Allan proposes to me that we swap places at the end of each exercise period so we can trade off being chained next to the radiator, the way we used to trade off sleeping in the bed at the office. He doesn't think we should ask the guards' permission to do this, so they can't deny the request peremptorily. We should just go sit on the mattress we want when the guards knock on the door to signal that they're coming in to rechain us. They might not even notice we've swapped, but if they do challenge us, we can explain why we're doing it then.
When Allan first makes this proposal, I'm unwilling to push the envelope. We've just arrived here, everything's too unsettled and tense. By the time we've been here almost a couple of weeks, I feel differently. At that point, our relationship with the guards is more relaxed. We're on a first-name basis with them. They've become more familiar with our habits and personalities and are therefore less jumpy around us. We've mastered the house rules and routines, so the guards are annoyed at us less often. And our improved living conditions have raised my self-esteem, making me more confident. I tell Allan I'm willing now to try to swap.
Waleed notices right away when we don't return to the correct mattresses and demands to know what we're doing. When Allan explains, he acquiesces—surprisingly easily. I settle in to enjoy my 24 hours pressed full-length against the radiator. Meanwhile, Allan hazards two trips out to the end of his new chain to eavesdrop by the door: one trip at night to try to follow the guards' movements around the front of the apartment (the trip I've been refusing to take for him), and another the next morning to listen in on the French.
We're encouraged that Waleed proved so amenable to our swapping places. He can be a difficult person, arbitrary and domineering, so if he's willing to let us have our way about this, we're confident that Sayeed will, too.
No. We get away with our first swap on Sayeed's shift because Mohammed and Hikmet do the rechaining and raise no objection. But later that day, Sayeed discovers what we've done, becomes angry without giving a reason, and immediately has us moved back to our original places. Allan tries to explain, but Sayeed doesn't know enough English to understand. Allan doesn't explain in French because he doesn't want to reveal he knows that language, for fear of losing future opportunities to eavesdrop on conversations with the French hostages.
Allan persuades me, with some difficulty, to try swapping again the next morning. We have to show them how much this means to us, he insists. This time, Sayeed comes in to help rechain us after our exercise period. As soon as he enters the room and sees us sitting on the wrong mattresses, he hauls me onto my feet and shoves me back toward my proper mattress with a hard, flat-handed blow between the shoulders. He does the same to Allan. He chews us out in his rudimentary English-for-guards. "No move! No good! What you do?" Allan tries again to explain: Jeremy is cold. Allan pantomimes shivering. Sayeed is unswayed. He repeats, "No move, no good," cuffing our heads to drive the point home.
I tell Allan that I am very appreciative, as always, that he's willing to stand up for me. But we need to quit, I don't want the low-level violence to escalate. Let's keep swapping during Waleed's shift, but I won't defy Sayeed, this isn't worth a confrontation. Allan pleads with me not to fold until we see if Sayeed escalates his reaction. Maybe if we stick with it, Sayeed will back down. I dig in my heels. No, I tell Allan. I'm willing to keep asking Sayeed for permission to swap, but I won't try to swap without his permission.
By the time I make that resolution, however, Sayeed has resolved upon his own decisive step to shut down the swapping. He makes his move during that night's shift change. The shift change always occurs in the middle of the night, I assume to prevent the neighbors from seeing armed militiamen coming and going. When the replacement shift arrives, Sayeed wakes Allan and me so that Waleed can translate into English for him. Sayeed orders us to stop trying to trade places. He is giving us fair warning: if we do it again, we will be punished. He doesn't specify how. He advises us that he has instructed Waleed not to allow us to change either. Waleed, too, is authorized to punish us.
Taking advantage of Waleed's presence as interpreter, Allan tries to negotiate. He starts by assuring Sayeed that it isn't our intention to make problems or to disrespect Sayeed's authority. He waits for Waleed to translate that, to make sure it doesn't get lost. Allan then explains why we want to change places. The radiator gives off very little heat, so it's very cold on my side of the room; my hands and feet hurt; I can't sleep. It isn't fair that one of us should have to suffer the cold every day. (Things aren't quite as bad as Allan's making them sound. I'm uncomfortable, yes, but no more so than in the back room at the abandoned office, and never as bad here as the worst we endured there.)
Sayeed responds that we are not allowed to change places because it is unhealthy for us to use one another's bedding and bottles. I readily see Sayeed's point about the bottles—which is why, in fact, we take our bottles with us when we swap, rendering that concern moot. As for swapping mattresses and blankets: I overcame whatever vague hygienic qualms I felt about sleeping in the same spot Allan had been lying, back when we were trading places in the office. It's true that we haven't been taking our blankets with us when we swap here, the way we used to do in the office, which has felt a little... unnatural. Allan's blankets are foreign. They smell different than mine. They smell like him. But that experience is consoling; I go to sleep snuggled up under Allan's smell.
Allan tells Sayeed that if he's concerned about our health, the two of us will be happy to move our mattresses and personal effects with us across the room when we trade places. Sayeed still refuses. Allan presses to know why. Because moving our things around will make too much noise, Sayeed says. Allan counters that we don't have to drag the mattresses across the floor, we can lift and carry them. That won't make any more noise than we already make when we tip our mattresses up against the wall to give ourselves more room to exercise in. And it will certainly make much less noise than we make when we're actually exercising.
Sayeed reiterates his denial, no reason given. Allan haggles: Can we trade places once a week instead of every day? No. Then can we trade just one more time, so that Jeremy can always be next to the radiator from now on? This is the same noble move Allan tried to make at the office, asking Abed to give me the bed permanently. I'm aware that this time Allan's motives aren't purely selfless. He would like to end up in what is now officially my spot so that he can stretch out toward the door for eavesdropping excursions.
No, Sayeed repeats. It sounds to me like Sayeed is on the brink of snapping, but Allan keeps pushing. Can we move my mattress to the wall opposite where I am now, so that I can be chained to the radiator, too? No chance of that, I think. They'll worry that we'll come together in front of the radiator for sex. I don't linger over that image, I gently push it out of my mind.
Sayeed loses his patience although not his self-control; conscious of the other hostages and the downstairs neighbors, he's keeping his voice down. He growls something in Arabic, which Waleed, who's entertained by this exchange, translates cheerfully as, " We say what you do. You are the hostages." Waleed loves that line. He'll adopt it as his standard way to deny us requests in the future.
Allan says he's sorry if he has offended, he didn't mean to make Sayeed angry. Sayeed retorts: If Allan is sorry, he should shut up and do what he's told. Okay, Allan says. His voice is quiet, meek, defeated.
His surrender is not unconditional, however. Allan's new form of resistance is to drape one of his blankets over the radiator after the evening feeding to warm it up. Then he throws me the warmed blanket, and I throw him one of mine in exchange.
He gets caught doing this one night when, unexpectedly, Mohammed enters the room to ask if one of us would like an extra toilet run. I could use one, actually; so thank you, Mohammed, for the unusual consideration—but lousy fucking timing. Mohammed regards the blanket over the radiator suspiciously. "What you do?"
Allan plays it very cool, as if he sees no reason to feel guilty or nervous about being discovered. Without a hint of defensiveness, he explains that he's warming the blanket for Jeremy, who's cold. I would have preferred that he keep my name out of it, but since he is doing this for my benefit, it's only fair that I share the risk of punishment.
Mohammed crosses the room to see if Allan is hiding something under the blanket, but he neither removes the blanket from the radiator nor orders Allan to do so. However, a minute after Mohammed brings me back from my toilet run, someone—Sayeed, no doubt—comes pounding down the hall. Without a word, he confiscates all our blankets.
I'm furious at Allan, but he doesn't regard himself as being at fault. He feels no regret, only outrage: Sayeed never said we couldn't heat a blanket over the radiator, so his reaction is entirely unprovoked, entirely unjust. I rein in my fury. Since I've never objected to Allan heating the blanket, I hardly have a right to be angry at him. Allan's right, Sayeed is the one to hate.
Happily, it turns out that Sayeed is merely firing a warning shot. He returns our blankets two or three miserable hours later, right before the guards go to bed. For the next several evenings, Allan and I are subject to random checks at night to make sure we're not doing anything the guards disapprove. As soon as it appears the checks have stopped, Allan resumes heating a blanket for me nightly. Although I whine in feeble protest at the risk he's taking, I never refuse a warmed blanket.
* * *
Sayeed is unaccommodating and punitive, but at least he's consistent. Waleed is unpredictable. Sometimes he can be more or less solicitious. Entering the room in the morning, he'll express concern for how I slept. "The night was very cold. You had a hard time to sleep?" At first I think he's mocking me. But when I answer yes, he says, "I also had a hard time," in a tone that suggests he sincerely intends to be empathetic. There may be a double edge to his empathy, though. He may be implying that if he can tough it out, Allan and I should stop making a fuss.
That's Friendly Waleed. But there's also Grouchy Waleed, who snarls if, for instance, we don't hold our hands in the "right" place when we're reaching out blindfolded to receive our dinner plates from him. And then there's Calculating Asshole Waleed, who tiptoes to our door and stands there, key at the ready, listening for so much as a tinkle of chain link so he has an excuse to fling the door open and order us to be quiet—forcing us into a scrambled panic to lower our blindfolds. He'll do this even if we haven't made any noise at all.
If another guard were behaving this way, we would write him off as someone to ignore when we can and to endure when we can't. But we can't merely ignore and endure Waleed. He has too much power over us, as head of his shift, and because his superior English makes him the guard to whom we have to direct non-routine requests, we need to cultivate his good will. No doubt he's aware that we depend on him this way, which is to say that he's aware of having that much more power over us to abuse. He relishes his power. We'll make perfectly reasonable requests—like allowing us to take our toilet runs before the French sometimes, or letting us shower after, instead of before, we exercise—and he'll deny our requests for no reason other than that he can. That's why it's so surprising when he doesn't raise a fuss about our swapping places. We've lucked out: Reasonable Waleed happens to be on duty that day. He doesn't show up often.
In a certain sense, however, Waleed depends on us, too. We're the only people in the apartment with whom he can practice, or show off, his English. He likes to come into our room to talk with us. More precisely, to talk at us. Sometimes these sessions begin on a friendly note. He'll ask if we've seen a certain movie or television show; he'll then recount it for us, whether we've seen it or not. Or he'll ask if we've ever been to some place—Las Vegas, say—and then proceed to enlighten us with what he knows about it. If one of us tries to correct him on some point, he'll insist that we're wrong and go on talking.
Although Waleed starts out sounding fascinated by whatever subject he's chosen, his monologues about Western culture inevitably bend into sermons inveighing against Western immorality. At some point, his friendly, fascinated tone turns stern, even agitated. His volume rises; if the French or the neighbors below ever hear anyone in our room speaking English, it will be Waleed they're hearing. He may get himself so worked up that he storms out of the room as if we have offended him.
On other occasions, he abruptly stops sermonizing and turns friendly again. He'll ask if we're enjoying our latest books, maybe inquire politely about what they're about. Are we out of candles, matches, tissues? He might joke around a little; the jokes might not even be at our expense. Then he'll remind us not to make noise and leave.
That's a good session. Less pleasant are Waleed's political rants. Those are unfriendly from the start. He marches into the room, demands to know what we think about Reagan, or Thatcher, or Israel's invasion of Lebanon, or some current event we couldn't possibly be aware of (but now get to learn some scraps about). Sometimes he plows on before we've finished our cautious non-answer. Other times he makes us sweat by pressing us to give him a substantive response. One way or another, sooner or later, he launches into his own diatribe, fuming, railing, denouncing whoever or whatever has outraged him today. Since the United States is usually involved somehow, I'm usually the one he's ranting at.
Waleed doesn't get so enraged during these soapboxes as to strike us. He's never struck us for any reason. Still, having him rant at me produces a fight-or-flight reaction, intensified by the fact that I can't see him. I sit on my mattress, heart thumping, forcing myself to breathe at a regular pace, willing Waleed telepathically to keep standing by the door away from me, praying that this won't be the day he loses it and hits me. Allan tries to help me, tries to draw Waleed's attention away from me, by interjecting a challenge to what Waleed is saying. Sometimes Waleed is annoyed by the interruption and ignores it. More often, he's in the mood for verbal sparring and will allow Allan to elaborate in order to have the satisfaction of rebutting him.
Allan lures Waleed into conversations about Britain, searching for clues to why our captors are holding him. What grievances do they want redressed? Waleed has much less to say against Britain than he does against the U.S., but he turns out to have two complaints. Thatcher refuses to negotiate for the release of hostages. (Yes, but why are you holding British hostages in the first place?) Also, Thatcher helped the Americans bomb Libya.
It's no surprise to us that Thatcher doesn't want to negotiate with hostage takers, but Waleed views her as incomprehensibly stubborn. He feels the same about Reagan, although he also charges Reagan with being inconsistent about the no-negotiation principle. Waleed resents that Thatcher and Reagan call his group "terrorists." They're not terrorists, they're fighting Western oppression.
As for the Libya bombing: Allan and I knew from Paul and Donald that the bombing had occurred, but we never found out when or why, and we still don't know by the time Waleed's done ranting to us about it. We know the bombing must have occurred between Allan's kidnapping, in April, and Paul and Donald's arrival to the Shouf at the end of July. The fact that Britain was involved in the bombing, we learn from Waleed.
Realizing that Waleed is unlikely to answer direct questions, Allan tries to elicit information by provoking Waleed into a rebuttal. "It isn't Thatcher's fault that Reagan bombed Libya." Or, "Don't you see, Waleed, Thatcher can't give you what you're asking." Waleed laughs at that last gambit, he recognizes what Allan is trying to do. "What do you think we are asking Thatcher?" he challenges Allan. When Allan falters, Waleed continues: "You want me to say a thing I should not say. But I am too smart for you." Why can't Waleed say? Allan asks. "Because you do not need to know," Waleed replies in a smirky voice.
Allan does provoke Waleed into revealing that Thatcher aided the bombing of Libya by letting the U.S. use Britain's "airports" (meaning RAF air bases, Allan assumes). Waleed doesn't drop any hints about what Libya did to prompt the attack.
Alone, Allan and I consider whether our captors might have purchased him from his original abductors as a reprisal against Britain for its support of the Libya bombing. Allan doesn't think so. At least that can't be the only reason our captors wanted him. If reprisal were their only motive, Allan wouldn't still be alive. There's something our captors want Britain to do in exchange for him and the other British hostages they're holding, however many those are now—and Thatcher's refusing to do it.
At least it sounds like they've made a demand. If so, though, it's strange they've still never photographed Allan to prove they're holding him.
In lodging his grievances against the United States, Waleed never mentions the Kuwait prisoners whose release Allan thinks I'm being held for. Allan reads the omission as confirmation, given that Waleed isn't supposed to let us know why we're being held. Waleed has plenty of other things to rail against the United States for. Backing the Christians in the Lebanese civil war. Supporting the Zionists in Israel. Trying to undermine Iran's Islamic revolution. Intervening generally in the Muslim world—the Libya bombing symbolizes that for him. Closer to home, Waleed is incensed that in the early 80s, American battleships bombed Lebanon, including Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut, and he blames U.S. Marines for allowing Lebanese Christians and Israelis to massacre Palestinians in the refugee camps.
I sympathize to a fair extent with Waleed's grievances against my country. My political instincts are liberal. In college, I was influenced by teachers influenced in turn by liberation theology, who deplored U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships in Latin America. I will readily concede that my government is guilty of evil in the world, especially under the Reagan administration. I agree with Waleed that it's wrong for Lebanon's Christian minority to dominate the Muslim majority, an arrangement left by the French colonial government. I don't think Israel should be occupying territory in Lebanon. I think Israel is unjustly holding territory that ought to be used to create a Palestinian state.
I decisively disagree with Waleed on major issues, of course. I believe in separation of church and state, so I don't support an Islamic revolution any more than I support the Moral Majority. I certainly don't accept the Shiite radicals' methods: hostage taking, suicide bombings. I have no doubt the CIA is guilty of outrages, but some of Waleed's accusations against them are too unreal, they have to be conspiracy theories. Waleed definitely subscribes to conspiracy theories about the global influence of Jews.
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