A House in the Sky (14 page)

One night she came by my room. I poured her a glass of wine. “You know,” she said, “that everybody’s mad at you, right?”

“What?” I said. I’d just returned from a few weeks of vacation time in Portugal, traveling again with Kelly. I looked at Julie in disbelief. How could anybody be mad? What could I have done?

In my absence, it turned out, some of my neighbors at the Hamra had discovered a video on YouTube. Unbeknownst to me, the Press TV anchor had uploaded a live broadcast I’d done with him a couple of months earlier, when I was still living at the Palestine, before I’d had any real contact with foreign reporters.

I hadn’t realized that live broadcasts went up on the Internet. As I watched it on my laptop after Julie had gone off to bed, I felt my chest squeezed by a monumental dread. On-screen, the Iranian anchorman was asking me, with no small degree of incredulity, how it was that the mainstream Western media seemed to be supportive of George Bush’s troop surge when the death toll among American troops had just ticked up to four thousand.

Standing in the heat of the day on a lower rooftop of the practically empty Palestine Hotel with a placid row of palm trees behind me, having spent a number of weeks driving around Baghdad with Enas and no security guards, I had answered with what I thought was the truth. At that point, I’d seen foreign reporters only in the heavily guarded Green Zone, absorbing the daily briefings given by bland-voiced Coalition Provisional Authority press officers. I’d heard from
the Iraqis working for Alhurra that in order to limit their risks, and often governed by media-outlet insurance policies, Western journalists sometimes sent Iraqi reporters—translators and fixers, usually—out into the city to do interviews so they could assemble the reporting and write their stories from the relative safety of their bureaus.

Sitting against a pillow on my bed at the Hamra, I braced myself for what came next. Already, I felt older than the version of myself I saw on the screen. I wished she’d never opened her mouth. I imagined all the Fancy-pants gathered around somebody’s computer, scoffing at every word.

“The problem with reporting in Baghdad, for many media outlets,” I was saying to the anchorman in the broadcast voice I’d worked so hard to cultivate, “is they don’t actually see what’s going on. They are living in compounds. They’re sequestered inside the Green Zone. And actually, by contract, they’re not allowed into the Red Zone, where you see me . . .”

Listening to myself talk, I felt ill. Since moving to the Hamra, I’d lamented that nobody seemed to want to include me. But I had made the mistake long before I met any of the journalists working there. After barely two months in Baghdad, I had awarded myself the upper hand on wisdom and experience, on live television, no less—and worse, immortalized on YouTube. And I’d been wrong. There were plenty of journalists living and working in the Red Zone. But I hadn’t been entirely misinformed, either. It was hard for anybody to see what was going on in Baghdad, myself included. It was just too unsafe.

I had no choice but to live with what I’d said. I had been quick-talking and naive, and now I was pretty much screwed. I gave up on making friends or professional connections in Baghdad. I wore my embarrassment like an iron lung. I studied my bank balance and looked for flight deals online, thinking I should find another place to report from temporarily—Africa, maybe. In the past, I’d calmed myself with breathing exercises, or by trying to meditate the way I’d done in backpacker hostels in India, but in this context, it didn’t seem to work. I felt stuck and alone and totally depressed.

Then came a surprise e-mail from Nigel, saying what seemed to
be a simple hello. He had a new girlfriend and had moved with her to Scotland. He was living on an estate near Glasgow, working as a groundskeeper. He was checking in on me, sending good wishes. He signed off with “Take care, darling, and stay safe over there.” Despite the news about the girlfriend, it was a blast of old sweetness right when I needed it.

A few days and a few e-mails later, we arranged to talk on the phone. The sound of his voice caused my eyes to well. I missed what we’d once had. Nigel made jokes about his new job, the Scottish weather. Since we’d spoken last, he’d anchored himself into a whole new life, though he didn’t sound all that excited about it. I didn’t understand what had led him from his newspaper job in Bundaberg to trimming hedges in Scotland. I knew nothing about how he’d spent the last year. I knew only that he wasn’t taking pictures anymore.

I told him a few stories from Baghdad, making it sound as though I were leading a fascinating, exciting life and leaving out the part about how everyone hated me. After about ten minutes, the conversation trailed off. A beat passed.

I heard myself blurting a question I probably should have kept to myself. “What about your photography? What happened? You had such big plans for yourself.”

It was a bit of a taunt, but some part of me was genuinely curious—the dim region of my mind trying to understand why, when I was the one who’d pulled off some version of the dream life we’d imagined for ourselves a couple of years ago in Ethiopia, I was the one who was miserable.

“I don’t know, really,” Nigel said. He sounded flummoxed, thoughtful, maybe a little glum.

I blurted onward. I mentioned that I was thinking about buying a plane ticket to Nairobi and that, from Nairobi, I thought I’d get myself to Somalia sometime in the next month. I had researched possible Somalia story ideas to pitch to the France 24 news director. I’d been thinking all these things, but now I was saying them out loud. And as I did, something old and hopeful snapped on.

“You could come, you know,” I said to him. “There’s so much going
on there. You could shoot pictures for a magazine, and I’ll do something for TV.”

“Maybe I could,” he said.

I hung up feeling pretty certain that he wasn’t serious. After all, he hadn’t joined me in Kabul when we were involved, and now, nearly a year later, he had a new girlfriend and was no doubt more rooted than ever in the comforts and safety of domestic life.

It didn’t matter, though. Over the course of that conversation, I’d quietly made up my mind. I was ready to get myself out of Baghdad.

*

There’s a famous old story in the journalism world about the news anchor Dan Rather. He was a young and inexperienced television reporter working for a second-rate TV station in Houston, Texas, in the early 1960s, when a monstrous hurricane barreled through the Gulf of Mexico, headed toward the island of Galveston. All the other reporters, it’s said, scrambled for the shelter and safety of their mainland newsrooms. But Dan Rather drove over the bridge and waited for the storm. When it bore down on Galveston, ripping up trees and houses and hurling ocean waves at the shore, he delivered live reports from the windiest and most dangerous heights.

He might have failed that day. He could have been injured or killed, in which case he would have become a footnote, known fleetingly as the guy who inserted himself into a hurricane and died, ruined by his own ambition. Instead, though, the gamble paid off. He survived the storm. Because he was there, because he’d taken the risk, he managed to tell the story in a vivid and meaningful way. His career was made. He was credited for convincing thousands of viewers in the hurricane’s path to evacuate their homes and promptly hired by a national network.

After almost seven months in Baghdad, I set my sights on Somalia. The reasons to do it seemed straightforward. Somalia was a mess. There were stories there—a raging war, an impending famine, religious extremists, and a culture that had been largely shut out of sight. I understood that it was a hostile, dangerous place and few reporters
dared go there. The truth was, I was glad for the lack of competition. I figured I could make a short visit and report from the edges of disaster. I’d do stories that mattered, that moved people—stories that would sell to the big networks. Then I’d move on to even bigger things.

Somalia, I thought, could be my hurricane.

T
he idea was to spend four weeks in Africa. That was it. In and out.

A photographer I knew from Baghdad—a friendly Frenchman named Jerome—had given me contact information for a fixer working in the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Fixers are hired to serve as on-the-ground planners for traveling journalists, setting up interviews, handling logistics, and often serving as translators. This one, Ajoos Sanura, was the elder statesman of Somali fixers and trusted by Western reporters. Jerome had been to Somalia twice already. He’d recently been offered a newspaper assignment to go a third time but had turned it down, in part because the country had become so dangerous. In his late thirties, married to another journalist and with a teenage son, Jerome had been in lots of war zones and had some scrapes with danger.

He warned me that everybody’s luck eventually ran out. There was no upside to moving between the world’s wars. “You’re still young,” he told me. “You should do something else with your life.” Yet I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I was twenty-seven years old, and my greatest successes so far—however modest they were—had come to pass in war zones.

The cheapest route to Nairobi from Baghdad was by way of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian city where I’d met Nigel two years earlier. I went there first, checking in to the Baro Hotel for nostalgia’s sake. It was still a dump, still home to enthusiastic, sun-blasted backpackers wafting
their traveler pheromones, clustering and pairing and seeking out new things. I remembered the feeling, the allure, but I could no longer pull it up in myself. It was like they were dancing to music I couldn’t hear.

I flew from Addis to Nairobi on August 10, 2008, finding a hotel downtown—a two-star place instead of my usual one-star, in deference to my laptop and wad of cash and the need to keep them safe. I didn’t plan to stay long. I’d been e-mailing with Ajoos and was encouraged by his responsiveness. For a hundred and eighty dollars per day, he would take care of logistics, including a translator and security. He would arrange a room at a place called the Shamo Hotel, the only lodging he recommended for foreigners, for an additional hundred dollars per night. I sent him a list of things I was interested in doing in Somalia: I wanted to visit a camp for displaced people, interview a female Somali doctor who was renowned for her medical relief work, and film the arrival of a Canadian naval vessel that was escorting a shipment of food aid funded by the World Food Programme to the coast of Somalia. Ajoos seemed to think it all would be possible.

The reality was that I was starting to need Nigel, or somebody, to come with me and share the costs. Ten days in Somalia would decimate my savings if I went alone. Nigel and I had e-mailed a few times. He seemed to be wrestling with himself over what to do, whether to come or not. He missed photography and the thrill of traveling. Some vain part of me hoped that he missed me, too.

On my second day in Kenya, I went to the Somali embassy and paid fifty dollars for a three-month journalist visa, granted overnight. Somalia was supposed to be the most dangerous country on earth, but its doors were wide open.

Another e-mail arrived from Nigel. He was coming. He would fly to Nairobi from London in a few days. He’d bought the ticket, packed his camera, and was on his way.

I was surprised by his decision and confused over what it meant. There was so much unresolved between us. The last time we’d seen each other had been in Australia sixteen months earlier, when we’d clung together in the airport, sure that our relationship was going to work out. Between Afghanistan and Iraq, my life had rearranged itself,
and so, too, had Nigel’s. We’d given up on each other without any real discussion. If I was honest with myself, I understood that I’d dangled the invitation to join me in Somalia precisely so he could turn it down. To torment him just a little bit about his lost dreams. To give myself the chance to paste up his “no” next to my “yes.”

But Nigel had called my bluff. He was saying yes. The prospect of seeing him again, of having him physically next to me, made me nervous. Why was he coming? What would we do? Whatever old affections we had, whatever resentments had gone unexpressed, I wasn’t sure I was ready to have them pried up—especially not in a place like Somalia.

*

Somalia is shaped like the number seven. It sits hooked over the top of Ethiopia, with one coastline pointing north toward Yemen and another, longer one facing east, overlooking the vast stretch of ocean that runs to the southern tip of India. Because of its location—wedged between the Middle East and the rest of Africa, with relatively easy sea access to Asia—Somalia has always mattered, especially to traders. The port of Mogadishu was once afloat with ships bringing in loads of spices from India and heading out stuffed with Somali gold, ivory, and beeswax. Much later, having been colonized by the Italians and the British, Somalia became a glamour destination for jet-setting Europeans who came in the 1940s and 1950s to bake themselves on the white sand of Mogadishu’s Lido Beach and clink glasses in its nightclubs and cafés.

This, though, was not the Somalia I was reading about in my Internet research. Mogadishu, some 630 miles north and east of Nairobi, was described as hellish—a chaotic, anarchic, staggeringly violent city, the shredded capital of a country that had ejected the colonialists and resisted democracy for the last fifty years. Power had been endlessly, hopelessly parsed between a network of mini-empires run by ancestral clans, warlords, and criminal gangs. A socialist dictator named Siad Barre had ruled unevenly for just over twenty years but had been driven out by rebel groups in 1991. Seventeen years later, those
groups—having splintered, morphed, and shifted allegiances repeatedly, in some cases joining forces with Islamic fundamentalists—were still battling one another for control. There had been thirteen different attempts at establishing a central government in Somalia, and all had failed. A fourteenth government was in place, basing itself out of one neighborhood in Mogadishu, though it was, by all accounts, almost completely ineffectual. When diplomats talked about Somalia, they called it a “failed state,” as if to suggest there was no possibility of solving its problems, as if it were deeply and permanently ruined.