The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  Late in the afternoon, Dhuxul’s phone rang. The last thing I remember hearing from the commander that day was “Ahhhhh. Maya.” No.

  Night fell, and Hashi came in to wrap the chains around my feet. I asked him, full of fragile and almost childish hope:

  “Aniga, free?”

  “Haa,” he said. “Tonight.”

  XIII

  I woke up at the first muezzin on the same filthy mattress. I thought I heard the thrum of a drone. The guards acted tense and ignored my requests for more drinking water and shampoo. All morning they maintained an uneasy quiet.

  In the afternoon, I asked permission to use the toilet while Abdinuur sat in a chair in my doorway. He just stared into the courtyard and ignored me.

  “Abdinuur,” I said. “KADI.”

  He gave me a filthy look.

  “What’s the problem around here?” I said, very loud, which brought Bashko darting into the room with his rifle. He told me to shut up and argued with Abdinuur. For a minute I watched in disbelief. The pirates were like Keystone Kops. At last my bladder asserted itself: “KADI,” I roared, and then all the pirates were arguing.

  They let me walk to the toilet, but I had shattered the uneasy quiet. Hours later, in the dead of night, a car arrived to drive us to Abdi Yare’s. The men tossed my things on the floor. They seemed resentful and bitter. When I lowered my mosquito net in the dark, Bashko came in to lock up my chains, and I whispered at him for an explanation.

  “Because, adiga,” he said. Because of you.

  The translator and runner at Abdi Yare’s House was a slithery, oily man with a long face and close-set eyes. He came in with deliveries of khat and necessities from the market. He looked no older than most of the guards but acted calm and superior. He did seem well informed, so I asked Bashko if this man, Hassan, could offer me news. He minced into the room, with careful disparaging eyes, and seemed to answer every note of defiance in my voice with a qualm of infidel hatred, as if I were too stupid to understand why I had to sit in a room.

  I asked about our day of near freedom the previous week. “A man came to give us money for you,” he said. “His name was Joe. Do you know him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He came with seven hundred thousand dollars, but we told him the price was three million. We told him, ‘Go back to your motherland.’”

  “How odd.”

  “He wore the uniform of your military. You say ‘fatigues’? He came here with three people. They did not have proper visas, and we do not know how they entered the country. We referred them to the minister of the interior. They were under arrest for two days.”

  “‘Interior minister’ for Galmudug?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “We have evidence he came from Djibouti. We do not know what he intended. He spoke like an American. We think this man was a commando.”

  “What a peculiar story,” I said.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I don’t know anyone named Joe.”

  At least not anyone who would come to Somalia. It did seem possible that a contractor might try to get me out, but I couldn’t fathom why someone like that would startle my kidnappers by wearing fatigues. The only fact I could rely on was my street address on Abdurrahman’s phone. Someone had spelled it correctly. A pirate wouldn’t have been careful about the c in Dunckerstrasse, which suggested that my apartment was intact, which suggested that no one had packed it into storage, which suggested that someone expected me to return, which suggested that my family and friends were more than just shades from the past. The more I wandered down this road in my head the more the wheel of hope and disappointment racked my emotions, lifting me for a while but leaving me, for a while, in even worse condition.

  My guards must have moved through the same cycle. I think it gnawed at their morale to think that a ransom had landed in Galkayo, briefly, but flown off again into the clear blue sky.

  XIV

  When Ramadan started later in the summer, we lived in Dhuxul’s house again, and someone liberated the TV, again, from his bedroom, though not for my benefit. The World Cup was on. The men watched it on the porch. I went to sleep every night with the glare of soccer matches flickering through the door. They played after dark in Somalia, beamed across the planet from Brazil, and since I had to be chained and quiet on my bed by sundown, I followed the tournament every morning on the BBC.

  World Cup soccer woke up a powerful nostalgia for Berlin. The commotion of a European city during a soccer tournament is unlike anything in America, where people retreat to backyards and living rooms for the Super Bowl or the World Series, leaving the streets deserted. Berliners collect in bars and cafés on summer evenings for the World Cup—men and women, young and old—to drink and chatter and holler at big outdoor screens. People wander the sidewalks with flags. They chant national songs. When I worked late in my apartment I could keep an ear on the score just by listening to the crowd. If opponents scored a goal, a few people cheered. If Germany scored, the sidewalk erupted. Mounting tension toward the end of every match expressed itself in the wavering noise, and you could actually hear the ball approach a goal, or the release of pressure when it changed sides, or the sound of agony when a player missed a shot. To follow a good game, you didn’t even need to watch TV.

  Germany advanced to the semifinals in 2014, to play Brazil, and I asked permission to watch. My body still felt the aftereffects of my weeklong hunger strike. Not only had my muscles wasted; my immune system had broken down. Boils had grown on my skin from a staph infection, and I suffered some kind of cyclical fever. These afflictions possibly helped my case. Dhuxul consented, but no one knew what time the game would air. I stayed up for the early time slot and the men let me sit, wearing chains, on a plastic chair in the doorway. But the early game was a rerun, so the men sent me to bed.

  In the morning Bashko woke me up with exciting news.

  “Michael!” he said. “Germany—seven points!”

  I scowled and shook my head. Obvious pirate bullshit. Who scored seven goals in a professional soccer match?

  “Seven points!” he insisted. “Brazil, finished!”

  “Hmmm.”

  The story led the World Service. Germany had knocked out the host nation with seven goals, humiliating Brazil while a billion people watched on TV. The sheer impertinence reminded people on the radio of the 1950 World Cup, also in Brazil, when a player from Uruguay hushed the vast crowd by scoring a goal against Brazil in the final minutes of the deciding match. The Maracanã Stadium—almost two hundred thousand people—fell silent. I heard an interview with the Uruguayan player as an old man on the BBC, and he gave a memorable summary of his own career. “Only three people have silenced the Maracanã,” he said. “Frank Sinatra, the pope, and me.”

  By now some friends in Berlin were starting to wonder if I’d learned to sympathize with my pirates, in the strange fashion of hostages who survive by adopting the viewpoint of their bullies. Therapists had named the Stockholm syndrome after the behavior of Swedish captives in a bank robbery in 1973. The hostages defended the thieves’ behavior to the police after a six-day ordeal. It wasn’t like that for me. Most of my comfortable and civilized self had stripped away, but the core of it, my will, had sharpened. I would have escaped in a second if I’d spotted a chance. My mother, in California, knew the World Cup was on, and she encouraged the FBI to suggest a military rescue during the tournament. She thought my guards might be distracted at night. “Soccer is kind of universal,” she said, “so I figured they would be watching, since they didn’t have much else to do.”

  She was right. But she didn’t call the shots. Mom had no direct line to the president. “I wrote a couple of letters to the White House, but I never heard back,” she said, and after more than two years this reticence upset her.

  I wouldn’t have minded. I was sane enough to welcome another way out, but it was crucial—for my own mental health—to q
uit straining for vengeance. Stockholm syndrome and forgiveness were not equivalent: I’d learned to forgive, but I hadn’t forgotten the nature of the game.

  Germany advanced to the final, and guards let me sit in the plastic chair again, well after dark, in the doorway. I wrapped myself in a blanket and thought our festivities looked like a sinister imitation of a World Cup party in Berlin. Eight or nine Somalis sat cross-legged on the cold patio, where no light shone but the flickering screen. Someone hung tarps across the arabesque arches of the patio to hide the TV glare, and Farhaan passed around a plastic bottle with some bootleg gin. We kept it hidden from Dhuxul, who lounged at the front of the group with his wooden leg against the wall. During the game preview, the TV flashed an up-close shot of the actual trophy, the World Cup itself—thick molded gold and malachite. Dhuxul’s hand reached up to swipe at it. His men laughed. I felt a wave of disgust. The gesture was pure instinct on Dhuxul’s part; a thief wanted anything that glittered.

  XV

  We moved back and forth between the houses, Dhuxul’s and Abdi Yare’s, throughout that summer. We never returned to the Pirate Villa, and Bashko insisted the reason was “drones,” but I think it had more to do with pirate-gang politics, because we heard furtive, indistinct humming at night no matter where we lived.

  In late August I woke up to hear that terrorists had decapitated a freelance journalist in Syria, James Foley, in a gruesome new style of video. For months my radio delivered bizarre news about the Islamic State, which rose like a gas from the Sunni provinces of Iraq and Syria in 2014 to establish a patchwork “caliphate” where callow and criminal men tried to live without conventional law, like the pirates who had strung Rolly from a tree, and who, like their predecessors in al-Qaeda, used Islam as a license for bloodthirstiness.

  I’d never heard of Foley. He’d been kidnapped in 2012, during my long news blackout. But his story sounded familiar—a freelance excursion to a dangerous country, some lapses in judgment, a world of shit. The radio report had me paralyzed. I didn’t know yet that the image of a hostage in an orange jumpsuit in the desert, kneeling before a robed Islamic State executioner holding a knife, would become a new gauge of mayhem in the world, an updated emblem of entropy.

  News of Foley’s execution agitated my guards. When Bashko brought my beans for breakfast that morning, he said, “Michael! James Foley. Killed!”

  “I heard that.”

  “Daesh, no good,” he added.

  I didn’t know the term, but to Bashko the name Daesh was as common on the radio as “Islamic State” was to me. He explained the derogatory Arabic nickname.

  “Ah, okay,” I said. “Fucking,” I added.

  I must have looked angry and grim.

  “Adiga, no,” he said, meaning it wouldn’t happen to me.

  “Hmmm.”

  Until now al-Shabaab had expressed only a low-voltage desire to buy an American hostage. I hadn’t been worth the money. Otherwise Garfanji would have sold me in the two or more years since his threats in the wilderness. But when Daesh started to win territory and fame in the Middle East, there was a faction of Shabaab fighters who wanted to shift allegiance to them, from al-Qaeda, and one way to draw their attention was to behead an American. So, among certain members of al-Shabaab, my market value went up, which may have encouraged one pirate faction to consider selling me off.

  Foley may have died under similar circumstances—kidnapped by one group, but sold to murderous Islamists. Mom was sheltered from the worst possibilities by the FBI. She learned nothing of these nuances at the time, although she’d exchanged emails with Jim’s mother, Diane, for moral support. Now Jim was dead. “When I first heard the news, I had a bad feeling,” she said later. “Then I heard the name ‘Foley.’” Mom, with a feeling of dread, had to send her condolences.

  The news in 2014 seemed to describe a new, wobbling twenty-first-century world order. I heard about the rotting out of nation-states, the spread of transnational groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram, which had started to dissolve borders in Africa and the Middle East and mock the power of some national militaries as a mirage. Russia had invaded Ukraine, using the U.S. war in Iraq as a justification to ignore a sovereign country’s borders. (“Good!” Bashko had said when he heard about Putin’s annexation of Crimea.) Entropy had picked up speed. A noticeable number of interviews on the BBC featured people from both the left and the right who ridiculed the idea of national sovereignty, as if old ideas naturally had to be dumped in the garbage. But it was hard to see a shimmering vision of justice and peace in the distance to replace these old ideas. Instead the world was rolling back to factionalism, to violent opportunism, to old swamps of chaos and crime.

  One brilliant late-summer morning I plotted another hunger strike under my mosquito net while the radio murmured beside my ear. The net indicated my mood. When it was down, during daylight hours, I felt depressed. Bashko sat alone in the room and watched me.

  “Sahib,” he said.

  I glanced up.

  “Mango,” he requested.

  I wanted nothing to do with Bashko today. But I sighed and crawled out from the net. I pulled a bottle from the clanking case of juice and tossed it to him. For this favor I expected information.

  “News,” I said.

  “No news, sahib,” he said.

  We had just moved back to Abdi Yare’s House again. I felt weary and disgusted with the old routine.

  “This house—why?” I said.

  “I don’t know, sahib.” He shook his head.

  “Aniga, no free. Why?” I said.

  “No news,” he repeated.

  I scowled and crawled back under my net. I resumed my position—one arm thrown over my face, listening to the radio—and this time I meant it as a direct personal snub.

  After a minute Bashko hissed, “Hey! Michael!” and waved at me to sit up.

  He did have news? I opened the mosquito net and sat on the edge of my mattress. Bashko told me a wild story. He said the guards would stop work if the bosses couldn’t cut a deal—they were tired of changing houses, too. For two months they’d received no allowance.

  “All group,” he said, meaning all the guards, “stop work.”

  I nodded, uncertain of what to say. “A labor strike?”

  The BBC had recently mentioned a miners’ strike in South Africa, so I said, for clarity, “South Africa, same-same?”

  “Yes!” Bashko answered and laughed.

  I nodded again and asked if a hunger strike by the hostage would help.

  “Okay, sahib!” He lifted his thumb. “Slow-slow. Two weeks.”

  XVI

  Several days later, Abdinuur—who was the senior guard, although he didn’t act like it—came into my room and announced to Bashko and some other men that he had quit. Bashko celebrated, throwing his hands in the air. Evidently Abdinuur had told “Abdi Yare” on the phone about his intention to strike. Abdi Yare had fired him on the spot. For some reason that was a good sign. The same evening a car arrived in the darkened yard with an ominous rumble, and Abdinuur disappeared. I found it blood chilling. Bashko reassured me that the rest of the group would stay and guard me—by his reckoning we were on the verge of freedom—but I didn’t dare believe him. I saw no reason Abdi Yare couldn’t replace the whole team, one by one, and leave me in the hands of new and more dangerous men.

  On the first day of September, Yoonis came to squat beside my mattress. He said there would be a phone call to a man called Robert, “from the U.N.” He gave me a list of simple facts to mention and said, “Do not tell him where you are.”

  “I don’t know where I am.”

  What was going on, though? I wondered if “Robert” would be the same man who had failed to show up with a U.N. security team at the airport. Or if “Robert” was the real name of “Romeo”—the nickname of the calm-voiced negotiator Garfanji had called in the darkened bush over two years before.

  I decided to rehearse a few lines in German to des
cribe my location. I concocted a sentence explaining that I was in a house near a mosque with a (rather loud) minaret, which I could see from my east-facing window. I practiced weaving it into English phrases for “Robert,” so the Somalis wouldn’t notice. My heart raced.

  Before lunch, Yoonis ordered me to throw my blanket over my head. Six of us had to walk out and sit in a hot Land Rover in the courtyard, with all the windows sealed. The call would be routed somehow from Mogadishu, and Abdi Yare would listen in. The phone rang. Yoonis spoke in rough Somali and handed it to me. “Michael, my name’s Robert,” said a self-assured, but unfamiliar, American voice.

  I answered a security question and gabbed about my health. Since Yoonis had ordered me to be dramatic, I also gave my whereabouts in half-hollered, desperate-sounding German. It seemed to work. I got every bit of information out to Robert, or Bob, who I gathered was not from the U.N., and I told myself that if the whole thing was a trick by the Pentagon—as Yoonis half believed—the Pentagon would have what it needed.

  Robert connected me somehow to my mother. She asked in an urgent voice how I was. “We’re trying to get you out!” she said. Hearing her again after nineteen months was a miracle, a memory of a lost life, but I couldn’t let it raise my hopes, because her language hadn’t changed—after all this time she used the same questions and the same vague, encouraging optimism. I spent the rest of the day in a haze of panic and confusion. I couldn’t tell whether negotiations had budged, or how much German my pirates had detected.

  For lunch Hashi cooked flat, crepe-like pancakes called anjero instead of pasta. I used the pancakes to sop up a potato-and-onion mixture with my hand. We’d been eating like this for weeks, if not months. The pirates had noticed that I refused plain spaghetti but didn’t mind anjero. Bashko asked if I knew anjero from the United States. (“Yes, from Ethiopian restaurants.”) Their treatment of me, I thought, had improved since my weeklong hunger strike. Maybe I’d convinced them I was crazy enough to commit suicide.