End of Manners (9 page)

A leaden silence had descended. More than silence, it was an absence of life, as if someone had turned off the background hum of the insects, birds and plants and silenced nature’s breath.

In that eerie emptiness a shot suddenly rang out. A distant, isolated shot, like a lonely instrument. Then rustling sounds, scuffling all around me. I heard feet dragging on the ground as if they were being pulled against their will; I sensed fear in those footsteps.

They’re taking them away now. One by one. Maybe they’re dead, I thought.

There was another shot. No shout, no struggle. Why didn’t any of us react, or at least try to find out what was happening to the others? Why didn’t anyone call out anyone else’s name?

Jonathan, Mike, Nkosi, Liz? I didn’t want them to die, I didn’t want anything to happen to them. They were my buddies.

Yet we were passively complying. Each one closed up in his own black hood, all spatial references, all sense of orientation gone; now merely victims awaiting execution. Another sharp report in the distance. Was there someone pointing a gun at my head as well, ready to shoot me if I moved or if I even called out someone’s name?

I heard footsteps coming quickly in my direction. Somehow I knew it right away. My turn had come.

They pulled me up like a heap of rags and shoved me forward. I stumbled into bushes, on the uneven ground, the hands prodding my back. I could hear the heavy breathing of the man shoving me. Then the hands pressed on my shoulders, forcing me down again. I fell to my knees on the wet grass. The hands grabbed my arms and made me cross them behind my head.

So this is it.

On my knees, hands crossed behind my head, waiting for a bullet that I can’t even see coming. Like an animal in a slaughterhouse.

This is how one dies, in the cold and the dark of a night like any other. Without a voice calling you by name, without even the sight of another human being. Your head stuffed inside a bag, alone. And you don’t even know why this is happening to you.

Memories and images muddled. The English hostage, the kind middle-aged man in the Day-Glo orange jacket. One moment in his car. The next on the ground with a gun at his head. Panic shutting my throat. Now the metallic taste of death.

It’s just this simple, and the same for every one of us. I thought I knew. But now I really knew.

I felt the hands loosen the tie on the bag.

Beheading, I couldn’t help but think.

They pulled the hood off my face. I saw Tim, the senior Defender.

He put a hand on my shoulder and leaned over me with a gentle smile.

“Everything okay? You all right?” he whispered while Alan was filming my face with a small video camera.

He smiled and spoke softly so he couldn’t be heard.

“You can go back inside with the others and have some tea. I’ll see you in class when we’re finished with this.”

I nodded. He handed me a plastic bag containing my ring, wallet, chain and the rest of my things. “Thank you,” I said.

Before I left, I saw Keith shoving a hooded Jonathan Kirk towards us. I watched him get down on his knees in front of Tim and the camera.

I saw the way Keith forced him to cross his arms behind his head.

I turned back towards the hotel. I didn’t want to stand there. I didn’t want to see his face when they took the sack off and uncovered his eyes.

“First of all, take a good look at yourselves,” said Tim, as the video started on the screen behind him. “Then we’ll go through what happened and analyze it.”

The sequence was identical for each of us. There we were, trotting along, dark bags over our heads. Stumbling, laden with fear, a bunch of grotesque hooded figures no longer recognizable, no longer human. The image of our bluish, grainy silhouettes lurching from the woods towards the camera was straight out of some sinister news footage.

We now slump to our knees, crossing arms behind heads. A hand pulls the sack off. The terrified, contracted expressions, disheveled hair, wide, staring eyes. A dress rehearsal for horror.

No one laughed when we saw our faces slip out of the bags. In fact, the room was mute, cold. It was like looking at yourself from the hereafter, staring into your pupils the moment before the trigger was pulled. There was our last glance, immortalized.

There is no dignity in terror; if that was to be our last image, then none of us looked the way we wished we had.

“Secondly, please forgive us for playing this—let’s call it trick—on you without any warning,” Tim continued, throwing his arms out, a faint note of embarrassment, “but the whole point of this exercise is that it has to be totally unexpected. In a hostage-taking scenario, the surprise factor is crucial.”

Just then the door opened and Liz Reading came in. She must have gone to wash her face and touch up her makeup; her eyes were still puffy and red from crying. She sat next to me, swathed in a hooded sweatshirt. We half nodded at one another as if we wanted to acknowledge a shift in our relationship. I felt like patting her on the shoulder but I restrained myself.

“Let’s go through the various phases together, now. The first is called ‘initial takeover.’ It’s the phase when kidnappers use lots of shouting and gunfire to induce shock and subdue the hostages. This is the most dangerous phase of the abduction; adrenaline is sky-high and a wrong move could cost you your life.”

That was exactly what was shameful. To be sitting there, cup of tea in hand, watching ourselves on the screen and analyzing what had happened as if it were an incident that could be split into phases, that had variables, unknown quantities of danger; an event that presented a problem but possibly had a
solution.

The shame lay in the astronomical sum—didn’t Pierre say just that?—we had paid to experience our own execution, to then be able to play it back in the warmth of the classroom and go over the behaviors that would save our hide. “The search,” Tim continued, “is the next phase, where the hostage is stripped of his identity. Its purpose is mainly to create a sense of disorientation. Who among you tried to react?”

Hands slowly raised, the others were starting to come back from the daze and take part again. Gradually the atmosphere thawed, everyone relieved to have to answer questions. After all, it was just an exercise, a reenactment, wasn’t it? That way what had just happened would slip away faster.

Tim went on, explaining that—once the initial violence had subsided—that would have been the moment to establish the beginning of communication with your captors through small, tentative gestures. He instructed how this new phase—number four, I believe—was crucial because it enabled the hostages to negotiate for water, food or blankets. My companions took notes. By now they had turned back into the diligent students they had been all week. Only Liz Reading, the enterprising top of the class ready to flirt with danger, seemed incapable of getting hold of herself. She kept blowing her nose and dabbing her eyes with tissues, to stop the tears that slid down slowly, like a dripping tap.

Tim droned on.

“It can be very long. Months, sometimes even years. If the negotiations aren’t successful straightaway, you have to resort to some tricks to stop yourself from going insane. An American soldier was taken hostage by the Vietcong for five years. They kept him locked in a bamboo cage and every day they lowered him waist-deep into a rat-infested river and left him there to rot until nightfall. Well, I’ll tell you how he succeeded in not losing his mind. He found a method, a kind of mental discipline. For five years he worked every day at building a five-star hotel in his mind. He began with the foundation, then he put in the pillars, the reinforced-concrete structure, the plumbing, wiring, fixtures, and so on. Every day he added a piece until he had done all the floors, the windows, right down to the beds, the table lamps and the towel racks. In a situation like that, you’ve got to find a way out, and if there isn’t a way out, then you have to find an escape into your own head.”

Liz Reading choked back a sob. I gave her a gentle smile. She tried to respond with a grimace. Her face was all red and blotchy. I laid a hand on her shoulder. She clutched it and didn’t let go.

The dress rehearsal for horror had changed everything. We bonded.

Now, as we came together once again for dinner, lined up in front of another roast leg of lamb and mint sauce, we looked at each other with a sort of gratitude, a newfound complicity. Not only were we now a group of survivors, but another bonding factor was the shared knowledge that we had all behaved the same way. The film had given us unblinking proof of this: we had watched the grim parade of our close-ups. Trembling, frightened and, worst of all, passive, reduced to silence immediately, without exception. There hadn’t been any heroes in the group, we had all been incapable of even attempting to save ourselves, let alone the others; nobody had reacted, not even when we had been robbed of our most precious and sacred belongings. All of us had felt an identical terror, as the succession of stares striking Alan’s camera lens had testified.

This was no time to brag about bullets, car bombs, minefields or thugs at borders. No previous real-life experience had outdone the event, simulated though it was, that we had just experienced together. Because through that cold rain, alone in our burlap sacks, each one of us had just had a close encounter with that cowardly self we didn’t know we harbored—that rather contemptible being we would have felt sorry for, been irritated or embarrassed by, had it manifested itself in someone else. But now, to have discovered it in ourselves, to have been forced to recognize it and accept it, had made us more open, humbler, lighter.

We piled into a car after dinner, riding the crest of this new camaraderie. Someone had suggested it; after all, we needed to celebrate.

The pub reeked of beer and smoke, damp shoes and rancid breath. There were six or seven Defenders sitting at the bar in front of a row of empty bottles. They were kidding around with each other, flirting with the barmaid, who looked like she’d known them for ages. She wasn’t young—hair dyed shoe-polish black, puffy eyelids, smoker’s wrinkles around her lips—and was leaning on her elbows on the bar in a pose that showed her generous cleavage. She had that slightly wayward, coarse look that sensible women who live in small places often have, who wear stay-up stockings under their aprons and know how to comfort a tired man.

The Defenders had given us a weak sign of recognition—a half smile, a nod, the slightest raising of a bottle—to confirm that the unwritten rule was that you weren’t supposed to fraternize. This was their pub where they let off steam at the end of the day. The last thing they wanted was to listen to us rambling about our trauma as pseudo-hostages. The implicit message was to leave them in peace. So, disheartened by this cool reception but still flush with the event of the day, we headed for a shabby couch at the back and ordered our drinks.

The simultaneous presence of pseudo-hostages and pseudo-kidnappers in the same place put something of a damper on our mission, which was to throw ourselves into a postmortem of the day’s events with alcohol-fueled ardor. This was the payoff we had been craving: to be by ourselves at last, free to repeat, compare, elaborate details and dramatize.

Obelix turned slightly, without a flicker, let alone a smile, of recognition. I passed by him, hoping he would send a signal at least to me, if for no other reason than because of the extremely personal contact there had been between us. After all, my hands, soaked in fake blood, had felt his skin under his shirt. But he only darted a glance and turned back to the barmaid, who was laughing, slowly stroking her bare forearms.

Maybe those two had something going on. Having to bear this desolate countryside for months on end, the Defenders had to find some distractions. Maybe they each had a lady friend in town they could spend the night with, some hot divorcée they’d met at the café, or the supermarket.

The sight of Obelix’s mighty back turned to me, the breasts spilling from the barmaid’s low-cut top, the proximity of their bodies and the perfect intimacy between them vexed me.

By the end of the week, I had gotten used to the military routine of our days, to the exhaustion that fell upon me around five, to the cold during exercises in the fields, to living in a group, to eating together and to collapsing into bed at ten.

We had learned how to get out of minefields in one piece by prodding the ground section by section with the same metal skewer one uses for kebabs. We put together makeshift stretchers with blankets folded a certain way, we practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR, we were told how to dig a shelter in the snow if caught in a blizzard, we gained some notion of navigating by the stars, we learned to give our position by the compass, to recognize a package full of explosives and to check that the ignition wasn’t connected to an explosive device. I had filled pad after pad with notes, watched an infinite series of videos and slides; my head was full of rules, warnings, procedures.

I’d gotten used to waking before dawn every morning and going straight to the hotel gym, a small, sour-smelling room. I would usually find Monika Schluss already there, working out on the machines with methodical slowness, listening to her iPod. We’d give each other a quick smile, then I’d get on the treadmill and run for twenty minutes. I’d stare straight in front of me and think about my life and how unadventurous it had been in the last few years, until the sun would start to come in through the window and the silhouettes of the fir trees formed outside; that was the signal that it was time to take a shower and start another day of war.

The last day of the course I woke up earlier than usual. I didn’t feel like going to run on the treadmill and so I started zapping between TV channels while it was still pitch-dark outside.

The hostages in Iraq were still wearing their Day-Glo orange jackets and their faces looked grainy in the livid light. I watched the mute images as the newscaster gave an account of the latest, slim developments. Nothing had happened, it was just a matter of waiting, he said. Almost two months had gone by since they had been abducted. Who knows how they had been spending the time, who knows if they’d found a technique, a mental escape route, to avoid insanity while they kept on waiting.