A House in the Sky (25 page)

Not one part of me believed him.

It was midway through September, approaching the one-month anniversary of our kidnapping. It was also Ramadan, the holy month. Ramadan was meant to reinforce purity and patience. There were extra prayers. Everyone fasted while the sun was up, a condition that made little difference to me and Nigel, since we were eating only twice a day anyway. Each morning before sunup, we were brought a few things by Hassam or Jamal, usually some canned tuna and a plastic bag of what looked to be hot-dog buns, though in a Muslim country, given the Koran’s prohibition on pork, surely they were meant to hold something else. We ate without enthusiasm and didn’t eat or drink again until nighttime, when a similar meal arrived. My body felt uninterested in the food set before me; my muscles were going slack after weeks of sitting. We drank water and craved the tea, energizing in its sweetness, that came with our meals.

What I most longed for was a single square of chocolate. Sometimes, as Nigel dozed on his mattress, I told him long made-up stories, personal fairy tales, that culminated each time with me happening upon a whole pound of dark chocolate or a big pile of M&M’s and eating it all up. Or I posed questions: “Would you rather have a piece of chocolate cake or a hot fudge sundae? A hot fudge sundae or a bag of Hershey’s Kisses?” He didn’t answer, and I didn’t care. I fanned the air with my hand to stay cool.

In my version of paradise, the air was always cold and the rivers ran with candy.

Meanwhile, the sweat pooled inside my bra cups, steaming my breasts until the skin grew spongy and raw. Nigel hadn’t worn pants in weeks, having adopted the Somali man-skirt to keep himself cool. I had recently stopped wearing jeans and the black abaya and instead donned a long shapeless dress made of thick red polyester that Donald had brought me during an earlier visit. I couldn’t bring myself to remove the bra. It felt like protection.

Before leaving our room after his visits, Donald always asked us what we needed from the market. Anticipating the question, I at one point made a list in my notebook to hand over the next time he surfaced, tossing in a few fantasy items for my own amusement: soap, aspirin, chocolate bars, exercise bike, cotton buds for cleaning the ears, a television.

He studied the page when I passed it to him, looking puzzled. I pointed to each item and pronounced the words slowly. “Ex-cer-size bike.”

“Ah yes, yes,” he said, not wanting to lose face by admitting that he didn’t understand.

“Do you think you could find one of those in the market, Mohammed?”

“Yes, I think so. I think so.”

A few days later, he brought us the soap and some acetaminophen tablets—so large they looked like horse pills—plus a packet of Q-tips and a pair of small scissors so that Nigel could trim his facial hair. I asked Donald for a new bra and some books in English for us to read. Nigel and I begged him, actually, for the books. More so than our bodies, our minds were beginning to starve.

There was something else I needed to discuss with Donald. I cringed to even think of it, but it was becoming necessary to address. My period was two weeks late. I’d had my fling with the fickle-hearted bureau chief before leaving Baghdad—that one bit of bodily distraction, the one concession to my neediness in a war zone—and now, in pretty much the worst imaginable circumstances, it was catching
up with me. I’d never been pregnant, so I had no idea what it might feel like. Was the aching in my hips some sort of symptom? Did the malaise I felt, sweating through the hot afternoons, have nothing to do with my surroundings and everything to do with a kernel of life, another little hostage, inside me? I wasn’t sure what it meant or how to feel about it. I just knew it was a secret I couldn’t—or shouldn’t—try to keep.

Tactfully, Nigel asked permission to leave the room so I could talk alone with Donald. We’d discussed how I should handle it, thinking it best that Nigel not be present. Donald, I figured, having lived in Germany, was the most likely of our captors to handle the news without invoking all sorts of moralistic disgust. Still, I worried what he’d do. On his forehead, Donald had a prayer mark—a dark, leathery-looking callus caused by the frequency and vigor with which he put his head to the ground. Some devout Muslim men cultivated these as a source of pride, a sign of their steadfastness.

“Mohammed,” I said, my voice faltering a little, “I have something to tell you.” I watched his expression grow serious, picking up on my tone. There was no turning back. “Before I became a good woman, a Muslim woman, I . . . I had sexual relations out of wedlock, with somebody in Baghdad.” I dropped my gaze to the floor before continuing. I explained the situation as if somebody I barely knew—the infidel I’d once been—had borrowed my body and taken it out for a joyride.

“I just need to know,” I said, “if there will be a baby.” I added “
Inshallah
” for good measure, not sure what the desirable outcome would be. Was I saying “
God willing
I am pregnant” or “Please just let me find out one way or the other”? I was twenty-seven years old. I did not want to have a baby, especially not one fathered by a man into whose bed I’d wandered for the sole reason that I’d been deeply and pathetically lonely. Above all, I did not want to be pregnant in Somalia. Then again, beginning with the moment we were ambushed on the Afgoye Road, all rules had been rewritten, all priorities rearranged. Maybe, I thought, a pregnancy would help get us released. Maybe it would make me into a ticking time bomb. I’d walked my mind around in circles already. I imagined they’d at least need to take me to a doctor, and
I could beg that doctor to call the authorities. When I really thought about it, though, I wasn’t sure if there were any authorities in Somalia who were capable of getting us out.

Donald received the news of my predicament calmly. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said, seeming inconvenienced but not exactly angry. I felt like a teenager confessing to her dad. “Babies are a blessing from Allah,” he added.

A few days later, he returned with a paper bag. Inside the bag was a plastic cup with a lid that could be screwed tightly shut. “For your pee-pee,” he said.

Nigel and I snickered about the word “pee-pee” when he left. Where had he learned it? We laughed at absolutely everything we could—any little fart or hiccup we produced, any strange thing one of our captors said. Otherwise, there was nothing at all to laugh about. In addition to the plastic cup, Donald had proudly brought us some English reading material, stuff he’d found in a market stall. There was a college catalog for Malaysian students, printed by the British Education Board in Kuala Lumpur. It was dated 1994 and listed courses of study available for foreign-exchange students at a variety of universities in the United Kingdom. We also were given a couple of grease-stained storybooks for Islamic children and a
Times
of London reader from 1981 that had gone dark with mold. Inexplicably, he’d brought us a watch—a cheap-looking black men’s digital watch, made in China. As if knowing the hour of day would make life better. Nigel and I laughed at all of this before falling back into the morose silence that governed so much of our time.

When I was ready, I went into the bathroom, peed in the cup, screwed the lid on, and passed it back to Donald, who got into his car with it and drove off.

That evening, when I prayed, I wasn’t sure what to pray for.

I
watched Nigel’s hands. Despite the heat and the grime, they were clean—his fingernails neatly trimmed, the Somali dust scrubbed from the furrows of his knuckles. He was fastidious. He always had been. Visiting him in Australia, I’d watched him wash his face in the mornings, floss his teeth, and carefully unfold his clothes. When we’d gone camping on an island off the Queensland coast, he’d been the one to shake the sand out of our sleeping bags and tidy up our tent, creating order out of my piles. Here, Nigel’s hands were the cleanest part of him. This was due to the
wudu,
the ritual washing that went on before each of the five prayer sessions. Jamal had taught us the
wudu
just after we converted. You washed your hands three times, then swished water through your mouth three times, then snorted water through your nostrils, then splashed more of it over your face, arms, head, ears, and finally, your feet.

Nigel and I performed our ablutions in the bathroom separately, using fresh water from the brown bucket, which the boys filled at the tap outside. The boys holding us all washed out in the courtyard or in their own bathroom, in a different part of the house, and so, it seemed, did the three Somali captives, since Nigel and I had this bathroom to ourselves. I always skipped over the nostril washing but took care to make fake snorting sounds in case anyone was listening. The
wudu
was important. It purified you before you talked to God. Judging from the outcome, Nigel took to his
wudu
like a surgeon prepping for the OR.
It was one part of Islam that seemed to agree with him. “Cleanliness is half of faith,” the Prophet had told his followers. On this front, Nigel—at least when it came to his hands—was in good shape.

I watched his hands because they were something to watch in a room where there was nothing to watch. Sometimes we tracked insects as they climbed the iron window grate. Once, looking outside, we saw a fat brown snake, maybe eight feet long, rippling through the sand in the alleyway behind the house. Otherwise, there was little to see. I was remembering how, what seemed a long time ago, Nigel’s hands had given me both pleasure and comfort. They were capable hands. Hands that had held hammers and squared off timber, staying busy until a whole house, floor and rafters and roof, was built. In the confines of our room, I saw his hands as an extension of our brains and our bodies: desperate for a project, a purpose.

One afternoon during the extra-hot time when our captors usually took a siesta, Nigel went over to the plastic bags where we kept our supplies. He rummaged intently through his bag, driven by some unspoken idea.

Within the hour, we were playing backgammon. Nigel had crafted playing pieces from our Q-tips—one of us using the cotton nubs, the other using pieces of the plastic handles, which he’d clipped with his beard-trimming scissors. On a sheet from his notebook, he’d drawn two rows of razoring triangles and then, using a couple of the acetaminophen tablets and the scissors, carved a set of working dice, itty-bitty white cubes with tiny numbers written on the sides in pen.

We played for hours. And then we played for days. He won. I won. We played rapid-fire and without much conversation or commentary, like two monkeys in some deprivation-oriented psych experiment. If we heard footsteps in the hallway, we quickly slid everything under my mattress. Games, like so many other things that might divert us, were considered
haram.
We felt sure they’d punish us if they knew.

Donald showed up one day and handed me a slip of paper with the name of a pharmacy on top. I saw my age listed next to the name of a Somali woman, an alias he’d used to submit my urine sample. “No baby,” he said.

“
Allahu Akbar,
” I said instantly, though it was clear from the look on Donald’s face that this was the wrong thing to say. You didn’t thank God for sparing you a baby, because a baby was a blessing, and blessings were things you hung on to, no matter what.

Still, I was not pregnant. It was a false alarm, even though my period hadn’t come. It seemed I was just stressed, right down through my hormones.

The news felt like a relief, though a relief with disappointment pinned to its backside. I couldn’t help feeling a little more alone. Trailing behind the disappointment, like a buzzing little motorcycle, was the faint and cloying memory of sex—a luxury of sensation that seemed almost unreal.

Ramadan came to an end in early October. Our captors celebrated the breaking of the fast—the holiday of Eid—with a meal of stewed goat. Nigel and I were given a small plate to share, along with a few sticky dates, a plate of cookies covered in a thick sugary glaze, and even some toffees. Between us we had one spoon, which Nigel, in a courtly move, passed to me to use. The goat meat was delicious—boiled and tender and served on a heap of oily rice. Afterward, it cramped our stomachs and pulsed savagely through our intestines. We swapped shifts on the toilet and felt ourselves growing dizzy and dehydrated. Despite ourselves, we ate the toffees instead of saving them for when we were well. They made puddles of sweetness on our tongues.

We tried to ignore the fact that our world had shrunk down to the size of our little pain-reliever dice.

*

Five weeks after being captured, I worked at being cheery. “Today’s going to be a good day,” I’d say to Nigel when we were awoken by the muezzin’s first call. Almost always, he pretended like he didn’t hear me.

There was nothing good about our days. We both knew it, but for me, being hopeful felt necessary, like pounding a fist on the wall in case somebody might hear it.

“Look,” I said one day. “I can’t handle the silence.”

We were on our mats. He was facing the wall. He said nothing.

I felt a swell of emotion. “Nige,” I said. “We need each other. We have to keep talking. It makes me crazy when you don’t say anything.”

This prompted him to roll over, looking aggrieved. “You think,” he said, “that if I fucking talk it’s going to be easier for you?” A second passed. “Do you think I really care about making this easier for
you
?”

We were like an old couple, a very old couple, our lust long extinguished, our affection worn away by constant togetherness. We lived like neighbors stuck for decades on the same cul-de-sac, breathing a resentful familiarity. It wasn’t helped by the fact that despite our misery, we were too afraid to touch. We never once hugged or held hands or delivered the other person a reassuring pat on the shoulder. When Nigel was brought outside to pray with the boys, he no longer looked sheepish about it. He didn’t get rushed back to the room when prayers were over. One day I heard him laughing on the veranda. I could hear them laughing, all together, as a group.