A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  The journalist Amanda Lindhout is no longer a Christian she has avert her believe of trinity to the worshiping of one God and that is Allah the most high she is now performing her 5 times of prayers and she is very contented with her marriage relationship with one of her captors you can’t imagine how they exchange laughter and smiles through gesture since the couples don’t understand each other in terms of languages, said Hashi one of the captors of Amanda Lindhout speaking to Waagacusub Website on Friday.

  A reporter for Waagacusub Website who lives in a house which is some few meters away from the house where Amanda lives has been closing following the situation of the two journalists has confirmed that Amanda is gleefully at a certain house at Suuq Holaha in the north of Mogadishu and is regularly performing her feminine work such as washing, cooking and cleaning the house at which she is residing.

  The reporter also added that he has no enough report about the Australian Freelance journalists but is sure that he is also living in the same vicinity with Amanda. Amanda wears a big black veil, and it is hardly to see part of her body and is now learning the Holy Quran.

  *

  We were, I can say with certainty, nowhere near Mogadishu when this particular item was published. It is also worth noting that I was not pregnant, married, nor anything close to gleeful. I did no cooking or cleaning, either, except just one time, on an afternoon nearly two months into our stay in the Dark House, when Jamal and Abdullah ordered me to scrub the bathroom that was mine. I think they believed they were humiliating me, but after weeks of being confined to my mat in the thick darkness, it was the best ten minutes I’d spent all winter. In the spidery light of the ventilation slats, I sloshed water from a brown bucket and an all-purpose powdered detergent around the filthy room, gratified by the freedom of movement, the idea that I was making the bathroom nicer for myself and no one else. With deliberate slowness, I pushed a rag over the sink and around the seat of the pink plastic toilet, dumping extra soap into the bowl, watching it streak into the vortex of dark stains.

  Just outside my room, Abdullah and Jamal had seated themselves against a wall in the dim hallway. They were deep in conversation, speaking Somali in tones I hadn’t heard in a long time, like two friends shooting the breeze. They seemed lighthearted, as if they’d forgotten to go through some routine to work up their normal hostility toward me.

  I took a chance, sticking my head partway into the hall, holding up the box of detergent. “Please,” I said, “could I wash my clothes in the bucket here?”

  I hadn’t been permitted to take a shower or change my clothes since the escape. When I cleaned my body, I did it while crouched next to the toilet, scooping water from a repurposed cooking-oil jug made from yellow plastic with its top cut off and its handle intact. I always washed in a hurry and with an eye toward conserving water, never using more than two cupfuls at a time, knowing that if the jug went down to empty, it could be days before the boys bothered to refill it. I smelled bad enough that my captors sometimes came into my room carrying a bottle of cologne, spritzing the air ahead as if clearing a sweeter path for themselves through the fetid dark.

  That day, sitting in the hallway outside my door, Abdullah and Jamal conferred a moment about me and my clothes. As they did, I caught sight of a moving shadow, a thin figure riffling a light-colored sheet that hung across a doorway directly across the hall from my room. Someone had paused there, perhaps to eavesdrop, but then had stepped away. It was the woman—it had to be—the ghostlike other female in the house. I realized it was her bedroom that lay behind the curtain. Her proximity explained why I so often heard her coughing.

  “Five minutes,” Abdullah said, interrupting my thoughts. “You hurry.”

  It was impossible to remove my jeans with the leg shackles, but back in my room, I stripped off the red dress, plus my tank top and bra, and put on the heavy black abaya I’d worn during our escape. Returning to the bathroom, working quickly, I dumped the clothing into what was left of the water in the brown cleaning bucket, sprinkling it liberally with soap, and kneading each piece carefully with my fingers, feeling the detergent burning the tops of my hands, thrilled by what that said about its potency. The idea of having anything clean against my skin felt like a tremendous gift.

  When I was finished, I hung the bra on a bar near the sink. I stepped back into the doorway and held up the dripping dress and tank top for the boys to see, gesturing that they needed to be hung somewhere to dry. I made a move to hand them to Jamal, but he recoiled. The two boys started arguing in Somali. Neither one wanted to touch my things.

  After some debate, I was told I could hang the clothing myself. This was not a small decision. A few more of the boys were summoned, arriving with their guns. I was allowed, for the first time in two months, to step all the way outside my room. I stumbled in my chains, carrying the clothes. As the boys corralled me forward, pushing me down the long hallway, the light intensified, coming through an open doorway ahead. My eyes felt as if they were exploding. I saw flares—a hot, exterminating white swirled with strains of blue and orange. I could make out shapes against the wall, people lining my pathway.

  Someone shouted in my ear, “Fast, fast, fast.”

  I had spent so many hours imagining the layout of the Dark House. Now my brain flooded with actual information. There were doorways, windows, corners. I’d lived here, but I’d never seen the place. I was outside suddenly, having stepped onto a sun-drenched concrete veranda, in front of a whitewashed wall. The light made me unsteady. The heat of the cement burned the soles of my bare feet. I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. I couldn’t process the blue enormity of the sky above me. Someone gave me a push.

  “Now, now, fast. Hang here.”

  Ahead of me was a drooping, empty clothesline. I tossed the red dress and the tank top over it and was hustled back inside.

  The air changed again, to clammy and then stifling. I was traveling the hallway, my feet too slow for my body, my eyes floating with sunspots, my mind trying to make sense of what I was seeing. We passed, on the left, a large room where it looked like the boys kept their belongings, then another open doorway on the right. The room was small but with a window—filled with enough light to make my sore eyes throb—and a person inside. It was Nigel, bathed in sunlight, sitting on a mattress with his blue mosquito netting draped like a king’s robe around him. He was reading a book. He did not look up as I shuffled past in my chains. I could tell from the rigid way he held himself that he knew I was going by, but probably felt too scared to look up.

  They returned me to my mat, shining a flashlight so I could find it inside the black maw of my room. I felt disoriented, my heart pounding. The room seemed even darker than it had before. My eyes struggled to adjust. Later on, someone—I didn’t see who—would toss my dried dress and tank top through the doorway. They were practically weightless, absent the dirt I’d scrubbed out of them, smelling like soap and still warm from the sun.

  For hours afterward, I lay on the mat, my mind running high after the half-minute spent in the outdoor air, and also stunned by my sighting of Nigel. I tried not to hate him for what I’d seen. He had books, a window, a net to keep the mosquitos away. I wondered if he had food, if our captors spoke kindly to him, if he worried about me or knew how different our two situations had become. I wondered what would have happened if he’d looked up and caught my eye, whether it would have given me solace or a window into his mind.

  I didn’t know, I couldn’t know.

  I thought about Nigel relentlessly for days to come, settling ultimately on the idea that I had no choice but to be glad for him, even if I felt whacked simultaneously by a bitter envy. For myself, I was grateful that I’d seen anything outside my room that day. It was a reminder of air, of oceans and continents, even. I carefully redrew the map of where we were, putting Nigel and his books toward the front of the house, where the boys slept, locating the kitchen and the woman with the cough closer to me at the back, sliding one room next
to another like pieces in a puzzle, taking some satisfaction in the power of clicking things into place.

  37

  The Snap

  One day in the Dark House, Skids turned up at my door holding a cell phone. On the other end was a man, speaking a heavily accented English, who said he worked at the Somali embassy in Nairobi. He posed a proof-of-life question, the first in many months, his voice crackling over the speakerphone. I hadn’t heard a voice belonging to anyone but one of my captors since the day after we’d tried to escape.

  “Tell me,” the man said, “where did your mother take you for vacation when you were nine years old?”

  The answer was Disneyland. California. Away on a plane.

  After Skids had carried the phone away, I sobbed for a day and a half straight, unable to stuff my emotions back inside.

  Still, that call delivered hope. The voice had come from an embassy. An embassy implied order. Even as I wept, my mind seized on the one thread of potential meaning, the single strand of substance in that query, and used it as a towrope. I convinced myself that the question had been a carefully scripted signal that Nigel and I were going home. My mother had asked it; I had answered. She was reminding me, deliberately, of a trip we had taken. It had to be a clue, a way of letting me know that I was soon to embark on the trip I most longed for. They—our families, our governments—had to be in the final stages of getting us out. We were about to be sprung. I knew it.

  For the next several days, I waited in the dark, letting those feelings percolate, certain that I was enduring my last hours as a hostage, that the door soon would swing open.

  It took about a week for my hopes to fully vacate. In my heart, an airplane tilted and took off without me. I felt my mind pooling, gushing almost, into the blackness around me. I’d fooled myself. I was alone, truly. The psychic link I’d felt with my mother was a delusion. I understood that now. A ravaging despair set in.

  My thoughts veered toward the irrational. Emotions hit like flash floods, tipping me when I didn’t expect it. Thoughts of Nigel came without warning and dismantled my defenses. I’d feel a wave of affection and worry for him—How is he getting through? What does he tell himself?—but it was almost always chased by a dose of paralyzing bile. He let them think the escape was my idea. He’s sitting there, in sunlight, reading books.

  When I was angry, I spared almost no one. I had way too much time to flay people in my mind, especially my captors. I fostered a vivid fantasy in which I became invisible. I pictured myself moving through the house unseen, tying up my captors one by one. Sometimes I imagined grabbing a gun and shooting them all, every last one. The only person I’d pass over, aside from Nigel, of course, was the other woman in the house, the cook.

  I now had a sharp pain in my left side that kept me curled up, knees tight against my ribs. The tension inside me was growing unbearable, like a wire pulled tight. Nothing I did seemed to relieve it. I was aware of the pressure every waking moment.

  One afternoon, I heard sandals slapping the hallway floor outside my room. I steeled myself, waiting to see who was coming.

  It was Abdullah. He came directly to my mat. “How are you?” he said. Then, “I want. Pull it up.”

  He wanted the red dress pulled toward my waist so he could undo my jeans. I rolled onto my back, turned my head to the side, and squeezed my eyes shut.

  Then he was on top of me, and I was hating him with every molecule in my body. I wanted him to die. I put my hands against his chest to create a sort of barrier between us. Something in me howled. I could feel what was happening—the bough of my mind had reached its snapping point. I couldn’t lift myself away from it, couldn’t lessen the tension. I couldn’t stand another second of this life. I was collapsing into insanity. I felt it. My head pounded as it arrived.

  Bracing myself, I pushed my hands harder against Abdullah’s chest, and something happened. A searing blast of heat hit my palms, a delivery of some sort, a quick shock followed by a strange, spreading calm. I wasn’t in my body anymore. I was somewhere else, my mind dissipating into a vast canopy, a thing hung over this place, stretched like a collection of tiny lights. Images ran past me, scenes from stories Abdullah had told me months earlier. His life was abruptly, seamlessly on display. I saw him as a young boy, running toward an explosion, realizing that his beloved aunt had been standing at its center. I saw him collecting and carrying home what was left of her—a piece of one leg—not knowing what else to do. I saw him a few years later, hiding behind a truck as a group of gunmen went from house to house, massacring his neighbors.

  For one split second, I knew his suffering. It had assembled itself and looped through me in a rush. Its absolute clarity made me gasp. It was anguish, accrued over the brief span of his life. It was rage and helplessness. It was a little kid hiding behind a truck.

  This was the person who was hurting me. His sadness trenched beneath mine.

  When he was gone, I lay on the mat, my body hurting the same way it always did. I felt completely confused. What had just passed? I had no idea. Whatever it was, it unsettled me. In the moment, it had felt perfectly rational and even profound, like the lifting of some great curtain, the flash of a hidden truth. But now my mind started to analyze, attempting to hammer what had happened into words and structure, and the thing itself resisted. I couldn’t shape it or explain it. I could only live with it, this new feeling, complicated as it was.

  In the end, though, it helped me. Because with it, I began to nurture something I’d never expected to feel in captivity—a seedling of compassion for those boys.

  38

  Omar

  The war around us was getting worse. Somalia, in 2009, was in political flux. The president of the shaky transitional government had resigned abruptly late in 2008, leaving a power vacuum in Mogadishu. Neighboring Ethiopia, which had spent two years trying to prop up the fledgling Somali government, had all but given up, calling its troops back home. Battles raged across the country as Al-Shabaab and other Islamist groups competed for authority, letting loose on one another in block-by-block street fights, while a few thousand African Union peacekeepers—mostly from Uganda and Burundi—tried to protect what was left of the functioning government in Mogadishu.

  All I knew was that the fighting appeared to follow us. The neighborhood surrounding the Dark House at first was quiet, but after a month or so, I began to hear bomb blasts and ricocheting gunfire almost daily—the blam and zing of a rising turf war.

  Its closeness must have worried our captors, because they moved us, this time to a house that looked more like a mansion. I rode in the car next to Nigel. He stared wanly ahead, his shoulders hunched, his whole body seeming deflated. When I turned toward him and said, “Are you okay?” Young Yahya hit me on the side of the head. “No talk!” he screamed. I didn’t speak again.

  The new house was shaped like a giant L, its yard enclosed by high walls. It was bigger and grander than anything I’d seen in Somalia, with an ornate front door made of wood and a boxlike outbuilding in one corner of the scruffy yard. Positive House, I would come to call it.

  Abdullah and Yahya led me down a tiled hallway. I moved awkwardly in my chains, my ribs aching, my posture stooped. During my time in the dark, I’d been kicked in the mouth so hard that two of my back teeth had come loose. One had fallen out, but the other now had abscessed, leaving the gums swollen, my jaw shooting with pain that worsened as I moved. But entering the new house, I was also wildly alert, my senses assaulted by the change of scenery.

  We were in a family home, it was clear—a place that, unlike the other places we’d stayed, felt only recently vacated. The air bore a certain freshness; the floor tiles were white and clean. I could almost feel the energy, the prosperity, of the people who’d left it behind. We passed rooms filled with furniture. I saw a couch and a lamp. I saw a plush-looking mattress with a wooden headboard behind it. At the end of the long hallway, we turned right onto a shorter hall, and I was pushed through the very la
st door on the left-hand side.

  It was a small room with a window covered by a set of heavy shutters. In one corner was a straight-backed metal chair with a missing leg and a ripped seat cushion, its yellow stuffing spilling outward. A rolled-up Persian-style carpet lay like a long cigar against the wall.

  Tacked to the right of the window was a brightly colored poster, laminated in plastic, depicting a suspension bridge. I’d seen posters like this many times before, hung in the cheap restaurants and guesthouses of the backpacker ghettos I once frequented, showing landmarks and nature scenes whose hues had been Photoshopped to a bursting Technicolor unreality. I’d always found them mockable for their artificiality. But here this was, pinned to the wall before me, a giant bridge spanning a giant river with flamboyantly green headlands rising toward an orchid-colored sky at sunset. I was starved for every color it held, transfixed by the geometry of cables and girders.

  I studied the bridge, the chair, the carpet, the window leaking light along the edges of the shutters. All of it was beautiful. All of it carried something loosely hopeful.

  The boys had tossed my foam mat into the room, along with two plastic bags containing my belongings and sheets, and departed. It seemed this would be my new home. As I set about making the bed, I noticed something sticking out from beneath the rolled-up carpet—a bit of paper, what looked to be the corner of an envelope. My heart fluttered at the sight.

  I don’t know what I thought would be in that envelope. A message for me? A map? It didn’t matter. The paper, whatever it was, didn’t come from my captors. It was left by other people, leading other lives. It carried with it a residue of normalcy. With shaking fingers, I pulled the thing toward me. It was indeed an envelope, a slim one with a fold-down top, the kind you got when picking up prints at a photo store. Inside was a single color photo—a passport picture of a boy, bordered in white—and a slip of paper with some Somali words written on it, including what must have been the boy’s name: Omar.