We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled by Wendy Pearlman

Author:Wendy Pearlman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

Billal, doctor (Harasta)

We were underground and couldn’t see a thing. We knew it was morning when the guards switched shifts. Otherwise, we had no idea if it was night or day.

There were eighty people in our cell. Without nutrition, we all became like skeletons. People were always sick and everyone had eye infections. As a doctor, I’d try to take care of them, but I couldn’t help much. I’d just tell everyone, “When it’s your time to go to the bathroom, try to splash your eyes with water.”

My cellmates respected me, so they let me stay near the small gate. There I could breathe a little and also see light from the corridor. Our cell was near the women’s cell, and sometimes they’d come for a specific girl, calling out her name and the name of her town. We knew that they were raping her, because they always took her during the shift of a particular officer. From the small window I could see that she was about sixteen years old, and looked sick and miserable. She wore a headscarf, but they would rip it off.

There was one guy in our cell named Yousef. He cried a lot, but wouldn’t say why. After three or four months, he finally told us his story. He worked as a driver for the Damascus Municipality. In the evenings, they’d take him to dig holes near the airport. Then a car would arrive filled with dead bodies. Yousef’s job was to help push them into the hole and bury them. They’d throw their ID cards in the hole so no one could know what happened to them. They simply disappeared.

Once Yousef was pushing a girl’s body into the hole when she moved. He realized that she was still alive, and left her to the side. The officer came and told him, “Throw her in or I’ll throw you in her place.” There was nothing Yousef could do, so he pushed the girl in the hole and covered her in dirt. After that he had nightmares and tried to run away. He became a wanted person, and was eventually arrested at a checkpoint and thrown in prison.

Yousef was in our cell for some time, but then one day they came and took him away. To where, I never knew.

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