Authors: Brian Keenan
They would trail and pull or push this piece of bread the full length of my tiny cell, scale a vertical wall, crawl along ridges until they found an exit point and take with them what they had found.
My fascination made friends of them. I was grateful for their fortitude, for their strength, for their resilience and instead of raging at IB them I would sit awaiting their return. I watched how they worked ” together. And how, if I had crushed one in the night by accident, the others would gather around and if there was life in it still, a comrade would lift this wounded companion and carry it across what for these tiny creatures must have seemed like miles, crawl up the vertical wall and search out an escape point through which they could take this maimed insect to be amongst its own. This incident became a symbol for me in this blank room with its three chained creatures. We cannot abandon the injured or the maimed, thinking to ensure our own safety and sanity. We must reclaim them, as they are part of ourselves.
The days in my last months of captivity were a coming back to reality for each of us. The half-man we had found when we first came there we understood and gently, without insistence, tried to lift that blanket from him, not with our hands but with our minds and with what compassion or affectionate criticism we could find.
Frank emerged from behind his blanket slowly, tenuously. As he did so, so did we. His coming back was a homecoming for us all, though we remained in that room, chained, barely able to reach out and touch one another’s hands. It was a restoration of meaning for all of us.
John’s strength, his defiance and resistance to the guards, his steely calm made them wary. John was in command. They became frightened. What if their chief should come to visit, if someone was ill, and what if John or I should speak of what had happened here to Frank. These violent men, who had taken their strength and manhood from a man unable to resist, were now cowering within themselves.
The beatings and the abuse were at an end. There were no more insidious insults. There was no more kicking or spitting. There was no more standing with us in the toilet and insisting that we could not stand to urinate because it was the way of Satan. Such abuse we would not listen to, but the idiocy that we had to endure was its own kind of punishment.
Things improved in this place, the food was better than it had ever been before. They gave us a television regularly, but we were never allowed to watch the news. Three times a week we would be offered a video film. Gratefully we would accept only to find ourselves bored stupid by Kung-Fu films or the usual gratuitous violence of western
movies. Often we talked about how the violence of men like our guards was at least partly conditioned by the glut of American video violence, and how their twisted, obsessional concern with sexuality was in part a response to the slew of nudity in the western films they saw. In our own way we were subject to a violence and perversion conditioned by products of the West. We remembered how the guns that they had shown us were all of European manufacture.
The shadows that engulf a man until he loses his substantiality had begun to dissipate. A light that glowed and burned and grew within was extinguishing the power of the shadowy darkness. We were all emergent, men still hungry for a future, believing in that future and casting off all futility. We were each laughing again, telling stories, outrageous lies as big and as monstrous as mountains and laughing at sheer fantasy again. Mad schemes were designed and as we each described them and watched the fascination of our listeners we got carried away, and made our tales taller and more incredible.
There was a new atmosphere here, and one that boded well for us.
Occasionally Mahmoud would come as a visitor to sit and talk with us and tell us about world events. We were never astounded by what he reported though the reality of some of these events was truly astonishing. The Berlin Wall had fallen in November 1989, but our minds could not be amazed by simply human things, for they had travelled into more amazing and awesome places. ‘
Many months after we arrived here Frank was removed. We knew though we were not told that this time he had been released. Every night, I would crawl across the floor, putting my ear to the bottom of the door and listening to the news reports, my Arabic good enough to tell me that he really had been freed. His release was a boost to us.
We had long recognized that the guards were as much our prisoners as we were theirs, and they were now more prisoners than ever before.
In many respects they had become our servants. If we asked for anything we were given it immediately. Medicine, a particular kind of food, coffee, hot chocolate — all were given to us. Only newspapers were refused. In the light of this, we became more confident. To treat us so royally, but yet to refuse magazines or newspapers, suggested strongly that something was happening which they did not want us to know about. That something, we were sure, was an impending end to our captivity.
After Frank left, another prisoner was moved into the room beside ours. For some days there was silence from this other person’s room,
then inevitably the knocking began. A man will risk his life or the better part of it to communicate. The knocking told us who it was, and we were not surprised. We had guessed as much beforehand. We returned the messages, tapping out our own identity and what news and information we could pass on. It was a slow, laborious process, but we knew how hungry Terry Waite must be for news. We had always known that he would be alone. The fact that he was in this apartment with us now further reinforced our hopes.
Daily we would be taken to the toilet, returned and exercised. In the afternoon the guards would come to unchain us, take us one at a time from the room, across the hall into the kitchen. We would sit on a chair in front of a window. The window would be opened and in would come the heat and light of the sun, blazing through our blindfolds. A radio was always playing in the kitchen. Often the guard Bilal, the one who had asked John to teach him to dance, would tune the radio to some western rock station and we would listen to old and familiar tunes. Occasionally we caught some quick news flash, half understanding it before the guards would flick to another station.
There was much talk now with the guards, and jokes were traded.
John sat chained to his wall at one end of the large apartment room and I, chained to mine, at the other. We would take our socks, stuff them full of paper or some rag or shirt that we had torn up, wrap the sock around this and make ourselves a small ball. Chained to the wall we would viciously pass this ball back and forward, scoring points against each miss. The next morning during exercise we would bring out our secret ball and play soccer or volleyball, choking on the laughter.
‘Hope for everything but expect nothing’ had long been our motto.
But now hope increased expectation, rather than limited it. We spoke little to one another about our possible release. We hoped we would both go together. We expected it would not happen like that. Yet we enjoyed one another’s company too much to bear the thought of either of us going before the other.
It comes as all things that change a life must come: without warning.
An afternoon visit, suddenly there are many men in the room. A guard kneels down, lifting me by the arm with the command ‘Stand, Brian, stand.’ I stand, wondering, not really expecting this to be the moment. I am unchained and led from the room and into another. On.
the floor is a mattress and I am made to sit on it and am chained again.
Slowly something is dawning on me. To move me to another room and rechain me is a separation that means something though I cannot allow myself to believe what it might be. Grasping hold of something and then having it instantaneously taken away had hurled many of us in the past into that abyss we all knew too well. But I sit in defiant silence. A man kneels in front of me, his hand gentle on my shoulder.
It is the voice of one of the chiefs. Quietly he says ‘Brian, you go home.’ I am silent and unstunned. ‘Home, you mean another place?’ I ask, for I have heard these words before.
Again the hand at my shoulder and the voice. ‘You go home, family, Dublin.’ The sound of the word Dublin suggests that something is imminent. I am still amazingly calm. I ask ‘What about my friend?’ There is silence, voices mumble in Arabic. All of them leave the room. Ten minutes later two men return, they ask whether I want anything. That phrase I have heard ten thousand times before.
‘I want to speak with my friend John. I want to speak with him now. I will not go without speaking.’ My voice is rising in panic, realizing ‘My God, it is over.’
They recognize my insistence, the loudness of my voice, the determination in it. A man kneels again in front of me, quietly he asks ‘What do you want?’ I answer, my voice slow, loud enough so that I hope John will hear. ‘I want to speak with John, I will not go from this room until I speak with him.’ The figure still squats in silence in front of me. After some minutes he leaves. I am given tea. I sit, the door is left wide open.
I know they have gone into the kitchen and are there talking. After half an hour two men come into the room. ‘Brian,’ a voice says. I sit silent, ‘You douche, take shower.’ I sit silent, wondering is this an order or an offer. Again I say to them ‘Take me to John, I want to say goodbye.’ My voice is more angry now than determined but it’s a quiet anger. Again the chief kneels down in front of my blindfolded face. His hand is at my shoulder but not this time in a pat of affection; squeezing and gripping hard again. ‘After douche, after some hours you talk with your friend.’ I nod, not knowing whether to believe and accept or to face the pointlessness of argument.
I am left for those hours to think. I begin to believe what I have been told and suddenly there is something in me I cannot resolve. I know it is over and within hours or days I will not be wearing a blindfold. I will be unfettered. But I feel it build in me, the weight of my imprisonment. For how much freedom can there be for a man when he leaves one half of himself chained to the wall? I begin to try to order my thinking to see beyond the consequences of any action I can take. I can argue and fight and insist on staying until my friend is released.
But if I don’t go, how will my family and friends receive it? Perhaps even now they are sitting waiting for the final confirmation. Has their suffering been so little over the past four and a half years that I can refuse this, and thrust them back into their anguish? I think one moment that I am thinking only of myself and then that I am not. I am trying desperately to find a balance in my compassion. I weigh the scales and I move back and forth and I am caught in indecision. My hands stretched out to the man in the room next door and to my family far away. Which has the greater hold and where is the greater pull on me?
My mind flashes back over four and a half years, those memories percolating through my history and that of my friends. I am in a delirium of contradictory desire that will not resolve itself. Only I can make this choice and I am incapable. Great love has weakened me. I am again on that raft in an ocean, tossed by the turbulent tides of affection. I try to work out what I should do for I must choose and in what I choose make myself. I remember every moment of my time alone, my time with John and with those other captives. And I remember how we first met, our relationship, the kinds of needs I had of John and he of me. And how we sought always to give and take, thinking always of the other. And as I review it all, all that wonder, I see his face stare at mine. I had watched this man grow, become full and in his fullness enrich me. And I know that if in my defiance I walk back into that room and have myself chained, refusing to go home, I will have diminished him, for he is a bigger man than to succumb to the needs that isolation breeds. I cannot do this, I cannot belittle him. I know that in going free I will free him. He will not surrender, he has gone beyond it. I know that the deep bond our captivity has given us will be shattered if I return. Our respect for each other demands of each that we take our freedom when it comes.
And so I took it, feeling that my arm had been wrenched off my shoulder and was suddenly missing. I walked blindfold into the shower. I stood indifferent to its warm embrace, and soaped down my body. I was numb. They allowed me to take as long as I wished. But I had no wish to stand, only to be gone.
I sat on a chair and listened to the scissors clip my hair. Jokes were being cracked about me. Bilal the barber offered to give the hairs on my chest a trim. I smiled.
Curiously the guards did not come to talk with me as I sat out those remaining hours. I wondered if they understood my anguish or my resolution. I sat in silence, unmoving, concentrating my mind and trying telepathically to send a message across that small hallway and underneath the door to my friend waiting and wondering. I tried also to send messages to say to those who I knew sat at the edge of a terrible anxiety and of a chasm of hope that it was over. I was about to begin my beginning.
As I had first been taken, so I was being released. I sat in the back of a Mercedes, my head resting upon the lap of one of the guards I had known as Ali. His hand gently shielded my eyes. We drove through the back streets of the suburbs. It was a strange comfort to sit in a Mercedes. The car stopped. I could hear men outside talking. There was much snapping of magazines into guns, and an older man, perhaps in his mid-forties or fifties, entered the passenger seat. The previous passenger had left and not returned. Ali sat, his Kalashnikov beside his knee. The driver said something. Someone clipped a magazine into a gun and handed it to him. The older man barked an order and the car moved off. For fifteen minutes we drove and then stopped. The passenger got out. The door opened. Ali excitedly, quickly said to me ‘Yallah, yallah, go, go … Good luck … good luck.’ I emerged as I had never done before, clothed in trousers, shoes, socks, a T-shirt, a sweater, and my eyes unblindfolded yet still unseeing in the dark. The older man took me by the hand.