Captivity (44 page)

MARCH 19
DAY 114

Midday. Medicine Man pops in with his video camera. He films me and Harmeet holding a copy of today’s newspaper. “I have some negotiation today with the Canadian embassy,” he says. “I must to finish today.” He’s harried, breathless, sweating. “The British too, but the Canadian one especially, they must to have it done.” And then he’s gone.

“The British got left behind again,” Norman says, his voice sad. I feel a pang of guilt. Neither of us acknowledged the glaring exclusion of Norman from the video.

Uncle returns with a big bowl of rice and a lovely spinach and bean soup. He says a neighbour brought it to the door. Later that afternoon Uncle brings us something else. Three one-inch-square, one-inch-thick rose-coloured confections.
“Helcoom, helcoom,”
he says. “This from Mosul.” I take it into my fingers. It’s dense, spongy, translucent. Uncle watches carefully as we take our first bites. Ecstasy! It is quite simply the most oh-my-God-delicious thing I’ve ever had. We thank him lavishly. He says he will give us some to take home with us.

Norman pulls up his left pant leg. He shows us, on his calf, a long purplish vein, half an inch wide and six inches long, and a large area of swelling. “Feel here,” he says. There’s a series of hard lumps under
the skin. He’s experiencing the same pain he felt during the end-of-December cellulitis episode. His toes are itchy. I give him the antibiotic I didn’t use when I was sick.

The captivity is taking its toll. I’m worried about him. He seems to be aging right before my eyes. He’s getting more uncertain on his feet and he looks waxy, almost embalmed. Swollen feet, chest pain, what appears to be a second bout of cellulitis. It’s as if his body is saying, “I can’t take this anymore.”

I wonder what happened to the robust young man who set off with his brother for a motorcycle tour of northern Scotland, stopping here and there to scramble up rocky mountainsides; the cross-country runner and track athlete; the bone growth specialist who researched and lectured and administered the St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts) Department of Physics; the tireless activist who marched in the street, wrote incisive pamphlets, dressed up as a peace tree at summer festivals and attended dozens of meetings? It’s such a mystery, the aging process, how it occurs, the imperceptible accumulation of wrinkle and sag, the greying of hair and coarsening of skin, the stiffening of joint and slowing down of limb.

Cheap grace. It’s haunted Norman all his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s rebuke of an easy, complacent Christianity that avoids hardships and struggle. He never suffered any consequence for his commitment to pacifism. In fact, it rather worked to his advantage. After completing a degree in physics at the University of Exeter, he registered as a conscientious objector when, at the age of twenty-one, he was called up for the National Service. His application was accepted without question and the tribunal directed him to perform alternative medical work for two years. He started off polishing nurses’ shoes and cleaning urine bottles, but then saw a rare posting for a trainee physicist and decided to apply. As chance would have it, one of the doctors who interviewed him was a leading member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international peace organization that formed after the war. His sympathy for Norman’s pacifism helped him earn the job and launched his career as a medical physicist. When he finished his service in 1955, he returned to London
where he met the world-renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Professor Joseph Rotblat in the peace circles they frequented. Rotblat hired Norman on at Barts and two years later he went on to do his Ph.D. He married Pat Cartwright in 1960 and spent one year as a post-doctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory (located on Long Island in New York State) before settling into a comfortable middle-class existence as the father of two girls, Sally and Joanna, and a lecturer in nuclear medicine. He succeeded his mentor as head of department when Rotblat retired from Barts in 1976, a role Norman held until his own retirement in 1990.

Caught between the demands of his family life and career on the one hand, and his Christian idealism on the other, Norman fell away from peace activism for many years. The ease and relative affluence of his life seemed incompatible with a life of real discipleship. He went to church, taught at Sunday school and helped out with a children’s club—activities that always complemented and never challenged the life he was living. He felt it was hypocritical to involve himself in the peace movement when he wasn’t prepared to substantially change his lifestyle. He only returned to it in the 1980s, rejoining the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Baptist Peace Fellowship after accepting that no one can fully live up to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Concerned always that he’d been a “cheap peacemaker,” he decided in his old age it was time to take a risk for what he believed, just as the young servicemen and -women in Iraq were taking a risk for what they believed.

Well, Norman, here we are. Any thoughts about cheap grace? I could use a little myself right now—how about you?

MARCH 20
DAY 115 10:00 a.m.

We need to get out of here. Pronto, now, today. Tom has most certainly been killed. Medicine Man is becoming desperate. Uncle is on a fight-to-the-death watch. Norman was excluded from the last video. His health is deteriorating. The order for his separation could come at any hour. We’re in mortal danger every second that we’re here.

Harmeet and Norman think we can just ride this out. They’re wrong. My mind has become very clear—we’re not going to get out of here unless we take matters into our own hands. My body, however, is not yet ready, and the mere thought of what we have to do sends me into spasms of involuntary shaking.

I am the delegation leader. This is what I have to do. Grapple with the fear, prepare the way, bring the decision to birth within myself first. My mind turns feverishly to making a plan. My body responds with constant invisible trembling.

MARCH 21
DAY 116

“Saba il hare,”
we say to Uncle when he comes into the room.
“Saba il noor,”
he answers. He has a rose in his hand. He closes his eyes, inhales deeply, makes loud smacking sounds as if he’s about to eat it, smiles, puts it in the plastic cup on the hostess trolley. “Garden, garden,” he says. He unlocks us and opens the blue folding chair. He sits and shifts his weight in one motion. The legs of the chair buckle and bend sideways. Uncle recovers his balance, the chair falls, he picks it
up, for a moment tries to fix it, shrugs, tosses it aside. “Finish,” he says. He locks us up after morning exercise and then leaves.

We will not see him again.

“My birthday is on Friday,” Harmeet tells Nephew. It’s part of the ongoing strategy: elicit sympathy, confront with our humanity. Who knows what will be the key that opens the door.

Nephew looks surprised. “Three days Friday?”

“Yes,” Harmeet says.

“Good Harmeet,” he says. How old will you be? he asks him. Thirty-three. When is your birthday? he asks me. October. Norman? August. “I bring happy-birthday-to-you cake,” he says to Harmeet.

Norman does not say anything, but I see him, in the corner of my eye, nodding from time to time. Harmeet and I agree: the worst has probably happened; we’re dealing with it in much the same way. It’s there, in a mental file folder, a box, a hermetically sealed container. A fact or a possibility, that is all. There’s no emotion around or for it. There can’t be.

The implication of this fact or possibility is ominous. If Tom has been killed, somebody had to do it. Who then? Medicine Man? Video Man? Number One? One of the initial five who kidnapped us? Somebody else altogether?

The thought makes me shudder. Whoever it was must be waiting in the shadows, ready to kill the rest of us.

We have to get out of here.

As always, we are very quiet when setting up the futon for our afternoon nap. We want to keep our captors from finding out about this sweet afternoon indulgence for fear they will take it away from us. It is this more than anything else that succours my mood. Every step and movement must be coordinated: getting the futon and pillows, opening up the futon, laying down the pillows, unfolding the sheet, lying down on the futon, getting under the sheet. We move like a gangly three-headed creature with six legs and three arms.

Nephew pops his head into the room just as we are lying down. My body tenses, prepares for an angry reaction. “Good good, nice nice,” he says, taking the sheet. He flicks it in the air, lets it fall gently upon us, makes sure that it covers our feet and our shoulders. The afternoon light is warm and gold-glowing. I close my eyes. The next hour is utter bliss.

Nephew and Junior are looking for their AK-47. They enter and leave the room, search and re-search their bedclothes, the floor behind the curtains, a cabinet cupboard.

“Should I tell them where it is?” Harmeet whispers to me.

“You know where it is?”

“Yeah, it’s in that cupboard over there,” he says, pointing to the cabinet. “I saw Uncle put it there when I was down washing the floor earlier. I guess he never told them where he put it before he left.”

“Let them find it,” I say.

“What kind of operation are they running here? They can’t even keep track of their guns.”

“I wish CPT training had included instructions on using an AK-47,” I say, half-joking, half-serious.

Nephew lies on his mat and covers himself with his blanket. Junior continues to search, casually, wandering here and there as if he is bored. He makes a phone call. The person on the other end of the line directs him to the cabinet. Junior opens the cabinet door. His eyes light up when he sees the gun. “Najis!” he says into the phone.

He closes the cabinet door. He doesn’t see there’s a drinking glass on the floor near Nephew’s bed. He knocks it over. The glass shatters on the tile floor. Junior jumps back and curses. It’s instinctual, my impulse to get up and help, the courteous thing to do when somebody breaks or spills something. But a foot slams down in my mind.
No, let him clean up his own mess. He’s the captor and you’re the captive
. I stay in my chair. Harmeet springs up immediately and is on his knees picking up the glass.

My first response is judgment—
Stop, you’re crossing the line, Harmeet
—but then I see Junior’s reaction. “Thank you,” he says, surprised and confused. This is not in the rule book, I think, a hostage offering spontaneous assistance to his kidnapper. Harmeet’s action confronts Junior with his humanity and shifts the balance of their relationship. In this moment, he’s no longer a helpless and subservient captive but a sovereign individual offering practical assistance to another. It’s an example of moral jiu-jitsu.

I experienced this myself when I was sick. Junior asked me for a massage and I said no. Instead of complaining and pleading as I had expected, he said he was sorry and told me to lie down on the floor and sleep. He left the room and returned with a wet cloth to put on my forehead. In that instant my whole orientation towards him changed. I was filled with wonder and gratitude at being cared for when I had expected animosity and provocation. He had turned the tables on me.

A similar thing happened with Uncle. When the captors brought us downstairs one evening, I brought the yellow scrubby from the bathroom with me to clean the hallway sink where we wash our hands
before supper and brush our teeth. It always appalled me, the dark veneer of grime that had been accumulating for God knows how long. Without asking for permission, I got the scrubby out and went to work. As soon as Uncle saw me, he wanted to know what I was doing. He stood behind me and watched, unsure at first what to do. He began to point to areas that needed cleaning and then took the scrubby so he could do it himself. “Good,” he said when we were done, pleased with the gleaming porcelain result. In that moment we were equals, two men admiring the sink we had just cleaned.

This is what that passage from the Bible is all about, I think: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” If he breaks a glass on the floor, help him pick it up. If he’s feverish, get a wet cloth to cool his forehead. If his sink is dirty, clean it. Turn the tables; confront with surprise; provoke wonder, chagrin, even shame. Heap burning coals of love on his head. Do this and you will both be transformed.

Breakfast: a cake that Nephew brought from home, made by his wife, and a
samoon
. Lunch: a big bowl of rice garnished with fried potato bits. Late afternoon snack (first ever!): macaroni with mild chili spice. Supper: rice, macaroni,
samoon
. A stupendous amount of food. I am, for the first time ever, full. And still I could eat, and eat, and eat.