11

While they were taking us into the holding cell at Azbakiya police station, one of the informers or policemen came up to me, pulled a strand of hair that was hanging down at the back of my neck, and gave it a violent tug, jerking my neck back until I was looking at the horrible ceiling. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this whore, though she looks like she’s been around,” he said, addressing his colleagues half seriously and half in jest.

“Let go of me, you animal!” I cried involuntarily, in a strangled voice.

It was the kind of thing that lovers might say lightheartedly during foreplay before bouts of frenzied lovemaking, and I had no idea what was coming. The next thing I knew, a heavy hand had landed on my cheek, forcing my whole head to the side. As my head swung back, for a fleeting moment I caught sight of two large tears falling in slow motion from my eyes. When I came to once more, curled up on the floor of the cell, I vaguely remembered they had persuaded a man to lay off me and stop kicking me, and someone had said it would be a shame if the shoes he had just polished got dirty kicking someone as foul as me.

When they closed the cell door on us, some of the detainees looked at me as if I were a madman, and some knew instinctively that I had no experience with police stations or detention, and so I was going to have a hard time. Some of them volunteered advice but I couldn’t hear anything. I was just enjoying the sensation of the tears running down my cheek, which was throbbing with pain. The bouts of crying came and went unsolicited and undesired. I prayed to God, silently and in embarrassment, as I tried in vain to gain control over my trembling limbs.

Prince hadn’t yet been able to reach me or hadn’t yet greased the palms of the policemen or warders with amounts that exceeded their monthly salaries, so that they would at least leave me alone and bring me food and cigarettes. I was not yet inured to the beatings, the insults, and the humiliation, and I hadn’t yet noticed or made friends with Karim Saadoun, one of the men in my batch of detainees. He would be with me in the nightmare for many hours before I realized he was there, and only later would we start what became our ritual of exchanging stories.

Time crawled at a different pace in prison. It moved so slowly that there was room in each minute for millions of thoughts and emotions. I no longer remember how long we were held in Abdin police station, without knowing anything of our fate, or how long we stayed in Azbakiya police station at the mercy of Hassan Fawwaz and his officers as they took morbid pleasure at our expense. I only remember the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere, the disgusting smells, and having to stand embarrassed in the corner to urinate into a plastic bucket that was overflowing with shit. I vividly remember the taste of the first small cup of tea I drank in prison, after about two days without any food or drink other than dirty water. Some of the policemen supplied us with tea through a small hole in the window grille. A transparent hose passed through the hole—a hose that two days earlier I would never have willingly touched with my hand. The thin end of the hose poured the tea into a plastic bottle that we held on the inside. The bottle buckled and shrank from the heat with each round of tea, and ended up about half its original size. Despite my disgust, I would take a used plastic cup and drink from it. How wonderfully refreshing the first mouthful was! It felt as if the blood, which had previously stopped running through my veins, was now flowing happily and unconstrained.

I learned that the body has its own priorities, and I learned to take note of all the little insignificant things that matter to the body, such as a sip of hot tea or a drag on a cigarette, until my day became dominated by a long succession of such matters—food, tea, sleep, and relieving myself. In the absence of such urgent concerns, we would revert to more important matters—the disaster that had struck us, the case against us, the scandal, and what they would do with us in the end. But for much of the time a piece of bread with cheese was more important than anything else, and I would have been willing to put up with as much as the others around me if only I hadn’t had bouts of asthma, sometimes accompanied by heart palpitations, only to remember suddenly that I hadn’t taken any tranquilizers or antidepressants for some time.

Over two or three days they summoned us one by one and played a game with us along the lines of “Admit that you’re a queer and we’ll let you go,” but none of us ever went anywhere, no matter what we confessed. Hassan Fawwaz had a small recording device to record our confessions as evidence before we were referred to the prosecutor’s office or before we were transferred to the medical examiners to confirm the oral confessions. Fawwaz was constantly surrounded by two or three men who were more like rhinoceroses than human beings. I couldn’t imagine that outside that place they had homes and families and maybe children they loved and cared for.

In a glass-fronted cabinet close to his desk, Hassan Fawwaz had a real black whip, which he used for the first time on Karim Saadoun. When the whip was about to land on his head, Karim automatically raised his hand and the tip of the whip wrapped itself around one of the fingers on his left hand, breaking a blood vessel or something like that. When he came back to us it kept bleeding for a long time, even after I ripped my shirt into shreds and wrapped some of them round his finger several times. The blood didn’t seem strange in our surroundings, but Karim kept looking at it in amazement. He noticed I was having trouble breathing. He studied my face for a while, and then asked me my name.

We were all beaten in Azbakiya police station: those who confessed, those who held out, those who said they were tops, and those who said they were bottoms. They weren’t too rough with me—just two or three blows. I was willing to admit to anything they read out to me. They asked me to take off my pants, and I thanked God that I was wearing white underwear. I knew that if they found anyone in colored underwear they beat them and humiliated them especially brutally, on the grounds that this was irrefutable evidence that they were effeminate. They laughed throughout the process and their tone of voice was surprisingly triumphalist. With each new pervert that stood in front of them for them to play with, their sense of their own virility seemed to rise, until it reached stratospheric levels.

Unlike Karim, I wasn’t whipped, but there were fists waiting to punch me as soon as I went into their room. The bully among them landed a punch in your stomach and held it there for a few moments, like a massive truck unloading its cargo inside you. Then he came at you again, and you felt that it would never stop and you would never breathe normally again. Then the next blow came, and then the next, on your back, or a quick, stinging slap on the back of your neck, bringing you back to the real world and making you forget the stone sinking into your stomach as if it had never happened, and you were surprised to discover that, like pleasure, pain has no known limits.

Unconsciously or unthinkingly, I told them what they wanted to hear: “I’m gay, passive and active.”

They asked me to repeat what I had said with the recording device switched on, after the beatings had stopped. My voice had calmed down a little and was now quite close to my normal voice. Other people had repeated this phrase under the impact of the beatings, without understanding what it really meant. After coming back bleeding, someone had asked me, “Does ‘gay’ mean you give or you take?”

At the end of the process all of us were preoccupied with the screams of pain from damaged parts of our bodies. Those pains continued long after we were referred to the prosecutor’s office, and were then renewed in the “welcoming ceremony” at the Tora prison. I stayed close to Karim, wearing just a vest with white braces over my pants. I wept in silence, a silence that drowned out the sound of my thoughts amid the wailing and the crying. Then the cell door opened and an officer stood there, looking handsome and kind. We hadn’t seen him before. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said with a serious face and in a sympathetic tone. “Yours is a very serious case. I want you to be strong and prepare for what will happen.”

Then he rushed off without lingering even a few seconds to face the flood of questions and entreaties that everyone pressed him with. His apparent sympathy merely added to our alarm.

At that moment I began to have a serious asthma attack. I looked around for help of any kind. Suddenly, amid all the sobbing and the suffering, Karim spoke out from the corner where he was lurking. Pointing his bandaged finger in the air, he said, “You’re our witness, Lord!”

He was staring at the ceiling with wide-open, startled eyes, as if he could see something none of us others could see.