A House in the Sky (31 page)

Using the high ledge in the bathroom as our transfer spot, Nigel and I swapped books. We read and did puzzles. We laughed over a thin booklet that had been included in my pile. It was titled
5-Minute Stress-Busting: Instant Calm for People on the Go
and included lines like “Our fast pace of life, and the pressure to look good and be successful in everything we do, means stress is more prevalent than ever.”
Stress is more prevalent than ever.
Oh, indeed it was. Though we mocked it, we read everything. We held a two-person book club at our windowsills. We discussed every detail of each book, right down to how we’d felt at the moment when we read the words.
Green Hills of Africa
was full of descriptions of cooking and eating, which tormented us but nonetheless needed to be revisited endlessly at our windowsills.
Newsweek
had a cover story about green energy, a topic upon which we became single-source experts. An old friend of Nigel’s, a photographer pal, had a photo in that issue—a picture of some soldiers in Afghanistan—which seemed to delight and cheer him, offering a bridge into something real.

It was like being given not just a meal but a feast. We chewed on every word, feeling as if each one had been spooned up by the people who loved us most, even though when I really thought about it, I was certain the supplies had come from the Canadian embassy and not from my family. My eyeglasses had been custom-ordered for my prescription, but the case that held them bore the logo of a shop in Nairobi. And after all the hours of
Oprah
my mother and I had watched together, all the dog-eared self-help books we’d exchanged over the years, I doubted she would have chosen a five-minute stress-buster manual to get me through. Much later, I would learn that I was right: The package had been mailed from Nairobi, assembled by RCMP agents working with the Australian Federal Police and sent to the Mogadishu International Airport. It had been addressed in care of Adam Abdule Osman, the name given by the kidnapper who’d been calling my mother a few times a week, the man with the little Ben
Franklin glasses who’d come to meet us on our second day of captivity but had rarely shown himself since.

Adam was the communications man. He seemed to conduct his business mostly from his home in Mogadishu, with his two little children running around in the background. In the transcripts of the calls with my mother, which I would read much later, he referred to her often as “Mom” and once or twice asked whether it would be okay if he married me. When she reminded him that he already had a wife, he reminded her that it was permissible, in his religion, for a man to marry more than once.

If Adam was worried about being caught, he didn’t seem to show it. He called my mother, repeating the ransom demands, telling her that my health was deteriorating. The investigators seemed to agree that he was using an alias. If there was a conversation about setting up some sort of sting operation to nab him as he picked up the package at the airport, I don’t know. Chances are, he had paid someone to retrieve the box, anyway, to avoid exactly that scenario.

*

The downside to receiving a package was that it made clear to me that nobody—not our families, nor our governments, nor our captors—thought we’d be free anytime soon. A feast is a feast, I soon recognized, only if it’s short-term. Despite the fact that I was constantly battling both a headache and diarrhea, I saved the blister packs of medicine, keeping them lined up along the wall next to my mattress. I began to ration my reading to a few chapters a day. Nelson Mandela got me through my mornings, but Hemingway, with his pages of dialogue, his men and women talking lustily, put me to bed at night. I continued to think of our situation as temporary, but I also was careful not to squander what we had, except for the digestive biscuits, which I scarfed down within a matter of days. The care package had made me jubilant and then sent me crashing. Everything had two sides. There was a fine line between holding steady and dipping into despair.

Meanwhile, the skin over my top lip had started to feel rough and itchy. Looking in my little compact mirror, I could see a white rash
there, some sort of fungus. Each day it seemed to creep a little farther across my face, slowly spreading around my nose and spiraling up one cheek in a way I found mortifying. I tried taking some of the antibiotics from my care package, but nothing changed. Then I tried rubbing the patches with my new skin cream, but that only seemed to make it worse. It felt like Somalia was beginning to eat me alive.

In a weak moment one day, I wrote a note to Nigel and left it in the bathroom. I was feeling low—too low even to talk at the window. In my note, I apologized for my sagging spirits and then added an explanatory line: “Someone has been paying unwanted visits to my room in the afternoons.” I knocked on the wall to tell Nigel the note was there. In a short while, he knocked back to say he’d received it.

During our next window conversation, he was quieter than usual. I wonder if he’d suspected it all along.

“Who is it?” he said finally. “It’s Abdullah, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What is he doing to you? Is he . . .” Nigel’s voice trailed off. “How long has this been going on?” He said the words sadly.

For a split second, I wanted to say everything, to dump the details on him ruthlessly, to hear him cry or explode or risk everything to start fighting the boys. But already I regretted telling him as much as I had. It wasn’t fair to Nigel, and it only made things more real for me.

When he started to ask another question, I stopped him midsentence. “Seriously, Nige, just forget about it,” I said, knowing that he wouldn’t.

I went back to holding steady. Mostly because there was no choice.

On the hundredth day of our captivity—December first—I left Nigel another note in the bathroom. “Congratulations on making it 100 days,” I wrote. “We have to stay positive. We have to believe there are many people on the other side of the world doing everything they can to get us out of here and home safely before Christmas.” As was always the case with my notes, writing it helped me to believe it. It staked some claim on the truth.

G
et up, we are going,” someone said in the dark. I’d been asleep. It was late. The door to my room was open. One of the boys shone a flashlight in my face. It was Hassam. I could see Captain Skids standing behind him. “We are going,” Hassam said a second time. He flared the flashlight to the edge of the mattress where I kept my belongings—my books and toiletries and extra clothes. “Put your clothes on and we go.”

I sat up in bed. I could hear other activity in the house, a general shuffling. They were moving us to a new place. It had happened before, always abruptly and at night. “We’re leaving?” I said to Hassam, my eyes avoiding Skids, whose coldness unnerved me. “Should I put all my things in a bag?”

Hassam looked impatient. “No, no,” he said. “Put clothes on only.”

I thought about what that meant. “Oh my goodness, are we being released?”

“Yes, yes, fast, now,” Hassam said. He pushed his palm toward the ceiling as if to hurry me along, as if lifting me from the dead.

Fireworks shot off in my head, pops of color and light. Joy, incredulity. I located the pair of men’s jeans I kept close to the mattress and pulled them over my hips, beneath the red polyester dress I wore both day and night. I scrambled to my feet and found a head scarf. I followed Skids down the dark hallway, with Hassam and his gun walking behind. I kept one hand on the waist of my jeans so they wouldn’t fall
off. Noticing that Nigel’s door was closed, I turned back to Hassam. I said, just to make sure, “We are getting freedom? Yes?” He said nothing.

In the courtyard, Ahmed’s Suzuki was waiting, the engine running. Hassam gestured, and I climbed into the backseat. I could see Abdullah walking out of the house, winding a scarf around his face, having swapped his man-skirt for a pair of trousers, which was what the boys did any time they left the house. Next I saw Ahmed emerge. Never once in my presence had he wrapped his face in a scarf, but this time he, too, was wearing one, every inch of his skin covered. Alone in the car, I could feel the optimism draining out of me.

Then Abdullah pushed into the backseat next to me. Ahmed opened the front door on the driver’s side and got in. “Abdullah, Ahmed,” I said, “is everything okay?”

Neither man responded. It was as if I weren’t there. Beneath the dome light, Ahmed turned the key in the ignition and slid the gear into reverse. Behind us, one of the boys unlocked the gate. The rear door opposite me opened, and Skids, fully wrapped, took a spot next to me in the rear seat.

In my throat, I felt a gurgling panic. I said, “What is happening? Where is Nigel? Is he coming? Where are we going?” My voice seemed to get ahead of my brain in sensing real danger. I heard it come out high and reedy.

With one hand draped over the passenger seat, Ahmed backed the station wagon through the open gate and maneuvered it onto the unpaved road. Nobody answered my questions. Nobody said where Nigel was.

We were driving now, the three of them and I, funneling through heavy sand, weaving among the neighborhood’s maze of high walls. Some rational part of me told me to take note of where we were, to figure out which street led to what, in case I had an opportunity to run, now or later or ever. But everything looked the same. Our headlights ranged over blank concrete as we turned corners from one unmarked lane to the next. I watched over the dashboard as some shrubbery came into view and then disappeared. After a couple of
minutes, Ahmed stopped the car in front of the entrance to a dark compound, where a man stood waiting. It was Donald Trump, the money guy. I was grateful to see that his face was not wrapped and he wasn’t carrying a gun.

Donald opened the rear door of the Suzuki and silently wedged himself in next to Abdullah. There were four of us in the backseat now and only Ahmed in the front.

The car lurched forward. I focused on Donald, still dimly clinging to the idea that maybe I was being released. “What’s going on, Mohammed?” I said, using his real name. “Where are we going? What’s happening?”

As I spoke, he stared straight ahead. He was acting as if he couldn’t hear me. I could see his eyes roving over the dashboard—nervously, it seemed—but he wouldn’t turn and look at me. I said, “Where are they taking me, Mohammed? Where’s Nigel? Please tell me. I’m your sister, remember?” A new fear went spiraling through my rib cage. Maybe I was being sold. They had threatened it a few times, saying that if ransom money didn’t come in, they could always recoup their losses by handing us over to Al-Shabaab. I wondered if that was it. It explained why Nigel wasn’t with me: I was on my way to be either killed or sold to new captors. Nigel’s family had money and mine didn’t. They were holding on to him and letting go of me.

Just then I did something instinctive and un-Islamic. I shot a hand out across Abdullah’s lap and gripped Donald’s forearm, not letting up with my talking, just wanting to hang on to someone who might listen. Hadn’t we once discussed what makes a good olive oil? Hadn’t he brought me a can of Coke and a pregnancy test? I was crying now. His arm felt stiff beneath my grasp.

“Please,” I said, “don’t let them kill me. Please tell me what’s going on. Where is Nigel? Can you stop this? Am I being sold? Did they sell me? Are things okay?”

Awkwardly, Donald shook free of my hand. He cleared his throat. “Uhhhh,” he said, glancing uneasily at Ahmed in the driver’s seat. “I really don’t know.
Inshallah,
things are okay, but I really don’t know.”

With that, he went back to silence.

After another minute, the car stopped moving. This time we’d pulled up in front of a small doorway set between two walls. I thought I recognized it as the door leading to Electric House, the place we’d left about six weeks earlier, where Nigel and I had played backgammon. Two men appeared to be waiting for us. They got into the front seat of the Suzuki, next to Ahmed, both of them wrapped up in scarves. One I recognized as Romeo, with his long torso and yellow-checkered scarf, which he normally kept draped over his neck. The other guy was new to me—broad-shouldered, heavyset, imposing.

As if following a set of instructions laid down in advance, neither of the newcomers looked at me. Nobody greeted anybody. Nobody spoke.

We careened forward into the thick darkness, following a dirt road in the path of our headlights. I leaned forward slightly, in part to avoid feeling too close to Abdullah on one side of me and Captain Skids on the other, keeping a hand on the animal fur draped over the middle console for balance. We seemed to be driving down some sort of market street. I saw what looked to be closed-down kiosks made of banged-together scraps of wood and metal. There were shanties built from tree branches and cardboard boxes, from broken crates and corrugated tin. Every structure, large and small, appeared to be made from sticks and garbage. Plastic water bottles skittered in the road. Bits of stray paper twirled in our lights. Ahead of us was a fire, orange and jutting against the black sky, as tall as a tower, almost like an illusion. As we pulled closer, I saw it was real, an enormous bonfire throwing light, its top lashing and sparking high above the human figures gathered around it.

Ahmed didn’t slow down for the fire. He accelerated past it, his shoulders hunched low over the wheel. I looked past Skids and out the window as we went. Young men, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, stood in loose clumps at the edge of the inferno. From what I could see, many carried assault rifles much like the ones my captors had.

About a hundred feet down the road, we passed another fire, this one smaller, with another group of men gathered around it. I could see several more bonfires dotting the distance. I noticed that there
were shadows on the street, people moving about, all of them young and male and drifting. It was as if we were passing through a flickering underworld grotto.

Donald saw me looking. Without making eye contact, he said, “Please, look around. You see this place? You see the gangs?” His voice blazed with scorn. “Did you think you were in Paris or Toronto? Well, you are not. This is Somalia.”