And so I took it, feeling that my arm had been wrenched off my shoulder and was suddenly missing. I walked blindfold into the shower. I stood indifferent to its warm embrace, and soaped down my body. I was numb. They allowed me to take as long as I wished. But I had no wish to stand, only to be gone.
I sat on a chair and listened to the scissors clip my hair. Jokes were being cracked about me. Bilal the barber offered to give the hairs on my chest a trim. I smiled.
Curiously the guards did not come to talk with me as I sat out those remaining hours. I wondered if they understood my anguish or my resolution. I sat in silence, unmoving, concentrating my mind and trying telepathically to send a message across that small hallway and underneath the door to my friend waiting and wondering. I tried also to send messages to say to those who I knew sat at the edge of a terrible anxiety and of a chasm of hope that it was over. I was about to begin my beginning.
As I had first been taken, so I was being released. I sat in the back of a Mercedes, my head resting upon the lap of one of the guards I had known as Ali. His hand gently shielded my eyes. We drove through the back streets of the suburbs. It was a strange comfort to sit in a Mercedes. The car stopped. I could hear men outside talking. There was much snapping of magazines into guns, and an older man, perhaps in his mid-forties or fifties, entered the passenger seat. The previous passenger had left and not returned. Ali sat, his Kalashnikov beside his knee. The driver said something. Someone clipped a magazine into a gun and handed it to him. The older man barked an order and the car moved off. For fifteen minutes we drove and then stopped. The passenger got out. The door opened. Ali excitedly, quickly said to me ‘Yallah, yallah, go, go … Good luck … good luck.’ I emerged as I had never done before, clothed in trousers, shoes, socks, a T-shirt, a sweater, and my eyes unblindfolded yet still unseeing in the dark. The older man took me by the hand.
We walked forward slowly. In front of me, perhaps a hundred yards off, the lights of a single car flashed on and remained alight. The car in which we had arrived flashed its lights and they also remained lit. Along this path of light we walked, this man and I, hand in hand. In the light two men approached us, one carrying a Kalashnikov. We met. There was a long, low whitish wall to the right of me, beyond which the last lights of the city were burning. Voices spoke and exchanged greetings. I could not understand them. The man holding my hand placed my hand into the hands of the men who had came up to us.
Nothing more was said. Heads were nodded. The deed was done. The man who had walked me like a child, his hand in mine, turned and walked slowly away.
I walked between the two men who had received me. ‘You are
Syrian?’ I asked. They looked at me. I asked again ‘You are Syrian?’
One of them answered ‘Syria,’ and nodded his head. I turned like Lot’s wife to take one last look and saw nothing but the car’s headlights. A Syrian nudged me forward. I climbed into another car. In the back, as in the car I had just left, sat a young man with a Kalashnikov. The pair who had received me spoke some words, the motor started and the car drove off. The passenger in front turned to me and with very feeble English asked ‘You … nationality?’ I answered ‘Irish.’ He nodded, said something to the driver, turned to me again and asked ‘How long?’ ‘Four and a half years,’ I answered. The driver made a noise like a low whistle. We moved on into the night. Did the night know what had passed?
On through that darkness. There was silence in the vehicle. I remember feeling extremely calm, resigned, unaffected by all that had happened. The car careered through those back streets and was suddenly in the heart of the city, and equally suddenly it stopped. Men with guns were milling around it. The door was opened for me, I stepped out. Faces stood and looked at me. I was ushered inside a building, up a marble staircase and into a waiting room. I was left there with two Syrians in plain clothes. They sat looking at me, then the passenger in the car came back and I was ushered into a large room.
At the head of the room was a huge polished desk and behind it a Syrian in his fifties. He beckoned me to sit. He exchanged some words with men who had come into the room after me. One of them went out and returned with a young man in his twenties who bowed in terror to the figure behind the desk. He spoke some words to him and he turned to me bowing and asked me would I like anything? Did I feel well? To which I answered ‘Yes, I’m fine … I would like a coffee.’
My answer was translated for the man behind the desk and the coffee was brought. He kept saying to me as I drank the coffee ‘You strong. Strong,’ making the bicep in his arm jump. I knew how important physical strength is to the Arab mind. I simply nodded and smiled, bemused by the excitement and the silence around me. My nationality and name were again confirmed. A telephone call was made to Damascus. I heard my name again and the word ‘Irish’ spoken. The receiver was placed back on the telephone. I was again asked if I would like to eat. I thanked them and said ‘No … a glass of water perhaps.’
Water was brought and I watched these men watch me as I finished , the glass.
Then we were off again. Back down the marble staircase and into the waiting car. The same driver, but a new passenger and another guard with his Kalashnikov sat in the back seat, and so we set off.
Driving once again, up through the hill villages of Lebanon. This time there were no check points. The car travelled unmolested through the night. I asked the passenger if we were going to Syria. ‘Yes, of course,’ he answered in good English. On and on we drove. I sat quiet and calm watching the villages go about their evening life. There seemed more night life here than in the city of Beirut. I turned once more to the passenger in the front and said ‘So this is the road to Damascus?’
He answered quietly’Yes.’
I spent two nights in Syrian Army Intelligence Headquarters. On arrival there I was brought to the Deputy Chief of Intelligence with the passenger who had driven from Beirut with me. While I sat in the office looking around its palatial furnishings and became aware of the poverty of the clothes in which I had been returned to life, I thought to myself how quickly our little vanities return to us. The two men chatted in Arabic and then asked me politely how I was and did I want anything? In the last few hours I had become excruciatingly bored with this expression. I didn’t know what I wanted. An interpreter was brought. I spoke with him at length, the questions coming first from the intelligence officer, through my interpreter to me.
At first they were casual questions, then increasingly they were asking about who had held us, where we were held, did I recognize the captors, did I know anything about them. They were keen to know who I had been held with, who I had had contact with. At first I answered, but became increasingly aware of what was happening.
This was another interrogation.
New clothes were sent for and I went into the security chief’s own bedroom with the interpreter and the servant and another man whose function I did not know. I undressed, the interpreter saying ‘We are all men here.’ I smiled. I had little vanity about my body. I stripped and got into the cool linen and the cool cotton.
I returned from the room and saw laid out on the table a huge spread of food. A typical Arab feast. My stomach quietly revolted. I could not eat much of this; still all the different shapes and colours would be fun to play with. I sat and joined the men about me.
Another man was there. The deference with which the others addressed him suggested that here was a man of some importance.
The meticulousness of his English confirmed this and the depth of his questions reinforced it. We talked generally of what was happening in the world. The Syrians were anxious to speak of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Then as we relaxed in this general discussion of world events, questions about my captivity again arose. I answered at first without thinking, then as I returned some questions and they remained unanswered, I realized I was being debriefed. It was time to toss the ball in the air. I remembered that old Belfast colloquialism which had sustained us all, and bec
ome a catchphrase for us in our imprisonment: ‘Say whatever you like, but whatever you say say nothing.’
At the end of our three-hour meal and curious conversation I was again addressed by the intelligence chief, this time directly in English.
‘You are tired, perhaps you would like to sleep.’ ‘No, I am not tired. I want to go for a walk … I have not walked the streets for four and a half years.’ There was astonishment on the faces of the men about the table. They looked questioningly at the security chief. He looked to each of them, then directly at me. He nodded to them, brushing away their fears. ‘Okay it is fine,’ he said. That night I was driven around the city of Damascus with two armed plainclothes security men on each side of me. Freedom comes slowly at first.
I know that nightmares have their source
Like the abstract has some social sense.
Time fluxes in the dark
Night stalking mind, closer than blood.
Dreams, words, things felt -not said,
Spaces on every side:
Bat’s wings beat like heart
Or drum
Translating silence to insanity.
Daylight mind invades the dark
Thing to be fixed or set apart.
Conviction rejecting guilt
Condemned without crime.
Onlookers can’t look in
Nor mind look out.
I huddle, insensible
As blank air
And fear the vertigo of the night
Seeing myself
Dropped
God knows where
From such a height.
Brian Keenan
Created by Tshirtman
Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling
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