A House in the Sky (28 page)

All the bricks of courage I’d stacked up over years of traveling were starting to come down.

With the boys, too, something was slipping. Their civility was beginning to lapse. I was allowed to shower every day before the noon prayer, walking to the tiled area that sat beneath a window at the end of the hallway past the bathroom, separated from the rest of the house only by a thin cotton curtain printed with red hibiscus flowers. There was a showerhead and a spindled knob, which, when cranked, sometimes produced a thin trickle of brown water and sometimes nothing at all. Usually, I washed with a bucket of water delivered by one of the boys from the tap outside. I relished the shower, the coolness of the water, the slick sensation of having wet hair, and the
milky scent of the German bar soap Donald had brought. Whereas earlier on I’d bathed cautiously and one limb at a time, now, driven by pure need, I stripped down and went for it. I craved those five minutes or so of private nakedness and the dribble of water, even rusty water, over my body. It was my one shot at something that felt remotely like joy.

The curtain, however, was quite sheer. Both the boys and I seemed to discover this at the same time. With the late-morning light pouring through the window, my silhouette was visible through the cloth. I could see through it in the other direction, catching shadows on the other side. Hassam was the first one I spotted, on his hands and knees, peering around the corner as if trying to see under the curtain. The next time I bathed, I heard a snigger and caught sight of two recognizable figures—Jamal and Abdullah—ghosting the boundaries of the shower.

Too nervous to sleep much at night, I dozed on my mattress through the heat of the late afternoon, cycling in and out of wakefulness, my head throbbing with the constant ache of dehydration as I sweated through my clothes and the sheet on my bed. I woke one day with a start when two boys with guns abruptly charged into the room—Abdullah and Mohammed, looking wild-eyed and wound up. They shut the door behind them.

“Mohammed, Abdullah,” I said, sitting up on my mattress, my voice a thin tremolo, “is there a problem?”

I used my captors’ names every chance I had. It was intentional, a way of reminding them that I saw them, of pegging them, of making them see me in return. I tried to milk something from even the shortest interactions. The traditional Arabic greeting is
Asalaamu Alikum,
which means “Peace be upon you.” I’d first heard it way back in Bangladesh and then through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. There was a more casual version of the greeting—a simple
Salaam
—and a more extended version,
Asalaamu Alikum Wa Rahmatulah Wa Barakatuh,
“May the peace and mercy of Allah be upon you.” I knew my Koran well enough by now to know that Allah had a rule that went with these things. I’d found it in one of my
surah. When a courteous
greeting is offered to you, meet it with a greeting still more courteous, or at least of equal courtesy.
I’d tried it out with the boys and seen that it worked. A long greeting evoked a long greeting. I used it every time. I threw the extra words at anyone who walked into my room, just to force him to linger in my presence—to address me as a human—for those extra three or four seconds that it took.

Today, however, there was no greeting. Abdullah took a step toward me and pointed his gun at my chest. “Other side,” he said curtly, indicating that I should turn facedown on the mattress.

My mind went into a free fall, dropping through one trapdoor only to find another one opening beneath it. Slowly, I flipped over, pressed my forehead to the fabric, kept my palms next to my face. The two boys were at my bedside, guns hovering by my head. I could see Abdullah’s bare ankle, the color of dark coffee and hairless, maybe six inches away. Down, down, I fell. I heard them breathing. I closed my eyes, waiting for the next thing.

Mohammed said, “You are bad woman.”

Abdullah said, “The problem is you.”

The steel finger of a gun barrel prodded the back of my neck. I tried not to think. The two of them were talking above me in Somali, as if they hadn’t quite planned out their next step, as if debating what they could get away with. There was a pause.

Then Mohammed kicked me in the ribs, hard. The pain ripped through my left side, causing an instant rush of tears. “You are bad,” he said again. “We will kill you,
inshallah.
” I saw their feet turn and walk away. The door opened and then clicked shut. The room went quiet. They were gone.

I was still crying twenty minutes later, when Jamal stuck his head through the door. The sight of my tears seemed to make him sheepish. Before he could run away, though, I gave him the full Arabic greeting and then waited for him to say it back to me. Gathering my wits, I said, “Jamal, please tell me what’s going on. Please.”

I watched some sort of unidentifiable emotion track over his face. He looked almost reluctant to speak. He sighed. “Why,” he said, “you tell your mother no pay money?” He shook his head as if he were helpless,
as if I’d brought it all on myself. He turned to leave. “We are here long time because she no pay,” he said. “The soldiers are very mad.”

I could almost hear how this theory was put into place. I could imagine Ahmed’s velvety voice, delivering his take on things to Captain Skids. Skids would have repeated it to the boys, stirring in his own bile.
For your frustration and misery, blame the girl. For two months of stasis and boredom and homesickness, blame the girl. For everything you don’t have, for everything you haven’t done, you can blame the girl. It is she who told her mother not to pay.

T
here was a little girl living in the house down the alleyway from my window, the daughter of the woman I’d seen hanging laundry on the clothesline in her yard. In the afternoons, during the hot, lazy hours when my captors snoozed in the shade of the veranda, I listened to the girl playing as her mother washed cooking pots or hung more laundry. She squealed and sassed and occasionally pitched a fit, shrieking
maya,
the Somali word for “no.” I could lose a whole afternoon to her tiny voice. Sometimes I angled myself to look sideways through the grate toward them, catching glimpses of the mother’s head or clothing, a snatch of yellow or deep indigo, over the fence. Donald had given me a round compact mirror, small enough for me to fit through the window bars. When I held it just so, I could get a wider view of the neighboring yard, though I didn’t do it often, for fear the mirror might flash and someone would spot my white hand sticking out. The outside world—the threat of being kidnapped away from my kidnappers and held by another group looking for Western dollars or killed for show—filled me with worry.

The neighbor’s little girl was too short for me to see, though judging from her voice, I guessed she was about two years old. She seemed always to be in motion, toddling the perimeter of the yard, bellowing
maya
any time her mother tried to reel her in.

Her mother was trying to teach her to converse.

Iska warran?
she would say to the girl. I knew from Jamal that this meant “How are you?”

When she was feeling agreeable, the girl would say it back.
Iska warran?

Waa fiicanahay.
“I am good.”

Waa fiicanahay,
repeated the girl.

Waa fiicanahay,
I whispered along with them.

Much of what they said I couldn’t understand, but the tones I recognized. A mother and her child, a mixture of love and exasperation. Once in a while I heard a man’s voice and what sounded like a grandmother back there in the yard. Sometimes I could hear a group of female voices—friends of the girl’s mother, I guessed—trilling and laughing. The sound made me weak with jealousy. Everybody seemed to dote endlessly on the child. In my mind, I could picture them all. I imagined them warm and open, as people who wouldn’t betray me. In my mind, I was going to follow them right through the back door and to their table for dinner, a phantom white lady appearing from nowhere, saying, “How are you?” in perfect Somali. I listened for the child’s name but never managed to catch it. I just thought of her as Maya.

In the afternoons, it was Abdullah who most often seemed to have guard duty. He stalked the hallway outside our rooms. Sometimes he opened my door without warning. He would step inside and stare at me, saying nothing, clutching his gun, keeping his gaze on me for full minutes without moving. Or he’d come in and tear through my bags as if searching for something. During the first week after I was separated from Nigel, he did this once, then twice, and then a third time. He tossed my things on the floor with a precise sort of violence. He still covered his face in my presence, even as the rest of them had given up and walked around unmasked.

I greeted Abdullah each time. I watched him move around my room. He was bigger than most of the other boys, with a thick torso and long arms. His eyes were dark and spaced widely on his face. He had a deep, barking voice, muffled slightly by his scarf. I did what I could to force a conversation, trying to trigger his interest in speaking
English. “I wonder what we will eat tonight for the meal,” I said loudly and slowly. “I’m getting hungry. Are you hungry, Abdullah?” For the most part, he ignored me.

All the noisy rummaging through my belongings, I would later realize, was a testing of the waters. Abdullah was figuring out how much of a disturbance he could make while the other boys slept through, while Nigel stayed quiet on the other side of the wall. He was calculating just what he could do in those empty hours.

*

With nothing else to distract me, I immersed myself in the reading materials Donald had given us weeks earlier—the moldy, antiquated booklets that had previously caused us to howl with laughter. There was the
Times
of London student reader from the early 1980s, filled with reprinted articles about the House of Lords and a tanking British economy, followed by lists of study questions and writing exercises with blank spaces to do the work. There was an English-language storybook about twin Muslim boys learning to be kind. And then the college catalog meant to entice rich Malaysians to study in the UK, its pages rank-smelling and glopped together by moisture. Ha, ha, ha. Nigel and I had flipped through the books with disdain. We’d torn out some of the cleaner pages and used them as plates for our tuna and onion. We’d mocked Donald for the proud way he’d delivered the books, for having paid money for them, for thinking them relevant. We’d mocked the whole country of Somalia for sucking up what would have been trash and selling it in the marketplace.

I remembered laughing with Nigel with the same distant fondness I felt when recalling eating a spinach salad or a piece of cake at home in Canada.

I now sat on my mattress with those books and read every word on every page. I studied a washed-out editorial cartoon showing Margaret Thatcher dressed in a neat suit and a pillbox hat. As the tin roof over my head moaned and expanded under the afternoon sun, I dutifully answered the reading-comprehension questions at the end of each reprinted article in the student reader.
Was this article written from a
point of view that is objective or subjective? Please provide supporting evidence.
When it came to the college catalog, I now saw the allure. The book listed universities in London, Manchester, Oxford, Wales, and many places I’d never heard of. Who knew England was so big? The text wasn’t terribly interesting—notes on class size and curriculum—but the photos were in color, stained and faded, though still vivid. The buildings were stony and grand. I looked at the grass and flowers, at the students smiling on the pathways, backpacks hooked over their shoulders, talking about what I imagined were abstract and absorbing things.

Those students were now over ten years out of university, I figured. They lived in houses and had jobs, dogs, babies. I wondered: Why hadn’t I wanted that for myself? Why had I funneled my savings into plane tickets and not tuition? For fun, I pictured myself in a lecture hall, a dorm room, a cellar pub late on a Thursday night. It seemed to fit. It felt like a plan. I put myself on a quadrangle with brushed hair and a new laptop.

The door to my room opened and closed. I looked up from the catalog to see Abdullah. He wore a purplish sarong and a singlet that was stretched out and yellowed with sweat. His eyes glowered from the open slit of his face scarf. This time he didn’t pretend to search my room. Instead, he leaned his gun against the wall. “Get up,” he said.

When I didn’t move, he said it again.

It didn’t matter that I’d worried about this. That I’d had a sense it might be coming. It changed nothing. There was no preparing.

I slid the book from my lap and slowly got to my feet, feeling my body quake, my throat contracting. “Please,” I said, “don’t.”

Abdullah responded by clamping his right hand onto my neck, shoving me back until I was pressed against the wall. The heel of his hand jammed into my windpipe, lifting my chin. I started to cry while his long fingers climbed my face, covering my mouth, digging into my eye sockets. I felt myself suffocating. “Please don’t, please don’t,” I said into the taut skin of his palm, gasping for air. “Shut up, shut up,” he was saying back, tightening his hold on my neck. His sarong was now off. Beneath it, he wore a pair of gym shorts with an elastic
waistband, and with his free hand, he was touching himself inside the shorts. My mind felt liquid, spilling out of me, unable to hold a thought. I felt him reaching down for the hem of my Somali dress, tugging it upward. I kept talking, my voice muffled, my arms batting uselessly at him. “Don’t do this. Please don’t.” He slammed a fist into the side of my head, and I felt my whole body go rigid. “Shut up I will kill you,” he said. “
ShutupIwillkillyou
.” Then he pushed himself into me and I wanted to die.

In ten seconds it was over. Ten impossibly long seconds. Enough time for the earth to rumble and split, making a gulch between me and the person I’d been.