Kismayo, they were saying quietly, betraying the secret without realizing it, Kismayo, Kismayo.
In Kismayo, I could taste the Indian Ocean on my tongue. Its humidity coated my skin, causing the shackles on my legs to rust, leaving florid streaks on my ankles. It was never in my sight, the ocean, but I could tell it was nearby, reaching east toward Australia, sprinkled, as I imagined it, with yachts and tanker ships and islands full of people going about their business. At night, storms swept overhead, dousing the place with rain.
For weeks, Romeo and Ahmed had been threatening to sell me and Nigel to Al-Shabaab. I was sure they’d brought us here to complete the deal. Kismayo was known to be a Shabaab stronghold. The thought of having to live under new captors and new rules—among the most extreme extremists in the country—filled me with anxiety.
After a few days, though, I realized that we’d moved to Kismayo only to get away from the fighting. We’d spent two nights in a second-floor apartment in the heart of the city and were now living in an empty office building, a place with five small rooms, located away from the downtown bustle—a place we would later refer to as the Beach House. My captors were likely paying protection money to Al-Shabaab in order to stay. Several times on our trip through the desert, we’d had to stop so that Skids could hand cash to the various warlords who controlled the road.
Nigel had been put in a room across from mine. It was hot enough that the boys didn’t loiter outdoors. Instead, they camped out in the reception area just beyond my door, closer than they’d ever been. They kept their Korans stacked on a battered-looking receptionist’s desk in one corner. All of us shared a bathroom with a squat toilet, spattered and rank from its previous tenants. The water supply was a waist-high cistern, its surface wriggling with mosquito larvae.
Romeo, it seemed, had moved in with us for good. Over ten months, the faces had changed, with different men on duty at different times. A few of our captors disappeared altogether, vanishing like wisps of smoke. Ali, the man who’d been our main guard in the first days of captivity, the one who’d taken credit for our conversion to Islam, had left after only a few weeks. Ismael, the youngest soldier of all, who said he was fourteen but looked closer to eleven, who appeared terrified any time he came near us, also had slipped away during the first month. As winter passed into spring, we’d seen less and less of Donald Trump. Young Yahya, whose wife had a new baby at home, stayed a few weeks in Kismayo and then departed, never to return. Sahro, Age 34, my silent female ally, had not made the trip south at all.
I had only the vaguest of understandings of what knit our captors together. Ismael had no immediate family to return to. I knew that because very early on, when Nigel and I were kept in the same room, Abdullah had made Ismael pull up his pant leg one day, showing us how his entire calf muscle had been stripped off in an explosion, his lower leg shaped like a mostly eaten drumstick. The boy then lifted his shirt, exposing flamelike scars that wrapped around his torso, the skin puckered and tawny and hard to even look at. Abdullah had explained that Ismael had survived a mortar attack that killed the rest of his family. He was an orphan, and as happened with a lot of orphaned boys in Mogadishu, he’d been pulled into the group—promised shelter, food, and community.
After Ismael disappeared, I’d asked Romeo what had happened to him, and he’d had to think about it a minute, not recollecting the boy’s name. Ultimately, he’d shrugged, saying that probably Ismael had been passed on to a new militia—shuffled, as it were, into a different deck of cards.
*
It was difficult to understand how our group functioned—who was pulling the strings, who recruited the boys and paid for food, who had made the decision to move us to Kismayo. Who, I wondered, would profit most if our ransom was paid? And if it wasn’t, who then made the decision on when to give up, when to either kill us or set us free?
Much later, I would read about the rogue and rough-seeming Somali pirate operations in the Gulf of Aden, in many cases run with the acumen and polish of mini-corporations, complete with investors, accountants, and structured payrolls based on the net ransom. One journalist studied a successful seventy-five-day ship hijacking with a ransom of $1.8 million and determined that about half went to the financiers, while middlemen (presumably men like Adam, Donald Trump, and Romeo) made more like $60,000, and guards got something closer to $12,000. In a country with an average per capita income of $266 per year, it was very good money, but only if everything went the right way.
One afternoon, Romeo turned up in my doorway to announce some big news: He’d applied and been accepted to a university in New York City, to study information technology. He’d be leaving for America in a matter of months. He had many questions for me. Had I been to New York? How cold would it be there? Did I think people in America would be able to understand his accent? He planned to live with relatives who were already there. My ransom, he said, would fund his tuition. “Inshallah,” he added. “If Allah permits it.”
He’d taken new interest in my education as a Muslim, carrying Nigel’s English-language Koran into my room and delivering long sermons about devotion and destiny. Happy to have access to a book, any book, I was again inhabiting the role of eager student. When Romeo was present, I was allowed to sit up and talk. I felt human. His presence was also protective, keeping Abdullah and the others away. Once or twice, he opened the Koran and showed me the lines covering “those whom your right hand possesses,” which, to his way of thinking, was a category that included me. He and the other leaders knew I was being abused by some of the boys in the house, but even while viewing themselves as too dignified to participate in such behavior, they believed I was not to question what the boys did. It was my lot as a captive. As it was with every person on earth, my fate had been written into my soul when I was in my mother’s womb. “Allah will decide when it is over for you,” he said. In the meantime, he was convinced that Allah was going to come through on his college plan.
“Why,” I asked him, “would you want to study in the country of infidels?” I’d heard him refer to the United States this way many times before.
The question seemed to make Romeo momentarily uncomfortable, as if he recognized the hypocrisy, but he bounced back, his tone languid and even. “Allah says that we can go to these countries if there is a purpose,” he said. “If we can take something from that country and we can then give it to the Islamic community, then it is good.”
Sometimes he would venture into a coyer sort of conversation. “Do you think Somali men are handsome?” he asked one day. “Are they better than men in your country?” Outside, a rare breeze blew, thrushing over the tin roof. Romeo sat across from my mat with his knees splayed and the Koran perched on his lap. When I didn’t answer, he tried a different tack. “Are there any of the soldiers you would like to marry?”
By “soldiers,” he meant the boys. I told him no, I never wanted to marry any of those soldiers.
He smiled, raising his eyebrows. His voice was sonorous, wheedling. “If I asked you to marry me, would you be happy?”
I noted that he didn’t ask whether I’d say yes. I’d sensed this sort of proposition coming, but hearing him say it made me quake with fear. If I were forced into some sort of formal marriage, I might never get away.
“I am not in a position to make a decision about marriage,” I said, shaking my head to emphasize that there was no possibility whatsoever. “I’m a prisoner.”
“Ah yes,” Romeo said, “but this is where Allah has decided you should be.” He folded his hands in his lap and looked at me matter-of-factly. “Do not fight it, Amina.”
For Romeo, the ongoing conversation about marriage seemed in part an active fantasy, a way to pass the time. Even he, I suspected, got tired of talking round-the-clock about the Koran. He described a kind of win-win situation in which he collected a fat payoff and a bride to boot. He said that if it were up to him, he’d marry me right away, except that everybody in the group had too much riding on the ran
som, so “the Program,” as he called it, would need to be resolved. Once it was, I could live in his mother’s house in Hargeisa, he said, even while he was at school in New York. He added that because I was white, I would probably have to stay hidden in a room—“a big room!” he said, as if the idea might thrill me—so that I wouldn’t be harassed or kidnapped.
“If you were the mother of my children,” he told me, “you would teach my sons about jihad. You would encourage them to fight jihad in Somalia or in another country. You would teach them the Koran, and you would be very, very good with that.”
His flattery was never comforting. One afternoon, he leaned in close and pointed out a certain verse of the Koran. It was one of the ones I’d read plenty of times before. Your wives are a tilth for you, so go into your tilth when you like . . . A tilth, as I understood it, was a field to be plowed.
Romeo smiled. “Do you know, when you are my wife, what this will mean?”
My heart sank. “Yes, but I don’t want to discuss these things,” I told him.
His term for sex was “making enjoyable.” “Inshallah, when you are my wife, we will be making enjoyable all the time,” Romeo told me that day. “Because I am wanting enjoyable all the time.”
I kept my eyes on the floor and said nothing until he stood up and left the room.
*
In the Beach House, when Romeo wasn’t around, all I could do was listen. In the reception area just past my door, I could hear the boys coughing and spitting. I listened to them wash and pray. I knew when they were cleaning their teeth with fibrous acacia sticks, or telling jokes, or sunk into a collective state of dull misery. I could hear when one of the boys snapped his fingers, summoning Nigel to get up and do his ablutions.
Much of the noise in the house came from their cell phones. Everyone had one. A couple of the boys owned two. These were high-end phones, some with touch screens, bought with money they’d earned fighting prior to our kidnapping. Because we had no electricity, someone would carry the phones to the marketplace late in the day to be charged at a kiosk, left overnight in exchange for a few coins. Rarely were the phones used for actual conversation. Jamal occasionally had short, awkward dialogues with Hamdi. Only the captain and Romeo received regular calls, presumably from the leaders who had stayed behind in Mogadishu.
The boys fiddled endlessly with their phones, changing their ringtones, which, given that sharia law prohibited music, were never musical. They used birds chirping, bells ringing, and children laughing, all of which drove me crazy. Away from the house, they loaded their phones with nasheeds—Arabic chants that extolled the glory of Allah or the virtues of Muhammad. Sometimes the boys would come into my room and show me videos downloaded from Saudi Arabian websites. The videos seemed designed expressly to incite and enrage, showing dead Palestinians and dead Afghans and lots of dead children. There were explosions in Iraq, intercut with video of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing into a haze of yellow dust. There were masked mujahideen soldiers performing military drills and firing mantislike grenade launchers against a backdrop of jagged mountain peaks. With Arabic subtitles running along the bottom, one video repeatedly showed George W. Bush announcing, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” All around the world, Islam was under siege.
I was soon able to distinguish between the voices of the individual imams who narrated them against a backdrop of tinny gun blasts and people screaming. I could tell which jihad video was most in vogue at any given time. New videos cycled in and out of our household routine. My God, I remember thinking, these guys spend something like ten hours a day watching people die on their phones.
*
Through the bars over the window in the Beach House bathroom, I could see past the walls of our compound to a green neon light that shone in the distance at night, marking what I guessed was the entrance to a mosque. Every so often, I saw the headlights of a passing car.
Feral cats sometimes wandered into the house, scavenging for food. The boys threw things at them—shoes, garbage—to shoo them away, but still the cats often found their way into my room—side-winding, rickety-backed creatures, most of them nearly bald. Stuck on my mat, unable to stand, I was in no position to defend myself as they advanced. They hovered while I ate a meal, erupting in violent hissing fights over the grease-slicked, deep-welled tin plate I’d ultimately leave on the floor.
The weeks blurred. My twenty-eighth birthday came and went, though I’d lost track of the individual days. I woke and slept, listening to the thumps of frigate birds landing on the roof. One day the voice of the Somali newscaster for the BBC threaded through my consciousness as the boys sat gathered around the radio in the next room. “Michael Jackson,” he was saying. “Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson.” The singer was dead, but it would be a long while before I knew it.
I was beginning to starve. Each morning, I was given three cubes of animal fat boiled in a weak, oily broth and a few small pieces of dense flatbread. Sometimes I got a cup of tea. Later in the day, after the evening prayer, I’d get the same thing again, often with a very ripe banana alongside it. At times, instead of three cubes of fat, there’d be only two. Once in a while, a day would pass with no food at all. My own body shocked me. My hip bones jutted like chicken wings. I could see each one of my ribs. My breasts had all but disappeared, my chest no more than a striation of bones.
Hunger feels like a rock in your belly, heavy and painful at the edges. Other times, my stomach felt like a balloon inflated to almost bursting, filled with a tight, dry emptiness. The ache took over my brain, to the point where I wanted to bash my head on something to make it stop.
Lying on my mat, I found relief in visiting my house in the sky. I went there and tried to stay as long as I could. Inside the shelter of my mind, I cooked and ate and took care of my body. I made soups, salmon, healthy things. I imagined picking fresh vegetables from a garden, or plucking oranges from the laden trees I’d seen long ago in Venezuela. This sustained me. It made all the difference.
Still, I needed to get more food. As I had done with other problems, I looked for solutions inside of my captors’ religion. I had read in the footnotes of my Koran that the Prophet recommended his followers fast on Mondays and Thursdays. It was not obligatory—the way fasting over the month of Ramadan was obligatory—but several of the boys in the house routinely did it, saying it kept them pure. Hassam, one of the more diligent fasters, once explained to me that the Prophet called for his followers to break a fast with bread and dates, but in Somali tradition, they broke it with samosas, which counted as bread.
Knowing this, I decided to try something. “Hassam,” I said one morning, a Thursday, when he arrived with my morning food, “Allah said it is good for the Muslims to fast. I want to fast, to be a better Muslim, like you.”
He smiled broadly at this, knowing that he got credit with Allah for any uptick in my devotion. “Okay, Amina. It is very good.” He left the room, and I could hear him relaying my announcement to the others outside.
Jamal and Yusef both stuck their heads in my door to congratulate me on my decision to fast. I could see they were surprised, but again, my growth as a Muslim gave them more points on Judgment Day.
My gamble paid off. I made it through the day, having declined the morning meal, and just before the muezzin called at six P.M., Jamal showed up, carrying a small plastic bag whose contents I could smell from across the room. Inside the bag were five little samosas, deep-fried triangles filled with spiced rice and what seemed to be cabbage. I fasted in order to eat. Sometimes the samosas were warm and delicious; other times they weren’t fresh and would make me sick. But either way it didn’t matter. They were nourishment.
*
I began to hear a new voice coming from the boys’ phones. This voice was calmer than that of the fiery sermons they played, a man’s Arabic alto that rang through the Beach House, sometimes broadcast from multiple phones at once. Outside, I heard the same voice being
blasted from cars passing by.
One afternoon, Romeo came in holding his cell phone and a pad of paper. “Amina,” he said almost genially, “I need help to improve my English.” Taking a seat on the floor, he handed me the paper and a pen. “You can write down the words for me. In English. And I will practice them. You get my point?”
He hit a button on his phone and then pivoted it so I could see the screen. A video began to play: A black screen with some Arabic writing on it faded into a map of Somalia, with a still photo of Osama bin Laden superimposed in one corner. He was dressed in a dark robe with a white cotton scarf draped over his head and shoulders. He held one long finger hoisted in the air. The audio began to play. It was the voice I’d been hearing. Bin Laden had released an audiotape addressing the mujahideen fighters in Somalia and, for the first time, linking the country’s struggle to Al Qaeda’s larger aims. Over the course of several months, the message had gone viral. Everyone around me, I realized, was electrified.
“Please,” said Romeo, “write the English.” I squinted to see the tiny subtitles running across the bottom of his screen and began to write. To my patient . . . persevering . . . Muslim brothers . . . The video was eleven minutes long. It would take me almost three days to transcribe the whole thing, with Romeo coming and going, sitting by me holding his phone for an hour or so at a time. It had been months since I’d written more than a few words. My hand ached from the effort. Bin Laden was calling for the Islamic soldiers to overthrow Sheik Sharif, the new president, who was barely hanging on as it was. He praised the Somali fighters and made clear that he saw them as being on the front line of a battleground, protecting their brothers in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In an even, paternal tone, he railed against the Americans, urging everyone to dig in, to show no tolerance of alliances with the West.
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 34