Captivity (32 page)

Junior looks at me intently. My face feels hot. I can’t believe this is happening. Sex education for insurgents. No, I say, forming a circle with my thumb and index finger. I dangle the index finger of my other hand in imitation of a flaccid penis. The gel has to go on the penis before it goes into the vagina, I explain, sliding a stiffened finger through the circle. He laughs hysterically and runs shouting to Nephew downstairs.

An hour later, we hear him in the stairwell, laughing. Fear surges through my body. We look at each other uneasily. He sounds unhinged, berserk. It happens again. He pokes his head through the door, his face a grinning mask of evil. He stands in front of Tom, legs apart and arms extended, hands wrapped around a gun, eyes murderous. “Ammmrrriikki,” he growls, pointing the gun at Tom’s head.

“Hello,” Tom says, holding his poker face up like a shield. Junior snarls and disappears.

“Are you okay, Tom?” Harmeet asks.

“Yeah. I’m okay,” he says, his voice firm and steady, matter-of-fact. “It’s the bombing of his house, losing his family. He’s traumatized. I’m the symbol of all that. I’m the enemy. When I walk around Baghdad, I watch people watching me. I look military. It’s the way I dress, my haircut, my manner. Twenty years of military service does that to you.”

This explains it, I think. Junior is a traumatized boy, a victim. To be a victim is to endure intolerable shame, humiliation without end, the worst possible thing. A boy who is a victim, in order to become a man, must prove he is not a victim. The clenched fist, the gun, the erect penis, these hard exhibitions of power that climax in the domination of the other, they all say the same thing. See, I am the one who acts, decides, controls, penetrates. See, I am not a victim. I am a man. If you do not believe me, I will show you. Fist, gun or cock, whatever it takes, you will be my victim, or I will die with honour trying. This is how it is for a boy who is a victim: through violence he becomes a man.

I am obsessed. I write feverishly, in point form and scattershot sentences. By the end of the day I have filled fourteen pages with my dense scribbles. I take the book to bed with me, in case Harmeet is awake in the morning and doesn’t mind sitting up again so I can write.

The next two days are a blur. I am consumed, swallowed whole in writing. We are a dramatis personae of four hostages and three guards, seven characters in a strange hallucinatory drama where nothing ever happens, actors on a stage no one will ever see.

Seven! We are seven! The biblical number for wholeness and completion. Everything universal and true, everything I need to know to become a whole and complete human being is available to me right here in this room. I don’t need to go or be anywhere else. I must write. Every particularity and detail is crucial. I must write it all down before we are released. It can happen at any time.

FEBRUARY 3
DAY 70

Thank God, Uncle has returned from captor leave. Of all the guards, he has done the most to improve the conditions of our captivity. He was the one who arranged for us to bathe, wash our clothes, trim our beards, the one who rigged up the electric heater, found an old rug to cut the draft under the door, brought Norman a more comfortable chair. “It’s because of his days looking after prisoners. He knows what needs to be done,” Harmeet says. Uncle told us once he’d been in charge of a group of prisoners during the Iran–Iraq War, when he was a conscript in Saddam’s army. Now he receives a regular pension. “Hubis
zane,”
he told us proudly—good money. We asked him what his work was. “Garden, garden,” he said, moving his arms as if working a hoe.

We live in a state of continuous apprehension. It spikes every time a captor appears. We never know what their arrival might portend: doom, freedom, nothing at all. Despite this, I usually don’t mind when Uncle wanders in to check on us. Sometimes when he enters it is with an agile turn and kick, as though he’s dancing a soccer ball on his toes. Sometimes he is silent as a stone, and he’ll sit staring at the floor deep in thought, or look at us with a cryptic smile, shake his head with what seems to be a kind of fondness, then leave again without having said a word. Sometimes we’ll hear him in the foyer, announcing his arrival with strange blowing and slurping sounds, or if the door is closed he will open it a crack and just his hand will appear, fingers counting down—three, two, one—before he steps into the room. Sometimes it is for just a moment, to open the window or pull the curtain back an inch or two, allowing us a taste
of fresh air and sunlight, and sometimes it is for an extended conversation. He’ll mime different animals and ask us their English names. It’s like playing charades. Do foxes live in Canada? he’ll ask. How much does an ostrich egg weigh? Whales are good, they like to swim—can you swim in Canada? In Iraq we swim all the time.
“Furat, Furat,”
he says.

He’ll spray bug repellent in wild arcs about the room.
“La, la,”
we protest, coughing. He’ll hunt mosquitoes relentlessly and show us their squashed bodies in his palm. He’ll bark, snort, neigh, smack his lips. “Shhewww, shhewww,” he’ll say to get our attention. He picks his nose habitually, even when handling our food. He spits pumpkin seeds, date pits, excesses of saliva and phlegm onto the floor. He likes smelling the tips of his fingers, lifting and smoothing the elastic band of his track pants, patting his substantial belly. Whenever we ask him if there is any news, his answer is either
“Hubis, hubis”
or his plane-taking-off gesture, the palm of one hand lifting off from the back of the other hand accompanied by a whooshing sound. In sharp contrast to Junior, Uncle is indifferent to Tom, indifferent to all of us in fact. He is a soldier with a job to do. The particularities of who we are mean nothing to him. “It’s almost like we’re his crops,” Harmeet says. Only once do we catch a glimpse of his true feelings. It happens while he is handcuffing us. His eyes are momentarily apologetic. These are
haji
’s orders, he says. If it was up to him, he wouldn’t lock us up.

Today he asks me what my house in Canada looks like. I draw him a picture in my notebook of a two-storey brick house with big bay windows and a peaked roof. He asks for my notebook and pen, draws a picture of his own home. It’s long, rectangular, flat-roofed, with a second storey jutting up in the middle. There are five windows, one door, a satellite dish and an antenna on the roof, gases rising from a metal chimney. The house is surrounded by trees and vines. In front of it is a wall that extends across the page, with a gate in the middle. In front of the wall is a road. In the middle of the road, to the right of the gate, sits a vehicle. It looks like a truck. There’s someone inside the truck.

I ask him if he’ll go back to working in his garden after we’re released. Yes, he says. First he pulls an imaginary hoe, then he fashions his hand into a gun. He alternates between hoe and gun, urgently, hastily. He is farmer and warrior both. He points to the vehicle in his picture, eyes darkening with rage. He repeats the story over and over. We glean what we can from the handful of Arabic words we know, his gestures and body language. He was stopped by U.S. soldiers on the road outside his house. They made him get out of his car, searched him, forced him to lie on the road face down with his hands folded behind his head. In his good clothes. In the hot sun. For three hours. One of the soldiers put his boot on his head. His face turns purple. He says they forced a woman who was with him, perhaps a member of his family, to breastfeed in public. The soldiers pointed their guns at him, and at the woman. Yes, at a woman! He used to be only a farmer, he tells us, but now he must be a mujahedeen too. As long as there are Americans in his country.

Junior brings us “lunch,” a stale piece of crumbling flatbread wrapped around some very dry rice, and leaves immediately. I look at it glumly and take a bite. The bread breaks into little pieces and rice free-falls onto the floor. I sweep the rice under my chair with my feet so it’ll be out of view. Junior will go ballistic if he sees it. It enrages me. We’re in handcuffs and somehow we’re supposed to eat these damned scraps without making a mess. There’s no way to avoid it.

I look over to see how the others are doing. Harmeet is managing okay. Norman eats whatever falls on the floor. Tom chews mechanically and stares into the distance, oblivious to the rice dropping at his feet. I want to snap my fingers and shout:
Wake up! Can’t you see this is only going to make your situation worse?

Junior returns before I’m able to say anything. He flies into a tantrum.
“La Islami, la Islami,”
he storms, pointing his finger.

“The rice is very dry and the bread is stale,” I say as calmly as I can. “We’re doing our best, but it’s impossible to eat without spilling it.”

“Najis!”
He scowls, sensing I’ve somehow objected to his insistence on manners. He castigates and we, looking chastened, bend down and clean up the rice. And this is how it works, I think bitterly; here the blindness of the oppressor is revealed, the one who steals life away, debases, if necessary kills. Always it is for the sake of some great project. Sometimes he calls it Civilization, sometimes Democracy or Progress or Truth. If he is religious, he might call it a Crusade or a Jihad. Whatever its name, always by definition it is just.

The oppressor takes the great project seriously. He gives his life to it. It anchors and grounds him, makes him feel good and important, like a real Somebody. Until he is confronted by his antithesis, the one he oppresses, whose degradation and squalor arise as a necessary consequence of the great project. Then, disturbed and dismayed, the oppressor turns spontaneously to contempt. The oppressed is an offence. His existence contradicts and interrogates the great project. This cannot be. The oppressor points his finger in accusation. He does this to protect himself from responsibility, separate himself from the thing he has caused. You are filthy, disgusting, contemptible, he will say. Take a bath, get a job, get a life. Pull yourself together. Use bootstraps if that’s all you have. Do this or perish.

The oppressor does not see that his pointing finger is a projection, the exteriorization of something interior. His pointing finger shields him from a truth he dare not admit, that his great project is a lie, that it is the generator of the very thing he despises. The oppressor is like the white-skinned good citizen who sits in horrified judgment of the brown-skinned failed citizen who lies in his streets and on his park benches reeking of alcohol and despair. The good citizen mutters among his own kind, debates solutions in his newspapers and town halls, affirms his good intentions. He passes laws and institutes social welfare programs. When all of this fails to remove the objectionable thing he has brought into being, he grits his teeth and sweeps the failed citizen away. It could be a jail or a ghetto or a reservation, it doesn’t matter where, just so long as he is no longer seen. The oppressor does not know that before he arrived with his great project, before
the forests were cleared and the park benches and the liquor bottles were unpacked from his bags, the so-called failed citizen had no knowledge or need of alcohol and park benches, because he was at home and lived free in his own land. This is the blindness of the oppressor in every time and every place. He does not see that he himself is the disease, the harbinger of what he reviles.

That night, Tom observes that we have neglected daily prayer and check-in since the notebooks arrived. We all agree that we have to get back on track. Tom starts off the check-in. He says this is the lowest he’s been—physically, spiritually and emotionally—since the captivity started. The lack of food, his inability to sleep, Junior’s antics; there comes a point when somebody pointing a gun at your head stops being funny. He knows this whole thing is going to end, but when, and what state is he going to be in when it does? He wants to hit the ground running. There’s going to be media, decisions to make, everything moving so fast after all this time of nothing happening. He’s resolved to work as hard as he can to maintain his connection to God and heal the negative energy he’s afflicted with. He concludes by saying he’s decided to cut back to one Valium a day. He says he’s in a haze all the time; he thinks it’s just making him more depressed.

I’m so relieved. There’s no longer any need for the confrontation I’d been dreading—and avoiding.

Norman says he’s been reconstructing the itinerary of each of his thirteen trips to France in his notebook. Otherwise, he’s just trying to disappear in his little corner, trying not to think too much. He says it’s sad to think of all the time that’s being wasted, how at seventy-five every moment is precious. Baptist spirituality isn’t cutting it, he says, at least not here, with its triumphalism and easy answers. He thinks he’s becoming an atheist.

As usual, Harmeet doesn’t say very much. We’re still here, he says, things have been tense with Junior, things will be easier now that Uncle is back. He’s been using his notebook to make a list of all the
things he needs to do when he gets home. His semester starts in three days. He’s missed the deadline; there’s no way he can enrol now even if they release us tomorrow.

Our lives are passing us by.

FEBRUARY 4
DAY 71

“Shid gul?”
Junior asks us, appearing in the doorway with a stump of cigarette pinched between his fingers.

“
Minundra ani gulak,”
we say, using the reply he taught us.

He takes a last campy drag and flicks the butt into the foyer. “This
zane,”
he says, tracing a path from his nose to his lungs. He flips open the top of a cigarette package and drops two pieces of silver foil on the floor. “This Virginia Smooooth,” he purrs, offering each of us a cigarette.

No thank you, we say. He looks vaguely disappointed, pockets the cigarettes and unlocks us for an afternoon
hamam
break. On his way to the bathroom, Norman stoops down to pick up the foil wrappers. He saves everything: the Sensodyne toothpaste box, his empty blood-pressure-medicine packages, the plastic bag our shoes came in. “You never know when you might need something,” he once said, after I’d asked him about this habit.