Read Online An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan - Free Book Online Page A

meal tasted like, and out of curiosity and boredom I began to eat. The food was tasteless. Though it was like much Arabic food, heavily spiced and flavoured with vinegar and pickles, its acidity didn’t affect me and I could taste nothing. I took only a mouthful out of each sandwich, hoping to jar one taste against another. But there was just a blandness in my mouth. I thought that the shock of what had happened was finally ebbing slowly into me, dulling the faculties of taste and perception with tension and an unacknowledged fear.
    The day progressed but I didn’t feel the drag of it. I lay on the mattress or paced up and down the six-foot length of my cell wondering how long it would take until they realized how useless I was to them. Strangely, another part of me wanted to be held for at least some time to make the whole thing worthwhile. I felt a curiosity growing in me, at first minimal, yet I was constantly asking myself with interest rather than apprehension what my two weeks’ captivity would mean to me. I was convincing myself that it would be two weeks, and only two weeks. And after that time perhaps I might have something interesting to say about my experience in Lebanon.
     
    They had taken my watch, my ring, a necklace that a friend had given me, and what little cash I had on me, leaving me only what I stood up in: my father’s shirt, a pair of grey trousers, socks and a pair of shoes that I had bought just a few days previously from a street vendor in the Hamra area. I thought of the shoes constantly in those first few days, remembering how when they picked me up there had seemed to be some dispute about them. The driver, the most aggressive and oldest of my captors, seemed to want them for himself. I dreaded the loss of those shoes more than the jewellery and the watch and the money.
    Perhaps as long as I had my shoes I had some dignity.
    A friend told me when we were having dinner one evening on the road to Sidon that on the beaches outside Beirut which were normally the haunts only of local people, I should not be seen exposing the soles of my feet. There was some religious connotation in this, and I still don’t know whether it’s true. But I know a fanatic’s mind is fed by such superstition, which removes him from the reality around him and in some strange way permits him to be aggressive and abusive to others because his own world is controlled by authoritative denial -all is forbidden to him.
    I don’t know when I decided it was time to sleep. I remember hearing loud bullish snoring from one of the Arab inmates and I thought it must be evening. The time had gone quickly, quicker than I imagined. The prison had been empty of its guards for several hours. I remember thinking as I heard the snoring that if it’s night perhaps the inmates here will begin to speak to one another, unafraid of being heard. But there was no talking. I found this hard to believe; that men could sit all day in a tiny cell and when given the opportunity, not even try to communicate with their fellows. I think I slept contentedly enough, that first night, having convinced myself that the first interview had gone well. I was not in any immediate danger. I had not been threatened or abused, and I refused to let myself believe that that would happen before I was set free.
    In the early hours of the morning, I woke and thought about that moment in the underground pass, when they had taken me from the car and I thought I was about to be shot. Recalling that incident from only the day before was abhorrent to me. Not the thought of death

 
    itself, but the cruelty and anonymity of it. Death should have some meaning even for the justly condemned. Those who know they are about to die should have the time and the opportunity to receive death without fear, without hatred or bitterness. To be driven to some filthy hole in the ground and executed without justification was beyond my comprehension. In those early morning hours when my