The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He made an airplane motion with his hand. “Adiga, free!”

  The skiff pilot moved at a slow, deliberate speed, still under orders, perhaps, from Tuure. By my own reckoning we were south of Hobyo, maybe near Harardhere, and I thought I saw something blink in the sky far ahead, either a drone or the top of a cell-phone tower. I wanted to jump. (Certain instincts die hard.) The pirates were tense and quiet. They maintained a tactical-seeming silence along the whole black and placid stretch of water, as if they wanted to avoid detection.

  We came to a skidding halt on the beach, and the guards hustled me across the sand to a pair of waiting cars. We drove north along unlit roads for two hours. When we settled, at last, in a shambling house, I breathed the dry odors of Somalia again—the dust, the ocean breeze, the wild sour smell of certain insects—with the openhearted gusto of a man who was about to go free.

  Untangling truth from pirate fabrications, never mind my own self-deceptions, could be tricky work. From the shambling house near the ocean we had driven hours inland to reach this Broom-Closet Bordello. The urbane-looking runner, who called himself Mustaf, stood beside me while I ate my breakfast on the wooden dresser. He rummaged through a drawer. When another plane shook the building on its way to what I took to be Galkayo’s airport, Issa watched me again for a reaction. He giggled and whispered to another guard.

  Something odd was going on.

  I said to Mustaf, “Excuse me, what’s going to happen? Am I going free?”

  “Inshallah,” he said politely. If Allah wills it.

  “Where are we now?” I asked.

  “You know Harardhere?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “We are in Harardhere.”

  I blinked.

  Bashko listened with a bright, alert face and seemed to hope I wouldn’t remember our chat in the skiff. Had the pirates not even noticed the stickers on our meals?

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes. There is much danger here from al-Shabaab in Harardhere,” said Mustaf. “You must be quiet.”

  “I see!” I raised an obedient finger to my lips. “Shhhh.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Harardhere, okay!” I said.

  “Yes.”

  II

  The Broom-Closet Bordello was not much larger than my cabin on the Naham 3, where I had spent three weeks in solitary confinement. My brain moved back to the ship in sudden jerks, like someone punching “rewind” on a cassette recorder.

  You have made a mistake. Mistakes are human.

  To distract myself in the cabin I had done push-ups on the floor, as well as a yoga routine on the bed. Li Bo Hai had excavated a spiral-bound notebook from somewhere on the ship so I could write, which may have been all that stood between my feverish mind and an aura of madness after my failed escape.

  You have made a mistake. Mistakes are human.

  On the first morning after my jump, the Naham 3 stood somewhere along the coast, farther from the beach, and through a shoreward window across the hall I could see the distant shape of a cargo ship moving in and out of view. We wavered on our moorings, in a strong current, like a flag moving in the wind. From my own porthole window, if I looked forward, I saw the rusted stern of the Albedo. The salt-streaked wall of greenish steel tilted back and forth about fifty yards ahead, and if I craned my neck I could see the long cables tethering us together. Now and then they tugged with the strain.

  We hadn’t moved ashore. We were floating in a field of hijacked ships.

  Ali Duulaay came to my door on this first morning and said, “Eh?” as if he deserved an explanation. He stood beside my bunk and thumped me in the chest with his fist. My muscles were loose and thin, and I felt a chest ligament snap. (It would hurt for several weeks.) He also clubbed me several times along my body with a filled bottle of water and said, “No! No! No!” and thrust his salt-chapped fingers in front of my eyes to rub them together. His eyes burned with incoherent rage. “Money, money, money!” he added, and stomped out.

  In the evening, now and then, Rolly or Ha came in to chat. Rolly said Duulaay had beat him on the feet, with the flat blade of a knife, in front of the whole Naham 3 crew, as punishment for my escape attempt. My head swam with guilt and sorrow. I should have realized Rolly might also be punished, and thinking about it was a worse punishment, for me, than the beating I took.

  I couldn’t tell what to expect during my three weeks of solitary confinement, but there was a sense that I would leave the ship, so I showed Ha the stack of folded clothes I had borrowed from certain crewmen. We exchanged addresses on a scrap of cardboard.

  Food arrived twice a day, on a plate. Tony or Big Jacket brought it. Big Jacket gave me a crooked smile of personal resignation, as if my leap had threatened his role as a guard leader. He disappeared, in fact, after a few days, and I never saw him again.

  Tony was more cheerful. “If you need anything, just ask,” he said. The plates of food included a lot of defrosted tuna from the hold, either boiled or deep-fried. There was less fresh fish. We no longer floated near a reef.

  Bashko came in one afternoon with fresh soap and shampoo, acting friendly—good humored, with a polite manner but a lively, sarcastic smile—and when I explained my escape attempt by mentioning Garfanji and al-Shabaab, he nodded. “No al-Shabaab. No more Garfanji. Finished!” he said and made a grand sweep with his hand, as if he had personally banished these threats from my future.

  I stored the shampoo and soap in a closet that was cluttered with spare clothing and trash. The pirates had broken the closet knob. The door swung open and closed whenever the ship swayed.

  You have made a mistake. Mistakes are human.

  One afternoon the guard called Dag appeared in the sunshine outside my window. “Michael,” he said, and I shoved my notebook under a pillow to hide it.

  “You remember me?” he said. “It is Dag.”

  “Yes, Dag.”

  He seemed groggy rather than hyperalert, possibly also drunk, a vision of simple pirate greed. I could tell he’d been chewing khat from the ooze of green mash in one corner of his mouth. If I gave him a good shove through the window, I thought, he would lose his balance and topple over the rail.

  “We want your money,” he said.

  “I know, Dag. I don’t have any.”

  “You are a writer.”

  I laughed. “Yes, and writers don’t make money.”

  “But your mother—”

  The rocking boat challenged his feet.

  “Yes?”

  “Your mother—”

  “She doesn’t have enough money, either,” I said.

  He swayed like a drunken sailor, wearing a heavy Kalashnikov.

  “Michael,” he said at last, in a tone of personal confession. “I want the Good Life.”

  He was too far gone to maintain the mask of an honorable fisherman. He didn’t even try to pretend. He was just a stoned bush soldier who wanted what he saw on TV.

  “I don’t have the Good Life, Dag,” I told him. “You guys kidnapped the wrong man.”

  III

  The pirates in the Broom-Closet Bordello made an excitable show of standing in formation with their guns whenever I had to shower, guarding the short outdoor path to the toilet. The barren courtyard had a separate small, unattached building made of crumbling stone, which I took for a storage room. I had to pick my way around it, past some automotive junk—wheel rims, electrical wire—to a tin-sided outhouse door.

  My first shower happened at night. I half closed the outhouse door and stripped naked in the dark. I was told, mysteriously, not to look up. While I lathered my hair with shampoo and thought no one was watching, of course, I did look up—the outhouse was open to the sky. Nothing to see except blurry stars and the top of a stone-and-mortar wall. A guard noticed me break the rules, though, and the uproar and hysteria didn’t subside until they had pushed me back into the bordello room, wrapped a brand-new chain around my ankles, an
d fixed it with a small brass lock.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Boss speak—Michael, chains!” said Bashko.

  Someone had called the boss to rat me out, apparently. Now I had to be punished. I heard Rolly’s voice in my head: Not make them angry, Michael. But I had done nothing else but make them angry ever since my leap from the ship.

  “Bashko—notebook?” I said after a while.

  “Shut up.”

  Before we left the Naham 3, the guards had searched my bag and discovered my spiral-bound notebook. “No, no!” Issa had said, as if I’d committed a crime. He rolled up the notebook, and I felt an ache of frustration. For the second time in my captivity my notes had been confiscated.*

  Now I had nothing to write with and no way to move, and a cold bicycle chain gritted the skin around my ankles.

  Late one night in the Broom-Closet Bordello, in early October, they loaded me into a Toyota Surf. We met another SUV on the outskirts of Galkayo, beside a lonely tree, and for two hours both cars moved like a caravan deep into the lunar wilderness. The drivers knew how to avoid boulders as well as acacia trees and thickets of thorn. Sometimes camels trotted into our headlight glare, and I was thinking about stories from the Old Testament—the elders and patriarchs, the armed brethren caught up in cycles of murder and revenge—when, somewhere along the way, we passed an actual burning bush, far to the right of our car. Most likely set by a nomad. No one even mentioned it.

  The story of the burning bush occurs in the Koran, too. The desert landscape of snakes and clans and prophets, with its traditions of the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden, is common to the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy books; and all three monotheisms share an even older set of myths from Mesopotamia, where the stories of Moses and Adam and Noah had moved like spirits, for centuries, under more ancient names. “We are the same!” Rolly had told the pirates months ago in the bush, when they inspected his crucifix. “We all got the same God.” But the Somalis were unconvinced.

  The cars stopped, and my guards led me to a patch of sand where a fat man sat on a blanket. He spoke decent English, in a high, feminine voice and a correct manner. But it wasn’t Garfanji. We shook hands and he introduced himself as Fuad.

  “Nice meeting,” he said. “You are not in very much danger, unless your family will be uncooperative. You are now being held by the family that captured you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I belong to their subclan. I have lived in Europe before. Now I have come to mediate for you. I will live in Galkayo. I do not wish to remain more than thirty days, and I wish to have your case concluded in that time.”

  Fuad held a small packet of nuts, which he fed into his plump mouth.

  “You are Sa’ad ?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “My captors are demanding too much money,” I told him. “It’s still at twenty million, isn’t it?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Please explain to my captors that I am not a cargo ship.”

  Fuad broke his grave, correct demeanor to titter out a laugh. He produced his phone—another elegant, orange-glowing Samsung. One purpose of the long drive was no doubt to use a distant cell tower, to locate the call outside Galkayo.

  “Hello?” said my mother.

  “Mom, it’s me.”

  “Yes, hi, Michael, how are you?”

  Her voice was clear and strong. The phone had beautiful reception. I couldn’t tell how much she knew about my circumstances, but Mom seemed more self-assured than before.

  She asked, “Are you still on the ship?”

  “No,” I muttered, and my stomach swirled. For the second time in my captivity, I worried that the horror, the hunger, the months of yearning—all the wasted time itself—had simply gone to waste. For nine months Abdul and Garfanji had fucked with us. Now negotiations would simply restart. (If they had ever, in any sense, started.) My head spun on the dark savanna, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I wanted to tip my location, but I didn’t know if we would return to Galkayo, and uttering that name would have invited punishment. So I said, “Ich bin da geblieben, wo ich gefangen worden bin.” I’ve been staying in the place where I was captured.

  “Yes,” said my mother, and Fuad didn’t notice the German.

  When the phone call ended I was piled into the car, and we steered through the savanna again, without headlights, for several hours. This time we arrived at a pastel-painted villa, one of the pirate mansions I had read about as a journalist. A plastic-wrapped foam mattress lay on a concrete floor, along with a fresh mosquito net. I unwrapped the mattress, and the pirates came in with heavy sacks of beans and sugar, cases of pasta, cigarettes, and mango juice.

  The place was barren, unlit except for some dim fluorescent bulbs. One or two pirates remained visible through a doorway, on a ragged mat. The light flickered over their heads, so the rectangle of the door seemed to flash on and off.

  When Bashko settled in the doorway, I asked him, “This house—who?” Who owns this house?

  “Bur’ad!” he said.

  A pirate!

  “Right, thanks.” I glanced around. “Are we still in ‘Harardhere’?”

  “Haa.”

  “Okay.”

  Galkayo, then.

  It mattered for several reasons. As long as they maintained the “Harardhere” story, I had secret information to reveal on the phone. Our location also indicated which pirates were in charge. In Galkayo, assuming it was South Galkayo, they were Sa’ad, “the family that captured you,” as Fuad had said.

  A few nights earlier, in the Broom-Closet Bordello, a new boss had waddled in to sit on a plastic chair by the foot of my bed. He was shapeless and squat, with wide-set eyes, and he smoked a cigarette while he listened to long explanations from my guards. He glanced at me through the mosquito tent now and then, sidelong, to nod. I sensed he was learning about my time on the ship. I found him ugly and sinister, and I wondered if he belonged to a whole new gang. Now I decided Fuad had told the truth: the gang was Sa’ad, maybe Gerlach and Digsi’s family, as opposed to the Hobyo crowd; we were back in Galkayo; and Fuad, just possibly, had meant it when he said “thirty days.”

  IV

  The hollow house grew bright in the morning, but cold weather kept it from warming up. The pastel colors of the walls—solid blue, pink, or green, depending on the room—seemed to glow in the African sun. I saw that my room had plenty of open, dusty space. Several weeks had passed since I last exercised, so I wanted a yoga mat.

  “Bashko,” I said, since he sat in the doorway again. “Bashko, I need a mat.”

  “Eh?”

  “Salli,” I said, using the Somali word for a mat, which sounded like “sully.” “Aniga.” I pointed at myself, then at the open floor. “Exercise.”

  Bashko gathered my meaning.

  “Okay!” he said, and lifted his thumb.

  The morning was so cold that he and Issa had wrapped themselves in blankets and built a coal fire. Bashko had dropped two or three hot coals from the kitchen into an empty powdered-milk tin and set it in the entry hall. In the late morning, for laughs—or to ward off flies—he also threw rocks of incense into the tin and sent a small cloud of white smoke wandering through the doorway.

  The pirate villa started to smell like a Catholic church.

  “Bashko, what is that?”

  He came in to show me, carrying the hot tin with a rag. He made an exaggerated show of sniffing the smoke, which burned off in fierce, thick gouts and had a sharp odor somewhere between soap and spice. He set down the can and held out a spare rock of unburned incense resin, dried sap from the Somali bush.

  “Somalia, full!” he said.

  Somalia had more than one source of incense, including a gnarled tree that produced frankincense and a white thornbush that gave up myrrh.* Both grew throughout Yemen, Oman, and the Horn of Africa. The dried-out bushes and trees used to mean real money. The Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula had once belonged to a
swerve of the Spice Route, and some traditions maintained that the “Wise Men of the East” were traders known to ancient Jews and early Christians from these pre-Muslim places.

  “You could sell this to churches around the world,” I told him, rubbing my fingers together. “Business, business.”

  “Okay!” Bashko laughed.

  A limited trade in both myrrh and frankincense resins existed in Somalia, and Bashko had a wiry intelligence that might have made him a good businessman. Part of me hoped that his share of my ransom, if any, would go toward funding an incense business. But I couldn’t be too optimistic. Bashko was also a khat addict, with a habit costing six hundred dollars a month. That was rent in some Western cities.

  He returned the censer to the hall doorway and waved at the smoke with a paper exercise booklet. The Somalis used this booklet to learn English.

  I pointed at it. “Aniga, okay?” I said. Can I read that?

  “Haa.”

  Bashko brought it over. I had left the Naham 3 without a Bible or a book of any kind. I devoured the pamphlet like a novel. It contained some poignant exercise questions.

  What is the purpose of human life?

  The purpose of life is to worship Allah.

  Who destroyed Somalia?

  Somalia was destroyed by Somalis, but most of all by the warlords.

  The other thing I noticed was a line at the bottom of each page indicating that the booklet belonged to an English class at a Galkayo private school, taught by a man named Abdurrahman. I’d heard the name Abdurrahman whenever Mustaf, the urbane young runner, delivered food.

  “Bashko,” I said, and described Mustaf. “Maga’iid?” I said, using a new vocabulary word from the book, meaning “name.”

  “Abdurrahman,” he answered carefully.

  “Abdurrahman the translator?”

  “Yes,” Bashko said.

  Interesting.

  I had gathered that Abdurrahman and Fuad were both in charge of negotiations. They worked together. The presence of Fuad in particular seemed to give everyone hope. The guards figured he was a pro because he spoke understandable English, and he claimed to be an educated member of the Somali diaspora in Europe. I found out later that the FBI in California considered him a rational middleman, at least compared with previous negotiators. But his written English fluctuated between excellent and poor, and his ideas seemed to waver between sanity and nonsense. One possible reason for this divide was that Abdurrahman and Fuad traded email and telephone duties, and Abdurrahman had smoother English. “Gunmen are winners here,” one of them wrote in an email to my mother, “while educated ones are losers in life. . . . I must assure you that kidnappers holding your son are the most ignorant and not like civilized pirates we used to see.* . . . For the release of your innocent son who has been wrongly abducted, we fully cooperate with you by any means that can quicken his rescue.”