An Evil Cradling (30 page)

The return of the electricity and the birthday party had somehow endeared us to these men. In the days that were to follow they would frequently come into our cell and try to talk, and seeing us play dominoes they would join the game. Said, the prison chief, who had beaten me so badly over my refusal to be shaved, now visited us often.

He would play dominoes and cheated outrageously. We knew even with our blindfolds that he was looking at the pieces we had in our hands. For Said it was important to win. We knew his cheating and laughed at its outrageousness. Yet this man who walked around the prison making noises and imitating cartoon creatures, in the belief that we were frightened by them, sat and played dominoes with us. The first time that he came he sat for almost an hour with his arm around my shoulder. It was as if I was his brother or long-lost friend. I knew that this action, sitting, almost nursing me or holding me in an embrace, was occasioned by a fierce kind of guilt. There was no other reason why he should display such affection.

For some reason the return of the light had prompted our captors to move the prisoners around. Frank was now brought from the cell opposite and put into the cell beside us, next to the guards’ room.

Terry was moved across into Tom’s cell, and Tom moved into Frank’s. The reason for these shifts we did not understand, but they later led to an event which was to remind us that beneath this idiocy and seeming friendliness cruelty was lurking, primed and always ready to be released. We knew from Frank’s signalled conversations with us that he had become a Muslim, enabling him to marry his Syrian fiancee. The guards had somehow learned of this and one of them visited him frequently with the Koran and talked with him about its contents, though we could not hear their conversation clearly.

Terry Anderson had been remonstrating with Said for a Bible to be given to us. His persistence had been fruitful and two Bibles were brought, one for John and me, and another one circulating around the three Americans. The blood and gore of the Old Testament stories horrified me and I sometimes wondered how far the men who held us were removed from the mentality of those vengeful days.

John and I both found great solace in reading the Psalms. The anguished suffering mind that had created them and had cried out to God in his suffering reflected much of our own condition. Exhausted with profound questions and never finding an answer, we took relief

in devotional moments. It seemed we could meditate on the active nature and qualities of what this God of love could mean in human terms. The gentle eroticism of the Song of Songs delighted me and I read it over and over. The Book of Revelation held me mystified with its elaborate language and symbolism.

It was sometimes disturbing to overhear a man in the next cell pray, speaking only of his own worthiness and his own importance and telling God why God should set him free. Long periods of isolation sometimes puff up the ego to monstrous dimensions. In this place we had only ourselves and choked sometimes with self-pity or self-indulgence, we lost control of our humility. Perhaps the need to keep hold of our identity, the need to reaffirm constantly to ourselves that we had value, and that we were important, allowed us to believe that we were greater than we really were. A man who prays in praise of himself rather than of what he understands to be God puts himself at a far remove from the God to whom he prays.

Sometimes the guards who spoke reasonable English would ask us questions about Christian belief. As far as we could we would answer them and attempt to talk to them about their own beliefs. They seemed amazed that we had read the Koran but they remained adamant that Christ was not the son of God. God was God and needed no sons. But always their belief was undermined by their own repressed sexuality. The idea that God could have sex with a woman in order to have a son fascinated them. But for us these conversations were difficult. We knew that these men cared nothing about scriptural or doctrinal argument. Their minds were simply intoxicated by the idea of a sexual God.

On those occasions when they brought with them a copy of the Koran in English we would turn again to those chapters that we recalled as being significant to our own situation. We would point out the phrases and question them; sometimes they would answer but their minds were not trained to think. They would leave us sometimes angry, sometimes confused. For them the relationship with God was one of complete submission and man should not question the ‘words of the Koran. I could not abide their abject surrender. How can one submit to what one does not understand? Their submission to God was an act of repression. Their God was a God of judgement and of vengeance and they were afraid of this God. And their own repressed fascination with sexuality hinted at none of the liberation that a religion should present to its followers. It held them in bondage.

These men existed in their own kind of prison, perhaps more confining than the one that held us.

The Count of the Holy Roman Empire and I had been talking about house-building. We chose locations high in the hills or near the sea, though we were both city born and bred. The city held no fascination for us now. We dreamt of a quiet rural idyll. Slowly stone by stone and plank by plank we discussed our dream homes. How we might build them and what we might do in them.

Our talk must have affected our keepers. For the past few days they had been painting the walls outside our cell. The work came to an end. We peered out, the walls were a creamy pink and a flat grey.

‘It looks like we are living in a fucking fairy cake, John,’ I told him.

The walls reminded me of icing sugar on a cheap cake. The guards were coming regularly to talk or to play dominoes. It seemed that they were fed up with their own company. During these games if I was losing I would exclaim ‘Oh bollocks!’ Once, a guard turned to John mumbling ‘John, what mean bollocks?’ ‘It is a very bad word,’ he answered. The guard seemed satisfied, quietly repeating to himself’Bollocks, bollocks.’

A new guard arrived. His English was quite good and his French even better. He told us his name was Abed but this was certainly not the Abed we had known in Abed’s Hotel. This man was younger. He was at first very polite, and somewhat shy. He was perhaps overawed by the situation, for here he was talking with foreigners. He spoke slowly, asking us to forgive him for what he was doing. In the days that followed he came frequently, and spoke often of his religion. He told us he had had visions in which he had seen angels, Christ, Moses and the holy Imams. We sat quietly listening and not knowing what to say. He explained how when he had been in the south with the other ‘warriors’, they had been creeping through the countryside to make an attack on some Israeli installation. Many of his friends had been killed.

As they prepared for their attack he looked behind him and saw many more warriors follow him, coming to help. These were the warriors sent by Muhammad and promised in the Koran.

At night we would sometimes hear him crying out or moaning fearfully in his dreaming sleep. Religion had possessed this man with an evil kind of possession. He continued his stories, telling us how his brother who had been killed would come to him in the night and call to him, to come and join him. This man’s death-wishing was of the most morbid and fantastical kind. Both John and I pitied, as much as we were a little afraid of, his strange warped mentality.

All of them wanted to die for Islam and each of them in their time told us of the plans they had made for heroic death in the name of Islam. But their dreaming and death-wishing had the quality of a child’s wish-fulfilment. Some of them saw themselves driving a car bomb into a crowd of Israeli soldiers, killing themselves and everyone around them. One of them hoped to crash an aeroplane into the heart of an Israeli town. Somehow this was not the thinking of a cold and calculating terrorist mind. They believed fervently that all the warriors of Islam went to an Islamic heaven. ‘This life no good,’ they would frequently reiterate but their boasting and their dreaming sometimes went beyond storytelling. Many times they would come into our cell brandishing a pistol or Kalashnikov and they liked to show us their guns. the prison chief, was the most boastful of them all. He had a huge macho dilemma and during these exhibitions he would bark out orders to the other guards until they brought half the armoury they kept in the guardroom. Several Kalashnikovs were shown to us, semiautomatic pistols, a Beretta, hand grenades and a mortar launcher. Said proudly showed us a rocket launcher, which he told us was one of many in their arsenal. We took these guns in our hands and fumbled with them. The magazines were always removed first. Some of these weapons were of Italian or Spanish origin, but the larger weapons like the mortar and the anti-personnel rocket launcher were of British make.

All of the guards crushed into the room and each of them was eager to display his knowledge of these weapons. As we held the large rocket launcher in our hands we would feel several of our guards’

hands pull and push at it, each wanting to be the man to show how it worked, and to display what a soldier he was. I heard John ask loudly ‘I say, do you fellows know if this thing is loaded?’ Said answered ‘Of course, it is always loaded, we are always ready to fight!‘John and I

laughed. Here in this tiny cell, two prisoners and five or six guards were crushed together, all of them grabbing and fumbling at and barely missing the firing-pin on this weapon. If any of us had touched it accidentally then all our troubles would have been over.

Often, after the guards had left, we laughed derisively at these childlike warriors of God. When Abed visited us, we spent some time and energy teaching him English. Unlike the other guards, he was quite adept at learning. The others would give up with boredom after ten minutes, but Abed persisted. We learned that his father was a teacher of French in one of the hill villages, which explained his fluency in the language and why he learned so quickly from us. Often as these lessons came to an end Abed would rise from the position he was sitting in, come over to us and kiss us both on the top of the head.

In our many short conversations with these men we slowly became aware of the dilemma in which they were trapped. Genuinely most of them wanted us to like them. Yet they wanted us also to be afraid of them. They had no meaningful reason to dislike us. They were afraid of us and when they occasionally displayed any instinctual affection towards us, it threw them into confusion and they retreated from us.

Somewhere in their minds was the notion that we were prisoners and therefore must be evil. This constant ambivalence played upon them, and we in our turn played upon it -sometimes to extract information, and sometimes when it was necessary to reveal our anger at the way we had been treated. These conversations also gave us some access to their language and with difficulty we would catch words and phrases in Arabic. It was a beneficial exercise, for as the years progressed we were able to pick up things on the radio in the guards’ room reporting world news or local events. We were told that the chiefs had specifically ordered them not to give us instruction in Arabic. For obvious reasons they did not want us to overhear their conversations.

On one of these visits Abed and another guard brought us each a small plastic stool rather like an enlarged bucket with a lid. The novelty of this soon wore off. It was hard and uncomfortable. We yearned for a chair with a back so that we might sit properly and relax.

Sitting down on a piece of furniture seemed strange. For so many months we had had either to stand up or to lie on a mattress. We were so unused to sitting that after those first few days we hardly bothered to use the stools.

Early in the morning we heard a loud banging noise that woke us from our sleep. We wondered what might be happening and thought to ourselves that one of the guards must be repairing something. We said he must be taking a hammer to the rocket launcher trying to make jt work. The banging continued. We couldn’t sleep and cursed our captors who insisted on making this racket so early in the morning.

But our surmise was incorrect. For some fifteen minutes the banging went on. It was perhaps four o’clock. Suddenly the banging stopped.

We lay back to try to catch some sleep before the guards came, and as we lay in that darkness, we heard someone speak to us through the grille above our door. The voice spoke softly, but urgently. ‘Hey you guys, I’m going out of here right now, they are going to shoot my wife and my child. I’ve heard them talking about it. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get to them. Don’t worry, I’ll get word to your families, I’ll tell everyone.’

We knew the voice and we knew that somehow Frank had got out of his cell and was wandering about in the passageway. He was excited and we became tense. He had set in motion something very dangerous for all of us. We began to panic about what he would do next. The entrance into the guards’ room was sealed off by a barred gate. How Frank intended to open this we could not conceive, nor why he failed to open the other cell doors. How did Frank expect to run through the suburbs of Beirut in a pair of shorts and a filthy T-shirt? Perhaps panic and fear, accumulating over weeks and weeks, had finally driven him to this action without any proper calculation of what would happen if things went wrong. We heard Frank bang at the gate into the guards’ room. Obviously they had not stayed the night. Frank’s banging continued and we knew he would never be able to open that gate. We whispered quietly to each other, wondering what the hell was going to happen. Frank kept banging but with less enthusiasm. Perhaps it was dawning on him that this gate could not be opened.

Despair leads to panic and panic drives a mind out of all reason.

Frank began shouting at the top of his voice ‘Come on you guys, you told me a few days ago would go home tomorrow, you said bukkra, well it’s bukkra now, I’m ready, I’m ready to go home… Come on you guys come on, come on and get me, come and get me.’ His voice shrieking rather than shouting. All logic had gone from it. Frank would be quiet for a while, sometimes shuffling around outside then back to the barred gate, shouting again and banging and then silence.