A House in the Sky (38 page)

I said nothing.

Abdullah looked at Nigel. “You,” he said. “What number girls you fuck?”

Nigel swallowed his food. His face was puffed up from the beating. “Four?” he said, as if guessing at a correct answer.

Abdullah’s smile grew wide. “Ah, four!” he said. “Many!” Appearing content, he leaned back against the wall.

Nigel and I finished our meal in silence.

*

Surprisingly, when they moved us that evening, they took us back to the Escape House, the house whose window we’d climbed through only hours earlier. Returning seemed risky on their part. The whole neighborhood likely knew about me and Nigel—our spectacle, after all, had been fully witnessed—but our captors were either unthreatened or desperate enough to bring us back. It occurred to me that they had nowhere else to go.

My room was just as I’d left it—my books, clothes, moisturizer, and medicine packs all lined up next to the foam mattress. The blue floral sheet sat folded on the bed. The window shutters had been closed.

I lay down, the chains sliding uncomfortably between my ankles, my body damp from a day of heavy sweating, my limbs thrumming with a dull bone-marrow ache. In the escape, I’d lost my shoes, my backpack, my eyeglasses, my Koran, and the two little instructional booklets on being an Islamic woman. I fought off dread. I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman in the mosque—how brave she’d been, how surely she’d suffer some consequence for trying to help. I prayed that she would be okay.

Later, when Jamal showed up at my door, I asked to use the bathroom. He walked behind me down the hallway, his gun pointed between my shoulders. When I pushed back the bathroom curtain, my breath caught in my throat, seeing the mess Nigel and I had made. The room was littered with pieces of crumbled mortar and brick. The hole we’d made in the window at the back of the alcove looked enormous and violently rendered, like a wound, a jagged portal opening to the darkness beyond. I imagined the shock of whichever of our guards had discovered it.

As I used the toilet, Jamal hovered on the other side of the curtain. I could hear him breathing. I felt embarrassed, knowing he was listening to me pee.

Back in my room, I waited all night for them to take me away, my mind roosting uneasily on that empty patch of desert with the twisted acacia tree, the memory of a knife held at my throat.

Then, improbably, the muezzin was warbling. Sun sliced through a crack in the window shutter, lighting the gaudy green of my walls. At some point, I’d fallen asleep. And now I was awake, alive. Sounds floated overhead as if everyone in the house were up, washing and praying, same as always. I heard some sort of conversation going on out on the veranda.

I felt a flood of warm relief.

Maybe, I thought, we’d be okay.

*

It would be nice if bad things happened only in the shadows, if life split easily into camps of darkness and light. How I would have liked it if the stream of sun pouring over our house that morning, over the neighborhood and the neighbors and the whole city of Mogadishu, had some sort of diverting, uplifting effect.

It seemed to be one of those moments when nobody knew what was going to happen next, how anything should go from here. I could hear the murmur of our captors, huddled in a group conference on the porch, presumably discussing what to do. Yesterday had been a bad day, indeed. Their two treasure chests had grown legs and sprinted away.

A short while later, Captain Skids and Abdullah brought me food. Skids never concerned himself with day-to-day matters, and it was never Abdullah who carried in my meals. But they were standing in my room, looking almost kindly, placing in front of me what amounted to a bonanza of a breakfast—a ripe yellowish mango, a hot-dog bun, a cup of warm tea.

“Eat the food,” Abdullah said without a trace of his usual fury. “We will wait.”

With this, my heart began to tick faster. Wait for what? I looked at the food in my hands, the cup of tea on the floor. The sight of it made me light-headed. I was ravenous. The exertion of the escape had drained me completely.

Skids gave a curt nod and left the room. Abdullah turned to follow him, again looking at me in a way I couldn’t read.

When they were gone, I tore a little piece off the hot-dog bun and ate it. I took a sip of the tea. I wondered if Nigel had been given the same food and whether they were waiting for him, too.

I peeled the fruit with my fingers, sucking the stray bits of flesh from each piece of skin. Inside, the mango was a vibrant orange, paler around the edges, deeper toward the core. Its sweetness was gratifying, though it would do nothing to fill the howling void in my belly. I’d learned enough about hunger to understand that the impulse to gobble down food was an animal thing, useless if you weren’t in a pack. When you were alone, it was better for both soul and body to make a small meal last.

I chewed the hot-dog bun piece by piece, alternating it with nibbles of fruit. Through the wall, I heard a sound—a pained yelp. They were in Nigel’s room, I realized.

After about ten minutes, Abdullah surfaced again at my door, appearing unrushed. “It is good?” he said. He sounded like he actually wanted to know.

I nodded, gesturing to show that the meal was only half-eaten. He walked away again, leaving my door open.

I ate what was left of the bun, continuing to tear it into tiny pinches, each bite the size of a little pearl. When I was done with that, I cleaned the pit of the mango with my teeth and tongue, all the way down to its woody center. I drained the last dregs of tea.

It was Abdullah and Skids who came back for me. Abdullah was holding his AK-47. Skids carried a pistol.

Abdullah said, “You are finished now?” He indicated that I should stand and follow them into the hallway. Skids said something to him in Somali. Abdullah pointed at my mattress and then at his
macawii
—the cotton sarong he wore tied around his waist—and then again at my mattress. They were telling me to pick up the blue-flowered sheet from my bed. It was about the same size and weight of a
macawii
. They wanted me to bring it with me, wherever we were going.

We walked out into the hallway, toward the veranda, past the room where Abdi and the other Somali hostages once stayed. The chains on my legs hampered every step, giving me a wobbly equilibrium at best.
I led with one foot and dragged the other, doing a kind of labored shuffle step. I was barefoot, wearing the clothes I’d escaped in, all but the heavy black abaya, which I’d taken off the night before. I wore the red polyester dress, a green tank top beneath it, the loose-fitting pair of jeans, and a black hijab over my head—all of it dirt-stained after my humiliating and involuntary exit from the mosque.

Midway down the hall, I lost my balance and fell, landing hard on one hip. Skids watched as I tried a few times to right myself, the narrow span of my chained feet keeping me from shifting my weight. I thought I saw a glimmer of pride in his eyes, seeing how difficult it was for me to move.

*

They led me through the double doorway of a wide, empty room. I’d been here once before, on the December day of Eid, when Nigel and I were invited to join our captors for prayer and we’d celebrated what Eid was about—the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his own son to God. The room was bright with sunshine. Its walls were painted yellow. I’d stood behind my captors on the holiday morning, looking at their backs. I’d knelt on the concrete floor, watching daylight drift through two windows on the left-hand wall, fascinated by the sight of the single stunted tree in the wide yard beyond—what they saw and I usually didn’t.

This time Abdullah pushed me to the front of the room. Skids was talking again in Somali, saying words that Abdullah translated for my benefit. “You are bad woman,” he said, his voice rising. “You run away. Do you have documents?”

I said, “Documents? No, I don’t have any documents.”

“You lie,” Abdullah said.

I realized that they must have searched Nigel’s room and found the paper on which he’d written some Somali phrases, asking for help. It was hardly a document, but our captors had always been obsessed by what they called documents—any paper with words on it. The written word held a strange power for them.

Skids drew close, the first time in five months that he’d come within spitting distance of me. I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes. Instinctively,
I shot out a hand to push him away, but it seemed to make his motions swifter. With his left hand, he seized the neckline of my red dress and, in the same instant, used his opposite hand to crack the butt end of his pistol over my skull. I felt the pain in my teeth, my eyeballs, my fingertips. My first thought was that he’d damaged my brain.

I fell sideways, but Skids still had a hold on my dress. He yanked me up and then pulled the dress over my head, his fingers finding my sweat-stained tank top. When I fought him, he hit me again.

“Please, please don’t do this,” I said.

Skids barked an order at Abdullah, and I began to understand why they’d had me bring the sheet from my bed. With Skids holding my arms, Abdullah took my piece of flowered cotton and hooded me with it, covering my head and tying it tightly at the back of my neck. Now I saw nothing but blue light. I felt hands on my body. My tank top was torn away. I twisted and squirmed, trying to dodge the hands, but they only came from new angles. Someone landed another blow on my head. I was dizzy, vomit rising in my throat. I felt myself sag. There were new voices in the room. More people. Speaking Somali. I heard Mohammed and Yusuf. The room seemed crowded suddenly, dense with male energy. I heard the voice of Hassam, the sweet young market boy, and that, more than anything, made my spirits plummet. I thought,
Not him, too.

Someone was tugging on my jeans, sliding them down to just above where the chains lay yoked around my ankles. The air in the room was hot, and I was naked but for the hood over my head and the jeans at my feet. My skin prickled. I pressed my arms over my breasts and hips, trying to cover myself. Down by my feet, I could feel a set of hands moving around my ankles. I heard a murmuring and then a collective gasp. Someone pronounced the name of Ajoos, the fixer at the Shamo.

My heart sank at the sound. They’d been searching through the pockets, I knew, and had come upon my one bit of contraband. It was the two tiny scraps of paper onto which, prior to the escape, I’d copied my Somali phrases and phone numbers. I’d rolled the papers up until they were about the size of two sunflower seeds and tucked them into the narrow triangular front pocket of my jeans.

My captors were talking loudly, excitedly, almost triumphantly, as if they had permission now to continue.

And they did. They continued. They called it a search, what they went on to do to me that morning, in that room. But what they did was drag us all into new territory. All of the boys were there. I understood later how much this mattered, how it kept any one of them from judging the others in the months to come. Together, they crossed into a darker place, where there was no retrievable dignity for anybody. They became guilty, one the same as another. I bled not for hours or days but for weeks afterward.

F
rom here, I went into darkness. By this I mean real physical darkness, a bleak black void with four walls around it, in the form of a new room in a new house—this one seeming to be far outside of Mogadishu, deeper in the country, somewhere in the catacombs of another whitewashed village. Just hours after what had happened in the prayer room, under cover of night, they brought us—me and Nigel both—to the new location. Shrouded in my black abaya and head scarf, I was strangely numb during the ride. My body had been shredded. So much of me was raw and hurt that I couldn’t shift my weight without triggering a new pain. All the while, my mind felt caught in a net, rigged high above what was going on.

Next to me, Nigel was panting so loudly that I feared they’d hit him for it. He was shirtless, for reasons I didn’t want to imagine.

In the back of the car, where several of the boys sat jammed beneath the hatchback with their guns, I could hear the rattling of cooking pots and plastic bags at their feet, a sign that they’d packed us up for a full move.

*

I saw almost nothing of the next house. I was hurried from the car through a doorway and then down a long hall.

Before we were pulled inside, I turned to Nigel and said one thing. “Stay strong,” I said. “We’ll get out of here, Nige. But we might not see
each other for a while.” My eyes welled at the thought. He, too, teared up. Despite everything, I wanted to crawl into his arms.

They put me in a room that was windowless and black, tossing in my foam mattress, several bags of my belongings, and the brown square of linoleum that appeared to travel with me now as well. The room was big. My mat lay in one corner, with the other walls far away. The air smelled sour, a stew of rot and urine. The room felt sealed off, like a cave, like a storage room, removed from light and the busier parts of the house. There was a bathroom inside the room, in an alcove near the doorway, smelling dank and unused.

Over twenty-two weeks of captivity, I’d nursed many thoughts that somehow Nigel and I would be found, that some cell phone signal could be traced and mapped, that maybe Canada or Australia would find a way to send soldiers or mercenaries to pluck us out or that someone—one of our captors’ wives or cousins or mothers—would blow the whistle on the whole operation and it would force an ending. My hopes had been dimming, but in the airless jar of the new room, they felt fully snuffed.

I’d lost a lot of blood and was burning with fever; my head ached viciously. I was certain I was dying and that it would happen slowly. As I lay on the mattress, my mind clung to the faintest of sounds: the scrabble of a rat in the far corner of the room, someone hammering something—a mosquito net, likely—into a wall. I heard something else, a light hacking coming from the hallway, a human cough that I didn’t recognize. The sound was distinctly female, but that seemed impossible. I wondered if I was hallucinating.