The low sun shining on to my tiled ceiling showed it was late afternoon when they returned some days later. It was the Troll who opened the door and the boy swung in like a bellhop with a letter.
“This way,” he directed and seized my upper arm as I passed him, needlessly pushing me through the door. This must be what it was like to have been hanged in Britain, I remember thinking dispassionately, as I left my condemned cell for the first time.
The next room was only slightly larger than mine. It held a square, dark wooden table, some plastic easy chairs and a heavy door facing the one I came through, with two heavy bolts across its cross-beams and a single mortice lock by its round handle.
My heightened consciousness took in the metal-framed window with its short and dirtied coral fabric curtains, through which I could see the top of a wall that might mark the boundary of our building and some roofs in a parallel line beyond, implying a narrow street or an alley. We were, I guessed, on the second floor. There was an open arch to my right, to a space with a stove and a fridge, also bathed in natural light from another window. I assumed this had a bathroom to its rear, next to my room. We were in a one-or two-bedroom flat.
This front reception room had five men in it. Burly, the Boy and the Troll, who had been joined by two others, a youngish man who could have been the boy’s elder brother, who was talking in Lebanese to a more European-looking man in maybe his forties. This one was tinkering with a camcorder, wired by telephone spring cable to a laptop on the table.
This table was being shifted, leading to an altercation between the technician and the European. The young men were simultaneously climbing into dishdashes and arranging turbans above dark cowboy-style neckerchiefs. Sheets of paper with Arabic slogans were taped to the wall opposite the camera and I was manhandled on to a stool in front of them.
The boys, dressed, picked up automatic weapons and flanked me.
I can follow Lebanese patois rather more easily than Palestinian, so I gathered it was proving difficult to frame me with the slogans and the militia boys. I was stood up and sat down again as the chair was moved forward and back. Then the camera tripod was pulled back hard against the opposite wall, with its operator deploying its autofocus while holding the laptop in his spare hand. The cable jumped from its socket and he swore.
I suggested – first in English and then in pidgin Arabic – that the cameraman should use the extra range afforded by the kitchenette. There followed a pastiche of the clifftop just-one-step-back routine, a silent-movie slapstick. At one point, Burly laughed, a grunted guffaw that acknowledged, I thought, that I was directing the shoot.
After a while, the camera stood at a slight angle in the cooking area. The boys now stood at my shoulders with legs braced and guns across their chests, in the internationally recognised pose for terrorist propaganda videos. The room was hushed and, with Burly standing aside, the Eurocrat began reading a script towards the laptop.
As I stared ahead, as instructed, it began to dawn on me that I might be about to die, that this pantomime was about my videoed execution. My response was neither cold terror nor warm resignation, but rather a sense of humiliation. I felt pathetically compliant, assisting in my own destruction because they were stronger than me and I needed to please them.
I’d seen it in the wretched footage of executions before, from the Nazis to the Chinese. The obedient kneeling, the facing patiently towards the self-dug grave. If I cooperate, if I just play this game your way, you might approve of me and I may thus be acknowledged momentarily as part of this world, rather than merely its waste product. It’s this instinct, this final hope, I think, that makes the condemned play their parts so dutifully in the drama of their own deaths, instead of raging against the darkness of their killers’ intent, spoiling the show, like a defiant Christ who spits in the eye of Pontius Pilate and takes one Roman centurion down with him.
For me, I was acknowledging my captors’ control, their total domination in the two-roomed universe that they had created to contain me. So naturally I would play their game by their rules, help them to the best camera angle so they could murder me most effectively for public consumption.
As I sat and tried to listen, almost politely – the Jews were this and that, the state of Israel was something else – like the guest speaker at speech day, the crippled girl at school swung her wheelchair briefly in front of me. I felt sorry for myself not because I was about to die, but because my instinct had been to make common cause with my executioners, because the desire to join in to avoid any further, unnecessary suffering overcomes any conviction of your own autonomy. I’d stepped in for Sarah. There was no one there for me now. It was lonely.
I wondered briefly who would see this video. The Ruperts in their riverside offices, freeze-framing my rag-doll moment, that final affirmation that I was commoditised meat. I have no family to speak of, but I hoped Adrian wouldn’t see it. I didn’t want to be his paschal lamb. And I didn’t want Hugh to see it either. He wouldn’t get the joke. Perhaps it would make YouTube. Perhaps they could play it on a loop at
