An Evil Cradling (15 page)

assured me that it was known I was Irish. John himself had interviewed a senior Irish embassy official I had known during my short teaching spell at the University. I drew great relief from this. We spoke quickly now, asking questions and exchanging information. I told John I had heard his arrival and had tried to contact him after some weeks by shouting through the bars of the grille in my cell door. He had not heard me, but he told me he heard me speak to the guards as he was being taken to the toilet. He said ‘I was greatly relieved to know there was somebody else in the place who spoke English.’

Perhaps the suppressed joy of being able to speak to someone, to have a meaningful conversation, perhaps also the fact that the room was quite large and we could walk about in it, made us both very relaxed. The conversation was one that I could imagine having with a friend whom I had not seen for a long time. I asked ‘Who is Ben Gunn anyway?‘John looked at me puzzled. ‘Ben Gunn, you know, Treasure Island,’ and I tried to remember the book, wondering what this man was talking about. John reminded me of the shipwrecked sailor who had lived on the island for so long and had grown a huge beard with hair hanging in unkempt folds and drapes about his shoulders. I remembered the character, but couldn’t think what Ben Gunn had to do with me. John said ‘Have you seen yourself?’ He came over and ruffled my hair and very heavy thick beard. I suddenly realized, as I had when I saw myself in the spoon, that I had not shaved nor combed my hair nor had access to scissors for some three months. I could see the association with the marooned and half-crazy sailor. And I began to laugh at the idea. Stevenson’s book was one of the many I had reshaped, but this character had not entered into my rewriting of the story. I had forgotten him completely. And here I was, Ben Gunn, the forgotten man.

In comparison, John looked very chic, very well groomed. Taking up the joke I told him ‘Well, poor Ben Gunn’s got the bed this time, I don’t know what you’re going to do.’ The size and the airiness of the room seemed to liberate our conversation. We talked without any meaningful reference to our situation and the danger of it. Then slowly we began to talk about the journey. We both agreed that there were two other prisoners in the van besides ourselves. John confirmed he was the person who had touched my foot and that he had also tried to touch the person beside him. But whoever that person was, he did not respond as I had done.

I remember in those first exchanges how calm we were with one

another. Perhaps the presence of an absolute stranger, but one who listened and understood what I said was comforting in a very real and physical way. My whole body seemed relaxed, and the anxiety and tension melted away quickly and painlessly. I was reassured by this stranger whom I had instantly befriended and who had returned my friendship so warmly. We spoke about the conditions that we had experienced in our separate cells. The terror seemed, as we talked about it, to become less extreme. Much of that first conversation was disconnected. Perhaps coming together and talking in the way that we did, our minds had not yet structured themselves around this new experience. It was like little children swapping comics or playing excited make-believe games.

Our conversation was disturbed when we heard footsteps approaching and the key turning in the door lock. Calmly we pulled the blindfolds down from our foreheads. We waited in silence feeling our mood of relaxation quickly diminish. Two men entered, and stood in silence for a few minutes looking at us. They threw something on the floor and left. A key turning once more in the lock was somehow a signal of safety. We pushed the blindfolds up again and looked at what had been thrown into the room. It was a mattress.

‘Well that solves the sleeping arrangements,’ said John. ‘Obviously we are going to be staying here for a bit.’ To which I said ‘Age before beauty, John, I’ll take the bed.’ He simply smiled. Even in those first few hours I quickly discovered what a curious creature John McCarthy was. For having scanned the room and having walked around it, he proceeded to examine its contents. A battered filing cabinet stood in one corner. The drawers were all open and it was empty. In another corner was a sort of chest for keeping documents and books, about the size of a small wardrobe. It too was empty. We agreed that the long hot wait in the van must have been occasioned by our captors hurriedly emptying what must have been some sort of storeroom or poorly-equipped office. We were both sure that we were not far from the city itself. That was confirmed some hours later when we heard the roar of an aircraft. It was obvious that we were close to the airport.

While John was examining the room’s contents, which seemed to me somewhat pointless, I turned to lie back on the bed and my eye fixed on something which made me suddenly very fearful and very angry. Beside the bed was a power point in the wall. From it hung a long wire with its ends exposed. I looked at the metal frame of the bed and looked at this wire and thought to myself’I am not going to let this happen to me.’ I held my silence, not saying to John what I thought it meant. I remembered that other bed and those screams from the room where I was given a few days’ exercise in my first prison. I stared at the wires and wondered how we would deal with the situation if this bed was ever to become a torture rack. I carefully moved the bed some six inches to hide this potential instrument of torture, thinking absurdly to myself’Out of sight, out of mind.’ It was a case of hiding it not from myself or my companion, but from the guards who would frequently be in this room.

‘It’s so good to be able to walk about,‘John said, not noticing that I had moved the bed. ‘The rooms we were in were so God-awful small, I was only able to stand upright at one end of my cell. The other end, the ceiling sloped down to about waist height and made it impossible to walk.’ He then began to laugh. ‘Do you know they took one of the other prisoners and locked him in the broom cupboard? In that prison?’ I was aghast. ‘They did what?’ ‘Yes.’ John’s laughter grew more outrageous. ‘They locked the poor bastard in a broom cupboard, pulled out all the brushes and bits and pieces and stuck him in it.’ They had built a prison and it could not contain all the men they had imprisoned in it. I thought of this poor man, I presume an Arab, taken from a tiny cell and locked up in a broom cupboard. I chuckled in the shadow of John’s laughter. It was the sheer comic lunacy of the idea, and something from a Walt Disney cartoon or early Charlie Chaplin film came flashing through my head as I was infected by John’s laughter. I forgot the exposed electric wire and the metal frame of the bed.

The man in the broom cupboard remained for us throughout the years to come a pathetic image, but the thought of him always made us laugh uproariously. He became a metaphor for ourselves. We could imagine his utter despair, his madness, his hopelessness, all locked inside that tiny room and all of them crying to be released, and we in our way chose to release those things through laughter: sometimes on the edge of hysteria, but always lifesaving.

The warmth, the intimacy and companionship which came flooding to us both at that first meeting was always undermined by something deeper, which we did not care at first to share with one another. It was a curious wariness that each felt for the other person with whom he had to share his whole life.

Those first days were spent in a kind of frivolous skimming over the surface of deeper things that had risen in each of us during that long period of isolation. I remember spending many of those first nights as we tried to sleep speculating about what kind of man John was. The intensity of mind and heart that solitary confinement had wrought in me had filled me with questions. How much had I really changed?

Was it possible to be open with this man and reach that type of brotherhood that is, I suppose, the hallmark of all those who have known suffering?

I felt a desperate need to be honest, always acknowledging to myself that whatever I had felt in isolation was excusable and everything should be understandable. We could only really know ourselves by being open about that experience and the meaning we had drawn from it. I lay in the darkness looking up at the high ceiling and remembering incidents in that small cell. I had dreaded ever being put in a cell with someone else, with whom I would have to live a kind of half-life, afraid of exposing myself, afraid of him seeing the hurt, the pain that had preoccupied me in isolation. I imagined that my new friend would be thinking the same things.

‘All men are but teeth on a comb’ is an old Arabic saying and so it was with us. Both of us had gone through experiences that opened up new definitions of what we were as humans. But to be truly humanized and to be truly whole again it would be necessary to expose that, to share it honestly with another person. Would this man be frightened of what I thought? We become our meaningful selves only if people receive meaning from us. I doubted suddenly if I could

draw from those dark days in isolation a meaning that someone would receive and understand.

Now confronted with another human being who looked at me and observed me as I did him, I found myself wondering whether I was more frightened of my friend than I was of the men who held me and who might if they so desired end my life. As much as companionship filled me with a sense of joy it was an unresolved joy. I wanted to wash my conscience and my memory clean from the experience that had overpowered them and had in some way contaminated them. Dare I expose the scars of this outrage, and acknowledge my own ignominy?

It might, I thought, be a kind of capitulation. So much of our experience had been dehumanizing. Would the confession of it make me permanently non-human? A part-formed creature?

Fear of self and fear of the other re-emerged as the constant undercurrent of our first days together. But if there was a gulf between us, our sense of mutual gratitude obscured it. Faced with the liberty we received from one another, we cast off our sense of loss, and of atrophy. The gregarious character which is part of what we are as humans slowly returned to us. We needed someone to share our beliefs, or even lack of them. This man, who might have been an ideological opponent forcing me to withdraw and become hostile and defensive, instead reached out to embrace as we all need and ultimately must do. But the breaking down of these fears, of these insecurities, of all this self-questioning was not an immediate thing. It takes a long time to come back to yourself. It needs a commitment to the courage of another person in order to approach them, be honest with them and know that you will not be shunned or rejected by them. That coming together over the long months and the years that lay ahead was the remaking of humanity and the recreation of a meaningful future that seemed to have been stolen from us.

The routine of this new place was little different from the prison we had previously been held in. In the morning the guards would come.

We would be walked perhaps fifteen yards to a toilet, and later returned to this airy room. We were now fed three times a day. As the days went by other changes became apparent. The change in location from a tiny squalid cell to a. large airy storeroom was of major importance to us, of course. The more significant fact that the guards themselves had changed suggested to us that something outside had changed too. What it was we could not tell. We were never told who it

was that was holding us, nor did we ask. As we tried to piece some logic into our move here, we decided that the only answer was that we had indeed changed hands from one group to another. We could not be sure but all the signs suggested it.

The guards would rotate in teams of two every two days. There were six of them and over the period of weeks in which we were held there we came to know them quite well. They enjoyed coming in to talk with us if they had sufficient English. Much to our surprise, they would attempt to tell jokes. One of them, a tall well-made young man of about twenty-six who called himself Abed, would signal his arrival by coming into the room and announcing light-heartedly ‘Abed’s Hotel is now open.’ This Abed took great pleasure in cooking us different meals on each of the days he was there. I recall him once telling us that he enjoyed coming to ‘care for us’; and we got to know a lot about him and his home and his family. We enjoyed his presence and the opening every two days of Abed’s Hotel. Another guard spoke in the most polite English. He was extremely well-mannered and we always had the feeling that he was not entirely happy with his task. He was always deferential to us. John called him ‘Jeeves’. Our introduction to the other guards was less pleasant.

During the first week in ‘Abed’s Hotel’ things were very disorganized.

The meal-times were irregular and cigarettes were not forthcoming. When I had been thrown into this room my briefcase had been set outside the door. During my period in the other prison I had kept a hidden stock of cigarettes, as there were days when none would be given to us. So I had brought eighteen cigarettes in my briefcase and our need of them was now great. Desperation overcame apprehension and I walked to the door and knocked loudly, then slowly retreated to my bed and waited for someone to respond. No-one came. I repeated my knocking and again no-one came. I thought there was probably no point in this, and of how much my knocking might antagonize the guards, and I was fearful of repeating my demand. But the thought of eighteen cigarettes in a briefcase outside the door was too strong. I went back again and knocked and knocked and knocked, demanding some kind of an answer. At least if they refused the cigarettes we would not have to sit thinking about them, longing for them.

I retreated back to my bed and heard the key turn in the door. We waited, expecting someone to come in. A voice asked ‘What you want?’ We knew then that the man speaking to us was outside the door and had only opened it slightly, so we both squinted from under our blindfolds to see a man’s forearm holding a gun, his hand trembling as he directed it about the room and hissed at us ‘Pray to God, pray to God.’ Fear and the desire to laugh at the stupidity of it gripped me.