A House in the Sky (24 page)

Slowly, we scrubbed our clothes in a plastic bucket under the hot sun, filling and refilling it at a tap located beneath a tall tree, leaving them out to dry. My nerves tingled. Despite the heat, my hands and feet felt cold. With Nigel, I’d been putting on bravado about converting, reminding him constantly of how much I knew already about Islamic cultures. I realized now that I knew very little. When it came to Islam, I’d been nothing more than a curious tourist. I felt quietly terrified of the decision I’d made.

Back in the room, we were each given a can of tuna for lunch. We took turns washing in the bathroom. We combed our hair and put on our clean clothes, which had already dried. I wore my abaya over my old tank top and one of the pairs of men’s jeans they’d given me. All of it smelled blessedly like detergent.

We were stuck together, Nigel and I. It was as if we were preparing for a bizarre sort of wedding, getting ready to cross a threshold, to seal our fates. I glanced at him, cleaner than he’d been in days, his hair wet and neatly parted on one side, looking wide-eyed and a little somber, and I felt a flare of old emotion. He had the beginnings of a beard, the scruff along his chin making him look grizzled, more suited to the drab, dusty purgatory of the house and walled yard.

When we were a couple, I’d imagined so many possibilities for the two of us, so many ways our lives might play out separately or together. This was so far outside anything I might have conjured, ever.

I folded my hijab beneath my chin so that it wrapped tightly around the perimeter of my face, my hair tucked carefully out of sight beneath. Nigel put on a black cotton shirt given to him by our captors. Ali returned to the room, having freshened his cologne and changed his own shirt.

To become a Muslim, you need only to make one honest declaration of your faith. It does not need to happen in a mosque, nor be witnessed by an imam. There is little ceremony involved. Converting is a simple matter of speaking two simple lines in Arabic, though the point is that you feel the conviction of those words in your heart. The sincerity is what matters.

Nigel and I stood solemnly in the room with Ali as he recited the words of the
shahadah
in Arabic and we mimicked them in slightly uneven unison.

We made vows to accept Allah as our only god and Muhammad as his messenger.

What I felt in that moment wasn’t surrender and it wasn’t defiance. This was simply a chess move, an uncertain knight slid two squares ahead and one to the side. It was not a betrayal of faith—of mine, or Nigel’s, or theirs. It was a way to feel less foreign, and in feeling less foreign, we could be less afraid. We were doing what it took to survive.

When it was over, Ali left the room, and all the boys filed in and jubilantly shook Nigel’s hand. “
Mubarak,
” Jamal said to both of us.
Congratulations.
Another nodded at me and called me “sister.” Young
Yahya said something in Somali, which Abdullah translated. “
Jannah, jannah.
He is saying you will go to paradise.”

A door, maybe, had cracked open. In our new lives as Muslims, Ali had told us, we were no longer Nigel and Amanda. They’d given us new names. Nigel was dubbed “Mohammed,” and I was to be called “Marium.” In a few days, we’d be given new names again; this time, at our request, our captors would match them more closely to our old names. Nigel would be called “Noah.” My name would be “Amina.” I would live with it for a long time. Much later, I would look up its Arabic meaning: Amina was a girl who, above all, was supposed to be faithful and trustworthy.

N
ow we needed to learn how to pray. From here on out, we’d be expected to pray each time our captors prayed. It would be the first thing we did upon waking and the final thing we did before sleep.

The conversion to Islam felt like a crossing. It was as if, for eleven days, Nigel and I had been floating on a ship in a harbor, and now we were coming ashore, with our captors lining the pier. I felt unsteady, disoriented. The boys were almost welcoming, showing us new courtesy. Instead of barging in and out of our room without warning, they stood in the doorway and waited for permission to enter. Abdullah, it seemed, had appointed himself to be my teacher, while Jamal attached himself to Nigel. They doled out assignments, gave us lines to memorize from the Koran. They had us write down the movements of prayer—thumbs by the ears, right arm folded over the left—and the words we were to recite as we went. I got the sense that teaching us was a way to relieve their own boredom. During our lessons, the other boys sometimes hovered in the doorway, listening as we fumbled over the Arabic, unable to hide their bemusement.

Muslim prayers are performed in cycles, called
raka’ah
. Depending on the time of day, you go through the cycle either two, three, or four times—a bit like doing sun salutations in yoga. Each prayer includes motion. You stand, you kneel, you touch your forehead to the floor, and you sit back on your heels in contemplation before starting all over
again. You recite Koranic verses from memory, each cycle beginning with the same seven lines from the first chapter, but expanding from there to include other chapters.
Surah,
a chapter is called. The most facile Muslims can draw from the whole of the Koran, having committed every last one of the book’s 114 chapters—over 6,200 verses in all—to memory.

I prayed awkwardly. I held my thumbs at the wrong angle next to my ears or forgot to keep my toes tucked beneath me when I touched my forehead to the ground. The Arabic words got tangled in my head, unhitched as they were from any sort of meaning. There were a few phrases I’d picked up during my time in Iraq, but for the most part, we were learning syllables more than sentences, stringing them together like beads, a couple of words at a time.
Bismillahil rahman ar-raheem. Al hamdu lillahi rabb el alameen.

I recognized how gentle it could sound, the lulling lift and fall of the words, how the lines might flow together like waves. Until one caught in my head and refused to come out.
Ar rah . . . ar-raheem?

Abdullah caught the question in my tone. He leaned in close for a split second. “No!” he snapped. “Wrong.”

He was not a patient teacher.

When it came to spoken Arabic, my copy of the Koran was no help whatsoever, since the Arabic was presented in indecipherable script, with nothing spelled out phonetically. So Abdullah chanted breathlessly, and I scrawled notes in my notebook so I could practice it all later. On the other side of the room, Jamal sat close to Nigel, his knees pulled up to his lanky body, taking him through new verses with painstaking care.

I looked at Abdullah. “Can you do that last part again, please? More slowly?”

He shook his head and got to his feet, seeming to signal that our lesson was over. “You are bad, Amina,” he said gravely, chucking his chin toward Nigel—Noah—as if he were the model student, the preferable one. He went on to repeat the verse in a last merciless whoosh of Arabic—
Ar-rahman ar-raheem. Malikee yawm ul deen. Iyyak naabudu
wa iyyaka nastaeen. Ihdina assirat al moostaqeem
—and then, relishing his own ability to pronounce English, he said nice and slowly, “You are very stupid woman.”

*

One thing about Islam is that paradise always beckons. Life is oriented toward the afterlife. Whatever pleasures you miss out on in this world, whatever comfort or richness or beauty is absent from your days and years, you will find it upon entering paradise, where pain, grit, and war disappear altogether. Paradise is a vast, perfect garden. It’s a place where everyone wears pretty robes, where there are lavish banquets and comfortable couches decorated with jewels. There are trees, and musky mountains, and cool valleys lined by rivers. Paradise is so perfect that the fruit there never rots and a person stays thirty-three years old forever. It is the finish line to all earthly misery, an entryway into perpetual bliss. According to the Koran, angels wait at each of its eight gates, congratulating new arrivals. “Peace unto you for that ye persevered in patience,” they say. “Now how excellent is the final home!”

The more I read about paradise, the more I understood that this was what the boys waited for, what they worked toward with their prayer, as if they had a giant layaway plan for their dreams, paid forward in daily devotion until it came time to meet the angels.

Helpfully, my Koran came annotated. Different passages were accompanied by long footnotes in English, quoting the Muslim
hadith,
the ancient texts that recorded what the Prophet Muhammad did and said and taught during his life. The
hadith
add context and detail to the word of God as written in the Koran. For me, reading in our concrete room in the Electric House, the footnotes helped answer some of my questions. They told instructive little stories and, together with the Koran, made clear that what a person does in this life matters immensely in the next. Paradise, it is said, has seven levels, with its top level further divided into a hundred degrees, and the highest spots reserved for the most righteous. The boys in our house, with nothing to distract them and no responsibilities beyond guarding me and Nigel,
were trying to land themselves a good spot in the afterlife. They had plenty of time to work on their faith, to bank their virtue in anticipation of Judgment Day.

If Abdullah had any suspicion about my sincerity as a Muslim, he didn’t show it. Instead, he passed hours sitting across from me, listening to my Arabic with intense, unblinking concentration, his eyes fixed on my face as I took baby steps with my chanting. If I managed to get through a few minutes of recitation without a single stammer or pause, he’d commend me. “You are very smart,” he’d say. “This is good.” But it was only a matter of minutes, usually, before I’d screw something up. Abdullah’s mood would flip instantly. He’d pounce on my failures, seething with new rage. When I looked up at him, trying to understand what I’d done wrong, he’d scream, “Look down!” and often lift a hand, threatening to hit me. His hands, I noticed, were unusually large.

When he was gone, Nigel and I wondered aloud whether he was just power tripping or possibly mentally ill. Either way, he seemed to believe that he owned me.

As the third week of our captivity began, I felt grateful for the challenge of learning both a new language and a new religion. It helped to fill the days. When we were left alone, Nigel and I compared notes on what we were discovering inside the Koran. He was focused on the idea that Allah had a lot of rules regarding promises and oaths. If you swore something on Allah’s name, you were obligated to fulfill the promise. His goal was to get one of the leaders to swear on Allah that they’d let us go.

Even in the off hours, I could hear the group of boys continuing to chant from the Koran as they sat outside on the patio, their voices braiding together in a long-lasting hum. How, I wondered, did they stay so focused? Did their beliefs really run that deep?

I would have expected that one of the older guards—the captain or Ali—would lead the prayers, but it was the small, serene Hassam, who, at sixteen, was one of the youngest in the group. Hassam’s father, Jamal had explained to us, was an imam at a mosque. As a result, Hassam knew more of the Koran than anybody else in the house and thus
was put in the pole position for prayers, standing at the front, facing Mecca, and leading the recitations, while the rest of the household stood in lines behind him. Through our spy hole in the bathroom vent, I watched him inhabit the role of an elder. He sang the prayers in a loud, clear voice, exaggerating his hand motions so that everyone could follow along.

Nigel and I were expected to pray in our room, with Nigel standing ahead of me because he was a man and thus our leader. Every so often, Jamal came and invited Nigel to join the rest of them outside. Nigel understood that he couldn’t say no and that it was a chance to get some fresh air. He’d look at me a bit apologetically, knowing that, as a female, I’d probably never be invited to pray outside, and then he’d go.

Left alone, I skipped my prayers altogether. Knowing my captors were occupied and wouldn’t bother me, I was happy to stare at a wall.

*

“This isn’t good,” said Donald Trump one evening after stepping into our room and taking stock of our grungy mattresses, the black mold along the back wall. “You can’t keep human beings like this!” Along with an expression of mild outrage, he wore a pink long-sleeved dress shirt and baggy trousers hemmed to the proportions dictated by the
hadith
—one hand span above his ankles, to keep the fabric from brushing the ground. He kicked at a roach crossing the floor.

Despite his feigned disapproval, Donald was one of the leaders of the group holding us. We were sure about that. Donald drove in every five or six days with supplies from the city. Ali, for reasons we’d never know, had disappeared sometime during the third week.

Donald’s real name was Mohammed, but we already had one Mohammed in the house, and besides that, he handled the household money and was more Westernized than the others. His English wasn’t perfect, but he talked a good worldly game. He aligned himself with me and Nigel, trotting out stories from what apparently had been extensive travels in Europe. He told us he’d spent time living in Germany. He rhapsodized about the olive oil in Italy, how it tastes more amazing than olive oil from anywhere else in the world. He’d seen
things. He knew things. He wanted us to know that he knew things. He seemed to think it set him apart. That night he showed up with two cans of warm Coke and handed one to each of us.

He squatted down for a chat, his face lit by the bulb overhead. “These people, you know, they’re uneducated,” he said. “They just want money.”

“We don’t have money to give them,” I responded. “There is no money.”

I sipped my Coke slowly, like a cocktail.

Donald lifted his shoulders and then let them fall. “If it was up to me, you would go in one week.” He smiled and tilted his head. “No, you would go in one hour.”