A House in the Sky (15 page)

Beyond that, it had been an especially bad summer. The rainy season that year had brought no rain. Crops had failed. Food prices were high; people were beginning to starve. Rebel militias, understanding that food was power, were hijacking trucks carrying food aid brought in by the United Nations, sometimes shooting the drivers. At least twenty aid workers had been killed that year; a few others had been kidnapped and held for ransom. A number of international organizations had pulled out of Somalia altogether, saying it was too dangerous to work there.

I’d like to say that I hesitated before heading into Somalia, but I didn’t. If anything, my experiences had taught me that while terror and strife hogged the international headlines, there was always—really, truly always—something more hopeful and humane running alongside it. What you imagined about a place was always somewhat different from what you discovered once you got there: In every country, in every city, on every block, you’d find parents who loved their kids, neighbors who looked after one another, children ready to play. Surely, I thought, I’d find stories worth telling. Surely there was merit in trying to tell them. I knew that bad stuff happened. I wasn’t totally naive. I’d seen plenty of guns and misery by then. But for the most part, I’d always been off to one side, enjoying the good, the harm skipping past me as if I weren’t there at all.

N
igel walked out of customs at the Nairobi International Airport on the afternoon of August 16, carrying the same red backpack he’d had in Ethiopia. He hadn’t changed a whole lot. Same bright eyes, same razored dimples in his cheeks.

“Trout, get your ass over here,” he said, holding out his arms. Trout was a nickname I’d had in high school, a play on my last name. Nigel had appropriated it in Ethiopia.

We hugged. I said, “It’s so good to see you.” I meant it. I’d been alone so much in the last year, on edge with just about everyone I’d met. Before leaving Iraq, I’d had a dalliance with one of the American reporters, a bureau chief who lived down the hall from me at the Hamra and who, despite being arrogant, had seemed briefly like a friend, or at least someone to pass time with. Yet even that had felt alienating.

The familiarity I felt with Nigel was instantly calming. He threw an arm affectionately over my shoulders as we walked outside into the warm Kenyan air. I let myself be flattered by his presence, by the fact that he’d gotten on a plane and flown all the way to Africa—to work, yes, but also to see me. We took a taxi to the hotel so he could drop his bags in his room, down the hall from mine, and then went out to do the only thing that would help speed us through the awkwardness of the reunion: We got drunk.

We went to a café for a beer and on to a restaurant for dinner and some wine. From the street, we spotted a second-story bar, its balcony crowded with Kenyans in business suits, and we found our way there for tequila shots and more beer. We were talking more easily, looking at each other frankly, but avoiding any conversation that would qualify as meaty or emotional. We agreed we wanted more from our lives, but we stopped it at that.

By the time we landed at a smoky karaoke place sometime after midnight, by the time we’d downed another drink, climbed onstage, and belted out a George Michael tune at full volume in front of a group of locals who stood up and danced as we sang, I felt like we almost didn’t need to discuss our relationship. I felt somewhere between 90 and 95 percent sure that we didn’t love each other anymore, that we could be friends. I took one last turn with the microphone—woozily dropping a little New Kids on the Block on the Kenyan crowd—promising myself I’d wake up the next day and get back to thinking about work.

After we’d lurched back to our hotel, Nigel dipped toward me for a kiss, almost as if it were obligatory, and it felt so immediately weird and wrong that I knew for sure, as a couple, we were finished.

*

A few days later, the two of us crossed the tarmac at the Nairobi airport, headed toward a decrepit-looking Daallo Airlines plane. We were both tense, lugging a couple of carry-on bags, a few thousand dollars in American money, the currency of choice in Somalia, and our cameras. We’d each checked a bag. We were not saying a lot. The night before, we’d gone out for a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant called Trattoria, giving ourselves a sort of last hurrah before moving into what we’d figured would be more austere conditions in Mogadishu. Given that Somalia’s population was almost entirely Muslim, and Muslims as a rule don’t drink, it would probably be our last taste of alcohol, too. Late in the evening, Nigel had made another attempt at a kiss, and this time I’d actively pushed him away. “You have a girlfriend,” I scolded.
I was sure that his girlfriend wasn’t pleased with him these days, for a lot of reasons.

The airplane was packed with about a hundred Somali men and women, plus a few kids who clambered over the ripped canvas seats. The walk across the hot tarmac, coupled with a sense of foreboding I couldn’t quite shake, had combined to make me feel light-headed and a little bit sick. I noticed many of the women wore a conservative form of hijab, heavy dresses with long veils. A number of them were wearing niqabs, their faces fully covered except for the eyes. A few had stuffed their feet into white plastic bags before putting on their sandals, an effort to cover every last millimeter of skin out in public.

Everyone seemed to be chattering loudly while loading what seemed to be an insane amount of carry-on luggage—plastic bags of every color, packed with clothes and books and food, knotted tightly to stay closed. The walls of the plane were streaked with dirt. The door to the bathroom hung partially off its hinges. In the waiting area, I’d exchanged a few words with what appeared to be the only other non-African on the flight, an older Italian man who spoke English. He said he worked for a Christian NGO and was headed for the northern city of Hargeisa, the capital of the independent province of Somaliland, which would be the plane’s second stop after Mogadishu.

Hearing that we were disembarking in the south, he raised his eyebrows and made a dramatic poof with his lips, a gesture of disbelief. “Be very careful in Mogadishu,” he said. “Your head”—he tapped his own head—“is worth a half million dollars there. And that’s just for your head.”

I knew what he was saying. Westerners were a useful commodity in Somalia, even dead ones. A body was a trophy; living hostages could be sold back to their home countries. The notorious 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident, in which a failed raid by American commandos on a Mogadishu warlord had resulted in Somali militiamen proudly dragging the corpses of two American soldiers through the streets. More recently, in the Gulf of Aden to the north, Somali pirates were getting rich, holding foreign ships captive until seven-figure ransoms
were paid. I knew exactly what the Italian NGO worker was trying to tell me, but I didn’t appreciate hearing it.

Nigel and I were sitting at the back of the plane. Around us, people talked on cell phones, appearing agitated, standing up to shout out what sounded like news to others in neighboring rows. A Somali woman who’d been raised in America and now worked in Hargeisa translated for us. “They’re saying the war has broken out at the airport in Mogadishu,” she said. “There is fighting on the road. Maybe it will be closed. Maybe we can’t fly.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly—
the war has broken out
—especially against the backdrop of a war that had been going on for almost two decades, but in the plane, among the Somalis, it appeared to be causing a stir. We waited for some sort of announcement. The blood seemed to be pumping with extra force through my veins. For a second, I allowed myself to feel relieved by the prospect of being ordered off the plane and back into the Nairobi airport, to have the matter taken entirely out of our hands.

But after a few minutes, the plane’s engines kicked on. A flight attendant pulled the door shut, vacuum-sealing us off from the morning heat of Nairobi before taking to the loudspeaker to order people off their cell phones. War at the airport be damned, we were flying.

Sitting beside me, Nigel looked almost gray. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he said. “I can’t help it. I feel like something bad’s going to happen.”

I reached over and squeezed his arm. In my mind, I ran through the reasons we should be feeling good and not bad. I’d arranged to have us met at the airport. Ajoos had told me that an armed security crew would escort us to the hotel. He’d mentioned other foreign journalists were staying there. How bad could it be? If the fighting around the airport was a problem, I figured the pilot would continue to Hargeisa with us on board. Everything was more or less settled. We’d be okay.

I looked at Nigel. “This is just what it feels like to fly into a war zone,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. “It’s totally normal. You’ll feel better when we get there.”

On cue, the plane began to roll, rattling over the asphalt like an old jalopy, until it picked up speed, tilted, and took off. I felt my stomach press against my spine. Nairobi fell away beneath us, an expanse of glinting shantytowns and flat brown plains. I sat looking numbly out the window as we lifted through the clouds.

The Italian man was sitting just across the aisle. He had removed a Bible and a pair of black-framed eyeglasses from his bag and was reading quietly.

I powered up my laptop, plugged a headset into the jack, and hit play on a meditation audio file I kept stored on my hard drive. It was something I’d listened to in the evenings in Baghdad, in my room at the Hamra as I tried to fall asleep. The recording had been made by a woman I knew from home who ran a meditation group that Jamie and I had gone to when we lived together. On it, in a sonorous maternal voice over a backdrop of piano music, she gave instructions to breathe, long and slow, again and again, adding words to feed through the mind as a mantra: “With this breath, I choose freedom. With this breath, I choose peace.”

I sat with my eyes closed and I breathed, the words pattering through my mind, more rhythmic than meaningful.
Freedom, peace, freedom, peace.
I did this for maybe half an hour, cooling my nerves. When I opened my eyes again, I felt better, more even. I stowed my laptop and noticed that the Italian man had shut his Bible and was looking at me. “Were you praying?” he said.

“Sort of,” I answered. Then I amended it. “Yes.” The man smiled and said nothing. “I was trying to ground myself,” I said. I wondered if he was a missionary or a priest.

The man nodded. He was old, maybe the age of my grandfather, his eyebrows overgrown and tufted, his eyes a little watery. He leaned in my direction. “It’s good you are going to Mogadishu,” he said. “I respect it. I hope you are careful.” This was possibly an apology for having scared me earlier, for raising the specter of my head on some warlord’s plate. In any event, it was as close as I’d get to a blessing for what we were about to do.

*

Ninety minutes after leaving Nairobi, we began to descend. Out the window, I caught my first glimpse of the Somali coastline—thickets of deep green vegetation hemmed by a highway of white sand, all of it pressed against a foaming mint-colored sea. It had to be one of the most astonishingly beautiful places on earth. There was no sign of roads or beachfront hotels, no sign of humanity whatsoever. There was only land—thick jungle, abundant and unshorn, like a tropical paradise spotted through the spyglass of an old-time explorer. The city of Mogadishu, when it came into view, was also stunning—a hive of whitewashed colonial buildings built around a crescent-shaped harbor.

Everyone on the plane had swiveled toward the sight of it. In front of me, the Somali woman who’d grown up in America had her face pressed against the window. “This is the only beautiful thing about Mogadishu, right here,” she said, directing her words back toward me and Nigel.

Nigel, for his part, didn’t seem ready to look. He’d gone rigid in his seat, his body a brick fortress inside of which, somewhere, lived the merry guy who’d once taught me Aussie pub songs from the back of a camel. I felt a pang of culpability. I’d asked too much of him, probably. Somalia was hardly a starter war zone.

*

Off the plane, the air was damp and fishy. The landing strip ran right alongside a wide beach with crashing sapphire waves. The terminal at the Aden Abdulle International Airport of Mogadishu was a washed-out aqua-colored building. Nigel and I waited in line to get our passports stamped. Once on the ground, he had come back to life a bit, swinging his red backpack over his shoulder with a faint smile. The airport was poorly lit and teeming with people.

A slim young Somali man standing by the passport booth jumped forward at us. He held a sign that read
AMANDA, SHAMO HOTEL
.

I felt a wash of relief. We’d been received. I gratefully pumped the man’s hand. “Are you Ajoos?”

He wasn’t Ajoos. He was the cameraman Ajoos had hired to work with me during my stay. Abdifatah Elmi was his name. He had an arresting, handsome face, the sharp curves of his cheeks set off by a thin goatee. We could call him Abdi, he said. Ajoos would meet us at the hotel. There had been fighting only a couple of hours earlier, but we’d gotten lucky: The road that led to the city center had been reopened. “Come, come with me,” he said.

We followed Abdi through the crowd in the arrivals hall. I was wearing jeans and a long shirt. Abdi had brought a thick green and purple scarf for me to wear draped over my head and shoulders, which did little to hide my foreignness. Nigel and I were jostled and shoved. Nobody smiled. The airport crowd seemed to be regarding us with a could-give-a-shit weariness. We pushed our way through a frenzy of touts, taxi drivers, and freelance luggage handlers, seemingly governed by a group of African Union soldiers—Ethiopians and Ugandans—dressed in forest-green camouflage uniforms and bearing Kalashnikovs. I’d landed in plenty of chaotic places before, but this one was different: The chaos here felt edgy, dangerous, as if we couldn’t keep ourselves outside of it and were breathing it in, as if it sat already in the lungs of every last person in that airport, the cyanide edge of a nasty war.