The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

“Yes.”

  Somehow Yoonis knew the slang word better than the real one. I squinted at him. “You mean because all the girls in Somalia are ‘circumcised’?” I said. “Don’t men in Somalia support this tradition?”

  “I think it is not so much fun,” Yoonis confessed.

  “Why do Somalis do it?”

  “It is in the Koran.”

  I shook my head. “No, it isn’t, Yoonis.”

  “It is the law in all Muslim lands,” Yoonis informed me.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “It’s not the law in Indonesia. Some of them do it, but it’s not the law.”

  “You have experienced?” Yoonis said. “Or you have read?”

  I smiled. “I have read. But I’ve been there. Indonesians are Sufis, too, you know. Same as Somalis. Most don’t cut their women.”

  Yoonis shook his head. “I think this is not true,” he said.

  “Do you have a Koran?”

  “No.”

  “You have to show me the passage where your religion orders Muslims to do this thing.” In fact, some parts of the hadith encourage it, but not the Koran. “It’s a custom from thousands of years ago, Yoonis, from ancient Egypt. Before Islam.” I was agitated now. “If Somalis didn’t cut their women, Somalia would be a happier place.”

  My guards wavered; they weren’t sure it wasn’t true. But there was no convincing them.

  Once, in another lifetime, I had received a nice pair of sandals from an activist in California who had appreciated a column of mine arguing against “female circumcision.” But around here—where my clever ideas might have made some difference—I had no clout.

  At last I retreated to my room. The whole compound at Mohammed’s House had a terrible insect problem. Over my mattress I’d assembled a gauzy mosquito tent, which served as a retreat from all insects, the carnivorous daytime flies as well as mosquitoes at night. The patio conversation about firstborn children made me brood about my bachelor life in Berlin, my own lack of children, and my dad. I sat in the tent and started to scribble.

  For thirty years I thought my father had died of a heart attack, and for almost as long I had maintained a wariness of our domestic life in Northridge, our model family, which had not filled him with understanding or joy. Alcohol and pills had eroded both. But before he killed himself, he had started to question why he worked for Lockheed, why he lived in the San Fernando Valley at all. At heart he was a fifties-style dad who liked to camp and fish, an American Romantic about the wilderness, and I remembered sitting with him in his rattling Volkswagen one hot afternoon, waiting for a red light to turn, while he gazed out the windshield through a pair of sunglasses with a look of half-astonished disgust. He took in the vast boulevard, the traffic, maybe the smog in the sky.

  At last he looked at me.

  “I wonder how much of our lives we waste sitting at stoplights,” he said.

  This memory startled me in Somalia. His desolation before he died must have been bottomless. I had pursued a different career because of his disenchantment—I had defined myself against my father to dodge the frustrations and disillusionments that had strained his heart. I preferred cities over suburbs, I liked exotic travel, I tried to avoid most addictive drugs and eat low-cholesterol food. I thought these habits would save me from a death like his. When I learned it wasn’t a heart attack, of course, I still believed—without thinking too hard—that my career choices might keep me from suicide.

  The irony appalled me now. I scribbled and scribbled. I wrote that Dad would have opposed my career. He would have hollered and yelled. And here—in a place where I had a strong and relevant opinion about female circumcision—I had no power to change a goddamn thing. But I also noticed that my notebook was becoming an essential refuge at Mohammed’s house. The stress of captivity had turned my mind into a cauldron of contradictory ideas—frustration, self-hatred, surprising impulses to violence—and nothing but the discipline of composition could lead me out of the soup. When I thought about it like that, I could answer the criticisms, in his voice, that rose in my imagination while I sat alone under the mosquito tent, these nightmarish and unanswerable condemnations from beyond the grave. Writing is impractical, selfish, narcissistic, and soft. Maybe; but I had found pleasure in it as a young man because it could reframe a scrambled mind. Good writing could be a release from narcissism, a declaration of independence, a way to order and furnish the mental prison.

  You’re not real independent now, are you?

  No, Dad, not exactly. Thanks for asking.

  X

  On a warm night in February, the men at Mohammed’s House woke me up by the glare of a fluorescent lantern and crammed me into a Land Rover. They bristled with weapons and ammunition. Tahliil drove us out of Hobyo and across the moonlit waste for more than an hour. A strong beam of light flashed across the bush like a beacon, and Tahliil aimed for it until we pulled beside a pair of unknown cars. Yoonis and Tahliil then grasped my elbows and walked me to a cluster of eight or ten Somalis squatting in the dust.

  “Hello, Michael,” a plump man said. “My name is Mohamed.”

  I wore nothing but thin cotton shorts and a T-shirt. I felt vulnerable and terrified. The boss in the middle, sitting cross-legged, had fat cheeks and a peculiar squint, heavy lidded and insolent. He acted groggy, like a man who needed his khat, and he drew a pall of quiet menace around himself, a fear I could sense from his gunmen. He spoke in a high, almost childish voice.

  “We will make a phone call,” he told me, “to someone who can help with your case. You must tell him that I need a letter from President Obama. It must request that I will be the main negotiator for your case, and it must declare me innocent of your kidnapping. It must have an official seal, from the White House.”

  “I’ll need your full name,” I said.

  “Just tell them Mohamed; that is enough,” he said. “And you must tell them that these pirates want their money right now. It is very important.”

  “How much is the demand?” I said.

  “Twenty million dollars.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. The outrageous demand was still in place. After a month of captivity, nothing had changed.

  The boss dialed a private American negotiator on his orange-glowing Samsung. The number placed the negotiator in Washington, D.C., and the voice on the phone was sane and good-humored. It calmed me to hear clarity in my own language after so many weeks of confusion.

  “The gentleman who handed you the phone: Is that the first time you’re meeting him?” said the negotiator. “Or you’ve chatted with him before?”

  “No, it’s the first time.”

  “That’s the main guy in charge, just so you know. That’s Mohamed Garfanji,” he said, and my vision swam—my blood felt just like ice water. Until then Garfanji had been a phantom, a figment of a rumor, and it weakened me to think that I was at his mercy.

  “Has he made a demand?” the negotiator asked.

  “Yes, he wants twenty million dollars and some kind of form letter from the White House.”

  “Signed by Obama!” Garfanji shouted. “It must say I am innocent!”

  “He’s asking for twenty million dollars?” the negotiator said, with just a hitch in his professional manner—he sounded surprised.

  “Yeah, and a letter from the White House,” I said.

  “It must say I am innocent!” Garfanji shouted.

  To this demand the negotiator gave a quiet, self-assured laugh.

  He’d been contacted through the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, he said. He reassured me that people were trying to help. Then he tried to patch our call through to my mother. “Just bear with me.” I heard a phone ring, and my mother said “Hello?” in the tone of someone who was not, at that moment, dreading a call from Somalia. We’d caught her off guard. By then she had a “command center” established in the dining room—she kept a phone on the table, surrounded by notebooks and coffee mugs and lists of questions to ask. The phone had
been souped up with caller ID, “so I would know who was calling me,” she said, and this ever shifting mess remained on the table for most of my captivity.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s Mike.”

  “Hi, Michael, it’s so good to hear your voice!”

  “I’m just calling—uh, to say hello,” I faltered. “And I miss you.”

  These phone calls, with their intense pressure and terrible connections, were masterpieces of understatement. Hearing her voice was like hearing music for the first time in weeks. I thought about my family and friends every day, but Mom’s voice brought back the dry heat of Los Angeles and all the changing resonance of the word home, this old carousel of personal scenery, from Northridge to the beach to the sound of German voices in Berlin. My heart unraveled like a film reel.

  “Are you healthy?” she said.

  “Uh, yes,” I said. “Terrified, but basically in good shape. A little food and a little water every day.”

  “After we talked last time,” she said, “we continued to call that number they gave us, but there was never any answer.”

  I started to wonder if Garfanji was the same person as Omar, the high-voiced Somali on the bluff. He seemed to be a different man. But in the dark it was hard to tell. After more confused conversation, I worked up my courage to speak German, to test whether Garfanji knew the difference. I babbled about a duffel bag I had left in a Nairobi hotel, containing my U.S. passport and a laptop. “Somebody found the bag,” Mom said in German. “It was transferred to the U.S. embassy.”

  “That’s very good,” I said.

  So government people were taking care of her. It eased my mind. I could also tell, from Garfanji’s glazed expression, that he wasn’t following our chitchat. I added in German that I had “nothing against” a military raid—“regardless of what the pirates here say.”

  “Yes,” Mom said. “Yes. Exactly.”

  Most of the time she sounded earnest on the phone, striving to hear my voice or just to understand this freakish situation; but she could also be guarded and veiled. She had a poker hand to play. Now she exposed a tough lack of sentimentality, a seeming indifference to the danger of a rescue. I didn’t mind at all. The pirates’ erratic behavior had steeled us both against the prospect of a raid.

  “Time’s off,” Garfanji said. “Come on.”

  I finished up and handed him the phone. The call had accomplished nothing. Twenty million dollars was a ridiculous outrage—Garfanji understood that as well as the rest of us. He started to scroll through some files on the phone menu and said, in an apathetic slur, “Your people have killed nine of my people. If they try it with you, we will shoot you.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “There was a rescue operation,” he said vaguely.

  I wanted to know if the hostages were safe, so I repeated my question from the phone call on the bluff.

  “What happened to the hostages?”

  “They were both killed.”

  My lungs constricted; my chest seemed to squeeze and bleed. Garfanji tapped his screen to open a sound file and tossed his phone in the dust. I didn’t want to hear about dead hostages. But a news clip on Garfanji’s phone explained in clear English that two aid workers held captive in Somalia since the fall of 2011 had been flown by U.S. helicopters, alive, to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.

  My heart thumped with hope.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I told Garfanji, and I think no one in that circle of pirates could tell how the phone had made a fool of their boss, by revealing his poor command of English.

  XI

  My mother and the FBI in California ignored Garfanji’s demand for a letter, but the way he insisted on a pardon from the president, on embossed letterhead, did suggest he was half-insane. “We wondered if he was the same person as Omar,” Mom said later. Garfanji became an inconstant, flickering figure to me. I met Omar in the sunshine on a bluff, Garfanji in the sandy waste under a full moon; and in the panic of a hostage’s mind, maybe one person could seem like two people, and two people could seem like one.

  “Mohamed Garfanji”—also known as Mohamed Osman Mohamed—invested in real estate, both in Galmudug and outside Somalia. “He likes to drink, he likes women, and he likes to beat the shit out of people,” a security contractor told me later. “He’s close to the Somali government, and he wants to be in the government, so he puts his men to work as if they were the government.” That meant patrolling the oceans and cultivating a “coast guard” image off Somalia as well as providing security forces for smaller Galmudug towns. He was a Suleiman, not a Sa’ad, but both clans belonged to a larger clan called the Habar Gidir. They could work together. Garfanji kept a private militia in Hobyo, but his pirates tended to be inland bandits and irregular fighters, closer to the violent highwaymen called shifta than to fishermen.

  The word shifta derived from another clan, the Mshifta, but referred to “any roaming bandit in the great desert that extended from Somalia to Sudan and took in the whole of northern Kenya,” according to Paul Theroux, who’d met them in southern Ethiopia. Garfanji hired men like that. A number of central-Somali pirates no doubt were former fishermen who needed jobs, but most of the foot soldiers I met came from Galkayo or landlocked nomadic villages. They were children of the desert bush.

  One reason piracy spiked in the early 2000s, in fact, was that security forces in Puntland went unpaid—and so many of the gunmen simply turned to different work.

  Garfanji also played a social justice game, a Robin Hood gambit for popular support intended to blunt local opposition to his crimes. He paid doctors’ bills in Hobyo. He made generous loans. He offered people jobs. He kept them from starvation. “There are no beggars in Hobyo,” Gerlach told me. “Garfanji is very popular there.”

  So from one point of view, Garfanji was a monster. From another, he was a social-minded capitalist working in tough terrain. I didn’t want either manifestation talking on the phone to my mom. But her poise surprised the FBI. Even when a phone call took her by surprise, she snapped to attention. “She amazed all of us,” one agent said later. “It didn’t seem to matter how much stress or anxiety she had—she could switch it on or off. Once she got on the phone, she was totally on point.”

  Mom was never aware of Garfanji as an individual boss. The name she heard most often on the phone was “Abdi Yare.”* But several bosses used that nickname, and Mom couldn’t tell which boss was which. During a conference call with three top-ranking pirates, she tried to distinguish each voice, one at a time, without success. “They didn’t want to talk,” she said, except through a translator. “And I was shaking inside. But I figured if I burst out in tears, that wouldn’t work. They had no compassion. So I tried to just keep to the subject, and keep on repeating what I was trying to say. Sometimes I sounded like a broken record.”

  She dealt with the stress on the tennis court. Golf had become her retirement game, but somehow tennis felt more satisfying while I was in Somalia. Between ransom calls, she reverted to her more strenuous sport. “I needed something to hit with a racket,” she told me. “And I thought of the ball as Abdi Yare’s head.”

  XII

  Plane visits over Hobyo became more common after the phone call, and for the next two weeks, at Mohammed’s House, I made a strict habit of unfolding my hand-drawn map in the outhouse and flashing Morse code at the sky. The sound of aircraft tracing a wide arc overhead could lift my mood for hours. Otherwise Mohammed’s prison compound was a tedious and nasty solitary confinement, and in spite of the relative calm I preferred the Italian ruin with Rolly and Marc. I missed Rolly’s conversation; I missed the way he said, “We are prizhonerr,” and explained things to me with one palm open, like an old Frenchman making an appeal.

  One afternoon in the first or second week of March, I heard a commotion on the porch and saw a black arm, with a gold wristwatch, point into my room. Ali Duulaay. I sat in the mosquito tent with a notebook and pen. Duulaay wanted to know from the guards why I w
asn’t ready to leave. With a wash of dread I tossed my radio and notebooks into a plastic bag, and Duulaay lurched in wearing his rifle. He threatened me with it and shook the curved ribs of the tent. There was no time to grab an important bag of clothes, and I left other things hanging or scattered around the room—towel, toothbrush, leather jacket concealing my LED lighter. Since I was barefoot, I stopped to put on my shoes. Duulaay pinched a slab of flesh in my side and twisted.

  “Go, go, go, go,” he said.

  A white car waited in the road. I climbed in front, and Duulaay crammed into the rear. Other pirates glared at me from the back seat while we sped off, as if I were the source of their trouble; Duulaay muttered something bitter and slugged me in the head.

  Soon another car caught up to us, churning dust. We bounced through the trackless bush, over ridges and rocks, and my head whanged with adrenaline. We arrived at some kind of gully south of Hobyo, another dry riverbed cut into the sand. Somalis piled out of the second car with equipment—pots, mattresses, weapons—and two other hostages made their way toward the wadi. Even at a distance, with blurry eyes, I recognized Rolly and Marc.

  The Somalis flopped our mattresses at the foot of a crumbling six-foot bank. A tree with its root system exposed in the wall of dirt stretched up a canopy of leaves. We had to lie beside the roots. Nervous birds fluttered and chirped overhead.

  “Ali come get you?” said Rolly.

  “Yeah. I didn’t have time to bring my clothes.”

  “What you got there?” He nodded at my plastic bag.

  “Notebooks. A change of shorts.”

  “Marc, also. Ali come in and say, ‘Go, go, go.’ I no listen, I take my time, I duck under Ali’s arm,” he said. “I got all my bags. But Marc have to go without his things.”

  “Why do you think we left in such a hurry?” I said.

  “I not know.”

  The open bush struck me as a good staging area for a SEAL raid, less dangerous than a house with concrete walls. I didn’t mind the prospect of my friends getting rescued, too. But Rolly’s face worked again with nervous anguish, maybe churning through his old, unchanging trenches of thought. At last he made his declaration.