I sank into the seat of the car, feeling the aches start to override my adrenaline. My back and butt had been scraped raw by being dragged across the mosque. My feet were swollen and covered in dried blood from the thornbushes. Had they not been vaguely throbbing, I might have thought they belonged to someone else.
We turned from one road onto another before finally reaching some sort of destination—a house behind a wall, a house that, unlike the others we’d stayed in thus far, was clearly occupied. Children’s shoes were strewn outside the doorway. Women’s clothing hung on a line. Donald and Skids whisked us down a low hallway, past a number of closed doors, to a back room. They left us there, guarded by Abdullah and Mohammed. I could smell food cooking.
Immediately, I guessed that we were in the captain’s home. The room we were standing in was a bedroom, and not just a bedroom but a full-blown frilly boudoir, with chintz curtains hung over the windows, a pink-flowered coverlet spread over a queen-sized bed, and a wooden dresser holding bottles of skin cream, perfume, and hair gels, all in a neat row.
We were in the interior of someone’s life, someone’s marriage, someone’s sweet-smelling nest of pink. I could hear a woman talking loudly and furiously in Somali at the front of the house, likely protesting the sudden arrival of two foreigners and a mini-militia of unwashed teenagers with guns.
Donald returned. “Sit,” he said, pointing at the floor.
Nigel and I sat against the wall opposite the bed while Donald began an interrogation. Mohammed and Abdullah stood over us, as if awaiting orders. Captain Skids posed questions in Somali. Donald translated with a blistering rage that held up across languages.
“Why did you run away?”
“How did you get out?”
“Who helped you?”
“Do you want to die?”
We answered every query more than once, with Donald berating us for being stupid and bad Muslims, with Nigel and me apologizing, swearing that nobody had helped us, saying that we didn’t want to die, that we only wanted to go home.
Skids was pointing at me, his finger shaking with emotion.
Donald repeated the words in English. “It was you,” he said. “This was your plan.” In their minds, it was all my doing. I was, as I’d always been to them, the evil and untrustworthy woman.
They hit us both repeatedly. When I hunched over in pain, Mohammed slammed the butt of his gun into the space between my shoulders.
Donald finally boomed what seemed to be the culminating question: “Why,” he sputtered, “did you say that we are fucking you?”
The words made me quake. Donald continued, “Do you know what fucking is? We could have done that, subhanallah, but we did not. You are a liar!”
The accusation hung in the air. I felt Abdullah blazing a warning with his eyes. All of them were looking hard at me.
My thoughts raced. This was my moment to expose Abdullah. Yet something in me couldn’t do it. I was afraid. I was sure, without a doubt, that he’d deny what he’d done, and either way, it would again all be blamed on me.
I said to Donald, “The woman did not speak English! She did not understand. I told her I was afraid of the boys, I was worried they’d hurt me. I didn’t use that word. It’s not a good word. It’s not good to say that. And I’m a Muslim.” I turned to Nigel. “Tell them I didn’t say that word. Tell them!”
Nigel said nothing.
Skids and Donald were conferring. Abdullah and Mohammed landed blows on my head and shoulders. I felt woozy, as if the ground had fallen away beneath me. When Donald walked from one side of the room to the other, I reached out and grabbed his pant leg, trying to make him look at me. “Help me, please. Please.”
“They’re blaming you already,” Nigel whispered to me. “I think you should just take this one.”
These were words that would stay with me a long time. A long, long time. Through everything that was to come, through the many hours I’d have to think about it, I’d turn his words over in my mind like a rock in the hand, looking for some seam that wasn’t there.
I think you should just take this one.
“I can’t do that,” I whispered back to Nigel.
Donald and Skids pressed on with their questioning. The boys kept on with their blows. All the while, Nigel offered nothing about how it had been his idea to climb out the window in the first place, or how we’d worked together to plot the whole endeavor. He owned no part of it.
The closest he came was saying to Donald at one point, his voice cracking with fear, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it. I shouldn’t have listened.” As in, he shouldn’t have listened to me. Because I was just taking this one.
*
What did I feel toward Nigel? Hate, love, confusion, dependence, all of it bound up in a knot. In the moment, I couldn’t unravel it in order to examine any individual strand. He was Nigel and I was Amanda, and we were stuck together in the most profound way. When I thought about it, it was not all that different from how I’d felt as a kid, caught inside the lurching, logrolling existence of my family. It’s hard to be mad when you need someone so fundamentally.
I can’t say for sure how long the questioning continued, whether it was another seven minutes or fifteen or fifty. All I could feel was my mind spiraling through a gap, into an empty, dark space with no walls and no floor, no connection to the world beyond.
What I thought was, Now we are dying. They will hit us until we can’t answer. They’ll leave us only when we’re dead.
Eventually, Donald announced that he had to go. He shook his head as if he were fed up and exhausted by us. He was sitting on the edge of the mattress with the floral spread.
I didn’t want him to go. I trusted Skids less than I trusted Donald. “Please don’t leave,” I said weakly. “Don’t go.”
Donald looked at me almost paternally. He patted a hand on the bed, indicating that I should come and sit next to him. Mohammed seemed to object, but Donald waved him off. Unsteadily, I rose to my feet and seated myself not far from Donald on the bed, my ribs aching with the motion.
He reached out and touched a hand lightly to my swollen cheek, causing a flare of pain. “Your face looks very bad,” he said. He added that he had to leave and he was sorry for what would happen. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but it will not be good.”
His cell phone rang, and he answered it with a brisk Salaam. Looking at me, he held the phone away from his ear. I could hear a woman’s voice on the other end, speaking rapid-fire. “You see?” Donald said to me, rising to his feet, offering a quick smile. “I am late. I must go now.”
After he’d departed, Hassam, who until now had been absent, arrived carrying a brown paper bag. He handed it to Captain Skids, who dumped the contents on the floor—two long chains and four padlocks, presumably bought at a nearby market, clinking in a pile. The chains were thick and heavy-looking, a dark steely silver—the kind of thing you might use to lock together two big doors. I watched Hassam’s eyes flick over me, taking in the new bruises, assessing what had gone on. I thought I caught some small wave of alarm or compassion passing across his face and then vanishing, like a rabbit into the woods.
Skids lifted the chains, appearing pleased by their heft. He passed them to Mohammed, who knelt in front of me. He wrapped my two ankles with the ends of the chain and clicked a padlock into place on either side, so that each one was held snugly, each leg cuffed by a circle of cold smooth links, my left foot connected to my right by about six inches of loose chain. He then did the same to Nigel.
When it was over, both of us were hobbled. I avoided looking at Nigel, too confused by my feelings to view him as an ally or even a fellow victim. I was alone, more than before—my self caught inside my body caught inside my life. I could walk, but only with a clumsy slowness, the chain metal digging into my skin. Running was a clear impossibility. We were entirely theirs. Whatever game we’d tried to play, we’d lost.
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Documents
Abdullah watched us eat, looking pleased with himself. Out of the blue, he said, “You fuck many men?” He sounded almost casual, but he was clearly trying out a new verb. I knew it was a question he’d never dare ask with any of the others around. “What number? What number men you fuck?”
I said nothing.
Abdullah looked at Nigel. “You,” he said. “What number girls you fuck?”
Nigel swallowed his food. His face was puffed up from the beating. “Four?” he said, as if guessing at a correct answer.
Abdullah’s smile grew wide. “Ah, four!” he said. “Many!” Appearing content, he leaned back against the wall.
Nigel and I finished our meal in silence.
*
Surprisingly, when they moved us that evening, they took us back to the Escape House, the house whose window we’d climbed through only hours earlier. Returning seemed risky on their part. The whole neighborhood likely knew about me and Nigel—our spectacle, after all, had been fully witnessed—but our captors were either unthreatened or desperate enough to bring us back. It occurred to me that they had nowhere else to go.
My room was just as I’d left it—my books, clothes, moisturizer, and medicine packs all lined up next to the foam mattress. The blue floral sheet sat folded on the bed. The window shutters had been closed.
I lay down, the chains sliding uncomfortably between my ankles, my body damp from a day of heavy sweating, my limbs thrumming with a dull bone-marrow ache. In the escape, I’d lost my shoes, my backpack, my eyeglasses, my Koran, and the two little instructional booklets on being an Islamic woman. I fought off dread. I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman in the mosque—how brave she’d been, how surely she’d suffer some consequence for trying to help. I prayed that she would be okay.
Later, when Jamal showed up at my door, I asked to use the bathroom. He walked behind me down the hallway, his gun pointed between my shoulders. When I pushed back the bathroom curtain, my breath caught in my throat, seeing the mess Nigel and I had made. The room was littered with pieces of crumbled mortar and brick. The hole we’d made in the window at the back of the alcove looked enormous and violently rendered, like a wound, a jagged portal opening to the darkness beyond. I imagined the shock of whichever of our guards had discovered it.
As I used the toilet, Jamal hovered on the other side of the curtain. I could hear him breathing. I felt embarrassed, knowing he was listening to me pee.
Back in my room, I waited all night for them to take me away, my mind roosting uneasily on that empty patch of desert with the twisted acacia tree, the memory of a knife held at my throat.
Then, improbably, the muezzin was warbling. Sun sliced through a crack in the window shutter, lighting the gaudy green of my walls. At some point, I’d fallen asleep. And now I was awake, alive. Sounds floated overhead as if everyone in the house were up, washing and praying, same as always. I heard some sort of conversation going on out on the veranda.
I felt a flood of warm relief.
Maybe, I thought, we’d be okay.
*
It would be nice if bad things happened only in the shadows, if life split easily into camps of darkness and light. How I would have liked it if the stream of sun pouring over our house that morning, over the neighborhood and the neighbors and the whole city of Mogadishu, had some sort of diverting, uplifting effect.
It seemed to be one of those moments when nobody knew what was going to happen next, how anything should go from here. I could hear the murmur of our captors, huddled in a group conference on the porch, presumably discussing what to do. Yesterday had been a bad day, indeed. Their two treasure chests had grown legs and sprinted away.
A short while later, Captain Skids and Abdullah brought me food. Skids never concerned himself with day-to-day matters, and it was never Abdullah who carried in my meals. But they were standing in my room, looking almost kindly, placing in front of me what amounted to a bonanza of a breakfast—a ripe yellowish mango, a hot-dog bun, a cup of warm tea.
“Eat the food,” Abdullah said without a trace of his usual fury. “We will wait.”
With this, my heart began to tick faster. Wait for what? I looked at the food in my hands, the cup of tea on the floor. The sight of it made me light-headed. I was ravenous. The exertion of the escape had drained me completely.
Skids gave a curt nod and left the room. Abdullah turned to follow him, again looking at me in a way I couldn’t read.
When they were gone, I tore a little piece off the hot-dog bun and ate it. I took a sip of the tea. I wondered if Nigel had been given the same food and whether they were waiting for him, too.
I peeled the fruit with my fingers, sucking the stray bits of flesh from each piece of skin. Inside, the mango was a vibrant orange, paler around the edges, deeper toward the core. Its sweetness was gratifying, though it would do nothing to fill the howling void in my belly. I’d learned enough about hunger to understand that the impulse to gobble down food was an animal thing, useless if you weren’t in a pack. When you were alone, it was better for both soul and body to make a small meal last.
I chewed the hot-dog bun piece by piece, alternating it with nibbles of fruit. Through the wall, I heard a sound—a pained yelp. They were in Nigel’s room, I realized.
After about ten minutes, Abdullah surfaced again at my door, appearing unrushed. “It is good?” he said. He sounded like he actually wanted to know.
I nodded, gesturing to show that the meal was only half-eaten. He walked away again, leaving my door open.
I ate what was left of the bun, continuing to tear it into tiny pinches, each bite the size of a little pearl. When I was done with that, I cleaned the pit of the mango with my teeth and tongue, all the way down to its woody center. I drained the last dregs of tea.
It was Abdullah and Skids who came back for me. Abdullah was holding his AK-47. Skids carried a pistol.
Abdullah said, “You are finished now?” He indicated that I should stand and follow them into the hallway. Skids said something to him in Somali. Abdullah pointed at my mattress and then at his macawii—the cotton sarong he wore tied around his waist—and then again at my mattress. They were telling me to pick up the blue-flowered sheet from my bed. It was about the same size and weight of a macawii. They wanted me to bring it with me, wherever we were going.
We walked out into the hallway, toward the veranda, past the room where Abdi and the other Somali hostages once stayed. The chains on my legs hampered every step, giving me a wobbly equilibrium at best. I led with one foot and dragged the other, doing a kind of labored shuffle step. I was barefoot, wearing the clothes I’d escaped in, all but the heavy black abaya, which I’d taken off the night before. I wore the red polyester dress, a green tank top beneath it, the loose-fitting pair of jeans, and a black hijab over my head—all of it dirt-stained after my humiliating and involuntary exit from the mosque.
Midway down the hall, I lost my balance and fell, landing hard on one hip. Skids watched as I tried a few times to right myself, the narrow span of my chained feet keeping me from shifting my weight. I thought I saw a glimmer of pride in his eyes, seeing how difficult it was for me to move.
*
They led me through the double doorway of a wide, empty room. I’d been here once before, on the December day of Eid, when Nigel and I were invited to join our captors for prayer and we’d celebrated what Eid was about—the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his own son to God
. The room was bright with sunshine. Its walls were painted yellow. I’d stood behind my captors on the holiday morning, looking at their backs. I’d knelt on the concrete floor, watching daylight drift through two windows on the left-hand wall, fascinated by the sight of the single stunted tree in the wide yard beyond—what they saw and I usually didn’t.
This time Abdullah pushed me to the front of the room. Skids was talking again in Somali, saying words that Abdullah translated for my benefit. “You are bad woman,” he said, his voice rising. “You run away. Do you have documents?”
I said, “Documents? No, I don’t have any documents.”
“You lie,” Abdullah said.
I realized that they must have searched Nigel’s room and found the paper on which he’d written some Somali phrases, asking for help. It was hardly a document, but our captors had always been obsessed by what they called documents—any paper with words on it. The written word held a strange power for them.
Skids drew close, the first time in five months that he’d come within spitting distance of me. I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes. Instinctively, I shot out a hand to push him away, but it seemed to make his motions swifter. With his left hand, he seized the neckline of my red dress and, in the same instant, used his opposite hand to crack the butt end of his pistol over my skull. I felt the pain in my teeth, my eyeballs, my fingertips. My first thought was that he’d damaged my brain.
I fell sideways, but Skids still had a hold on my dress. He yanked me up and then pulled the dress over my head, his fingers finding my sweat-stained tank top. When I fought him, he hit me again.
“Please, please don’t do this,” I said.
Skids barked an order at Abdullah, and I began to understand why they’d had me bring the sheet from my bed. With Skids holding my arms, Abdullah took my piece of flowered cotton and hooded me with it, covering my head and tying it tightly at the back of my neck. Now I saw nothing but blue light. I felt hands on my body. My tank top was torn away. I twisted and squirmed, trying to dodge the hands, but they only came from new angles. Someone landed another blow on my head. I was dizzy, vomit rising in my throat. I felt myself sag. There were new voices in the room. More people. Speaking Somali. I heard Mohammed and Yusuf. The room seemed crowded suddenly, dense with male energy. I heard the voice of Hassam, the sweet young market boy, and that, more than anything, made my spirits plummet. I thought, Not him, too.
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 29