A House in the Sky (19 page)

If this were some sort of army base, it was a small and hardscrabble one. There was a long, low, tin-roofed building shaped like a shoe box, with three doors equally spaced on its outside wall. I could see what looked to be a cooking area underneath a lean-to made from hammered-together scrap wood and a thick-trunked acacia whose branches hung heavily over the yard. In front of the house beside the
gate was a small shed, which I took to be an outhouse. I turned to Ahmed. “Can I use the bathroom, please?” I said.

He pointed in a solicitous manner toward the shed. “Of course, my sister.”

One of the soldiers escorted me. I carried my bag with me, hoping nobody would notice. The bathroom had tall walls and no roof. Inside was a stale-smelling shallow hole cut into the concrete floor. It did not seem to have been used recently. Standing to one side of the hole, I pulled out my camera and switched it on, cringing at the sound of its electronic ping, hoping nobody could see me through the wide cracks on either side of the wooden door. Fishing the memory card from the bag, I reinserted it and quickly hit “delete all” on the stored photos, erasing the evidence of what we’d done thus far in Mogadishu. For good measure, I squatted down and peed into the hole before exiting.

Back outside, the soldier named Ali—the one who’d hit my arm in the car—barked an order to one of the younger-seeming soldiers, who approached me with a plastic bucket of water so I could wash my hands. Ali then marched me toward the low building, to a darkened room on the far left, where I found Nigel sitting on a foul-looking foam mat, his shoulders pressed up against a dirty wall. The air was musty. Along the back was a small window with closed metal shutters. A very long time ago, the room had been painted a pale shade of pink. The floor was strewn with bits of electrical wire. Nigel had lit a cigarette and was looking distraught.

Ali hovered momentarily in the doorway. He pointed at a mat along the opposite wall, indicating that I should sit. Then he disappeared.

Nigel glanced at me. We hadn’t had a moment alone since we’d been taken. “What are we going to do?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“We’ve been kidnapped, right?” he said. “Or is this something different?”

I was thinking about the difference between being detained and being kidnapped. I’d been detained once with Enas and an Iraqi cameraman while reporting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. A group of armed
men had surrounded our car and then taken us to the Sadr Party headquarters, where we’d been questioned about our political affiliations, whether we were loyal to the Sunnis. I’d been able to make a phone call to a Shia contact who’d exerted some pressure, and we’d been let go within an hour. It had been a hassle, and scary, but it had ended quickly, over and done. How I wished for something like that now.

Before I could say anything much to Nigel, Ali walked through the door, this time carrying a piece of newspaper. With a flourish, as if wanting to be sure he had our attention, he folded the paper in half, then rolled it into a tight cone, expertly flipping back the tip, his long fingers working around the rim, pressing it into a thin ledge. He leaned down and dropped his creation on the floor next to Nigel. An origami ashtray. Nigel and I stared at it wordlessly.

“Have you seen this before now?” Ali said. His English was accented but understandable, the product of some sort of schooling, I guessed.

We both shook our heads. Ali was still wearing his warrior scarving, but it seemed as if, hidden beneath his layers, he might be smiling. He dropped into a squat not far from where Nigel was sitting, as if settling in. “I used to smoke,” he said. “Before the jihad.” He looked from Nigel to me. “But since two years, no smoking.”

I took this to mean we were going to have a conversation. I tried not to feel terrified of him despite the glare in his eyes and the gun in his hands and the bizarre fact we were sitting, the three of us, in a grubby room in an off-the-grid Somali village, waiting to see what would happen next. I reminded myself that it could only serve us to build some rapport with Ali.

Ali, it turned out, had plenty to say about Somali politics and jihad. His jihad was all about driving the Ethiopian troops out of Somalia, which was pretty much the same jihad being fought by the armed groups of teenagers we’d seen charging around Mogadishu in pickup trucks. Ethiopia’s population was predominantly Christian. Somalia was a Muslim country and needed an Islamic government, one that enforced Islamic rules, Ali said. He’d been battling the invaders for two years—ever since 2006, when the Ethiopian government sent troops over the border and he signed on with the mujahideen. As he saw it,
it was a straight-up case of Christians meddling in Muslim affairs. He hated the Ethiopians. He hated everything about them.

“For two years, my life is only jihad,” he said from beneath his scarf. He was sitting against the wall now, knees jutting, gun propped next to him.

Being a holy warrior in Somalia seemed to involve giving up the pleasures of your former life and marrying yourself fully to the cause. It meant adopting and abiding by the most rigid interpretation of Islamic law. It meant no television, no music, no smoking, and—what seemed to pain Ali the most—no sports. Football, he said with no small amount of wistfulness, had been his game of choice. He’d played it, watched it on television, considered himself a loyal fan of some of the African World Cup teams.

We did what we could to work Ali over. We empathized with his struggle. We said “of course” each time he mentioned how hard it was to be battling the infidels all the time. Nigel dropped the names of various soccer stars and team rivalries, which seemed to excite him. But whenever we felt even a loose connection starting to build, we’d hit a wall.

“Your country,” Ali said, waving a finger at the two of us, forgetting the chitchat, his voice suddenly spewing rage, “sent the Ethiopians to us.”

It didn’t matter to him that Nigel was Australian and I was Canadian. The differences were insignificant. An unbelieving white foreigner was an unbelieving white foreigner. The Western world was inscrutable and immodest and ruled over by Satan, or
Shaitan,
in Arabic. When we reiterated to Ali that we’d come to Somalia as journalists trying to tell stories about how the people there were suffering, he was wholly unimpressed—suspicious, even. I knew that the worries about spies weren’t entirely unfounded. I’d read that the U.S. had quietly sent Special Forces into Somalia to assist the Ethiopians and the faltering transitional government. I’d heard, too, that every so often, unmanned drones passed over Mogadishu, buzzing the city like steel-gray dragonflies.

When Ali left the room, closing the door behind him, Nigel and I
sat silently in the shadows. What did they want from us? It was hard to know. We tried to buoy each other by reviewing the circumstances. Ahmed had seemed so certain that everything would be okay. Ali brimmed with anger but hadn’t done anything to hurt us. Nobody had asked us for money, even.

Light leaked through the shuttered window. On the sill was a stack of thick hardcover books—Korans, it looked like, about eight of them. In the far corner, there was an iron coatrack with some men’s clothes hanging from it. The sun radiated across the tin roof above, heating the room like an oven. Beneath my head scarf, I could feel the sweat matting my hair. Outside, men were murmuring. Nigel and I went round and round over the puzzle of what was happening.

“This is a kidnapping,” one of us would say.

“No, it’s not. It’s just a misunderstanding, a political thing.”

Something in the act of debating it made us feel better.

After a time, Ahmed poked his head through the door. “I will be leaving,” he said, as if we were friends parting ways. “Be very careful with these men. They will kill you if you don’t do as they say.”

Where was he heading? I was desperate for him to stay. That his English was so dignified and his face was uncovered felt important, consoling. He was the one guy here who didn’t carry a gun. I’d been running the words he’d said in the car—
Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you
—again and again through my mind.

“Wait,” I said, “what about the commander? I thought he wanted to meet us.”

“Ah,” Ahmed said, almost as if he’d forgotten. “
Inshallah.
Tomorrow.”

Right away, I started to wonder if he’d been lying to us. Was there no commander? Was it possible that nobody would come to hear us out? I’d put all my hopes on this one possibility.

I tried to wring whatever I could out of Ahmed. It felt like a last chance. “My brother, I need to ask you one thing,” I said. “Can we please call our families? Because if we don’t go back to the hotel, they’re going to know something has happened to us. Can we just tell them that we’re okay?”

Ahmed nodded as if this were an excellent suggestion. “Perhaps,” he said obliquely. “Perhaps that will be the next program.”

I told him that if we could at least make a call to Ajoos from the Shamo Hotel, he might be able to help everyone get what they needed.

This, Ahmed said, with a parting grin, could be another piece of the program. He closed the door gently, leaving us again in darkness. We heard the squeak of the gate and the sound of his car driving away.

*

With Ahmed gone, Ali appeared to be fully in charge and relishing the role. He was worked up. Any eagerness to talk about his life or the jihad had evaporated. His anger now seemed focused and specific, directed entirely at us.

He demanded our money. “Where is it?” he screamed. I fumbled in my bag and produced the $211 in U.S. dollars that I’d brought from the hotel that morning, having left the rest in the Shamo’s safe. My hand was shaking as I passed it over. Nigel was carrying a few coins and a folded-up hundred-dollar bill he’d stashed in his front pocket. Ali counted our money with open skepticism. “This is all?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t believe,” he said. The rage was building in his voice. “I don’t believe,” he repeated. “How can this be?”

Nigel and I said nothing.

“Where is your money?” Ali said.

“It’s at the hotel. We left it there.” Somehow I’d become the one who did most of the talking.

“Your passports. Give them to me.”

“They’re at the hotel, too.”

Ali gave me a narrow-eyed, judgmental look, as if silently making up his mind about something. I averted my gaze, not sure whether it was better to project meekness or defiance in return. My looking away caused him to laugh, a nasty chortle. He walked out the door. I could hear him conferring with the soldiers outside in the yard. Within a minute, he was back.

This time Ali grabbed my backpack and dumped out its contents. In the light cast by the open door, he inspected everything carefully, disdainfully. My camera, my notebook, my water bottle. He took the lid off my lip balm. He examined both sides of my hairbrush. He handled each item delicately, as if it might explode. He shook his head, seeming disgusted by the things I’d chosen to carry with me that day.

Each time Ali left the room, he seemed to recharge his fury, as if taking hits off a tank full of hatred somewhere just off the patio. After going through my backpack, he stepped outside and then came back almost immediately. He pointed at me, his eyes bulging. “Get up!” he said. He touched the shoulder strap of his gun as if to remind me it was there. Ali had a thick, stocky body—not fat, exactly, but well fed, solid in a way that few Somalis seemed to be. I glanced at Nigel and then got to my feet, my knees and back stiff after all the sitting. Ali motioned toward the door.

The sunlight outside was blinding. We walked a few steps across the concrete patio. Two stairs led up from the patio to another closed door. Ali pointed at it, signaling that I should go inside. For a split second I hesitated, and his hand thwacked my back, hard. “Do you want me to kill you?” he said. He gave me a shove forward and I stumbled on the stairs.

The room we entered was dark and small, with a metal cot against one wall. The air was an unmoving envelope of heat. Ali closed the door.

“Please,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Do not do this.” I searched for his eyes in the dimness and kept talking. “Please, you are Islamic. The Muslims are the best kind of people. I know this is not good in Islam. Please . . .”

I had been thinking about this on the car ride through the desert, crammed in with all those men, imagining the things that could go wrong on top of everything that already had.

If he heard me talking, Ali gave no indication. He pulled at my head scarf and tossed it to the ground. Then he reached out and grabbed the neckline of my abaya, yanking it down so that the snaps popped open
and its two sides fell apart. When I lifted my hands to cover myself, he hit me over the head. I yelped in surprise. “Do you want me to kill you?” he said for the second time, and then he pushed me toward the wall. I could see on the other side of the room, on the windowsill, a stack of heavy-looking books—more copies of the Koran.

I felt Ali’s hands slide beneath the fabric of my tank top and into the cups of my bra. He was fumbling, squeezing. His breath came in sharp huffs. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see his face. With his right hand, he found the button on my jeans and then the zipper. A thick finger probed me between the legs, then quickly pulled away. I felt repulsion, nausea climbing my ribs.
Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you.
Hadn’t Ahmed said that? I was crying, jaggedly, feeling like I had a block of wood stuck in my throat. “This is wrong,” I was saying in a croaking voice. “You are not a good Muslim.”

He gave me another hard shove, toward the floor. “You think I need this?” he said, almost spitting the words. “I have two wives. You are ugly, a bad woman.” He picked up his gun from the floor and made a gesture, indicating that I should dress myself. He acted as if I’d offended him, as if I’d violated his honor instead of the other way around. “I was searching for money. Just money.”

“Okay,” I said back quietly. With trembling hands, I worked to snap up the abaya, suddenly grateful for the fact that it covered me so entirely. I wrapped the scarf over my head. “No problem, no problem.”