Authors: Brian Keenan
We would not allow this failure to diminish us and we both agreed half-heartedly that perhaps there would be another time and another opportunity. We grabbed hold of a future we could only half believe in and insisted that it would happen. The following weeks we spent devising games, for they would not give us books and we had read the two magazines so many times that to read them again only made the monotony worse. They brought us processed cheese regularly, wrapped in little foil triangles; sometimes the cheese was wrapped in gold and sometimes in silver foil. I began to collect these wrappings, not knowing why. The mind chooses to do strange things without
reason. John would look at me. ‘What are you keeping all those bloody things for?’ he would ask. ‘I don’t know yet,’ I answered. The question was always the same, the answer was always the same and my collection of coloured paper kept growing.
One day it struck me. I took one of the empty plastic bottles which we used for drinking and managed to tear the bottle in half. John sat in silence and watched me. I then rolled up the silver and the gold foil in two separate piles, rose from the bed and took my half-bottle over and set it against the wall. John eyed me, I returned his stare in silence, sat on the end of the bed facing the bottle and with a fistful of little balls of gold and silver slowly aimed and threw them at the bottle. My first attempt was disastrous; I managed to land three out of some thirty pieces inside the bottle. John was fascinated. I went and picked up the scattered pieces of paper, returned to my bed and tried again, and scored a more miserable one out of twenty throws.
As I went to pick them up, John said ‘You’re bloody hopeless, give me those things and I’ll show you how to do it,’ and thus it began: constant competition for hours and hours each day, attempting to land tiny balls of foil into a broken plastic bottle. The weeks that followed made us quite expert and the fierce competition we insisted on maintaining was full of vicious but good-humoured banter. Expletives rolled off our tongues with such fury that we entertained ourselves doubly. Our language was a rich, colourful, foul and imaginative counterpoint to our pellets of silver and gold dropping and rattling against the empty plastic bottle. ‘John, you blind bastard, stick your blindfold back on. You might have more luck.’
The size of the room allowed us sufficient space to exercise. We would walk around it in single file and often in silence try to measure out the miles that we could walk in a day. For the sheer hell of it we would argue about who had walked furthest in the past week, always insisting on a competitiveness that was never really competitive.
Neither of us sought to outdo or diminish the other but simply to set a challenge for ourselves. A small orange, which at one time in the prison had almost mystical significance for me, we kept as a simple handball and tossed it back and forward and back and forward till it became uninteresting and we put it aside. We would talk into the small hours as we fantasized our bottle of water to be a very strong red wine.
Our imagination had performed a Cana-like miracle. We babbled drunkenly.
Our life histories were no longer exclusive preserves. For as we told our different stories of friends and of families we exchanged each other’s friends and families until they became our own. People we had never met became vividly real to us. We began to move into each other’s lives.
A chequered bedcover became a draught board. With our silver and gold pellets we would shuffle them across a square of this folded sheet and engage in another kind of struggle through which we could climb out of the always threatening vacancy of our imprisonment.
On another occasion two new guards arrived. Like Joker they seemed apprehensive initially. They had no English and very poor French. We tried to engage them in conversation but it was impossible. They were frightened to come into the room to serve us.
These men would simply shove food under the door. It was always a trying time when these two guards were in sole charge. Their fear of us was always most apparent when they had to take us to the toilet. On the second or perhaps third occasion on which they were on duty, they came one morning to take John first. For some reason, perhaps because they sensed our confidence and that we had no fear of them, they entered the room shouting noisily. John got up to go and a gun was poked fiercely at him. One of them said something abusive. John quietly answered ‘Okay my dear fellow, do be calm.’ This seemed to be of no avail. I heard him being shoved through the door. Some minutes later he returned and said to me across the room ‘Be careful of this man, Brian, he seems very nervous and he’s got a gun and he’s extremely edgy.’ I could only say ‘Okay’ and was myself taken off at gun point.
It was my habit when things became tense to break into song. I did so on this occasion. On entering the toilet, I took off the pair of shorts that John had given me, stepped into the shower and began my sing-along.
This seemed to cause some distress. I heard loud bangs and shouts from beyond the door. But I continued singing. I must stand firm, I thought. If I allow them to silence me and implant in their heads the idea that I am afraid they will continue to abuse me. I sang on. The door was then thrown open, something was hissed at me in Arabic, and three shots from a revolver were fired. I stood with my back to them, unmoved. The door was closed. I finished drying myself and knocked on the door for permission to leave.
I was walked back this time and now the man was even more fearful than he had been before. I felt his trembling hand on my arm. I was 1
returned to my companion and the door locked. John quickly lifted his blindfold. ‘My God, I thought you’d really had it that time, you’ll have to be careful about being so cocky, Brian, these guys are not very stable.’ I could only shrug my shoulders. There wasn’t an alternative, I thought. From that day forward these two men were known to us as the Brothers Kalashnikov.
The relationship we formed with the guards during our six weeks in Abed’s Hotel was based on polite curiosity on our part. The one we called Jeeves was always a gentleman. He spoke English much better than I did, was always polite, always dignified and would come to talk with us for fifteen minutes at a time. He had been to London. He commented often on the beauty of the place, so vastly different from the ruined hotchpotch of buildings that the city of Beirut had become.
After perhaps twenty minutes he would apologise, excuse himself and say ‘Now you are tired, I must leave.’ Abed would try to tell us jokes.
They were the equivalent of the Irish jokes in England or Polish jokes in the United States, only this time it was the Syrian who was seen as the dumb and stupid buffoon. He told us of his family life, how his father had been killed in a carbomb explosion and how he himself was a student at the University at which I was teaching. Sometimes his garrulousness would frighten even himself and he would suddenly stop, saying ‘I have spoken too much.’
Joker was the house pet of our prison. The man who had originally in terror pointed a gun threateningly at us was now a man of childish innocence. He was fascinated by the world we came from. I remember him asking John what he would do instead of being a journalist if he could choose. John simply answered that he liked being a journalist and would like to remain one. When the same question was put to me I said ‘I’d like to be a millionaire,’ at which his eyes would roll and a grin would spread across his face.
Joker’s ambition was to marry a German woman and live in Germany. We asked him why. He told us he would have many children and German children were very clever. But on one occasion Joker came to visit us, this time waving his gun under the towels that covered our faces, and whispering insidiously into our ears ‘You believe evil is good.’ Such a profound statement from such an innocent mind was difficult to find an answer for.
On another occasion Joker brought us an English translation of the Koran. But in his innocence he asked us to promise him when we read we would not let our fingers touch the holy words. I pointed to a ring on his finger, a silver signet ring with a deep red stone and some Islamic symbol cut into it. As I reached out to point to the ring, he gasped in shock and horror and pulled his hand away from me. Sacred objects were not for our unclean hands to touch. The absurdity was beyond laughter. It filled me with a kind of sadness, and a pity for him.
I wondered if these holy things were more beyond his reach than mine. For I had become convinced that whatever life is it is for living fully, without fear or doubt.
The Brothers Kalashnikov were an odd couple. Communicating with them was difficult for they had no English and only rudimentary French. Often we would ask them the time and the answer was always ‘Dix.’ It seemed we lived in a permanent state often o’clock. We sensed that these two men came from an extremely poor background.
They enjoyed coming here to guard us not because of any commitment to a holy war, but because they could feed themselves much better than they could at home. They were still afraid of us. When they entered our prison room, they entered into a world unknown to them: two men, their faces hidden, talking in a language they couldn’t understand, seemingly unafraid of them and always trying to talk to them. Here the Brothers found themselves exposed to a world they had only seen through the television. In us they confronted the myths of their own propaganda. The reality of our presence was very different from the images of Westerners that had been imprinted on them. They had a hunger to communicate, to know the intimacies of our lives.
Constantly, we were asked whether we were married, had girlfriends, children. With these questions they were expressing the hunger of their own lives. Marriage and family were the first and almost the only important thing to them. As time went on it seemed this curiosity and hunger became a need for affection. I often asked myself if our own need for affection, for human warmth, did not in some strange way communicate itself to them and meet with their own inarticulate and desperate need to be loved. Occasionally one of the men would sit beside me on the bed. He would tickle me under the chin, the way one would a child, saying softly ‘We like you, we like you.’
John and I spoke often about the reason why we had been moved and why we had been put together. We could never have known the
reason for the move but came to believe that it was in some way related to our imminent release. Out of the timeless capsule of isolation, we began to think that somewhere in the very near future our captivity would come to an end. But my ultimate conclusion was always ‘Hope for everything, but expect nothing.’ Sometimes I made it my night-time benediction to John. Hope should always be restrained by objectivity lest it leads one off on a dance into a fairyland, which is the final delusion. If that hope is somehow shattered then the level of despair becomes unbearable.
The dashing down from that high ground of hope to which we would often take ourselves with humour, with vicious banter, with the exhilaration of exercise, was soon to come. During one of the routine changes of the guards Abed came in, pleasantly announcing that today we would be getting new clothes. Depression flooded me with that news. I quickly asked what kind of clothes they were, to which he answered ‘Pyjamas, maybe shorts and a T-shirt.’ I tried to grab hold of myself before I fell too far. I sat in silence letting a kind of slow-burning suppressed anger buoy me up. Abed left and locked the door. John began to talk about our new clothes and I calmly insisted that these new clothes were not a good sign. We discussed what they could mean. They plainly implied to me that we were staying for a much longer time than our hope had led us to believe.
Flatly I announced to John ‘I will not wear these clothes.‘John was anxious at my refusal, appreciating the problems it might cause. He was also anxious because my own decision committed him to making some decision about this matter. He said ‘At least these are clean clothes, we can’t be sure that just because they give us clean clothes we are going to spend an unknown number of years in here.’ I welcomed his easing of my own anxiety and admired his attempt at rising above the bleakness of what to me was inherent in these garments. But I still flushed with suppressed anger. ‘John, you’re not facing reality.’ My anger built itself into a kind of white-hot Irishness. I said to him ‘To put on these clothes is an act of submission … it is a capitulation and an acceptance of something that we are not and of which we are not guilty … I will not wear these because I cannot.’ I remember almost spitting the last words out of me, less with anger than with an upwelling of frustration.
To calm myself, maybe to strengthen my resolve, I talked with John at some length about the ‘dirty protest’ in the prisons of the North of Ireland. They were an act of defiance and resistance, a means J
of holding yourself together against an absolute condemnation. It was a way of insisting more to oneself than to the world that one was innocent. I wanted to affirm that I was myself and would not allow my integrity to be taken from me by a surrender to what another believed or would make me be. Perhaps, as I think back on it, these fiery words were not helpful for John. This was not a choice he had ever thought about making. Would my decision force him to follow suit, and if he chose not to would the relationship between us deteriorate?
Something in me -Irish stubbornness, the refusal to surrender no matter what the consequences -meant I could not take and wear these clothes. I walked around the room in slow silence trying to fix my resolve and John lay quietly on the bed trying to prepare himself for what he must do. After perhaps twenty minutes of this sombre but steely silence he spoke. ‘Let’s worry about this thing when it happens, Brian, okay.’ I quietly answered ‘Okay.’
Some time later the door opened and Abed and Jeeves entered, cheerfully throwing down our new clothes on the bed beside us. A pale blue T-shirt, clean white shorts. I pushed them from me saying nothing, only taking a deep breath. I could not capitulate now. Abed, unaware of my decision, said as he lifted me from the bed ‘You take shower.’ Quietly I nodded and moved towards the door. He stopped me gently, handing me the clothes, saying ‘You put on after shower.’ I handed them back to him and said ‘There is a problem, I will explain when I return.’ A silence followed after in which he simply answered ‘Okay,’ half puzzled and half unconcerned.