Limassol Read Online Free PDF Page B

guts to take it down.
    The detainee was shoved, blinking, into the room. Downstairs, it was dark. He was a fat fellow with a black beard. They sat him down on the chair with his hands cuffed in back. I offered him water, as I always did at the beginning of the interrogation; they’d always drink. When somebody is thirsty, he doesn’t think he’ll have to pee in his pants afterward. I asked them to take off his handcuffs. It’s better like that, now the two of us are free human beings.
    I called him by his nickname, the name of his oldest son. I never went into the interrogation room without reading the file beforehand. I asked how he felt. He drank the water and mumbled something. “What do you say?”
    â€œHurts a little,” he mumbled in Arabic. “I don’t feel good.”
    I said I wanted to send him home, if he’d just tell us where his brother was.
    He mumbled into his beard, it was very hard to understand him. There were interrogators who sat with interpreters at their side because they weren’t sure enough of their Arabic. I didn’t. I learned Arabic in school, afterward I used it in the army for four years, at the university I took courses in the history of the Middle East, and for more than ten years I’ve been speaking it with the detainees. My Arabic became more and more primitive, the Arabic of the barricades, of simple questions, where and when, why, what did you do there, snarls of monkeys. I didn’t have time to read anything worthwhile. I barely understood that fat fellow, he swallowed words.
    I took a deep breath, as if nothing was urgent for us, even though his brother was wandering around outside with a corset of nails and steel balls. “How old are you?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
    â€œThirty-three.” He looked much older, probably from all the baklava and ground lamb.
    â€œAnd how old is your brother?”
    â€œWhat brother?” he played innocent, and raised his defiant eyes a little.
    â€œMeroan,” I called him by name. “The one who disappeared.”
    â€œOh, he’s going on nineteen.”
    â€œAnd where did he go?”
    â€œI really don’t know. Maybe to look for work.”
    The young man was sitting next to me, as if he were at a job interview. His fingers drummed nervously on the table. I was awfully tired, and didn’t know how to proceed with the detainee. I tried a direction.
    â€œYou love your brother Meroan?” I asked.
    â€œYes. Love.”
    â€œAnd you don’t care that he’s going to blow himself up?”
    He bowed his head and I saw that his lips were stretched into a smile he couldn’t repress.
    â€œYou know what happens when a person blows himself up?” I asked. “First of all his head flies into the air like a ball, but the eyes go on seeing for a few more seconds. Can you imagine how scary that is? And then all the internal organs are smeared all around, and the prick flies to hell. Have you ever thought of how such a performance looks?”
    He sank into himself. His fingers rolled an imaginary chain of prayer beads and his mouth mumbled chapters of the Koran.
    I came close to him. I wanted to attract his attention, so he’d be full of me and what I was telling him. At a certain point, you’ve got to take up the whole stage.
    â€œThat’s how concerned you are for your brother?” I whispered to him. “That’s how concerned you are for your little brother? What kind of a person are you?”
    â€œMaybe he’s scared of what will happen to his brother when they catch him,” the young man played the good cop, with a kind of clumsiness that angered me.
    â€œWe’ll save him,” I said into his plump ear. “He’ll go to jail for four or five years, get three meals a day, and then he’ll go back home. Maybe they’ll kidnap some soldier and he’ll get out sooner.”
    My