Sitting in that darkness one evening, speaking of those songs and the music we loved and missed more than we had ever expected to, we
promised how, should we ever leave this place, we would each teach ourselves to play some musical instrument. We both believed ourselves hugely impoverished in that neither of us had any musical skill. John was keen to take up the piano, which he had begun to learn as a child. I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to play a banjo and a harmonica. Occasionally when John was asleep I would sit with my two hands cupped over my mouth holding an imaginary harmonica and humming tunes into my hands as I rocked back and forth, its rhythm nursing me and comforting me. I believed myself to be the world’s finest harmonica player. I was indeed, in the world in which I was held.
It was again late at night when the key turned in the padlock. The door began to open very slowly, which was unusual. We sat in silence facing one another, wondering who had come in and what they m wanted. It was unusual for the guards to visit at night and especially when there was no light in the cell. Someone came in, a voice spoke, one we did not recognize, but it was a voice disguised, just as Said often attempted to disguise his own. It spoke in Arabic.
We didn’t answer but we both knew who this person was. It was Abed, the young man of the nightmare dreams: the zealot who cried out in his sleep, who saw angels, who had spoken with Christ and Moses and who had seen the imaginary holy warriors of the thirteenth Imam march behind him as he carried out a raid in southern Lebanon.
This was the young man who told us he had hidden in a cave in the hills to experience visions. This was the man who heard his dead H brother call to him ‘Come, come, come and join me here,’ so immersed in the Koran that his mind was contaminated by hallucina tions. We had tried to teach him English. When he first came he asked m us for forgiveness, and kissed us on the head as he left us, but now he had become someone else.
He stood over John sitting some ten feet from me and I heard again the butt of a Kalashnikov fall repeatedly on John’s body. Slowly and unexcitedly the blows continued and then stopped. I heard him walk towards me. This time I cared nothing. There was no trembling. m There was no fear. I secretly relished what was about to happen because of the strength it gave me. Here it was again, the thumping down of this weapon bruising my body. Unlike the excited quasi-sexual rapture of Said’s rape, this man was frightened, his blows only j half as heavy as Said’s, slow and deliberate, picking the impact points.
I even felt a smile inside myself. The hot tempest that was part of Said’s abuse was not here now. I was oblivious for the duration of this beating. He stopped and walked away quickly, almost running from the cell. I crawled over to John. We were both unhurt and unafraid.
In the morning we were taken to the toilet, our arms firmly twisted up our backs, Abed kicking and pushing at our feet. Both of us laughed.
Abed now became our tormentor every other night. Occasionally in the afternoon he would come in and play out a game, his role as torturer. He would take great pleasure, having beaten us, in jumping up and down on our outstretched legs. We never spoke or cried out. It was becoming apparent to us that this perverse individual had more need of us than he understood himself. He was attempting to make himself a man. He thought by beating and brutalizing us, that his manhood was assured.
We spoke often and at length about Abed, attempting to understand what distortion of mind or imagination could allow him constantly to beat naked and blindfolded men in the dark. What was there in a man that would tell him such things made him more a man? I often thought that he had seen in Said’s violence a way of obtaining power and stature and perhaps a way of obliterating his own weakness. In these moments of torture Abed suddenly had had thrust into his hands absolute and unlimited power. He could not resist it. He immersed himself in it. He had become addicted to his own cruelty. But in the compulsive addiction to the power he had over us he was powerless.
His need of us made him our prisoner. In our silence and in our strength he felt only his own fear thrust back on him. He knew and was afraid that we cared nothing for him and would not submit nor cry out to please him. As these beatings continued it was as if Abed was feeding off our naked flesh. We were bored by his pathetic need.
Our silent resistance made him more fearful, and we felt his fear in the blows and laughed inside ourselves. But not all was calmness and quiet resistance.
John knew the Vesuvius of rage that smouldered inside me. ‘John, I can’t take much more of this little bastard using me and getting himself off on me. At times I feel like blowing up and breaking the little bastard’s neck.‘John was always calming. ‘I know … I feel the same,’ he said. ‘But what’s the point. You do that and you give them what they want, full licence to do anything they want.’ What reinforced my anger and loathing at this man’s violence was that on other occasions he would come to visit us as himself, Abed, and talk, perhaps play a game and then go off again to return later, his voice disguised, and begin again to take his pleasure, his addiction out of control. I was always sickened when he sat with us to talk of his family and of the politics of Lebanon and then return in the darkness as someone else: the other person he wanted to be but could not be because he was not a hero and we would not let him be one. How long would we have to endure this? I wondered as I tried to sleep.
The answer was to come sooner than either of us expected. After lunch we were playing a game and making up our new songs when we heard several feet come to our door. Quickly we pulled down the blindfolds and the guards entered. Our cells were emptied of everything. We were left sitting on a cold floor wearing only a pair of shorts. We sat in that freezing silence for hours, wondering what was happening. We found some last pieces of candle wax and some threads and made a small candle, and in the white darkness we sat with our eyes fixed on this struggling blue flame, shivering and shuddering in the cold. That little tiny blue flame was like ourselves, struggling to stay alive, and then finally exhausted with the struggle it was snuffed out, and the blackness crashed in.
We lay huddled together for warmth, then heard feet moving quickly towards our cell. The door opened, two sweaters were thrust at us. ‘Put on, put on,’ a voice ordered. We did so, grateful for the warmth. Then quickly we were taken out and rushed along the passageway and heaved up through that hole which we had been dropped through so many months before, then out along the dark passage and once more into that old Volkswagen van which we had now christened ‘The War Wagon’.
For some twenty minutes we careered and bumped through the dark suburbs of Beirut. The van stopped and we waited, expecting to be taken out and delivered to another prison. But the waiting was to be prolonged and for three hours, our muscles and bones aching, we were made to sit in cramped silence. Every time we moved or sought to stretch our limbs or to ease the pain, a gun would touch our chests or heads, and a voice would spit out ‘Silence.’ But we cared little now for guns and this was an order that could not be obeyed: the cramp needed to be relieved.
The agonized waiting ended. The old Volkswagen engine exploded into life. We drove on for two or three minutes, then stopped again.
The door slid open and quickly we were taken from the van and
walked awkwardly inside what seemed to be the foyer of an old apartment block. I was left waiting with one of The Brothers Kalashnikov. John was brought quickly behind me. The Kalashnikov Brother seemed genuinely delighted to see me. I heard him announce himself and pat my shoulder, then John and I and Abed were squeezed into a small lift and it ascended. John was shaking, not from fear, it was just his muscles and limbs relieved suddenly from their tense strain. Abed spoke, this time in French. ‘Pas bonne experience.’ He touched his pistol to our foreheads. We smiled.
From the lift we were ushered into an apartment, walked along its hall, and into one of the bedrooms. A huge room, perhaps three times the size of our double cell. A carpet filled the floor. Nothing else was there. Within minutes mattresses and covers w
ere brought to us. One of the guards asked ‘Do you want a toilet?’ I said ‘You bet,’ and was taken to the bathroom. The door closed, I lifted my blindfold and stood in amazement: a bath, a shower, bidet, washbasin, real soap. I squatted with mystified delight on the toilet seat. Laughing in my confusion at once more sitting on a toilet seat, I quickly finished, knowing that my friend would most certainly want to use these luxurious facilities.
We slept that night side by side, a two-foot gap between the mattresses. We were exhausted from the cold in the prison and the cramped ache from sitting in the van, but the size of the room was a relief. Space to walk again; we cared for nothing else. The windows were covered with sheet steel, but we had electric light with a switch on the wall. This was paradise.
The next morning we discovered what we had least expected.
There were other prisoners being held in the bedroom opposite ours.
We could not see them but their voices revealed that the Americans were not home, they were here, hostages still. The next six weeks we spent here were comparatively carefree. The horrors of the House of Fun passed quickly from us.
We walked around the room daily, scoring up the miles, and in the evening played dominoes, often talking and reminiscing about that last awful place. Mahmoud, the guard who spoke good English, and with whom we had established a reasonable relationship, was here.
Abed was too and so was our friend the Kalashnikov Brother who we now knew as Saafi. Said visited occasionally. We had little to say to him and he stayed for only a few minutes. Walking around the perimeter of the room, John felt a lump under the carpet. Cautiously we lifted it. Underneath was a fat envelope. We opened it. 240 Lebanese pounds. We were amazed. Searching and lifting the carpet in other places we found a letter written in very small handwriting. It was in French and difficult for us to decipher. We knew that this letter and the money had been hidden by some other guest of our captors.
We returned the letter, because it would have been dangerous to have it found in our possession. The money we decided to keep. “This is our taxi fare home, Brian, if we ever get out of here.’ I laughed, but it was a spur to hope. We had never given up planning our escape. Escape was never possible when held in an underground prison, but locked up in an apartment there was always a possibility.
Abed came regularly with our food. He had become himself again.
Perhaps being away from the confines of the prison and being able to look out from the balcony onto the street below, he, like us, had become more human again. He would frequently attempt to wrestle playfully with John. It was impossible, it was a piece of childish foolishness. John, blindfolded, could see nothing. Abed would laugh.
He never played such games with me. He always sensed my antagonism. I think he was fearful. So was I, for if he attempted to play with me I was not sure I would be able to keep it playful.
The six weeks we spent in the apartment were alleviated when they at last gave us some books. Mostly they were ineffectual gothic romances or poorly written stories dating from the 1950s. Surprisingly some of them were recent works, particularly in the field of international politics. Michel Seurat’s name was written in a few of them. We knew he was a Frenchman taken hostage at the beginning of Islamic Jihad’s campaign. We also knew, from the Americans, that Seurat had died at the hands of his kidnappers.
We were not disheartened though we knew the three Americans were being held in the room opposite. We knew also, from hearing a chance radio broadcast, about Terry Waite’s disappearance. We were still hopeful, we still wanted to believe that our transfer to this apartment was a preparation for our release. We concluded that the kidnapping of Terry Waite was only a measure to ensure the kidnappers’ security during the releases. Thus our spirits remained high.
Towards the end of that six-week period Mahmoud, the tall English-speaking guard, came and took away our mattresses, bed covers, the books and everything that we had been given. We were left alone. This was surely indicative that something was about to happen, and we were both convinced that this time it was over. For two nights we lay shivering on the carpet trying to sleep, but unable to for excitement and anticipation. We were always wide awake and talking with one another before the dawn call to prayer. It would have been impossible to sleep in any case. The nights were filled with automatic gunfire and the relentless shelling of a heavy cannon. What radio news we picked up told us that this was an attack by Amal, one of the Shia Muslim paramilitary groups, on the Palestinian refugee camps. All night long this bombardment continued. It became for me the noise of some grotesque monster grinding and slashing the earth outside our four walls. This city was in a perpetual night of warfare and what my
Lebanese friend had once told me rang true once more. ‘In Lebanon it is not a matter of whom you kill, but how many.’
For many hours as we walked in circles around the room we argued out why it seemed that the time was right. We had accumulated limited information from the radio besides what we had gleaned from the Americans and knew it was just under a year since our disappearance, since those snatches from the radio allowed us to fix an approximate date. It had been a long year. We always felt that the longer we were held, the stronger our captors’ position became. But whatever our expectations, the truth was not as we were desperately believing it to be.
Several men entered the room late one evening. Our hands were taped to our sides, our blindfolds tightened and most of our faces covered. We were given sweaters, and then quickly we were walked out of the apartment and down the six flights of stairs. Outside the air was hot and dusty. We were walked a short distance, then hands took hold of my body and I was slid into some kind of compartment underneath the floor of a truck. John was put in beside me, his feet beside my face. It was tiny and we were crushed together. Lifting my head from the floor I felt the roof of this compartment some three inches above me. We were in a kind of coffin.
We lay in this cramped airless space for perhaps three-quarters of an hour, wrestling to free our hands and pull the gags from our mouths so that we might breathe more freely. Outside the guards talked and then were silent. We thought they had gone away. Were they going to leave us here for someone to come and collect us? What if the people that were coming for us could not find us? The air was thin and the heat would make this coffin an oven. Tormented with these thoughts we heard Said’s voice speak loudly. ‘John, John no speak.’ Then Said informed us that if we made a noise the truck would be blown up: the driver had instructions. We couldn’t speak in any case, with the gags on our mouths and our hands tied to our waists. The man was a fool, I thought. Then the engine roared into life and we set off.
We drove for several hours, and all through the journey we were squirming and wriggling to release the gags and our hands and somehow edge up the blindfolds from our eyes. But it was pointless.
It was so dark and all the effort was using up what little air there was.
As we moved we could see some light filtering in through odd holes in the floor and in the sides of our container. Soon the sun began to beat down and the dust off the road thrown up into the compartment made breathing still more difficult. The pungent fumes from the diesel made the atmosphere suffocating.
The horror of this panic-stricken journey seemed to me indescribable.
Fear choking in your throat. The air suffocating and your head banging and bloody against the roof of that shallow space. My attempts at silent song could not calm me. I began to rage and blaspheme man and God. I cursed every one of my captors and searched out every foul-mouthed word of condemnation that I could find. Panic was seizing me by the throat. I felt the pressure of it and I raged and raged and tried to remember those convoluted chapters of the Book of Revelation. There in those apocalyptic words, I found enough violence of expression to condemn these men. Exhausted from my ranting I would try to recall that hymn of William Blake: Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me
my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant Land.
I would repeat it over and over again spitting out the words defiantly, this time hating only myself and wishing that I was not here and being made to endure slow and crippling death in this tight hot darkness. John was silent. I tapped his head with my feet and he returned the gesture. There was no comfort of touch and reassurance beyond this tapping with our feet on one another’s heads.
The hours were endless. We were drowning in that airless box.
Through it all, the raving, the singing silent songs defiantly and the desperate prayers to end this thing, for death was preferable to this slow, slow poisonous suffocation. In these conditions, there was no way to control the mind. It spun off, launched into some unholy awfulness, doubling the physical suffering. The words and images that flash through the mind in such conditions are not of human origin, and they were beyond my understanding. They crushed me with their horror. It seemed as if hot wires were being drawn slowly through the centre of my brain. My mind was exploding over and over again. Given the chance I would have screamed out and had the van and the horrors that it bred blown to oblivion. It would be over, and the torment would be extinguished. We travelled for about three hours, my head continually beating as the truck bumped and swerved.