The game was so addictive that sometimes there was a waiting list to get in on the action. Even the brass would play, though if they ended up in the middle nobody ever gave them more than a pat. I invited Theo to play several times, but he always declined, even when I promised that nobody would hurt him.
“No, I’m not going to play if you’re going to hit me,” he snapped.
Once the rivalries started heating up you’d see some of us walking around the room rubbing our bruised-to-the-bone arms and shoulders—we were beating each other worse than the guards were. Leave it to the Syrian Army to turn hacky sack into a full-contact sport.
All of our clothes were in tatters so one of the men asked a guard to bring us a needle and thread. Surprisingly, he delivered, which was great for me because I had a rip in my pants that ran from the crotch all the way down the seam of the left leg. My only problem was that I didn’t know how to sew, but luckily one of the soldiers did, and later that same day after he fixed my pants he tossed me my ball with a sock sewn tightly around it. Our games were frequently interrupted by ball malfunctions, specifically the need to rewind the shoelace; now that would never happen again. And our new, sturdier equipment made it possible for us to evolve from playing full-contact hacky sack to one-on-one volleyball.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but one night I looked up to see Rias and another inmate on their knees, each holding one end of a blanket that stretched from one side of the room to the other, while two prisoners, also kneeling, volleyed the ball back and forth over the top. The Syrian people are definitely the most competitive I have ever met in my life, and within minutes they were playing for points and everyone was lining up to play the winner. Unlike our Aleppo-style hacky sack, this game involved no corporal punishment, but that didn’t stop the men from fighting or throwing temper tantrums when they lost. Eventually the arguing got so bad that Rabir took the title of referee, standing over every game as if perched on a high chair like a tennis umpire.
The rules of the tournament were simple: the first man to reach five points won and moved on to the next round. As in hacky sack there was no spiking, otherwise no game would have lasted longer than three seconds, and also as in hacky sack, intense rivalries formed between the players. Mine was with Hassan, whose gaunt frame and protruding cheekbones led some of the men to call him “the human skeleton.” Every time I played him, he scored on me with the same dinky-ass move, and every game started out the same way, with me staring at him from one side of the net like a gunslinger at high noon, and him staring back with a big grin that said: I’m about to school your ass in front of the whole room, son.
The winner of our first tournament was Rabir, and upon beating the runner-up he rose like a phoenix with his arms held high in triumph and was immediately surrounded as nearly every man in the room stormed the court. As someone lifted one of Rabir’s arms up to declare him the victor, Fatr handed him an empty two-liter soda bottle as if it were the Stanley Cup. Rabir thrust the bottle proudly into the air as everyone hollered, and for a moment our cell resembled a baseball field after a World Series victory. We’d have many tournaments, but no other moments quite like this one, where for a few precious minutes we all forgot we were prisoners.
They came for them at night. There was no warning, no light, and no goodbyes—only the voice of a guard telling Pops and the Shabiha to get up and follow him. We never saw either one of them again, and were never told their fate, but we all knew that they had most likely been executed. The Senator had been in the boiler room at the hospital when the Shabiha’s confession was forced from him and said there was no way in hell he’d ever be released given what he’d admitted to.
Earlier that evening, Pops had led everyone in prayer, reciting the Koran in the same fading light in which I’d met him. It was a moment of pure beauty, and I remember so clearly sitting there watching him as he sat cross-legged, the prayer flowing out of him in his raspy voice. We all missed him, just like I’m sure his family did.
The bathroom was up the hall from our cell and had a regular toilet like the ones we use in the West. Unfortunately, it did not flush. There were over twenty of us sharing this one toilet, and during our first days there the bowl filled up so fast that by the time it was my turn people had already begun to shit in the bidet. I’d breathe through my mouth to avoid the smell but the air was so moist and putrid I could almost taste it. Twice a day prisoners were taken from the cell for dish duty upstairs, and I assumed they were the ones burdened with emptying the toilet.
There was a hose in the wall, but it rarely worked, and so instead we had another blue five-gallon jug of water and a plastic cup. A prisoner had sixty seconds to shit, wash his rear out with cups of
