A House in the Sky (47 page)

I hadn’t seen a bird in nearly a year. I’d always believed in signs—in charms and talismans, in messengers and omens and angels—and now, when it most mattered, I’d had one.

I would live and go home. It didn’t matter what came next or what I had to endure. I would make it through. I believed it with a sureness I hadn’t felt since the beginning.

R
amadan finished. Our captors slaughtered a goat, ate it, and moved us again, to a house far out in the country, away from Kismayo and the coastline, somewhere back toward Mogadishu. Bush House, I called it. The house had a big sandy yard with two broken trucks rusting in one corner and a high stone wall that surrounded the whole place. A row of ragged trees grew on the other side.

Skids and the boys had not come back to tie me up the next day. The abrasions around my elbows and ankles slowly began to heal. A few days after I’d been untied, Skids had tossed a plastic bag into my room. Inside the bag were two new dresses, folded neatly, made of thin cotton, in bright floral prints. They were a gift, an acknowledgment that I’d suffered.

I sensed a lingering guilt among my captors over what had happened. Hassam and Jamal avoided me completely for several days. The others focused on the new dresses—asking me to try them on, complimenting me when I did, telling me I looked like a Somali woman. In truth, the fabric was too thin to feel comfortable. I felt exposed in the dresses and never wore them for long, sticking instead to the heavy red dress I’d worn for so long. Abdullah showed up in my room one day and gave me a small plastic tub of perfumed body lotion, telling me proudly that he’d paid for it himself. “From Germany,” he said. It seemed his way of appeasing his own guilt. I opened the tub and sniffed it but never once put it on my body.

Romeo had not been present in the house during the days I was tied up. When I told him what had happened, he pretended to be surprised, but I could tell from his expression that he was fully aware. It was possible, even, that he’d been the one to issue the order. As the weeks passed, he’d grown increasingly morose. Allah, it turned out, had not wanted him to go to graduate school in New York after all. His departure date came and went with no money surfacing for a plane ticket. His fate was to stay with me and Nigel and the boys and Skids, to keep waiting.

We spent about six weeks in the Bush House, long enough that, through the bathroom window, I watched a sea of green wheat sprout and grow tall in the backyard, swallowing up the two trucks. It was raining again, the start of another season.

Romeo threw himself into teaching me to recite the Koran. He brought me Nigel’s copy to study, leaving it with me overnight. Beginning from the back of the book, where the chapters were shorter, I learned the verses, usually five or six lines at a stretch, slowly working my way into longer passages, until I could chant thirty lines at a time in halting Arabic. I followed along with the English, trying to make sense of what I recited.
Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his light is as if there were a niche and within it a lamp: the lamp enclosed in glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star . . .

Sometimes Romeo laughed at my pronunciation. Every so often, he’d slap me if I got something wrong. But once in a while I’d hit some benchmark and make him proud.

He’d summon the boys into my room so that I could chant for them, not unlike a prize canary. “You see?” Romeo would say to the boys, as if proving a point. “Amina is a good Muslim woman.”

This always seemed to be the debate.

The Koran was traveling regularly from Nigel’s room to mine and back, along with a hardcover book of
hadith
. I was allowed to sit up on my mat while reading them. When Romeo wasn’t around, Hassam came and gave me my lessons. He seemed contrite over what had happened and went out of his way to check on me, bringing me tablets of ibuprofen and stealing back to my room once in a while with an extra cup of tea. He also allowed me to have a couple of the books that had
come months earlier in the care package, sneaking them to me for a few hours at a time. To help with my Koranic studies, he brought me a pen, a pencil, and a thin unlined notebook with mint-green covers, the UNICEF logo emblazoned on the front.

Catching sight of the notebook one afternoon, Abdullah tore it out of my hands and waved it in my face. “Do you know what this is?” he said in a seething voice. He was pointing at the logo—a mother in profile, holding a young child against the backdrop of a globe.

I said, “UNICEF?”

His finger moved from mother to child. He looked at me emphatically. “Very bad.”

He carried the notebook off, leaving me despondent. So far, I’d used it only to write down a few questions I wanted to ask Romeo or Hassam about the Koran, but it had mattered to me—the milk white of those pages, the freedom of making even a simple query visible in ink. About twenty minutes later, Abdullah returned, throwing the notebook onto the floor with disdain. He’d taken a marker and scribbled big black slashes over mother and child, abiding by the Prophet’s rule that living beings were not to be displayed in artwork. Now it was okay to use.

I spent hours staring at that notebook, daring myself to record a real thought in it, worried that Romeo—the only one who could read English—would ask to see it.

In the meantime, I noticed that Nigel had used a pencil to underline some of the English verses in his Koran. On a blank page at the end of the book, he kept notes—a simple list of page numbers, marking verses I assumed he wanted to revisit. What he’d underlined concerned captives and laws about behavior. It seemed that Nigel, like me, had been using the Koran to argue for better treatment.

I decided to try something. I paged through the book, skimming the English, looking for individual words with which to make a message. When I found one, I’d underline the whole passage surrounding it lightly in pencil, but under the word I wanted him to notice, I’d make a firmer, more distinct line, almost as if drawing an arrow to it. I picked one word, then another, then another, and then, at the back
of the book, next to Nigel’s notes, I wrote down an ordered list of the page numbers on which they could be found. Later that afternoon, I told Hassam I was finished studying the Koran for the day. I watched him scuttle out the door with the book, trusting that he would bring it to Nigel.

The message I’d sent went like this:
I / love / you / my / mother / says / they / have / half / million.

The next day, when the Koran came back to me, I waited until I was alone and then flipped to the end of the book. Nigel had jotted down a new string of page numbers. My heart leaping, I whipped through the corresponding pages, hunting for the references.

He’d understood the code and responded:
I / want / home / I / despise / men.

*

During the weeks we spent in the Bush House, we were getting mixed signals about what was going on at home, whether any progress was being made. Nigel and I had been allowed a few quick, scripted phone calls. I’d overheard parts of one conversation Nigel had with his sister Nicky on speakerphone, in which she told him the family had sold two houses and a couple of cars.

One day Romeo came into my room, trailed by all the boys. He said, “There is one chance. Your mother has five hundred thousand dollars, and if she pays tomorrow, we accept that.” He added, “She can pay for you only, not Nigel. His family has money, and she is poor. But she decides today if she will save you.”

Moments later, his phone rang—a call being patched in from Adam, with my mother on the line. “Make her understand you have only this chance,” Romeo said. He gestured toward the boys, standing tall with their guns, and shrugged. “After this, I cannot say what they will do to you.”

With Romeo holding the phone in front of my face, I repeated his message. I begged my mother to get me out, even if it meant me alone. It crushed me to say the words. I knew Nigel would be able to hear some of the conversation. I hoped he’d understand that this
was just another manipulation: Romeo was trying to assess how much money my family had. But my mother was resolute. The families were working together, she said. They had five hundred thousand dollars for both of us. There was nothing more they could offer.

Romeo then left the house, replaced for a few days by Ahmed, who arrived in his car, clean-shaven and in city clothes, a polo shirt and pressed pants. He brought a new proof-of-life question for me—
What is your father’s favorite color?
—and did not hide his disgust at the squalor in which we were all living. Seeing that my feet were swollen and scabbed from mosquito bites, he ordered the boys to hang my mosquito net over my mat. I’d had it in my belongings all along but hadn’t been allowed to use it since the time we’d escaped, nine months earlier.

It was less an act of goodwill on Ahmed’s part and more, I figured, added insurance that I wouldn’t get sick and die on him: Skids had fallen ill with malaria and spent his days curled in a ball on the floor. In order to reach the bathroom, I had to pass by where he lay, writhing in fever on the floor in the main room of the house. He looked hunched and craven, his bald head gleaming with sweat. I hoped he would die.

“Hunter green,” I said to Ahmed. My father’s favorite color.

I asked if he could give me an update on the negotiations, whether we would go home soon. Ahmed shook his head vigorously and delivered some chilling news. The group, he said, had given up on reaching an agreement with our families and was working instead to strike a deal to sell us to Al-Shabaab. Shabaab would then sell us back to our families.

He passed me a few pages of paper and a pen and ordered me to write out a statement for him, something he referred to as “the Promise.” In it, I was to declare that wherever I ended up, I would adhere to the tenets of Islam and promote the faith. If I were freed, I needed to find a way to send him half a million dollars for jihad. He wanted me to put into writing exactly how I’d raise the money. I thought about it a minute and then wrote down that I’d start a jihadi website for profit and write a book that promoted Islam for women. Knowing how he loved documents, I used as much official-sounding language as I could, dropping in words like
“hereby” and “herewith,” in case that would help tip the balance toward our release.

At the bottom, I put a signature: Amina Lindhout.

Ahmed looked the whole thing over and told me it was good. Before leaving, he said, “
Inshallah,
your situation will be better soon.”

I didn’t believe him for a second. If they struck a deal with Shabaab, it would not be better. I felt sure, in fact, that things were about to get worse.

*

I took a chance, finally, and wrote something personal in the UNICEF notebook. I’d lived with the notebook for about a month. It had become a temptation I could no longer resist. Having the tools to write and not using them was like sitting in front of a meal and not eating it even though I was starving.

So one day I did it. I sat on my mat with the notebook flipped open in front of me, ready to slide it out of sight if anyone came into the room. I drew the blue mosquito netting around me like a curtain. Then I wrote a sentence, taking care to keep my writing so small that if any of my captors looked at it, they wouldn’t be able to read it. My words, as they accumulated, looked like the writing of a lunatic, like strings of tiny pearls packed onto the page.

I phrased what I wrote as a letter to my mother, a one-way conversation. I told her about my days. I described how I passed the time by escaping in my mind, how, if I needed to use the bathroom, I had to bang an empty water bottle on the floor to get my captors’ permission. I wrote about being hungry and lonely, and about the regrets that gathered at the edges of my mind each day, asking to be reviewed. The two things I deliberately didn’t mention were religion and the abuse I’d suffered at the hands of my captors, knowing that those, more than anything, would get me punished if the journal were found.

Writing felt like defiance, an outlet, a vein opened up. I kept the notebook hidden under my mat and wrote in it almost daily, usually when the boys lazed around in their midafternoon torpor, always with the Koran or the book of
hadith
open on my lap so I could pretend
to be studying. The guilt streamed out of me, old memories firing at close range. I wrote about how, years earlier in Afghanistan, during my first attempts at being a journalist, I’d visited a big prison outside of Kabul and, in the women’s wing, had met a Sudanese woman who’d been arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison for attempting to smuggle heroin. She shared a cell with five other women. I’d taken note that the room was clean, that they had their own small bathroom. I remembered thinking,
Well, this isn’t so bad.

The Sudanese woman was heavyset and wore a flowered dress. She had corn-rowed hair and her eyes struck me as sad and empty. She had been the only prisoner in the cell who spoke English. She’d talked to me urgently, desperately, as if telling me her story would help get her out. “I’m sorry for what I did,” she told me. “I want to go home.”

My reply was something I now regretted deeply, the words of a young woman who knew nothing, understood nothing. I’d said something like “Yes, but you have to pay the consequence of your crime.”

I’d given her no consolation. I’d only shamed her. The memory of it burned painfully in my mind.

To my mother, in the journal, I wrote, “I wonder sometimes if this has happened to me because I have been such a thoughtless person.” I also made what was the very beginning of a larger vow. “I wonder, when I am free again, how I can help oppressed people. I owe it to everyone to make my life into something.”

*

Our next move was to a ramshackle village. I could understand enough of the boys’ chatter to know that we were now just outside of Mogadishu. Skids, the boys, and Nigel stayed in a grubby concrete house, while I was put in a windowless, attached storage room, which, judging from the droppings that littered the floor, recently held goats.