The Return of the Wounded Bird
Saeed was on the train, yet in a way, he wasn’t. He was out of prison, but part of him was still there. A certain kind of prison gets into the head and never comes out; it burrows into the soul and never lets the sun in. When they open the door and let you out, they know you carry the jail inside you. You become, eternally, a self-prisoner. Saeed was thinking about nothing, watching nothing, hearing nothing. He was as he had learned to be for the last three years: the absent present.
He couldn’t believe that his beloved mother had gone, and that he hadn’t been able to give her the land he had promised before she died – or that he had, perhaps, brought death to her instead of the land. So many times he had desired to die in jail. They had told him, ‘We will make you desire death; we will make you implore for it.’ And he did. Many times he had asked them to kill him, but they had denied him this, telling him he had no right even to that. It was they, and only they, who decided matters of life and death. The marks of torture were everywhere on his body, but the biggest mark was on his soul. The biggest rupture was inside him, through which everything human had leaked out, leaving him the shadow of a being that once was human.
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