A House in the Sky (37 page)

He’d lived, I’d lived, but now for sure we were dead.

S
tuffed into the backseat of the truck with Young Mohammed, Nigel and I held hands. I watched, dumbfounded, as two of the men from the mosque—unsmiling guys who, twenty minutes earlier, appeared to have been thoughtfully advocating for our freedom with the larger group—piled in with our captors, apparently having switched sides and joined the squad. One slid into the driver’s seat next to Skids and Abdullah; the other sat himself wordlessly next to Nigel in the back. Jamal climbed into the truck bed. Doors slammed shut. The engine fired. Several people from the crowd waved goodbye.

Wherever we were going, it wouldn’t be the same as what we’d left. I started to shake, and then I started to talk, delivering a last-ditch attempt at shame, directing my speech toward Young Mohammed next to me but, more generally, the rest of them, especially the new guys.

“How could you do this to us?” I said, watching the side of Mohammed’s face as he stared straight ahead. “You say you’re believers, but we’re believers, too. You’re holding us captive, and it’s not right.”

He had punched me several times before loading me into the car. My jawbone was sore. I waited for him to hit me now, but he didn’t. He kept his gaze ahead as the truck boosted forward in the sand. Nobody in the vehicle said a thing. Nigel squeezed my hand. Through the windshield, I could see Ahmed and Donald driving in a station wagon ahead of us, half-enveloped in a cloud of yellow dust.

After about ten minutes of ripping over potholes, the truck blew a tire and careened to a stop. As it happened, we’d broken down right in front of a pink building bearing a sign that read
MOGADISHU UNIVERSITY
, confirming for me that the houses they’d kept us in were close to—if not inside—the main city. The building’s walls were pockmarked with bullet and mortar holes, making clear that student life was no walk in the park. With their guns, the boys directed us out and in the direction of Ahmed’s station wagon, which had pulled up alongside. Ahmed stepped out. Over his shoulder, I caught glimpses of palm trees and low buildings. The urge to run again was like a tickle in my throat, a chance weighed against another chance, a rocket shot at nothing.

Suddenly, I felt more tired than I’d ever been in my life. I had no fight left.

We got into the new car with Donald, while Ahmed stayed behind with the broken-down truck. Skids, sitting on the passenger side, turned around and pointed at me and Nigel, then coolly put the finger to his own temple and motioned as if firing a gun.

“They’re going to kill us,” I said to Nigel, pointlessly. The message had been clear enough.

I noticed that one of Nigel’s shirtsleeves had been ripped nearly off. His skin looked waxy, drained of color. Just then Mohammed, riding on the seat beside him, punched him in the face, hard. Nigel ducked his head and covered his eyes. I could tell he was trying not to cry.

He was saved from another blow by the ringing of Mohammed’s cell phone, its ringtone the sound of croaking frogs. Without another glance at Nigel, Mohammed removed his phone from his pocket and answered it.

Talking just above a whisper, I started telling Nigel what I wanted him to say to my family if he should happen to live and I didn’t. There was the obvious fact that I loved them, that I was sorry for the trouble I’d caused, for their grief. I told him to tell my mother she should go to India, since I thought she’d understand me better if she went there. “And tell my dad and Perry to go visit Thailand,” I said, “because it would make them so happy.”

Nigel said things back to me, messages for his parents, his siblings, his girlfriend—loving and sorry and hopeless, all of them, just like mine.

Mohammed crooned lovingly into his phone in Somali. I thought I could hear a child’s voice prattling on the other end, laughing at whatever Mohammed was saying.

We drove through the streets, passing eucalyptus trees and lumbering minibuses and rubber tires strewn alongside the road. We passed buildings that were whitewashed and sun-weathered, like old bones. I saw men pushing wheelbarrows, women carrying pails, kids staring at traffic as it passed by. To me, everything now looked like a closed door, a reminder of how impervious Somalia was to our presence.

After a time, we stopped for gas, pulling up in front of a skinny old woman standing on a street corner next to several jerry cans. Skids handed some bills out the window, and she used a can to fill our tank. Nigel and I, in the backseat, were in plain sight. I looked at the woman imploringly, watching her eyes pass over us before she turned away.

We drove on. It seemed we were riding in circles with nowhere to go. I was convinced they’d wait till nighttime to kill us. Which meant we had hours to pass.

Donald, who’d shown us some empathy over the months, was sitting behind us in the hatchback. Taking a risk, I turned around and grabbed at his shirtsleeve. “You have to help us,” I said. He pretended to be looking out the window. I added, “Please, please, please.”

This caused Donald to snap. “You think you are the only ones?” he said, his voice edged with fury. “There are people from German, from Italian. They all go home easy.” He was speaking about other hostages, probably people he’d read about in the news. He continued, “No one wants to pay for you, and now you have made trouble.” He wrenched his sleeve from my grasp.

I sank into the seat of the car, feeling the aches start to override my adrenaline. My back and butt had been scraped raw by being dragged across the mosque. My feet were swollen and covered in dried blood from the thornbushes. Had they not been vaguely throbbing, I might have thought they belonged to someone else.

We turned from one road onto another before finally reaching some sort of destination—a house behind a wall, a house that, unlike the others we’d stayed in thus far, was clearly occupied. Children’s shoes were strewn outside the doorway. Women’s clothing hung on a line. Donald and Skids whisked us down a low hallway, past a number of closed doors, to a back room. They left us there, guarded by Abdullah and Mohammed. I could smell food cooking.

Immediately, I guessed that we were in the captain’s home. The room we were standing in was a bedroom, and not just a bedroom but a full-blown frilly boudoir, with chintz curtains hung over the windows, a pink-flowered coverlet spread over a queen-sized bed, and a wooden dresser holding bottles of skin cream, perfume, and hair gels, all in a neat row.

We were in the interior of someone’s life, someone’s marriage, someone’s sweet-smelling nest of pink. I could hear a woman talking loudly and furiously in Somali at the front of the house, likely protesting the sudden arrival of two foreigners and a mini-militia of unwashed teenagers with guns.

Donald returned. “Sit,” he said, pointing at the floor.

Nigel and I sat against the wall opposite the bed while Donald began an interrogation. Mohammed and Abdullah stood over us, as if awaiting orders. Captain Skids posed questions in Somali. Donald translated with a blistering rage that held up across languages.

“Why did you run away?”

“How did you get out?”

“Who helped you?”

“Do you want to die?”

We answered every query more than once, with Donald berating us for being stupid and bad Muslims, with Nigel and me apologizing, swearing that nobody had helped us, saying that we didn’t want to die, that we only wanted to go home.

Skids was pointing at me, his finger shaking with emotion.

Donald repeated the words in English. “It was
you,
” he said. “This was your plan.” In their minds, it was all my doing. I was, as I’d always been to them, the evil and untrustworthy woman.

They hit us both repeatedly. When I hunched over in pain, Mohammed slammed the butt of his gun into the space between my shoulders.

Donald finally boomed what seemed to be the culminating question: “Why,” he sputtered, “did you say that we are fucking you?”

The words made me quake. Donald continued, “Do you know what fucking is? We could have done that,
subhanallah,
but we did not. You are a liar!”

The accusation hung in the air. I felt Abdullah blazing a warning with his eyes. All of them were looking hard at me.

My thoughts raced. This was my moment to expose Abdullah. Yet something in me couldn’t do it. I was afraid. I was sure, without a doubt, that he’d deny what he’d done, and either way, it would again all be blamed on me.

I said to Donald, “The woman did not speak English! She did not understand. I told her I was afraid of the boys, I was worried they’d hurt me. I didn’t use that word. It’s not a good word. It’s not good to say that. And I’m a Muslim.” I turned to Nigel. “Tell them I didn’t say that word. Tell them!”

Nigel said nothing.

Skids and Donald were conferring. Abdullah and Mohammed landed blows on my head and shoulders. I felt woozy, as if the ground had fallen away beneath me. When Donald walked from one side of the room to the other, I reached out and grabbed his pant leg, trying to make him look at me. “Help me, please.
Please.
”

“They’re blaming you already,” Nigel whispered to me. “I think you should just take this one.”

These were words that would stay with me a long time. A long, long time. Through everything that was to come, through the many hours I’d have to think about it, I’d turn his words over in my mind like a rock in the hand, looking for some seam that wasn’t there.

I think you should just take this one.

“I can’t do that,” I whispered back to Nigel.

Donald and Skids pressed on with their questioning. The boys kept on with their blows. All the while, Nigel offered nothing about how it
had been his idea to climb out the window in the first place, or how we’d worked together to plot the whole endeavor. He owned no part of it.

The closest he came was saying to Donald at one point, his voice cracking with fear, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it. I shouldn’t have listened.” As in, he shouldn’t have listened to me. Because I was just taking this one.

*

What did I feel toward Nigel? Hate, love, confusion, dependence, all of it bound up in a knot. In the moment, I couldn’t unravel it in order to examine any individual strand. He was Nigel and I was Amanda, and we were stuck together in the most profound way. When I thought about it, it was not all that different from how I’d felt as a kid, caught inside the lurching, logrolling existence of my family. It’s hard to be mad when you need someone so fundamentally.

I can’t say for sure how long the questioning continued, whether it was another seven minutes or fifteen or fifty. All I could feel was my mind spiraling through a gap, into an empty, dark space with no walls and no floor, no connection to the world beyond.

What I thought was,
Now we are dying. They will hit us until we can’t answer. They’ll leave us only when we’re dead.

Eventually, Donald announced that he had to go. He shook his head as if he were fed up and exhausted by us. He was sitting on the edge of the mattress with the floral spread.

I didn’t want him to go. I trusted Skids less than I trusted Donald. “Please don’t leave,” I said weakly. “Don’t go.”

Donald looked at me almost paternally. He patted a hand on the bed, indicating that I should come and sit next to him. Mohammed seemed to object, but Donald waved him off. Unsteadily, I rose to my feet and seated myself not far from Donald on the bed, my ribs aching with the motion.

He reached out and touched a hand lightly to my swollen cheek, causing a flare of pain. “Your face looks very bad,” he said. He added
that he had to leave and he was sorry for what would happen. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but it will not be good.”

His cell phone rang, and he answered it with a brisk
Salaam
. Looking at me, he held the phone away from his ear. I could hear a woman’s voice on the other end, speaking rapid-fire. “You see?” Donald said to me, rising to his feet, offering a quick smile. “I am late. I must go now.”

After he’d departed, Hassam, who until now had been absent, arrived carrying a brown paper bag. He handed it to Captain Skids, who dumped the contents on the floor—two long chains and four padlocks, presumably bought at a nearby market, clinking in a pile. The chains were thick and heavy-looking, a dark steely silver—the kind of thing you might use to lock together two big doors. I watched Hassam’s eyes flick over me, taking in the new bruises, assessing what had gone on. I thought I caught some small wave of alarm or compassion passing across his face and then vanishing, like a rabbit into the woods.

Skids lifted the chains, appearing pleased by their heft. He passed them to Mohammed, who knelt in front of me. He wrapped my two ankles with the ends of the chain and clicked a padlock into place on either side, so that each one was held snugly, each leg cuffed by a circle of cold smooth links, my left foot connected to my right by about six inches of loose chain. He then did the same to Nigel.

When it was over, both of us were hobbled. I avoided looking at Nigel, too confused by my feelings to view him as an ally or even a fellow victim. I was alone, more than before—my self caught inside my body caught inside my life. I could walk, but only with a clumsy slowness, the chain metal digging into my skin. Running was a clear impossibility. We were entirely theirs. Whatever game we’d tried to play, we’d lost.

A
s evening came, our captors moved us out of the house with the chintz curtains. My guess is that the woman who lived there—the one who’d been angry when we arrived—had ordered them to take their mess elsewhere. Before we left, she sent back a dinner for us, delivered by Jamal, a platter of spaghetti and a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice served on a tray with two plastic cups. More elegant than anything we’d had in months. My jaw was so sore that I could hardly chew, but the food—the taste of the noodles, the normalcy of sipping from a cup—was dimly comforting.

Abdullah watched us eat, looking pleased with himself. Out of the blue, he said, “You fuck many men?” He sounded almost casual, but he was clearly trying out a new verb. I knew it was a question he’d never dare ask with any of the others around. “What number? What number men you fuck?”