A House in the Sky (29 page)

When he released me, I fell to the floor, collapsing like a rag doll.

Abdullah rewrapped his sarong and picked up his gun. He opened the door and checked the hallway. I kept my head in my hands and didn’t look. I asked to go to the bathroom. I was desperate to wash, to cry, to hide myself away. He checked the hallway again. “Go,” he said. Before I could leave, he pointed his gun at my chest, close enough so that he was almost touching me again. “If you speak of this, I will kill you,” he said. And I felt sure he would.

N
othing had changed and so had everything. The sea-foam-green paint on the walls was the same, the windows with their shutters and grates, the dirt coating the floor, the roof overhead. The hockey-puck can of tuna that Jamal brought at dinnertime was the same. The call for prayer from the mosque near our house was the same, and the Koranic drone that drifted down the hallway from the boys outside was the same. What was different was me.

I lay on my mat and hardly moved. I kept my eyes closed, one arm covering my face. My back ached. Between my legs, I was raw and sore. I felt as if I’d been evicted from my body, like I no longer fit in my own skin. What had been outside me was now in, like some vicious flattening force. I was a ghost wandering the ruins of a wrecked city.

I should have hated Abdullah, but I hated myself more. My mind ticked through every mistake I’d ever made, every wrong thing about me. Why had I come to Somalia? What had I done? I’d spent eight weeks telling myself that this was all temporary, but now the reality felt unshakable. It didn’t help that every minute was basically the same as the last, every hour like the one just past. Alone with myself, I had nothing. Every fear I’d ever had now came back to me—darkness was scary, noises were scary. I felt like a child. Panic swept over me in waves, giant and forceful. To think even half-rationally was an effort. When I tried to steady myself, all I wanted was to hasten the inevitable. I thought about the blue-flowered sheet I kept on my mattress, trying
to figure out whether it was long enough to be twisted into a noose. I thought through the layout in the bathroom, wondering if there was anything sharp or blunt or high enough to launch myself onto or off of, something to hammer me right out of the world. He couldn’t kill me, I reasoned, if I got to myself first.

I lay for two days like this, getting up only to use the toilet, mimic the motions of prayer, and drink water, unable to go through with trying to kill myself but with no interest in living, either.

On the third morning, not knowing what else to do, I left Nigel a frivolous note in the bathroom, saying nothing beyond a recognizable, half-sunny hello. If I faked sunshine, maybe sunshine would come. I knocked on the wall to tell him the note was there. Then I lay back down on my mat. Waiting for him to retrieve it and send a knock back, I looked around the room with its grotty floor and straw-colored light threshing through the window grates and tried to force a single positive thought. Was there something? There had to be. It would come. The expectation sat. It shot out roots. It became my stand-in for a positive thought.

*

Later that morning, I stood up and started to walk. I did one lap around the room and then another. The walking felt good. It gave me purpose. I walked calmly, at a steady pace, looping in bare feet, holding the hem of my red dress with one hand to keep from tripping. In motion, I told myself things, the words resonating right down through my legs.

I will get out of here. I will be okay.

There was comfort in it. I repeated the words like a mantra and kept moving. For once, I was grateful that the room I was being held in was so big. Now that I was walking, I couldn’t think of any reason to stop. Hassam peeked in at one point as if expecting to guide me in learning a new
surah.
I’d left my Koran sitting on the windowsill and made no move toward it. Hassam looked perplexed but said nothing and left. I was certain that none of them knew what Abdullah had done.

When the afternoon arrived—the hot, quiet hours I now feared—I was still walking, sweating like an Olympian. Jamal brought tea and
a bottle of water. Mohammed opened the door a couple of times, scoffed at me, then disappeared again. Meanwhile, I was busy getting ready to be free. I’d wiped any uncertainty out of my plans, and all the desperation and vague, sideways bargaining that went along with it. No longer did I think,
If I get out of here, I will be kinder, more patient, more generous.
I was thinking instead,
When. When I get out of here.
When I got out, I would hug my father all the time. I’d take my mother to India, since she’d always wanted to go. I’d eat better food, look into going to university, find a man who really loved me, do something that mattered. I imagined Somalia as a story I would tell my friends. Not a happy story, clearly, but a story with an ending. Walking circles in my room, I awarded myself a future.
Hold on for it,
I said.
Hold on, hold on.

It was a few days before Abdullah came again, in the late afternoon, just like the last time, pushing me to the wall, his hand gripping my neck, undoing whatever resolve I’d built. He came again several days later, and again on many other afternoons after that. Each time it felt like being robbed, like he was siphoning something vital out of me. Sometimes he’d just punch me and leave.

Six, seven hours a day I walked. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. The bottoms of my feet grew thick. A dirty pathway took shape in the room, a trammeled-on oval, a miniature one-lane track. I took breaks for water and for the bathroom. I stopped at prayer times and sat on my mattress, no longer bothering to go through the motions. I reversed direction several times a day to take the pressure off the inside foot. To an observer, I might have looked like a pacing, half-mad zoo animal, but what I felt, what I believed, was that I was getting stronger.
I will get out of here. I will be okay.
I strapped the men’s watch Donald had brought us weeks earlier onto my wrist. Suddenly, the time mattered. It allowed me to plan. I’d look at the watch and think,
Oh, it’s eight o’clock. I’ll walk till noon, and then I’ll knock on the door and have my shower.
As I moved, I shed despair. My body became all ropes and cords and knots of hard muscle. Hassam stopped me from time to time to work on my memorizations from the Koran. I took solace in my circles. Anytime little Maya let out a defiant yell outside my window, I silently cheered her on.

*

When Donald came for one of his visits, I begged him to let me spend time with Nigel. I asked why we’d been separated and then watched as he blinked placidly, explaining that unmarried men and women should not consort, according to Islam.

I knew that, of course. It was a familiar catch-22 for me. Now that I’d converted, I was supposed to agree with the rules. Never mind that there were plenty of moderate Muslims in the world who were more likely to see things the way I saw them. My captors were fundamentalists. If I argued with their views, I was exposing myself as an infidel. I still didn’t know why they’d allowed us to stay together for so long before imposing their rules.

Donald spoke in a consoling voice. He gestured at the room. “This is a good place,” he said. “It is better this way for everyone.”

I knew he didn’t believe that. It was clear that Donald was generally appalled by the way we lived—not just me and Nigel but everyone in the house. He almost always remarked on the dirt and lack of furniture. When he came, presumably driving from his home in Mogadishu where he had a wife who cooked for him, he often brought plates of fried fish or pots of stew for the boys. With me, he made a show of being accommodating. Each time I asked for the same things—a chance to talk to my mother, a king-sized bar of chocolate, more food of any kind. He always nodded as if taking it all in, then did nothing about it.

“How are you?” he said every time, after we’d finished the Islamic greeting.

“Not good,” I’d say. “I need to go home.”

His answer since the very start had been the same. “I think it will be soon.
Inshallah.
”

The word “Islam” comes from the Arabic language. It means “to surrender or submit to God.” I would time and again see what this looked like among my captors. We were, all of us, meant to wait without complaining and see what would come.

On this day, I decided to take a risk. “It’s
not
better that we’re separated,”
I said. “One of the boys has been paying visits to my room.” I was careful not to name a name, convinced that Abdullah would find a way to kill me if I made a direct accusation. “He does things that are
haram.
”

Donald understood what I was saying. Sitting on the floor in the middle of my room with one knee pulled up to his chest, he appeared uncomfortable but not taken aback. Feeling the sting of tears, I gave him an imploring look. The leaders of the group had always struck me as more sophisticated than the soldiers. Surely they would disapprove of Abdullah. I didn’t know whether Donald would want to investigate or admonish the boys, or whether he’d make some sort of change to better protect me, like putting Nigel back in my room.

“I am your Muslim sister,” I continued. “You have to help me. Allah says the Muslims have to help one another. You wouldn’t let what is happening to me happen to your daughter or your wife, right? Please, make it stop. I need to go home and live with my family. It’s too dangerous to be here with these soldiers.”

He cleared his throat a few times. He then lifted a finger and pointed at my Koran, sitting open on the mattress, motioning for me to pass it to him. I handed it over and watched him shift into a cross-legged position, propping the book carefully on his lap. He flipped through the pages, skimming over the Arabic. “Ah,” he said after a moment or two. He then looked for the corresponding verse in English. “Here.”

He turned the book so I could see where his finger had landed. Chapter 23, Verses 1 through 6. I knew the passage. It was miserably familiar, one of several places in the Koran where female captives—those possessed by the “right hand”—seem to be referenced as the exception to the rigors of practicing good behavior and self-control. I got anxious every time I read them, and now the words hit like a cudgel.

Successful indeed are the believers

Who are humble in their prayers

And who keep aloof from what is vain

And who are givers of poor-rate

And who guard their private parts

Except before their wives or those whom their right hands possess,

for surely they are not blamable.

“You see,” Donald said, “what is happening is not obligatory but it is permissible.” He steepled his hands like a wise man, as if he’d just taught me something interesting. “It is not forbidden.”

I understood that the boys in the house took the Koran’s instructions as literal, but I’d figured the leaders—especially Donald, having lived in Europe—would leave some space for interpretation, viewing it through the lens of the centuries that had passed, similar to the way my pious Christian grandparents looked at the New Testament, which had its own provocative lines about slavery and the treatment of women, cherry-picking the good while disregarding the bad. Donald was having none of it, though. His verdict: not blamable.

“But,” I said, giving it another try, “I’m being hurt. What’s happening is a problem.”

He passed me the Koran and stood up to leave. He then said to me what I’d been saying to myself, though coming from him, it felt like a slap. “
Inshallah,
Sister Amina, you will be fine. No problem.”

*

November arrived. I kept track of the days obsessively, making note of the friends’ birthdays I was missing, imagining the turn of seasons in Alberta. I was aware that Christmas was on the horizon. In my mind, I trusted that I’d be safely home by then. Every Friday the boys in the house washed their clothes and took turns going to a mosque—another way of marking a week gone past. I walked myself to the point of fatigue daily, waiting and hoping for some sort of change. I replayed the last conversation—if it could be called a conversation—I’d had with my mother back in early September, telling her not to sell anything, not to pay.

My mother. I could build her in my imagination, head to toe, from the dark shine of her hair to the worn brown cowboy boots she liked to wear. I could put her in the room with me, practically. The last time
I’d seen her was over the holidays, nearly a year ago, just before I’d gone to Iraq. We’d stayed in together on New Year’s Eve at her apartment in Canmore, watching movies—her on the couch and me lying on the floor—both of us long past any interest in crowded parties and drunken countdowns. My mother had recently turned fifty. I was roughly the age she’d been when she’d gotten pregnant with me. She was now the age my grandmother had been back then. We were like clicks on a dial. Young, middle, old.

Every once in a while, one of the leaders came to the house and posed a question to me, a query flung over continents, evoking something both intimate and concrete and sent directly from home.

What award did Dad win recently?
Communities in Bloom, for his gardening.

Where does Oma keep her candy?
In a pumpkin-shaped jar.

My answers were proof that I was alive, that my freedom was still worth negotiating for. To me, the questions also felt like gifts, an invitation to conjure my grandmother’s tidy house in Red Deer or the quivering dahlias in my father’s backyard. They were a reminder that I’d had a life outside.

In my mind, I talked and talked to my mother. I imagined thoughts strung between us, spider threads floating over the ocean. She was sending love, I knew it. I sent messages back.
I love you. I love you.
And
I’m sorry, so truly sorry.
And a reversal of my earlier plea, a thought I needed her to hear more than anything:
Please get me out of here. Find a way to pay. Do everything, sell it all.