“He’s giving him back the Koran,” said Abdelatif. “We’re with good Muslims now.”
Later that day Obeida paid us a visit with one of his friends, a skinny jihadi with dark skin and an especially long beard. Upon hearing that I’d recently converted to Islam they both lit up, and when I kicked the Fatiha for them they couldn’t have been more pleased. By now I had it down pat from studying with the guys and practicing before sleep every night.
It was during another, similar exchange that Theo tried to make me think they were going to kill me. As the Moroccan went back and forth with Obeida, he suddenly threw in a question as if it were from us.
“He asked him if they’re going to kill us because we are really scared,” said Theo.
“What’d he say?”
“Maybe,” Theo answered.
I turned to Ali for confirmation, but before he could expose the lie, Theo decided to come clean.
“No, no, he said no.”
“No? Then why’d you tell me maybe?” I asked, pissed.
“I got confused.”
That was his excuse. Someone who spoke fluent Arabic confused “maybe” and “no” when it came to a question of life or death. This wasn’t the first time Theo had used my lack of Arabic to try to make me think someone had said they were going to kill me when they’d actually said something else entirely. I didn’t really get that mad or go nuts after Obeida left like you’d think. I mainly just wondered what kind of human being does something like that to another, let alone one of his own.
Later that day Oqba told me that we were no longer in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra. We were now being held in trust for them by Ahrar al-Sham, another incredibly powerful rebel group.
After the sun went down, Obeida came in and told Theo and me that we were not in the same boat as everyone else and that they were going to launch an investigation into us, starting that night. An investigation would mean questioning, and after he left, the Moroccan told me that he no longer wanted to act as my translator. He said he wanted to distance himself from being lumped in with the Americans, which I totally understood. However, he got pushback from the place he least expected it.
“I don’t want to translate for him,” Theo said bluntly.
I just shook my head at his treachery. Abdelatif quickly went from mad to furious as Theo continued to refuse, because he wasn’t only creating a dangerous situation for me, but for him as well. As he got angrier and angrier, a cold and sinister look came over his eyes.
Crack!
It happened so fast I didn’t see it coming. With the knuckles of his pointer and middle fingers jutting from his fist, Abdelatif punched Theo in the face, just below his eye. A second later, little drops of blood began to run down his cheek like tears. He crouched there, shaking with what looked more like humiliation than fear. The rest of the men were disgusted by this violence, but I admit I felt mostly satisfaction. Leave it to Theo to provoke a terrorist to punch him in my defense.
“That’s Karma for you,” I said, as footsteps approached. “Wipe your eye.”
The door opened and I was taken out for interrogation, with the Moroccan acting as my translator.
The shelling began at dinner a few nights later. Each group had a huge metal tray piled with a steaming mountain of brown rice. I said the Bismillah and then ripped off a big piece of bread, using it to pinch up a mouthful.
Before I swallowed we heard a sharp whistle, followed by a huge explosion less than a second later. The shell had landed maybe a hundred yards away and caused a near panic in the room. One of the soldiers jumped to his feet with fear on his face and walked to the back wall, and within seconds we had all followed his lead. A few minutes later we heard another whistle and looked up, waiting to see if this one would land on us.
Crash!
This explosion could not have been more than fifty yards from our cell and was followed by something awful, the screaming of a man on his way to paradise. His shrieking paralyzed the room, though it didn’t last long. Not one of us ate a bite until the suffering expired.
The rest of the night was quiet.
Ever since we’d arrived at Obeida’s, Theo had been trying to make chess pieces out of the flat Styrofoam trays we sometimes ate from, or the paper wrappings from sandwich night, but somehow it never seemed to work—until one day, when every tray came wrapped in aluminum foil. When everyone was finished eating and only the trays remained, I watched as Theo ripped off a piece of foil. From the look on his face you would have thought he’d just discovered fire.
“You should use that for your chess pieces,” I said with a smile, but he was way ahead of me.
Within a few hours one of the soldiers had sculpted all the pieces from the foil and another had made a perfectly symmetrical board on a white sheet with one of the pens we’d kept from writing our reports after the interrogations. By nightfall, Fadaar and some of the other men had made another game as well, using the leftover foil and a piece of foam. The game was called Mancala, and it was something the men loved to teach me to play and completely whip my ass at while doing so.
As for chess, I had never really learned to play, but prison seemed like a great time to pick it up. The only problem was that I was the only beginner in the room, with the exception of the Moroccan, which meant I had
