The six months before Mohamed Barud went to prison were the best six months of his life.
He'd found true love.
We went to a small restaurant near where we lived.
She lived in his hometown, in Somalia.
Her name was Ismahan.
And we realized that we wanted to get married.
That’s it — love at first sight sort of thing.
Yeah, in a sense, yeah.
Mohamed was in that phase of new love where you can do risky things.
I suppose maybe I wanted to share my happiness.
He writes a letter exposing conditions in a local hospital,
which angers the dictator.
And Mohamed is sentenced to life.
In solitary confinement.
And in his cell, his thoughts about Ismahan start to turn.
They darken.
I could not imagine how she is, because there are no news from the world,
from the outside world.
It’s really difficult to imagine where she is.
Even whether she is alive.
He’s in the silence, with the cockroaches and the rats.
She's probably enjoying herself.
She's living her life and I am in this place.
He thinks ...
You think everybody has forgotten about me.
Maybe she’s left him?
You probably hate her at that particular time.
Mohamed had entered a dark and angry place of the mind from which he saw no way out.
Until one day he hears a tap ... and a whispered voice ...
A, B, C, D, E, F …
It’s a code.
And letters turn to words.
Words to conversations.
The inmate on the other side of the wall is a doctor, who starts diagnosing Mohamed.
Acute anxiety, he had.
He was telling me these symptoms through the wall.
I was frightened of going to a certain area in my mind when I would commit suicide
without knowing, without wanting to.
The doctor manages to get hold of a book, the fattest he could find.
He thinks, maybe this’ll help.
So then I started knocking.
And he started listening.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, is 800 pages.
That’s 2 million letters.
Each letter a set of taps.
Anna is a Russian noblewoman who is cut off from society because she has an affair.
She spends a lot of time alone,
obsessed with what her lover is doing when he’s not with her.
She’s jealous.
And her jealousy drives her to an impulsive act.
... she knew what she had to do.
With a rapid, light step she went down the steps that led from the tank to the rails
and stopped quite near the approaching train.
I really cried.
I felt for her.
But then he realizes, his tears are not just for Anna.
That’s when I remembered my wife.
Ismahan.
How much she’s suffering.
And yes, the book’s the one that brought me back to think about her a lot.
What happened?
At first, he saw himself as Anna, a mirror of his pain.
But Tolstoy’s novel tells stories from many perspectives.
And that takes Mohamed out of his head, out of the prison.
He goes from self-pity to pity for his wife.
Did I do well in those few months we were together?
He could think a thought like …
She suffered worse than me because I was only in prison, but she was in the outside world.
Eight years later, when the dictator relented and Mohamed was released from prison, he found
out she had suffered.
She was a refugee.
But she was still in love with him.
And it was Tolstoy, he says, who helped him let go of hate and keep his love for her.
I should build a monument for that book!