“Mohammad, I was just cleaning my nails out on the door,” I said.
Theo and I were ordered to stand in the back of the room, and this was when the thug lifted my blanket and found the bracket. I was sure he was going to dig it into the flesh of my face and drag it down, but all he did was walk up to me and hold it in front of my eyes.
“Jumu’ah!” said Mohammad, kneeling by the door.
He’d found the impression Theo had made with the spoon months before—the “peephole.” Mohammad motioned me over, and when I knelt beside him he furiously pointed to the gouge in the door.
“Mohammad, that was already there,” I said, honestly. “I swear to God.”
He looked down. At his feet was a small pile of broken concrete pieces, the mess Theo had made so he could kick a piece of rubble around the room like a soccer ball. Mohammad picked up a chunk of concrete, examined it, and then placed it in the impression in the door and turned it from side to side—obviously imagining that this is what he’d heard us doing. Just my luck: it fit perfectly.
Mohammad turned to look me in the eye. A seriousness had overtaken his usually animated face, and in that two or three seconds as he stared at me, I knew I was finally meeting his darker half.
“Mohammad . . .” I said slowly, looking at Theo to see if he was going to fess up to making the mark in the door. Theo just stood there, silently watching events unfold.
By the time I turned my head back to Mohammad our punishment had begun. I saw the first punch coming and blocked it so that his fist only grazed the side of my head. The second one I blocked completely. Now on his feet, Mohammad dealt me a swift kick to the abdomen and then brought the piece of concrete down on the back of my head with wrecking-ball force. Stunned by the blow, I heard him instruct Yassine to tend to me, and I was dealt another kick as he moved on to Theo.
Theo hadn’t moved—Mohammad grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and threw him against the back wall. He fell to the ground flat on his face with his hands out, shaking. As Mohammad shined the light in Theo’s face, he took out his Glock. I ran over as he pointed it down at Theo’s head.
“Mohammad, please don’t do it!” I begged. “Please don’t shoot him! I’m sorry, it was my fault!”
“I am going to come back in ten minutes to beat you,” said Mohammad to Theo in Arabic, while holstering his weapon. “And then come back at night to beat you some more. Take their beds!”
A second later they were dragging our beds and blankets out into the hallway and we were once again alone. That’s when Theo translated what Mohammad had said. There was a moment of silence.
“Hey, I don’t mean to be a dick, but did he say he’s gonna beat me too?” I asked.
“No,” answered Theo. “This is bad. We need our beds or we’re going to get sick.”
I told him not to worry about the beds, that I would talk to Mohammad and get them back. I waited a few minutes and then started banging on the door.
“Mohammad, come on, man, talk to me,” I called out. “This is all just a misunderstanding!”
After a few minutes of this, Yassine appeared. He looked enraged.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“I wanna talk to Mohammad.”
“No!”
“Well then, how about a bathroom run?”
“No, no bathroom! No food! Never again!” he shouted, slamming the door.
About ten minutes later, he returned and dropped a tray of olives and yogurt for us, then left without saying a word. Theo had lost his appetite, so I ate alone. Not long after this we heard a large group of people assembling outside our door and looked at each other with dread. When the door opened, standing there were about eight men wearing masks, dressed in black from head to toe. One entered and, after telling Theo to cover his eyes, cuffed him with his hands behind his back. Then they led him away and locked me in by myself. Theo didn’t say a word. A minute or two later the chilling sound of his screams came floating through the hallway and crashing into my ears. I paced back and forth, praying to God to make it stop and for them not to take me next, but I was pretty sure my luck in this area had run out.
Shortly after the screams had faded into silence, the door opened. It was the same group, only now two of the men were holding Theo up by his arms. He was soaking wet below the waist from pissing himself. They threw him violently to the ground, blood from his battered ankles smearing all over the floor of the cell, and then took off the handcuffs. One of the men motioned for me to turn around and put my hands behind my back.
“Yala,” he said.
Unlike Theo I didn’t go quietly—I pleaded with them to reconsider and explained again and again that it was all a mistake, even though I knew none of them understood a word I was saying. I was hoping that maybe my insistence would need no translation, and I kept it up all the way down the hallway, right up until we entered the boiler room. The room was not big, and from what I could see from under my cap, it was packed. It was obvious that they’d chosen this room to torture people in for a reason: dim and dirty, lit by a single bulb that made the
