Authors: Brian Keenan
‘If you keep grabbing me like that you’re going to pull my arm out of my shoulder, then we’re both fucked,‘John said. Both he and I knew that there could be no limitation to the violence once this thing had begun. We were going to have to beat this man into silence. To beat someone physically appalled us both. Finally we were convinced that the overpowering of the guard would take a maximum of three minutes. We could train no further.
It was time for action. I loved this man who was now so determined partly because of my own stubborn antics. I knew he drew strength from me and his belief in me in turn gave me strength and determination. The day was agreed: whoever was in the best position to begin this ‘capture’ would be decided by chance. We had built up a regime of each sitting in a fixed position. A change would make the guards wary. We had everything stuffed into the mattress or under the raffia carpet. This was to be the day.
We were both confident and frightened -that mix that raises the adrenalin and which we had to hold in check to let the energizing effect of it empower us. We each acknowledged that if this escape failed we were most certainly finished. But we dismissed the fear and told ourselves recklessly that such a daring escape was worth the consequences of failure. We placed everything out of sight but close enough to be able to grab it swiftly and tie Joker up when he arrived. As I think over this episode now and how we sat there waiting for the key to turn and the guard to come in, I think that the desire to escape was secondary to an unspoken need to prove ourselves to each other. Here
was the primary unconscious motivation. The initiation ritual was as yet incomplete. The key turned and the door opened. We each sat tense as cats waiting to pounce on their prey.
Then a voice spoke. A voice that wasn’t Joker’s. It was a guard whose habits did not include sitting with us or talking with us. He simply left the food and turned to go. For some unknown reason the guards’ routine had changed. The Brothers Kalashnikov were here.
All our tension suddenly left us as the door closed and the key turned.
We looked at each other in silence, in relief and desperation. Our escape plan had come to nothing. ‘There is definitely something in this,’ said John. ‘The man upstairs isn’t playing the game.’
These men with their Kalashnikovs and their prisons and their blindfolds seemed to us to be servants of a fate whose purpose was that we must remain hostages. We never saw Joker again and with his departure was removed any hope of ever getting out of this room.
We had been in Abed’s Hotel some six weeks. Our companionship had bred new confidence in each of us. The size of the room and our ability to walk and exercise in it helped us in controlling our hopes.
But it was not to last. Sitting one afternoon, talking about old friends, we heard movements outside. The key turned in the lock and we calmly took our positions: one of us sitting on the bed and the other on the mattress on the floor. One of the Brothers Kalashnikov rushed to me and thrust another towel over my face. For the first time, I became aware that they knew I could see through my threadbare blindfold.
Before he had completed his action, I saw a tall, stout man dressed in full Arabic costume with a turban on his head. I knew that this was someone very important. The kind of excited homage, almost fear, with which the guards approached him confirmed this. He quickly opened the tin cabinet and took from it what clothes we had there. He threw them at us, with an order to dress. The door closed and he left.
We looked at one another and wondered without speaking what was going to happen. At this stage in our captivity every new event caused us to believe that perhaps finally it had come, and freedom was only a door’s width away. We dressed and repositioned ourselves, hearing again the key turning in the door. The tall, stout Arab came over and tied two towels tightly about our faces. He never spoke. We were then ushered out of the room and made to squat on the floor in the hallway outside.
For some five or ten minutes we sat in silence and then the outer door opened and we were quickly rushed into an enclosed area beyond it. Again many voices whispering. Car doors slamming. We were walked to the rear of a car and the boot sprang open. Cautiously but without real care we were helped into the boot, first myself and then John. Someone hissed at us ‘No speak, no speak,’ and the boot slammed. Another car journey began. For the first few moments we said nothing. Then, to comfort and reassure each other we spoke softly. We patted one another to further the reassurance and said no more, wondering how long this journey might be and where it might end.
For some twenty minutes in the darkness of the boot, we travelled like two silent foetuses. The journey was by now monotonously familiar. We travelled through the night streets of Beirut and caught occasional echoes of the city quieting itself for sleep. The car stopped.
Car doors slammed and again we heard men around us whispering.
The boot opened. We lay there anxious and tense. Arms reached in and pulled us from the boot. We were led stumbling into a building. I waited while John joined me. Then both of us were walked quickly through what seemed to be a long passageway. We were jostled and pushed and then abruptly stopped. Rough hands bundled us into a manhole-sized opening in the ground. We were lowered helplessly, and some hands beneath us caught our legs and feet and guided them, step by step, down a ladder.
It was like my dream of birth in reverse. The hands that pulled me into that womb-like hole hissed and cursed at me as they laboured to receive me. The encouraging, reassuring words of the midwife were now replaced by abuse. I knew from the tenor of the voice that I was not entering into a new life as a child does but entering into some unholy underground; away from the sun, from light and from any sense of life.
I had always been afraid of heights and wondered curiously if I would have been so calm had I been able to see the distance I had been dropped. Reaching ground level I was sat in a corner. A guard stood with his hand on my shoulder. In the darkness I heard John being similarly handled. He was put next to me while the men who had brought us climbed down tojoin us. We sat quietly for some minutes.
Then I felt myself being slowly lifted and walked across the floor.
After some ten or twelve paces I was turned abruptly and stared, half-seeing, into an area of bright blurred light. The threadbare condition of the towel covering my head allowed me to see more than they suspected. Horrified, devastated, I looked into what I knew to be another prison. Slowly, even gently, I was guided into its corridor. I counted each prison door as I passed it. The voice of the guard behind me spoke softly ‘Hope to go home soon.’ I remember how the softness of his voice and the sincerity of it held me back for a moment from the great rush of despair that was welling up inside me. Again he spoke. ‘Your friends from the other place at Rauche have gone to their home.’ It would be many months before my suspicions about Douglas and Padfield were confirmed. But there was something in the way it was said: not threatening, yet somehow ominous.
At the fourth cell I was stopped, turned quickly and guided in. The door behind me closed. I slowly lifted my blindfold. I was in a bare cell. It was six feet by six feet with walls of about the same height. It was completely covered, walls and floor, in white tiles. The ceiling was also painted white. ‘Jesus, I’m in a bloody sugar cube,’ I said aloud, remembering the last lonely cell in which I was kept, my dread of isolation resurrecting itself. At the far end opposite the door was a shelf. I sat on it and looked at the white emptiness about me. ‘No, not a sugar cube, it’s an ice cube,’ I said, the chill of my despair transforming my first impression. I sat in the white silence and tried to compose myself and control the panic eating into me. Moments passed and again I heard footsteps near my cell door. They stopped. A key turned, and I slowly lowered the blindfold, covering my eyes. I heard someone enter and the door close quickly and lock. I lifted the cloth from my eyes and saw John still blindfolded standing with his face close to the door.
His hands were spread, feeling around the door and walls. I watched him for some moments and then said ‘Welcome to the house of fun.’
John turned, quickly raising his blindfold. He saw me sitting looking at him. He ran to me and flung himself in an embrace upon me. ‘Thank God,’ he said, his voice full of despair and gratitude. I choked back my own emotion, sharing his thanks. I patted him comfortingly on the head. In that still cameo of affection between us the icy fearfulness of the cell melted. In that moment I thought of my father and felt a surge of fatherliness well up in me.
The moment passed for both of us. We perched side by side on the stone shelf and wondered what future now awaited us. Our buoyant humour had gone. The white oppression of the cell pressed in on us.
‘It’s too small for two people … Do you think they will keep us together?’ This question dominated everything else and we feared the answer to it. I began taking off my clothes and wrapped the towel around my waist. The heat was overbearing. I knew that if I cared nothing about my nakedness, which was an affront to my captors, I could remain defiant. I was still self-chosen: I chose to sit like this, it was a silent insult I slung at them. They had made it like this -the arrogance of my flesh always confronting their zealous puritanism. question itself. The confrontation of innocence nakedly demonstrating itself as defiance and absolute resolve throws that same system into self-questioning disbelief. I was convincing myself that I would not be overcome and broken. Pavlov’s dogs were only so because they could not find a way to be unconditioned. Man has choice; even reduced to nothing, he must still choose. Resistance may be passive, but its power breaks chains and changes minds. The unquestioning acceptance of those who walked naked and unashamed in fearful quiet to the final places of Auschwitz or Belsen was ample testimony to the power of renunciation and fortitude. Cruelty and fear are man-made, and men who perpetrate them are ruled by them. Such men are only half-made things. They live out their unresolved lives by attempting to destroy anything that challenges the void in themselves. A child holds a blanket over its face in fear. A fear-filled man transposes his inadequacy onto another. He blames them, hates them, and hopes to rid himself of his unloved self by hurting, or worse, destroying them.
We sat on that stone shelf persuading ourselves to hope, but always silently anxious that we might be separated again. We spoke about the journey and comforted ourselves with the words of the guard who had walked us to this cell: ‘Your friends have gone home.’ We needed to believe him. We sat asking desperate questions and knowing that neither of us had the answers. One thought always remained unspoken at the back of these questions: Would we be separated?
Again we heard feet approaching the cell. A key turned and the door opened. A voice spoke. ‘You want anything?’ Our minds raced.
There were many things we wanted. Most of all we wanted to know where we were and when this absurdity was going to end. But these were answers we knew we would never be given. After some moments I stood up and said ‘Yes, I want a colour TV set, a bicycle and a grand piano!’ Silence. The guard spoke again. ‘Speak slowly, what you want?’ Again I said slowly, very meticulously and menacingly. ‘I want a colour TV, a bicycle and a grand piano.’ The guard muttered something to the men who stood with him. I could hear him laughing briefly. The others stood in silence, then walked off and the door closed.
We lifted our blindfolds and John looked at me, a smile on his face.
‘What in the name of Christ ever made you say that… ?’ ‘What else do you say under the circumstances,’ I answered. We both knew that these men had little in the way of a sense of humour. When we did speak in this manner, they found our comic dismissal distasteful.
Humour was no part or condition of their lives. They could not understand why men in our plight chose to laugh in the face of what might ultimately happen. We ourselves did not know. I only knew the necessity of it and the strength that lay in it. Within moments of the door closing, someone passed by our cell. A hand came in through the grille over the door; a pair of shorts were flung in at us. ‘Well, those are obviously for you,’ said John. And I said ‘Yeah, I expect so.’ I lifted them, looked at them and slowly put them on.
I knew John was silently perplexed at this seeming submission.
After my fierce refusal to wear prison clothes in Abed’s Hotel, here I was quietly accepting these clothes.
In the intense heat of the small room I had removed my clothes. I was unsure what was to be our fate. Would we be separated? How important was my protest if there was no witness? The guards in this place were all new to us. My protest was only meaningful if my captors understood it. I had first to take the measure of this new situation and respond accordingly.
The ominous statement about ‘my friends’ and my own shock at arriving in another prison had begun to take its toll. I needed time to reassert myself. I was sure we had somehow changed hands again, from one group to another. Who these men were or what their intentions were I could not hope to know. I needed to base any protest on knowledge. I would not walk naked to the toilet until I was sure that these men knew the significance of my protest. Too many confusing questions and emotions were racing blindly around my head.
I was grateful for John’s silent acceptance. He knew I was troubled and I knew that to share my thoughts would weaken us and add to our confusion. We both instinctively knew never to share weakness until you understood it. ‘Share only strength’ was an unspoken motto between us.
In the days that followed we adapted ourselves to the new routine.
Always trying to glean information about where we were being held.
We took surreptitious looks about us as they walked us from the cell to a toilet at the end of the corridor. All the other cells seemed empty. Yet we frequently heard other doors opening during this morning walk.