The skinny pirate didn’t ask for his coat back. I fingered the sleeve. Not bad quality. The leather was soft, the elastic cuffs were thick and firm.
“Ah, Angelo give you this jacket?” said Rolly.
“Who?”
“That Somali, An-gel-o,” he said, pronouncing the name for me.* “I see he give you this jacket last night. He give you food that day you arrive,” he added. “In the desert.” I must have looked confused. “We send over the tuna and bread. Angelo bring it for you.”
“Oh.”
“He’s a good man, eh?”
Pirates had captured Rolly and his friend Marc Songoire three months earlier, in November 2011, about fifty miles from Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles. They were cleaning fish in Rolly’s boat by night when a skiff approached under a crackle of gunfire. The Seychelles are African islands, scattered around the Indian Ocean north of Madagascar, and Mahé lies more than eight hundred miles from Somalia. (Their trip to Hobyo, at gunpoint, took seven days.) But the pirates thought Rolly was too light skinned to be African. “Seychelles, you know, is many islands,” he said. “We are mixed, mixed, mixed. Me, I am part Chinese.”
The looniness of the pirates still astounded him. They had read the rear of his little boat—aride, port victoria—and put the letters together in some dyslexic way that led them to accuse Rolly of being Australian. Maybe they thought an Australian hostage could bring higher ransom. One pirate liked this idea so much that he aimed a rifle at Marc’s chest on the boat and ordered him to make an out-loud declaration, demanding to hear that Rolly was indeed Australian. But Marc spoke only Seychellois Creole. He said nothing. The pirate took it for insolence and pulled the trigger. The detonation of a blank charge in his AK-47 left the old fisherman quivering for the rest of the day.
“After,” said Rolly, “when they bring us to Somalia, you know, they torture him.”
“What?”
“Yah! Marc, when they ask him to call his family, he not understand. The pirates, they take the battery from my boat, they put cables”—he patted each arm to show where they had clamped the cables—“and they electrocute him like that.”
I winced.
“At first he cannot eat.” Marc had lost the use of his arms.
“So I have to take his fork and feed him, like a child.”
A dread settled on my chest and wouldn’t move. “Jesus,” I said.
“These men are crazy,” he said with a shrug. “We are like the devil, they are like God, Michael. You can’t tell them nothing.”
VIII
Our dusty valley, with its proliferation of bushes and trees, was unusual in the blasted landscape of central Somalia because it had leaf and shade. It sustained thousands of little creatures, and I could spend a diverting hour defending my mattress from lines of ants, persistent spiders, and curious black-and-red beetles. Wasplike insects the size of a fist went motoring on dry wings between the sun-shot trees. And I noticed a weird shimmering call on the brushy slopes that seemed indistinguishable from a horse’s whinny. It moved here and there in absolute silence, without the violent rustle a horse would make.
“Is that some kind of bird?” I asked Rolly.
He listened.
“Is a corbeau,” he said.
“It sounded like a disembodied horse.”
I started to imagine these equine-voiced vultures flapping in silence, like spirits, from tree to tree.
Somalis came down a slope of the valley on the second morning with cases of bottled water and mango juice, boxes of spaghetti, canned tuna, powdered milk, three brands of cookies, a sack of rice, a sack of beans, a sack of flour, and—crucially—toilet paper.
“A truck arrive, eh?” said Rolly.
“Up on the bluff.” I nodded.
For lunch we ate tuna with bread rolls called “roti.” The rolls were short loaves, like soft baguettes, not like Indian roti, which is a flatbread. But it was interesting that Somalis had borrowed an Indian word. The word shaah,* for their all-important tea, also pointed across the water, toward Urdu or Arabic. The country was Muslim because of old trade links to Arab cultures to the north (across the Gulf of Aden), to Sudan in the west (beyond Ethiopia), and to the Mughal Empire, far across the sea. Gerlach liked to say Somalia wasn’t African but “oriental.” Of course it was both. On our way to Hobyo we had seen squat and ragged pyramids in the bush, uncovered by the Indian Ocean tsunami eight years before: Gerlach had said they were ancient remains of colonization by Egyptian pharaohs.
A large, blustery pirate named Abdinasser, with broad sloping shoulders and an eager smile, started to use the word “sahib” with me in the first few days of my captivity. “Aniga, adiga,” he said, pointing at himself and me in turn, “SAHIB!”
To me sahib also sounded Indian, and in South Asia it implied a colonial relationship, but Somalis used it to refer to a relationship of equals. That meaning was closer to the original Arabic—the first sahibs were companions of Mohammed—and pirates used the word among themselves.
Abdinasser’s voice was chesty and high, not booming as you’d expect from such a barrel-shaped man. Unlike the other pirates he never said bitter or sarcastic things. For my shower that afternoon he brought us two heavy, one-and-a-half-liter bottles of clean water. Afterward he handed us freshening products like skin moisturizer and purple cologne. I thought they were effeminate things to see in a bush camp, so I pointed to a female model on Abdinasser’s moisturizer bottle and teased him.
“For women only, sahib,” I said. “Not for men.”
“Haa, yes,” he said with an enormous smile, “SAHIB!”
Abdinasser proved hard to embarrass. Most pirates were touchy and proud, but he harbored none of their grim suspicion. From then on we called each other nothing but sahib.
The next morning at breakfast, he saved us from an awkward impasse when I complained about the coffee, the vile tea-and-Nescafé mixture, which Rolly didn’t like, either. “Shaah-caffè,” I said to the pirates, trying out my grasp of the language. “No good.”
My noncaptive self was still intact, and I asked for simple boiled water to mix with our satchels of instant coffee, as if decent coffee were a basic necessity, some kind of human right. The guards listened in bewilderment. The atmosphere grew tense. (“Not make them angry, Michael,” muttered Rolly.) At last Abdinasser said, “Haa, yes!” and boiled a kettle of fresh bottled water.
The pirates watched us make instant coffee with hot water and powdered milk, then gave our innovative beverage a name:
“Water-caffè!”
“Haa, water-caffè,” I said.
We were learning to communicate.
IX
Rolly and I talked in short bursts under the canopy of leaves, and during our silences my mind seemed to flip through pages of memory like a film. The impulse to study the past reminded me of those supposed moments before you die—“life passing before your eyes”—except that my sense of urgency just went on and on. During my first week of captivity I was tense and afraid for my life, so I called up the past like a man dying in slow motion.
First I remembered Berlin. At breakfast I liked to sit in the kitchen window of my apartment and look at the massive, waving trees at the corner of Helmholtzplatz, a park where a nineteenth-century streetlamp stood next to an odd, Space Age plastic street clock. I missed having a soft-boiled egg with my coffee and listening to the BBC. I’d never been rich, but in the Somali wilderness the coffee, the radio, and the egg felt like impossible luxuries.
I thought about the words on the rear of the technical, kibir jabiye—“To bring down the arrogant”—and wondered if the same technical had accompanied us out to the coast. Most likely. I had not acted arrogant or overweening in Galkayo, but to the Somalis I was a white man, a symbol of colonialism and latter-day wars. It had been arrogant to think I could come to Somalia and expect to be treated as anything else.
You have made a mistake, Boodiin had said. Mistakes are human.
&nb
sp; I started to think back years, rather than weeks or months, to find out where I’d gone wrong. Maybe it was normal to gnash my teeth and rake the past for answers; it certainly wasn’t rational. But camping in the woods like this reminded me of a summer when my parents and I drove up Pacific Coast Highway and stopped at Big Sur, by a freshwater stream, close enough to the ocean to smell salt among the redwoods and pines. In those days the name Big Sur had a countercultural flair; my only experience of it was trout fishing with Dad and burning some roasted marshmallows. Now I missed the whole thing with every fiber of my heart: the salty Pacific and the campground dust and the rich, vanilla-tinged odor of the California forest.
During that road trip, Dad was drinking hard. Mom exiled him on some nights to sleep outside. I noticed the friction only when I stepped out in the morning to use the campground toilets and saw Dad wrapped in a dark-blue sleeping bag, covered in dew, beside the wheels of the van. It always happened in silence—this tension between them smoldered but never flared into the open. Somehow Mom kept in good humor and excellent maternal form throughout this shambling trip, as if the family weren’t under threat.
I had no brothers or sisters, so the hopes of my parents had settled on my unsuspecting head like a heap of wet hay. Growing up means leaving certain expectations behind, along with received ideas from your childhood; on the other hand, they stick to you. Back then I wanted to be an astronaut or a doctor. I could have been a doctor—I could have trained for any profession at all. Instead I had to be a writer.
“Michael,” said Abdinasser, my sahib, holding out a handful of khat. “Sahib.”
“No.”
“Cigarette?” said another pirate.
It was a game for the pirates to find out what the hostages would consume. Out of boredom I took a cigarette. The pirate handed me a lighter. Oddly enough it had a cheap photo of the Lorelei, a rock formation on the Rhine River near Koblenz. My parents had met in that part of the world.
“Thanks,” I said.
I remembered photos of my father from that era showing a more suave and self-controlled man than the one I remembered. A snapshot from the early sixties showed him wearing a trim black suit, with polished shoes, next to a new white Volkswagen, pinching a slim cigarette. In those days he worked with Denis Lyon. They might have traveled together to the Koblenz office. I had time to imagine them seeing the Rhine Valley for the first time, on a smoke-filled train. “That’s the Lorelei,” Denis might have said, gazing out the window at some cliffs beside the river, and he would have explained the legend of a beautiful siren singing river navigators to their doom.
Dad was smart but indifferently educated; he’d spent a semester at MIT in the fifties and finished his training in the Navy. “I guess I thought the sirens were Greek,” I imagined him saying, and Denis would have coughed out a dry, sarcastic laugh.
“Well, I think this one’s a blonde, Bert.”
They had belonged to the hard-drinking culture of aerospace in the sixties, practical but hell-raising men who remembered childhoods during World War II. The global reach of the United States, with its satellites and fighter planes, was a project they supported. For them it belonged to the natural order after 1945: America’s newfound significance after Hitler’s defeat was a sensible counterweight to Communism. Mom in those days had a generous, marquee-worthy smile, and my parents were sleek and fashionable, annoyed and bewildered by sixties counterculture. If drugs and alcohol infected our household in Northridge, misgivings about the American imperium never did.
I spent hours, eventually days, rebuilding chapters of my family’s past. Everything flowed like an underground stream. The strange association with Nuur, the gap-toothed security chief, cast me back to scenes I could remember with Denis and scenes I had to invent. Aerospace used to infuse life in Southern California, and I remembered the tone of that world, the banalities and the international glamour, and I remembered Denis and Sylvia sitting on our concrete patio in Northridge, after family dinners, smoking cigarettes and speaking German. The women spoke it with uncommon grace; the men sounded more like drill sergeants from Gomer Pyle. They sat for hours on dry Los Angeles evenings with glasses of wine and flickering citronella candles. It was easy to reject the American suburbs, easy to disregard the whole military-industrial complex for its weapons and its habits of war, but the keenest emotion I felt now was a profound sense of failure, not just for the catastrophe of getting kidnapped but for a sense of spiritual waste: for not having loved everyone enough.
I was at the rough edge of what I thought would be a foreshortened life, and the memories amounted to a frenetic and subconscious groping around for the person I had been, since I couldn’t accept the label “hostage” and didn’t yet know what it meant.
X
The next morning we woke up to find a pirate squatting near our beds, his head wrapped in a turban. He was tall and fine featured, and he watched us in the gray dawn with a long mistrustful stare. No one prepared food, not even a thermos of tea. For breakfast Rolly and I shared a packet of cookies.
“Who is that man?” I mumbled to Rolly, nodding at the lean, unsmiling guard. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before.”
Rolly had. “Angelo say he Ali’s brother,” he said.
He’d replaced Ahmed Dirie, who had disappeared after his beating. Too injured by the boss to continue as group leader, apparently.
Khat arrived in the early afternoon, and Rolly made fun of it. Every day, he put on a grinning, grandfatherly act for the ritual arrival of the drug. “Tchat!” he said to Angelo. “Tchat!” he said to a guard named Hersi. “Tchat!” he said to Abdinasser the Sahib.
They all lifted their thumbs.
“Why do you say ‘tchat’ instead of ‘khat’?” I said.
“Is their word, Michael. Is what the Somalis say.”
That was true. Our pirates all softened the first consonant and said “tchat.” A regional difference. But Rolly had never heard it pronounced another way.
“Do you have ‘tchat’ in the Seychelles?” I teased him.
“Oh no, Michael.”
Rolly watched them unwrap their bundles of leaf.
“They no feed us,” he observed, “but they buy this fucking tchat.”
Ali’s Brother ordered Rolly to his feet in the midafternoon and marched him across the valley and up the hill. I didn’t know what was going on, but Abdinasser, my sahib, made a telephone gesture with his hand.
Rolly returned after half an hour, seeming despondent. The pirates’ demand was still outrageous, he said, and his family in the Seychelles held out little hope. “The pirates say if they do not get money in twenty-four hours, I will starve,” he said in a hoarse and quiet voice. “My son-in-law not know what to say. He tell me, ‘Papa, God will take you up to him. God will accept you.’”
Ali’s Brother stood in front of us.
“Come on,” he said to me.
We climbed the hill. On the grass-grown bluff I saw a Land Cruiser, a fire pit, and several more armed Somalis. A pair of men sat cross-legged under an acacia, and I recognized one as Ali Duulaay, holding a pistol in his lap. The other was a plump and fleshy man with a high voice, who called himself Omar. He spoke decent English.
“We will have to call your family,” he said, fingering a mobile phone.
“I don’t have much family,” I said.
“Your wife?”
“I am divorced.”
“Your father?”
“My father died when I was young.”
“What about your mother? You will need to ask for a ransom of twenty million dollars.”
My heart sank like a bag of sand. A demand of twenty million was pathological. I must have given a desolate smirk.
“Do not laugh!” shouted Omar, and Ali Duulaay raised his pistol, threatening to beat me. “It is not a joke! We have information that you are a spy!”
“I am not a spy.”
“Tell them not to listen for your voice!” Omar pointed
at the clouds and added, as if to clarify this mysterious demand, “Tell them not to listen with planes! Tell them we need twenty million!”
“My mother doesn’t have twenty million dollars,” I said. “Nobody has that.”
“If she does not send the money in twenty-four hours, we will stop giving you food and water! You must tell her that. Your treatment until now has been good. Tell her that! But if she does not pay in twenty-four hours, you will starve.”
I said nothing.
“And tell her to deliver a message to President Obama: If someone tries to rescue you, you will be shot! Tell President Obama!”
“We don’t know President Obama.”
“Your mother will tell him! It is not a joke! Many Somalis were killed last week in a rescue. This man lost his brother!”
Duulaay, looking crazed, aimed his pistol at my face and shook it. I’d never stared down the borehole of a firearm before. My heart vibrated, and the dark notion that he might pull the trigger—that I might just see a muzzle flash and flop over in the dust—infected me with a heavy, unusual calm. I wanted to leap and run, but that would have been stupid. I had to sit and accept the prospect of a sudden death. Omar held out his hand to quell Duulaay, and I blinked, half-surprised in a rush of adrenaline that I hadn’t been shot dead.
“What happened in the raid?” I managed to ask.
“Thirteen people were killed.”
“Including hostages?”
“Yes.”
Nausea rose in me. Omar handed me his phone, but I choked on the idea of tapping my mother’s number into it. The proper place to call was the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
“Can’t you bring my backpack?” I said. “The pirates took it. A maroon backpack, with my camera. All my phone numbers—”
“We don’t have it.”
“You must have it. Who else would have it?”
“We must make a phone call.”
The Desert and the Sea Page 7