She was as terrified as I was. I could hear her voice shaking as she said, “I don’t know.”
The room was the filthiest thing I had ever seen. It was crawling with cockroaches, their hard shells racing across the floor and up the walls, the scurrying of their legs making a low, clicking sound. The room stank of piss and sweat and every foul odor possible to imagine. I took small breaths through my hand, my stomach clenching in revulsion. There was another, smaller room attached. It had no door, but it was supposed to be the bathroom. There was no toilet, just a hole in the ground and human shit all over the floor.
On the floor, amid the cockroaches, was a sponge mattress. Nomadic Arabs don’t have traditional beds, just these roll-up mattresses. Even now, when many people live together in one house, we often sleep on these mattresses at night and then roll them up for the daytime. This was a small mattress, and it was filthy, shiny with sweat and dirt that had been worn into the covering. There was nowhere else to sit. We were inside the detention room of the Khobar police station, and I did not know for how long. I felt tears well up in my eyes, but I shut them. I was not going to cry in this place. I was not going to cry in front of this woman.
Finally, the woman told me her name. Halimah. I kept saying to her, “Halimah, what did I do? Where is my brother? What’s going on? Why did they take my bag?” I was like all those interrogators, but in reverse.
Halimah kept saying, “I don’t know.”
I started banging on the metal door, my fist pounding and then stinging. “Please, please, where’s my brother?” I would call out. “Can I just talk to my lawyer? Can I talk to my son?”
I stood for a long time, but I was so tired. I had been awake for the better part of two days. My head was throbbing, and I had to sit down on that disgusting mattress. I had to close my eyes. But I started talking to Halimah. I asked her about her husband, I asked if she had children. She told me that her husband was a security guard. Being a security guard is usually the lowest form of work that a Saudi man can accept. Most guards work long hours and earn low wages, maybe 1,500 riyals a month, which is only about $400, not even enough to pay rent in most places. Halimah said she had two kids. She told me their names, but in my exhaustion, I forgot them. I asked her question after question, the way you try to forget about your own situation by involving yourself in someone else’s.
As she spoke, I looked at my fancy shoes and my fancy, well-made abaya, which cost the equivalent of her husband’s salary for at least one month. The bag that they had already taken from me would have cost her husband three months’ wages. Her phone was an old phone, black and white, the kind that could only hold about ten messages before it ran out of storage. I looked at her and thought of her having no other options than to work in this place, thought of what must have driven her to take this job. Sitting in that cell, I pitied her, even more than myself.
Suddenly the door was wrenched open. Two guards told me to come out, and as I walked through the doorway, they told me to show my hands. One of the men was holding a large roller covered in blue ink, which he proceeded to slide across my hands until they were thickly coated. He told me to press my fingers and hands to a series of papers, first my thumbs, then my fingers, then my whole hand. Because I am a woman, it was taboo for him to touch my skin. Methodically, I followed his instructions. I placed my hands on the papers, and when I looked up, I recognized one of the other men in the room—the head of the Khobar police station. He had also been present at the Thuqbah traffic police headquarters when they had detained me the day before.
I looked straight at him and asked, “What’s going on? Why are you doing this?”
“You ask yourself, Manal al-Sharif,” he said. “You put yourself in this position!”
2
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* * *
Cockroaches and Prison Bars
* * *
* * *
I could not tell you if I stayed in that police room with my sticky, ink-stained hands for a long time or for a short time, if many minutes had passed or only a few. My entire sense of time had vanished. Eventually, another man entered and said that we were going upstairs. He carried the stack of rustling papers with my handprints on them. He was talking in brisk, overlapping sentences to me, but really to no one, rattling off a list of bureaucratic instructions and observations. It was like being thrust into a conversation where I only knew a few words of the language. I felt my mind grasping for a familiar phrase. “We need to send your papers to the governor’s house. It’s out of our hands, we can’t do anything. They’ll take care of your papers there. We’ll need to send you there.”
I was not going home.
There were two guys waiting for me, in civilian clothes with a civilian car—a white Toyota Camry with fabric seats. A man in a uniform handed them my papers and told the two men to open them once they were inside the car. They acted like they were in a hurry, sliding into their seats, facing forward. Around their heads, held in place by a black band, they wore the traditional Saudi shemagh, the red-and-white checked cloth that identifies Saudi men. But their shemaghs were draped in such a way that I could not see their faces. If I were to pass them on a street or in hallway at some point in the future, I would not be able to recognize them.
Halimah came with me, trailing slightly behind with her ripped gloves and her bag with the nearly broken strap. She sat next to me, completely silent, clutching her bag on her lap. They had given her my cell phone and my ID but had returned the rest of my bag to me. In the bright sunlight, I could see that her abaya was dirty. She looked even poorer than she had inside the police station.
I asked the men if I could perform my afternoon prayers. They ignored me. I asked again, and they very curtly told me that I could do my prayers “when we get there.” The entire time that I had been at the police station, I had convinced myself that I was not a criminal, just a regular person merely being brought in for an interrogation, that I’m not someone who would be sitting next to a woman whom they would all call “my prison guard.” But now, in that silent car, it was hard to keep pretending.