On the third night, Jack angered Madobe by creeping back and forth across the pirates’ mat. When, inevitably, he crouched on the porch for a shit, Madobe swiped him against a wall. I slept through this commotion, but in the morning I noticed that Jack looked ill, or at least off-balance, and Bashko told me what had happened. He insisted on tying up the cat.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Restrain him?”
“Haa, yes,” he said. “Nighttime, only.”
I glanced around the room. “Using what?”
There was no answer, so I let Jack roam free. When night fell, I told the Somalis to let him go where he pleased. The next morning, of course, he was gone. Bashko tried to explain that the mother cat had returned, so the guards had set Jack free. But later I heard an alternate story from Hashi. He said Madobe had thrown Jack over the wall.
“Because why?” I said.
“Because—Madobe.”
“Fucking,” I said.
No young animal had much of a chance in Galkayo; I knew that. I had also understood that Jack’s term as a pet would be limited. But caring for a stray had reminded me of the pleasures of ordinary life.
Three days later, we heard a thin wail outside the compound wall. Someone opened the door and the kitten raced into my room.
“Jack!” I said.
He looked frantic, frightened, and thin. He hadn’t found much to eat. It sucks out there. I opened a can of fish, and he feasted like a lion.
I’d missed him keenly. I tried to stifle my emotional reflex the way I tried to stifle my disgust at the flyblown filth in my room, or my urges for revenge, but even while I suppressed these instincts I knew it was a muffled and white-knuckled way to live. The kitten got to me. He was the only creature I had met since my leap from the ship who seemed to like me. Now that he’d returned, I decided to keep him around. I dug in my bag for a pair of underused long pants, which had a belt improvised from a frayed strip of sarong cloth; I tied this soft rope around Jack’s middle, like a harness, and fastened the other end to a door handle. The fabric was long enough to let him sleep on the foot of my mattress, on a flattened part of the mosquito net. Bashko threw a rag behind the door for use as a kitty toilet. This system worked. Jack established a spot and slept there. At night sometimes he attacked my feet through the net, which woke me up, but he kept out of trouble with the guards.
At last I subjected him to a bath. I carried him to the shower room in one hand, with my soap and shampoo in the other, to give him a lather and a rinse. He didn’t appreciate this treatment at all. But in the Somali heat his coat dried quickly, and his color changed from dun and foxlike to something like furry peach.
IV
Jack had a long Abyssinian face, and he could be clumsy as well as ridiculously cheerful. He grew like a weed. But his furry nether regions failed to develop like a boy’s, so I started to think he was female.
“What should your name be?” I asked the kitten. “If you’re a girl and all.”
I decided to call her Julianne, after the actress Julianne Moore (another redhead).
One morning when Yoonis turned up at the house, I made a joke to Bashko—out of Yoonis’s earshot—about the cat returning from the chaos outside to eat free meals at the house. Bashko’s eyes lit up.
“Yoonis, same-same!” he said, and I laughed out loud.
The joke distracted me from an obvious fact. Yoonis, as a translator, showed his face only when the bosses had organized a phone call or a video. Bashko caught me unprepared the next day with an order to pack my things. “Video, video,” he whispered. He promised we would return to Dhuxul’s, so we left Julianne in the room, harnessed, with a supply of milk and an open can of fish. We drove out to the desert bush for another pointless act of pirate theater in front of another arching cluster of thorns. These excursions took hours; they were object lessons in wasted time. But under this particular cluster of thorns, I first heard the name Abdi Yare, which the pirates had used in phone calls to California. It was a shape-shifting name, a label applied to more than one pirate, but the rumor in California was that my guards were tired of holding me—“Abdi Yare” had run short of cash—so he seemed willing to bargain.
We returned to Dhuxul’s and idled in the compound while the men packed our things. Hashi found Julianne in my bedroom and handed her to me in a blanket. “Bisad, okay,” he said, and instead of staying at Dhuxul’s, we drove to the Pirate Villa with the kitten trembling in my lap.
That night I heard swirling sounds in the sky, an erratic and maddening noise like a turboprop landing and taking off. Galkayo’s airport lacked runway lights—it closed for business after dark—so I think all of us had visions of SEALs using the airport for a staging area. The rolling-thunder sound continued for a week and filled me with a strange and hopeful trepidation. It frightened the pirates, and one of them woke up in such a state of nerves he needed pills to calm him down. The next morning he sat against a wall in the entryway, smoking a cigarette with sagging lips, and the others made fun of him. They told me to call his name. “Xiiro,” I said,* and he just looked around, glassy eyed.
By now I just wanted freedom or death. I was ornery enough to suffer until my price fell to something manageable—I refused to yearn for a sudden, splash-out ransom of many millions—but my patience had shriveled, and I would have welcomed violence. I wanted pirates dead. These weren’t my rules. Death, and threats of death, were currency in Somalia; pirates wielded them for profit and fun.
One morning I happened to ask Bashko for news about the Naham 3, and he came up with a surprise.
“Naham 3 finished!” he said. “Albedo, sink!”
“What happened?”
“Finished! All crew, Somalia.”
The cargo vessel we’d been tethered to had sunk, Bashko said, and the bosses had tried to run an emergency skiff to save the hostages and pirates from the foundering ship. But several of the original twenty-three hostages from the Albedo, and about twenty Somalis, had drowned.
“All died,” he said.
“Jesus.” I squinted. “Pirates no swim?”
“No.”
I nodded. “Naham 3 okay?”
“Yes, okay. Not died.”
“All crew, Hobyo?”
Bashko hesitated. “Eh—Hobyo, Harardhere,” he said.
Bashko’s details were off, but overall he’d told the truth. The Albedo sank in the summer of 2013, because parts of the hull had rusted through. The Naham 3 stayed on the water, somehow, for another month, but by late summer the Somalis had abandoned both vessels.
“One Chinese,” Bashko admitted, “is died.”
“What? Who?”
He described Jie, the young Chinese crewman, and said he had died after a hunger strike. Jie was the good-humored, fey-looking kid who had made the joke about “cargo” when I showed him my new soccer jersey. One part of grief is fear, and the proximity of death—news of a fellow hostage, even if he was miles away—left me grim and melancholy.
“He go crazy,” Bashko said.
“I wonder why.”
V
Julianne was a pain in the ass, like any decent kitten. When she wandered free of her cloth rope during the day, she drove Madobe nuts. She scampered around the Pirate Villa yard to inspect laundry buckets and potted plants, and more than once I glanced out to see Madobe’s tall shape lumber after something unseen, like a ballplayer trying to field a tricky grounder. He would bring in Julianne and dump her in front of my mattress with a fierce, hissing complaint in Somali, shaking his splayed hands in frustration. That thing won’t sit still.
One night, a plane made a deep arc over Galkayo, and I heard the pirates whisper, “AC!” They went quiet and tense, and I fell asleep with Julianne perched on the foot of my mattress. Around midnight, Issa woke me up. “Michael, come on. Go out.” Groggily, I let him unlock the chains. I had to gather my things and roll up the mosquito net. Pirates packed the car while Julianne stood in the middle of the concrete room, look
ing confused, tethered by the long cloth to a window shutter.
Bashko led me into the courtyard while the pirates emptied the house.
“Bashko,” I said. “Bisad.”
“Bisad, no,” he said. “Bisad free.”
I squatted next to the car, draped in my blanket, looking up at the black, starry sky. For months I’d felt like a man underwater; for months I had drowned the most subtle and human feelings of sympathy and hope because they would have exposed me to emotional destitution. The cat had revived them. Bashko came over to explain that we were moving back to Dhuxul’s, but he would stay behind to clean things up. He would feed the cat. Then he would set her free.
“Okay, Michael?”
I shrugged. It was long expected, but not okay.
We drove to Dhuxul’s in a hurry and I had to sleep somehow in the humid concrete room. Through the doorway and the arabesque arch I could still see a spatter of stars. The pirates had feared a raid. I wondered if surveillance had traced us to this house. Weird feelings asserted themselves. Can they find me, or not? I had no idea what the military wanted, I couldn’t tell why I was still here, and there was no way to measure my own losses in character and ordinary love except by the numbness in my blood. Grief overwhelmed me—not just for Julianne but also for Jie and the Albedo and the stupid waste of lives and time that seemed to trail these pirates like a stink. I’d never seen such a powerful human force of chaos at such close range. Pirates had blinkered, selfish habits—they had a weaker instinct for cooperation than any group of humans I had ever met—and they were too shiftless and khat-addled to clean up their own mess in Galkayo, which resulted in a stupid and self-aggrandizing pirate society, a suicidal culture in which gunshots rang in the street and gunmen were winners, as Fuad had written to my mother, “while educated ones are losers in life.”
I’d read a theory somewhere that pirate behavior tended to increase during lulls between empires, because when tension between great powers existed, bands of pirates or guerrillas had less room to operate. They tended to fall under the ordered influence of one side or the other. In periods of transition—let’s say after the fall of Communism—the center gave way, and more forces acted on their own. The French historian Fernand Braudel had noticed this pattern when he studied the Mediterranean of the 1570s. The Spanish Armada had overwhelmed Ottoman imperial ships at the Battle of Lepanto (where Cervantes had fought), and tensions had slackened. “The end of the conflict between the great states,” he wrote, “brought to the forefront of the sea’s history that secondary form of war, piracy.” The theory held for Somalia because Siad Barre had collapsed after his Cold War sponsorships dried up. But it couldn’t quite account for the century and a half of relative peace on the oceans before the Cold War, the surprising lull in piracy that had started only under pressure from a minor breakaway republic (the United States) in the early 1800s.
I came up with another theory in the hot concrete room. Barbary pirates were a fringe expression of a long-simmering war between Christians and Muslims. They had existed before the Battle of Lepanto, and they had existed afterward. Tensions between empires may have let up after that battle, but the struggle didn’t end for good. Mediterranean piracy was a “secondary form of war” that also flourished during eras of primary war, not unlike our own, when imams find political reasons to fire up their people by emphasizing Verses of the Sword.
“Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero,” says Don Juan in Shaw’s marvelous play Man and Superman. Sure. And ideas about the Koran gave my guards an excuse to hold me captive. But they weren’t unique in the history of human rights abuses. An Argentinian journalist named Jacobo Timerman had counted the number of high-minded and lethal ideas fueling violence in his country while he sat in a government prison during the 1970s.
Rural and urban Trotskyite guerrillas; right-wing Perónist death squads; armed terrorist groups of the large labor unions . . . terrorist groups of Catholic rightists organized by cabals who opposed Pope John XXIII . . . Hundreds of other organizations involved in the eroticism of violence existed, small units that found ideological justification for armed struggle in a poem by Neruda or an essay by Marcuse.*
Ideas were just indicators, like words. They could inspire a person to great heights, or they could stodge the flow of instinct and love. Some ideas worked as excuses for tribal violence. Even fine ideas could drive people nuts, which meant that the foliage of an idea depended on its mental and emotional soil. There was entropy and violence in the world, I thought, and that was interesting. But there was also entropy and violence in the human heart.
One morning Issa leaned against a wall and fiddled with his phone. He always looked pensive, so I sometimes thought he was clever, or at least less gullible than the others. Now he said, “Michael,” and showed me a doctored photo of a smiling African man with a single, centered eye in his forehead. He’d found it on the internet.
“Real?” he said.
“A one-eyed man?” I said, and he gave a bashful laugh. It wasn’t a joke—he really wanted my opinion.
“No, no,” I said, a little startled by the question.
He nodded and went back to browsing through pictures on his phone.
“Issa,” I said after a while, “what will you do if I go free?”
“I will go out,” he said, and waved his hand. “From Somalia.”
“With your money?”
“Yes.”
“When Michael is free, Issa will be free?” I said with a crooked smile.
“Yes.”
“Where will you go?”
“To Italy,” he said. “Boat, from Libya.”
Stories had mounted on the radio about a fresh push of migrants to Europe. Issa stood to earn several thousand dollars from my ransom, and with that kind of money he could live well in Somalia. Did he really dream about a complicated voyage to Italy? The overland route through Ethiopia and Sudan to Libya would be dangerous and long.
“Somalia to Libya—how?” I said.
“No problem.”
Maybe he had good smuggling connections; maybe he was just being coy.
“You’re crazy,” I told him.
This was the end of 2013. Chaos in Libya had opened paths for smugglers to move more people across the Mediterranean, and lethal capsizings had become regular news. I thought of the humanity pouring into the sea as a mass of strangers, a class of people called “migrants” who would be unknowable until you met them, here and there, in Europe. But one of them sat right in front of me. Calling my feelings “mixed” was an understatement. My feelings whistled and pissed like a tropical storm—resentment, fury, pity, alarm. Issa held violent power over my fate, he could kill me if I tried anything funny, and both of us wanted out of Somalia. But his captive would move home to the relative privilege of Berlin—if I got out at all—while my Kalalshnikov-armed jailer harbored the grand dream of moving to Europe on a tottering Mediterranean boat.
VI
Near the end of 2013, negotiations budged again, and Mom had reason to hope the pirates would capitulate. She had to wonder for the first time about the logistics of my release. “We thought they might come to an agreement for $1.5 million,” she said, “and we thought we’d better have a plan in place to get you out of there.” She contacted a retired British officer in Nairobi, Colonel John Steed, who knew how to organize transportation for pirate hostages once a ransom had been paid. Steed ran a charity within the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime called the Hostage Support Program.* “Fair degree of trust required,” he wrote to my mother. “Pirates do sign a faxed agreement, and have only gone back on agreements twice.”
Steed put Mom in touch with a pilot named Derek, a charter flight operator who lived in Nairobi and had long experience with missions in Somalia and other parts of Africa. He named a steep fee, but added, “Take note that I will be totally exposed and on my own.”
While Mom considered this offe
r, her mysterious intermediary, Sheikh Mohamud, insisted on receiving his own fee of one hundred thousand dollars, effectively raising the ransom. Derek asked questions among his contacts in Galkayo and reported that he could verify the bosses involved in my case, including Ali Duulaay and “Abdi Yare,” but he couldn’t establish a credible identity for Sheikh Mohamud. “He does not fit in,” wrote Derek. “Sheikh Mohamud is also the name of the current president of Somalia.* So that does draw some suspicion.”
To me, “Sheikh Mohamud” also resembles “Mustaf Mohammed Sheikh,” the supposed name of the pirate we interviewed in Hobyo. Maybe the resonance was deliberate. But “Sheikh Mohamud” is also a clichéd and common name in Somalia, almost like “Fred.”
Several days later, Mom received a phone call from this shadowy Sheikh Mohamud, saying he was no longer in Galkayo and did not want to see Abdi Yare or any of the other bosses again.
“They have insulted me,” he said, and disappeared.
VII
I knew nothing about these negotiations. But Bashko and Issa insisted that my family, and my governments, were the causes of our constant location changes. We were still locked up together because of my clan’s intransigence. Around New Year’s the pirates drove me through the streets of Galkayo in broad daylight, blindfolded, to a house protected by extra-high compound walls, with words painted over the doors indicating it had once been an office or a school. We called this new villa Abdi Yare’s House. No one told me the meaning of the move, but a left-behind sheet of paper taped to the powder blue wall in the largest room had cartoonish, classroom-style computer graphics and several lines of Somali, along with a slogan in English:
TO BE A PIRATE IS TO BE IN DANGER!
Someone had a sense of humor. Abdi Yare’s House had previously served as a pirate reeducation center.
Outside the front window I could see a minaret heavy with loudspeakers. By evening, after two calls to prayer, it was obvious that the blaring sacred song would vibrate through our concrete walls, like an AC/DC concert, five times a day. It reminded me of a story credited to Kabir, a fifteenth-century Hindu poet from a Muslim family who once wrote a whimsical dialogue between himself and a fictional mullah. “Why must you shout,” Kabir asks the mullah, “as if Allah is deaf?”
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