For a little while, you are that angel. Ephemeral saintliness hangs on you. It will not last. Already, irritations seep into your fingertips. You feel yourself slipping back to the conditions of living. But for a time, briefer than your captivity, and only because of it, you are burned pure, by everything you look upon.
You step from the plane and see them, as in the world newspaper photo they instantly become: two forms racing to meet you across the tarmac of Istanbul. The woman who has saved you, and some smaller other. Your eyes search for an empty prison to hide in. There will be talk; there will be touching. There is no earthly way that you can bear it. Your love rushes toward you but stops short, sobbing at the thought of real contact, of what happens next. Her small shadow steps forward from her. You look down and see your girl, this Scheherazade, whose name plays everywhere across her face, clutching a picture she has drawn for her foreign father. She clings to you as if she's known you all her short life. Grasps at long last the fable she's grown up on.
"Look," she says, shoving her drawing into your shaking hands. A crayon man, returning to a crayon home. "Look! I made this for you."
Freeing hostages is like putting up a stage set, which you do with the captors, agreeing on each piece as you slowly put it together. Then you leave an exit through which both the captor and the captive can walk with sincerity and dignity.
— Terry Waite, ABC TV, November 3 1986, shortly before his capture
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In telling the story of Taimur Martin, I have drawn on the many memoirs of the Westerners held hostage in Lebanon. I am indebted to these extraordinary accounts.