I, Who Did Not Die Read online

“You’re an engineer. Can’t you build a ladder or something out of all these spoons?” I asked.

  “Agricultural. Agricultural engineer.”

  Something with an exoskeleton and six legs skittered over my foot, and Sharshab lifted a slipper and annihilated it. He flipped the slipper over and examined the heel with intense interest. Beetle, cockroach, spider—hard to tell in the dim light.

  “Get the manager on the phone,” he said. “This hotel has bugs.”

  I smiled, relieved to hear a joke. The bruising on my back made it hurt to laugh, but laughter was the only thing that made my mind feel better.

  “How badly were you beaten?” I asked.

  “Not too bad,” he said. Already it was getting steamy in our room, with so many of us inhaling and exhaling the same air. Sharshab wadded his second blanket into a pillow, trying not to wince as he stretched out carefully on his side. I did the same.

  “Tell me one of your stories,” he said.

  I made sure Sharshab’s eyes were closed, then asked him to imagine a mysterious island off the coast of Hong Kong, belonging to a former Shaolin monk gone rogue. His name was Mr. Han, and he lived there inside a huge walled compound with servants and concubines, and he only emerged once every three years to host an international karate competition.

  “Trouble is,” I said, pausing for dramatic effect, “strange things keep happening. White ladies keep washing up on shore. But they didn’t drown; they died of drug overdoses.”

  Sharshab opened one eye at me.

  “British Intelligence Agency did autopsies,” I added.

  He lowered his eyelid.

  “So Bruce Lee gets a coveted invitation to Mr. Han’s martial arts competition. When the Brits find out, they recruit Bruce Lee to spy. They suspect Mr. Han is trafficking in opium and slaves, but they can’t get access to his lair.”

  I explained that Bruce Lee was dubious, and didn’t want to accept the dangerous mission.

  “But then, one day, Mr. Han’s henchmen come ashore to Bruce Lee’s village and try to gang-rape his sister!”

  By now, several more prisoners had gathered around.

  “They chase her through the alleys and across rickety bamboo bridges, clawing after her with their lusty fingers, but she fights valiantly, karate-chopping and helicopter-kicking them to the ground, knocking several into the canals.”

  I pantomimed her flashing arms as they sliced through the air and felled her pursuers, one by one.

  “But then . . .”

  Most of the room was now sitting near Sharshab and me, cross-legged on the floor.

  “She makes a bad decision. She runs into a wooden warehouse, crammed to the ceiling with broken furniture and other junk. The three thugs crash through the windows, backing her into a corner.”

  I got on my knees and acted out the rest of it, pretending to lift a dagger-shaped shard of glass from the ground, turning it toward my stomach and clasping it with both hands.

  “She has nowhere to go. So she stares them right in the eye and plunges the pointed glass into herself, dying before they have the chance to violate her!”

  I toppled on my side in slow motion, acting out my best dead stare.

  “Where’s Bruce Lee?” one of the listeners called out.

  I sat back up.

  “Not there. But he finds out later that Mr. Han’s men were responsible for the death of his sister. He’s furious for revenge and tells the British he will accept their spy mission.”

  I stretched back out on my blanket and let the anticipation build. Finally, someone asked what happened next.

  “Find out tomorrow,” I said, staring up at the hole in the ceiling and willing a rope ladder to drop down from it. “We have plenty of time.”

  That night I dreamed that I was in a new grave and someone was shoveling fresh dirt on me. I coughed and sputtered, and tried to claw my way to the surface to let them know I was still alive, but there was too much earth in my mouth and I couldn’t make any sound. I couldn’t die, I kept trying to say, because I had a family now. I had promised Alyaa that she wouldn’t become a widow, and I had never broken my word to her. The dirt got heavier and heavier, pressing on my chest, and I was losing my energy to fight back. Finally I let my body go slack, and just when I accepted death, I heard someone aboveground shouting for me to get up.

  “Boland sho!”

  I awoke at the wrong end of a gun. The guards were back, and this time they were demanding that we pray on our blankets. We were so turned around inside the mountain that even the religious ones who did pray daily had no idea which way Mecca was. There were Kurds and Christians among us, and agnostics, but it didn’t matter; all of us had to follow Islam now. We blinked in the dark, confused with fear and sleep and afraid to get punished for facing the wrong way. A guard rolled his eyes and pointed to his left, and we all shuffled in unison and placed our blankets in that direction. We kneeled down, bowing forward and lowering our foreheads to the ground. The ones who knew the positions lined up in front so the rest could copy their movements. We murmured and prostrated ourselves through a complete round of prayers, and sat back up.

  “Again!” barked the guard. “You unbelievers owe God more prayers for all the past years that you didn’t pray.”

  As I went through the motions, I tuned out my surroundings and played a mental game. I challenged myself to find one good thing about my life right now. I was being forced at gunpoint to pray, and it was demeaning, but it was . . . it was . . . it was stretching. Morning stretches were good for your health, and I pretended I was warming up for a soccer game like I used to when I was a teenager in Basra. Each time I bent forward and sat back up, I chose a different muscle in my body and squeezed it. I relived my best plays, the fakes and passes and goals that stayed with me all these years. This way, I stole praying away from them. I started with my toes and worked my way up my entire body, clenching and releasing each muscle to build my stamina.

  A whistle pierced the air, signaling prayers were over. Now it was time to chant slogans against our government. The guards taught us three sentences and made us repeat them over and over until we could pronounce them in Farsi singsong:

  Death, death to Saddam!

  Go and tell Saddam we’ll never be oppressed by him again!

  Oh God, God, give Khomeini long life!

  Our voices fell into a dull rhythm, and I felt my temples knock to the beat and realized it had been a full day since I’d eaten anything. Because the guard had put Rasoul in charge of food, I was hopeful that meant a meal was in our future, but the more I imagined what they might give us to eat, the more my stomach twisted with want. I felt anger coming on, and returned to my search for one good thing to chase it back. I was chanting, I didn’t want to chant, but . . . what? But I was expanding my Persian vocabulary: life, oppress, him, never, give, we. I tucked the words that might be useful into the folds of my brain. To conquer your enemy, you must first understand him.

  After we’d chanted, the guards finally left us alone and I repeated the vocabulary words in my head: life, oppress, him, never, give, we. We never oppress him, give life. We give him life, never oppress. I was still making sentences when I heard a scraping sound and looked up to see the lid slide off the hole in the roof. An angled column of sunlight shot into our cave, making a hot, white circle on the ground so bright I had to squint until my pupils were ready for it. Men jostled to the light, turning their faces up to feel sunlight on their skin. Slowly, a large black net like the kind fishermen use was lowered through the hole, and as it got closer we could see it contained an enormous bowl. Rasoul, already taking charge, ordered everyone to back up as the cargo dropped to the floor. He approached cautiously, peered over the rim, and raised his palms upward in thanks. Bread and hard-boiled eggs. We lined up, and when it was my turn, Rasoul solemnly placed one slice of bread and one egg in my hand. This time I ate the shell, too. There weren’t enough eggs to go around, and when they brought us a big pot of sugary tea,
I refused it because I didn’t feel right taking my share when others needed the calories.

  The meal shortage was not an accident. As the weeks went by, we came to expect that there would never be enough food in the net. Dinner was often rice and lentils, and by lentils I mean you could count them on your plate. Sometimes I gave my meals to the ones who were elderly or ill, because I was younger and could bear the hunger better than they could. My skin started to turn yellow from lack of vitamins and sunlight, and I started to feel the curves of my hip bones. Some days it was all I could do to fake pray between naps, all the power seemingly sucked out of my body. The guards avoided the foul air of our caves by keeping a twenty-four-hour watch over us through the clear plastic manhole cover, opening it for just five or six hours a day to air out our rooms and feed us like zoo animals. But that one small vent was no match against the olfactory power of so many armpits and so much stale breath, and the odors from the communal bathroom of squatty toilets down the hall. It was a combined aroma so assaultive that I taught myself to breathe through my mouth. But still, the letting in of the light each day was an exciting event, like a dinner bell calling us together for a common reprieve. That column of light was our gathering spot, where we could see one another fully and remind one another that we were real. We had a few former doctors in our group, and we went to the light to have the experts examine our toothaches and itchy rashes.

  I began etching tick marks into the wall to record the passage of time. And that’s how I figured out that the meal with meat came every other week. This “special meal” became an obsession in the cave. Days beforehand, we would start fantasizing about the ingredients. Instead of our regular stewed onions or prunes with rice, would we get chicken? Lamb? Beef? We talked incessantly about how much meat there might be, how our mothers used to prepare stews, which dishes were our favorites, which restaurants in which cities made the best shawarma or kebabs. I was asked over and over to tell the story of how I made falafel at Bruce Lee Restaurant. No description of cucumber slices or parsley was too insignificant. The special meal wasn’t delivered like clockwork, but I knew by my rough calendar when it was close. And I knew for sure when they opened the manhole cover and I smelled grease.

  The first time the scent of meat wafted into our cave, all conversation stopped. I stood up with the crowd, looking heavenward with sunken cheeks. But the bowl just hung there, as our mouths filled with saliva below. Finally, a voice called down to us, and Rasoul translated.

  “Hungry?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” we hollered.

  “Then give thanks. Chant for your food.”

  We knew exactly what our captors wanted to hear, and we collectively sang: “Death, death, death to Saddam! Long live Khomeini!”

  The bowl lowered halfway, then stopped again. Whoever held the strings above wanted more enthusiastic chanting, accusing us of just mouthing the words. I yelled louder this time, and the chorus reverberated off the walls and pounded the ceiling: “Death, death to Saddam! ”

  I was hoarse by the time that bowl made it all the way down, and by then the chicken had gone cold. Rasoul doled out a cupful to each of us, trying his best to give everyone at least a thin shred of meat. But I wasn’t lucky; I just got a taste of where the meat had once been. But it was better than no food at all.

  If only our former lecturers could have seen us then, chanting down our own government and praying to Mecca daily. We had been sent to this cave because we were the bad students, which was funny to me, because we had our own secret school in Sang Bast. We figured out who among us had special skills or knowledge, and during our free time, we collected into classes. There were groups to learn mathematics, others that liked to discuss history or debate politics, and even poetry lessons. Some groups were more like therapy sessions, where people would give one another courage and inspiration to help steer themselves away from depression. Our curriculum was our method of counteracting the fakery we had to do each day to get fed and avoid beatings; it was our own little camouflaged insurrection. I had an aptitude for languages, so I chose to go with the group that spent three or four hours a day learning English.

  Our instructor was self-taught, a former middle-school math teacher before the war. Both his parents were teachers, so he had a natural talent for understanding how people learn, in my opinion. He even gave the equivalent of an entrance exam, quizzing our skills and dividing us into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. I was a beginner.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said one day, running up to the group. When one of us was missing, the whole class went looking until we found him.

  “What did you say? We speak English only here,” the teacher said.

  “Oh, soorree I wath late.”

  He looked at the other pupils. “Who can correct Najah’s verb?”

  “Was!” they rang out.

  My teacher nodded at me. “Say it one more time.”

  “Wath.”

  He raised an eyebrow and drew W-A-S in the dirt. “Wuzzzzzzz,” he said, pointing at the word. I felt my tongue slip on my barren gums and knew that I’d never be able to pronounce an s properly again. And suddenly, I found this hilarious. I grinned to remind my teacher that I had no teeth, then belted the word out like an opera tenor: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaath.”

  One of the students, a former sergeant named Abu Amad, laughed himself into a coughing fit. When it lasted longer than seemed normal, I clapped him on the back, and he finally gained his composure, but his breathing was still labored. We were approaching a year in the mountain, and we had become skeletons of our former selves; there was no position to sleep in that wasn’t agonizing on our bones. Without enough circulation, disease and germs hung in the air, and it was impossible to avoid getting the same head cold or intestinal flu that everyone else had. Men died of illness, of malnutrition, and of lack of spirit. More than a dozen had been buried outside already, and it seemed like now we couldn’t go two weeks without adding another grave. We cut the lesson short and went back to our room so that Abu Amad could rest and we could tell Rasoul that he needed to see a doctor.

  Rasoul stood under the hole in the ceiling and shouted to the guards.

  “Hello! We have a sick man down here!”

  Nothing.

  “Can you hear me? We need a doctor!”

  Silence gripped our room as we waited for an answer. We heard footfalls above, but no words. Rasoul cursed them in Arabic, calling their mothers whores, and returned to Abu Amad’s side and began massaging his chest in small circles to increase circulation. A group of us joined in, rubbing his temples, his arms, his legs—anything to help him relax and fall asleep.

  “I have two baby girls,” he said, his voice wet and raspy. “If I don’t make it, promise to tell them about me; tell them what I was like.”

  Abu Amad slept fitfully that night, talking in his sleep about needing to return money he’d borrowed. The acoustics in our dungeon were so sharp that every murmur, every scratch, every digestive growl could be heard from all points in the room. We rubbed his arms and shushed him, telling him that his debts were good, that he was not in trouble with anyone.

  That morning, Abu Amad was done. We lowered his eyelids and put a blanket over him, and this time, when Rasoul shouted to the guards that we had a corpse in the room, he got a response. Five hours later, a prison doctor arrived with a clipboard. He inspected Abu Amad and then asked us a lot of questions, writing the answers down on his paper. What were we eating? How often were we eating? Were we washing our hands regularly? Was there soap in the bathrooms? I don’t know why we needed a medical professional to convince the guards of this, but the doctor determined our quarters were unsanitary and a breeding ground for communicable diseases. He recommended that we be relocated immediately. Two prisoners were chosen to go outside and bury Abu Amad.

  Lucky bastards, I thought. And by that I meant all three of them. The gravediggers got the chance to see the outside world again, but really Abu Amad was the lucki
est of all. He got out.

  Although the doctor said we needed to leave Sang Bast “immediately,” that word had a different definition in prison. Another five months went by, and during that time, every week or so someone else would get the same far-off stare as Abu Amad, and that’s when you could almost count the hours until he’d stop blinking. The burials continued until we’d lost twenty-five or so. While we never had an exact diagnosis, I can tell you this: people died of heart attacks, malnutrition, and the flu. But they also died of fear, anger, and depression. But on paper, I’m sure, everyone died of “natural causes.”

  I somehow did not get sick. Maybe it was because I spent each day looking for one good thing. Maybe because I secretly exercised during prayers. Or maybe it was because despite the disaster of my life, I found something to laugh about, whether it was my lisp or an old story I told from Bruce Lee Restaurant or someone making kissing noises in the middle of a dream. Because let’s face it, our situation was utterly ridiculous.

  Then one day, mercy came. Guards entered our room and blindfolded us. We walked in single file, with our hands on the shoulders of the man in front of us, out of the mountain. The clean air settled like silk around my forehead, and I gulped mouthfuls of it as if I were drinking spring water. I could only see glints of sunlight at the edges of my blindfold, but those slivers signaled hope. A wake-up call accompanied by a blindfold meant we were going to a new prison.

  By now I knew enough Farsi to ask a guard where we were being sent.

  “To a special prison,” he answered.

  I shuddered to think what could be more special than Sang Bast.

  ELEVEN

  YADOLLAH’S RAM

  One supremely annoying thing about the Basij was that they were very strict about daily prayers. We were expected to pray three times a day, and the only exception was when we were in the middle of battle, of course. Other than that, hundreds of us would routinely form a perfect line, bow down at the same time, and come up at the same time, all singing the same sound together. But if I was going to talk to God, I wanted to do it in my own language. Why did I have to just repeat stuff in Arabic that the minister of ideology and politics ordered me to say? That wasn’t really praying; that was being a parrot. If I was going to talk to Allah, it should be in my own language, and what I would say in Persian was, “You are an asshole.” Every time I asked him why he killed Mina, all I got was silence.