An Evil Cradling (22 page)

Thankfully things were not left to the staff. The student body argued that a demonstration was necessary. I felt that those staff members who had originally supported strike action should join the students. After all it was the kidnapping of staff members that they were protesting about. During the demonstration I found myself sitting beside a student holding a placard saying ‘Who is next?’, ‘If I had known, John, I don’t know if I would have sat there.’

But for all my enjoyment in teaching at the University, it was the life outside that defined Beirut.

On another occasion I recalled having lunch in a friend’s apartment.

The noise outside was the typical raucousness of the city. Then sudden gunfire, loud and crackling. This was nothing unusual either. I ambled slowly out onto the balcony of the second-floor apartment. I watched the cars like dodgems screech and race along the Corniche road below me, occasionally crashing into one another, driving furiously into oncoming traffic, all fleeing from the gunfire. But below us as I looked down I saw several young men jump into Mercedes and BMW cars and drive off towards the sound of the guns.

They could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen and they hung from the cars, sitting inside but winding down the windows and pulling themselves through to rest with their backsides on the windows and their bodies leaning out holding onto the roof rack with one hand, a Kalashnikov jauntily carried in the other. From other directions men were running with guns, shouting excitedly, almost deliriously, heading towards the fighting. My friend called me in from the balcony. ‘Look at them,’ she said. ‘Every one of them masturbating.

They’re all running about there with their hands on their penises exciting themselves, only their penises have become pistols.’

There may be some justice in taking up arms to resolve one’s loss of power. History has seen such revolts again and again. Some might say that whatever we are as civilized beings is built on the blood of generation after generation and it may be true. But here in Lebanon there was another dimension. These people sought power, sought to be at home in the land and the community in which they lived. Yet they had taken a quantum leap. Though they might achieve power, though they might murder or slaughter each other, or chase out their foreign overlords -Israeli, Syrian or American -they themselves had no understanding of power or its uses: how to devolve it, how to share it and thus increase it. The warriors may, on history’s balance-sheet, win the wars. But they are rarely leaders in the peace, and these young men sought a solution to their problems in a Ramboesque fantasy, not yet understanding that the true revolutionary is a lover, whose passion is creative.

One of the saddest stories I remember from my teaching days in Beirut was that of a young Maronite boy who had been working for one of the many press agencies in the city. His sister had a relationship with a Muslim youth and had become pregnant. When the family heard that their daughter was pregnant by a Muslim their hatred for her was unfathomable. She had committed the ultimate disobedience to the family, to God, to herself: she carried the child of a Muslim. In that male-dominated society she was an outcast from her own family and from her community and friends. The rage festered within the family. The young woman could neither be kept at home nor sent away to have her child. So deeply embedded was this vindictive morality that the father’s rage turned into the most perverse deterI

mination, and he ordered one of his sons to kill the daughter. After the daughter was buried the family claimed that she had been murdered by Muslims.

The community of grief for the loss of this young woman was so vast that even the son, her brother who had killed her, came to believe that Muslims had murdered his sister. He returned to work in the Beirut press agency and everyone felt great sympathy for him. This reinforced his self-chosen belief that a Muslim had murdered his sister.

One night, when all the staff in the office had returned home the young man took a gun from his bag and sat quietly in the evening, waiting. As the people began clearing the streets to go home he opened fire, randomly, shooting anyone that came within range.

They were Muslims, they were all the murderers of his sister, they were all equally responsible. How many he killed or how many he injured one cannot be sure -the numbers always changed. But some time later, when the journalists returned to work one morning his own mutilated corpse was found in the office. He had obviously been j/j, I murdered, probably by the families of those he had killed, perhaps by ‘ some organization seeking revenge on their behalf.

Months after the whole bloody affair, the story came out. The young man really did believe that Muslims had murdered his sister, and the love and sympathy of his friends and colleagues and community reinforced this. This kink of mind that confuses love with power and equates power with aggression and domination remains a painful sore under the skin of Lebanese society.

John and I often spoke about the guards, and how the word ‘terrorist’ seemed totally inappropriate. It is a term too frequently applied by people to certain others and serves only to shore up their own prejudices. ‘Some terrorists wear pin-striped suits John,’ I would argue; ‘They hide their terrorism behind institutions of law or social regulation that have more to do with control than liberation. This terror maintains the status quo and power brokerage in the hands of a select few. Democracy has become a myth-word. It has a magical quality. One has only to speak it and people bow down to it and worship it without knowing their own surrender.’

The men who kept us were far from the cliche image of the terrorist.

They were a composite of different needs and motivations. Imagine a man aged twenty to thirty, but with the maturity and intelligence of a thirteen-year-old, a mind steeped in fundamentalist and medieval suspicion, a mind propagandized into a set of beliefs and values which it

was not informed enough to understand, but weak and fearful enough to accept unquestioningly. The natural and healthy instincts of youth are twisted and repressed by a religious and moral code that belongs more to the days of the Inquisition. Then, imagine the final absurdity.

Into the hands of such a person someone places a machine gun and tells him to take his freedom. This was the kind of person to whom we were subject and the contemplation of it was disturbing.

Our understanding of the guards, which was not one of spite or hatred, was soon to be overturned.

After many requests we had obtained from them a set of dominoes.

Still they refused us books. Seventeen-hour marathon games of dominoes began, with an earnestness that was necessary to keep the mind from strolling offdown dark passageways. Again I was collecting the silver and gold paper in which the processed cheese was wrapped. I also kept storing match boxes and cigarette boxes. Eventually I had enough material to make a chess set. I was able to hide this whole chess set inside a match box. We knew that games were forbidden and whenever the guards found any they immediately confiscated them. But as needs must we continued to make them and to create totally new games. I remember one game I invented called ‘Escape From Beirut’. It took me several hours to explain the rules. When I thought we both understood the game, we began playing. In the course of playing situations arose which I had not devised a ruling for. John would appeal to my rules and I had to reply that I would think up a new rule for thenew eventuality, at which John would look at me in surprise, the laughter rising in him, and say ‘You dirty cheating bastard, you devise new rulings every time you think I’m winning and you’re losing. The rules only favour you.’ I would respond with something like: ‘You must understand, John-boy, we Irish are more imaginative than you mongrel race of Brits. It’s obviously better I devise the rules, having a much more subtle and more elaborate mind.’

One morning after being brought back from the toilet we settled ourselves down to replay our long game of dominoes. Then we heard a noise, a buzzing sound. We were careful not to be seen looking out, John tried lying on the floor and peering through the fan as the blades whirred. We could see little for the fan was at ground level and it was difficult to look up. We both realized after a little while what the buzzing noise was. It was an electric hair-clipping machine, the sort that I remember being used in the barber shops of my childhood.

I lay back and felt panic and anger and fear beginning their slow, taunting rise in me. I had little vanity, I cared nothing about my head being shaved, but I would not let them shave my beard. I lay quietly thinking what I was to do. I turned to John. ‘I don’t like this one, John-boy,’ I said, as his eyes raised in puzzlement. ‘I’m not very happy about getting my head shaved but I’m not going to let them shave my beard off.’ He sat silently listening. After some moments he said ‘I don’t fancy having my head shaved to tell the truth.’ I replied ‘Well, you are a prisoner after all. I’ll be able to call you Papillon now.

‘What does it really matter,’ I asked him. ‘There is no one to look at you down here and there’s certainly no women about that you need to fancy yourself up for … no need for vanity in this place, John-boy!’

He snapped back ‘Well what’s so fucking important about your beard then. If I can’t keep my hair, why should you keep your beard.’ We were both being affectionate and joking with each other. I explained ‘I’ve had a beard since I was sixteen and I’ve never shaved it off. I’m fucking well damn sure that this shower of shits isn’t going to shave it off just because they want to.’ I looked at John’s face and I knew he saw the anger rising in me. John ran his fingers through his own bushy growth. ‘Well I’ll be quite glad to be rid of this anyway, it’s so annoying … its too hot in here and you’re always scratching and itching.’ I looked across at him; he reminded me of the old sailor’s face on the packets of Senior Service cigarettes I remembered from the 1950s. I thought he looked quite handsome and mature. The boyish good looks that I had first noticed had been changed powerfully by this thick bushy beard. ‘We’d both be a lot cleaner without these things,‘John affirmed. I turned, anger mounting. ‘What the fuck do you mean, cleaner … we get a shower every day, we can’t be much cleaner although with the sweat and stink in this place the shower hardly merits very much after a few hours. But that’s not the problem, there is a principle here, we’ve got to hold onto principles. I’ve had this beard for too long for some halfwit who thinks he owns me to make me what he wants me to be.’ I was losing my coherence, becoming angrier at the thought of having to sit through this humiliation. ‘These bastards don’t even shave themselves,’ I spat out.

John sat quiet for by now he had learned to let me ride out this anger. I was full-fired now and he let me rant on. ‘This is the last remnant of who I am, of my identity, John. They have taken everything from us, everything, everything by which we defined ourselves … clothes, money, jewellery, possessions, letters, liberty, the whole fucking lot whipped in a matter of hours and locked up in this stinking hole in the ground where you have to, hour after hour, day in day out, reaffirm to yourself that you are someone and that you are meaningful and that you are bigger, better and beyond their futile stupidity.’ I was flying now. John remained silent. ‘We can’t give in to everything. We have to stand firm on something that gives us back who we are, we have to say no. We have to be self-choosing. We have to keep hold of ourselves or sink forever in this fucking quagmire.’

‘Okay old man,’ said John, reaching out patting my shoulder. ‘No need to blow a fuse … It’s time to put a leash on that Irish temper of yours.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps if you just simply tell them you don’t want to have your beard shaved they won’t shave it… I don’t think it’s any big deal, maybe there are more important things to get angry about.’ I looked up at him. ‘There’s nothing more important than one’s identity and how you maintain and how you hold it and what you do with it because once you let it go you’ve got nothing and nothing’s worse than that,’ I said slowly, calming myself, knowing that I must be determined, that determination must be the greater part of my anger at the gross indignity I was about to undergo.

We sat waiting, nervous tension thickening the silence we were enveloped in. Then finally we heard the feet shuffling in their plastic sandals towards our door. The key turned and I heaved a deep gulp of air. I was taken out from the cell and walked towards the shower and toilet. I washed quickly, wanting this confrontation to be over with. I finished drying myself, knocked on the door, and turned my back to it, fixing the blindfold over my eyes. I was walked out and into the guard’s room. They told me ‘Today you haircut, you shaving.’ I stopped, stood straight and said ‘You will not shave my beard. I have had this beard all my life. You will not shave it.’ The guards were perplexed, not fully understanding what I had said but I knew they understood my refusal. Quickly they ushered me back to the cell and John was taken.

The door was locked and I sat down exhilarated, believing that I had won and that they would not shave me, but I was frightened that this would not be the end. In the minds of our guards, prisoners could not be allowed to refuse. I sat thinking through all the possibilities of what might follow and what I would do and say in the face of the consequences that kept tumbling through my head. John seemed to be taking longer than usual. Then I heard him return. The door opened, I shielded my eyes again with the towel over my face. The door locked.

As I removed the towel John hissed at me ‘What the fuck have you done… you’re going to get us both shot.’ I stood up. He was talking quickly. ‘Those boyos seem really excited about something … what the fuck did you say to them?’ and as he spoke, for some reason, I don’t know why, I stood and stretched my arms and made as if to unleash an arrow from a bow. John made the same gesture in response. We were both two kids in that instant. Perhaps we were David and Jonathan.