Forever A Prisoner

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The walls of Lahib Nouman's home don't just talk, they howl. They scream in terror, shout with rage, moan in pain and sob with frustration. All the emotions overloading this tiny woman's brutalized mind she projects onto the walls of her living room. She scrawls on them with maroon lipstick, ocher spray paint and gray lumps of charcoal, in Arabic and a sprinkling of French. It's the only way she knows to exorcise her mental demons, to preserve what remains of her sanity. "There's so much inside here," she says, slapping violently against the side of her head. "I have to take some of it out and put it down somewhere, or I will burst."

The effort seems to have taken over Nouman's life to the exclusion of everything else. Her small home in Baghdad's working-class al-Ghadeer district is filthy; the rooms are damp and smell of rotting garbage. Her pets, a mangy brown pup and two molting cats, have shed clumps of fur on her bed, an old foam mattress on the living-room floor. There are pieces of stale bread everywhere.

But the squalor doesn't seem to bother Nouman. She has lived in much worse places — a succession of prison cells, torture chambers and mental-hospital wards. Her living room may be fetid, but it is home, and she's free. "Nobody bothers me here. Nobody does bad things to me," she says. "I can say and do and write whatever I want."

Even by Iraqi standards, Nouman, 48, has enjoyed little freedom, at least not since 1985, when she ran afoul of Uday, Saddam Hussein's barbaric eldest son. A criminal lawyer, Nouman had the temerity to defend a man Uday wanted punished for insulting his girlfriend, and Nouman paid for it with nearly two decades' worth of torment. In prison, she endured rape, beatings and unspeakable torture. In the hospital, she was subjected to countless sessions of shock therapy and powerful sedatives. Along the way, her mind became unhinged, her memories scrambled and her face frozen in a mask of permanent terror. "They have turned me into a witch," she says, ruefully pulling at her stringy hair, which she has dyed the color of tea. "They have made me horrible."

Until a month ago, Nouman was incarcerated at al-Rashad, Baghdad's main mental hospital. When U.S. forces began taking the city, the staff ran away, enabling inmates to escape. Nouman made straight for her house in al-Ghadeer, and has been holed up there ever since, scrawling furiously on the walls. "This is my work now," she says. "This is what I have to do."

Already she's running out of space. She set out to write the story of her life, but the narrative is lost in a maze of digressions. There are religious motifs — a number of crooked crucifixes (she was raised a Chaldean Catholic) and exhortations to Mary and Allah. There are homages to her favorite mutt, Sandi. There are political slogans calling for solidarity among Iraq, the Arab nations and France, where she was educated. And then there are some doggerel verses that don't always make sense but are apparently designed for self-motivation: in the grave, there are no cowards. i will never give up.

This isn't how Lahib Nouman's life was supposed to turn out. Her father was a wealthy dealer in engineering tools. The Noumans lived in the then tony district of Saadun and sent their 13 children to the city's best schools, where they learned Arabic, French and English. Lahib's genteel upbringing is clear. She uses demure terms even to describe the depraved treatment she has endured. Her torturers "made pee-pee and ca-ca" on her, she says in English, and they "made love" to her against her will.

Although the Noumans were Assyrians, an ethnic minority suppressed by Saddam's regime, they were careful to toe the official Baath Party line. Lahib joined the party in 1973 and become an enthusiastic apparatchik. She remembers participating in political debates at Baghdad University, arguing forcefully for Baathist principles like secularism and socialism. She remained loyal even after her father blamed the collapse of his business on the government, which took away his exclusive distribution deals with British and American toolmakers.

After completing a law degree, Nouman took a job as a criminal investigator at the Justice Ministry. Later she pursued a doctorate at the Sorbonne. Her studies were cut short in 1985, when she broke a hip in a traffic accident. Back in Baghdad, she began to take on criminal cases, mostly pro bono. That's how she came upon Naadi, a young Egyptian bellhop who had crossed Uday Hussein. Naadi was being held at a police station and being tortured even as Nouman waited to see him. "They were touching his fingers with a live wire, and I could hear his screams in the waiting area," she recalls. "When they finally let me see him, his first words were, 'Please help me to kill myself.'"

Naadi's trouble began when he barred one of Uday's girlfriends from entering the Babylon Hotel, where he worked, because she was drunk. Soon after, he was accused of stealing videotapes out of Uday's house. Nouman persuaded Naadi to let her represent him. The charges were so obviously false that the court threw them out without much argument. But the clock had begun to run down on Nouman's liberty. "My friends told me I had cut my own neck," she says. "But I thought Uday wouldn't dare to touch a lawyer, a respected member of society."

How wrong she was. Barely a month after the Naadi verdict, in a casual conversation with law colleagues, Nouman said the fateful words, "There's no justice in this country." Someone informed the police, and within hours she was arrested for contempt of court. Taken to al-Zafaraniya police station, she was, she says, brutally beaten for several days in a row, raped and had a hot candle forced into her rectum. "I kept telling the police, 'You can't do this to me. I'm a lawyer,'" she says, smiling sadly at her own naiveté. "They said, 'Once you become an enemy of Uday, you are nothing.'"