HICHAM
The trip through Africa didn’t represent the end of my suffering, but it was the end of my total confinement. Was the Guide getting tired of me? Had I passed my expiration date? I don’t know. There never was any logic or explanation. I lived from day to day, depending on his goodwill, no horizon in sight. But the day he returned from his African tour he had Mabrouka call me in and with a pout of disgust tossed out these words at me: “I don’t want you anymore, you slut! I’m going to have you join the revolutionary guards. You’ll be living with them. So get lost!”
After this, Mabrouka gave me a cell phone: “If you feel like contacting your mother . . .” It came as a total surprise! I immediately called Mama. She had noticed me on national television in uniform behind Gaddafi in the stadium in Conakry and seemed almost happy to let me know this. “How I’d love to see you, my darling. I miss you so much!” I felt emboldened enough to make another request of Mabrouka and against all expectations she answered that Mama could come by the following day to see me. At Bab al-Azizia!
Imagining her coming into this universe was, of course, sort of terrifying to me. But I needed her so much, so I explained how to get to the garage, the point from where someone would bring her to the Guide’s residence. I was hoping that everyone would be nice to her. How naïve I could still be! Mabrouka, Salma, and Fatiha were downright obnoxious and callous. “You want to see your daughter? It’s downstairs.” Fortunately, Amal kissed her and let me know she was there, and I ran into her arms, where I immediately broke down crying and wept for a long time. I couldn’t even get a word out. What would I tell her? Where would I start? This basement told my story for me. My sobs must have been unbearable. Mabrouka made fun of my tears, and Mama was hurt by that. And soon we were separated.
A few days later Galina appeared in my room, her face drained of color. The Guide ordered us to come to him together, wanting to know more about the African incident. I was bowled over that he had no more important topics to concern himself with.
“Why did you lie to me saying she had her period?” he asked the nurse.
“I didn’t lie. In young girls the cycle can be quite irregular and their period can be slight.”
“You’re nothing but a liar, and deceitful to boot! Farida told me the truth. As for you, you little whore, go down to your room. You won’t miss anything by waiting.”
That was the last time I saw Galina at Bab al-Azizia. Very much later, at the beginning of the revolution, I would be astounded to see her on television, filmed at the time of her return to the Ukraine, the secret of her experience in Libya buried deep inside her. A few days after that stormy interview, Gaddafi sent for me again, and assaulted my body with such violence that I came out of it all groggy and covered in bruises. Amal G., another girl in the house also named Amal who was usually rather indifferent to my lot, was overcome. “I need to get you out of here for a while!” I didn’t even pick up on it; I had no hope left, the days went by, and I was slowly going under. But she came back to my room with a triumphant look. “Mabrouka says it’s all right for me to take you home to my family!” And she took me away for a few days to her place, or rather to her family’s home, where her mother and her little sister were waiting for her with a heaping plate of couscous.
Three days later she was again given permission to take me out. Even though it was conditional, this freedom was incredible, and I didn’t know what to make of my jailers’ change of face. But the few hours outside of the compound gave me such a boost that I never asked any questions. I wasn’t even thinking of escaping anymore. I had no hopes, no dreams. I was a long-forgotten girl, without any sort of future beyond Bab al-Azizia. One of those women, among so many others, who belonged to their master forevermore.
On that day I couldn’t foresee that another man would come into my life.
Amal G. took me out to lunch in the old fishermen’s quarter near the sea. We were about to leave and she was taking a step backward when a man yelled: “Watch out!” Looking exasperated, he came out of his car, which we’d almost smashed into. But he quickly calmed down. We exchanged a look, a smile, and that was it. I was head over heels. I didn’t even know that feeling existed. An earthquake, with a before and an after. He was about thirty, with a square build, robust, muscular, his gaze as dark as his hair, and laden with energy. Better yet: with boldness. I was stunned. But Amal G. drove off, straight back to Bab al-Azizia, and life returned to its usual routine between the basement and the master’s bedroom, between indolence and submission.
One afternoon I was permitted to go out with her again. She wanted to take her younger sister to a fair and show me the rides. One of them looked like a huge sieve, inside of which riders sat in a circle and held on to the edge, and then the whole thing shook in every direction. We were laughing and screaming, trying to keep our balance, when I realized that the man in charge of the ride was the one we’d seen the other day. Again our eyes crossed, and he increased the speed of the ride. Fear and excitement! The more I laughed as I clung to the side, the more he intensified the shaking. “We’ve seen each other before, haven’t we?” he yelled.
“Yes, I remember. What’s your name?”
“Hicham. Do you have a phone number?”
This was crazy! Completely forbidden and totally fabulous! He didn’t have any paper but told me his number, which I dialed immediately so that he’d have mine in his phone. Amal G. quickly hauled me off elsewhere.
As I was returning to Bab al-Azizia I felt a sweet euphoria. Life was taking on a new hue. I called him from my room, which I knew was crazy. He picked up right away.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“At home.”
“It was great to see you again at the fair. Nice coincidence, right?”
“I would have recognized you anywhere.”
“I’d really like to see you again. What do you do in life?”
Oh, that question! I should have expected it. How could I answer it? I didn’t do anything in life. I wasn’t making anything of my life. In fact, I had no life. An abyss. I burst into tears.
“Nothing. I do absolutely nothing.”
“Why are you crying? Tell me!”
“I can’t.”
In tears, I hung up the phone. I was eighteen years old now. The girls at my school had graduated. Some of them were already married. Others had been accepted to the university. I remembered how in middle school I’d dreamed of becoming a dentist. Teeth and smiles were the first thing I looked at in people and I couldn’t keep myself from giving advice on how to take care of one’s teeth, keep them clean and white. A dentist! It was almost laughable. What fun they’d make of me if I told that to people in my basement. They had ruined my dreams, stolen my life, and I couldn’t even talk about it. For what they’d done to me was so shameful that, outside these walls, it was me who became the leper. What could I tell Hicham?
I didn’t even have time enough to ponder the question. They called me upstairs.
“Get undressed, whore!” the Guide ordered when I got to his bedroom.
This time I felt it went too far. I burst out in sobs. “Why do you say that to me? Why? I’m not a whore!” That enraged him. He roared “Shut your mouth, whore” and raped me, making me understand that I was nothing but a possession of his, someone without any right to speak. When I went back down to my room I saw on the cell phone I had hidden under my pillow that Hicham had called me twenty-five times. At least there was someone who saw me as a person.
The next night Gaddafi summoned me again and abused me once more. Then he forced me to snort cocaine. I didn’t want to; it scared me. My nose started bleeding and he put some on my tongue. I blacked out.
I woke up with an oxygen mask on my face in the infirmary of the Ukrainians. Elena was caressing my hand and another nurse, Alina, was watching me anxiously. They didn’t say a word but I could see they were worried about me. They brought me back to my room, where I spent two days in bed, unable to stand. The only thing that kept me alive was thinking about Hicham.
Amal G. didn’t find out what had happened to me until the next day. Though I was doing a little better I was in no mood to talk, but she took me by the hand and dragged me to the Guide. He was sitting in front of his computer. “Master! You’re not seriously giving drugs to this young one! It’s criminal. And dangerous. What’s come over you?” She was confronting him with astonishing audacity. Her hand in mine, the other on her hip, she was demanding an answer. She had dared to confront him! “Get the hell out!” he shouted, showing her the door. “And leave her here!”
He jumped on me, crushing my chest, and yelled “Dance!” as he put on the music. Then he pinned me to the floor: “Why did you talk, you slut?”
“I said nothing. They guessed it on their own.”
He beat me and raped me, urinated on me, and as he went to take a shower he screamed: “Go away!” I went back downstairs, wet and wretched, convinced that no shower would ever wash me clean again.
Amal G. stayed angry. And yet she had a true fascination with the Guide. Maybe she even loved him, as implausible as that seemed to me. She said that she was indebted to him for the house her family owned, for her car, for a comfortable life. I asked no questions; I hated him far too much. But when she said, “I swear it on Muammar’s head,” I knew I could believe her. She didn’t hesitate to put everyone at Bab al-Azizia in their place. She’d yell at the horrible Saada Al Fallah, one of the heads of the Department of Protocol, who called her a whore: “You’d do better to be quiet, you fag!” She’d shout and swear, as friendly as a porcupine, not caring at all about the others. But my distress worried her. In the morning she came into my room and said: “Come, I’m taking you home with me. They’ve given me permission. Bring enough things for a few days.”
I threw my arms around her, kissed her. “All right, all right,” she said as she released herself, always a little aloof, but I could see she had tears in her eyes. So we left to go to her family’s house. How sweet it was at first, that impression of a normal family life: a house, parents, regular meals. I felt homesick for my own family and phoned Mama. “You have to come get me.” Amal G. hit the roof. “Don’t say you’re at my house! You absolutely can’t! If you tell your mother, I’m taking you back to Bab al-Azizia immediately.” She scared me. Anything but returning to my basement, seeing Gaddafi and Mabrouka again. Anything, including lying to Mama, something I’d never done before.
That’s when I discovered the strange secret life of Amal G., the network she had built up to obtain alcohol, her nocturnal car trips, her friendliness with the police officers who crossed her path—“How is it going, Amal?”—and the mixture of Red Bull and vodka she’d drink at the wheel before she’d splash perfume on herself on her way back. It became clear to me she was hungry for money, and had dealings with businessmen who sent commissions her way. And I realized fairly quickly she was using me to attract powerful and wealthy men. She took me and other girls to parties that were eagerly attended by the country’s dignitaries and celebrities, where an abundance of alcohol and drugs was available, and where money circulated in exchange for sexual favors. Was that all they wanted from me? Was my body, which I despised, really the only thing I had to offer? Was that all I was worth, even outside the harem? Did my link to Bab al-Azizia raise my value in the eyes of certain men? A single night at the opulent home of a famous cousin of Gaddafi’s earned me five thousand dinars—money which Amal G. quickly pocketed and I never dared ask for. She had me in her power.
One day, when I was on the phone with Mama, catching up on her news, she told me that Inas, my childhood friend from Benghazi, was in Tripoli and really wanted to see me again. She gave me Inas’s number, which I called right away. I really wanted to pick up the thread with normal people, people from my earlier life, although I didn’t know whether that was even possible anymore. Inas answered promptly and very enthusiastically. I asked for her address, suggesting that I come see her right there and then. “Oh, really? You can leave Bab al-Azizia?” She knew! I was dumbfounded. How did Mama dare tell her the truth when she’d been lying to the entire family from the start?
I took a taxi and asked Inas to pay the driver when I got there. “How can it be that a girl who’s living at the president’s house has no money to pay for her cab?” she joked. I smiled but didn’t answer. How much did she know? What did “living at the president’s house” mean to her? Did she think it was my choice? A status symbol and a real job? I was going to have to walk on eggshells.
We went into the house and the whole family greeted me with hugs and kisses. “We’ll call your mother so she can join us,” Inas said, suddenly very excited.
“No!”
“Why not?”
“You shouldn’t . . . I’m temporarily with another girl, outside Bab al-Azizia, who doesn’t want people to know.”
Everyone looked at me skeptically, in silence. So little Soraya was lying to her mother. And that ruined the atmosphere. “What is your relationship to Bab al-Azizia?” someone asked.
“I don’t want to talk about that. Surely Mama told you my story.”
Then I lit a cigarette, causing a mixture of dismay and disapproval in the family’s eyes. Soraya sure had turned out badly.
I spent the night there. It was a break for me, a brief return to childhood, and it was lovely. Amal G. must have been crazy with anger and worry—I hadn’t accepted a single one of her many calls. When I finally did answer the next morning, she shouted at me.
“How could you go out without alerting me?”
“I needed some air, can’t you understand that? At your place I feel imprisoned all over again. Thank you for getting me out of Bab al-Azizia, but now let me breathe a little.”
She kept on yelling, I started to cry, and then Inas picked up the phone. “I am a childhood friend of hers, and my family is taking care of her, don’t worry.” But Amal G. insisted and said that I was putting myself in a terribly dangerous situation whose consequences I wasn’t taking into consideration. So in the end Inas gave her address to Amal G. “I’m coming!” she said. That was what I had been afraid of. The only refuge I had left, the one that nobody at Bab al-Azizia would have known about, was going to be discovered. I felt hunted. So I called Hicham. “I beg you, please come get me. I don’t want to see anyone but you anymore.”
He got there in a few minutes and all but kidnapped me. The car tore through the streets of Tripoli, then through the suburbs and into the countryside. He was tense at the wheel, focused on the road. I was watching his profile, my head back against the seat and more relaxed than I had been in ages. I wasn’t thinking any thoughts; I had no plan; I was smiling, simply trusting this man whom I’d met only twice before. I had made no mistake. He was strong and spirited. He drove me to a small vacation house and said: “Get some rest. I know your story and from now on I won’t let anyone hurt you.” Without my knowledge, Amal G. had gone to see him to tell him what my connection was with Bab al-Azizia, saying: “This is no girl for you.” And there she was calling me on my cell phone, having tried a dozen times already. “Pick up,” Hicham said. “You don’t need to be afraid of her anymore. Tell her the truth.”
Trembling, I picked up. She exploded: “You are insane, Soraya! You’re really looking for trouble. How dare you escape when I was coming to get you?”
“Leave me alone! I’m far away, staying with a girlfriend.”
“You’re lying! I know you’re with Hicham!”
I hung up. Hicham took the phone from me and called her back. “Leave her in peace. Forget her. You’ve hurt her enough. From now on I’ll defend her. And I’m quite capable of killing if anyone tries to harm her.”
“You don’t know me, Hicham. You’ll pay very dearly for this. I’ll make sure you end up in prison.”
For three days I was happy. The first twenty-four hours I did nothing but cry—I think I was just crying the overflow of five years’ worth of tears. Hicham was patient, gentle, soothing. He prepared food for me, cleaned up, wiped my tears away, and finally I was no longer alone. Perhaps there was life after Bab al-Azizia after all.
But at the Gaddafi house the news of my escape exploded. Amal G. had taken Inas to my mother, who called me immediately: “I’m crushed, Soraya. You’ve been lying to me for two months! How is that possible? You’re in the city, you smoke, you run away with a man. What has become of my little Soraya? A slut! A whore! It would be better to see you dead than to imagine you living this life. I am so disappointed in you!” I took the blow. The way things looked was against me. But how could she not see that I was just trying to survive?
Amal G. called me again: “Whatever you do, you’ll come back to Bab al-Azizia eventually.” And sure enough, the internal security forces in their 4x4s besieged the home of Hicham’s parents: “Where is your son? He must bring back the girl he kidnapped.” His brothers phoned him in a panic. So after three days we gave up.
I went to Amal G., who gave me a choice: to be taken to my parents or to Bab al-Azizia. I chose my parents, but with great anxiety. I could tell that our bond of trust had been broken. Mama stared at me long and hard, as if my face had become a mirror of my depravity, as if I was no longer her poor stolen child but a guilty daughter, a fallen girl. My father welcomed me more affectionately. He looked me over carefully, seeming to not quite recognize me. I think I’d grown a little, but most of all I had aged. Still, he had to play the father’s role and quickly began to ask for an explanation. Who was this Hicham? I told him how lucky I’d been to have had this chance encounter, about his courage, his cool-headedness, and his gentlemanly manners, and about his wish to marry me. They listened to me with a look of disbelief. There was a distance between us that had never been there before.
My mother didn’t want me leaving the house anymore, more out of fear of this new danger, Hicham, than of Bab al-Azizia. I had to resort to a subterfuge, pretending I was accompanying Papa somewhere and giving him the slip long enough to see Hicham, who provided me with cigarettes and a new card for my cell phone. This way neither Amal G. nor Mabrouka could call me again. At home the atmosphere was tense. It almost killed me not to be able to smoke and sometimes I would hide in the bathroom to have a cigarette, then use an air freshener afterward. I had nothing to talk about. It was as if I were hanging in the air.
Then one morning at dawn I heard a knock at the door. It was the driver from Bab al-Azizia. “Come with me, Soraya, you are wanted over there.”
So I left again. Icily, Mabrouka led me to the little lab, where a nurse took three vials of blood from me. I had to wait for an hour in a small room before Salma snarled: “Go upstairs!” The Guide was waiting for me in a jogging suit and a sleeveless T-shirt. “What a slut! I know you slept with other men.” He spat in my face, fucked me, and urinated on me, then concluded: “There’s only one solution left for you: to work under my command. You will sleep at home, but from nine in the morning until nine at night I want you here, at my disposal. You will finally learn to have the discipline of the revolutionary guards.”