500

When the knocks finally came, they made me jump, although I had been expecting them for weeks. Just past midnight, an air of complete ordinariness defined the moment, the dead silence of the curfew had been broken by the insidious hum of vehicles stopping outside, followed by the sharp stampede of heavy boots climbing to the front door. The late night soap opera had finished a few minutes earlier, the television set still blaring aimlessly onto the empty space, beds that never got their usual occupants that night laid lonely. They had come for me, at last, many sleepless nights watching every sound, every movement outside, every step, had sharpened my senses. It was April Fool’s Day, a day that was going to last for a very long time, although I did not know that then.

I waited in the bedroom while my mother, trembling and pale, opened the front door. No one was there. Suddenly a rifle materialized out of the darkness, followed by a blackened face and, behind it, a young lieutenant curtly asked to see me. Troopers were standing on both sides of the door, faces hidden by dark balaclavas, M16s ready, ready for me, a dangerous terrorist, a dangerous subversive, on the loose, ooo good citizens! lock your doors, hide your daughters (if you can), keep your cats indoors...

“I’m here, I’ve been waiting for you…” I, somehow, managed to say, quietly, unthreateningly, as they came upstairs. The waiting was over, I just felt relieved, a numbness invading my whole body, the numbness that follows a long exhausting journey. The guns were lowered, my room was searched while the commander took my details. One soldier came over with the confident attitude of somebody who had discovered a major crime, a smile distorting his face as he handed the Building Society book: “Look here, sir, he has loads of money!” The soldier was impatiently dismissed, he had misread the position of the coma, it looked like that I was not a millionaire Russian agent.

A gun was pointing at my head as I was made to lay face down on the harsh platform at the back of a military pick-up, my hands clamped behind my head, my legs having been kicked wide open. It was a cold night, winter was approaching, I was glad of the blanket I was covered with. A strong sense of detachment permeated my body, as if someone else was on that truck, not me. Sometime later, it seemed to have been hours, although it was probably no more than an hour, the soldiers returned, the blanket was thrown over my head, and the small convoy set off. The long journey had begun.

The sad dusty strip lighting of a small grey reception room greeted me, bare of any human warmth but by a battered steel desk of undefined colour, probably also grey at some point of its life. An inventory was made of my possessions with bureaucratic officiousness. “The banality of evil”, Hannah Arendt's thought slipped into my mind much later. A black hood was put on my head, I was blinded. Someone led me outside to urinate at the edge of what felt like a precipice, a few days later I saw the place, it was a deep ravine, the backdrop of the blue ocean overpowering the horizon. A cold breeze scolded my face when I was marched to a minuscule cell located on a terrace at the top of the compound, a cold windowless room with just enough space for a steel bed.

Sharp questions and threats shocked me early on the following morning, the black hood giving an eerie air of unreality to the proceedings. The interrogation had begun, I could just see the men's boots under the hood if I strained my eyes downwards. I feigned ignorance to their questions: “Which five hundred Kalashnikovs are you talking about?” and, certainly, in spite of being part of the leadership, I knew nothing of the left-wing political organisation I was being accused of belonging to, which had been legal until the coup occurred, a few months earlier, a party much feared in some quarters. Infuriated by my stubborn attitude, the angry voices with no faces gave me a week to come up with some answers. No more.

At some point, I do not remember exactly where and when in the order of things, it was so long ago, I saw under the black cloth the legs of a beautiful young girl when I was taken into an urinal as she was being led out of it, I recognised her by the voice when she replied to one of the guards as a school friend of one of my cousins, a girl I had fancied not long before. If they were taking in people like her, no-one, but no-one, was beyond their clutches. I could not bring myself to think what they had done to her, not even now.

When I returned to the cell, I was ordered by a young officer, I learned a few weeks later that he was a university student like myself, to remove my clothes and take apart the bed until I stood there, shivering in my underwear, with the naked skeleton of the bed propped against the rough concrete wall. The cold steel door shut with a clank. The wall recoiled at the humiliation of receiving the first mark when I inscribed a dash with a small fragment of loose concrete from the floor. How many more were to be carved before I was extricated out of that hole, so near the sky and, yet, so far? A day and a night at least went by, at dawn I was licking the early morning dew from the steel surface of the door, no water or food had been brought. Another dash scarred the wall, or was it two? At some point, the door opened for a guard to leave a mug with water on the floor. I put it tentatively to my lips, it was heavily salted, practically undrinkable. I took a sip or two, enough for my body to cope with the excess of salt.

It did not take long, to retain a degree of mental and physical fitness, for all the asanas I had been striving for years to achieve to be executed to near perfection, the hours becoming seconds, fear was put on a leash. The wall suffered in stoic silence more scars. Later, the same young lieutenant came in, this time with a bucket of water: “Are you thirsty?” “A bit”, I replied cautiously. “I thought so… look… I brought some water here… let’s see… mmmmh… I think it would be better if I put it on you…” The officer left with an empty bucket, I was left behind, soaked and shivering. On another morning, a young conscript, no more than a boy really, slightly opened the heavy door at dawn to take a peek inside, to have a look at the strange beast that had to disentangle himself, climbing down from the ceiling to look normal to his inquisitive gaze.

I saw or tasted no water or food for nearly a week. When I faced the interrogators again, the sky was dark, dawn still hiding, my eyes blinded by the then customary hood. I was resigned yet ready, if not prepared, for them. “Where are the five hundred guns?” the question was thrown at me over and over as I was being beaten with some kind of batons that made a low noise: ‘Thump! Thump!’ I found out days later that these were made of sections of mains telephone cable, they left no visible long term marks on the body and broke no bones. Did I belong to that infamous party? No, certainly I did not. Had I any Marxist books in my possession? “Yes", I knew that my personal library had been searched and, most likely, ransacked. I went for the obvious answer, rather than dwell on more obscure writers: “Books by Marx and Engels”, I added. “Who?” “Ah!”, I thought. “Books by Karl Marx”, I rectified. The absence of the word “sir” was conspicuous; yet I was not challenged, any intellectual superiority they may had had was already eroded. Either by design or ignorance, it seemed that other material had been overlooked by the searchers. A couple of very compromising books had been buried in the garden (one of them being an American army counter-insurgence manual), otherwise they would had been picked up straight away and I would had been put in the category of ‘subversive’, in the language of the time, rather than just a rather ineffectual left-wing intellectual, as it was my game. I would, very likely, have been shot on the back of the head, for my corpse to be thrown into the sea from an amphibious plane, I had seen them taking off from a nearby military airfield. Fortunately, many of my books were translations, otherwise languages such as German could had been taken as Russian, an accusation strong enough to lead me to rot in the ocean.

I was beaten until I was nearly unconscious, I did not even know if I was fearful or not, not any longer. No swear words were left untouched, all were thrown at my ears. Somebody asked if I had fucked my mother, perhaps an indication of the myths the left had generated in the feverish minds of our opponents, or perhaps the interrogators were letting out their own moral degradation. Electrical cables from a field telephone were attached to my genitals and anus, I already had some knowledge of this technique, the reality being somewhat different than the theory, as I was to find out. When I tried to rip the wires apart, I was threatened with being tied down to the chair, and as my claustrophobia kicked in, I put my hands on my sides and gritted my teeth, feeling millions of starving ants eating they way into my lower body. The session was frequently stopped for a few minutes or so as a stethoscope was applied to my chest, making me to realize that for as long as I could keep them on edge, holding back precious information, I was relatively safe, in spite of the beatings. Then all would start again, the bastards having become like human machine guns, judging by the frenzied pace that the questions, insults and blows were being fired. At one point, the pain having become unbearable, I asked to be killed. They were going to do precisely that, they said: “Little bit by little bit”. I would had had shuddered in any other circumstance, then, it just did not matter, not any more, my assured self-confidence of a few moments earlier had evaporated.

Suddenly silence regained the room, the beating stopped, the ants rested, fear showed its ugly head again, somebody was brought in. “There’s somebody you know in here. She’ll speak to you”, the voice cut through the thickness of the silence. “They know it all… don’t deny it any more… they already know everything…” the whisper was fraught with fear, pain, despair. It was the voice of a young woman who had been in my unit. I realized that I had to change my approach, fast, the current position having become untenable. I could no longer risk denying my involvement with the party, although that, in reality, I had been inactive since the coup, when I realized that many of its cadres had been arrested and were presumed to be dead, myself having had a close escape in a 'safe house'. I also had been reappraising my own role and views, particularly in relation to violence for political ends; during my wanderings after the coup I had come across with a small group of badly armed and trained young people preparing an attack on the military. I refused to join them, the whole venture was stamped with foolishness and irresponsibility. I also realized the futility of any resistance to the generals, they were whistling the tunes and everybody else were dancing to them. The attack was launched on the open market during the few hours that the curfew had been lifted, not only no one had survived, but the conscripts had panicked and shot indiscriminately at the shoppers as they were re-stocking their depleted provisions.

I also knew that my involvement in the paramilitary wing of the party was unknown to her and, certainly, to the military, as I could gather from the tenor of their questions. The guns probe was probably being thrown at everybody they could lay their hands on. If they ever found out that I was also a paramilitary, the only words coming out of my mouth would be “Bye bye!” to the sky, blue or otherwise, for my body to become yet another ingredient for the crab food factory that they were running. Intense torture would eventually break me, I was very aware of that, there were people I knew I had to protect.

I had always managed to rejoice at the murmurs of the petals of a flower opening to the sky, or the gently fraying of a floating smile, my soul had not being invaded, and would not, by the barren desert that had taken over so many of my contemporaries. How could I have known the havoc that such intellectual landscape would cause on both sides of the Atlantic and the Middle East many years later when already living in a land where April weather happens in any month but April?

I was blindfolded, wires were attached to my body, I was being beaten savagely by a gang of thugs in military uniforms, yet, I was strangely in control of the situation, I knew the power of words, I knew how to set the course of the next stages of the interrogation on the direction I wished through skilful manipulation of language. These thoughts raced through my mind as I drew a strategy, aware of the topography of the knowledge that military intelligence had of the party, and my position in it. I could then acknowledge my own political role, deflecting away from me, and from those whom I had closely worked with, such as the sobbing young woman who had been brought in such a state of distress that had created so much anguish, the unwanted and undesirable line of questioning the interrogators were taking. I knew I had to instil in their minds the notion that all those names which had been wildly thrown at me over and over during those endless past hours could be discarded as either low level activists, or mere sympathisers. Fear was back on the leash.

The interrogators stopped, the ants went home, fear - not knowing what to do - fell asleep, I was allowed to dress (what a relief!), and a glass of water was brought for me. The hood remained in place, yet I managed to glimpse that the sky was already dark as I was led into what felt like a guards’ room. Any illusion I may had harboured of spending a few minutes quietly on my own were soon dispelled as sobs, cries and thumps crossed the flimsy partition from the adjacent room. A man was crying, the sobs of an infant. Eventually the muffled sounds died down, perhaps it was time for the interrogators to go home, to tell their wives how exhausting a day it had been, how they hoped to be paid overtime, to tell stories to their children, already safely tucked up in bed, stories of invading demons sailing from a cold and white land beyond the seas into the fatherland, and how God was on their side, as these were godless devils.

Silence had taken over the guards’ room. Was I alone? I strained my ears, a whining door gave the reply, steps approached closer, the voice was quiet, difficult to hear at first: “Are you hungry?” “Yes”, I replied unhesitantly. Instinctively, I felt reassured. “Here, take this, but don’t tell them, or I’ll be in trouble myself”. It was no more than a standard ration of beans and spaghetti.