An Evil Cradling (10 page)

they had closed off and sealed up permanently two doors of possibility as effectively as the real door that held me. I decided that I must again be forceful in my demands; that I must obtain some information as to why I was being held. My strategy was one which I had turned over in my mind as a third possibility or a third door: a door which was always to remain with each hostage, and which we alone could open and go through.

Hunger-strike is a powerful weapon in the Irish psyche. It overcomes fear in its deepest sense. It removes and makes negligible the threat of punishment. It powerfully commits back into the hunger striker’s own hands the full sanction of his own life and of his own will. I was desperate for information. I needed to know something, anything, even a lie, something on which the mind could fix and, like a life belt, cling to for survival. I simply stopped eating. I recall now that in those first few weeks I had eaten very little and felt little need to.

Hunger never seemed to affect me. Perhaps the mind, constantly shifting and readjusting and falling back, grew so preoccupied that it never turned its attention to the needs of the body. But because of this I felt supremely confident about what I would do. So each morning as breakfast arrived, I would simply consign it to a corner and forget fly about it. It was not an effort. The food accumulated in my plastic bag.

I considered it to be a wise move not to inform the guards of my ?, intention but to go it alone until I could use the threat of my own death to obtain the information for which my mind was ravenous. I thought I would leave it for some days until I was fully launched on this course and fully committed to it, until I was so fixed on it that they could take no action to break me from it.

Day after day, the food piled in the corner, forgotten, untasted and unconsidered. I thought that this rotten food might infest the cell with all the horrors of the toilet. In the mornings I concealed what I could of the food in my shirt, carried it with me to the toilet and got rid of it there. I thought also to keep enough sitting in the room so that when I revealed my intentions to them, they would see I was serious. After seven or eight days, I thought it was time to make a move. I had felt myself growing dizzy as I stood up in the mornings to walk to the toilet: that short walk of some thirty feet exhausted me. To let this thing run too long and not to pressurize them when I was sufficiently alert and strong would put them under little enough compulsion to respond. I took from my briefcase a stub of pencil which the guards had not found and scribbled on the cover of one of

the textbooks a note to the chief, declaring what I was doing and why I was doing it.

When I had been given my food and before the guard had left, I called him back. The Grim Reaper arrived, and squatted in front of me; I simply handed him the note and told him to take it to his boss.

He was puzzled. His English was very poor, so with some pidgin English, mixed with pidgin French, I was able to communicate the purpose of my note. He understood the word ‘Boss’ and looked at the note. He did not understand what I had said, but pointed to my name at the bottom and then with his finger pointed at me. I nodded ‘Yes’.

He explained falteringly that he would take this note to his ‘deck boss’.

I understood that term to mean some junior lieutenant. He left and locked the door.

One way or the other I was committed to confrontation. But the days of hunger, or rather of indifference to hunger, had steeled my purpose. I remember as I refused to eat each meal feeling myself grow stronger. A fierce kind of pride met a fierce determination of will as the food heaped in the corner. My resolve was banked equally high and my purpose became more strongly fixed. Within the hour, the door of my cell was opened and in came the kidnapper who had been in the car when I was taken. He read the note quietly to himself, pointed to some words he was unsure of and I explained them at length. He looked around the cell. I lifted the plastic and pointed to the food. He appeared very anxious and upset by this. There was no anger. His voice was pleading when he asked ‘Why you don’t eat?’

Again I told him that I would not eat until someone came here and told me why I had been taken; how long I was going to be held; what was being done and whether they had had any communication with representatives of the Irish Government. I was amazingly calm. I had not lost that defiant self-confidence but for some reason, whether it was the effect of a long period without food or the mind fixing itself so definitively on its purpose, I felt no need for anger or aggression. My stubbornness had interiorized itself. The guard left, telling me he would return with his chief.

The next morning, after I had been brought back from washing, my kidnapper and a man I presumed to be his boss came to my cell. The chief stood just inside the door while the kidnapper squatted beside me and talked to me. His chief would say something to him in Arabic. He would translate it for me. I would answer but he never translated the answer. I was sure that his chief spoke English and knew exactly what

I was saying, but for some reason, and this was to happen again and again, the chiefs when they came would not let their voices be heard speaking English. I repeated again what I had earlier told him, so that this boss might hear my reasons and my purposes. I spoke slowly and calmly. I recall that this seemed to cause them some concern. They were probably worried that I was already becoming ill. They explained that they had no doctor. I answered that I did not want a doctor. If they brought one I would refuse to see or speak with him. I was made to stand, then to sit, then to walk in the passage. I assumed my light-headedness and my weakness were obvious to them, for they quickly brought me back to the cell and told me to eat. I refused.

They said that I would die. I simply shrugged. I was then told that they did not care if I died, there were many hungry people in Lebanon. I said ‘Feed them with this food, for I shall not eat it.’ Words were exchanged between the chief and the young kidnapper and they left, saying simply ‘OK, you die.’ I smiled.

The next day, they were back, the young kidnapper and the prison chief and The Grim Reaper. They checked that my day’s ration of food was untouched. Again the question ‘Why you don’t eat?’ I answered, ‘I will not eat until you tell me why? They talked outside my cell. For a moment I thought that they would try to punish me, but I was beyond caring. The young guard came back and told me that he did not know, it was simply his job to do such things. I told him that I still wanted to know and would not eat until I was told. He left, and as the door closed I heard him speak outside the cell. I knew that his chief was standing there, listening and saying nothing.

For the next few days nothing happened and I ate nothing. I was confident, I was strong-willed and almost ecstatic as I pushed each meal from me. Occasionally one of the guards would come and tempt me with an apple. But I was beyond desire. Things would come flying through the grille. A piece of cheese, and different pieces of food. I remember carrots were occasionally flung at me. I laughed and laughed. Here was a game I was winning; I was in control and control could not be taken from me.

My hunger strike ended the day the cell door opened and in came my young kidnapper. He had with him copies of Time and Newsweek. There were dramatic headlines on the front cover of each magazine about the attack on Libya by the US Airforce, the death of some of the family of Colonel Gadaffi, and the bombing of Tripoli. My kidnapper told me ‘My boss he say this why you here.’ I was amazed, half laughing and half angry but holding both in check I said ‘What the hell has this got to do with me? … I am not American. I am not British. I am Irish.’ The young guard talked excitedly about the events in Libya.

I could only follow part of what he was saying, but he concluded: ‘Now we give you what you ask … now you eat?’ I simply answered, my mind reeling with what had happened and my sudden involvement in it, ‘I cannot eat.’ The shock waves of what I had become associated with made it doubly impossible for me, at that moment, to consider food. Exasperated, he walked out and left these magazines with me. I had become a tiny, insignificant pawn in a global game over which I had no control.

The man with the skin

The man within

The man in the bright light, silent

The Atlantic beyond the window

The face behind the window

The face at an angle

The man remembers the colour orange

The colour of the orange

The ribbed texture

Of the orange skin

The man within the skin

The skin’s the man’s cage

The Atlantic beyond

The memory of no light

And no colour orange.

Leland Bardwell

Water, because it gives life; The Quran the mirror, because it is as the eye; and a bit of greenery -these are the first things to be brought into a new house.

I had, of course, like all of us, seen prison cells. We have all seen films about prisoners, or read books about prison life. Some of the great stories of escape and imprisonment are part of our history. It seems much of our culture is laden with these stories. But when I think back to that cell, I know that nothing that I had seen before could compare with that most dismal of places. I will describe it briefly to you, that you may see it for yourself.

It was built very shoddily of rough-cut concrete blocks haphazardly put together and joined by crude slapdash cement-work. Inside, and only on the inside, the walls were plastered over with that same dull grey cement. There was no paint. There was no colour, just the constant monotony of rough grey concrete. The cell was six feet long and four feet wide. I could stand up and touch those walls with my outstretched hands and walk those six feet in no more than four paces.

On the floor was a foam mattress. With the mattress laid out I had a pacing stage of little more than a foot’s width.

In one corner there was a bottle of water which I replenished daily when I went to the toilet, and in another corner was a bottle for urine, which I took with me to empty. There was also a plastic cup in which I kept a much abused and broken toothbrush. On the mattress was an old, ragged, filthy cover. It had originally been a curtain. There was one blanket which I never used, due to the heat, the filth and the heavy smell, stale and almost putrid, of the last person who had slept here.

The cell had no windows. A sheet steel door was padlocked every day, sounding like a thump on the head to remind me where I was. At the head of the mattress I kept my briefcase with my school text books.

Behind the briefcase I hid my shoes. I was forever afraid that I would lose those shoes. If I did, I felt it would be a sure sign that I would never leave that cell. I was insistent that they should not have them. They had taken everything else by now, but the shoes I guarded with jealous and vicious determination. The foolish things one clings to. A pair of cheap shoes off a street trader’s stall! Since the day they had given me Time and Newsweek I also treasured these magazines. Initially to read, reread and look at the pictures and read again. But later they served a more needy purpose.

Come now into the cell with me and stay here and feel if you can and if you will that time, whatever time it was, for however long, for time means nothing in this cell. Come, come in.

I am back from my daily ablutions. I hear the padlock slam behind me and I lift the towel which has draped my head from my face. I look at the food on the floor. The round of Arab bread, a boiled egg, the jam I will not eat, the slice or two of processed cheese and perhaps some houmus. Every day I look to see if it will change, if there will be some new morsel of food that will make this day different from all the other days, but there is no change. This day is the same as all the days in the past and as all the days to come. It will always be the same food sitting on the floor in the same place.

I set down my plastic bottle of drinking water and the other empty bottle. From bottle to bottle, through me, this fluid will daily run. I set the urine bottle at the far corner away from the food. This I put in a plastic bag to keep it fresh. In this heat the bread rapidly turns stale and hard. It is like eating cardboard. I pace my four paces backwards and forwards, slowly feeling my mind empty, wondering where it will go today. Will I go with it or will I try to hold it back, like a father and an unruly child? There is a greasy patch on the wall where I lay my head.

Like a dog I sniff it.

I begin as I have always begun these days to think of something, anything upon which I can concentrate. Something I can think about and so try to push away the crushing emptiness of this tiny, tiny cell and the day’s long silence. I try with desperation to recall the dream of the night before or perhaps to push away the horror of it. The nights are filled with dreaming. The cinema of the mind, the reels flashing and flashing by and suddenly stopping at some point when with strange contortions it throws up some absurd drama that I cannot understand. I try to block it out. Strange how in the daytime the dreams that we do not wish to remember come flickering back into the conscious mind. Those dreams that we desperately want to have with us in the daylight will not come to us but have gone and cannot be enticed back. It is as if we are running down a long empty tunnel looking for something that we left behind but cannot see in the blackness.

The guards are gone. I have not heard a noise for several hours now. It must be time to eat. I tear off a quarter of the unleavened bread and begin to peel the shell from the egg. The word ‘albumen’ intrigues me for a while and I wonder where the name came from. How someone decided once to call that part of the egg ‘albumen’. The shape of an egg has lost its fascination for me. I have exhausted thinking about the form of an egg. A boiled egg with dry bread is doubly tasteless. I make this meaningless remark to myself every day and don’t know why.

I must ration my drinking water for I am always fearful that I might finish it and then wake in the middle of the night with a raging thirst that I cannot satiate. I think of rabies and the raging thirst of mad dogs and I know how easy it would be to go mad from thirst. Now I know the full meaning of the expression so frequently used in our daily lives: ‘He was mad with thirst.’ If I were to knock over this water-bottle there would be nothing I could do because there is no-one here. Until tomorrow there will be silence in this tomb of a place so far down under the ground.