The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  Now I missed the upholstery of life in the West; the annoying banalities, the traffic, and the fluorescent-lit stores were intimate elements of my childhood. I couldn’t reject them without rejecting my family, and I missed my family. I missed everyone I could remember. The end of my romance with Hanley’s eloquence brought on a sharpened desire for the people I loved. There was no contradiction, because love isn’t a question of dramatic demonstration or lyrical words. It’s a question of attention, presence, and time.

  Which was going to waste.

  IX

  Yoonis came and went, making gaseous promises about the U.N. and the ICRC, as if our video would lead to a tense handoff between the pirates and these international groups. He disappeared a day before my deadline. When I asked Bashko for news, he said, “No news,” and when I asked if I could speak with Yoonis, he said, “Yoonis, coming.”

  But Yoonis didn’t. His vague promises, along with the supposed U.N. video and Fuad’s hint of “thirty days,” had swaddled my brain for six weeks in a soft narcotic hope. During the afternoon of Yoonis’s fictional deadline this hope burned off like mist.

  Evening arrived. The cool sunset over Galkayo brought mosquitoes, and even before dark I could hear their high thin chorus in the courtyard. I had quit worrying about insects and disease on the Naham 3. Now they were a problem again. To fend off disease, I had to rely on my own immune system and the gauzy blue net that I unbundled every evening to dangle over my mattress, like a lampshade.

  The food on the Naham 3 must have propped up my immune system, and maybe an unlikely optimism had stilted my health during my first month and a half in Galkayo. But when the sun vanished that evening in a whining haze of mosquitoes, a fever lit up my skeleton; I went to sleep feeling swollen and strange. I overslept in the morning and woke up dizzy. I ate about half my beans. I walked heavily to the bathroom.

  “Michael! Problem?” said Bashko when I returned.

  “Aniga sick.”

  Malaria feels like a heat in the bones and a leaden weight in the blood. I napped and woke up in a pool of sweat.

  I thought about Marie Dedieu, a Frenchwoman who’d been captured by Somalis from her second home, on a northern Kenyan island, in 2011. Pirate gangs as well as factions of al-Shabaab had learned that skiffs could rush the sea boundary between Somalia and Kenya to kidnap vacationing Europeans. Madame Dedieu was a retired journalist and a quadriplegic who relied on drugs for a heart condition. The gunmen had failed to understand her difficulties, and she died within a month.

  I asked for goat broth instead of spaghetti for lunch. This special order, with the rumor of illness, brought Yoonis to the house, carrying a massive shoulder of meat. The guards cooked it while Yoonis dodged my questions about going free. At last he served me a plate of goat.

  “I can’t eat all that,” I said when he set it on the floor. “Soup only.” I pushed away the plate, and Yoonis made a show of thuggish surprise.

  “You refuse?” he said.

  “I don’t refuse, Yoonis. I’m sick. I can’t eat it.”

  “I don’t believe you are sick.”

  “Believe what you want.”

  The illness may have been related to stress over the promise of going free, but I was, in fact, sick, and Madame Dedieu’s fate scared the hell out of me.

  “It is psychological,” he said.

  “It is not fucking psychological. I need to see a doctor.”

  “What for?”

  “I need a real doctor. Didn’t you mention the ICRC?”

  “Hah.” He smiled, as if he’d caught me out. “You see, it is because of what I said to you. It is all in your head.”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  The next morning, I couldn’t hold down water. When I returned from the bathroom, I thought a swig from the water bottle might stabilize my swimming head. Instead, with nothing else in my belly, I puked.

  “Problem!” said Bashko.

  “Yeah, problem,” I agreed.

  Abdinasser the Sahib came in with an old shirt to help me clean the water and stomach acid from the floor. “Kiniin?” he said, and I thought he meant “quinine.” Bashko handed me a scrap of paper and a pen, and at last I understood. Kiniin meant “medicine,” and he wanted me to diagnose myself so they could order drugs on the phone.

  “No,” I said. “I need a doctor.”

  A runner brought a malaria drug, chloroquine, which failed to do much good. I puked again in the morning. I felt sluggish and hot, like a radioactive log.

  The same runner turned up the next evening with Yoonis, bearing a blood-test kit, intending to draw blood. I hadn’t showered in two days, and the entire house was filthy. Without real hygiene, I didn’t want to come near a needle.

  “Do you have disinfectant?” I said.

  “We do not need.”

  “Oh, yes, we do. I need to see a doctor, Yoonis. Bring a real doctor here. Someone from the ICRC.”

  Hearing “ICRC” again upset him. Yoonis had taken lessons somewhere in bully-boy manners. Any reasonable argument now impressed him as a threat.

  “If you do not take this test,” he said, “you will not receive any treatment.”

  He and the runner, a mild-faced man who came and went with a pistol tucked into his sarong, squatted in front of my mattress. I insisted on washing my hand with shampoo (since we had no soap). The runner turned out to be conscientious and careful. He drew a small vial of blood and went out. I spent the next day in a near stupor, misted with fever, but Yoonis and the runner returned in the evening with a surprise. A local doctor had tested the blood and found both typhoid and malaria. Yoonis now had a whole bagful of pharmaceuticals. He explained how to take the drugs, in what order, for how many days—everything the pharmacist had told him—and I was impressed. They had visited a real clinic in Galkayo. The hostage was an investment, after all, and he had to be kept alive.

  X

  I shivered under my blanket for seven days and leaked sweat into my foam mattress. One drug, Cotecxin, seemed to lift me out of my feverish muddle. But there was nothing like disease in a prison house to strip off your mental defenses. On a normal day as a hostage, I had enough cussedness to resist the pirates’ nonsense with a critical mind and hope for freedom in the not-too-distant future. With malaria in my blood, I wanted to die.

  My appetite returned, slowly, and I harassed the guards for better food. The runner brought bananas and limes for a week. Goat shoulder and soup came every two days. After I appeared healthy again, my diet regressed to a bowl of beans dusted with sugar in the morning, a bowl of almost dry spaghetti for lunch, and another bowl of beans when the sky deepened and the mosquitoes started to whine.

  Malaria can kill, so the ordeal humbled me. I had to reorder my head to move myself through an average day. I missed Rolly and Marc, and I tried to imagine them in the Seychelles—their families, the mango tree, the yelling turtles—but I hedged any enthusiasm about their freedom, the way I hedged everything I heard from the pirates.

  On the Naham 3, I’d compiled a list of crew names on a slab of cigarette cardboard, so I could learn to spell them, along with a list of Creole fish names I’d learned from Rolly. I had reproduced these lists on a few folded scraps of paper in my shorts pocket. One evening, while I scribbled on these scraps, Madobe crept up to my mosquito tent and hissed. I jumped and almost shouted. He confiscated my notes, and I threw a tantrum and compared Madobe to Somalia’s last dictator. “Bur’ad, Siad Barre—same-same!” I shouted. (These men loathed the memory of Siad Barre as much as they loved their self-image as freedom fighters.)

  I was clearly on edge; I had to find another way to manage the inarticulate stress. Without my notepaper I learned to recite the lists of crewman and fish names in my head, every morning, to keep them memorized. I had also left two unfinished books behind in Berlin, so, to keep my brain busy, I thought about the passages I wanted to change. Every morning I ran through what I could remember of the manuscripts and composed new parag
raphs. Once I had a new section “written,” I started to rehearse it, the way an actor memorizes lines. Soon I had a two-hour drill.

  This mental strategy worked. It was not completely original: the idea came from the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who had spent fourteen years in prison after a military coup in the sixties. I had interviewed him in Jakarta in 2004, not long before his death—a sweet, smiling old man with bifocals who chain-smoked clove cigarettes. Ten of his years in captivity had consisted of hard labor on the jungle island of Buru, where convicts had to clear dense foliage and build their own barracks and roads. “Usually, during a break in forced labor,” Pramoedya told me, “the inmates and I were gathered and they would listen to my stories. When they worked somewhere else, they retold the stories to their friends.” The other prisoners arranged for him to be excused from work for a few hours every day so he could sit at a desk. Imagining these stories, first for inmates, then on paper, had kept his mind in order. So it occurred to me that story composition, even in silence, might keep me from losing mine.

  When I finished my recitations, I stood up to do yoga. Early sun shot through the windows every morning to light the painted concrete room, and while I faced the window on my feet, I could watch guards work in the yellowish courtyard, watering potted trees or washing saucepans from the kitchen. Running from this house was impossible, since the pirates lazed in the hallways leading to both doors, but I studied the courtyard every morning anyhow, with my blurred, still-optimistic eyes, looking for ways to escape.

  Sometimes the pirates paused at the front gate to peek through a gap at the road. They were locked in, too.

  Around midday a phone would ring and a runner would open a smaller gate with his keys. He handed the pirates a bag of khat, which they carried into my room. The men surrounded the bag like sharks, and when each pirate had his share he would thumb through the stems, looking for a reddish tinge that meant ripe khat and a high afternoon.

  For me these afternoons were long and terrifying. The heat mounted; the flies lost their minds. On the worst days I took to lying on my mattress with one arm across my face to shield myself from the torture of their twitchy, intolerable legs. They tried to land on my lips, in my nostrils, on my eyeballs. The flies I knew from home had a near-magnetic evasion instinct for an oncoming hand, but hunger had taught these creatures a stubborn headlong aggression. They didn’t care if you hit them. Instead they tried to land on the same patch of skin, over and over, to wear down a victim’s will. Trying to kill them turned into a game, and I could fall into a delirious, zombielike afternoon rut:

  Smack.

  I did that already.

  Smack.

  I did that already.

  Smack.

  I did that already.

  Smack.

  A fly would drop to the floor.

  Gunfire punctuated these passages of time like a savage cuckoo clock. People just fired their guns in the street. I was never sure whether someone had been wounded or killed. (“They are happy,” said Bashko.) But I understood through these long hours that my sweaty idleness and indiscriminate fear profited no one but some distant investors. “The only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in a very different context. “All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth.”

  Smack.

  I did that already.

  Five times a day I heard distant muezzins. Five times a day, the pirates swept khat leaves off their mats in the hall to spread thin cloths or sarongs at their feet. They faced north, crossed their arms, murmured “Allahu akbar,” and started to kneel and scrape in a flowing, unchanging rhythm.

  XI

  Somali bananas had an intense, tangy-sweet flavor, and in December I hassled the guards to bring a supply of bananas and limes to eat instead of my second, rather disgusting bowl of sugared beans. Otherwise I ate no fruit. I wanted a better diet.

  “Banana, too much,” said Bashko.

  “Banana good,” I argued. “Banana, liin—vitamin. Good!”

  Liin was the word for “lime.” I felt a lack of vitamin C. For a pirate gang demanding millions from my family, it wasn’t a crazy demand. Bashko ordered one more bunch of bananas from the runner, but nothing else, and once they ran out we had a simmering debate. I couldn’t believe my guards found it easier to cook beans for me twice a day than to provide a cheap dose of fruit. So I borrowed a pen and drew an obsessive little diagram on a scrap of cardboard.

  First, there was my regimen of half-nutritious stodge:

  DIGIR [beans in the morning]

  BAASTO [dry spaghetti in the afternoon]

  DIGIR [beans at sundown]

  “Somali, no problem!” I added, with an angry flourish in ballpoint ink.

  Then I gave them my idea of a more balanced prisoner’s diet, which was still inadequate but should have been easier to prepare:

  DIGIR [beans]

  BAASTO [pasta]

  BANANA–LIIN [banana–lime]

  “Somali PROBLEM FULL!” I wrote.

  Bashko took the scrap of cardboard and laughed. He handed it around to his friends, who all had a good chuckle.

  “Somali no money,” Bashko complained.

  “Somali bullshit,” I said.

  The next day, Bashko sat in the hall in a white plastic chair, which he’d found in another room and placed in the middle of a khat-littered mat. Two other guards, Issa and Abdul, curled around him like dogs. It was the sluggish hour before khat arrived. Bashko wanted to banter again.

  “Michael,” he said with a grin. “Somalia, money full?”

  I sat up and smiled.

  “No, no,” I clarified. “Bur’ad, money full.”

  Somalia wasn’t rich, but its pirates were. Bashko repeated my phrase and grinned. “Bur’ad, money full.”

  “Yes,” I insisted. “Issa said he had a house in Galkayo. I don’t own a house.”

  “Adiga no house?” he said, surprised.

  “No.”

  Issa sat up from his doze. He remembered that my father, like his, was gone.

  “But—your father’s house,” he said.

  “No, that’s gone, too.” I stared at them. “I don’t own a car. Issa says he has a car.”

  They were both surprised. “Adiga no car?”

  “No.” In Berlin I didn’t need one.

  “But, before . . .” said Issa.

  “I’ve owned a car in my lifetime,” I said.

  “Ah, okay.”

  Bashko adjusted himself in the chair. “Okay—adiga, aniga, no problem,” he said. You and I are cool. “But America, money full. Europe, money full. In Somalia,” he added, “hungry-problem.”

  “That’s true,” I said and held his eyes. “No good.”

  A brutal famine had killed thousands of people in other parts of Somalia in 2011 and 2012; but I couldn’t tell whether Bashko was also claiming starvation. Refugees from within Somalia had fled to Galmudug because of the relative prosperity there.

  “America was not always rich,” I said. “Europe was not always rich. You have to build up, slow-slow,” I said, and made a stepwise motion with my hand.

  We were limited by our failures of language to some pretty crude arguments. We left out the ravages of colonialism; we left out the Somali climate and a hundred other complications.

  “Indonesia isn’t rich,” I went on. “It’s poor and Muslim, with many Sufis, like Somalia. They don’t shoot each other.” By and large.* “They have roads and decent shops. A lot of people don’t have cars, but they ride scooters. You can raise a family in peace.” I shrugged. “Indonesia’s nice.”

  “Muslim?” said Bashko.

  “Yes.”

  “Muslim good!”

  “Sure.”

  Bashko was surprised to hear such a thing from me. So far I’d been treated like a prisoner of a vague but global war, a captive from
a distant subclan that, by definition, hated Muslims. I did not hate Muslims. But now I had a chance to ask a question that had baffled me for most of the year.

  “Bashko, you are a Muslim.”

  “Yes!”

  “But you are also a thief.” I bumped my fingers together, which by now was a comprehensible gesture for us. These things don’t fit together. “No same-same.”

  A smile crept over his face as my intention dawned. He laughed and rattled a translation to his friends. “Hmm,” said Issa. Bashko straightened up in his chair and tapped his chest.

  “I am a Muslim,” he said. “But I am also a thief. Why? Because in Somalia, hungry-problem.”

  As if Allah could outlaw thievery but make exceptions for pirates. It’s okay, guys, you’re poor. Once you steal enough money, you can be good Muslims.

  “I don’t think Islam works like that,” I said.

  Bashko had a spry, combative mind, so the theological problem bothered him for the next two weeks. We returned to it one morning while I ate my dawn ration of beans. He’d been lazy about cooking them, and I had threatened a hunger strike. He’d lost our little showdown and delivered the bowl with ill grace, like a man feeding a dog.

  He watched me eat with fervid, resentful eyes.

  “Michael.”

  “What.”

  “Muslim,” he said, and smiled wickedly. “No chum-chum, no problem!”

  “Oh?”

  “Christian, no chum-chum—problem full!”

  A Muslim could tolerate hunger, in other words, unlike a certain Christian in the room.

  I wiped my fingers clean with a scrap of toilet paper. I had great stoic reserves, but I was not about to go hungry just to make life easier for a bunch of lazy pirates.