A House in the Sky (34 page)

W
as there some way out? There had to be. In January, we started talking about trying to escape. It began one day when Nigel announced he’d been studying the window in the bathroom and thought we could climb through it.

I, too, had looked at that window, plenty of times. I saw no possibilities there. The window was about eight feet off the bathroom floor, recessed far back in the thick wall up near the ceiling, with a ledge maybe two feet deep, almost like an alcove or a cubbyhole. What was at the end of that alcove hardly counted as a window. It was, rather, a screen made of bricks with a few decorative gaps in between them, serving as ventilation holes for the bathroom. The bricks were cemented together. And then, as if that weren’t enough, laid horizontally in front of the bricks was a series of five metal bars anchored into the window frame.

“Are you crazy?” I said to Nigel. “It’s impossible. How would we get out?”

“You should crawl up there,” he said. “I’ve been looking at the bricks. The mortar is crumbling. We could dig it out.”

“Yeah, but the bars . . .”

“I think I could pull them loose. They’re not that secure. I don’t know,” he said, sounding not entirely confident, “but I think it could work.”

I was doubtful. The idea was crazy for other reasons, the most obvious
one being that if we were caught trying to escape, I felt sure our captors would either kill us or punish us in ways we didn’t want to imagine. Besides that, having been driven into the desert, I’d seen the outside world—our immediate surroundings—a landscape of big bonfires and young men wandering around with guns. If we were to run, it wasn’t as if we were running toward any certain safety. Finally, too, there was the matter of the three Somali men being held captive with us—Abdi, Marwali, and Mahad—and what might happen to them if we got out. If we ran, I was convinced they’d be killed. And I could see no way that five of us would manage to escape together.

I hardly knew the three Somalis, but I felt a sense of kinship with them and a responsibility for having gotten them captured in the first place. Whenever I was in the hallway, I found myself glancing in the direction of their door, where their shoes—two sets of sandals and a pair of Western-style hiking boots that belonged to Abdi—were always arranged in a neat line, presumably so they could slip into them when it was time to visit their bathroom outside. Every so often, I’d catch sight of one of them sitting there in the light, reading the Koran or sometimes stitching a piece of clothing. What I knew of them came only from these narrow glimpses and sounds that carried through the hallway and from what little we’d learned before being kidnapped. Abdi struck me as an earnest family man. Marwali, the driver from the Shamo Hotel, seemed more boisterous. I appreciated the sound of his laughter in the house. He seemed to chuckle easily and often, despite the circumstances. Mahad, who’d come from the medical clinic we’d been planning to visit on the day we were kidnapped, appeared to be extremely religious, loudly reciting verses from the Koran through much of the day.

As we moved toward our fifth month of captivity, Jamal remained the best source of information on what was going on with our captors and our families back at home.

“Any news?” I asked one day as he carried in the morning bag of food.

“There is no news,” he said, shaking his head, adding with a sigh, “
Inshallah,
this is done soon.”

When I asked when the leaders would next visit, he pursed his lips, wearing an expression of slight distress. He said, “I don’t know.” They hadn’t come in nearly a month.

It was only through Jamal and his penchant to speak English, to linger and gossip in our rooms, that we knew the boys, to some degree, also felt like hostages, living as they were under the thumb of the captain and the group’s increasingly invisible leaders. They were eating poorly, Jamal said. The guard named Yahya, who was no more than eighteen or nineteen, had missed the birth of his first child earlier in the month, though Skids had granted him a few days’ leave to go home for a visit. Jamal had appealed to take time off and marry Hamdi, but Skids had denied him, saying he had to wait until the ransom money came in and the Program—all of them referred to our captivity as “the Program”—was finished.

We all wanted it to be soon, every last soul in that house. I fell asleep at night thinking,
soon,
and I woke up in the morning and called the word back.
Soon, soon
. I believed it enough to think we shouldn’t try to dig bricks out of the bathroom window, that we should trust
soon
was coming.

Until one day I stepped out into the hallway, headed toward the shower, and noticed a new quiet. It was January 14, a Wednesday. The shoes outside Abdi, Marwali, and Mahad’s door were gone, all three pairs. It appeared they’d been moved. My hope was that they’d been released, though I knew it was unlikely. Our captors wouldn’t want three witnesses roaming free.

A while later, I was able to ask Abdullah what had happened to our Somali colleagues. He didn’t hesitate. Seeming pleased with himself, he lifted a finger to his throat and drew it in a straight line across. My mind flashed to the desert, to the lonely acacia tree under the moon. Had the leaders come in the middle of the night and taken them? How had I not heard anything? Was Abdullah telling the truth? When Nigel and I met up at the window, he said that he, too, had asked about the men’s whereabouts. While Jamal had given a vague answer, suggesting that maybe they had been let go, Abdullah had made the same emphatic throat-slitting gesture. My stomach started to churn. The
worst case seemed the most likely: The Somali guys had been killed. And it was our fault. Before we were captured, Abdi had proudly shown me pictures of his children—two boys and a girl, smiling little kids in school uniforms, who now, thanks to me, had no father.

Every part of me felt weak. The disappearance of Abdi and the others told us something important about our captors. Money to feed and house our group seemed to be running out. Desperation was setting in. That they could kill their fellow Somalis, Muslim brothers all three, didn’t bode well for me and Nigel. There was no question in my mind: We had to get out.

*

It took some effort to pull myself up to the window in the bathroom, to check the possibilities. I had to stand with one foot planted on either side of the toilet seat, reaching up past my shoulders to get my hands on the ledge, and from there, to boost myself up, as if levering my way out of a swimming pool. The alcove leading to the window was too shallow to hold all of me, so I leaned forward, holding my weight with my elbows, stomach balanced on the ledge, legs dangling heavily back toward the ground.

With my chest pressed against the ledge and my face up close to the window, I could see instantly that Nigel was right. The bricks covering the opening were only loosely cemented. The mortar between them crumbled at my touch, coming away in small cascades of white dust. From my room, I’d brought my pair of nail clippers, and using the little knifelike apparatus meant to dig dirt from beneath the fingernails, I was able to reach between the metal bars blocking the window and poke into some of the deeper, rubbly spaces between the bricks, where I felt a promising bit of movement, the suggestion of bigger fault lines. With some diligent chipping, it seemed possible we could remove a few rows of bricks, creating an opening just big enough to fit through.

The bars over the bricks were another matter. They were about three feet long and appeared to be sunk deep into the walls on either side of the window, though I could see that Nigel had already managed to loosen one of them from its anchor points. He’d sworn to me
that he could muscle at least one more out of its hold. Feeling elated, I dropped back to the bathroom floor, covered in grit and cobwebs. I hurried back to my room, for the first time in months not thinking about danger or hunger or worry, consumed instead by the idea that we could make a hole to the outside, a body-sized hole, and slip through it.

Standing at our windows, we began to work on a plan. What time of day would we go? What would we bring? Which direction would we run? Who would we seek out and what would we say? The considerations were enormous. We debated whether it would be best to escape at night, while most of the guards were asleep and we were less likely to cause a ruckus running down the street. Recalling the bonfires, I assumed night was a more dangerous time to be out. And maybe, too, we wanted to cause a ruckus. Maybe we needed to be loud and visible, forcing someone to call the authorities, whoever the authorities in these parts might be. Or did we find a sympathetic person and beg to use a cell phone, hoping he or she had enough calling credit to sustain a one-minute call to Canada or Australia? Or a cheaper call to Ajoos, whose number I had written on a hidden-away scrap of paper. Or to the Somali director of the World Food Programme office in Mogadishu, whose number I’d also been carrying when we were first taken.

Nigel and I agreed that we needed to put distance between us and our captors as quickly as possible and that we’d be well served by trying to blend in. For me, in an abaya and hijab, looking like any other woman on the street wouldn’t be so hard. But there was no hiding Nigel’s white skin. We considered whether I should loan him one of my Somali outfits and he could pose as a very tall woman, fully covered, but even my longest abaya would reach only halfway down his calves. We knew, too, that dressing Nigel in drag was the kind of thing that could backfire on us in the end. Every option we explored felt like a blind corner. Every idea seemed like a gamble, with myriad ways it could go awry.

We spent many hours discussing the plan. All the while, we traded shifts in the bathroom, hauling ourselves onto the ledge with fingernail
clippers in hand, chiseling at the window mortar in hurried five- and ten-minute bursts. The work was gratifying, like surgery or digging for gold. Sometimes I’d grind and get dust; other times, with some careful prying, I’d manage to extract a nice little slab of fully intact cement.

Because my door was in easy sight of the veranda, I had to be more cautious—knocking for permission to leave my room, never staying too long in the bathroom, carefully brushing off all signs of white mortar dust before stepping back into the hallway. I also realized how frail I’d become, despite all the deliberate hours spent walking. Although my legs were strong, the muscles in my arms were wasted and wobbly. Midway through the second day, my elbows started to buckle every time I tried to pull myself up to the window ledge, and I had to give up.

Nigel continued to work diligently. He was in a better position than I to make undetected trips to the bathroom. I kept watch through my keyhole, ready to create a distraction if any of the boys started heading his way. Using my medical phrase sheets, I cobbled together a little message and wrote the Somali words on a piece of paper to carry with me when we escaped, tucked in the front pocket of my jeans, which I’d wear beneath my black abaya. “Please help. I am Muslim. Don’t be frightened.” I rehearsed the Somali syllables over and over, not 100 percent sure of what I was saying:
Fadlan i caawi. Waa islaan. Ha baqin.
On a separate tiny scrap of paper, I copied the few Somali phone numbers I had in my reporter’s notebook, putting that in my pocket as well.

Each time I visited the bathroom, I looked up at the window to track Nigel’s progress. Though he was careful to cover his work, sliding each brick he’d removed back into place, tucking it in with stray nuggets of cement, you could see the disturbance, the skewed bricks and mounds of loose mortar sitting on the sill. I tried to take solace in the knowledge that the boys walked into our bathroom only once or twice a week—mainly to take the oversized bucket we used for water and refill it. But still, the risk we were taking felt suddenly huge. Since Abdi and the others had disappeared, I’d felt too stressed to eat much, and now my stomach went into a full clench.

*

On the start of the third day, Nigel declared that he’d carved out the final brick. He now had to contend with the metal bars, but he already had that first one loose and thought it would take only one more to create enough space to pass through. Before that, though, we had to recommit ourselves to escaping. Once he yanked out the two bars, the side walls would likely collapse. There would be no masking the debris in the bathroom. We’d really have no choice but to run.

We decided that we should make our break that same night, slipping out the window at about eight
P.M
., just after the evening’s final prayer. We had hardly slept in three days, hopped up on the perpetual buzz of adrenaline. It seemed pointless to wait any longer. I was worried that if we did, our nerves would give us away.

We hoped that the darkness would serve as a sort of camouflage. We’d try to disguise Nigel as a sick person, an old man, draping a sheet over his head to cover his skin, wrapping his shoulders in a blanket that would hide his hands. I’d pretend to be guiding him, burying my hands in the folds of the same blanket. Both of us would hunch deliberately, with our faces cast down, as if hurrying to a doctor. We’d carry a Koran in my little backpack to prove we were Muslim, that we weren’t enemies. We’d look for a door to knock on, a house that somehow seemed like a friendly house, a place with women and children living inside. I was focused on finding a woman. I hadn’t come into contact with one in five months. A woman, I thought, wouldn’t turn us away.

We were banking on that night being like every other night in the house, governed by the mind-numbing clockwork routine—prayer followed by dinner, followed by prayer, followed by bedtime for everyone but the two boys on guard duty, who would sit outside, talking idly in the darkness.

I was startled, then, when Jamal arrived in my room with dinner a full hour ahead of when the meal usually came.

“
Asalaamu Alikum,
” he said with a slow smile.

My thoughts spun. Did they suspect something? What was happening?
I’d spent the last week so anxious, I felt like I was releasing some sort of new scent, a giveaway to our plans.