The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  His closest friend in the house was a young man his age named Abdullah, who was more heavily built and somber. Abdullah sometimes carried in our twice-daily meals—a couple of tins of tuna, several buns, a flask of sweet tea, and a mango or a few soft bananas. Unlike Jamal, he seemed stuck on the war. One day I asked him what he was going to do later in life. He gave me a fierce look, mimed the act of putting on a jacket, and made the sound of an explosion.

  It took me a second. “Suicide bomber?”

  Abdullah nodded. He believed that at the gates to paradise, soldiers in God’s army got to enter through a special doorway.

  Jamal, sitting nearby, shook his head as if to say no, no, no. “I don’t want him to die,” he explained. “He is my friend.”

  In early October—roughly six weeks after we were taken—they moved us into a concrete building where we sometimes heard gunfire between warring militias outside our windows and sometimes a mother singing nearby to her child, her voice low and sweet. The sound of it filled me with longing. The three Somali men who were kidnapped with us were put into a room down the hallway, their shoes lined up outside the door. Abdi, the freelance cameraman, occasionally sat on the threshold, reading the Koran in the light from the hall. A few times I peered out and flashed him the hand sign for “okay,” as in “You okay?” Each time he shook his head, looking forlorn.

  Our room was large and unfurnished. Nigel and I lived like a two-person family, doing what we could to fight off depression, to distract ourselves from the gnawing hunger. I poured the tea, and Nigel washed our clothes. Our captors had given us basic supplies—two tubes of toothpaste, some Q-tips, nail clippers, a packet of acetaminophen tablets as large as horse pills. I received a cloaklike dress and headscarf, both made from red polyester. Nigel was given a couple of collared shirts. Between us, we had two tin plates and a single spoon. With what little food we were given, we made menus, eating our meals on a table-size square of brown linoleum the boys had tossed in our room. Some days we ate the buns followed by the tuna; other days it was tuna followed by the buns.

  To pass the time we tracked insects as they climbed the iron window grates. Once, looking outside, we saw a fat brown snake, maybe eight feet long, rippling through the sand in the alleyway behind the house. Otherwise, there was little to see.

  Nigel fashioned a small backgammon game, crafting playing pieces from our Q-tips—one of us using the cotton nubs, the other using pieces of the plastic handles, which he clipped with a pair of beard-trimming scissors. On a sheet from a notebook we received, he drew two rows of triangles and then, using a couple of acetaminophen tablets and the scissors, carved a set of dice, itty-bitty white cubes with tiny numbers written on the sides in pen.

  We played for hours. We played for days. He won. I won. We played rapid-fire and without much conversation or commentary, like two monkeys in some sort of deprivation experiment. If we heard footsteps in the hallway, we quickly slid everything under my mattress. Games, like so many other things that might divert us from religion, were forbidden, haram.

  Early on, Nigel and I told our captors that we wanted to convert to Islam. It was a survival move and not a spiritual one, made in the hope that it might garner us better treatment. Five times a day now, prodded by the craggy voice of a muezzin calling from a nearby mosque, we went through the motions of prayer. We each received English translations of the Koran. A few of the boys spent time teaching us how to memorize verses in Arabic, so we could gain favor with Allah. In the evenings, the group of them sat on the patio, chanting Koranic verses.

  Back at home, my mother had become the de facto negotiator for both my family and Nigel’s. I was allowed to speak with her a handful of times. Our phone calls were quick, conducted over faulty cell-phone connections, and wrenching every time. It felt as if the two of us were swimming between enormous ocean waves, shouting into walls of water. She told me that she loved me, that people at home were praying for us. Our captors were demanding $3 million for the two of us. She told me they were trying to get some money together. Those were the words she used, “get some money together.” What that meant, given their financial circumstances, I couldn’t imagine.

  Any time I thought of my parents, I was overcome with guilt. My one hope was that our captors would simply get tired of waiting and let us go. Each night, as we were getting ready to sleep, I would turn and say to Nigel, “Now we are one day closer to being free.”

  Then one morning late in October, several of the boys stormed our room, surprising us as we sat eating breakfast on the floor. They dragged away Nigel’s foam mat and unhooked his mosquito netting from the wall. A few minutes later, they returned for Nigel, guns leveled at his chest, motioning him toward the door. There was no explanation, no dialogue. I watched the back of his shirt as it moved away from me. There was no goodbye or anything. He was just gone.

  They put him in a small, bare room right next to the one we had shared. We’d peeked into it plenty of times before, as we came and went from the bathroom down the hall. We were worried from the start that they would separate us, because in traditional Islam, unmarried men and women were not supposed to consort. I couldn’t guess why they chose that particular day to finally do it. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it had been eight weeks since we were taken from the road, and there was no sign of a ransom payment.

  The boys’ anger seemed to be percolating. There were days when nobody spoke to me at all—when Jamal said nothing as he delivered food, when Abdullah, the would-be suicide bomber, hovered menacingly in my doorway. The isolation put me in a cistern, dark and deep. The leaders of the group holding us mostly stayed away, though every so often one would arrive at the house and pose a question sent from home, breaking my solitude with a query flung over continents, evoking something both intimate and concrete.

  “What award did Dad win recently?” Communities in Bloom, for his gardening.

  “Where does Oma keep her candy?” In a pumpkin-shaped jar.

  My answers were to furnish proof to my family that I was alive. To me, the questions also felt like gifts, an invitation to pass an afternoon conjuring my grandmother’s tidy house or the quivering dahlias in my father’s backyard.

  Sometimes I was despairing, but other times I felt my mind beginning to carry me. I didn’t know if it was a survival tool or the first flutter of lunacy, but I began to feel as if my thoughts held new power. One morning I ate a tin of tuna and then sat for an hour holding the spoon in front of me, trying to see if I could bend it with my mind. I couldn’t, not even a little, but still, the idea seemed less crazy, more possible, than it once had.

  During the hottest hours of the day, the boys dozed in the shade of the veranda outside, while one of them stayed awake for guard duty. Usually in the afternoons, it was Abdullah on patrol. He often opened my door without warning. He didn’t say anything, clutching his gun, keeping his gaze on me for several full minutes without moving. Sometimes, he searched my room, noisily rooting through my belongings, throwing things against the wall. I realized later that he was just testing the waters—seeing what he could get away with as the others slept outside.

  One day he showed up and closed the door behind him. He leaned his gun against the wall. I knew right away what was happening. It didn’t matter that I had worried about this. It didn’t matter that I tried desperately to fight him off as he forced himself on me. In less than three minutes it was over, three impossibly long minutes.

  I felt as if I had been evicted from my body, as if I no longer fit in my own skin. My mind ticked through every mistake I ever made. Why had I come to Somalia? What had I done? Every fear I ever had came back to me—darkness was scary, noises were scary. I felt like a child. I hated facing the uncertainty of every afternoon, not knowing whether Abdullah was coming or not.

  Eventually, to ease my own agony, I began to walk circles. I did one lap around the room and then another. Soon, I was walking six or seven hours a day in my bare feet. A dirty
pathway took shape on the floor, a miniature one-lane track. In motion, I told myself things, the words resonating right down through my legs: I will get out of here. I will be okay.

  When I wasn’t walking, I spent time standing at one of the two windows in my room, feeling the outside air float through the grilles that covered it. One afternoon, a light rain began to dapple the concrete wall across the alleyway from my window. The sky darkened to a powdery gray. A wind gusted, rushing through trees I couldn’t see, causing the rain to spray sideways on the wall.

  “God, it’s beautiful,” a voice said, clear as day, articulating my exact thought at the exact moment I had it.

  The voice wasn’t mine. But it was a voice I knew. “Nige?”

  The voice said, “Trout?” Trout was a nickname I’d had since high school.

  For a shocked second, we were both silent. He was maybe 10 feet away from me at the window in his room. Because the alleyway was narrow and the tin roof of our house overlapped slightly with that of the house behind it, the acoustics were perfect. Our voices carried clearly, sheltered by the rooftops. It was a little miracle of physics. We had gone weeks without figuring this out, but now we had.

  Standing at our windows, Nigel and I spoke each day for hours on end, keeping our voices low and our Korans open on our sills in case anyone walked in. We ran through old stories, adding new details every time. We discussed our nighttime dreams, our interactions with the boys. I started one day to tell him about Abdullah, but then stopped myself: It didn’t seem fair to involve him in something he could do nothing about. Instead, we made guesses about what was happening with ransom negotiations. We talked about the future as if it were arriving at any minute. When Christmas came, marking the end of our fourth month as hostages, we quietly sang carols together.

  On January 14, a Wednesday, I stepped into the hallway, headed toward the shower, and noticed a new stillness in the house. The shoes belonging to our Somali colleagues—Abdi, Mahad, and Marwali—had disappeared, all three pairs. A while later, I was able to ask Abdullah where they went. He didn’t hesitate. Seeming pleased with himself, he lifted a finger and made an emphatic throat-slitting gesture. My stomach churned. Before we were captured, Abdi had proudly shown me pictures of his children—two boys and a girl, smiling little kids in school uniforms, who it now seemed, thanks to me, had no father. If our captors had killed their fellow Somalis, Muslim brothers all three, it didn’t bode well for me and Nigel.

  Was there some way out? There had to be. Nigel told me he had been studying the window in the bathroom we shared and thought we could climb through it. I, too, had looked at that window plenty of times, seeing no option there. About eight feet off the bathroom floor, recessed far back in the thick wall up near the ceiling, was a ledge maybe two feet deep, almost like an alcove. But what was at the end of it hardly counted as a window. It was rather a screen made of decorative bricks with a few gaps, serving as ventilation holes for the bathroom. The bricks were cemented together. And then, as if that weren’t enough, laid horizontally in front of the bricks was a series of five metal bars anchored into the window frame.

  “Are you crazy?” I said to Nigel. “It’s impossible. How would we get out?”

  “You should crawl up there,” he said. “I’ve been looking at the bricks. The mortar is crumbling. We could dig it out.”

  “Yeah, but the bars . . .”

  “I think I could pull them loose. They’re not that secure. I don’t know,” he said, sounding not entirely confident, “but I think it could work.”

  It took some effort to pull myself up to the window in the bathroom. I had to stand with one foot planted on either side of the toilet seat, reaching up past my shoulders to boost myself up, as if levering my way out of a swimming pool.

  With my face up close to the window, I could see that Nigel was right. The bricks covering the opening were only loosely cemented. The mortar between them crumbled at my touch, coming away in small cascades of white dust. I had brought my nail clippers, and using them, I was able to reach between the metal bars and poke into the cement between the bricks. With some diligent chipping, it seemed possible that we could remove a few rows of bricks.

  The metal bars were another matter. They were about three feet long and appeared to be sunk deep into the walls on either side of the window, though Nigel had already managed to loosen one of them from its anchor points. He swore to me earlier that he could muscle at least one more out of its hold. Feeling elated, I dropped back to the bathroom floor, covered in grit and cobwebs. I hurried to my room, for the first time in months not thinking about danger or hunger or worry, consumed instead by the idea that we could make a hole to the outside, a body-size hole, and slip through it.

  Standing at our windows, we began to work on a plan. What time of day would we go? What would we bring? Which direction would we run? Who would we seek out, and what would we say? The considerations were enormous.

  All the while, we traded shifts in the bathroom, hauling ourselves onto the ledge with fingernail clippers in hand, chiseling at the mortar in hurried 5- and 10-minute bursts. The work was gratifying, like digging for gold. Sometimes I got dust; other times, with some careful prying, I managed to extract a nice little slab of fully intact cement.

  Because my door was in easy sight of the veranda where the boys spent their time, I had to be cautious—knocking for permission to leave my room, never staying too long in the bathroom. I was also frail. The muscles in my arms had become wasted and wobbly, my elbows often buckling when I tried to pull myself up to the window ledge.

  Given where his room was located, Nigel was in a better position than I to make undetected trips to the bathroom and to stay there longer. He worked methodically, but there was no hiding the mess we made, the skewed bricks and mounds of loose mortar sitting on the sill. I tried to take solace in the knowledge that the boys walked into our bathroom only once or twice a week—mainly to take the oversize bucket we used for water and refill it at a tap outside. The risk still felt huge.

  On the start of the third day, Nigel announced that he had carved out the final brick. He then had to contend with the metal bars, but the first one was already loose, and he said it would take only one more to create enough space to pass through.

  We decided that we should make our break that same night, slipping out the window around 8 P.M., just after the evening’s final prayer. We were banking on that night being like every other night in the house, governed by the mind-numbing clockwork routine—prayer followed by dinner, followed by prayer, followed by bedtime for everyone but the two boys on guard duty, who would sit outside, talking idly in the darkness.

  I was startled, then, when Jamal arrived in my room with dinner a full hour ahead of when the meal usually came.

  “Asalaamu Alikum,” he said with a slow smile. Peace be upon you.

  My thoughts spun. Did they suspect something? What was happening?

  Jamal waved for me to pull out my tin plate and lay it on the floor. He then opened a plastic bag and slid something onto it—a slender piece of deep-fried fish, golden brown and glistening with oil. From his pocket, he pulled out two small limes and set them next to the fish.

  It was protein, a gift. It seemed that he was worried about my diet. “You like?” Jamal said, pointing at the fish.

  We stood for a few seconds, regarding each other. I gave myself an internal kick. Snap out of it. “Oh, Jamal,” I said, lifting the plate, “this is so nice of you.” I smiled at him, feeling a touch of guilt. I hoped the leaders wouldn’t punish him too badly after I was gone.

  Following the day’s last prayer, I rapped on my door and pushed it open slightly to see who responded. It was Abdullah who peered down the hallway, which meant that he was on nighttime guard duty. My heart sank. Abdullah liked to roam.

  “Mukuusha,” I said in Somali, pointing at my stomach. Bathroom. “I am feeling sick. Very sick.”

  Abdullah snapped his fingers to indicate that I could go
.

  Slowly and coolly, I left my room and walked down the hallway in the direction of the bathroom. Earlier in the evening, I’d smuggled my backpack to the bathroom and left it on the window ledge. Inside it, I had put a headscarf and the heavy black abaya I wore the day we were kidnapped, so that once outside, I could better blend in. Nigel stood waiting for me at his doorway. He had done some advance work in the bathroom, wrenching two bars out of the walls, then putting them back in place, propped up precariously with chunks of loose cement.

  Up in the alcove, Nigel removed the two bars and next began gingerly unstacking the bricks from the window frame. I could hear him panting. One brick came away, then two, then three, then four. When they were all out, he jumped back to the floor and motioned that we were ready. After I put on my abaya, Nigel lifted me toward the window and the 18-inch gap that was now there.

  I looked through that hole for no longer than two seconds, but it was enough to see everything. I could see the alleyway beneath, and the darkness of a village with no lights and everything uncertain beyond. We had worried about breaking our ankles in the drop. We had worried about so many things, and as I stared at the gap in the window, every one of those things felt there, right on the other side, along with our freedom. I turned around and started to back my way through the remaining window bars, sliding both feet through the gap—with two of the remaining bars above me and one bar beneath—lowering myself slowly into the air outside. I could feel a breeze on my ankles. It worked until it didn’t: I pushed myself back and felt my rear end jam up against one of the bars still in the window. The gap was too small. If I couldn’t fit, Nigel never would.