Now Bubbles turned to me. Theo translated without getting up.
“Admit that you are a CIA agent,” Bubbles demanded.
“La,” I said.
“Turn around and face the wall,” he ordered. I did. “Now, speak Arabic.”
To appease him I began spitting out what little Arabic I knew, but I did this in the most condescending tone possible, thinking he wouldn’t pick up on it. But Bubbles immediately cut me off, yelling:
“Tell him to talk normal!”
I continued, this time in my regular voice, until I felt a slight tug on my vest.
“He wants you to take it off,” said Theo.
I removed the vest. Then he tugged on my hoodie and I removed that too. Now I stood in the white sleeveless tee shirt Yassine had given me—with part of my shoulder tattoo visible. Not only are tattoos in general a sin in Islam, I knew that this one in particular could cause me considerable problems. It was a picture of Leo Tolstoy as an old man, with a long gray beard that made him look Hasidic. Aside from the “Jewishness” of the figure, the fact that Russia was supplying the regime with the bulk of their weapons meant that I had no desire to explain who the guy was. For this reason I had worked hard to keep Leo totally concealed—and I had, until now. Bubbles noticed the tattoo immediately and pulled my shirt aside to expose the rest of it.
“He wants to know who that is,” Theo translated.
“It looks like a Jew,” said one of the guards.
“Tell him it’s just an old man I picked off the wall in the tattoo parlor,” I said. “Tell him it’s a wizard.”
Theo translated but Bubbles was less than convinced, so we settled on Walt Whitman. Then Bubbles tugged on my tee shirt. I took it off and stood there in the freezing cold, exposed in front of everyone, keeping myself turned to the wall to conceal my other tattoo.
“He says this is your last chance to confess,” said Theo. “Just do it.”
“And be treated like this?” I asked, turning slightly and motioning to him where he still lay, cowering on the floor.
I looked Bubbles right in the eye.
“No!” I said defiantly, in English.
Bubbles instructed one of the guards to return Theo to our cell so he could tend to me alone. Once it was just the two of us he wasted no time in getting to work.
Lash!
I screamed as a strip of garden hose landed on my back.
Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash!
The bathroom was an echo chamber and my screams must have reached every corner of the building. And then, as suddenly as he’d begun, Bubbles stopped. I don’t know if he saw that I wasn’t going to break or he just didn’t want to get in trouble with management for inflicting too much damage upon me, but something made him think twice about continuing, and as I stood waiting for another blow he abruptly reached around me and pulled my shirt from where it rested on the radiator. I looked at him and he nodded for me to get dressed. I didn’t hesitate. Sancho appeared to grab me by the arm and lead me back to the cell, where Theo was sitting on the blankets. Sancho ordered me to get on my knees and place my head to the wall, then with his thick cable dealt me a blow to the elbow that made me shriek at the top of my lungs. He left; the door slammed behind him.
At that point I was still determined never to admit I was a spy under any circumstances, if only to avoid being placed in the same category as Theo, who’d “confessed” after one lash to the feet and was now the prisoner on which every jihadi vented his hatred. Mine was a good strategy, but it would not stand the tests of time and torture.
Sometimes we’d go long stretches without being taken to the bathroom—the record was two and a half days. Since we had our piss bottles and were hardly being fed, most of the time this wasn’t really a problem. Other times it was. We had a bucket, but at this point I still refused to take a dump in it, just on principle.
“Don’t knock on the door,” Theo would warn me.
“No, fuck that!” I’d yell back. “I’m knocking!”
The rules in this prison were different than the last: we weren’t allowed to knock on the door; if we did, we were told, we would be punished. This threat wasn’t enough to deter me when I really had to go, and so when the time came, I knocked and yelled the same phrase over and over, figuring I was bound to annoy them into taking me to relieve myself, eventually.
“Bathroom, please, bathroom!” I bellowed, pounding on the door.
I would do this for as long as it took—and sometimes it took hours.
Usually, that was the end of it: I got to shit in a toilet like a human being, and despite their threats, no one was punished—a win-win. However, on other occasions we got a different reaction:
“Who knock door?” we heard Sancho scream once as he marched toward our cell.
“Oh shit, it’s Sancho,” said Theo, trembling.
“I did!” I yelled, knocking some more.
A second later the door opened and standing before me was a vexed Sancho, holding a thick rope. Yassine was with him.
“Who knock door?” Yassine asked me, enraged.
“I did,” I said.
We stared into each other’s eyes for a second, and then Yassine abruptly turned his attention toward Theo, ran over to him, and began beating the shit out of him. Sancho joined in, bringing the rope down on Theo’s back again and again as Yassine kicked him and yelled about the knocking. I tried to stop them, but my attempts were futile.
“Yassine, wait!” I said pleadingly. “It was me! I knocked!”
It didn’t matter. They got in a few last
