The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  “’Bout four minutes, like that.”

  I nodded. “I think I can hold my breath for about two.”

  “Why you asking?” he said.

  “No reason.”

  “You want to jump at sea?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Ah, Michael. You crazy. I know how you think.”

  For a while we watched the wind blowing laundry on the ropes. The Naham 3 had four or five clotheslines and a constant cycle of newly cleaned hostage clothes flapping in the wind.

  At last Rolly said, “You know, Michael. Me, I am a skipper. Is my job. I never say to another man, ‘Jump at sea.’”

  “I know.”

  “Never, never. Is not safe.”

  “Unless a helicopter can scoop you,” I said.

  He gave me a dark look. “What helicopter?”

  “Unless a helicopter could come and rescue the man who jumped off the ship.”

  Rolly was quiet for a long time.

  “But, Michael, they will shoot you,” he said.

  After some careful thought, he added, “Only—if you can tell the helicopter when it must come.”

  “Like an appointment for the jump,” I said.

  “Yah.”

  After dinner I borrowed the plastic alarm clock. I agonized about telling Rolly more; I didn’t want to leave him behind. But earlier in the summer I had asked him, “Would you come with me, if we found a way off this ship?” and he had shaken his head: “I no want to leave Marc.” Which was a strong point—I didn’t want to leave anyone behind, and I would have preferred a military rescue of the entire Naham 3. But I’d already blurted my request.

  We filed up the stairs at sundown. Under the bunk in my cabin I did push-ups on my few square feet of dirty floor. I also did leg stretches, to avoid cramping in the water. I went to sleep wondering whether I should jump first, at an unguarded spot along the upper rail, in anticipation of my appointment, or keep moving down to the work deck, as usual, wait for the sound of a helicopter, and then sprint.

  When the clock rang at 5:00 a.m., the sea looked calm. The breeze through my porthole window felt not too cold. By 5:25 I had assembled the pink flowered blanket over my head and tied up my mattress instead of lugging it outside. For several days I had alternated lugging the mattress with leaving it behind. But whenever I left it in my cabin, I noticed that night-shift pirates would sleep on it during the day, smudging it with dirt and grease. I’d learned to tie the mattress with a rope and stash it under the bunk.

  I walked out to the corridor in a state of nerves. The bearded translator named Abdiwali lounged with his rifle on the floor of the bridge. He waved me out, but I must have looked suspicious, because the damaged-looking pirate gave a fierce and wary glare and followed me to the stairs with his pistol raised. My head whanged with alarm. I went down the first set of stairs and listened for any sound of rotor blades on the wind. I glanced back and up at the old Somali, who waved his pistol from the door as if to say, Keep moving.

  I scowled at him—What’s your problem?—and trotted down the deck stairs as usual.

  The damp morning silence was heartbreaking. The clearing sky looked iron blue. Bleary pirates watched me like huddled scarecrows, and my whole body seemed to vibrate from nervous anticipation. I forced myself to sit still. It was less easy to listen for rotor blades from the origami-bowered bench, but soon enough I could tell that my helicopter, imaginary or real, was about to miss its appointment.

  XIII

  After breakfast, Big Jacket and some other Somalis attached a cardboard flag to a pole on the upper deck and moved through some patriotic military drills. The damaged-looking man stood with his rifle and shouted orders while two other pirates marched in formal, quasi-fascist style. Most pirates had, or wanted to have, real training, and I wondered how much antiquated Italian discipline had clung to the national army while the older pirate had served in it.

  Their powder-blue flag hung on its head. “We are celebrating independence!” Big Jacket told me. “Today is our liberation day! Fuck Europe, fuck America, fuck South Africa!” He meant all the racist colonialists of the world. “We are free!”

  I gave him a thumbs-up.

  “But your flag’s upside down,” I said.

  “Hah?”

  “Look at the star on your flag. It’s upside down.”

  He waved me away, angrily.

  The guards strutted through these maneuvers all afternoon, in shifts. Their pride in “Somalia” fascinated me. The federal government was a shambles, the state hardly existed, but the nation lived on as a passionate idea. Loyalties to any of Somalia’s bickering clans ranked below a feeling of Somaliness, and all the warring sides on every front of the desultory civil war considered themselves Somali. That was unique in Africa. Most modern countries on the continent were postcolonial constructions, and European-drawn boundaries had lumped together different religions and tribes, which led to civil strife. But modern Somalia was a natural nation-state. European boundaries aggravated it in a different way, by carving three regions away from the heartland, leaving ethnic Somalis stranded across the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. This exile became a founding wound. The national flag raised in 1960 had a five-pointed “star of unity” to show the dream of Greater Somalia, the hoped-for unification of people who had lived under five separate colonial systems.* So the flag itself was a land claim, a vision of the future, a refusal to accept postcolonial lines.

  Despite this patriotic fervor, clan warfare had trashed the state. The most obvious unifier was Islam. By 2006 a religious movement called the Islamic Courts Union had expanded throughout large parts of Somalia to replace local clan justice, which often sparked clan wars, with sharia law. The ICU brought relative stability. But it also had links to al-Qaeda, and it threatened the weak transitional government in Mogadishu. The Bush administration helped Ethiopian troops defeat it, and the success of this remote front in the war on terror by Christian soldiers inflamed Islamist hard-liners in Somalia and left the bloody ground fertile for an even worse group: al-Shabaab. American meddling had backfired, and suddenly the complicated civil war had a religious front.

  Strict religious rules never sat well with Somalis, though, and “Islam” proved as useful a unifier as “Somalia.” Nationalism and religion relied on such powerful emotions of selfhood that civil war had been hard to avoid. Now I found it hard to think of Somalia as anything but splintered. The entropy on land that drove piracy at sea was no longer mysterious. Entropy wasn’t nation-specific, of course, and Somalia wasn’t a traditional mess—which meant there was no reason the same chaos couldn’t wander to other parts of the world. Somalia had once been peaceable and calm, and Mogadishu had been a jewel of the East African coast. But the current clannish violence had spun up fast in the final years of Siad Barre’s rule and the first years of civil war, and the pirates who arrived now on skiffs alongside the Naham 3 couldn’t cooperate long enough to carry a bag of khat up the stairs, or a case of pasta, or jerry cans of World Food Program–labeled cooking oil, foreign donations which had found their way into Somalia’s cash economy. The chaos made me think of Naipaul’s Guerrillas, a novel about a corrupt black Muslim leader in the Caribbean named Jimmy Ahmed. His sour, self-ironic remark at the core of the story could apply all over the world: “When everybody wants to fight,” the fictional Jimmy says, “there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.”

  Somalis looked gaunt and poor to a TV audience, but they were proud as cowboys, and their culture had a tradition of independence that would have rung bells in America. They viewed neighboring Swahili and Bantu cultures as complacent, comfortable, and lazy. They saw themselves as restless, lean, and self-reliant. They were nomads instead of farmers, Muslim slave traders (as a rule) rather than Bantu slaves. One Somali folktale has a sheep explaining to a gazelle that following humans will bring him to some top-notch grass. The gazelle grows impatient. �
�A sheep cannot understand,” he says. “My family and yours are not alike. We are the children of liberty and open space. . . . My heart is not the heart of a sheep.”

  I watched the cardboard flag quiver upside down in the wind.

  XIV

  July moved along in a sluggish series of cold, bright weeks. One Cambodian fisherman landed four or five “sawara,”* enormous black fish with silver bellies, every night, and their powerful tails thumped the rubber mat until somebody clocked them with a crowbar. Because of the drop in water temperature these fish became harder to find. So the Cambodian worked in the afternoon. His name was Korn Vanthy. He seemed to have no status on the crew, but he was deft at hurling out hooks and bait by swinging the whole line sideways, like a weighted net. The twirling hooks could sometimes catch a hand or an arm, and one afternoon a hook went straight through the flesh between Korn Vanthy’s thumb and his forefinger. He gave a little cry; the line clattered against the side of the ship. Some of us ran over to help. Pirates came down, too. The hook was a four-inch length of steel, bent into a question mark. The barbed end had raised only a small bead of blood, but removing it would have ripped the muscle. Jian Zui suggested cutting the hook with a pair of pliers.

  I had a bottle of iodine among my stash of things in the cabin. I asked permission to go upstairs. When I came back, Jian Zui had clipped the hook, and Korn Vanthy was bleeding into a rag. Captain Tuure guided him back to the tuna bench. The old pirate was solicitous toward the injured man, and while I doused the wound with iodine, he told Korn Vanthy about his own wounds from the Battle of Mogadishu. “Helikopter! American!” he told anyone who would listen, lifting his shirt to show Korn Vanthy the scar. But none of the Asians knew about Black Hawk Down.

  Korn Vanthy was goofy and young. His ears stuck out; he had a broad, silly smile. When I asked his name, he seemed pleased by the attention and sat with me for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes he said something in ship’s pidgin, with extra commentary in Khmer, so I hardly understood. He made these remarks with either a grin or a narrow, philosophical stare across the water.

  “You have a new friend,” Arnel commented.

  “Looks like it.”

  When I opened a pack of cookies, Korn Vanthy was happy to eat one. When I made tea, Korn Vanthy didn’t mind a cup. He had so little status on the ship—and I was so disengaged from crew politics—that our friendship became important. After a few days, whenever I sat under the conveyor belt next to Rolly, Korn Vanthy found a reason to join me for a couple of hours. He relaxed on part of my mattress and fell asleep.

  He had been a truck driver before he signed up to fish, and he enjoyed it, judging from the way he mimed bouncing through the Cambodian countryside. In his own language, Korn Vanthy must have been good humored and funny, and I wanted to talk to him through a Khmer interpreter—I wanted to know about his family, his fears, and his path to the Naham 3. Again I felt like an ignoramus, living next to marvelous stories without the equipment to listen. He asked for vocabulary words in English, including the name of the origami birds. “Swan,” I said, since the word crane had escaped me at the moment; but when I corrected myself, Korn Vanthy had latched on to the word “swan.”

  The pirates had contributed an avian creation of their own to the fluttering bower, a dinosaur-like thing made from cardboard and patched together with duct tape. It had a terrifying beak and long airplane wings. Also a pair of gray wheels.

  “Michael,” Korn Vanthy said, and pointed at the monster. “Name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “‘I don’t know.’”

  “No—sorry.” I was confusing him. “Dinosaur,” I ventured.

  “‘Dinosaur.’”

  It was just a guess. “Or helicopter.”

  “Helikopter?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed off the ship to indicate the metal birds we’d seen over the water, the helicopters that, in my lonesome opinion, had grown too scarce.

  “Helikopter!” he said.

  “Yes.”

  But it was hard to tell. The pirates’ weird art project may have expressed a fear of helicopters, or sarcasm toward the Chinese, or general cussedness, or all three. Maybe I was projecting my own wishes onto the wrinkled gray tape.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “‘I don’t know,’” Korn Vanthy repeated.

  Later, while fishing over the rail, he pulled up a chunk of soft reddish coral and hung it up to dry. In a fit of hilarity, he told me it was for a rare Cambodian recipe, “coral soup,” which he would cook for me with onions.

  “Okay, Korn Vanthy,” I said.

  We were both full of amiable bullshit, which helped pass the time.

  XV

  Somebody unearthed an antique meat grinder from the bowels of the ship, and Sosan set to work on a three-day project to clean and reassemble it. He let the parts soak in salt water and cleaning fluid. He scrubbed everything with steel wool. He cleaned it, again, in fresh water, but couldn’t decide where to use it. The bottom formed a vise clamp, for the edge of a table, so Taso found a beam of wood. Someone else found a wooden dowel for a handle, and soon the men were feeding carefully filleted sides of grouper into the greenish-copper machine.

  The final result was a bowl of mashed fish, which Taso kneaded with flour. We formed the mixture into little rounds. The Cambodians cooked them in a sizzling wok. Then they were salted and left to dry, and soon everyone had fish cakes.

  The strangest meal on the Naham 3, however, was also the simplest. Whenever the crew hauled a new tuna from the freezer and carved it up with the buzz saw, Tony made sure to keep aside a small brick of red meat. Before dinner the brick would be washed and defrosted, and by dinnertime Tony would carry out a tin platter of cold, sliced sashimi.

  “Sashimi, okay!” said Korn Vanthy.

  “Psycho-psycho,” said Sosan, meaning crazy good.

  The Chinese had a bag of powdered wasabi mix, and they stirred up a batch of watery green sauce in a plastic bowl. The men were used to helping themselves to sashimi this way, now and then, from the frozen stock, as an indulgent treat from the captain. (“The captain ate raw fish a lot,” said Tony. “He was over sixty years old, but very strong!”) Everyone ate five or six slices on a hot pile of rice. Some slices were still half-frozen, but the fish tasted surprisingly fresh. Without thinking about it, I suppose, I had lived under the impression that “sushi grade” tuna in the West was somehow fresh—once frozen, maybe, but recently caught, within weeks or days. But sushi-grade fish may sit flash-frozen on a ship like the Naham 3 for many months. A “sushi grade” designation in the United States, in fact, requires a week of freezing to kill parasites.

  One afternoon, a number of rainbow runners were lying on the deck, and I took a filleting lesson from Em Phumanny, the bowl-cut Cambodian with Buddhist tattoos. We planned to make kinilaw, a kind of Filipino ceviche made of cold, chopped, vinegary whitefish. “The fish is not cooked, you know?” said Tony. “It is cured in the vinegar.”

  I squatted in the sun near the cutaway rail while the pirates watched us drowsily. Phumanny showed me how to start the cut. It was late morning. There would be no fresh khat for hours, and when I pulled the first fillet free and walked over to lay it on a plate, I heard an unnatural buzz from the north, to the rear of the ship. A light wind blew the sound away. It didn’t rouse the Somalis. I listened. By now I knew the difference between helicopter rotors and airplane propellers, and I was still anxious to jump.

  Two quick steps over the cutaway section, a twenty-foot dive to the rocking surface of the water . . . I was tempted. But the sound didn’t chop like a helicopter. I heard a steady, rising buzz. A helicopter could have dropped a safety line, but no plane could have scooped me from the sea.

  My mind raced.

  I stood still and listened.

  It was spectacular: a twin-engine plane with numbers on its flank roared up the shore-facing side of the Naham 3 and roused all the Somalis. I hol
lered my delight and made sure whoever it was had a clear view of me on deck. The plane banked away and buzzed into the sky. The startled pirates reached for their guns. Before one of them could order me back to the work area, I retreated on my own, to make tea, but the plane returned while my water boiled, and this time the pirates opened fire. The thunder of their machine guns sent a group of five Chinese men tumbling into the work area. They knocked me over while I scooped sugar into my cup, and my brain went black. I didn’t faint, but I must have gone into shock, because in the confusion and panic I didn’t even feel my knee knock against the conveyor belt. Adrenaline from the gunfire swamped my senses, and afterward I had a mysteriously painful bruised kneecap and a surprising mess of sugar on the floor.

  Nothing worse—and no one got shot. Ferdinand said the plane had opened a side door on its second pass, revealing a man with a camera.

  “Spy purposes only,” he said. “No weapons.”

  “Okay.”

  I had no idea what the plane meant; I had no idea what any of it meant. But the work area rang with chatter. Rumors came around from the Somalis that it was an American plane. When a young pirate named Hamed ventured downstairs to beg for powdered milk, Taso pointed at him with a smile on his melancholy face and mimed snapping a camera. Busted! (Pirates hated to be photographed.)

  Later, a pirate who’d been watching us from a plastic chair on the upper deck, right beside the steps, wanted to talk about the plane. “Michael!” he said. I shaded my eyes to look up. “Aeroplane!” he said, and gestured with his hand to remind me of how it had buzzed the ship.

  “Yes.”

  He wore a colored turban against the sun and gave me a bright, ironic smile. His name was Bashir—“Bashko” for short—and he thought the whole thing was funny. “Now—finished,” he said. “No more aeroplane. Because Somalis—” and he aimed his rifle out to sea to demonstrate their terrifying resistance.

  “Scared off?”