I never saw another prisoner, never heard a human sound except for the Turkish guard who seemed to be assigned to me. He came morning, noon, and night with food. Breakfast was always a slab of cold black toast and a cup of thick black coffee. Lunch and dinner were always the same-a tin plate piled with a suspicious pilaff, mostly rice with occasional bits of lamb and shreds of vegetable matter of indeterminate origin. Incredibly enough, the pilaff was delicious. I lived in constant fear that misguided humanitarian impulses might lead my captors to vary my monotonous diet, substituting something inedible for the blessed pilaff. But twice a day my guard brought pilaff, and twice a day I wolfed it down.

It was the boredom that was stifling. I had been arrested on a Tuesday. I’d flown to Istanbul from Athens, arriving around ten in the morning, and I knew something had gone wrong when the customs officer took far too much time pawing through my suitcase. When he sighed at last and closed the bag, I said, “Are you quite through?”

“Yes. You are Evan Tanner?”

“Yes.”

“Evan Michael Tanner?”

“Yes.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

“You flew from New York to London, from London to Athens, and from Athens to Istanbul?”

“Yes.”

“You have business in Istanbul?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “You are under arrest,” he said.

“Why?”

“I am sorry,” he said, “but I am not at liberty to say.”

My crime seemed destined to remain a secret forever. Three uniformed Turks drove me to jail in a jeep. A clerk took my watch, my belt, my passport, my suitcase, my necktie, my shoelaces, my pocket comb and my wallet. He wanted my ring, but it wouldn’t leave my finger, so he let me keep it. My uniformed bodyguard led me down a flight of stairs, through a catacombic maze of corridors, and ushered me into a cell.

There was nothing much to do in that cell. I don’t sleep, have not slept in sixteen years-more of that later-so I had the special joy of being bored, not sixteen hours a day, like the normal prisoner, but a full twenty-four. I ached for something to read, anything at all. Wednesday night I asked my guard if he could bring me some books or magazines.