A House in the Sky (35 page)

I returned Jamal’s greeting, sick with worry.

He gestured for me to pull out my tin plate and lay it on the floor. He then opened a plastic bag and slid something onto it—a slender piece of deep-fried fish, golden brown and glistening with oil. From his pocket, he pulled out two small limes and set them next to the fish. Finally, he produced two hard-boiled eggs and placed them on the plate as well.

It was protein. He’d been worried about my appetite. This was a gift, and Jamal was proud of it. “You like?” he said, pointing at the fish. “I can get for you every day at the market, but only at night. They don’t make in the morning.”

We stood for a few seconds, regarding each other. I gave myself an internal kick.
Snap out of it.
“Oh, Jamal,” I said, lifting the plate, “this is so nice of you.” I smiled at him gratefully, feeling a touch of guilt. I hoped the leaders wouldn’t punish him too badly after I was gone.

Alone again, I sat on the floor and forced myself to eat the food, not just because it was fuel but also so I didn’t arouse suspicion. I then went through the motions of the day’s last prayer. When it was over, as I’d planned with Nigel, I rapped on my door and pushed it open slightly to see who responded. It was Abdullah who peered down the hallway, which meant that he was on nighttime guard duty. My heart dropped a little. Abdullah was less lazy than some of the others. He liked to roam.

“
Mukuusha,
” I said in Somali, pointing at my stomach.
Bathroom.
“I am feeling sick. Very sick.”

Without hesitating, Abdullah snapped his fingers to indicate that I could go. Normally, I didn’t make a bathroom trip after the last prayers, but stomach problems were something they never argued with. It also bought me extra time once I was there. In this case, Jamal’s slab of fried fish only bolstered the viability of my cause.

Slowly and coolly, I left my room and walked down the hallway in the direction of the bathroom. Earlier in the evening, I’d smuggled my backpack under my dress and left it on the window ledge. Nigel stood
waiting for me at the doorway to his room. Out of Abdullah’s sight, we accelerated. I figured we had ten minutes, fifteen tops, before he’d figure out that I hadn’t returned from the bathroom and would come walking down to check on me.

Inside the bathroom, I drew the curtain and quickly pulled the black abaya from my backpack, putting it on over the red dress. Nigel climbed onto the toilet and reached up to start removing the window bars. He’d sneaked into the bathroom earlier and done some advance work, wrenching the bars out of the walls, then putting them back in place, propped up precariously by chunks of loose cement. Despite his efforts to conceal it, the walls on either side of the window at this point looked fully torn up, with gashes in the plaster where the bars once were set. The goal now was to move everything out of the way while staying perfectly quiet.

Within a minute, Nigel had wriggled the first bar free and handed it down to me. Then came the second bar, its weight cool in my hands. I laid both bars on the floor next to the sink, my nerves making me dizzy. Swiftly, Nigel heaved himself up from the toilet onto the alcove, and lying on his belly with his legs pointed back to the floor, he began gingerly unstacking the bricks from the window frame, moving them to the outer part of the sill. I could hear him panting. One brick came away, then two, then three, then four. When they were all out, he jumped back down and motioned that we were ready. It was time to go. Nigel interlaced his fingers into a stirrup for me to step into and then boosted me toward the window and the eighteen-inch gap that was now there.

I looked through that hole for no longer than two seconds, but it was enough to see everything. I could see the alleyway beneath, and the darkness of a village with no lights and everything uncertain beyond. We’d calculated about a twelve-foot drop to the ground, given that the house sat on a concrete foundation. We’d worried about breaking our ankles. We’d worried about so many things, and as I stared at the gap in the window, every one of those things felt there, right on the other side, along with our freedom. As we’d planned, I turned around and started to back my way through the remaining window bars, sliding both feet through the gap—with two bars above me and one bar
beneath—lowering myself slowly into the air outside. The night was cool and moist. I could feel a breeze on my ankles. It worked until it didn’t: I pushed myself back and felt my rear end jam up against one of the bars still in the window. I pushed again but went nowhere. The gap was too small. If I couldn’t fit, Nigel never would.

From below, he was getting anxious. “Go, go, come on,” he whispered.

“I can’t. It’s not working.” I thrust again at the bar to show him my predicament. His face looked stricken, his forehead slick with sweat. I said, “Can you take out another bar?”

“Not now,” he said, almost hissing. “It makes too much noise.”

The window ledge was a mess of bricks and broken mortar. Abdullah was probably starting to wonder why I wasn’t back in my room. We were stuck—not just stuck but screwed.

Nigel waved a hand, telling me to climb down. “Get back to your room,” he said. “Quickly. I’ll try to fix this up.”

“What about my backpack?”

“Leave it,” he said. “I’ll bring it with me. Just go, hurry.”

I stripped off the black abaya and stuffed it in my backpack. Then I walked back to my room as casually as I could and closed the door noisily, to let Abdullah know I’d returned. I lay on my mattress in the dark, trying to muster one calm thought. I listened for Nigel in the bathroom. It sounded as if he was vomiting in the toilet, his own nerves having betrayed him. There was a shuffling in the hallway, a flashlight. Through my keyhole, I saw Abdullah making his way down the hall. Nigel, too, must have noticed the light coming, because within seconds he was out of the bathroom and in the hallway, mumbling something about being sick and needing more water to flush the toilet. There was quiet discussion, the light disappeared and then came back after a few minutes, and soon Nigel was back in the bathroom, alone.

I knew it was only a matter of hours before our plan was discovered—before one of our captors spotted the jerry-rigged pile of bricks and bent bars that comprised the bathroom window or just read the whole stupid plotline in my eyes.

When dawn broke and Hassam came to open our window shutters before prayer, Nigel and I talked, agreeing that we had to leave immediately.
Quickly, we redrew the outline of our plan. We knew from the calls of the muezzin that there was a mosque somewhere close by. We decided we’d run there. It seemed like the one good option, a place to find a crowd. I accepted the morning bag of food from Jamal, trying hard not to make eye contact. We waited for the midday prayer, for the heat to arrive and the boys to start nodding off afterward. I knocked for the bathroom, and Nigel met me there, holding my backpack and abaya. Early that morning, he’d pulled out a third window bar. The mess of it was staggering. I waited while he quickly unstacked the bricks again. This time, my pulse throbbing, I didn’t hesitate. I got one leg out the window and then the second. I slid a few inches on my stomach to lessen the distance to the ground, holding on to one of the remaining window bars for support, and then I let myself drop.

We hit the ground one right after the other, me and then Nigel, two soft thumps in the sand. My heart lifted and crashed with the impact.

Things were bad. I knew it the instant I touched the soil. Nothing looked like I thought it was going to look. Nothing appeared the way I’d planned it in my mind. I’d built a scene, a stage set for us to run through, based on the sliced-up view I’d had through my window. I remembered bits and pieces from the car ride that had brought us to the house. I remembered seeing camels, people walking on the street, rows of bushes, and a shabby little village with twists and turns and places to hide. I’d figured all of that would be waiting for us outside the window. But now, looking toward the ends of the alleyway, I understood with absolute dismay that I’d been wrong. To the left was a sideways-leaning fence made of patchwork pieces of colored tin and old oilcans that had been hammered flat. To the right was a row of shanties, built from more tin and pieces of loose burlap and other refuse. There wasn’t a bit of vegetation in sight, beyond a few brambly thornbushes, low and leafless in the sand. More alarming was the sudden appearance of an emaciated child, a boy of maybe seven, standing only a few feet away from me, naked but for a pair of shorts, swaybacked and wide-eyed, staring at me in a shocked way, as if just about to let out a mighty scream.

I fixed my gaze on the boy, trying to smile and appear kindly. I lifted a finger to my lips. The child looked at me and then Nigel, his eyes getting bigger. Without a sound, he took off at a sprint—heading, I was sure, toward the first adult he could find.

It was as if a starting gun had been shot, as if a seismic disturbance had unsettled the air, rippling over the rooftops to the patio where our captors lay in repose. Everything became instinctual then. The colors went flat and the world went insane. Nigel and I didn’t even look at each other. We just started, madly, to run.

T
he boy had charged to the right; Nigel and I dashed left, down the narrow alleyway, along the side of the house and toward where it opened onto a street, about ten meters away. Our feet flailed in the deep sand. Both of us wore flip-flops, which slowed every step. Now that we were running, there was no keeping Nigel’s head covered with the sheet we’d brought, no pretending that he was a sick Somali man and I his gentle caretaker. There was no pretending anything. Every strategy we’d plotted at our windowsills had flown out of our heads. Every bit of reason had lifted away. Our bodies floundered in the free air as if our bones had gone to rubber during those months in the house.

At the end of the alley was a rutted sand road, and on the road there were shacks and some market stalls and the land beyond was a flat brown.

Nigel was yelling—another diversion from the plan—at nobody and everyone, screaming
I caawin, I caawin,
the Somali words for “help me.”

I saw it all in a high-speed panic, which is to say I barely saw it, or caught it only in flashes—a half-collapsed wall, a few nervous goats, a man standing in an arched doorway, a donkey lashed to a cart by two thin poles. We ran through it and past it, this landscape we’d spent hours conjuring in our minds, this place to which we were colossally
mismatched, me behind Nigel, Nigel shouting, the heat warping the air around us, all of it with the unreality of a bad dream. Up ahead, several women walked together in the sunlight, their hijabs flowing behind them in waves of hot pink and yellow. We shouted and moved faster, heading toward them—some women,
thank God
—only now the women were looking over their shoulders at us, murmuring and pointing, their faces floating inside their robes. Seeing we were headed toward them, they started to run.

More people spotted us and fled. The street emptied, everyone scattering ahead of us. Later, I would look back on it and realize that if you are running in a place like Somalia, everyone understands that you are running from danger. Which means that they also should run.

At the corner, we instinctively turned left, racing out onto a wider road. I looked for the mosque but couldn’t see it. We’d deliberately timed our escape for the midday prayer, knowing we’d find a roomful of people at the mosque, banking on the hope that we’d encounter some sympathy there. Finally, Nigel looked back and spotted a minaret, a knitting needle in the blue sky over my shoulder. We reversed direction and bolted toward it. The mosque was a hundred meters in front of us, then fifty, then ten.

Ahead, I saw a young man standing in place, watching us with interest. I recognized him at once. He was the neighbor I’d seen through my window months earlier, the man who’d locked eyes with me across the yard.

I charged right up to him, adjusting my head scarf so it was tighter around my face, the words tumbling out. “Help, help, please, do you speak English?”

Appearing unsurprised, he nodded.

“You have seen me,” I said. “Do you remember? The window?”

He again showed that he understood. Nigel had stopped running and come to join us.

I continued, speaking a careful English while trying to catch my breath. “We are Muslims. We have been kidnapped. They have kept us five months. Can you go with us inside the mosque?”

The man paused a second, as if weighing his options. Something told me that he felt guilt for having lived next door to us all these months and done nothing to help.

“Come with me,” he said.

Flanking him on either side, Nigel and I race-walked toward the mosque, each keeping a hand hooked under one of the man’s arms, almost dragging him, or at least preventing him from changing his mind.

The mosque building was tall and wide, painted green and white with a crescent moon on top and a short set of steps leading to a wooden platform and an entrance. The platform was heaped with shoes, signaling that the place was full of people. Moving up the stairs behind the neighbor and Nigel, I felt the first trickle of relief, a feeling so unfamiliar that I almost couldn’t identify it.

Just then, a lone person came skidding around the street corner and halted maybe thirty feet away. It was Hassam—market boy and master of my Koran lessons—now just a thin dark figure against a canvas of sand. He wore a white tank top that hung from his bony frame, plus a sarong and no pants, a sign that he’d run from the house in a rush. His expression was one of disbelief and fury and selfish terror.

Then another of our captors rounded the corner—Abdullah, unmasked and carrying his gun.

I bolted forward into the mosque, forgetting to remove my shoes. What I saw first was a field of men—kneeling, sitting, milling about in small groups. There were prayer mats spread in lines across a concrete floor. Heads turned. A few people stood up. The interior of the mosque was vast, a single room with a vaulted ceiling, about the size of a gymnasium. I heard myself calling out Somali words and English words and also some Arabic, my brain blurry with distress. I shouted
Help!
and
May the blessings of Allah be upon you!
and
I am Muslim!
and
Please help me!
and
Help me!
and
Please help!
Nigel, too, was yelling.