Captivity (27 page)

Tom’s dread fear is that he’ll be overcome by “negativity” and begin to hate and dehumanize the captors, thus losing everything he’s worked so hard to achieve in the spiritual life. He fights tooth and nail against this, redoubling his efforts each day to pray, meditate and breathe. It’s as if salvation for him is a process of hard work and sacrifice—a project of the will rather than a gift to receive.

It’s not working. He tells us one day that he’s going to take a second Valium. His mind becomes foggy. His perceptions grow rigid, his ideas fixed, he’s less able to incorporate new information, we have to repeat things. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” he tells us. “I’m trying, but I just can’t shake this negativity.” He alternates between long periods of silence and helpless rambling. His judgment is becoming erratic. I begin to worry that he’s losing the ability to cope altogether.

It pains me to see him in this struggle. It seems futile. There’s no way of prevailing against the boredom, the hunger, the uncertainty, the fear. It’s all too big and too much. I concluded early on that there was no way to fight it. Whatever my inner creativity, force of will or capacity to endure, the captivity would always win, like a vast and limitless cloud, insensible to both rage and despair, swallowing whole. The strength to get through would have to come from outside me. Coping was not a matter of projecting my will but of opening myself to receive a gift. The gift of grace. The spontaneous, unmerited self-giving of God. What can never be earned or achieved, only awoken to, discovered, received.
God loves you more than you can possibly imagine
, I want to tell Tom.
Your connection with God is already given. It’s permanent and irrevocable. There’s nothing you need do but fall into God’s arms. Surrender and He will carry you through
. I worry his ceaseless striving is causing him to suffer needlessly, that it may lead him to a breakdown and compromise our safety. But how do you say this to a person whom you are handcuffed
to, without sounding preachy and judgmental and calling into question every cherished thing they believe?

It comes from the poverty and isolation of his childhood, I think, this unwavering faith in the power of his will to get him through adversity. It was the way he survived, and indeed, triumphed. It almost breaks my heart when he tells us his story. He was born in 1951 in the town of Graysville, Tennessee, the only son of Virginia and Henry, aged forty and fifty-five. His grandparents on both sides had died, and there was no extended family to speak of. When he was five, they moved into a poor Chattanooga, Tennessee, neighbourhood. They were the only white family on the street. His father, a First World War Marine, suffered from emphysema and couldn’t work. Tom believed his father’s health condition was the result of a battlefield gas attack. His days were spent reading and exchanging letters related to a keen interest in an obscure philosopher. His father never played with him; he couldn’t because of his health, Tom said.

The responsibility for keeping the family going fell to his mother, who worked for a beer distribution company. She started to drink as soon as she got home. Tom would spend the first half-hour after school visiting with her—he used to love that time with her, when she was sober—and then he would go to a friend’s house, only to return late in the evening. He was forever arranging things so that he didn’t have to be at home.

Tom’s street dead-ended onto a woods. He took refuge there, spent countless hours wandering, exploring, playing. He loved the trees, the creek, the sun dappling through leaves. It was where he truly felt at home, the only place where he was free.

He found solace in the clarinet. He practised endlessly in his room, and sure enough, had quite a flair for it. When he didn’t have enough money for his private music lesson, the instructor waived the fee. His hard work earned him a music scholarship to Peabody College, where he met Jan Echols in his first year of study. They married at the end of his junior year, shortly after the death of his parents. He graduated in 1973 and successfully auditioned for the Marine Corps Band. The young couple moved to Washington, D.C., and Tom began a life of
travelling the world and playing at glittering White House functions. Their daughter, Katherine (called Kassie), was born in 1980, Andrew in 1984. He and Jan divorced in 1990. He spoke of it with regret. “I wasn’t paying attention. I should’ve seen it coming,” he said. After playing his clarinet for four successive presidents, Tom retired in 1993 and trained to become a baker.

He told his story without emotion. It was just what happened, the facts as they were. I wanted to cry, hold him tight, undo what could not be undone.

JANUARY 5
DAY 41

Norman finishes his course of antibiotics. The cellulitis in his leg has disappeared. We’re all very relieved. Medicine Man appears like a fat genie popping out of a bottle. He says there’s been no contact with Big
Haji
, but this is not a problem, everything is fine, you’ll be released any time now. He reassures us with smiles and shrugs. I want to strangle him. We ask him if he can bring us notebooks to help us pass the time. This is not a problem, he says, the next time I come.

JANUARY 6
DAY 42

It happened on a Monday, three years ago today, the eighth day of the delegation, during my first trip to Iraq. It was an accident that could have happened anywhere. We were on our way back to Baghdad after spending two nights in Basra, a convoy of three white-gleaming, late-model Suburbans travelling at 120 kilometres per hour on a divided highway, no one else on the road. It was a perfect blue-weather morning, already hot and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. None of us was wearing a seat belt. It’s not the done thing in Iraq. The back tire exploded, our vehicle skidded out of control, flipped end over end, and crash-landed on the roof.

I relive the accident frame by frame. The sound of the back tire exploding. The wild fishtailing and long skid towards the shoulder. My body bouncing helplessly up and down. Sand flying in grey light. The
Voice:
I am with you I am with you
. The sudden silence and stop of motion. Everything crazy and upside down, knees jammed into my chest. The calling out,
“Is everyone okay?”
The slide out through the smashed window. The overturned wreck of the vehicle. Luggage scattered across the desert. The lifting of George Weber’s body onto a stretcher.

Razza (our driver) and I escaped without so much as a scratch. Larry Kehler from Winnipeg and Pat Basler from Wisconsin were cut and bruised. Michele Naar Obed from Duluth broke her nose. Charlie Jackson from San Antonio wrenched his back and cracked his ribs. It would be two weeks before he could travel home. But George … We found his body lying on the sand, thrown clear of the vehicle, his face an unrecognizable mass of blood and brain and bone. He died instantly. Razza was inconsolable.

At the time, George and I were country neighbours. He lived in the town of Chesley, twenty minutes from the farm where I was living. We had done our CPT training together in 2000. He was a retired high school teacher with a dry sense of humour and an unflappable distaste for platitudes, social bromides, pretence of any kind. You would often find him on the other side of an argument, poking holes with his devil’s advocate stick, a boyish grin on his face. “What are you going to do when the bombs start falling?” he’d asked me three weeks before we left for Iraq. He was testing me.

I said something about war not being imminent, but if it did happen the Iraqi government would likely evacuate us in advance of hostilities, as it did in 1991 when the Gulf Peace Team was camped in the desert between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. I tried hard to sound nonchalant, but in truth the prospect terrified me.

A veteran world traveller, George chuckled in reply. “When the war comes, there won’t be any government left to do anything. It’ll be chaos. What you’ll need is two thousand American dollars in your pocket to hire someone to drive you out of the country. But don’t worry.” He smiled. “I’ll look after you.”

Perhaps it is the ineluctable habit of reading back into things, the effort to make sense of the capricious and the absurd. At the airport,
waiting for our flight, watching the jets ferry back and forth, George had said, “You know, I’ve lived a long life, and it’s been a good life. Of course, I want to come back, but if I don’t, I’m okay with that.” He laughed. “When I think of some of the taxi trips I’ve taken in Hebron, the way some of them drive, I always think I’m much more likely to die in a car accident than I am doing actual CPT work.”

In Amman he purchased an exquisite silver necklace for his wife Lena, a perfect and beautiful memento of his love. In Baghdad he ordered a tailor-made suit. He said it was “to help the local economy.” It ended up being the suit he was buried in. Then, on that fateful morning, contrary to his established habit of sitting up front with the driver, George sat in the very back in the place where Michele always sat. She couldn’t help ribbing him. “George,” she said, “what’re you doing back here? You should be up front, in the seat of honour!”

“What? Are you kidding?” he joked. “That’s the death seat.”

I always wondered, did George know? Did some part of him, perhaps in the wordless deep of his spirit, intuit what was to happen? I reach out to him with my spirit, the first CPTer to die in the course of duty.
Are you watching over us now, George?

JANUARY 8
DAY 44

Uncle stops in to tell us he’s heating up water for a bath, the second of our captivity. While we’re waiting, Norman asks if we’ve seen the gecko. No, I say, what’s that? A little creature, rather like a lizard, but smaller, he explains. Harmeet has seen it too. “I quite like it,” he says. “Sometimes when I’m in the bathroom I just sit and watch it.”

“Yes, it’s rather nice to have a living creature around. Something that’s free, rather unlike ourselves,” Norman says.

We hear sounds in the bathroom, then a loud whack. The door to our room, closed during the day now to keep the heat in, opens. A dead gecko rolls into the room. Uncle appears in the doorway, grinning from ear to ear. He flicks the gecko back into the foyer with the bathroom squeegee and disappears without saying a word. I almost burst into tears.

–

Uncle has brought us a kerosene heater. For the first time in weeks we are warm. The dark foreboding of January lifts just a little and I start to feel good. Now, if only we could have a cup of tea.

When Harmeet returns from his bath, his long hair is dripping water onto his shoulders. We move the
soba
in front of him. He leans over his knees and flops his long black mane forward so that it can hang freely in front of the heater. He squeezes the water out of his hair and combs the tangled strands apart with his hands. It takes almost an hour for it to dry. Not long after that, Nephew shuts off the kerosene heater.
“Bush najis. La petrol,”
he says.

We ask every day for the use of the heater. Each time, they say the same thing:
“Bush najis, la petrol.”
Finally relenting, they put the heater on for a couple of hours in the evening before we go to bed. The blue dancing kerosene flames introduce a tiny bit of cheer into our lives and ease the chill out of our bodies for a while.

In a fit of boredom one day, Uncle pulls a prehistoric electric heater out of the barricade. It has no plug. He strips the sheathing off the cord with his teeth and inserts the exposed wires into an electrical outlet. With a sudden electric hum, some snapping and sparking, the coils come glowing to life. The room fills with the dry smell of burning dust. Uncle shakes his head and points at the electrical outlet. It’s dangerous, he says.

JANUARY 10
DAY 46

There are two Eids in the Muslim calendar. Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan and the month-long discipline of fasting during daylight hours. Eid al-Adha commemorates Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael (in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the story of Abraham and Isaac). Today is Eid al-Adha. To celebrate, Junior solemly announces that he is going to cook.

He delivers lunch on an ornate metal tray—a plate of rice and a bowl of thick lentil stew—and sets it down on the
zowagi
cube with a restrained
flourish of pride. My eyes fix greedily on the food. Nephew instructs us to move our chairs around the cube. I grab a spoon off the tray and note with relief that it is clean. I’m ready to start eating. Junior shakes his head, waves his finger, points towards the bathroom. We have to wait for Tom, he says. Today is an occasion, it seems; proper manners are required.

When we’re all gathered, Nephew smiles and points towards heaven. We’re starting the meal with a prayer. He repeats a phrase over and over: “
Bismillah al rahman al rahim.”
In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. The first words of the Quran, Tom tells us later. When we’ve each taken a turn stumbling our way through the words, Nephew signals for us to begin. Junior watches closely as we take our first bites. The stew is rich and warm and soul-nourishingly good. We express our gratitude with lip-smacking hmmms, nods, shokrens. Junior beams.

Tom and Harmeet shovel food into their mouths with tunnel-vision urgency. I watch with dismay as the lentils and rice start to disappear. I measure and count compulsively: for every spoonful Norman and I take, Tom and Harmeet take two. I feel as if I’m at a feeding frenzy at the zoo. If I want my fair share, I’m going to have to compete, match them spoon for spoon. I slow down, eat less, smile. Inside, I rage.

Some rice falls onto the floor from Norman’s spoon. “Najis! Haram!” Junior cries, waving his arms angrily. Norman ignores the reprimand and keeps on eating. Junior scowls, picks up the rice and carefully puts it on the tray.

“You never let food fall on the floor where it can be stepped on,” Tom says to Norman. “It’s considered disrespectful.” But then some rice falls off Tom’s spoon. He doesn’t notice. Junior’s eyes dart to the floor. I pick up the rice and put it on the tray.