12Interlude One. A Voice from the Ward

The interlude monologues were reconstructed by the author from real patient stories; names and details have been changed, and the direct speech was recreated from memory and notes.

My name is Rafik. I was twenty-six when they first put me away. I’m sixty-one now, so you can do the math on what those years were like.

I won’t bother explaining about the voices. Those who’ve heard them know already, and for those who haven’t, no explanation will suffice. I’ll just say this: in the end, I knew those voices better than I knew my neighbors in the stairwell. And honestly, the voices were the least of my fears.

I dreaded Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, they administered sulphur at the ward.

Everyone knew it. In the morning, the wards would grow silent—so quiet, perhaps, like a barracks before formation. The nurse clattered with the meal trays, and by the sound, we guessed how many there were today. They didn’t say who. They told us after breakfast: you, you, and you.

Let me put it to you plainly. Remember the highest fever you’ve ever had in your life. Now imagine it even hotter. Then picture lying motionless in that heat because four spots on your body feel like someone poured boiling water under your skin—water that never cools off. Not for an hour. For three straight days.

You get so thirsty you dream about water. The water jug is right there beside you—but you can’t reach it, so you call out. Someone who can still walk comes over and hands it to you. The sick looked after the sick. If you want to know, that was the only real medicine in that ward—that we handed each other water.

Nobody ever explained why they gave the sulfur treatments. Doctors just said “indicated.” But we knew the schedule better than they did. Snapped at an orderly? Tuesday’s yours. Begged to go home too often? Yours too. Stayed silent, lay still, said hello politely? Sometimes you got lucky—but what kind of treatment punishes behavior? It wasn’t treatment. Just couldn’t say it aloud. Say it, and suddenly you “lack insight into your condition.” And if you lack insight—well, what comes next? You guessed it: Tuesday.

Then it ended. Not all at once, not in a single year, but it ended. New medications came along, new doctors appeared, who looked at sulfur the same way I did. Now I get a shot once a month, something modern, and the voices are like a radio playing behind a wall: I know they’re murmuring, but I can’t make out the words. I take my grandchildren to school.

But Tuesday stayed with me. Forty years on, I’m at a clinic, and when the nurse says, “Go into the treatment room,” I feel my back go damp. The back remembers. Nobody ever told it that times had changed.

You write books, I know. Then write this down. God gave me my illness — I’ve made my peace with it. But the Tuesdays were people’s doing. People with diplomas. And that’s harder to come to terms with.