“So, all fake?” I asked.
“I don’t know!”
Captain Tuure came to sit with us before breakfast and said, “Five helicopters! NATO!” Abdul came down, too, and I asked him for an explanation.
“We saw it on the radar, and some of our guys, they got the phone number for NATO,” Abdul said. “So when we saw them coming, we called ’em up and said, ‘We got some hostages here, and we’re gonna kill ’em all if the commandos try to come on board.’”
“I see.”
“So they turned back.”
“You saved our lives,” I said.
“Yeah!” Abdul smiled. He liked that one. “It coulda been bad, man.”
Captain Tuure pulled up his shirt and showed me a twisted-looking scar in his side. “NATO,” he said.
“He’s been shot by NATO?” I said.
“You know Black Hawk Down?” said Abdul.
“Yes. That was the U.N.”
“Captain Tuure fought in that. He got hit by a helicopter. So he don’t like to hear about helicopters.”
“I guess not.”
“He don’t like Americans, either.”
Captain Tuure started to speak in rapid Somali.
“He says, ‘Why do we gotta deal with American planes all the time? These ACs, these fucking drones?’” Abdul said with equal feeling. “He says, ‘Is this America, or is this Somalia?’”
I chuckled and said dryly, “Maybe if you didn’t take Americans hostage you wouldn’t see so many American planes.”
Tuure spoke with more heat. “He says in Mogadishu that day, the American pilots got dragged through the streets,” Abdul interpreted.
“Black Hawk Down. I know.”
Tuure made hacking gestures with his hands, at his shoulders and knees. “You know what the people in Mogadishu did?” Abdul interpreted. “They chopped up the Americans and made a barbecue.”
“Horseshit,” I said.
“He was there. Tuure was there, man. He says the people were so mad, they chopped up the soldiers and had ’em for dinner.”
“Are you going to stick to that story?” I asked Tuure.
“Were you there?” Abdul said.
“I’m a writer, Abdul. You want me to write that Somalis are cannibals?”
“American!” said Captain Tuure, and made his hacking gestures.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
VII
After the Night of the Five-Helicopter Raid, the pirates chose ten of us to sleep every night on bunks in the cramped, humid cabins behind the bridge. Rolly and I had to line up with Arnel, six Chinese men, and Nguyen Van Ha, the Vietnamese fisherman, at the base of the stairs every evening to file up to our beds. Nguyen’s black hair held the shape of a once stylish pompadour, and the more we talked, the more I understood that the Naham 3 crew was a cross section of hip young Asian youth. Ha* liked to play guitar. He sometimes smoked opium. One night in my cabin, using a scrap of cigarette cardboard, he wrote out the economics of his decision to fish on a tuna boat. As a rice farmer in Vietnam he used to earn six dollars a day. His recruiter had offered him ten. He realized, too late, that “ten dollars a day” would be traded for hard, nearly unlimited hours of work. The recruiter in his case wasn’t Step Up, but a Vietnam-based firm, and Ha, when pushed, was too polite to accuse them of trickery. But he divided ten dollars by twenty work-hours on the scrap of cardboard and showed me how the hourly wage for a day of fishing—fifty cents!—was smaller than the wage for farming rice.
He shook his head and batted it with his flat hand, as if to blame himself for the failed logic.
“Loco-loco,” he said.
Different nationalities on the Naham 3 earned different wages for the exact same work, because different agencies had hired them. “The Chinese earn the most—three-fifty a month,” said Tony. The Chinese recruiting firm seemed to have a relationship with the Taiwanese shipowners, which made the non-Chinese-speaking men second-class, almost by definition.
The pirates picked out one Cambodian, called Hen, for physical work. He was a squat, strong man with bulking shoulders, panda-faced and mischievous, maybe twenty-five years old. I call him “Hen” because that was his name, Kim Koem Hen, but the crew and the Somalis called him by a nickname that’s hard to render in English. It sounded like “Hayle,” but when I asked the Filipinos how to spell it, they said it was “Gel,” short for the Spanish name Angel. The Filipinos had told him what hen meant in English and made fun of him for it. He protested, so they found a more affectionate nickname.
Hen attracted abuse from the Chinese. They would sock him just for walking by. Squeezing through a cluster of the wrong men in the work area would bring down a gauntlet of punches on his shoulders, half-joking, half-admiring, a direct function of his strength. From a Chinese point of view, Cambodians were lower-class, but Hen possessed a natural cool. He ignored the punches and took most of his saltwater showers with a burning cigarette in his mouth.
Rolly referred to the crew as “children,” since most of them were under thirty. They referred to him as “grandfather.” These Asian kids were unencumbered about bisexuality, and it flustered Rolly at first. While we sat under the conveyor belt, Tony would come over to share his mattress, sometimes embracing the old fisherman like a big teddy bear.
“Grandfather,” he would say.
“Tony, stop that. You know I no like.”
I didn’t care one way or another. My libido had flagged. Somalia was unarousing, and ignoring my emotions was one powerful strategy to navigate an average day. So, among other sad developments, I had started to feel like a depressed old man. Rolly and I cultivated this role together, under the conveyor belt.
“We are like the Dodosya under a rock,” he would say.
I think Rolly would have preferred to tell all his stories to his five-year-old granddaughter, since adults asked too many questions. He described his granddaughter often and seemed to miss her uncomplicated trust as much as he missed his island home. He painted a picture for me of rain on ragged palms, churches with sea-softened wooden floors, sea turtles and sea cucumbers and shoals of red snapper. He said the Seychelles in the 1940s were so poor that it was the privilege of a rich man to own a bike. Regular people walked. Almost no one owned a car. He remembered playing soccer in the road with a ball made of banana leaves. “We tied it with a rope,” he said. “Sometimes you see one piece go over here, and one piece go over there.”
The French had run the Seychelles before Britain took over in 1811, and the British didn’t leave until 1976. “In 1977, coup d’état!” said Rolly. He’d learned to write English in school, not Creole, because the British in those days had considered Creole a low street slang. So he’d never learned to spell in his own language.
“Michael, you know in my neighborhood we got a big mango tree. Is near the store, where we buy our beer. When we not fishing, Marc and I sit under this tree.”
“Under a mango tree?” I said.
“Yah.”
It sounded nice compared with this rusted ship. And I wanted a beer, come to think of it.
“If you and I ever get out of here,” I said, “I want to have a beer with you under the mango tree.”
He gave a sad and elderly smile. “Okay, we do that, Michael.”
Some time later, he asked me if I “knew about the ground turtle” in the Seychelles, meaning giant land tortoises that live wild on the islands, even in the capital, Victoria.
“With turtle,” he explained, “you got ground turtle and sea turtle.”
“Okay. Yes,” I said.
“You know about the ground turtle?”
“No.”
“Michael, why you just tell me yes, when you don’t know about the ground turtle?”
“I just want to hear the story.”
“But—the ground turtle, you know what he do?”
“I have no idea.”
Rolly gave a twinkling smile. “He yell, eh?”
“What does h
e yell?” I said.
“When he do that.”
“When he does what?”
Rolly lowered his voice. “When he fuck.”
“Oh!”
“Yah!” said Rolly.
And he gave me a vision of giant, frowning tortoises crawling across the island of Mahé in the spring, females lying still while enormous males climbed on top of their shells to yell and holler and grunt.
“They get happy about the rain. That’s true, eh? They make a lot of noise.”
VIII
One morning, Tony handed us a thick, gold-bound Bible. “I don’t know if it will help you to read this, but it helps some of us,” he said.
I was starved for a book; I’d gone three months with nothing to read but food labels.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yah, thank you, Tony,” said Rolly.
The Filipinos had three or four Bibles. When Tony noticed us trading the large book back and forth, he handed Rolly a small abridgment, with fraying pages. Rolly read it easily. He remembered verses in English from grammar school. He liked the Psalms in particular.
I hadn’t studied the Bible in years. I would reread it twice. At first I browsed the Song of Songs for the racy bits, and this passage brought me up short:
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.*
“Rolly,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Your ground turtle’s in the Bible.”
“What you mean?”
“You just told me about the ground turtle. It’s right here in the Song of Solomon.”
Rolly squinted at the page. He didn’t understand.
“There’s a line about the ‘voice of the turtle’ in the spring. It’s just like you said about the turtles yelling.”
“In Seychelles?”
“No, in ancient Israel.”
“Ahh.”
I read the Bible urgently, critically, like a man starved for good ideas. As a young Catholic I had never read it literally: I had thought that the value of the Gospels wasn’t their promise of a literal afterlife but the gesture toward something durable in the human soul. Something could outlast death. Right? I’d written a novel about a dead suburban teenager that investigated the ancient Jewish notions of the soul—nefesh, ruach, and neshamah—underlying the language in the Bible, and it had helped me refine my own coarse childhood ideas about death and the hereafter. Of course none of it had prepared me for that stark moment before my first phone call home, on the bluff with Ali Duulaay, staring down the barrel of a gun.
God, to the ancient Jews, was the sum and source of life, and “going back to God” was not just an idiom for death but the goal of spiritual pursuit. I wanted to firm up these ideas in Somalia, but most references to rebirth in the New Testament were realistic and therefore strange. The Gospels promised an unpoetic resurrection of the dead, and after rereading them, I could see why fundamentalists believe in a mass resurrection, almost a zombie apocalypse, when the corpses of believers would awake to the Second Coming.
I wanted to train my mind for actual nonexistence, and my Catholic-shaped mind still preferred my own death to be useful if possible, transcendent, selfless, not driven by panic. The first thing I noticed was that parts of the Old Testament pushed a gritty ethic of survival. Ecclesiastes, for example, is the record of late and pessimistic reflections by King Solomon—wise judge, chief rabbi, fantastic womanizer, and enlightened monarch during an unparalleled era of prosperity in Israel—who placed no stock in a transcendent afterlife.
For that which befalleth the sons of man befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath;* so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
(Ecclesiastes 3:19)
I thought about the goat kicking when a pirate sawed open its throat, the way its tail wagged while it bled.
All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
(Ecclesiastes 3:20)
I thought about the snapper flapping on the deck after a flat knife to the skull.
For to him who is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.
(Ecclesiastes 9:4)
King Solomon wasn’t helping.
IX
A new pirate leader named Bakayle came aboard in late April. He was large and loping, fleshy-faced, with ears like Mickey Mouse and a cruel gangsterish smile. His teeth had metal crowns as well as a gap in front. When he noticed us reading the Bible, he mocked us by folding his hands in prayer. He straightened his posture and gathered himself to look very pious, then recommended, in a mild but paternal voice, my swift conversion to Islam. He uttered the name Allah with an overscrupulous Arabic pronunciation, careful to scratch his throat; he pretended to care very much for our moral improvement. But he was khat-addled and stupid.
Tony told me in private that Bakayle had boarded the ship after they first anchored near Hobyo. Bakayle had personally beaten the Chinese men with a broom.
“Michael,” he asked on his first day, with a clever smile. “Ham?”
“What?”
Abdul the translator happened to be lingering on the work deck, too, so Bakayle waved him over.
“He wants to know if you want ham,” Abdul translated.
“Why would I want ham?”
The pirates conferred and snickered like schoolboys.
“When you go back to Germany,” Abdul translated, “you can have all the ham you want.”
I nodded. “Great, thanks.”
Ever since my capture I had dreamed about steak, beer, greasy quesadillas, great bowls of fresh berries and melon, spareribs, grilled vegetables, and pumpkin pie. I didn’t miss ham. But the pirates mentioned it again a few days later. During dinner, at sunset, we ate oily strips of pork belly on our piles of rice, and the Somalis whiffed the pork fat. They gazed down from the upper deck in disgust and condescension. Soon we heard jokes about “ham,” and I squinted at Bakayle, who was standing on the upper deck.
“Do you mean pork?” I said. “Eating pig?”
“Haa, yes,” Bakayle said.
That was how he understood us. Hostages were eaters of pig.
Bakayle means “rabbit” in Somali—a reference to his gapped teeth and oversize ears. I made a serious face and tried to explain something to him.
“Christian, ham—no problem,” I said in a deadpan voice. “Yehud, no ham.” Jews don’t eat ham. “Muslim, no ham,” I went on and bumped my fingers together in a way that meant equal or equivalent.
“Muslim, Yehud, same-same!” I concluded, with a big sarcastic smile.
Arnel, sitting near us, giggled. Bakayle’s face darkened. A direct hit. If a comparison to Jews insulted him, I thought, he could boil in his own hate.
I passed as Christian in Somalia because I was white and not Muslim, and the whole Naham 3 crew looked Christian to the guards because we traded a handful of Bibles. Pirates were just clannish enough to consider themselves at war with most of the world. Which made enemies easy to find.
Another pirate, a friend of Bakayle’s named Chorr, liked to wear rings and a fancy watch.* He had no clear status as a boss, but he imitated Bakayle by trying to humiliate hostages. One afternoon he sat on the work deck while I stood in front of a bucket of fresh water, at a table beside the conveyor belt, cleaning my tin mug. A group of hostages who sat behind the Honda motor glanced up and past me. I turned around, and there was Chorr, flashing a sheepish smile.
“Okay, Michael,” he said.
“Problem?” I asked.
“No problem.”
I noticed him drop a fish knife on the freezer portal and scurry up the stairs. I went back to sit next to Rolly.
/> “That man pretend to stab your back,” he said.
“What?”
“Yah! He take that knife and pretend to kill you.”
Chorr had mimed my murder in silence while I cleaned my cup. Charming. He turned out to be just a nuisance, but much later he kicked the frayed paper Bible out of Rolly’s hands and found himself punished by Captain Tuure. When Rolly told Tuure the story, the old pirate lost his temper, and in a show of justice he hauled two or three guards downstairs, by the ear, to stand in front of us. Rolly shook his head each time—always the wrong man. But after a day or two, he saw Chorr upstairs and fingered him.
Tuure marched him away, but we never saw the punishment. A rumor circulated that Chorr had spent all night on the filthy floor of a cabin with his wrists and ankles trussed, like a pig.
“That make you feel better?” I asked Rolly when the story came around.
“No, Michael,” he said in his grandfatherly voice, unwilling to take pleasure in the pirate’s misery. “Nothing make me feel better in Somalia.”
X
The Naham 3 crew had a sack of DVDs, all “pirated.” A player was fixed to the green Honda motor, and a black TV set dangled from the ceiling by four strong, ribbonlike tethers. The tethers let the TV rock with the ship. Since the Chinese made up the largest bloc—ten men*—they set the programming, and it started in the morning with Chinese karaoke. Keening, syrupy ballads rang out like strange birdsong over the deck after breakfast, and the Chinese would sing along.
The most popular DVD was a collection of Tom and Jerry cartoons. We all sat rapt and silent whenever Tom prepared fancy traps for the mouse, who scampered around outsmarting him. I hadn’t seen Tom and Jerry in years. At first it reminded me of cheap and boring things from my childhood—fluorescent lights, mouthwash, Doritos—but after one or two cartoons I learned a deep appreciation for the MGM Studio Orchestra. Out here in the Indian Ocean, floating near Hobyo, I noticed the qualities of an L.A. big band that could play smooth jazz or evoke the flight of bowling balls, or crashing garbage cans, with kettle drums and prepared pianos and kazoos. There were hot, flaring trumpets and scurrying violins. Some of the music wasn’t just clean stuff for kids. I tried to imagine the musicians who daylighted in Burbank to finance nightclub careers in L.A.; and I felt grateful for every one.
The Desert and the Sea Page 15