Bir Shiva, Israel
A blast OF wind roared off the Negev desert just as I exited the taxi in front of Bir Shiva prison. Plastic trash bags were plastered against the outer chain-link fence and the rolls of razor wire that topped it. The sun was almost blocked out by the swirling sand. A hundred feet south of the prison I could just make out a Bedouin encampment, camels and all.
The guard in the booth at the outer perimeter was on the phone talking. I pounded on the door to get his attention, waving a letter from the Israeli Prison System. He slid open the window, took it, and called someone on his walkie-talkie.
"Wait," he told me, pointing to an open shed covered by a tin roof.
Peri, my retired Shin Bet friend who had arranged the letter for me, advised me not to bother going to see Hassan Saleh. An unrepentant mass murderer, he wasn't going to tell me anything useful.
"I can make him sit down with you, but that's all," Peri said.
I didn't really have any other choice. It was the only name Nabil's father gave me. The rest of Nabil's group was either dead or, like Nabil, on the run.
"He'll never say a word," Peri insisted. "Don't waste your time." Peri didn't need to say it, but I knew he was also nervous about being the one who was getting me into Wing Six. Leftist journalists, especially the Scandinavians, were known for passing messages from inmates to the outside. If the prison officials suspected that's what I was doing, I'd wind up in a cell myself.
I shared the waiting shed with a Palestinian family who looked as if they'd been there for days. At noon, when the sandstorm finally seemed to pass, the old lady opened a satchel of partially burnt wood and charcoal and prepared tea. She saw me watching and prepared a cup for me. By the time the tea was ready, the wind had picked up again.
We huddled together in the shed, barely able to hear one another over the wind. The woman told me she was there to visit her son, who was doing three years for theft. When I told her I was waiting to see someone in Wing Six, I'm sure she thought I was lying or crazy. No visitor ever got to see the prisoners in Wing Six, including parents. Prisoners weren't allowed to make or receive phone calls, either.
More than an hour later the Israeli guard walked over to the shed and crooked a finger my way: "Mr. Arends, you can go in."
At the main guardhouse they took everything: cell phone, keys, belts, even my Bic pen, giving me one of theirs for the interview. The guard let me take in my yellow eighty-by-eleven pad after he fanned it to make sure nothing was in it. Fortunately, I had the photo of Muhammad Shahadah and his wife and their letter to Nabil in my pocket.
The guard waved me into an air lock. After the door closed behind me, the one in front clicked open and a voice came over the loudspeaker in German telling me to come through. On the other side, I walked through a metal detector and then an organic strip searcher, which detects explosives secreted on the body.
I felt as if I was about to enter the Death Star and come face-to-face
with Darth Vader. Instead, a striking, petite woman in a sky-blue prison-guard uniform met me on the other side. She looked Moroccan. We walked side by side, not saying a word, until we came to a two-story blue pastel building surrounded by rolls of razor wire and an electrified fence. Wing Six.
The woman and I waited silently in Wing Six's air lock for another five minutes while they locked down the prisoners. A guard then led me out into the prison exercise yard while my escort stayed behind. A thick metal screen and razor wire covered the yard. No Hollywood helicopter rescues from this place.
A minute later Hassan Saleh appeared, shackles on his legs, cuffed from behind. The guards pushed him through into the exercise area, then waited while Hassan turned his back so his shackles could be removed through two holes in the bottom of the door. Freed for the moment, he walked over and sat down in the chair next to mine. He didn't offer his hand or say a word.
Saleh was a small man with small hands. His prison uniform hung on him loosely. His green eyes, the color of antifreeze, were fixed on mine. Both of his hands were badly burned, no doubt from chemicals.
I started by telling him I was doing a profile on him for Der Spiegel, the German weekly. I could have told him I was writing an article on floor waxes for Good Housekeeping for all the reaction I got. I hadn't expected this guy to be a complete mute. My experience had been that prisoners locked down for three years welcomed conversation with a stranger, even with a journalist. Not this one.
I threw out a couple banal questions, like were the prisoners treated well, was the food okay, did the guards speak Arabic. The more I willed him to respond, the harder Saleh studied the mesh wire above us. Finally, I pulled out the picture of Nabil's father and mother and nudged Saleh with my foot. "Look at this."
Nabil's father had told me he'd known Saleh from when he was a child. Saleh had played with Nabil in Nabil's parents' living room. When Saleh was arrested, Nabil's father had gone to Saleh's parents' house to offer his sympathy.
Saleh took the picture from me and stared at it. He then looked back up at me.
"Your brother graduated from high school two weeks ago," I said, another piece of information I'd gotten from Nabil's father. He told me Saleh and his brother were very close. "He's doing fine. He'll be at the university this year."
Saleh now blinked. "What do you want?" he said, speaking for the first time.
"Let me ask you what you want. Would you like me to call your›rother and tell him you're okay?"
"You know what they do here? They steal your time. But we do just the same. We read. We recite the Koran. We strengthen our faith. We steal our time back. I'm not just okay, I'm at peace."
I noticed the guard was pacing impatiently back and forth on the other side of the mesh wire watching us, no doubt surprised I'd gotten Saleh to talk.
"Do you want me to call your brother or not?"
Saleh didn't answer.
"I already have his phone number."
Saleh looked over at the guard, leaned closer to me, and whispered in my ear. "Okay. In two days it's his birthday. Wish him happy birthday."
"I will. Now a question you won't like. How do I find Nabil Shahadah?"
Saleh stood up abruptly and motioned to the guard that he wanted to go back to his cell.
As the guard started to unbolt the metal door to the exercise yard, I held the picture of Nabil's parents up to his face.
"I saw them yesterday," I said. "They haven't talked to Nabil in three years. Are you telling me you don't care whether Nabil gets the picture or not?"
"I don't know who Nabil Shahadah is."
I pulled out the letter Nabil's parents had written from my pocket and handed it to Saleh.
As Saleh read it, he shifted from foot to foot, no longer calm. The guard was now in the exercise yard walking toward us.
"Let me write my parents' telephone number," he said, grabbing my eighty-by-eleven pad. He quickly wrote something and then handed the pad back.
The guard led him away as I read what he'd written: Gaza. Beach Camp. Port Video.