PART EIGHT
A young man… his face bruised, swollen. The image was not entirely clear, yet his features were unmistakable.
I flinched… then composed myself.
He spoke in a low, decisive tone, as if presenting irrefutable evidence:
” You know him, don’t you? ”
I said nothing, yet my silence spoke what my lips could not.
He continued, watching my face intently:
” He will be fine… if you cooperate. ”
I replied with cold detachment:
” Are we not back to blackmail again? ”
He smiled, as if nothing had happened, his tone shifting like a subtle current:
” We practice the art of prevention, Numan. ”
He paused for a moment, then pulled out a blank sheet of paper, adjusted his posture, and said:
” We will start anew. Answer my questions honestly, without evasion or deceit. No one will trouble you. ”
I looked at him, a gaze devoid of hope or fear, and said:
” Ask what you will. ”
Muna wiped a tear forming at the corner of her eye and whispered:
” Father… he is not merely interrogating, he is playing with hearts. ”
Her father held her trembling hand and replied:
” Yes… this is not an interrogation. This is slow shattering, until he takes what he wants… and he smiles. ”
Numan continued:
” The investigator asked me, his voice almost formal:
” Were you ever part of any secret organization? ”
” No. ”
” Have you met with suspicious people? ”
” I met classmates, booksellers in reputable stores or on the streets, public library directors, a literature professor giving a lecture…
And above all, with my mother.
My mother, who planted in me a love of reading, who waited for me every night, never sleeping until I returned. ”
” Did you write political pamphlets? ”
” I wrote reflections, some of what I call poetry, and summaries I gathered from the margins of the books I read… They were never printed, never distributed. And now… they are in your hands. ”
” Do you believe the system is corrupt? ”
I looked at him steadily and said:
” I believe that any system left unaccountable… produces corruption, even if it begins with prophets. ”
The investigator paused for a moment, then rose, muttering as if speaking to himself:
” Perhaps you are more dangerous than I thought… ”
He turned to me, his voice laced with mystery:
” Tomorrow we continue… and I will make our conversation something unforgettable. ”
He clapped once, and a man in faded gray clothes entered—unarmed, calm, but with eyes so rigid they sent shivers down the spine.
The investigator said, in a gentle tone:
” Take Mr. Numan to his cell… let him rest. Tomorrow is a new day. ”
I rose from the chair as if my body had lost all weight. My steps were heavy—not just from exhaustion, but from the weight of the image that refused to leave my eyes… and from what had not been spoken, what was yet to come.
In the lower corridor, the lights buzzed intermittently, as if dripping, drop by drop, onto bodies moving without names.
The guard opened the cell door and motioned me inside.
In a monotone, as if reciting instructions without soul, he said:
” Sleep now… for nightmares await those who wake. ”
Then he closed the door.
I curled into myself—not because the space was tight, but because my spirit had grown narrow within.
The blanket placed beside me was no longer a blanket… it had become a heavy skin of silence, separating me from the world.
Sleep eluded me, so I lay on my back atop the makeshift slab of the cell.
The wall echoed his words:
” We practice the art of prevention, Numan… ”
Muna whispered, trembling against herself:
” Can anyone sleep after this? ”
Her father placed his hand over hers and said:
” No… sleep here is a temporary death. The body finds no rest, the mind no peace. ”
After a pause, he added:
” But Numan… he grows a heart among the stones that cannot be broken. ”
Numan continued:
” And in the dead of night, lying on the cold ground, I felt something break within me… and something else begin to grow. ”
A faint movement stirred in the cell, and I opened my eyes.
A huge rat crouched on my chest, facing me, whiskers long, nose twitching as if testing whether what lay before it was foe… or food.
I reached slowly, taking the last hard piece of bread by my head, and placed it beside him.
He turned toward it, beginning to nibble with deliberate calm, while I watched, motionless, daring not to open my eyes further, nor to make a sound, in the quiet moments before dawn.
And when he had finished what was his, he glanced at me briefly, then hurried toward the hole in the floor that served as a toilet, returning from where he had come.
The darkness of the cell felt like a black page, filled with images and words yet to be written…
But the ink inside me was no longer ink—it had become blood, pain, and questions without answers.
Muna’s father said, ” Let Numan rest a little in his room, and let us prepare lunch. He has spent a time full of exhaustion, and he deserves some rest. ”
In the kitchen, steam rose from the pot of food, filling the air with a warm scent, as if trying to erase the cold words clinging to the heart.
Muna stood, cutting vegetables slowly, her knife striking the wooden board with a mechanical rhythm, like a restless pulse that refuses to calm.
Her father, sprinkling a little salt into the soup without looking at her, said, ” I knew the fourth night would be the hardest… but he held himself together, more than I expected. ”
Muna was silent for a moment, then murmured, ” Father… that which crouched on his chest, was it a rat… or a hallucination, a ghostly man in the form of a rat? I could not chase that image from my mind, as if the rat was the one interrogating me. ”
He lifted the lid from the pot, then replaced it, saying, ” In the detention cell, there is no difference between the rat and the interrogator… all of them appear in the darkness, searching for a weak point, a tiny fragment of fear to gnaw their way through. ”
Muna sat on a chair, resting her head against the wall, and whispered, ” He said, ‘ We practice the art of prevention, Numan… ‘ Father, don’t you see that this phrase alone… is poison wrapped in a smile? ”
“Yes, pure poison. For them, prevention means surrendering before it is demanded of you. To frighten yourself before anyone frightens you. It is a safeguard against dignity, not against pain.”
Muna looked at him, her eyes shadowed by distant thoughts:
“Yet Numan… he did not yield to a steady shadow, even in his answer about the system, when he said, ‘Any system that is unaccountable produces corruption, even if it begins with prophets…’”
For a moment, I felt that the interrogator did not reply because he feared he might have heard the truth.
Her father approached, placing a glass of water before her, then sat beside her and said,
“Yes… that sentence was a knife in the tyrant’s chest. And that is why he said to him, ‘Perhaps you are more dangerous than I thought…’ For danger lies not in the one who wields a weapon, but in the one who plants an idea.”
Muna smiled, a mixture of pride and pain, then whispered,
“How beautiful… in the height of his weakness, he refuses survival at any cost. And in the presence of suffering, he lifts his head as if to say: you may take only my body… my soul has escaped you.”
Her father rose, extinguished the fire beneath the pot, then looked out the window as if contemplating something unseen. He said quietly,
“Tomorrow… they may offer him more than he can bear. They will barter for his words, for his silence, even for his name.”
Then he turned to Muna and added,
“Yet he will not fall into their traps. He is far too aware for that.”
Muna asked, her voice trembling,
“And you… how can you be so certain?”
He approached her, resting a hand gently on her shoulder, and said,
“Because he is the child of a dream… not the child of fear.”
A heavy silence settled over the kitchen, broken only by the spoon stirring the food, a sound like the toll of a time unwilling to end.
Afternoon light filtered through the frosted windowpane, casting dusty golden lines across the table, like the lines time had etched on a mother’s face, weary from endless waiting.
Muna called for Numan; the meal was ready. Yet he appeared at his door and excused himself with words of thanks, signaling that he needed rest more than he needed food.
The aroma of the meal had begun to lose its warmth as Muna sat before her father at the long kitchen table. The plate in front of her held no appeal, yet she reluctantly placed a bite in her mouth. Her father observed her unease and spoke softly, pouring himself a little food:
“Eat, Muna. Those in the cells do not have this privilege.”
She shook her head, her voice low and tinged with shame,
“I’m sorry… the food in my mouth feels like stones. Every time I recall the image of the rat on his chest… I cannot.”
Her father sighed slowly, setting the spoon aside, then looked into her eyes:
“What Numan endured last night was not merely patience in the face of cruelty, but a lesson in dignity. Even the rat, in that moment, was not an enemy… but a fellow prisoner, as hungry as he was, as lost as he was.”
Muna let out a soft gasp:
“Was he not afraid? A man in that state, a monster looming above him, that image he saw, and that voice still ringing in his ears: ‘We practice the art of prevention, Numan.’ Does that not crush a person?”
Her father answered without raising his voice:
“Perhaps it does. Perhaps it does not. Numan is one of those who, when shattered, rise with greater clarity… not greater fragility.”
Muna picked up a small bite, then returned it to the plate:
“I am afraid, Father… all of this feels like the beginning of a storm, and we do not know where it will take us.”
“The storm has already come, Muna, and we are in its heart. Yet some people, like Numan, do not wait for the clouds to clear… they create a spark of dream in the darkness of the storm.”
Muna set down the plate of mujaddara on the table, then poured a dish of yogurt with cucumber beside it, whispering as she moved to sit:
“Father… do you know? I still hear the investigator’s tone in my ears, that smooth swing between gentleness and threat, between promises and blackmail… there is something in him that terrifies me.”
Her father sat quietly, choosing his words carefully over this table of pain, and said as he cut a piece of bread:
“What he did was closer to a chess game… a piece sacrificed, another taken, then waiting for the next move from an opponent who does not know the rules of the game… but knows how not to be defeated.”
Muna raised her spoon, then paused before bringing it to her mouth, staring into the empty air:
“Do you think he was sincere when he said to Numan: ‘Let us turn this night into the beginning of a dream, not its end?’”
Her father wiped his mouth with a napkin, then regarded her thoughtfully:
“Truth, in someone like him, is not a virtue but a tool… He does not seek a dream for Numan, but a thread to grasp the nerve of truth within him, to empty it and shape it anew.”
Muna lowered her head and whispered,
“Yet Numan… he was not fragile. In his words, there was a cohesion that could not be bought, and a candor that unsettles those accustomed to lies as their trade.”
Her father offered a faint smile and said,
“That is why they feared him. One who knows how to read in a time of rote is considered dangerous, and one who asks questions amid the terrified is deemed insolent.”
Finally, Muna reached for the plate, took some mujaddara, and said,
“But I fear for him… I fear that rat that crept into his chest, the cold of the cell, the sound of the weary lamps groaning as if they were dying.”
Her father shook his head, his voice carrying the weight of a private hope:
“Numan, my daughter, is not easily broken. But he… he is scratched, he suffers, and he may bleed long before he heals. And every time he survives a pain, he emerges deeper, brighter… like noble metal, purified only by fire.”
Muna blinked, struggling with tears forming at the corners of her eyes unbidden, and said,
“Father… does every patience have an end?”
He rose and walked to the window, gazing at the empty street, then turned to her and said,
“Yes, my daughter… but the end is not for patience alone. The end comes for injustice too. We only need to wait a little… and not forget the dream.”
In the other side of the city, where time was measured in spoons rather than lashes, Muna sat at the lunch table in a heavy silence, the spoons moving across the dishes as if stirring memories. Her father looked at her, then sighed, his voice quiet, on the verge of breaking:
“Could it be that half of life is in a cell?… and the other half in waiting for it?”
Muna lifted her gaze toward him, as if torn from a reverie, and said,
” I feel as if his breath still lingers with me… in the air, in the bread, in the silence of these walls.”
Her father paused, as though reading in her features what went unspoken, then murmured,
” What he said that night… about the dream that never dies, about honesty that does not deceive itself, about the courage to say no… in the mouth of death… it reminded me of you.”
She studied his weary face, then whispered,
” I used to fear for him—the cold, the night, the harshness of the streets when he was late… and I did not know there was a cold harsher than exposure, that the night has a door of iron, and a silence that cannot be borne.”
Her father set the spoon aside, as if the meal no longer held meaning, and said,
” And there… in the cell, he fed the rat his bread, so it would not bite him… while we, outside, were nearly devoured by anxiety.”
Muna’s eyes glistened, and she said,
” The rat was easier on him than to let go of his dignity, or lie to survive. He is still free, even behind bars.”
Her father replied with a sad smile,
” Freedom, my daughter, is not measured by chains, but by the ability to keep your skin unchanged… when someone asks you to sell it.”
Then he added, rising slowly,
” Let us wash the dishes together… perhaps we can wash away this weight pressing upon our chests.”
Muna stood, wiping a stray tear, and said,
” Yes, Father… and the traces of salt clinging to the dishes are no saltier than this waiting.”
In the kitchen, the dishes were washed in silence, yet the water whispered things left unspoken. The faucet’s drip sounded like a soft lament, and the foam fluttering across the plates resembled dreams that had found no place to settle.
Muna held a plate in her hands, then handed it to her father to dry, as if offering a fragment of memory, and he received it with a palm shaped by waiting. He said, brushing the cloth over a white plate,
” You know, what frightens me most is not what Numan is enduring now… but that darkness might creep into his heart.”
Muna replied in a faint voice, rubbing a small cup,
” His heart is made of light that no darkness can extinguish, Father… yet I fear that this light might turn into a pain that never heals.”
Her father shook his head slowly, then said,
” Those who endure there do not emerge as they were… they emerge carrying a wound akin to insight.”
They were silent for a moment, then Muna asked,
” Would you have endured, had you been in his place?”
He answered without looking at her,
” I do not know… perhaps I would have tried, but I do not possess his courage. Numan is not merely our son, Muna… he is the son of the books he has read, the poems he has believed in, and the dreams his mother planted in his chest.”
Muna lowered her eyes, then whispered as if speaking to herself,
” I wish he could join us now, to hear us… to know that in every moment we offer a prayer for him… and that this house without his voice is no longer a home, but an endless echo.”
Her father paused the cloth, set the cup aside, and said,
” Call him from his room, for houses know their children… so he does not remain alone, feeling that he is still with those the walls have taken from him.”
They were silent for a moment, then Muna glanced at the clock and asked,
” Do you think tomorrow night will be harder?”
” Every night in the prison is a new test. But the sixth night… perhaps it was a new beginning on the path of the dream.”
He rose from his chair, took the plate to the sink, and, wiping his hands, said,
” Come… let us write what we saw, what we understood. For the dream, if left unwritten, is lost among these walls.”
Numan returned with quiet steps and joined them on the balcony overlooking the garden. A teapot and cups were set on a small side table. The evening air caressed the leaves softly, and the scent of jasmine drifted up from the garden, like an old memory awakening with every pause in silence.
Numan stepped forward to pour tea for everyone, but Muna rose with her usual lightness, moved inside, and returned holding a glass of chilled fresh orange juice, its surface dotted with a delicate mist of dew.
She extended her hand toward him with a warm smile:
” Leave the tea for us, and this is for you.”
He took the glass from her, their hands meeting for a single, fleeting second, as if something invisible had passed between them, then he sat down.
Her father looked at him with a gaze full of concern, his voice tinged with gentle authority:
” Numan, my boy… do you want to continue what we started? We listen with all our hearts, sharing with you a heavy memory, so you are not trapped alone within its walls? Or would you prefer that we pause… or stop?”
Numan lifted his gaze toward the father and daughter, as though searching for something in their eyes, then spoke in a calm voice that carried the weight of quiet assurance:
“I thank you both for this embrace I feel… Ever since I left the prison, even up until this very morning, its shadows have kept waving at me from the horizon, day and night. It was impossible for me to speak of it with anyone before you—not because I lacked trust, but because I had not yet fully stepped out of it. Now, I feel a loosening in my chest, a quiet that seeps slowly into my heart. And that is what moves me to continue with you—if it does not weigh too heavily on you, or cause you discomfort.”
Mr. Ahmad answered at once, his features softening with warmth:
“Never worry about us, my son… If anything, we are drawn closer by your sharing. We listen not out of curiosity, but for your sake—so that you may be unburdened.”
Numan turned to Muna, his voice low, carrying a mixture of tenderness and unease:
“And you, Muna… I fear for you, for the toll of all I have laid before you, the horror of those events.”
She replied with steady voice, her eyes wide open to a profound honesty:
“Be certain that what my father has said applies to me entirely. In fact, I may be even more eager than he is to hear more. I don’t say this out of defiance, but because I know that to understand what you endured is also to understand you.”
Numan drew a deep breath, as though breaking free from an invisible chain, then said:
“Then… let me tell you what I lived through on the sixth night in that prison…”
He paused for a moment, took a sip of juice, and went on:
“The night in the cell was not so different from those before it—except in one thing: the silence had grown heavier, the darkness more absolute, as though the walls themselves shrank with every thought carried in silence.
I was sitting against the wall, my back pressed to the coarse blanket, my eyes half closed. Neither asleep nor awake. It was a moment suspended, not afraid of time itself, but of what might follow it.”
Suddenly… the iron door swung open to a sound I knew too well: the rattle of keys, boots striking against the corridor floor. One of the guards stepped in, motioned to me without a word. I rose, without a question. In that place, questions were not asked—they were swallowed.
He led me down the same stairwell, the same corridor, into the same room: the office of the silent interrogator, as if it had been built out of the chill of time itself.
He was waiting for me—the same gray smile, the same dim light. He gestured toward the chair before him and said:
“Sit down, Numan… I know you haven’t slept, so I won’t keep you long.”
I sat. I showed nothing. No weakness, no defiance. Only silence.
Then he pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer and asked:
“Do you believe that those who resist, win?”
I looked at him. His tone was different from the day before—tinged with curiosity, laced with fatigue. I said:
“Sometimes they don’t win. But they keep defeat from becoming a habit.”
He lowered his eyes for a moment, then spoke again:
“I’ve been watching you from the start… There’s something in you unlike the others. You’re not the strongest, but you believe that what’s within you cannot be bought.”
I remained silent. He went on:
“Let’s not waste time… Here is a list of names. All we ask is that you confirm whether you’ve met them.”
He pushed the paper toward me. I read the names. Some I knew, others were strangers. Each name seemed to tremble on the page, as if it might confess before I ever opened my mouth.
I answered calmly:
“I will not confirm what I cannot recall, and I will not deny what never happened. I’m not an employee in some story you are writing—I am a man, with memory, and with trust to keep.”
He let out a short laugh.
“Good… so you choose memory.”
I answered:
“Because it is the only thing you cannot confiscate—unless I betray it myself.”
For a fleeting moment his eyes gleamed, then the light faded. He said:
“We have plenty of time… we will continue later.”
He clapped his hands, and the silent man in gray appeared again. Without a word he led me away, my weary steps dragging across the floor.
When I returned to the cell, I knew the struggle was no longer between prisoner and interrogator, but between two wills: one betting on fear, the other on meaning.
I sat facing the wall. I was no longer searching for light outside, but for a certainty that might ignite from within. I whispered to myself:
“Tomorrow… it must be written.”
Muna had her hands clasped tightly in her lap, listening with uneven breath, as if holding back tears she refused to release. She spoke softly:
“And what gave you that strength? How did you not break?”
Numan looked at her for a long while before replying:
“Perhaps… because I never felt I was alone. I kept hearing the voices of those I loved echoing within me:
Stand firm… not for yourself alone.”
Mr. Ahmad murmured as his eyes wandered toward the garden:
“That is the meaning… when a dream stands firm against the nightmare.”
A brief silence settled over the balcony, as if the words just spoken needed to rest in the air before life could resume. The leaves in the garden stirred gently, as though they too were listening—or saying what lips could not.
Mr. Ahmad rose slowly, brushing away the thin veil of autumn from his knees.
“Let’s go inside… the air has turned colder, and the tea is no longer enough to resist it.”
Numan said nothing, only nodded, and rose with them.
Inside the house, warmth slipped back in through the doors, and from the kitchen came the faint sweetness of cinnamon—Muna had prepared something small, something that felt like dessert or memory.
They gathered around the rectangular table. Muna placed three small plates and quietly cut the cake. The movement of her hands spoke something she had not yet voiced.
Numan held the glass in his hand and said:
“You know, the most frightening thing in the cell wasn’t the pain… it was the thought of being forgotten. That your voice could be erased from the world. That your days could pass without anyone missing you, or even knowing whether you were alive or not.”
Mr. Ahmad traced the rim of his cup with his spoon and said:
“Oblivion… that is what tyrannies wager on—that your memory will be emptied of yourself and filled with what serves them.”
Numan nodded, then turned his eyes to Muna.
“And you? What makes you want to hear all this? I know I’m asking you to carry more than anyone should.”
Muna lifted her head, fixed her gaze on him, and spoke in a tone that hovered close to a whisper:
“Because I don’t want you to carry it alone. And because I know that when pain is spoken, it becomes less desolate. And also… because I don’t want to be only a happy chapter in your story, but a witness to it—from the very beginning, to the very end.”
Father and daughter exchanged a silent glance. Numan looked at them both and said quietly:
“Then let us continue. There is still more… more that deserves to be told.”
He fell back into his story, wrapped in a hushed stillness, as though preparing for a confession that could only be spoken once in a lifetime. Muna and her father sat at the far end of the balcony, watching his face as if listening first to his heart, and only then to his words.
Muna leaned slightly forward, resting her hand beneath her chin, and whispered:
“I wonder… what did you see there?”
He did not answer at once. He lowered his gaze for a long moment, then lifted his head and said:
“Being taken to the interrogator’s office that night felt like pulling back the curtain on a new act of a dark play—a play with no written ending, improvised in a cold silence that resembled no evening I had ever known.
Barely half an hour had passed after they returned me to my cell when the door opened again, and I heard the dry command to stand.”
Muna’s father drew in a deep breath, as if about to speak, then let it out in a sigh instead.
Numan continued, his voice calmer now, as though watching the memory from a distance:
“The same guard led me on, his heavy steps striking the cold tiles, until we reached a side room I had never entered before. And there… I saw something my eyes have never forgotten.
Two prisoners. I cannot recall their faces completely, but their voices, their image… are carved into me, as though etched into my own body.”
Muna gasped softly, covering her mouth with her hand, and murmured:
“Were they… all right?”
He shook his head, almost as if apologizing for her innocent question, then went on in a quiet voice, weighted with detail:
“They were each seated inside the hollow of a car tire, their legs bent upward at an almost perfect angle, their hands bound behind their backs.
Beside each of them stood two guards holding thick leather whips, striking their feet with a steady violence, caring nothing for precision or placement. Sometimes the lash missed and struck the head, the shoulder, the face… it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the scene continue.”
This time the father lowered his gaze and ran a hand across his brow, as though pushing away an image he refused to see.
Numan said:
“In the corner of the room stood a small table, with a sheet of paper and a pen upon it. They were brought forward only when resistance faltered—when the prisoner was ready to sign. Not a statement of his own words, but confessions already written about him, words he would never even read.
And if he refused to sign?
Then it was nothing more than another chance for one of the guards to exercise his muscles on him.”
Muna’s eyes clouded. She lifted her face toward the sky, as though trying to drain her heart of its weight, then spoke in a trembling voice:
“My God… and how did you stand in the midst of all that?”
He looked at her for a long moment, then whispered:
“Like an actor on a stage—only the audience does not applaud. They wait for him to fall.”
He paused for a moment, then continued:
“Then I was led once more into the interrogator’s office. But this time, it looked entirely different.
Two small tables stood at opposite sides of the room. At each table sat a prisoner, his face bent toward the paper and pen before him, his hand stretched out beside the sheet—waiting either to write, or to receive the lash of a cane across the back of his hand.
The blows were so brutal that one of them screamed in a way that made me think he had lost his hand altogether.”
Numan’s voice sharpened, carrying a sudden edge:
“And when the cane wasn’t enough, one of the guards would take a pair of pliers and pull at the prisoner’s fingernails—one by one. Slowly. With a hidden pleasure, as if he were performing some sacred ritual.”
This time Muna gasped audibly and whispered:
“Did… did you actually see that?”
“I saw it as clearly as I see you now. The light was dim, designed to unsettle perception, so you could no longer tell what was real and what was illusion. To the interrogator’s left stood a guard with a face of stone, watching every detail without a blink, as if he were part of the wall itself.”
He fell silent for a moment, then whispered as though speaking only to himself:
“I stepped forward cautiously, every part of me pounding to the same relentless rhythm: my heart, my breath, my eyes… even my soul was stumbling.”
Muna’s father asked, his worry plain:
“And the interrogator? What did he say to you?”
Numan looked at him, his voice edged with bitter irony:
“The interrogator said:
(These two are detainees, and the third and fourth you passed on your way here, didn’t you? All of them are men you claimed you had never met…)
That was only the beginning.”
After a tense pause, Numan went on, as if forcing a burning coal out of memory—one he knew would not cool if spoken, nor grow quiet if buried.
His voice was calm, but his eyes betrayed more than they concealed.
“I did not answer. I could not make out their faces in that dim light. But the trembling bodies, the bent backs, those shaking hands that seemed to clutch the pen not to write, but to rest—just for a moment—from a deeper pain… None of it was familiar to me. And yet it hurt as if it belonged to me.”
Muna’s father whispered, his brow furrowed, his grip tightening on the arm of the chair:
“What kind of world is this—where injustice wears the mask of fairness, and speaks the language of law?”
Muna longed to interrupt, to say something—anything. Instead, she held Numan in a steady gaze, her eyes glistening with silent plea:
“Go on… don’t stop.”
Numan continued, his voice lowering as though he were walking down a narrowing corridor of memory:
“The interrogator spoke without a trace of feeling, casting a sidelong glance at one of the prisoners who had been ‘broken,’ as they called it:
‘I asked them to write down everything they knew. They confessed freely to belonging to a banned political party, and they said you were with them. No pressure, no threats… they simply wanted to tell the truth.’”
Muna’s father shook his head in despair, whispering to her with a voice heavy with sorrow:
“Perhaps it’s a perfect performance… Did you see how injustice is built with a cold hand?”
Though his words were directed at Muna, they struck Numan like an arrow. He did not respond, only continued in quiet, tearful calm:
“I wanted to say: ‘Why shouldn’t I confront them? Isn’t the point to uncover the truth?’ But I stayed silent. In that place, even questions are twisted into charges, added to the indictment.”
Numan then began to mimic the investigator’s tone with sharp precision:
“We did not allow anyone to see the other, nor to see you, so that later it could not be said that one was influenced by your presence, or that you were influenced by them.”
He paused, then added with a thin, almost wet smile in his voice:
“Here they write… each with his testimony. And the conscience is the only witness.”
Numan shook his head slowly, speaking more to himself than to them:
“I looked at the two sheets, at the guards, at the whole scene… I felt that truth had been stripped of its flesh and turned into an image imposed on paper.
And I said, quietly, hiding a pure rage between the lines:
‘This is not the truth… this is a staged scene. You are not seeking light; you are casting a shadow and convincing others it is the light.’”
The investigator laughed, an empty sound, colorless, as if echoing a deep void, and said:
“Perhaps someone is writing now what condemns you more than you have ever said. And maybe another will give us a surprising ending.”
“I looked at the two detainees, at their fingers beginning to move, and said calmly:
‘I do not know either of them. I have no connection to them.’”
The investigator raised an eyebrow, his voice soft yet hiding a sharp edge:
“And what about all of you belonging to a banned political party?”
I answered:
“Am I supposed to confess now that I belong to a banned party? That I have acted against the security of the nation? And will you release me, or them, if I do?”
He looked at me long, as if weighing a bargain, then said:
“We want nothing more than a confession of your affiliation, that you participated in a demonstration. That’s all we ask… I promise you a swift return to your home.”
I met his gaze steadily, surprised to find the strength still in me:
“Write what you will, if that is how it must be, and I will sign it.”
He signaled to the guard:
“Bring him blank paper and a pen. Take him to the next room. Let him write everything he knows. When he finishes, return him to his cell, and bring the paper to us. The others go to their cells immediately.”
Numan’s voice faltered for a moment, then he spoke as if he were stepping back into that room whose memory had never left him:
“In the next room, I sat before a wooden table, the guard standing like an idol at the door. The papers were laid out before me, the pen… and I began.
I did not write what they wanted. I wrote what should have been said on the day when words were still safe.
I began to organize my memory, as a prisoner arranges his steps in a narrow cell: slowly… cautiously.”
Here, Muna’s father leaned forward, clasping his fingers over his knees, and asked in a low voice, as if afraid to disturb the moment:
“What did you write first?”
Numan said:
“I began from the moment I realized I had a mind that could think, not just a body that obeyed. I wrote about the shock of the first political book I picked from a dusty shelf in a tiny bookstore where no one dared ask the owner what he sold. I wrote about the lectures I attended at cultural centers and public libraries, about professors whose tones felt more like prophecies than explanations.
About the small turning points that shaped me.”
“In the next room, I sat at the table, feeling I held its reins, with paper and pen before me. I began to write… not a confession, but a record. I documented everything I had read in politics, and especially what touched Islamic thought, keeping away from other knowledge I had absorbed. I listed the books, their authors, where I had acquired them, the names of libraries, the lectures I had attended, and my contributions in them.”
Muna, visibly tense, said:
“It’s as if you’re writing them your life’s diary, Numan!”
Numan gave a faint smile and said:
“It is only one side of it that bears testimony. A testimony of awareness, not of crime. I wrote, sifting through everything inside me, and everything I recorded was about me. Every line, every paragraph, had its own intimacy within me.”
He continued after sipping some water:
“I wrote as if no one else would ever read it. Yet deep down… I was gambling on something else.”
Mr. Ahmad asked:
“And what were you gambling on, my son?”
Numan, staring into the distance, said:
“I was gambling on the idea that whoever read it, whoever it might be, would not understand. And when the pages ran out… I asked for more. And when the ink dried, I asked for another. I lingered over the writing… not to escape it, but to resist it. Even though I wasn’t certain of anything as I was then certain that someone would read it. But I was certain of one thing: it had left my body, stored in some drawer, yet it no longer burned within me.”
Muna’s father, with a warm sigh, said:
“This kind of fight… cannot be taught.”
Numan continued:
“And the next afternoon, I finished. I numbered the pages and handed them to the guard. I no longer knew who was watching whom, who wrote the truth, and who performed honesty.
But I knew one thing…
If a human life were to be stopped, I would not be the reason for it.”
“I was not counting nights, so much as I was counting the silence between two sittings, the trembling between two steps. That night… there was something unlike any before. It carried the taste of endings, or the scent of beginnings born from a regret that would not confess itself.
The air in the cell was colder than usual, as if the walls had finally exhaled after a long suffocation, releasing the breaths of those who came before me… one by one, including my own.”
Hearing this, Muna drew a slow breath, as if inhaling the same chill with him, and whispered:
“It’s as if the cell swallows memory and spits out suspended souls…”
Her father nodded silently.
Numan continued:
“The air in the cell felt colder, not because of the weather, but as if the walls had finally exhaled, releasing all the breaths of those who had passed before me. I was on the floor, neither lying nor sitting, but suspended between both, as if my body had become a question that refused an answer.
When they returned me to the cell, I was no longer myself.
Inside me was someone else, resembling me in name and features, yet missing something irretrievable.
The gate closed behind me with a metallic clang, like a seal on a page that was never meant to be opened.
I sat in my usual corner, not looking at the wall, but seeing it… as if it were a mirror exposing me.
I whispered to myself, in a voice only I could hear: “Did you believe them? Or were you simply trying not to break?
Do you deceive them when you stay silent, or do you deceive yourself?
Did you hope someone would survive? That someone would write a word to absolve you?
What foolishness this is, Numan!”
In the quiet room where they listened, Muna’s brow furrowed with silent grief, and her father whispered, as if commenting on a thought with no clear source: “He is judging himself now… and this is harsher than any interrogation.”
Muna lowered her gaze, saying:
“Yes… he cannot endure injustice, yet he also cannot forgive himself if he thinks he faltered for a single moment.”
Numan continued in his cell, as if writing on the walls with his voice:
“Those who were there, they write… not to expose the truth, but to bury it.
Is it possible for a human, in a moment of fear, to betray their own soul?
Or does fear not create betrayal, but merely reveal it?”
“I watched them bend over the papers, not to write, but as if descending from the low ceiling of torment into an even deeper abyss.”
Here, Muna asked, her voice soft yet charged:
“Was he afraid of them? Or of himself?”
Her father replied, staring at some imaginary point on the floor:
“Fear of others is temporary… but fear of yourself, that is true imprisonment.”
And Numan’s voice echoed from the depths of memory, from a narrow cell as if it lay within his own chest:
“How foolish I was to think that paper could vindicate me, that a pen could be fair if left in the hand of someone who only knows how to write what is dictated to him.
Where is the truth?
In their pages, tainted with fear?
Or in the gaze of a prisoner I thought I did not know, only to feel that I resembled him more than anyone else?”
Muna’s eyes drifted, as if she could see the cell in her mind, and she said in a tone blending confusion with sorrow:
“As if he is trying to find himself amid the ruins of faces.”
Her father shook his head slowly:
“He is not searching for innocence… he is searching for meaning.”
Numan continued:
“The door was knocked, not violently as before, but as if the knocker was asking permission.
I opened my eyes, and there was the guard himself, yet his steps were slower, his gaze struggling not to meet mine.
He motioned to me. I rose without a question, for I had learned that questions here are not answered—they are punished.”
Muna whispered, holding her father’s hand:
” It feels as if we are approaching something… something unlike anything before.”
Her father nodded, as if unwilling to preempt what was to come:
” Let him continue, Muna… silence now speaks truer than any expectation.”
We moved forward—the guard and I—down the same corridor. Nothing had changed… neither the dampness, nor the metallic scent, nor the hum of silence. Only we were changing.
But he did not lead me to the investigator’s office. Instead, he took me to the rooftop, where no high walls enclosed, no ceiling loomed. Only a metal chair without a back, dangling wires from above, and the wind groaning through the corners of concrete.
I stood in the center, while the guard stepped back to the wall and became a frozen statue.
Then he came. The investigator.
But he did not come alone… he carried a cup of coffee, steam curling softly. He smiled—a measured smile, like a rehearsed trick.
“Do you like the sun, Numan?” he asked, his voice seeming to speak outside of time.
I looked at him, without answering. The sun was sinking slowly, as if dragging its skirts in shyness, and shadows crept like nocturnal creatures searching for a story.
He spoke again, his smile easing slightly:
“You know? This rooftop has witnessed many conversations… the air softens the mind, opens the heart.”
I remained silent.
He approached and pulled the chair closer:
“Sit. I want nothing today. Just… we converse as friends.”
I sat—not from trust, but from a curiosity tinged with caution.
He looked to the horizon:
“Have you seen any of your comrades here?”
I answered,
“No.”
He shook his head, as if confirming a possibility:
“Nor do I. Some of them… I don’t know if they will remain among us. In the end, no one stays, Numan.”
Silence. Then he added:
“Everything fades… pain, friends, truth. Only acceptance remains. If we survive.”
I looked at him quietly, but my heart tore in the shadows.
He leaned closer, whispering in a tone almost intimate:
“You are a clever young man, and not an enemy to us. Yet your stubbornness makes you seem so… think.”
He stepped back, as if leaving me with my own thoughts, then said, turning away:
“I’ll be back shortly.”
Muna’s father exchanged a glance with his daughter, worry etched on their faces. He muttered:
“They do not grant respite except to plant something far crueler…”
But Numan had not finished his story.
Muna’s voice choked as she said:
“It’s as if he tempts you with a glimpse of freedom, but it comes only with bowing.”
Her father replied slowly:
“Or he wants to see if despair will force you into obedience.”
Numan continued:
“He returned after a few minutes. He came close and whispered in my ear:
‘Be careful, Numan, and let this remain a secret between us. For the next six months, security will follow your every step—where you go, where you stay, wherever you are. Everything about you will be recorded: whom you meet, what you say. But you must not fear, not look back, not hesitate, and ask only about what concerns your studies. You will be summoned monthly for the next two years to the Political Security branch. Do not miss a session, and do not be afraid. Then, every six months after those two years, if the reports are favorable regarding you.’”
“And from me! ….. Just for you, in particular, Beshara. Two days, roughly, and the procedures will end… and you will return to your mother’s embrace.”
The words seemed to pierce the wall of pain; my heart trembled against my will.
Muna lifted her hands to her face, hiding a sudden tear, and whispered so softly it barely reached the ears:
“It’s a test… a test unlike any exam we’ve ever faced.”
Her father stared into the void, then said:
“They do not return prisoners… they return them laden with expectation, tethered by an invisible thread.”
Numan continued:
“His whisper was not reassurance, but an announcement of a new prison… in the open air.”
Then he gestured to the guard, who led me—not to the cell this time, but to an empty room, with a metal bed and a small window that looked onto a narrow courtyard, then a strip of sky.
I lay down… slowly closing my eyes, whispering to myself:
“This is no mercy… just another test. And who said the night hides less than it reveals?”
I recalled what the investigator had said with his cold, inappropriate calm:
“A few days, and you’ll be out.”
As if he were speaking of a weather change, not the gates of hell opening after being shut for so long.
A few days?
Just days, and the sky will open?
Could I return a man with a shadow outside these walls?
But why did I not answer him? And how could I answer?
Should I believe? And if not, why shouldn’t I?
It was as if something inside me trembled, something like my mother’s hand pulling the blanket from my face each morning to say,
“Wake up, don’t forget to dream.”
When the door closed behind him, I rested my head against the wall and closed my eyes…
And I saw her… my mother… seated in the heart of the house, on that wooden chair where she had mended my small wounds so many times, holding in her hands what she had embroidered. The colors bloomed like flowers, and she folded them slowly, as if preparing them for some coming joy.
Light filtered through the window as if it knew, and the air carried the scent of fresh jasmine.
She rose suddenly, listening… as though familiar footsteps approached the door.
She advanced slowly, hesitated, then opened it… and I saw her freeze for a moment.
She stared at me, unable to believe.
Then she ran, ran, ran…
She embraced me and whispered in my ear,
“You’re back? By God, I knew you would come back.”
I wept in her arms—not because I was weak, but because I had finally arrived.
Arrived at the point where the soul finds peace, even if only for a moment.
But a deep voice knocked from inside,
And the dream shattered, her face fading into the darkness,
And I was back in the cell, in the damp, with my name scrawled in ash I had gathered from the ground, chalking the wall, writing in silence the echo of my mother’s voice:
“Numan… he will return.”
I was still Numan in my new cell, but my heart had already raced ahead to the house. I imagined my first day after release, moment by moment, as if living it, so that if it came, it would not escape me.
That night, after the guard left dragging his heavy shadow, I returned to my dream.
I imagined my first morning at home…
I would wake to the sound of the key in the door, not the chains in the corridor.
The smell of coffee, not the damp of prison walls.
And my mother’s face filling the horizon, moving toward me, extending her hands,
casting off the prison blanket, her voice like a prayer:
“Thank God, I see you sleeping in your own bed at last.”
I sit at the edge, looking around.
The walls are clean, no footprints upon them.
The window is open, a small bird sings, as if waiting to tell me that the world is still here.
My mother in the kitchen prepares a simple breakfast:
olive oil, eggs fried the way I like them, and a warm loaf from the oven.
She calls me, patting the table:
“Come, eat, and think of nothing today, nothing but that you are here… safe.”
I sit before her, staring at her face that had been absent a thousand years in the days I spent here.
Every feature is with me, every word embraces me.
Her eyes trace every detail of my face; I have never forgotten the face I know so well, perhaps more than I ever remembered my own name.
And now I see it as if for the first time, as if I were born anew from the womb of absence into the embrace of life.
I ask her, “Mother, have you been waiting for me all this time?”
She smiles and nods:
“Does a mother’s heart ever sleep while her son is in the dark?”
She offers me a cup of tea, but her hands tremble.
She hides her tears, looking at the spoon, and says, averting her gaze:
“I tidied your room every day, as if you would walk in tonight. I turned off the light and said, ‘If he returns, let him find it just as he left it.’”
And I, I wanted to tell her that I had died a thousand times there, yet I kept returning… to live through it all.
She offers me breakfast. She feeds me with her hands. When the meal is finished, I stay seated near my mother, sipping tea in a warm silence, as if speaking might shatter this moment.
She reaches out to my face, brushing her palm across my cheek, then whispers,
“You’ve grown so much, Numan… but your eyes are still the eyes of my child.”
I look at her long, without answering. Words would seem too weak for this moment.
Then she rises slowly and says,
“Go, take a breath outside. The neighbors… they are waiting for you.”
I step out the door hesitantly, as if the air itself were unfamiliar.
The first thing I do is tilt my face to the sky… a long breath, untouched by a slap or a command to stay silent.
The street is narrow as ever, yet it feels wider than that endless corridor in prison.
The doors, the windows—unchanged—but the eyes behind them are no longer the same.
I take a few steps when a voice calls behind me,
“Numan?! Is that you?”
I turn. There stands Haj Hussein, the grocer, at his doorway, as if he has seen someone rise from the other side.
He approaches tentatively, then embraces me tightly, saying,
“Thank God, alive… alive, everyone!”
The word spreads like water:
“Numan’s back!”
“Our boy is back!”
“Returned from the long absence!”
Children run around me, women peer from balconies,
and men step forward to shake my hand with cautious joy, as if afraid to hurt me,
and yet unable to fully believe.
One whispers to me,
“It’s like a dream, brother… as if you rose from a grave, not a cell.”
I walk through the neighborhood as if returning to myself, to the clay that shaped my heart. Every stone on the pavement I know, every shadow on the walls once spoke to me in the distant nights.
I reach a corner by a leaning wall where we used to play as children. I stand there and cry for the first time—not from pain, but from fullness.
I return home at sunset. My mother opens the door before I knock.
“I knew you’d come back before the tea got cold,” she says, opening her arms.
I enter my old room, where memory begins to weave its threads again, and the child I left there years ago comes back.
I step into my room as a stranger might enter a house he once inhabited in an old dream.
It is just as I left it, or as my mother wanted it to remain.
The books are on the shelves, some old papers carefully placed in a small wooden box. Even my coat, once hung on the hook behind the door, is still there, though now a little dusty, as if it has aged with me.
I approach the bed and kneel, placing my hand on the simple cover my mother stitched with her own hands. It carries the scent of home, the scent of quiet love—silent in voice, yet alive in every little detail.
On the wall hangs the picture I drew as a child, my face in mismatched colors, with the words: “My mother… and nothing equals my mother!”
How I cried when I drew it… and how I cry now.
I sit on the edge of the bed, as if listening to something unsaid.
The silence in the room is not silence at all, but a long conversation with the things that knew me in my solitude and waited for me without impatience.
I hear a soft knock at the door, then my mother enters, carrying a cup of warm milk, just as she used to on cold nights when I stayed up late, lost in my books.
“I know you like it before bed,” she says, placing it in front of me.
She sits beside me and speaks in a low voice, as if afraid to awaken an old wound: “Well… everything is over now, isn’t it?”
I look into her eyes and see a hint of hesitation, as if she cannot quite believe that the long night has truly ended.
I hold her hand and say, “It’s over, Mother… but I stayed inside it.”
She embraces me, as she did when I returned exhausted from school or work, and says: “You won’t stay there. I’ll bring you back, piece by piece… and we will wash the night away with cups of sweet morning.”
That night, I dreamed I slept on my old bed, feeling like a child returning from the corridor of a long nightmare, finally resting in the arms of peace.
In the isolation of the prison, childhood begins to seep through the cracks, carrying with it my mother’s smile and a small hand holding mine toward the great gate… the light is faint, barely enough to cast a shadow,
Yet it is enough to form a dream.
I close my eyes and find myself standing at the school door.
A boy of eight, on his second day of school, holding a small bag, with a fragment of fear dangling from his eyes like a lost tear.
Beside him, his mother holds his hand tightly, as if handing the whole world to this child in one motion.
“Be brave, my soul… school is your new home,” she says, straightening his collar.
He does not understand the meaning of “new home,” but he feels that all the birds that once perched on his village window have come today to accompany him.
The teacher with the faint beard, the one who had taken him by the hand yesterday from his father and grandfather and brought him to the classroom, called out in a rich voice: “You… Numan… come here, my son, we will begin the lesson.”
Numan stepped into the classroom, his small feet carrying him forward, and he sat on the wooden desk. Its surface was rough,
yet to him it felt like a towering platform.
The teacher opened a book and said, “Today, we will write the first word.”
He handed him a piece of chalk and pointed to the blackboard.
Numan rose, walked up, stretched out his hand, and wrote: “Muna.”
He woke in the cell to the guard’s low murmur behind the door.
But the smile did not leave his lips.
I thought to myself: “Perhaps I will write it again when I get out… but this time, it will not be on the board, but on the walls of the world.”
I rose and approached the wall, drawing with my finger the same word on the cold stone: “Muna.”
And the letter smiled, so I smiled too, and the letter began to glow.
It was enough for the letter to glow
for my mother to appear to me in it,
illuminated by its light.
× Sheikh Hassan Prison ×