Free An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan Page A

matter, I supposed, of them authenticating my Irish identity, realizing that there was little they could obtain from me and then setting up some mechanism for releasing me without endangering themselves.
    Hill Sunday came and went. I buoyed myself up thinking of cracks and jokes that my friends in Belfast would make when I returned. I’
    thought also with some degree of anger that I had come to Lebanon to work for a couple of years, had been kidnapped as a British subject,locked up as a British subject, and questioned as a British subject. I had run away to this country to escape the consequences of British policy , in Ireland and here I was about to be sent back for all the wrong reasons I after only four months. It angered me and the anger kept away those dark moments which were yet to possess me. I was not discontented with my imprisonment so much as with what my release would mean: the loss of ajob, a feeling that whatever was to be my future had been 1 chosen for me. On Monday, after the usual ablutions, my kidnapper and aspiring I confidant came back. A social visit this time, not to interrogate me but ll . to give me some news. He seemed excited, telling me that the Irish Government had placed a large advertisement in the local Arabic newspaper with my photograph and a copy of my passport, appealing Mi to my kidnappers for my release. He laughed. He found it funny. I J laughed too, but I laughed out of relief that finally something was confirming my own insistence that I was Irish, and that it was I pointless to keep me for it would surely only complicate matters for 1 themselves. However my increasingly acute discontent was not to be relieved by this good news.
    One day during those first weeks of my captivity, I was brought a 1 towel and a toothbrush, having asked for them on several occasions.
    My mind reeled on receiving them, trying to understand what this meant. Did they want to keep me in good shape for my imminent release, or had they resolved to hold me for some time and keep me in condition to endure my imprisonment? I was soon to learn the 1 significance of the towel. It was not only for cleaning myself but it was also to become my shroud. It was a drape which I had always to put on my head and face so that I might not see them nor see anything around me when they were present. So began the real monotony of my imprisonment.
    Each day became another day, unmarked by any difference from the day that preceded it or the day that would come after. Always it began with a door banging and the guards crying out to one another in Arabic; the sounds of the preparation of food, boxes or tins being opened; and then the opening and closing of doors and the shuffling footsteps of the men who occupied the cells next to mine fumbling their way to the bathroom. It was always an old man in filthy ragged pyjamas and broken and torn bedroom slippers who came to my cell.
    Henceforth I was forbidden to look at him but saw only the door opening, the broken shoes, the legs of the pyjamas and heard his soft, feeble voice saying something to me in Arabic. I came to call him the ‘Shuffling Acolyte’. There was only this old man and perhaps one or two other guards. One of them was in charge, and gave the orders, more shouting than ordering. I always recognized the sliding gait of my old man. As if to hold the shoes upon his feet, he would slide himself forward, his feet in constant contact with the ground.
    Sometimes he would hurry me and at other times he was content to smoke as long as I was content to wash or do whatever else I could find to do in the toilet. But I always knew when he was coming for me, that telltale shuffling slide outside my door. The other, much younger guard who seemed to be in charge, I called ‘The Grim Reaper’. These were the only two human beings with whom I had the barest contact.
    The Grim Reaper was given his name because of his occasional outbursts of violence and his frequent beatings of some of