Lebanon Hostage Ch. 07

The guards will tolerate us chatting softly during daylight hours as long as they're convinced that our voices aren't carrying enough for the hostages across the hall to hear. However, we are forbidden to talk once evening falls. This might be simply because the guards want to relax at the end of the day without having to monitor the volume of our conversations; Abed did the same back in the office. But where Abed would enjoin us to silence with a mild "Go to sleep now," like a father shushing his kids, our new guards are more menacing. The menace is why we think they may be worried about the downstairs neighbors discovering that we speak English. The evening hours, after all, would be when neighbors are most likely to be in the bedroom beneath us.

The prohibition against letting our chains rattle only makes sense as a measure to conceal us from the neighbors, not from the other hostages. Even if the French haven't figured out our nationalities or anything else about us, they must know that we're here, from hearing us take our toilet runs, and the guards must realize that. Right?

To avoid being harassed by the guards, Allan and I have to keep our chains on our mattresses with us—a nuisance—instead of letting them sit on the floor, where they could drag and clatter. Also, as we move we have to minimize the sound of chain links striking one another. For my trip to eavesdrop on the other hostages, I move to and from the door in a very slow arc so that my chain is stretched taut in the air the whole way. I'm irked that while the guards make some effort to be quiet when they chain and unchain us during toilet runs, they don't require themselves to be as careful as they demand that we be. They'll let the links rattle as they lock the chain onto my wrist, but if, immediately afterward, I make a rattle while shifting the position of my wrist, they'll chastise me.

Back in the Shouf prison, when I first learned about hostages being kept in residential apartments, I had imagined that there would be a high risk of the hostages being discovered. Now that I'm in an apartment, I feel that the guards' measures to prevent the downstairs neighbors from overhearing us are excessive. Paranoid. Allan and I would have to be shouting at each other for the neighbors to recognize that we're speaking something other than Arabic. And while I'll concede that chains dragging across the floor could make a distinctive noise audible beneath us, this business of not letting the chains clink while we shift around on our mattresses is ridiculous. If sound carried that well from one floor of the building to the next, we would hear sounds rising from downstairs too, wouldn't we?

As in the office, we are allowed thirty minutes off our chains each morning to exercise. If this is a norm for hostages who aren't being kept in prison cells, that would explain why Abed offered us the same amount of time. The guards here aren't as uptight about security during the exercise period as Abed was. In fact, I find their attitude peculiarly lax, given how strict they are in other ways. Unlike Abed, our new guards allow the two of us off the chains at the same time. Here our exercise period coincides with our toilet runs, so while one of us is being taken to and from the bathroom, the other is unchained too, working out. Also different from Abed's rules, no one stays in the room to monitor us while we exercise, although a guard may unlock the door and poke his head in if he hears (or doesn't hear) something that makes him suspicious.

Downstairs neighbors notwithstanding, the guards place no restrictions on what we can do for exercise: pacing, jogging, jumping jacks. The guards themselves spend hours banging around in the front part of the apartment and the hallway, apparently wrestling or fighting for recreation. The guards aren't concerned about bothering the neighbors with noise in general, they just don't want the neighbors hearing certain sounds—rattling chains or words in English.

One of Abed's concerns during our exercise period was that Allan and I not touch each other, as ordered by the chef. The guards here don't share that concern. Do they not know about the chef's order? Do they know but just don't bother to follow the order? Have Allan and I passed some kind of probation period, such that we're no longer under suspicion of homosexuality?

That last possibility seems overly optimistic given that we're kept chained on opposite sides of the room. I can't think why the guards would keep us apart like this unless they've been told to. Given how important it is to them that we talk softly, it would have been logical for them to arrange our mattresses closer together. The fact that they haven't done that must mean they don't want us close enough that we could do anything sexual at night. They must figure we're unlikely to try anything of that sort during our exercise period. Or maybe they're not thinking about this at all, maybe I'm attributing more thought to these men than I should.

Whatever's going on, the fact that we exercise together means that I enjoy some limited physical contact with Allan on a daily basis. Hands on ankles as we help each other do sit-ups—that's something. But I miss the days when we could sit side-by-side chatting, or when Allan could roll over and pat my back as we lay on adjacent mattresses. I miss the huddling. I would very much like a hug now and then, but I don't have the guts to ask for one during our exercise period, when we could do it. I've hugged Allan, what, three times in the seven-plus months we've been together? Two of which,I initiated in moments of high emotion. I'm fortunate that Allan allowed me that much.

Our daily routine in the apartment is similar to the no-frills routine followed in the office by the Brothers Kalashnikov. Gone are the daily showers graced to us by Abed, we're back to once a week. But we're still being fed three times a day instead of two: a main midday meal, plus a sandwich morning and evening. We don't have plastic bowls in our tubs. Instead the midday meal is brought to us on plates, which the guards retrieve afterwards to wash. Because we're served on plates instead of in bowls, I feel like we're getting larger portions than we used to, though maybe that's an optical illusion. The quality of the midday meals has declined from what Abed and Fadil used to serve. The food's not salted or otherwise seasoned. The vegetables are simply dumped on top of the rice, straight out of a can onto our plates, not mixed together with the rice and heated in a pot. Fruit has gone back to being a less frequent treat. Meanwhile, Allan enjoys the usual cigarette ration: two packs for each of us per week.

A taxing departure from the routine at the abandoned office is that we're no longer guaranteed a second toilet run. If one of us asks for an evening toilet run when the guards bring us our suppertime sandwich and tea, wemight get it, depending on two things: whether the guards can squeeze it in around the TV programs they intend to watch, and whether they've already promised a toilet run to one of the French hostages. The guards won't allow more than one or two hostages in the apartment the privilege of a second toilet run because that would take more time than they're willing to give up. Since the guards always feed the French before they feed us, Allan and I are usually screwed when it comes to extra toilet runs, because the French usually claim them first.

Competition for extra toilet runs is one reason I come to dislike the French. Another is that Allan and I have to wait for the French to finish their half hour of exercise in the morning before we're allowed to take our toilet runs. It's a security issue: the guards don't want all five hostages off their chains at the same time. If I have an especially urgent need to go, waiting for that last half hour to tick by while the French exercise is excruciating. The French always get their toilet runs and exercise period before Allan and I do. Once I've gotten to know the guards well enough that I'm more confident making requests, I propose that, in the interest of fairness, they should alternate which bedroom gets their toilet runs and exercise first. That request is wasted breath, the guards' routine is already set in concrete.

The most infuriating thing about the French is the way they leave the bathroom towels. For the first time in my captivity, I am in a place where the guards routinely place towels in the bathroom for us. There are only two towels, however, for all five hostages to share. The guards won't provide more towels than that. I don't know why, all I know is that begging for more does no good. Since all five of us take our weekly shower on the same day, and since the French always go first, both towels are wet by the time Allan and I get to them. I'm incensed that the French don't do the patently fair thing under the circumstances, which would be to reserve one of the towels for Allan and me to use. I've tried exiting the bathroom with a towel folded discreetly under my arm, intending to store it in our bedroom; but the guards won't let me get away with that, even after I've tried to explain why I'm doing it.

To make things worse, it's not uncommon to find that the French have simply dropped the towels on the floor instead of hanging them back up. This is so grossly inconsiderate toward Allan and me that it makes me despise not just these three men but French people in general. Maybe they've been the only hostages in this apartment for a long time, so they're not used to someone else coming in to shower after them. But Allan and I are here now, and they can't possibly be unaware of that, so they need to get their fucking act together and change their habits.

Although sympathetic, Allan grows tired of hearing me complain about this. Towel off with your pajamas, he tells me; you have clean ones to change into once you've finished showering. Yes, fine, but the point is we shouldn't have to resort to that. The French should show some basic consideration. Or the guards should get us more towels.

Allan has a different frustration: that the guards won't change the timing of our showers in relation to our workouts. The guards' inviolable pattern is to take us for our toilet runs at the beginning of our half-hour exercise period. They stick to this schedule even on our shower days, which means thatafter we shower, we return to our room to work out. Allan asks the guards for permission to do it the other way around. He's planned the schedule for them: give us twenty minutes to exercise, then start escorting us to the bathroom. He promises we'll be efficient, we'll squeeze both our bathroom trips into the remaining ten minutes of our exercise period. That way the guards won't have to spend any more time on this chore than they do when they take us to shower at the beginning of the half hour. No deal, the guards aren't buying it.

Our complaints about towels and timing notwithstanding, there is good news about shower day. We have hot water in this apartment, enough to last through all five hostages' showers since we are allowed, as usual, only a couple of minutes apiece. And an unprecedented luxury: we get a fresh change of clothes every shower day! Pajamas, socks, underwear—everything changed except our sweaters. We don't necessarily get our old clothes back once they've been laundered. Rather, they become part of a common pool from which the guards randomly assign us items to wear each week as we enter the bathroom. It's a grab bag of a collection. Button-up flannel pajamas. Thin cotton sweatshirts. Long silky drawers in leopard or tiger prints, cheerily colorful but not warm. A pair of heavy sweatpants is the plum catch.

Our clean clothes come with a stiff texture that indicates they've been hung out in the cold air to dry, not machine-dried, and they're folded so neatly when the guards hand them to us that I'm convinced the folding has been done by a woman. Who? A hired washerwoman? A guard's wife? A guard's mother? Does the person know she's doing laundry for hostages?

The best thing, hands down, about being in this apartment is that we get books! Oh my God. What cigarettes are to Allan, books are to me. The quality of the books leaves much to be desired, but there's no restriction on how often the guards will dispense books to us—no ration. The guards are surprised by how quickly I devour books; even Allan's a little surprised by it. Nevertheless, as soon as I've finished one, the guards will bring me another from the cache they keep somewhere in the apartment. Probably because reading keeps us silent, the guards are unexpectedly prompt about replacing our books. They're not so prompt about feeding us or taking us to the bathroom; those chores get done whenever the guards feel like getting around to them.

The book collection consists of forgettable or outdated titles, the kind that gather dust for years on someone's bookshelf before being carted off to gather dust on the shelves of a used bookstore instead. I assume that's exactly where the guards got these books: a used bookstore. Before that, I imagine the books were the home library of an expat who either died or moved back home and didn't want to transport all the books they'd accumulated over the years. There are mildewed editions of second- or third-tier literary classics, decades-old textbooks on subjects like history and economics, lurid true-crime narratives (our expat benefactor had a creepy streak), and genre novels, including a whole lot of romances by someone named Barbara Cartland. Allan laughs. She's famous in England, he tells me, but there's no reason I should ever have heard of her. He's sorry I'm being introduced to her now. Please don't think less of his country because of her.

When Waleed sees how frequently I request new books, he cautions me that they have only one box of books in English. How big is the box? I ask. "This big," he says, as if he's signaling with his hands—which of course I can't see because my blindfold is down. He laughs, mocking me. Jerk.

To avoid burning through the mystery box too quickly, I read every page of every book the guards give me, however cursorily. I even plow through the economics textbook, which proves more interesting in parts than I had anticipated. I get in the habit of reading a book twice before I return it—once at a gulp, for content, then a second time more slowly, savoring the details and the language, performing literary and rhetorical analysis. Rarely the guards give me a book in French, drawn by mistake, I presume, from the other hostages' cache. I'd be willing to skim even those, as an exercise in reading comprehension, except that Allan doesn't want the guards here to find out we know French.

My favorite read is a history of Lebanon written at the beginning of the sixties; I wish I could supplement it with a more recent history of the country. The Cartland romances feel demeaning at first—am I really so desperate as to read this shit?—but the more of them I read, the more I'm tempted to write my master's thesis on them. I become intrigued by tensions in the novels' operating assumptions about gender; I dig away at unearthing the ideology that underlies Cartland's representations of history; I want to develop a theory of what it reveals about contemporary Western culture that these romances are still popular. Maybe that's a Strange Idea, maybe I perceive these novels as more significant than they really are because they happen to loom large in my highly constricted hostage life.

Reading makes my life so much more bearable. The books are lifelines from the outside world, they bring other people's voices into the room. If my captors would have given me books back when I was in solitary, I'm sure I could have done better than I did. Not as much better as with Allan, of course. But better. I wonder why they've granted this boon now, so many months later.

* * *

Six guards work in the apartment, in two shifts of three. Waleed, Ameer, and Moustafa are on duty the night we arrive. A couple days later, we encounter Sayeed, Mohammed, and Hikmet.

They don't volunteer their names right away. After a few days, Allan takes the initiative of introducing the two of us formally to the guard who speaks the best English. The guard replies that they already know our names. News to us. "May I ask your name?" Allan says cautiously. "Waleed," the guard tells us without hesitation, followed by the names of the other two guards on shift. When the second shift returns, Allan and I introduce ourselves to them too, at which point they also reciprocate names.

We realize, of course, that the names they've given us are likely pseudonyms; ditto for Abed and Fadil. Real or fake, I have no idea why these guards are willing to give us names to call them by when the guards in our prisons didn't want that, apart from Makmoud. Maybe living together, after a fashion, in a regular apartment prompts the guards to relate to us on a more human basis.

As in the abandoned office, the guards' shifts change every two or three days. Allan figures out the pattern: two two-day shifts, followed by a three-day shift that covers the weekend, Friday to Sunday. He speculates that this pattern is to ensure that the guards get every other Friday free to go to mosque.

The guards stay up late at night watching TV off in the front area of the apartment, toward my left as I face the door. They sleep in a room through the wall by my head. They generally don't use our bathroom, though; there's another one elsewhere in the apartment. Allan, eager to construct a map of the apartment, is annoyed that I won't make afternoon or nighttime trips out to the end of my chain to eavesdrop on the guards' movements out front. He wants me to figure out the relative locations of the TV room, the kitchen, the guards' bathroom, the front door. I won't do it for him, I consider the risk too great even after the confidence boost of my successful morning trips. It's one thing to chance the trip toward the door under the cover of toilet runs and the French hostages' exercising. It's another to move around on my chain in the afternoon, when the guards' movements are less predictable, or at night, when they've ordered us to lie still.

All the guards have at least a rudimentary English vocabulary suitable for routine orders. Waleed's English is quite good; he's the one who ordered me not to speak or move on my first night here. Judging from my eavesdropping on the bedroom across the hall, most if not all of the guards speak some French—better French than English as a rule, I'd say, with the exception of Waleed. Sayeed sounds to me like he speaks French fluently.

Since we overhear and interact with these guards more than we did with the guards at the Shouf prison, Allan and I are able to discern the hierarchy among them. Waleed heads his shift, Sayeed heads the other. Sayeed is also the apartment's highest authority, as we learn during the brief struggle over the radiator.

The radiator in our room is extremely weak. Allan, laid out on his mattress in front of the radiator, has to roll up against the metal to feel the heat; I don't gain any benefit on the opposite side of the room. When I'm unchained to exercise, the first and last thing I do is sit pressed to the radiator, coaxing the chill out of my body, especially my hands and feet. I drape my sweater over the radiator while I'm exercising, so it will be warmed up when I put it back on. I envy Allan's ability to lie against the radiator whenever he wants. Even though I have two blankets, the nights are still rough, especially if I've been assigned flimsy silky drawers to wear that week. One week, when Allan happens to draw a pair of sweatpants from the clothing pool, he generously exchanges with me. I ask the guards if I can have a third blanket, but they claim there aren't any more.