Captivity (42 page)
Authors: James Loney
It fascinates me. They have not understood that this movie is about them. They are what the finger of this movie is pointing at, freedom-hating, suicide-bombing terrorists that George W. Bush invaded Iraq to save the world from. They do not see that this movie is the most dangerous weapon being aimed at them, that it is far more powerful than any tank or gun or bomb because it explains and justifies why they must be destroyed. I wish, instead of pointing his gun at it, Junior would leave the theatre altogether.
MARCH 11
DAY 106
It’s official. I’m back in the land of the living, sitting with Harmeet and Norman against the wall in plastic-chair hostage formation. Time here moves more slowly than it does in sick bay, where I could sleep at my leisure.
Medicine Man arrives at about 11:20 a.m. He has a video camera
and a newspaper. He’s going to film us holding the newspaper. All we have to do is say the name and the date. Who is the video for, we ask. The Society for Peace Between Canada and Iraq, he says. I wonder if this is a government front for transferring the ransom money.
We ask if there’s any news. He shakes his head. Britain is still cold. Things are moving slowly with the lord. He is frustrated. “This should only be one month, not two, three, now four. This is the big problem. I talk with my chiefs in a worried way about this—the delay, the risk for us—and they give to me the decision. Now we just take some money—any money—and release. All of you. We have to finish the matter. Now it is just money. There are two people between me and the negotiator, but I am the one who make the decision. It should not be this way, going on for so long.”
After taking the video, he holds up the newspaper. “Do you know what this says?” he asks us. He reads the headline—something about how the Sunni political parties have fallen into disarray. “It is very bad,” he says, shaking his head. He seems despondent, tired, almost desperate.
Junior is beside himself with boredom. He stands in front of the TV with the remote, clicking through the eight stations. Soap opera, news, soap opera, news, soccer, commercials. He curses the television and throws the remote onto his mat in disgust. He takes his Quran and sits cross-legged on the floor. Nephew lounges on the mat against the wall. The room feels claustrophobic, filled with the bored agitation of its five captives.
Junior puts his Quran to the side and lies cruciform on the floor, covering his face. He gets up, kisses his prayer rug, unrolls it in front of the TV, kneels down and begins his evening prayers with great heaviness. When he is finished, Nephew takes the rug from him and steps out of the room. Junior lies face down on his bed. “Come on, Jim, massage,” he says.
“La, la, ani mooreed,”
I say.
“Massage sit down,” he pleads.
I laugh and pretend for a moment that I’m going to sit on him.
What are you doing?
I think, suddenly panicked.
That was not smart at all
. Luckily Junior does not react. I kneel down beside him on the mat. “Shwaya massage,” I say.
Harmeet asks Junior if he can have the remote control.
“Na’am, na’am,”
he mumbles.
Harmeet takes the remote from his bed. He finds an English documentary about Iranian transsexuals. A young man is being interviewed on the eve of his sex change operation. He’s radiant. He tells the interviewer he can’t wait for the operation so that he can really begin his life as a woman. There are interviews with his doctor, what appears to be a social worker, his mother. My eyes fill with tears. It’s people like him whose lives are the real frontier of human progress, I think.
Nephew returns from saying his prayers just as the documentary is concluding. He’s frustrated that there’s nothing worth watching on the TV. “La cable. Mooshkilla.” He takes the remote from Harmeet, changes the channel to al-Hurra news, yawns, scratches his belly, lies down on his mat. And then we see it. The top news story. A poster-board shot with all of our faces and names. The camera focuses on Tom. Then Tom blindfolded and wearing an orange jumpsuit. Then a road, the camera moving in on a spot on the ground and—the channel changes. Nephew is pointing the remote at the television
. “Shid ghul Tom?”
Harmeet says to Nephew.
Nephew sits up. He says something about a prisoner exchange, Tom is okay, he’s at the other house, they’re just doing a show about him this week, next week it will be one of us. He is lying.
I finish Junior’s massage and return to my chair. Junior gets up and puts
Time Cop
into the DVD player for the third time.
MARCH 12
DAY 107
Nephew asks Harmeet to go downstairs to help him in the kitchen—just before breakfast and again right after. I am jealous. I would give just about anything to be in his place, handcuff free and doing something useful, reconnoitring escape possibilities.
Harmeet gives us a full report when he returns. Nephew said the news was good for me and Harmeet. He made Harmeet promise not to tell Norman: Harmeet and I will be released first, then Norman, then Tom. There’s a prisoner in the United States they’re trying to get out in exchange for Tom—Omar Abdel-Rahman, the man who was convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in 1993. Harmeet asked about Tom. Nephew repeated his story about how they’re doing a profile on each of us. Harmeet told him how Medicine Man had said they were going to announce to the media that they had killed Tom. Nephew repeated the story about the prisoner exchange.
I ask Harmeet what Nephew had him do.
“I washed some dishes first and then helped to clean the floor. He threw some water on the floor. I had this worn-down broom to scrub the floor with and he had a squeegee to push the dirty water into the drain. He didn’t seem to want me to do a good job, though. I’d be digging into it, wanting to really clean, and he’d say that’s enough. It was quite dirty but he just wanted to do a quick little rinse, it seems.”
I have to know. “Do they use hot water for their dishes?” No, he says.
I remember feeling, when we were first promised “copy books” by Medicine Man, a little pang of disappointment. If we had asked, if we had received them earlier, I could have kept a journal chronicling our story, replete with spiritual bons mots and inspiring deep thoughts—something that could be published and, in a vain flight of fantasy, thereby join the pantheon of incarceration journals: Martin Luther King, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, Alfred Delp, Eugene Debs, etc.
So now I have paper, a pen, copious measures of time—have had this facility now for thirty-nine days—and I have to face it: I’m pretty darn banal, superficial, weak, limited in my ability to transcend the choking hold, the suffocating confines of our captivity. I won’t be writing a great prison journal. This record, if I get to keep it, which I won’t know until the day of release, will merely document my self-absorbed efforts to survive, get through the excruciating
crawl of time, cope with the various deprivations that define this miserable limbo, illustrate the emptiness and profound limitations of my will, my mind, my emotions, my spirit.
I think of Etty, the amazing generosity and expansiveness of her spirit, how you can see her shining in those last handful of days, a Jewess in a concentration camp awaiting deportation to the Final Solution. I, meanwhile, am preoccupied with my sore throat; whether or not to take more antibiotic; choking down stale
samoons;
bemoaning the lack of food and the thoughtlessness of our captors; wondering if I will finally get a comb today, after asking repeatedly over the course of almost two weeks. How could she? How did she open herself so much and give so much? How was she able to reach beyond the anxieties of physical comfort, survival itself? I at least have the consolation (though possibly illusory) of a hope and an expectation of getting out of here. Etty had to have no such hope, yet she shines with a breathtaking generosity of spirit.
I’m afraid I’m not shining very much. I say this not to berate myself—really, what’s the point of that? It is as a statement of fact and a reality for reflection: I’m a compromised compromiser who’s willing to barter silence, complicity, co-operation and lassitude in exchange for the hope (promise?) of physical survival, release from captivity.
Case in point: Medicine Man’s outrageous statement that they will use a public statement of Tom’s death as a strategy for moving the Canadian and British negotiations forward to conclusion. I said nothing. I did not challenge him. I failed to be a voice for Tom’s children, for Tom himself.
There are other examples. Every day that I eat, comply, co-operate with the directions of my captors, I am helping to put money in their pocket. This is not what I want. It is profoundly disturbing to think that my life will be bought back for two million dollars, and be used to kill and maim more American soldiers—beautiful young men and women who should be at home figuring out how beautiful and amazing they are—more Iraqi police and soldiers, or Shia, or whoever is determined to be public enemy #1. Blood on my hands.
This is not moral scrupulosity. It is merely a fact. I am a cog that’s helping to turn the war machine, and I’m not willing to gum up the works. I want out. I want to go home. I’m willing to accept and live with the facts of this compromise. I don’t expect it will keep me up at night. I am weak, afraid of consequences, torture, death. I do not, of my own accord, possess the action-hero testosterone to stand tall in the saddle and go to the wall no matter what. If that time ever comes (as well it may), and if I’m able to stay any course of moral integrity, it will be God’s grace and gift that will be acting—nothing of me. What Norman says of himself is absolutely applicable to me: I am feeble. Everything about me is limited: my will, my understanding, my willingness to risk, (especially!) my generosity. Even something as banal as the capacity to entertain myself. There is no power, no capacity I am in possession of that can’t be exhausted or crushed. Not even, I’m afraid to say it, my faith, my ability to love.
I think that’s what I learned during those days of being sick, feverish, without the relief of painkillers, when my captivity was a constant stench in my nose. I learned that there are and there will be times in our lives when we will merely exist, when we will stumble through a landscape of desolation, when suffering can’t be comforted or ameliorated, when we will feel that God has withdrawn, disappeared, when there is no possibility of meaning or hope or anything but somehow, second by second, trying to endure the relentless crush of suffering, and we begin to see/understand that it is entirely possible to be crushed, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing because it offers a way out, an end. Perhaps there is a door of despair for all of us to pass through. It is just a fact, something difficult we can’t avoid, a season of a human being’s life. Even Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.”
Perhaps I am too quick to universalize. Perhaps there are a holy handful who live their lives—and deaths—with the constant comfort and an awareness of God’s presence. But I am suspicious of any such claims …
—notebook
–
It starts with a question. “Do you see a cat on the wall, there above the window?” I ask.
“Where?” Norman says.
“It’s next to the ogre,” Harmeet says, pointing to the shape next to it in the water-damaged plaster. Yes, Norman sees it.
“You can see two very distinctive eyes,” I say. “The right eye, it makes the cat’s face seem quite vicious.”
“ ‘Tiger tiger burning bright/in the forests of the night,’ ” Harmeet says, reciting William Blake.
“ ‘What immortal hand or eye/could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ ” Norman adds.
“What happened to his rhyme?” I say. “It clunks.”
“It’s a half-rhyme,” Harmeet says.
“That’s just what they call it when they can’t make their rhymes work,” I scoff.
No, Harmeet says, Blake is trying to call attention to those words. The poem is about evil, and the idea that nature holds within it a reflection of its creator, just like a work of literature, or any artistic creation. And so he’s asking, what does the existence of violence in the world say about the nature of God? What does it mean to live in a world where a being like the tiger is beautiful—and horrific—at the same time?
“Are there other parts of the poem that clunk?” I ask.
Norman explodes. “Really, I must object to your use of the word ‘clunk.’ This is William Blake you’re talking about. His poetry does
not clunk!”
I’m taken aback by Norman’s anger. “Well, in this instance it does.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! When you can write poetry as good as William Blake, then maybe you can criticize.”
I turn to him, shaking with anger. “Don’t tell ME what I can say or think!” I cry.
“Very well, I withdraw that,” he says. “But you need to be more careful about whom you’re criticizing.”
I hold my tongue. The room fills with an angry silence.
–
Nephew comes in to check on us. We ask him if his house is in Fallujah. Yes, he says.
Where do you stay now, in Fallujah or Baghdad?
“Fallujah,” he says. “Madame, children, mother, father—all Fallujah. When it’s hot, you come to Fallujah for swimming. Very nice, swimming in the river.”
When does Sayeed come back? we ask. He’s been away for several days now.
Bacher
, Nephew says. “Sayeed good.”
Yes, Harmeet says, he gives us lots of food, lets us wash our clothes, brings us to watch television.
“Yes, yes,
ianni
, Sayeed good,” he says. “Hayder angry.” Nephew makes an angry face, waves his hand at his head, tenses his shoulders. “Hayder very angry.
Sadika mot.”
He drops his head against his shoulder, closes his eyes and sticks his tongue out.
Did his girlfriend die? Harmeet asks.
“Shwaya,”
he says. She will die soon.
“Shoo mooreed?”
Harmeet asks.
Nephew traces a path from his breast to his head. She has breast cancer and it’s metastasized to her brain. We ask how old she is. Seventeen, he says. We ask if she goes to school. No, he says, she is too sick. That is very sad, we say. Yes, he says, looking down. We tell him we will pray for her. Thank you, he says.
