for my freedom. Who had the right key to let me run away? How did they get it? To whom do I owe my life? Who is the man my mother qualified as providential? Where is he today? Questions I had pushed aside, had tried to forget. In order to have a life again. And now they are pouring down on me, assailing me. Oppressing me. I should never have agreed to take this assignment. I’m not going to manage. It fills me with fear. The fear of losing my job. The Colonel repeats, It requires astuteness to unmask the high-ranking officials involved.

Astuteness, or even genius. Prisoners and jailers, from the guard to the warden by way of the judges and lawyers in the pay of the powerful, I had my eyes on all of them. Advanced technology is infallible, and in my domain I’m unbeatable. I assured the Commander that very soon everything would be back to normal.

I set up what was needed, where it was needed, to spy on prisoners, jailers, wardens, judges, and court-appointed lawyers. I wove my web. A network of opaque waves, which made them — individually and all together — audible and visible at all times. No one could escape my vigilance. Every one of them, from the greatest to the most insignificant, was under surveillance. Day and night. At work. At home with their families. At home in their beds. Whether they were sleeping or fucking. Visiting family or friends. When they were traveling. By car. By train. By plane. On camelback. Wherever they were, they were under my control. After a few months had gone by, over one thousand seven hundred people had fallen into my net. Guards, wardens, judges, torturers… From north to south, from all over the country, by way of the capital, the arrests were multiplying in number.

That was my last position. I had decided it would be the last. Even though the job allowed me to travel. As a businessman, I went around the world. Russia, Japan, Korea, China… Beautiful countries. Unforgettable scenery. Fascinating discoveries. I was amazed by the incredible variety of cutting-edge items. The latest in espionage equipment. Miniature devices… What did you say? I don’t understand. What do you mean by instruments of a particular kind? The ones used for brutal interrogations? Do you mean instruments of torture? I swear, you are obsessed! I already answered this question. In the first place, it wasn’t my sector. In the second place, we didn’t need to go abroad to get devices like that. Our correspondents delivered them to us. Russians, Chinese, Koreans… Consultants who were officially appointed by their respective governments. There were also the unofficial consultants. Arms dealers are increasingly trading in interrogation technology software. Something of a cynical pun, I agree. But significant. And I’m not the one who invented the term. I am only using it in an attempt to be precise. Software means maximum efficiency without any drawbacks. No collateral damage. Not a trace on the body.

I’m suffocating. I don’t feel well. I can’t breathe. I am dying to grab him by the throat. The bastard, the way he articulates the words sophisticated software , so self-assured… I see myself back in solitary. My mouth forced wide open, in a jaw-crushing grip. My mouth is a toilet bowl. For the requirements of the penis pissing between my teeth… I don’t need software to slaughter you without leaving a trace, you monster. I stop the screams coming from deep inside, filling my lungs to bursting. I clear my throat, to rid it of the aftertaste of this traceless torture. All I do is translate. Tell us about these foreign consultants, asks the boss, calmly.

Consultants? Oh yes, the Russians. A whole load of Russian officers. They gave classes and trained the local interrogators. Or the torturers, if you prefer the exact terminology. It’s the truth. They were torturers. Obviously, I had to know about it. But no more than that. I didn’t have anything to do with the dirty work. No, I wasn’t present at the interrogations. I did, however, occasionally see video recordings of some of them. The brutal ones, as you call them. There had to be verification, in the event there was cause to suspect any complicity between prisoners and authorities. When my subordinates couldn’t cope, I would intervene. It was up to me, in the end, to decide one way or the other. Why did I run away? But how many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t want to become the Supreme Commander’s plaything. He wanted me for a guard dog. I would have to be at the Residence. Live there three hundred and sixty-five days a year. And if I refused, I was a dead man. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Why did he refuse? Was he suddenly feeling remorse? I translate the boss’s questions, articulating each word to modulate my voice, to keep it calm and neutral. The Colonel doesn’t reply. He’s unnerved. I can tell from the way his knees are trembling, more than ever. He stands up. All of a sudden. He needs to go to the toilet. He has to take some medication. He has a stomach ulcer, and heart palpitations. An irregular heartbeat, he says. His staccato voice slips, falters when he says irregular heartbeat. Is he hoping to make us feel sorry for him? Well I won’t. Let the bastard die. I won’t lift a little finger. If I could look at him. Flood him with my hatred. Bury him alive. I keep my eyes down. Obstinately. My gaze slides from his knees to his feet. A giant’s feet, in military boots. Eloquent feet. They step forward and head toward the way out. I stifle the cry in my throat with a cough. The Colonel isn’t wearing military boots, he’s wearing sneakers. I immediately understand why I was mistaken. It’s his walk that led me astray, blurring my vision. A walk like a lame duck, with his right foot turned inwards. It blurred not my vision but my perception. I saw a memory, or thought I did. It’s always like that, when buried images take the place of reality. I’m frozen stiff. All of a sudden. The snapshots from Ravine prison stored on the hard drive in my brain are emerging, out of order, in slow motion. Have I recognized the Colonel’s feet? Those big feet, with their awkward movement, remind me of the feet of the man who burst into the interrogation room. I was close to death. They told me my end was approaching. My imminent execution. They were going to send me to the gallows… I have to get a grip on myself. I must be hallucinating. Haunted by the memory of a twisted walk. Of a pair of giant’s feet. Feet, and the way they walk, flimsy clues political prisoners steal behind their torturers’ backs, while those same torturers destroy their lives, incognito.

In jail, the cleverest inmates — and I was one of them — quickly learn how to loosen the blindfold in order to see what their prison hell is made of. Only during interrogations. The rest of the time, we were stuck with the regulation hood over our heads, or the burlap bag stinking of piss, the uniform of the ones who were kept in solitary. Interrogation meant torture. Moral of the story: in Ravine, all the female inmates knew that the blindfold, which meant no hood or burlap bag, was synonymous with rape. As sordid a relation of cause and effect as they come: the inmate, if she was as agile as she was bold, could make the most of the unique view onto the world the blindfold offered her if she loosened it just a few millimeters. During the eighteen months of my imprisonment I was forced to undergo long sessions of brutal interrogation. My view of the world amounted to a few centimeters of space above the ground, and a few pairs of feet, sometimes with shoes, sometimes without. You have to have survived a place like Ravine to understand how and why a world reduced to an insignificant patch of floor can suddenly become so vital. You have to have a real hunger for life, in spite of Ravine, to be able to capture that random shot of a pair of feet that spend more time kicking you than walking by. The net of your blurred gaze beneath the blindfold is the only thing connecting you to the world, and most of the time it is reduced to a pair of boots, shoes, or worn-out old slippers splattered with blood, snot or puke. To survive in Ravine you learn to read the infinitesimal, in spite of yourself. A few foot movements which you then classify according to walk. Even if it’s only a few steps forward or back. Traces on the ground… Insignificant clues to start with but which over time turn out to be far more eloquent than you would have thought. Rhetoric that is inconceivable outside of isolation. Because freedom doesn’t necessarily make you observant. Any more than confinement will ineluctably turn you into a moron. In the deafening world of a prison, where human beings with the power of speech no longer speak, but vociferate, bellow, and scream — some from pain, others to inflict terror and pain — any intelligible element becomes a tool for survival. In Ravine, deciphering the cement floor is the most tenacious road to escape. Thinking allows you to resist, to contain your fear. And on rare occasions to force it over to the other side. So, the codebreakers of the interrogation room floor — and I was one of them — had a head start on the others. If you could read the ground, you could be informed. It was a tiny wedge against absolute isolation. You quickly learned that a floor splattered with blood or smeared with shit, urine, or cum was just as eloquent as one wiped with bleach. You could go on to decipher the veiled messages these traces left behind. A pool of blood or urine, drops of blood or cum, a streak of blood or vomit spoke volumes about the torturers’ mood, as well as the ordeal your comrades had been through. After the rapes they would mop the floor with the bleach of ritual ablution, and haloes of white foam remained, furrows of macabre still lifes, signs the inmate was scared shitless. Scared shitless before torture, and after. Clues that, like news flashes, regularly punctuated the cadence of the rape and sexual torture, the beatings, the miscarriages. A persistence that narrated the agenda of the days to come. In Ravine, the ground — pure or impure — was a silent screen where a new type of reality show played to an absent audience. The floor in Ravine, or the dazibao of psychedelic drawings. No comment. The floor in Ravine needed no words, but it twisted the soul. In Ravine, a man’s walk was the ID card of a coward. It was up to the most observant prisoners to identify the jailers and their rank among the despicable. An exploit only the bravest undertook, and which they paid dearly. We were playing with fire, to be sure, but it was worth it. Even with our shackles, we were better armed against the enemy we had tracked down. Even if he was invisible, and armed with every right including that of beating a prisoner to death, he became vulnerable the moment we could see through to the slightest weakness. There were voices, too, and we could try to make out who they belonged to, these louts who held our lives in their hands. But voices were unreliable. Even the keenest sense of hearing could not unravel the sophisticated effects of the microphones used in Ravine. The only thing I could rely on were the motions that went into a person’s walk. Tell me how you walk and I will tell you who you are. I was good, very good at the game. The best. If there was a competition for identifying walks, I would win it every time.