I entered through another building. The door was damaged, almost broken, there were no windows, and the seats were filthy. Someone told me to sit down. I was still insisting on making a phone call. Mussad had told the security guard that I could use a phone once I was inside the women’s jail, but that I could not make a call from my phone. Inside the jail, I could pay money and buy a phone card, ten or twenty riyals’ worth. (Interestingly, some of the Saudi men who are detained are allowed to keep their phones.)
I bought a card and the guard then asked me how many cards I wanted for food.
“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t want anything.”
He kept saying, no, no, no, you will need it inside. So I bought a small coupon book for 100 riyals. It looked like the booklet that we used to buy as kids in school to pay for our breakfasts. It was full of yellow cards, and I stuck it in my bag.
We walked from this admission room closer toward the prison itself, passing through two gates. At the smaller one, the male guard had to leave. We were entering the place where only women could pass.
On the other side of the gate was a hallway. The moment I stepped inside, I covered my nose and mouth against the stench of urine and shit. It smelled like a giant bathroom. On one side, the wall was thick Plexiglas. This, I would learn, was the place where visitors were permitted. There were no chairs to sit down: everyone pressed up against the Plexiglas. There were small holes on each side, but none of the holes matched up. You could shout some conversation, but nothing could pass easily back and forth.
Halimah took my hand in her thin, worn glove. Then she handed my papers and my phone to the internal prison guard. She looked at me and said, “May God protect you.” Then she added, “You will be fine.”
She turned and walked back through the doorway, back to the outside world. Even though she was called a “prison guard,” she was not an actual guard inside a jail. When they shut the door behind her, I felt as if more than a door was closing. I felt as if it was the last time that I would see the outside or see someone from the outside world. My hope closed along with that door.
I didn’t know that was there was basically no cell phone service in jail. The coverage was very weak; it came and went. The two texts that I had sent did not go through. Had I known that at that moment, I might have cried for real.
I was alone now with a new female guard, who was little more than a girl, certainly younger than me. She was not wearing an abaya. She was dressed in a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, with her hair twisted tightly and wrapped around at the back of her head in a style of bun. She took my papers, the papers that had followed me from the Khobar police station to jail, and pointed at a place where I was supposed to sign. On the paper there was a line for charges. In the blank space, someone had written “driving while female.”
After I signed, the guard looked at my paper and asked me, “Why are you here in this jail?”
I looked at her and said, “Guess.”
She said, “You are Manal al-Sharif?”—she already knew my name—and then added, “They brought you here? For driving a car?” She asked each question as if she couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that I was standing there, couldn’t believe that I was being sent to her jail for driving a car.
I decided that this was the opening I needed. I told her that I was to be allowed one phone call before I entered the jail. She looked at me and said, “No. Who told you that?” I explained that Musaad had told me to ask the prison guard when I got inside. I showed her that I had already bought my calling card.
The prison had one small room with an old landline phone for prisoners. Each woman was allowed one call per month. I kept insisting that I could make a call. Finally, the guard called the main section, and someone must have told her that it was okay. I used my phone card to call my sister-in-law.
She was upset and relieved at the same time. She kept asking, “Where are you?” I told her that I was fine, that I was in Dammam Central Prison and to tell my friend Ahmed to tweet about it. She replied, “What’s ‘tweet’?” She had no idea what Twitter was. We went back and forth a few times, and finally I said to her, “Just tell Ahmed to tweet, and he will understand.” And I told her to find me a lawyer. Then the call was over. I hung up the receiver with its long cord. There was nothing else I could do.
I wasn’t going to be getting any more special favors. The guard looked at my bag and told me that I could not take it with me. She took it, along with my ID and my phone, and told me to follow her through a back door. In an apologetic voice, she said, “You will not like this.” I didn’t understand what she was talking about.
We entered another foul-smelling area and she said, “Take off your clothes.” I thought I had misheard her.
I said, “Excuse me?”
She told me again to take off my clothes and to bend over.
“All my clothes?” I asked. “Even my underwear?”
“Yes, even your underwear.”
It is hard to convey just what an extreme indignity this was. If you are raised as a traditional Saudi woman, you cannot bear being exposed. It is the greatest shame possible. Women do not uncover themselves even for doctors. When I was in the hospital giving birth to my son, the only time I felt embarrassed and uneasy was when the doctor came in and I had to take off my underwear. The doctor was another woman, and still I felt extremely uncomfortable, even though I was in labor. Submitting to this examination, bending over to have this strange prison guard with her gloved hands check the most intimate parts of me was the most humiliating thing I had ever experienced.
When it was done, she told me to put on my clothes.
All my frustration and rage spilled over. I starting shouting at her, saying that this could not be happening, and I vowed that I would have her exposed.
She looked at me and said very calmly, “You have to leave here first. Only then can you start threatening to expose us.”
Those words stunned me into silence.
We stepped back into the processing office where another woman was waiting. Her name was Zahrah, which means “flower” in Arabic. She was also wearing a skirt; apparently that was the uniform for the prison guards. She was short and heavy and was carrying an enormous chain of keys. She was to lead me to jail.