Two new Somalis joined the group at Dhuxul’s. One was lanky and mild-seeming, named Farrah, with a sharp chin and shy, hooded eyes. The other was a young man who called himself Hashi. He had innocent-looking round eyes and a wispy mustache. He approached me, at first, with a round-shouldered meekness, and he left thin little notebooks lying around on the patio. I hadn’t seen a notebook in months.
Hashi never tried to do me harm. He never made jokes at my expense. Bashko’s loyalty to my welfare depended on his mood, but Hashi was low-key and kind. He and Farrah became friends. These allegiances were significant, because at least half of the ever-shifting team treated me with the same indifference and contempt as Madobe.
One afternoon, while I sat on the edge of my mattress and ate from a bowl of potatoes, I spotted a notebook near Hashi’s cross-legged knees. The men used them to record not just shifts but wages, khat debts, and pocket money. They received an allowance, I think as an advance on their expected windfall, and sometimes, after a visit from a boss, I saw them with stacks of Somali shillings. Bundled, rotten stacks of devalued shillings were still traded on the street in Somalia, even though the nation had no central bank and hadn’t printed new money since 1991.
Hashi seemed to have extra notebooks. I asked for one.
“Okay!” he said.
I had an old pen stashed in my bag, so after my meal I took the thin stapled notebook—blue, with a UNICEF logo—and sat in a far corner of the room, to hide from the Somalis’ unblinking attention.
Recipe ideas came out first:
Green salsa
Green tomatoes, cilantro, lime, poblano, onions, garlic
Baked ham with squash and cilantro pesto mash
Red snapper with shallots, lime, poblano, refried beans
Fat white beans
Fry garlic in sesame oil, cut tomatoes, let juice mix with oil, & pour over warm beans. Serve with whatever.
These cravings surprised me. They were sharp and specific. I’d never cooked any of this stuff before. I rarely cooked ham,* and I never made recipes up. I was an eager but not an original cook. Now clear ideas arrived, whole and uninvited, like shimmering poetic visions.
When the pirates made a stew with mutton kidney, instead of liver, I remembered a rich brown kidney stew I had tasted in Britain and scribbled a recipe in my notebook that improved on the pirates’ mess with mushrooms, garlic, salsify, chestnuts, Worcestershire sauce, and Guinness. The ingredients were pure guesswork. Astonishingly, at least to me, I got most of them right. I had no experience cooking kidneys, but my body needed protein and iron, and it drove my brain to compose a recipe from the memory of a single meal eaten five years before.
Jotting down recipes reintroduced me to the incredible pleasure of composing by hand. Soon I drafted a short story that had occurred to me during those long, blank afternoons in the Pirate Villa. I sat cross-legged, with the book on the floor, and because of my weak eyes I had to bend forward in a way that started to hurt my shoulders and spine after an hour or two. I structured my day around these short bursts of writing. No one seemed to care. Something had changed, in me as well as my guards. It felt unnatural to live in the same house and remain filthy-minded toward someone for twenty-four hours a day. Most people couldn’t maintain that level of enmity, so my attitude tempered, and the guards allowed themselves to forget the evening, last autumn, when Madobe had confiscated my scraps of notepaper, when writing was still against the rules.
VIII
One night at Dhuxul’s, I had to urinate before the morning prayer. The guards sat on the patio, watching me sleep, and when I stirred too much, they objected. I wasn’t supposed to be awake. But my bladder felt like a balloon. I raised the mosquito net.
Madobe said, “Wuuriyaa!” and shone a flashlight at my face. Hey!
“Kadi,” I said.
“Sleeping!” he said.
I sat still and held up my chains.
“Kadi,” I repeated calmly.
I couldn’t make out faces in the dark, but I heard Hashi’s voice and Farrah’s. Madobe leaned in close to threaten me. Making any disturbance at this hour was against the rules.
“Kadi,” I insisted.
Madobe lurched and flicked his hand, so one knuckle flattened my eyeball.
“Jesus!” I shouted, and the noise angered Hashi and Farrah. They argued with Madobe. Hitting hostages was also against the rules. They hissed in whispers until one of them tossed me the keys.
Madobe had thwacked me this way before, when it was his job, one evening, to chain my feet. He was adept with his knuckle, and I knew the eye would hurt for a day or two. It throbbed now with every heartbeat, and I returned to the mattress pulsing with anger. I lay awake until the sun rose. Hashi came in to remove the chains, and after some time Bashko delivered my bowl of beans.
I shook my head and pushed it away.
“No chum-chum?” he said.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Madobe hit me.”
When the boss came out for a shower, Bashko translated my complaint. Hashi and Farrah corroborated the story. Dhuxul listened to everything with dead and quiet eyes, gave his men a phlegmatic order, and went out.
A thermos of tea helped me through the morning. I still felt drawn with hunger, but I knew what to expect, appetite-wise, and while the minutes ticked by without breakfast, I could manage the animal panic.
Dhuxul returned for lunch with a hot restaurant delivery of spiced rice and boiled goat. The men unpacked it from foam trays and feasted. I lay still, and Dhuxul limped in to set a plate of food on the floor, near my pillow. The room filled with the smell of seasoned meat. I stared at Dhuxul, thinking he was the same person I had seen on my first night in Galkayo, the sinister, fat boss who had settled in our room and smoked a cigarette while the guards told him about the Naham 3. He seemed familiar in another way, too, but I couldn’t place why.
Dhuxul made an offer. He would punish Madobe “tonight.” Madobe is sleeping right now, Bashko said.
Would I eat?
Prickly question. Refusing this overture risked punishment, but agreeing would have made it easy for Dhuxul to forget our terms.
Yes, I told Bashko. After Dhuxul punished Madobe, I would eat. Not before.
I pushed away the plate.
Dhuxul picked up my chains from a corner and moved to a room next door. I heard the chains clink. Hashi and Farrah sat on the patio, with worried faces. When I saw Dhuxul again, he held Madobe in the posture of a slave, bent forward, with his chained hands yanked behind his back. He smacked the young guard across the head and shoved a knee against his rear end. Madobe, my wiry persecutor, glanced into my room with derision and fear. Dhuxul pulled the chains tight, Madobe winced in pain, and Dhuxul shoved him back to the other room.
It appalled my conscience to see a man chained and smacked on my account; but there was no room for such fine feelings in Somalia. The pirates were poor but vengeful bullies who wanted to acquaint me with hunger, with the prospect of death, above all with the rule of force. The soul of the country’s social order was still violent, even autocratic, and there was no contradiction between the disorder of its anarchy and the power of violent discipline.
“Okay, Michael?” Bashko repeated.
The boss had made his concession. I had to respond.
“Okay,” I said.
And Madobe, for a while, quit thwacking me.
IX
The bosses’ demand for money tumbled in the first half of 2013, from eight million dollars to six million, then flirted with five. Mom kept track of everything in her notebooks, the FBI saved recordings; there was a sense of progress. She bargained with Fuad, or some proxy for Fuad, by email and phone. “I told them I was a retired person, I was on a fixed income, and I had sold property and I was raising as much as I could,” Mom said.
She’d assembled money for my ransom through various circles—family, friends, magazines I had worked for, various U.S. and German instit
utions. But the fund was limited. Western hostages have a rough price on the world market, but it’s a function of guesswork, of global rumor and bluffs, of sheer illusion and sometimes accurate journalism.* In Somalia, the shipping industry had distorted the hostage calculus, because the largest cargo ships carried massive insurance plans, and every day a vessel full of oil or steel rested at anchor off Somalia represented a dead loss for its owners. After a certain amount of time, it made financial sense for the owners to splash out and recover both hostages and ship. This logic didn’t apply to human beings on land. But pirates pretended it did.
For a year and a half, Mom’s life had revolved around the mess on the kitchen table. She’d spent most of it struggling with a brick-wall demand of twenty million, so the momentum in the spring came as a relief. Since our last phone call in January she had asked for another conversation with me. “I would say, ‘I need to talk to my son; I need proof of life.’” she said later. “We were dealing with ‘Abdi Yare’ . . . and he would say, ‘I will do that as soon you have the money.’ Meaning his amount.” So a long period of no telephone contact began.
In late spring, Fuad, or Abdurrahman, put my mother in touch with a mysterious Sa’ad elder calling himself Sheikh Mohamud, who promised to work as an intermediary. Under his ministrations, the ransom demand seemed to collapse. “He mentioned $1.5 million,” said Mom, “and I said, ‘Okay, I can work on that. I don’t have one point five, but I will do my best, and maybe we can reach an agreement.’”
Until then, her offer had rested at one million dollars. “But he retracted a few days later,” Mom said. “He came back and said, ‘No, you misunderstood—it was coming down $1.5 million, from six.’
“Of course, we listened to the recording, and we had not misunderstood,” she said. “He was very clear about it. But now it was different again, and it bounced back and forth, and on our next conversation it was five million again, and it stayed there for a while.”
The odd part of this story is that I had a similar conversation with Abdurrahman in June 2013. One afternoon, he came into the compound in a happy fog of smiles from the whole team of guards. “Michael,” he said, “you will go free. The demand is down to $1.5 million. You will fly to Nairobi in seven days.”
The news was so sudden I thought he was telling the truth. Eight million dollars was ridiculous, but $1.5 million—from what I knew about hostage negotiations—did not seem out of range. I didn’t know how Mom would pay, but it was the first time I’d heard a story from Abdurrahman that was not an obvious lie. So I allowed myself a flutter of optimism, which carried me along on a dream of freedom that fit with the chronology Mom had indicated on the phone—“Another couple of months!”—and I was nicer to the pirates, and everyone got along, until, after seven days, the excitement faded, there was no sign of change, and, when I saw Abdurrahman again, he seemed unwilling to talk.
I asked him about the pirates’ demand, and he mumbled, “It is four point five.”
“You said one point five just over a week ago.”
“No, I said one point five less,” he insisted. “You have misunderstood.”
X
The devastation I felt was foolish and brutal, foolish because I should have known better and brutal because hope had become a psychological risk, something worse than a frustrating cycle. It was a breaking wheel, an emotional indulgence with a treacherous downward slope. It could fuck me up for days. I had to detach myself like a Buddhist from my own desire to be free, the way I had to detach myself during a hunger strike from my profound desire for food. I had to quiet my raging thoughts and quit hoping for any future at all. The discipline was monkish but not large hearted; I just learned to adjust to the shifting currents of indignity with as much quiet loathing as I needed to keep myself sane.
Sometime in the summer a new pirate named Farhaan joined the group of guards. I woke up one morning and a fat, jolly-seeming man with dull eyes and a scruffy goatee, who spoke some English, introduced himself with a gentle handshake, pointing to a little scar on his wrist.
“From Mogadishu,” he said. “Nineteen ninety-three.”
“Black Hawk Down?”
“Yes.”
I squinted. Bashko was about twenty-five; Farhaan seemed a little older.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Shooting-shooting,” he said.
“Twenty years ago,” I noted.
“Yes,” he said, and walked away.
Bashko sat in the doorway with his gun. “How old is Farhaan?” I said, and Bashko flashed me a number with his fingers and hands. “Thirty!”
“So in Mogadishu,” I said, “he was ten?”
He laughed and said something down the hall to Farhaan, who answered in an irritated rattle of Somali.
“Thirty-five!” Bashko corrected.
Somalis called the Battle of Mogadishu “the Day of the Rangers,” and it had mythic status in my pirates’ minds. The two-day battle in 1993 was a low point for the American military as well as the U.N., whose good-hearted mission to feed Somalis in the first years after the fall of Siad Barre now stands as “the greatest failure of the U.N. in our lifetime,” according to one UNICEF official. The author Aidan Hartley, who first applied the word “warlord” to Somalia’s belligerent ex-generals and tribal leaders, has been more colorful and direct. “International forces swiftly picked a fight with one of the Mogadishu warlords, and the development goals were all swept away in a bloody feud that led to the mission’s failure,” he wrote in an afterword to Gerald Hanley’s Warriors. “And so it was that U.N. peacekeepers . . . ended up machine-gunning civilians from helicopters.”
The battle, in that sense, exposed the worst contradictions of international aid. Food aid is not just largesse between nations; it’s a political tool, and Siad Barre had relied on it during his regime—first from the Soviet Union, then the United States. When the collapse of Communism ended any political need to shore up distant African dictatorships, Western aid to Somalia dwindled, and generals rebelled. The most powerful upstart was a Sa’ad leader of the Habar Gidir,* Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Warlords need political support no less than presidents, and sacks of U.N. grain, for Aidid, were one way to shore it up.
The civil war after Siad’s collapse was bloody enough to shock world leaders to attention, and a swarm of U.S. Marines swept onto beaches near Mogadishu in late ’92 with the goal of stabilizing Somalia. The elder President Bush intended the mission as a grace note to his first term in office. He hoped for reports about Western medical care and international aid, and the self-contradictory doctrine of “humanitarian force” did manage to bring most warring Somali clans to the peace table. But “trucks with food,” as a German Red Cross worker pointed out at the time, “are like trucks full of money,” and Aidid simply rerouted them. It was straightforward corruption. The unequal distribution spoiled high Western talk about nation-building, and when the U.N. tried to break Aidid’s stranglehold on the grain, America had to back up its demands with guns.
Aidid hated the U.N. He wanted to lead Somalia, but the U.N. had tried to push him out of the peace process without considering that his wider clan, the Habar Gidir, held crucial influence. Violence escalated between Habar Gidir militias and U.N. troops for several months while presidents changed in the White House. Finally an American group of special forces in helicopters captured two of Aidid’s lieutenants in October ’93 (under President Clinton). The mission went wrong. Somalis shot down two Black Hawks over the streets of Mogadishu, angry Somalis closed in on the wrecks, and international forces fought a two-day street battle to rescue the trapped Americans. It turned into the bloodiest quagmire for the American military since Vietnam. Hundreds of Somalis died, maybe a thousand were wounded, and the Army lost eighteen troops, including two Delta Force fighters and one Black Hawk pilot whose corpses were dragged naked through the streets and paraded on Somali TV.
This mess did help explain what I was still doing in Somalia. Sa’ads had not
forgotten the Day of the Rangers. For them it was a humiliation, a day of murder they still failed to understand. Aidid died in 1996, but some of the Sa’ad guards I met still considered themselves embroiled in a clan war with the United States.
(Some pirates thought of Germany as a “subclan” of Europe, and some accused me of having clan relationships with “ruling families” in the United States—the Bushes or the Clintons. The reason they could get away with such a weird but convenient misunderstanding was that last names have a different meaning in Somalia. Every Somali, in fact, has three first names: one personal and the other two cascading down from the father’s side, indicating recent parentage but not advertising clan or family membership.)
What the pirates said around me, in any case, played up the supposed clan tensions, including Ali Tuure’s ridiculous claim of cannibalism and anything Farhaan uttered. Farhaan wasn’t even Habar Gidir. But he came into my room one morning with his phone to show me a Somali documentary about the disaster. It included clips of President Bush making promises on TV, spliced with bloody scenes of Somalis wounded or killed by helicopters. He squatted near my bed and watched me watch the movie.
“George Bush—criminal!” he said after a while.
“No good,” I mumbled, frowning at the scenes on his phone. But it was odd and complicated to hear this criticism from a pirate.
Some liberal opinion held that Western aid to developing nations amounted to neocolonialism, a soft imperialism that allowed poor nations to grow addicted to charity while rich nations told them what to do. The Day of the Rangers was Exhibit A.* My pirates wanted aid anyhow. They didn’t think too hard. Bashko felt that rich countries should help destitute places like Somalia with no strings attached. But there were always strings, and the odd part was that aid didn’t even seem to cross Bashko’s mind when he thought about the Day of the Rangers.
The Desert and the Sea Page 28