THE Prisoner dreamed every night, and every night the dream was the same. He dreamed of a young girl, ten or eleven years old, whose face was smooth and oval, whose eyes were dark and deep, and whose hair was a wave of chestnut that a loving mother had drawn into braids. That was what The Prisoner saw at the start of each dream, but at the end of it the oval face was shattered, the eyes were sightless, and the little girl's hair was matted with blood and bits of brain.
In his dream, The Prisoner knew that it would not have happened if the child had not screamed. It would not have happened if the mother had been able to control her. In an airplane operation the silence and obedience of the hostages are essential to the success of the mission. It has to be that way, but the little girl had screamed, had gone on screaming, and so Amir had hit her on top of the head with his pistol. Even then, she had not stopped, and Amir had had to hit her several times before she was silent. That was the way that The Prisoner remembered it, although sometimes his memory played tricks on him, and in recollection it seemed that it had been Murad, not Amir, who had beaten the child. Amir or Murad, one or the other. Both of them were dead now, hunted down by the Zionist murder squads. Of the four on the mission, only Zahra and The Prisoner were still alive, she undercover in Paris, and he in the camp that he thought of as a prison.
He wondered if Zahra ever dreamed of the child, and he doubted it. It was eight years now since the airplane job, eight years since the four of them had snatched Pan Am 307 out of the sky, but it was only during the last six months that the face of the child had begun to come to him in the night. He wondered at that, because down through those years there had been much more blood and many other faces, but the face of that child was the only one that was able to unsettle his sleep.
The Prisoner always woke at the end of the dream, but he did not wake in horror or in sweat. Nor did he cry out. The dream was a companion now, and he had learned to live with it. At the end of the dream he would open his eyes, and repeat to himself the words of Muhammad Taqi Partovi Sabzevari.
"It is Allah who puts the gun in our hand," he would whisper to himself, "but we cannot expect Him to pull the trigger as well, just because we are fainthearted."
Then he would sit up in his cot and look around in the darkness at the other men sleeping in the long, rectangular tent that was open at both ends to the breezes of the desert. Each night when he woke from his dream he would check to see that they all were well. There were twenty-two others who slept in the tent, and as their leader The Prisoner could have slept in a tent of his own, but he preferred to be with his brothers. The only time that he used a private tent, and they all did then, was during the monthly visits when the women were sent in from the outside. But other than that single day each month, they lived communally, sleeping, eating, and training together. The number of them varied. There were twenty-two now, but The Prisoner could remember a time when there had been as few as six. They came and they went, some never to return, and whenever that happened The Prisoner would remind his men that, unlike other religions, which consider death to be the end of a man, in the vision of the Qur'an death is not the end of life but its continuation in another form. He told them that man's evolutionary movement toward infinity continues after death. He told them that death is no more than a hyphen between the two parts of man's existence. He told them that sincerely, for he believed it all, most of the time.
And then, having checked to see that his men were well, he would lower himself to his pillow again, and compose himself to return to sleep. A lesser man at a time like that might chase the dream of the little girl by conjuring up a soothing vision: a golden day, a verdant field, a ring of children playing gaily. But that was not the way of The Prisoner. Instead, he would turn his mind to the broken bodies of all the Arab children he had seen in his life, the children of Gaza, of the camps in Beirut, of the villages of the Bekaa. Some of the children had been the victims of poverty and malnutrition, others had been slain by the Nazarenes, and still others by the Zionist warplanes. There were many that he could count, hundreds, perhaps thousands, and as he lay on his cot The Prisoner would stack them into piles in his mind, one pathetic corpse on top of the other, until the pyramids of their bodies managed to mask one broken, oval face, and then he would sleep undisturbed until dawn.