Authors: Brian Keenan
I went out through the gate, locking it behind me, and began to walk off in the direction of the University. I had taken, I suppose, no more than twelve steps. I was barely away from the gate and the fence which enclosed the garden when an old Mercedes, hand-painted dark green with a cream roof, pulled up alongside me. The driver’s door opened, preventing me from passing on the narrow street.
Out jumped four men, the driver with a hand pistol and three other young men in their mid-twenties, each with a Kalashnikov in his hand and a hand gun in his belt. I stood and we exchanged silent glances.
How long this took I do not know. But I remember looking at them, them looking at me. Then I was quickly pushed into the back seat with two of the Kalashnikov-toting gunmen.
The doors slammed and the car moved off quickly. I remember smiling to myself, looking at these men. The driver was watching me in the mirror, and his friend on the passenger seat turned full face towards me, half-smiling. The two men in the back seat beside me were silent, grim and I think somewhat fearful. The car gathered speed and I was ordered down on the floor. I could not, would not go down on the floor amongst their feet. I simply bowed my head, resting it on one of the men’s knees. This seemed to cause much confusion. The driver was angry, he wanted me on the floor. His friend in the passenger seat was smiling and laughing. The guard on whose knee I rested my head seemed perplexed.
Only the man in the passenger seat seemed to speak some English, not particularly well. The questions began. ‘You know where you go?’ Of course I told them I didn’t know where I was going. It seemed a lunatic question. ‘You English?’ At this point I sat up quite determined:‘No … I am not English, I am Irish… Irlandais.‘They looked shocked and puzzled. The passenger in the front seat said something quickly to the driver. The driver looked at me, looked at
his compatriot and there was a moment’s silence again. ‘You like Thatcher?’ was the next question. I could quite honestly say with a smile on my face ‘No, I don’t like Thatcher. I’m Irish,’ foolishly thinking that these men might understand how impossible it was for any Irish person with an ounce of imagination to even consider liking Thatcher. The questioning at this stage was pleasant enough, though answering such questions half squatting, half lying in the back seat of a car with a hand gun in your ribs and a Kalashnikov lying across the back of your neck was not only difficult, but ludicrous.
The car travelled for some distance. I tried to look up but all I could see were the tops of buildings, and the occasional tower of a mosque. I had no idea where I was. We travelled for some fifteen minutes. The car then entered darkness, and after some minutes stopped. I was aware of some argument going on between the driver and the man who spoke English.
He seemed angry and kept looking at my shoes. I knew this was an ominous sign. They had already begun to reckon up and divide the spoils, my clothes and my possessions, amongst themselves. There was very little I could do about it. Not that I was carrying much, but to be present when men talk about sharing you out is disconcerting.
The kidnappers all climbed out of the car and I was told ‘Get out, get out.’ We seemed to be in a kind of subway. I remember it was strewn with litter. It must have been difficult for a car to make any headway through the mass of garbage that had been dumped there. I was told to walk to the back of the car. When I did so I was stopped. Immediately off to the right of where I stood at the boot of the car there was a tiny alleyway, perhaps an exit from the subway we were in. I thought to myself, ‘Oh no not here, not here of all places.’ My first thought was that I was going to be taken up this little narrow tunnel and executed.
I don’t recall feeling any sense of panic or fear. I can still remember thinking that this was such an awful God-forsaken place in which to die.
My next thought was that I was wearing my father’s shirt and how unkind it was to him that I should die wearing his shirt, even though he himself had died some years previously. This preoccupied me to the exclusion of everything else, regardless of the fact that within seconds I might be shot. I said nothing. The men looked about, talked rapidly with one another. The boot was opened and I was told ‘Get in … get in’; I crawled in, their hands pushing and squeezing me. The panic was more on their side than on mine. I lay crumpled and curled in the boot. The kidnapper who spoke English said to me viciously ‘No noise, no noise’, the boot slammed and the darkness was complete.
The car doors shut, the engine started up and we moved off. I could not tell when we exited from that underground passage, but faint glimmerings of light and the noise of the street, which was now a roar in my ears, told me that we were in the daylight and moving through a congested area. There were people all around, going about their business and their lives, oblivious to the fact that a man was at this moment disappearing out of life, lying quietly in the boot of this dilapidated Mercedes.
The car stopped once; two doors slammed; there was loud talk. I assumed that we were at some check point belonging to one of the various paramilitary groups, though which one I shall never know. A couple of minutes’ brief exchange, then the slamming doors again and movement to God knows where. The car drove briskly. I could hear the crunch of the gears and then an almost screeching sudden halt.
Again the doors opening. Again the lid of the boot being unlocked. I was not blinded by daylight but was in what I thought might be the enclosed car-parking area of some building. I was quickly hauled out of the boot. This time only French was spoken: ‘Vite, vite, vite’ was hissed at me, but not angrily. These men were simply urgent to finish what they were doing.
I was run some twenty or thirty feet to a doorway on my right and quickly pushed through it. All the gunmen entered after me. I noticed two of them breathing very fast. These men were not exhausted by any expenditure of physical energy, but by fear. That erratic breathing was a deadly give-away, something I was to hear time and time again during my long period in these mens’ charge.
We moved down a short corridor and a door was opened to my left.
I stopped and looked in and was nudged gently into the room. It contained only a folding camp bed and I was told to sit on it. Then an odd question was put to me by the smiling guard with the poor English: ‘You are fine, yes?’, to which I could only say ‘Yes.’ He went off, and the door was locked. I remember sitting on the bed and thinking, ‘So this is it.’ This small fearful room. How could anyone survive a stay in a place so small. I felt some sort of relief that at least I had a bed. I had heard stories of the conditions that hostages were kept in and none of their descriptions included a bed. I sat and tried to order my thoughts. Again without panic, just slowly putting piece upon piece together to work out what exactly had happened, how long I had been travelling, and where I was likely to be. Something to keep the mind calm.
The door opened. The English-speaking guard came in and told me to take offmy shirt. I remembered again my thoughts in that tunnel. It was my father’s shirt. I slowly unbuttoned the shirt, looking at this man, half smiling with my own puzzlement as I tried to contain my growing confusion. What could these men want with my father’s shirt? With slow deliberation I removed the shirt and handed it at a full arm’s length to this man, looking always into his eyes, and smiling at him. As I remember it, it was a kind of sardonic smile; what he understood by it I will never know but I believe to this day that that sardonic smile, and my staring him full in the face restrained him from whatever violence he was prepared to offer.
I was told to sit again. The shirt was folded in a band and my first blindfold was my father’s shirt, tied tightly about my head. With two . men on each side of me, holding my arms, I was walked out of that small room. There was a descent down three flights of roughly concreted stairs and bare concrete walls. I could feel them scrape against my skin as I stumbled. I wondered how far underground I I would be going. At the bottom of those three flights, the ground i levelled off. I seemed to be walking slowly in a straight line.
I could hear noise in front of me, not loud, but the sounds of people talking and moving about. I sensed some light as I tried to peer underneath the blindfold down along the line of my body to my feet. ? My captors restrained me as I tried to walk on and simply said ‘Stop’. I stood wondering ‘What next?’ My blindfold was removed. I saw two other faces, of men who had not been in the party that kidnapped me.
‘ One looked at me, the other spoke to the men who had brought me in.
It seemed they had no English.
The passenger in the car, who had begun his questioning about my nationality and about Margaret Thatcher, asked me if I would like a shower. I said quite politely ‘No thank you, I had one this morning before leaving.’ It seemed like a natural response, but in retrospect it was a ridiculous one. My captor spoke then to this man who was in effect in charge of this underground prison. In halting English, the prison officer said that there was no hot water, speaking almost apologetically, again adding to my confusion and increasing the breadth of the smile on my mouth. I said ‘It’s OK, don’t worry.’ I was then taken by four men to a small cell. It was no bigger than the last one and it had no bed. A mattress was laid out on the ground. The room was probably smaller than a bathroom in an average suburban semidetached.
I was left for some minutes; then the door opened again. The English-speaking guard came in with my briefcase. He sat it on the ground, squatting in front of me. ‘You want to eat?’ If this was four-star service, I thought, it was extremely pushy. I had just arrived, they offer me a shower but apologize for not having hot water, now they ask me if I want something to eat. I was in no mood for eating and told him so. He asked again ‘You want anything?’ I said ‘No’ and then thought again and said ‘Yes … I want some newspapers.’ He grunted, nodded and left, taking my briefcase with him. The door closed again. Like so many doors that were to close. I sat on the mattress waiting and wondering how long, that awful anguished question that I was so frequently to ask.
Psychologists tell us that one of the first and instinctual reactions of the personality when faced with a traumatic transition is to attempt to trivialize or to minimize the event and the consequences it may have.
Our denial stimulates a euphoric state. Obviously the extremes to which denial can be taken are dependent on the qualities and strengths of character the person has acquired over the years. But it is important to distinguish this process of minimizing danger from the idea of flight; of running away in horror, in fear, in confusion, which is another and different road. Denial is often a necessary phase in the process of adjustment, a normal and necessary human reaction to a crisis which is too immediately overwhelming to face head on. Denial gives time for a temporary retreat from reality, time for our internal forces to regroup and to regain strength, to begin to deal with the loss that has been forced upon us.
For most people the effects of change and the resulting stresses begin to become apparent. We exhaust the strategies of denial. Reality slowly but surely overcomes our attempts to hold it at bay. As we become aware of the new realities we begin to experience depression.
Depression can be a kind of extreme mania: the highs and lows of a movement between awful despair and a giddy euphoria coming wave upon wave, day after day attempting to erode whatever degree of resilience and resistance one has in one’s self. With this depression there is associated an awful frustration. It is difficult to know how best to deal with the new requirements, the new relationships that have to be established.
As we move further into awareness of our new reality, the new conditions about us have the effect of reconditioning us. We move into a process of acceptance, but this acceptance should not be seen as a defeat of our powers of resistance and of maintaining the integrity of the self. It is simply that in a situation of total confinement one has to learn to unhook from the past in order to live for the present.
My first hours, then days and then weeks I found myself constantly having to deal with the slow hallucination into which I had been dropped. I had been removed from a known reality. The four concrete walls of my shoe-box-sized cell formed my only vista. Beyond these I could see nothing, only my imagination gave me images, some beautiful, some disturbing and unendurably ever-present. The vast landscape of the mind unfolds on its own. At times I felt the compensations of this gift and at other times cursed my imagination that it could bring me sensations so contorted, so strange and so incoherent that I screamed; not out of fear but out of the rage and frustration of having to deal with these flashing pictures of which I could make little or no sense.
Exaggerating this distorted sensitivity were the voices of my captors in a disembodied language which I didn’t understand but could hear being spoken, being whispered, being shouted beyond the walls of my cell. There were the cries, too, of the other prisoners, all in Arabic as I recall, some of them weeping and in the long hours of darkness some of that weeping becoming screaming. At other times the shouts came from a street vendor selling fruit or fish, reminding me starkly that there was something outside, but that I was buried away from normal life and could only hear its echo. So many thoughts, so many ideas, so many feelings came hurtling into my mind in those first days; too many to take hold of and deal with in an ordered and coherent way. You simply had to sit in lethargy, letting them wash over you and holding on to some point of resistance that would only let them wash over but not sweep you away. The dangers of that were too great and too apparent. There was nowhere to run to.