“You came here to make this country look bad,” the interrogator told me.
“We came here to tell the truth,” I answered. “We are professional journalists for the New York Times, and we have everything we need to prove that.”
I remembered the names on the wall and was sorry that I had not left mine behind. The driver and Nick told me later that my voice was calm but strong during that interrogation in the car. Though the interrogator was screaming from time to time, I somehow appeared in control of my emotions. “Listen, even if you kill us, there are many others who will tell the story,” I told him. “Even if we disappear, you cannot silence all the voices.”
The interrogator was clearly relaying my answers to somebody else. He would lean down and speak to me, then step away and speak on a walkie-talkie, then come back and ask another question. “Why did you come when you did, right before all this trouble?” he asked.
I began to hear my inner voice. It was time to say good-bye to this world, time to say the words my parents and grandmother in Morocco had taught me as a child: There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. I heard myself whispering those words. This was the end. I felt oddly placid. I saw moments from my childhood and with friends and family playing in front of my eyes like scenes from a movie. What are you leaving behind? I asked myself. The answer made me sad. I had done some work I was proud of, but I wasn’t leaving anything personal behind: no children, no partner. Who’s going to cry for you? I thought.
One of the back doors opened and a man got in and sat next to Nick. Then a voice boomed into the car: “We will take you to another place now. Driver, you can look up and follow this other car. You two, don’t look up and don’t move. Mr. Muhammad will drive with you.”
Z stared at the car ahead of us and drove. “They will dump us in the desert,” he whispered.
Mr. Muhammad spoke into a walkie-talkie. Then he started to question me again. My throat was very dry and I could barely speak, but I answered his questions one after the other. This went on for about twenty minutes but it felt much longer.
Finally, Mr. Muhammad asked the driver to stop and wait. He got out of the car. My head was still bowed. “This is the end,” I heard Z whispering in Arabic. Just then, Mr. Muhammad spoke to us through the driver’s window. “You are free to leave. May Allah be with you.”
I looked up and into Mr. Muhammad’s face. He had green eyes and something friendly in his look. “What?” I asked him. “What did you say?”
“You can go. Go in peace.” He walked away.
We were somewhere in Cairo, on a street lined with houses and shops. It was late afternoon. We parked the car, got out, and took a taxi to the hotel. In the cab the three of us hugged. The driver glanced at us in the rearview mirror, looking perplexed. I told him we were family who had just reunited after a long time apart.
I called my parents and told them I was okay, but I wasn’t. We were all acting normal, but nothing was normal. We booked a hotel room for the driver and gave him some money. We hadn’t eaten anything in more than twenty-four hours except the small package of Oreos we’d been given in detention, so we went to the hotel restaurant. I had just ordered spaghetti when my phone rang.
“Souad, listen, don’t tell me where you are,” said the voice of a journalist colleague in Cairo. “You should know the intelligence service is apparently calling hotels in Cairo and asking if you and your colleague are staying there. If I were you guys, I’d leave as soon as you can and go to a safe place.”
We left our food untouched and called the German embassy. They sent a car to get us.
Nick and I left Egypt the next day, but only after we’d made sure Z was safe. The Times and German TV took care of him and his family, checking them into a hotel under a fake name.
Back in Germany, about three days later, I received an email from an address I didn’t recognize.
“This is Marwan; we met in Egypt. I wanted to know if you are okay and let you know, I was impressed by you. Can we become friends on Facebook? I want to get to know you better.”
It was Marwan, my jailer.
*
IT TOOK ME some time to get over the stress and trauma. I would often wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming. I had to admit that while I was fine physically, my soul was not in a good place. I was afraid and didn’t want to be afraid. If I felt fear, our jailers would win.
I took some time off from work and spent a week in Morocco. A friend had told me about a small hotel on top of a mountain outside Marrakech. It sounded like the right place for me. I needed to be alone; I needed to heal.
When my regular Moroccan driver, Abdelilah, picked me up from the airport in Casablanca to drive me to Imlil, I sat in silence in the backseat. Usually we chatted and laughed on the road, but this time we were both quiet. I wore my sunglasses and looked out the window.
As we drove, I thought about what had happened and what was coming next. Nick had been a great source of support. We both had to deal with what we had endured, and we hadn’t finished the research for our book. Should we go back to Egypt? Was it worth it?
I thought about what might happen to the Middle East, and even Morocco. All these protests all of a sudden; all these protesters who wanted so many different things and had such high expectations. In Egypt, some asked for more rights; others said they wanted better jobs; others, better health care. I also met a group who said they wanted someone like Libya’s president, Muammar Gaddafi, or former longtime Eygptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in charge because they were “strong leaders.”
I also wondered why the uprisings had come to be called the “Arab Spring.” Who had chosen that optimistic name? My thoughts went back to the Copts in Alexandria, and how one of our sources had whispered his fears that the Muslim Brotherhood would take over. He told us that we didn’t understand how dangerous the Muslim Brotherhood was, especially for minorities like the Egyptian Christians. We were never able to write that story because we were detained.
I knew that sometimes democracy wasn’t good for minorities. From my history lessons in school and in my research for the Nazi book, I’d read about how Hitler and his party had won power through elections and coalition politics. Why did people think that a voting system was protection against totalitarianism?