Hood

I fell headlong onto the back seat. They tied my hands behind my back. They had heaved me in, causing bruising to my shins. I felt their hands all over me, tugging at the hood, pulling it down over my shoulders because it was big, and I am small. They tucked as much of me as they could inside what was now a sack. The coarse hessian was rough on my skin. It smelt strongly of body odours and spread a sense of doom. As the vehicle raced on, they jostled to hold me down. I was struggling because I’m claustrophobic , and I was as frightened as a caged animal. My lungs were sucking in the chafed fibres that had been loosened as they wrestled with me. With my hands tied behind me there was nothing I could do to save myself. 

I imagined the two young officers stony-faced and smug. My last image of them was at the door towering over the old man who had sheltered me for almost a year. They had swaggered then in front of him, amused with the satisfaction of youth lauding it, usurping the precedence of age. They were insolent, yet sheepish with the unnatural nature of the flip. For me it was no different. It was strength over weakness, nature in the raw.  They sat either side of me and pressed the muzzles of their guns hard against my thighs.

I had a memory of hoods. Long time ago. Memory of a gallows against a church wall. Not a Christian affair. More a tyranny. I had seen tyranny from the outside, never imagining the inside and how completely a hood smothers you. Like tyranny does.

Why the hood I asked myself, not myself though. 

Why a hood, I asked the indifferent universe. What was it I must not see? Their faces? The route? No it was none of these. It was a hood because, once you cannot see the world as you saw it before, you cannot be of it as you were. You are gone inside yourself where the heart beats faster, blood pulsing noisily in your head.  And that is absolute fear, fear without defence. Not fright nor flight but pulsating flow of blood through veins, viscous and life-driven. There is no fight or flight. There is freeze in a sweat.

Sweat poured down my face so profusely I could not tell its moisture apart from my tears. The world that passed along outside me was muffled. Fibres filled my nostrils, I breathed too fast with my mouth open and at some point I must have gone unconscious.

I found the two youths anxiously staring at me. I was lying on the road, the hood removed. They seemed sorry. They fussed about me and offered water. They smiled when I drank. They wiped my face. They untied my hands. They were no longer the brutes I had seen in them. They seemed relieved. 

I wondered now what their purpose could be. I made the rest of the journey without the hood.  But I registered nothing of the landscape we passed through. I did not care to see, to feel, to forgive, to remember. I could only be.  For who was this person who was me? What right had I to be here? What purpose did I serve? What did it mean if they had rescued me after first breaking me out of the quiet oasis I had thought I could be a part of? 

How painful now to think of Ramzi’s wife with her newborn son. To think of their kindness to me. The risk they had taken and the danger they could now be in. Only now   –  as my distance from them stretched not as a road but as a line of time that after so much lengthening must thin to a thread of spider gossamer and snap  –  only now did I understand the risk they had taken to shelter me. I could not bear to think about what could happen to them, neither could I let go of the thread .