A House in the Sky (23 page)

Ali sat with his back against the wall. He sighed. “It is better to pray,” he said.

It occurred to me that were our situations reversed, if Ali were captive and unmoored from everything he knew, he would manage to keep his appointments, to live by the order imposed by his faith. As my own days felt increasingly like a long wait for nothing, I realized there was probably strength in that. During prayer times, we could hear Abdi and the two other Somali captives reciting their Arabic in the room next to ours.

Talking religion with Ali was something we did cautiously and only during his calmer moments, when he was not raging about one thing
or another. Nigel at one point attempted to say that he leaned toward Buddhism, but Ali wasn’t interested.

“We know how to pray, brother,” I said, deliberately not looking at Nigel, who had not been raised with a formal religion and was capable of objecting. “We just have to learn more about the Muslim way.” I asked if Ali had an English-language copy of the Koran he could loan us, just to look at.

This appeared to make Ali happy. “I will check in Bakaara Market,” he said, looking from me to Nigel. “
Inshallah,
there is one there.”

Bakaara Market was a well-known area in central Mogadishu, a place where people sold food and supplies and weapons. Before we were kidnapped, I’d asked Ajoos if we could visit, and he’d just laughed. “Impossible,” he’d told me. “Bakaara Market is a base for Al-Shabaab. Very, very dangerous for white people.”

“
Inshallah,
” I said back to Ali.

I was floating a balloon of willingness. I knew from my time in Iraq that for at least some Muslims, it was not considered such a leap for someone to move from Christianity to Islam. The two religions worshipped the same god under different names. The Muslim faith acknowledged Moses and Jesus,
Musa
and
Isa,
they were called. It acknowledged the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospels as revelations from God. To convert, you needed to declare Muhammad the Prophet of record, the one whose path you were ready to follow.

I told Ali I had read the Bible many times. I told him I’d spent my childhood on my knees, that my grandparents were very religious.

He picked up on what I was saying immediately. “Then you are fifty percent Muslim already,” he said. He gestured somewhat grandly with one hand. “You only have to say the
shahadah
”—the Islamic declaration of faith—“and you will go to paradise.”

Nigel gave me an impatient look. He knew what I was doing and didn’t like it. We had talked once or twice about pretending to accept Islam, asking to convert. He was solidly against it, thinking it was too big a risk. If we got caught faking their religion, the thing they took more seriously than anything, he said, we’d surely be killed.

I had argued the other side: Our captors would have to treat us well if we converted. They’d have no choice but to see us as fellow believers. They’d have to be more charitable. For me, it would be a way to distance myself from my Western-woman image. My freedom—my travels and work, my way of dressing and talking, my life unyoked to a husband or a family—was a taunt. The sooner I could reinvent myself, the better I’d do.

Ali stood up, brushed the dirt from the floor off his pants, and left the room.

Nigel glared at me. “No fucking way,” he said. “Don’t do this.” He relocated himself to the far side of the room, carefully keeping his distance from the mold on the wall, but also from me.

On cue, a fuzzy-sounding loudspeaker nearby kicked on. The muezzin—different from the one we’d heard at the last house, this one older-sounding—cleared his throat into the microphone a few times and began to chant the call to prayer.

Nigel exhaled loudly and shook his head. “Look, you can become a Muslim,” he said, “but I’m not going to.”

We couldn’t afford to divide. I knew that much. I sighed, too. “That won’t work, Nigel,” I said. “If I do it and you don’t, then they’ll move me out of here for sure. You can’t have a Muslim woman living with a non-Muslim man.”

“Right,” he said.

And that was it. We were in a standoff. Conversion, we both knew, was an all-or-nothing move. I let the subject drop.

*

The window in our room was open to the air but covered by several iron bars. It looked out at another house. Every so often, we could hear the noises of the family living there—kids playing, parents talking, laughter. I caught a glimpse of a woman’s back, but I felt too nervous to call out, worried that she’d start yelling. Our only interaction at the window was with a cat, a skinny orange creature that one afternoon leaped from the alleyway onto our sill.

We were allowed to come and go freely from the bathroom attached to the room. There, high in the wall that faced the courtyard, opposite the toilet, was a vent—a one-foot-by-two-foot piece of scrollwork cut into the concrete to let fresh air inside. Nigel and I soon figured out that if we craned our necks while standing on tiptoe, we could see through it to a small wedge of the yard where our captors passed most of their time.

The bathroom vent became our portal, our television set, our news station. It was something to monitor.

We took turns watching one morning as a new guy showed up in the courtyard, carrying a yellow plastic bag. He was fat, middle-aged, and well dressed. He walked hunched over, as if the weight of his belly were too much for him, as if he’d been thin all his life and wasn’t used to carrying his bulk. He greeted Ali and Old Yahya in the way that was customary between Somali men—offering a hug on one side and a hug on the other. He took a moment to inspect the courtyard, then pulled from his bag a six-inch-thick wad of Somali shillings, the local currency. He handed it to the captain. They talked for a few minutes before the guy left again.

This was how we knew there was a moneyman—somebody funding the operation or delivering money on behalf of whoever was funding it. From here on out, the man would arrive at least once a week, bringing money and supplies for our captors. Once or twice, we saw him carrying a big pot of home-cooked food and leaving it for the boys. We nicknamed him Donald Trump.

Through our spy hole, we watched the boys doing military drills and fitness routines to pass the time. Following the lead of the heavyset, dark-skinned boy called Yusuf, they performed marches and squat-thrusts and did bicep curls as if holding invisible dumbbells. Sometimes Captain Yahya would referee wrestling matches, pausing the action every so often to demonstrate a certain kind of hold. We would eventually nickname him Skids, since the boys sometimes complained to us privately that he was too strict with them, that he put the brakes on things, that he always said no.

The vent gave me things to look at, but it didn’t give me hope. I stood on my toes until my calves throbbed, trying to spot something that might signal a way out. The idea of escape felt fruitless. There were too many people crammed into too small a space for anything to happen undetected, and there was only a single exit point—the small door in the heavy metal gate at the edge of the yard. The walls of the compound had been topped with razor wire. Somewhere beyond it, the craggy-voiced muezzin cranked up another call to the faithful, signaling to all that it was time to stand up and point themselves the same way.

*

One morning a few days after we’d discussed it, Ali arrived in the room carrying two thick books bound in navy blue leather, the covers adorned with intricate gold embossing and, written in English, the words “The Holy Koran.” He handed them to us with apparent pride, one for me and one for Nigel. They were brand-new. The pages inside were tissue-thin, the verses written in tiny print—the original Arabic on one side, an English translation on the other.

The truth is, I would have devoured any book handed to me—anything to feed my gnawing mind—but the Koran, in that particular moment, felt like a gift from heaven. It was like getting the key to an intricate code.

I’d been allowed to speak with my mother twice more in the first seven days we were held hostage. Both calls had lasted under a minute. Neither yielded anything but proof that I was alive. Nigel had been granted a single call with his sister, Nicky, for what seemed to be the same purpose. We agreed that help or release did not seem to be coming soon.

I read the book in hopes of using their religion to talk my way out.

Both Nigel and I read for hours, for several days straight. We said very little to each other during that time, handling the books carefully, storing them on the ledge of the window when we ate or went to the bathroom.

Seeing how intent we were, Ali allowed us out into the yard a couple of times, gesturing for us to sit on a low round wall that encircled a skinny papaya tree. The yard was dry and hot. The boys lounged with their guns, ignoring us.

I went page by page through the Koran, trying to ignore the fear roiling inside me. I looked for strands of logic, for insights into the minds of my captors. I cross-referenced one bit of information against another. The Koran was dense, poetic in some places, dictatorial in others, its messages often mixed. There were many verses about jihad and enemies alongside many about kindness and mercy. Paradise was dangled like a sumptuous fruit. Women were most often described as wives. The Arabic phrase for captives or slaves was “those whom your right hand possesses.” The book was explicit about what such possession meant: You were basically owned by your captors. There were verses instructing that captives be treated with kindness and granted freedom if they were well behaved. There were others that made clear that a female captive was fair game sexually. In a couple of verses where the Koran forbade men to have sex outside of marriage, there was a worrisome little clause tacked on at the end: “except with those whom your right hand possesses.”

We would have to focus on being well behaved and appeal to their sense of mercy. The book gave us some power. It gave us language to use, lines of reasoning to apply. It was like getting a look at the operating system that ran our captors’ lives.

I found two notions that seemed like they might make a difference:

A believer is not supposed to kill a fellow believer.

And:
A believing slave is given more lenience than an unbelieving slave.

“Nigel,” I said, “they can’t kill us if we convert.”

He, too, had found the same verses, but still, he was worried about the risk. Converting would feel false, he said. It could insult them. It was too dangerous.

I was remembering the back-of-the-throat ripping sound Ali had made when dragging a finger across his neck, explaining how we would be killed. I was willing to be false if it gave us more leverage.

*

I woke up on the eleventh morning of our captivity, knowing it was time. Nothing was changing. It felt like we had to make a move, to force some sort of energy shift. Nigel’s spirits seemed dangerously low. He sat on his mattress, sullenly reading the Koran.

When Ali walked into the room and he started talking, as usual, about Allah and Islam, I seized the moment, saying the words before I could think too hard about them. “I think we’re ready to say the
shahadah,
” I told Ali, bowing my head to appear modest and also to avoid looking at Nigel.

Ali was unhesitant in his jubilation, treating it like a personal victory. He dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the ground. “
Allahu Akbar,
” he exclaimed, repeating it three times.
God is great. God is great. God is great.
It was the first time in eleven days when I felt like I’d had any influence.

Getting to his feet again, Ali studied me closely. I was sweating, pointedly not looking in Nigel’s direction. Ali seemed to read the disconnect between us. His voice grew stern, the words directed at me. He said, “This is not a game, you know. It is a serious thing.”

I nodded, trying to appear humble and capable of great piety. “Yes, of course, my brother,” I said. “We understand.”

“It is set then,
inshahallah,
” he said. “You can prepare, and then, at eleven o’clock, you will become Muslim.”
Moo-slim
was how he said it. He left the room.

Nigel slammed his Koran shut. His look was incredulous. “What the hell was that?” he said. “Aren’t we going to discuss this?”

We
had
discussed it, I wanted to say. I said, “Nige, we have to do this. It’s crazy, I know, but it’s a way to keep ourselves alive.”

We were aware of the risks. In my Koran, I’d read the word that would apply to us—that would doom us—if they figured out we were converting without believing. Hypocrites. Enemies from inside. Such enemies were considered far more evil and dangerous than those encountered on the battlefield. The Koran gave specific instructions
for all pretenders to be killed.
They are the enemy, so beware of them,
one verse read.
May Allah destroy them.

Returning to the room, Ali instructed us each to choose a set of clothes from our sparse collection and come with him outside so we could wash in the courtyard. This alone felt like a new freedom, our willingness awarded with soap. The Muslim obsession with bodily cleanliness was only going to improve our situation, I thought.

Nigel gathered up his clothes and followed me as I followed Ali down the narrow hallway, past the room where Abdi and the others were being held, past a small unused kitchen, and out onto the concrete veranda that overlooked the yard. When I turned to look at him, he gave me a quick, surprising smile. “What are you getting us into now, Lindhout?” he said under his breath.

The question was both tender and bitter. It flashed through my mind that our story—what got set into motion that first night Nigel and I spotted each other on the veranda in Addis—had been madness from the start. Mad love, mad confusion, and now maybe mad tragedy. What would have happened if I hadn’t introduced myself? What if I’d just walked past him with my backpack and left him as he was?

I was sure that in his mind, he’d rewritten the story and its outcome plenty of times.