Dear Muadh,
I’m sending you another letter before I receive your response to my first because I know it may not reach you. I was actually lucky when I received your first letter. I’ve always considered receiving a letter an honest-to-God miracle. I’ve always had that continuous obsession: what if the mailman lost it? What if it got lost among the thousands of letters in the plane? What if the mailman decided—for a reason or another—to use it to mop the coffee he spilled on his clothes? I always reached this conclusion, ‘not receiving a letter is a usual thing. Receiving it is actually the strange thing’.
This was the case in the good old days. Nowadays receiving a letter is an event that deserves celebration…let alone when the recipient is a prisoner like me. I’ll be rather optimistic if I say I expect your reply to reach me or this letter to reach you.
Let me then practice my narcissism through writing to myself and sending you the letter later, and I will convince myself that I don’t have an oversized ego as it might seem.
It’s been two weeks since I was imprisoned. In the first week, I was comfortable somehow despite all tremendous fast events I’ve been through; I returned to my Tangier, and she’s overwhelming me with her warmth despite that I’m in her worst places ever.
I was really in need for the calm that follows the storm. In addition, I was in need to sit on my own for some minutes to organize my thoughts and ‘listen to the sound of my bones’ as our elderly say.
There’s another thing that you may find really odd. I was really happy as Zahrliza returned to its normal place in the American Museum. The robbery of the painting was a gash in the body of Tangier which means in my body, too. Tangier has suffered a lot of injustices, and I didn’t need her to suffer any more.
Tangier is a quiet and luxurious city according to the international standards. They’re trying to transform it into a savage city. They’re taking away all her beauty or damaging and tearing it apart at the least. Those psychopaths people! There’re artists and innovators who loved Tangier, and there’re on the other hand some beauty adversaries who insist on seeing Tangier nothing more than a wasteland. It’s an aim, if they ever know, too difficult to achieve.
I told you that restoring the painting relieved me to the degree that I was about to forget my misfortune. However, after the passage of two weeks, I started to be worried and upset. It seems the whole thing is going to take a long time, and prison isn’t a lovely place.
I was lucky in some instances, but it won’t last. For example, the prisoners knew somehow that I’m a journalist, so started to call me ‘The Journalist’. It’s a title that enjoys some resonance and importance in some places such as a prison. Some come to me to expose their enemies who were unjust to them and put them in the prison. My whole situation would cite our local proverb, ‘Had peach been able to cure. It would have cured itself first’.
Some ask me to write their lovers letters. One asked me to write her a letter and wanted the first line to be, ‘I’m writing to you in blue, and I’m feeling blue’. He asked me to write that and showed me his forearm where he tattooed her name. He swore then he’d marry her after avenging himself of course the same way as Shah Rukh Khan did.
When I looked him in the eye, I found him really honest. He was really aware of what he was saying. My goodness! What world is this?
A lot of people here avoid me, as I do, out of respect or hatred. My two cellmates signed with me an unspoken peace pack. Mind your own business, and nobody will be harmed. They think I’ll exposed their trading in drug or some very light weapons. I won’t of course do that not because I can’t, but when I order my priorities, I find that reporting these two in a world whose every corner is plagued with corruption is a kind of injustice to them and me. There’re things more important to me than these two in the time being and getting involved in irrelevant peripheral conflicts is a stupidity and an act of heroism I won’t claim.
All people here trade and practice their corruption their own ways. It’s very difficult to classify them here into good and bad. I’m only trying to observe and discover this world I entered despite my own will.
You can’t imagine the amount and quality of things that are being bought and sold here. Imagine and order whatever you please, and they’ll bring it to you before you stand up provided that you pay for it. The price and payment method differ according to your status and the thing that you ordered. The point is the word ‘impossible’ is only said here to the powerless prisoners who can’t defend themselves. There’re unfortunately a considerable number of them.
As a matter of fact, I’m one of them although I try to appear otherwise. I’m taking the title journalist as a cover and following the aphorism, “When you dispense with people, you will be the richest among all people”. I’m also saving some money for emergencies. How long can I survive this way?
Actually I don’t know because I can see some unpromising faces, and I see many eyes looking askance at me… people with bleak faces who can inflict damage whenever they need due to the authority they’ve imposed in this jungle in different ways such as alliances, bribery and cruelty, but they’re hesitant and my reserved mask are able to keep them away until now. They can’t know until now whether it’s the mask of fear, confidence as I’m a ‘journalist’, or the mask of a man whose heart is dead.
Dear Muadh,
I find myself for another time engaging you in my thoughts and obsessions that will disturb you all day. I apologize again and let me conclude my letter with a somehow good bit of news.
My lawyer told me that he exerted a considerable amount of pressure on the Interpol to reveal the party that reported me because it’s a point he definitely needs to defend me. He threatened them that withholding this piece of information shall have dangerous repercussions. At last, they gave up and told him they received an email from an anonymous person reporting the incident. Their tracking systems revealed that they letter was sent from an internet café in Marrakesh. Consequently, it was impossible to identify the sender.
According to my lawyer, this’s in my favor and indicates that it was a matter of settling scores, and someone must have tucked the painting in my bag. This’s the foundation of my lawyer defense as he told me. I hope it’ll convince them hopefully.
You will ask me for clarifications. I swear to God I, myself, don’t know who is interested in framing me in such a trouble. Despite all this harm, I feel that this devil has started overpowering the last scruple in me that have enabled me to remain a moderate person. I’ve never been an angel, but I haven’t been a harmful person, either.
One writer once wrote, ‘If you don’t wrong other people, others will wrong you’
Some people do their best to trigger the evil inside us. Are they actually ready to bear the repercussions?
Your loving friend,
Khaled
Sat Village Prison