It gave me a sense of comfort to know that I could escape this nightmare. And knowing this lifted my despair just enough to help me hold on.
Two days after I tested the rope I was back in the courtyard, pacing as usual, when my cellmates started shouting my name. “You’ve got a visitor! It’s your wife!”
Three weeks had passed since I’d arrived in Sakran and I’d been thinking about Norine nonstop. I’d been wondering how long it would take before she was allowed to see me. To know that she had finally made it to Sakran and that she was here to see me right now left me almost euphoric. I ran up to my bunk, grabbed my toothbrush, and headed to the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” said Emin. “They’re taking it off your time already. Just go!”
AS SOON AS I WAS SHOWN into the room where Norine was waiting, I broke down. It wasn’t just Norine who had been allowed to visit, but my mother too. The guard had told me as we’d walked from the cell that this was an open visit, which meant that I would be allowed to talk in English. But for the first five minutes all I could do was sob.
“Hey, my love,” said Norine as she rocked me gently in her arms. “It’s okay. I’m here. I found you, right?”
With three guards looking on, we sat side by side at a table in a corner of the room. Norine and I clung to each other the entire visit.
When I finally could speak, I was desperate to explain the spiritual crisis that was suffocating me. “Norine, I am Job,” I said. “I am Job. God has turned me over to Satan.” I was unshaven, distraught, and unraveling.
My mother was concerned that I was heading down a dangerous path by blaming God. “You know, Andrew, I made a mistake in telling you at Harmandali that you were God’s prisoner. Actually, you are a prisoner for God.” I knew what she was doing, trying to give me a right perspective, but I wasn’t ready to write this off completely to persecution. I was convinced that God had planned to set me free but changed his mind to accomplish some purpose—what exactly, I did not know. And this meant that ultimately he was the one keeping me in prison. In the end, he was my jailor.
Norine explained how she had been trying to get to me since day one, even coming out the very first Saturday. But there was no bend in this place. To come in today they’d been through multiple security checks, a thorough search, and had had their irises scanned twice. Mom had not even been allowed to keep a Kleenex with her. The high walls, the security, the iron bars—it was imposing and intimidating.
“I hope we can finally have a phone call this week. Because our home phone and my cell phone were registered in your name, the prison would not approve those numbers. I had to get a new number and register it in my name and then mail all the paperwork in. I’ve been working on it.”
I was sure she had been. I knew that Norine would keep fighting for me.
But I knew that we were both powerless here.
MY NIGHTMARE about Okan Batu had been troubling me, but there was another dream that I wanted to tell Norine about.
It was one of those dreams where you sense rather than see something happening, and in mine I was aware that Turkey, Iran, and Russia were coming together to form an alliance so dark that I woke up sweating and gasping for breath. It seemed counterintuitive, as Turkey and Iran were historical enemies. As for Russia, Turkey had shot down one of its jets a year earlier and the two countries were on opposite sides of the conflict in Syria. Then, three days after my dream, an off-duty Turkish police officer assassinated the Russian ambassador at an art exhibition in Ankara. I thought it would drive them apart, but as the story dominated the news in the coming days it became clear that the incident had brought Erdogan and Putin closer together.
The dream scared me. “Norine, you’ve got to get me out of here before this happens.”
I wanted her to understand the urgency I felt. If Turkey turned away from its Western alliances toward what I had seen, it would be bad news—and very bad news for me.
“Time’s up,” said one of the guards.
“Is it going to be another three weeks until I see you again?” I said in a pained voice.
Norine’s voice was soft. “I don’t know when I’m going to see you again.”
I understood.
They had done everything they could to encourage me in this short time, but I needed something to hold on to, a sliver of hope, no matter how vague and insubstantial. I asked the one question that had been growing within me ever since I’d arrived. “Am I going to grow old and die in this place?”
I could hear Norine’s breath catch in her throat.
A FEW DAYS LATER, on my forty-ninth birthday, things in the cell got worse.
The door opened in the afternoon and a man came in carrying a couple of trash bags full of his possessions. A few minutes later the door opened again, delivering another inmate. Another came after that, and by the end of the day we had gone from twelve to eighteen men in a cell built for eight. Even though many criminals had actually been released to make space for the FETO prisoners, there still wasn’t enough room for the huge numbers arrested. And new prisons couldn’t be built fast enough.
The bunk beds filled up, and the last four to arrive were given a mattress and told to find a space to sleep on the floor. The two-foot gap between my bunk and my neighbor’s became home to a military policeman in his twenties. Right from the beginning it was clear that he tolerated but did not like me, which added to my stress. When we were each in our beds we would often end up with our faces just inches apart.
I was glad to have a bed—it was the only place I could retreat to. Every afternoon I would pull out paper and write a letter to Norine, pouring out my anxieties. I wrote the same things again and again: “Am I a Peter, or a James?” They were two of Jesus’s closest disciples: Peter was released from prison, James was not.
In the same way that I kept asking the same questions, I also needed to hear the same reassurances again and again from Norine.
One of the most painful worries I had was about her. And my dreams didn’t help. In many of them I was with Norine, but then she would disappear, or she would be in a place where I could see her but not reach her. She sometimes seemed not to care. And when I woke up, the feelings of her being distant or leaving me behind would still be there. I had to repeat to myself: This is only a dream! This is not really Norine!
I knew that she would remain faithful, but I wondered whether she was going to go back to normal life. Sundays were especially difficult. It had been the highlight of my week for so many years, and it was the one day when I knew where she’d be and what she’d be doing at any given hour. I knew when she’d be leaving the apartment, when our church service would be starting, and when it would finish. I’d picture everyone going out for a meal after the meeting, just like I had done with them so many times. Was she with them? Was she moving on, having fun, enjoying life?
In all our life together Norine had never given me reason to doubt her. On her lowest day, when she was released from Isikkent, she fought to stay with me. I knew she loved me; I’d always known it. And even in the cell I knew that my fears were baseless, but I felt them all the same. She’s my closest confidant, the person in the world I most desire to be with. I have never spent too much time with her. I have never needed time away from her. We did everything together.
So the whisper that came in the darkest moments—that Norine wasn’t missing me, that she had moved on or would move on and eventually forget me—that was the cruelest whisper of all. I knew it was irrational, but it was demoralizing.
When we were finally allowed a phone call and I told her about my fears, she said exactly what I needed to hear.
“Andrew, I cannot have a normal life without you, and I don’t want to. Would you feel any differently if our positions were reversed? It’s my honor to be walking through this with you. My love, I’m waiting for you. We will go back to normal life together.”
I was comforted. It sounds pathetic now, but I said, “I need to hear this often. Keep telling me.”
Then I asked her the biggest question of all. “Do you have hope? Will I get out of here?”
Even before she said a word I felt as though my insides had been crushed by a vice. The silence only lasted a second or two, but I could tell she was weighing her words carefully.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “I’m not God.”
The panic was fiercer than ever. It was like I was clawing the walls. “You’ve got to get me out of here, Norine. You’ve got to get me out.”
“Calm down, my love.”
The phone died. We had reached our ten-minute mark. I followed the guards back to the cell. I said nothing as I picked my way through the crowd and out into the cold air of the courtyard.
I was devastated. I was barely holding on. If Norine didn’t have hope that I’d get out, then I might as well give up.
I remembered the stories I’d heard over the years of Chinese Christians persecuted by the state. In every tale where they were locked up inside brutal prisons, they seemed to be so joyful. They were suffering for their faith, yet somehow they made persecution look like a privilege. It was inspiring. I wanted to be like them. But I wasn’t.
How could I be so broken by prison? What was wrong with me? I said time and again, “God, you chose the wrong man.” Why would he put me in a place where I would start to believe that it’s harder to live for God than it is to die for him?
ON JANUARY 20, 2017, I was given another reminder of how far everything was slipping away from me. For once I was watching the TV in the cell. It was showing some US news, the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Norine had spent weeks trying to get through to someone in the President-elect’s team, and our best hope so far was Franklin Graham. He grew up in the same church back in North Carolina that my family attended. Amazingly, Franklin had been invited to take part in the ceremony, and we’d heard that he was going to raise my case with Trump if he could.
I watched in silence.
Franklin was right there, in front of the microphone. He was praying, and President Trump was right there too. He was so close, and I was pleading with God to let the two men talk.
After that, days slipped by.
Nothing changed.
LIFE IN T4 C BLOCK continued—excruciatingly slowly.
Erol was the first to go on trial from our cell. This was a big deal, because everyone else had been held for months now, with no movement on their cases—no indictments, no trial dates, and no end in sight. Erol was a quiet and gentle man who worked for the forestry department. When his wife brought their four-year-old to the open visits, she would tell the boy that his father was working in this building. She asked one of the guards to play along. “Dad works here, right?” It was very sad.
Erol had been arrested for a simple reason: he had an app on his phone.
ByLock was a secure messaging app that had been freely available. The problem for Erol was that some of the people who planned the coup had used ByLock to communicate. When the government discovered this, it cracked the server and started arresting anyone who had used it.
The day Erol went to court for his third trial appearance, the cell was tense, even though everyone agreed that the ByLock charges were absurd. Before Erol left the cell, one of the former police chiefs laid out exactly why he was going to come back a free man. “There’s no criminality proven, and no connection to the coup plotters. It is simply not possible to convict you—the courts will not allow it.”
His words made sense, they sounded logical. But this was Turkey in the aftermath of the coup. Logic didn’t count for much.
Erol left, nervous but looking cautiously optimistic. The rest of the men spent much of the day talking nervously and doing their prayers. They discussed their cases and I found out that at least six others in the cell had also been caught with ByLock on their phones. Someone else had been arrested for having an account at Asya Bank, a bank linked to the Gulenist movement. Just having an account there was enough to land someone in Sakran, even though when the first branch was opened, none other than Erdogan himself had held the ribbon as it was cut.
As time passed, I listened to my cellmates’ conversation settle on a new topic.
“When I get out of here they’re going to owe me so much money in compensation.”
“Oh yeah. Seven hundred dollars per month!”
“Plus you can sue for missed earnings and damages.”
“I heard about a guy who got $100,000. Can you believe it?”
“I’m buying myself a summer cottage.”
“Hey, Andrew. You can really sue. An American locked away for months like this? They’re going to owe you big-time!”
I just smiled and nodded.
There was no way that any of them were going to be able to sue.
As the evening arrived, the sense of anticipation about Erol’s return increased.
As soon as he walked in, the atmosphere changed.
Erol sat at the table, his face drained of color, his voice shaky and weak. “I pleaded with the judge to look at my messages and see that they were just the kind of normal things you send to your family and friends. There was nothing to do with the coup in there. Nothing to do with anything. But the judge said that just having the app meant that I was part of FETO. Then he gave me ten years.”
We all sat in silence.
It wasn’t just the others who had ByLock on their phones who took it hard. All of us did. We all knew then that there was nothing about this judicial system that was fair or independent.
There was no way out.