Free Escape from Saddam by Lewis Alsamari Page B

clearly hadn’t worked for years, and a small bottle containing water for cleaning yourself. Two fans hung from the ceiling, providing a little welcome coolness but also circulating the putrid smells from the lavatory. Graffiti covered the wall, and a few glum-looking prisoners sat at one end, hunched up with their arms around their knees. I stood for a few moments, not quite able to believe what was happening to me, before, in despair, I sat down to join them. My face fell into my hands in utter desperation.
    Some hours later, the door opened again, and the guard who had detained me put his head into the cell. The moment he appeared, my fellow prisoners rushed up to the door like hungry children to a sweet-seller. They started begging him to let them leave. “I can get my brother to send you some money! Please, let me out,” one of them implored.
    The guard sniffed the air dramatically. “I’m going home now,” he told us. “When I get there, I’m going to sit under the shade of my vine and eat cold watermelon while my wife cooks me a delicious meal. You know,” he said regretfully looking directly at me, “all this could have been avoided if you had simply rustled up a few notes.” He smiled an insincere smile, then slammed the door.
    I stayed in that stinking cell for a week while the army’s interminably slow internal mail system verified that my leave papers were in fact genuine. During that time, other prisoners came and went, and as I talked to inmates more experienced than myself, I began to understand why the guard had picked on me particularly. I was neatly dressed, for a start. I took pride in my appearance, but all the guard saw was a young man from a good home who probably had a bit of money. The Al-Mansour address on my papers had confirmed this impression. My leave was for eight or nine days, and that too counted against me. The guard knew that I had to be returned to my unit before the end of the leave period. If I had only a couple days of leave, the threat of one day in the cell would not have been enough to encourage me to pay a substantial bribe.
    I listened to what I was told, but I took very little of it in. After a while I even stopped noticing the revolting conditions. All I could think of was Saad and my mother. They were expecting me back home, and they had made arrangements. What those arrangements were I did not know, but they had probably cost money and they were most likely time-sensitive. My uncle and my mother had no way of knowing what was delaying me: my mother would be sick with worry that some accident had befallen me, and driven to distraction by the constant questions from my brother and sister—“Mama, when is Sarmed coming home?” Saad, I was sure, would be expecting something more sinister. And every day I spent in the cell, my chances of leaving the country were becoming more and more remote as I became increasingly desperate: the longer I stayed there, the less chance I had of being able to get to Baghdad.
    After a week, tired and dirtier than I had ever been, I was released into the custody of a military guard. Confirmation had come through from my unit that my leave papers were not in fact forged, but it had been decided that there was no point in my going on to Baghdad as I had only a couple days of leave remaining. Wordlessly I was ushered into the back of a military truck with a heavy camouflage canopy with seven or eight other soldiers. Two Red Berets sat at the back keeping watch over us.
    I wanted to cry with frustration as the truck headed back south, trundling along the road that took me inexorably farther from the place I had to be. My companions kept their distance—I assumed it was because I smelled terrible after my week in the cell—and the Red Berets eyed me suspiciously. Clearly they had not bothered to find out why I was being returned to my unit, so they assumed the worst. As I sat there, driven to distraction by my situation, crazy escape plans