Authors: Brian Keenan
How could a man see what he was pointing at when his face was behind the door. I quickly asked for the cigarettes from my bag. The nervous voice behind the trembling forearm and wildly wavering gun kept hissing ‘Pray to God, pray to God.’ It was apparent that this guard was very frightened about coming into the room. The door closed and locked, and we still had no cigarettes.
We looked at one another. The menace and the fear in the voice of the guard and that gun seeking out a target began to strike home. We stared at one another in silence. I raised my eyebrows in amazement and John blew out a sigh of relief. It was our first real confrontation with what might be our eventual fate. The hissing chant of ‘Pray to God’ made it all the more ominous. We had long thought of death, of being executed during our long period in solitary confinement. But suddenly confronting a gun being pointed at us seemed to break up the ice barrier that had prevented us from talking to one another of our fear of death. We were in agreement about one thing, and perhaps it was a romantic notion, but we were both convinced that if it ever came to it, then we would ask to have one last look at the sun before the sentence was carried out. On reflection neither of us seemed frightened of the real possibility of this. So long sunk into contemplation of our own death, we had come to terms with it and dismissed it.
But we both shared a sense of the ultimate indignity of being executed in a strange building within four enclosed walls. That would be worse than death itself.
The floodgate began to open. We eased ourselves out of our quiet and unspoken apprehension of one another. We began slowly, carefully but honestly to tell one another of the things we felt, the things we thought about, and our experiences during that time alone.
It is always difficult for two people to come together and talk openly about those experiences that might normally be termed religious. But once we had begun and realized that each was listening to the other, then there was no need to hold back. Sometimes the words were inadequate to what we needed to share. This inadequacy was always overcome by a sense that we each understood, whether the words or the concepts were correct or not. We admitted to moments of weird religious mania. Perhaps our intoxication with deep and profound
things in isolation was misconceived by the conscious mind as a sort of religious fervour. Maybe in its own way it was. But such fervour seems always to speak more about our needs than our beliefs. In that emptiness, memories and delusions piled one on top of the other until they seemed to fill the vacuum. We both spoke about the voices we heard in our heads, and in being so frank we returned to a kind of childlike innocence that absolutely believed in all these imaginary things.
At times God had seemed so real and so intimately close. We talked not of a God in the Christian tradition but some force more primitive, more immediate and more vital, a presence rather than a set of beliefs.
Our frankness underlined the reality of our feelings. We were both still trying to deal with the force and the weight of them. We prayed unashamedly, making no outward sign. We simply knew that each of us did pray and would on occasion remind each other to say a prayer for someone in particular among our families and lovers. In its own way our isolation had expanded the heart, not to reach out to a detached God but to find and become part of whatever ‘God’ might be. The energizing experience of another human being did not allow either of us to dwell too long on these matters, which were deep and unresolvable. We gave honestly of ourselves and of our experience and each received from the other with gratitude whatever was given.
On occasion there would be discussions on vaguely religious themes, but they were certainly not confined by the dictates of straitlaced doctrines. We had each gone through an experience that gave us the foundations of an insight into what a humanized God might be.
We talked frequently of where we might be, how we might get out of this place and where we could go to ensure our safety. We structured different plans and went through them in meticulous detail only to find that they could not succeed. On going to the toilet each morning I would cover my face with a very old tattered towel which was so worn with washing that I could see plainly through the threadbare material. We were quick to look around us on this short walk and gather what information we could. We pooled that information and hoped that one day it might give us an escape route.
High up in the corner of one of the walls, just below the ceiling, there was a large air vent. It was impossible to get one’s body through it. Curious as a cat, McCarthy would frequently climb up on top of the old filing cabinet, lift out the grille and peer out into the room beyond. He would give me daily reports after the guards had left the building on what they had left behind them. There were always the inevitable Kalashnikovs and hand guns in the room where they slept.
On the table just outside the door were cigarettes, bread, and other items of food. We noticed that one guard left the key in the door after locking us in. There was a gap of about five inches between the bottom of the door and the floor itself through which some of the guards would simply push our food without bothering to come in.
This was extremely distressing to John, to have his food shoved across a filthy floor. But as we realized the implications we were not displeased any longer. It would be easy now to remove the key and bring it under the door.
For many days we had been collecting bits and pieces which we thought might be useful at some later stage. Foolish things: I had been ripping threads from my bed and making lengths of string; a coat hanger we found hanging in the tin cabinet; and I had finally revealed the piece of electric wire fitted to the socket on the wall and attempted to pull it out. John was not happy about this, thinking that it would make our captors very angry, to which I could only respond ‘I don’t care if it makes them angry, John, I’m not going to make it easy for them’; and so I ripped it from the wall and hid it under an old piece of raffia carpet on the floor. We had by this time obtained some old magazines. They were several years out of date, and of no importance or value to us, except that they were something to read and talk about.
One of the magazines had a full-face cover picture of the Shia spiritual leader Fadlallah. There were two other magazines, one in French, the other in English. When one of the guards discovered that his friends had given us this particular magazine with Fadlallah’s face on it he became angry. It was clear that those who were holding us had some connection with the fundamentalist leader.
We had, while squirrelling away the bric-a-brac of our possible escape attempt, assiduously cultivated the guard who called himself ‘Joker’. When he first told us this we burst out laughing, much to his delight. Joker was the man behind the trembling hand who pointed the gun at us and told us to pray to God. If we could overcome his fear life would be much easier for us, and less difficult for him. And so we had over the weeks chatted with him, built up his confidence until he would come into the room, sit and talk and leave again feeling happy and confident.
We had planned, when Joker would next be on duty and had left the key in the door, that we would poke out the key and let it fall onto some pages of a magazine that we would slide under the door, and then drag the key back into the room. We talked while we were planning this and we would start panicking about what we would do once we got the door open. We resolved we would deal with that when it was necessary to do so.
What few clothes I still had, my father’s shirt, my trousers and new shoes, I had carefully washed and put away in that tin cabinet so I could at least leave without being too obviously half dressed. John’s observations through the air vent high in the wall had also told us that Joker arrived by bicycle. We laughed long into the night at the thought of us cycling through the most dangerous part of town in this most dangerous part of the world on Joker’s bicycle, one pedalling and the other sitting on the handlebars or on the saddle. The laughter deflected from us the real fear of what we were planning. How fast we could pedal, and to where, we never considered.
The day came. We awaited the arrival of Joker and his friend. The daily ablutions were over and we waited for Joker to leave. Some nights, particularly when Joker was supposed to be on guard with his friend, he would simply go home. He was fearful of staying overnight. And so everything was set. We heard the door closing and the silence enveloping the building. We waited patiently with suppressed excitement. Like children waiting to raid a neighbour’s orchard. Then as the noise of the streets died, it was time. We weren’t fearful. We just wanted to try this thing out, to get it done. If the worst came to the worst and we thought we couldn’t get out of the building, we could simply go back to our room and lock ourselves in. How we thought we would do this we didn’t know.
The final dilemma of this escape plan had been cleverly resolved by John some days earlier. How could we ensure that the key was turned in the right position, so that it could be pushed easily from the inside of the lock and fall onto the newspaper, allowing us to slide it under the gap in the door? As resourceful as ever, John had taken out one of the drawers from the filing cabinet and broken off one of the long metal runner bars. He twisted and bent it into shape. We had left it hidden inside the cabinet. Previously we had persuaded Joker that we had not seen ourselves for a long time and asked him for a mirror, which he forgot, as we hoped he would, to take back from us. So we were equipped with all we required.
John lay on his back on the floor and with this extension to his arm he could reach out under the door, and holding the piece of metal in his
hand, bend his arm upwards and jiggle the key in the lock, pushing it ever so gently and slowly. On the floor just outside the door lay the mirror guiding him as he painstakingly nudged the key. There was no way, of course that he could turn the key completely in the lock. He pushed, and looked in the mirror, and sweated until he said ‘Right, I think that’s it,’ quickly pulling the mirror and the piece of metal back into the room. With the piece of coat hanger I poked gently at the key and pushed again, tenderly, as though I was dismantling a detonator. ‘That’s it, John,’ and the key fell on the paper. We looked at one another, huge childlike excitement beaming from our faces. We shook hands and burst out laughing. It seemed we had stolen the apples from the orchard and were in fits of laughter at our daring deed. I pulled the key swiftly underneath the door and lifted it up calmly and looked at John. The glint in his eye and probably my own sent us again into fits of laughter.
John was enthusiastic. ‘Come on, hurry up, let’s go.’ I thought to wait a moment, to ensure that no-one heard, that no-one was about to come in. So we both sat on the edge of the bed in silence while our minds raced at the audacity of what we were doing. ‘Okay, let’s go,’ I said to John. Gingerly he stood up with the key and went to the lock. I waited as he fiddled and then exploded ‘Fuck me, this key doesn’t fit.’
‘How can it not fit?’ I answered. ‘It’s one of those bloody stupid locks you can only open from the outside, this key doesn’t fit from the inside, it has to be reversed.’ In disbelief I took the key from him, tried and it was true. This door could only be opened from the outside.
That so much careful planning had come to such an abrupt and disastrous end was difficult to deal with. Disbelief silenced us.
After so many days filled with the idea of escape, it was not possible to stop thinking about it. We still had our crude tools, the steel arm of a sliding drawer, and our bits of wire, and perhaps if we prised off the wooden door frame and hacked away at the keep of the lock we might still make it. It would take some weeks and we could cover up the work every day by replacing the wood. Eventually we should be able to force the door open as there would be no retainer to hold the lock.
We tried carefully easing off the wooden surround which made up part of the door frame, exposing the bare wood underneath. We slowly hacked and hacked until our fingers ached. Finally the impossibility of what we were trying to do dawned on us. We could not continually be doing this, for it was not every night that the place was left empty and weeks could become months and months a mass of frustration, especially if near the end we were discovered.
With this deflation came panic. It would be impossible to reinsert the key into the lock. We had to get it back outside on the table where they would expect to find it the next morning. Dear God, we thought quietly, if we don’t get this key back we will be in very serious trouble.
Again McCarthy’s resourcefulness pulled out the only solution that might work. With pieces of string I had been collecting and weaving from wool in the bedcover, we very gently and loosely tied the key to the end of the broken piece of metal. John climbed up onto the filing cabinet, removed the grille and I handed him the length of runner with the key attached. Out went his arm and shoulder and half of his head to look down onto the table. He carefully slid the steel runner down the wall as far as his arm could reach and then by shaking his arm sharply, the key would come loose from its mooring at the end of the piece of steel and fall three feet to the table. If it fell on the floor, too bad. If it fell on the table, all was safe.
With a moan from the pain in his shoulder and the exertion of trying to shake his arm, half caught in the opening of the air vent, John quickly pulled out his arm, I heard the key rattle, and he handed me down our steel implement and said ‘Quickly, give me the mirror.’ I gave it to him. He held it out, pointed downwards onto the table to see where the key had landed. To our great good fortune it was back on the table and had not rolled to the floor. John climbed down and we hurriedly hid our bits and pieces in their hiding places.
We sat down back to back on the bed and for a moment were quiet; then with an affectionate pat he said ‘At least we tried, that’s what’s important,’ not allowing despair to detract from the excitement of the past fifteen minutes. We thought of ourselves as two heroes in a Hotspur comic attempting this escape, and laughed again at our bicycle ride to freedom. I reminded John of my own failed attempts in the last prison. He said ‘I don’t think the man upstairs is on our side after all.’