Days of Fear by Daniele Mastrogiacomo

there.” He points to the opposite side of the room where there are two openings in the wall that serve as windows, as far as possible from the entrance, which is low, tight as a small tunnel, and without a door.
    I crawl into a corner of this hole and try to pluck up my courage. I keep my mind busy by forcing myself to focus on details, colors, sounds, the days of the week. But thoughts continue to bluster through my mind—like hurricanes, they shake me to the core and overwhelm me. I will suffer from frequent headaches. My head will feel full to the point where, more than once, I will feel that it is ready to explode. I don’t speak much, I lose myself in other worlds, other issues, and I almost always fall asleep sitting up. I usually do not remember my dreams. But since I’ve been in captivity, I recall them vividly. Dreams about all manner of things. My mother, my father, who died last summer, my wife, my children, the newspaper, my colleagues. They are not nightmares, but the situations are absurd, improbable. I feel like someone on the outside wants to talk to me, to transmit messages and thoughts. A kind of telepathy that travels thousands of kilometers to reach me in this forsaken place. It comforts me to think this might be true.
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    For thirty-six hours we remain where we are, almost comatose. I run through the days that mark off our captivity. It’s March 8. Aleef, the soldier who, to a certain degree, has become my reference point within the group, charges into the cell and asks Sayed to leave. He obeys and follows the Taliban out. Ajmal is still sleeping, or perhaps he is awake, but he keeps his eyes closed. I’m not worried about our friend; there has been no cause for tension, nothing of any particular relevance has occurred. Almost an hour passes and Sayed does not come back. Now I am concerned. I don’t know where he is, I have not heard a single cry, a single sound, not even the usual low murmur that reaches us from beyond our cell. I’m starting to think that they’ve gone, all of them, that they’ve let us go. Alone in the middle of the desert, but free.
    It’s only an illusion. Sayed appears at the door; he bows his head and crawls into the hole that serves as our prison. His face is white, his eyes miserable slits; the corners of his mouth are lined. He shakes his head. He is crying. Then he curses through clenched teeth: “Fuck Taliban, fuck Taliban!” I want to know what happened, and I ask Ajmal to translate. The interpreter has just woken up, his face is heavy, drowsy, but he, too, is shaken by the sight. Sayed says that he was beaten on the back and the legs, and then tells us exactly what it was that finally made him panic: they tried to strangle him. He mimes the movements: hands grabbing at him from behind, then something like a length of cord around his neck, tightening so that he could not breathe. They stopped only when his eyes began bulging out of their sockets and he collapsed. He thinks he passed out for a few seconds. He’s afraid. So are we. I look at Ajmal, he looks at me, and we put mute questions to one another, enveloped in a weighty silence.
    It is my interpreter’s turn. They take him from our cell and lead him away. Sayed mutters something in English—he asks me not to betray him. If I am interrogated, he implores, I must say that I gave him fifty dollars a day to be my driver. Ajmal warned me of this last night: if they interrogated him, he would say the same thing. You gave me two hundred dollars, he said, for the whole five-day journey to the south. This aspect had not occurred to me. Apparently Sayed and Ajmal had already dealt with the question in their conversations with the Taliban, but nobody told me.
    We’re in the middle of the investigation now, and they want to know who the five thousand dollars belongs to. It’s actually Ajmal’s fee, paid in advance, for setting up the interview. I was