Lebanon Hostage Ch. 06

That evening, I'm dizzy and can't get up for my toilet run without the guards' help. I feel like I'm going to faint—all the way to the bathroom, the whole time I'm inside, and all the way back. Less a Bastard brings us sandwiches. He plays good cop, coaxing us to eat; it turns out he knows a little English, too. He assures us, "Chef comeboukrah," tomorrow. Allan insists he won't eat until after he's spoken to the chef. Less a Bastard turns his attention to me. "Eat," he pleads. "You sick." Well, look who gives a shit about my health all of a sudden.

Less a Bastard leaves our sandwiches on our mattresses, two apiece. "Eat, okay?" he urges us one more time before shutting the door so we can lift our blindfolds. He and Rat Bastard hang out in the front room, waiting to find out what we'll do, I guess.

Allan hurls his sandwiches at the door. When I pick up mine, I begin weeping. I tell Allan I can't keep going, I'm sorry. He consoles me wearily: It's all right. I promised him no guilt, remember? I keep crying, ashamed because I'm giving up and afraid because Allan isn't. Why can't we both stop now, together? I plead. They said the chef was coming.

For my sake—maybe his own, too—Allan proposes a compromise. How about we eat one sandwich each? That way, if the guards are lying about the chef coming, they'll know we haven't totally given in. I nod, grateful, relieved, humiliated. Since Allan has already thrown his sandwiches away, he asks me to throw him one of his. I'mlouti, I can't throw worth shit even when I haven't gone three days without eating. The sandwich lands on the floor out of Allan's reach. He tells me to go ahead and eat my sandwich, he'll ask a guard to bring him the one I threw. Less a Bastard is pleased by the request, although he's disappointed we won't also eat the two sandwiches Allan discarded.

The guards arrive unusually early the next morning. According to an agreement we made the night before, Allan and I eat only half a sandwich each from our breakfast, even though Less a Bastard promises that "chef come soon." We'll eat the rest after we talk to the chef, Allan tells him.

Today the guards remain in the building, waiting for the chef. He arrives sometime in the middle of the day. It's the same chef who came to the Shouf prison, the young English speaker.

Without any preliminaries, he asks sarcastically, "Why will you not eat this time? You want another video?"

Allan launches into an angry speech protesting the guards' mistreatment of us. They don't feed us properly, they don't give us enough warm clothes and blankets, and now they've beaten us and chained us up when we didn't do anything wrong.

The chef makes a disgusted sound. "That is the difference between our people and yours. We still know what is wrong."

"We're not homosexuals," Allan says. My heart skips a beat. Introducing the wordhomosexual feels dangerous to me, even for the purpose of denial. "We were just trying to stay warm. We're freezing in here. We fell asleep, and the guards startled us when they came in. That's all that happened." He adds, "What's wrong is the guards treating us the way they do. We'll become very sick if they don't—"

The chef interrupts. "If you were cold, why did you not ask for more blankets?" His tone suggests that he's trying to poke a hole in Allan's story.

"We did ask. We've been asking ever since we came here. Every single time the guards turn up here, we beg them for blankets, but they never bring us any. We couldn't stand it anymore. We had to share the blankets we had if we were going to get any sleep at night. Now that we're chained up separately like this, we're too cold to sleep again—"

The chef interrupts again. "You slept together in the bed at night?" He sounds shocked and outraged. Oh Allan... what have you done?

"No one ever told us we couldn't."

The chef says something in Arabic; Rat Bastard responds. "You are lying," the chef says to Allan.

"About what?"

"You never slept together in the bed at night."

Huh? Obviously the chef is repeating something Rat Bastard told him. But for what possible reason can the chef be imagining that we would invent that particular lie? If we weren't really sharing the bed at night, why would we want him to think that we were?

Allan says, slowly and emphatically, "The guards didn't see us in the bed at night because they weren't here. They're never here at night, and they only turn up for a few minutes during the day. They leave us alone here nearly all the time."

"You lie!" Rat Bastard shouts, after which he rattles something off at the chef.

As soon as Rat Bastard is finished, Allan tells the chef in a calm voice: "If the guards had been here, we wouldn't have shared the bed. We didn't want them to see us, because we were afraid that they would think we were doing something we weren't."

The chef makes Allan repeat that, he had difficulty following Allan's logic. This time Allan phrases it more directly: We shared the bedbecause the guards weren't here.

Several long, tense moments pass in silence. Then the chef issues agitated orders in Arabic. Rat Bastard starts to speak again; the chef cuts him off. I am unchained and led out into the front room. From there I'm taken through another door, into what must be the inner office I detected the time I peeked through the grate into the hallway. The guards seat me on the floor in a corner. To block my hearing, they cram wet tissues in my ears. So—all this time, they had more tissues they could have given us when we needed them. Assholes. Come to think of it, the tissues they just inserted into my ears are probably wetted with their spit. Goddammit.

The door to the inner office closes, unnecessarily loudly. I can hear enough through the tissues to know there's still at least one guard in the room with me. It sounds like he's on the other side of the room; I assume he's trying to eavesdrop through the door on the chef's continuing interrogation of Allan in the back room. I hope it's Rat Bastard hovering there, sweating bullets.

Allan is fucking brilliant. I hadn't realized he was planning to expose all the guards' misdoings, I thought he just wanted to protest the beatings and the chains. I love the ironic justice of it. By revealing to the chef our supposed offense, Rat Bastard gave Allan an opening to reveal their actual offenses. In trying to screwus over, Rat Bastard made it possible for Allan to screwthem over. The pride I feel in Allan lifts my heart—as does a very satisfying vindictiveness I'm feeling toward the guards, Rat Bastard most of all. Who be sorry fucker now?

When Allan's interrogation is finished, the guards lock him into the bathroom so they can return me to the back room without the two of us being able to communicate in any way. Then I hear them conduct Allan from the bathroom to the inner office. They can be scrupulous about security when they want to be.

In the back room, the chef and I sit across from each other in chairs that have been set up near the far wall, where my mattress is now located. This location puts us well away from the door, which the guards close as they leave. The chef talks to me in a low voice, and I respond in kind. He evidently realizes that the guards are trying to eavesdrop.

The chef tells me I have nothing to be afraid of as long as I tell him the truth. I will not be beaten again unless he discovers that I am lying or I refuse to cooperate. The words are supposed to be reassuring in their way, but the tone isn't. The mere fact of being interrogated makes me anxious. I worry that my anxiety will lead the chef to doubt my honesty. I've had that problem with him before, during the first grilling he gave me on the day I was kidnapped.

The interrogation begins with inquiries about the guards' habits. The chef wants to know what time the guards arrive and leave. Do they always come as a pair, or does one ever come alone? How do I know they're actually leaving the building? When did they start spending time away? How many hours in a day do they spend away? How often do they leave the door to our room open or unlocked? Did they ever chain us before they found us in bed together? How many times each day do they feed us and take us to the bathroom? What do they feed us? How much? Do one or two guards accompany us to the bathroom? How often do they tell us to shower? What did they do when we were sick?

Some of his questions are obviously trick questions. He's fishing for inconsistencies in my answers, or trying to lure me into confirming something that the question assumes to be true and would make the guards look better if it were. I take it that he asked Allan the same questions and is checking to see if our stories match.

Next, the chef probes into what Allan and I have been doing while we've been alone. Since I can't know what Allan has or has not confessed to, I calculate that total honesty is the best policy. I trust Allan was shrewd enough to think the same. Eager to convince the chef of my candor, I volunteer incriminating facts without waiting for him to ask. I tell him that Allan and I debated whether to try smashing through the door with the bedframe. I tell him about peeking through the grates. I tell him I thought about trying to communicate with someone outside, but Allan didn't think anyone would help us, so we never did.

The chef tries to play clumsy tricks again. "I know you are lying, your friend already told me about the men you talked to." "How many notes did you push outside? I must know the exact number." (Notes pushed through the grate—how did that idea never even cross our minds? We might have used the foil from our first cigarette packages.)

Once the chef has decided that he isn't going to get anything from me through trick questions, he says, "Your friend is right, no one here would help you. They hate the West. But we will not accept that you make any risk for us. If you talked to anyone, or if anyone saw you, you must tell me now. I will not hurt you for it—if you tell me now. If we find out later, we will hurt you worse than you have ever hurt before. Do you understand?" My throat has closed up, so I simply nod in reply. Is there anything else I need to tell him? No, I manage to say, I've told him everything. He presses: Am I sure? This is my last chance to tell him the truth. Fear and hunger are making me feel faint, but I answer in as level a voice as I can pull off: Ihave told him the truth.

Finally he brings us to the subject of the huddling. His voice indicates that he finds the subject distasteful. How many times did we sleep together in the bed? I explain that I can't give an exact number of days because I don't know today's date. But I know we started on November 30, because that was Allan's birthday, and he was upset about not having his photo taken for his family, which is why he decided he wasn't going to put up with the cold anymore. I have to repeat that for the chef, inserting clarifications on the way. Apparently Allan didn't provide these details. I hope this convinces the chef I'm being forthcoming.

When the chef asks me why we did it, I try to sound matter of fact, not defensive. We were too cold to sleep alone. I resist the urge to say "nothing happened" (too defensive), but I explain that we were almost always sleeping while we huddled. If we weren't sleeping, we would lie there talking. At the risk of seeming to protest too much, I add that we always wore all the clothes we have; that was the whole point, to be as warm as we could. I offer an unsolicited description of how we used to position our bodies—on our sides, knees bent, arms crossed over our chests—to show him there was nothing sexual about it.

If we weren't doing anything wrong, the chef asks, why didn't we want the guards to see us doing it? Because of what in fact ended up happening, I reply. We were afraid the guards would misinterpret what we were doing.

I'm afraid the chef will ask me point blank if I'm homosexual and that I won't be able to lie convincingly. To my relief, he doesn't ask that. Still, I'm afraid of him detecting my anxiety and becoming suspicious, so I give vent to a different anxiety as cover. I ask him to please not let the guards beat us again; I've told him the truth about everything, but I think the guards still have the wrong idea...

The chef cuts short my whining. His tone is irritated, disdainful. "Don't cry."

"I'm not," I say, just a tiny bit huffily. "I wasn't going to."

To observe the damage from the beatings, the chef tells me to stand up and lower my pajama bottoms (but not my underwear, he's explicit about that). He betrays no reaction. If he was present at Robert Berg's beating, then he's seen—and helped administer—far worse.

The interrogation is over. The chef calls for the guards. I'm rechained to the filing cabinet, Allan to the bed. We have evidently persuaded the chef we were telling the truth, at least about the guards' misbehavior, because out in the front room, the chef lays into them. A cowed Rat Bastard delivers a speech of protestation. The chef lets him go at it for a while, then shuts him down. The chef grills them; they answer with protests and excuses. At one point, the chef enters our room and grabs our tubs to take out front. His voice becomes angrier, more accusatory; the guards' become more plaintive, submissive. Then they fall silent, and the chef rages uninterrupted, "ripping them new ones," as Allan will contentedly describe it later.

The chef leaves the building. Shortly afterward, the guards come into our room. I'm afraid they may be seeking revenge, but they're bringing back the sandwiches we wouldn't eat earlier. "Chef say eat," Less a Bastard tells us glumly. Rat Bastard doesn't say a word. As soon as they see that we're eating, the guards retreat back to the front room. We discover that they'll allow us to talk now. Either the chef has told them to, or they're too engrossed in their own gloomy conversation to care.

I alert Allan that I told the chef everything we did, I hope that's all right. He assures me he didn't hide anything either. He asks if the chef gave me any hint about what's going to happen to us now. Just that they would hurt us if they found out we'd communicated with anyone, I reply.

Allan tells me that he asked the chef straight out not to separate us. When the chef was noncommittal, Allan begged. He told the chef that being together keeps us mentally healthy. We're good friends, we help each other to not break down, the way the chef saw Allan before. "Just friends?" the chef asked sourly. Allan told him again: We're not homosexuals.

Allan assumes that the chef is less upset about the guards' poor treatment of us than he is about the time we've spent unsupervised and the fact that the guards have been fleecing the organization. They must receive a salary for watching us—plus funds to buy the food, cigarettes, and other things they're supposed to give us, which no doubt they have been pocketing. Allan would not want to be in their shoes right now. He speaks with malicious cheer. They must be out there shitting themselves; he's surprised they haven't bolted from the building.

We wait to see what will happen next. To see what will become of the guards. And of us.

***

The chef returns some hours later, accompanied by other men. The building is full of activity, which unnerves me. Are they transferring us? Or one of us? Apparently not: they've brought thicker chains to replace those the guards have been using. As one of the guards is putting my new chain on, the chef chews him out some more, I think because he's displeased about the hole they punched in the filing cabinet. Even so, they enlarge that same hole to accommodate the new chain.

The new chain is heavier but longer; by the time they've adjusted it to their liking, I have maybe three feet of slack instead of one. However, where the guards had been chaining us by an ankle, the chef instructs that we be chained by a wrist. As a result, despite the increase in chain length, the range I can reach with my hands is reduced. The chain is long enough that they could have allowed me another couple of feet of mobility if they'd wanted, but they didn't. The extra length spills wasted onto the floor, hanging off the padlock that keeps the chain attached to the filing cabinet.

Out front, it sounds like men are moving all the furniture from the outer office to the inner office. I don't know why they didn't do that earlier, to give the guards more living space—unless, perhaps, they were planning to keep a hostage in the inner office. It occurs to me that rather than placing Allan and me on opposite sides of the same room, our captors could have separated us more decisively by transferring one of us to the inner office. I feel a mixture of horror and relief. We dodged a bullet.

In addition to moving furniture from room to room, I think the men are lugging new items in from outside the building. Some major change is taking place. Not knowing what's going on is nerve-wracking.

As all the activity winds down, the chef gives Allan and me a final dressing down. He informs us sternly that we have been given separate mattresses for a reason; it is forbidden for us to share a bed. I don't say anything, but I don't see how sharing a bed is fundamentally different from occupying adjacent mattresses in a six-foot-wide cell, as they made us do for half a year. If they're afraid we'll have sex, why did ever leave us together in the same cell?

Allan asks the chef if they're going to unchain us. I understand the logic behind that hope. Why would the chef be warning us not to share the bed again if they're going to keep us separated by force? On the other hand, it doesn't bode well that they just finished giving us new chains.

My pessimism proves correct. No, the chef tells Allan, they are not going to unchain us.

"Why? It isn't fair to punish us for something we didn't know was against the rules yet."

"This is not punishment. It is normal that you are chained."

"We were never chained before," Allan protests.

"Many things here were not normal before," is the chef's icy retort.

The chef announces that he is leaving us with new guards. We are to do exactly as they tell us. In particular, we are to eat when they tell us, and we are to eat everything. If we make problems again, the chef warns, he will not return to see us. Instead, he has given the guards permission to beat us as badly as needed to make us cooperate. Do we understand? We understand.

The chef and all but two men leave. The two who remain introduce themselves as our new guards. One of them does all the talking because he's the only one who speaks English—fairly good English. His name, he informs us, is Abed. His partner is Fadil. In spite of the chef's parting threat about having authorized the guards to beat us, Abed's manner is what I would call professionally friendly. He says, without a hint of irony, that he and Fadil are here to "take care" of us. He asks us for our names and remarks that he is pleased to meet us. He comes across as serenely self-confident, no intimidating bluster.

Abed announces that they have "brought things" so we can have better food. Also, they have a second blanket for each of us, which they give us now. If there are other things we need, we should tell them. Allan tests that invitation immediately by explaining that we have been beaten: would it be possible to get hot water to soak our bruises? Abed asks if there is hot water running in the bathroom. When we tell him no, he promises to look into that. Meanwhile, he and Fadil will heat water on the cooker for us so we can take a sponge bath.

Not long afterward, I'm in the bathroom using a dish towel to press hot water from a pot against my body. I shiver in the cold air, and I still don't have anything to dry off with but my pajama top, but the hot water feels incredible. This is the first time in my captivity that I've been given hot water to bathe with.