An Evil Cradling
We were to spend many weeks of expectation here. Our hopes at the ending of the Gulf war had not been lessened. As time went on and nothing seemed to be happening, we reassured one another by constantly repeating ‘Another month, perhaps two.’ Always our future was another month, perhaps two.
When it came, the manner of our removal was different from before. We knelt down; again our hands were chained to our ankles.
We were carried in a bag and there was a car to be dumped into. We were driven for miles and miles, coming down to Beirut again. But there were no check points. Cars behind us, cars in front of us guaranteed our delivery back to the city. A blaring siren accompanied us throughout thejourney. Never before had that happened. I thought then and I still believe that it was the Syrian Army that guaranteed our journey.
So we were hauled out of the boot, carried upstairs to a room, thanking God that we were still together. They chained me to one wall and John to another. This was all done in darkness. I reached out ‘You okay?’ ‘Yes,’ John replied. From nowhere a cigarette lighter flared.
Throughout our noisy arrival, with the guards carrying in mattresses and blankets, another prisoner had been sitting, silent and invisible in the corner. The momentary flash revealed only a darkened silhouette.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded. A voice like a slowly returning echo declared, ‘My name is Frank Reed.’
I could reach out at the end of my chain and tousle his head, the way people do a child or a dog. It was good to be with someone else. The next morning was a surprise and a confirmation. Frank had been there for about nine months on his own. He had been abused remorselessly.
When the guards came in during the day they would kick him. Mazin, the guard who lay on top of me during that suffocating ride, who kissed me and took away the binding tapes, was here. He disliked Frank. He kicked him. He said to us: ‘You all right? … This man touch you? … This man touch you?’ The man that we were now living with was incapable of touching. We were chained well away from one another, barely within reach. I suppose they thought we would have sexual relations with one another. We were angry at the behaviour of our guards and their treatment of Frank. His constant physical humiliation left a deep scar on him.
He had known more periods of isolation than the rest of us and had lost resolve, lost his capacity to be himself. Though we would have some hours of light during the day, I thought as I watched Frank that much of him remained in the dark.
We talked to Frank about things that had happened in the outside world. But Frank had decided a long time ago to leave the reality of the situation. He was hurt deeply. The sudden novelty of our return was perplexing and confusing.
The belief that we would be sexually involved if we could touch one another made me sick and angry at the inadequacy of the people who chained us, at their small obsessive minds. The poison was not in the locks but in the mental chains of our captors. Touch was, to us, survival, defiance, self-assertion. They chained us away from touching, from reaching out to one another to take a hand and say ‘Fuck it, come on, we’ll beat it.’
When we were taken off the chains John and I exercised vigorously.
Frank did not. We said ‘C’mon get up, walk.’ He would not walk. He believed he was the last American hostage. His sense of reality was much distorted, and his conversation and behaviour evidenced the huge toll the deprivations and brutality had taken on him. For long periods he would sit with a blanket over his head, lost in his own world. For him we were not there. When the guards came in during exercise periods he fell on the floor, and crawled to his corner. ‘Get up, don’t ever do that, get up, get up.’ I lifted him to make him stand or sit. This is what happens to anyone left alone for too long and their life becomes nothing but abuse, I reflected. ‘Get up, get up, never let these people see you crawling … Get up, get up, get up.’ A man can be so destroyed that he crawls across the floor, frightened. It was crucifying to watch. I could not bear it. ‘Get up, get up, don’t do this … get up.’
I hoped that I was speaking to something deep in him. My Irish bravado did not help. John McCarthy, being calmer, said to the guards: ‘Don’t beat this man any more … bring your chiefs here. I want to speak with them.’ The guards didn’t like that sort of questioning of their own freedom. They loved a brave man but they were frightened of the challenge. Mazin knew that if the chiefs ever visited and we complained of his ruthless abuse there would be much trouble for him. John’s firmness and assurance made Mazin fearful.
Within days the atmosphere of brutality changed. Mazin, afraid of the consequences to himself, began treating Frank like a favourite uncle.
Frank in response slowly returned to himself and to us.
Slowly, as the months passed, we each of us sought to find a meeting place in our understanding. Humanization is a reciprocal thing. We cannot know ourselves or declare ourselves human unless we share in the humanity of another. Finding our way back from the animal condition imposed on us was no easy task. The worlds we created and in which we found a refuge were more alluring than the vacant reality of the world outside ourselves. We needed the stimulus of another person, his sympathy, his critical judgement to help guide us. We needed his assurance that the world was worth the effort. And this when there was no external stimulus, no window to look out of, no door to walk through; when there was not the colour and the noise of movement and of life. Then the idea of a return home was more than difficult. It was frequently undesired. There were no signposts and no lights by which to see the way.
I remembered one of the prison cells I had been kept in. I awoke early in the morning hearing the dawn call to prayer and suddenly jumped up screaming and swearing as I swept the ants from my flesh.
Hundreds and hundreds seasonally invaded the cells in which we were kept. Like the giant Gulliver in a rage of frustration and cold sweat I would stamp and slap and crush them without mercy, without any thought of their separate existence. But after days of this I got tired of my anger. It exhausted me. The ants were inexhaustible. I began searching out where they entered the cell, blocking up small cracks and fissures with bits of wet tissue or broken matchsticks, but they would always find another point of entry. As I watched them pour into the cell through so many different places they became for me a form of entertainment. I watched them work. I watched how they would search out a crumb of bread four or five times their own size.
They would trail and pull or push this piece of bread the full length of my tiny cell, scale a vertical wall, crawl along ridges until they found an exit point and take with them what they had found.
My fascination made friends of them. I was grateful for their fortitude, for their strength, for their resilience and instead of raging at IB them I would sit awaiting their return. I watched how they worked ” together. And how, if I had crushed one in the night by accident, the others would gather around and if there was life in it still, a comrade would lift this wounded companion and carry it across what for these tiny creatures must have seemed like miles, crawl up the vertical wall and search out an escape point through which they could take this maimed insect to be amongst its own. This incident became a symbol for me in this blank room with its three chained creatures. We cannot abandon the injured or the maimed, thinking to ensure our own safety and sanity. We must reclaim them, as they are part of ourselves.
The days in my last months of captivity were a coming back to reality for each of us. The half-man we had found when we first came there we understood and gently, without insistence, tried to lift that blanket from him, not with our hands but with our minds and with what compassion or affectionate criticism we could find.
Frank emerged from behind his blanket slowly, tenuously. As he did so, so did we. His coming back was a homecoming for us all, though we remained in that room, chained, barely able to reach out and touch one another’s hands. It was a restoration of meaning for all of us.
John’s strength, his defiance and resistance to the guards, his st
eely calm made them wary. John was in command. They became frightened. What if their chief should come to visit, if someone was ill, and what if John or I should speak of what had happened here to Frank. These violent men, who had taken their strength and manhood from a man unable to resist, were now cowering within themselves.
The beatings and the abuse were at an end. There were no more insidious insults. There was no more kicking or spitting. There was no more standing with us in the toilet and insisting that we could not stand to urinate because it was the way of Satan. Such abuse we would not listen to, but the idiocy that we had to endure was its own kind of punishment.
Things improved in this place, the food was better than it had ever been before. They gave us a television regularly, but we were never allowed to watch the news. Three times a week we would be offered a video film. Gratefully we would accept only to find ourselves bored stupid by Kung-Fu films or the usual gratuitous violence of western
movies. Often we talked about how the violence of men like our guards was at least partly conditioned by the glut of American video violence, and how their twisted, obsessional concern with sexuality was in part a response to the slew of nudity in the western films they saw. In our own way we were subject to a violence and perversion conditioned by products of the West. We remembered how the guns that they had shown us were all of European manufacture.
The shadows that engulf a man until he loses his substantiality had begun to dissipate. A light that glowed and burned and grew within was extinguishing the power of the shadowy darkness. We were all emergent, men still hungry for a future, believing in that future and casting off all futility. We were each laughing again, telling stories, outrageous lies as big and as monstrous as mountains and laughing at sheer fantasy again. Mad schemes were designed and as we each described them and watched the fascination of our listeners we got carried away, and made our tales taller and more incredible.
There was a new atmosphere here, and one that boded well for us.
Occasionally Mahmoud would come as a visitor to sit and talk with us and tell us about world events. We were never astounded by what he reported though the reality of some of these events was truly astonishing. The Berlin Wall had fallen in November 1989, but our minds could not be amazed by simply human things, for they had travelled into more amazing and awesome places. ‘
Many months after we arrived here Frank was removed. We knew though we were not told that this time he had been released. Every night, I would crawl across the floor, putting my ear to the bottom of the door and listening to the news reports, my Arabic good enough to tell me that he really had been freed. His release was a boost to us.
We had long recognized that the guards were as much our prisoners as we were theirs, and they were now more prisoners than ever before.
In many respects they had become our servants. If we asked for anything we were given it immediately. Medicine, a particular kind of food, coffee, hot chocolate — all were given to us. Only newspapers were refused. In the light of this, we became more confident. To treat us so royally, but yet to refuse magazines or newspapers, suggested strongly that something was happening which they did not want us to know about. That something, we were sure, was an impending end to our captivity.
After Frank left, another prisoner was moved into the room beside ours. For some days there was silence from this other person’s room,
then inevitably the knocking began. A man will risk his life or the better part of it to communicate. The knocking told us who it was, and we were not surprised. We had guessed as much beforehand. We returned the messages, tapping out our own identity and what news and information we could pass on. It was a slow, laborious process, but we knew how hungry Terry Waite must be for news. We had always known that he would be alone. The fact that he was in this apartment with us now further reinforced our hopes.
Daily we would be taken to the toilet, returned and exercised. In the afternoon the guards would come to unchain us, take us one at a time from the room, across the hall into the kitchen. We would sit on a chair in front of a window. The window would be opened and in would come the heat and light of the sun, blazing through our blindfolds. A radio was always playing in the kitchen. Often the guard Bilal, the one who had asked John to teach him to dance, would tune the radio to some western rock station and we would listen to old and familiar tunes. Occasionally we caught some quick news flash, half understanding it before the guards would flick to another station.
There was much talk now with the guards, and jokes were traded.
John sat chained to his wall at one end of the large apartment room and I, chained to mine, at the other. We would take our socks, stuff them full of paper or some rag or shirt that we had torn up, wrap the sock around this and make ourselves a small ball. Chained to the wall we would viciously pass this ball back and forward, scoring points against each miss. The next morning during exercise we would bring out our secret ball and play soccer or volleyball, choking on the laughter.
‘Hope for everything but expect nothing’ had long been our motto.
But now hope increased expectation, rather than limited it. We spoke little to one another about our possible release. We hoped we would both go together. We expected it would not happen like that. Yet we enjoyed one another’s company too much to bear the thought of either of us going before the other.
It comes as all things that change a life must come: without warning.
An afternoon visit, suddenly there are many men in the room. A guard kneels down, lifting me by the arm with the command ‘Stand, Brian, stand.’ I stand, wondering, not really expecting this to be the moment. I am unchained and led from the room and into another. On.
the floor is a mattress and I am made to sit on it and am chained again.
Slowly something is dawning on me. To move me to another room and rechain me is a separation that means something though I cannot allow myself to believe what it might be. Grasping hold of something and then having it instantaneously taken away had hurled many of us in the past into that abyss we all knew too well. But I sit in defiant silence. A man kneels in front of me, his hand gentle on my shoulder.
It is the voice of one of the chiefs. Quietly he says ‘Brian, you go home.’ I am silent and unstunned. ‘Home, you mean another place?’ I ask, for I have heard these words before.
Again the hand at my shoulder and the voice. ‘You go home, family, Dublin.’ The sound of the word Dublin suggests that something is imminent. I am still amazingly calm. I ask ‘What about my friend?’ There is silence, voices mumble in Arabic. All of them leave the room. Ten minutes later two men return, they ask whether I want anything. That phrase I have heard ten thousand times before.
‘I want to speak with my friend John. I want to speak with him now. I will not go without speaking.’ My voice is rising in panic, realizing ‘My God, it is over.’
They recognize my insistence, the loudness of my voice, the determination in it. A man kneels again in front of me, quietly he asks ‘What do you want?’ I answer, my voice slow, loud enough so that I hope John will hear. ‘I want to speak with John, I will not go from this room until I speak with him.’ The figure still squats in silence in front of me. After some minutes he leaves. I am given tea. I sit, the door is left wide open.
I know they have gone into the kitchen and are there talking. After half an hour two men come into the room. ‘Brian,’ a voice says. I sit silent, ‘You douche, take shower.’ I sit silent, wondering is this an order or an offer. Again I say to them ‘Take me to John, I want to say goodbye.’ My voice is more angry now than determined but it’s a quiet anger. Again the chief kneels down in front of my blindfolded face. His hand is at my shoulder but not this time in a pat of affection; squeezing and gripping hard again. ‘After douche, after some hours you talk with your friend.’ I nod, not knowing whether to believe and accept or to face the pointlessness of argument.
I am left for those hours to think. I begin to believe wh
at I have been told and suddenly there is something in me I cannot resolve. I know it is over and within hours or days I will not be wearing a blindfold. I will be unfettered. But I feel it build in me, the weight of my imprisonment. For how much freedom can there be for a man when he leaves one half of himself chained to the wall? I begin to try to order my thinking to see beyond the consequences of any action I can take. I can argue and fight and insist on staying until my friend is released.
But if I don’t go, how will my family and friends receive it? Perhaps even now they are sitting waiting for the final confirmation. Has their suffering been so little over the past four and a half years that I can refuse this, and thrust them back into their anguish? I think one moment that I am thinking only of myself and then that I am not. I am trying desperately to find a balance in my compassion. I weigh the scales and I move back and forth and I am caught in indecision. My hands stretched out to the man in the room next door and to my family far away. Which has the greater hold and where is the greater pull on me?
My mind flashes back over four and a half years, those memories percolating through my history and that of my friends. I am in a delirium of contradictory desire that will not resolve itself. Only I can make this choice and I am incapable. Great love has weakened me. I am again on that raft in an ocean, tossed by the turbulent tides of affection. I try to work out what I should do for I must choose and in what I choose make myself. I remember every moment of my time alone, my time with John and with those other captives. And I remember how we first met, our relationship, the kinds of needs I had of John and he of me. And how we sought always to give and take, thinking always of the other. And as I review it all, all that wonder, I see his face stare at mine. I had watched this man grow, become full and in his fullness enrich me. And I know that if in my defiance I walk back into that room and have myself chained, refusing to go home, I will have diminished him, for he is a bigger man than to succumb to the needs that isolation breeds. I cannot do this, I cannot belittle him. I know that in going free I will free him. He will not surrender, he has gone beyond it. I know that the deep bond our captivity has given us will be shattered if I return. Our respect for each other demands of each that we take our freedom when it comes.