The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  “Now we in the desert,” he said.

  A pirate came down to attach a blanket to the thorny tree branches over our head. “No blanket,” I objected, meaning I didn’t want the shade, but he insisted. “Because qorrax,” he said, meaning sun, but I knew very well it wasn’t because of the sun.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes later, we saw the glint of an aircraft to the south.

  “Is an airplane,” said Rolly.

  The Somali hadn’t dangled a blanket on that side, so I mumbled, “It can see all three of us.”

  “Is too far, Michael.”

  “I doubt that.”

  A nearby pirate lit a cigarette, using an LED-equipped lighter, so I bummed a smoke. When he obliged, I palmed the lighter. It would have been appalling manners anywhere else in the world, but the guard just nodded and smiled. There was no shortage of lighters in the camp. Now I had a flashlight again.

  Later the pirates delivered thick, sturdy rubber thongs in a plastic package marked made in thailand. These Thai sandals replaced my shoes. We each received a pair, and we quibbled about the colors. Rolly took yellow, Marc took orange, I took light blue.

  I explained to the pirates that because of Ali Duulaay, we lacked other important items. Marc had no blanket. I had no coat. “Tonight, cold,” I told them. “Desert, cold.”

  “Haa.” Yes.

  “Jacket coming?”

  “No problem.”

  An hour later, I stood up to unhook the blanket from thorns in the tree. The Somalis stared. I handed it to Marc. The guards weren’t about to confiscate the blanket from an old man, so, after a while, a pirate came around to hang a new blanket, a pink one with flowers, to protect us from the “sun.”

  “No blanket,” I protested.

  “Haa, blanket.”

  “Jacket coming?”

  “No problem.”

  None materialized, so by the end of the day, when sundown had cooled the air, I made the same complaint.

  “No jacket. Problem!” I said, and stood up to unhook the pink blanket from the tree. “Tonight, cold!”

  Now we had a flashlight, two blankets, and nothing to block the view of another surveillance plane. Rolly found it amusing. But he wiped his anguished face with one hand and said, with as much irony as force of habit, “Not make them angry, Michael . . .”

  “Okay, Rolly.” I smiled. “I’ll try.”

  XIII

  We spent most of March in the desert bush: a week under the bird-infested tree, then more time under an arching white thorn bramble, a cluster of bushes so large that Rolly could stand up inside it. We ate car-delivered pasta from plastic sacks and listened to the radio. The white thorns were supposed to shield us from overhead view, but I made a point of flashing the sky with my cigarette lighter in the morning and evening, away from camp, when I went to relieve myself in the weeds. Large planes cruised near us twice a week.

  Meanwhile, I scribbled in my notebook. Whenever a guard noticed, I told him that writing helped my wrist heal. Most of the pirates didn’t give a damn, but I felt an instinct to keep the book hidden from Ahmed Dirie.

  One afternoon, the fading sunlight in our thorn bramble struck a fat bead of red sap bulging from a branch. I reached up from my mattress to inspect it. I’d never seen such a garnet color seep out of a plant before. These white thornbushes were a source of myrrh resin—they grow across Yemen and Somalia and parts of Ethiopia—so the symbolism was about as subtle as a crucifix on Mexican velvet. But Rolly said, “You know, Michael, in my country, we say when you see thorns, you going to heaven. But when you see flowers, then you going to hell.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Well, we haven’t seen a flower in months,” I said. “We must be doing okay.”

  “Yes, but . . .” He looked deeply troubled. He had just lost a rosary, a charm he’d rescued from the Aride. “I not know if I believe that now.”

  Late one morning, we piled into a pair of cars and drove north for most of the day. Near sundown we found a strange village close to the coast, a near ghost town with widely spaced stone buildings. We parked outside this village, seemingly at random, and Ahmed Dirie climbed out to stand next to our car with his phone in the air, as if to check for signals. He gave me a rotten smile.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “No problem.”

  The evening sun cast a sulfurous, green-yellow light. The pirates ordered Rolly out and led him to a distant rise overlooking the ocean, just out of sight, where he had to dial his family in the Seychelles. But something went wrong with the connection. There seemed to be no other point to our endless drive, as if we’d come all the way up here to shake aerial surveillance, to make a phone call to Mahé in signal-free air, without interference from international authorities—only the line was busy.

  We continued north while the sun disappeared. In the dark we crossed an expanse of desert on a straight highway made of powdery dust. Nothing seemed to exist in the damnable blackness outside, and we spent almost an hour on the same unbending road. We drifted through the darkness on the soft dust, and the only feature I remember was another Land Rover, silver painted but blank as a shipwreck, rearing into view so fast that our driver had to jerk the steering wheel.

  Abandoned. Someone else had tried to cross this desert, and failed.

  Late the same night we drove into some hills and found a small cluster of huts. A herding family with curious children had prepared a place for us to sleep. In absolute silence they watched us, these ragged foreign strangers, as well as the glamorous pirates with their guns. A young girl climbed out of a squat hut the size of a doghouse, where we were supposed to sleep, and her innocence, her thirsty curious eyes, broke me open like an egg. Her presence was a stark, astonishing exception to the anger and sarcasm I had felt aimed in my direction for more than two months. The night felt cold, windless, and silent like no part of the world I’d ever seen.

  “I been here before,” mumbled Rolly after we settled into the little hut. “They take us here once before.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yah, we come up from Hobyo. While you live in that house.”

  “How long?” I said.

  “Five, six days, like that. We live in this hut. They make Marc pee in a bottle.”

  “Why?”

  “They no let him outside.”

  We did get to leave the hut for bathroom breaks, but the emptiness of the countryside, whenever I did, alarmed me. The thornbushes grew evenly spaced, brown instead of white, all about three feet high. There were no acacia trees, nothing remarkable besides this single, far-flung breed of vegetation. Dying out here would be like drowning at sea. No one would even notice. We’d ventured beyond any landmarks that could help me orient my mind, and the long detour had frayed my sense of forward motion toward freedom. I just felt whirl and watery fear. I retraced our car trip and tried to fathom how I had arrived at this precise corner of the world, squatting near a thornbush and flashing the sky with my ridiculous LED, through a tube of toilet paper.

  On the first evening, I noticed a boy from the nomad family, far off to one side. He’d followed me out here. Was he spying on my Morse-code habits? I put the lighter away, but while I pissed in the weeds, I tried to weigh my ambition to write a unique book about Somalia against the vastation of this place.

  You have made a mistake, Boodiin had said. Mistakes are human.

  On the second night, I went out to pee and noticed Ahmed Dirie and one other pirate pointing at the sky. One of them said “aeroplane,” and after an hour they gave us an unexpected order to move. If dodging surveillance was the purpose of this detour, it had failed. Drones, or something, had pursued us. The pirates filled our car with mattresses, provisions, and cooking pots. Before we drove off, they searched my belongings. The LED cigarette lighter was in the pocket of my cotton shorts, which they didn’t check. But Ahmed Dirie found my notebook.

  “What is this?” he said, flipping through the tightly wr
itten pages.

  “Practice. For my wrist.”

  Abdinasser the Sahib backed me up. He argued my case in Somali. Ahmed Dirie gave me a bitter squint, and rolled up the notebook to keep for himself. Weeks of therapeutic note-taking disappeared into his dusty bag.

  “You respect me!” he ordered, and lifted his rifle.

  “Oh, sure, boss,” I said.

  “You have a flashlight?” he asked in Somali.

  Someone translated, and I said no, hoping they wouldn’t search my shorts.

  “Do you flash signals at satellites in the sky?” he said.

  “No.”

  “If you flash signals at the sky, you will go down!” said Ahmed Dirie. He clicked the safety off his rifle and aimed the barrel at my chest. “You—like Michael Jackson,” he said. “Boom. Dead!”

  “I understand.”

  “You respect me!” he shouted.

  “Oh, I respect you, boss.”

  “Or BOOM—down!”

  “That’s right.”

  Reluctantly, to my considerable surprise, he returned the notebook. After nightfall we took off under a fat moon. I recognized some of the silvered landscape and a few turns in the road. We started to speed along the straight, soft highway, and the driver bounced his wheels over stray rocks and jammed them into potholes. At last the abandoned Land Rover loomed up again like a ghost.

  Rolly cried, “Oh! Jesus,” and I grimaced. I thought we might flip the car. Instead we slammed into a pothole, and the left front wheel started to knock like a hammer.

  Ahmed Dirie told the driver to stop.

  “We’re fucked,” I mumbled to Rolly.

  “Why you say that?”

  They hauled out a jack to lift the car. In the glare of a flashlight, they banged and twisted with hammers and wrenches until someone decided the wheel was fixed. The driver started again at a prudent speed. At last—still nervous about aircraft, I think, but convinced the wheel would hold—he stood on the gas.

  It was like floating through darkness again, fishtailing along that soft, ethereal highway with almost no feeling of gravity, not even traction, until the left wheel slammed into another hole and we slid to a stop with the front axle leaning into the dust.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Rolly said again.

  “Told you we were fucked,” I mumbled.

  “What happened?”

  “Rolly, we lost a wheel.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  XIV

  The sheer alarming stupidity of breaking off a wheel in the middle of the desert while running from a plane, or a drone, or nothing at all, made the blood pound and slosh in my head. There had to be a limit to the volume of absurdity we could suffer. But no nightmare dissipated, no director lowered his jib crane to stop the idiotic film, and no American analyst seemed to recognize this car accident as a wide-open chance to rescue three stranded hostages. “There is nothing like isolation in an atmosphere of electric violence for bringing before one’s mind the understanding that the varnish of two thousand years is so thin as to be transparent,” wrote Hanley in Warriors. “It is living in civilization that keeps us civilized. It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when one is threatened by other men, men of almost mindless resolve.”

  The rest of the night was too dumb to explain. But I noticed that living among lunatic people had made me depressed and lunatic, too. Hanley was right: chaos was contagious. Pirates acted like criminals because they belonged to a criminal gang. While we sat in the car and waited for them to solve our asinine situation I considered filching a Kalashnikov and solving it myself. I knew how to fire a weapon, but I wasn’t a gunman, and without glasses I was half-blind. Not a good combination. But idiocy, evil, and entropy fed on themselves like a hurricane over warm water.

  We returned to Mussolini’s Farmhouse the next day in another car, and stayed about a week. One evening, I went out to piss on the white rocks and noticed a line of sharp lights on the dusky water. I didn’t mention them afterward to Rolly, because I didn’t know what they were, but the next morning, after he and Marc had traded shifts outside, Rolly said from his mattress, “Big ship, eh?”

  “What?”

  “Big ship in the water. Must be fifty meters, like that.”

  My heart fluttered. “Did it have a flag?”

  “I didn’t see no flag.”

  I went out to the white rocks myself and saw the vessel in broad daylight—a long, rusted, industrial-looking tub with a white bridge tower. Not a warship, not a freighter.

  “Angelo say is from this pirate group,” Rolly said when I returned. “Is hijacked.”

  “Oh. Where’s it from?”

  “He say China.”

  Our relationship with this vessel developed in quick phases. First, we almost ran out of toilet paper. When we harassed Ahmed Dirie for more, he brought a Chinese-printed package of coarse, flat, folded stuff that was like paper towels.

  A few days later, I went for a shower in the white stone ruin, shadowed by a tall Somali named Issa. He told me to take a “one-minute” shower, and while I tilted a plastic yellow jerry can full of water over my head, we heard the thump of a helicopter. I squatted behind a window of the ruin and watched. The wasplike helo raced across the ocean and circled the ship. Issa waved me over to a wall, where he stood holding his rifle.

  “Get down!”

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  “NATO!” said Issa.

  NATO was an all-purpose term for him, but NATO warships in fact worked only in the Gulf of Aden. The central Somali coast was monitored by the EU and a U.S.-led naval group. Either way, it was interesting. I took my time hiding behind the broken front wall.

  That night the pirates woke up Rolly and me and hustled us into a car. We slept in the bush again, with Ahmed Dirie’s group of guards. Despite the pirates’ efforts to keep us out of sight, we were harassed by aircraft for almost a week. In mid-April—after days of playing tag with surveillance planes in the bush, moving camp almost every night—we packed up in the dark, and someone confiscated my notebook and radio. We drove for an hour and swapped vehicles among chaotic promises of freedom. “Make a good telephone call,” said one guard, obscurely. “Adiga, free!” But there was no phone call. Instead we sped toward the coast, and while I considered how it might feel to see my family and friends again, our driver steered crazily through the quiet houses of Hobyo, past dimly lit businesses and food shacks—where townspeople had gathered for late-night meals—and raced across the curving beach until the Land Rover came to a stop beside the water’s edge.

  “What are we doing?” I said.

  “Go, go, go, go.”

  A skiff had drawn up under the moon. With our Thai sandals in our hands, we waded into lukewarm surf. Pirates hopped in and told me to keep my pink blanket on my head, while the pilot puttered our skiff over crumbling whitewash, then higher swells, and around the seawall of rock, which Hamid, in a different lifetime, had insisted should be a loading pier.

  Then the pilot opened his throttle. He pushed us faster over the swells, up and down, causing the hull to slap. The blanket slipped off my head. We spent more and more time in the air between each wave.

  “Slow down!” I shouted into the wind.

  One pirate motioned as if he expected me to fix my pink head covering. For that I would have to let go of the rail.

  “Slow the fuck down!” I shouted.

  The guards sat on a relatively stable bulkhead at the rear of the boat. We sat in the bouncing front. As we picked up speed, Rolly shifted his weight off our bulkhead and squatted in the hull, holding the rail with one tight-knuckled hand. He used his knees to absorb the motion of the waves, and I tried to do the same, but we flew over another swell and the boat dropped away from my butt. Our bulkhead floated downward, leaving me in the air. When we came together again, the bulkhead hammered my spine, and pain shot from my tailbone to the base of my skull. I collapsed into the bottom of the skiff. (“I see
you go down,” Rolly said later. “You go down like a leaf.”)

  The pilot brought his speed under control. I managed to sit up, but my back throbbed. We pulled alongside the ship, and someone hurled a rope. The motion of the rolling hull, together with the waves, bounced our boat like an elevator, and a pirate showed us how to climb up. Rolly did it first, standing on the skiff’s prow until a cutaway section of the gunwale lurched into range. Someone lifted him, he grabbed the gunwale, and a group of Somalis on the ship leaned over to grasp his shoulders and pull him aboard.

  I went up the same way. My back hurt, but the feeling of four men lifting me helpfully by the shoulders was a strange distraction. We found ourselves on a square deck lit with sharp white lamps, where dozens of Chinese-looking hostages lay on mats, arranged like dominoes. We had woken them up. The Somalis led us up a set of metal stairs and around to a forward section of the ship, where our two mattresses waited on the upper deck.

  “Sleeping, sleeping,” they said.

  I certainly wanted to be unconscious. But my sore spine kept me aware of the ocean wind and a large number of spidery, unknown pirate guards. My notebooks and radio were gone. I wondered if the Somalis had moved us here to dodge a raid on land. If so, everything had to reset. Drones would have to find us again. Military plans, if any, would be redrawn. Three wasted months in filthy prison houses and the desert bush had themselves gone to waste. My breathing came fast. I still wanted forward momentum, progress, logic, but instead I felt the edge of an emotional hurricane, the whistle of a gathering panic. Several hours earlier I had indulged fantasies of freedom; now I was injured and stuck on a ship. For the first time in Somalia, but not the last, I considered suicide.

  One common story about the trauma of gunfire is that you feel the bullets at first like a spatter of rain. The body registers a brush of metal but recoils from the rest of the damage in a merciful cloud of shock. The burning horror comes later. On the deck of this windblown vessel I think my captivity first started to feel really hopeless. I couldn’t see well in the dark, my back radiated pain, and, with my notebook gone, I wondered how to sort out the confusion in my head. The notes also represented a small pile of work, so my time on land seemed triply wasted. And the confusion of ocean elements didn’t help. I thought our vessel had started to move. Seagulls flapped into the wind under the strong deck lamps, not flying forward but scouting for fish in the artificial light; they seemed to glide and flap next to a sailing ship. I didn’t realize the vessel was straining against its anchor chain in a stiff current. It wavered back and forth in the water, so the moon changed position in the sky, and the flapping of the birds, with the shifting of the moon, gave me the false impression that we were motoring north. This wrong idea infested me with a ferocious despair, and after a long sail to some forsaken part of the Somali coast, I thought, the pirates would no doubt assemble armies of men to defend this vessel of the damned; and it was time, at last, to check out.