An Evil Cradling (42 page)

I am still and always will be amazed at the qualities men find in themselves when they have only themselves in which to find a source of life. I had seen John McCarthy turn from someone who was frightened, as we all were, into someone who was unafraid and totally committed to life. He found and gave a sense of delight to all of us. But beyond this I had seen him become confident and challenging to those who were holding us. And underlying this he was a man who remained deeply sensitive.

In that long time of captivity I had also come to know all the many people that were in me. Here again, I saw the same: many different qualities in each man and each of them looking and seeking for expression. Though we were all different, our shared suffering had made of us a collective community. We sought to complement each other, to understand the different aspects of each others’ personalities and meet with them meaningfully. By so doing we were always aware of each others’ mood swings and frustrations.

At the beginning as John and I recommenced our affectionate and playful lunacy I thought I saw in the faces of some of the others a kind of jealousy or envy. And I could well understand it. For so long these Americans had sustained themselves with debate and conversation, a competitive extracting from one another of each others’ intelligence or interests. They seemed not to have, or to have lost any capacity for playfulness, for laughter. But as I came to know each of them in the confines of this room, I began to reunderstand that each man’s humanity and capacity to love expresses itself in different forms. In those sharing moments I discovered qualities that were lacking in myself.

Sometimes we create too finely, too exclusively, and think our own world best of all. This theme was a frequent topic of discussion between us. We each had a vision of our own Utopia, but being so far removed from the world we had the time and opportunity to examine it in great depth. Each of these separate, self-chosen, self-constructed worlds we laid upon the table, that each might see and evaluate and question. I don’t remember a bitter row, I can hardly ever remember anyone turning aside from his comrade, though those debates went on long into the night and re-emerged perhaps days or weeks later.

Someone had forgotten to make a point, a new observation occurred to someone and he would bring it back to the table to be resolved.

The squabbling, when it did come, came over insignificant things.

Always it is the case that when the mind is empty or tired or when like a child we need to be fed, we cry out in tantrums. Some men needed to be proved right to gain a small victory over their neighbour. It was a means of restoring identity. We all needed these things and we sometimes turned squabbling like hungry birds fighting over crumbs.

At other times we realized the pettiness and futility and turned away embarrassed. Offence would be taken at insignificant and undeliberate abuse. For days a man might sit in silence, considering his dignity vastly insulted. At other times the dispute would be respectful but forceful. There would be no compromise. From all this John and I eventually turned away. We would no longer be participants. Our silence drew the disputants to us. They sought allies for their individual cause, but we would not be arbiters or referees. In the end these minor skirmishes ended silently and on most occasions amicably, though the return to friendship sometimes took a few days.

When one is constantly subject to a heightened reality, all things are disproportionate.

I have watched a man lie still for days, his body a living corpse. His face stares back, a pallid mask of the man he was. Nothing will arouse him from his torpor. We are wordless and angry at the constant sight of his silent corpse. We push down our anger, looking to one another to see which of us might have the energy to go in and find this man and bring him home to us. Our empty faces and our shrugging shoulders display our own fearful anxiety.

I speak to him as if nothing strange is happening and the day is like all the others. ‘Tell me about bees,’ I suddenly say without knowing where the thought came from, only that I am now at this instant interested in bees. There is no reply. I speak again to him but know that I am talking to myself, and start pulling from the air of my imagination some facts that I know about bees. I talk about them and ask odd questions that occur to me. Nothing, no response. It’s time to find another key. I begin talking about cheese-making. I have always wanted to know how to make cheese, but the subject is boring and my knowledge limited.

I jump from one thing to another desperately tying together disparate ends to find a way in. ‘You know what I am going to do when I get out of here? … There is an island just off the North Antrim coast called Rathlin Island. It’s a place where in the fourteenth century Robert the Bruce went to hide out from the English armies. and it’s the place where he saw the spider. Rathlin Island is sometimes still called the disputed island because the Scots claim it and the Irish claim it and the Brits claim it because they claim a part of Ireland. But as far as I know, and it’s only a small island, nobody has ever found the fucking cave where the spider went swinging back and forward, back and forward, back and forward. I think if I get out of here I am going to hunt all over it till I find the cave and if I don’t find one big enough I am going to see somebody with a lot of explosives and blow a bloody great big hole in the side of a hill somewhere and call it the Robert the Bruce Cave, and then what I am going to do is I am going to fill the fucking island full of goats and then I’m going to … No, I’m not going to fill the island full of goats, that’s ridiculous, ‘cause everybody knows about goat’s milk cheese and everybody knows about sheep’s milk cheese … What I think I’ll do is, I’ll get a load of pigs, they’re cheap, and I’ll milk the pigs … When I’ve made all the milk into cheese I’ll put the cheese in this cave and I’ll call it Robert the Bruce Cheese and make a killing because with everybody disputing who owns this island how can anybody tax me when I start selling the stuff, and nobody will ever have eaten cheese like it before because there is nobody who eats pig’s milk cheese.’

My own lunacy is beginning to intoxicate me. I am sitting close to the dreaming man. I look quickly at him and see what I haven’t seen for days. His eye brightening. Pretending not to notice I carry on ad-libbing.

‘I’ll have to make this cheese look different… You know, all cheeses look the same but this being a special Robert the Bruce cheese made on this island, which has never been known before and stored in ‘If

these caves … I think the French store their cheese in caves but how did it get that funny colour in it… You know you get this smelly-sock cheese and it’s all marbled with blue, well my Robert the Bruce cheese is going to be mottled green ‘cause its obviously going to be Irish cheese … Now how the hell do you get all that green mottling in it? … Do you inject some sort of bacteria, or maybe I could get a lot of shamrocks and stick them in it and maybe the bacteria from them would turn it green or something, but then nobody will eat green cheese so I just have to get it mottled the way Danish Blue is.

Look at the Danes, they just spread a whole lot of blue ink over their cheese and everybody is buying it.’

Laughter beginning to ripple up. Again I continue ‘What are you all laughing at? … I’m deadly serious, this thing could work, think of it … you could make a fortune… Pig’s milk cheese, stick Robert the Bruce on it, go to this island, blow a big hole in the wall, who is going to know? Who is going to know if that is Robert the Bruce cheese or not, you get a lot of spiders from somewhere and hang them all over the place; that’s your evidence and then how do you get this green stuff into it?’ In the middle of the laughter, even the ‘dead man’ begins to come to life. Suddenly his voice says nonchalantly ‘You need to bury some copper wires in it, Brian, and after a time pull the wires out, it leaves a green mark throughout the cheese.’ ‘Fuck me, how did you know that?’

A man emerges back into life, not because of anything I have said, but the lunacy and the laughter that is at the heart of our life beckon him back and he cannot resist it. There are many things a man can resist -pain,

torture, loss of loved ones -but

laughter ultimately he

cannot resist.

We moved in and out of these moments of intimacy and compassion, of sharing and of rejection, at times when turmoil turned us inward to deal with what troubled or confused us. I sat back to watch and attempt to comprehend. I remembered Terry Anderson’s words in that prison where we were all held, sometimes separately, sometimes one or two of us together. ‘Why me, Lord? … Why me?’

He would half remonstrate and half joke with God and even here he echoed those words, always in jest. ‘Why me Lord? Why me?’ I tried to learn from these men, from their thoughts, their confessions, their behaviour, something that might answer Anderson’s question for all of us.

I remembered a story I had read when I was young, Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey. The story is located in South America.

It tells of an incident that is supposed to have really happened. An unrelated group of people is crossing a rope and wood bridge stretching over the river and gorge called St Luis Rey. Amongst them is an old aristocratic lady, a few children, a youth and an old man. As they attempt to cross the bridge it snaps and breaks and they tumble to their deaths. The incident was insignificant in world history. But a Spanish Jesuit priest sought to understand the significance of why all these people, having no relation to one another, should be killed, by an ‘act of God’. He researched diligently into the backgrounds and relationships of each of these people who had died, trying to find a connecting thread and from that connection to perhaps clearly understand the will and purpose of God, believing that if he could decipher such a meaning then not only might he prove God’s purpose but make God more real to himself. Seeking to find proof of God’s purposefulness in this incident was indeed a daunting task and one that only the priestly mind could conceive.

The author uses the device of collecting the priest’s researches and sought in an imaginative reproduction of this story, and of the lives of the dead people, not to answer the questions that the priest had sought to answer but to provide an imaginative landscape for the reader. The book was not simply a story but an exploration.

Perhaps self-interestedly I tried to apply the theses of the priest and of the novelist to our own situation. We were all from diverse backgrounds. Each of us had different life experiences and a different complex of needs and aspirations. There was nothing in our life histories that should have brought us together. We were all in our own way innocently walking over a bridge that had collapsed and we had all tumbled down here into this hole in the ground and found ourselves together. Why? Why were we picked specially to be here?

The interrogator’s words so many years before -‘God is testing you’ were not sufficient for me. I rejected them for there were others with me who thought differently. What was there beyond the pathetic politics of the struggle outside our jail that had brought us to this? We had each of us revealed as we talked through the long hours of many mornings something about forces greater than ourselves, our minds having been pushed through all sorts of dark mysterious places. We had all had moments of religious mania and hard times of deep contemplation. Whether it was a paranoia of isolation or whether it was some rage as great as the religious fervour of our captors, we were as yet still unclear. In my observations of and conversations with these men, I found that like the group in Wilder’s book there was a single common denominator that bound us together. We each had turned inward intensely. In searching through the complex panorama of our past, one thing emerged again and again: our relationship to and understanding and experience of love underlay everything else.

In his story Wilder hints that the lives of his characters were somehow lacking in love: either they had never known it, or they had passed through it into a condition of life devoid of love. Some of them, the children who died, had not yet experienced it. The priestly researcher would have concluded that their death was a sure sign of the love of God coming to take them into his passionate embrace. Wilder allows the reader to question this. The men I watched silently, or talked and argued with, these men with whom I laughed and played, were for me the five people on that bridge over the St Luis Rey. We each of us had fallen down into meaning, if we cared to seek it out, and to climb with it out of that awful chasm into which we had been toppled. The experience of love was the stepladder up which we could climb.

Between the time we had left the Israeli-occupied zone and our arrival at Baalbek we had spent some months in an apartment in the southern suburbs of Beirut. We knew that Frank and a Frenchman were being held in a room adjacent to ours. We could not communicate with them. The Americans now told us that they had each been held with a French citizen during those months. Indeed before our arrival here Tom Sutherland had occupied this very room with Marcel Carton. He had previously been locked up with Jean-Paul Kaufmann. Tom’s excellent French allowed him to glean much information from them.

Carton was an elderly man who had lived for many years in Lebanon and spoke good Arabic. His facility gave him immediate and intimate access to the guards’ conversations. ‘Every day, tout les heures, they speak only of sex always, always sex, sex, sex and Allah. Always it is the same. It is the minds of boys in the bodies of men.’ They spoke frequently about aids and the sexual perversion of the American imperialists. This struck a chord in my memory. I recalled how on many occasions when we were ill and required medication the guards would spit at us ‘You aids, you aids. ‘ Even in the minds of our captors love or its perversion was the prime mover.

For our captors homosexuality was a vice exclusive to the West and

it was the wrath of Allah’s judgement that we should be poisoned with aids. ‘Woman is for man,’ a guard would remonstrate excitedly. I remembered the line from the Koran. ‘Women are as your field, go into them.’ Carton had also observed to Tom that in their discussions of Allah and the Koran half of them could not read the classical Arabic in which the Koran was composed. They were therefore not so much receivers of the word as followers of the instructions of their immediate religious superiors.