Anatomia microscòpica del sistema nerviós central

Our days in prison passed slowly and tediously, so slowly that we soon forgot about time and its passage. We no longer differentiated between night and day. We guessed at the time in order to perform our five daily prayers by keeping track of the guards’ changing shifts and by trying to keep count of how long each of us had been in prison.

The light in the hallway outside our cell did not turn on and off with the rising and setting of the sun, adding to our blurred sense of night and day. Somehow, winter time seemed to bring even more darkness to our already dark existence, and it felt as if we were drowning in all this darkness, slowly suffocating, slowly dying, along with our dreams of freedom.

We were only allowed to whisper. If a guard heard us speak, he would slam his stick against the door and startle us back into silence.

“Shut up!” he would yell, and we would shut up.

When one of the guards wanted to call on any of us, they would call us by a man’s name. The guards called me Mohammad.

After two weeks of living in this state of terror and tension,

my mother decided she had had enough. She wanted to lighten things up, to soothe the tension. She knocked on the door and called out to Hussain, the guard, and asked him to please bring us a copy of the Quran. Hussain’s eyes widened. He looked at my mother as if she had completely lost her sanity.

“Do you happen to think that you are at home or in a palace where you can demand what you please? Do you not know that the Quran is forbidden in this place?”

“Why?” She tried to stay calm and polite.

“Because we don’t keep copies of the Quran here.”

“I saw some with my own eyes. They were stacked in the interrogation room. They belonged to those young men in the solitary confinement cells.”

She was talking about the group of boys they had rounded up at the mosque and dumped into one solitary confinement cell.

“Those Qurans are for burning, not for reading,” Hussain answered with a look of disgust on his face. “Forbidden!” he yelled and slammed the peephole shut.

My mother gently knocked on the door again and pleaded with Hussain. He opened the peephole, shouted that it was forbidden and slammed the peephole shut in my mother’s face. At that point, my mother lost her poise. She banged and kicked the door. This time, Ibraheem showed up. Mama asked for a copy of the Quran.

“The Quran is forbidden here. Forbidden.”

“Fine, give me a paper then. I want to write to the warden.”

“I don’t have any paper.”

My mother insisted that she get a piece of paper right away and went on and on with her arguments, until Ibraheem couldn’t take it anymore. The warden received my mother’s letter and sent for her to come to his office. We had no idea that he had sent for her not to discuss her request, but to humiliate her. He yelled and screamed at her and told her that they didn’t keep any Qurans in prison.

“Why do you want one anyway? So you can read it and pray to God to send us to hell?”

When Mama returned, she told us about her meeting and we all decided to go on a hunger strike. That day we refused breakfast and lunch. A guard came to warn us that if we didn’t end the strike, they’d put all of us back in solitary confinement. To show us they were serious, they cut off our water supply.

This was our first attempt at a strike and we hadn’t yet built up the courage to persist, so we ended the hunger strike. The next day, my mother asked for another paper. She wanted to write to the head of the division again. Abu Asim, the warden, personally came to our cell this time.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“We’re so bored in here and we just want a copy of the Quran so we could have something to do.”

“Why don’t you occupy yourselves with something else?”

“Like what?’

“Like making things with dough, like the men.”

“Fine, teach us how.”

“Okay, I will go find out how the men work the dough and I’ll come back and tell you.”

One hour later, Abu Isam, came back with a copy of the Quran so old and worn, I wondered where he got it from. The truth was, we didn’t care how old or worn it was; we felt thrilled to have it. We immediately divided the large copy of the Quran into different chapters and used a piece of cardboard - I don’t know where that cardboard came from - to cover each chapter. We numbered the chapters and started reading and memorizing and we felt overjoyed. Some time later, an officer came from Abu Isam’s office and taught us how to make things with dough, like the men did.