On this day, Theo and I got along. He didn’t start with me at all—no complaining, no snide comments, no tracking bugs onto the blankets. He was respectful, even supportive. At one point we decided to honor my mother by singing “Happy Birthday” to her, together. It was a beautiful moment on a terrible day, and one that I can honestly say I was happy to have him there for.
About two weeks later, on March ninth, we did the same thing for Theo’s mother on her birthday. When I woke up that morning I could see an ocean of emotions racing through him as he sat with his back to the wall. It was the only time I ever really saw him look concerned for another person, and I made sure to be just as supportive of him as he had been of me.
The next morning, the door opened and it was Yassine and Sancho, holding hand ties. They were moving us again. Our time in hell had finally come to an end.
THE HOSPITAL II
MARCH 10, 2013
When they led us outside, I was surprised at how beautiful the weather had become over the past month. Our room was always freezing, so once in the sunlight the change in temperature hit us hard. I felt my ski cap–blindfold becoming saturated with perspiration as I looked out beneath it at the crowd of jihadis standing around, waiting to take us wherever we were going. This time we were laid shoulder to shoulder instead of head to foot, and once we were in the trunk of the SUV they piled wool blankets on top of us until we could barely breathe. Within minutes my clothes were drenched with sweat and I leaned forward to pull off my hat. Yassine opened the back door, reached through to where Theo was lying, and started punching him on the top of the head over and over again like he was knocking on a door, all the while carrying on a conversation with one of his friends as if it were the most normal thing in the world. A few minutes later we were on the road, headed toward the unknown with General Mohammad’s voice blaring from the front seat.
About an hour had passed when we arrived; we were taken from the trunk and led into a building, down again, a flight of stairs to the basement. Once we were alone and locked inside a room, Theo and I lifted our blindfolds—to see that we were in the exact same cell they had taken us from over a month before. Nothing had changed except that the window was no longer blocked by bags of gravel, and a thick cable was fed into the cell between the bars and then through a hole in the concrete wall.
“Thank God!” I said. “We’re home!”
Theo felt the same. We were both hugely relieved to find ourselves brought back to the hospital, although we were still unclear about whether this meant our punishment for the door incident was over. Before we were transported I’d pocketed a piece of bread that I was saving; once we were alone I broke it out to avoid it being confiscated in case they searched us.
“Here,” I said, holding half out to Theo.
“No,” he said. “That’s yours.”
“No, look—we may fight about everything, but when it comes to food and water we’re brothers, and we share everything.” I handed him his piece, and we ate.
We kept expecting either the Little Judge or Mohammad to pay us a visit, to warn us against messing with the door again, or the cable running through the room, but neither came. Instead, a guard of around twenty popped in to take us to the bathroom, a cheerful new recruit with a baby face and a big head of thick black hair above it.
After the guard locked us in the bathroom I noticed a bag of old bread sitting on the radiator, and we ripped into it. This stale bread was actually trash, but since wasting food is considered haram, they often left a stockpile of it here. We didn’t know whether they planned to keep starving us, so to be on the safe side we stuffed our mouths and pockets with whatever we could. A few minutes after we were returned to our cell the new recruit was back again, this time with fresh bread and a big bowl of steaming-hot Mamouniyeh, a sweet porridge-like dish that tastes like heaven when you’ve just spent more than a month being starved in hell.
As the days passed, not only were we no longer being starved, we were fed better than ever. The last time we’d been here the standard had been two meals a day; now we got three. They brought us some extra clothes and three blankets apiece, which was a big step down from the nine that I’d had before we left for the electrical institute, but I guess in their view I did bite the hand that fed me and there was obviously no coming back from that.
By March fifteenth it almost felt like we’d never been gone—except for Theo’s behavior. It had been five days since our return and he was still spending all his time under the covers, only emerging to eat or hunt for bedbugs.
