Captivity (26 page)

But no, it will never be done. Hate is never finished. It sickens me. The shrapnel-blasted lives, the futile cycle of reprisal and vengeance, the blind self-righteousness, the endless grief, the calamity and waste of war. This is not what we were made for. God did not give us our amazing, beautiful bodies for hating and killing. We were given life to give life. Eyes for seeing the wild beauty of the world. Ears for hearing the sweet songs of children and birds. Hearts for loving. Hands for blessing and healing and giving.

How do I tell Junior this? How do I tell him that his life is sacred, his body a wondrous chariot, that he must not do this, foreclose every possibility of good in an irrevocable act of hate? I struggle to find words, for some way of communicating across the divide of language and power. He is captor and I am captive. I am slave and he is master. Words, I decide, are useless. He needs to taste and see,
feel
the goodness of God in his body. Only then will it be impossible for him to turn himself into a bomb.

Human touch. That’s how to do it. My heart starts pounding. It’s ridiculous, crazy, insane. I immediately sweep the idea out of my mind. One does
not
massage one’s captor.

DECEMBER 31
DAY 36

Morning exercise. The second-floor foyer is awash with light. How I love the reach and stretch of arms, the bend down and twist of waist, the all-around move of my body handcuff free, the feeling of being myself again.

Junior and Nephew are leaning against the stairway railing, talking. Junior is massaging the back of his neck with his hand. There’s a look of pain in his face. Something seizes me. The next thing I know, the blue folding chair is in my hands and I’m standing beside Junior. He looks at me. I point to the chair, touch my shoulder, make a massaging gesture with my hands. Junior looks at me strangely. “Massage, massage,” I say, demonstrating on my shoulders.

He looks at Nephew. Nephew shrugs. Junior takes off his sweatshirt and sits down. Now what? I stand behind him, take a deep breath, rest
my hands on his shoulders. I can’t believe it. I’m actually touching one of the captors.

The edges of his white undershirt are yellow and worn, the fabric saturated with his body oils. I’m surprised by the animal warmth of his skin, the ordinariness of his body. His back is covered with acne scars and blackheads. His shoulders and biceps are thin, soft, lacking definition. Such a strange contrast to the bulging strength of his forearms. For a moment I am seized by the desire to close my hands around his neck. He looks flabby and weak. I could do it, choke the life out of him. No, I think, Nephew is right there.

I put my fingers and thumbs to work. I search, press, knead, strip the muscles of his neck and upper back, gently at first and then with increasing pressure. His back is a mess of knotted cords and tight little fists of muscle.
“Zane, zane,”
he groans, melting into the chair. I breathe deeply and pray for this young man whose name I don’t know. I pray for the healing of his spirit, that he might know the amazing goodness of God in every cell of his body. I start to hum, “Go now in peace/go now in peace/let the love of God surround you/everywhere, everywhere you may go,” a song Tom taught us.

The massage prolongs our exercise period. Nephew directs Norman, Tom and Harmeet to return to their chairs. Sensing Nephew’s impatience, I pat Junior’s shoulders to indicate that I’ve finished. “Come on, Jim. Massage, massage,” he protests. I continue for another five minutes and then return to my chair. Nephew handcuffs me and leaves.

“Well, that was pretty crazy,” I say. I worry that I’ve crossed the line. I want to know what they think.

“No, that was good,” Harmeet says.

“It gave us more time for exercise,” Norman says.

“It was like you soothed the savage beast,” Tom says.

I feel uneasy. “I wonder what I’ve started. I just hope he doesn’t expect me to do it all the time.”

“He was really out of shape,” Harmeet says.

“Yeah, I noticed that too,” I say. We are agreed. Of the three, he would be the easiest to subdue.

–

New Year’s Eve is a popular wedding day in Iraq. All day and into the evening we hear waves of honking, celebratory gunfire and blaring music as exuberant wedding parties make their way through Baghdad in hired vans and buses, women and men in separate vehicles. “I love it,” Tom says. “How even in the middle of all this uncertainty about the future, and all the terrible suffering that’s come with the occupation, people just keep living their lives.”

That night we have a special New Year’s Eve visitor. We can hear him yukking it up downstairs with the guards. “He better come up and see us,” I fume. We’ve been waiting on pins and needles ever since he told us three day, four day, Big
Haji
in UAE. He comes without party favours, but he does have news. “The negotiations are almost finish. Just some small thing and you release. All of you. One day, two day. Not more.” He holds up his cellphone. “I get the phone call. Money in Baghdad and you release.”

JANUARY 1, 2006
DAY 37

Laughing in the stairwell. The captors are coming.
“La cahraba,”
Junior says, entering with a lantern, followed by Nephew.
“La cahraba,”
we say. Uncle enters quietly and eases himself carefully into a chair. He appears to have been limping.

Nephew steps towards us with the keys: his first time unlocking us. “Sleep, sleep,” he commands, but his fingers are nervous, clumsy. He doesn’t know how to position the handcuffs, which way to turn the key in the keyhole, when to shake the ratchet loose. Junior snickers as Nephew struggles a fourth time to open Norman’s handcuff. Nephew’s face is red when he comes to open my handcuff.

When we are unlocked, Norman goes to the bathroom and we start right away to set up for the night. As I stack the plastic chairs and put them next to Uncle, I happen to look down at his feet. He’s barefoot and his right ankle is massively swollen.

“What happened?
Shoo
this?” I say, pointing to his ankle.

“Football, football,” he says, lifting his bruised ankle off the floor.

“Have you seen a doctor?” Norman asks.

“No doctor,” Uncle says.

Harmeet bends down to look. “You should see a doctor. This
mozane.”

Uncle shakes his head. “Iraqi doctor
mozane
. No Iraqi doctor.”

“This massage?” Junior asks me.

“This no massage. Massage
mozane,”
I say.

We try to explain with our handful of Arabic words the best way to treat a sprain. Harmeet is something of an expert, having suffered several bad ones from playing squash. The one thing we seem able to successfully convey is that he should rest it as much as possible and keep it elevated. Then, without explanation, Tom is on his hands and knees, hands wrapping gently around Uncle’s ankle, eyes closed. Puzzled, Uncle and Junior look down at Tom and then at each other.

“
Shoo?
What this?” Junior asks, frowning.

I fold my hands under my chin and point to heaven. “He is praying to Allah. For
haji.”

Junior nods reverently. The room is quiet and still for a full minute. Then Tom stands up, eyes blinking rapidly as if emerging from a trance. “I was trying to draw the pain out,” he says. “Sometimes I can draw the pain out.” Junior and Uncle look at each other blankly and shake their heads. They are completely bewildered.

I’m the last one to go to the bathroom. When I return, the three captors are talking quietly. Norman and Tom are chained to each other by the ankle as usual, and Harmeet is handcuffed to Tom. I slide under the blanket between Norman and Harmeet.

“Shwaya, shwaya,”
Junior says, earnest like a choirboy. Only a little longer to wait.

“Hubis, hubis,” Uncle says, miming a jet taking off with his hands.

“Mooshkilla, mooshkilla,”
Nephew says, shrugging his shoulders.

We say good night and the captors depart. I’m shocked and amazed. They left without locking me up! I’m free as a bird! I feel myself starting to panic. I don’t know what to do. I slide my wrists against the
blanket. I can’t get enough of it. The direct, smooth-gliding contact of wrist against blanket is delicious comfort. “What should we do?” Harmeet asks. He wants to know if we should lock ourselves up or let them discover their mistake in the morning.
This is the wrong question
, I want to shout.

No one speaks for a long time. I can hardly breathe. Is it now? Is this the time, the open window, the key to the door, the helicopter rescue hoist coming down? Adrenalin roars through my body like a cataract. There’s nothing to stop me. I can get up, find out if the windows in the other rooms are also barred, see if the door to the roof is locked, creep downstairs when the captors are asleep and try to get out by the kitchen door, or find some other avenue of escape.

But!
What if, in opening one of the bedroom doors, it creaks, or there’s an alarm on the door to the roof, or I knock something over while feeling my way through the pitch-black kitchen? And if I’m successful, what will happen to the others when the captors discover I’m gone? Do I act to save my life or do I throw my lot in with the others? I’m frantic with indecision. Freedom! I want it desperately. But it means risking everything. Why are they so silent? We should be making a plan—acting! Don’t they know, can’t they see, what an opportunity this is? Damn them. Damn their passivity and resignation.

They’re waiting for my answer. “I’ll put them on in the morning,” I force myself to say, “before the captors come. So they don’t realize their mistake.” The thought of handcuffing myself is repugnant.

“Well, I’m certainly going to enjoy having my hands free,” Norman says. “Now I’ll be able to stand up for a bit in the night.”

“We’re all going to sleep better,” Harmeet says. “Good night, gentlemen.”

I’m suddenly exhausted. I turn onto my side, curl my hands under my chin and fall asleep.

–

JANUARY 2
DAY 38

“It’s time,” I say to Norman, sometime after the call to prayer, when the streets of Baghdad are still quiet and the day’s light is gathering. I close Harmeet’s handcuff around my right wrist. He sits up with a grunt and uses his free hand to lock us together.

There, I’ve done it. Chosen slavery over freedom. I lie back on my pillow in a stupor of self-loathing.

T.S. Eliot was wrong. January is the cruellest month, not April. January is an open wound and a sealed tomb, a door that won’t open, a gate that leads nowhere. We drift like broken bits of Styrofoam in a ceaseless ocean. Our lives are a breath held in suspended animation. There are no words to describe the pain of this waiting. A minute feels like an hour, an hour like a day, a day like a week.

January is named after Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, beginnings and endings. He’s a two-headed deity with two minds and two faces who sees the past and looks into the future at the same time. He’s the point-in-between that keeps watch as things move from one condition, one time and place to another. He’s the god of change.

Alas, it is a betrayal. Nothing changes. The gates and doors of January never open to us. There is only waiting.

It begins hopefully, with our hearts set on Medicine Man’s most recent promise: “Big
Haji
in the UAE, negotiations almost finish, money in Baghdad and you release.” Tom, however, cautions us. We’re in the endgame, he says. He says the image of a marathon came to him during one of his middle-of-the-night meditations. Every marathon runner says the last mile is the hardest to run. You’re almost there, but your body has used up everything. They call it hitting the wall, when a person is most likely to injure themselves, drop out or die, and getting across the finish line becomes an excruciating mental game. Now that we’re in the endgame it’s only going to get more difficult, and we’re going to have to work even harder. Except the difference for us is, we have no idea where the finish line will be.

I don’t know whether to be encouraged or despair.

January is cold. I wear every article of clothing I have: socks over socks, underwear over underwear, sweatpants over pants. We huddle together under the big red blanket and wrap our shoulders with some upholstery covers Tom found in the barricade, the curtains we use as part of our bedding. “We’re cold,” we tell the captors.
“Soba?”
we ask.
“La petrol, la petrol,”
they say, “Bush
najis.”

In January, Tom hits the wall. It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, the eroding away of the impossible resolve and stoic leadership of those first days. Fear, boredom, gnawing hunger, incessant cold, the lack of sunlight, exercise, time alone—these things accumulate, take their toll. “I can’t get warm,” he tells us in his check-ins. “My body is just not getting enough protein.” “My stomach is full of acid. It just can’t handle this diet.” “I don’t know what’s wrong. I just can’t sleep.” His face becomes grim and skeletal.

Tom’s response is to dig in, fight with our captivity, try and wrestle it to the ground. He exercises constantly, rotating his shoulders, stretching his neck, extending and lifting his legs in his chair. “I want to be able to hit the ground running when we get out of here. I’ve got to do everything I can to keep healthy,” he says. When he’s not exercising, he’s meditating. His long in-and-out breathing punctuates the days like a respirator. He tells us about his experiments with different images, prayers, patterns of breathing. He’s determined to spiritually prevail; it’s a matter of hard work and applying the right technique. “I’m just trying to stay in the present moment. I’m not going to be controlled by negativity,” he insists over and over. It’s a life-and-death struggle: his will against the captivity.

He sees God as a kind of non-personal energy, an energy of love, perhaps best described as light, which suffuses and imbues everything. There is no limit to this energy. Its desire is to grow and expand infinitely. A little bit of this energy, or light, exists in every human being. “There is that of God in everyone,” the Quakers say. Thus, every human being is connected to God and our task is to perfect this connection. Jesus points the way, shows us how to do it. While not the Son of God, Jesus had a unique and privileged understanding of his connection to
God, something he achieved through a life of hard spiritual work. We too are capable of perfecting our connection by going all the way in the spiritual life just as Jesus did. In so doing, we will be working towards an increase in the total amount of love energy in the Universe, and the time when everything becomes transformed into love.