THE UNIQUE EXPERIENCE: PART VII
So, I was no longer alone as a slave, there were at least three of us. And I didn't doubt that there were already many more, waiting chained somewhere downstairs for their horrible fate, as we were here upstairs. And that many others would follow on this road to Hell after us, I was rather sure about, too. Anyhow, I had a moment to rest now, as the 'Roman' who was already keeping an eye on both other slaves ordered me to sit down on the bench next to them. While I was following his order with chains rattling, trying to make myself comfortable, the other guard, who brought me into this place, left, leaving us three to the custodianship of his colleague, who now had become responsible for three prisoners.
If you think, now that there were three of us against one would give us an excellent chance to revolt and escape, and that therefore we immediately rose up suddenly as an allied force from our seats to overpower the fourth guy in our company after the other 'Roman' was gone, I must disappoint you. Of course, by nature there was still the furious drive inside me to put an end to all this: I may have been turned into a slave externally, but I hadn't turned into one internally.
No, of course I didn't accept my fate as just stuff happening! I didn't say to myself: well, just bad luck, no problem that I have to change my mind in regard to my long planned professional carrier, no problem that instead of becoming an academic Dutch historian I will just become a dumb Arab galleyslave, that's also fine, as it doesn't really matter very much as to which way I will earn a living, that if it's not possible to do that by brain-work, in times of crisis and lack of employment one shouldn't make trouble accepting offered alternatives and doing that for awhile with manual labor, just give it a chance. Oh no: perhaps some victims may react stoically in this way, or some armchair victims reading my story now may think they would do so as that may seem from an objective viewpoint the most realistic option, as denying the facts on the ground is senseless. But when you've just become a slave, you're not bothering about being objective. And I wasn't disturbed mentally so far at that point as to weigh the pro and con, although I indeed was mentally disturbed very far.
But what could we do in reality? With some thirty pounds of iron - roughly twenty for the chains, ten for the collar - riveted to your limbs, you just don't jump up cheering to fall upon your prey. The total weight of all this heavy metal together makes every movement very strenuous, particularly when you're not used to being chained (and to be clear: none of us three already was yet). And those slavers will have known that by experience, otherwise they wouldn't have created this seeming opportunity, which in reality was none.
Be sure that those irons we as slaves had to wear were so extremely heavy as to extinguish every hope of running away, not only from here in this gloomy building, but also later on the galley or wherever. Adding a lot of non-functional pounds to our hands (non-functional from the point of view of extracting the maximum of effort out of us in the most efficient way), tugging on them from underneath, they might hinder us a lot when rowing. But they also (thanks to their mental impact) made us more obedient and thus more willing - if that's the right word - to row at all. And a good bullwhip does a lot to compensate for the loss of rowing power per slave body that the chains caused, just by making their tortured body's slave labor harder.
Apart from that, chains as such restrict your movement. I hope you will understand that they indeed are intended for that. And ours restricted us a lot. Also, in case they hadn't been built up from thick iron links but just from thin iron-wire, for example when standing (and to overpower our 'Roman' we would have to stand) we wouldn't be able to raise our hands much higher than our crotches. That's not enough, you will imagine, if you want to seize someone by the throat, as long as that someone isn't a dwarf. To be sure, our guard wasn't. So we all three would have been defenseless from our navel upwards. That's a big part of your body, and moreover a rather vulnerable part. Think of a punch in your stomach, or something similar. We wouldn't have a chance, even three against one. And apart from that, there would be enough of those Arabs in the vicinity to suppress any incipient rebellion immediately.
Yes, even if there weren't enough of them nearby and even if we could succeed in overpowering - killing? - the guard, where to go then? With those heavy chains it was not just a question of running quickly into the street and stopping the first taxi driver passing by - none was presumably passing by this remote part of the harbor anyway - to bring us safely to the airport. We all three had seen how the chains were riveted to our limbs - but none of us had seen how one could unrivet them. And I hadn't the slightest idea how this indeed should be done or if this was at all possible. I could expect that both other slaves were as ignorant in regard to this as I was.
But please do not think that I thought this all over in this rational way at that moment. I didn't need to. Perhaps the circumstances already were such that even the thought about an escape not did come into my head. And apart from that, I was as such too exhausted to think anything over at all, and my fellow-slaves seemed to be, too.
In a normal story you might expect me to describe my future oarmates sitting next to me now, what they looked like and their individual characteristics. But the problem is that there were none, as we all three had intentionally been stripped of ours. As slaves we were no longer individuals, we had lost all distinguishing personal marks - apart from the new marks in the form of impersonal characters and ciphers with which our slavers had replaced them. All three of us looked exactly the same now, as identical clones of the same standard slave, with the same shaved bald skull, the same huge collar around our necks, the same ashen loin-cloth around our waists, the same shackles riveted to our limbs, that were connected in the same way by the same heavy chains.
Differences in our appearance were reduced to an absolute minimum - to the minimum our slavers couldn't change, or at least had to accept for the moment as they were: our height, our girth, our muscularity, the details and inner distances of our face. No doubt, if those guys had been able to do it, they would have changed and standardized all those features, too, to make true interchangable robots out of us. And as to our girth and muscularity they could in the long term exercise some influence indeed; in the first case by deciding the nature of our food - there wouldn't be much room left for us for doing individual shopping at the supermarket according to our personal taste preferences - and their quantity; in the second case by training us with the whip to make muscled rowing machines out of all of us. Regarding this, one should keep in mind that we were already preselected for our task as being more muscular in the right spots than average guys our age.
I assure you: especially when shaved bald, deprived of all your hair and thus of your familiar hair appearance, it is not only difficult for you to identify yourself in a mirror. It is even more difficult for somebody else, who doesn't see you in a mirror daily. Without hair, and thus without a characteristic haircut, you have much less to go on in identifying someone. That is already the case when you're with only a few shaved bald and identical dressed persons, such as we three now. But that is even much more the case when there are dozens of them hanging around in the same place, as with slaves on a galley. How, by God, can they be distinguished from each other by outsiders and how can they themselves distinguish each other?
Fortunately, they all wear their own unique numbers in a pretty visible way! The short, easy to remember but temporary number printed on their slavetag, the longer, not so easy to remember but permanent one branded on their left chest. Such numbers are quite helpful for the slaves themselves to recognize each other, too - hello, there is G-22 again, is G-3 doing fine? Hey, G-65, beware of G-7, he's a real backstabber! Can anybody help G-44, as the oar is too heavy for him alone? Very soon the slaves will also remember each other by their number, and also - as far as speaking is allowed or otherwise as far as whispering is possible - discuss each other and call each other by his number, like their overseers do. This kind of mutual depersonalization by the slaves themselves will be intended too, as it helps them to regard themselves as just the impersonal number they with their enslavement have become.
Well, that my slavetag number was G-46 I have already told you, and this number I already knew by heart by now. It may interest you to hear what the numbers of my two fellow-slaves were - or perhaps not really, as it doesn't tell you anything about who they are. The one next to me, however, was stamped G-17 and the third one was numbered G-59. That would mean, as I would later realize when I discovered the numbering aboard the galley, that each of them would have the middle position on their rowing bench on the right, each of which counted three oarsmen.
So you can calculate already what my personal spot on board was to become: the innermost one on a right bench, directly next to the middle-passage where the slavedrivers would walk up and down. At that very moment that I was sitting there upstairs after having endured the whole enslavementprocedure, trying to recover from my branding, I of course didn't know that, as I didn't know how the galley looked like, and thus how the seats would be numbered. All those tagnumbers uptill now didn't make any sense - in regard of possible consequences - to me at all. The only relevant thing I in that moment was aware of was that both other slaves were nearly of he same length, and that they both were a little bit shorter than I was.
Of course, after I sat down I looked at them while they looked at me. That's the reason I was able to read the numbers on their slavetags and also on their still fiery red brands, which looked as disgusting as did mine. G-17 - you will notice: there the depersonalization starts already on my part! - was branded SLAVE C-0083-K-7714; G-59 as SLAVE B-5225-N-9619. As I was, as you will remember, marked for life as SLAVE B-2307-X-1856, I couldn't find any system in this at all. Why the hell were my predecessors not just B-2307-X-1855 and B-2307-X-1854, or something very close to that, in case those numbers were given away to some other slaves who arrived before us or had yet to arrive? One thing was of course clear: the galley wouldn't hold enough slaves to be able to cover the whole range of numbers from B-2307-X-1856 till C-0083-K-7714. You would need all the adult men in a town as big as New York for that!
Only much later I would learn the meaning of it. We all were illegally enslaved - that will still be clear to you, I hope - but slavery as such was legal. On the Arabian peninsula criminals can be sentenced to be a slave, and in that case they are branded by the state, to be sold at a slavemarket to whomever wants to buy them. The state keeps a register of them all. As this lawful enslavement might happen rather quickly to you in case of a false step, in fact for every serious crime, even just for stealing a couple of loaves of bread, there are a lot of legal slaves indeed. Not always for life, to be clear, perhaps just for a year when the committed crime is not that big. But all those condemned guys are branded, and thus numbered; the unimaginable terrible acts that Mehmed did to me in fact are very regular business over there.
But slaves are mortal beings, so they sometimes die, and thanks to their brutal owners they may die even earlier than they otherwise would have. In that case, in a way their slave number is set free. If the slave died officially, too - which means that his death is reported to the state officials - his name in the slave register is deleted. A new legally enslaved criminal can then get that number; that slave number so to say acquires a second life. But if you succeed in hiding the fact that the slave died, you can use his number for somebody else yourself and replace your dead slave not by buying a new arbitrary, perhaps old, weak, unemployable criminal, but with someone fitting much better into your slave team, selected by you from the best guys available.
Or - perhaps even more lucrative - you can sell, after disposing of his dead body, your deceased slave's number to somebody who can make good use of it for a guy chosen by himself on his own. Those chosen people of course don't have to be criminals, they also can be somebody kidnapped by those who succeeded in securing a free slave number. No, that's not a legal practice, just as isn't the branding that follows for the victim. And yes, sometimes the state is controlling what slave owners are doing and to whom, so if a slave owner has plans to enslave somebody who has not legally been turned into a slave he doesn't do all this on the public street in front of the City Hall.
But once you HAVE been branded, who will - if you ever get the possibility of your rightly suspicious illegal enslaver to talk to some state official, which you for that reason better not reckon with! - believe you when you pretend NOT to be a slave, that you are NOT identical to the guy who is registered officially as a slave under the number you display on your chest? A quick look in the slave register by anybody will (in case of mistrust of your identity) confirm that a slave with such and such a number exists and is still alive and kicking - and thus that you must be that slave.
But how about your specific biographical details, you will ask now. As a European of a certain age I will not look like an Arab of some totally different age. That's quite right. But in the first place: Westerners, if behaving in a criminal way, are not spared condemnation to slavery. In the second place: bald shaved slaves look much more alike each other than unshaven free men. In the third place: Saudia Arabia is corrupt. If you have the connections, for money you may succeed in changing some details in the slave register regarding age, physical characteristics and the like. But better not change too much, as those changes (although done very carefully by erasing some characters) may still be visible by careful scrutiny on the respective page - yes, Saudi Arabia is a very conservative country, for recording such a backward institution as slavery they still use such a backward material as paper instead of the internet.
The more those erasures are restricted to a minimum, the lower the risk that one will be unmasked in case of a superficial inspection of the slave register. But it's exactly for that reason that some slave numbers, with a lot of good usable biographical and physical details regarding age, height and so on, have far more value than others, when the slave with this desirable number - whether the one who assumed it legally or his illegal successor - dies. It helps explain the seeming total arbitrariness in regard to the three slave numbers branded on the chests of my two fellow-sufferers and me.
Then, finally, to the numbers themselves. The B and C at the beginning are in fact not numbers, but symbols standing for the duration of your slavery. C is a lifer, B is for more than fifteen years. A is for less, so was not employable in our case. You may say now: B isn't either. But fifteen years is a very long time in a slave's worklife and a lot of slaves don't survive that long. And when those fifteen years are up, and you're still alive, they will easily get the terms in the slave register extended by saying that you've committed this or that crime in the meantime and thus have to be condemned to another fifteen years of slavery. No, they won't let you go. Yes, a judge can be paid to pronounce such an unfair sentence. Most judges like money, you know, and they're not paid very well in this country. You will protest? Nobody will believe a branded criminal, previously condemned to slavery for fifteen years or more, when he claims not to have committed the crime he's accused of after that.
O yeah, unless I forget. Perhaps you might also want to know what the second character is for, such as my 'X' (in B-2307-X-1856), and the 'K' and the 'N' of my colleagues.They each stand for a special category of crime committed once by the slave who was originally the wearer of that number. There exists a special code survey for looking that up. It's helpful for the criminal statistics of Saudi Arabia - there are so and so many murderers, swindlers, thieves, etc., enslaved now - and it may make clear to those observers who know those codes what crime your slave number has committed once, and perhaps thereupon that person might shiver. For the more or less harsh treatment of yourself as a slave it means not very much - that's not related to what you've done in the past before becoming a slave, but to what you're doing as a slave now. Your slavedriver is interested not in your moral failure but in your corporal utility, as he doesn't want to save your soul but instead to make money.
I myself was never told what the 'X' stood for. And as a slave you had better not ask which unknown crime you've been made guilty of. You might get even more disgusted by the number branded on your chest in that case, without the possibility to exchange it for another that perhaps gives you more moral relief.
However, taken together it means that where the B and X were just categorizing me as a special kind of enslaved criminal without much relevance for my factual existence as a slave, in fact my number in the slave register was 23071856. Why the X was precisely inserted in the middle and not at the beginning or at the end? I suppose an overseer or an official can read the whole more easy without a mistake this way.
But let's not worry you with ciphers, and concentrate on the reality behind them. The reality behind the slaves' C-0083-K-7714 and B-5225-N-9619 - or to be short: G-17 and G-59 - was that they were as exhausted as I was. G-17 had been staring in front of himself without any expression when I entered. His neighbor G-59, the one sitting the farthest away from me now, looked even more out of balance, as he was weeping at that very moment. Both guys seemed close to my age, but shaved completely bald (as they of course were) it was a bit difficult to say if I was right, because when you lose all your hair, you not only lose a part of your individuality, but also an easy way to recognize your age. Without identity and without age: that's what a slave looks like - and that's what he in fact is, without identity and without age, as time and place lose all relevance once you've been enslaved.
Looking from my seat at both guys who were deprived of their personality, I thus in fact was also looking at myself. I stared at them as they stared at me - the sobbing second guy in spite of his tears, now looked at me, too. After a few seconds I somehow felt that I had seen both of them before - and judging from their reactions at seeing me, it seemed that the same thought crossed their minds. But who were they? Where had I seen them? For the present, I searched my memory in vain, as of course to be succesful I had to transform the image of two uniform shaved bald slaves into that of two individual with-what-kind-of-haircut-of-what-length guys of some unknown place at some unknown time.
Of course, as both were that kind of muscular guy that our slavers were searching for in the first place, I mentally reviewed the category of sportsmen first, especially those who I knew from the rowing scene, as the most promising oarsmen a galley owner could catch as slaves were guys who already were used to pulling on oars. And then suddenly I recognized them - I had met them several times at European regattas indeed, although never had had closer contact with them: those were the Belgian Twins, as they were commonly called - their Christian names I had forgotten - by us Dutch contestants. They were well-trained rowers. Yes, those slavers had made a nice haul with them, I thought grimly. But to see them in these horrible circumstances! One of them I must have heard screaming when branded before me - who it was I couldn't detect now, but presumably his brother had not screamed less when it had been his turn before him, only at that time I hadn't been already near enough to be able to hear him, because at that time I was still making trouble with those two guys in the reception room after being confronted the first time with my heavy chains when the bag containing them was turned upside down.
Even in better circumstances the Belgian Twins had looked very much alike; completely deprived of their hair, they looked even more the same, having become nearly totally interchangable but for their new slave numbers. So I couldn't blame myself very much for not being able to distinguish between the two of them. I would have to do that in the future wholly based on the numbers on their slavetags, that luckily were big enough to be clearly visible - and I will not have been the only one over here who had to cope with that identification problem and therefore was in a way grateful that we slaves all were carefully numbered.
The Belgian Twins had always rowed together, and as a couple had made a good rowing force at regattas. They were nearly inseparable, doing everything together. So they would have reacted together as well to the advertisement which had been set as a trap for all of us who apparently searched for something special and unusual (I hope you understand I can't abide the word 'unique' any longer). But their numbering as slaves G-17 and G-59 did implicate, as I later would be able to make out, that they would be cruelly divorced at the oars, unreachable for each other for contact and mutual mental support in the future, as those slavers didn't show any signs of respect for the emotions and lifelong personal bonds of their victims. Did the Twins know that at that moment already? I doubt it, as I didn't know what was to be my own place at the oars.
At the moment I recognized who they were, however, I started to open my mouth automatically to say hello or something like that.
But before I could utter any sound, or even think about what sound I exactly should utter, our guard, who up until now had leaned rather relaxedly against the windowed wall in front of us, rose and intervened immediately: 'Slaves are not allowed to speak.'
So I closed my mouth without saying anything. Meanwhile, it had become clear that G-17 recognized me too, although me being by myself there was less reason for me to have left a strong impression upon them than was the reverse.
So we all three stayed silent - and sat on our seats, worried by fear for the future that was awaiting us and trying to recover from our torture. I mean: I anyhow hadn't planned to start a long and brisk conversation with the Belgian Twins, therefore after what had happened to me I lacked the energy, as they will have also, although they had already waited here a little longer, and thus had had more time to recover from the pain and the shock.
Because the pain, an aching pain, of the branding was still there the whole time and demanded a big part of my attention. It toke some willpower for me not to touch the branded spot on my body to try to soften the pain, as Mehmed had warned me not to do. Next to that there still was the aching pain of my crudely pierced penis, with that ugly big ring underneath my loin-cloth. Luckily my shaved balls, head and armpits already ached less - well, there IS some difference afterwards between parts of your body being branded or perforated, and parts of your body being just shorn. But physically and mentally still exhausted, I not only had to cope with damaged skin and flesh, but also with the incredible weight of my chains and shackles, and that of the narrow collar encircling my throat, that I felt pushing against my Adam's Apple every second - it seemed as if I would have to start learning to breathe all over again.
In a way I was relieved that I could just sit here for a while on that bench, waiting for ... yes, waiting for what? After several minutes of spacing out, I suddenly asked myself that question: what, indeed, were we waiting for? For the next slave, perhaps?
We were indeed. We sat there for at least thirty minutes, I suppose, till we got the first sign that a fourth slave was to join us soon. Suddenly we heard far away a terrible screaming - yes, you now will know, as I did, were it came from and what caused it. Nobody can stand it stoically when his skin is burning, you at least should be an old Christian martyr from Roman times to be able to keep your mouth shut at the moment the hot branding iron touches your body. And although we by our captors, being pious Muslims, will have been regarded as damned Christians, and although our captors were dressed as a type of Romans, we three chained slaves had to do without the belief of those holy early Chistians that our martyrdom would take us to Heaven. In the first place, we weren't to die, to underline the difference of our fate compared to those of the holy, we were to toil.
How long this time did it take after the screaming caused by the branding until the door to the corridor opened and the next slave was pushed inside to join us - I didn't counted the minutes - in fact I had lost all sense of time - but suddenly that was what happened: we heard a quickly increasing noise coming from the corridor, then the door was opened and the next slave was literally pushed inside. Or should I say: pushed and pulled?
Because slave number four, who soon turned out to be slave G-45 (and thus was to become a kind of neighbor of mine at the oars), wasn't in an exhausted state tottering forward on his own. Being big and strong as a bear, after being chained, collared, shaven, pierced (I at least suppose he was, the loin-cloth was hiding it as in the case of all three of us) and branded, he still possessed more energy than we three together had at our disposal after having had already some time to recover. This guy didn't walk in as a good boy, as I in the end had done. He was full of rebellion and tried to resist his enslavers every second in every way. This time one 'Roman' wasn't enough to let him walk in the right direction, irrespective of the chains that restricted - or at least SHOULD have restricted - his movements as much as they did in my case.
In fact, the guy behaved as if he wasn't chained at all. Not noticing the shackle rubbing his ankle (which I had experienced to be very painful), he used both his feet to kick and both his hands to beat his handlers. Yes, handlers plural: there were two of them, one pulling, one pushing - the other 'anonymous' Roman (the one who had brought me here) pulling and good old Abdel the piercing-and- branding assistant pushing. Both were needed, because this guy was really strong and muscular, as if he had already served for years as a galleyslave at the oars! He must have been a well-trained fighter too, considering the fact that he, although being chained, was able to beat off the attacks of two strong unchained men, who repeatedly tried to subdue him by punching him in his stomach!
The whole process of getting slave G-45 inside was accompanied with a lot of shouting and swearing, and of course the noise the three together made also incorporated the inevitable rattling of the new slave's chains.
We three slaves, and our own silent guard - apart from having forbidden me to speak he hadn't said a word the time entire we had been waiting - as well, were totally overwhelmed by what was happening before our eyes, and reflexively we all four woke up from our lethargy and rose more or less flabbergasted from our positions, which made our chains rattle too, in clankerous concert with those of our fellow.
Was this the moment to join G-45 in a general uprising? If any one of us had that in mind for a single second, it would have been just for one second indeed, because behind the fighting trio appeared the face of Mehmed and then that of the blacksmith's assistant, Ali. They had to interrupt their slave production line - would there be other candidates already waiting for their first shackle in the reception room? - to get this big problem solved first apparently because of this unforeseen disturbance of the normal routine. And they came with four men at the same time, to be sure that we (G-17, G-46 and G-59) would behave as we should as good and obedient slaves.
Not knowing what to do, and thus doing nothing, we watched the fight in front of us, being watched ourselves now in a very keen way by our 'own' Roman, who then decided to bark one short sentence at us: 'Sit down, slaves, all three of you immediately, and stay still.'
In the meantime Mehmed and Ali made it inside our room, which didn't offer much space for all five of them. Ali turned to us, as to throw his full weight behind the order of our guard. I now saw that G-45 was bleeding from his nose. I also saw that the area on his chest where he was branded - I could clearly see now the big five letters S L A V E, but wasn't able to decipher his number so quickly - wasn't spared by his captors' fists, as there were several bluish purple spots all over it.
Mehmed now interfered in the fight, shouting:
'Don't damage this fucking slave further, he is of too much value to us. This bull has enough power for three, and the bullwhip will help him indeed to do the work of three at the oars. But until then he has to be spared and kept in good health, to recover from the piercing and the brand. '
But what to do if you want to spare a slave for your own profit but the slave doesn't behave in a way that is helpful for doing that? The fresh piercing made a normal 'solution' to this problem - kicking the slave in his crotch - impossible, as this was too risky because of his mutilated cock.
But if Mehmed indeed had worried about that up to now, this worrying now came to an end, as Abdel, after having tried in vain to choke off the wild slave's breathing (rather difficult, when someone's throat is already covered nearly totally by a huge iron collar) succeeded in hitting G-45 right in his stomach. A short retching followed, then the slave's resistance slackened.
'First get him first down by himself, before we take care of the three other slaves', Mehmed ordered. 'I am fed up with this intractable guy!'
While the slave was gasping for breath, the other two men pulled him up and more or less dragged him to the door at the other end of the room, which, as I could see when Mehmed opened it for them, gave access to some stairs. I saw the three of them disappear with their victim down the stairs - Ali stayed with us - and from the fact that the noise they and the slave's rattling chains together made gradually faded away, I concluded that they succeeded in transporting G-45 in the desired direction.
An eerie silence came over our room. Our two guards didn't exchange a word, and we three slaves of course - being well-bred enough to know to behave when there was no reason not to - didn't exchange any either. We waited, we all waited, till they were ready downstairs with whatever had to be done there.
After ten or fifteen minutes, Mehmed returned, followed by the other two. After a short, disdainful glimpse at us three, Mehmed left our room in the direction of his own workshop, followed by his assistant, Abdel. Ali joined them, leaving us to the two anonymous silent 'Romans'. The one who brought me inside thereupon turned himself to us three.
'Now it's your turn, slaves, to get acquainted with your own dungeon for the next few days', he ordered.
'Raise yourselves to move your lazy bodies in the direction of the stairs, and of course you do this in the RIGHT order. First slave 17, than slave 46, than slave 59.'
So we did.