I once asked Peter Niesewand, who while a correspondent in Rhodesia (for the Manchester Guardian newspaper) was held for months in solitary confinement by the (Prime Minister Ian) Smith regime, how he had survived.
Niesewand, who was as modest as he was talented, told me the secret was simply to think. There was no trick to mental survival beyond using the mind. I thought often of Niesewand during my 62 days` captivity in Beirut over the summer.
There was something about him after his imprisonment that made him different from the rest of us. He was calmer, more reasonable, aloof from mundane concerns. He had been through an inconceivable ordeal. It was a tragedy when he died a few years ago, having become a successful novelist with every reason to live. He knew he was dying, and he prepared his wonderful wife, Nonie, and their children both spiritually and financially for his death. He was ready to die once in a Rhodesian prison. What is solitary confinement but a premonition of purgatory?
I have written a detailed account of my captivity, which began on June 17 with the kidnaping and ended on Aug. 18 when I escaped. Even so, I find my memory calling up still more events, more thoughts, more moments of fear and spiritual contentment.
There was a regular changing of the guards, no doubt to avoid the possibility of friendship between hostage and captor and perhaps also because it is a dull job. The guard cooks and cleans up after the hostage but spends most of his time sitting around. Usually there were only two guards in any of the four apartments where I was held.
There were occasional guards who prayed, as devout Moslems should, five times a day. When I would be praying silently to my God-the Father, Son and Holy Spirit-I could hear one guard in the next room praying out loud to his. Could God hear us both at the same time? Whose prayers would He answer-his or mine? I tried not to feel pride or vanity but believed that wherever an oppressor and his victim pray, God listens to the victim. This would be true for the guard and me, just as in another context it would be true for Israeli prison guards and their Lebanese prisoners or for Nazi murderers and Jewish captives.
The guards would leave me alone most of the time. During the long period when I had no books, I sat quietly alone on my mattress. I thought of Niesewand`s prescription and used my mind. I channeled my thoughts along certain specific lines, and whenever I found myself daydreaming, I would think about one of six things.
My family: I would talk to them in my thoughts or imagine what they were doing at any time of the day. More than anything else I wanted to end their suffering.
One day I had the distinct impression my 9-year-old son, George, was crying at school. The impression was so strong that I cried myself and tried to tell him not to worry, that I was alive and would soon be home. My wife, Fiona, told me when I came home that George had indeed been crying at his school, but-before I turn to mysticism-I must admit it is impossible for me to know whether my sensation and his crying took place on the same day.
I would spend each day in my imagination with a different member of my family, as though they were taking turns baby-sitting.
Telepathy: I had met a wonderful character in Damascus a few months earlier named Docteur Solomon. He was a magician out of a Fellini film, gregarious, funny, doing tricks and chattering in six languages, telling us how to eat if we wanted to live to his ripe old age of 82. He was the uncle of a friend of mine, and the high point of his performance was mind reading.
Almost every day in my room I would think, ”Docteur Solomon, Docteur Solomon, c`est Charles Glass qui vous appelle. Aidez-moi.” I would describe my location as best I could and urge him to tell the Syrian army.
Thinking back on it, I would love to be a screenwriter constructing a scene in which an 82-year-old magician enters the office of the head of Syrian military intelligence to tell him where an American hostage is held. ”Don`t call us, doctor. We`ll call you.”
The strange thing about the telepathy is that Fiona, who is ordinarily not given to faith healing, astrology or tarot cards, was in touch through a friend with two psychic women in the United States. One told Fiona that I was having difficulty getting enough water to drink, which I was, and that my captors were translating my notebooks into Arabic, which they were. This was before anyone knew I`d had my suitcase with me when I was taken.
One clairvoyant told her I would escape in mid-August, and the other said I would arrive home on Aug. 19, which I did. These women would take no money. I have an open mind now on clairvoyance. If God gave me the gift of eyesight, why shouldn`t he have given some people other gifts as well?
A novel: I wrote two novels on pages in my mind. The first was about two writers, one English and the other American, who are touring the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean, in search of its essence. They never meet, but their paths cross just as they cross those of writers in other countries.
Each stands for an imperial ideal: the now less-innocent Quiet American, treading in the wake of a departed Pax Britannica, both lost and degenerate in a Levant that has not recovered from its own tribalism and centuries of foreign domination. The heroine is a beautiful Armenian who, though abused in different ways by each man, triumphs over them both. Most of the story takes place in Crusader country around Aleppo and north Lebanon but, not
surprisingly, there is a kidnaping. (Publishers who can bear this story may call my agent, Gillon Aitken.)
The other book is about a young man who decides to become a priest and wreaks havoc in the lives of his family, his pregnant girlfriend and the Society of Jesus. I was on the third or fourth chapter of this one when I escaped. Now I`ve lost interest.
My life: I`ve led a troubled life, and it seemed to me I should relive it to determine where I`d gone so wrong that I was blindfolded and chained helpless to a wall. I began with my earliest memory, which is, not
surprisingly, of pain: At the age of 3 I had burned my hand on an iron and run screaming into the road. I remembered my cocker spaniel Bobo, who had been killed by a car when I was 4, and I followed the course of my life, not seeking meaning, up to the moment I was kidnaped.
Like a man when he joins Alcoholics Anonymous, I had to get out of my prison to make amends: I had to beg the forgiveness of some people and forgive others. So often they were the same people: Those I had wronged were those who had wronged me. And I thought of all those important figures in my life who were now dead. Where were they? Could they hear me? Would they know I loved them? I noticed how my life had changed-how I tasted happiness-when I got married.
Prayer and meditation: It took most of 62 days, but I learned how to pray. I began in the early days to recite the prayers I`d learned as a child and to ask God to deliver me. I promised to amend my life, to help others, to become more spiritual if He would only let me go. I did not care how I became free: a rescue, a deal, an escape or divine intervention. I just wanted to go home. I later tried to couch my desire to be free in terms of wanting it for the good of other people, namely Fiona and the children. But it was not until I prayed sincerely for others that a kind of spiritual peace descended on me. Very early in my captivity my captors announced I was being set free that night. In the event, they merely moved me to another location. When I recall how I felt at the thought of going free after 10 days, the vanity with which I greeted the prospect, I realize I was not ready. I had learned nothing.
It took time for the seed of prayer to grow. Too often my conscience was torn when I was praying: How could I pray for my family and not for the families of the other foreign hostages? How could I pray for the foreign hostages and not for the Lebanese and Palestinians? How could I not pray for the seven Israeli prisoners held incommunicado in Lebanon? What about captives everywhere else in the world? When I would pray for all these others, my conscience would nag at me: You have a duty to pray for your family. With a Catholic conscience you can never win. Nor should you.
Escape: Every day I would have to think of a way in which I could do something to get out. This might involve writing a note to be forced out of the bathroom fan or digging a hole in the wall in the hope of passing a note to the apartment next door or manipulating my chains or trying to pick a lock. I believed I had a moral duty to my family to escape, no matter what the risk. My great fear was that my children would in this life or the next ask me,
”Didn`t you do everything possible to get home?”
When it came to doing everything possible to escape, did I have the right to use violence? Should I pick up that gun, I asked myself, even if it meant killing these boys and possibly dying myself, with all the pain this would cause all our families?
I wondered whether Jesus, if He had been held captive while He was on His way to Jerusalem to fulfill the destiny that would be the salvation of mankind, would have killed His guards. Where did His duty lie? The fifth commandment says, ”Thou shalt not kill,” without any qualifications or exceptions. But should the salvation of mankind have been lost because highwaymen in Palestine had kidnaped our Lord and He was too conscientious to kill them? I decided our Lord would have had to fall back on a miracle, perhaps sending them to sleep or vanishing before their eyes rather than killing them.
I did not touch the pistol, and the guard finished locking me up.
A month later, when my guards went to sleep, a miracle delivered me to the family who had waited so long and patiently for my return.
When I took my children to mass my first Sunday home, the priest read Psalm 68: ”God setteth the solitary in families: He bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.”
