An Evil Cradling (23 page)

But that instinctive mimicry, with excitement, the fear, the adrenalin coursing through our bodies, was an inarticulate gesture of mutual support.

‘I’m not going to let them shave me,’ I said, deliberately emphasizing every word. ‘Okay, ‘John said and as he spoke we heard the guards coming towards the cell. This time there were several of them and this time I had gone beyond the point ofretreat. I had no choice but to stand firm, take what was coming and resist it if I could. We quickly pulled the blindfolds down over our eyes and I pushed my back firmly against the wall, squatting but upright. A voice said ‘John come,’ and I felt John move away from me out into the corridor.

As he went several men entered the cell. I could hear what I thought were four voices. Someone knelt in front of me. I knew this man to be a senior officer. At first he spoke softly. ‘Why you don’t clean this cell?’ he asked; I answered equally slowly ‘This cell was like this when we came here.’ He was silent for a moment then touching my hair, ‘Why you don’t have hair cut?’ Then his hand slid from my head, down to my chin and tugged at the beard. ‘Why you don’t shave?’ I answered taking hold of my defiance, ‘I’ve had this beard for a long time, since I was a young man, and I will not let you shave it!’ I knew he felt the defiance, his hand was now on my wrist and he started to twist, slowly at first. I twisted forcefully against him. He spoke again saying ‘We are army, every two months you must haircut, you must shave,’ still twisting my wrist and I resisting him. I said ‘I will not be shaved.’ The whispering voices of the guards behind the man who was speaking with me fell silent. He leaned forward and said ‘This is very bad, you know what will happen now.’ I sat for a few seconds thinking of an answer and could only say ‘Yes I know … you are going to beat me but I am not going to let you.’

The man barked an order to one of the guards behind him. I knew the Arabic for pistol. I heard a gun being handed to him and heard him snap and prime it ready to fire. I felt absolutely and completely calm for no matter what he did to me I had already won. Death was nothing and I was already past it. A gun was pressed against my head. His voice again saying ‘You know what is going to happen now.’ It was softly spoken, but I could feel the tension in it. I was still calm. I said slowly ‘I am not afraid of you and I am not afraid of your gun.’ This time he exploded with more fury than before. I heard the gun drop on the mattress beside me and the man launched into a furious attack, punching and beating me about the head, my face and temples, screaming something in Arabic. The shock of it and the adrenalin of the last few minutes made it seem painless. It was just a knocking and the jerking of my head. I felt like a kind of marionette being handled by some inexperienced puppeteer. I kept silent. I must not show fear, I must not show pain or cry out.

For how long he rained his blows upon my head and face, I cannot remember. So many things coursed through my mind; perhaps that is how pain is obliterated. At the end he stood up. He seemed exhausted and tense. He barked something to the guards and they bent down, trailed me from the cell, pulling me along the corridor. They sat me on the low wall that ran down its middle. I heard him shout orders or shout at me, I could not tell. He came over to me and I knew I had to say something to keep face, to maintain identity. He said something in Arabic, I knew he was speaking to me. I raised my head, unseeing, and simply said ‘You are a very brave man.’ I knew the insult of it and I didn’t care whether he did or not, for things had taken their course and we would each complete it in our own ways. He struck me hard on the head and walked off again snarling orders. Two of the guards followed hurriedly after him and one stood with me. His hand gentle on my shoulder. He patted me. Maybe he admired my defiance or sympathized with me, I could not tell. His hand on my shoulder made me feel less alone. Perhaps it was to tell me it was over. Yet I felt that what had happened in the cell was only the beginning of something worse. My premonition was to be confirmed in the months and years that followed.

I heard the feet hurrying back. I was lifted out of my sitting position and marched to the guards’ room. I was pushed into a chair, my arms held by guards at each side of me. I heard the electric clipper begin its buzzing and with it felt the fall of my hair onto my naked shoulders. I sat in silence, the hair continued to fall. My head was pushed forward, my chin resting on my chest as the clipper crawled up the back of my head. I attempted blindly to blow the cut hair from me. A voice hissed at me. I continued to blow.

To complete this operation they had removed the blindfold from my head and sealed my eyelids with pieces of scotch tape. My head was forced back and over to the side. The tape was pulled from my eyes and a voice hissed at me ‘Do not look, do not look.’ I held my eyes closed. I felt the clipper run down my temple onto my cheek. I screwed my eyes tightly closed, thinking I must find a way to express resistance, to express defiance even though they were doing this thing to me. I could do nothing more than sit erect trying to force power into every muscle of my body so that their hands tight on my arms might feel the anger boiling in me. It’s hard to work one’s muscles in a sitting position but the grip of their hands on my forearms and shoulders gave me something to press against. Quickly the clipper trimmed my beard. I felt the coarse hair, different from the hair on my head, fall onto my chest and my lap. I thought it was over and wondered what was to come. Perhaps they would separate me from John. They would not like this defiance. They would seek a way to punish me; possibly I would be beaten again. But I consoled myself that I still had a stubble. The hands slackened their grip on my arms. I sat still, waiting for the blindfold to be put back on my face. Instead I felt the soapy warmth of a shaving brush covering my face and chin with lather.

My immediate reaction was one of awful self-pity but I could not allow it to engulf me. Then I felt several of the guards come close to me, whispering in my ear, softly, slowly but insidiously: ‘You Esa, you Jesus, you Esa,’ different voices echoing the same words ‘Esa, Esa, you Jesus.’ Each of them in turn scraped parts of the remaining stubble from my face. I sat straight, the humiliation almost breaking me, and I tried desperately to hold myself together. Around me still, that soft insidious chant of ‘Esa, Esa, you Esa.’ The razor blade stroking my face and being passed hand to hand. Another man taking his turn to strip me, to rape me of myself. Tighter and tighter I screwed my eyes, feeling something huge and piteous, that pendulum drop into harrowing humiliation. I would not surrender to it and I squeezed my eyes tighter, feeling tears coming into them. I cared nothing now that they were shaving me in this obscene ritual. I cared only that I should not be seen to weep. I squeezed my eyes tighter and tighter and clamped my hands onto my knees. In horror I felt a tear come, caught between my eyelashes, and hoped it wouldn’t find a course down my face, wetting their stroking razors.

And then it was over. Someone knelt before me on the floor. The other guards stood behind me. ‘Open eyes,’ someone said sharply. I sat still and waited. ‘In your own time, Brian, let no tears fall,’ I thought to myself. ‘Open your eyes,’ a voice barked, more insistently, and I slowly opened my eyes. Before me a man squatted. He held a large mirror in front of his face so that I could not see him. I looked at my fractured image. For some seconds unmoved, unflinching, showing no expression in any way, I stared at a man I did not know and then said slowly ‘It is not me.’ I raised my head up from the reflection and closed my eyes, sitting, waiting, uncaring. My eyes were dry.

I waited, they talked about me and around me. The towel was carefully put over my eyes and knotted tightly at the back of my head.

I was lifted from the chair. I brushed the hair from my chest and shoulders. My hands were wrenched down by my sides. I stood stiff, awaiting a continuation of what happened in the cell, but I was moved away from the chair and guided towards the passage. This time with one arm twisted fiercely up my back.

I was happy that they still felt the need to punish me. They still knew I was resistant. My cell door opened and I was pushed in. It was banged behind me. I stood and slowly untied the blindfold. John looked up at me and I at him. I felt his great sympathy surge towards me and I felt embarrassed and I didn’t know where to turn or what to say. He looked in silence for a moment, then away, understanding my embarrassment. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked; ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I said slowly. Silence again separated us. I continued again after some minutes ‘That was a bit of a fucking close shave.’ John looked up, I knew the sympathy and the hurt he was feeling for me but he took hold of the humour I tried feebly to offer, and said ‘You look like Enoch Powell. ‘John had his hair cropped but they left him with a neat goatee beard and moustache. Regaining confidence, grateful for his warmth I said ‘Well, you look like a cross between Jimmy Hill and i Sheikh Yamani.’ He stroked his beard and his chin. ‘It was a bit of a shock.’ I nodded in agreement. ‘Van Dyck you are definitely not. I suppose I am going to have to put up with living with Sigmund Freud for the next few months.’ We both eased into a soft laugh.

Perhaps because this place seemed to be a purpose-built prison, the routine was more organized. Though we often looked across the wide corridor we could never see anyone. Yet we knew that there were other prisoners. We were sure one of them was a person from the first prison. We heard him occasionally speak with the guards in a high-pitched voice. He had muttered something about being able to speak English, German and French. We thought we heard him give his name as ‘Sontage’, or something similar. At night we would hear him mumble or cry out in his sleep. He was in a cell opposite us.

Occasionally when he was being taken to the toilet we would lie on the floor and peer through the fan, which was about the size of a saucer.

We could see he was old. The guards would make fun of him, push him and slap him, in the way one might goad a donkey.

The folds of flesh on his body seemed to hang about him. It was a pathetic sight to watch him being so abused. The indifference to his condition and the callous pleasure our guards took in mistreating him made them more like bullies in a school playground than so-called ‘warriors’. Sometimes during the day we would hear him babble incoherently in his sleep. His old squeaky voice echoed in the long stony corridor of the prison. The guards would rush towards his cell, banging and hissing at him to be silent. But in his sleep he was helpless. Their banging only served to wake him and silence his dreaming for a few hours, and then he would be off again gabbling, shouting and snoring.

Some days the guards would come and talk with us after they knew our names and where we came from. Their questions were always about our families, and they constantly asked whether we were married. When we explained we were not they wanted to know why.

We were very old not to be married, they said. Did we have girlfriends? How many? Did we sleep with them? We would not answer these intimate questions.

But it was only the beginning. We were to learn more in the years to come of their fixation on sex. ‘Why in England and America everyone is fucking? … In the American universities they are fucking in the bushes… In America men are fucking men… In America everyone has aids … How many times you can do with a woman in one night?’ and so it went on, always the same. Their obsession betrayed their own repressed desire. And they were boring. When they began on the subject of sex we simply passed their questions back to them, or made ajoke of it. ‘Brian, how many times you can do with a woman in one night?’ and I would always answer ‘You mean how many women in one night?’ Their reaction was always the same, silence followed by admiring laughter. Often they would feel the muscles in our arms or with their thumbs and fingers press savagely into the sinew running from the base of the neck to the shoulder. Sexual potency was measured in muscle. Muscle was power. A powerful or strong prisoner they admired but secretly feared.

Allah, the God of retribution and judgement, dominated their minds. How can a man love the thing he fears? When fear commands M the mind then the heart is imprisoned. In time I came to understand the greater and more profound prison that held our captors. For years we were chained to a wall or radiator, but they were chained to their guns; futile symbols of power, not power itself. This was something these men could never know: real power embraces; it cannot destroy.

Their poor English limited the scope of their questions and their comprehension of our answers. Occasionally they would talk of politics. Their detestation of Israel was absolute. It was justified by the Koran and it was even more justified by the internment camps set up in Israel to hold and torture many innocent Lebanese Shias from the south. They told us stories of men who had returned from these places, how they had been fed on a starvation diet. How they had been beaten and tortured with electric cattle prods applied to their genitals.

The rapture with which they spoke of this sadistic practice again expressed their fascination with sex. Their loud condemnation of this torture was an inverted reflection of their own impotence. With a scream they would tell us ‘Never can these men have babies!’

Manhood was measured in sexual potency. There was little of real pity or sympathy for their tortured comrades. The relish with which they spoke about torture made me think how much they secretly enjoyed reflecting on atrocities. Even as they spoke a part of them became the guards hung a small transistor radio in the passage outside our cell. It was turned up to the limit and tuned to static. The constant fuzz and buzz and crackling screech bored into our heads like a needle. At first we tried to forget it and ignore its pressure but it was useless. The mind was always drawn into it. It seemed to be inside us, recklessly slicing and gouging with a rusty broken scalpel. Every fibre and nerve of the body felt plucked and strained by it. Hour after hour, night after night. It tore at the very membranes of the brain. There was no possibility of rest or sleep. It ate into you, devouring all sense and sensibility.