In the early hours of the morning, I woke and thought about that moment in the underground pass, when they had taken me from the car and I thought I was about to be shot. Recalling that incident from only the day before was abhorrent to me. Not the thought of death
itself, but the cruelty and anonymity of it. Death should have some meaning even for the justly condemned. Those who know they are about to die should have the time and the opportunity to receive death without fear, without hatred or bitterness. To be driven to some filthy hole in the ground and executed without justification was beyond my comprehension. In those early morning hours when my mind was only half awake I imagined myself lying there, my father’s shirt blood-stained and filthy. Why it was my mind stuck so tenaciously onto this image I cannot tell; perhaps it was the gross indignity of it, a kind of insult to him. I spent hours wondering what this second day would hold.
Doors banged in the distance. Voices shouting. The guards were returning. I quickly got myself up, tried to dress. Strange how we preserve some kind of minimal vanity even when there is nothing to be vain about. I heard the other prisoners’ cells opening, heard them shuffling past my own, and water running in the distance. It was obvious they were being taken to a shower or to a sink to wash. I waited my turn, eager to be out if only to see what the shower room was like. But my turn did not come. All the prisoners were taken back, but no one came for me.
My cell door opened, only a few inches. I saw the face of an old man looking in at me. His hair was askew, several days’ growth on his face. I looked at him. He kept staring and then the door opened wider. I stood up thinking I was going to be taken to wash, to use the bathroom but he gently put his hand out as if to tell me no, and I sat down. I was given bread, some cheese and a cup of tea without milk. A small glass of hot, and very sweet black tea, and the door was locked. I looked at my second breakfast, without desire and without hunger.
After some minutes the door opened again and in came my captor; the one who spoke English and sat in the passenger seat of the car. It seemed I was to have him with me frequently, perhaps because he had some English and the others had none, only very poor French. He squatted beside me. ‘How are you today?’ I answered that I was fine, what other answer was there? ‘Do you want anything?’ I shook my head wanting to say: yes, I want to get the hell out of this place; but I didn’t. I simply nodded, remembering always to look him in the face and not to flinch. He offered me more tea. I refused trying to explain to him it was too hot and too sweet, but I don’t think he understood.
Instead I asked for some water and it was quickly brought. He watched me as I drank slowly, then came the second interrogation, if that is the proper definition. A lot of questions: Why did I come to Lebanon? What Lebanese people did I know? Did I know any Lebanese people before I came to Lebanon? Who were the political advisors to the foreign teachers in the American University of Beirut?
Though I tried to answer these questions as uncomplicatedly as possible, I think that he was unused to asking questions and getting answers. He was simply a messenger boy, a gunman or a warrior given an order to go and collect someone. Anything beyond that he would have been incapable of dealing with. But nevertheless he asked the questions again, trying to fix one word in his head so that he could report back. I explained again how I came to be in Lebanon, and that I knew no Lebanese before coming and had only met a few since arriving; that I knew of no political advisors to the foreign teaching staff. I think he understood the nos and the yeses and that was enough for him. He rose to leave and said he would be back. I asked him when.
He simply said ‘Soon, soon’ and went.
I spent some time wondering about the significance of these questions. My answers hardly gave any information and couldn’t be of any use to them, so I waited to see what would be the outcome of his report to his superiors. I was soon to find out. Within an hour he returned, this time accompanied by the much older, more literate and intelligent interrogator of the day before. It was a repeat of the previous day’s confrontation. He stood in the doorway and I sat on the floor on my mattress. We stared fixedly at one another and held the silence, each contemplating the other. He asked me how I was, as his younger friend had done previously, and I gave the same innocuous answer. ‘I am fine.’
He then gave me back my briefcase which had been withheld from me since the day I was taken. I thanked him, still staring at him.
Abruptly he said ‘I want the names and addresses of fifteen English teachers.’ Something in his expression had changed. He was now giving me an order. I looked back at him and said ‘I have not been here long enough to know fifteen English teachers.’ He was silent and I repeated that I had not been in Lebanon long enough to know so many English teachers, and then emphasizing my Belfast accent and retreating into a stubbornness that has always been part of what I am when I feel myself cornered or under attack, I told him ‘I am Irish, I am from Belfast… Why do you think I would have made friends with English teachers … I do not know where these English people live.’
He insisted that I must know their addresses, I insisted that I did not.
Those few foreign teachers that I had got to know all lived on campus and I told him surely he must know this. As he knew where I lived and where to come and get me, he must also know that many of the foreign teachers lived within the University for their own security. He took from his pocket a piece of paper folded neatly, passed it to me, and I opened it. On it were written the names of two English members of the teaching faculty, who had arrived some weeks after my own appointment. One of them I knew reasonably well, the other was a much older man and I had only a nodding acquaintance with him. I said that I did not know their addresses, only that one of them lived on campus and the other near one of the Embassies.
He talked to me in some detail about one of these men. He knew that he had been in some of the shops in Beirut that sell hi-fi equipment and flashy transistor radios and TVs, enquiring about the possibility of ordering a piece of computer equipment. I could tell him only that I knew him on campus and that I knew nothing about his interest in computers. Whether or not he was satisfied with this information, I cannot tell. He left the paper on which the two names were written with me and insisted that I add the names of other teachers and their addresses. I reiterated that I knew some of their names but did not know their addresses, beyond the fact that they lived on the campus, and that had I had more sense, I would have done the same. I tried to make this sound funny, but he was unresponsive. He said something to the guard who was with him and they left. I
The guard came back within a few moments. He asked this time whether I had registered with the Irish Embassy. I told him that I had, and he replied ‘We do not think so.’ I gave him the address and the precise location of the Irish Embassy and the name of the first secretary to the Irish Ambassador, with whom I had had dinner and occasional drinks. It seemed to make little impact. I doubt if he understood much of what I was saying. He rose, said ‘Goodbye’ and left.
Again I was alone. I passed the rest of the day listening to the noises of the people in the street, aware of the smells of the men in the next cells, and also an obnoxious and throat-choking smell of some kind of paint percolating into our prison from outside. I remembered once
having driven through Beirut and noticing a number of small car repair shops. Beirut is a great place for having your car stolen and seeing it the next day, driven by someone you might know. It would definitely be your car, but it would be a different colour and there
would be no number plates on it. There was little you could do to prove it was yours, and it was dangerous to try and claim it back.
As yet the different emotions of resignation, rebellion, of religious abandon, fear, despair, anger, frustration had not fully taken hold of me. I was to know them in their fullest and most profound sense much later. At the moment I was still riding that high wave, convinced that my time would not be long. It would be a matter, I supp
osed, of them authenticating my Irish identity, realizing that there was little they could obtain from me and then setting up some mechanism for releasing me without endangering themselves.
Hill Sunday came and went. I buoyed myself up thinking of cracks and jokes that my friends in Belfast would make when I returned. I’
thought also with some degree of anger that I had come to Lebanon to work for a couple of years, had been kidnapped as a British subject,locked up as a British subject, and questioned as a British subject. I had run away to this country to escape the consequences of British policy , in Ireland and here I was about to be sent back for all the wrong reasons I after only four months. It angered me and the anger kept away those dark moments which were yet to possess me. I was not discontented with my imprisonment so much as with what my release would mean: the loss of ajob, a feeling that whatever was to be my future had been 1 chosen for me. On Monday, after the usual ablutions, my kidnapper and aspiring I confidant came back. A social visit this time, not to interrogate me but ll . to give me some news. He seemed excited, telling me that the Irish Government had placed a large advertisement in the local Arabic newspaper with my photograph and a copy of my passport, appealing Mi to my kidnappers for my release. He laughed. He found it funny. I J laughed too, but I laughed out of relief that finally something was confirming my own insistence that I was Irish, and that it was I pointless to keep me for it would surely only complicate matters for 1 themselves. However my increasingly acute discontent was not to be relieved by this good news.
One day during those first weeks of my captivity, I was brought a 1 towel and a toothbrush, having asked for them on several occasions.
My mind reeled on receiving them, trying to understand what this meant. Did they want to keep me in good shape for my imminent release, or had they resolved to hold me for some time and keep me in condition to endure my imprisonment? I was soon to learn the 1 significance of the towel. It was not only for cleaning myself but it was also to become my shroud. It was a drape which I had always to put on my head and face so that I might not see them nor see anything around me when they were present. So began the real monotony of my imprisonment.
Each day became another day, unmarked by any difference from the day that preceded it or the day that would come after. Always it began with a door banging and the guards crying out to one another in Arabic; the sounds of the preparation of food, boxes or tins being opened; and then the opening and closing of doors and the shuffling footsteps of the men who occupied the cells next to mine fumbling their way to the bathroom. It was always an old man in filthy ragged pyjamas and broken and torn bedroom slippers who came to my cell.
Henceforth I was forbidden to look at him but saw only the door opening, the broken shoes, the legs of the pyjamas and heard his soft, feeble voice saying something to me in Arabic. I came to call him the ‘Shuffling Acolyte’. There was only this old man and perhaps one or two other guards. One of them was in charge, and gave the orders, more shouting than ordering. I always recognized the sliding gait of my old man. As if to hold the shoes upon his feet, he would slide himself forward, his feet in constant contact with the ground.
Sometimes he would hurry me and at other times he was content to smoke as long as I was content to wash or do whatever else I could find to do in the toilet. But I always knew when he was coming for me, that telltale shuffling slide outside my door. The other, much younger guard who seemed to be in charge, I called ‘The Grim Reaper’. These were the only two human beings with whom I had the barest contact.
The Grim Reaper was given his name because of his occasional outbursts of violence and his frequent beatings of some of the younger Arab prisoners. It was not unusual to hear him shouting abuse at one of the passing prisoners and continuing the scolding until he had worked himself into enough of a frenzy to make his abuse more physical. Either outside my cell door or in the cell of one of the Arab prisoners he would kick and beat and scream at some unfortunate. It seemed as the days passed that he had one favourite, a pet he enjoyed tormenting. I would hear this pathetic creature trying to run past The Grim Reaper on his way to and from the toilet, and then there would be the familiar flurry of abuse followed by the beating and the screaming.
The toilet was no more than a hole in the ground, and beside it a water tap, where I could fill a plastic jar to flush away whatever needed to be flushed away. It was a filthy place. I doubt if anyone had bothered to wash it in years and indeed, as I came to learn, no-one would want to wash it. We were prisoners, unwanted, unworthy and according to our jailors’ convictions, unclean. They would not enter a place which we had used to wash or relieve ourselves. But it was what lived in there amongst the rubbish and the filth that made those minutes in the toilet so disgusting. The place was alive with cockroaches, large and shiny. Their hard body armour and their claw-like legs made loud scratching noises as they moved. They scurried rather than crawled. Their speed and the hardness of their shell made it impossible to crush or kill them. The toilet was their nesting place. It was necessary on each visit to poke through the filth and chase these monsters out of our privy. I remember once trying to drown them in the water of the toilet hole and to my horror watching them climb unscathed from this pit of excrement and dart glistening around my feet again. Using the toilet was, because of this insect menagerie, a painful experience. I sat half squatting above the receiving hole while nervously watching every dark corner.
The toilet was screened off from the cell block by a crude and tattered curtain. I would sit at times and watch the daily procession of bodies, their faces draped with filthy towels, move in slow silence to and from this place. It was like some unholy ritual at which I was a secret observer. One day during that first week, I can’t remember precisely when, they took me for my first shower. The shower space was like the toilet, a cubicle of filth. It was fitted with a brace of pipes and an ancient shower head. The walls were of crude block construction, about shoulder-high. I noted that some of the blocks had fallen away and revealed a dark space beyond; through it I could hear more clearly the noises from the street, voices of children and occasionally what I took to be their mothers calling to them. What was immediately beyond the shower room I could not clearly see, nor could I risk looking. But it was possibly a way out. I took my time showering, wanting to establish in the minds of my guards that when I was brought again I could be left there for some ten or fifteen minutes, enough I thought to climb the piping and slither like one of those cockroaches through the opening. But it would have to wait. I was also still trying to convince myself that I would soon be released.
There was no point in pre-empting that freedom by making a failed escape attempt.
Showered and refreshed, and my head filled with plots and hopes, I was returned to my cell. I think now how much like one of those hateful cockroaches I had become. Crawling every day, fearful and half-blind, to the toilet hole and back to my corner. My food awaited me. It was the same as before and would be the same for many days to come: a round of Arab bread, a piece of cheese, a spoonful of jam, a boiled egg. The bread was my plate, the floor my table and my fingers became my fork. This was my morning and my only meal. The guards came only to wash us and to feed us, much as one does with animals, the terminally ill or the deeply insane.
During those days as I sat complementing hopes for release with plans for escape, I had occasional visits from my kidnapping friend.
He was always amicable. He seemed intrigued that I was relaxed, that I seemed unafraid and that I was able to laugh. He told me of his time in London and how his English teacher, who was of Scots origin, had called him a ‘Sassenach’. He didn’t understand what this word meant.
I tried to explain it to him. He became even more confused while I thought quietly to myself, I have another name for you, my friend.
On one of his last visits I recall him telling me that if any of the guards should beat or punch me I was to tell him. Instead I told him, filled with cocky self-confid
ence, that if anyone punched me I would most assuredly punch them back. He heard this I am sure not knowing exactly what my words meant, but feeling the confident force of them. He only looked at me for a moment and perhaps then the thought crossed his mind that maybe he should beat and frighten me to avoid such happenings. The moment passed, and nothing happened.
He had taken to wearing my new sunglasses. I boiled with anger, but concealed it. He seemed oblivious to the fact and I wondered what had become of my ring and my watch. Insignificant and inexpensive things had now become so vitally important to me. Parts of me had become parts of someone else. I wondered, as they walked about and looked at my watch, did they ask where it had come from and what had happened to its owner? Was there one split second of thought about me, as they twisted my ring or wound my watch?
Sometimes my kidnapper would ask me to give him English lessons, which I agreed to do, more out of boredom than any desire. I remember looking through the textbooks that he had brought with him for an appropriate lesson, and somehow I found the right one.
On the day I had decided to execute my plan, which I jokingly called ‘Operation Clean Getaway’, I was duly delivered to the shower cubicle. I waited some minutes for the guard to take himself back to the main cell-block. Slowly I turned on the water and rapidly put on my shirt. I remember stupidly rubbing my shoes against the calves of my legs to polish them. I must have thought I was going to ‘Come Dancing’. First, I tested the pipes, and they seemed secure. I reached up and placed one hand into the hole through which I hoped to disappear. With the other I reached up and clasped one of the pipes. I next had to lift my foot onto the lower bend of the pipes, then heave and push myself hand over foot into the hole. Thus positioned I waited, steeling myself and trying to calm my nervous breathing by taking huge gulps of air. I chose the number eleven in my head and began to count slowly. On reaching eleven I was supposed to disappear, head first like a rabbit down a hole. ELEVEN!!! Up and Away!!!