An Evil Cradling

  They would not be questioned in the presence of another prisoner. I took a leisurely shower, deciding that whatever had happened I would

  learn of it soon enough. I was led out from the shower and began my walk back to the cell. But as I slowly paced out my steps I was suddenly stopped and turned into the doorway of a cell which I normally passed on my return.

  I entered. The guard stood behind me and whispered in my ear ‘Look, look.’ I raised up my blindfold to find myself in a double cell.

  This was the cell in which our American friends had been held. The wall separating it from the cell next door had been knocked out.

  Before me on the floor was a mattress with a brand-new light cotton bedcover. On the stone shelf was soap, a red toothbrush and to my surprise a bottle of eau-de-Cologne. I glanced into the other cell and saw John sitting, his blindfold still down over his eyes. The guard asked from behind ‘You like? … You like?’ I nodded, yes. How could anyone say they liked this place? The guards thought that we should be delighted with our new larger accommodation. With the new bedclothes and eau-de-Cologne we were being treated like kings.

  But to us it meant nothing. If you put a diamond collar on a dog it’s still a dog, made more ludicrous by the diamonds around its neck. The guard patted my shoulder thinking he had performed me a great service and left. I sat down on the mattress and looked at John sitting in his cell. It was as if I was hypnotized. We sat in silence looking at one another. His cell and his bed and the accoutrements on the shelf beside him were an exact replica of my own. It was like looking at ourselves in a mirror.

  John took no joy in our new accommodation. He was beginning to feel now as I had felt when they first brought us new clothes to wear. I had refused, knowing that those new clothes meant we were to be staying for a long time. John’s sense of this new cell was that there was nothing awaiting us beyond the continuing monotony of this place.

  The thought struck us both at the same time: what had happened to the Americans? We dared not look out through the grille while the guards were walking about, taking the other prisoners to and from the shower. There would be time enough after everyone had been brought back and locked up to see if we could still communicate with our friends. ‘Poor old Tom,‘John said, ‘he’s not going to find it easy being on his own.’ I nodded but there was nothing more to be said. I did not want to think about Tom’s situation or to dwell too much on m that isolation, which both John and I had experienced when first captured.

  Later that afternoon, when everyone had been returned to the cells and the guards had retired to their own room, we thought it safe to look to see where everyone was.

  Tom Sutherland’s face peered from behind the grille of the cell that John and I had recently occupied. He signalled to us that Terry was in the cell next to us. As we began our slow hand-talking a face appeared in the cell next to Tom Sutherland’s. It was Frank Reed, another American — the man who had been brought some weeks before, and with whom we had exchanged knocks on the wall. Tom was already despairing. He did not know how he would be able to manage on his own. We knew he was afraid of the guards. He had previously been badly treated and now felt greatly threatened. We could only talk with Terry by passing our message across to Tom and Tom passing it back to Terry. These conversations naturally took longer. But both John and I knew that we had to keep contact with the others. If it were us in their situation we would desperately need this silent communication.

  The next few days we spent teaching Frank the rudiments of our hand-language. Once he had grasped enough of it he was able to tell us about himself and his life in Lebanon and how he had been kidnapped.

  Frank was able to confirm what I had suspected, that Leigh Douglas and Philip Padfield had indeed been executed. At first we were unsure what this would mean for us. We sat and talked about it, whispering quietly in the darkness. John and I both acknowledged that the death of these British men had serious implications for ourselves. It told us quite clearly that our captors would have no hesitation in executing who they wanted, when they wanted.

  We made a point now of communicating daily backwards and forwards across the cell passageway with Tom and Frank. They in their turn would pass the message to Terry in the cell beside us. But these conversations were too tedious. The longer they took the more dangerous they became for us. It was necessary, we all agreed, for us to re-establish our mail service. For these men now in solitary confinement such communication was essential. As before, we scratched out notes or even jokes on pieces of silver cigarette paper with a match for a pen. They were delivered in the old way and collected the next day. Tom, because of his past experience with the guards, felt unable to collect any messages that were left for him.

  Consequently someone had to pick up the message, bring it back to their own cell and then send the message by hand-signal across to him.

  We also discovered that there was another prisoner next to Tom. We only saw his face twice. He never noticed us looking at him or waving,

  trying to attract him. But he was a Korean diplomat who had been taken some few days before the disappearance of the two murdered Englishmen. For the rest of our time in this prison he sat alone on his mattress. We never saw his face again, only his feet as he walked past our cell each morning.

  Frank Reed, the most recent arrival, engaged our attention. He was a new face, and with that new face came new stories. As the days progressed we became somewhat anxious about Frank. Whether it was the shock of being taken captive, whether it was the result of so many weeks alone it would be hard to say, but Frank’s stories sometimes seemed outrageous. There is a kind of distortion of self-image which takes possession of a man subject to long periods of isolation. Frank eagerly informed us that he would soon be going home, that he had many important friends in the Lebanese government.

  We listened and made sarcastic remarks to one another about Frank’s confidence in his own importance. We had all learned the lesson that no-one was important in this situation. All men were equal and equally liable to end up dead if that was the will of those who kept us. The Lebanese government meant nothing to these men. Their allegiances lay in a very different direction, to God and to the Iranian Republic. The Lebanese government was unable to ensure our safety, much less our release. Yet Frank remained convinced that he would be going home soon. He would be the first to be released. His insistence on this at first bored us and then made us angry. But we tempered these feelings, remembering the kind of irrationality that we had both experienced in similar ways.

  During our first weeks of captivity each of us had undergone a process of denial of the reality we were trapped in; continually we minimized our situation and in so doing inflated our self-importance.

  We, like Frank, believed absolutely the lies we had concocted about our own importance.

  My anger at Frank was more because he had exposed to me that weakness and delusion that was so much part of that early period of captivity; I wanted to turn away from it; I did not want to acknowledge that weakness in myself.

  Frank had become me and I could not bear to look at the mirror image of myself.

  Late one evening, a fan rattled. It was a signal that someone wanted to talk. We stood up and looked out through the grille to see what eyes met ours. They were Frank’s. He was excited and very distressed. He told us how some of the guards had come and prayed outside his prison cell. He knew that he was going to be shot. We tried to calm his fears but our silent finger-talk was meaningless to him. He was caught up in the idea of his own execution. Anxiously he told us to tell his wife and young son whatever happened. We tried again and again to tell him that it meant nothing that the guards prayed outside his cell door. But he would not be calmed.

  Another day he told us how the guards had come and had told him that they were going to shoot his wife and son. This for him was further confirmation that his own death was near. We became more certain that he was suffering from paranoia and was full of the sorts of undi
scovered fears that rise up in a great rush and fill the mind beyond the control of reason. On other days Frank told us how the guards had come in with whips and beaten him. They had tried to torture him with wires connected to a car battery. We sometimes tried to make a joke, telling him to be careful, and not to give in to such wild imaginings. It was impossible to instil some reassurance or comfort in him across that wide silent passageway. We all need the reassurance of a human voice and the touch of another human to make those words of comfort meaningful and real. The silent hand-talk we shared was inadequate for this purpose.

  Each of us had travelled the road that Frank now found himself on.

  Frank’s suffering was not unique to him even now. In the cell next to his we would see Tom Sutherland’s distraught face. He found being alone difficult. There were no books, no games to play. I would look every day at these two men and see the face of one man desperate with thoughts of his imminent execution and the face of another man sunk in despair. I began to feel that here were not men’s faces but masks of madness, and as I watched their hands feebly spelling out their anguish, I felt myself becoming angry. For it was as if their own distress was a kind of contamination running rampant around the prison. It beat around the walls of my own cell, like those blind birds I had known in my own long period of isolation. Their despair, their fear came crashing in on me and I wanted no part of it.

  Occasionally I sank back on my mattress and condemned these men for giving vent to their frustrations and confusions, offloading them onto me when I could hardly deal with my own. Then I would feel the hot flush of guilt at my lack of compassion and my own self-interest. I saw shadows of myself in their anguish. I raged at the futility of trying to signal messages to a man who was desperately trying to kill himself.

  How can one make shapes in the air to convince a man that his own death would be a death of part of each of us? That he had no right to ask us to participate in his death? We would all be maimed by it, even in freedom. But I myself had on occasions thought the same thoughts, juggling with the desire to kill myself. My own experience taught me that in such a situation each of us dies many times. But if we can take hold of that moment of death, we go beyond it and pass into a fuller life.

  On many mornings I would hear Terry Anderson praying in his cell. He always began by thanking God for the day that had been given him. I remember one day Terry, full perhaps of despair and anger, sat banging his head repeatedly against the wall. The claw of despair and insanity reaches deep down into the very bowels of a man and wrenches all life from him.

  These were hellish days for all of us because in that silence each of us shared and partook in each other’s suffering. We breathed in great lungfuls of it, and had to regurgitate the foulness of it and find some way to protect ourselves from it: in so doing, hopefully protecting those who had become engulfed in it.

  The only thing in our prison cells with which a man might end his life was the plastic bag which we were given every day for rubbish and the remains of food. I thought often of a man lying alone in that tiny emptiness, so full with black imaginings. How could he take a plastic bag and place it over his head and block off all air from it and lie and hold it there and hope that he might soon die? It was not possible.

  Surely everything in the body and in the mind and spirit of a man would rebel against such a thing.

  The fury of life is always stronger than the compulsion of death.

  From somewhere John remembered an old axiom as the means by which we sought to forge our way out of this hell-hole: ‘Exercise, the companionship of friends and above these the gift of the spirit which is divine’ became for me and my friend John an oft-quoted phrase in which we would lay a claim to life. We had the companionship of friends in each other, outside our cell we had other friends. We each felt we had come to know, with meaning and real purpose, the gift of the spirit. Because we had found that gift understood by another person, it became more real.

  Exercise, which had for so long been denied us in our tiny cell, we could take up again in our new double cell. As before, in those marathon games of dominoes, we insisted on maintaining a fierce competitiveness. It didn’t matter that the room was only twelve by six feet. To us it was panoramic. Every day we would walk around this space, each trying to gauge the miles and always trying to better the previous day’s walk. It was the same with the press-ups and squats that we devised for this small area. They were fierce and demanding; we constantly pressurized each other as we tried to outdo each other’s best efforts.

  By this we could energize the mind and move it out of maudlin preoccupation. It was refreshing and life-giving. On other days, we would attempt to race around this small space hurling ourselves in a half-demented fury against the four walls, deliriously crashing into them. Sweating and panting like two retrievers, after some ten minutes of this lunacy we would throw ourselves down exhausted, giggling with laughter. We were children playing games. In his foolishness, John, as he raced around, would slap his backside pretending to be riding a horse. On other days we raced around the cell because the cold and dampness of the place had driven us to it. The cold white tiles exaggerated the numb atmosphere inside. But running for warmth was less enjoyable. As always John injected some humour. Strutting the cell and flexing his wasted muscles, he would act out some humorous caricature. Like a drill sergeant on a parade ground, he would bark at me: ‘Right you puny little Irishman, I am going to show you what a real man is made of,’ and with this he would press his bare chest against the wet freezing wall and to complete the performance would drop his shorts and plant his backside onto the same freezing tiles.

  We would imitate different characters as we played, or more frequently we would create characters out of our imagination. With these characters we entertained ourselves for many hours. Through them we brought other people into the cell to be with us, to talk to us or to make us laugh. In that laughter we discovered something of what life really is. We were convinced by the conditions we were kept in and the lives that we managed to lead that if there was a God that God was, above all else, a comedian. In humour, sometimes hysterical, sometimes calculated, often childish, life was returned to us.

  However, on each occasion that we found ourselves rising above the grinding monotony, something happened to warn us that reality is not always comic.

  (Dedicated to Brian)

  A fragment of sky alone remains

  The troubled memory of an Ulster day,

  Poised between black-fissured rock and violent sea

  Where high above the Causeway’s serrated edge

  A seagull lost in flight

  Endured alone the wind’s adversity.

  It had fallen from the chaos of the air

  In exultation or in pain,

  Plummeted downward, searching the perilous rock

  Hoping to regain the narrow cleft

  That was its home.

  Surrendering its solitude

  Paddling the air with ungainly feet

  It strove against the wind, struggling to touch

  The cliffs beneath.

  And yet, each time it neared, each time bird

  And land appeared to meet,

  The wind’s malicious hand cast it back

  Into frenzied sky,

  Barring it from the indifferent shore.

  Absorbed by the clownish heroism of its flight,

  I watched through an afternoon, that seemed

  Suspended in the tangled intricacy of

  Wing and wave,

  Until, mangled between foam and sky,

  Seeking always the comfort of its befouled nest,

  It sank beneath my sight, borne down by its

  Salt-sodden breast.

  No Yeatsian elegance certainly,

  No swan-like wing outstretched upon the night,

  And yet, like all impoverished birds of air

  This too a symbol in its own right,

  A metaphor for a rock-nurtured man,


  Dreaming of a wind-lashed, bitter land

  Not a land of ‘saints and scholars’ in which the heart Can find its ease,

  But a land from which the wind-crazed eye

  Can watch the desolation of the seas.

  We were still sending messages and signalling conversations.

  One day we had just finished sending a message to Tom and sat down to begin our game of dominoes. We heard a cell door open. I quickly scuttled to the fan and lying on my chest saw Tom being brought out. It was late afternoon. Tom walked past our door and was led to the guards’ room. A voice abruptly ordered him to wait. For some moments there was silence, then suddenly the radio was turned up to full volume. Western pop music flooded into our silent prison. We were perplexed.

  Western music was forbidden to these Islamic warriors. John positioned himself near the door, pressing his ear against it.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked. John hissed me to be quiet. Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’ filled the cell. Behind the music, we heard the sounds of a man being beaten. This was the first time since we had been together that we had heard that dreadful sound. We could only sit in silence and try to block out the sounds of the blows landing on naked flesh and the smothered moans of a man in pain. We tried to continue our game, but our black comedy had become blacker and the ‘Sultans of Swing’ took on a horrible significance. We sat and listened until it was over. Tom was shuffled back to his lonely cell.