They like to transport you at night. When the roads are deathly quiet and dark, that’s when the authorities move you. It’s more intimidating that way.
I was not in a panic—I was numb. Sometimes when bad things happen to me, part of me locks down and it’s almost as if I’m an observer, sitting outside and watching myself from a distance.
At first I tried to keep track of the route we were taking, but as we left the lights of Izmir behind us and headed up into the darkness of the mountains, I gave up. All I could do was sit back and pray that somehow Norine would be able to find me.
Before I left Isikkent, Burak had called me into his office. He mentioned a name I had never heard before—a deportation center called Harmandali—and told me that he had received an order to transfer me there right away. He was annoyed because I was making him miss a soccer match that was on TV.
“What about my wife? Will someone tell her? She has to know. Please!”
Burak had always been less cold than Melih, but as I pleaded with him to contact Norine, he brushed my words aside and sent me out.
An hour after we left Izmir the car finally slowed. We pulled off the smooth tarmac. Suddenly I recognized where we were as we drove by the apartment of some of our closest Turkish friends from the church. I had eaten there several times. Now I was going by in the dead of night, so close, and yet they had no idea. We bumped along a rougher road for several miles. It was too dark to see the building properly in the distance, but when we finally stopped I could clearly make out metal gates, a security booth, and a handful of police waiting.
Inside, after I’d been taken through airport-standard security, a group of guards upended my backpack onto a table. When a gray-haired hawk of a man came in they all snapped immediately to attention.
Everything the old man said was delivered in a loud, impatient bark. “Don’t give him that!” he said, pointing at my watch. “Or those”—he gestured toward my glasses. When the guards picked up the small plastic cross that Norine had left me at Isikkent, the old man’s eyes grew wide. “Take that away. Don’t give him anything.”
I was led in silence to a room down on a lower floor. Once the metal door was locked shut behind me, I looked around. There were three bunks but no one else inside. Dirty sheets but no blankets. A Western-style toilet that didn’t flush. A window with bars.
Without warning the lights went out.
From the street lamp outside I could just about make my way around the room. I gave up trying to find a light switch after a few minutes and gathered all the pillows and piled them around me as I lay on one of the beds.
I was shivering with cold, my eyes peeled wide. But inside I was numb. I’d felt that way ever since I’d left Isikkent.
As I lay in silence, the questions came. Like a plague of locusts they attacked my mind.
Will Norine find me here?
What happens if she doesn’t?
What happens to me if they deport her?
What happens to me if they don’t deport me?
I tried to block them out. I tried to distract myself, to pray or remember the songs we had sung together at Isikkent. But it was no use. The best I could do was inhale the scent of Norine that still hung on my clothes, and wait.
THE LIGHTS CAME ON early the next morning. Soon the guards were banging on the door, shouting that it was time for me to get up. Minutes later the door crashed open. A short, stocky man in uniform yelled at me. “Get out here. What are you waiting for? Why aren’t you ready?”
“Please,” I said, holding up my hands. “Stop yelling at me. I don’t know any of the rules. What am I supposed to be doing?”
“Get out.”
Outside my room—my cell—were several guards. I had no idea why I needed so many, but they escorted me across the corridor to a room where there was Turkish tea and bread on a table.
One of the guards nodded at the food. “You want to eat here or go back to your room?”
I was so stressed that I couldn’t even think of eating. “I’m not hungry at all,” I said. Seconds later I was back in my cell. The door slammed. The lock turned. I was alone.
The window was low enough for me to look out, but the view was nothing like it had been in Isikkent. Back there at least there were streets and cars and once in a while a person to look at. In Harmandali there was nothing but scrubland, a mothballed construction site nestling beneath some hills, and way off in the distance, a thin strip of sea. I had never felt so far away from Norine.
I stared out the window, searching for a sign of life or some activity that might help distract my mind, but there was nothing to see. Hours must have passed as I watched, and still nothing happened.
I was in the middle of nowhere.
And I was in solitary.
AS THE DAY WORE ON the challenge of keeping my anxiety in check became increasingly difficult. Just before Norine had left we agreed that I would always hang a certain T-shirt in the window of our room in Isikkent so she’d know I was still there. The thought of her arriving and seeing the window empty tore me up.
I’d hear sounds in the corridor outside—guards shouting, doors slamming—and my heart would surge. I’d stare at the door, readying myself for the moment that it swung open, or holding my breath until the moment I was sure that the guards had gone.
I remembered the thought about how it was time to come home. In just over two weeks I’d gone from weeping because I had to leave Turkey to weeping because I couldn’t leave. I had gone from begging to be allowed to stay in Turkey to pleading to be allowed to leave.
I thought about everything that we’d done in Turkey and the price I was now paying.
I thought about my kids.
I thought about my wife.
I thought about a song I had not heard for years—“Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea. The chorus started playing in my mind, on endless repeat. It was taunting me, mocking me. Was I really going to be kept here until Christmas? Was I really facing another nine weeks of being locked up in solitary confinement? Could I even cope?
I had no control over where my mind went next, and with each shift in focus I could feel the panic ratchet up a notch.
At lunchtime my door opened and I was given food. I wasn’t taken out of the room like before, but the styrofoam plate was brought to me. “You’re high security,” said the guard. “So you don’t go out.” High security? Why would I be high security? It didn’t matter where I was fed, I could not eat. My stomach was twisted tight, my throat was locked.
It was the same with sleep. I knew my body needed it, but I could not sleep. Throughout the afternoon I tried to lie down and close my eyes. But every time I felt myself starting to drift, a massive surge of adrenaline would startle me awake and my heart would race once again.
The cell was its own torture. It was just me and a bed. I did not have a chair, and I could not sit easily on the bunk because of its low height. So I either lay on the bed, or stood, or walked. There was nothing to do, no reading, no writing, nobody to talk to. On its own this would have been enough to drive me mad. But with the added weight of fear it was overwhelming.
Piece by piece I could feel myself falling apart.
In the moments I was able to think clearly, I forced myself to focus on a single question: What am I going to do to stop myself from going crazy? I feared that if I let my mind wander too far then full-fledged panic and a total meltdown would follow.
I walked up and down the room and prayed, forcing myself to focus on God in order not to lose control. For the first time I realized that I was in the hands of a dreadful, malevolent spiritual power. The dread of this welled up inside of me and gripped my heart. I felt weak and powerless, a man alone, held captive by a vast, dark force.
All that day there grew within me an aching realization that this was now very, very serious. Maybe they were never going to let me go.
SOMETIME IN THE AFTERNOON of my first full day in Harmandali, a guard told me that I had a visitor.
Hope surged inside me. I jumped to my feet. “Who? Is it my wife?”
The guard shrugged. “I don’t know. But you are to come with me now.”
Norine was standing in the same area I had been processed.
As soon as I hugged her, I started sobbing.
I struggled to catch enough of my breath to finally be able to talk. “Look at what they’ve done to me, Norine. Look at me.”
She held me closer. “It’s okay, my love. I’ve found you now. I’m here. But we haven’t got long, so I need you to listen to me.”
All the time I’d been in my cell I’d been willing time to speed up. Now, with my head on my wife’s shoulder, inhaling the scent of her hair, I begged time to slow down.
“I’ve been talking to people constantly since I got out. Your parents put me in touch with a group that specializes in this kind of case—fighting for Christians who have been locked up in the Middle East. They’re very good and they say they’re already asking political leaders from around the world to contact the Turkish government quietly. They’re going to help get you out. And maybe that’s why they’ve transferred you here—this is where most people are deported from.”
Hearing Norine’s voice, feeling her arms around my shoulders, and knowing she was fighting for me calmed me down.
But then it was over. A guard separated us. The door to freedom was right there, but only Norine could go through it. For the briefest moment I fantasized about breaking free and running out. But where to? I would be caught in no time.
I was led away. A minute later I was back in my room.
Alone.