And just like that, Theo was returned to the very men he’d escaped from the night before. That night, the FSA and the thugs all had a party and tortured him together. Eventually—after a “trial” in Bab al-Hawa, on the Turkish/Syrian border, featuring the kidnapper he’d pointed out as the prosecution’s star witness—he found himself first in a toilet stall that had been turned into a prison cell and then in a trunk for two hours on his way to this, his final destination. By the time his story was over I was exhausted.
Theo didn’t know what year it was or even who the president was anymore, because they’d bagged him before the election. I thought about telling him Mitt Romney’d won, but after hearing his story I realized this guy was lost enough. It was astonishing how brain-dead he’d become—how could he know what day he had been taken in late October, and that he’d been there for three months, and still think it was 2012? I started freaking out on the inside—was this what I would become in another two months?
At one point I mentioned General Mohammad, saying he seemed to be a good one.
“No, he’s not good,” Theo said. “He’s bad.”
“Why?”
“Because he tortured me.”
That was the first time I heard about the tire, but I cut him off before he finished telling me all the details. I really wasn’t in the mood.
Although this room was identical in size and color to the one I’d been in at the beginning, there were a few differences, some good and some not so good. The good news was that nobody had ripped out Theo’s light switch. The bad was that, whether Theo was a spy or not, it was obvious our captors were thoroughly convinced that he was: They had not only ripped the entire radiator from the wall so he couldn’t stand on it to reach the window, they’d torn out all the pipes along the walls. On top of that, even though the window was completely blocked off from the outside with grain bags filled with gravel, they’d electrified the bars as well—though with the electricity out so often it was far from Jurassic Park.
As soon as I noticed the light switch I flipped it up and asked why it was off in the first place. Theo explained that he never used it, and certain things began to make sense. There were tons of bread crumbs scattered on the floor all around him, where he slept and ate. At first I’d thought this was because he was a slob, but in reality they were there because he was a slob and because he mostly ate in the dark, even when he didn’t have to. He had been lying in the blackness alone for the past three months, vegetating, too scared even to get up and turn on the lights.
Without the lights on it was practically pitch-black in the room, with the only illumination filtering in through the bags of gravel in tiny cracks. It wasn’t until the lights flashed on that I saw what had been carved into the wall next to the door. It was abstract, but there was still no mistaking it.
“Is that a Star of David?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
“Did you do that?”
“Yeah, they don’t know what it is.”
By now I knew that he wasn’t Jewish.
“Are you fucking stupid? You don’t think any of them have seen an Israeli flag?”
I could not believe someone could be so ignorant and arrogant at the same time. It was obvious that he didn’t think much of the enemy, which made him a serious liability, and I realized he would have to be watched like a baby fresh out of the womb.
It was hard not to wring his neck for putting me in the position of having to scratch out my own religious symbol in a place where I needed faith more than ever. I had never been very religious, but had always been proud to be a Jew. I’d been fascinated by our history and had read about it voraciously, absorbing stories about the perseverance of the Jewish people and the challenges we had overcome. Now, I felt like it was my turn to uphold this tradition of grit and determination, surviving the impossible like so many others had in the millennia before me.
Within a day or two of arriving in my new cell I met the emir for the first time, as he showed us off to some visitors. In Arabic, “emir” means “prince,” and every militia group has one leading it. Here the emir’s name was Muawiyah—he was surprisingly young, in his early thirties. He wore glasses and confidence well together, and like Mohammad, carried a pistol in a shoulder holster.
“Assallam alekum,” I said when he entered, extending my hand.
He nodded and shook it, a gesture that shocked Theo because they’d never shaken his—they don’t usually extend this courtesy to infidels. Then he handed us a few pieces of cinnamon like those he’d been nibbling on when he entered. He and his visitors didn’t say much, just looked at us. We were the exotics in his zoo and the emir was proud to display us.
A few days later I asked Yassine if I could have another bath. Theo hadn’t had one at all in the three months since he’d arrived and emitted an odor so foul it was making the paint peel, so I figured this would be a good chance to get him one, too. At first Yassine refused to even consider it.
“No! He is a criminal!” he’d shouted, but I kept complaining about the stench and eventually he gave in.
A hot pot was prepared