An Evil Cradling (26 page)

Margaret: There’s an Irishman who’s an Englishman who’s been kidnapped.

Charlie: A what, Margaret? An Irish-Englishman, kidnapped …

What’s that you say Margaret? The British Government’s going to take care of everything? Margaret do you think you should have a wee think about this first? The British Government’s been looking after Irish problems for a long time and there seem to be more of them than when you originally started out. Maybe a little bit of Irish charm might sort it out.

Margaret: No! No! No! I will not tolerate …

Charlie: Now, now, Margaret, don’t be getting yourself all worked up. Think of your poor husband. He’s too old for this. Do you think, maybe if we gave them a couple of hundred tons of Kerrygold … ;

Margaret: No talks, no deals, no compromise, no surrender.

Charlie: Easy now, Margaret, easy, easy. What about a few hundred cases of Irish whiskey or a few thousand gallons of Guinness? Do you think that might do the trick? And Margaret while we are at it, you know the new house you are building? How about if we sent over a few labourers to lay the drive, build a few walls and a few observation posts? Sure it would be a grand place. And haven’t the Irish been building English castles for centuries …

And so we continued, crazily demolishing the hours. Occasionally we might pick up some snippets of news from the guards’ radio. This was eagerly transferred across the ‘Great Divide’ to our companions. On one such occasion we heard that the British representative at the United Nations had put forward a proposal that the Israeli Army should withdraw from the occupied area of Lebanon. The resolution was passed unanimously. Our hopes soared. We were convinced that this was directly related to our imprisonment. What more could these men hope to obtain from our respective governments? But we knew nothing would happen immediately. It would be weeks before any release could be effected. We were prepared to wait without expectation, allowing hope to carry us through. But another event was to quell this new hopeful approach. They spoke softly in English to someone. A deeper, more mature voice answered ‘I’m okay.’ The newcomer was locked into the cell next to ours. The prison was filling up, not emptying. The latest arrival made our numbers eight, of whom we could communicate with only three. That evening as the guards slept, our neighbour began knocking on the wall. We knocked back. It was enough. We knew that in the morning we could establish some communication with him via Tom and Terry. But we were wrong. For days the man in the next cell did not show his face. Fear and confusion, even more than the cell that held him, imprisoned him. We knocked a nightly reassurance to him and he returned it. Each of us in our separate cells tried tapping messages but they were incomprehensible. In the early hours of the third morning after our neighbour’s arrival we heard him call out through the bars above his door. ‘Is there anyone Lebanese here? I am Lebanese. There are thousands of us.’

The voice in those early hours was eerie, and so was the message it carried. Who could the thousands be? We had seen the pale skin of this man’s feet and legs as we looked through the fan as he passed our door each day. How could he be Lebanese? But more worrying was his attempt to communicate aloud to us. We would all be punished if he was heard. The guards still came to talk with us occasionally. But always we were instructed to speak in whispers. We tried listening when we heard them entering the next cell. We picked up only a few words. But why was this Lebanese man always speaking English with an American accent? We knew from Tom and Terry that David Jacobsen, another American, was in the first cell on our side of the prison. He had been brought with them but after a few days he had been removed to a cell of his own.

Jacobsen, Anderson and Sutherland had spent a lot of time together since they had first been taken hostage. They had also shared cells with Ben Weir and Lawrence Jenco, two American clerics who they knew had been released. Sutherland and Anderson were sure that Jacobsen’s separation from them had nothing to do with their personal relations.

Perhaps he was being made ready for release or the group may have wanted him to make a video message. The guards who visited us never mentioned the other prisoners to us. Whatever brief conversation we had was always limited and always terminated with ‘You want anything?’ We had long since learned that no matter what we asked for, we rarely received it. But there was one guard who we often heard in the passageway but who as yet had never come into our cells nor spoken with us. We always knew when he was about. He would parade up and down imitating the sounds of the cartoon character ‘The Road Runner’. ‘Meep, beep, whoosh’ would constantly echo throughout the prison. Other half-learned phrases from cartoon characters were added to his repertoire. The guard was called Said, as we were later to learn. He was the authority in the prison, a lower lieutenant in his group and extremist in his religious beliefs. He had a curious psychology. He told us some months later that he made these noises because he knew that in our condition we would find them frightening. It was strange reasoning, and as we were later to learn Said was a strange and frightening man.

Occasionally our complaints about the food worked, and sometimes we regretted our requests. Fresh fruit when we were given it still delighted us with its colour and texture more than its flavour. Most times, though, the fruit was ripe rather than fresh. The ripeness was a condition that made the fruit unsaleable. Passion fruit I came to hate with a passion. It was given to us often with the usual lunch of rice and some vegetable or other. One day I rolled the soft fruit through my hands. It was more interesting to play with than to eat. It had lost its firmness and its sheen. It felt like a lump of rubbery dough. I broke it open to bite into its soft flesh. The skin repelled me. I told myself it had vitamins I needed. The slithery softness of it made me gag. I swallowed it quickly. ‘If these Muslims ate pork they’d probably feed their pigs better than us,’ I gulped, throwing the remains of the fruit into our rubbish bag and wiping my wet stained fingers on my towel.

‘There is as much passion in that piece of mush as there is in the dried up dugs of a witch’s ditty.’ I tried to bury my revulsion in language as foul as the fruit I had just eaten. ‘Can you really imagine anything sexual about this?’ I continued, tossing the other passion fruit into the rubbish. ‘Well not with these particular fruit,’ said John, holding his broken fruit before my face. ‘They’re full of maggots, look! And you just ate one of them.’ He was already roaring with laughter before he had finished his sentence. I began to burst into vituperative abuse but the infection of John’s laughter swept it from me. I joined him and laughed until it hurt.

Our laughter soon degenerated into a childish malice. ‘Go ahead Brian, give the Americans a call and ask them if they enjoyed the fruit,’

John suggested, his eyes laughing more than his face. I grinned in return. ‘You filthy malicious bastard, you ask them. I wouldn’t be able to keep my face straight,’ I admitted, collapsing into laughter at the thought of what the Americans might reply. We were filled with comic impersonations of the Americans. That night we planned the next day’s entertainment.

The following afternoon, as John signalled the question ‘Did you enjoy lunch? How was the passion fruit?’ I sat in the corner choking with laughter as John stood straining and giggling surreptitiously while translating the answer signalled back to him. ‘Yes they enjoyed them. A little on the ripe side and a bit messy to eat, but a welcome change.’ John could hardly hold himself upright. I was already prostrate on my mattress in torments of laughter.

This was only the first occasion that the Americans’ misfortune caused us to collapse in laughter. Our silent conversations with Tom and Terry had told us that their cell was extremely damp. They had spent several mornings mopping up the pools of rainwater that seeped in. After several days of continual rain the Americans demanded to be moved to another cell. We watched through the fan as they were led to another room carrying their mattresses, bed covers and piss bottles.

Dressed only in shorts they stumbled out in their blindfolds, tripping on their dragging blankets. It was a pathetic sight. For some reason the children’s song Three Blind Mice came into my head. I hummed it as I watched the macabre procession. But my tune changed within the next half hour as I watched this same procession returning to the cell they had just vacated. This time I hummed The Grand Old Duke of York. We laughed cruelly at the senseless comedy that was being played out before us. We learned later just how black this comedy was.

Signalling to us, Terry Anderson explained that they had been taken to a small room. After the guards left them and they lifted their blindfolds to see where they were, they were shocked at what confronted them. The cell was filthy and alive with cockroaches. ; Terry Anderson lost control. He banged and banged on the door until the guards returned. With his nerves frayed and anger choking him he ( told them he was not an animal and would not live in such filth. ‘Go ahead, why don’t you shoot me. You enjoy killing Christians. Your religion permits you to kill. Go ahead, shoot me. I am just an animal to you people.’ Such was the force of his despair that he challenged them and was fearless of the consequences.

I watched his face as he silently signalled to us an account of this confrontation. In that silent exchange I felt guilty at my mocking abuse of his misfortune. I also felt his despair in myself. It was true: we were treated like animals. But self-pity is a measure of defeat. One has to overcome it with humour or with anger. It had long been apparent that the men who kept us feared both: they were confused by our laughter, and our anger about our conditions made them guilty. The worst of them, unable to bear such guilt, turned aggressive. We were prisoners, therefore we were evil, and if they felt guilty about what they were doing they displaced it into anger. Soon their anger was to work itself out in violence.

Our silent hand signals across the prison passageway had become fewer as the weeks passed. There were weeks when nothing happened.

We had nothing to talk about. Occasionally we would pass on odd snatches of news we had picked up on the radio. On other occasions we spoke of the guards, sharing our separate impressions of them.

Tom Sutherland had a particularly stressful time. They frequently accused him of being an agent of the cia. Their hatred of this organization was intense and Tom took the brunt of it. Tom was a man who had spent all of his life in the teaching profession and nothing in his past experience had prepared him in any way to deal with the abuse that was now laid on him. Talking with us one day, signalling in the air, he informed us that the guards had proposed to the Americans that they be given a new cell. Tom was greatly distressed about this for it seemed to imply that they were to be separated into individual cells.

Being alone is the most difficult situation to deal with as a hostage.

Tom had not yet been held for any long periods on his own, and in the time he had spent with Terry Anderson he had become reliant on him.

Both John and I tried to allay Tom’s fears. But we knew that our jailers could do as they wished.

And then the dreaded day came. We were all unprepared for it. The usual routine of going to the toilet and being brought back changed suddenly. I sat one morning waiting for John to be returned from the daily ablutions. To my surprise the guards came back without him, telling me to come to the toilet. I wondered what had happened. It was normal for John to be taken and returned and then I would go after him. I walked along the passageway into the guards’ room and then up the high step into the shower room and toilet. I searched the toilet for any sign of what might have happened. There was nothing. I thought perhaps they had simply taken John off for questioning. If they wanted to question anyone they normally took them off on their own.

They would not be questioned in the presence of another prisoner. I took a leisurely shower, deciding that whatever had happened I would

learn of it soon enough. I was led out from the shower and began my walk back to the cell. But as I slowly paced out my steps I was suddenly stopped and turned into the doorway of a cell which I normally passed on my return.

I entered. The guard stood behind me and whispered in my ear ‘Look, look.’ I raised up my blindfold to find myself in a double cell.

This was the cell in which our American friends had been held. The wall separating it from the cell next door had been knocked out.

Before me on the floor was a mattress with a brand-new light cotton bedcover. On the stone shelf was soap, a red toothbrush and to my surprise a bottle of eau-de-Cologne. I glanced into the other cell and saw John sitting, his blindfold still down over his eyes. The guard asked from behind ‘You like? … You like?’ I nodded, yes. How could anyone say they liked this place? The guards thought that we should be delighted with our new larger accommodation. With the new bedclothes and eau-de-Cologne we were being treated like kings.

But to us it meant nothing. If you put a diamond collar on a dog it’s still a dog, made more ludicrous by the diamonds around its neck. The guard patted my shoulder thinking he had performed me a great service and left. I sat down on the mattress and looked at John sitting in his cell. It was as if I was hypnotized. We sat in silence looking at one another. His cell and his bed and the accoutrements on the shelf beside him were an exact replica of my own. It was like looking at ourselves in a mirror.

John took no joy in our new accommodation. He was beginning to feel now as I had felt when they first brought us new clothes to wear. I had refused, knowing that those new clothes meant we were to be staying for a long time. John’s sense of this new cell was that there was nothing awaiting us beyond the continuing monotony of this place.

The thought struck us both at the same time: what had happened to the Americans? We dared not look out through the grille while the guards were walking about, taking the other prisoners to and from the shower. There would be time enough after everyone had been brought back and locked up to see if we could still communicate with our friends. ‘Poor old Tom,‘John said, ‘he’s not going to find it easy being on his own.’ I nodded but there was nothing more to be said. I did not want to think about Tom’s situation or to dwell too much on m that isolation, which both John and I had experienced when first captured.