A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  Muslim prayers are performed in cycles, called raka’ah. Depending on the time of day, you go through the cycle either two, three, or four times—a bit like doing sun salutations in yoga. Each prayer includes motion. You stand, you kneel, you touch your forehead to the floor, and you sit back on your heels in contemplation before starting all over again. You recite Koranic verses from memory, each cycle beginning with the same seven lines from the first chapter, but expanding from there to include other chapters. Surah, a chapter is called. The most facile Muslims can draw from the whole of the Koran, having committed every last one of the book’s 114 chapters—over 6,200 verses in all—to memory.

  I prayed awkwardly. I held my thumbs at the wrong angle next to my ears or forgot to keep my toes tucked beneath me when I touched my forehead to the ground. The Arabic words got tangled in my head, unhitched as they were from any sort of meaning. There were a few phrases I’d picked up during my time in Iraq, but for the most part, we were learning syllables more than sentences, stringing them together like beads, a couple of words at a time. Bismillahil rahman ar-raheem. Al hamdu lillahi rabb el alameen.

  I recognized how gentle it could sound, the lulling lift and fall of the words, how the lines might flow together like waves. Until one caught in my head and refused to come out. Ar rah . . . ar-raheem?

  Abdullah caught the question in my tone. He leaned in close for a split second. “No!” he snapped. “Wrong.”

  He was not a patient teacher.

  When it came to spoken Arabic, my copy of the Koran was no help whatsoever, since the Arabic was presented in indecipherable script, with nothing spelled out phonetically. So Abdullah chanted breathlessly, and I scrawled notes in my notebook so I could practice it all later. On the other side of the room, Jamal sat close to Nigel, his knees pulled up to his lanky body, taking him through new verses with painstaking care.

  I looked at Abdullah. “Can you do that last part again, please? More slowly?”

  He shook his head and got to his feet, seeming to signal that our lesson was over. “You are bad, Amina,” he said gravely, chucking his chin toward Nigel—Noah—as if he were the model student, the preferable one. He went on to repeat the verse in a last merciless whoosh of Arabic—Ar-rahman ar-raheem. Malikee yawm ul deen. Iyyak naabudu wa iyyaka nastaeen. Ihdina assirat al moostaqeem—and then, relishing his own ability to pronounce English, he said nice and slowly, “You are very stupid woman.”

  *

  One thing about Islam is that paradise always beckons. Life is oriented toward the afterlife. Whatever pleasures you miss out on in this world, whatever comfort or richness or beauty is absent from your days and years, you will find it upon entering paradise, where pain, grit, and war disappear altogether. Paradise is a vast, perfect garden. It’s a place where everyone wears pretty robes, where there are lavish banquets and comfortable couches decorated with jewels. There are trees, and musky mountains, and cool valleys lined by rivers. Paradise is so perfect that the fruit there never rots and a person stays thirty-three years old forever. It is the finish line to all earthly misery, an entryway into perpetual bliss. According to the Koran, angels wait at each of its eight gates, congratulating new arrivals. “Peace unto you for that ye persevered in patience,” they say. “Now how excellent is the final home!”

  The more I read about paradise, the more I understood that this was what the boys waited for, what they worked toward with their prayer, as if they had a giant layaway plan for their dreams, paid forward in daily devotion until it came time to meet the angels.

  Helpfully, my Koran came annotated. Different passages were accompanied by long footnotes in English, quoting the Muslim hadith, the ancient texts that recorded what the Prophet Muhammad did and said and taught during his life. The hadith add context and detail to the word of God as written in the Koran. For me, reading in our concrete room in the Electric House, the footnotes helped answer some of my questions. They told instructive little stories and, together with the Koran, made clear that what a person does in this life matters immensely in the next. Paradise, it is said, has seven levels, with its top level further divided into a hundred degrees, and the highest spots reserved for the most righteous. The boys in our house, with nothing to distract them and no responsibilities beyond guarding me and Nigel, were trying to land themselves a good spot in the afterlife. They had plenty of time to work on their faith, to bank their virtue in anticipation of Judgment Day.

  If Abdullah had any suspicion about my sincerity as a Muslim, he didn’t show it. Instead, he passed hours sitting across from me, listening to my Arabic with intense, unblinking concentration, his eyes fixed on my face as I took baby steps with my chanting. If I managed to get through a few minutes of recitation without a single stammer or pause, he’d commend me. “You are very smart,” he’d say. “This is good.” But it was only a matter of minutes, usually, before I’d screw something up. Abdullah’s mood would flip instantly. He’d pounce on my failures, seething with new rage. When I looked up at him, trying to understand what I’d done wrong, he’d scream, “Look down!” and often lift a hand, threatening to hit me. His hands, I noticed, were unusually large.

  When he was gone, Nigel and I wondered aloud whether he was just power tripping or possibly mentally ill. Either way, he seemed to believe that he owned me.

  As the third week of our captivity began, I felt grateful for the challenge of learning both a new language and a new religion. It helped to fill the days. When we were left alone, Nigel and I compared notes on what we were discovering inside the Koran. He was focused on the idea that Allah had a lot of rules regarding promises and oaths. If you swore something on Allah’s name, you were obligated to fulfill the promise. His goal was to get one of the leaders to swear on Allah that they’d let us go.

  Even in the off hours, I could hear the group of boys continuing to chant from the Koran as they sat outside on the patio, their voices braiding together in a long-lasting hum. How, I wondered, did they stay so focused? Did their beliefs really run that deep?

  I would have expected that one of the older guards—the captain or Ali—would lead the prayers, but it was the small, serene Hassam, who, at sixteen, was one of the youngest in the group. Hassam’s father, Jamal had explained to us, was an imam at a mosque. As a result, Hassam knew more of the Koran than anybody else in the house and thus was put in the pole position for prayers, standing at the front, facing Mecca, and leading the recitations, while the rest of the household stood in lines behind him. Through our spy hole in the bathroom vent, I watched him inhabit the role of an elder. He sang the prayers in a loud, clear voice, exaggerating his hand motions so that everyone could follow along.

  Nigel and I were expected to pray in our room, with Nigel standing ahead of me because he was a man and thus our leader. Every so often, Jamal came and invited Nigel to join the rest of them outside. Nigel understood that he couldn’t say no and that it was a chance to get some fresh air. He’d look at me a bit apologetically, knowing that, as a female, I’d probably never be invited to pray outside, and then he’d go.

  Left alone, I skipped my prayers altogether. Knowing my captors were occupied and wouldn’t bother me, I was happy to stare at a wall.

  *

  “This isn’t good,” said Donald Trump one evening after stepping into our room and taking stock of our grungy mattresses, the black mold along the back wall. “You can’t keep human beings like this!” Along with an expression of mild outrage, he wore a pink long-sleeved dress shirt and baggy trousers hemmed to the proportions dictated by the hadith—one hand span above his ankles, to keep the fabric from brushing the ground. He kicked at a roach crossing the floor.

  Despite his feigned disapproval, Donald was one of the leaders of the group holding us. We were sure about that. Donald drove in every five or six days with supplies from the city. Ali, for reasons we’d never know, had disappeared sometime during the third week.

  Donald’s real name was Mohammed, but we already h
ad one Mohammed in the house, and besides that, he handled the household money and was more Westernized than the others. His English wasn’t perfect, but he talked a good worldly game. He aligned himself with me and Nigel, trotting out stories from what apparently had been extensive travels in Europe. He told us he’d spent time living in Germany. He rhapsodized about the olive oil in Italy, how it tastes more amazing than olive oil from anywhere else in the world. He’d seen things. He knew things. He wanted us to know that he knew things. He seemed to think it set him apart. That night he showed up with two cans of warm Coke and handed one to each of us.

  He squatted down for a chat, his face lit by the bulb overhead. “These people, you know, they’re uneducated,” he said. “They just want money.”

  “We don’t have money to give them,” I responded. “There is no money.”

  I sipped my Coke slowly, like a cocktail.

  Donald lifted his shoulders and then let them fall. “If it was up to me, you would go in one week.” He smiled and tilted his head. “No, you would go in one hour.”

  Not one part of me believed him.

  It was midway through September, approaching the one-month anniversary of our kidnapping. It was also Ramadan, the holy month. Ramadan was meant to reinforce purity and patience. There were extra prayers. Everyone fasted while the sun was up, a condition that made little difference to me and Nigel, since we were eating only twice a day anyway. Each morning before sunup, we were brought a few things by Hassam or Jamal, usually some canned tuna and a plastic bag of what looked to be hot-dog buns, though in a Muslim country, given the Koran’s prohibition on pork, surely they were meant to hold something else. We ate without enthusiasm and didn’t eat or drink again until nighttime, when a similar meal arrived. My body felt uninterested in the food set before me; my muscles were going slack after weeks of sitting. We drank water and craved the tea, energizing in its sweetness, that came with our meals.

  What I most longed for was a single square of chocolate. Sometimes, as Nigel dozed on his mattress, I told him long made-up stories, personal fairy tales, that culminated each time with me happening upon a whole pound of dark chocolate or a big pile of M&M’s and eating it all up. Or I posed questions: “Would you rather have a piece of chocolate cake or a hot fudge sundae? A hot fudge sundae or a bag of Hershey’s Kisses?” He didn’t answer, and I didn’t care. I fanned the air with my hand to stay cool.

  In my version of paradise, the air was always cold and the rivers ran with candy.

  Meanwhile, the sweat pooled inside my bra cups, steaming my breasts until the skin grew spongy and raw. Nigel hadn’t worn pants in weeks, having adopted the Somali man-skirt to keep himself cool. I had recently stopped wearing jeans and the black abaya and instead donned a long shapeless dress made of thick red polyester that Donald had brought me during an earlier visit. I couldn’t bring myself to remove the bra. It felt like protection.

  Before leaving our room after his visits, Donald always asked us what we needed from the market. Anticipating the question, I at one point made a list in my notebook to hand over the next time he surfaced, tossing in a few fantasy items for my own amusement: soap, aspirin, chocolate bars, exercise bike, cotton buds for cleaning the ears, a television.

  He studied the page when I passed it to him, looking puzzled. I pointed to each item and pronounced the words slowly. “Ex-cer-size bike.”

  “Ah yes, yes,” he said, not wanting to lose face by admitting that he didn’t understand.

  “Do you think you could find one of those in the market, Mohammed?”

  “Yes, I think so. I think so.”

  A few days later, he brought us the soap and some acetaminophen tablets—so large they looked like horse pills—plus a packet of Q-tips and a pair of small scissors so that Nigel could trim his facial hair. I asked Donald for a new bra and some books in English for us to read. Nigel and I begged him, actually, for the books. More so than our bodies, our minds were beginning to starve.

  There was something else I needed to discuss with Donald. I cringed to even think of it, but it was becoming necessary to address. My period was two weeks late. I’d had my fling with the fickle-hearted bureau chief before leaving Baghdad—that one bit of bodily distraction, the one concession to my neediness in a war zone—and now, in pretty much the worst imaginable circumstances, it was catching up with me. I’d never been pregnant, so I had no idea what it might feel like. Was the aching in my hips some sort of symptom? Did the malaise I felt, sweating through the hot afternoons, have nothing to do with my surroundings and everything to do with a kernel of life, another little hostage, inside me? I wasn’t sure what it meant or how to feel about it. I just knew it was a secret I couldn’t—or shouldn’t—try to keep.

  Tactfully, Nigel asked permission to leave the room so I could talk alone with Donald. We’d discussed how I should handle it, thinking it best that Nigel not be present. Donald, I figured, having lived in Germany, was the most likely of our captors to handle the news without invoking all sorts of moralistic disgust. Still, I worried what he’d do. On his forehead, Donald had a prayer mark—a dark, leathery-looking callus caused by the frequency and vigor with which he put his head to the ground. Some devout Muslim men cultivated these as a source of pride, a sign of their steadfastness.

  “Mohammed,” I said, my voice faltering a little, “I have something to tell you.” I watched his expression grow serious, picking up on my tone. There was no turning back. “Before I became a good woman, a Muslim woman, I . . . I had sexual relations out of wedlock, with somebody in Baghdad.” I dropped my gaze to the floor before continuing. I explained the situation as if somebody I barely knew—the infidel I’d once been—had borrowed my body and taken it out for a joyride.

  “I just need to know,” I said, “if there will be a baby.” I added “Inshallah” for good measure, not sure what the desirable outcome would be. Was I saying “God willing I am pregnant” or “Please just let me find out one way or the other”? I was twenty-seven years old. I did not want to have a baby, especially not one fathered by a man into whose bed I’d wandered for the sole reason that I’d been deeply and pathetically lonely. Above all, I did not want to be pregnant in Somalia. Then again, beginning with the moment we were ambushed on the Afgoye Road, all rules had been rewritten, all priorities rearranged. Maybe, I thought, a pregnancy would help get us released. Maybe it would make me into a ticking time bomb. I’d walked my mind around in circles already. I imagined they’d at least need to take me to a doctor, and I could beg that doctor to call the authorities. When I really thought about it, though, I wasn’t sure if there were any authorities in Somalia who were capable of getting us out.

  Donald received the news of my predicament calmly. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said, seeming inconvenienced but not exactly angry. I felt like a teenager confessing to her dad. “Babies are a blessing from Allah,” he added.

  A few days later, he returned with a paper bag. Inside the bag was a plastic cup with a lid that could be screwed tightly shut. “For your pee-pee,” he said.

  Nigel and I snickered about the word “pee-pee” when he left. Where had he learned it? We laughed at absolutely everything we could—any little fart or hiccup we produced, any strange thing one of our captors said. Otherwise, there was nothing at all to laugh about. In addition to the plastic cup, Donald had proudly brought us some English reading material, stuff he’d found in a market stall. There was a college catalog for Malaysian students, printed by the British Education Board in Kuala Lumpur. It was dated 1994 and listed courses of study available for foreign-exchange students at a variety of universities in the United Kingdom. We also were given a couple of grease-stained storybooks for Islamic children and a Times of London reader from 1981 that had gone dark with mold. Inexplicably, he’d brought us a watch—a cheap-looking black men’s digital watch, made in China. As if knowing the hour of day would make life better. Nigel and I laughed at all of this before falling back into the morose silen
ce that governed so much of our time.

  When I was ready, I went into the bathroom, peed in the cup, screwed the lid on, and passed it back to Donald, who got into his car with it and drove off.

  That evening, when I prayed, I wasn’t sure what to pray for.

  22

  Today’s a Good Day

  I watched Nigel’s hands. Despite the heat and the grime, they were clean—his fingernails neatly trimmed, the Somali dust scrubbed from the furrows of his knuckles. He was fastidious. He always had been. Visiting him in Australia, I’d watched him wash his face in the mornings, floss his teeth, and carefully unfold his clothes. When we’d gone camping on an island off the Queensland coast, he’d been the one to shake the sand out of our sleeping bags and tidy up our tent, creating order out of my piles. Here, Nigel’s hands were the cleanest part of him. This was due to the wudu, the ritual washing that went on before each of the five prayer sessions. Jamal had taught us the wudu just after we converted. You washed your hands three times, then swished water through your mouth three times, then snorted water through your nostrils, then splashed more of it over your face, arms, head, ears, and finally, your feet.

  Nigel and I performed our ablutions in the bathroom separately, using fresh water from the brown bucket, which the boys filled at the tap outside. The boys holding us all washed out in the courtyard or in their own bathroom, in a different part of the house, and so, it seemed, did the three Somali captives, since Nigel and I had this bathroom to ourselves. I always skipped over the nostril washing but took care to make fake snorting sounds in case anyone was listening. The wudu was important. It purified you before you talked to God. Judging from the outcome, Nigel took to his wudu like a surgeon prepping for the OR. It was one part of Islam that seemed to agree with him. “Cleanliness is half of faith,” the Prophet had told his followers. On this front, Nigel—at least when it came to his hands—was in good shape.