A House in the Sky (41 page)

In early March, my mother had learned that Hamilton had struck some sort of private deal with Michael Fox, okaying him to go into Somalia and use their family money to negotiate for Nigel. She was devastated. She had angry phone conversations with both Hamilton and Nigel’s mother, insisting that the kidnappers would surely take the money, release Nigel, and promptly kill me.

Late that month, our two families reached an uneasy truce. The Brennans agreed to call off Fox’s efforts and to sink their faith once again in the government agents working the case, hoping for some sort of breakthrough.

*

But then a blog post surfaced on the Internet, sending my parents into a dizzying tailspin. An American blogger reported that I was pregnant. His post—on a site that covered war and intelligence issues—was short, containing no specifics. He noted that the information came from Mogadishu, from a source he trusted, but at the same time, he warned his readers that it was little more than a rumor.

The RCMP negotiators in the house with my mother insisted that it was likely just gossip, one of dozens of unconfirmed stories that had floated out of Somalia since we’d been captured. Quite possibly, they said, it had been planted by the disgruntled Adam or someone close to him in order to boost the urgency of the negotiations.

Somalia seemed to be a factory for rumors, with a handful of news websites and uncredentialed bloggers pumping out what passed for information, largely for the benefit of the million or so Somalis who had fled the country and scattered across the globe. And also, it turned out, for the benefit of my mother, who scrolled every morning through poorly translated reports on the shifting curtain of the country’s civil war, its clan politics and pirates, and the growing bond between Al-Shabaab and Al Qaeda. The media in Somalia was mostly underground and unofficial. Somali journalists attempting to do honest work were routinely threatened, detained, and sometimes assassinated. A number of radio stations had been attacked and forced to close. Some news sites were reportedly controlled by certain clans and accordingly biased in what they reported. It was impossible to know what was truth and what was not.

Any news about me and Nigel arrived in unfocused glimpses, either via a blogger or passed on to the Canadian or Australian intelligence agents through a mysterious network of informants. The two of us had been spotted in the back of a car. There were other, more dubious reports, like the one that said I was happily teaching English to Somali children. It would astound me later to learn how accurate some pieces of information had been, how droplets of truth managed to leak out of our otherwise sealed-off existence. My parents had been told, for
example, that I’d sprained my ankle early on in Escape House, during my weeks of pacing in circles, which was true. They had been told that my captors took it upon themselves to bring me ice, a rare commodity in Somalia, which was also true.

It was the specificity of these fragments that both alarmed and reassured my mother. Despite the broken English with which it was delivered, the news was often worded in a chillingly sure-footed way. Most of the time, she took it as proof that I was alive and at least partially visible in Somalia, though it also could seem as if I’d been swept away and brainwashed, the phantom woman described in the news bearing little resemblance to the daughter she once knew. One of the more extensive reports, published on a Somali news website after we’d been held for nearly a year, read like this:

The journalist Amanda Lindhout is no longer a Christian she has avert her believe of trinity to the worshiping of one God and that is Allah the most high she is now performing her 5 times of prayers and she is very contented with her marriage relationship with one of her captors you can’t imagine how they exchange laughter and smiles through gesture since the couples don’t understand each other in terms of languages, said Hashi one of the captors of Amanda Lindhout speaking to Waagacusub Website on Friday.

A reporter for Waagacusub Website who lives in a house which is some few meters away from the house where Amanda lives has been closing following the situation of the two journalists has confirmed that Amanda is gleefully at a certain house at Suuq Holaha in the north of Mogadishu and is regularly performing her feminine work such as washing, cooking and cleaning the house at which she is residing.

The reporter also added that he has no enough report about the Australian Freelance journalists but is sure that he is also living in the same vicinity with Amanda. Amanda wears a big black veil, and it is hardly to see part of her body and is now learning the Holy Quran.

*

We were, I can say with certainty, nowhere near Mogadishu when this particular item was published. It is also worth noting that I was not pregnant, married, nor anything close to gleeful. I did no cooking or cleaning, either, except just one time, on an afternoon nearly two months into our stay in the Dark House, when Jamal and Abdullah ordered me to scrub the bathroom that was mine. I think they believed they were humiliating me, but after weeks of being confined to my mat in the thick darkness, it was the best ten minutes I’d spent all winter. In the spidery light of the ventilation slats, I sloshed water from a brown bucket and an all-purpose powdered detergent around the filthy room, gratified by the freedom of movement, the idea that I was making the bathroom nicer for myself and no one else. With deliberate slowness, I pushed a rag over the sink and around the seat of the pink plastic toilet, dumping extra soap into the bowl, watching it streak into the vortex of dark stains.

Just outside my room, Abdullah and Jamal had seated themselves against a wall in the dim hallway. They were deep in conversation, speaking Somali in tones I hadn’t heard in a long time, like two friends shooting the breeze. They seemed lighthearted, as if they’d forgotten to go through some routine to work up their normal hostility toward me.

I took a chance, sticking my head partway into the hall, holding up the box of detergent. “Please,” I said, “could I wash my clothes in the bucket here?”

I hadn’t been permitted to take a shower or change my clothes since the escape. When I cleaned my body, I did it while crouched next to the toilet, scooping water from a repurposed cooking-oil jug made from yellow plastic with its top cut off and its handle intact. I always washed in a hurry and with an eye toward conserving water, never using more than two cupfuls at a time, knowing that if the jug went down to empty, it could be days before the boys bothered to refill it. I smelled bad enough that my captors sometimes came into my room
carrying a bottle of cologne, spritzing the air ahead as if clearing a sweeter path for themselves through the fetid dark.

That day, sitting in the hallway outside my door, Abdullah and Jamal conferred a moment about me and my clothes. As they did, I caught sight of a moving shadow, a thin figure riffling a light-colored sheet that hung across a doorway directly across the hall from my room. Someone had paused there, perhaps to eavesdrop, but then had stepped away. It was the woman—it had to be—the ghostlike other female in the house. I realized it was her bedroom that lay behind the curtain. Her proximity explained why I so often heard her coughing.

“Five minutes,” Abdullah said, interrupting my thoughts. “You hurry.”

It was impossible to remove my jeans with the leg shackles, but back in my room, I stripped off the red dress, plus my tank top and bra, and put on the heavy black abaya I’d worn during our escape. Returning to the bathroom, working quickly, I dumped the clothing into what was left of the water in the brown cleaning bucket, sprinkling it liberally with soap, and kneading each piece carefully with my fingers, feeling the detergent burning the tops of my hands, thrilled by what that said about its potency. The idea of having anything clean against my skin felt like a tremendous gift.

When I was finished, I hung the bra on a bar near the sink. I stepped back into the doorway and held up the dripping dress and tank top for the boys to see, gesturing that they needed to be hung somewhere to dry. I made a move to hand them to Jamal, but he recoiled. The two boys started arguing in Somali. Neither one wanted to touch my things.

After some debate, I was told I could hang the clothing myself. This was not a small decision. A few more of the boys were summoned, arriving with their guns. I was allowed, for the first time in two months, to step all the way outside my room. I stumbled in my chains, carrying the clothes. As the boys corralled me forward, pushing me down the long hallway, the light intensified, coming through an open doorway ahead. My eyes felt as if they were exploding. I saw flares—a hot, exterminating
white swirled with strains of blue and orange. I could make out shapes against the wall, people lining my pathway.

Someone shouted in my ear, “Fast, fast, fast.”

I had spent so many hours imagining the layout of the Dark House. Now my brain flooded with actual information. There were doorways, windows, corners. I’d lived here, but I’d never seen the place. I was outside suddenly, having stepped onto a sun-drenched concrete veranda, in front of a whitewashed wall. The light made me unsteady. The heat of the cement burned the soles of my bare feet. I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. I couldn’t process the blue enormity of the sky above me. Someone gave me a push.

“Now, now, fast. Hang here.”

Ahead of me was a drooping, empty clothesline. I tossed the red dress and the tank top over it and was hustled back inside.

The air changed again, to clammy and then stifling. I was traveling the hallway, my feet too slow for my body, my eyes floating with sunspots, my mind trying to make sense of what I was seeing. We passed, on the left, a large room where it looked like the boys kept their belongings, then another open doorway on the right. The room was small but with a window—filled with enough light to make my sore eyes throb—and a person inside. It was Nigel, bathed in sunlight, sitting on a mattress with his blue mosquito netting draped like a king’s robe around him. He was reading a book. He did not look up as I shuffled past in my chains. I could tell from the rigid way he held himself that he knew I was going by, but probably felt too scared to look up.

They returned me to my mat, shining a flashlight so I could find it inside the black maw of my room. I felt disoriented, my heart pounding. The room seemed even darker than it had before. My eyes struggled to adjust. Later on, someone—I didn’t see who—would toss my dried dress and tank top through the doorway. They were practically weightless, absent the dirt I’d scrubbed out of them, smelling like soap and still warm from the sun.

For hours afterward, I lay on the mat, my mind running high after the half-minute spent in the outdoor air, and also stunned by my sighting of Nigel. I tried not to hate him for what I’d seen. He had books, a
window, a net to keep the mosquitos away. I wondered if he had food, if our captors spoke kindly to him, if he worried about me or knew how different our two situations had become. I wondered what would have happened if he’d looked up and caught my eye, whether it would have given me solace or a window into his mind.

I didn’t know, I couldn’t know.

I thought about Nigel relentlessly for days to come, settling ultimately on the idea that I had no choice but to be glad for him, even if I felt whacked simultaneously by a bitter envy. For myself, I was grateful that I’d seen anything outside my room that day. It was a reminder of air, of oceans and continents, even. I carefully redrew the map of where we were, putting Nigel and his books toward the front of the house, where the boys slept, locating the kitchen and the woman with the cough closer to me at the back, sliding one room next to another like pieces in a puzzle, taking some satisfaction in the power of clicking things into place.

O
ne day in the Dark House, Skids turned up at my door holding a cell phone. On the other end was a man, speaking a heavily accented English, who said he worked at the Somali embassy in Nairobi. He posed a proof-of-life question, the first in many months, his voice crackling over the speakerphone. I hadn’t heard a voice belonging to anyone but one of my captors since the day after we’d tried to escape.

“Tell me,” the man said, “where did your mother take you for vacation when you were nine years old?”

The answer was Disneyland. California. Away on a plane.

After Skids had carried the phone away, I sobbed for a day and a half straight, unable to stuff my emotions back inside.

Still, that call delivered hope. The voice had come from an embassy. An embassy implied order. Even as I wept, my mind seized on the one thread of potential meaning, the single strand of substance in that query, and used it as a towrope. I convinced myself that the question had been a carefully scripted signal that Nigel and I were going home. My mother had asked it; I had answered. She was reminding me, deliberately, of a trip we had taken. It had to be a clue, a way of letting me know that I was soon to embark on the trip I most longed for. They—our families, our governments—had to be in the final stages of getting us out. We were about to be sprung. I knew it.

For the next several days, I waited in the dark, letting those feelings
percolate, certain that I was enduring my last hours as a hostage, that the door soon would swing open.

It took about a week for my hopes to fully vacate. In my heart, an airplane tilted and took off without me. I felt my mind pooling, gushing almost, into the blackness around me. I’d fooled myself. I was alone, truly. The psychic link I’d felt with my mother was a delusion. I understood that now. A ravaging despair set in.

My thoughts veered toward the irrational. Emotions hit like flash floods, tipping me when I didn’t expect it. Thoughts of Nigel came without warning and dismantled my defenses. I’d feel a wave of affection and worry for him—
How is he getting through? What does he tell himself?
—but it was almost always chased by a dose of paralyzing bile.
He let them think the escape was my idea. He’s sitting there, in sunlight, reading books.