Held (21 page)

“I’m going to take a bath,” I said, wiping away tears. “If I draw the curtain can I keep the door open? I want to make sure you don’t leave.”

“I won’t leave. I have the day off today.”

I ran a bath with the scented oils and bubble foam. “I must be losing my mind,” I said from behind the curtain. “Literally. I heard machine-gun fire. Twice. The first time was really close, the second time was more distant. I didn’t know what to think.”

“You just had a vivid dream, Chloe,” he said. “You’re under a lot of stress.”

“Nothing like a hot bath,” I sighed, shutting my eyes. “I used to soak for hours when I was training …”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Of course I mind! In case you haven’t noticed, this place is about the size of a hamster cage … I didn’t know you smoked.” I peeked out from the edge of the curtain. He was sitting on the floor, facing the side wall. He was as still as a statue—a classical statue of Apollo, or maybe some emperor, seen in profile. His arm was resting on his raised knee and he was holding a pack of cigarettes in his hand. I couldn’t see the brand.

“I don’t usually,” he said, without turning his head. “Smoking reminds me of prison, in fact. But I found a pack lying around in the kitchen, and I’m suddenly in the mood.”

“Why does it remind you of prison?”

“The guards smoked.”

“That reminds me—I keep meaning to ask you, how come you gave me mouth-to-mouth? Isn’t that for when people drown?”

He continued to stare at the wall. “I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“Do you work in a hospital?”

“Not exactly.”

“I guess you saved my life.”

“I endangered your life.”

“You like anatomy and all that stuff, I can tell.”

He paused, then said, “My father was a physician. I began studying medicine too, but I was arrested before I got very far.”

“Do you live here? In this house?”

“No.”

“Does the woman?”

“Don’t ask so many questions, Chloe.”

“I’m coming out. I guess I’m feeling better. Will you stay? We can watch another movie.”

I grabbed a towel and stepped out of the bath. I didn’t feel like getting dressed right away. Instead, I lay on the bed with the towel wrapped around me.

“I’m desperate for a massage,” I said.

I didn’t think my more-than-obvious ploy would work, but to my surprise he said, “If you get dressed I’ll give it a go.”

I pulled on the sweats and a T-shirt and lay on my stomach. He kneeled next to me on the bed and slid his hands under my T-shirt. For a few seconds his hands lay motionless on my back, as if I were a specimen from outer space that he was curious about. Then slowly he began locating different muscles. I never imagined I could derive so much pleasure from mere touch. I felt myself falling into a semi-trance; at the same time it was as if I was discovering my own body. A body that had once been my obsession as I worked for hours each day, trying to make it stretch and spin and land in precise ways. But this was different. It was an exploration, not just for him, but for me too.

When he finished, he lay down next to me and we held each other in silence. I forgot about the no-touching rule, or maybe now that we were so close I assumed it didn’t apply any longer. I reached out and touched his cheek.

It was a small, spontaneous gesture, but his response was almost violent. He pushed my hand away forcefully and sat up. He seemed to be under immense strain. “I asked you not to do that,” he said angrily.

I had no idea what was going on. He wasn’t struggling with desire—it wasn’t that at all. Something about my gesture had upset him. Something that had nothing to do with me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”

He shook his head, no longer angry. “No, it’s I who should apologize. I had some memories intruding.”

“Is it from your time in jail? Did the other prisoners … you know—try things with you?” I knew I shouldn’t be asking, but I couldn’t help myself.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t that sort of prison. We were barely even able to talk to one another. We sat in a large cell and we were more or less watched all the time. You had to bribe the guard just so he wouldn’t punish you for whispering.”

“Tell me what it was like for you there.”

“I don’t want to talk about my time in prison, Chloe. It would upset you, and there’s no point.”

“But I’d like to know. It’s an important part of your life.”

“I’m not sure I’m up to it. I don’t want to go back there, even in conversation.”

“You can give me a shortened version.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Tell me what an average day was like.” It wasn’t only that I wanted to know. I felt he was carrying the weight of his experiences, and that it would be better for him if he talked about them.

He paused, trying to decide whether to continue.

After a long silence, he said, “The biggest problem in the beginning was fear. When you first arrive, they’re after you a lot. But then they get bored, or maybe when you get weaker they want to move on to someone who will respond more. After a while I was only called every few weeks, mostly because some influential friends on the outside were paying bribes. Three entire years I was forgotten altogether, and I was beginning to think that it was permanent. But then out of the blue I was relocated. Relocation is always dreaded—because almost always it’s for the worse. And there was one guard everyone feared. It was said that no one survived once they’d been put in his charge.”

His face was different as he spoke. He didn’t look impassive now. He looked like someone in an old painting, one of those classical paintings with men in robes looking puzzled.

“What do you mean, called? You mean for interrogation?”

“Yes, in theory. Interrogation under torture. But my friend—the one who’s the reason you’re here—he helped me with that as soon as I arrived. He told me that at first it might seem there are no boundaries, but that in fact there were boundaries and that I didn’t have to fear the unknown. He told me exactly what to expect. Even if they threaten, they won’t go past a certain point.”

He paused, then went on. “You have to think of it as intimidation. It’s true that you’re too disgusted to admit to things you haven’t done. It’s preferable to die. Death at least puts an end to pain. That’s why sometimes they torture your family members instead. I can’t think of anything worse, but I was spared that particular nightmare. What my friend explained to me is that there isn’t anything you can say to make them stop. First, you haven’t got any information. It’s just a way to increase the prison population, by being able to say, well, such and such a person, while only half alive by the way, said you were subversive. If you admitted you despised the regime, you had to give the names of all your friends. If on the other hand you lied and said you were loyal and obedient, they wanted proof in the form of a name. And then if you gave a name, it meant you were guilty, because you had that knowledge, and it meant you had more names and probably also that you should in fact be executed. The paranoia and ignorance—it was beyond anything. On the other hand, you could be released suddenly, if someone with money or influence was making an effort on your behalf. It was Kafka territory. Or maybe Swift.”

I was having difficulty grasping everything he was saying. “What about that guard?” I asked.

“Yes, the guard. I don’t know what happened, something slipped in the system. Bribes were coming in on my behalf, and I wasn’t supposed to end up with him. But either he got his eye on me or a bribe got stolen in transit. I was taken through a tunnel to an underground cell. There was almost no air, and I was on my own, and I had one arm and one leg chained. The heat in that cell was indescribable, the light was on all the time, and I can’t begin to describe the dirt and stench. It’s strange, but the body goes into different gear, a hyper-protective mode, and things that ordinarily would kill you, don’t. It would be very interesting to study that phenomenon and see how it works—we could make good use of it if we understood it better.

“Well, I wanted to die and I tried to die, but my body refused. And then after a week or two I got lucky, as I saw it then. I got septicemia, which is fatal without treatment, sometimes even with treatment. I was relieved that the suffering would be over and I was finally going to die.

“But the man who’d helped me was working on my behalf. He managed to bribe a guard to contact my friends outside and let them know I was in danger—because everyone in the prison knew about this guard. My friends began frantic efforts on my behalf, and the day I diagnosed myself, I was pulled out of my cell. I was sure they were taking me for execution and I was glad. But I found myself in the back seat of a car with my two friends. I was sure I was hallucinating. They began to protest that they were given the wrong prisoner because they didn’t recognize me at first. I had a beard by then, and I was probably only hours away from giving up the ghost.

“Anyway I pulled through, thanks to that man. I owe him my life.”

We sat in silence for a while. I didn’t trust myself to talk, and I also felt he didn’t want me to say anything. I knew that what he most wanted was for me to relate to him in exactly the same way as before. When he told me about these things, he was trusting me not to change the way I felt about him, not to see him differently. I would have to force myself to be as casual as he was.

But I had goose bumps, and I was in pain. For him it was in the past, but for me it was in the present, and I was filled with grief.

The silence became oppressive; it was separating us from each other. I had to find a way back to him. I asked, “How did you survive five years in a place like that? Psychologically, I mean.”

“Well, I didn’t entirely. I lost myself for a while.”

“Lost yourself?”

He got up, used the toilet, and came back to the room. He leaned against the bureau and gazed down at me. He looked almost amused. “Yes. I had strange habits for the first year. I couldn’t bear for anyone to touch me, not even to shake my hand. In the hospital I took my own blood pressure, gave myself injections when possible, I even tried to put in my own IV. When someone touched me I jumped. I think it was partly neurological, some neural damage probably, and it takes a while for the nervous system to repair itself. The rest was really neurotic. I would only eat food I made myself—I couldn’t eat at restaurants or other people’s houses. Eating meat was out of the question, I couldn’t even watch other people eat meat, it seemed to me they were eating human flesh. I could no longer stand up to urinate, I had to sit, otherwise I’d feel faint. I read books backwards, starting at the last page and moving back page by page. Sometimes I couldn’t see, everything went black. Nights were hard, I had enormous guilt about my friends who were still in prison. So I spent my nights just walking through London—that’s where I was at the time. I felt like Dracula, haunting the dark streets before getting back into my coffin. Weirdest of all, I identified with objects. I projected feelings onto them. If I saw a cup with a broken handle I felt bad for that cup.”

“I can hardly bear to think of you in that state,” I said.

“It’s interesting—physical pain can be forgotten. No matter how terrible it is, how helpless you were, you recover. Your body repairs itself, and though you might be depressed afterwards, you don’t really remember the pain. But sexual degradation is completely different. It haunts you, it just won’t let go. No matter how hard you try to get rid of it, you can’t. And it’s the hardest thing to talk about, too.”

“I’m sorry I was so insensitive.”

“How could you have known? Anyway, that’s the last word I’d use about you.”

“But rationally you know you weren’t degraded,” I said. “That guard degraded himself. You managed to survive, but he’s not even human.”

“He’s very human, that’s the problem. It’s as if there was a camera there and the whole world saw me. It’s as if everyone can still see it. Rationally I know that’s not the case, but I haven’t succeeded in convincing myself emotionally.”

“Mr. Hostage-Taker?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still lost.”

CHAPTER 24

For a while—I don’t know exactly how long—I was all right. I exercised until I was on the verge of collapse; it was the only way I could deal with the confined space. I ran in place, I did four hundred jumping jacks, I got through as many push-ups and sit-ups as possible. I soaked in the bath, played video games, watched movies.

My hostage-taker usually came to see me in the evenings, after I’d eaten. His visits kept me sane. His visits and my love for him.

My breakdown happened suddenly.

We were eating an Indian curry and watching
Brief
Encounter
when suddenly, out of the blue, I lost it. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the room—being cooped up in that tiny place without even a window to let me know if it was day or night. Even in solitary confinement, prisoners are probably allowed into a courtyard once a day.

Or maybe
it
was the barriers my hostage-taker kept putting up between us—he never let things progress beyond kissing, and he never allowed me to touch him.