The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (19 page)

Because my door was in easy sight of the veranda where the boys spent their time, I had to be cautious—knocking for permission to leave my room, never staying too long in the bathroom. I was also frail. The muscles in my arms had become wasted and wobbly, my elbows often buckling when I tried to pull myself up to the window ledge.

Given where his room was located, Nigel was in a better position than I to make undetected trips to the bathroom and to stay there longer. He worked methodically, but there was no hiding the mess we made, the skewed bricks and mounds of loose mortar sitting on the sill. I tried to take solace in the knowledge that the boys walked into our bathroom only once or twice a week—mainly to take the oversize bucket we used for water and refill it at a tap outside. The risk still felt huge.

On the start of the third day, Nigel announced that he had carved out the final brick. He then had to contend with the metal bars, but the first one was already loose, and he said it would take only one more to create enough space to pass through.

We decided that we should make our break that same night, slipping out the window around 8
P.M.
, just after the evening's final prayer. We were banking on that night being like every other night in the house, governed by the mind-numbing clockwork routine—prayer followed by dinner, followed by prayer, followed by bedtime for everyone but the two boys on guard duty, who would sit outside, talking idly in the darkness.

I was startled, then, when Jamal arrived in my room with dinner a full hour ahead of when the meal usually came.

“Asalaamu Alikum,”
he said with a slow smile. Peace be upon you.

My thoughts spun. Did they suspect something? What was happening?

Jamal waved 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.

It was protein, a gift. It seemed that he was worried about my diet. “You like?” Jamal said, pointing at the fish.

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, feeling a touch of guilt. I hoped the leaders wouldn't punish him too badly after I was gone.

Following the day's last prayer, 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 sank. Abdullah liked to roam.

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

Abdullah snapped his fingers to indicate that I could go.

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 to the bathroom and left it on the window ledge. Inside it, I had put a headscarf and the heavy black abaya I wore the day we were kidnapped, so that once outside, I could better blend in. Nigel stood waiting for me at his doorway. He had done some advance work in the bathroom, wrenching two bars out of the walls, then putting them back in place, propped up precariously with chunks of loose cement.

Up in the alcove, Nigel removed the two bars and next began gingerly unstacking the bricks from the window frame. I could hear him panting. One brick came away, then two, then three, then four. When they were all out, he jumped back to the floor and motioned that we were ready. After I put on my abaya, Nigel lifted me toward the window and the 18-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 had worried about breaking our ankles in the drop. We had 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. I turned around and started to back my way through the remaining window bars, sliding both feet through the gap—with two of the remaining bars above me and one bar beneath—lowering myself slowly into the air outside. 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. The gap was too small. If I couldn't fit, Nigel never would.

“Go, go, come on,” Nigel whispered from below.

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

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

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

I walked to my room as casually as I could and closed the door noisily, to let Abdullah know I had returned. I lay on my mattress in the dark, trying to muster one calm thought. I knew it was only a matter of time before our plan was discovered—before one of our captors spotted the jury-rigged pile of bricks and bent bars that comprised the bathroom window or just read the whole stupid plotline in my eyes.

After dawn broke and the boy named Hassam came to open our window shutters before prayer, Nigel and I stood at our sills, deciding 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. It seemed like the one good option, a place to find a crowd. We waited for the midday prayer, for the heat to arrive and the boys to start nodding off. I knocked for the bathroom, and Nigel met me there, holding my backpack. Early that morning, he pulled out a third window bar. I waited while he quickly unstacked the bricks again. This time, 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 appeared the way I had imagined it. To the left was a sideways-leaning fence made of patchwork pieces of colored tin and old, flattened oil cans. To the right was a row of shanties, built from more tin and pieces of loose burlap. There wasn't a bit of vegetation in sight, beyond a few brambly thornbushes, low and leafless in the sand. More alarming was the 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 and looking like he might scream.

The boy 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. Nigel and I didn't even look at each other. We just started, madly, to run.

 

Every strategy we plotted at our windowsills flew out of our heads. Every bit of reason lifted away as we dashed down the alleyway.

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 at nobody and everyone, screaming
“I caawi, I caawi,”
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 donkey lashed to a cart by two thin poles. We ran through it and past it, this landscape we had spent hours imagining, 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. People on the street spotted us and fled. 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, too, should run.

The mosque was tall and wide, painted green and white with a crescent moon on top and a short set of wooden 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 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. It was Hassam, one of the younger guards. His expression was one of disbelief and selfish terror. I saw Abdullah run up, just behind him.

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 the floor. Heads turned. A few people stood up. The interior of the mosque was vast, a single room with a vaulted ceiling. 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!” Nigel, too, was yelling.

A crowd magnetized around us, men with puzzled faces, some showing alarm. And then Abdullah was upon me, having blasted through the door with Jamal right behind, both of them holding guns.

Abdullah lunged and I dodged, feeling his grasp slip off my shoulder. I ran to a far corner of the room, where another group of men sat on the floor. I said every Arabic word I could think of as they lifted their bearded faces toward me, dumbstruck. Off to the side, Jamal had corralled Nigel against a wall and was hitting him repeatedly in the head, pounding on him with a closed fist, beating him with every ounce of strength he had. Nigel, I could see, was trying to hit him back, all the while shouting, “Jamal! Jamal!” as if to remind him that, in a weird way, they were once friends.

My fear organized itself into speed. I ducked through a doorway leading out into the air. With Abdullah two paces behind me, I leapt over the three stairs that descended from the side door of the mosque, landing in heavy sand, shedding my flip-flops as I ran. A gunshot ripped overhead, hollowing out the air. I looked back to see Abdullah, who had stopped running long enough to fire at me. My mind circled back toward the mosque. Nigel was inside. Inside was safer than outside. Keeping my shoulders low, I did a high-speed 20-yard end run around Abdullah, throwing myself back up the stairs and into the mosque.

The scene inside was oddly calm. Nigel had managed to shed Jamal and was sitting, not quite placidly but pretend placidly, at the front of the mosque, in the semicircular area that served as the imam's pulpit, surrounded by a loose cluster of maybe 15 bearded men, most of them standing. I dropped to my knees next to Nigel, who was speaking English with some of the men, sounding like he was answering to some skepticism that he was Muslim.

Through a large, low window to one side of the pulpit, I could see a woman, sheathed entirely in black, peeking in at us, until one of the men strode to the window and slammed its metal shutters closed.

Abdullah had reentered the mosque. He was creeping his way into the group of bystanders, his gun canted loosely in my direction, sweat dripping through his hair and shining his cheeks. Nigel, meanwhile, was loudly reciting verses of the Koran like a schoolboy.

One of the men explained to us that someone was phoning the local imam, who was in the next village but would come to hear our story and give his judgment. “
Inshallah,
everything will be fine,” he said, indicating that we should remain seated on the floor. “
Inshallah,
maybe fifteen minutes.”

I felt relieved by this. An imam, I figured, would want to help us. I could hear Abdullah and Jamal arguing—politely—with some of the men.

Abruptly, a woman parted the quarreling crowd, elbowing her way past the men with the guns. I recognized her as the woman who had been looking through the window. She wore a black abaya and full hijab, including a niqab draped over her nose and mouth, covering everything but her eyes. Every man in the place was staring at her. The woman noticed no one. She came right over to me, kneeling down at my side without a word. Automatically, I reached for her hand. Her fingers wrapped around mine. I felt, for a second, safer than I'd felt in ages.

Her eyes were brown and somehow so familiar that it was as if I knew them from somewhere. The tops of her hands were painted with delicate, tendril patterns of rust-colored henna, the sort of ornament that one woman draws painstakingly on another. She was speaking in Somali to the men around us. I watched her, my nerves firing. I couldn't understand what she was saying. I knew she was helping me somehow. I heard distress in her voice. When she looked at me, her eyes swam with emotion.

Without thinking, I reached out and brushed my fingers over her face, feeling the warmth of her cheek beneath the fabric.

I said, “Do you speak English?”

“A little,” she said, moving closer. “You are a Muslim?”

“Yes, from Canada.”

“You are my sister,” she said. “From Canada.”

She reached out both arms, and I let myself fall. I sank my face into the pillows of her body. Her arms fit snugly around me. I felt the edges of my vigilance soften, the domino fall of my defenses. I began to cry. As men jabbered around us, the woman tightened her hold on me. She was the first woman I'd interacted with in five months. Lifting my head to find her eyes again, I told her I had been a prisoner, that I wanted to go home. My voice rose and fell unevenly. Uttering the word
home
caused me to sob. I pointed toward Abdullah, who was scowling at us, probably 10 feet away. “He is abusing me,” I said, suddenly desperate. To be sure she understood, I used my fingers to mimic the mechanics of sex.