Lebanon Hostage Ch. 05

I'm terrified and furious at the Praying Hostage—"Durham," as Allan now calls him, since we're unsure of the first name. As it turns out, though, an unusually long time passes before a guard comes down into the basement, and when he finally does, his footsteps come from the front part of the house. Allan concludes from this that the guards were doing their midday prayers when the power went out. Since they pray in the vicinity of Durham's cell, perhaps he could hear them overhead when we couldn't; that would explain why he felt safe speaking.

Allan grants me that Durham probably shouldn't have risked speaking anyway. More to the point, Allan promises me thathe'llnever take the risk of speaking across cells. At the same time, though, he's thrilled to know another hostage's name.

A week or two before my birthday, Allan ushers the Communication Game into the next stage of its evolution. I suspect he would have preferred to do it without my knowledge, to prevent my anxious protests. But it's impossible to hide his preparations, so he begs me to have an open mind as he delivers what is clearly a mentally rehearsed presentation to preempt my objections.

Allan has figured out that he can use a tine of his fork to impress letters onto the piece of foil that comes in each of our cigarette packs. Allan wants to leave messages on foil in the bathroom for the Mustached Hostage and his cellmate to find.

Where is he planning to leave these messages? I ask in a very tight voice—not indicative of the open mind Allan begged me for.

Allan assures me that he has thought this through very carefully. Obviously the foil has to be left someplace where there's no chance of a guard accidentally spotting it. Allan's plan is to roll the foil up, carry it to the bathroom tucked inside his briefs, and insert it into the mouth of the hose by the toilet. The first time he does this, Allan will tie a white thread from his tank top around the rolled-up foil, long enough that the thread will hang out the mouth of the hose. The thread will be too thin for the guard to see from the bathroom door, but when the next hostage picks up the hose, he will see the thread, which in turn will lead him to see the foil, so he doesn't just turn on the hose and possibly flush the foil before realizing it's there. Admittedly, the thread is the element of Allan's plan that carries some risk of discovery, but Allan emphasizes that the risk is miniscule, and he only needs to use thread the first time he leaves a message. After that first time, the Mustached Hostage and his cellmate will know to check the hose for future messages.

This plan unnerves me, as Allan had predicted. I can't decide if his proposed means of written communication is safer than all the coughing and throat-clearing everyone's been doing; I see risks both ways. But what he's concocted is certainly clever, I have to give him that—at least as a one-way form of communication. Is Allan hoping that the Mustached Hostage's cell will somehow leave us a reply? Since our toilet run always precedes theirs, how would that work?

Here, it seems to me, Allan becomes unrealistically ambitious. His dream is that every hostage will start leave messages on foil for the hostage after him, creating a circle that will allow anyone to pass a message along to anyone else. It only takes one nonparticipant, however, to break the chain; the Handcuffed Hostage is a likely weak link. Maybe the Mustached Hostage's cell won't ever be able to reply, Allan concedes. But at least we can introduce ourselves and pass encouraging words on to them. And maybe if the Handcuffed Hostage or someone else doesn't want to write his own messages, he'll at least put any messages he discovers back in the hose for the next man to find, so the chain won't be broken. At any rate, Allan wants to try.

I'm not sure why Allan is asking my permission. He can do whatever he wants while he's in the bathroom, I have no way of stopping him. On second thought, he's probably envisioning me getting violent again, as I did the first time he wanted to tap on our door. Maybe he imagines me hitting him while he's trying to write his messages, or ripping the foil out of his hands and tearing it up. I feel sick that he may be thinking of me that way. I feel sick that I everwasthat way. Even if he's not worried about me becoming violent, he's probably asking my consent so there won't be bad feelings between us again.

I consent. I'm worried that somehow the guards will catch him; I immediately have to thrust aside the question of how we would be punished. On the other hand, Allan's depression is still recent enough that I fear a relapse, whereas this is something he's excited about, it gives him energy, and I want to encourage that. The plan he has developed is reasonably cautious. The risk of his being caught is less, I calculate, than the risk of his becoming low again, or resenting me again, if I don't consent. So I swallow my fear and say yes. He knows how hard that was for me, so he's appropriately emphatic in his gratitude.

The first message Allan composes contains our basic biographical data as hostages, presented in a kind of telegraphic code. We stack our folded-up blankets against our cell door, and then Allan sets his tub upside-down on top of them, to create a makeshift writing desk that reaches as high as possible to the level of the fan, our light source. Watching him inscribe the first letters onto the foil with his fork, I'm convinced that I could print in smaller and neater letters than he's managing to do, so I offer to take over. He's happy to have me join in, and he quickly concurs that I have better handwriting than he does. He cautions me, though, not to write too small. He knows from his experiments that the impressions will become hard to read once the foil gets crinkled from being rolled up and unrolled again.

He dictates to me:

Allan Porterfield, UK, journlst (GTN), 30yo, kdnp 4/86. Jeremy Lawrence, US, studnt (Eng lit), 23yo, kdnp 3/86.

That's all we have room for, unless I write smaller than Allan thinks will remain legible.

The morning after we've prepared the message, I'm a nervous wreck as Allan takes his toilet run. Back from the bathroom, blindfolds up, he beams at me and nods: Message successfully planted. We listen as the first prisoner from the Mustached Hostage's cell is taken for his toilet run. On his way back to his cell, the prisoner clears his throat, once, as during the Communication Game, which Allan interprets as a signal that the message was discovered. He beats the air with his fists, exhilarated.

The question now is: Will we ever hear back? If the Mustached Hostage and his cellmate plan to leave a message of their own in the hose, the soonest they could do it would be tomorrow's toilet run. Assuming that every other hostage in the basement discovers the message, takes it back to his cell, reads it, then returns it to the hose during the next toilet run for the next hostage to find—all precarious assumptions, in my opinion—we'll have to wait three more days for the message to work its way to us. An absurdly slow way to communicate with a pair of men who occupy a cell just six feet away from ours!

That very night, after the evening feeding, we are startled by someone in the Mustached Hostage's cell pounding on their door. A guard descends and demands to know what's going on. The Mustached Hostage insists that he has to go to the bathroom, something he ate made him sick. The guard doesn't want to let him go. The hostage protests that he can't wait until morning, he'll be forced to shit in his cell. The guard refuses again and leaves.

Immediately, the Mustached Hostage resumes pounding on his door and keeps at it until two guards show up. They open the cell and give the hostage "a thumping," as Allan would say, but afterward they take him to the bathroom. They allow him barely a minute before they start banging on the bathroom door, and then they smack him some more on the way back to his cell. Allan and I think they're making him walk in front of them, unguided, and then slapping his head whenever he slows down or drifts off track.

If this is the Mustached Hostage's plan for communicating with us, I don't think it's worth the price he's paying.

The next morning, Allan goes to the bathroom before me. After I've returned from my toilet run, he silently shows me what he found waiting for him in the bathroom: not one but two pieces of foil, plus a scrap of a third, apparently ripped from the foil we sent our message on.

Once the guards have finished everyone's toilet runs and left us alone, Allan explains to me that the scrap of foil was waiting inside the hose. It has two words inscribed on it: "sink, pipe." The plumbing underneath the giant clothes-washing sink by the bathroom door includes, for some reason, an open pipe that sticks out horizontally. The other two pieces of foil that Allan found were rolled up, one inside the other, just inside that open pipe.

Holding the foil up to our fan for light, Allan and I work together to decipher the messages. This proves quite difficult, both because the light is bad, and because—as Allan had warned me—the letters are hard to make out on the crinkled surface once the foil has been rolled up.

One of the two messages contains the biographical info of the Mustached Hostage and his cellmate, plus that of the Beaten Hostage, separated from theirs by slashes:

Donald McFarrell, US, prof econ, kdnp 6/85. Paul Watts, US, jrnlst (AP), 3/85. // Robert Berg, US, 5/85.

They ran out of room before they could list Robert's occupation, but Allan already knows that he was chief administrator at the hospital connected to the American university in west Beirut, where Donald also taught. Allan is vindicated: These are, as he suspected, the Americans held by the Organization for Jihad—except there should be a fourth hostage in that group, which we'll need to ask them about in a future message.

Their second message to us, written in a different hand, reads:

PW: Great to meet you guys! AP glad you are better. JL how you holding up buddy?

For reasons that I know are unfair, this message gives me an unfavorable impression of Paul, who Allan is now certain is the Mustached Hostage (making Donald the quieter cellmate). I hate that Paul called me "buddy." It's the patronizing way a gym coach would talk while trying to motivate me to complete a chin-up. It's exactly the language I would expect from a man so macho he insists on wearing a mustache.

My hostility toward Paul is born of humiliation. I'm convinced that the reason he asked how I'm "holding up" is that he heard how hysterical I became talking with the chef when Allan was depressed. Possibly he's heard me crying on other occasions as well. Shit. I notice that he didn't feel a need to be so solicitous when talking to Allan.

As I say, I know my reaction is unfair. Paul's concerned about me, I should be appreciative. But I'm not. Don't talk down to me, Mustache Man. I don't need you reminding me how weak I am.

Allan wants me to write a reply to Paul's question, so Allan can leave it for him in the pipe under the sink. I object to them using the sink to pass messages. I understand why the hose doesn't work as a hiding place for Paul and Donald's messages to us: other hostages use the hose before we do and might not forward the messages on. But the sink is dangerous. It's next to the bathroom door, so the guards might hear the foil being slid in and out of the pipe. And even if they don't hear that, they're likely to become suspicious if they hear Allan and the others moving around by the sink, because we have no business there.

Allan dispatches my objections. True, they have to be very quiet moving the foil in and out of the pipe. But the pipe's large enough that won't be a problem. They don't have toslidethe foil in and out; instead, they can silently set the foil down in the mouth of the pipe, then lift it up and out again.

As for my objection that the guards will get suspicious if they hear us by the sink: Allan always drapes his clothes over the side of the sink when he's in the bathroom. Don't I? Sure, I say, but that's only once a week, on shower day. Allan is puzzled: Every time he uses the toilet, he removes his bottoms and leaves them on the sink, so they won't touch the wet floor.

Now I'm irritated—at myself, but I redirect the irritation toward him. No, I had never thought to leave my bottoms on the sink. Because I'm an egghead, who can discuss French critical theory but lacks common sense, I've been draping my bottoms over my shoulder, which is a little precarious when I'm squatting. Leaving them on the sink, I realize now, is a smarter thing to do. More to the point for our current conversation, leaving our bottoms on the sink provides a natural cover for Allan and Paul and Donald to leave and retrieve messages there.

Allan tells me that he himself had considered using the pipe under the sink as a hiding place before he settled on using the hose. But the pipe is too good a hiding place: other hostages would never notice a message tucked inside the mouth of the pipe unless they were specifically looking for it. Now that we four—Paul and Donald and Allan and I—know to look in the pipe, that problem is solved.

I can't counter Allan's logic. I give in: they're going to go on exchanging messages via the sink. All I can do is pray that we don't get caught. I'm stressed every morning until Allan, Paul, and Donald have all finished their toilet runs without incident.

In answer to Paul's question about how I'm "holding up," I provide a terse account of my track record in captivity:

JL: Alone first 3 mos., very bad. AP's a huge help.

Allan adds in his own hand:

AP: Vice-versa. This brave fucker saved my ass!

I'm moved, although I realize I'm applying a double standard: Allan's praise of me isn't any more or less patronizing than Paul's question to me. I'm at least consistent enough to feel annoyed at seeing Allan "talk macho" back to Paul. Allan isn't fooling anyone, talking that way. It's obvious he's a nerd. He used Latin in the same message, for God's sake.

Our jointly authored message receives this jointly authored reply:

DM: Well done JL. PW: You're gonna make it buddy!

I decide instantly that I like Donald better than Paul. He's understated, he doesn't strike macho poses, he talks intelligently instead of using slang, he addresses me as an equal. I know it's ridiculous to draw so many conclusions about Donald from two words plus my initials. But those words are what I have to draw my impressions from, and draw them I do.

Because each of us receives two packs of cigarettes a week, Allan and I have enough foil to send four messages a week to Paul and Donald, and vice-versa (as Allan would say). We can communicate more frequently if we tear a piece of foil in two and send even shorter messages, but we don't do that often. It's even possible, Allan has discovered, to reuse a piece of foil: since the letters are pressed into the foil, not scratched onto it, they can be mostly rubbed flat again. But letters inscribed on a reused foil prove more difficult to read than the first time around—too much crinkling.

One morning shortly after we've begun exchanging messages, Allan returns to our cell with what turns out to be a message written in both English and French, intended not for us but for the Handcuffed Hostage. Allan alerts Paul and Donald to the failed delivery. They write back, explaining that they had left a scrap of foil in the hose directing the Handcuffed Hostage to look in the pipe under the sink for the longer message, just as they did for us. Evidently, however, the Handcuffed Hostage doesn't want to take the risk of getting involved in the Communication Game.

Paul and Donald report that they have followed up by leaving another bilingual message rolled up inside the hose. This new message informs whoever reads it about the improvised mailbox under the sink and asks the reader to please reinsert the message into the hose for the next hostage to find. Paul and Donald hope that the Handcuffed Hostage will at least pass the message along. It would appear, though, that the Handcuffed Hostage isn't willing to take that risk either, because Allan and I never receive a message from anyone other than Paul and Donald.

Allan is angry at the Handcuffed Hostage for preventing us from making contact with Durham and Robert. I don't blame the Handcuffed Hostage. I have no doubt that if I were alone, I wouldn't take the risk. Maybe, I propose to Allan, the Handcuffed Hostage really doesn't know either English or French and therefore doesn't understand what's going on. Allan doesn't buy it.

Allan has passed on to Paul and Donald his conviction that the Handcuffed Hostage is "Korean diplomat, kdnp 1/86." Paul reacts, "Korean?!"—which makes me realize, for the first time, how odd it is that our captors would kidnap someone from that country. What do they want from Korea?

The Korean was kidnapped for ransom, Allan informs me; his abductors issued the demand right away. I'm floored. How is he still a hostage, nine months later, when his government has known all along that all they have to do to get him home is pay money? Behind that question, I'm thinking frantically that if the Handcuffed Hostage is still here underthosecircumstances, the rest of us are fucked!

Allan is impatient with my obtuseness, or maybe his frustration at the Handcuffed Hostage is spilling over to me. No government wants to pay a ransom to free a hostage, he tells me in the tone of someone explaining the obvious. Paying the ransom would invite more kidnappings. The Korean government will want to negotiate some other kind of deal, something less direct, behind the scenes. But it takes a long time to negotiate a deal with someone you don't know how to contact.

Paul and Donald are dismayed to learn from Allan how many more foreign hostages have been taken since they were kidnapped. Having seen two of their own group go home, they had hoped things were getting resolved. Allan gets excited when they say "two." He already knew about the release of Baptist missionary Tim Sutton last fall. Now Paul and Donald inform us that Charles Dalessio—the priest whose name Allan couldn't remember earlier—has been released as well. His release occurred just before Paul, Donald, and Robert were transferred here.

At one point, Paul and Donald claim, they were all about to be released, but then "US bombed Libya, fucked us over." Allan can't think what they're talking about, so this bombing must have occurred after his kidnapping. I don't say so, but I suspect that Paul and Donald think they know more than they actually do. Who told them all this? Our captors never tell us what's going on—and the time they toldmeI was being released, they were lying.

Allan, however, accepts Paul and Donald's account of their scuttled release and then, in his optimistic way, construes it as good news. Sure, things got derailed, but at least we know the train was moving—and moving so rapidly that their whole group was about to go home. The fact that Dalessio went home just a couple of months ago suggests that things are now getting back on track.

Paul and Donald know that they're being held for the release of the prisoners in Kuwait. Evidently their captors told them. So why the hell have Allan and I been left in the dark? When Paul and Donald ask what's being demanded for our release, Allan has me write out this reply:

Not sure. JL, assume Kwt prisnrs b/c claimed by Call of Islam. AP, Palestine prisnrs? UK-Iran? $?

Paul was the Associated Press's main Middle East correspondent before he was kidnapped, so Allan trusts that he'll be able to interpret these shorthand references to Allan's theories about why he's being held. I'm familiar with his theories from earlier conversations on this subject. A couple of years ago, a Palestinian group operating in Lebanon kidnapped a British journalist—who escaped, luckily—in hope of obtaining the release of some Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in England. So Allan's first theory is that our Shiite captors might be expressing solidarity with the Palestinians by throwing their own weight behind that demand.