An Evil Cradling (34 page)

We were not disheartened though we knew the three Americans were being held in the room opposite. We knew also, from hearing a chance radio broadcast, about Terry Waite’s disappearance. We were still hopeful, we still wanted to believe that our transfer to this apartment was a preparation for our release. We concluded that the kidnapping of Terry Waite was only a measure to ensure the kidnappers’ security during the releases. Thus our spirits remained high.

Towards the end of that six-week period Mahmoud, the tall English-speaking guard, came and took away our mattresses, bed covers, the books and everything that we had been given. We were left alone. This was surely indicative that something was about to happen, and we were both convinced that this time it was over. For two nights we lay shivering on the carpet trying to sleep, but unable to for excitement and anticipation. We were always wide awake and talking with one another before the dawn call to prayer. It would have been impossible to sleep in any case. The nights were filled with automatic gunfire and the relentless shelling of a heavy cannon. What radio news we picked up told us that this was an attack by Amal, one of the Shia Muslim paramilitary groups, on the Palestinian refugee camps. All night long this bombardment continued. It became for me the noise of some grotesque monster grinding and slashing the earth outside our four walls. This city was in a perpetual night of warfare and what my

Lebanese friend had once told me rang true once more. ‘In Lebanon it is not a matter of whom you kill, but how many.’

For many hours as we walked in circles around the room we argued out why it seemed that the time was right. We had accumulated limited information from the radio besides what we had gleaned from the Americans and knew it was just under a year since our disappearance, since those snatches from the radio allowed us to fix an approximate date. It had been a long year. We always felt that the longer we were held, the stronger our captors’ position became. But whatever our expectations, the truth was not as we were desperately believing it to be.

Several men entered the room late one evening. Our hands were taped to our sides, our blindfolds tightened and most of our faces covered. We were given sweaters, and then quickly we were walked out of the apartment and down the six flights of stairs. Outside the air was hot and dusty. We were walked a short distance, then hands took hold of my body and I was slid into some kind of compartment underneath the floor of a truck. John was put in beside me, his feet beside my face. It was tiny and we were crushed together. Lifting my head from the floor I felt the roof of this compartment some three inches above me. We were in a kind of coffin.

We lay in this cramped airless space for perhaps three-quarters of an hour, wrestling to free our hands and pull the gags from our mouths so that we might breathe more freely. Outside the guards talked and then were silent. We thought they had gone away. Were they going to leave us here for someone to come and collect us? What if the people that were coming for us could not find us? The air was thin and the heat would make this coffin an oven. Tormented with these thoughts we heard Said’s voice speak loudly. ‘John, John no speak.’ Then Said informed us that if we made a noise the truck would be blown up: the driver had instructions. We couldn’t speak in any case, with the gags on our mouths and our hands tied to our waists. The man was a fool, I thought. Then the engine roared into life and we set off.

We drove for several hours, and all through the journey we were squirming and wriggling to release the gags and our hands and somehow edge up the blindfolds from our eyes. But it was pointless.

It was so dark and all the effort was using up what little air there was.

As we moved we could see some light filtering in through odd holes in the floor and in the sides of our container. Soon the sun began to beat down and the dust off the road thrown up into the compartment made breathing still more difficult. The pungent fumes from the diesel made the atmosphere suffocating.

The horror of this panic-stricken journey seemed to me indescribable.

Fear choking in your throat. The air suffocating and your head banging and bloody against the roof of that shallow space. My attempts at silent song could not calm me. I began to rage and blaspheme man and God. I cursed every one of my captors and searched out every foul-mouthed word of condemnation that I could find. Panic was seizing me by the throat. I felt the pressure of it and I raged and raged and tried to remember those convoluted chapters of the Book of Revelation. There in those apocalyptic words, I found enough violence of expression to condemn these men. Exhausted from my ranting I would try to recall that hymn of William Blake: Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant Land.

I would repeat it over and over again spitting out the words defiantly, this time hating only myself and wishing that I was not here and being made to endure slow and crippling death in this tight hot darkness. John was silent. I tapped his head with my feet and he returned the gesture. There was no comfort of touch and reassurance beyond this tapping with our feet on one another’s heads.

The hours were endless. We were drowning in that airless box.

Through it all, the raving, the singing silent songs defiantly and the desperate prayers to end this thing, for death was preferable to this slow, slow poisonous suffocation. In these conditions, there was no way to control the mind. It spun off, launched into some unholy awfulness, doubling the physical suffering. The words and images that flash through the mind in such conditions are not of human origin, and they were beyond my understanding. They crushed me with their horror. It seemed as if hot wires were being drawn slowly through the centre of my brain. My mind was exploding over and over again. Given the chance I would have screamed out and had the van and the horrors that it bred blown to oblivion. It would be over, and the torment would be extinguished. We travelled for about three hours, my head continually beating as the truck bumped and swerved.

The man who drove this truck was as mindless as my mind was full of terrifying and incomprehensible things.

Finally the van stopped. My mind jumped with delight and with relief and it seemed that all those horrors were instantaneously washed away, but another kind of panic set in. I was impatient to be out. I could not bear waiting. My mind lay in smithereens inside my skull. I wanted to breathe again and blow away this creature-thing I had become.

The doors opened. ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry … you bastards, you pieces of filth … hurry up.’ I snarled to myself’Hurry up, hurry up’ and then like a piece of bread from an oven I was slowly dragged out and carried to the ground. I lay gulping, choking myself with the fresh air. But the tapes about my face still restricted that full sweet inhalation. At last I felt a knife cut the tape that bound my hands and feet and the tapes on my face were ripped off. They bundled me into a corner against the wall and soon John was thrown in a heap beside me.

I reached out to touch him ‘Are you okay?’ I asked. John’s answer puzzled me. He asked, with his mind half gone, ‘Are they going to shoot us?’ Now I understood that he too had travelled further than this truck had carried us. ‘No, John, they are not going to shoot us,’ I whispered. The guards were sitting around us. They were silent. ‘Do you want anything?’ one of them asked. ‘Water, give me some water,’

I answered, angry, not caring now that they should know my anger.

They gave me a bottle of water. I gulped it down, almost choking myself with another huge swallow of water. ‘John,’ I said again, ‘here, drink.’ I handed the bottle to him. One of the guards again asked ‘Do you want anything?’ and I answered with loud sarcasm ‘Yes, I want a swimming pool!’ I wanted to defuse myself in cool, clear, crisp water.

I wanted to feel my body languidly move through it, to be alone and free in the vast sunlight with cool water caressing my flesh.

The next few days we were held in the outhouse of a farm in the hills. Said spent all that time with us and revealed more of his paranoia.

He could not sit with us in silence. He desperately wanted us to talk with him. He was always asking questions, making remarks or simply demanding ‘Talk, talk to me, speak, speak.’ It was then I knew for sure that this man was afraid of himself and of being alone with himself. John, having recuperated quickly from that dreadful journey, seized the opportunity, ‘Said,’ he asked ‘why were we beaten so many times in the prison?’ Said was silent, then answered, brushing the question away from him, ‘This man, he is crazy man.‘John coldly, defiantly answered, ‘Yes, Said, he is very crazy, he is also very evil.’

Said was silent. Later that day he gave us his own plate of food.

Never before had he shared a room with us. It was a gesture of appeasement and an acknowledgement of guilt. We devoured the roast chicken, forgetting nothing.

After two days we were moved a short distance, again in the boot of a car, to a new hiding place. We found ourselves in a very large space, more like a barn than a room. We were placed in the corner, mattresses were brought for us and we were told to sleep. To our surprise the guards slept with us, only a few feet from us. We were warned not to look at them as they slept, but we had no desire to. More and more now we sought to live our lives exclusively to ourselves and as far as possible dismiss the existence of these men and create our own separate meaning.

The next day, sitting, leaning against the wall whispering to one another as the guards watched television or listened to the radio, we realized it would be impossible to sit for twenty-four hours a day blindfolded with the guards beside us. It is difficult to live in a world when you can see no-one in it. Conversation dries up when you cannot see the response or the eyes of your listener. We decided to ask the guards to put a screen around us so that we could exercise and lift the blindfolds in order to eat. If they refused, we could refuse to eat, for we would not be animalized any more. We would eat as human beings and look at what we ate.

Mahmoud, the gentle giant, as we came to regard him, hung bed sheets around us creating a barrier between themselves and us. We were in our own world again. Foolishly at night the guards would sit in the full glare of the TV and the light burning brightly in their half of this barnlike accommodation. We sat in our darkness, but we peered through the coarse weave of the fabric, watching our captors as they sat and stared at the television.

From now until our release, for over three years, we were to be held with chains on our ankles and wrists. They came and drilled the wall, fixing steel bolts into it, to which they attached the chains by padlocks and then put the chains on us. The shock of being treated like this made us furious. We insisted bitterly that we were not animals. But our complaints fell on deaf ears. ‘It is our work,’ one guard would say, half apologetic, and another simply said viciously ‘It is not your business.’ These chains made it difficult to sleep and practically impossible to exercise. They were totally unnecessary. We could not escape and even had we done so we didn’t know where we were, nor how to return to Beirut.

The proximity of the guards, with only a coarse cotton sheet separating us, was more and more disconcerting. We had to talk in whispers. We had to restrict our conversations for there were many things which we would not want them to overhear; things that we held precious to ourselves.

We were aware that other prisoners were near us in other rooms, but, could not see them, only hear them move to the toilet in the mornings. We were sure that the French were amongst the other captives. The days were crushingly long though we had some relief in listening to the television through the curtain.

We now received our first in-depth interrogation. We were given no warning. On one of those long boring days, the guards came and unchained my feet, and took me out from behind the sheet. They led If Illlll me across the room where two roughly made long wooden stools had been placed at right angles, and I was put behind them and rechained to a radiator. The man who came to speak with me was polite and well-spoken: his English was almost that of an academic. His accent suggested that he might not be Lebanese. He asked me how I had come to Lebanon, who had interviewed me for my position in the University, what courses I taught. I insisted on asking him why I had been taken and what value was an Irishman to the cause of Islam or the freedom of the Arab peoples. My interrogator was nonplussed by my interrogation of him. He sat silent, fumbling out his answers. In the end I sensed a genuine sympathy and confusion.

‘I do not know why you are here,’ he said. ‘It is not my decision, I promise you I will speak with my chief of your case,’ he concluded.

‘Do you want anything?’ Those words, so often repeated, had become intensely annoying. Knowing I had his sympathy, and that he could not answer my questions, I told him calmly, emphasizing every word, ‘Yes, I want something, I want my freedom, I want to live like a man, I am not an animal.’ His hand reached out and took mine, he held it for a moment much as a young lover would, then squeezed it firmly in a strong handshake. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. I knew that to protest any more would gain me nothing. ‘I want books, many books.’ He asked, surprised, ‘You have not been given books?’ He wanted to know what books I would like. I could not think of titles and I did not expect that a specific request would bring me what I wanted. ‘Anything, bring me anything.’ He tapped my shoulder again. ‘I will return tomorrow.’ Across the room I heard him questioning John. He spent a long time talking, seeking information which John did not have.

That evening a television was placed in the far corner of the room.

Sitting in diagonally opposite corners, we could see the screen but not each other. The guards were out of sight in another room. The film was the usual Americans-in-Vietnam story, full of macho posturing and constant slaughter. Something struck me as I watched this. I was appalled at the violence of it and yet the movie was no more violent than anything I had seen previously, perhaps even less so; yet the violence in it burned deep into me and sickened me. I could not watch it, I was horrified and ashamed. After it was over I sat thinking why I had found myself so repelled by what I had watched. What had changed in me? Perhaps it was a combination of the futility of the mindless violence in the film and the way these men were entranced by it. But these are the reasons of the mind. Something deeper within me recoiled, aghast and unbelieving at the horror. I could not understand this passionate revulsion in me.