An Evil Cradling (43 page)

I listened as Tom related his stories about what he had learned from Carton and Kaufmann. I was reminded again that our captors’

obsessions with God and sex were not about religion or morality.

They were ciphers for their own powerlessness: an impotence that they experienced unconsciously at a deeply personal level and also in the world of politics.

Tom also told us how at the beginning of their captivity the French had been treated with courtesy. They were allowed to cook their own food occasionally and to make coffee. However, as the duration of their confinement increased many of these prerogatives were taken from them. The French, Tom had gathered, had had a bad time not so much from the guards, but from each other. Apparently there was much bitterness and division. Only Jean-Paul Kaufmann held himself above this.

Tom and Terry spoke occasionally of their own early period of captivity with those other Americans who had been released years ago. There was occasional rivalry there too.

We were not always engaged in such deep conversations. We resorted as we had done so many times before to games. Terry Anderson had a meticulous mind and excellent recall. With a piece of cardboard carton and a pen scrounged from the guards he constructed a precise replica of a Monopoly board. On scraps of paper, usually the backs of cigarette packets, we made our Community Chest and Chance cards. Old pieces of newspaper, or tissue or cigarette packs became money. We played for hours. The playing of games is anathema to the fundamentalist mind, which believes it should have no preoccupation but God. Our God, we quietly acknowledged, existed in each other and it was to please each other and ourselves that we played our games, with the omnipresent eye of the camera watching us. A deck of cards and a chess set were also constructed over a period of weeks.

These games were a revelation. The way men play them, the games they choose not to play and how they handle victory or defeat define much about their character. Some men would not play for they could not bear to lose. Others played for the game itself, which engendered a kind of comedy that was inspiring for all of us. At other times the game played seriously was a way to feed a hungry or exhausted mind.

Without games perhaps we would not have been able to bear one another as long as we did.

But our playroom was not always filled with laughter. I remember late in the evening, lying in the candlelight looking around at my sleeping friends. My eyes rested on Anderson. He was lying awake.

On a small stone shelf above his mattress, he had rested a tiny newspaper photo of his daughter, Salome. She was born after he had been kidnapped. In the five years since he had disappeared he had seen only three photos of her. I watched him as he lay awake, his eyes and mind fixed on the yellowing crumpled newspaper photo. What was in his thoughts or in his heart? Terry chose to keep these things to himself.

Maybe they formed for him the private treasure house that no-one needs to share.

Christmas came again.

For us it was not a time of festivity. It merely marked another year on the calendar of our captivity. In the months before Christmas we had been shown one or two video films a week. Only Frank, hidden behind his blindfold, refused to watch them. They were the usual low budget war movies or shoddily made Kung-Fu karate films. We watched an old version, I think the original one, of The Dirty Dozen. Telly Savalas played one of the leading roles, a bald, fat, aggressive killer. Our captors believed that these films were true records of the Second World War. Saafi, my wrestling companion, sat behind me as we watched. He cracked his usual jokes at each killing sequence, ‘Not bad two dollar tomorrow’. Full of serious intent he tapped both John and me on the shoulder, and pointing to the image of Telly Savalas he asked in all innocence: ‘He Churchill, yes?’ Laughter erupted from us.

It was as if God himself had cracked this joke. Telly Savalas’s malign face sucked at its cigar and stared back at us from the TV.

Christmas Eve found us contemplating what delights they might bring us to eat. Usually we were guaranteed one slice of cake each.

Upstairs the television was blaring. We could hear the film that was being shown. It was the story of the killing of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. We talked or read while we waited for the guards to come and unlock us for the morning toilet. I was humming the tune

of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ quietly to myself. Above us the film roared to its conclusion. The silence from the television room was followed by footsteps descending to our crypt. A key turned in the lock and the guards Ali and Bilal entered. They paused for some moments, then unexpectedly came first to John and myself. Normally the Americans were released first. Ali had been with us for some months and had also been at some of the other jails in which we were held. He was devout, a zealot. I knew he would have been enjoying what he saw on television. I sat waiting as I normally did, my back to the wall, my knees pulled up towards my chest.

Ali leaned over me. Normally he squatted down to unlock the padlock and chain and I waited calmly for the usual routine.

Suddenly he yanked fiercely at the chain, pulling my feet from under me, my head whiplashing back and banging against the wall. I knew instantly what this meant. Ali was drunk with the movie he had just seen. He wanted to replay it here in this place. ‘Don’t do that again,’ I hissed at him. My neck was bulging with anger. The words snarled out of me. Ali hesitated then with double force yanked once more at the chains on my feet. Again my head banged off the wall. Anger suffused me. I jumped to my feet. Not to attack but to make myself ready for what I knew was about to happen.

Ali ran from the room shouting and screaming. He disappeared into the silence upstairs. I knew the camera in the corner would be watching. Slowly I sank back to my squatting position. I felt that as I had not been attacked immediately, Ali would simply bring down a senior officer and I would be questioned. In the silence I felt the expectant fear of my friends. No-one knew what to say and as I said nothing, they sat silent. I heard the footsteps returning. The quiet about me seemed to calm and steel me. Ali ran quickly across the room to where I sat. Without warning, I felt it again, the dull thumping thud of the butt of a Kalashnikov banging into my shoulder, my arms, my chest. The man was kicking me and grinding the gun butt into my thighs. Crashing it against my knees, screaming something in Arabic, no doubt some street abuse. The gun continued to smash down. I had had this before and I could only grunt as each blow landed on me unexpectedly. My mind tight now, not caring. I was bored with it. I only wanted it to be finished and over and the foul presence of this man gone from me.

My friends sat in helpless silence, feeling pain with every blow. My mind reached out to them.

In a fit of beating and kicking, of spitting and screaming, the hysteria washed over Ali. Exhausted, he knelt down beside me, pushing and grinding the gun hard into my face. ‘Tomorrow for you I am returning.’ In the background I heard Bilal’s forced laugh. I was angry with him. I had liked this young man. He used to sit with us mimicking the song of the birds that lived around his farm.

They left and the door locked. Slowly, simultaneously we each pulled the blindfolds to our foreheads. Anderson was the first to speak. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Yes, I’m a bit shook, but I’m getting awful fucking tired of this.’ ‘What happened?’ Anderson asked. I explained.

Each was silent for a while. Sutherland asked: ‘You know he is coming back again tomorrow?’ ‘Fuck him.’ Anderson walked towards me as far as his chain would allow. Tom Sutherland and John were closer to me and stood beside me examining the bruises. I stared with menacing vengeance towards the camera. Then quickly changed my expression.

I smiled. Not the smile of a valiant hero but someone who was smiling at themselves. Ali’s blows fortified me. Without knowing he had strengthened my resolve.

For the rest of that day, there was much discussion about what we should do. The ultimate sanction was to refuse to eat, but how long would our guards tolerate that without beating us into submission?

Yet there was a need in all of us to do something. To sit quietly and accept this animal humiliation was not worthy of any of us. All of us were aware that we had also to accept that we were powerless and anything that we might do they could do ten times worse.

The day passed into evening. Each of us said what we should do. It was a way of protecting ourselves from our utter hopelessness and futility. Each of us had to believe we could do something.

The next morning we each refused to eat. It was not a group decision, an ordered and collective response, though we had discussed it long into the early hours of the morning. It was only good to take this decision if we had a strategy we could follow through. By the morning this was not resolved, only that none of us could eat. We had to make some kind of gesture.

The guards had anticipated this and were prepared. They left the cell and after about half an hour returned with one of the junior officers.

He went immediately to Terry Anderson. ‘Why don’t you eat?’ he asked. Terry was silent. ‘Why?’ he asked. Terry calmly said ‘I don’t want it.’ It was obvious to our guards that it was more than a matter of not wanting food, and they were becoming angry.

Terry was unlocked and taken hurriedly from the cell. We heard his steps as he went up the stairs and crossed through our guards’ toilet and into their room. We looked at each other in silence. We heard the mumbled voices above us but could not make out what was being said. A long pause, then a gunshot. We smiled at one another. We knew this game. With the gunshot a voice let out a long moan. It’s pathetic, I thought. The guards returned, went to Tom and John and spoke with them. Their intention was obvious, to frighten each of us into submission and into eating. None of us would indulge in this childish game. Fifteen minutes later Terry returned and was locked back into his chains. Terry told us they had simply asked him what had happened and that if we did not eat there would be much trouble for all of us. 1 sat in silence and watched the faces around me and then said ‘Yes, they can make trouble for each of us, so each man decide only for himself, this cannot be a group thing, it puts too much pressure on everyone. Ultimately what you do you do alone because only that way will you be able to go through with what you choose, resting on no-one’s support.’ For the rest of that day we did not eat.

We were each prepared to continue our strike on the following day.

The next day the guard Mahmoud entered our room. He too went straight to Terry. ‘What is your problem?’ he asked. His voice was firm but not unfriendly, and we had come to like this man. He had not been involved in any of the brutality. And we could have a conversation with him, where he would as a kindness venture information he was not permitted by his chiefs to give. Terry’s angry response could not be contained. ‘I don’t have a problem, you have a problem … Look at Brian, ask him what the problem is … We are not animals in here, but you’ve got an animal! Get him out of here and keep him out of here.’ I was surprised at the vehemence of Terry’s words. Mahmoud came immediately over to me. The two days had brought the bruising out on my body. I looked a bit like a dapple cow or a Dalmatian. ‘Who done this?’ he asked. I quietly answered ‘You know.’ There was silence between us. His hands felt over my body, turning me around to look at where the bruises had come up. ‘What happened here?’ he asked. I explained quietly. I knew this man was listening not to my words but to how I was saying them. He was trying to interpret how I was feeling. Mahmoud rose, spoke some words with John and Tom, and they reiterated my story. He came back, and squatting in front of me, said solemnly and aloud for each to hear ‘I will speak with my chief, perhaps this man will be punished.’

That evening we were informed Ali would not be returning. It was enough. There were worthier things to die for.

No-one watched whether I ate or not when lunch arrived. My friends did not want to be voyeurs of my suffering. And I had calmly resolved to myself that to continue to refuse to eat would be an imposition on them. If I continued with this thing, I would be setting precedents that some of them would be obliged to follow, if something similar happened to them. Could I be so self-interested that I didn’t care for them? I had no choice. I lifted the food to my mouth but I could taste nothing.

There were many other incidents in this hole in the ground. But each of them was an affirmation of human capacity to overcome despair. I could write at length and try to reveal each of those situations, some hilariously funny, some pathetic, others undignifying and ignoble, but that is not my purpose. For each of these incidents revealed what each and all of us are. We are all made of many parts; no man is singular in the way he lives his life. He only lives it fully in relation to others.

The Corn Crake (For John McCarthy)

Somewhere in Fermanagh it still survives

In the gentle grass, the corn crake,

Thrashing through the field as happy as Larry,

Its piteous cry its beautiful song.

One summer we were plagued by a corn crake,

Cracking its lullaby — harsh was the night.

Next door ‘Pat the Twin’ roared in unison,

The whole of Marion Park cursed the bird.

What would I give to hear its song now?

Value what you have, lest it’s lost.

Guardians of the air, birds of the earth,

If there be paradise, they live there.

They have seen the world. This solitary cell. As they fly, in chains, can you hear The corn crake surviving, singing in Fermanagh,

Remember me, remember me, remember me.

Frank McGuinness

.

Conditions in our cellar underneath Baalbek had been much alleviated towards the end of the Iran/Iraq war. In June 1988, the guards brought us the first copies of Time and Newsweek that I had seen since the early weeks of my captivity. We had not seen any newspapers for some three years. Our captors were careful to censor these magazines. Any articles referring to the situation in the Middle East, particularly the war, were torn out. Any articles referring to ourselves or the situation in Lebanon were also censored. But our captors’ strategy was a hopeless one. By simply reading the contents page of one issue and then reading the letters page in the following week’s edition we were reasonably informed about what they had prevented us from reading.