A House in the Sky (48 page)

The fact that we’d moved nearer to the city might have made me feel hopeful—closer, even just a little bit, to a world I could recognize. In a different state of mind, I might have imagined the Mogadishu airport—the place Nigel and I had flown into two summers ago, feeling thrilled by the first canted glimpse we’d had of Somalia’s golden
coastline, the low-lying, unexplored city beyond. I might have listened for the sound of planes flying overhead and tried to calculate the distance between me and that tarmac, as Nigel and I had done so carefully before we’d escaped. But I didn’t. I’d had my hopes raised and then dashed so many times now. I couldn’t dream myself out of the leg shackles and over the wall surrounding the property and into a car driven by someone—anyone—who didn’t fear or hate me, who would take me to a waiting plane.

To my chagrin, Skids had made a full recovery from his malaria, though the toll on his body was evident. He no longer looked like a militia captain but rather like a stooping dowager. The whole group seemed to wear the time more heavily. Hassam, who had always been small-framed, looked emaciated, swallowed up by his clothing. Romeo no longer lived with us. He’d come for a last visit while we were at Bush House, having abandoned all discussions about school or marriage. He’d talked only about the impending deal with Al-Shabaab. If it worked, the transaction would allow his group to pay off debts and turn a small profit. There were new men, he said, who couldn’t wait to own us.

According to Romeo, Al-Shabaab had enough money to keep us alive and wait for the full ransom amount. They could hold out ten years or longer, he said.

“We cannot do this anymore, Amina,” Romeo had told me, shrugging. “I am sorry about your luck.”

*

One evening shortly after the six
P.M
. prayer, the door to the shed hinged open, revealing Skids, Abdullah, and Mohammed. All three of them had their faces wrapped in scarves. They were holding guns. My heart whirred. I knew it was time. A day or so earlier, as if signaling an end, Hassam had passed me a scrap of paper with his e-mail address written on it. “Hassam123” was his handle. “Maybe one day,
Inshallah,
you write me,” he’d said.

Skids had me hobble inside the house, where I was given a new abaya—a thick gray satin thing—to wear over my jeans and then he
waved me back outside, toward an SUV parked in the driveway. When I reached the car, he gestured for me to sit on the pavement. Abdullah produced a small bow saw and began to hack at the two padlocks that bound the chains to my ankles. He sawed wordlessly, switching from one leg to the other, the sweat dripping from his face onto my feet, the links twisting into my flesh with a bruising force. It seemed they’d lost the keys.

The saw blade grazed my ankle as Abdullah worked. Everyone around us was tense. I heard cell phones ringing. My captors came and went from the house, propelled by an urgency I didn’t understand. Skids peered down impatiently at my legs, tracking Abdullah’s progress with the saw. Eventually, Jamal came out, also wrapped in scarves, and took a turn, having me sit in the backseat of the car with the door open so he’d have better leverage. One padlock fell away. My ankle was so numb, I felt no difference.

As Jamal started work on the groove Abdullah had put in the second padlock, Nigel emerged from the house, limping in my direction. His chains had been removed. He was wearing a clean shirt and new jeans, and moving clumsily. His gaze stayed fixed on the ground. Just as my other foot was freed, he was pushed into the other side of the car.

I figured the new clothing and removed chains represented an attempt to spruce up the merchandise before they passed us on to Al-Shabaab, to show that we were worth the money paid for us. Nearly every one of the boys piled into the vehicle, while Skids took the wheel. Ahmed, I could see, was leading in a car up ahead. We commenced another swerving ride through the desert. Nigel and I said nothing to each other. Quietly, I began to cry. The sun was setting, and I remember how purple the land looked. I remember my stomach heaving with fear.

At some unnamable place, some characterless sandy path, we pulled over. Nigel and I were pushed hurriedly into another car, this one holding two Somali men we’d never seen. Ahmed tapped a finger on my window three times, indicating that I should roll it down. When I did, he bent to look at me.

“Don’t forget the Promise,” he said.

Romeo also appeared, holding Nigel’s Koran, passing it to him through the window.

And then the new car took off—me, Nigel, and the two silent strangers—rocketing into the darkness before anyone could say a word. Nigel and I held hands, hiding our touch beneath the folds of my billowy new abaya. He kept his other hand resting on the Koran in his lap.

We’d been passed to Al-Shabaab, I was certain of it. I felt as if I were falling through space, as if I’d stepped off the top of a skyscraper and was plummeting with nothing to reach out for, my mind unable to catch on to one thought. I fell and fell and fell, so fast I was tingling, so fast it was all blackness, until the car lurched to a halt and we were tugged out into the night. Forty or more gunmen surrounded us in the darkness, shouting and waving, many of them hidden behind scarves. I felt shock, exhaustion. It was happening all over again. I clung to the open door of the car as some of the men pulled at my legs, trying to tear me away. It had been ten months since I’d taken a single full step without shackles on my legs. I stumbled and fell as they pushed me toward yet another car, an SUV parked with its headlights on by the side of the road. Men yelled and clamored and pointed guns at us. I was sobbing, screaming words I didn’t recognize, batting at whoever’s hands were near me. I was shoved into the backseat of the SUV. Nigel, who’d also put up a fight, had been thrust in ahead of me.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I was saying. “I can’t believe this is happening.” Next to me, Nigel looked terrified.

The car doors slammed shut. We were surrounded by a new set of men—two sitting in the front seat, one in the back. I caught the faintest whiff of a long-forgotten scent—cigarette smoke. Someone in the car was a smoker. A realization bubbled from the recesses of my rational mind: A fundamentalist wouldn’t smoke. The men in the car didn’t belong to Al-Shabaab.

A gray-haired Somali man appeared at the window, a cell phone pressed to his ear. He leaned in and inspected us. He had a close-cropped beard and wide brown eyes and was the spitting image of the
actor Morgan Freeman, as if he’d stepped right out of some movie set and was now standing alongside a car parked in the Somali desert, watching me sob. His expression was impassive, confused. “Why are you crying?” he said. He passed me his phone. “Here, talk to your mother.”

And there was her voice, closer than it had ever sounded, my lifeline back to the world.

“Hello, hello?” she said. “Amanda, you’re free.”

W
hat came next felt both unreal and yet utterly vivid. Our captors, it turned out, had handed us over to a group of intermediaries, who then passed us on to the man standing at the side of our car, the man we began referring to as Morgan Freeman. He was a member of the Somali Parliament and was being paid by AKE, the security firm our families had hired. Working by phone over several weeks with John Chase, AKE’s director, Morgan Freeman had helped arrange for the delivery of ransom—six hundred thousand dollars—transferred from Nairobi to a banking kiosk in Mogadishu earlier that day. Our families had been assured that a receipt for the money would be handed to some group of tribal elders, which, in a country lacking police, organized military, or a well-functioning government, constituted the only authority available. Once it was confirmed that Nigel and I were safe, the elders would withdraw the money and pass it on to the kidnappers, minus whatever debts were owed to other militia groups and presumably keeping some for themselves. Nobody here worked for free.

The plan that night was for me and Nigel to go directly to the airport in Mogadishu, where the same chartered plane and two men working for AKE—both of them former Special Forces soldiers, one from South Africa, one from New Zealand—waited to take us to safety in Kenya. But Morgan Freeman had made a critical mistake, failing to alert African Union peacekeeping forces that we’d be driving through the darkness to
the airport, which was normally closed at that hour. When we turned down the road, the troops guarding the airport opened fire on our vehicle. We were forced to reverse direction and drive back toward the city.

It didn’t matter that I’d spoken with my mother. It didn’t matter that our captors appeared to be long gone. We were still in a car, hurtling at a panicky high speed. We were still in Somalia, still surrounded by armed strangers. No part of me trusted that we were free. After a while, the car skidded to a halt in front of a tall gate, and we were ushered into the open air. “Come, come,” Morgan Freeman was saying, waving us through a door inside the gate.

My legs felt like stumps beneath me, unaccustomed to motion, let alone moving quickly. I fell twice trying to reach that door. Nigel stumbled, too. The two of us held on to each other, our arms intertwined. Through the door was a garden filled with manicured shrubs and a patio restaurant where Somali businessmen sat at plastic tables, eating dinner under the stars. We were at a hotel, a place to spend the night, waiting for morning, when it would be safer to reattempt the airport drive. The businessmen on the patio gaped as we wobbled past.

Nigel and I were rushed through the hotel reception area and into a ballroom filled with couches. Framed paintings of Mecca and ornate renderings of Islamic text hung on the walls.

“Please, please, here,” Morgan Freeman was saying, directing us toward a red love seat in the center of the room. The room began to fill, men drifting in and surrounding us. Some wanted to shake our hands. A number of them spoke English, saying they’d heard bits of gossip about us over the months—the hostages who’d tried to escape. Several introduced themselves as officials with the transitional government. Many jumped on their phones, appearing to be spreading the news. “You are safe,” the hotel manager kept saying. “You are safe.” He told me I could take off my head scarf, but I didn’t dare. A uniformed waiter materialized before us, offering two dewy bottles of Coca-Cola on a tray. Nigel and I stared, not quite bold enough to reach for them. When you have spent fifteen months having every move monitored and controlled, the first glimmers of independence can leave you stunned.

Both Nigel and I were too afraid to behave in any way like Westerners. “
Allahu Akbar,
” we said to the men in the hotel ballroom when they congratulated us on our freedom. “
Inshallah,
we will soon go home.”

Eventually, the hotel manager led us to two rooms on the same hallway. He read the anxiety on our faces and kept repeating, as if it would mitigate it, that he had relatives in the United States. He gave us each clean towels and soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste. He handed me a fresh-smelling flowered dress that belonged to his wife.

Alone in the room, I felt like an alien landed on a new planet. A ceiling fan rotated overhead. The double bed held two pillows and faced a small television. Curtains were drawn over the windows. I locked the door and pushed the bedside table in front of it for good measure. In the bathroom, I turned the knobs on the sink to confirm there was running water. I then peeled off the gray dress my captors had given me only hours earlier. Standing naked in front of the full-length mirror, I looked at myself for the first time in many months and was aghast at what I saw. My body was all bones. My skin looked waxy, so pale it had a bluish tint. My hair dangled in thin strands past my breasts, longer than it had ever been and dark after months hidden away from the sun. My ankles were ringed with purple bruises where the shackles had been. It was like looking at a stranger.

In the shower, I put the water on as hot as it would go, scrubbing myself all over. I did everything hurriedly, believing that the luxury of washing was something I’d lose at any moment. I clutched the bar of soap, feeling a little war going on in my mind.

Slow down, you’re safe.

No, I’m not.

Yes, really, you are.

*

Afterward, Nigel and I sat together on the bed in my room. I’d tried to comb the knots from my hair but it fell out in clumps, so I’d given up. He, too, had showered and donned fresh clothes. His beard remained an untrimmed monstrosity. The officious hotel manager delivered us a couple of chicken sandwiches. Like the Cokes, they looked almost too
strange to touch. Nigel and I held hands and talked, which in itself felt like a miracle. We were shy around each other, steeped in our individual uncertainties, hit by the night’s surrealism. Were we really going home? Were our captors truly gone? When we heard a muezzin call for the final prayer and other hotel guests rustling down the hallway, we debated whether we should join the men in the ballroom and make a show of praying. In the end, we opted to stay in the room.

That we’d made a choice and we weren’t punished for it felt like a second miracle.

Nigel and I talked through much of the night, neither of us interested in sleep. He asked questions about what had happened to me, about the extent to which I’d been abused, but I wasn’t ready to discuss any of it with him. Everything felt too raw. We joked lightly about how we’d never eat bananas again, or canned tuna. We shared bits and pieces of information about the months after we’d been separated. Nigel had been allowed books and writing materials during his months of isolation. He’d been shackled for the duration, but never tied up and tortured as I had been. We reconciled ourselves to the fact that as a man, he’d received better treatment right through. We flipped on the television in the room and were startled to see a news story about our release playing on Press TV, the network I’d worked for in Baghdad.

*

The next morning, we flew out of Somalia, 463 days after we arrived, lifting away from the glittering coastline that at first glance had struck me as gorgeous, away from the city I’d once mistaken for calm. Landing in Nairobi, we were met on the tarmac by representatives from the Canadian and Australian embassies. I was put into a vehicle with little Canadian flags flapping from the side mirrors, and Nigel was loaded into an official-looking car of his own. Sirens blaring, we were driven to the Aga Khan University Hospital nearby.