A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  He looked about nine years old. He wore a collared shirt and a sober expression. He had short brambly hair and dark circles under his big brown eyes. His neck was long, like a flower stem. Beneath the seriousness, he seemed sweet and eager, as if trying to appear older than his age, worthy of whatever journey might have prompted the photo session.

  I stared at Omar’s picture for ten seconds, then put it back in the envelope and left it on the floor, as if it were radioactive. Which it kind of was. Almost certainly, my captors would see it as a document, and documents were a problem.

  After I finished putting the sheet over the foam mat, I lay down. Then I reached for the envelope again. It was irresistible. The boy was irresistible. I held the little photo out in front of my face, so I could better see Omar and he, I imagined, could better see me. We examined each other solemnly, and then, worried that someone would surface at my door, I put him back in his envelope and stashed it beneath my mat. My pulse raced. I knew if the boys found me with it, I’d be beaten. Some part of me couldn’t let go of the photo, though. I felt like Omar was mine to protect. I thought of us as allies. He’d left his house and now, in the twisted logic of his country, I was here, in his place. It was possible that his daddy was a militia leader and he himself was already bent on jihad. But something, maybe desperation, told me otherwise.

  Every few minutes, unable to stop myself, I took Omar’s picture out from beneath my mat and looked at it again, trying to memorize the details of his boyish face, his narrow chin, the clamshell bend of his mouth, all the while paying attention to the doorway.

  I had just slipped the envelope back into its hiding place when Abdullah and Yahya returned. Abdullah stared at me fiercely, seeming to read guilt on my face, and ordered me to my feet. I was sure he was about to do one of his document searches, but instead he gestured that I should gather my things. They’d decided to move me to a new room in a different part of the house.

  The next room would have no furniture in it, only a cardboard box filled with white porcelain dishes and a bouquet of plastic blue flowers set on top of it. Its doorway looked out onto a patch of hallway wall. There I’d find, nailed into the concrete, a different oversaturated, cheesy-in-another-lifetime poster, this one showing a pile of fruit—a pineapple, red apples, bright bananas, and a dewy pyramid of bulbous green grapes—all of it luridly bright, heaped against a sky-blue backdrop. The sight would be punishing. I’d stare at it from my mat. It would sharpen my already vicious hunger for days to come, until finally, either sensing the lust it pulled out of me or worried that the image offended Allah, one of the boys would take the poster down.

  But before that, as I was ordered to gather my things and move from the first room, I had to figure out what to do with my contraband. I spent my last thirty seconds in Omar’s room caught in a heart-thudding, should-I-or-shouldn’t-I crisis as, under the gaze of Abdullah and Yahya, I slowly pulled the sheet from my mat, trying to buy some time. The envelope with the picture lay beneath the mat. Using the sheet for a screen, I thought I could reach down and snatch it up, attempting to toss it into one of my plastic bags before either of the boys noticed. I could take Omar with me, which would make me happy and also might be safer than exposing the envelope where it lay on the floor, a sure give-away that I’d been hiding it.

  There was no time to ponder. In one quick swoop, I picked up the bags and the foam mat while making, in my chains, what passed for a fast and obedient bolt toward the door. This left Omar where he was, somewhere between the broken chair and the carpet, under the gaze of the Technicolor bridge, faceup in his paper envelope, abandoned a second time. Leaving the room, I didn’t look back, and thankfully, neither did my captors.

  39

  Positive House

  We stayed in Positive House for about two months, and there, too, the fighting crept closer. I could hear gun battles outside my window. The boys seemed wound up by the war. A new president had been appointed to run the transitional government in Mogadishu—a former high school geography teacher named Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who, a few years earlier, had helped build an alliance of Islamist groups in Mogadishu and managed briefly to keep the city’s warlords in line. The boys had been thrilled with their new president. The week Sheik Sharif was elected by the Somali Parliament, back in the Dark House, Abdullah had broken from routine and spent a few minutes talking to me about how excited they were to have the Ethiopian troops gone and a strong Muslim leader in office. The struggle was over, he said. Thousands of people who’d fled Mogadishu were moving back home. Sheik Sharif would unite all the Islamic factions using sharia law.

  “The fighting will stop,” Abdullah had predicted, sounding confident. The prospect of peace seemed to please him. I trusted that the new political order meant something hopeful for me and Nigel as well.

  But all I’d been able to hear through the walls of the Dark House was more fighting.

  What I learned when we got to Positive House was that not only had the boys lost faith in the new president quickly, they now saw him as an enemy. Their optimism had flipped into something darker. In Sheik Sharif’s first weeks in office, he’d established himself as a moderate and—more horrifyingly to my captors—a coalition builder, open to seeking support from foreign governments, saying he wanted to make peace with Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian nation. In Positive House, the boys docked themselves in front of the radio in the afternoons, listening to the news on the BBC Somali World Service. The war was escalating rather than dwindling, the hard-line Islamists pitted against the new president and his ideas about peace. Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam, another insurgent group, were launching fresh attacks against the African Union peacekeeping troops protecting the government in the capital. The peacekeepers were fighting back. After a roadside bomb hit one of their trucks, African Union soldiers were said to have opened fire on a crowd, killing more than a dozen bystanders.

  With this, the boys declared the new president a kafir—an unbeliever—and the jihad fully back on.

  They were talking to me again, more than they had since the escape attempt. All the rules held—I was not allowed to sit up on my mat without permission; I was expected to only lie on my side—but the boys’ hatred had realigned itself somewhat; they seemed more focused on politics, less bent on making me suffer. They kept the windows of my room shut against the daylight, even stuffing the cracks with plastic bags to blot out any stray lines of sun. None of it worked, though. I could see and hear more than ever. Darkness, for me, was now relative.

  Romeo began to make long visits to the house, staying for three or four days at a time and bringing with him a different energy. As a leader, he granted new freedoms to the boys and to Captain Skids. All of them now got full days and nights off, going home to see their families. They’d come back with new haircuts, in fresh shirts and good spirits. Sometimes they arrived with a bag of fruit or pieces of fried fish to share with everyone. Every so often, as a treat, they’d bring me something—a toffee or a ripe purple passion fruit sliced open at the middle.

  From my mat, I could see out my door and down the hallway, catching a glimpse of the room on the opposite side where Nigel was kept. It looked big, like a living room, and was furnished. I could see a brown couch against one wall. The boys regularly spent time in there, talking with Nigel. I could overhear snippets of the conversation. Nigel told them about how he liked to build houses, saying he wanted to build houses in Somalia, even. I heard him ask if he could sleep on the couch, and I heard them answer no. They did, however, let him remove the cushions and make a bed for himself on the floor.

  They seemed frequently to discuss girls and Islam. “We call it masturbation,” I heard Nigel say loudly one day. The boys were tittering. They were teasing one another about who did it, making jokes about the extra bathing required by Islam after ejaculation. One of them made exaggerated sounds of orgasm, causing more laughter.

  With Romeo in the house and the war in full swing around us, Abdullah wa
s permitted to take on daytime soldiering jobs, going out once or twice a week and joining militias fighting the African Union troops. It was part of his jihad. Among the boys in the house, he seemed the only one keen on street fighting. He’d get a call in the evening from some commander and spend hours readying himself for the following day. He’d fiddle with his gear, sometimes lugging it into my room to show off. These were the rare moments when I could converse with Abdullah, when he’d allow me to ask a question or comment on what he said. He’d stand in my doorway and clean his AK-47 with an oily rag, talking all the while about how, God willing, he would kill a lot of enemies the next day.

  “Inshallah,” he said on one of the first nights we had this exchange, “tomorrow I am dead.”

  I reacted automatically, with an objection—not because I didn’t want him to die but because it seemed the only decent response. “Don’t say that!” I said. “You don’t want to die. Think of your mother. She’d be so sad.”

  Abdullah shook his head at me. “No, it is best way.” He added one of his favorite comments, “You are a bad Muslim.” He took his gun and walked out the door. A few minutes later, he reappeared, carrying Nigel’s blue leather copy of the Koran. Setting the gun down and seating himself near my mat, he paged through the book, finally alighting on the right passage. He pointed to the relevant line on the English side of the page. Let those fight in the cause of Allah, who sell the life of this world for the hereafter.

  I’d read it before. I knew the boys believed that paradise would be their reward, that in a straight-up trade, there was no arguing that any sacrifice made in their hot, hungry country wasn’t worth an eternal seat on a jeweled couch in Jannah. This, for them, was the creed. Abdullah was reminding me that I was supposed to believe it, too.

  *

  At twenty-four, Romeo was not only older than the boys but seemed to come from a different world altogether. He was sophisticated, speaking English without effort, in a clipped bookish accent that resembled the way I’d heard English spoken in India. He wore jeans and a nice-looking scarf and cologne that smelled expensive. He claimed to have a university degree in engineering and spoke of his travels to Kenya.

  In the afternoons, he visited me, sitting cross-legged against the wall opposite my mat. He looked me directly in the eye and punctuated his speech with well-worn Western phrases. “You know what I mean?” he’d say after telling me something. “You get my point?”

  He did not strike me as friendly, but talking to me seemed to feed his ego. He told me he was the twenty-eighth child in his family. His father had married four women. After his father died, everyone except Romeo had fled Mogadishu for the northern city of Hargeisa. He said that he himself was unmarried, focused on his education. He was taking correspondence courses through the University of Yemen. He wanted to get another degree, in information technology, and work with computers. He was applying to graduate schools.

  “You look very nice,” he said one day. “Very healthy.” He leaned in closer. “You see, before we took you, you did not look good. You were looking very bad.” He pointed to his forehead and then toward mine, mimicking the motion of eyebrow plucking, which I knew was an act of vanity forbidden by the hadith. In my previous life, I’d been an assiduous, even zealous, eyebrow plucker. After eight months in captivity, I knew that my brows were thick and straight as caterpillars. Romeo was voicing his approval. “Allah makes you very beautiful,” he said. “When you leave here, a man will be very lucky to have you as his wife.”

  I would have given anything, then more than ever, to go at my eyebrows with a pair of tweezers. I was vain. I was still vain, stubbornly vain. I’d rot in the hellfires for an arch in my brow.

  The truth was, I was an unsightly wreck. My body was deteriorating. I had broken teeth from some of the beatings. My ribs never stopped aching before they were kicked again, and making it worse, I’d developed a bad cough. My hair was falling away in clumps. The dirty water cramped my stomach. The itchy skin fungus had spread along the left side of my face, down my neck and chest. My skin oozed with pus.

  But I was past feeling sorry for myself. I began to make declarations, piggybacking them on to my regular silent talks with myself in the evenings. I’d made it out of the Dark House, I reminded myself, and I’d get out of this place. I summoned all my confidence and directed it at my body. Rather than thinking, as I often had, I hope my stomach stops cramping and maybe tomorrow my diarrhea will go away, I got bold. I stated everything like a truth, a proclamation. My digestive system is healthy. I get nourishment from the food I’m eating. My skin is healthy, smooth, and healed. I went through it daily, a point-by-point scan of my body—an incantation, a resurrection. My eyesight is good. My teeth are solid. My hair is full. My mind is strong. I focused a lot on my reproductive system, the part of me I worried about most. I hadn’t had a period since being captured. I felt pains in places I couldn’t identify. I tried not to think about them. My organs are protected, I told myself. My ovaries still work. I am okay.

  One morning Skids came to my room and dropped a small plastic bag on the floor. Inside was a blister pack of capsule pills, sheathed in a narrow box that bore a picture of bananas and oranges on the front. Its information panel appeared to be written in Chinese. Half the pills were gone. At the bottom of the bag I found a square of paper, a form from a pharmacy, printed in English and filled out in pen. It read:

  Name: Sahro

  Age: 34

  There was a check next to the word “Female.”

  It was a gift. The medicine was a gift, but to know her name meant even more. Sahro, Age 34. It had to be her, the woman whose retching cough had penetrated my nights in the Dark House, the otherwise silent cook for my captors. She’d heard me coughing. She wanted to help. She had pressed those tablets into the captain’s hands, I was sure of it, telling him that I should have them. He might have balked at first, but she’d insisted, and he’d relented. I saw the whole story in my mind. She cared, and that mattered. I took Sahro’s pills, one every morning. They didn’t seem to help, but at least she and I had a bond.

  *

  The bathroom I used at Positive House was outdoors. Getting there involved a long walk down the main hallway, a turn to the right, and a trip down the shorter hall, past Omar’s room—now being used as a kitchen—and then through a door to a bathroom stall in the yard. The boys had given me a pair of shoes—a set of oversized yellow flip-flops with the words “HAPPY 2008” and a bunch of balloons printed on the sole though half worn away with age.

  As I moved, I kept my eyes on the ground, followed closely each time by one of the boys. My gaze was supposed to be always lowered. A few times, passing Omar’s room, I’d seen a set of feet belonging to the cook—Sahro, Age 34—as she paused in the doorway, evidently watching me. She was close enough to touch. I could see the flowered hemline of her dress, long enough to graze the floor and hide her feet, in keeping with Islamic custom.

  One day, overcome by a burst of courage and a deeper longing to know the woman who’d shown me such kindness, I glanced up at her face.

  She was beautiful, strikingly so. Her body was willowy and tall, her features finely sculpted. Her eyes were dark, her cheeks sloping, her chin a slender point. She had the same angular face and elegant carriage as the Somali fashion model Iman. She wore a light brown scarf wrapped tightly over her head.

  When our eyes met, Sahro let out a gasp. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth. We’d lived under the same roof for several months, but this was to be our first and only contact. Her eyes widening in alarm, she looked toward Yahya, who had been trailing me to the bathroom with his gun, and uttered a Somali word that seemed to indicate her state of surprise, something akin to “Oh!”

  It wasn’t a betrayal, but it certainly wasn’t an act of allegiance. If anything, it told me that she was as afraid of the boys as I was, that despite being willing to share her medicine, she wouldn’t, even for an instant, be caught conspiring with me. She didn’t
dare.

  Without hesitation, Yahya hit me from behind, landing a punch on my back and another on my head. My gaze fell again to Sahro’s hemline against the floor.

  Later that day, Jamal and Abdullah would come to my room and hit me repeatedly as I lay curled in a ball, making me promise never to look up. I wouldn’t dare try it again, but I was glad, at least, to have seen her face.

  40

  Wife Lessons

  This might be difficult for you,” Romeo said to me one afternoon in June, “but this life, it’s like this.” He snapped his fingers to show no time at all. “And the rewards of paradise are forever.”

  It was meant as encouragement. The idea was that we should hold steady because better things were coming. For my captors, God’s plan was unfolding. For me, captivity was a moment—a long moment—that would pass. We all waited on an afterlife. Only I planned to be alive for mine.

  We had moved again. We were staying a long way from Mogadishu, somewhere near the port city of Kismayo, in the south of Somalia, not far from the border with Kenya. I wasn’t supposed to know where we were, but I did. On the drive there, about twelve hours in an SUV piloted by Ahmed, we fishtailed over desert tracks, slamming through ditches and climbing the sides of steep ravines, avoiding the north-south highway altogether. As the boys sat in the two forward seats, their gunmetal clinking in the dark, Nigel and I, too afraid to say even one word to each other, lay jammed in the hatch of the car, stuck between Romeo, who for some reason had volunteered to sit there, and a sloshing fifty-gallon drum of fuel. I’d listened to the boys murmuring with excitement at the promise of the unknown. It was as if they were on a school field trip. It seemed as far away from home as they’d ever been. With the moon coasting alongside us, they craned their necks to see out the window.