The ISIS Hostage

by Puk Damsgård

  Daniel took off his glasses and sobbed towards the church floor, unable to repress a desperate wail, which came thundering out in convulsions from his stomach and along his spine. He let it all come flooding out for the first time since August, when Arthur had told him the news of James’s death. He wiped away the tears with both hands, exposing the red scars around his wrists. They were imprinted into his skin like tattooed bracelets. Daniel put on his glasses again and looked towards the altar with flushed cheeks.

  ‘Happy birthday, Jim,’ concluded the priest, and the congregation said a prayer for all the refugees in the world and the Syrians who were living in a bloody warzone for the third year. They finished the service by singing ‘I Am the Bread of Life’.

  Outside the church, Daniel smoked another cigarette.

  ‘A demon has just left my body,’ he remarked to Arthur, before he screamed out loud to himself and to the autumn air: ‘James, you asshole! I miss you! Why the hell did you have to go and die?’

  The family drove out to the graveyard. A flat grey headstone lay in the grass, surrounded by red maple leaves and yellow flowers. Diane put her arm around her mother’s shoulders as they stood in a semicircle and silently prayed. The clouds cleared and the sun’s rays hit the burial plot. Daniel looked at James’s headstone. It read: ‘A man for others’.

  ‘Look, here comes the sun. It turned out to be a bright day after all,’ commented Diane.

  After the ceremony James’s family paid tribute to his life by holding a reception at the church. His former nanny remarked that he had died dressed in the bright orange colour of life, while the executioner wore the black robes of Satan. The priest, Reverend Paul, recalled one of the last evenings when he had eaten dinner with the family before James travelled to Syria.

  ‘I said to James that his brothers and his sister were not thrilled about his decision to travel to Syria, back into the lion’s den. “Father,” James answered. “I have to go back and tell the stories of the Syrian people. They’re living under a dictator who tramples all over them as if they were grass.”’ Reverend Paul added: ‘Here, we have food on our table, but we have no idea what the Syrian people are going through. I know that James’s mission came from the heart.’

  Diane stood in the same spot for several hours, receiving condolences from the guests, who stood in a queue that wound around the entire room.

  ‘God bless you all,’ she whispered.

  The next morning Daniel impulsively bought a sweater featuring New Hampshire’s revolutionary war motto ‘Live Free or Die’. Arthur and he also bought a couple of beers, some water and biscuits from an old lady’s convenience store and drove out to the enormous forest surrounding Lake Winnipesaukee, where James had spent time as a child.

  Daniel pulled the burgundy ‘Live Free or Die’ sweater over his head and wandered with Arthur along the humid forest paths for hours, getting lost between the bare trunks and russet leaves. Daniel took a deep breath. It was just as quiet as it had been sometimes in captivity – or back in the field near his childhood home in Hedegård. He knew what it felt like to long for death rather than life. Among the tree trunks, in the clinging mud that weighed down their shoes, he shouted, ‘That’s my motto from now on, Arthur: Live Free or Die!’

  The Elite Gymnast from Hedegård

  Daniel clapped his hands at the audience from the stage of the Ocean theme park in Hong Kong. It was 15 July 2011 and he was dressed in a seahorse costume on a light-blue stage decorated with painted coral. Below him, he could see people with umbrellas shading themselves from the sun. Techno rhythms were booming so loudly from the speakers that parents had to shout to their children, who sat in folding chairs eating ice cream.

  He looked up to where he could just make out a platform against the sky, which was at a height of twenty-five metres. He had to climb up there, jump off – and land in a three-metre deep pool. It was the climax of the show.

  He pulled off the costume that fitted his body like a wetsuit and threw it away from him. The audience was enthusiastically cheering the blond, fit, tanned twenty-two-year-old Dane in his black bathing trunks, who was now beginning to climb up to the platform. Every muscle in his body was tense. This was the moment for which he had been rehearsing and waiting.

  After a few weeks of performing, he had become tired of being a bouncing seahorse turning somersaults on a trampoline. He would rather be the cool, bare-chested diver, who jumped off the tower in a high dive. Daniel was a perfectionist and, even though this was just a holiday job in a Hong Kong arena, he had insisted on learning how to dive.

  When he reached the platform, there was barely room for his feet. He stood on the small square, leaning against the metal behind him and clapped to get the audience going. Then he turned around and jumped out in a backward somersault.

  The landing had to be precise − legs first, side by side. If he hit the surface askew or his legs were too spread out at the moment of landing, then, because of the entry speed, water would be forced up his rear end. Afterwards, it would be like he was pissing out of his backside, which he felt would be inelegant when he should be taking the applause from the audience.

  The dive took him out of his comfort zone. But Daniel was an elite gymnast who had competed internationally, so it was the simplest thing in the world for him to perform moves like an Arabian Whip Double or a Stretched Whip Flick Double or a Stretched Whip Double Hip with a perfect landing.

  Daniel had been competing for years in European and world championships in power tumbling, a branch of gymnastics in which gymnasts perform eight different elements on a fibre track. The dive in Hong Kong added a new height element to his physical abilities. It was frightening at first, but he soon got used to it.

  During the six weeks he was working in the theme park, his attention began to be drawn towards the Middle East. In his breaks he read about the revolutions in Syria and Libya in the local English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post. He cut out pictures of demonstrations from Syria and hung them up in the shipping container where the artists rested between shows.

  The Syrians were demanding reform and these demands were being met with live ammunition and police violence. When President Bashar al-Assad refused to listen and instead deployed the military and the police against peaceful demonstrators, the protesters demanded the removal of his regime.

  The seeds of the war in Syria had been sown.

  · * ·

  Daniel was born in Brøns, in south-west Jutland on 10 March 1989, the younger brother of Anita, who was seven years older. The family lived in a detached house where Daniel’s mother Susanne also ran a hair salon. His father was a fisherman. Susanne was meticulous with her customer’s hair, a trait which was also reflected in her insistence upon order and tidiness in the home. Daniel was just a year old when his father was diagnosed with brain cancer. One morning in early May 1992 he passed away on the sofa in the living room. His last wish was that Susanne would find a new man who could be a father to Daniel and Anita.

  A few months later – and with that thought in mind – Susanne put her grief and obligations on hold for a night and went to a widows’ ball in a nearby town, where she met Kjeld, a tall, handsome man. They were married exactly one year after their first meeting on 11 September 1993 – a date which became a day of happiness in Susanne’s life. She and the children soon moved into Kjeld’s red-brick house in the village of Hedegård, close to Billund in south-central Jutland. Their new home was twenty brisk steps from the yellow house where Kjeld’s parents lived and where he himself had grown up. The couple had a daughter, whom they named Christina. Although Daniel had never known his biological father, he got a new one in Kjeld, who adopted him and Anita.

  The family’s single-storey house was surrounded by fields and woodland and had a lawn covered with molehills. There were horses and cows on the neighbouring land and just up the road was the local village
hall. Behind Susanne and Kjeld’s house was the big garage where Kjeld’s lorry was parked and where they celebrated special birthdays. The couple added a bay window on to the house and turned the bedroom into a hairdressing salon, where Susanne cut her customers’ hair during the day, while Kjeld made a living as a lorry driver.

  Daniel passed his grandmother’s yellow-brick house on his way to Hedegård Free School, where Kjeld had also been a pupil many years earlier. It was on a narrow asphalt road with no street lights. Motorists drove fast out in the country, so Susanne sewed reflectors on to Daniel’s clothes. The neighbours smiled when he walked by and said that he looked like a Christmas tree. Susanne shushed them. If her son heard their jokes, he would rip off the reflectors.

  As a youngster, Daniel loved to do somersaults and handstands. Susanne thought it was a healthy hobby and sent him to gymnastics in the neighbouring town of Give. From the floor of the hall, he soared through the air with extraordinary power and it was obvious to everyone that he had elite potential. When he got older, he dedicated himself to developing his gymnastic skills for two years at the Vesterlund sports boarding school, where he lived the disciplined life of an athlete and where, for the first time, he experienced a strange and unsettling sensation over a girl.

  Her name was Signe and he loved her freckles, her reddish hair and her round, pale-blue eyes. She was the most talented girl in the school. She did the same jumps and somersaults as the boys, and Daniel noticed that she didn’t doll herself up with make-up and nail polish like the other girls. While in school they were sweethearts, but the relationship petered out afterwards when Daniel became busy with his apprenticeship as a carpenter and training with the national gymnastic team.

  It became commonplace for him to be laying a roof on a house with a pain in his back and having to make regular appointments with a chiropractor, until he eventually decided to drop his apprenticeship.

  ‘I can always find time to become a carpenter. I can’t always be on the national team,’ was Daniel’s answer to his mother when she admonished him about not finishing what he had begun.

  Instead, he made unsolicited applications to all the gymnastics schools in Denmark for a position as an instructor. A school in Vejstrup in the province of Funen snapped him up. He taught gymnastics for a year, while also building stairs and mowing lawns, between participating in competitions. He took up photography, too, inspired by the photos his coach took of him as he soared and rotated through the air. There was something in those frozen nanoseconds that fascinated him. They captured the tension in the muscles or concentration in the eyes. So he borrowed Kjeld’s SLR camera, which he took along in his bag when he went to compete in the World Championship in power tumbling in Canada in 2008. He photographed the gymnastics halls and hotel rooms; the bodies in their tight suits and the successes, sweat, somersaults and setbacks that shone out from the faces of the gymnasts. He photographed the gymnastics bubble in which he travelled around the world, and discovered that the camera was a tool he could use to explore people’s lives.

  He soon took ownership of Kjeld’s camera, carrying it around with him to every competition. Later, he got in touch with his grandfather’s friend, whose son was a photojournalist. Hans Christian Jacobsen invited him to Aarhus, where he patiently looked at Daniel’s photographs of flowers and gymnastics. Afterwards, Hans Christian showed him his own photographs, which he had taken in some of the world’s most troubled regions. Daniel stared at a photo of a boy who was jumping into a lake somewhere in Kabul – shadows, light, a boy in a ray of sunshine. Hans Christian’s images sparked something in him and all Daniel could think about was getting out into the world and capturing it all with his camera. When he was twenty-one he bought his own camera, packed it in his rucksack and went off with his childhood friend Ebbe on his first trip outside the security of the gymnastics world. It was a journey that turned him upside down in a way that somersaults and back handsprings had never done.

  Daniel sat several feet above the ground between the humps of a camel, looking at an expanse of sand in north-west India. The camel-driver was making the journey on foot in his long blue kurta, wearing a broad smile on his chubby face.

  When they took a break during their five-day camel safari, Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off the camel-driver. The man would fetch his leather pouch from the animal and take out a few potatoes, a little fruit, some rice and spices, which he would then cook in a pot over a small fire.

  ‘He can make so much out of so little,’ thought Daniel and he took photos of this simple, quiet life and of the camel-driver, who was at one with the sand and the four-legged animal.

  At night they slept out in the open. The stars had never shone clearer. The wild dogs howled and, during that summer of 2010, the sky seemed unusually high.

  In India’s big cities the waste floated in the gutters and Daniel couldn’t always get to where he wanted, because of the cows and goats that wandered around freely and shat everywhere. The tuk-tuks sped by close to him and the air was heavy – even on the beach where the boys played football. Daniel struggled with the contrasts, as well as the overwhelming feeling that he couldn’t just escape into a gym. His travel guides were Lonely Planet and his friend Ebbe, who led him through a world of extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

  Back in Denmark, Susanne could have won a world title in worrying as she followed Daniel and Ebbe’s accounts of their travels on Facebook. One mentioned that twenty Indians had been involved in a mob-fight that they had watched on a beach.

  ‘Mum, we’re fine! Nothing happened to us, except that we’re an experience richer,’ they wrote, while uploading regular videos from their journey. In one, Susanne and Kjeld watched Daniel do handstands on a beach, while gaping Indians stared at the unbelievably flexible white man. With a red shirt slung across his bare back, he declared casually on the video: ‘Three days ago, we arrived at Kovalam in Kerala, South India’s answer to Goa. We’ve been playing beach football and having a really, really good time.’

  What they couldn’t see on the video were the changes inside Daniel. He had suddenly been torn away from his disciplined lifestyle. Now he was more often than not sleeping late, drinking beer at all times of the day and doing exactly as he pleased.

  When he came home, he imagined he was back in Asia as he went through his photos and videos from the journey. He really wanted to learn the craft of photography properly, so he called Hans Christian, who suggested a photography course at the Grundtvig College in Hillerød, north of Copenhagen. Two days before the course began in January 2011, Daniel called the school.

  ‘How much time do you allocate to the actual photography?’ he asked. The answer was that they spent a lot of time on it.

  ‘Many people have followed their dreams here,’ was the message. Daniel no longer had any doubts.

  The classroom door flew open. ‘What’s up, arseholes?’ shouted a loud, teasing voice.

  The experienced war photographer and photojournalist Jan Grarup plodded across the floor, wearing desert boots, a white shirt and tight jeans, his fingers heavy with rings. While Jan was lecturing, Daniel stared at his role model, who had won countless international photo awards and followed his own wild path. Jan showed photos from his reporting trips and answered every question with the same answer: ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Nothing mattered – which camera you used, how to compose your pictures, how to trim them and edit them.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s about taking your hearts and personality with you into whatever you’re doing and photographing,’ said Jan.

  After the lecture, Daniel, in awe and with his heart pounding, went out on the terrace to find Jan. While they drank a cup of coffee, they discussed Daniel’s ideas about undertaking long-term photo projects – for example, following some young people in their development through a whole year of boarding school.

  Daniel discovered at the college how
little he knew about what was happening in the world. He would absorb as much information as possible from people who shared their love of their chosen field when they came and gave lectures. In the beginning he was unsure of himself and hid behind his camera; the praise he had become used to for his somersaults and rotations was absent from his photography teachers. He would often sit in his room, staring at his work, which he thought completely lacked talent, until one day his teacher, the art photographer Tina Enghoff, praised him for his cheerfulness, energy – and talent. In particular, she thought that Daniel inspired confidence, which would be crucial for him as a photographer to be able to get close to the people he wanted to photograph. While attending the college, Daniel became more self-assured, developed his photography skills and learned to talk to people who had interests other than gymnastics.

  After finishing his photography degree Daniel started a higher education course in Aarhus, but he kept missing classes. He was spending most of his time taking photographs for The Gymnast magazine and was also in training for the 2012 World Team tryouts. He was practising the jumps and rhythmic sequences that the jury would be looking for when he and about ninety other young men gathered, hoping to be included among the chosen few. After a weekend with series, track jumps and exercises on the trampoline, the selection committee invited Daniel in for a talk with the eight judges. He was among the remaining twenty young men chosen to compete for fourteen places. The decision was long in coming, but it appeared in his inbox one day while he stared indifferently at his computer during a class.

  ‘Congratulations! You have been selected for the Danish Gymnastics and Athletics Association’s ninth World Team.’

  Fourteen young men and fourteen young women were selected. Daniel packed his bag and took time off from his courses in order to tour with the World Team. But a chance event would change everything.

  At one training session, Daniel stood contemplating the long black and white track in front of him before starting his run. As he set off, he sensed he would have difficulty making the height he needed. He tensed up in his hips and buttocks to squeeze himself through the full rotation before landing. When he landed in ‘The Grave’, as the landing spot was called, his hips were tense, where normally they should be more relaxed. The only place his body could counter the imbalance was in his legs.