Corporal prison, detail. Wikicommons/Onlysilence. 2004. Some rights reserved.This is the most telling portrait that my past twenty years in journalism have bequeathed me. Had I the least talent for drawing, I could’ve sketched it here and now. Had Maral lent an ear to my pleas, I could’ve asked the lady police officer who brought a chocolate bar with her to the cells each day to alleviate her sense of guilt, to take a photograph of me.
It was not possible… I was not able to capture the cell, its approximately 1.90 meters by five meters in width; its twelve black bars of steel, lined up with half a span between and wet baby-clothes hanging from those bars, with water dripping little by little onto the floor; the arms of white sweaters smelling of soap and legs of patched pyjamas tangling around the black bars of prison cells.
What I was more or less able to discern of the remaining parts of the cell, the part that dwelt in darkness, the only image that lingers in my mind, that is, is of two bare-foot women with their long, night-black hair covering their babies, resting on torn blankets and the babies’ almost-white, pale faces, never looking up.
