A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  Ali hovered momentarily in the doorway. He pointed at a mat along the opposite wall, indicating that I should sit. Then he disappeared.

  Nigel glanced at me. We hadn’t had a moment alone since we’d been taken. “What are we going to do?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ve been kidnapped, right?” he said. “Or is this something different?”

  I was thinking about the difference between being detained and being kidnapped. I’d been detained once with Enas and an Iraqi cameraman while reporting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. A group of armed men had surrounded our car and then taken us to the Sadr Party headquarters, where we’d been questioned about our political affiliations, whether we were loyal to the Sunnis. I’d been able to make a phone call to a Shia contact who’d exerted some pressure, and we’d been let go within an hour. It had been a hassle, and scary, but it had ended quickly, over and done. How I wished for something like that now.

  Before I could say anything much to Nigel, Ali walked through the door, this time carrying a piece of newspaper. With a flourish, as if wanting to be sure he had our attention, he folded the paper in half, then rolled it into a tight cone, expertly flipping back the tip, his long fingers working around the rim, pressing it into a thin ledge. He leaned down and dropped his creation on the floor next to Nigel. An origami ashtray. Nigel and I stared at it wordlessly.

  “Have you seen this before now?” Ali said. His English was accented but understandable, the product of some sort of schooling, I guessed.

  We both shook our heads. Ali was still wearing his warrior scarving, but it seemed as if, hidden beneath his layers, he might be smiling. He dropped into a squat not far from where Nigel was sitting, as if settling in. “I used to smoke,” he said. “Before the jihad.” He looked from Nigel to me. “But since two years, no smoking.”

  I took this to mean we were going to have a conversation. I tried not to feel terrified of him despite the glare in his eyes and the gun in his hands and the bizarre fact we were sitting, the three of us, in a grubby room in an off-the-grid Somali village, waiting to see what would happen next. I reminded myself that it could only serve us to build some rapport with Ali.

  Ali, it turned out, had plenty to say about Somali politics and jihad. His jihad was all about driving the Ethiopian troops out of Somalia, which was pretty much the same jihad being fought by the armed groups of teenagers we’d seen charging around Mogadishu in pickup trucks. Ethiopia’s population was predominantly Christian. Somalia was a Muslim country and needed an Islamic government, one that enforced Islamic rules, Ali said. He’d been battling the invaders for two years—ever since 2006, when the Ethiopian government sent troops over the border and he signed on with the mujahideen. As he saw it, it was a straight-up case of Christians meddling in Muslim affairs. He hated the Ethiopians. He hated everything about them.

  “For two years, my life is only jihad,” he said from beneath his scarf. He was sitting against the wall now, knees jutting, gun propped next to him.

  Being a holy warrior in Somalia seemed to involve giving up the pleasures of your former life and marrying yourself fully to the cause. It meant adopting and abiding by the most rigid interpretation of Islamic law. It meant no television, no music, no smoking, and—what seemed to pain Ali the most—no sports. Football, he said with no small amount of wistfulness, had been his game of choice. He’d played it, watched it on television, considered himself a loyal fan of some of the African World Cup teams.

  We did what we could to work Ali over. We empathized with his struggle. We said “of course” each time he mentioned how hard it was to be battling the infidels all the time. Nigel dropped the names of various soccer stars and team rivalries, which seemed to excite him. But whenever we felt even a loose connection starting to build, we’d hit a wall.

  “Your country,” Ali said, waving a finger at the two of us, forgetting the chitchat, his voice suddenly spewing rage, “sent the Ethiopians to us.”

  It didn’t matter to him that Nigel was Australian and I was Canadian. The differences were insignificant. An unbelieving white foreigner was an unbelieving white foreigner. The Western world was inscrutable and immodest and ruled over by Satan, or Shaitan, in Arabic. When we reiterated to Ali that we’d come to Somalia as journalists trying to tell stories about how the people there were suffering, he was wholly unimpressed—suspicious, even. I knew that the worries about spies weren’t entirely unfounded. I’d read that the U.S. had quietly sent Special Forces into Somalia to assist the Ethiopians and the faltering transitional government. I’d heard, too, that every so often, unmanned drones passed over Mogadishu, buzzing the city like steel-gray dragonflies.

  When Ali left the room, closing the door behind him, Nigel and I sat silently in the shadows. What did they want from us? It was hard to know. We tried to buoy each other by reviewing the circumstances. Ahmed had seemed so certain that everything would be okay. Ali brimmed with anger but hadn’t done anything to hurt us. Nobody had asked us for money, even.

  Light leaked through the shuttered window. On the sill was a stack of thick hardcover books—Korans, it looked like, about eight of them. In the far corner, there was an iron coatrack with some men’s clothes hanging from it. The sun radiated across the tin roof above, heating the room like an oven. Beneath my head scarf, I could feel the sweat matting my hair. Outside, men were murmuring. Nigel and I went round and round over the puzzle of what was happening.

  “This is a kidnapping,” one of us would say.

  “No, it’s not. It’s just a misunderstanding, a political thing.”

  Something in the act of debating it made us feel better.

  After a time, Ahmed poked his head through the door. “I will be leaving,” he said, as if we were friends parting ways. “Be very careful with these men. They will kill you if you don’t do as they say.”

  Where was he heading? I was desperate for him to stay. That his English was so dignified and his face was uncovered felt important, consoling. He was the one guy here who didn’t carry a gun. I’d been running the words he’d said in the car—Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you—again and again through my mind.

  “Wait,” I said, “what about the commander? I thought he wanted to meet us.”

  “Ah,” Ahmed said, almost as if he’d forgotten. “Inshallah. Tomorrow.”

  Right away, I started to wonder if he’d been lying to us. Was there no commander? Was it possible that nobody would come to hear us out? I’d put all my hopes on this one possibility.

  I tried to wring whatever I could out of Ahmed. It felt like a last chance. “My brother, I need to ask you one thing,” I said. “Can we please call our families? Because if we don’t go back to the hotel, they’re going to know something has happened to us. Can we just tell them that we’re okay?”

  Ahmed nodded as if this were an excellent suggestion. “Perhaps,” he said obliquely. “Perhaps that will be the next program.”

  I told him that if we could at least make a call to Ajoos from the Shamo Hotel, he might be able to help everyone get what they needed.

  This, Ahmed said, with a parting grin, could be another piece of the program. He closed the door gently, leaving us again in darkness. We heard the squeak of the gate and the sound of his car driving away.

  *

  With Ahmed gone, Ali appeared to be fully in charge and relishing the role. He was worked up. Any eagerness to talk about his life or the jihad had evaporated. His anger now seemed focused and specific, directed entirely at us.

  He demanded our money. “Where is it?” he screamed. I fumbled in my bag and produced the $211 in U.S. dollars that I’d brought from the hotel that morning, having left the rest in the Shamo’s safe. My hand was shaking as I passed it over. Nigel was carrying a few coins and a folded-up hundred-dollar bill he’d stashed in his front pocket. Ali counted our money with open skepticism. “This is all?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I don’t belie
ve,” he said. The rage was building in his voice. “I don’t believe,” he repeated. “How can this be?”

  Nigel and I said nothing.

  “Where is your money?” Ali said.

  “It’s at the hotel. We left it there.” Somehow I’d become the one who did most of the talking.

  “Your passports. Give them to me.”

  “They’re at the hotel, too.”

  Ali gave me a narrow-eyed, judgmental look, as if silently making up his mind about something. I averted my gaze, not sure whether it was better to project meekness or defiance in return. My looking away caused him to laugh, a nasty chortle. He walked out the door. I could hear him conferring with the soldiers outside in the yard. Within a minute, he was back.

  This time Ali grabbed my backpack and dumped out its contents. In the light cast by the open door, he inspected everything carefully, disdainfully. My camera, my notebook, my water bottle. He took the lid off my lip balm. He examined both sides of my hairbrush. He handled each item delicately, as if it might explode. He shook his head, seeming disgusted by the things I’d chosen to carry with me that day.

  Each time Ali left the room, he seemed to recharge his fury, as if taking hits off a tank full of hatred somewhere just off the patio. After going through my backpack, he stepped outside and then came back almost immediately. He pointed at me, his eyes bulging. “Get up!” he said. He touched the shoulder strap of his gun as if to remind me it was there. Ali had a thick, stocky body—not fat, exactly, but well fed, solid in a way that few Somalis seemed to be. I glanced at Nigel and then got to my feet, my knees and back stiff after all the sitting. Ali motioned toward the door.

  The sunlight outside was blinding. We walked a few steps across the concrete patio. Two stairs led up from the patio to another closed door. Ali pointed at it, signaling that I should go inside. For a split second I hesitated, and his hand thwacked my back, hard. “Do you want me to kill you?” he said. He gave me a shove forward and I stumbled on the stairs.

  The room we entered was dark and small, with a metal cot against one wall. The air was an unmoving envelope of heat. Ali closed the door.

  “Please,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Do not do this.” I searched for his eyes in the dimness and kept talking. “Please, you are Islamic. The Muslims are the best kind of people. I know this is not good in Islam. Please . . .”

  I had been thinking about this on the car ride through the desert, crammed in with all those men, imagining the things that could go wrong on top of everything that already had.

  If he heard me talking, Ali gave no indication. He pulled at my head scarf and tossed it to the ground. Then he reached out and grabbed the neckline of my abaya, yanking it down so that the snaps popped open and its two sides fell apart. When I lifted my hands to cover myself, he hit me over the head. I yelped in surprise. “Do you want me to kill you?” he said for the second time, and then he pushed me toward the wall. I could see on the other side of the room, on the windowsill, a stack of heavy-looking books—more copies of the Koran.

  I felt Ali’s hands slide beneath the fabric of my tank top and into the cups of my bra. He was fumbling, squeezing. His breath came in sharp huffs. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see his face. With his right hand, he found the button on my jeans and then the zipper. A thick finger probed me between the legs, then quickly pulled away. I felt repulsion, nausea climbing my ribs. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. Hadn’t Ahmed said that? I was crying, jaggedly, feeling like I had a block of wood stuck in my throat. “This is wrong,” I was saying in a croaking voice. “You are not a good Muslim.”

  He gave me another hard shove, toward the floor. “You think I need this?” he said, almost spitting the words. “I have two wives. You are ugly, a bad woman.” He picked up his gun from the floor and made a gesture, indicating that I should dress myself. He acted as if I’d offended him, as if I’d violated his honor instead of the other way around. “I was searching for money. Just money.”

  “Okay,” I said back quietly. With trembling hands, I worked to snap up the abaya, suddenly grateful for the fact that it covered me so entirely. I wrapped the scarf over my head. “No problem, no problem.”

  I hated the words, but that’s what came out of me.

  He ordered me not to cry. He marched me back to the other room. Seeing Nigel on the foam mat in the gritty dark, exactly as I’d left him, I felt the tears start to flow again. I squelched a sob. I could see the devastation on Nigel’s face, a clear reaction to what he was reading on mine.

  Before leaving us, Ali jabbed a finger menacingly in my direction. “You are a problem,” he said.

  *

  Nigel and I were pretty sure there was a school right behind our building. We could hear children’s voices floating in the air, lots of them. It sounded as if they were playing in a yard, laughing. The Korans piled on the shelves made us wonder if the compound was part of a madrasa, a Koranic school. But the fact that the floor of every room we’d been in was littered with fuses, old batteries, and bits of wire offered an alternative idea—that this was a place where mujahideen fighters built their bombs.

  The truth was, we had no idea where we were. Somewhere west of Mogadishu, we figured. We’d driven a long time at high speed. We’d passed nothing but a few camel herders and that one single truck full of soldiers. Early on, I’d caught glimpses of the bright tarps that made up the IDP camps toward which we’d originally been heading, but then we’d veered off again into the scrub. We could hear no sounds of cars driving by, no planes flying overhead, only the occasional ping and crackle of the building’s tin roof, expanding noisily under the pour of hot sun. It felt like we were in a box inside another box, sealed away from everything we knew.

  Ali delivered us lunch—a flask of sweet dark tea, some bottled water, and two flimsy blue plastic bags, each containing a glop of cold spaghetti. He also gave us a tin of oily tuna fish. I took a few bites but couldn’t eat more. The day’s fear had accumulated into an acidic brew that sloshed in my stomach.

  For a while in the late afternoon, we were allowed outside. Beneath the boughs of the acacia tree, Nigel and I played a few listless games of tic-tac-toe, drawing crosses and circles in the dust, watching the soldier boys out of the corners of our eyes. They were sprawled in the dirt with their guns, boredom seeming to have set in. Blooming white clouds drifted across a blue sky.

  I was looking for diversion. “When you were a kid,” I asked Nigel, “did you ever play the game where you called out the shapes you saw in the clouds?”

  He looked at me like I was insane.

  Back inside our room, he began to cry. I was too afraid to put my arms around him or even to move off my foam mattress and over to where he sat. Earlier, Ahmed had asked if we were married, and after giving myself a split second to make a choice, I’d told him that we weren’t. This had been a tactical move, since I’d just finished encouraging him to Google us to prove that we were journalists and not spies. I didn’t want to get caught in any sort of lie. Now, though, I couldn’t comfort Nigel, for fear of igniting the mercurial Ali. I was already worried that he’d separate us for good. In Islamic tradition, an unmarried woman should not be alone with an unmarried man, let alone touch him. I didn’t want to take any risks.

  Instead, I spoke softly to Nigel from a distance, saying all the things that I myself wanted to hear. It would be all right, I told him. We’d get out of this place. We had each other. At one point, we’d spotted Abdi and the two other Somali guys being walked at gunpoint across the courtyard. Nigel and I had been wondering whether they’d been in on the kidnapping—whether one or all of them had sold us out—but it looked as if they were being installed in one of the other two rooms in our building, captives like us.

  I tried to get Nigel to meditate with me, running through the phrases about freedom and peace that I’d listened to a couple of days earlier on the plane from Nairobi, this time saying them aloud. He whispered the words alon
g with me.

  At some point, we both nodded off in the heat. I slept hard—for how long, I have no idea. Waking up, I enjoyed a quick instant of unknowingness before my surroundings reintroduced themselves. The grubby walls. The tattered mat. Nigel staring at the ceiling from his own mat about ten feet away. The sound of men speaking a foreign language outside our door. As my mind locked in on the scene, I felt something internal start to plummet. Now what?

  Our door flew open. Ahmed was back, dressed in the clothes he’d worn earlier, accompanied by Ali and two other men. One was tall, wearing Ben Franklin glasses and an orange-striped polo shirt. He held a notepad and pen. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, thin and serene-faced, but unable to mask how pleased he was to see us, two trophy animals in a cage. He introduced himself as Adam.

  “I am the commander,” he said. He shook Nigel’s hand but made no move to shake mine. When he spoke, it was with only a slight accent. “What is your country?” When Nigel answered “Australia,” Adam wrote it down in the notepad. “What is your village?” he said next.

  The other man was introduced as Yahya. He was older than the others, with a short white beard, and seemed gruff, entirely detached. Something in the way he squared his shoulders made me think he had a military background. I recognized him as the guy who’d driven our car away from the spot where we’d been taken earlier. He was looking with scorn at Nigel’s pink paisley shirt.

  Adam took down our names and professions and addresses. I gave him my father’s phone number in Sylvan Lake, wishing that I had my mother’s number in British Columbia. She would hold up better in a crisis, I knew. Nigel gave a number for his sister, Nicky. Adam smiled and closed his notebook. “Inshallah, this will be over quickly,” he said. “You are my brother and my sister.”

  A while later, he returned to the room, offering some good news. “We no longer believe you are spies,” he said. Before anyone could get too excited, he tacked on another announcement: “Allah,” he said, “has put it into my heart to ask for a ransom.”