One Drop of Blood

A fictionalized account of torture, and the intrusive search for information.

We surrendered to the Army in waves. There was a palpable relief that one act of the horror show in the theater of war was over. But we were terrified of our saviors. Exhaustion was ignored as everyone became suddenly alert, and obedient. We were ordered to remove our clothes and walk naked down a dusty runway lined with sandbag walls that protected our captor’s bodies, revealing only their eyes.  It would not be the last time I had to choose between dignity or death.

A voice rang above our heads, mangled audio made their attempt at our language even less decipherable. We asked each other what was being said, desperate for any semblance of information. A nearby soldier clarified, If you have been with the movement even one day, you must turn yourself in. It will be worse for you if it is found out later. My heart sank into an empty stomach.

The one day rule. One day and you were no longer a civilian, you were a combatant. If you are already the “other” to the outside and a female on the inside…an ex-combatant is the least desirable thing to be. Especially in the rough hands of a military that is deliriously, violently, victorious. I had been in the movement only five days. From the backdrop of war, I was pulled to the frontlines. Standing there, naked, I thought, I have nothing to hide.

They took a group of us separately, but there was some confusion. I spotted my mother and slipped into the herds being prodded behind a barbed wire. I didn’t know whether my fate inside the blue tents would be any better than the green ones…but at least I was with my mother.

In those months we had run in every direction. Sometimes backwards and forwards in the same day, following instincts and rumors to safety. I was grateful, in that moment, to sit still. Only after a few days, we realized that we had bought freedom from war with our freedom of movement. A reporter asked me later, you must have been relieved, at least, that the war was over? She seemed surprise by my response.

We didn’t know it was over. Nobody told us.

…

When they first took me, I yelled and pleaded. My mother’s cries faded slowly behind the van. In here my voice fell silent, even as everything else was heightened. The dark was so enveloping, I felt it. The metal chair was so cold it broke through faded cotton, and I heard the sound of my own shivers. Searching for even the thinnest veil of protection, I lift my scarf over my head.

It was only on the first day that I was spoken to.  Despite their name, the interrogators had only two questions. Where are the group’s leaders? Where are the weapons kept?

I kept trying to explain. I don’t know.

If I had the information that they wanted, would it save me? Maybe they didn’t believe me, or maybe they never needed the information…but after that, the questions stopped. In the days that followed the walls shuddered with screams, but I never recognized the sound of my own voice.

Asphyxiated. That’s the word the lawyer uses to describe the first part of endless torture. I have never heard this word before. I know that my eyes closed and when they opened everything felt different. A sharp pain on my leg, a dull throbbing in my stomach. I looked down at a naked body that couldn’t have been mine.

Below the bruises, and above the burns – there was only one sign of an invisible intrusion. One drop of blood.

…

When the days turned to months, I was in a van again. I couldn’t see anything as we moved. It felt like a long time. I was dropped on the side of a road. A relative found me there, my wounds filled with dirt. I was scared of everyone and everything.  I was the most afraid of what I knew. I remembered, many years before, a man working in my village was searching for his son…but nobody would help him.

The army will question anyone. Everyone is afraid to speak, to hear, and even to see. They don’t want to know. Anything.

At the time, I didn’t know what he meant. I had always thought we tried to protect each other, from them. But now it was as if I was invisible and marked, all at once. Most people didn’t look at me, those that did pleaded with their eyes. Please don’t tell me anything.

There were  those who knew without knowing. They were advocates who were not afraid to protect and defend. The rumor was that they could extract the internal time bomb and throw it overseas for someone foreign to defuse and examine. But I wasn’t sure. If I kept it inside, I was certain I would die. If I let it out here, I became a dispenser — unleashing a cluster of violence on anyone else who knew.

I knew others who survived through silence, but for me it grew too loud. I jumped on a motorcycle and directed him as best I could. Behind the main junction, a small road, next to a school. I didn’t know what came next. His face was kind and peaceful, perhaps because he was a man of God. He seemed to know me already, or enough others like me. Where is your family from? Where are they now? And then only the details around me, not what was happening on the inside. What day did they take you? How many girls were with you?

When I finally spoke, it was softly. He listened intently, absorbing my pain for long enough to draw out the tears that went missing in detention. And then, in a fog of urgency and emotion, he jumped into action.

…

In the thick air of the airport tarmac, I thought, Now that I have said something, I can save myself.  When I landed at Heathrow airport, I felt the cold again, and a familiar sense of fear and foreign-ness. A stranger that resembles me hands me an over-sized winter coat. I cried every day in their safe space. In this state, I had to see a lawyer — my status was in question.

I ride the train to the last stop and am still nowhere close. I enter a dimly lit pub. In the general excitement about a football game, I go un-noticed until someone picks me up. The lawyer is kind, but harried. The walls are lined with folders that fall into each other. Scrawled on their sides are names that barely fit. The papers stuffed inside could guarantee safety, but how did they survive?

The lawyer needs the details, before I forget. I am confused.

I tell her, The things that happened, I cannot forget – even for a minute. I know it all the time.

And then I am telling the story as plainly as she is documenting it. It seems mechanical. Like a math lesson, where I have the numbers that fit into a formula. Here, nobody cries.

Before I was just me. Now, I am a lot of other things. A Survivor. I couldn’t imagine all the things I would live through as a Victim, while I prayed for death.  And now people tell me that what nearly killed me makes me valuable, a key Witness. I finally have the information.

I don’t know how they heard about me, but in a moment where nothing mattered, I gave my consent. They usually came to me. The people who needed to hear my story more than I needed to tell it.

At first, familiar requests, I had almost memorized. What happened in the last stages of the war? How long were you with the movement?

And then they asked me to delve deep, into the darkest recesses of my mind. What did they rape you with? How many men were there? As they press into the pain, they offer a promise in exchange. Not for social services, but for social justice.

…

My information is electronically transferred, added to the others, carefully molded, and secretly transported to Washington D.C. It has arrived on these desks because for hundreds of civilians like me, the threat level has gone from yellow to orange. And suddenly, in this town, our collective pain turns grey.

We are concerned about gender-based violence, but we just don’t have the information.

My story should matter on its own immoral merits–but it doesn’t.

…

The details of my life are floating somewhere between a dirt road and the information superhighway. I hear my story has reached Geneva, joining a loud chorus calling for action.

Won’t the new questions still have the old answers? I wondered.

I started to hear myself, speaking clearly. I needed information, about my family, my friends. But I am afraid the sound of my voice will threaten the lives of those who hear it at home. Eventually, I start to make phone calls, trying reach anyone in the familiar zone of discomfort. I was shouting, so they could hear me. They speak quietly, telling me that my mother died. In the camp where I left her.

For one whole year, I didn’t know.

I hear my own screams. Maybe my information could save someone else now, but it’s too late to save me.

The phone rings, a request for an interview. I don’t want to answer any more questions.

I think to myself, This is torture.

The details of this story have been fictionalized for security reasons, but the statements and histories are drawn from actual testimonies.