A hostage’s daydream

Twenty-five years ago, in a windowless Levantine oubliette, my wrist and ankle were bound with chains, but my imagination soared. Among my many daydreams was a reunion a quarter-century hence. The guests at this illusory affair were to have been my captors. There were times when I envisaged our encounter as real, and others as a piece of theatre. Either way, 25 years on, it hasn’t happened. Nor has anything else I expected before I escaped from Hezbollah in Beirut in August 1987.

The rendezvous was to take place at the Grand Hotel Kadri in Zahle, a Christian village where the foothills of Mount Lebanon descend into the Bekaa Valley. At that time, the United States government declared Bekaa the ‘world capital of terror’, an attribution subsequently transferred to Iraq, Afghanistan and, latterly, northwest Pakistan. The Kadri, a stone edifice with elegant ogival arches in the late Ottoman manner, provided a tranquil setting beside the river Berdawni, removed from the confusion and violence of Beirut’s southern outskirts. (Some time after my escape, decorators vandalised the hotel interior, but that did not figure in my vision of its future.) The first act of this impossible drama was set early in the morning. My wife would be sleeping upstairs, while I paced the stone terrace waiting for my former jailers. How, I wondered, would I recognise them? They had kept me blindfolded — no bad thing. If they let you see their faces, they were going to kill you.

I would listen for their voices at the breakfast table and hear the hoarse rasp of Mohammed, one of the few guards who had shown me kindness. (Midway through my 62 days as Hezbollah’s guest, he had taken a letter to a friend of mine asking him for money to tell Mohammed where I was.