A House in the Sky (27 page)

Nigel and I talked in ways we never had. I described my shock and anger over how he’d lied to me in Ethiopia about being married, how crushed I had been. He took me through the months he’d spent in Australia, ending his marriage and feeling ashamed. He talked about his girlfriend in Scotland, Erica, who was Australian but was working as a chef on an estate there. She had a dog. She was a good person. He was missing her, torn up over having done something as stupid as run off to Africa, leaving her behind.

We had honest conversations about money, about the net worth of our families. I thought my family could come up with about fifty thousand dollars. He said his parents had access to more. We had faith that our families were talking to each other. Each night, as we were getting ready to sleep, I would turn and say to Nigel, “Now we are one day closer to being free.”

Then one morning during the third week of October, the boys stormed our room. Abdullah, Mohammed, Young Yahya, and Hassam came running in, almost at a sprint, startling us as we ate our breakfast on the floor.

“You have to get up,” Hassam said.

I said, “What’s happening?”

“Get up,” he said again, an edge in his voice.

I noticed he was the only one without a gun. I felt my body start to shake. We were on our feet. Abdullah and Mohammed were tearing angrily through our belongings, as if acting on a tip. They pulled everything out of our bags, overturning our mattresses, looking for something, though I couldn’t guess what. We were blameless, I reminded myself. Aside from the backgammon game, which was tucked away in one of the books and which I doubted they’d recognize anyway, we had nothing to hide. But I didn’t know. How could I know what was wrong?

The boys said nothing. Hassam stood grimly before us while the other three ripped through what little we had. They threw everything across the floor, and next they started carrying things from the room. My backpack went out. Nigel’s camera bag. Our notebooks and pens and the plastic shopping bags with our toiletries and clothes. All of it disappeared. And then Yahya picked up one end of Nigel’s mattress and started to drag it toward the door.

It dawned on me then what was happening. Abdullah unhooked the mosquito netting from the wall on Nigel’s side of the room and walked out. There was a smaller bedroom right next to the one we’d been staying in. We’d peeked into it plenty of times, coming and going from the bathroom down the hall. Through the wall, I could hear someone hammering—Abdullah, most likely, rehanging the mosquito net in the next room. And then they were back for Nigel, guns leveled at his chest, motioning him toward the door. They were separating us. There was no explanation, no dialogue. I watched the back of his shirt as it moved away from me. There was no goodbye or anything. He was just gone.

I
lay for a long time on my mattress, hoping that something would reverse itself. I waited for one of the boys to come in carrying Nigel’s mattress and for someone else to hustle Nigel back through the door, maybe even apologetically, as if taking him away hadn’t been the plan. I expected to hear some sort of noise—a shuffle, a creak—that would tell me the change was under way, that we were soon to resume our old spots, with our belongings, our routine. Instead, the house was quiet. The silence sat heavily in my ears. I was alone.

One hour passed and then two. Alone felt like a new country. Alone felt like a new planet—one containing just me and my mattress with the blue-flowered cloth and the room’s four walls, which seemed to have shot up like tall trees in a dark forest. Without Nigel, I had nothing to say, no one to look at, nobody stirring the air. Alone in that big room, I was nothing but small.

I couldn’t guess why they’d chosen this day to separate us. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it had been eight weeks since we’d been taken from the road, and there was no sign of a ransom payment. Frustration seemed to be mounting among our captors. The previous afternoon, there had been a commotion at the front of the house, and one or more of the leaders had shown up. We’d heard a long, intense conversation with Captain Skids on the patio. I wondered now whether the leaders had been instructing him to prepare for a long haul, informing him that we’d be houseguests for longer than
anticipated. Skids already seemed to view us as a burden. He expressed no curiosity about me and Nigel. He spoke no English and showed no warmth. I wondered whether it was he who’d insisted that Nigel and I be separated, as an exertion of his control. An I’m-the-boss-of-the-house move.

Later that day, Jamal returned, carrying my backpack and the plastic bags with my toiletries, clothes, and the English books, dropping it all on the floor with a clunk of finality. I stared at the divot in the wall where the nail holding Nigel’s mosquito netting had been. Had he been there to hear it, I would have said something encouraging and bright to stop the slide of emotions. I would have said,
Come on now, we just need to get through this morning.
Or
Tell me about the happiest birthday you ever celebrated.
There seemed no point. My throat felt as if it had pinched shut.
Calm down,
I told myself.
Calm down, calm down.

Sitting up, I took out the spiral notebook they’d given me for my Islamic lessons and opened it to a fresh page. “Breadbeard,” I wrote, using a nickname I’d had for Nigel in Ethiopia. “Stay strong. Don’t give up. We are going to get out of here and be with our families again. I am just on the other side of the wall and will be sending love your way.”

I read the note a couple of times. It was the sort of message I’d been giving him every day in person. Did I believe it? I wasn’t sure. But it felt good to write. I added another line in the same crimped handwriting: “Flush this down the toilet as soon as you read it.”

I tore the page from the notebook and ripped away the blank edges until it was a tiny scrap containing only the writing. I rolled what was left into a compact white pellet about the size of a pencil eraser, and then, before I could talk myself out of it, I knocked on the door for permission to use the bathroom.

The boys had grown too lazy to escort us to and from the toilet, as they had in the early weeks, in previous houses. When one of us knocked on the metal door, the guard on duty, usually sitting out on the veranda, would quickly lean over and glance in our direction and then snap his fingers a few times loudly to indicate that we had permission. The hallway running through the house was L-shaped, with my room located at the junction. A guard sitting on the veranda might
have a view of my doorway but would not be able to see around the corner to the rest of the hall—the stubby part of the L—which led to Nigel’s new room and the bathroom beyond it.

When the snap came, I stood, holding the balled-up note loosely in my palm, and started down the hall. Whatever soldier was on duty, whoever had snapped his fingers, was nowhere in sight. The hallway was about fifteen feet long, with thick blue walls and a white tiled floor. Nigel’s room was on the right, next to mine.

Passing by his open door, I took a fast look out of the corner of my eye to make sure he was alone, and then, with a flick of the wrist, I sent my little note sailing. As the ball of paper skittered across the floor, I caught a sideways glimpse of Nigel lying on his mattress, faceup, possibly asleep. I continued on to the bathroom, my heart racing, hoping like hell he’d find it before any of the boys did.

It had occurred to me that, due to the way our two rooms were positioned, he had no ability to respond. There was no circumstance under which Nigel would have to pass by my door. Our communications could be only one-way.

Back in my room, I stewed over our new reality. I imagined Nigel on the other side of the wall, lost in his own worries, though I knew instinctively that I was now the more vulnerable one. The wall was green and veined with cracks in the plaster. I guessed it was probably about twelve inches thick. As an experiment, I tried rapping a knuckle against it. The sound was slow, not seeming to travel far, caught in the wall’s density.

A moment passed. I sat, paralyzed by the stillness.

Then, from the other side, came two short raps. My spirits jumped. Nigel had heard me. And I could hear him back. I wanted to knock all day. I probably would have, were it not for the fact that every hour or so, one of the boys pulled himself off the patio and came wandering down our hallway, gun in hand. I worried that if they caught us knocking, they’d move us even farther apart. Instead, I answered Nigel with one swift knock, and then both of us, being cautious for good reason, fell silent. We could communicate, sort of, but it didn’t mean anything.

Evening came. I lay in the inching darkness, trying to stave off panic. So far, our captors had not touched me. Aside from the first-day grope I’d gotten from Ali, I’d been left alone. Nonetheless, I was aware of being female every second of every hour. I knew what the Koran said about captive women, how they could be treated like wives, but I didn’t know how literally that might be taken by the men holding us. The captives described in the Koran were mostly men taken prisoner on the battlefield during the seventh century or war widows swept by force out of their villages and conscripted to do housework. It seemed like ancient history, fallout from very old battles. But then again, it was how the leaders of our group described me and Nigel each time they shrugged and told us not to take our situation personally: We were just pawns in a religious war, an old story being replayed in the modern day.

I passed the night alone in the giant room, sleepless. My mind galloped. I was desperate to talk with Nigel, to have an actual exchange. During my ablutions before evening prayer, I’d studied the bathroom he and I shared. There was a toilet and a dingy-looking plastic vanity mounted to the wall above a porcelain sink, framing a square of reflective foil paper instead of an actual mirror. There was a small window in the room, maybe eight feet off the ground, covered by iron bars and with a wide ledge beneath. After breakfast the next morning, I wrote to Nigel again, flinging another ball of paper into his room to explain a new idea: I’d leave a note in the bathroom, tucked back out of sight on the window ledge, and then knock on the wall to signal that it was there. When he’d read it during his next bathroom trip and flushed it down the toilet, he’d come back to his room and knock to let me know he’d seen it. He could do the same for me.

We did a test run. I left a note and then rapped on the wall. About forty minutes later, Nigel knocked twice in return. It was a small triumph, but it mattered. We began to exchange letters—short, cheery-seeming messages and drawings—once or twice a day. We changed the hiding place from the window ledge to an empty lightbulb socket in the vanity, which seemed a bit less likely to be discovered. I wrote
notes to Nigel telling him to look for one beautiful thing, even something little, inside his room. I sketched a tiny picture of the two of us sitting on an airplane, clinking champagne glasses, hightailing it out of Africa in the comfort of first class. I drew a dialogue bubble over Nigel’s head and wrote, “Shall we have another?”

Nigel’s notes to me were affectionate and funny and most often about the future—what we’d do, what we’d eat, once we got out. He drew a picture of the two of us as smiling tourists, pointing at giraffes at the national park in Nairobi. I memorized the contents of each note before tearing it into pieces and dropping it into the stained toilet, sloshed out of sight with water from a bucket.

From our individual rooms, we knocked on the wall, back and forth, several times a day.
Lub-dub,
like a heartbeat.

You there? I’m here.

*

With our separation, all routine had gone out the window. It was as if our captors were running off a different set of batteries. Jamal no longer loitered in my room. Abdullah stopped overseeing my memorization of the Koran and was replaced by Hassam, who came in the early afternoons, first visiting Nigel and then me. Hassam was small for his age. Under other circumstances, I’d have thought of him as cute. His cheeks were smattered with acne. He had a wide, perfect smile and always seemed eager to engage. The other boys liked to pick him up and throw him over their shoulders for fun.

“Okay, today is lesson,” he would say to me. “Today is lesson how to be best Muslim.” He spoke of Allah as the protector, and prayer as a way of staying on a straight path to paradise. About our kidnapping, he was almost apologetic. “It is money, not Islam,” he told me once. Where Abdullah had been erratic and controlling, Hassam was earnest and patient as I ran through the words of the Koran. He sang verses as if they were music, encouraging me to inflect my voice the same way, rising and dipping with each turn of phrase.

“
Lahu ma fis-samawati wa ma fil-’ard,
” he said, then waited for me to repeat.
His are all things in the heavens and on earth,
it meant.

Nigel and I had spent plenty of time discussing which of our captors we feared most. There was young Mohammed, who had hulking shoulders and eyes set close together like a rat’s. Mohammed said very little to us. In the early days, he’d sometimes wag a finger at us and make a clucking sound, as if to say,
You are bad people.
Before we knew his name, Nigel and I referred to him as “Son of Satan,” for the hatred we saw in his eyes. Topping our list was Abdullah, with his cold glare and mood swings and oft-repeated fantasy of becoming a suicide bomber and killing lots of people.

Seeing more of Hassam and less of Abdullah might have felt like an improvement, a comfort, even, were I not experiencing the frisson of round-the-clock worry now that Nigel had been removed from the room.

I hated everything about being alone. There were days when nobody spoke to me at all—when Jamal delivered the food without saying a thing, when Hassam didn’t bother to stop in. The isolation put me into a cistern, dank and deep. I started to understand the old movie trope, the self-fulfilling prophecy where a perfectly intact person is locked up and isolated in an insane asylum and begins, over time, to actually go mad. My own brain pawed at me. If I shouted, would anybody respond? If I died, would it matter? Everything I’d told Nigel, every chirrup about how this would end and we’d soon be sitting by a pool having sandwiches and beer, now seemed like a farce.