An Evil Cradling (35 page)

The next day my interrogator brought me a gift. It was a newly purchased book about the history of Black Americans. I was grateful.

He apologized for the violence of the previous day’s movie. That evening I was returned and chained up again with John. We spoke of our interrogations. John had been quizzed at length about his work, what he knew about the different paramilitary groups in Lebanon, and who his political advisor was in his news agency. It was obvious they considered John to be some kind of spy. We were all tarred with that brush.

When this interrogator returned the following day, we complained vehemently about the chains and the many beatings that we had received. He was genuinely surprised. He seemed also to be angry that they had occurred. His simple answer to our anger at the chains was that they were for our security. His calm explanation that God was testing me brought my anger to a boiling point and I turned on him and asked ‘And who is testing you, my friend?’ To make God the justification for the way these all-too-human warriors had treated us was more than I could bear. It seemed the ultimate cowardice.

Later we were offered the chance to write a letter to our families. We said we would think about this. At first I was not in favour of letters arriving home a year after our disappearance. It would be unbearable for our families. We discussed whether these letters, if we wrote them, would ever be posted, but concluded after a time that it would be better for our families to have some news of us. At least they would know we were alive. When the interrogator returned to collect the letters we asked him what was happening in the negotiations with our government. He answered ‘Nothing, your governments have done nothing for you.’

We sank back into our separate silences. There was nothing to be said. One year and nothing, and how many more years? So many questions filled our heads. We retreated, almost grateful for our blindfolds, and lay back, drowning in our own thoughts. How long could our families hold out? To what extremes would these men go to achieve their purpose? What were they demanding? And what was in the minds of our respective governments, that they would not negotiate? We tried to console one another and compensate for the futility of those questions. After all, would these men know if there were negotiations? Even our interrogator with the authority he seemed to have might not know if negotiations were progressing secretly at a higher level.

The immensity of our kidnappers’ conceit was beyond belief. They had murdered, maimed and taken hostage a handful of men, how many exactly we did not know, but we reckoned possibly fifteen.

With these fifteen men, some like ourselves chained to walls in apartments, in prisons, or in underground cells, they hoped to hold the world to ransom.

The cotton sheet that separated us from our captors also allowed us a deeper insight into their minds and their behaviour. Every morning before dawn Said would come and sit at the other side of our sheet with a portable cassette player and would play a tape of some holy man chanting and reciting the Suras of the Koran. The tape would be loud and blaring. Said would sit chanting in unison with his mullah and after hours of this he would become delirious. He would begin sobbing, then wailing. This self-induced morbidity seemed interminable.

At times he would continue in this distraught and mind-jarring state literally for hours, and when he had finished another guard came.

Said made his men pray, and they, like him, would work themselves up into a grief-stricken hysteria. Having to sit listening to this three times a day, day after day after day, was maddening. It was a kind of psychological torture.

Both John and I were driven to distraction by this religious frenzy a few feet from us. It was becoming harder and harder to hold ourselves together. In its own way it had much the same impact as the radio tuned to static outside our old prison cell. It seemed these men could thrust themselves into the most pathetically morbid states, effortlessly, like throwing a light switch. They would move from monotonous repetition of the words of the Koran into hysteria, wailing and crying out to Allah. At first we tried to sleep through it, and since this was not possible, to plug our ears with pieces of tissue and tie towels around our heads, clamping our hands over our ears.

Anything to put a barrier between ourselves and the moronic and If 1 ecstatic chanting. Then just as instantaneously they would finish, get up and walk away, talk and laugh with their friends or watch television. These prayers were not acts of spirit in grateful submission and contemplation of God, but rather of personalities massively unresolved. I now began to understand how it was that these men could effect such mercurial personality changes, one minute being affectionate and pleasant and then suddenly aggressive and violent. I could now understand how they confused need with revulsion, and .’! now much they were afraid of what we were. I understood why it was that they had this unacknowledged dislike, or in some cases loathing m of themselves.

™ It was becoming increasingly difficult for us to hold our own minds in balance. On each occasion when these prayers would begin it was as if we were innoculated with their hysteria. As hard as these man prayed I called out to God to shield my own mind from the contamination of this holy insanity. I raged with anger at the pain of m listening for long periods as one man after another displayed his V

sickness in front of me. It was becoming impossible. Both of us were on the edge of screaming. I would much rather be beaten than be subjected to this more traumatic and emotional disturbance.

To combat this onslaught we tried talking in low whispers to one another. The mind needed an exchange with another mind to overcome this oppression. As we tried to engage our minds in something that would release us from the grip of madness, we found ourselves bursting into giggling raptures. Each time these prayers started we would be caught up in a whirlwind of giggling. We were unable to speak for laughter, unable even to look at one another. It was our own hysterical defence, beyond our ability to control. We stuffed pieces of blanket into our mouths or bit tightly on the corner of a book trying to silence ourselves. We were not laughing at these men but protecting our own sanity.

The guards’ ecstatic states were not restricted solely to the ritual prayer times. One evening they sat as usual beyond the curtain. The TV was blaring. They were enthusiastically watching the US serial The A-Team. Said was in his corner reciting the holy scriptures, then, as we had witnessed so many times before, he began chanting and slowly sliding into self-induced rapture. As we listened, it seemed he was in competition with the television. His prayers got faster, more intense, excited, building up, trying to rise above the gunfire and the screaming cars on the TV. Said wanted the attention of his men. He wanted his great but pathetic holiness to be admired. Then, suddenly, in the midst of his religious metamorphosis he suddenly looked towards Mahmoud and barked out at him to turn off the television.

Mahmoud, calm and unawed by Said, answered something that we could vaguely translate as ‘Pray if you want to pray … God cares nothing about the television.’ Mahmoud returned to his viewing and Said to his prayers, at first feebly, but slowly again building to a crescendo. Beginning with deep sobs, he recited the chants hypnotically and he was again transported. Then just as before, he snapped out of his ecstasy. As if he had awoken from a dream and was still half dreaming, he called out to Mahmoud, his voice slow and distant: ‘What is the gunfire?’ Mahmoud answered uninterestedly ‘A-Team.’ Said insisted on making an impression and said he believed it was the Israelis or the forces of Geagea. He wanted to fight, he declared, he wanted to die for Allah. No-one was impressed. He returned sulkily to his recitation.

One afternoon when the other guards had left Said alone with us, John was dozing, tired from the constant early morning prayers which ripped into our sleep. I lay half awake, trying to enjoy what little sunlight filtered through the guards’ side of our room. The sheet that separated us from them was hung just above head height and with the high ceilings of this old Arabic building we could catch some light.

Said was moving about restlessly. The radio was on; Said always needed noise, he needed to distract his mind, and this was common to many of our captors. He began talking to himself, speaking words in

English, which he had obviously learned from TV from those violent films. For hours they all watched them in awe-struck wonder. Said spoke: ‘You bastard, I kill you … you bastard I kill you, bastard, bastard, bastard,’ he repeated, trying to imitate the aggressive manner in which he had heard the expression used. Then he was moving about the room again, distracted and restless. As if he was looking for something, anything to occupy him.

My own mind was equally restless, seeking out something on which to concentrate and evade the crushing boredom of the coming hours. The room was flushed with the morning’s half-light. Birdsong sparked softly outside. Said and I were caught up in our mutual rapture, drifting heedlessly around one another like fish in a tank.

Suddenly the dreaming silence was shattered. Said was weeping great shuddering sobs. This was a different kind of weeping from the automatic religious melancholia of his prayers. He walked around the room crying, the whole room seemed to fill up with his anguish. I felt, as I never had before, great pity for this man and felt if I could I would reach out and touch him. I knew instinctively some of the pain and loss and longing that he suddenly found himself overwhelmed by.

The weeping continued. Said became fleshy and human for me.

Here was a man truly stressed. His tears now wrenched a great wellspring of compassion from me. I wanted to nurse and console him. I felt no anger and that defensive laughter which had before cocooned me was no longer in me. I lay on my mattress and looked up over the top of the sheet. Said’s shadow, caught in the sunlight, was immense.

It flowed up the wall and across the ceiling. He was now chanting, fleeing from his sadness into recitation. His hands were clasped on the top of his head in the gesture of prayer. His body swayed and turned in a slow chanting circle. The room was filled with his eerie shadow and the slow rhythmic utterances choked with sobs. At times his voice broke and he cried out in desperation for Allah. I felt my own tears. I was transformed with a deep and helpless love for him. I had become what he was calling out for.

I woke John. ‘Look at this, look at this,’ I urged quietly. We both stared at the great moving shadow, fascinated and compelled. After a few minutes, John, exasperated, sighed in disgust and turned away. I remained watching. There was something unbearably beautiful about it. At once terrified and intrigued, my loathing for this man began to fall from me. I no longer thought of him as nothing, and felt guilty for having dismissed him so completely. Said’s violence against us was a

symptom of his need of us. Here was a man whose mind was forever locked in that desert wilderness that I had known during my worst moments in isolation.

During our captivity we were moved some seventeen times. On many of these occasions we were kept for short periods, sometimes days, sometimes weeks or months in the hills in the south of Lebanon.

These places and my time in them all blur together in my memory. To go through them in chronological sequence would be as boring for me as it would be for the reader. It was all monstrous repetition. I have tried therefore to encapsulate many of these moves in one, so that I may miss nothing essential.

We never knew when we were going to be moved until the occasion came. We would hear lots of noise and talking in the early hours. If it was before the morning call to prayer we would know that something was about to happen and that we were to be moved. I remember how stressful it was even though we knew what was likely to happen, that it simply meant a move to another location. We became agitated, upset, nervous, I suppose in the way a captured animal does when its daily routine of feeding and sleeping and walking around its cage is changed, and it becomes aggressive. So it was with us.

The routine was always the same. They came into the room to wake you though you were already awake and pulled the blankets away.

They would bark ‘Up, up … get up.’ You would stand while the chains were removed from your hands and feet. Then you would be walked to the middle of the floor and there pushed down, told to ‘Kneel, kneel,’ and like obedient performers in a time-worn ritual, you would obey. Your heads would be hooded and bound round with thick broad packing tape; an aperture was left only at the nose. You were always gagged, so that you could neither speak nor shout out.

After this your wrists were chained closely to your ankles: the left wrist to the left foot and the right hand to the right foot.

In this bowed and bent position the muscles soon began to ache and breathing became laboured. You sat through this for some minutes,

wanting them to hurry. With a kind of careless arrogance you would be lifted into a large sack. It was pulled up over the head and the top firmly tied off. In this close confinement the air and heat were thick.

The body raged into sweat, the tight constriction of the tape forcing the body’s heat back onto itself.

With a sudden jerk, the sack would be hoisted onto the back of one or two of the guards. The chains about your wrists and ankles cut viciously into the bones. Your wrists would begin to throb with a painful drum beat, making the hands feel like they were on fire, then numbed and cold. Your feet would sting with terrible pinpricks as the circulation was severed. You would try to relieve the pain but each infinitesimal movement sent it shooting to your neck or shoulder or some muscle contorted in trying to relieve the stress in other parts.

Imagine a child trying to escape from the ever tightening carcass of a dried-up womb. The body screamed in unrelieved agony.

Outside this hot enclosure ‘porters’ grunted and swore. Your body banged off the walls as they descended darkened stairways. You knew your weight was too much for them. You expected to be dropped and to feel the cold sharp edge of stone snap a bone or wrench your arm out of its shoulder socket. Your bound hands could not shield your head.