Authors: Brian Keenan
I chose, as all men in those circumstances would, to disbelieve that I would be held for very long. I immediately set a date in my head and I look back now with some amusement on it. I decided within those first few hours that I would be kept no longer than a few weeks. My nationality was worthless to them. It would be pointless to hold an Irishman: they could trade me for little or nothing. It was while thinking this through that I fixed my mind on the only option open to me: somehow to convince these men of the fruitlessness of keeping me I as a hostage against some political demand. While I was forcing this belief on myself so as to hold back all the vast confusion and fear, the cell door opened for the third time on the first day.
I was given a bottle of Coke and two sandwiches wrapped in Arabic bread. I was told by the guard ‘Soon, my boss he come.’ I shrugged my shoulders, confident and nonchalant. The door closed again but it was not locked. I could dimly see the guards moving past. There seemed to be several of them. They hovered about my door trying to look in, me looking out, convinced that it was only in this eye contact that I could maintain a distance from them. In those first weeks when confronted by them I would not take my eyes from their faces. In the few times that I did see a face, all the faces were as one to me, each blending in to one another, and I could hardly distinguish their separate features.
The door opened again, four men in their mid-twenties, some with hand guns, peered in at me. They stood in silence. Two of them just inside the door, two of them standing in the hallway beyond, looking intently at me as I looked back at them. I felt like a fish in an aquarium.
They were silent and staring and I stared back. There was something between us. Maybe it was the fear in the air.
The long minutes of gazing down at me as I sat on the floor were oppressive. Then suddenly there was movement. The men parted, and an older man in a brown suit, with grey wavy hair and a full grey beard was standing in the doorway, studying me. He was obviously a man of some rank. The other men stood back in fearful respect. He looked at me, and I looked back at him. I was unmoved and did not blink. He asked me ‘Are you English?’ I noted that his English was an educated one. He spoke it well and I answered him. ‘No, I am not English … I am Irish.’
He looked at me again in silence, with long pauses between his questions: ‘Where do you come from?’ I answered with the same nonchalance, perhaps this time filled with the native stubbornness of rny city: ‘I’m from Belfast… Do you know it?’ There was a touch of anger and aggression in my voice. He noted it, nodded, yes he knew it. He asked me how long I had been in Lebanon. I was uncomfortable that I had to sit on the floor while I was being questioned. It put me at a disadvantage. I wanted to stand up to him face to face, but something told me that that would be foolish, perhaps dangerous.
He muttered something to the guards, and there was an exchange between them. He looked back at me and asked calmly did I have an Irish passport. I told him of course I had an Irish passport. He asked ‘Where is it?’ I saw that it was time for ajoke. ‘Well if you’d like to take me back to my apartment I’ll get it for you.’ I smiled. He did not return the smile, but turned again to the men with the guns and said something in Arabic. There seemed to be some confusion. It was hard to tell with these excitable men. He turned and quietly told me that if I co-operated I would not be harmed. He told me he would return, and the door banged shut again. The padlock rattled, accompanied by the babble of this fearfully incomprehensible language.
I was pleased with my first interrogation. I sensed that my interrogator was confused about my nationality. I was equally pleased that I had made him feel I was not afraid of him, though secretly I was. I had simply not allowed myself to think of what could have happened, only what I could prevent happening. The Arab mind is often dominated by its cult of masculinity. It admires what it conceives to be courage, a show of power, of fearlessness. I tried to maintain these defensive self-images in my head, and wondered how long I could continue if things got much worse and if they began to play games —
psychological torture games — or resorted to some more brutal violence.
Yet I told myself constantly that I was of no value to them. What did I know? What did they think I knew that might make them turn to more severe methods?
1 looked at my two sandwiches and Coca-Cola still sitting untouched in the corner. I was not hungry, but I began to wonder what a first prison meal tasted like, and out of curiosity and boredom I began to eat. The food was tasteless. Though it was like much Arabic food, heavily spiced and flavoured with vinegar and pickles, its acidity didn’t affect me and I could taste nothing. I took only a mouthful out of each sandwich, hoping to jar one taste against another. But there was just a blandness in my mouth. I thought that the shock of what had happened was finally ebbing slowly into me, dulling the faculties of taste and perception with tension and an unacknowledged fear.
The day progressed but I didn’t feel the drag of it. I lay on the mattress or paced up and down the six-foot length of my cell wondering how long it would take until they realized how useless I was to them. Strangely, another part of me wanted to be held for at least some time to make the whole thing worthwhile. I felt a curiosity growing in me, at first minimal, yet I was constantly asking myself with interest rather than apprehension what my two weeks’ captivity would mean to me. I was convincing myself that it would be two weeks, and only two weeks. And after that time perhaps I might have something interesting to say about my experience in Lebanon.
They had taken my watch, my ring, a necklace that a friend had given me, and what little cash I had on me, leaving me only what I stood up in: my father’s shirt, a pair of grey trousers, socks and a pair of shoes that I had bought just a few days previously from a street vendor in the Hamra area. I thought of the shoes constantly in those first few days, remembering how when they picked me up there had seemed to be some dispute about them. The driver, the most aggressive and oldest of my captors, seemed to want them for himself. I dreaded the loss of those shoes more than the jewellery and the watch and the money.
Perhaps as long as I had my shoes I had some dignity.
A friend told me when we were having dinner one evening on the road to Sidon that on the beaches outside Beirut which were normally the haunts only of local people, I should not be seen exposing the soles of my feet. There was some religious connotation in this, and I still don’t know whether it’s true. But I know a fanatic’s mind is fed by such superstition, which removes him from the reality around him and in some strange way permits him to be aggressive and abusive to others because his own world is controlled by authoritative denial -all is forbidden to him.
I don’t know when I decided it was time to sleep. I remember hearing loud bullish snoring from one of the Arab inmates and I thought it must be evening. The time had gone quickly, quicker than I imagined. The prison had been empty of its guards for several hours. I remember thinking as I heard the snoring that if it’s night perhaps the inmates here will begin to speak to one another, unafraid of being heard. But there was no talking. I found this hard to believe; that men could sit all day in a tiny cell and when given the opportunity, not even try to communicate with their fellows. I think I slept contentedly enough, that first night, having convinced myself that the first interview had gone well. I was not in any immediate danger. I had not been threatened or abused, and I refused to let myself believe that that would happen before I was set free.
In the early hours of the morning, I woke and thought about that moment in the underground pass, when they had taken me from the car and I thought I was about to be shot. Recalling that incident from only the day before was abhorrent to me. Not the thought of death
itself, but the cruelty and anonymity of it. Death should have some meaning even for the justly condemned. Those who know they are about to die should have the time and the opportunity to receive death without fear, without hatred or bitterness. To be driven to some filthy hole in the ground and executed without justification was beyond my comprehension. In those early morning hours when my mind was only half awake I imagined myself lying there, my father’s shirt blood-stained and filthy. Why it was my mind stuck so tenaciously onto this image I cannot tell; perhaps it was the gross indignity of it, a kind of insult to him. I spent hours wondering what this second day would hold.
Doors banged in the distance. Voices shouting. The guards were returning. I quickly got myself up, tried to dress. Strange how we preserve some kind of minimal vanity even when there is nothing to be vain about. I heard the other prisoners’ cells opening, heard them shuffling past my own, and water running in the distance. It was obvious they were being taken to a shower or to a sink to wash. I waited my turn, eager to be out if only to see what the shower room was like. But my turn did not come. All the prisoners were taken back, but no one came for me.
My cell door opened, only a few inches. I saw the face of an old man looking in at me. His hair was askew, several days’ growth on his face. I looked at him. He kept staring and then the door opened wider. I stood up thinking I was going to be taken to wash, to use the bathroom but he gently put his hand out as if to tell me no, and I sat down. I was given bread, some cheese and a cup of tea without milk. A small glass of hot, and very sweet black tea, and the door was locked. I looked at my second breakfast, without desire and without hunger.
After some minutes the door opened again and in came my captor; the one who spoke English and sat in the passenger seat of the car. It seemed I was to have him with me frequently, perhaps because he had some English and the others had none, only very poor French. He squatted beside me. ‘How are you today?’ I answered that I was fine, what other answer was there? ‘Do you want anything?’ I shook my head wanting to say: yes, I want to get the hell out of this place; but I didn’t. I simply nodded, remembering always to look him in the face and not to flinch. He offered me more tea. I refused trying to explain to him it was too hot and too sweet, but I don’t think he understood.
Instead I asked for some water and it was quickly brought. He watched me as I drank slowly, then came the second interrogation, if that is the proper definition. A lot of questions: Why did I come to Lebanon? What Lebanese people did I know? Did I know any Lebanese people before I came to Lebanon? Who were the political advisors to the foreign teachers in the American University of Beirut?
Though I tried to answer these questions as uncomplicatedly as possible, I think that he was unused to asking questions and getting answers. He was simply a messenger boy, a gunman or a warrior given an order to go and collect someone. Anything beyond that he would have been incapable of dealing with. But nevertheless he asked the questions again, trying to fix one word in his head so that he could report back. I explained again how I came to be in Lebanon, and that I knew no Lebanese before coming and had only met a few since arriving; that I knew of no political advisors to the foreign teaching staff. I think he understood the nos and the yeses and that was enough for him. He rose to leave and said he would be back. I asked him when.
He simply said ‘Soon, soon’ and went.
I spent some time wondering about the significance of these questions. My answers hardly gave any information and couldn’t be of any use to them, so I waited to see what would be the outcome of his report to his superiors. I was soon to find out. Within an hour he returned, this time accompanied by the much older, more literate and intelligent interrogator of the day before. It was a repeat of the previous day’s confrontation. He stood in the doorway and I sat on the floor on my mattress. We stared fixedly at one another and held the silence, each contemplating the other. He asked me how I was, as his younger friend had done previously, and I gave the same innocuous answer. ‘I am fine.’
He then gave me back my briefcase which had been withheld from me since the day I was taken. I thanked him, still staring at him.
Abruptly he said ‘I want the names and addresses of fifteen English teachers.’ Something in his expression had changed. He was now giving me an order. I looked back at him and said ‘I have not been here long enough to know fifteen English teachers.’ He was silent and I repeated that I had not been in Lebanon long enough to know so many English teachers, and then emphasizing my Belfast accent and retreating into a stubbornness that has always been part of what I am when I feel myself cornered or under attack, I told him ‘I am Irish, I am from Belfast… Why do you think I would have made friends with English teachers … I do not know where these English people live.’
He insisted that I must know their addresses, I insisted that I did not.
Those few foreign teachers that I had got to know all lived on campus and I told him surely he must know this. As he knew where I lived and where to come and get me, he must also know that many of the foreign teachers lived within the University for their own security. He took from his pocket a piece of paper folded neatly, passed it to me, and I opened it. On it were written the names of two English members of the teaching faculty, who had arrived some weeks after my own appointment. One of them I knew reasonably well, the other was a much older man and I had only a nodding acquaintance with him. I said that I did not know their addresses, only that one of them lived on campus and the other near one of the Embassies.
He talked to me in some detail about one of these men. He knew that he had been in some of the shops in Beirut that sell hi-fi equipment and flashy transistor radios and TVs, enquiring about the possibility of ordering a piece of computer equipment. I could tell him only that I knew him on campus and that I knew nothing about his interest in computers. Whether or not he was satisfied with this information, I cannot tell. He left the paper on which the two names were written with me and insisted that I add the names of other teachers and their addresses. I reiterated that I knew some of their names but did not know their addresses, beyond the fact that they lived on the campus, and that had I had more sense, I would have done the same. I tried to make this sound funny, but he was unresponsive. He said something to the guard who was with him and they left. I