A House in the Sky (42 page)

When I was angry, I spared almost no one. I had way too much time to flay people in my mind, especially my captors. I fostered a vivid fantasy in which I became invisible. I pictured myself moving through the house unseen, tying up my captors one by one. Sometimes I imagined grabbing a gun and shooting them all, every last one. The only person I’d pass over, aside from Nigel, of course, was the other woman in the house, the cook.

I now had a sharp pain in my left side that kept me curled up, knees tight against my ribs. The tension inside me was growing unbearable, like a wire pulled tight. Nothing I did seemed to relieve it. I was aware of the pressure every waking moment.

One afternoon, I heard sandals slapping the hallway floor outside my room. I steeled myself, waiting to see who was coming.

It was Abdullah. He came directly to my mat. “How are you?” he said. Then, “I want. Pull it up.”

He wanted the red dress pulled toward my waist so he could undo my jeans. I rolled onto my back, turned my head to the side, and squeezed my eyes shut.

Then he was on top of me, and I was hating him with every molecule in my body. I wanted him to die. I put my hands against his chest to create a sort of barrier between us. Something in me howled. I could feel what was happening—the bough of my mind had reached
its snapping point. I couldn’t lift myself away from it, couldn’t lessen the tension. I couldn’t stand another second of this life. I was collapsing into insanity. I felt it. My head pounded as it arrived.

Bracing myself, I pushed my hands harder against Abdullah’s chest, and something happened. A searing blast of heat hit my palms, a delivery of some sort, a quick shock followed by a strange, spreading calm. I wasn’t in my body anymore. I was somewhere else, my mind dissipating into a vast canopy, a thing hung over this place, stretched like a collection of tiny lights. Images ran past me, scenes from stories Abdullah had told me months earlier. His life was abruptly, seamlessly on display. I saw him as a young boy, running toward an explosion, realizing that his beloved aunt had been standing at its center. I saw him collecting and carrying home what was left of her—a piece of one leg—not knowing what else to do. I saw him a few years later, hiding behind a truck as a group of gunmen went from house to house, massacring his neighbors.

For one split second, I knew his suffering. It had assembled itself and looped through me in a rush. Its absolute clarity made me gasp. It was anguish, accrued over the brief span of his life. It was rage and helplessness. It was a little kid hiding behind a truck.

This was the person who was hurting me. His sadness trenched beneath mine.

When he was gone, I lay on the mat, my body hurting the same way it always did. I felt completely confused. What had just passed? I had no idea. Whatever it was, it unsettled me. In the moment, it had felt perfectly rational and even profound, like the lifting of some great curtain, the flash of a hidden truth. But now my mind started to analyze, attempting to hammer what had happened into words and structure, and the thing itself resisted. I couldn’t shape it or explain it. I could only live with it, this new feeling, complicated as it was.

In the end, though, it helped me. Because with it, I began to nurture something I’d never expected to feel in captivity—a seedling of compassion for those boys.

T
he war around us was getting worse. Somalia, in 2009, was in political flux. The president of the shaky transitional government had resigned abruptly late in 2008, leaving a power vacuum in Mogadishu. Neighboring Ethiopia, which had spent two years trying to prop up the fledgling Somali government, had all but given up, calling its troops back home. Battles raged across the country as Al-Shabaab and other Islamist groups competed for authority, letting loose on one another in block-by-block street fights, while a few thousand African Union peacekeepers—mostly from Uganda and Burundi—tried to protect what was left of the functioning government in Mogadishu.

All I knew was that the fighting appeared to follow us. The neighborhood surrounding the Dark House at first was quiet, but after a month or so, I began to hear bomb blasts and ricocheting gunfire almost daily—the blam and zing of a rising turf war.

Its closeness must have worried our captors, because they moved us, this time to a house that looked more like a mansion. I rode in the car next to Nigel. He stared wanly ahead, his shoulders hunched, his whole body seeming deflated. When I turned toward him and said, “Are you okay?” Young Yahya hit me on the side of the head. “No talk!” he screamed. I didn’t speak again.

The new house was shaped like a giant L, its yard enclosed by high walls. It was bigger and grander than anything I’d seen in Somalia, with an ornate front door made of wood and a boxlike outbuilding in
one corner of the scruffy yard. Positive House, I would come to call it.

Abdullah and Yahya led me down a tiled hallway. I moved awkwardly in my chains, my ribs aching, my posture stooped. During my time in the dark, I’d been kicked in the mouth so hard that two of my back teeth had come loose. One had fallen out, but the other now had abscessed, leaving the gums swollen, my jaw shooting with pain that worsened as I moved. But entering the new house, I was also wildly alert, my senses assaulted by the change of scenery.

We were in a family home, it was clear—a place that, unlike the other places we’d stayed, felt only recently vacated. The air bore a certain freshness; the floor tiles were white and clean. I could almost feel the energy, the prosperity, of the people who’d left it behind. We passed rooms filled with furniture. I saw a couch and a lamp. I saw a plush-looking mattress with a wooden headboard behind it. At the end of the long hallway, we turned right onto a shorter hall, and I was pushed through the very last door on the left-hand side.

It was a small room with a window covered by a set of heavy shutters. In one corner was a straight-backed metal chair with a missing leg and a ripped seat cushion, its yellow stuffing spilling outward. A rolled-up Persian-style carpet lay like a long cigar against the wall.

Tacked to the right of the window was a brightly colored poster, laminated in plastic, depicting a suspension bridge. I’d seen posters like this many times before, hung in the cheap restaurants and guesthouses of the backpacker ghettos I once frequented, showing landmarks and nature scenes whose hues had been Photoshopped to a bursting Technicolor unreality. I’d always found them mockable for their artificiality. But here this was, pinned to the wall before me, a giant bridge spanning a giant river with flamboyantly green headlands rising toward an orchid-colored sky at sunset. I was starved for every color it held, transfixed by the geometry of cables and girders.

I studied the bridge, the chair, the carpet, the window leaking light along the edges of the shutters. All of it was beautiful. All of it carried something loosely hopeful.

The boys had tossed my foam mat into the room, along with two
plastic bags containing my belongings and sheets, and departed. It seemed this would be my new home. As I set about making the bed, I noticed something sticking out from beneath the rolled-up carpet—a bit of paper, what looked to be the corner of an envelope. My heart fluttered at the sight.

I don’t know what I thought would be in that envelope. A message for me? A map? It didn’t matter. The paper, whatever it was, didn’t come from my captors. It was left by other people, leading other lives. It carried with it a residue of normalcy. With shaking fingers, I pulled the thing toward me. It was indeed an envelope, a slim one with a fold-down top, the kind you got when picking up prints at a photo store. Inside was a single color photo—a passport picture of a boy, bordered in white—and a slip of paper with some Somali words written on it, including what must have been the boy’s name: Omar.

He looked about nine years old. He wore a collared shirt and a sober expression. He had short brambly hair and dark circles under his big brown eyes. His neck was long, like a flower stem. Beneath the seriousness, he seemed sweet and eager, as if trying to appear older than his age, worthy of whatever journey might have prompted the photo session.

I stared at Omar’s picture for ten seconds, then put it back in the envelope and left it on the floor, as if it were radioactive. Which it kind of was. Almost certainly, my captors would see it as a document, and documents were a problem.

After I finished putting the sheet over the foam mat, I lay down. Then I reached for the envelope again. It was irresistible. The boy was irresistible. I held the little photo out in front of my face, so I could better see Omar and he, I imagined, could better see me. We examined each other solemnly, and then, worried that someone would surface at my door, I put him back in his envelope and stashed it beneath my mat. My pulse raced. I knew if the boys found me with it, I’d be beaten. Some part of me couldn’t let go of the photo, though. I felt like Omar was mine to protect. I thought of us as allies. He’d left his house and now, in the twisted logic of his country, I was here, in his
place. It was possible that his daddy was a militia leader and he himself was already bent on jihad. But something, maybe desperation, told me otherwise.

Every few minutes, unable to stop myself, I took Omar’s picture out from beneath my mat and looked at it again, trying to memorize the details of his boyish face, his narrow chin, the clamshell bend of his mouth, all the while paying attention to the doorway.

I had just slipped the envelope back into its hiding place when Abdullah and Yahya returned. Abdullah stared at me fiercely, seeming to read guilt on my face, and ordered me to my feet. I was sure he was about to do one of his document searches, but instead he gestured that I should gather my things. They’d decided to move me to a new room in a different part of the house.

The next room would have no furniture in it, only a cardboard box filled with white porcelain dishes and a bouquet of plastic blue flowers set on top of it. Its doorway looked out onto a patch of hallway wall. There I’d find, nailed into the concrete, a different oversaturated, cheesy-in-another-lifetime poster, this one showing a pile of fruit—a pineapple, red apples, bright bananas, and a dewy pyramid of bulbous green grapes—all of it luridly bright, heaped against a sky-blue backdrop. The sight would be punishing. I’d stare at it from my mat. It would sharpen my already vicious hunger for days to come, until finally, either sensing the lust it pulled out of me or worried that the image offended Allah, one of the boys would take the poster down.

But before that, as I was ordered to gather my things and move from the first room, I had to figure out what to do with my contraband. I spent my last thirty seconds in Omar’s room caught in a heart-thudding, should-I-or-shouldn’t-I crisis as, under the gaze of Abdullah and Yahya, I slowly pulled the sheet from my mat, trying to buy some time. The envelope with the picture lay beneath the mat. Using the sheet for a screen, I thought I could reach down and snatch it up, attempting to toss it into one of my plastic bags before either of the boys noticed. I could take Omar with me, which would make me happy and also might be safer than exposing the envelope where it lay on the floor, a sure give-away that I’d been hiding it.

There was no time to ponder. In one quick swoop, I picked up the bags and the foam mat while making, in my chains, what passed for a fast and obedient bolt toward the door. This left Omar where he was, somewhere between the broken chair and the carpet, under the gaze of the Technicolor bridge, faceup in his paper envelope, abandoned a second time. Leaving the room, I didn’t look back, and thankfully, neither did my captors.

W
e stayed in Positive House for about two months, and there, too, the fighting crept closer. I could hear gun battles outside my window. The boys seemed wound up by the war. A new president had been appointed to run the transitional government in Mogadishu—a former high school geography teacher named Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who, a few years earlier, had helped build an alliance of Islamist groups in Mogadishu and managed briefly to keep the city’s warlords in line. The boys had been thrilled with their new president. The week Sheik Sharif was elected by the Somali Parliament, back in the Dark House, Abdullah had broken from routine and spent a few minutes talking to me about how excited they were to have the Ethiopian troops gone and a strong Muslim leader in office. The struggle was over, he said. Thousands of people who’d fled Mogadishu were moving back home. Sheik Sharif would unite all the Islamic factions using
sharia
law.

“The fighting will stop,” Abdullah had predicted, sounding confident. The prospect of peace seemed to please him. I trusted that the new political order meant something hopeful for me and Nigel as well.

But all I’d been able to hear through the walls of the Dark House was more fighting.

What I learned when we got to Positive House was that not only had the boys lost faith in the new president quickly, they now saw him as an enemy. Their optimism had flipped into something darker. In
Sheik Sharif’s first weeks in office, he’d established himself as a moderate and—more horrifyingly to my captors—a coalition builder, open to seeking support from foreign governments, saying he wanted to make peace with Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian nation. In Positive House, the boys docked themselves in front of the radio in the afternoons, listening to the news on the BBC Somali World Service. The war was escalating rather than dwindling, the hard-line Islamists pitted against the new president and his ideas about peace. Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam, another insurgent group, were launching fresh attacks against the African Union peacekeeping troops protecting the government in the capital. The peacekeepers were fighting back. After a roadside bomb hit one of their trucks, African Union soldiers were said to have opened fire on a crowd, killing more than a dozen bystanders.

With this, the boys declared the new president a
kafir
—an unbeliever—and the jihad fully back on.