‘Well that solves the sleeping arrangements,’ said John. ‘Obviously we are going to be staying here for a bit.’ To which I said ‘Age before beauty, John, I’ll take the bed.’ He simply smiled. Even in those first few hours I quickly discovered what a curious creature John McCarthy was. For having scanned the room and having walked around it, he proceeded to examine its contents. A battered filing cabinet stood in one corner. The drawers were all open and it was empty. In another corner was a sort of chest for keeping documents and books, about the size of a small wardrobe. It too was empty. We agreed that the long hot wait in the van must have been occasioned by our captors hurriedly emptying what must have been some sort of storeroom or poorly-equipped office. We were both sure that we were not far from the city itself. That was confirmed some hours later when we heard the roar of an aircraft. It was obvious that we were close to the airport.
While John was examining the room’s contents, which seemed to me somewhat pointless, I turned to lie back on the bed and my eye fixed on something which made me suddenly very fearful and very angry. Beside the bed was a power point in the wall. From it hung a long wire with its ends exposed. I looked at the metal frame of the bed and looked at this wire and thought to myself’I am not going to let this happen to me.’ I held my silence, not saying to John what I thought it meant. I remembered that other bed and those screams from the room where I was given a few days’ exercise in my first prison. I stared at the wires and wondered how we would deal with the situation if this bed was ever to become a torture rack. I carefully moved the bed some six inches to hide this potential instrument of torture, thinking absurdly to myself’Out of sight, out of mind.’ It was a case of hiding it not from myself or my companion, but from the guards who would frequently be in this room.
‘It’s so good to be able to walk about,‘John said, not noticing that I had moved the bed. ‘The rooms we were in were so God-awful small, I was only able to stand upright at one end of my cell. The other end, the ceiling sloped down to about waist height and made it impossible to walk.’ He then began to laugh. ‘Do you know they took one of the other prisoners and locked him in the broom cupboard? In that prison?’ I was aghast. ‘They did what?’ ‘Yes.’ John’s laughter grew more outrageous. ‘They locked the poor bastard in a broom cupboard, pulled out all the brushes and bits and pieces and stuck him in it.’ They had built a prison and it could not contain all the men they had imprisoned in it. I thought of this poor man, I presume an Arab, taken from a tiny cell and locked up in a broom cupboard. I chuckled in the shadow of John’s laughter. It was the sheer comic lunacy of the idea, and something from a Walt Disney cartoon or early Charlie Chaplin film came flashing through my head as I was infected by John’s laughter. I forgot the exposed electric wire and the metal frame of the bed.
The man in the broom cupboard remained for us throughout the years to come a pathetic image, but the thought of him always made us laugh uproariously. He became a metaphor for ourselves. We could imagine his utter despair, his madness, his hopelessness, all locked inside that tiny room and all of them crying to be released, and we in our way chose to release those things through laughter: sometimes on the edge of hysteria, but always lifesaving.
The warmth, the intimacy and companionship which came flooding to us both at that first meeting was always undermined by something deeper, which we did not care at first to share with one another. It was a curious wariness that each felt for the other person with whom he had to share his whole life.
Those first days were spent in a kind of frivolous skimming over the surface of deeper things that had risen in each of us during that long period of isolation. I remember spending many of those first nights as we tried to sleep speculating about what kind of man John was. The intensity of mind and heart that solitary confinement had wrought in me had filled me with questions. How much had I really changed?
Was it possible to be open with this man and reach that type of brotherhood that is, I suppose, the hallmark of all those who have known suffering?
I felt a desperate need to be honest, always acknowledging to myself that whatever I had felt in isolation was excusable and everything should be understandable. We could only really know ourselves by being open about that experience and the meaning we had drawn from it. I lay in the darkness looking up at the high ceiling and remembering incidents in that small cell. I had dreaded ever being put in a cell with someone else, with whom I would have to live a kind of half-life, afraid of exposing myself, afraid of him seeing the hurt, the pain that had preoccupied me in isolation. I imagined that my new friend would be thinking the same things.
‘All men are but teeth on a comb’ is an old Arabic saying and so it was with us. Both of us had gone through experiences that opened up new definitions of what we were as humans. But to be truly humanized and to be truly whole again it would be necessary to expose that, to share it honestly with another person. Would this man be frightened of what I thought? We become our meaningful selves only if people receive meaning from us. I doubted suddenly if I could
draw from those dark days in isolation a meaning that someone would receive and understand.
Now confronted with another human being who looked at me and observed me as I did him, I found myself wondering whether I was more frightened of my friend than I was of the men who held me and who might if they so desired end my life. As much as companionship filled me with a sense of joy it was an unresolved joy. I wanted to wash my conscience and my memory clean from the experience that had overpowered them and had in some way contaminated them. Dare I expose the scars of this outrage, and acknowledge my own ignominy?
It might, I thought, be a kind of capitulation. So much of our experience had been dehumanizing. Would the confession of it make me permanently non-human? A part-formed creature?
Fear of self and fear of the other re-emerged as the constant undercurrent of our first days together. But if there was a gulf between us, our sense of mutual gratitude obscured it. Faced with the liberty we received from one another, we cast off our sense of loss, and of atrophy. The gregarious character which is part of what we are as humans slowly returned to us. We needed someone to share our beliefs, or even lack of them. This man, who might have been an ideological opponent forcing me to withdraw and become hostile and defensive, instead reached out to embrace as we all need and ultimately must do. But the breaking down of these fears, of these insecurities, of all this self-questioning was not an immediate thing. It takes a long time to come back to yourself. It needs a commitment to the courage of another person in order to approach them, be honest with them and know that you will not be shunned or rejected by them. That coming together over the long months and the years that lay ahead was the remaking of humanity and the recreation of a meaningful future that seemed to have been stolen from us.
The routine of this new place was little different from the prison we had previously been held in. In the morning the guards would come.
We would be walked perhaps fifteen yards to a toilet, and later returned to this airy room. We were now fed three times a day. As the days went by other changes became apparent. The change in location from a tiny squalid cell to a. large airy storeroom was of major importance to us, of course. The more significant fact that the guards themselves had changed suggested to us that something outside had changed too. What it was we could not tell. We were never told who it
was that was holding us, nor did we ask. As we tried to piece some logic into our move here, we decided that the only answer was that we had indeed changed hands from one group to another. We could not be sure but all the signs suggested it.
The guards would rotate in teams of two every two days. There were six of them and over the period of weeks in which we were held there we came to know them quite well. They enjoyed coming in to talk with us if they had sufficient English. Much to our surprise, they would attempt to tell jokes. One of them, a tall well-made young man of about twenty-six who called himself Abed,
would signal his arrival by coming into the room and announcing light-heartedly ‘Abed’s Hotel is now open.’ This Abed took great pleasure in cooking us different meals on each of the days he was there. I recall him once telling us that he enjoyed coming to ‘care for us’; and we got to know a lot about him and his home and his family. We enjoyed his presence and the opening every two days of Abed’s Hotel. Another guard spoke in the most polite English. He was extremely well-mannered and we always had the feeling that he was not entirely happy with his task. He was always deferential to us. John called him ‘Jeeves’. Our introduction to the other guards was less pleasant.
During the first week in ‘Abed’s Hotel’ things were very disorganized.
The meal-times were irregular and cigarettes were not forthcoming. When I had been thrown into this room my briefcase had been set outside the door. During my period in the other prison I had kept a hidden stock of cigarettes, as there were days when none would be given to us. So I had brought eighteen cigarettes in my briefcase and our need of them was now great. Desperation overcame apprehension and I walked to the door and knocked loudly, then slowly retreated to my bed and waited for someone to respond. No-one came. I repeated my knocking and again no-one came. I thought there was probably no point in this, and of how much my knocking might antagonize the guards, and I was fearful of repeating my demand. But the thought of eighteen cigarettes in a briefcase outside the door was too strong. I went back again and knocked and knocked and knocked, demanding some kind of an answer. At least if they refused the cigarettes we would not have to sit thinking about them, longing for them.
I retreated back to my bed and heard the key turn in the door. We waited, expecting someone to come in. A voice asked ‘What you want?’ We knew then that the man speaking to us was outside the door and had only opened it slightly, so we both squinted from under our blindfolds to see a man’s forearm holding a gun, his hand trembling as he directed it about the room and hissed at us ‘Pray to God, pray to God.’ Fear and the desire to laugh at the stupidity of it gripped me.
How could a man see what he was pointing at when his face was behind the door. I quickly asked for the cigarettes from my bag. The nervous voice behind the trembling forearm and wildly wavering gun kept hissing ‘Pray to God, pray to God.’ It was apparent that this guard was very frightened about coming into the room. The door closed and locked, and we still had no cigarettes.
We looked at one another. The menace and the fear in the voice of the guard and that gun seeking out a target began to strike home. We stared at one another in silence. I raised my eyebrows in amazement and John blew out a sigh of relief. It was our first real confrontation with what might be our eventual fate. The hissing chant of ‘Pray to God’ made it all the more ominous. We had long thought of death, of being executed during our long period in solitary confinement. But suddenly confronting a gun being pointed at us seemed to break up the ice barrier that had prevented us from talking to one another of our fear of death. We were in agreement about one thing, and perhaps it was a romantic notion, but we were both convinced that if it ever came to it, then we would ask to have one last look at the sun before the sentence was carried out. On reflection neither of us seemed frightened of the real possibility of this. So long sunk into contemplation of our own death, we had come to terms with it and dismissed it.
But we both shared a sense of the ultimate indignity of being executed in a strange building within four enclosed walls. That would be worse than death itself.
The floodgate began to open. We eased ourselves out of our quiet and unspoken apprehension of one another. We began slowly, carefully but honestly to tell one another of the things we felt, the things we thought about, and our experiences during that time alone.
It is always difficult for two people to come together and talk openly about those experiences that might normally be termed religious. But once we had begun and realized that each was listening to the other, then there was no need to hold back. Sometimes the words were inadequate to what we needed to share. This inadequacy was always overcome by a sense that we each understood, whether the words or the concepts were correct or not. We admitted to moments of weird religious mania. Perhaps our intoxication with deep and profound
things in isolation was misconceived by the conscious mind as a sort of religious fervour. Maybe in its own way it was. But such fervour seems always to speak more about our needs than our beliefs. In that emptiness, memories and delusions piled one on top of the other until they seemed to fill the vacuum. We both spoke about the voices we heard in our heads, and in being so frank we returned to a kind of childlike innocence that absolutely believed in all these imaginary things.
At times God had seemed so real and so intimately close. We talked not of a God in the Christian tradition but some force more primitive, more immediate and more vital, a presence rather than a set of beliefs.
Our frankness underlined the reality of our feelings. We were both still trying to deal with the force and the weight of them. We prayed unashamedly, making no outward sign. We simply knew that each of us did pray and would on occasion remind each other to say a prayer for someone in particular among our families and lovers. In its own way our isolation had expanded the heart, not to reach out to a detached God but to find and become part of whatever ‘God’ might be. The energizing experience of another human being did not allow either of us to dwell too long on these matters, which were deep and unresolvable. We gave honestly of ourselves and of our experience and each received from the other with gratitude whatever was given.
On occasion there would be discussions on vaguely religious themes, but they were certainly not confined by the dictates of straitlaced doctrines. We had each gone through an experience that gave us the foundations of an insight into what a humanized God might be.
We talked frequently of where we might be, how we might get out of this place and where we could go to ensure our safety. We structured different plans and went through them in meticulous detail only to find that they could not succeed. On going to the toilet each morning I would cover my face with a very old tattered towel which was so worn with washing that I could see plainly through the threadbare material. We were quick to look around us on this short walk and gather what information we could. We pooled that information and hoped that one day it might give us an escape route.
High up in the corner of one of the walls, just below the ceiling, there was a large air vent. It was impossible to get one’s body through it. Curious as a cat, McCarthy would frequently climb up on top of the old filing cabinet, lift out the grille and peer out into the room beyond. He would give me daily reports after the guards had left the building on what they had left behind them. There were always the inevitable Kalashnikovs and hand guns in the room where they slept.
On the table just outside the door were cigarettes, bread, and other items of food. We noticed that one guard left the key in the door after locking us in. There was a gap of about five inches between the bottom of the door and the floor itself through which some of the guards would simply push our food without bothering to come in.
This was extremely distressing to John, to have his food shoved across a filthy floor. But as we realized the implications we were not displeased any longer. It would be easy now to remove the key and bring it under the door.
For many days we had been collecting bits and pieces which we thought might be useful at some later stage. Foolish things: I had been ripping threads from my bed and making lengths of string; a coat hanger we found hanging in the tin cabinet; and I had finally revealed the piece of electric wire fitted to the socket on the wall and attempted to pull it out. John was not happy about this, thinking that it would make our captors very angry, to which I could only respond ‘I don’t care if it makes them angry, John, I’m not going to make it easy for them’; and so I ripped it from the wall and hid it under an old piece of raffia carpet on the floor. We had by this time obtained some old magazines. They were s
everal years out of date, and of no importance or value to us, except that they were something to read and talk about.
One of the magazines had a full-face cover picture of the Shia spiritual leader Fadlallah. There were two other magazines, one in French, the other in English. When one of the guards discovered that his friends had given us this particular magazine with Fadlallah’s face on it he became angry. It was clear that those who were holding us had some connection with the fundamentalist leader.
We had, while squirrelling away the bric-a-brac of our possible escape attempt, assiduously cultivated the guard who called himself ‘Joker’. When he first told us this we burst out laughing, much to his delight. Joker was the man behind the trembling hand who pointed the gun at us and told us to pray to God. If we could overcome his fear life would be much easier for us, and less difficult for him. And so we had over the weeks chatted with him, built up his confidence until he would come into the room, sit and talk and leave again feeling happy and confident.
We had planned, when Joker would next be on duty and had left the key in the door, that we would poke out the key and let it fall onto some pages of a magazine that we would slide under the door, and then drag the key back into the room. We talked while we were planning this and we would start panicking about what we would do once we got the door open. We resolved we would deal with that when it was necessary to do so.
What few clothes I still had, my father’s shirt, my trousers and new shoes, I had carefully washed and put away in that tin cabinet so I could at least leave without being too obviously half dressed. John’s observations through the air vent high in the wall had also told us that Joker arrived by bicycle. We laughed long into the night at the thought of us cycling through the most dangerous part of town in this most dangerous part of the world on Joker’s bicycle, one pedalling and the other sitting on the handlebars or on the saddle. The laughter deflected from us the real fear of what we were planning. How fast we could pedal, and to where, we never considered.