An Evil Cradling (44 page)

For the four or five weeks in which we received these magazines we devoured and discussed them at great length.

The ending of the first Gulf war and the fact that we were given these magazines assured us that something would happen in the very near future concerning our release. We asked for a radio and much to our surprise we were given a small portable. We listened avidly to the local news and French news from Monte Carlo. Only Frank remained uninterested in this new situation. He rarely listened to the news and never bothered with the magazines. Our conversation about what we read seemed to supply him with as much news as he required.

More importantly for me, these magazines brought more than printed news. They were filled with coloured photographs. It was the first time we had something other than the four bare walls and ourselves to look at. I looked at these magazines and read them with the kind of fascination a child has for his comic book. I still remember a large full-page ad for Singapore Airlines that depicted the faces of three air hostesses. They were extremely beautiful. On many occasions I sat in a stupefied torpor looking at the faces and into the dark oval eyes of these creatures. The holiday ads for the Far East and India transported me. The shapes and styles of the latest motor cars and the new incomprehensible world of computers fascinated and sometimes frightened us.

We read with some anxiety about the Vincennes incident. It was not the fact of the tragedy itself, but rather the genocidal potential of this new military technology that frightened us. We had no fear now for our own lives. The end of the Iran/Iraq war augmented our value at the negotiating table. We were confident that our release could only take a matter of months after the settlement of the conflict. The more relaxed attitude of the guards reinforced this view. For some of us hope of freedom brought its own anxiety. The dread of being so near and being let down again was a terrifying one. Once before, the Americans had been assured of their release. They had been given new clothes and shoes and were about to walk through the door to freedom, but after a few hours, the guards came and removed the clothes and shoes.

Whenever anyone had doubts we would gather around him, cajole and convince him that such doubts were groundless. It was a time when one had to be calm, patient and to believe in something we had neither the courage nor the energy to believe. It was agonizing to be standing at a doorway waiting for it to open telling yourself that it will open and you will walk through. Impatience is the brother to panic.

After some five or six weeks our deliveries of Time and Newsweek suddenly stopped. The radio was taken from us. No explanation was given. We did not press the matter. We had stored enough information to keep our imagination and our critical faculties well-oiled and working. Tom was greatly depressed by the loss of the radio. That contact with the real world was a great boost to him. The last item of news we heard on the radio before it was taken away was that Islamic Jihad had threatened the lives of the American hostages unless some of their demands were met. The following day when the guards came to unchain us, Terry Anderson quipped ‘Those who are about to die salute you.’

Frank Reed was the first to leave. One of the chiefs confirmed that he was going home. They asked Frank his shoe size and measured him for trousers. None of us believed that he would really be set free.

There was something not quite right about the situation. None of us would hint to Frank that these men were lying. Frank made no comment on what he had been told. A few days later he left us.

We were anxious for Frank because of what we had heard on the radio, but we were sure if our kidnappers were intent on carrying out their threat they would have taken more than one American, and they would probably have asked the Americans to make a video broadcast.

We decided to play up our anxiety about Frank with the guards to get back our radio. When we challenged them about the radio and Frank’s safety they became extremely anxious themselves. They were worried that if we believed Frank had been executed we would cause trouble for them. We had little to lose if we were going to be taken one by one and summarily shot. To placate us they returned the radio for a day. We listened to all the news reports, sure in ourselves that Frank had not been released. The news that we heard confirmed our suspicions. In the morning the radio was removed from us.

A few weeks after Frank left, Terry Anderson was taken away. This time there was no warning, and no suggestion that he was being released. No-one came to measure him for clothes or ask his shoe size.

The guards simply came into the room, unlocked him and said ‘Terry come.’ Terry went with them and never returned. Tom, John and I discussed the significance of this but could come to no agreed conclusion.

: Tom talked at length about his time with Terry Anderson. They had been together for many years. Tom had found Terry’s aggressive debating technique exhausting, and felt he could never win an argument. He was aware of his dependence on Terry. Yet a few days after Terry’s departure Tom admitted he felt a kind of relief that Terry had gone. Sometimes when two people spend all of their time in each other’s company, having nothing but themselves and their Own quality of mind or spirit to entertain themselves, they can without perceiving it become exhausting to one another. But, as we explained to Tom, it is a matter of mutual survival. Terry needed to talk and needed someone to listen and Tom needed to hear someone speaking to him. The sharing was reciprocal.

The companionship we had shared in this cellar restored Tom’s confidence. Now when the guards abused him for being cia or called him a spy, Tom simply laughed it off. He would say ‘Yes, I am the big chief cia, all Lebanon, Syria, Israel.’

When a person leaves a room, he becomes the topic of conversation for those remaining. It is a human preoccupation. So it was with us.

These men with whom we had spent so much time and whom we had come to know with such intimacy had left a deep impression on us.

That we talked about them in their absence was a measure of the mark they had left upon us. It was also a way of finding a point of balance in ourselves, understanding our friends correctly, and in so doing assuring ourselves that we were worthwhile and had meaning; that our perception and our understanding had not been twisted out of all recognition. To love someone and know that it is meaningful one must be critical of the object of one’s love. Criticism gives it value. As it increases in value, our own sense of self-worth equally increases.

Terry and Frank, our absent comrades, became the object of humorous derision, admiration, sympathy and sometimes pity. We had known them as part of ourselves. We had identified much in them with our own experience. To be cruelly critical would be like brutalizing ourselves. Inevitably some petty frustrations with our departed companions surfaced, but we were always able to restore a more reasonable and humane perspective. In this situation of absolute denial we needed to feed off one another. It only mattered that we gave as much as we took.

It was a few weeks after Terry Anderson was taken from us that Tom Sutherland’s turn came. Like Anderson’s it was without warning. One day he was with us, the next he was gone. John and I were alone again. We found ourselves discussing the Americans as a group, and their relations with each other as compared with our own.

Our absent friends filled our discussions for many days. We talked a lot about how you would go about making a film of the experience we had undergone.

Our captors came to talk with us more often now. Perhaps with only two of us in the room, they felt safer. We were let off our chains for longer periods. With fewer people to talk to and the room less crowded we returned to our exercising. Knowing that the camera in, the corner was an eye unblinkingly observing us, we would sometimes perform for our audience upstairs. It was a way of ridiculing them and of restoring our own sense of resistance, defiance and strength. John would occasionally stand with his face pressed close to the camera grimacing and making faces. On other occasions he would mimic the departed Americans.

We were to spend many weeks of expectation here. Our hopes at the ending of the Gulf war had not been lessened. As time went on and nothing seemed to be happening, we reassured one another by constantly repeating ‘Another month, perhaps two.’ Always our future was another month, perhaps two.

When it came, the manner of our removal was different from before. We knelt down; again our hands were chained to our ankles.

We were carried in a bag and there was a car to be dumped into. We were driven for miles and miles, coming down to Beirut again. But there were no check points. Cars behind us, cars in front of us guaranteed our delivery back to the city. A blaring siren accompanied us throughout thejourney. Never before had that happened. I thought then and I still believe that it was the Syrian Army that guaranteed our journey.

So we were hauled out of the boot, carried upstairs to a room, thanking God that we were still together. They chained me to one wall and John to another. This was all done in darkness. I reached out ‘You okay?’ ‘Yes,’ John replied. From nowhere a cigarette lighter flared.

Throughout our noisy arrival, with the guards carrying in mattresses and blankets, another prisoner had been sitting, silent and invisible in the corner. The momentary flash revealed only a darkened silhouette.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded. A voice like a slowly returning echo declared, ‘My name is Frank Reed.’

I could reach out at the end of my chain and tousle his head, the way people do a child or a dog. It was good to be with someone else. The next morning was a surprise and a confirmation. Frank had been there for about nine months on his own. He had been abused remorselessly.

When the guards came in during the day they would kick him. Mazin, the guard who lay on top of me during that suffocating ride, who kissed me and took away the binding tapes, was here. He disliked Frank. He kicked him. He said to us: ‘You all right? … This man touch you? … This man touch you?’ The man that we were now living with was incapable of touching. We were chained well away from one another, barely within reach. I suppose they thought we would have sexual relations with one another. We were angry at the behaviour of our guards and their treatment of Frank. His constant physical humiliation left a deep scar on him.

He had known more periods of isolation than the rest of us and had lost resolve, lost his capacity to be himself. Though we would have some hours of light during the day, I thought as I watched Frank that much of him remained in the dark.

We talked to Frank about things that had happened in the outside world. But Frank had decided a long time ago to leave the reality of the situation. He was hurt deeply. The sudden novelty of our return was perplexing and confusing.

The belief that we would be sexually involved if we could touch one another made me sick and angry at the inadequacy of the people who chained us, at their small obsessive minds. The poison was not in the locks but in the mental chains of our captors. Touch was, to us, survival, defiance, self-assertion. They chained us away from touching, from reaching out to one another to take a hand and say ‘Fuck it, come on, we’ll beat it.’

When we were taken off the chains John and I exercised vigorously.

Frank did not. We said ‘C’mon get up, walk.’ He would not walk. He believed he was the last American hostage. His sense of reality was much distorted, and his conversation and behaviour evidenced the huge toll the deprivations and brutality had taken on him. For long periods he would sit with a blanket over his head, lost in his own world. For him we were not there. When the guards came in during exercise periods he fell on the floor, and crawled to his corner. ‘Get up, don’t ever do that, get up, get up.’ I lifted him to make him stand or sit. This is what happens to anyone left alone for too long and their life becomes nothing but abuse, I reflected. ‘Get up, get up, never let these people see you crawling … Get up, get up, get up.’ A man can be so destroyed that he crawls across the floor, frightened. It was crucifying to watch. I could not bear it. ‘Get up, get up, don’t do this … get up.’

I hoped that I was speaking to something deep in him. My Irish bravado did not help. John McCarthy, being calmer, said to the guards: ‘Don’t beat this man any more … bring your chiefs here. I want to speak with them.’ The guards didn’t like that sort of questioning of their own freedom. They loved a brave man but they were frightened of the challenge. Mazin knew that if the chiefs ever visited and we complained of his ruthless abuse there would be much trouble for him. John’s firmness and assurance made Mazin fearful.

Within days the atmosphere of brutality changed. Mazin, afraid of the consequences to himself, began treating Frank like a favourite uncle.

Frank in response slowly returned to himself and to us.

Slowly, as the months passed, we each of us sought to find a meeting place in our understanding. Humanization is a reciprocal thing. We cannot know ourselves or declare ourselves human unless we share in the humanity of another. Finding our way back from the animal condition imposed on us was no easy task. The worlds we created and in which we found a refuge were more alluring than the vacant reality of the world outside ourselves. We needed the stimulus of another person, his sympathy, his critical judgement to help guide us. We needed his assurance that the world was worth the effort. And this when there was no external stimulus, no window to look out of, no door to walk through; when there was not the colour and the noise of movement and of life. Then the idea of a return home was more than difficult. It was frequently undesired. There were no signposts and no lights by which to see the way.

I remembered one of the prison cells I had been kept in. I awoke early in the morning hearing the dawn call to prayer and suddenly jumped up screaming and swearing as I swept the ants from my flesh.

Hundreds and hundreds seasonally invaded the cells in which we were kept. Like the giant Gulliver in a rage of frustration and cold sweat I would stamp and slap and crush them without mercy, without any thought of their separate existence. But after days of this I got tired of my anger. It exhausted me. The ants were inexhaustible. I began searching out where they entered the cell, blocking up small cracks and fissures with bits of wet tissue or broken matchsticks, but they would always find another point of entry. As I watched them pour into the cell through so many different places they became for me a form of entertainment. I watched them work. I watched how they would search out a crumb of bread four or five times their own size.