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.