He seemed angry and kept looking at my shoes. I knew this was an ominous sign. They had already begun to reckon up and divide the spoils, my clothes and my possessions, amongst themselves. There was very little I could do about it. Not that I was carrying much, but to be present when men talk about sharing you out is disconcerting.
The kidnappers all climbed out of the car and I was told ‘Get out, get out.’ We seemed to be in a kind of subway. I remember it was strewn with litter. It must have been difficult for a car to make any headway through the mass of garbage that had been dumped there. I was told to walk to the back of the car. When I did so I was stopped. Immediately off to the right of where I stood at the boot of the car there was a tiny alleyway, perhaps an exit from the subway we were in. I thought to myself, ‘Oh no not here, not here of all places.’ My first thought was that I was going to be taken up this little narrow tunnel and executed.
I don’t recall feeling any sense of panic or fear. I can still remember thinking that this was such an awful God-forsaken place in which to die.
My next thought was that I was wearing my father’s shirt and how unkind it was to him that I should die wearing his shirt, even though he himself had died some years previously. This preoccupied me to the exclusion of everything else, regardless of the fact that within seconds I might be shot. I said nothing. The men looked about, talked rapidly with one another. The boot was opened and I was told ‘Get in … get in’; I crawled in, their hands pushing and squeezing me. The panic was more on their side than on mine. I lay crumpled and curled in the boot. The kidnapper who spoke English said to me viciously ‘No noise, no noise’, the boot slammed and the darkness was complete.
The car doors shut, the engine started up and we moved off. I could not tell when we exited from that underground passage, but faint glimmerings of light and the noise of the street, which was now a roar in my ears, told me that we were in the daylight and moving through a congested area. There were people all around, going about their business and their lives, oblivious to the fact that a man was at this moment disappearing out of life, lying quietly in the boot of this dilapidated Mercedes.
The car stopped once; two doors slammed; there was loud talk. I assumed that we were at some check point belonging to one of the various paramilitary groups, though which one I shall never know. A couple of minutes’ brief exchange, then the slamming doors again and movement to God knows where. The car drove briskly. I could hear the crunch of the gears and then an almost screeching sudden halt.
Again the doors opening. Again the lid of the boot being unlocked. I was not blinded by daylight but was in what I thought might be the enclosed car-parking area of some building. I was quickly hauled out of the boot. This time only French was spoken: ‘Vite, vite, vite’ was hissed at me, but not angrily. These men were simply urgent to finish what they were doing.
I was run some twenty or thirty feet to a doorway on my right and quickly pushed through it. All the gunmen entered after me. I noticed two of them breathing very fast. These men were not exhausted by any expenditure of physical energy, but by fear. That erratic breathing was a deadly give-away, something I was to hear time and time again during my long period in these mens’ charge.
We moved down a short corridor and a door was opened to my left.
I stopped and looked in and was nudged gently into the room. It contained only a folding camp bed and I was told to sit on it. Then an odd question was put to me by the smiling guard with the poor English: ‘You are fine, yes?’, to which I could only say ‘Yes.’ He went off, and the door was locked. I remember sitting on the bed and thinking, ‘So this is it.’ This small fearful room. How could anyone survive a stay in a place so small. I felt some sort of relief that at least I had a bed. I had heard stories of the conditions that hostages were kept in and none of their descriptions included a bed. I sat and tried to order my thoughts. Again without panic, just slowly putting piece upon piece together to work out what exactly had happened, how long I had been travelling, and where I was likely to be. Something to keep the mind calm.
The door opened. The English-speaking guard came in and told me to take offmy shirt. I remembered again my thoughts in that tunnel. It was my father’s shirt. I slowly unbuttoned the shirt, looking at this man, half smiling with my own puzzlement as I tried to contain my growing confusion. What could these men want with my father’s shirt? With slow deliberation I removed the shirt and handed it at a full arm’s length to this man, looking always into his eyes, and smiling at him. As I remember it, it was a kind of sardonic smile; what he understood by it I will never know but I believe to this day that that sardonic smile, and my staring him full in the face restrained him from whatever violence he was prepared to offer.
I was told to sit again. The shirt was folded in a band and my first blindfold was my father’s shirt, tied tightly about my head. With two . men on each side of me, holding my arms, I was walked out of that small room. There was a descent down three flights of roughly concreted stairs and bare concrete walls. I could feel them scrape against my skin as I stumbled. I wondered how far underground I I would be going. At the bottom of those three flights, the ground i levelled off. I seemed to be walking slowly in a straight line.
I could hear noise in front of me, not loud, but the sounds of people talking and moving about. I sensed some light as I tried to peer underneath the blindfold down along the line of my body to my feet. ? My captors restrained me as I tried to walk on and simply said ‘Stop’. I stood wondering ‘What next?’ My blindfold was removed. I saw two other faces, of men who had not been in the party that kidnapped me.
‘ One looked at me, the other spoke to the men who had brought me in.
It seemed they had no English.
The passenger in the car, who had begun his questioning about my nationality and about Margaret Thatcher, asked me if I would like a shower. I said quite politely ‘No thank you, I had one this morning before leaving.’ It seemed like a natural response, but in retrospect it was a ridiculous one. My captor spoke then to this man who was in effect in charge of this underground prison. In halting English, the prison officer said that there was no hot water, speaking almost apologetically, again adding to my confusion and increasing the breadth of the smile on my mouth. I said ‘It’s OK, don’t worry.’ I was then taken by four men to a small cell. It was no bigger than the last one and it had no bed. A mattress was laid out on the ground. The room was probably smaller than a bathroom in an average suburban semidetached.
I was left for some minutes; then the door opened again. The English-speaking guard came in with my briefcase. He sat it on the ground, squatting in front of me. ‘You want to eat?’ If this was four-star service, I thought, it was extremely pushy. I had just arrived, they offer me a shower but apologize for not having hot water, now they ask me if I want something to eat. I was in no mood for eating and told him so. He asked again ‘You want anything?’ I said ‘No’ and then thought again and said ‘Yes … I want some newspapers.’ He grunted, nodded and left, taking my briefcase with him. The door closed again. Like so many doors that were to close. I sat on the mattress waiting and wondering how long, that awful anguished question that I was so frequently to ask.
Psychologists tell us that one of the first and instinctual reactions of the personality when faced with a traumatic transition is to attempt to trivialize or to minimize the event and the consequences it may have.
Our denial stimulates a euphoric state. Obviously the extremes to which denial can be taken are dependent on the qualities and strengths of character the person has acquired over the years. But it is important to distinguish this process of minimizing danger from the idea of flight; of running away in horror, in fear, in confusion, which is another and different road. Denial is often a necessary phase in the process of adjustment, a normal and necessary human reaction to a crisis which is too immediately overwhelming to face head on. Denial gives time for a temporary retreat from reality, time for our inte
rnal forces to regroup and to regain strength, to begin to deal with the loss that has been forced upon us.
For most people the effects of change and the resulting stresses begin to become apparent. We exhaust the strategies of denial. Reality slowly but surely overcomes our attempts to hold it at bay. As we become aware of the new realities we begin to experience depression.
Depression can be a kind of extreme mania: the highs and lows of a movement between awful despair and a giddy euphoria coming wave upon wave, day after day attempting to erode whatever degree of resilience and resistance one has in one’s self. With this depression there is associated an awful frustration. It is difficult to know how best to deal with the new requirements, the new relationships that have to be established.
As we move further into awareness of our new reality, the new conditions about us have the effect of reconditioning us. We move into a process of acceptance, but this acceptance should not be seen as a defeat of our powers of resistance and of maintaining the integrity of the self. It is simply that in a situation of total confinement one has to learn to unhook from the past in order to live for the present.
My first hours, then days and then weeks I found myself constantly having to deal with the slow hallucination into which I had been dropped. I had been removed from a known reality. The four concrete walls of my shoe-box-sized cell formed my only vista. Beyond these I could see nothing, only my imagination gave me images, some beautiful, some disturbing and unendurably ever-present. The vast landscape of the mind unfolds on its own. At times I felt the compensations of this gift and at other times cursed my imagination that it could bring me sensations so contorted, so strange and so incoherent that I screamed; not out of fear but out of the rage and frustration of having to deal with these flashing pictures of which I could make little or no sense.
Exaggerating this distorted sensitivity were the voices of my captors in a disembodied language which I didn’t understand but could hear being spoken, being whispered, being shouted beyond the walls of my cell. There were the cries, too, of the other prisoners, all in Arabic as I recall, some of them weeping and in the long hours of darkness some of that weeping becoming screaming. At other times the shouts came from a street vendor selling fruit or fish, reminding me starkly that there was something outside, but that I was buried away from normal life and could only hear its echo. So many thoughts, so many ideas, so many feelings came hurtling into my mind in those first days; too many to take hold of and deal with in an ordered and coherent way. You simply had to sit in lethargy, letting them wash over you and holding on to some point of resistance that would only let them wash over but not sweep you away. The dangers of that were too great and too apparent. There was nowhere to run to.
I chose, as all men in those circumstances would, to disbelieve that I would be held for very long. I immediately set a date in my head and I look back now with some amusement on it. I decided within those first few hours that I would be kept no longer than a few weeks. My nationality was worthless to them. It would be pointless to hold an Irishman: they could trade me for little or nothing. It was while thinking this through that I fixed my mind on the only option open to me: somehow to convince these men of the fruitlessness of keeping me I as a hostage against some political demand. While I was forcing this belief on myself so as to hold back all the vast confusion and fear, the cell door opened for the third time on the first day.
I was given a bottle of Coke and two sandwiches wrapped in Arabic bread. I was told by the guard ‘Soon, my boss he come.’ I shrugged my shoulders, confident and nonchalant. The door closed again but it was not locked. I could dimly see the guards moving past. There seemed to be several of them. They hovered about my door trying to look in, me looking out, convinced that it was only in this eye contact that I could maintain a distance from them. In those first weeks when confronted by them I would not take my eyes from their faces. In the few times that I did see a face, all the faces were as one to me, each blending in to one another, and I could hardly distinguish their separate features.
The door opened again, four men in their mid-twenties, some with hand guns, peered in at me. They stood in silence. Two of them just inside the door, two of them standing in the hallway beyond, looking intently at me as I looked back at them. I felt like a fish in an aquarium.
They were silent and staring and I stared back. There was something between us. Maybe it was the fear in the air.
The long minutes of gazing down at me as I sat on the floor were oppressive. Then suddenly there was movement. The men parted, and an older man in a brown suit, with grey wavy hair and a full grey beard was standing in the doorway, studying me. He was obviously a man of some rank. The other men stood back in fearful respect. He looked at me, and I looked back at him. I was unmoved and did not blink. He asked me ‘Are you English?’ I noted that his English was an educated one. He spoke it well and I answered him. ‘No, I am not English … I am Irish.’
He looked at me again in silence, with long pauses between his questions: ‘Where do you come from?’ I answered with the same nonchalance, perhaps this time filled with the native stubbornness of rny city: ‘I’m from Belfast… Do you know it?’ There was a touch of anger and aggression in my voice. He noted it, nodded, yes he knew it. He asked me how long I had been in Lebanon. I was uncomfortable that I had to sit on the floor while I was being questioned. It put me at a disadvantage. I wanted to stand up to him face to face, but something told me that that would be foolish, perhaps dangerous.
He muttered something to the guards, and there was an exchange between them. He looked back at me and asked calmly did I have an Irish passport. I told him of course I had an Irish passport. He asked ‘Where is it?’ I saw that it was time for ajoke. ‘Well if you’d like to take me back to my apartment I’ll get it for you.’ I smiled. He did not return the smile, but turned again to the men with the guns and said something in Arabic. There seemed to be some confusion. It was hard to tell with these excitable men. He turned and quietly told me that if I co-operated I would not be harmed. He told me he would return, and the door banged shut again. The padlock rattled, accompanied by the babble of this fearfully incomprehensible language.
I was pleased with my first interrogation. I sensed that my interrogator was confused about my nationality. I was equally pleased that I had made him feel I was not afraid of him, though secretly I was. I had simply not allowed myself to think of what could have happened, only what I could prevent happening. The Arab mind is often dominated by its cult of masculinity. It admires what it conceives to be courage, a show of power, of fearlessness. I tried to maintain these defensive self-images in my head, and wondered how long I could continue if things got much worse and if they began to play games —
psychological torture games — or resorted to some more brutal violence.
Yet I told myself constantly that I was of no value to them. What did I know? What did they think I knew that might make them turn to more severe methods?
1 looked at my two sandwiches and Coca-Cola still sitting untouched in the corner. I was not hungry, but I began to wonder what a first prison meal tasted like, and out of curiosity and boredom I began to eat. The food was tasteless. Though it was like much Arabic food, heavily spiced and flavoured with vinegar and pickles, its acidity didn’t affect me and I could taste nothing. I took only a mouthful out of each sandwich, hoping to jar one taste against another. But there was just a blandness in my mouth. I thought that the shock of what had happened was finally ebbing slowly into me, dulling the faculties of taste and perception with tension and an unacknowledged fear.
The day progressed but I didn’t feel the drag of it. I lay on the mattress or paced up and down the six-foot length of my cell wondering how long it would take until they realized how useless I was to them. Strangely, another part of me wanted to be held for at least some time to make the whole thing worthwhile. I felt a curiosity growing in me, at first minimal, yet I was constantly asking myself w
ith interest rather than apprehension what my two weeks’ captivity would mean to me. I was convincing myself that it would be two weeks, and only two weeks. And after that time perhaps I might have something interesting to say about my experience in Lebanon.
They had taken my watch, my ring, a necklace that a friend had given me, and what little cash I had on me, leaving me only what I stood up in: my father’s shirt, a pair of grey trousers, socks and a pair of shoes that I had bought just a few days previously from a street vendor in the Hamra area. I thought of the shoes constantly in those first few days, remembering how when they picked me up there had seemed to be some dispute about them. The driver, the most aggressive and oldest of my captors, seemed to want them for himself. I dreaded the loss of those shoes more than the jewellery and the watch and the money.
Perhaps as long as I had my shoes I had some dignity.
A friend told me when we were having dinner one evening on the road to Sidon that on the beaches outside Beirut which were normally the haunts only of local people, I should not be seen exposing the soles of my feet. There was some religious connotation in this, and I still don’t know whether it’s true. But I know a fanatic’s mind is fed by such superstition, which removes him from the reality around him and in some strange way permits him to be aggressive and abusive to others because his own world is controlled by authoritative denial -all is forbidden to him.
I don’t know when I decided it was time to sleep. I remember hearing loud bullish snoring from one of the Arab inmates and I thought it must be evening. The time had gone quickly, quicker than I imagined. The prison had been empty of its guards for several hours. I remember thinking as I heard the snoring that if it’s night perhaps the inmates here will begin to speak to one another, unafraid of being heard. But there was no talking. I found this hard to believe; that men could sit all day in a tiny cell and when given the opportunity, not even try to communicate with their fellows. I think I slept contentedly enough, that first night, having convinced myself that the first interview had gone well. I was not in any immediate danger. I had not been threatened or abused, and I refused to let myself believe that that would happen before I was set free.