From Guantánamo
by by Dorothea Dieckmann

translated from the German by Daniel Slager
(Excerpted from Chapter 4, "Death - Happiness")

Guantánamo is an invention. It is a new variation on the camp, which is by no means an American invention. Camps are secret, closed laboratories; places where experiments are conducted on human beings in order to achieve certain results. The European tradition with such laboratories is a long one, and extends far back into history. In the twentieth century the most extreme of these inventions were carried out in Germany. The military regimes of Greece and Spain followed suit. The great experiment has had manifestations around the world, from Indonesia to Israel, from Chechnya to China. Only a few have survived to bear witness on the outside. There is, however, one possibility for penetrating the interior of the camp without seeing it with one's own eyes: the power of imagination. With this in mind I have used the few facts available to imagine the interior of this camp, along with the inner life of a camp inmate. Literature can uncover the secrets of these laboratories by making use of the same means: Guantánamo is an invention.

Honor Bound to Defend Freedom

--Slogan of the Guantánamo Joint Military Task Force

The only thing we know for certain is that these are bad people.

--George W. Bush (July 17, 2003)

Engulfed in the night. They way one bows one's head to reflect sometimes, so completely engulfed in the night. People are sleeping all around. A modest theater of sorts, an innocent self-deception, as if they were sleeping in houses, safely tucked in bed, under their own roof, stretched out or crouching on mattresses, in the sheets, under the covers; in reality they have come together the way it was once done long ago, and then again now, in a desolate place, an open air camp, a vast number of people, an army, a nation, under the cold sky on the cold earth, cast down where once one stood, forehead resting on one's arm, face down to the ground, breathing softly. And you stand watch, you are one of the guards, you find the next one, brandishing a torch from the enormous pile beside you. Why are you standing watch? Someone has to do it. Someone has to be there.

--Franz Kafka, In the Night

(Born in Hamburg, Rashid is the twenty-year-old son of an Indian grocer and a German woman. While traveling through India and Pakistan, he was arrested by American soldiers and brought to Guantánamo.)

When toothpaste dries in the sun it gets brittle. It hardens, cracks, and shrinks. It also bleaches out. The light green that squirts out of the tube inscribed with Government Item Mint Toothpaste turns plaster-white. In the end it reduces to powder that one can simply blow away. A boat, a gallows, circles, waves, letters, and numbers - over days and weeks it all disappears as white dust.

He kneels at the back wall of the cage, crushing clods of dirt in the palms of his hands. In the stalls all around him they are exercising again on their hand towels. Rashid has been lying on his mattress since dinner, wondering whether he should get up. It isn't an easy decision, for he has an invisible hole inside him, and only food can fill it momentarily. As soon as he stands up he feels the ever-expanding hollow space between his gut and his throat. And yet everything functions normally, only his knees hurt on the hard concrete. He works slowly and precisely, every movement requires effort and concentration. He wipes the mixture of mud and chalk from his orange pants and removes the cap from the tube. He uses the paste sparingly. A small drop on the fingertip suffices for each letter, half of one for the I. He sketches each line along the edge of his finger, then flattens it slightly with the tip, so that strips of color the width of a finger appear on the concrete surface; up, down, across, and one of them round: K - I - R - A - T. The MPs have yet to discover his work. I and A are everywhere - Rashid, Tarik, Kirat, Islam - letters in a dice-box, secret connections. Tarik, Islam, the chaplain Muhammad Halabi-Islam: all of them are gone. Rashid remains, along with Kirat, the lizard.

When he first saw the lizard, it was affixed to the foot of the wooden wall like a giant green neon letter - head down, luminous, motionless. For a moment he too was completely still. It was very beautiful, and it came from another world. It didn't belong in the camp. He stared at the lizard as if he could hold it fast with his gaze, remaining in the position he was in when he discovered it, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, his head turned slightly above his shoulders. He thought he could see one of its eyes moving, a ball rotating mechanically in a dead relief. There was nothing to indicate that a heart was beating or lungs were breathing in this lizard, and yet its body was perfect, free and unblemished. Its form, with its pointed head emerging from the body as if there were no neck, pointed at the ground like an arrow, tapering above its tiny splayed legs into the outstretched tail, which was itself longer than the head and the rear together. Its striking adornment seemed superfluous and fragile, transforming this humble creature into a mercurial, entirely singular being. It was clearly a lizard, sleek and long, of a cool, glowing color, just like Rashid imagined the nearby sea, at the shore, where the yellow sand colored the blue water, and light yellow flecks grew on the turquoise, light yellow strips ran along the neck, from the shoulders to the crack of the mouth.

After a while Rashid discovered that waves actually rippled on its surface. Tiny, iridescent movements wiped the flecks away and then brought them back again, a play of light whose source must have been in the creature itself. He sat motionless, forgetting himself. The changes in the pattern of the green skin looked like a soliloquy. He wanted to understand it. Some kind of meaning moved the unmoving body, some kind of promise. At first the wandering flecks seemed to multiply, then they came together in a single motion, and suddenly a great wave issued forth from the center to the ends of its body, washing the green out, so that it grew paler, warmer; the whole animal seemed at once to expire and come to life anew. Sea green turned to light brown before Rashid's eyes. The lizard melted into the wooden wall. It didn't move. This was magic, and it was meant for him. The yellow flecks remained, trembling on. Rashid leaned forward, to the point where he could no longer see the mesh of the fence around his cage, and when he was almost touching the wire, the tail whipped to the side without a sound, wound up into a ball, and the arrow shot off. The lizard paused once more on the ground, its head raised, and then tumbled into the grass. The light brown figure flitted through the tall grass and disappeared. Rashid's heart pounded, palpitating in his chest like a bird in one's hand.

Since then the lizard visits him, it comes whenever he wants. At first he watched the wooden wall for hours. He alone could see the arrow with its tip and long tail, standing motionless between the pictures in shadow. He spoke to it secretly, and the whirl of voices in his head grew fainter. Then he brought the sign into the cage. The pale mint color of the toothpaste, which had something of the sea green of the lizard's skin, faded gradually, until only white chalk lines remained on the floor. At night it was luminous in the cold hue that everything white took on in the glare of the spotlights. The curved shape alone reminded him of Kirat's body. Rashid gave the lizard this name. From him it learns what is going on in the camp. It knows that the soldiers are called MPs, that the prisoners are called oranges, and that Tarik invented the name because of the suits they wear. In telling the lizard these things he distances himself from them. The process is silent, difficult, halting. He talks about what the shower looks like, and how long the water comes before one has to press the button again; he says that the Uzbek reminds him of a bull terrier, and that he hates the black men and barks at them; that he holds one nostril closed and blows out the other one, leaving the snot to hang on the mesh of the fence. He tells how he gathered the downy strands that come from the tall grass and counted them, and how they feel like cotton when you hold them in your hands. He doesn't tell the lizard that he thought of the little white feathers when he stood under the shower, searching for a face, only to conclude that it was gone and that his cock wouldn't move. Nor does he tell of the interrogations that go on in the cage, the hearings. It is enough that he speaks of simple things, things that belong to someone else, not to him and not to it. He almost gets a sense that these surroundings make up a kind of reality. Now and then he reads aloud from the Koran.

He looks at the drying characters, which spell TARIK backwards. The name is strange yet common, just like his own. Sometimes he knows for a few seconds what it was like to be Rashid. Then he senses the weight that kept him in the world, even when he didn't feel like taking the world or himself any longer. A plain, pulsating feeling resurfaces, weak and distant, like someone who waves long after saying goodbye. The memory grows fainter and less frequent, which isn't all bad, for it is painful to have lost this wonderful if stupid understanding. Rashid hasn't heard his name in ages. To the men who interrogate him in the barracks he is Mr. Bakhrani, for the MPs sand nigger or rag head, or simply fucking terrorist. Outside, when they move him around, they call him guy or man or two-o-for. 204 is also on the synthetic blue armband fastened around his wrist; 204 is the number he has to write on the lined, postcard-sized forms he sends home - DETAINEE JJJ A 204, 160 Camp X-Ray, Washington, DC 20353, USA. The Uzbek next to him does little more than grunt when he wants to speak with Rashid; it sounds like hoj, or he calls out Schörrmen, German, to get a rise out of him over the food or the noise or a black MP. For the most part he sits on the bare floor with his back to Rashid's cage, his head between his knees, mumbling to himself. His right and left fists drum weakly on the concrete, a stagnant rhythm punctuated by pauses. At odd moments he leaps up and rams his head into the wall without a word; once, twice, three times, the wire mesh rattles, and the Uzbek continues, panting in resignation, arms at his sides, until he throws himself on the mattress, as if he had reached the end of an arduous workday. It isn't long before the mumbling resumes again. At night these bewildering movements wake Rashid from a semi-conscious state, and he begins to speak with Kirat in whispers. Now he is losing his mind again. They're all crazy. I'm crazy. Perhaps you can tell me what will come of this. After all, this is your home. Go back to your wanderings. The toothpaste shimmers. Kirat listens to him from outside. Between him and the lizard there is nothing but air.

The buckets have been changed, the shadow play on the wall extinguished. The artificial day is about to break. The path is still the color of tired earth. It is always clear during prayers. At some point the MPs retired, driven off by the fury of Allah's oranges. Suleiman yelled at one of them for noisily dragging leg irons on the ground behind him during afternoon prayers. The guards beat him in his cage until he couldn't stand up; in the evening he was gone, they had broken one of his arms. That was a long time ago. The camp has become more muted. Even when someone has hung himself again, there is hardly a peep. Men simply disappear. One only learns why when they reappear, for they always do reappear - other than Tarik, other than Suleiman - they return to their old cages, more subdued than before. All the crazy ones struggle, but their struggle is eerily quiescent, their movements slow and repetitive. Even the Uzbek, bashing his thick head against the fence, raging and spitting through the mesh, just as others rage and spit through the mesh; it comes with the territory, they are punished, moved up and down the various rungs - one shower a week, two showers a week, they eat and sleep, are taken away and brought back again, nothing more. Everything is in order on the outside.

But inside it is teeming, an invisible, nervous throng. The chorus is relentless, the grumbling and grousing. He crouches, leaning his forehead cautiously on the fence, admiring his work. He wants quiet. They are up to Ibrahim, yet again Ibrahim, inneke hamidum mecid - it is nearly over. But he knows the praying will never stop, no more than the cursing and roaring and shaking; it all presses in, his cage is too narrow. They cough and blow and snore, they shit and piss in the slop bucket. They cower and stare silently. But even the silence penetrates the walls, just like the MPs, when they draw the chain clattering through the mesh, trample in, stamp around, trod on his hand towel, kick the bucket over, and then lock the door with a bang, which is echoed by the severe emptiness in his body. The din is omnipresent, it always comes suddenly, leaving him to squint, jump up, and shudder, much like the flies that stick to his body and buzz in his ears - no escape. Esselamu aleykum. They get up and gather their hand towels. The hot air vibrates with rustling and shuffling. The loudspeaker crackles. The sun has circled the cage yet again. Every day wraps the box in a new wire. Every time the lights go on the cage has grown smaller. The lights go on.