I could pick out some of the hurried Lebanese, delivered in a monotone rap, like a languid recitation of someone else’s audition piece. The Western oppressors of Islam were as guilty as the killer Jews, apparently. Mr Euro turned slightly to address this passage to me, and the boy to my right laid the cool blade of his curved kukri, or agricultural machete – I’m no expert on weapons of dismemberment – across my breast.
I glanced down, as if a waiter had dropped something in my lap. Burly shouted and left the wall, into the light of our stage area. Talking colloquial Arabic too fast for me to follow, he grabbed the handle of the blade, then my hair, and yanked my head back so that I blinked into the white light of the ceiling bulb, like Joan’s final vision at the stake of St Margaret.
Burly was still babbling at the boy and I realised he was giving directions in how to slit my throat. Mad as it sounds now, a paralysing calm consumed me at this point, as I winced into the light. I dreaded the pain, for sure, and I could feel my blood pound, so I knew it would spurt under some pressure. And it hurt now as he gathered a firmer clump of hair and pulled on the roots, but imminently I was to be no longer part of this room, nor of this foul human charade, with its cock-strutting politics. It all began to fall away and that was soothing, in its way.
I started, before I even recognised the formation of the words, to whisper the Nunc Dimittis. It’s odd to think of now, because I’m not sure I’d know the words that well, in Cranmer’s version anyway, if I was asked for them in, say, a taxi.
But these words moved my lips then in what I assumed would be their last articulations.
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.”
Burly stood aside, handing my hair to the boy, who held it more gently, and Mr Eurotrash was talking, the last other voice I would hear, I presumed. The words popped noiselessly on the breeze over my lips.
“For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
On which word, I wondered, would Simeon’s prayer end? I suppose every martyrdom leaves the fragment of an unfinished prayer, but I didn’t count as a martyr, I wasn’t dying for the Lord I now professed, I was dying for a Hamas promotional video. The sort of motivational tool that’s used in motels on Beirut’s périphérique and becomes the sordid currency of prurient schoolboys on social media. Decapitation. Would my brain know when it hit the floor?
“To be a light to lighten the Gentiles.”
The boy, it came to me, had dropped the hacking sword to his side and had let go of my hair, like a schoolchild who had completed his role in the nativity play. I rocked my head forward, away from the light, celebrating my intact neck, and looked the camcorder dead in the eye. Then Burly was in my face. There were minty toothpaste notes to the twist of tobacco on his breath.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
I switched my focus to his right ear, the blur of his sun-leathered skin becoming suddenly sharp.
“I was naming my children,” I said.
He straightened and said something about taking the camera out, then indicated that I was to be returned to my cell. The younger one to my left took me under the armpit and, more roughly this time, swung me to my feet and around in a cruel parody of a square dance, and through the door. Burly followed. As I stood on the rope carpet, he looked at me with a sort of palsied face and his shoulders dropped.
“We don’t kill you today,” he said without expression, then turned and left. I heard the bolts shift on the outer door to the street. The boy and the dark young man remained.
“You like it?” said the boy, his top lip parting from his upper teeth.
“Do I like what?” I said, as benignly as I could muster. I genuinely didn’t know what he meant. He swung up his arm and handed the other his automatic weapon, then rushed on me, pushing me hard up against the wall, a forearm across my throat, his other hand working the buckle of my trouser belt ineffectually. He was gurning at me and I hung limp against the wall, as I think you’re taught to if attacked by a bear. The fumbling hand slowed and he glanced at his friend in an appeal for assistance, but he stayed at the door.
“You won’t like it,” I said softly. He was still and I fixed his dark eyes. “I’m bleeding.”
I held the stare. It was a point of information, no more.
He whisked his arm away in a grand gesture of jettisoning me and staggered into the middle of the room as if drunk, snapping his head from me to his friend and back again.
“Huh,” he went and “Huh” again, then a chuck of the head and a grin. He took his weapon back and, rather spoiling the effect of his desperado exit, gestured an “after you” to his partner, before slamming and locking the door behind him without looking back at me.
I stayed against the wall, breathing in the solitude of the room. This was my space. After a few minutes like that, I took the steps to my bed and lay on my back, breathing evenly and deeply. My limbs felt heavy but didn’t shake. The palms of my hands spread over the sheets, which had stiffened from my night sweats.
I realised, curiously, that I had slept for a moment or two when my left knuckles slid into the narrow gap between the bed and the cool of the wall. There was a fissure in the wood,
