He began laughing again. ‘What do you mean, my old son?’ he asked. I explained to him how with his origins in the McCarthy clan in County Kerry, his now proudly held English Protestant citizenship made him a type of turncoat. ‘You’ve taken the Queen’s shilling … You went fleeing out of Ireland when times were tough, took the Queen’s shilling, changed your faith and now look where it’s got you.
That will teach you to sell your heritage for a mess of porridge.’ He was laughing and I saw him studiously take on board this new term, ‘shilling-taker’. ‘Shilling-taker,’ he said, trying to get my Belfast accent. ‘Shilling-taker.’ We were both pleased and delighted with this new term that had entered into our repertoire and would remain a constant source of abuse and of affection.
When we were not engaged in our marathon domino games or our candle-making or our discussion of John’s ancestry we found ourselves talking of how men could do such things as had been done to us. What was in a man that allowed him to lock up another human being for long periods of total darkness -a human being he did not know or understand, who had given him no offence, nor committed any crime against him. We could never answer the questions we asked ourselves. But as we talked and tried to understand how these men could ever justify their actions, I recall saying to John ‘I understand it, I accept it, even though I do not condone it… I think I understand it.’
John looked back at me, puzzled, and quick as a flash I said to him ‘Well in another sense now you know what it is like to be Irish.’ He knew what I was hinting at, for so many people in the history of Ireland had lost their lives or liberty and now here was this English man undergoing something of the agony that people were still suffering in English jails.
Another morning came. I lay in the dark silence waiting for my friend to wake, and thought back on the sleepless night I had undergone. Half asleep but with my mind working overtime I had jg suddenly opened my eyes, and stared into the blackness, listening to the silence made louder by the darkness around me. For a moment I thought how do I know I am alive? I felt my skin and felt my face and it gave me no assurance. I could have died in the night. I might be dead now. Do even the dead imagine living? I see nothing and hear nothing and feel only my flesh. What does it tell me? This kind of self? indulgent iny? trospection fascinated me, yet made me wary. Was my mind so empt Was I left only with this futile curiosity? For some minutes I lay and thought again about what happens when there is nothing more to think about. Do I reach the edge, and feeling the intoxication of its darkness, throw myself hungrily into it? Would a mind so completely empty feel any pain?
I struggled to convince myself that by thinking such thoughts my mind was not empty. Even if it was approaching a vacuum these questions denied that there ever was or ever could be a real emptiness of mind. I somehow convinced myself that, in some way that I could not explain, the mind could never become a void. I repeated these words lest that insidious panic should take hold again. The mind is endless. There is no vacuum in the mind.
I heard John wake and quickly seized the opportunity to move myself out from this obsessive introspection. ‘Good morning, your Eminence. What may I order you for breakfast today?’
It was later that day, as we sat huddled beside our homemade candle playing our usual dominoes, that the light suddenly, blindingly returned. We both started up, dazzled. We looked at one another and held one another’s stare and then both simultaneously jumped up raising our hands in the air, jumping around in circles. The light was back on! ‘How many days do you think it’s been, John?’ Looking at him now in the full light, wondering strangely had he changed any. ‘I don’t really know,’ he answered. ‘Seven, eight days, now that I think of it it’s hard to remember.’
But this surprise of light was to be topped by something which made this place we called the House of Fun funnier and more insane than we could ever have imagined. Days passed with their usual monotony. But then one day we heard the guards coming to unlock the cell. As usual we pulled the blindfolds down. We were both given new shorts and new T-shirts and told to dress. The cell closed and we looked at each other, puzzled. ‘I am sure we can’t be going anywhere, not in this get-up anyway. What can it mean?’ John asked. I simply shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ I said: ‘At least it’s good to have them, the elastic has gone out of my shorts and I have to tie them in a knot to hold them up they’ve had so many washes, but they are more often around my ankles than around my ass.’ Without further conversation we changed and sat down thinking nothing more would happen that day.
We had guessed wrong and the key was turning in the padlock again. ‘Come, come’ a voice said to John and I heard him lift himself off his mattress and walk out into the passage. The door closed and I waited. After some minutes I was also walked to the guards’ room. It was our habit to tie the blindfold loosely so that we could look down underneath it at our feet as we walked. Now as we stood in the guards’
room I looked down and saw spread out on the floor the edge of a new bed cover. The creases were still in it and sitting on top were bowls of fruit and nuts, oranges and apples. I tried to turn my head slowly to take in the area several feet around me and caught sight of other bowls with similar fruit and nuts laid out around the perimeter of this bedspread stretched on the floor. Two hands gently pushed my shoulders. ‘Sit, sit’ a voice said quietly and I sat down. I could hear John’s voice across from me say something to one of the guards.
‘What is this?’ he was asking. We both feigned surprise for we knew what it was.
It was John’s birthday. These terrorists were giving him a birthday party. One of the guards switched on a cassette player playing some piece of classical music and a few other guards arrived and talked excitedly amongst themselves. Then we heard the voice of the officer Said. He seemed angry and switched off the cassette. For this zealot, music was absolutely forbidden. With much enthusiasm we passed the next ten minutes eating our nuts and some fruit and then great slabs of birthday cake were set before us. We ate and tried to speak with the guards who were sharing our birthday meal. I tried to visualize the situation: here were five or six men with guns in their waist bands and Kalashnikovs stashed against the wall, sitting here eating this food, trying to talk normally with us as we sat blindfolded, fumbling with the food that we could not see properly, trying to peel the fruit or to break the shell from the nuts. The House of Fun was restored to its lunacy and the black comedy was began again. John must have been reading my mind. From across the birthday feast I heard him politely ask ‘Excuse me, do you think I could have a photograph of this?’
Said, the officer, barked some order and into this bizarre scene there came a chorus of Arab voices singing a discordant harmony of’Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday John, Happy Birthday John.’ Our laughter was nervous and forced, though we felt unafraid.
This would take some time to come to terms with. When we had finished the meal and washed it down with a cup of Pepsi we were raised from the floor. A handful of nuts and some boiled sweets were placed in our hands and I began my walk back to the cell. The door closed behind me and I sat waiting in confusion for John. I expected him to be brought in immediately after me, but I was left to wait for fifteen or twenty minutes before I heard the door opening and John entering.
I lifted my blindfold and John standing above me raised his. ‘Okay, birthday boy,’ I said ‘what else did you get?‘John raised his eyes and his outstretched hands in a very typical Arab manner. He answered ‘You’re not going to believe this, you’rejust not going to believe what this bunch of fruitcakes have just tried to do.’ I waited for him to continue. ‘Well then come on, spit it out, what happened?’ I asked. John began to explain and as his story unfolded my laughter unfolded with it. ‘They took me a little way down the passage, then spread a blanket on the floor and told me to lie down. I tell you, Brian, I was a bit panicky … I lay down on my back and Said said to me “Don’t worry, nothing bad, nothing bad happen…” I
wasn’t too sure about nothing bad going to happen… I’ll be honest, Brian, for a moment I thought these bastards were going to sexually abuse me.’ At that statement I stopped laughing for a moment and quickly said to him ‘You must be joking, who would want to sexually abuse a piece of rubbish like you!’ He smiled and continued his story.
‘I just lay there, I didn’t know what these cretins were going to do.
Next thing I heard all the guards come around me. Said was giving orders and I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Then I felt their hands reach under my legs, my backside, then hands on my back and at the back of my head as I lay there. I was beginning to panic I can tell you. Then they started humming something and then they started laughing and Said started shouting and they were quiet for a while with their hands under me and then they were all laughing again. I don’t know what I was feeling at that time but I just wanted to get away from those crazy creeps.’ ‘Well, what was it all about then?’ ‘You won’t believe it, you just will not believe this.’ ‘Come on, John, stop fucking around and tell me.’ ‘Well it’s simple,’ he answered. ‘They were trying to levitate me.’
I looked at him dumbfounded. ‘They were trying to what?’ ‘I told you you wouldn’t believe it. They were trying to levitate me.’ I rolled back on my mattress, the laughter choking me. ‘Did it work, John-boy?’
‘Did it hell,’ he answered. I was laughing again. ‘Well I suppose you can always tell your grandchildren that you were levitated on your birthday by a bunch of Arab gunmen.’ ‘No-one would believe it,’ he said dolefully. ‘You bet,’ I said. ‘The inmates of the asylum are the keepers of the sane.’
The return of the electricity and the birthday party had somehow endeared us to these men. In the days that were to follow they would frequently come into our cell and try to talk, and seeing us play dominoes they would join the game. Said, the prison chief, who had beaten me so badly over my refusal to be shaved, now visited us often.
He would play dominoes and cheated outrageously. We knew even with our blindfolds that he was looking at the pieces we had in our hands. For Said it was important to win. We knew his cheating and laughed at its outrageousness. Yet this man who walked around the prison making noises and imitating cartoon creatures, in the belief that we were frightened by them, sat and played dominoes with us. The first time that he came he sat for almost an hour with his arm around my shoulder. It was as if I was his brother or long-lost friend. I knew that this action, sitting, almost nursing me or holding me in an embrace, was occasioned by a fierce kind of guilt. There was no other reason why he should display such affection.
For some reason the return of the light had prompted our captors to move the prisoners around. Frank was now brought from the cell opposite and put into the cell beside us, next to the guards’ room.
Terry was moved across into Tom’s cell, and Tom moved into Frank’s. The reason for these shifts we did not understand, but they later led to an event which was to remind us that beneath this idiocy and seeming friendliness cruelty was lurking, primed and always ready to be released. We knew from Frank’s signalled conversations with us that he had become a Muslim, enabling him to marry his Syrian fiancee. The guards had somehow learned of this and one of them visited him frequently with the Koran and talked with him about its contents, though we could not hear their conversation clearly.
Terry Anderson had been remonstrating with Said for a Bible to be given to us. His persistence had been fruitful and two Bibles were brought, one for John and me, and another one circulating around the three Americans. The blood and gore of the Old Testament stories horrified me and I sometimes wondered how far the men who held us were removed from the mentality of those vengeful days.
John and I both found great solace in reading the Psalms. The anguished suffering mind that had created them and had cried out to God in his suffering reflected much of our own condition. Exhausted with profound questions and never finding an answer, we took relief
in devotional moments. It seemed we could meditate on the active nature and qualities of what this God of love could mean in human terms. The gentle eroticism of the Song of Songs delighted me and I read it over and over. The Book of Revelation held me mystified with its elaborate language and symbolism.
It was sometimes disturbing to overhear a man in the next cell pray, speaking only of his own worthiness and his own importance and telling God why God should set him free. Long periods of isolation sometimes puff up the ego to monstrous dimensions. In this place we had only ourselves and choked sometimes with self-pity or self-indulgence, we lost control of our humility. Perhaps the need to keep hold of our identity, the need to reaffirm constantly to ourselves that we had value, and that we were important, allowed us to believe that we were greater than we really were. A man who prays in praise of himself rather than of what he understands to be God puts himself at a far remove from the God to whom he prays.
Sometimes the guards who spoke reasonable English would ask us questions about Christian belief. As far as we could we would answer them and attempt to talk to them about their own beliefs. They seemed amazed that we had read the Koran but they remained adamant that Christ was not the son of God. God was God and needed no sons. But always their belief was undermined by their own repressed sexuality. The idea that God could have sex with a woman in order to have a son fascinated them. But for us these conversations were difficult. We knew that these men cared nothing about scriptural or doctrinal argument. Their minds were simply intoxicated by the idea of a sexual God.
On those occasions when they brought with them a copy of the Koran in English we would turn again to those chapters that we recalled as being significant to our own situation. We would point out the phrases and question them; sometimes they would answer but their minds were not trained to think. They would leave us sometimes angry, sometimes confused. For them the relationship with God was one of complete submission and man should not question the ‘words of the Koran. I could not abide their abject surrender. How can one submit to what one does not understand? Their submission to God was an act of repression. Their God was a God of judgement and of vengeance and they were afraid of this God. And their own repressed fascination with sexuality hinted at none of the liberation that a religion should present to its followers. It held them in bondage.
These men existed in their own kind of prison, perhaps more confining than the one that held us.
The Count of the Holy Roman Empire and I had been talking about house-building. We chose locations high in the hills or near the sea, though we were both city born and bred. The city held no fascination for us now. We dreamt of a quiet rural idyll. Slowly stone by stone and plank by plank we discussed our dream homes. How we might build them and what we might do in them.
Our talk must have affected our keepers. For the past few days they had been painting the walls outside our cell. The work came to an end. We peered out, the walls were a creamy pink and a flat grey.
‘It looks like we are living in a fucking fairy cake, John,’ I told him.
The walls reminded me of icing sugar on a cheap cake. The guards were coming regularly to talk or to play dominoes. It seemed that they were fed up with their own company. During these games if I was losing I would exclaim ‘Oh bollocks!’ Once, a guard turned to John mumbling ‘John, what mean bollocks?’ ‘It is a very bad word,’ he answered. The guard seemed satisfied, quietly repeating to himself’Bollocks, bollocks.’
A new guard arrived. His English was quite good and his French even better. He told us his name was Abed but this was certainly not the Abed we had known in Abed’s Hotel. This man was younger. He was at first very polite, and somewhat shy. He was perhaps overawed by the situation, for here he was talking with foreigners. He spoke slowly, asking us to forgive him for what he was doing. In the days that followed he came frequently, and spoke often of his religion. He told us he had had visions in which he had seen angels, Christ, Moses and the holy Imams. We sat quietly
listening and not knowing what to say. He explained how when he had been in the south with the other ‘warriors’, they had been creeping through the countryside to make an attack on some Israeli installation. Many of his friends had been killed.
As they prepared for their attack he looked behind him and saw many more warriors follow him, coming to help. These were the warriors sent by Muhammad and promised in the Koran.
At night we would sometimes hear him crying out or moaning fearfully in his dreaming sleep. Religion had possessed this man with an evil kind of possession. He continued his stories, telling us how his brother who had been killed would come to him in the night and call to him, to come and join him. This man’s death-wishing was of the most morbid and fantastical kind. Both John and I pitied, as much as we were a little afraid of, his strange warped mentality.
All of them wanted to die for Islam and each of them in their time told us of the plans they had made for heroic death in the name of Islam. But their dreaming and death-wishing had the quality of a child’s wish-fulfilment. Some of them saw themselves driving a car bomb into a crowd of Israeli soldiers, killing themselves and everyone around them. One of them hoped to crash an aeroplane into the heart of an Israeli town. Somehow this was not the thinking of a cold and calculating terrorist mind. They believed fervently that all the warriors of Islam went to an Islamic heaven. ‘This life no good,’ they would frequently reiterate but their boasting and their dreaming sometimes went beyond storytelling. Many times they would come into our cell brandishing a pistol or Kalashnikov and they liked to show us their guns. the prison chief, was the most boastful of them all. He had a huge macho dilemma and during these exhibitions he would bark out orders to the other guards until they brought half the armoury they kept in the guardroom. Several Kalashnikovs were shown to us, semiautomatic pistols, a Beretta, hand grenades and a mortar launcher. Said proudly showed us a rocket launcher, which he told us was one of many in their arsenal. We took these guns in our hands and fumbled with them. The magazines were always removed first. Some of these weapons were of Italian or Spanish origin, but the larger weapons like the mortar and the anti-personnel rocket launcher were of British make.