A Poet and Bin-Laden

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Day after day, night after night, withdrawing into the furthest corner of the Shebergan prison, Yosir recalled his life, grain by grain. If there was one memory that had haunted him for the past two or three years, it was the memory of electric light. Neither at Hoit, nor at Kunduz, nor at Mazari Sharif had there been any electric light during the evenings and the nights. Only when he arrived in Kabul and stayed in a detached house on Vazir Akbarhon Street, had the electricity supply provided dim light for a short period, but even that had frequently failed. All this reminded him of his childhood on the outskirts of Osh, where sometimes his grandmother and sometimes his uncle would clean the kerosene lamp for every evening, and by its flickering light he was allowed to read his grandmother either the tales from A Hundred and One Nights or Mashrab’s gazelles.

But the initial ache of nostalgia had been replaced long ago by either weary habit or a state of permanent irritation as the smoky light of a candle or a kerosene lamp, or even a simple wad of cotton wool or rag doused in oil sucked out his inflamed and bloodshot eyes.

In the Shebergan prison, where they had been taken from Kal’ai Jangi after the bloody m******e, lying with his battered and broken back on the straw covering the damp clay floor – that way the pain was soothed by the piercing cold – Yosir was quite simply unable to extinguish the naked lamp bulb in his mind, or rather the filament that hung there in a blinding zigzag in front of his eyes, whether he closed them or opened them, and this slim thread prevented him from seeing the bodies around him or the barred windows at the sides, even though the incessant groans drifted into the curves of this filament from all sides.

They were beaten methodically and regularly, in the same way they were given food, But instead of water there were streams of abuse. The Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens were threatened with being left to rot if they weren’t shot. But the Uzbeks were threatened with being sent to Karimov: “Let him f**k you up the ass!” They had been beaten from the very first day, when they were led out of Kunduz after surrendering and the Afghanis were set free, while all the foreigners were loaded into trucks. The Red Cross is going to investigate your cases, they were told, and under that pretext they had been brought to the citadel of Kal’ai, where they were locked in the barracks hut. But it wasn’t the Red Cross that investigated, it was several American soldiers, accompanied by General Dostum’s toadies, who worked out their own old betrayals on the prisoners.

The darkness of the prison was the only refuge in which there were no thoughts and no feelings – nothing but the oblivion that he had been seeking for so long – but his body clutched with all its pain at his soul and would not let go, and with the pain the nightmares of life returned: the first blow of a rifle-butt against his coccyx when they were being herded into the trucks – that was where Yosir had suddenly seen the dazed face of the journalist who was standing a little distance away and had even shouted something after him, but the blow of the rifle-butt had driven Yosir into the closed truck, where he had collapsed on to the prickly straw for the first time, and then there had been the same kind of straw at Kal’ai Jangi, which had reminded him of the regional Machine and Tractor Station at home, with its dereliction and its smell and its scattered black-fading-into-purple patches of diesel oil….

And again Yosir was called out for interrogation, and again the barking American tried to prove that he understood what he was saying, and the local Uzbek, supposedly translating these words, threatened him every now and again with being handed over to the authorities in Uzbekistan, where they didn’t mollycoddle you in the prisons like here, but simply sat you on a bayonet or sluiced boiling water over you. Every now and again Yosir said that he had been working on a film in Kunduz and he didn’t know any Juma Namangani or Tahir Yuldash. “Who were you working for?” the American shouted in unison with the Uzbek, and Yosir named a certain Zubair, whose surname and whereabouts he had never known. “What was this film about? Bomb-making or terrorist activity?” the American persisted, putting his feet up on the table in front of Yosir’s face. Yosir waited for the translation, although his impatience was only restrained by the dull ache in all of his body, and then he said yet again: “About people who were forced to flee from Uzbekistan because of the persecution…”

The Afghani Uzbek came out from behind the American and swung the hardest punch he could manage into Yosir’s face. The blow landed on his cheek, but it was his lips or teeth that started bleeding, because together with the scorching pain Yosir felt a warm, salty taste in his mouth. His hand instinctively jerked up in a protective reflex, but the infuriated Afghani was already kicking him in the stomach and shrieking: “I’ve been in Uzbekistan, I lived like a king, and you say it’s impossible to live there! I’ll show you where it’s impossible to live!” The American waited for the beating to end, then lazily got to his feet and dragged the interpreter back behind the desk.

Hunched over from the pain in his belly, Yosir sat there on the straw scattered across the damp clay floor, while the American asked him once again in a conciliatory tone exactly which people his film was about. Yosir felt as if the film were running endlessly in front of his eyes. He was reading some subtitles or other that didn’t fit properly: about the family they had brought to him from the Shirbirgan hospital, about the woman from Khoresm in Kabul, about the man from Ferghana in Mazar. The man from Ferghana had fled to Turkmenistan with the remaining members of his family who had not been arrested, and then he, his wife and their one-year-old son had made their way to the Afghan border and begun waiting for the night in order to swim across the Amu-Darya. Of course, he was the only one who could swim, but his strength should have been enough for his wife and his son. Night came, he quietly lowered himself into the cold, murky water, took his wife and son in his arms and at first started wading. The moon rose above the horizon and just when he finally decided to swim, the beam of a searchlight suddenly flashed on above his head and the Turkmen border guards opened fire on them. The young man was under the water, his wife on his back was wounded in the leg and she howled in pain and let go of the child. Speaking to camera, the young man said he would have plunged after his son, but his wife had clung on to him so tightly in her fear of death that he was unable to swim off in pursuit of the little infant, who howled once and then fell silent in the murky torrent. He and his wife had only been saved by the superhuman strength of terror, but on the Afghani riverbank the wife tried to throw herself back into the water to get the child, and now it was the husband who clutched her wounded body and dragged her away from the terrible force drawing her back to the country from which they had just fled….

The pain in his body kept trying to match the pain that lay deeper, to rise to the same level, and everyone around him seemed to be trying to help it: twisting his arms behind his back and tying them there with a cattle noose until they turned blue and numb, punching him as he walked to his darkness in the cell, kicking him on the coccyx in the doorway before slamming the barred door of the damp, welcoming darkness behind him.

And then again those two zigzag filaments sprang to life in his eyes and those uncontrollable, unwanted pictures began slipping along them.