An Evil Cradling (33 page)

That evening I told John of the dream that I had had when I was first kidnapped and held alone. I dreamed that I had been in a cafe

somewhere and that a friend had come to sit and chat with me. We talked of times we had enjoyed together. I listened but as I looked into his blue eyes I knew that this friend had come to kill me. His eyes told a story that made his words lies. He noticed the intensity of my watching, and knowing that in his blue eyes I had read the truth, said to me ‘You know! … Don’t you?’ and I said ‘Yes, I know.’ There was silence as we looked at one another. I was submerged in the blueness and softness of his eyes. Suddenly I saw something in the eyes and heard the bang of his gun as he shot me, then he wasn’t there. I was free of him and of his deceit and of his awful betrayal. I felt no pain or fear. If this was a nightmare it held no horror for me. It was so clear and I remembered it after all those months. John sat silently and listened. ‘You don’t want to read too much into these things, Brian.’ ‘I know,’ I said slowly, ‘I don’t, it’s just a dream I had.’

We saw little more of Said in the days that followed. Whether or not he was frightened of us and knew our anger, he was most certainly aware of our changed attitude towards him. Perhaps he was embarrassed. His violence had been without purpose or meaning. His absence was a relief for us. Had he come to talk or even to attempt to [ play games with us, the atmosphere in the cell would have told him how much we loathed him. We believed with Said gone that we would be left alone to eke out those long periods of darkness as best we might. We had become accustomed to the darkness. We had our candles and our games and above all we had each other, more defiant and stronger than before.

In those long dark hours we taught each other songs that we half remembered. We made up new lines for them. ‘The Boxer’ by Simon and Garfunkel became a favourite. We added many additional verses to the original song, extending the story and often drawing on our experience of imprisonment. Our feelings were transformed into verse and harmony, recreating what we believed was a better and certainly a much, much longer version of the original song. In this way we were articulating indirectly to one another some of the intensity and intimacy of our experience. It was a way of speaking confessionally to one another about our deepest emotional responses to what had happened over the past months. But this time of mutual reassurance, of shared imagination which was as comforting as it was stimulating, was to be short-lived.

Sitting in that darkness one evening, speaking of those songs and the music we loved and missed more than we had ever expected to, we

promised how, should we ever leave this place, we would each teach ourselves to play some musical instrument. We both believed ourselves hugely impoverished in that neither of us had any musical skill. John was keen to take up the piano, which he had begun to learn as a child. I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to play a banjo and a harmonica. Occasionally when John was asleep I would sit with my two hands cupped over my mouth holding an imaginary harmonica and humming tunes into my hands as I rocked back and forth, its rhythm nursing me and comforting me. I believed myself to be the world’s finest harmonica player. I was indeed, in the world in which I was held.

It was again late at night when the key turned in the padlock. The door began to open very slowly, which was unusual. We sat in silence facing one another, wondering who had come in and what they m wanted. It was unusual for the guards to visit at night and especially when there was no light in the cell. Someone came in, a voice spoke, one we did not recognize, but it was a voice disguised, just as Said often attempted to disguise his own. It spoke in Arabic.

We didn’t answer but we both knew who this person was. It was Abed, the young man of the nightmare dreams: the zealot who cried out in his sleep, who saw angels, who had spoken with Christ and Moses and who had seen the imaginary holy warriors of the thirteenth Imam march behind him as he carried out a raid in southern Lebanon.

This was the young man who told us he had hidden in a cave in the hills to experience visions. This was the man who heard his dead H brother call to him ‘Come, come, come and join me here,’ so immersed in the Koran that his mind was contaminated by hallucina tions. We had tried to teach him English. When he first came he asked m us for forgiveness, and kissed us on the head as he left us, but now he had become someone else.

He stood over John sitting some ten feet from me and I heard again the butt of a Kalashnikov fall repeatedly on John’s body. Slowly and unexcitedly the blows continued and then stopped. I heard him walk towards me. This time I cared nothing. There was no trembling. m There was no fear. I secretly relished what was about to happen because of the strength it gave me. Here it was again, the thumping down of this weapon bruising my body. Unlike the excited quasi-sexual rapture of Said’s rape, this man was frightened, his blows only j half as heavy as Said’s, slow and deliberate, picking the impact points.

I even felt a smile inside myself. The hot tempest that was part of Said’s abuse was not here now. I was oblivious for the duration of this beating. He stopped and walked away quickly, almost running from the cell. I crawled over to John. We were both unhurt and unafraid.

In the morning we were taken to the toilet, our arms firmly twisted up our backs, Abed kicking and pushing at our feet. Both of us laughed.

Abed now became our tormentor every other night. Occasionally in the afternoon he would come in and play out a game, his role as torturer. He would take great pleasure, having beaten us, in jumping up and down on our outstretched legs. We never spoke or cried out. It was becoming apparent to us that this perverse individual had more need of us than he understood himself. He was attempting to make himself a man. He thought by beating and brutalizing us, that his manhood was assured.

We spoke often and at length about Abed, attempting to understand what distortion of mind or imagination could allow him constantly to beat naked and blindfolded men in the dark. What was there in a man that would tell him such things made him more a man? I often thought that he had seen in Said’s violence a way of obtaining power and stature and perhaps a way of obliterating his own weakness. In these moments of torture Abed suddenly had had thrust into his hands absolute and unlimited power. He could not resist it. He immersed himself in it. He had become addicted to his own cruelty. But in the compulsive addiction to the power he had over us he was powerless.

His need of us made him our prisoner. In our silence and in our strength he felt only his own fear thrust back on him. He knew and was afraid that we cared nothing for him and would not submit nor cry out to please him. As these beatings continued it was as if Abed was feeding off our naked flesh. We were bored by his pathetic need.

Our silent resistance made him more fearful, and we felt his fear in the blows and laughed inside ourselves. But not all was calmness and quiet resistance.

John knew the Vesuvius of rage that smouldered inside me. ‘John, I can’t take much more of this little bastard using me and getting himself off on me. At times I feel like blowing up and breaking the little bastard’s neck.‘John was always calming. ‘I know … I feel the same,’ he said. ‘But what’s the point. You do that and you give them what they want, full licence to do anything they want.’ What reinforced my anger and loathing at this man’s violence was that on other occasions he would come to visit us as himself, Abed, and talk, perhaps play a game and then go off again to return later, his voice disguised, and begin again to take his pleasure, his addiction out of control. I was always sickened when he sat with us to talk of his family and of the politics of Lebanon and then return in the darkness as someone else: the other person he wanted to be but could not be because he was not a hero and we would not let him be one. How long would we have to endure this? I wondered as I tried to sleep.

The answer was to come sooner than either of us expected. After lunch we were playing a game and making up our new songs when we heard several feet come to our door. Quickly we pulled down the blindfolds and the guards entered. Our cells were emptied of everything. We were left sitting on a cold floor wearing only a pair of shorts. We sat in that freezing silence for hours, wondering what was happening. We found some last pieces of candle wax and some threads and made a small candle, and in the white darkness we sat with our eyes fixed on this struggling blue flame, shivering and shuddering in the cold. That little tiny blue flame was like ourselves, struggling to stay alive, and then finally exhausted with the struggle it was snuffed out, and the blackness crashed in.

We lay huddled together for warmth, then heard feet moving quickly towards our cell. The door opened, two sweaters were thrust at us. ‘Put on, put on,’ a voice ordered. We did so, grateful for the warmth. Then quickly we were taken out and rushed along the passageway and heaved up through that hole which we had been dropped through so many months before, then out along the dark passage and once more into that old Volkswagen van which we had now christened ‘The War Wagon’.

For some twenty minutes we careered and bumped through the dark suburbs of Beirut. The van stopped and we waited, expecting to be taken out and delivered to another prison. But the waiting was to be prolonged and for three hours, our muscles and bones aching, we were made to sit in cramped silence. Every time we moved or sought to stretch our limbs or to ease the pain, a gun would touch our chests or heads, and a voice would spit out ‘Silence.’ But we cared little now for guns and this was an order that could not be obeyed: the cramp needed to be relieved.

The agonized waiting ended. The old Volkswagen engine exploded into life. We drove on for two or three minutes, then stopped again.

The door slid open and quickly we were taken from the van and

walked awkwardly inside what seemed to be the foyer of an old apartment block. I was left waiting with one of The Brothers Kalashnikov. John was brought quickly behind me. The Kalashnikov Brother seemed genuinely delighted to see me. I heard him announce himself and pat my shoulder, then John and I and Abed were squeezed into a small lift and it ascended. John was shaking, not from fear, it was just his muscles and limbs relieved suddenly from their tense strain. Abed spoke, this time in French. ‘Pas bonne experience.’ He touched his pistol to our foreheads. We smiled.

From the lift we were ushered into an apartment, walked along its hall, and into one of the bedrooms. A huge room, perhaps three times the size of our double cell. A carpet filled the floor. Nothing else was there. Within minutes mattresses and covers were brought to us. One of the guards asked ‘Do you want a toilet?’ I said ‘You bet,’ and was taken to the bathroom. The door closed, I lifted my blindfold and stood in amazement: a bath, a shower, bidet, washbasin, real soap. I squatted with mystified delight on the toilet seat. Laughing in my confusion at once more sitting on a toilet seat, I quickly finished, knowing that my friend would most certainly want to use these luxurious facilities.

We slept that night side by side, a two-foot gap between the mattresses. We were exhausted from the cold in the prison and the cramped ache from sitting in the van, but the size of the room was a relief. Space to walk again; we cared for nothing else. The windows were covered with sheet steel, but we had electric light with a switch on the wall. This was paradise.

The next morning we discovered what we had least expected.

There were other prisoners being held in the bedroom opposite ours.

We could not see them but their voices revealed that the Americans were not home, they were here, hostages still. The next six weeks we spent here were comparatively carefree. The horrors of the House of Fun passed quickly from us.

We walked around the room daily, scoring up the miles, and in the evening played dominoes, often talking and reminiscing about that last awful place. Mahmoud, the guard who spoke good English, and with whom we had established a reasonable relationship, was here.

Abed was too and so was our friend the Kalashnikov Brother who we now knew as Saafi. Said visited occasionally. We had little to say to him and he stayed for only a few minutes. Walking around the perimeter of the room, John felt a lump under the carpet. Cautiously we lifted it. Underneath was a fat envelope. We opened it. 240 Lebanese pounds. We were amazed. Searching and lifting the carpet in other places we found a letter written in very small handwriting. It was in French and difficult for us to decipher. We knew that this letter and the money had been hidden by some other guest of our captors.

We returned the letter, because it would have been dangerous to have it found in our possession. The money we decided to keep. “This is our taxi fare home, Brian, if we ever get out of here.’ I laughed, but it was a spur to hope. We had never given up planning our escape. Escape was never possible when held in an underground prison, but locked up in an apartment there was always a possibility.

Abed came regularly with our food. He had become himself again.

Perhaps being away from the confines of the prison and being able to look out from the balcony onto the street below, he, like us, had become more human again. He would frequently attempt to wrestle playfully with John. It was impossible, it was a piece of childish foolishness. John, blindfolded, could see nothing. Abed would laugh.

He never played such games with me. He always sensed my antagonism. I think he was fearful. So was I, for if he attempted to play with me I was not sure I would be able to keep it playful.

The six weeks we spent in the apartment were alleviated when they at last gave us some books. Mostly they were ineffectual gothic romances or poorly written stories dating from the 1950s. Surprisingly some of them were recent works, particularly in the field of international politics. Michel Seurat’s name was written in a few of them. We knew he was a Frenchman taken hostage at the beginning of Islamic Jihad’s campaign. We also knew, from the Americans, that Seurat had died at the hands of his kidnappers.