Lebanon Hostage Ch. 03

Allan's rule, then, is that if one of us is feeling low, if he just wants to lie down and retreat into himself and be sad or discouraged—he's entitled to do it for as much as a few hours. But after that, the other is supposed to prod him, make him sit up, make him do something else. Chat. Tell about his life. Tell a story. Solve a math problem. Pace a little. Exercise. Something.

Allan applies this rule to my crying. I cry much less often after we're brought together. But if I've had a particularly dark day, a day when I've been low and haven't been able to shake it and have just been going through the motions when Allan makes me do something else—at the end of a day like that, when we lie down to go to sleep, and I reflect that I could be facing two more years of days like this, if not more, I'm liable to cry. If Allan's awake to hear me, he may give my back or shoulder a pat, but otherwise he lets me ride it through alone. I'm entitled to my cry. Come morning, however, I have to sit up with him, in keeping with our rules, waiting for breakfast.

Allan typically spends some time every day lying down silently with his eyes closed, or with his arm across them, or facing the wall. I can't always tell, when he does this, if he's feeling low or if he just wants some time to himself; I know he's not napping. (He naps at other times. I enjoy watching him when he does, but it's a guilty pleasure because it feels vaguely erotic.) Allan generally rouses himself from these "down times," as I think of them, within what I guess to be an hour or so. If it feels to me like he's gone longer, I get nervous and invoke the rule requiring him to get up, which he usually does graciously. Sometimes he can be grouchy. "Fine, I know, I made the bloody rule." Or, "Relax for Christ's sake, it hasn't been that long yet." Always when he's snappish, he apologizes later: he shouldn't have been a bastard, I was entirely in my rights, I was following the rule, he thanks me for doing it.

At the beginning, his grouchiness wounds and unsettles me: I can't bear to have him push me away. In time I learn to let it roll off me, even if it rolls heavily. I also learn not to be afraid to allow him more down time—he always gets up again.

Even when he gets low, as I can clearly tell at times that he does, Allan never cries. A part of me wishes he would, because then I wouldn't feel so much shame about the fact that I cry. But mostly, I'm glad he doesn't. It shows that he's strong. I need him to be strong.

Some days, we both get low—so low, that neither of us takes the initiative to make the other get up, so we both end up doing nothing all day but lie around, privately moping. After these moods have run their course, I become guilty and frightened. We mustn't ever do that again, we have to be more disciplined, what if we both sink into a serious depression? Allan doesn't get worked up about it. He has another rule that authorizes these lapses, a corollary to his precept that we shouldn't feel low about feeling low: We shouldn't feel low about breaking a rule. It's going to happen. It's fine.

He formalizes that rule entirely for my benefit; for him, this permissive principle goes without saying. Unlike me, Allan is rarely troubled by guilt. Yet his lack of guilt does not translate into self-centeredness, as I would have expected. On the contrary, he's considerate and generous, so much so that it makes me feel—of course—guilty. I'm envious: consideration and generosity seem to come naturally to him, they're his temperament. And he extends his consideration and generosity to himself.

Allan likes himself better than I like myself. It may well be that Allan likes me better than I like me. Apart from his lapses into snappishness, which I take as a symptom that he's feeling low, he treats both of us—me and himself—with courtesy and patience. He pushes me to do the same. After hearing me refer to myself as "stupid" on several occasions, Allan lays down a new rule: I can't call myself names that wouldn't be polite for me to call someone else. If he hears me slip, he'll expect me to apologize to myself, out loud. "I thought the point of these rules was to prevent insanity," I grouse. But secretly, I am moved, almost to the point of wanting to cry. Allan worries about me. He cares about me.

I am happy to let Allan impose his rules and routines onto my life. He is like an older brother, watching over me, taking me under his wing, showing me the ropes. Ironically, this is a role reversal for both of us. In my family, I was the older brother, responsible for looking after Chris while my mother was at work, whereas Allan was the younger brother, growing up under the wing of his older brother Michael. Even though Allan and I are virtually the same height—I can see that every time we're both standing—I think of him as being taller. In my mind's eye, Allan is not only older than me, he is bigger than me. That's how I want things to be, anyway.

I worry sometimes that my relationship with Allan ought to be more equal. Does he grow tired of me snuggling under his wing? Should I be carrying more of my own weight? Am I supporting him in the way he needs, or am I only taking? He seems content with the way things are...

I develop a theory, as Allan would say: he's always concocting "theories" as we try to make sense of what's happening to and around us. My theory is that playing the older brother helps Allan feel stronger, more competent, more knowledgeable, and thus more confident in his ability to survive. I assure myself that I'm going to survive by leaning on Allan; he assures himself that he's going to survive by letting me lean on him. The knowledge that he can be leaned on sustains him. He can do this—and the proof is that he is helping me do it.

* * *

With some improvements, our current prison is similar to my first; for Allan, though, this transfer has been a more significant step up in his living conditions. The cell he occupied in his first prison was narrower than ours—not much wider than was necessary to allow him to get on and off his cot. He had a canvas folding cot, not a mattress; both the cot and his blanket were stained with a previous prisoner's vomit, a persistent degradation. By the door, the ceiling was high enough that Allan could stand up straight, but the ceiling sloped down as he moved toward the back of the cell. In addition, he had to stoop under an air duct that ran through the top of the door and across the ceiling, his source of ventilation (no fan in the door). There was a light bulb in his cell, which he could unscrew at night, and he had candles for when the power went out; those are two features of his last prison that he wishes we had here.

In his last prison, as here, Allan was taken on a daily toilet run, to a squalid little bathroom down the corridor. He was fed only once a day, however, in the morning: always flatbread with hummus and a chunk of cured sausage. Never fruits or green vegetables—he worried about scurvy. He had a pee bottle and a drinking bottle, but none of the things we now have in our tubs. When Allan was visited by the English speaker, he asked for a toothbrush, which he received several days later; he carried it with him here, in his pocket, when he was transferred.

Like the cell doors in my first prison, the door of Allan's first cell had a barred gap up top, which he was forbidden to look through but did anyway. (Is it possible that I am the only hostage in my last prison who never looked out of his cell? I have always been unusually deferential to authority.) He got caught once, but all the guard did was yell at him, which made Allan only a little more cautious about peeking in the future. There wasn't much to see: a short, very narrow corridor, the bathroom at one end, a turn at the other end, maybe leading to more cells. All the cells were on the same side of the corridor, so he couldn't see other prisoners, but he could see the stairs leading out of the basement and the shelves where the food was stored. He spent far more time than he should have staring at those shelves.

Although Allan never saw other prisoners, he knows they were Lebanese because during power outages, they would all start yelling in Arabic. He wasn't sure if they were yelling to each other, or if they were yelling to the guards to protest the darkness and the heat, or if they were trying to call to the outside for help in the silence produced when the ventilation system went out. It was eerie, he says. An earlier abductee, a Lebanese Christian presumably, had somehow scratched onto Allan's door a large, elaborate, artistic cross.

Whereas I think that my first prison was beneath a garage, Allan thinks his was in the basement of a residential apartment building. Through the air vent in the bathroom, he often heard children playing outside. I'm floored: How could people living in the building never become aware that there was a prison full of kidnap victims in their basement? They probably were aware, Allan says—and they may have approved, or been indifferent, or not dared to interfere. His first prison, like mine, was undoubtedly located somewhere in Beirut's southern slums, a stronghold of Shiite radicalism.

* * *

In our new location, Allan sets himself the task of orienting us in space and time. He wants to assemble as clear a picture as possible of our prison, and he wants to be able to predict the guards' movements. Is he trying to come up with an escape plan? No, he says—though obviously we should keep our eyes open for any realistic possibilities for escape. He just feels better knowing, as best he can, where he is and what's going on around him.

Constructing a picture of the basement is as simple as Allan peering through the fan when the guards are upstairs. (I peer through a few times when I know the trapdoor is closed, but I can never shake the feeling of violating a fatal taboo. Besides, once I've peeked a couple times, I feel little need to do it again: the view doesn't change.) Allan concludes that there are four cells across from us, alongside the stairs. He surmises that there are probably, then, four cells on our side of the basement as well, one of which is the bathroom. Allan thinks that he and I are in the second cell down from the bathroom. The other two hostages are being held in cells across the way. In fact, Allan reports, they are being held in the two cells at the opposite ends of their row. The three cells containing hostages are thus spaced as far away from each other as they possibly could be, presumably to prevent us from communicating from cell to cell. There are no other prisoners besides us four.

Extrapolating from the size of our cell and the number of cells, Allan theorizes that we are in the basement of a small house, maybe 25 by 30 feet, he estimates. Despite the background noise that issues constantly (and maddeningly) from the radio, we're able to hear the guards clomping around over our heads in their boots. From those sounds, Allan constructs a rough floor plan of the house above. The guards sleep at the top of the stairs, where the trapdoor is; that's the last place we hear them move to at night. They have a bathroom located directly above our bathroom; we can hear the water moving through the plumbing. The stairs and the bathroom are located to our right when we face our cell door. Over our heads and toward our left is the front portion of the house, where the guards move around during the day. It's in this part of the house that they pray and watch TV, both of which sometimes rise to a volume level that we can make out over the radio.

Allan and I surmise that there are three guards on duty at a time, based on the facts that three guards accompanied us here and that we never hear more than three guards in the basement at once. There are two different shifts of guards, which change weekly. We figure this out because Makmoud is in one of the shifts.

He appears our second week here. The first time I hear him say, "Hello, Jérémie," I feel a thrill. I am even more deeply touched when he hands me the eyeglasses I left behind at my last prison. I thank him very much, and he replies in his somber yet friendly way, "No problem, Jérémie." I feel that the bad air that hung between us after my meltdown has dissipated. I introduce Makmoud and Allan. "Hello, Allan," Makmoud says. Allan is polite though audibly puzzled by the exchange.

After Makmoud goes back upstairs, I sit on my mattress, basking in the happiness of having him with me in this new place. At the same time, my awareness of Allan's puzzlement prompts me to interrogate my happiness. Is it a Strange Idea that I feel so warmly toward a guard? Allan and I revisit the subject over several days. Allan tells me that he, too, finds himself becoming fond of Makmoud. He's the guard who most respects our humanity, and it's natural that we appreciate that. We can't lose sight, though, of the fact that he is one of our captors; he is helping to keep us here, away from our families; he is denying us our freedom. He is friendly, and it would behoove us to respond in kind, if only to encourage him to keep doing it, but he is most definitely not a friend.

When Allan puts it that way, I feel talked down to, which I secretly resent. On the other hand—this is why I keep my resentment a secret—perhaps I deserve to be talked down to on this subject. I did, after all, make the absurd mistake, in my last prison, of imagining that Makmoud would help me escape. I've never told Allan about that fiasco, it's too humiliating.

Allan himself is in the friendly habit of telling the guards "thank you" when they bring us our food or bring him back from his toilet run. He hasn't laid this practice down as a rule, and he's emphatic that I shouldn't feel any pressure to do it with him. (I don't do it, though inevitably I feel a little guilty that I don't.) Allan initiated the practice in his last prison, after some interior debate: Is it servile of him to thank the guards when he also wants to send the message that food and toilet runs are his right? He decided that thanking the guards offers them an opening to acknowledge his humanity; he's reminding them that they ought to treat him with common courtesy at the very least. He's used to being ignored, though, so he had come to think of the thank-yous as a quiet protest. Makmoud is the only guard so far who has responded to him. "No problem," is Makmoud's reply. Makmoud is also the only guard Allan has gotten to know by name.

Eventually a guard on the other shift begins to respond to Allan's thank-yous by saying, "You're welcome." This guard has decided to use Allan's opening to him as a chance to build up his English. He asks us to verify that he knows the proper English word or pronunciation for the kinds of food he brings us. Once he's mastered that paper-thin lexicon, he graduates to asking us such things as do we like the food, or do we need the toilet. (We only get that second question in the morning, when he's taking us anyway; it's never an invitation to an extra toilet run.) Sometimes he's coached by another guard accompanying him, who evidently speaks more English but doesn't speak to us unless truly necessary. We don't ever exchange names with the guard who's learning English—he's not that friendly—or with any other guard besides Makmoud.

None of our guards here is as cruel or menacing as the Bully, from my last prison, but they can get surly, especially as they're nearing the end of their weekly shift. They can be rough as they're guiding us on our toilet runs, or impatiently stingier than usual about how much time they allow us in the bathroom. When Allan says "thank you," he runs the risk of being hissed at if a guard has decided that today we ought to remain silent; now and again Allan even gets rapped or slapped on the head. Neither of these reactions makes him consider desisting. The thank-yous are a perpetually repeated, small-scale tug-of-war, which more often than not Allan wins in the sense that the guards let him say it without shushing or hitting him. I admire his bravery, although I'm nervous that one day a guard may lose his temper and really hurt Allan—or both of us.

I imagine that the guards must find looking after us to be tedious work, boring and repetitive. Perhaps they have girlfriends or wives, even children, back in Beirut from whom they dislike being separated. I wonder sometimes how these men became guards for hostages, and what they do when they're not here.

The guards' weekly shift change must occur at night, while we're asleep. Makmoud's shift will serve us dinner one night, the English student's shift will give us breakfast the next morning. We are always told to shower on the last day of the shift; I guess scheduling our shower for that day is how the guards remember to do it.

During the day, the guards leave the trapdoor open, closing it at night so they won't be bothered by the radio static while they're trying to sleep. Judging from the sounds of people moving overhead, we think that by day a guard routinely sits watch in the room where the trapdoor is, "keeping an ear" on us while lounging on his cot, I imagine.

Although the guards' schedule requires them to come down into the basement only for feedings and toilet runs, they frequently make unscheduled visits during daytime power outages. Allan and I can tell the power has gone out because the fan in our door stops spinning; however, the fluorescent light and the radio never go out, so they must both have battery power. When the power goes out, it's common for one or two of the guards to come into the basement, just to hang out—presumably because it's cooler here than upstairs.

Allan has to generate that theory because I do not perceive the basement as cool. We're fine as long as the fan is running. The humid early mornings can feel so brisk, in fact, even though it's summer, that I retreat under my blanket, which I otherwise use as a pillow. Once the fan goes dead, though, our cell becomes sweltering. Maybe it's even worse upstairs; maybe it's worse inside our cell than in the rest of the basement because of two people's bodies radiating heat into a tightly enclosed space. I don't know, I don't get it. What I do know is: I hate sweating through a power outage. And I hate the guards invading our space, our time to ourselves.

When the guards hang out, sometimes they sit on the stairs, sometimes the floor; sometimes they bring chairs down with them. They smoke, they chat with each other in Arabic, they retune the radio so they can listen to a station, they play dominos or a board game. Sometimes, one lugs a folding cot down the stairs and naps. Rarely do all three guards come down at once. It's probably never supposed to happen, since when they do, it means there's no one keeping watch upstairs on the approach to the house. On those occasions, I have to restrain myself from entertaining unhelpful fantasies of a rival militia storming the place and setting us free.

Having the guards hang out downstairs is tense. We feel we have to stay very quiet to avoid attracting unwanted attention, especially since the loss of electric fans might have made the guards testy. We lie on our mattresses, trying not to move at all. Not being able to have conversations of our own during this time means that Allan and I are likely to become bored, which in turn means that we're susceptible to our minds carrying us places that will make us low.

Quite often, a guard who's hanging out will open the grate covers on all the hostages' cells; there's apparently a latch on the ceiling that can hold the cover open. I imagine that Makmoud and the English student are usually the guards who do this, because they're the two guards who interact with us most and thus who treat us most like people; but they don't typically speak to us while they're opening the covers, so I don't really know that. I assume that the opening of the covers is meant as a kindness, to give us more air circulation in the absence of our fan, not as a way to monitor us. The tradeoff, however, is that as long as the cover is up, our blindfolds have to be down, which becomes disagreeably hot and sweaty and itchy, above and beyond the inherent irritation of being blindfolded for more than just a few minutes.