An Evil Cradling (40 page)

I often thought how having to live beside a man so ill and watch his illness and his helplessness is almost as bad for those who watch as those who suffer. John’s crack buoyed me up: ‘We could sell your arse to a medical experimentation centre when we get out of here.’ It was the longest illness I had ever known. Weight fell from me. My legs were like needles; all the muscle tone that I had spent so long building up was gone.

John’s unremitting ministrations revealed another side of him to me. The buffoon, the fool, the comic was a man of vast tenderness, a man of compassion. His buffoonery hid this tender part of himself that he would not normally display. I wondered if my stubbornness had forced him to emulate me, obscuring this much greater strength which his tenderness revealed. I was indebted to him. His very presence, apart from his help, meant more to me than all my beliefs about who I was throughout these two weeks of constant pain, filled with hours aching and praying for an end. I wondered frequently how much of oneself does one give away or can one give away even to a suffering companion. During one of those long afternoons I lay, pain twisting and turning in my gut. I said nothing and hoped John would continue reading his book. I lay trying to sleep, to relieve this pain, but still it twisted and knotted. Through the mangle I went, and was stretched and pulled. I believed John thought I was sleeping, then I felt his hand lie gently on my stomach, and it remained there. He was praying. I was overcome. I was lost for words again. I wanted to join him in prayer, I wanted to thank him for this huge and tender gesture.

It revealed more courage than my battling with the guards.

This new revelation of John’s inner strength made me question myself and my actions. For days I remained troubled. Was my will to resist merely selfish, an arrogant self-indulgence? I spent hours in long silent dialogues with myself, seeking out a resolution. I had wanted to push Abed as far as I could. Having pushed him so far he would push me over the edge. I would have the ultimate victory in my own self-destruction.

I had been along the road of hunger strike before. It still intrigued and drew me. The sense of power, illumination and self-possession which the hunger striker experiences were weapons that these men barely understood.

It was Easter time. We sat watching television. The Christian Maronite faith in Lebanon celebrated Easter with a devout intensity.

We watched hours and hours of religious services all conducted in Arabic. The passion and the trance on the faces of the communicants held me. What was this fascination with death, a fascination that repeated itself in the aspirations and pathological thinking of our Muslim captors? Here was a world and a people trapped in death’s shadow. The eclipse of the sun at the moment of crucifixion had not passed for them. My own thoughts of death were the reverse of gloomy. It was dazzling and light-filled. Death was only a moment of life bursting into life.

Was I becoming heady with such thoughts? Had my egotistical obsession with death broken the bonds of my humanity? Was I only a mirror image of the strange psychopathology of my captors? These questions troubled me. I was irresolute, but not unresolved. I needed to commit and focus my inner understanding and strength outside myself. My relationship with and responsibility to John was part of my resolution. I could not make any choice which betrayed that responsibility to him.

John sat behind me silently watching a programme about a hospital run by nuns for the mentally handicapped. It was one of the religious programmes that filled Easter week on TV. The answer flashed up in front of my eyes. In the television film a nun was attending one of the patients, a full-grown man whose mental retardation was so severe he had spent his whole life in a cot-like bed. His frail skeletal body was ageless. He lay naked and unmoving, his dark hollow body in stark contrast to the nun’s white habit. I watched her as she patted and pawed him all over. Her touch was not the gentle pat of affection. She seemed to be slapping him. Her blows were a brutal compassion. I understood then that she was trying to break through the useless withered shell of his body to touch his semicomatose mind and give him a sense of himself and the otherness of the world around him.

I watched entranced. I was a secret communicant again. The eyes of the paralytic mesmerized me. They stared at the nun with such questioning intensity. They were asking ‘What are you doing? What do you want?’ Those eyes, so big and bright in that dark face, were staring right through the nun and beyond her. In that instant I knew the nun’s need of this pathetic creature was greater than his of her. The intensity of his eyes watching her told me that somehow he knew it too. They were creatures in symbiotic relationship. Each was meaningless and lifeless without the other. Something erupted within me. I was filled with absolute assurance, a resolution of confusions beyond my immediate dilemmas. I gasped for breath. I sat staring at the TV, seeing nothing, feeling the shock recede. I was dimly perceiving a new world of meaning.

Tara Tara Tara

They have taken the heroes from Tara

And tucked them away in the Tain

There are whins of the Rath of the Synods

And the Kings are in Brugh na Boyne

Tara Tara Tara

The shackles are rusted and broken.

The hostages are gone.

They slept in the dark at Tara

And woke in Lebanon.

Tara Tara Tara

The heroes have risen from Nemnagh.

The kings are at the gate.

They have sounded the horn for McCarthy

And Sutherland and Waite.

Tara Tara Tara

And here is the Mound of the Hostages.

This is the Mound of the hostages.

Where have they hidden the hostages

Who wore the chains of Kings?

In the dark they are speaking in whispers.

They are fettered hand and foot.

But in front of the Mound there is open ground

From Tara to Beirut.

Tara Tara Tara

Tara Tara Tara

I am standing in the centre of a room. Men are talking around me.

An old towel is draped over my face. On my mouth they tie a gag tightly. The cloth covering my face and head is now taped over with thick bands of scotch tape. A slit at my nose allows me to breathe. A man now is at my feet. He pushes my ankles together and begins taping up my legs. The thick bands of scotch tape are tighter than any rope. The crackling tape snakes up my legs. My hands are held firmly by my side. Over my loins the snaking tape winds itself and entraps me. I am being embalmed and mummified.

I feel my senses falling apart, nervous tension runs in and out and over me like a crackling electric current. And still the tape wraps around me, over my chest now, pinning my upper arms tight into me. I am suffocating.

I know what this means. I am going back to the coffin. I am going on that awful journey. I try to think of something else. The tight confinement of the tape around my chest and shoulders will not let my mind escape contemplation of what is to come. Around me are my guards, noisy, I think of the conversation of bees. This is babble, whispering and hissing, ‘Do nothing … I kill you.’

I am the chrysalis of a butterfly and I cannot break out of this larval state. Around me these men walk pulling, tugging, making tighter the sticky tape. My mind is filled with the dread of the coffin and the journey. I stand still trying to calm myself from the riot that is bursting out within my senses. A voice at my ear says ‘No noise, no speak.’ I stand unable to respond to this idiotic instruction. How can I say anything. I am already a complete mummy. No part of me can move, only my toes are exposed and I wriggle them forcefully as if letting loose all the fear that is slowly welling up inside me. I feel myself trembling within this mummified corpse of myself and think if I fall, I will fall like a felled tree. I hear behind me my friend being similarly

packaged. A thought flits through my head: ‘Why don’t they just stick a stamp on us and post us to where we’re about to go?’

We are lifted and carried in the arms of our captors to that unholy confinement in the underfloor of the lorry that is to deliver us somewhere else. The increasing heat makes me feel like a fat slug, a worm encased in stickiness. They slide me brutishly into this oven.

Beside me I feel my friend being thrown down. There is silence and darkness and airlessness. We cannot reach out to touch and reassure.

This is the ultimate emptiness.

We lie on our backs and try to blank out what is happening. Trying with our minds to push away the turmoil that is bubbling up like hot poisonous lava to suffocate us. Amazingly one of the guards crawls in and lies half between us and half on top of us. The doors bang, the engine roars and in this horrific constraint we travel for six hours.

At first I try to sing to myself. But the words will not squeeze out the panic beginning to bite great lumps out of me. The diesel fumes and the heat and the bumping of my head and body as the lorry careers across the broken road begin to overwhelm me. The suffocating heat of the air entering my nostrils is a fire inside my skull. The scotch tape will not let my flesh breathe. Perspiration slithers out of me, I am cooking in my own fat, like a basted bird. The guard places his gun on my face. I can’t expand my chest to take in a breath of the reeking diesel-filled air. My heart is about to burst out of my skin. I am panting like a woman in labour. Prayer is hopeless, the mind is inundated with nightmare images.

No thought can complete itself before it is consumed by another and another. I struggle to free my hands and toss my head to release the gag. I need my own noise to return me to myself. I hiss, my mouth now free ‘Mazin, you poisonous little bastard I am going to kill you… You hear, I am going to kill you.’

The guard’s gun jams into my face again. I gulp for air and blast him with the violence of my tongue ‘I am going to rip off your head with my bare hands and shove it up your arse.’ Mazin, lying on top of us, realizes I am suffocating. He fumbles uselessly to release the tape from my chest.

‘Mazin, I am going to eat you… I am going to eat your living flesh, then spit it out and walk on it… Mazin, I am going to eat you,’ I snarl at him.

Now my mind has flown full flight from me. I forget about the man lying on me, crushing out the air from me. For hours the poison pours out of me. I roar for life and scream for death with the same breath.

Laughter, my constant saviour, is transformed into a maniacal rage.

Mazin crawls on top of me. His lips are at my chest, then on my face. The stench of his garlic breath is in my mouth. I feel his thin lips on mine. I return to myself, pulling my face viciously from him. ‘You little gutless, insignificant piece of offal … I am going to eat you raw,’ I hiss and spit at him. Mazin’s kiss isn’t the kiss of a lecher, he is trying to calm me, in the only way he knows, for he is in this black confinement sweating with fear at the rage mumbling beside him. It is a kind of lover’s kiss for it seeks to ease me. His hands are pulling hard at the tapes on my chest, letting my lungs loose to gasp in the air that is forbidden me.

The hours go on in this black airless hole. I won’t be silenced. I try to fill this emptiness with all of me. I roar into what little air is around me. My dark lover’s calming kisses are as meaningless to me as he is. I consign him to oblivion.

All those long, crushing, grinding hours this maniacal outburst t fl continues. It is the only part of me alive during that hellish descent. I can’t let go of it. I stare into the darkness within me and see its dark eye stare back. I feel that to give in to the darkness inside us is to live forever in the shadows, and I am not a shadow, I am a man. That six-hour journey from south Lebanon up into the Lebanese hills and down into the Bekaa valley is an eternity. How many deaths a man may die, he alone can know.

Beside me and half buried by the guard, my companion lies silent, a living corpse. ‘Rage, John, rage … Rage … Rage, John, rage.’ I chant out these words hoping that the noise I am making may enter into his own madness and somehow communicate life to him.

This journey ends like all journeys. That the human mind can travel into those dark regions and return exhausted but intact is more a miracle than that word can ever convey.

The doors bang open. The onrush of air, clean and cool, is an anointment.

It was some ten minutes before the guards pulled me like a dead fish from that underfloor coffin. I was carried into a room and laid on the floor. I sensed the guards standing above me, staring. I wondered what were they looking at, what were they thinking, why they didn’t take these mummy’s bandages off my body. Suddenly a knife was hacking at me from my chest to my groin. Carelessly cutting through the tapes that contained me. The knife near my genitals filled me with an instant of fear. To go through all that and have this ignoramus castrate me struck me for a second as frighteningly funny, but its comical aspect was the light edge of hysteria. The gag was ripped from my mouth and I lay drinking in great drafts of air. My body spasmed, the nerves refinding themselves. A calm voice beside me asked ‘You want anything?’ I answered: ‘Get him out, get him out, get John out.’

I sat in my blindfolded darkness, gulping water as the operation was repeated for John. After some fifteen minutes, slowly coming back to ourselves and sharing words of reassurance, we were walked across the room into which we had been delivered. Bricks were taken from a wall and tiles lifted from the floor. Beneath us was yet another hole into which we were to descend. This time there were rough concrete steps. We were guided down some twelve steps and then immediately in front of us was a large iron door. Keys turned in a huge padlock. We entered, a hand guiding us from behind. We walked across a room and were gently pushed onto a mattress on the floor. The door banged closed.

As always John and I cautiously lifted our blindfolds. There was light in the room, quickly we pulled the blindfold up to our foreheads.