A House in the Sky (26 page)

When he got back, I asked what was funny.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, climbing back onto his mattress, tired of me already. I watched him close his eyes.

Nigel had been helping Jamal with his English every day, teaching him vocabulary words. They seemed almost like buddies, while Abdullah—my tutor—only got creepier. During lessons, he’d started brushing a hand, as if by accident, against my knee or shoulder any time he reached over to turn a page or point to something in my Koran.

One day Jamal came in bearing a surprise plate of fried fish, a gift from Donald, who was eating outside on the patio with the boys. As he set the plate down, Jamal attempted a joke. He looked at me, smiled, and puffed his cheeks out comically, as though to indicate that if I ate all of it, I would put on weight.

Nigel instantly roared with laughter. “Amina is
fat,
” he said, emphasizing the word in the same exaggerated tone he used when running through vocabulary with Jamal. “Yes, fat.”

Jamal started to giggle. Nigel laughed harder.

The cruelty of it rocked me. I went into the bathroom and shut the door. I didn’t care what Nigel thought of my body at this point, if that was even the joke. It was the allegiance I didn’t like, the possibility that he could switch sides, that I couldn’t make him laugh but those boys could.

Returning to my mat, I tallied all the ways Nigel had disappointed me. I made a list of his weaknesses. Then I made a second list, the one with which I defended myself against whatever he was tallying up about me over on his mat, all the things that made me detestable and at fault. In my mind, we had a vicious screaming fight. We yelled
fuck you
and pounded each other’s chests until we ran out of steam. Then we sobbed in each other’s arms and vowed to do better. All this happened without a word, without anyone getting up from his or her mattress, without an actual tear. But somehow it helped.

*

Over the course of the second month, they moved us multiple times—shifting us in and out of the Electric House, bringing us to a bigger place not far away for a couple of weeks, then back to the Electric House, and then finally, for reasons we didn’t know, to the new house again. They moved us at night, crammed into Ahmed’s Suzuki, the boys having rewrapped their faces in scarves, with extra rounds of ammo hung over their shoulders, gun barrels filling the air around our heads. They ran a second trip to bring Abdi and the other two Somalis to each location. Coming and going, we never saw another soul on the road.

I had caught glimpses of Abdi and the others in the hallway at Electric House. I could hear them murmuring prayers and sometimes spotted one of them returning from the bathroom. They looked ragged, unhealthy, slumped over with depression. From what I could see, the room they were kept in was completely dark. Abdi sometimes sat in the threshold, reading his Koran in the light from the hall. A few times I peered out and flashed him the hand sign for “okay,” as in “You okay?” Each time he shook his head, looking forlorn. He touched his belly to show that he was hungry, that they weren’t being fed much.

Several weeks earlier, before we left the Electric House for good, a couple of the boys had marched me and Nigel out into the courtyard, where Ahmed, Romeo, Donald, and Adam stood with a video camera set up on a tripod. The boys had covered themselves with their scarves. Brandishing their guns, they surrounded us while Nigel and I knelt on a mat. With the camera running, they coached us to make positive statements about Islam, to urge our governments to pay the ransom. They didn’t have us say the amount they were demanding out loud, but that was all I could think about. I’d heard it from our captors many times now: $1.5 million for one hostage, $3 million for two. Back in my waitressing days, I announced drink specials the same way.

They filmed multiple takes, having us repeat the words over and over. The video, I knew, was bound for television. I tried to picture my family watching it. What would they see? Me and Nigel in a semicircle of menacing soldiers and guns. I was pale but not unhealthy. My eyes watered constantly due to the fact that I wore contact lenses and, without contact solution, had been rinsing them in the unsterilized bucket water. I pictured my parents watching the screen, studying what they saw. I kept my shoulders squared even as Ahmed told me to look at the ground. When I said my lines, I tried to inject some intensity into my voice—a message designed for my parents, to show them I was not crumbling.

“Good, good,” said Ahmed finally. He shut off the camera and then let us linger outside in the sun awhile. Much later, I’d learn that the videotape would find its way to Al Jazeera and that the network would release only part of it to the international media—and, at least in Canada, with no audio. A clip played on the news at home not long after it was filmed. My parents saw about nine seconds of me, lips moving, eyes down, fully cloaked in the garb of a modest Muslim woman, my voice lost beneath the newscaster’s drone.

On the final drive away from Electric House, one good thing happened: Nigel reached into the dark space between us and, without anyone noticing, spent five minutes holding my hand.

*

The new house was the one we called Escape House, but not until later.

Our room there was huge, the size of a living room rather than a bedroom. There were two brand-new foam mattresses, a few inches thick, still in their plastic packaging, and also some mosquito netting, which hung from nails in the wall on either side of the room, above each of the mattresses. The room had white tiled floors and two windows, both with metal shutters, the open spaces covered by decorative metal grilles. One window opened out toward somebody’s yard, which had a small shed made of corrugated tin and was locked with a padlock. The second faced a narrow alleyway with a high whitewashed wall directly across the way.

Every evening, one of the boys came in and pulled the shutters across our windows. In the morning, someone came to open them again. When no one was around, Nigel and I tried shaking the grilles to see if they’d come loose, but they were anchored on four sides by concrete, totally solid. From time to time, I stuck a finger through the grille and into the air outside, to give some part of me a chance to feel the air.

It’s true, we might have yelled out those windows. And we might have been heard. But both Ahmed and the man we called Romeo had warned us that we were in a neighborhood full of Al-Shabaab loyalists. In other words, we were surrounded by enemies worse than our captors, since our captors were apparently a renegade group, unaffiliated with the dominant extremists. Al-Shabaab, Romeo suggested, would be happy to take charge of our captivity, to sweep us up if we caught their attention.

It was enough to keep me quiet. My mistrust was wrapped in more mistrust. Standing on the far left side of the window that looked out onto the alley, I could see over a fence and into the yard of another home, where one day I saw a woman pinning laundry to a clothesline. She wore a brightly printed, loose-fitting housedress and had her hair wrapped in a scarf that left her neck exposed. With her back to me, she moved slowly, as if killing time, happy with her solitude. She hung a white shirt, and then another white shirt. She hung some granny-style women’s underwear, a pale yellow dress made for a child, a couple of
bright floral hijab, some men’s trousers, and something that looked like a cotton nightshirt. When she was done, I could see her whole family floating on the line.

It had been about six weeks since I’d been allowed to talk to my mother. I felt like she could hear my thoughts, though, when I directed them to her. I sent her thoughts every day. I told her to stay strong, and I heard her say it back to me. I could only guess at what was going on at home. My parents had so few options. I knew they’d be eyeing their one asset—my dad and Perry’s house in its Sylvan Lake subdivision, surrounded by the flower beds my father had spent years slavishly tending—thinking they’d sell it to raise ransom money. The thought of this, the guilt, made me queasy. From the first day, I’d drilled the point with my captors: Our families couldn’t pay. If this kidnapping was political, as they kept saying it was, then they were punishing the wrong people. Ahmed had reassured me many times, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. We are interested only in money from your governments. We do not wish to harm your families.”

I believed it because I wanted to believe it, even as Nigel told me I was crazy. His family had more resources than mine. When they retired, his parents had sold their family farm at a profit. He thought they’d have at least enough money to negotiate with. What was left unsaid was that the money might cover his release but not mine.

On that last call with my mother, I’d tried to emphasize the idea that my parents should sit tight and not gamble with what little they had. “I don’t know what you guys are doing, trying to get money together, but stop whatever you’re doing,” I said. “Do not sell anything.”

It wasn’t that I thought our governments would come up with any money. I was holding on to my one serious hope, the idea that we could exhaust our captors with inaction. Nigel and I were not starving. We had each other. For the most part, we were getting by. I still believed that waiting it out was our best strategy.

*

Hamdi was the name of Jamal’s sweetheart. She lived somewhere in Mogadishu. Jamal’s mother had picked her out for him. Now that
they were engaged, Jamal got to see her every once in a while. Before Ramadan, there had been an engagement party for their two families. Jamal had disappeared from the house for a couple of days, returning with a new haircut and a goofy look in his eyes.

“How is Hamdi?” I asked.

“Ah,” he said, trying to swallow his grin. “So beautiful.”

When Eid arrived, Jamal had been allowed to send gifts to Hamdi. He bought her a new hijab and some chocolate, which seemed like a grown-up gesture for a teenager who, by his own admission, had never talked to a girl outside his family until two months before. “Women, they are
ex-pen-sive,
” he declared. He was proud he could pronounce the word. He knew it would make us laugh.

He seemed dazzled by his own prospects, marking out the time between now and the future. He explained that when it happened, the wedding—the “marriage party”—would be small, since big gatherings in Mogadishu sometimes drew the attention of Ethiopian troops. I got the feeling that Jamal was so excited about his wedding, he’d happily invite the whole city. But the two families didn’t want to run the risk. Which was okay with Jamal. He just wanted Hamdi.

Nigel and I looked for excuses to mention Hamdi, if only to watch the emotion play out on Jamal’s face. He was desperate to hear her name but shy about saying it himself. Every so often he would go to the market for food but would forget to buy the hot-dog-shaped rolls that accompanied so many of our meals.

“Oh, Hamdi,” we’d sigh dramatically when he turned up without the bread. We mocked his daydreaming by raising our hands to our foreheads. Every time it made him laugh.

Sometimes, looking out through the grilles of our windows at what I could see of the outside world, I tried to imagine what Hamdi looked like. Was she tall or thin or heavy? Quiet or bold? Was she afraid of what was coming, or did she long for it? I wondered how much Jamal knew about her, whether his excitement came from love or just the possibility of love. He never said so, but my guess was that thoughts of Hamdi were getting him through the long days in our house.

In the meantime, he had discovered the college catalog Donald Trump had delivered to us as reading material, the one designed for Malaysian students bound for the UK. Each page bore a few pictures of university students dressed in clothing that was now outdated. The students carried books over pathways that butterflied through green quadrangles amid Gothic stone buildings.

Jamal flipped through the pages one morning, studying the photos with fascination. He turned the book toward me so I could see a page that had caught his interest. There was a photo showing a group of students sitting by a small pond with a couple of swans gliding on the surface. “Is this like Canada?” he asked.

“Well, yes, but that book is all British schools.” I was sitting on my mattress. Nigel stood at the window, quietly reading the Koran.

Jamal ran a finger over the English text as if reading it. His brow wrinkled. “I heard,” he said, “that Canada is more beautiful than British. Because British, London, is more . . .” Searching his mind for the word, he pointed at the walls of the room, the ceiling.

“Concrete?”

“Yes, concrete. London is concrete.”

He wanted the world. I understood that. I felt him swaying toward it.

“London is very pretty, Jamal,” I said. “You’d like it. The buildings are very old. There are a lot of Muslims there.”

He seemed to think about this. “But,” he said, lifting a finger professorially, “it is not a Muslim country. And it is better to live in a Muslim country.”

I was aware of what I was supposed to say next—that yes, of course, he was right—but because it was Jamal, I didn’t.

*

From our exhaustion, Nigel and I built a routine. We lived like a two-person family. We took on responsibilities. I poured the tea, and Nigel washed our clothes. We took turns doing dishes in a bucket. Between us, we had two tin plates and a single spoon. With the food we were given, we made menus, eating our meals on a table-sized square of
brown linoleum the boys had tossed in our room. Some days we ate the buns followed by the tuna; other days it was tuna followed by the buns. When we were given more, I’d use the straight edge of the spoon to chop up papaya and onion, and then Nigel—pretending to be a chef on a cooking program—would make an elaborate show of tossing it all together for his world-famous tuna salad. Occasionally, Jamal would bring us some wilted lettuce, and I’d use my waitress voice to crow about today’s most elegant special: tuna salad
served on a bed of lettuce.

In the mornings, we straightened our beds and talked about what we’d dreamed while sleeping. I was having vivid dreams of old friends, people I hadn’t thought about in years. Rhianna, my best friend from high school, made frequent appearances, and so did my family—grandparents, cousins, aunts. In my dreams, I was always free, but then, inside the dream, I would realize that none of it was real.