The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  The guards had to serve my breakfast, clean my dishes, tote my laundry, and boil my tea. It put them in an awkward position. They expected a massive payout for watching an American, so guarding the Pirate Villa was in some sense a top-notch job. But the dynamic was hard to ignore. The foreigner lay on his bed and made requests; the Somalis served him. They enforced this cartoon-colonial arrangement with Kalashnikovs. The parents and grandparents of these pirates had resisted Italian occupation as well as Siad Barre; they had struggled for independence to keep their children free. They would have been appalled by the self-degradation. The men had long afternoons in our concrete villa to understand that piracy was little more than begging with guns, and after several months, I think, this indignity reversed the gangster romance in their minds—although Bashko tried to wield the humiliation to his advantage by claiming that he was a prisoner, too.

  “Adiga, aniga—same-same!” he would say, meaning we were both locked inside the compound. We certainly were. But I looked Bashko in the eye and answered,

  “Same-same—okay, sahib. Aniga, Kalashnikov?”

  And I lurched, jokingly, for his gun.

  “No!” he said. “Fucking.”

  For about three weeks in February we heard lumbering overflights every handful of days. A circling Orion would rouse us in the cool hours around midnight, and the guards whispered like fugitives while I came straight up from sleep in a charge of confusion and hope. (Had my laundry trick worked? Would SEALs come blasting in?) One of the bosses—in response, I think, to the flights—ordered the men to lock my feet in chains, and from then on we lived by a grim unchanging schedule. When the light faded in the room, when the mosquitoes started to whine, when I had dropped the net around my mattress and eaten a bowl of dull brown beans, when the evening muezzin had called from the nearest mosque and I had gone to the bathroom, I had to submit to a Somali guard squatting in front of me, sometimes with a flashlight, to wrap my ankles in a bicycle chain and snap on a pair of locks. I remained locked up for about eleven hours, until the first muezzin sang over the rooftops at five the next morning when I was allowed to sit up and say, “Kadi?” and the guard watching me from the dim hall would root around for a set of tinkling keys.

  IV

  The padlocks flopping on my ankles changed my state of mind. I had flown to Somalia with curiosity and compassion; I had wanted to show, as far as I could, how Somalis lived and what pirates thought. But with the chains on I struggled every night with hatred and debilitating rage. The men treated me like a herd animal. Around me they smoked, giggled, bowed toward Mecca, and whispered passionate prayers the way nomads in the desert might pass their time around livestock.

  While I lay in the dark one night, I realized that Bashko’s logic about infidels echoed the reasoning of Barbary pirates. Ottoman leaders on the coast of North Africa used to send out pirates as a form of slow-burning jihad. In those days, the most obvious tension along the southern borders of Europe was between Christians and Muslims, and catching Christian prisoners was just a halal way to raise cash. The ships hunted in both directions. “By the end of the sixteenth century, slave-hunting corsair galleys, both Christian and Muslim, roamed throughout the Mediterranean,” wrote Robert C. Davis in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, “seeking their human booty from Catalonia to Egypt.”

  Miguel de Cervantes spent five years as an Algerian hostage after pirates attacked his galley in 1575. They caught his brother Rodrigo, too. Both men were soldiers on their way home to Spain; Miguel had lost the use of his left hand in the Battle of Lepanto. The Moors demanded a steep ransom from the Cervantes family, because Miguel had letters of recommendation from powerful-sounding noblemen. But the family struggled to pay. Miguel tried to escape five times. The jailers kept both men chained in the bagnios—royal Moorish baths converted to dungeons underneath Algiers—until the family ransomed each brother, one at a time, with help from an order of Spanish friars.

  European captives who couldn’t be ransomed were auctioned by pirates into the great Arab-run market for slaves, the trans-African network of bazaars and caravan routes running from Mombasa to Marrakech. Since Ottoman slave owners delighted in converting infidels, the whole saga of Mediterranean kidnapping—captivity under “the Turk,” suffering and slavery, then release to a Christian home—became a commonplace in European church services. Whenever freed Italian slaves came home from North Africa, for example, their towns held parades and sang songs of liberation. “The processions usually set out in the late morning,” wrote Davis, “often led by soldiers, but sometimes by ‘trumpeters [and] drummers, with a chorus’ (who sang such appropriate psalms as ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’ or ‘Super flumine Babylonis’).”

  Lying on my mattress, I could gnash my teeth and curse this old tradition of Muslim kidnapping; I could remember how the U.S. Navy and Marines had squelched Barbary pirates in 1815 and I could wonder where the hell they were now. But a hundred years before the Barbary missions, American colonists had also sailed as pirates, because it was an accepted way for them to raise cash. People who lived in Atlantic seaboard towns in the 1600s were almost as secluded and peculiar as modern Somalis in Hobyo or Eyl, and if the locals had to resort to piracy, well, that was nobody’s business but their own. Underemployed sailors did it. Sea captains did it. Before the African slave trade took off in the New World, a white underclass of European servants figured out fast that regular life in the colonies wasn’t for them. “Prisoners of war, poor debtors, criminals from the gaols and young men and boys kidnapped in the streets of English towns” were shipped across the Atlantic and sold into colonial servitude, wrote George Francis Dow in The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630–1730. “A roving disposition was soon awakened and runaway servants were almost as common as blackbirds,” and some of these rovers became “pirates of the usual type.”

  When Americans think of colonial piracy, they might imagine British or Spanish swashbucklers roving the Caribbean, or Blackbeard in Carolina, lighting firecrackers in his hair. But the real money came from a different part of the world—from long-distance raids on treasure-heavy ships in the Red Sea. Colonial captains like Henry Every, Thomas Tew, and William Kidd* sailed from the American coast to Africa and sacked East Indiamen en route from England, to annoy the Crown, or hijacked Mughal vessels laden with gold. These pirates often traveled under contract from northeastern governors,* and their hunting ground was the watery lane between India and the Red Sea. They set up year-round camp on Madagascar. The whole enterprise was a middle finger aimed at the Navigation Acts, the English laws restricting colonial trade. Supply lines to these distant Madagascar settlements became a lucrative commerce for American colonists, and during the hajj the most adventurous captains in Madagascar sailed around the Horn of Africa to attack Muslim-crewed ships trundling through the Gulf of Aden, and then the Red Sea, toward Mecca. “It is known that Eastern people travel with the utmost magnificence,” wrote Captain Charles Johnson* at the time, describing one raid on an imperial Mughal vessel called the Ganj-i-Sawai: “They had with them all their slaves and attendants, their rich habits and jewels, with vessels of gold and silver, and great sums of money to defray the charges of their journey by land.”

  In 1700, William Penn was so impressed by the role pirate treasure had played in colonial finance that he wrote to London, with a baroque flair for sentence construction:

  As for Piracy, I must needs say that if Jamaica had not been the Seminary, where pirates have commenced Masters of Art after having practiced upon the Spaniard, and then launched for the Red & Arabian Sea, and at Madagascar have found a yearly supply of flour, bread, ammunition and arms from some of our neighboring colonies, that perhaps in 10 years’ time got a million by it, and then have returned these fellows upon us and our Coasts, we had never had a spot upon our Garment.

  Three hundred years before Somali pirates, in other words, the scourges of the Indian Ocean were rebel subjects of the British Empire—American colonial pirates.
So I could lie in the dark and curse my kidnappers, but I had done this research and I knew better than to think of myself, or my heritage, as innocent.

  V

  My guards took orders from pirate bosses because they had little choice—they’d joined the gang out of poverty, and the bosses ruled by violence—but they still had a weird notion of their own moral agency. For them the criminal violence of extortion, hijackings at sea, chains on a hostage’s ankles, or even torture in the woods were just things that happened. Pirates did them, sure, but the average pirate considered these evils to be over his head, out of his personal control. Bashko told me I was a hostage because of “Allah’s will”—as if Allah could somehow bring Bashko fortune, and me misfortune, without the strenuous intervention of pirates.

  One morning in February, Bashko lost the keys, and his carelessness upset me so much that I refused to eat breakfast.

  “No problem,” he mumbled, by way of encouragement.

  “Somali bullshit,” I declared.

  The keys turned up in another man’s bag of clothes. Bashko spent a few minutes tongue-lashing him before he unlocked my chains.

  A few days later, he came in to unchain me in the morning gloom and left the keys beside my mattress on the floor. More carelessness; but my heart trotted. I took a strip of toilet paper and waited two hours before my sentry, Madobe, was distracted. Then I swept up the keys and stashed them in an empty biscuit box.

  Before a trip to the bathroom, I stuffed this wad of toilet paper into my shorts pocket. The bathroom was a high stall of cracked white plaster, with a vent near the ceiling crafted from filigreed concrete. The porcelain toilet had to be flushed with water from a jerry can. I tossed in the wad of toilet paper, keys and all, and peed onto it. I flushed with a sense of mounting joy, over and over, and left the jerry can where it belonged, beside the bathroom door.

  “Mahadsanid,”* I said to Madobe, who was guarding the door with his rifle.

  It was a measure of my emotional destitution that something so petty could brighten me up. I felt elated for the rest of the day. When the evening muezzin called and I noticed Bashko rooting for the keys, I felt even better. He came in to ask about them.

  “Aniga, no,” I said, and shrugged. Wasn’t me, boss.

  He stared with a mixture of derision and disbelief. But he had no proof. The memory of missing keys from a few days before worked in my favor. He returned to scold the other men, and they picked up their mat in the hall and scoured the floor.

  “Michael!” Bashko said again. “Keys!”

  I shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Stand up!”

  He searched under my mattress, around my mattress, and through the biscuit box. He took the clothes out of a faux-leather bag I used as luggage. He let out a stream of well-chosen Somali.

  “Aniga, no,” I kept repeating.

  It felt wonderful to go to bed that night with no chains, but I lay awake while the guards inspected the house and Bashko made a frantic phone call. He shuffled and muttered until a runner arrived with new padlocks, and I had to be roused. Bashko strapped the chains around my ankles himself.

  When the first muezzin called in the morning, I sat up, swung my ankles out of the mosquito tent, and let the chains clank on the floor. “Kadi,” I said, but no one came in with keys. The Somalis took their time standing up to guard my way to the toilet.

  I held up the chain.

  “No. Fucking,” said Bashko. “Come on.”

  The chains gave me a six-inch stride. I lifted the excess length off the dirty floor and started to shuffle. The links rubbed my ankles raw, and the guards watched with hard satisfaction, as if I had bought and paid for this treatment myself. Maybe I had. But I returned to bed in a flush of rage at the prospect of spending all day fettered like a goat. My heart knocked against my sternum and I lay rigid, one arm over my face, just trying to keep the floor-grimed chains off my mattress, while in my head I recited the capitals of all fifty American states.

  When that was done, I tried to name all of Saul Bellow’s novels in order.

  Then Dylan albums.

  Then Faulkner.

  I still had an arm over my face when breakfast arrived. The steel bowl made a gritty, ringing noise on the floor.

  I didn’t stir, and Bashko hadn’t been out of the room longer than a minute when he put his head through the doorway again.

  “Michael,” he said. “Digir!”

  “No,” I said.

  “No digir?”

  I shook my head and waved him off. He returned to take the bowl.

  “Fucking!” he said.

  I didn’t even watch him leave. But he moved with such electric anger I couldn’t tell who was in charge. Would I get beaten, or punished in some other way? Were the pirates starving the hostage, or was the hostage refusing to eat? I had no clue how to end a hunger strike, but I knew my terms had to be straight and clear in my head. I was, for one thing, really hungry. Hunger rubbed a hole in my gut on a normal morning in Somalia, but now my body’s reaction to a single missed meal was a vivid, unexpected, deep-organ panic: WHERE’S THE FOOD? I lay on the mattress all morning with one arm over my face and sirens blaring in my head.

  VI

  I decided to eat again when the men took off my chains. How long would that take? Two days, maybe three? How long could I last? How long could anyone last without food or water? I must have known, once upon a time, but captivity had softened my brain and I had no way to research these things.

  Had I even sworn off water?

  In the dry heat of Somalia it would have meant a quick death to drink nothing. I didn’t know the rules of a hunger strike, or what the pirates assumed. I reached furtively for a water bottle, and took a gulp. It calmed and refreshed me. I took two more gulps and covered my face with my arm and pretended not to care what the pirates thought. I expected them to make a fuss. They didn’t. I ventured a cup of tea. It was delicious, and I realized the treacly hot liquid would become an important source of calories.

  Before noon, I heard busywork in the kitchen. Bashko finally carried in a heaping bowl of pasta, drenched in boiled potato and onion.

  “Michael—baasto, okay!” he said.

  Interesting. So they weren’t starving the hostage.

  “No,” I said.

  “Fucking!” Bashko said, and carried the bowl away.

  I heard an argument in the hall. Bashko used his phone. For lunch, a runner brought heavy plastic bags of restaurant food, including greasy seasoned rice and slabs of camel meat. It smelled like a holiday feast. Someone arranged it in heaps on a round tin tray the men used for communal meals, and they squatted in the hall where I could see them, scooping lunch into their mouths with their hands. It reminded me of our dinner in Budbud, the piles of pasta and Digsi’s ceremonial shoulder of goat.

  Soon Issa turned, with a deliberately pleasant look on his face, and raised his lanky arm to wave me in. “Michael, come on! Chum-chum.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Gil! Adiga!” they said. Camel for you!

  “No.”

  “Why not?” said Issa.

  I shook my head.

  The whole team ate; even the night-watch pirates woke up for camel and rice. Afterward Bashko and Issa came in with a small bowl of leftovers and squatted next to my bed.

  “Michael, why no chum-chum?” said Issa.

  “Because chains.”

  They conferred.

  “Chains finished, Michael chum-chum?” said Issa.

  I had to think about that.

  “Yes,” I said finally.

  Bashko found the keys and opened the padlocks. My stomach thanked me, and the simple holy relief of chain link falling from my skin gave me a rush of joy.

  “Okay, Michael?”

  I shrugged, still startled by my quick success. What if I’d held out for some greater goal? Better food, or freedom itself?

  I didn’t look the men in the eyes; I just nodded and searched for my fo
rk.

  VII

  In the spring of 2013, we moved to a different house in Galkayo, belonging to Dhuxul, an almost bald, almost obese man with deadened eyes and a tuneless voice. He walked with a limp, on a calf-shaped prosthetic—a pirate captain with a wooden leg. He told me his lower right leg had been shot off by American helicopters during the Battle of Mogadishu. That wasn’t impossible. He looked old enough—in his forties—to have fought Black Hawks in 1993; but then every pirate with a scar claimed to have memories of that disastrous battle.

  Dhuxul—pronounced Duhul, a dull and shapeless noise, not so different from the man—looked familiar to me in a way that flipped my stomach. He spent part of his time in the prison house, which was odd for a pirate boss. He kept booze and a TV in his bedroom. Every morning he started his Toyota Surf and let it idle in the courtyard until the house filled with diesel fumes. Then he drove off to some sort of job.

  At this house, my mattress lay just inside an open door, facing east. I could see planes land at the Galkayo airport and watch the dawn sky lighten every morning through an arabesque patio arch. When I asked Bashko why we’d moved, he said the other house had “too many drones.”

  “But here, not so many?”

  “Here, okay.”

  The houses weren’t far apart. The men had blindfolded me during our nighttime drive, and we’d taken a detour, but I could tell from the sound of muezzins around Galkayo that we hadn’t left the neighborhood.