A Manual for Hostages

After returning to New York in the late 1980s, having spent seven-hundred and thirty-six desperate, hopeless days as a hostage in Beirut, Rook began to hear a voice. This voice neither forbade, nor commanded him to do things. It brought no knowledge. Hailing a cab on Third Avenue, the voice would speak; pareva facile giuoco. Or, standing in front of the counter in a liquor store, a bottle of bourbon in one hand, cash in the other, the voice would say: kein sweiter himmel. It offered terse, oblique commentary: Ta vie n’est rien

Rook worked as a translator at the Thessalonian Foundation in the old Con-Ed building on Lexington Avenue. He spoke English, Italian, French, German, Arabic, Farsi. Tall and anxious-looking, his eyes were the color of sky on the last pale day of winter. White teeth, slightly irregular, with one tooth overlapping the other. They remained unseen because he never laughed.

Late into the evening he wandered the streets, coughing into his fist, wearing a Loden coat. No other passerby looked so fragile. “What happened to me could happen again at any minute. It must be continually remembered.”

At forty-seven, Jason, the Foundation’s mail clerk, looked even older than Rook. What was left of his hair was snow-white, his eyes were surrounded by frown lines. He limped, he hunched, he mumbled. He was nothing like his father, a Jew from Budapest who converted to Catholicism and attended seminary in order to elude the Nazis. He was nothing like his mother who escaped from Vienna via Greece eventually making shore in Haifa by way of a converted cattle boat.

Jason held a degree in medicine but had chosen not to pursue it as a career. Incapable of caring for both his parents and strangers, he quit after his first year of residency.

“As a doctor I would never amount to anything important. I feel this absolutely.”

His parents, each of whom were in their eighties, owned a home in Forest Hills. From the window of his room in the attic, Jason could see the Chrysler Building, gleaming like a 30-gauge syringe.

Rook was married to Mallory, a dancer in the New York Chamber Ballet Company. Thirty years older than Mallory, Rook admitted to experiencing, despite the depth of a genuine love, the ‘loneliness a deux’ of the couple.

They first met in a bar — Siberia, located underground in the 1/9 uptown subway stop at 50th street. Louche and disreputable, it was not the sort of place Mallory usually frequented. Rook had been on one of his binges and she was meeting a date. When she walked in the door — blonde, shimmering — he’d popped off the barstool like a marionette and approached her. Drunk and on pills, he was a rocket fired by longing, roaring through the night. While she was still taking off her coat he gestured at the surroundings and recited a line of poetry:

It would take more than a lightning-stroke/To create such a ruin.

Was he talking about the bar or himself? She’d ordered a drink and pulled from her bag the very book — The Colossus — that the words had been quoted from. She wrote down her telephone number with grim efficiency — like she was making out his severance check — and sent Rook on his way. A week later they ran into each other on the F train. Inevitability dogged them every step of the way.

****

She may have danced the role of Giselle for months on end, but she still went through the same routine, the same grueling exercises every morning. Her life appeared to consist of little more than discipline and deprivation. She barely ate and suffered from a series of nagging injuries that left her in almost constant pain.

At their wedding, Jason had been the best man. Sipping champagne afterward, Mallory had whispered to him; “He was always like this, wasn’t he? I don’t think he was ever any different.” Giddy, gesturing with her long, exquisite arms, she acted out a typical afternoon.

Mallory: “Let’s go to a museum.”

Rook: “I don’t go to museums.”

Mallory: “O.K.”

Silence.

Rook: "Have you noticed that winter is over?"

Mallory: “Yes, Rook I have.”

Rook: “What museum were you thinking of…?”

Early in May she’d left New York to visit her parents in Los Angeles. Rook refused to accompany her. When in the presence of Mallory’s father and mother he felt like an impostor, an unclean spirit; the aging, near elderly husband of their beautiful, talented daughter. For their own good, the less they saw of him the better. Rook’s father had been a stonemason, his mother a midwife and both had been dead for more than twenty years. He’d outgrown the idea of ‘parents’.

Mallory thought he was scared, more scared than anyone she’d ever met.

“I understand, Rook…”

After her visit in Los Angeles ended, she would leave for an eight-week tour of the Far East.

****

They questioned him for twenty hours a day, sometimes longer. He was hungry, cold. Left on the floor, he’d fall asleep in seconds. Ten minutes later they’d force him to stand, to recite his name and his reason for being in their country. He was blindfolded, punched and kicked around the room. Handcuffed, they allowed him to eat rice, to drink dirty water. His wrists and ankles were swollen from festering insect bites. They lied to him constantly. His entire life was remade before his eyes: you are a CIA agent, a Mossad agent. You are one or both. He was marched from room to room, up and down stairs, back and forth for hours on end.

They showed him that the worst thing in the world was to be made transparent. And that the most persuasive argument was a simple punch in the face.

****

Jason’s parents were always awake before him, slippers hissing against the floor as they moved from room to room. Listening to the daily account of crime and punishment on 1010 WINS, his mother would shake her head and mutter: “When the slave has finally wrested the whip from his master’s hand and begun to whip himself, it is then and only then, that he has become a full-fledged American citizen.”

Meanwhile, his father would moan and cry — his wife called him the Mourning Dove — as he tied and retied the belt of his bathrobe.

Jason cooked, cleaned, mixed their medications, administered their injections, their enemas, helped his incontinent father in the bathroom. Pain and terror were not hidden aspects of the world, but always present. Accept them with patience and resignation, accept them with open eyes. His parents insisted on this.

When he’d finally leave for work at 730am, great spasms of relief would wash over him. At the bus-stop, he could be seen — a small man in a shabby raincoat — breathing heavily beneath the Plexiglas enclosure.

****

The room — ten paces by six — was the size of a suburban bathroom or walk-in closet. The cloud-colored walls were stained with blood and offal. Marauding mice and bugs came and went from crevices in the cement floor. A bricked over window, a symbol of his foreclosed life, mocked him.

In the mornings and evenings, he was blindfolded and led to a stinking, shit-encrusted toilet. At other times the masked men pointed their weapons and pulled the triggers. Click-click. Click-click.

****

On the day after Easter, in the first year of President Bush’s second term, Rook and Jason took a lunchtime walk. They left the office, went momentarily blind in the afternoon sunlight then headed uptown toward Bloomingdales. Moving against the current of pedestrian traffic they were like two trout in a stream.

Rook’s hands were clasped behind his back. He walked in one direction while his mind went in another. He could feel himself slipping from reality. Spots boiled in front of his eyes, a door opened, and a certain Abdel appeared carrying a wooden stool. Dressed in a blue business suit and spotless white shirt he placed the stool in the center of the room and sat on it. His attire and clean-shaven face were an anomaly among the militants. From a distance of twenty years Rook heard himself speak, I am not a hostage, Abdel. I am a saint. And you are not a militant but an artisan; you manufacture saints…

Just as Rook was about to step in front of a taxicab, Jason reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Watch it, watch it.”

Rook smiled, pushed on the bridge of his glasses. “The ancient Greeks used a word to describe torture: άvάγkάi. It means indispensable. ”

Jason had been a virgin when he’d met Rook. Rook had quickly intuited this state of affairs and set about putting an end to it. It had entailed a mere commercial transaction; L’argent pour les femmes.

They stopped at an intersection. Blinking above Rook’s head like hammered silver: DON’T WALK DON’T WALK.

He was a man who spoke from unfathomable depths. “Abdel is so close to me, Jason, that I am almost always engaged in a struggle with him.”

Jason lifted a cigarette to his lips. His face was thin with hard edges. Mother forbade him to smoke at home. His life was one long act of penance, spent in a world devoid of timeless, sacred spaces. Rook, on the other hand, had found one and refused to leave it.

****

It might not have happened if Rook hadn’t missed the shuttle-bus transporting members of his delegation from the hotel to the airport on what should have been his last day in Lebanon. Beset by a fit of insomnia he hadn’t fallen asleep until 5AM and subsequently slept through the wake-up call at 6.

The concierge found him a cab and as he sat in the back giving the driver instructions, a coffee-colored Fiat pulled in front, blocking the way. Without speaking, a man in a black balaclava stepped out of the passenger side door waving a pistol and dragged Rook from the cab into the back seat of the Fiat. Another man, also wearing a balaclava, put the car in gear, pointed a gun at the overcast sky and fired.

****

Mallory had seen the fresh marks on his back, along his shoulders and arms. She’d recoiled in fear. “My god, what’s happened?”

His lies had sinew and bone and were not easily pushed aside. “Stress causes the old wounds to reappear. Fatigue, poor diet. It’s like a chronic disease…if I don’t take care of myself, they come back.”

Mallory was used to believing things about her own body that were far from true. Like many dancers she was convinced that bodies were governed by the uncanny. She was not so different from a peasant who assumed that a cat sneezing was good luck for all who heard it.

****

At The Foundation, Rook translated financial statements, press releases, applications for research grants. Over time, the workflow had diminished to a trickle. His office, however, remained a dusty forest, a kingdom of paper. Periodicals, industry journals, government reports, correspondence, manuscripts all written in a variety of languages rose from the floor like stalagmites. The cleaning woman was under strict orders to stay out — one errant stroke of her duster could lead to her death by an avalanche of interoffice correspondence. The demiurge at the center of this labyrinth could, naturally, find anything requested at a moment’s notice.

Jason walked in the door. Without looking up, eyes on the page in front of him, Rook asked: “Where the hell have you been?”

When Rook had work, Jason was his de facto assistant, typing, emailing, telephoning on Rook’s behalf. At those times, he could be found in Rook’s office working at the small table beneath the window, while Rook sat at his desk drinking a cup of hot water, rereading his manuscript. It had been rejected by thirty different publishers. He no longer had an agent. Emotionless, Disconnected, Overwritten, Not Believable were some of the adjectives that had been applied to his memoir of Beirut.

“Getting your lunch among other things

Jason placed a brown paper bag on Rook’s desk. “One can of coca-cola, one pint of brown rice. They were out of white.”

Perhaps, because Rook was fluent in so many languages, he spoke English as if he’d learned it the day before. Often, he sounded sarcastic or condescending.

“You know Jason, while some men persuade themselves that devotion is superior to obedience…I learned…” He picked up the brown paper bag with a thumb and forefinger. “I learned long ago that one can live solely on indifference.” With a thud the bag landed in the garbage can next to his desk.

Sometimes they argued. Once, Jason suggested that self-pity should always be avoided in writing. Rook had snapped: “I’m a not a man, Jason, I’m a metaphor.”

The first words Rook spoke to him (other than Can you post this?) were: “You wouldn’t want to have been in my shoes, arriving here after Beirut…it was as if my eyes were new. I could literally see through people. Even worse, I could hear their beating hearts, the blood pulsing in their arteries.”

“Jason,” he lifted his manuscript and waved it in the air. After all these years it remained a slim volume. “They want a sentimental, facile tale of redemption, how, in the end, I became a better person for having been kidnapped. And they hate the title: A Manual for Hostages. Irony has no place in a memoir such as mine, or so I’m told. ‘You suffered yet you overcame that suffering. That is your story.’” His voice was hoarse, as if he needed a drink of water. He looked even more haggard than usual.

The only time Jason ever saw anger in Rook’s eyes was when he discussed his book.

“Braudel wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a German POW camp. And Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus under similar conditions. My book suffers from a lack of immediacy…I’ve overthought everything.”

“It has its charms, Rook.”

Rook spun in his chair to face the window. “The language that my book should have been written in is neither English, nor French nor Italian, nor Arabic, but a language of which I know not a word…” Rook stopped and began to cough.

In the mail clerk’s estimation, the hermetic cadence of Rook’s writing, often mocked by cynical editors, was a stumbling block.

Eyes watering, he cleared his throat. "I'm sorry I was rude to you just now, Jason. I am dreadful to everyone. But I shouldn't have been to you.”

****

Backstage, Mallory stared into the mirror. Beneath all the makeup she saw only a fragment of herself, peering out as if from a half-remembered photograph. Performance over, her muscles remained engorged, as endorphins and adrenaline flashed through her blood. Her body and soul would not reunite for another forty minutes…when the pain returned.

It was strange to her that more performers and athletes didn’t look to Christ as an example. He was often thanked as a vehicle for one’s success — without God I could not have done this — but who admired Him for His ability to suffer, to invite torment and affliction? No one, it seemed to her, had ever said Christ has given me a good example, from Him I learned how to suffer like a champion.

Bernard appeared behind her, hands squeezing her shoulders. In the mirror she could see dandruff from his beard flecking his black sweater where it covered his sternum.

“My god, that was awful, Mallory. I mean, I thought I was going to be physically ill. And you’re only thirty. Maybe you’re one of those women who gets…what do they call it? Premature menopause?”

He walked away, in the direction of Paulette, the prima. Mallory watched Bernard’s hand reach out and grip Paulette’s wrist. Almost immediately Paulette’s fingers began to change color. First red, then purple. Bernard lowered his head and whispered into her ear.

When they’d first met, a year earlier, Paulette had confided: “After my aunt stopped dancing, she shrank — literally, almost three inches overnight. And then the arthritis commenced. She walks with a cane now. Was it worth it? She swears it was. I mean, what else could she say?”

****

Do not show fear, he’d told himself. Fear made them drunk. The room they’d kept him in had smelled of sewage and car exhaust. He’d crouch in one corner with a soiled grey London Fog raincoat thrown over his shoulders like a cape. Bony wrists jutting from a frayed black sweater, he’d draw on the floor with the nub of a pencil.

Would he ever again witness soft light falling upon a rain-soaked, verdant landscape?

The sound of gunfire could often be heard; sometimes faintly, at other times the walls shook with the thunder of heavy weaponry.

Periodically, Abdel would appear with the men in balaclavas: “I have rescued you, Rook, from the barbaric frenzy of America and given you the vita contemplativa. One day, I’m sure, you will thank me.”

Before departing like actors from a stage, they’d leave a container of rice, a can of Pepsi.

****

They drank schnapps from clear Wagenfeld teacups and watched 60 MINUTES on the television. Half-eaten meals decomposed on TV trays in front of them. Like children they never finished their meals.

His father cupped a thick-fingered hand to his ear. “Jason, I can’t hear what he’s saying…I can’t hear Morley Safer…”

He lifted a remote control, the TV roared.

Morley Safer: You are arguably the greatest jockey ever to live. I would be hard put to think of another who could compare. What goes through your mind these days?

Willie Shoemaker: The losses. I think only of the races I should have won. Of the impotent possibility of… (Shoemaker grimaces) In my heart I know that my losses made me the man, made me the jockey I became…the victories really…(Shoemaker rubs a tear from his eye) the victories…(he pauses)…the victories were only the byproduct of defeat.

His mother drained her cup and returned it to its saucer. “This man is a millionaire! What does he have to complain about? What has he seen? What has he born witness to? What?”

Hands in his lap, Jason was silent. One could only guess whether his silence was due to respect, indifference, anger or some other emotion that only silence could contain.

****

One evening or morning (it was hard for Rook to say with any confidence which was which), as he was blindfolded and led to the toilet, he heard a man crying. Perhaps, he suffered from an illness. Or perhaps it was the sound of hopelessness, of a mind coming apart. Rook had entertained the idea that there were hundreds, even thousands of hostages — that he was imprisoned in a vast, ever expanding dormitory for abductees. What if, in this building — a building he’d never seen, which held an unknown number of rooms — what if there was a hostage in each room? Or multiple hostages in each room? The idea fascinated him, but he could not explain why.

****

Jason walked down the carpeted stairway and stopped in the kitchen doorway. His mother held a beige telephone receiver against her chest. “Your friend, Mr. Rook, is on the line.” She handed him the phone and winked. “One might gather from the looseness of his tongue that he’s been drinking.”

Jason tried not to think about it or allow himself to be alarmed. He took the phone and waited for his mother to shuffle back to the living room. He lifted it to his ear: “Hello.”

“Jason? Is that you?” Rook sounded congested. “I’m just home from a memorial…an old…well I don’t know how to describe him…he wasn’t a colleague exactly…in fact I never met him…but, he was once imprisoned in the same building as I was.”

“I see.” Jason looked at his watch. It was eight-ten.

“I’d heard through the grapevine that he wasn’t doing well.”

“Hmm-mm.” Jason pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat. He detested himself for not hanging up the telephone.

“A woman — I don’t even know who she was — read something. I found it very moving and jotted it down. Let me read it to you: If tears could wash the dust, if blood could be exchanged for freedom, may tomorrow remember the roar of today, may the world also behold the wound of history.”

Rook often insinuated that he was part of something that sounded almost like a network of ex-hostages. He’d even hinted that there was an element of exclusivity to it. To Jason, it seemed so far-fetched, so absurd on its face that it had to be true.

“He died of mesothelioma.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Rook…” Jason could picture him sitting on the window sill of his third-floor apartment on Charlton Street, black desk phone in his lap, a hum of traffic from the nearby Holland Tunnel buzzing in the background.

“There were asbestos-clad pipes in every room. They left a residue on everything. Especially when the earth shook — which was often — with all the explosions, gun battles and so on.”

Jason had resigned himself to spending his life in obscurity, barely noticed by anyone — then he’d met Rook, a man whose name was in encyclopedias, a man with a luminous, complicated history. “That’s one more reason for you to see a doctor as soon as you can.”

His voice seemed vague. “The reason I called you…”

Jason stood up, then sat once more. “It’s been twenty years, Rook. You should see a doctor.”

“…Let me sketch out a scenario,” A silence followed. “A man — let’s call him A. — visits a building…he walks through the lobby, up flights of stairs…the shabby maroon carpet is filthy, the walls stained with the handprints of children. Through empty windowpanes, cold air blows on his face. Loud music, screams, laughter bleed into the stairwell from the hallways. At apartment 308, Jason, Mr. ‘A.’ stops, knocks on the door. It swings open and another man — let’s call him Mr. B.’ — large, working class, probably a Pole, dressed like a painter in white pants and t-shirt. Different colored paint stains decorated his pants, his shirt, his hands and arms. And he smells terribly of alcohol and body odor. He pulls Mr. ‘A.” by the lapels into the apartment. He removes Mr. ‘A’s wallet and counts out one hundred dollars, pockets it.” A long pause. The words, coming with agonized slowness, seemed to take forever. “The room is bright; a fluorescent tube cast its sickly light from the center of the ceiling. Can you see it, Jason? There are cans of paint are stacked against the wall, step-ladders piled on the floor, battered, ancient tool-boxes, an exterminator’s sprayer. The smells of chemicals, of cigarette smoke are overpowering. In the middle of the room there is, strangely enough, a piano bench. Mr. ‘B.’ lifts the lid and removes a telescopic fishing rod. He instructs Mr. ‘A.’ to sit on the bench. Mr. ‘B’ snaps open the fishing rod; “This will make the air sing, Mr. ‘A.’

Jason interrupted: “It’s late, I have to go…”Like an actor who’d lost his place and forgotten his lines, Rook’s tone of voice abruptly changed. “The end, the secret, the hidden truth has been inside me for twenty years.”

****

It was a painting of the unfolding of time. Time was merely another color in the painter’s palette. Rudoph II once owned it. Its shapes sang to him. Exhausted men swung scythes, women carried bundles in the distance. On a hillside covered in chest-high, golden wheat, the peasants carried out tasks they had performed a thousand times. The sky was yellow with light. The painting, almost a manual on how to harvest, had neither beginning nor end. He’d stood before it again and again and assumed that the secret to his own existence could be revealed if he approached it from the right angle. At other times he felt the painting was suffocating, monstrous. It was a hymn to death: the infinity of the barren sky, the corporeality of the peasants, the cut wheat on the ground, waiting for workers to bind it. He imagined the painter, brush stroking the wooden panel, believed himself capable of seeing the entirety of the universe.

****

It was difficult to face the evening calmly. So, Rook walked. By eight the sky was fading, the Hudson was molten gold. Tugboats and barges sailed past. A moral life was possible; but he had not lived one. Turning away from the river, he lost his sense of direction and was soon out of breath. As he hesitated in the middle of Houston Street, a passing bicyclist cursed at him. The city could sense his weakness. It had found him unfit and would expel him. Ta vie n’est rien. He ran a trembling hand through his hair, changed direction and headed back toward the river.

****

Jason hung his father’s bathrobe in the closet and tiptoed across the carpet to the bedroom door. They were both asleep, their breathing synchronized; perhaps they even dreamt the same dream. He closed the door behind him. An immense weight pushed down on him as he traversed the dark hallway. Streetlights shone outside the windows. He was alone; he could drink a glass of kirsch, read the biography of T.E. Lawrence he’d gotten from the library and fall asleep in his father’s Laz-y-Boy. He thought of the book as he descended the stairs. The words he’d read had become like his own distant memories of a very sunny world with men in long white robes. In the kitchen he poured out his drink, pushed aside the curtain and looked out. It had begun to rain. He smiled at the wet streets. He turned away and carried the drink into the living room. Next to the chair was a basket filled with books and magazines. He picked up the biography, took a sip of his drink and flipped it open. A newspaper clipping held his place between pages 188 and 189. Helplessly, he unfolded it and read it for the hundredth time:

Ex-Hostage Drowned, Suicide Likely.

He folded it once more and placed it in the back of the book. Lawrence had helped bring about the end of the Ottoman Empire. What had Jason done with his life? His smile hung, like a cloud, above his heart.