A House in the Sky (22 page)

Dutifully, Nigel and I fawned over his purchases. I assumed that American toothpaste was neither cheap nor easy to come by in Somalia. Then again, as Adam seemed to be calculating it, he’d soon be on the receiving end of a seven-figure ransom payment that would render all expenses trivial.

He smiled and said good night.

*

The next several nights were not in any way restful. We’d hear the evening prayers, and then the house would go quiet. The electricity was spotty. The lights clicked off abruptly and on no sort of regular schedule. Nigel and I whispered until he drifted off, covering every meaningless or pleasant topic we could think of—our pets, our school days, our past travels. In the darkness, I could just make out the contours of his face. Sleep, for him, had become a means of escape. By day, his anxieties were so stark and so crippling that he almost didn’t resemble himself. Back in the last place, the Bomb-Making House I called it, he’d combed the room for things he might use to kill himself—the cut wires, the iron coatrack—thinking it was better to stay one step ahead of Ali and his drive to have us beheaded.

Lying on my flowered sheet, I listened enviously to Nigel’s breathing. Cockroaches skittered in the corners of the room. I wrapped the two edges of the sheet over me and rolled to make it tight, like a cocoon, as I lay on my side. In the bathroom at the new house—this one I thought of as the Electric House—our captors brought us water
in a brown bucket from a pump outside, which we used to wash and to pour down the toilet as a flush. Before going to bed, before the lights went off, I splashed water over as much of my body as I could, too afraid to remove any piece of clothing, exposing my skin only in pieces, unsnapping the abaya to run a hand over my clavicles, pulling up the loose sleeves to get to my arms, keeping my pants down long enough after using the toilet to douse myself quickly between the legs. The water felt like a relief, though I was far from clean. But it was relative. Everything was relative. One day’s worries were either greater or lesser than the previous day’s worries.

What I lay with at night was the fear of being raped. I was the lone woman in a house that included, by my count, twelve men, in addition to Ahmed and Adam, who continued to sleep elsewhere. Four of them were prisoners. Nigel and I had been relieved to hear Abdi and our driver and security guard—Marwali and Mahad, their names were—moved into a room next to ours, if only because it meant they hadn’t been killed. We could see their shoes piled on the floor in the hallway outside their door.

The house hummed with what I can only describe as male energy, a buzzy mix of repression and young strength. I felt it when the boys came to deliver food, when their eyes fell on me and then quickly moved away, as if the sight of me, or whatever thought that followed, was shameful. I felt it in the afternoons when Ali plunked himself down on the floor of our room and went on his long rants about how the Western countries, the Christians, were to blame for the war in Somalia. He seemed to view me with a mixture of intrigue and disgust, much like he viewed the world beyond Somalia. “Your
women
 . . .” he said to Nigel one day, scooping his hands so they looked like splayed breasts. Then he trailed off, lacking the words, his lips curled in distaste. Pointedly, he did not look in my direction.

I felt it most, though, in those hours spent in the darkness, my sheet and the polyester abaya making a flimsy barrier between me and them, in the moments when I heard a rustle or a grunt from somewhere in the house. I was an aberration, an enemy to their morals, and also fully powerless. With me, they seemed unsure what to do.

“You see,” Ahmed said to me at one point, suggesting that the original plan had been to kidnap the
National Geographic
guys off the road, “we were told it would be two men.”

*

Midway through the first week, Ahmed showed up at the house and handed me his cell phone. “Talk to your mother,” he said.

I took the phone and held it to my ear. “Mom?” I said.

And there was her voice, her voice saying my name. The line crackled and faded, and for a second she didn’t seem real. Ahmed had put the phone on speaker. He gestured for me to hold it away from my head so he could listen. There was a split-second delay between what my mother said and when I heard it, causing our voices to overlap uselessly.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Well, no, not really . . . Are . . . are you okay?”

“Yeah, we’re okay,” I said.

Her voice cut over mine. “Okay.”

“We’re okay.”

It felt as if the two of us were swimming between enormous ocean waves, dropping in and out of each other’s sight, shouting into walls of water. She told me that she loved me, that people at home were praying for us. She asked if Nigel was with me. She said they were trying to get some money together. Those were the words she used, “get some money together.” What that meant, I couldn’t imagine.

I asked what the ransom demand was. My mother hesitated and then replied, “One point five million,” she said. My mother and I were silent for a few seconds. The money was an impossibility, we both knew. My mother stuttered. “Amanda,” she said, “Is, is, there any . . . sorry . . . is there any, um, ideas that . . . that you can think of?”

I wasn’t sure what she was asking. Later, I would learn that she was being coached by a negotiator from the RCMP, one of a number of people listening in on the phone call. My mother was now living in a government-rented home in Sylvan Lake, which doubled as the RCMP’s operational center. She and the negotiator were trying to figure out how firm the demands were, whether we were safe, and who
was keeping us. Meanwhile, I was sitting in our room in the Electric House, surrounded by my captors—Ahmed and several of the others—as my mother’s voice entered the room, their world, sounding tinny and weak. “No . . .” I said, feeling tears begin to brim. I tried to think of something, anything, to tell her. But before I could say more, the line disconnected and she was gone.

*

I began to obsess over the idea that Nigel and I needed to stay together—that we had to do all we could to keep them from separating us. Even as he confused our captors by weeping openly in front of them, Nigel still was more familiar to them. Because he was a man, he was accorded more respect. Because we were together, we were treated more or less the same. I hung on to this, knowing his proximity helped keep me safe.

When the leaders showed up at the house, every other day or so, I did my best to appear composed and businesslike, delivering the same message again and again: Our families had no money. Our governments wouldn’t pay. Sometimes Nigel joined me in reinforcing the message. Other times he dripped silent tears, following my instructions not to say anything that sounded desperate or emotional. Having discarded the hope that some easy negotiation could take place, my new hope was that after a few weeks or a month, our captors would get tired and give up. Every day I worked to make myself—to make us—harder to kill, by being friendly and remaining neutral on politics and religion. If we could bore them without frustrating them, I figured, maybe they’d deliver us back to the Shamo, just like two boxes that had spent a month uselessly collecting dust in a warehouse.

“How is your situation?” Ahmed said each time he greeted us, stepping into the dark room, looking every bit the visiting nobleman in a clean shirt and pressed khakis.

There were two answers. There was the one I wanted to scream—that our situation
sucked,
thank you very much—and the one that maintained the status quo, that kept the basic arrangement undisturbed, which, given that we were together, receiving two basic meals a day, and had toothpaste to last an eternity, seemed the better choice.

“Our situation is okay,” I’d tell Ahmed, “but we want to go home.”

“Ah, yes,” he would say. “We are working on that.”

When the leaders weren’t around, the boys loitered in our room, mostly focused on Nigel. They looked him in the eye. In faltering English, they talked about sports and cars, which seemed to break him out of his depression for short stints. Slowly, we were learning their names. There was Ismael, who was fourteen, and a boy whose name was Yahya, same as the older captain’s. There was a Yusuf and two Mohammeds and another soldier who seemed sweet, like Jamal, whose name was Hassam. Each one of them carried a cell phone, an AK-47, and a tiny edition of the Koran, about the size of a deck of cards, tucked into his shirt pocket.

Around me, the boys were more cautious. Most, I assumed, had never spent time close to a woman who wasn’t a family member. I worked constantly to demystify myself. I learned there was a benefit to mentioning again and again that I’d lived in Afghanistan and Iraq and had traveled in places like Pakistan, Sudan, and Syria. They felt a kinship with these countries, especially Afghanistan and Iraq, where Islamic soldiers were fighting, as they saw it, infidel invaders. Any time I showed even a vague familiarity with Islamic tradition or culture, acknowledging that Ramadan was soon to start, recalling the beauty of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem or the time I’d traveled through Tora Bora, they seemed to become slightly less suspicious of me, more eager to engage.

Jamal, it was clear, had been born almost too happy for his circumstances. Misery didn’t suit him. He loped in and out of our room, bringing us flasks of tea or small bunches of green bananas. Almost always, he wore an effervescent smile. There were moments when he burst out laughing, having understood one of Nigel’s weak wisecracks, and then clamped a hand over his mouth as if to stuff his delight back inside. After one of his trips to the market, he smuggled in a couple of packs of cigarettes and handed them off to Nigel, looking pleased by his own naughtiness.

When Jamal came for a visit, Abdullah often tagged along, the Hyde to his Jekyll, unwilling to laugh or be casual, but listening with
interest to everything we said. Even as most of the other boys had stopped wearing scarves over their faces in our presence, Abdullah kept himself carefully swathed. He sat close to me, his eyes flashing an emotion I couldn’t read, his nose and mouth buried beneath folds of checkered cotton. He asked me questions about the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan—what kind of guns they carried, how they dressed, whether they had cars.

Slowly, we began to extract information. Most of the boys had gone to some form of training camp to learn to be a soldier. Ismael, the fourteen-year-old, had been schooled in insurgent warfare somewhere out in the desert. Jamal had joined the mujahideen out of grief and duty. His father had been killed a couple of years earlier by Ethiopian troops, he told us. His mother was still alive. The memory of losing his father was fresh enough that it caused his eyes to water. “For me, this was start of jihad,” he said.

Before jihad, we learned, Ahmed and Adam had both worked as teachers. The older Yahya had been a farmer. Before jihad, some of the younger boys had gone to school. Now they got paid to fight, though it wasn’t much. I knew from my research that funding for the insurgency in Somalia flowed in from other countries, raised through radical Islamist networks. Some, it was believed, came from the fat ransoms paid for ships held hostage by pirates in the Gulf of Aden. From where I sat, the group holding us captive looked to be a straight-up hierarchy. The leaders—Ahmed, Adam, and a third tall man we’d come to call Romeo—appeared to be reasonably well-off, with cars and expensive-looking clothes. Captain Yahya and Ali seemed to be middle management, while the boys had been given little more than a weapon, housing, and food, plus the conviction that Allah was behind them.

“Jihad,” in Arabic, means “the struggle.” There are two types in Islam, the greater and the lesser. Both are seen as noble. The greater jihad is inward, the lifelong striving of any Muslim to be a better person, to ward off temptation and desire, to maintain faith. The lesser jihad is outward and communal and violent when called for—the struggle to defend and assert that faith. For our captors, this jihad involved fighting
the Ethiopians, although our kidnapping was wrapped into the cause. Not only did we come from “bad” countries, as Ali put it, but any ransom money they got, he said, would get channeled back into the larger fight.

It seemed that young men were organized into cells, getting called out for combat in the streets of Mogadishu or elsewhere when necessary. From what we could gather, most of the boys had been living at home right up until the day we’d been taken on the road to Afgoye, a task for which their cell had been activated—by whom, we couldn’t be sure.

While Jamal brimmed with plans for his life after the kidnapping—he would get married, then study information technology in India, since he’d heard there were many universities there—Abdullah seemed stuck on the war. One day I asked what he was going to do later in life. He gave me a fierce look, mimed the act of putting on a jacket, and made the sound of an explosion.

It took me a second. “Suicide bomber?”

Abdullah nodded. Martyr, was how he saw it. At the gates to paradise, soldiers in God’s army got to enter through a special doorway.

Jamal shook his head. He waved his hand back and forth, as if to say, “No, no, no.” Like me, he had an idea that life could again be normal, that all of this could be rolled back. “I don’t want him to die,” he explained. “He is my friend.”

W
hy are you not Muslim?” Ali wanted to know one morning, having surfaced in our room, seeming a little bored. “Why don’t you pray?”

He’d expressed this confusion before, perplexed by the idea that our days could be ungoverned by scheduled prayer, whereas his fell so neatly into five slices, the several hours between each appointment with Allah, from the first one in the early morning to the last in the evening. For our spiritual idleness, Ali was certain that we were going to hell. He’d said this to us previously, too, in angry condemnation of who we were, but today he seemed less spiteful. It was hot already, hotter than usual. The air in our room smelled like a bog.