The Prince of Bagram Prison by Alex Carr

Author:Alex Carr [Carr, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49738-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

From the street, the Ain Chock Charity House looked no different from the rest of Casablanca's state-built apartment blocks, looming, soulless structures that had been built to replace the squalor of the bidonvilles, but which had managed only to reduce poverty to its basest level. Whatever small redemptions the slums offered—the community of others, the culture of place, the simple gift of individuality—were all but negated by the architectural fascism of the government buildings, the relentless repetition of gray cement and soot-darkened windows, the surrounding aprons of hard-beaten earth.

It was midmorning by the time Manar descended from the last of three buses that had carried her from the privileged world of Anfa to this dismal industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. She should have been nervous as she walked the last few blocks to the orphanage and approached the building's imposing front gate. Should have been, but wasn't. Beneath her loose djellaba and dark scarf, her body buzzed with an almost ecstatic sense of calm. It was something, she imagined, like what a Sufi dancer must feel, or someone standing in the eye of a scouring sandstorm. The kind of peace that came from being at the very nadir of the world, with everything else in revolution.

Inside the front gate, in what had once been a courtyard, a squatters' village had sprung up, more miserable than any slum Manar had ever seen. Not just children but the old and sick and lame had congregated within the walls of the orphanage. In the doorway of the shanty closest to the gate, an old woman, blind and legless, sat tending a pitiful fire. Farther inside, a young girl with the moon face of Down syndrome held a screaming baby. Beside her, a boy was skinning a rat.

The settlement itself had the runaway look of an organic being, some kind of wild cantilevered fungus that had grown forever out and up, the new obliterating the old, until the entire organism appeared ready to collapse beneath the weight of its own ambition.

Manar had not gone more than a few meters before she found herself surrounded by some dozen boys. “Dinars,” one of them pleaded. He was the oldest of the bunch, though he couldn't have been more than nine or ten. He lifted his shirt and pointed to his sunken stomach, then made the universal sign for food. He was a seasoned beggar, the gestures, Manar thought, pure theater. But the look on his face said there was nothing contrived about his hunger.

Manar reached into her robe and pulled out a single ten-dinar coin. She would have fed them all if she could have, but as it was she could allow herself neither pity nor compassion. She would accomplish nothing if she did. “Take me to the director,” she told the oldest boy, holding the coin just out of his reach.

He turned and hissed at the others, who disappeared almost as quickly as they had come, scattering into the series of narrow alleyways that branched chaotically off the settlement's main artery.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.