The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  “There, see?” I said when I came back down to the work deck, toweling off my hair. “Completely arbitrary.”

  “Yes, Michael. Now you go up there alone,” Rolly said, and looked away.

  “Oh, come on! You could go up there, too. I’m just saying we can challenge the pirates’ rules.”

  “Me, I take saltwater shower,” he said with a kind of bitter pride.

  He had a point. An American attitude of protest was also an attitude of privilege, looked at from the right angle, and marching upstairs with a bright-yellow towel sent the wrong message to the non-English-speaking crew, who might have wondered why the American still got to use their murdered captain’s facilities. So I started using the saltwater hose the next day. The steady, urgent flow of lukewarm brine didn’t clean your hair and skin, exactly, but stripping naked for a few minutes, and getting wet, broke up the boredom of a standard afternoon.

  IV

  Without a clock in my cabin, I learned to tell time by the color of the sky. Somalia is near-equatorial, so the sun rises and sets around six all year round. I fell asleep by eight. The ship would rock and I would doze, in nervous catnaps, until four thirty or five, when the dark sky turned blue outside my window. By five thirty an orange stain had spread on the horizon, and I got up. A Somali gunman sat in the bridge to watch for movement in the corridor, and with his permission, holding my foam mattress and my pink patterned blanket, awkwardly, I picked my way down the hall, outside to the steel stairs, down to the deck. The swaying boat and narrow stairs were tricky with the mattress. I sometimes lost my balance, and sometimes the big thing caught the wind like a sail. I didn’t care. It was conscious and deliberate. I moved the mattress back and forth like an idiot to flag the attention of drones. I thought a man lugging his foam mattress up and down the stairs of a tuna boat, wearing a flowered pink blanket on his head, at a predictable hour, twice a day, might become easy to track from the sky.*

  Before 6:00 a.m., the air felt quiet and damp. I heated up water for coffee in an electric kettle and took a spoonful of Nescafé from a can. I mixed it with sugar and powdered milk while the crew snored. And I waited. Around six, the nighttime guard shift changed over to more alert Somalis, and every morning before it happened I hoped for the distant chop of a helicopter. I would have been off the deck like a cannonball.

  Rolly came down from the cabins by six thirty, followed, normally, by Ha, who was comical in the morning, because he never tried to spruce up. He just looked like crap until he had his coffee and cigarette. He also made an amusing game of bumming the cigarette by leaning against one of the Chinese men and holding his hand like a beggar, as if to admit to himself that his desire for nicotine was degrading.

  I don’t know why he never had his own pack. The ship had a vast supply of cigarettes. Every couple of days a man came out of the freezer, brushing frost off a new carton, and passed out hinge-topped packs like candy. No one seemed to bother about running out, although everyone knew the ship’s provisions had a limit, like the ship itself—we understood the omen of the Shiuh Fu 1 on the shore.

  Another cabin sleeper who came early down the stairs was a Chinese officer, Qiong Kuan. We nodded at each other as he settled on the fiberglass bench, still wrapped in a thin blanket, and we taught each other to say “Good morning” in English and Chinese. The crew had an English-Chinese dictionary, a fat little cube of important information, which became a subject of contemplation for me, like the Bible.

  “Good—morning,” Qiong Kuan had learned to say in clear but halting English.

  “Zaoshang hao,” he had taught me to say, and then he would correct my intonation.

  “Zaoshang hao,” I would repeat.

  Again a correction.

  “Zaoshang hao,” I would say, and Kuan would hold up his thumb.

  Kuan had a paunch and a growing bald patch on his round head, which made him look middle aged. In fact he was thirty-seven. He smoked with a stony, comical, phlegmatic gaze, as if nothing surprised him. He was first mate, a rank higher than Li Bo Hai, but he rarely asserted himself. Li Bo Hai had assumed everyday leadership, maybe because the pirates preferred to deal with him. No one cared. The hijacking was too absurd. Kuan had quit. He smoked cigarettes with Li Bo Hai and with another engineer named Cao Yong. Those three were the leading cadre, the most experienced men.

  From our halting conversations I learned that Kuan came from a rice-farming province of China, and no one in his family—not his wife and kids, not his parents—understood the problem in Somalia. The crazy demands by pirates on the phone were like noises from a distant star.

  The Chinese kept a paper calendar, and each wide sheet gave a Western and a Chinese date. Taso and Jian Zui maintained it. By June there were near-daily arguments about the actual date, which led to scuffles in the corner by the Honda motor. Accurate or not, a page from the calendar drifted around the deck as a ritual, from one man to another, while we gathered for morning coffee on the bench. Sometimes I kept it to scribble on, since I missed my notebook. Sometimes Ha, with his hair in a messy pompadour, cigarette dangling from his lips and curling smoke in his eyes, folded the sheet into a tight paper plane. He moved to the edge of the boat to launch it over the sea, and we watched it loop around, caught by an air current, and glide over the morning glass, which at the right hour was touched with bronze patches of wavering light. The plane would fall and stick to the surface of the water, like a flying insect newly captured in sap. We might or might not stand up to watch it sink.

  V

  One morning in May I used the Chinese dictionary to converse with Cao Yong, the wiry second engineer. He had the angriest energy of all the Naham 3 crew and seemed the least beaten down. He hated the pirates, but he did his work, which sometimes included repair trips to the engine room. Part of the ship’s engine ran as a generator, day and night, and I’d learned to appreciate the steady thrum as an indicator of our comforts on the ocean. It had started to spit and falter. The freezer hold, the kitchen, the filtration system for drinking water—nothing ran without the cycling generator, and if it gave out, we would have to move ashore.

  Along with my fantasies of escape, I dreamed up a collective mutiny. The story of a suicidal hostage from the Shiuh Fu 1 haunted me every day. “Fifteen months,” Hamid had said. Maybe that was some kind of limit. I’d been a hostage for almost four, Rolly about seven. The crew had been captive for two and a half.

  We had free use of steel fish knives on the work deck, as well as whetting stones, marlinspikes, and a sharp fishing gaff (a hook mounted at the end of a twelve-foot bamboo pole). I brooded about these weapons and tried to guess the number of pirates. Thirty, at most? One for each hostage? Of course, we lived on this forward deck by design—the pirates could be anywhere on the ship, and we weren’t supposed to count them.

  “Cao Yong,” I said, and flipped through the dictionary. When I found a word in English, I pointed to the Chinese character, and he nodded. We built up phrases that way.

  Life on land no good, I suggested.

  Cao Yong nodded. I came to the point:

  Should the crew attack the pirates?

  It was a dangerous idea, but not out of the question. It needed Chinese leadership. The Somalis were superfluous on the Naham 3; Cao Yong, Li Bo Hai, and Qiong Kuan were not.

  Then again, none of us had military training, and the ship was possibly hobbled. Cao Yong took the dictionary.

  Very dangerous was his reply. I nodded.

  He flipped through and showed me further English words:

  Pirates do not kill. Eventually they release.

  I worried about death or suicide on land. But that was too elaborate, too conjectural to explain.

  Cao Yong flipped through the pages again and found the Chinese character for a single, conclusive phrase:

  Not worthwhile.

  I nodded and shrugged.

  VI

  Every afternoon, when “tchat” arrived in a skiff, the Somalis would shuffle back
and forth upstairs like cats about to receive a treat. They lined up to receive their rations, and Big Jacket came to the upper rail to summon Taso, because Taso and several other hostages had developed fledgling habits—out of stress or boredom, or both—and the pirates donated half a bundle every day to their corner of the deck. Taso hustled out in nothing but a pair of red shorts and returned, clutching his bundle, with a comical, mournful, baffled expression of need.

  “Is happy hour,” said Rolly.

  One Cambodian who chewed with Taso was intense and reedy, and he mouthed off in a way that inspired abuse from the Chinese, who punched him in the arm when they grew tired of his comments. His name was Ngem Sosan. He and Taso had been close friends of the dead captain’s. They had enjoyed certain privileges while the Naham 3 was in regular operation, and now Sosan complained in a braying voice about the pirates and refused to do much work. After a while I realized he raised his voice during shower time to make loud, sarcastic appraisals of the size of each man’s cock. That was one reason they slugged him.

  These stress fractures in the muted, quiet society of hostages on the Naham 3 came slowly into focus. The hijacking had shifted a balance of power on the ship. It was a Chinese-dominant vessel, so the Chinese speakers and their friends were used to feeling privileged. But English became more important after the hijacking. “The Somalis think I am the crew chief,” Arnel said. “I’m not—I’m just a crewman—but I speak English, so I became the translator.”

  “You got a promotion,” I said.

  Arnel laughed brightly. “Yes!”

  Rolly and I had gravitated toward the Filipinos because of their English. Skiff deliveries of mango juice and vanilla cookies* came only for me, the expensive hostage, and I tried to distribute them fairly, but side benefits tended to pile up in the Filipino corner. So the Chinese and their allies gained the impression that extra bottles weren’t for them.

  One hot morning Sosan protested his maltreatment in a reedy-voiced, sarcastic, but also comical diatribe complaining about the Filipinos and the Chinese and the Somalis and the food on the ship and the American and the lack of mango juice for Sosan. I handed him my last bottle, but he shook his head, electrically aware that I wanted him to shut up. Instead he made fun of my pale skin and my pointy nose.* The rest of the crew grumbled with uneasy laughter—no one knew what to say—and Sosan continued in a mixture of ship’s pidgin and Cambodian until I shouted, “Cambodia, saitei! Cambodia, loco-loco!” That Cambodian’s crazy!

  Everyone laughed, including Sosan. Of course. Insults blew off steam. Later Sosan and I would be friends.

  Several days after this tirade, we heard Taso complain in Chinese. He sat in his corner by the Honda motor, while Li Bo Hai sat near us on the bench and listened over a smoldering cigarette. Li Bo Hai was an arbiter of justice on board; he tried not to take sides among national cliques. After a while he brayed back in Chinese.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked Tony.

  “They are arguing about coffee.”

  “What about it?”

  The whole crew acted chastised. Taso complained a little more. Tony said the main complaint was that coffee in the Filipino corner had disappeared too quickly.

  “Well, that’s because of us,” I said.

  “Shhh.”

  Taso stood up, as if he wanted to fight. Li Bo Hai stood up in response. Instead of climbing over to grapple with Taso, though, the chief engineer darted to a closet in the work area. “Heh!” he shouted and tossed out a packet of tea. “Heh!” he shouted and tossed out a box of Abu Walad biscuits. “Heh!” he shouted and returned to the sunlit deck to empty a plastic jar of tea packets and other hoarded food. Taso fell silent, like the rest of the crew. Li Bo Hai sat down again on the bench.

  “Those are Taso’s things,” said Tony. “He says Taso should not complain so much about the coffee.”

  VII

  Apart from these outbursts, it was hard to tell how everyone coped with the constant strain. Our anger should have been directed upward, at the pirates, but it tended to slop sideways, back and forth, like acid in a vat. Most of us no doubt fell back on religious training; but our ship’s pidgin kept us from indulging in sustained philosophical conversation.

  Four Indonesians were Muslim, a fifth was Christian. The Cambodians and Vietnamese were Buddhist, and sometimes I saw Phumanny, the tattooed man with bowl-cut hair, chant rapid Buddhist prayers at the back of the work area. The Chinese might have been Buddhist or Taoist or Confucian. When I thought about the man from the Shiuh Fu 1 who’d killed himself, I wondered how Buddhists regarded suicide, and this question reminded me of Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who’d famously doused himself with gasoline on a Saigon street corner in 1963. He had wanted to protest religious inequality in South Vietnam. The most striking aspect of the photo of his fiery death was his erect posture, his look of evident calm. A student at the University of California, San Diego, imitated Quang Duc in 1970 to protest the Vietnam War, but instead of remaining on the pavement in monkish serenity, George Winne Jr. jumped up to run, flaming, across a wide plaza. Before he died in the hospital, several hours later, he said to his mom, “I believe in God and the hereafter and I will see you there.”

  I didn’t want to die like that. The promise of a hereafter didn’t spark my imagination. Quang Duc had shown a deeper religious instinct: Buddhism promises no personal afterlife, no survival of individual consciousness,* and I figured any man who could sit unflinching, without the prospect of heaven, while his robes and body burned, had learned to loosen the bonds of selfishness and desire. There was no other yardstick for philosophy or religion, from my point of view. I lined up with Albert Einstein: “The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self,” he wrote in a letter in 1934, and by this brilliant, simple formulation even our devoutest pirates were imbeciles.

  Rolly put it another way while we sat under the conveyor belt one morning. He watched the pirates bumble around on the deck while they unloaded a supply skiff, refusing to help one another out, like clowns.

  Rolly was the closest thing to a philosopher we had on the sweltering work deck, and, knowingly or not, he paraphrased Socrates.

  “They not evil, Michael,” he said after a while. “They just not know.”

  VIII

  One day in June, Abdul the translator came aboard wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt over his printed Indonesian sarong, with a pair of sunglasses, maybe to shield his eyes from the confusion of patterned cloth. He disappeared upstairs for a while. In the late morning, he came down to sit on the bench and ordered Tony to fry him a fish. He also loaded a few wads of tobacco-like dry tea straight into our electric kettle, where it would stain the plastic (instead of parceling it out into mugs, as we did), and before everything boiled he used a hammer and a piece of cloth to crush two plump cardamom pods he had carried in the pocket of his shirt.

  “This is how you’re supposed to drink it—with a little spice,” he told me. “It’s how my mother made tea when I was young.”

  He poured out a fragrant cup and handed it to me with one of his flare-toothed smiles. “For the boss,” he said.

  “No, no.”

  The whole crew watched. Some of them resented what he had done to the electric kettle. There was also not enough spiced tea to go around.

  “Just take it, man. It’s good.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “Just taste it, then; I’ll drink the rest. It ain’t poisoned.”

  I took a sip and handed it back. Not bad.

  “Okay,” I said. Why was he buttering me up?

  “We gonna do a phone call tonight, to your mother,” Abdul said at last. “The bosses on shore, they gave me permission to handle your case.” He found a scrap of cardboard. “Do me a favor and write down your phone number and your mother’s name.”

  I did so.

  “I think we gonna get somewhere,” he said.


  I’d never made a phone call with Abdul before. My mind began to churn. Would he recognize German? His English was better than Garfanji’s. The pirate master spoke an orotund, almost Kenyan-colonial English, but Abdul’s had an edge of American slang.

  Which was odd.

  “Where’d you learn to speak English?” I asked him.

  “Right here, in Somalia.”

  “Have you ever been abroad?”

  “No, man, I haven’t been outta the country.”

  “Hmm.”

  Later, a Somali guard came down to distribute supplies. He handed out shampoo, detergent,* and cigarette lighters. When the lighters appeared, the work deck pounded with bare feet—every man from behind the conveyor belt rushed the unsuspecting, unarmed pirate. Tony returned from the scrum with a new LED lighter. He knew I wanted one, since my last LED had burned out, so I dug through my stash of things and produced the old lighter, with less fuel, and traded it, along with two bottles of mango juice, for Tony’s high-end equipment.

  That evening Abdul came to sit next to me and said, “Okay, tonight we gonna call this guy in Norway. He’s gonna wrap up your case. Somali guy. Just answer his questions. Don’t say anything else.”

  “Sure.” I waited for more. “Why’s he in Norway?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  At sundown, the hostages assigned to cabins filed upstairs for bed. I spent an hour wide awake on my bunk, wondering what to say on the phone. I wanted to request a helicopter in German. We hadn’t seen a helicopter since before our video shoot with Garfanji. The sky in the meantime had been suspiciously, perhaps deliberately, quiet.