An Evil Cradling (21 page)

His staring face changed; I felt he was becoming intrigued by my suggestion. ‘Come on, John, I’ve done it lots of times … You’ll find it’s fascinating and you’ll find it’s interesting and it will bring you down. Think of it, think of that room, think of those things. There’s an orange peel. There’re shoes with no laces in them … Put two more things in that room, any two things. Go into that room and find out what’s happening in there … Who’s been there … What did they do? … It helps, John, it helps.’ He looked again at me, very softly and very slowly he said ‘You and your fucking rooms.’ Forcing a gentle laugh I replied ‘Rooms are what we know lots about.’ I lay back and John continued sitting against the wall. I lay awake and wondered would he do as I had suggested or would he sit in silence trying to crush out the insanity. The moment passed.

I slept and awoke early. John was deep in sleep and I was grateful. I felt the huge relief that a parent might feel when their child has passed through some crisis of fever. But the dread of what had happened hung about. What if we were both to lose control, or if one of us was to let go and fall permanently down into that pit of mindlessness, could the other bear it? But what was the alternative? To be separated would be worse. No, there was no alternative. We were responsible for each other; no matter what happened we must not be separated.

Our strength lay in one another. As I thought these things I looked at the little fan turning in the bottom of the door. Its blades were exposed. If things got too bad we could always ram a hand or foot into the blades. The guards would have to do something. I heard John wake, I kept my thoughts to myself.

‘How’s the raving lunatic?’ I asked. I saw the weariness in his eyes, but it was not the weariness of sleep. I felt guilty and tried to cover up my guilt and embarrassment with idle talk. ‘It gets very rough sometimes, the mind just goes galloping off, it either leaves you empty or it trails you helplessly after it.’ John looked up. ‘It’s been galloping around in circles for days until nothing made sense, everything was just a mess of everything else. Sometimes there was just nothing … How long do you think we are going to be here?’ he asked. ‘Until the man upstairs says your number is up.’ I could say no more. I knew John was only half listening. It was better in any case not to speak. To cover up and pretend that these things are insignificant is an injustice and is selfish. Soon breakfast would come and we would be taken to the shower and maybe things would lighten up.

The food was ample but hardly nourishing. Breakfast was bread, tea, cheese and jam. Lunch was a mixture of rice and spinach or rice and peas and carrots. Occasionally we had a coarse stew. They gave us hard-boiled eggs frequently. Supper was always a repeat of breakfast.

Sometimes we would be given sandwiches brought in from a shop and with them some pastries. Such food was a delight. The sandwiches often contained meat or chicken heavily spiced and filled with hot chillies and pickles. The pastries were often cloyingly sweet and we could not eat them. We knew that lunch was always cooked by a woman living nearby and brought in to us. The food that we could not or would not eat we deposited in a plastic bag that was given us each day for rubbish.

We often noticed that food we handed back, such as hard-boiled eggs, was thrown into the guards’ rubbish. Our unclean hands had touched it and thus it was forbidden to the zealots that held us. Each time I saw this I was angry. To be considered unclean and untouchable was a humiliation I would not stand. This absolute judgement was without logic, reason, understanding or humanity, and devalued me beyond all comprehension. To concede to this was an admission of defeat. I hated the waste. I remembered what they had said to me in my first imprisonment when I had refused to eat and they simply shrugged their shoulders saying ‘There are many people hungry in Lebanon; if you do not eat, we do not care.’

As we sat in our cell passing those long hours, John and I often discussed the Lebanon we had got to know before we were taken captive. During my four months teaching at the university, I had been fortunate enough to travel around the country, usually going out with a colleague for dinner and driving up into the hills, or perhaps to Sidon. I had seen much of how the land had been devastated and was aware of the grinding poverty with which the people from the southern suburbs had to contend. Lebanon is a country of vast extremes, of great wealth set side by side with the most abject poverty. Its different religious groupings, each of them insisting on the absolute correctness of its own system of belief and way of life, had made impossible the kind of compromise and acceptance of each other’s traditions that could have more equitably distributed the country’s wealth. Lebanon is crippled by a kind of tribalism, its peoples afraid of one another though they live so close together in this tiny land mass.

I remembered talking to a Lebanese in a hotel one evening and asking him why it was that Lebanese who suffered collectively should choose to kill one another rather than come together and face their common enemy. I couldn’t understand the huge arbitrariness of the slaughter that continued between men who after all shared common political beliefs and aspirations. My friend answered in the curious way in which the Lebanese sum up all their problems, in one sentence.

He said ‘In Lebanon it is not who you kill, but how many.’

I told John a story of the Turkish villa in which I lived before being taken. It was set high off the ground and surrounded by its own gardens. Beside the entrance steps was a small Christian grotto. The Virgin stood angelic in her blue and white. At Easter-time I watched old women walk past and push lighted candles through the gate and rails that set the villa off from the street. They left them there, crossed themselves and prayed. I used to stand and look out of the villa at this.

I wanted to open the gate to let them walk through the garden and pray beside the object of their veneration, but I could not. I was living near the Green Line that divides Christian East from Muslim West Beirut. My self-interest prevented me from opening the gate for them. I felt deeply ashamed. Behind me lived poor Armenians and near them even more impoverished Shias who had been dispossessed of their homes in the south of Lebanon. Overnight they had become urban citizens. Their whole way of life and their traditions had been stolen from them, obliterated overnight by the gratuitous and monstrous slaughter of the Israeli invasion of 1982. The city was a refuge but it was also a place alien to them. They were literally strangers in their own land. The distance between the rural population and the city life of Lebanon is immense. You can drive for a half-hour out of the city and into the hill villages and feel that you have driven back generations. John told me stories of the wealthy Lebanese drug barons he had met while working as a journalist, and of their complete lack of interest in and apathy about Lebanon and its problems. Their wealth and their power set them apart and they were untouched by poverty and suffering.

It is always the case when a people feel themselves so totally dispossessed, so unjustly condemned to a condition of absolute poverty that the anguish of it forces them to seek an escape. The need to escape becomes stronger as each community acknowledges its dispossession. Such acknowledgement always carries with it, hidden beneath the surface, a kind of shame and guilt, an admission of loss of identity, of full humanity, and that shame and guilt grows into anger.

When the anger can find no outlet, when there is no recourse within the social structure for redress of grievances, the anger turns inwards and festers. They cannot find value in themselves; they reject and loathe themselves. A man can then no longer surrender to such a

monstrous condition of life. He seeks power, power that will restore his dignity and his manhood; that will let him stand with other men and know himself to be their equal and restore him to the community of humanity. But so filled with anger is he that he must act to reclaim meaning and purpose. With one great leap he tries to exorcize his fury.

The man unresolved in himself chooses, as men have done throughout history, to take up arms against his sea of troubles. He carries his Kalashnikov on his arm, his handgun stuck in the waistband of his trousers, a belt of bullets slung around his shoulders. I had seen so many young men in Beirut thus attired, their weapons hanging from them and glistening in the sun. The guns were symbols of potency. The men were dressed as caricatures of Rambo. Many of them wore a headband tied and knotted at the side above the ear, just as the character in the movie had done. It is a curious paradox that this Rambo figure, this all-American hero, was the stereotype which these young Arab revolutionaries had adopted. They had taken on the cult figure of the Great Satan they so despised and who they claimed was responsible for all the evil in the world. Emulating Rambo they would reconquer the world and simultaneously rid themselves of that inadequacy which they could never admit.

I told John how, one evening, I had gone with some friends to a cinema near where I was living. They were showing a war film set somewhere in Vietnam. It had a story which was not a story about men killing each other to no purpose. There was no meaningful exploration of the war or the inhumanity of it. We sat there in the darkened cinema and as each character pulled out his weapon and began firing furiously, the young Arab men around us would groan and moan in a kind of ecstasy, crying out the names of the weapons.

All around us in the cinema we could hear the words ‘Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov; Beretta, Beretta.’ These young men knew the names of every type of gun, even the names of mortars and rocket-launchers.

The cinema rang with a chant of excited worship.

John was keen to listen to my stories of Beirut. Although my stay there had been short it was still much longer than his.

My life in Beirut before my capture was full of insistent exploration.

Unlike many of my professional colleagues I could not bear simply to go to work and return home and lock myself in until the next morning. I had visited much of the city. The Green Line was a division I could not accept. How could I accept the absurdity of such a barrier when the students I taught came from all parts of this divided community and mixed with one another without fear or suspicion?

I told John how, when I came to work at the American University, a French colonial-type mansion with various American additions of the 50s and 60s perched on a hill overlooking the sea and laced with glorious gardens, the faculty administrator lectured the new staff that on no account were we to discuss politics or religion with students.

‘An impossible situation,’ I explained, as I was constantly asked by my students ‘Why have you come here? … Everyone is killer.’ I could only answer I was from Belfast and let them draw their own conclusions. John smiled remembering my tales of Belfast and its rich and violent tapestry of personalities and conflicts.

John asked whether I enjoyed teaching there. I told him that I used to awake early in the morning excited about the day in front of me.

The students were very keen and their enthusiasm made me work.

One young woman, one of the many strict Muslims who attended college, her head shrouded in a chador, told me one day she must go to a hospital as her sister had been shot at a wedding. I reached out instinctively to wish her well. ‘I cannot,’ gasped the stunned student.

But her companion nodded encouragingly. She reached out and accepted the proffered hand saying ‘This does not matter now.’ I was delighted, I explained to John. That one gesture was worth twenty lessons.

But other students were less open. One of them, a young man, invited me to take coffee in the student restaurant. I joined him and when I responded to his question was I a Christian that I did not believe in God, I was subjected to a lengthy disclosure of Allah.

‘Where do you come from?’ demanded the student. ‘From the womb of my mother and the delight of my father,’ I riposted. ‘And your family?’ my interrogator continued. ‘It really doesn’t matter. It’s the present that matters and what you do with it,’ I answered, increasingly aware of the clusters of students studying me.

Later, having escaped this interrogation I was approached by one of my students, Mustapha. ‘I am with the troubles of your people,’ he said. He handed me a crucifix. He explained it was for his girlfriend.

But he was a Muslim and they must keep their relationship secret. ‘We can never marry,’ he said. I could only squeeze his arm understandingly, knowing the chains that people put on themselves.

One story of my short-lived career in Beirut had John laughing uproariously. One evening I had been visiting a friend. During my absence armed men raided my apartment, tying up my colleagues.

Some days later Shamir, a young male student, called me to his car, insisting I sit on the passenger seat. He offered me a handgun, saying ‘Mister Brian, I know you have troubles … Please give to me again when you leave Lebanon.’ My refusal of his offer perplexed him but he persisted. ‘I have something else,’ he continued, handing me two hand grenades. ‘What would I do with these?’ I questioned. Shamir excitedly explained a Heath Robinson contraption for attaching to my door. If anyone opened the door they would be blown to bits. ‘What about Mr Usher?’ I asked, remembering my flatmate. ‘Halas, Mr Usher’ grinned Shamir, dusting his hands fatalistically.

But this academic garden was a thorny one. The disappearance of Leigh Douglas and Philip Padfield had caused much anxiety on campus. At a faculty staff meeting to talk about the situation there was some discussion, and a vote was taken to close the University for a short period. The whole faculty sat there afraid to speak and obscuring their faces behind their hands, for some students took photos, supposedly for the student newspaper. I could not believe the unanimous show of fear in that gesture.

At another staff meeting some days later the University’s Senior Administrator expressed deep concern about the danger of strike action. Though I argued demonstratively against such an overturn of the original decision, I saw again the faces hidden behind hands or newspapers and knew it was pointless. The decision was reversed and fear and apathy won the day.