Authors: Brian Keenan
You awaited that crashing thud that would make you insensible to the raging ache. You wanted the relief yet feared the pain.
It ended as it always did with your corpse being slung awkwardly into the boot of some vehicle. The relief of resting against something fixed was short-lived. You twisted and turned in tiny movements to find some comfort. It was futile. The vehicle moved off and you would be half smothered for the duration of the journey. The torment began again as you were carried upstairs to your new prison apartment.
Many of the journeys were like this but we did not often end up in the relative luxury of an apartment. Sometimes we found ourselves spending weeks or months in the winter in a ramshackle farm outhouse in those south Lebanese hills. Here the snow and rain and icy wind held us in numb subjection. The cold of the chain burned against foot and wrist like dry ice. We spent weeks permanently buried under five or six blankets.
We had devised a way of playing poker with our dominoes, always our dominoes came with us. We would lie under our mountain of blankets huddled close together to hold in our body heat and share it, if we could, between ourselves. Only the fingers of one hand were exposed as we fumbled delicately in the freezing air with our new game. Our bets became outrageous. We gambled a wealth we would never possess but the mathematics of it was a way of blanking out our eskimo existence.
Our abuse of one another was as vociferous as ever. ‘You fat-assed fucker, McCarthy, you are a rotten snake, you lost the last five games yesterday, you owe me five thousand,’ to which John would reply ‘You must be soft in the head like all those Irish that you come from,’ and I would bounce back ‘Soft! … Wait till I tell you, fella, just call me Obo hard as nails.’ The word ‘Obo’ fascinated John, he had never heard the word nor did he know the product: Obo, masonry nails, nails for driving into walls. John loved the sound of the word. ‘Obo.’
Often thenceforth John would call me Obo and I acted out the caricature that the name represented to him. I in return addressed him, hissing out the word ‘Snake’ and he would in his turn try all sorts of duplicity and cheating. So the game went on. The days of Obo and The Snake. We were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This new name I had acquired made me readjust my game of dominoes. I would attempt to start and finish the game with the same double, as the word Obo begins and ends with an ‘o’. When I had achieved this I would bounce up and declare an Obo victory, and John would hiss back ‘Obo my bollocks!’
Our conversation in this place we mockingly called the pig-sty was not about our past but more and more we turned with enthusiastic excitement to discuss our future, the places we would go, the things we would do. We lay all day shrouded in blankets with a vast vision of our future. We would not let it go.
These hill hide-outs were so far removed from any town or village that the smallest luxuries such as soap, toothpaste or a toothbrush were forgotten. Our plastic cutlery when it broke was never replaced.
We ate with filthy fingers, enjoying the pleasure of the warm food on our hands. Our clothes became filthy. The cold spring water that was brought to us each day for washing was useless. We retreated into the comfort of our own dirt. To stand shivering in that freezing water was an endurance easily foregone.
Every few days they would bring a one-bar electric fire and leave it with us for perhaps an hour. We washed and dried what underwear we could but most of the time was spent drying tissues for reuse. How many times I blew my nose into the dried residue of yesterday’s cold. I did not know nor did I care. The guards spoke little to us. They did not want to leave the warmth of their fire.
Many times when we were held in the hills Frank Reid was near us.
We often heard him being punched and kicked. When one is held alone so long in such awful conditions it is easy to succumb to fear. The mind’s flight from fear becomes a refuge of sorts. But the guards saw only his fear. It pleased the weakest of them to abuse him. Their own fear was in those blows. We knew it and were thus protected from it. If they ever tried to be aggressive, we would resist. Sometimes in silence, sometimes with a joke or laughter. They were easily disarmed. They were forced back into their own fear, unable to exploit ours because we would not expose it. Our world was separate from theirs. We had become fierce in our own self-reliance, but they needed our fear to become the men they wanted to be. We would not give it. Nor did they know how to extract it. They were the prisoners of our resistance.
Many of these moves up into the hills were precipitated by the internecine wars that were a constant feature of Lebanese politics. As we knew, having travelled and stayed in many parts of that small country, nowhere in Lebanon is at peace. We spoke frequently about the guards and their peculiar characteristics. We had come to know them extremely well. Even blindfolded, you can observe much of a man. The brutal way in which they moved us was totally unnecessary.
Why they couldn’t simply walk us down those stairs in the darkness before dawn, slip us into the boot of a car and drive us to wherever they wanted to go was a question we often asked ourselves. The need for hoods and for chains and that bone-wrenching carriage in that smelly hot sack was an illustration of these men’s need to see themselves as warriors in the cause of Islam.
I remember telling John how on an early afternoon during my short stay in Beirut I had been walking along the back streets of the area known as Hamra. It was a poor area but close enough to the busy commercial centre to make its own living. As I walked along the street that afternoon with a colleague from the University we observed a small butcher’s shop. It was hardly a shop: more a recess with a table inside for the pieces of cut-up carcass and another table outside with a gallows-like fixture on the wall above it. As we walked past, the butcher was hanging a live goat, its hind feet tethered and hooked over that gallows spike. It hung head down, quiet, unable to move, and beside it, tethered to a drainpipe, was a sheep, which sat quietly looking around it undisturbed and unworried. The butcher with a sharp knife banged home a vicious blow that punctured the jugular vein of the hanging goat. Blood spurted onto the street and all over the cobblestones, into the roadside drain and off into the sewer system.
The butcher nonchantly proceeded to gut the animal. Its innards fell at his feet. The animal was still alive. We noticed how the butcher saw us stop and watch him for a few minutes. He smiled, whether it was because he saw us looking at him as if admiring him or whether it was his pleasure in his work, I could not be sure. I was at once captivated and repulsed by the viciousness of it. He calmly continued his work, looking constantly at us and not at his probing hands and lacerating knife entering into the still-living body of the animal.
My friend tapped my elbow ‘Come on, Brian, lets get out of this place.’ I looked at the sheep who sat waiting. It was so calm and placid.
I knew this animal was next to be slaughtered, and yet it was totally unconcerned. I looked again at the butcher and he now seemed to me as dazed and as unconcerned as the sheep. The whole scene became for me a metaphor for the city itself, its bloody and continuous slaughter that no-one seemed to care about. It had accepted that slaughter into itself. Even the dying themselves turned blind and nonchalant eyes to it. The city was falling down around them. Those Lebanese I knew spoke often of the war and ended their comments with a shrug of the shoulders: ‘Welcome to Lebanon.’ The phrase echoed with acceptance and resignation.
The feuding in Beirut since 1976 had given the men that held us an identity beyond the political reason for our kidnapping. They had a purpose, they had a job to do. They were made meaningful. Yet on those occasions when we engaged in conversation about the politics of Lebanon and what they themselves were doing they would shy away, as if answers had not been worked out. They were merely the receivers of orders and if their chief asked them to march into a minefield they would do it, like sheep, like that waiting sheep, dazed and uncaring.
We talked obsessively about the food we received while we were kept in the hills, away from the villages. The food was not always good. It sufficed, but on other occasions we would get those cloyingly sweet pastries, or at the other extreme, pungent and spicy meat. It seems to me still that what we eat as much as how we eat it speaks volumes about our personalities. These men loved their spicy meats and equally adored their viciously sugary pastries. Their likes and their loves sat at either end of one extreme. There was no middle ground. One moment they could be charming, friendly, and within an instant became something that was other than human.
We had long philosophical debates. I would argue that ‘anything one human being perpetrates against another cannot by its own logic be called inhuman. What is inhuman if that act is carried out by a human being?’ We discussed such questions seriously, picking up our conversation days after we thought we had ended it. In our musings we were examining ourselves, our own responses, the moral identity that we thought defined us and perhaps also the changes, doubts and desires that we felt growing in us. Our world was not the monochrome morality which defined and limited theirs. Even in these most deprived conditions we found within ourselves and within those shared discussions a more valuable and richer world than we had conceived of before. We were beginning to learn our freedom, the way Rousseau spoke of it. Captivity had recreated freedom for us.
Not a freedom outside us to be hungered after, but another kind of freedom which we found to our surprise and relish within ourselves.
The endless moving had worn us down. It was not the stress of the actual move itself but the dread of where we would arrive. Some of them, such as ‘the pig sty’, were places where, we both agreed, we would not keep our pet dogs. We frequently expressed our anger at this kind of accommodation to the guards. We would tell them ‘I would not keep an animal in this place.’ They would simply shrug; they did not have to stay in it. They only brought the food to us, the animals. With each move we expected to descend lower and began to expect less.
On one of these moves we did not have to undergo that awful chaining of wrist to ankle and the hooding but were simply gagged and our hands tied, walked out to a car, quickly put into a boot and driven off. Some fifteen minutes later, we stopped and were taken from the car. We were obviously still in the countryside, the silence was complete. Quickly we were rushed through a door. There was a smell of animals, sheep bleating nearby. Then upstairs again, and we expected the worst as we entered a room, hands guiding us from behind. We were pushed into what seemed another small room. We heard the guards outside the room talk and heard what we assumed were our blankets, bedclothes and mattresses being brought in. We were lifted again, walked out of that small room. We were shoved into another room and heard a door close. We lifted the blindfolds and as we had suspected, we found ourselves in a small room, smaller than the prisons we had been in. But it was covered with wonderful tiles with vine leaves and bunches of grapes embossed on them. In one corner was a hot and cold water tap which didn’t work. High up on the wall, too high to see out, was a tiny window perhaps six inches square. The door to our new prison was a brown plastic folding door.
For the first few days that we remained here, we were not chained. We were excited as always; this was an apartment, and we were only one floor up. The door had no lock. Every apartment we were held in inspired us with schemes of escape. We half believed in them. Here we began to believe that escape was really possible.
After three days the guards came back with electric drills, strong bolts, and lengths of chain. Nothing had changed after all. But we were still exuberant, we thought that it might still be possible, that we only needed time. We didn’t know yet where we were but could guess. The knowledge we would require to build a plan and execute it would come to us somehow. With us back in chains, the door that had been closed since our arrival was now left open. We could look out from our tiny little washroom into an elaborate kitchen, covered with the most expensive tiles, both on the floors and on the walls. This was obviously the home of someone wealthy. It was only part complete: doors stood in the kitchen waiting to be hung. Immediately outside our room and to the right of our open door there was a large panel door, inset with opaque mottled glass.
The chains on our feet meant nothing now. We were delirious. Our folding door was open every day, and every morning the sun came blazing in to us. The glass itself seemed to turn a bright glowing silver with the light of the sun and even through our blindfolds that dazzling, blinding, silvered pane of glass was ajoy and we drank our fill of it in silence for hours, saying occasionally ‘Jesus, light after all these years … it’s fucking sunlight out there.’
Several new guards exchanged a rota with some of the men who had been with us from the beginning. Abed was here, the Abed who had enjoyed so much his nightly visits with his Kalashnikov. Saafi was here, one of the original Brothers Kalashnikov. Two new guards were here, both of them extremely polite, very reverent. When we asked them questions about the war between Iran and Iraq, which we knew had something to do with our own captivity, they fell silent. They pretended to know nothing.
Each morning, the guards came, unlocked our feet and walked us blindfolded across that large kitchen room, through a doorway into a kind of hallway and then we were turned right and walked some ten paces into a bathroom. The door closed and we were left to do what we had to do. The mirror above the washbasin had been removed.
The suite in the bathroom was green and the walls and floor tiled in a complementary colour. There was a window here also, high up in the wall. Unlike the other windows it was not shut, but it had some paper or cardboard over it.
New toothbrushes and toothpaste were brought to us. We were given clean towels and new shorts and T-shirts. We were delighted to receive these. The clothes we had been wearing for so many months, sometimes unwashed for weeks, were ragged and torn and had to be held up by our hands or with pieces of string as we walked to the toilet.