Captivity (50 page)

I ask him when we can see the pictures. He says he doesn’t know, but it will probably be tonight.

I ask him when our debriefing with the CPT team will be. He says he’s still working on it, he’ll let us know as soon as he knows. That would be great, I say, feeling slightly alarmed. It’s already nine o’clock in the morning and a plan still hasn’t been made. Time is passing. I want to spend the whole day together.

In my last act as delegation leader, I suggest to Norman and Harmeet that we might want to debrief, maybe have a little prayer service where we can express our gratitude, ask each other for forgiveness, say goodbye. This might be the last time we’ll all be together.

Harmeet seems unenthusiastic but agrees. Norman says he’ll think about it. I’m disappointed by their lack of interest. There is no pressure, I tell them. Lunch is at noon. “Any time before then, if you want.”

I prepare a little prayer service and debriefing for us just in case. At eleven-twenty I decide to go hunting around. Norman’s departure is rapidly approaching. The door to his room is open. “Hello?” I say, peeking my head inside.

I am nervous. I don’t know where things stand between us. We’ve hardly spoken since the release. I wonder if my presence is somehow intrusive to him, a grating reminder of things he’d just as soon forget.

“Hi!” he says. “Would you like to see my room?”

“Sure,” I say, stepping onto a plush carpet in a spacious five-star room decorated with ornate plaster mouldings. No clutter here. “I see you got the deluxe accommodations.”

He laughs. “Yes, I suppose it comes with being old. And being British doesn’t hurt. My guess is that this must have been the master bedroom, but it could just as easily have been the ballroom.”

“Hey, you shaved! You look good,” I say. He looks fit, steady on his feet, ready to meet the world—much better than yesterday.

“What about you?” he asks, pointing to my patchy beard.

“After I kiss my mother,” I say. Then silence, heavy, awkward. “Are you almost packed?” I ask, reaching for something to fill the vacuum.

“Well, yes, but there isn’t much to pack, is there,” he answers, pointing to the suitcase on his bed. Silence. Norman coughs, looks down at his hands. I look down at the floor. I see Norman’s Nike running shoes, smile, look up at his shirt and woollen tie.

“I see you have your new shoes on,” I say.

“And I see that you have yours,” he says. We both laugh. “They’re not quite my style, but they’re certainly much better than what we had.”

“How I hated those shoes.”

“Would you like to sit down?” he asks me.

“Yes, sure, thanks, I would,” I say. We fall easily into talking. About the arrangements for our travel home, our families, the British ambassador, yesterday’s lunch. He wants to know if I still have my notebooks. Yes, I tell him, but I had to fight to hold on to them.

“I gave them everything. I wish now that I had kept my notebook. I hope I get it back,” he says.

The topic turns to the CPT team. “They probably thought I was rude,” Norman says. “I certainly didn’t stick around very long. I didn’t mean to be. It’s just that I couldn’t … I couldn’t talk to them right then. Maybe you could thank them for me …”

“It’s all right, Norman. I know they’ll understand. Yes, I’ll tell them.”

“Perhaps later I’ll send them a note.”

Silence. I turn to look at Norman. Our eyes meet briefly. I take a deep breath. “I want to apologize to you,” I say. “For anything I might have done that made things harder for you. I wasn’t always the easiest person to be locked up with, and I … I wasn’t very generous at times. To you, or to Harmeet.”

“Well, none of us was at our best, were we?” His hand briefly touches my shoulder.

“No.”

He looks at his watch. “I’m glad they at least let me keep my watch. Well, it’s 11:45. Shall we find Harmeet?”

We face each other for a moment. Norman shakes my hand. “We got through it,” he says.

“Yes, we got through it,” I say, grinning.

“I guess we’ve had our debriefing, then?”

“Yes, I guess we have.”

The British ambassador is travelling back to Britain with Norman. “Thank you. For everything,” I say, shaking his hand.

“No problem, any time, come again,” he chuckles. “Here’s my card. Just call me if you ever need anything. And make sure you sign the guest book.”

I turn to Norman. It’s a stiff leave-taking. There it is again, that strange absence of emotion. We shake hands and say goodbye. Adrian takes Norman’s suitcase and they walk to a waiting SUV, a top-of-the-line occupation model complete with tinted bulletproof windows, armoured body and self-contained air circulation system. A Gurkha opens the gate and the vehicle drives away. Norman never looks back.

I am both relieved and sad. Norman is going home to Pat and my responsibility has come to an end. But I feel his sudden absence intensely. It is too soon; so much has been left unsaid; for better or
worse, we are brothers. I turn to go back into the ambassador’s house with a big, gaping hole in my heart.

Sonia and Stewart, the Canadian diplomats we met at lunch yesterday, come for us at two-fifteen to take us to the Canadian embassy. They hate driving in the Green Zone. I immediately see why. It’s impossible to get anywhere quickly. We crawl behind a military convoy through a slalom course of tire-shredding road plates. They say it is really dangerous to drive in the Green Zone. This surprises me. I ask them why. Stewart points to the fifty-millimetre gun mounted on the Humvee in front of us. They’ll shoot you if you get too close, he says.

I don’t believe it. This is a constant danger for anyone travelling in Iraq, but here too, in the Green Zone, where everyone is security-cleared? Stewart and Sonia laugh. Why do you think we’re driving in this? You’re looking at half a million dollars of armoured car. And this is an economy model.

Really? I say. It looks like a normal four-door sedan to me.

“Look again,” Stewart says. “Look closely at the windows and doors. You’ll see they’re quite a bit thicker than the norm. There’s an inch of glass there. A month ago we were driving along just like this, and I don’t know what happened but the convoy stopped really fast, and we must not have stopped quickly enough or something, because they opened fire on us. We were lucky. We could’ve easily been killed. The bullets went right through the middle of the car into the back seat. After that, Foreign Affairs said we couldn’t go anywhere in the Green Zone unless it was in an armoured vehicle. Another reason why this is one of our more expensive diplomatic missions.”

The embassy is located on a small triangle-shaped piece of land surrounded by an eight-foot wall. Behind the wall are two buildings: a garage in a state of serious disrepair and a two-storey house adorned with Romanesque columns. The garden in front of the house is overgrown, and the empty land in the narrowing end of the triangle is full of metal junk that Stewart has no idea what to do with. “The
house might look impressive on the outside, but it’s really quite modest,” Stewart says. It belonged previously to Saddam Hussein’s official photographer. They were lucky to get it—it was the last available property in the Green Zone. Nothing is set up yet. No phone line, no generator, no heat, no plumbing. But he comes here to work for an hour every day in the hope that one day it will be a functioning embassy. Eventually, he says, the whole diplomatic mission will live and work here.

Gordon arrives with Beth, Anita, Peggy and Maxine. They bring us into a room they call the library. “We have to sit here because it’s the only room that has any furniture,” Stewart jokes.

I am eager to start our debriefing—finally! They’ll wait for us outside, they say. They don’t mind, it’s a nice day. We have until four o’clock, and then the team has to go back. It is 2:50 p.m.

“That only gives us an hour and ten minutes,” I say, dismayed. They say they’re sorry, the checkpoints close early today.

“What happened?” I ask. I was hoping we would have the whole day.

They apologize, this was the best they could do, even to arrange this was very complicated.

“Well then, please wait outside so we can begin,” Maxine says. We start our debriefing immediately. There’s so much to tell, so much to ask. We pepper them with questions. What about Tom? What do they know about where he was found? How did they find out? When did they learn about the kidnapping? How did they react, what did they do first, how did the authorities get involved? Had the team ever established contact with a third-party negotiator? What do they think about our negotiated-release theory?

Harmeet wants to talk about his dilemma with his family. He tells us he feels as if he’s right back in handcuffs; he doesn’t know what to do. He’s just beginning to explain the situation when Sonia, Gordon and Stewart burst into the room singing “Happy Birthday.” Sonia is carrying a square slab of cake decorated with white icing and a pink Canadian flag. We immediately join them in the singing. I have to fight back tears. I’ve never felt such pride in my country.

Sonia puts the cake down on the coffee table we are sitting around. “Happy Birthday, Harmeet!” they exclaim. She is beaming.

“Thanks, guys!” Harmeet says. He blows out a tea-light candle.

“Here Harmeet, cut the cake,” Sonia says, handing him a knife. They sit down. My heart sinks. Our debriefing is over. When and how are we going to figure out Harmeet’s problem?

“Thank you for the cake,” Maxine says before Harmeet can start cutting. “Now if you don’t mind, we still have twenty minutes. We’d like to continue with our debriefing. Privately.”

Everything in the room stops. Sonia looks as if she’s just been slapped.

“We certainly don’t mean to intrude,” Stewart says. “We’ll give you a chance to finish up and we’ll come back in twenty minutes.”

I look at Maxine, astonished. After four months of obsequious captor-pleasing, I marvel at how anyone can be so assertive. She’s furious. “I can’t believe they did that,” she says. “Barging in here, taking away even the little time they’d given us. This is the way it’s been all along. They could’ve at least asked.”

“I think they wanted it to be a surprise,” I say.

“I don’t care. They should’ve asked.”

“Let’s focus. We don’t have much time,” Anita says.

“How about if we go until ten- to and then we invite them in to have the cake?” Harmeet says. Everyone agrees.

At ten to four I go outside to get them. Sonia’s eyes are red from crying. “I’m really sorry,” I say. “We just really needed the time.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Sonia says. “It’s not your fault.”

Sonia and Stewart carry on as if nothing has happened. The room fills with laughter as the cake is cut and shared. We gather around Harmeet for a picture. It feels good to celebrate. Like it’s my birthday too. In a way it is. I feel new and reborn. Today is the first day of a whole new life.

Two RCMP officers arrive at eight o’clock that evening. I like them immediately. André is soft-spoken, unassuming, cerebral, almost shy.
Tom is a big, warm, open-hearted man—the one I saw crying yesterday. They greet us like old friends. We find ourselves a corner in the ambassador’s sepulchral living room. Tom has a file folder on his knee. After a bit of small talk, they ask if we know anything about Jill Carroll, an American journalist who was kidnapped in January.

No, nothing about Jill Carroll, we say.

Did your captors mention anyone else?

Just that they kidnapped a German archaeologist and killed an American contractor in December, and that they had kidnapped two German oil workers in February.

Tom and André nod. Then Tom explains they have some pictures to show us, all of different men, people who are in custody.

What is this, some kind of photo lineup?
“Gordon told us you had pictures of Medicine Man,” I say. I feel set up, betrayed.

It’s not a photo lineup, they say. There’s one picture of Medicine Man; the rest are of other people who are in custody. This is just for our own purposes. None of this is going to the Americans.

We don’t want to identify anybody, we say. We only asked to see a picture of Medicine Man so we can verify for ourselves whether or not the man we saw at the house was him.

Their voices are calm, gentle, so very reasonable. They know how to soothe ruffled feathers. We don’t have to identify anybody, they say. In Canada we have certain values. We don’t agree with the death penalty, for example. This is just for Canadian purposes. Like for immigration. So that, in the future, we don’t unknowingly admit one of your captors to Canada. We want to protect you from bumping into one of them on the street. It’s happened before. Lots of people try to come to Canada to escape criminal pasts. And perhaps even more important, some of these men may be innocent. The Americans just pick people up. This is rough-and-tumble, it’s the middle of a war. So, by you looking at the pictures, we can eliminate anyone whose picture we have as a suspect in this particular crime. On the other hand, we don’t want to release anybody who is likely to do this kind of thing again. I’m sure you wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone else, they say.

Harmeet and I look at one another. We need to think. They keep talking, say the same things over and over, their voices repeating in a closed loop. My head is spinning. I have to fight against an almost irresistible desire to please them.

Can we have a minute to talk? I finally say. Harmeet and I step out of earshot. We agree to look at the pictures but we won’t say anything until we’ve seen all of them, and only then to confirm that none of the men are our captors. If we see even one we recognize, we won’t say anything.

Tom opens the file folder and passes the pictures to us one by one. He has about twenty of them. I study each face closely. It’s a sad exercise. Each man is a locked-up human being, just as we had been, with a story, a family, somebody who misses and needs them. Sometimes I think I can read defiance, sometimes fear, but mostly their eyes are distressingly vacant, not really there. No one looks to have been beaten. “Some of them could be innocent,” Tom had said. Most of them undoubtedly are. Colonel Janis Karpinski, the commander of Abu Ghraib at the time of the torture revelations, estimated that 90 percent of their detainees were innocent. I say a prayer for each man as his photo passes through my hands. I don’t recognize any of them. Except the very last picture. I am startled by something familiar. Something in the structure of the jaw, cheekbones, forehead. But the eyes … the eyes aren’t right. It’s as if somebody else’s eyes have been put into Medicine Man’s face. I look at Harmeet. He sees it too. I go back to studying the picture, my heart pounding.