The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  Bashko talked in vague but optimistic terms about my ransom negotiations, as if he expected fabulous wealth to rain down from several glittering cities at once—Los Angeles, Berlin, Washington, D.C. His optimism threw me for a loop. Before my kidnapping, I had believed that professional kidnappers all over the world knew that America, in particular, maintained a strict no-ransom policy. But it was news to Bashko.

  One day, after Somali negotiators evidently tried to lower the pirates’ expectations by telling them no money could be expected from Washington, Bashko stalked into my room and said, “Why?” with a look of mocking sarcasm. “America no money?”

  I shrugged.

  “America, no money for thieves,” I said, and tried to explain the rationale: if governments paid out for every hostage, thieves would keep taking more. “Criminals, everywhere,” I said, and mimed a person nabbing a hostage.

  But I was no longer sure I believed it. Ransoms did fund more kidnappings, and a no-ransom policy could slow them down. But not deter them: Americans, like Europeans, were targets no matter what. Greed was too fundamental. Relative wealth was its own incentive. My kidnappers were romantics who thrived on dreams of a life-changing fortune dropping from the sky. To Bashko it seemed the height of American evil that helicopters might arrive before a bundle of cash, because he listened to reports on the radio every morning about billion-dollar bailouts, catastrophic Wall Street losses, interstellar arms deals, and trillions in public debt. When they did the math it seemed incredible that some slice of that action couldn’t be wired to Somalia. The gulf between my privilege and their poverty was so vast that my own vile state—bearded and filthy and chained every night, rotting into my mattress like a castaway—was readable as the price of a poor man’s ambition.

  These justifications did not make me mellow. They did not ease my mind. I didn’t want my guards to move to Europe, and I didn’t think they deserved a cent of my cash. I even thought a no-ransom policy worth its salt in Washington should require a consistent military response. Otherwise, criminals like Issa or Bashko, not just in Somalia but throughout the world—young men who heard about the fantastic wealth of the West but spent little time boning up on divergent hostage policies, who hardly knew the difference between Britain and France, and who, in any case, had seen enough government corruption to scoff at principled statements by the State Department—would never learn how dangerous it could be to kidnap a Westerner.

  “Michael,” Bashko said, his temper heating up. “Because, adiga. Aniga—no America, no Europe!”

  Because of you, he was saying, I can’t go to America. I can’t go to Europe.

  “Because of me?” I said. “Why?”

  Drones around the Naham 3 had photographed him while he guarded us on the upper deck, he said. He was a recognizable pirate; his face would be in databases, and for the rest of his life he would have to stay out of the most promising nations on earth. Bashko’s international prospects were dimmed, and it was all Michael’s fault.

  “I did not kidnap me,” I told him. “I did not make you a pirate.”

  “Because—adiga—Somalia!” he shouted in our broken language. Because you came to Somalia! “Fucking!”

  “Fucking,” I agreed.

  One afternoon I glanced up from my mattress at Abdi Yare’s House and noticed that Bashko had left the room. His rifle lay on a mat. I considered grabbing it. The room was large and empty, with a glare of sunlight streaming in from the concrete yard. I tried to judge from the sound of movements and hushed voices where the guards were. They would have bedded down in two separate rooms.

  Bashko came in, noticed the gun, picked it up nimbly by the muzzle, and sat down with a brilliant smile.

  “Problem!” he said, meaning the unattended firearm.

  I smiled back.

  The house was silent that afternoon, because an Orion had flown overhead. Bashko rested his rifle behind him. He locked his elbows around his knees and munched a stem of khat. His eyes were fervid. I had just been wondering how many of the guards I could shoot before they got to me.

  “Michael,” he said. “America, coming—adiga finished.”

  If the Americans come, you will be killed.

  “I know.”

  “Why no money?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  VIII

  From my mattress at Abdi Yare’s House I could sometimes see the moon, large and blurry, like a fat silver lantern over the compound wall. The light spilled in through a metal screen. Moon sightings were so rare for me in Somalia they came as a shock: the prison houses kept me locked away from the drama of the natural world. I couldn’t count the number of clear, moonstruck nights I had missed in Somalia, or (even worse) the number I had left to enjoy. Somewhere in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky the lead character wonders the same thing. “Everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really,” he says. “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.”

  I wondered if Mom could see same full moon from California. No reason why not. I was lost, but I hadn’t left the planet. I had just quit indulging in hope for the future. I wandered, instead, in the underworld of the past, and on one of these nights I remembered my father, just before he died, picking me up from a guitar lesson wearing his clothes from work, chewing a toothpick, broodily distracted behind a pair of plastic sunglasses. In spite of his mood he was full of enthusiasm for something I had written to commemorate my sixth-grade graduation. Those few sentimental lines had melted him. He wanted a copy. I can’t remember what they said. But this memory in Somalia disrupted the story I had continued to tell myself, all these months and years, about our relationship. I wondered if we would have fought like hell over my career.

  Not loving enough was the crucial failure, like not appreciating the moon. I never told Dad how much I wanted him home when I was twelve, because I was twelve, and because I had no idea that I would see him again maybe four, maybe five times more in my life.

  His alcoholic sense of waste in Northridge must have been a powerful distraction from the simple thrill of living. My childhood memories were charged with that thrill. The dry tedium of the suburbs hadn’t beaten it down. It occurred to me in Somalia that I lacked my father’s problem. I was learning to thrive in an ugly atmosphere. In spite of foul circumstances I had found a way to live. It’s still hard to describe. Dad’s disillusion sounded like bare-knuckled realism, but it proved to be a stubborn chemical ignorance of a beauty that surrounded us every day. Northridge, after all, could also be beautiful—a once fertile part of Southern California still dotted with sycamores, pines, and liquid amber trees, even cactus and banana trees. It had wildlife: possums and cougars, rattlesnakes and owls. The relative bleakness of Somalia had revived colorful memories of an awkward American boyhood, a chorus of strange people and cracked-asphalt schoolyards, graceless restaurants, dusty baseball diamonds, of polluting cars and stifling schoolrooms that were beautiful, too, and this weird superhuman beauty, like the power of the sun, had not even wavered when Dad shot himself in the chest.

  After one of these horrible nights I woke up feeling shaken, frightened, but somehow cleaned out. I remembered that one point of a sublime poem by Saint Francis called “The Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon” was love for the unlovable, an opening of the soul toward beauty as well as the ugly abomination of death.

  A pirate tossed the clinking keys. I unlocked my chains and shuffled to the bathroom. I came back and waited for breakfast. Bashko, replacing the night-shift guard, delivered my ration of beans and sat against the wall, wrapped in a sarong. He listened to news on his phone.

  A few stray flies showed an early-morning interest in the sugared beans. I waved them off.

  “
Michael,” said Bashko after a while. “America, no money?”

  I didn’t want talk about it.

  “Bur’ad, finished!” he went on. Pirates are done for.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Bur’ad, no ships,” he said, cryptically.

  I shrugged and finished eating, then retreated under my mosquito net and listened to the radio.

  Bashko had placed his finger on an unpleasant fact. One reason I’d languished so long in Somalia was the decline of piracy off the coast. The Naham 3 turned out to be the second-to-last vessel hijacked during the dramatic upswing in Somali piracy, the heyday between 2005 and 2012, and now the bosses invested money elsewhere—in foreign real estate, drug running, weapons smuggling, even human trafficking. Shipowners now sent cargo vessels past Somalia with armed teams on board; navies were helping to keep the peace. Hijackings off Somalia had all but ended in 2013 and ’14, and the gangs clung to what they had. Including me.

  On the radio I heard about a U.N. report announcing precisely what I had flown here to investigate—that piracy in Somalia had employed thousands of people in certain regions and towns. Illicit business had attracted capital to industries like boat repair, restaurants, and housing, and I wondered if turning the illicit movement of goods into something legitimate might not be far behind. While I rotted in Galkayo, in fact, work had started on the Hobyo waterfront to build a small port and to grade the dusty bush trails leading from the town. Members of the Galmudug government were even working to renovate Mussolini’s Farmhouse. It was a comical act of whitewashing, and I wouldn’t learn about it for months, but Hobyo elders and investors had started to convert the ruin where Rolly and Marc and I had lived into a quasi-government building known as the Villa Galmudug.

  Also on the radio, I started to hear familiar voices. A Somalia expert I knew from the Hamburg trial, Stig Jarle Hansen, talked about al-Shabaab. A BBC reporter from Berlin, a friend named Damien McGuinness, now reported from Latvia. People’s lives had moved on. Hearing Damien’s voice unstuck my habit of resisting hope. It reminded me of busy restaurants in Berlin, of low lights and music, cigarette smoke and half-crumbled East German tenement buildings, especially the bar in one of those buildings where I used to gather friends for casual dinner and drinks. It cracked my practiced indifference to think about that life, and I missed them all with a crushing, lonely desire.

  IX

  During the first half of 2014, we moved between Abdi Yare’s House and Dhuxul’s house every four or five weeks, depending on aircraft noise, and Dhuxul decided to stash me in the corner of a larger, dimmer room at his house, away from the door, so I no longer had a view of the sky. My guards shut the bottom half of the steel shutters in this room, all day long, so I had to squint when I wanted to read or write. At night they closed the shutters completely.

  I thought my colorful clothes could still flag the attention of planes, so I did laundry often. The outdoor bathroom at Dhuxul’s was a semidetached chamber with no windows, and the pirates had to stand in the yard holding Kalashnikovs while I plunged my shorts and soccer jersey into a bucket of water and sudsed them up with Top-O-Mol. Sometimes they wouldn’t let me out because of a plane in the sky. I started to wonder if the presence of armed men in the yard, on its own, was a clue to my location.

  Laundry became a comforting ritual. My brain wandered to strange places while my hands did the work. Every African I’d met—Rolly as well as the pirates—referred to Top-O-Mol detergent as “O-Mol,” which struck me as weird, because the company promoted the opposite nickname on each plastic satchel: top! I remembered Ahmed Dirie sitting under a thorn tree one afternoon in the bush, staring at a plastic satchel of the powder and coming up, finally, with “Top!”—which produced a rotten-toothed grin of surprise, as if he’d never studied the package before.

  It it dawned on me during a laundry session that they were echoing Omo, a brand of detergent African kids grew up with from Senegal to the Seychelles. That made me think about the pop-cultural power of a simple brand of soap, which reminded me of old Ajax detergent ads in the United States. They predated my childhood, but they’d left such an impression on a generation of American kids that both Tom Waits and Jim Morrison had made fun of the jingle in their songs. The old black-and-white commercials featured a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue of plumbers, diner cooks, and suburban housewives, while a jarring ridiculous chorus in the background sang, “Stronger than dirt! Stronger than dirt!”

  I hummed this jingle to myself while I worked.

  One day, Bashko denied me permission to wash my clothes. “Tomorrow!” he said, but the next day he also said no. This petty restriction moved me to rage. It eroded my slim but established set of rights. I stood up to mount a protest on my woven-plastic exercise mat. I said, “Washy-wash,” in the same calm and patient tone I used to insist on trips to the bathroom before dawn. The tone must have irritated Madobe, because he stepped over in a quick fury to pull the mat from under my feet. I went straight down. Most of my weight landed hard on my twisted right leg, and there was intense pain from the top of my shin to my ankle, like a crack in wood. I took this rich opportunity to yell and swear. Bashko hollered back, brandishing his rifle. He ordered me to sit on my mattress in silence, and my next trip to the bathroom involved an excruciating limp.

  By dinnertime I had declared a hunger strike.

  “No chum-chum?” said Bashko when he tried to serve me food.

  “No chum-chum,” I said. “Because Madobe.”

  He sighed and left the room. These strikes were a ritual now, like the laundry. Bashko and the other guards pretended not to care. But the next day, after I refused a second meal, they asked for my demands.

  “I must see a doctor,” I said and pointed at my shin. “X-ray.”

  Any clinic in Galkayo with an X-ray machine would have to be run by a real doctor. I doubted the pirates would present me to one. But I saw good reason to hold out for a demand just beyond the bosses’ reach: I wanted to force them to let me go. This cloudy design was a far more serious proposition than protesting a missing bowl of beans, and it had to be approached with care, since the bosses would shut down any protest that posed a direct threat to their ransom. I thought a defiant, showy strike would invite beatings or torture. But I could imagine escalating a small misunderstanding to a justified, disciplined protest.

  From stray reports on the BBC I had gathered that a human could last a month without food, given water to drink. Without water I would die in three days. I wondered if the pirates would confiscate my liquids. But the injury to my leg went against every rule, as Dhuxul and Madobe both understood.

  I navigated the first day with water, tea, milk, and mango juice. I just rationed supplies. Half a bottle of juice and one cup of milk per day, plus one bottle of water, felt right. I could anticipate the gnawing hunger, and I handled the panic.

  On the second day I felt a heavy, hollow depression from the moment I woke up to pee. The panic returned. My brain went groping for a way to rationalize my self-starvation, but all it found was a stubborn refusal to let Madobe off the hook.

  By the end of the third day the men had begun to worry. Abdul, the effeminate guard, came in to hand me a greasy package of sambusi.

  “No,” I said.

  “No problem!” he whispered. Our little secret. He motioned for me to hide them, so I ate one and hid the rest. My body sponged up the nutrition and I felt better for about two hours.

  Abdul and Bashko came in the next morning and said, “Michael! Doctor tonight! Chum-chum okay.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  It was a ploy, but I noticed my advantage. I had demanded an X-ray. I could take them at their word, eat a snack, and if I still had no X-ray “tonight”—which seemed unlikely—I could resume the protest in the morning.

  “Okay,” I said, and let them serve me a bowl of beans.

  My leg had improved, and I knew the bone was only bruised, not fractured. But I limped convincingly to the
toilet, which kept Madobe’s sarcasm in check. He always watched me with alert, half-mocking eyes for evidence that I was just fine.

  That evening, I went to sleep without knowing the state of my own hunger strike. No doctor had arrived. Bashko pretended we were back to normal in the morning and delivered a bowl of beans. With my stomach rumbling, I said, “No doctor, no chum-chum!”

  “Fucking!”

  The hunger intensified every day. It made me scrappy and mean. During my fierce and starving afternoons I nursed every old, familiar prisoner’s grievance. I resented the guards’ resentment, I loathed their guns, I hated their religion. I thought of them as enemies who lived on such a deep circle of hell that they owed me a profound moral debt from the first sluggish hours of the morning, when they unlocked my chains, opened the clanking shutters, and granted me permission to pee. These grievances weren’t new, but the hunger stripped them raw, and the longer I turned them over in my head the more I had to face my own mistakes, until the emotional balance I nurtured to survive an average day seemed to burst into black smoke and spiral like a crashing plane. On these occasions I could screw myself into the ground with memories of my capture in President Alin’s car and my warm swim in the ocean off the Naham 3—my feelings of guilt, my suffering mother, my helpless relatives and friends—and this easy lurch from righteous anger to self-recrimination made me rotten-minded with rage. Part of me still begged for vengeance. Part of me still wanted suicide. I still pulled at my chain, psychologically, like a junkyard dog.

  On day five, I had to review my motivations. I felt weak. I wanted the struggle to end. The pirates hinted that liberty was imminent—“Chum-chum, okay!”—but in my undernourished state I thought their wispy gossip and promises of freedom were more maddening than the raw passage of time. I learned to listen with distant bemusement, the way an old man watches TV.