The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  My heart thumped. If the hostages were dead, I would have their lives on my conscience.

  Two days later another car arrived, and a number of new Somalis hiked down to the camp. They brought a watermelon, more vanilla cookies, and a live goat, which Angelo slaughtered on the bluff. Our camp also gained a new boss. Ali’s Brother disappeared, and a quirky and gentle new Somali stayed behind. Mohammed Tahliil had a shy, snaggletoothed smile and a furze of almost Ethiopian-looking hair. He seemed at first like a low-ranking man, a cook, because he was so diligent about building a fire and providing us rice and tea. Unlike the others, he seemed to enjoy his work.

  “We call this a ‘cat’ in the Seychelles,” said Rolly.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “A man like that, who work in the kitchen.”

  The next morning, a Somali dropped something rectangular at my knees, a wallet-like case. “Okay, boss,” he said and added two packs of batteries. From the furtive way he behaved I knew to keep it quiet from the other pirates. Rolly noticed and said, “Ah, you get a radio?”

  “Shhh,” I whispered. “We can listen to the news.”

  Reception was terrible. But I found English lessons in Chinese, news in Somali, something in Arabic, and a keening, lonely call to prayer. With difficulty, I stumbled across a station with officious British voices.

  “Holy shit.”

  “What you got?” mumbled Rolly.

  “It’s the BBC World Service.”

  After two weeks in the wilderness, the World Service felt like a miracle. I stood up to ask Tahliil for “water-caffè.” By the time another news bulletin came around, in half an hour, I could sit on a boulder, in the cold morning sun, with a glass mug of instant coffee in one hand and the murmuring, staticky radio to my ear, feeling almost human. All I needed was a boiled egg.

  We listened for news about Somalia; instead we learned about a hurricane off Madagascar, a sinking Italian cruise ship, and Syria’s deepening civil war.

  “I work on a cruise ship like that,” Rolly said after a while.

  “Really?” I said. “Where?”

  And he was off—Rolly’s term of relative silence had ended. Between spurts of news on the BBC, I learned all about his previous life. In the eighties he had worked as a steward on a Greek cruise line, sailing the Mediterranean from Italy to Israel. He mentioned passengers who tipped well, and passengers who didn’t. (After two and a half decades, those details remained in his mind.) He also told a good story about a forced-air heater in a hotel room in Greece. “I put this electric heater on. And the stove, you know, it was gas—you can make your tea on this stove. But it leak. And me, I don’t smell this gas.”

  His room had a sliding glass door overlooking an Athens street. When he turned on the heater, it ignited the leaking gas and forced a tremendous plume of flame through the door.

  “Mi-chael!” said Rolly, squeezing his eyes at the memory. “That glass shatter! Thank God, nobody was in the road. The man there, the manager, he say it cost three thousand drachma to fix. I give him four thousand. Is not a lot of money. But he say, ‘Not talk about this to your wife.’”

  He acted roosterish about his early career as a fisherman and a laborer in the 1960s, when he went skin diving for sea cucumbers and sea turtles. His job on the cruise line represented an international phase, when he saw the world and earned a good salary. His wife had worked as a housecleaner in the Middle East during the same period, and they traveled back and forth—a season in the Seychelles, a season abroad. But after several years they settled in Mahé for good. Rolly grew out of his life as an employee by purchasing the Aride, a yellow fishing cruiser with a sleeping cabin and four fixed drop lines. For the first time in his life, he ran his own show. Long experience of the Seychelles’ reefs and shoals made him a good skipper. He sailed out for days at a time. “Other fishermen, they follow me,” he boasted. “Because in the harbor, they see I come in with a lotta fish.”

  “What do you catch?”

  “Red snapper, island snapper, like that.”

  But now the Aride was gone. He thought about it every day. He’d neglected to buy insurance. His family was poor.

  “Mi-chael—” he concluded. “When you poor, people look at you like this.” He gave an evil squint. “But when you rich, people say, ‘Look at this rich man!’”

  Rolly was a chatterbox by nature, and once he decided to talk, he chattered about anything that came into his head. I never felt bored. His English reminded me of the French-inflected Caribbean patois in Derek Walcott’s plays, Ti-Jean and His Brothers or The Sea at Dauphin—his voice could be dirty, low-down, clever, funny, and sad. He told me a Seychellois legend about a madman in the woods. “We are like the Dodosya under a rock,” he said. “We say that in the Seychelles. Dodosya, like a crazy man.* He go to the forest because his wife no good. He sit under a rock and laugh, laugh, laugh. These men got us here in the forest like that.”

  IV

  A sandstone rock in the forest, though, was no match for Somalia’s weather. Even during the dry season, water could pour like a faucet into the arid savanna. One night we woke up to a wet patter on the leaves. The pirates told us to pack our sparse belongings into plastic bags. They drove us like cattle through a gentle rain—down the crevasse, up a trail, across the thorn-grown bluff—until we piled, wet and exhausted, just before the downpour started, into a waiting car.

  We sped through the forest and the bush at top speed, for several hours, until the pirates pulled off to one side of the road and waited on a moonlit expanse. We had outrun the rain, at least for now. Somali folk music pounded and scraped from the stereo. We had no choice but to listen to a stark female voice and a careening, melancholy oud.* In a Somali musician’s hands the oud can sound spare and thorny, like the savanna itself, and this song was so strange I started to pay attention. The woman used a glottal stop to keep time. A glottal stop is a consonant sound in Somali—it’s written into words as an apostrophe or as a c, which is why one common spelling of Galkayo includes a c—Galkacyo—and why Sa’ad has two syllables.*

  The woman sang whole trills of glottal stops, in perfect time, to drive the rhythm of her song. My resistance melted. The music had a strange beauty, and the bending, frantic oud reminded me of American blues.

  I had just started to forget where I was when our driver pulled out his smartphone, flipped through some pictures, and tilted his phone back to show me a photo of my own face in the dark. A chill washed through my limbs. Pirates laughed. It was my own author photo, ripped from the New York Times. The bosses must have sent it around to their foot soldiers’ phones.

  Soon we drove to a dismal stone ruin with faint light glowing behind colored rags in the windows. Pirates wrapped a blindfold around my head. I stumbled up a broken stone staircase, and when they unwrapped me, I stood in a half-lit honeycomb of crumbling, filthy rooms. Pirates listened to twanging folk music and sat in front of piles of leaf, chewing their narcotic cud and staring up with startled, stoned, urgent expressions, as if we’d interrupted them. Thorn brambles were stuffed in one doorway—tumbleweeds in place of a door. Someone led us down the hall to a tattered cloth hanging in another doorway, and behind it three mattresses lay on the ground. A tall man slept on one.

  “It is Marc!” Rolly whispered.

  We set down our bags. Marc stirred and spoke from the corner, and Rolly answered him in minor-toned Creole. In the light from a fluorescent lantern I saw Marc was an old man with stiff limbs. I shook his leathery hand.

  “He say is getting better,” said Rolly. “He feed himself now.”

  “Better from the electrocution?” I asked.

  “Yah.”

  A man came in wearing a white shirt and dress slacks. I recognized him in the uneven light as Boodiin, the translator from our first house.

  “You are safe here now, you are okay,” he said. “You can sleep.”

  I didn’t feel safe.

  “Are we in Hobyo?” I said. />
  “Yes.”

  One or two men in another room began to pray, and their chanting mixed with the clamor of folk music on their phones.

  “Can you ask the men to turn their music down?” I said. “It’s very loud.”

  “I will ask,” he said. “But these men are soldiers.”

  So?

  “Ask them to be quiet soldiers.”

  He went out. The volume lowered on one or two phones. Boodiin returned, and I remembered my manners and thanked him. He wondered if it would rain again. He was in a hopped-up, conversational mood, although he’d instructed us to sleep.

  “I hope it won’t rain, because I want to go fishing tomorrow,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “What do you catch?”

  Boodiin dressed like a small-time businessman, a hustler putting on airs, more than some kind of fisherman.

  “Lobster, I fish for lobster,” he said. “I hope tomorrow I will catch . . . five k-g!”

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Five k-g,” about eleven pounds, was meant to be a lot for a man like him. I remembered thinking before that he was a world-class liar; now his will to disorient me rattled my nerve. Was I expected to believe, on this particular layer of hell, that pirates were just needy fishermen? I remembered Boodiin’s admonition from our first meeting in Hobyo—You have made a mistake—and wondered if he would repeat it. My real mistake had been coming to Somalia at all. What did I think I would find around here? Pirates who trusted writers? Truth? Some war correspondents come away from the battlefield more disoriented than before, less confident about the facts, and by now I just wanted to be unconscious. I wasn’t in the mood to hear Boodiin offer up some pirate public relations line. This trashed and nightmarish stone building stood in a uniquely desolate part of the world, where escape was impractical and even my dreams of freedom had no obvious place to wander; but it was Boodiin’s insistent dishonesty that gave me the creeps.

  “That man get seasick,” Rolly said when he left. “Boodiin, he not a fisherman.”

  I snorted.

  “How do you know?

  “When I come to Hobyo on the Aride,” he said, “he get on with some other bosses. After five minutes, he go to the rail and vomit.”

  V

  At dawn I saw more of the house. We’d slept in a filthy room colored with layers of pastel paint, flaking blue and yellow and dusty green. The thick walls rose twelve feet overhead to reveal a barnlike space crossed by rafters. Birds fluttered among them. The slanted corrugated roof had rust holes that shone bright from the morning sun.

  My blood pressure had a way of zinging to a certain level every morning when I woke up from a benign dream to realize I was in Somalia. Angelo now sat folded beside the doorway with a rifle across his thighs, deep in thought, shielding his forehead with one languid hand. He noticed me stir.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Kadi?”

  He leaned through the hanging cloth to give an order. Feet shuffled; Kalashnikovs clacked. The hall was like the room, a pastiche of flaking paint, except that a patterned ceiling that must have once decked the entire building still remained, half broken away. Lengths of wirelike metal suspended the remnants of it. This ruin, in its day, would have been a well-appointed European-style house.

  “Toilet?” I asked, since no Somalis were offering guidance.

  One of them waved into a room near his end of the hall. There was a toilet inside, but it looked as if someone had assaulted it with a sledgehammer. The floor had a litter of rock, plaster, and dried human shit. The toilet was a broken plinth of porcelain with a hole gaping into a stinking watery sump.

  I peed into it.

  “Somali bullshit,” I whispered to the guards on my way back, making sure to remove my shoes and leave them in the filthy hall. By now Rolly had woken up. “What is this place?” I said when I sat down.

  “I not know. I stay here before.” He glanced around. “Angelo say is seventy years old.”

  “Really?”

  “Thick walls, eh? And this roof is good iron.”

  The deep-set windows had broad sills of concrete on either side. The walls were a yard thick and almost twelve feet high. The design felt Fascist monumental, simple but massive, like a farmhouse built by Mussolini.

  “Seventy years ago,” I said, “the Fascists were in charge here. This place might be Italian.”

  “Yah?”

  The colonies of Italian and British Somaliland had united in 1960 to become modern Somalia; but during World War II, they had fought on behalf of their colonial masters. Gerlach had told me one of his earliest memories was the sight of Somali soldiers marching through Galkayo for the Italians. I remembered an excellent book by Gerald Hanley called Warriors, about Somalia during and after World War II. Hanley was an ethnic Irishman, born in England and sent by the British Army to East Africa. He had no passionate loyalty to the British Empire, so his book is an independent-minded snapshot of Somalia during that dramatic span of years when war had weakened Europe’s colonial grip on much of the world and Africa was full of hope. “I can remember sitting by the waterhole,” he wrote, “wondering how it was that the war I had joined because it was against Fascism had landed me in ragged shorts and shirts in a geography like the moon where Fascism had vanished like a thin mist and the war had rolled far away into distant silences.”

  Marc stood up, gingerly, to use the toilet. He was shy, almost docile, and he looked older than Rolly, though he was younger by seven years. He had imploring eyes and white-dusted hair, and he held his arms in-curled, like broken wings.

  When he returned to lie down, I saw how weak his arms were from the electrocution. But I caught no trace of resentment in his manner. He was gentle and calm. He lit up when Rolly spoke to him in patois, which sounded like mischievous broken street French.*

  For lunch that afternoon, the pirates delivered a large, restaurant-prepared platter of rice, yellowish and decorated with wedges of lime. For some reason, they brought a separate bowl for me.

  “You get extra?” said Rolly.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want extra.”

  We shared it equally. Khat arrived at the house while we ate. Strange voices outside began to shout. Our guards gravitated to rooms across the hall to watch the commotion through the windows. Even Angelo stood up to crane his head.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  Angelo patted his hand at me, as if patting an invisible dog. The shouting grew louder. Angelo picked up his gun, and I felt a wash of anxiety.

  “Angelo,” Rolly whispered. “Problem?”

  Angelo shook his head. “Problem khat.”

  The noise rose to a near riot. The only word I could make out was not khat but bariis.* That was the word for rice. “Bariis! Bariis!” the strangers were shouting. I looked at Rolly and nodded at the platter.

  “Someone saw them deliver our lunch,” I said.

  Either it was a food riot, or the fancy tray had tipped off a rival group to our presence. It occurred to me that members of Gerlach’s subclan might want to rescue us. A rescue by SEALs sounded risky enough; I hadn’t considered the prospect of a Somali militia battle.

  The shouting grew louder. Ahmed Dirie came in to dig through a pile of belongings in the corner for his military vest, an olive-green jacket with pockets for Kalashnikov magazines. He strapped it around his belly.

  “No problem,” he told us and stepped out.

  Rolly grunted. On a normal day as a hostage, the worst condition is uncertainty, a sheer terror of what might happen. This riot made it worse. The ferocity of the shouting altered like the weather but never dissolved. I didn’t believe Angelo about the khat. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine pirates growing so passionate about anything else, except maybe a fight over hostages. We heard gunfire—crackling warning gunfire, aimed at the sky—but the noise rolled on and on, rising and subsiding, for most of the afternoon. We felt like trapped animals. I don’t want to die, I thought. I don’t w
ant to die.

  The riot was a mockery of my fledgling wish for a military raid. I sat on my mattress in a pair of thin cotton shorts and a T-shirt, helpless as a boy, leaning against the yard-thick walls and wondering how to defend myself against death when it came, if it came, in a scatter of ricocheting rifle rounds.

  Angelo sat down again and mumbled, “No problem.”

  Rolly tapped me on the elbow. “These men always say ‘no problem,’ Michael. When they say ‘problem,’ I think on that day we die.”

  “We might die right now,” I suggested.

  “No say that,” Rolly answered.

  When the riot dissipated, Rolly turned to our guard and said, “Angelo—why?”

  “Problem, bariis?” I interjected with a crooked smile.

  “Problem khat,” Angelo said.

  VI

  When we complained about the wretched toilet room, pirates took us elsewhere for piss breaks and showers—out to an expanse of white rocks littered with goat and human shit. Beyond this dead zone stood the crumbling walls of an even older house, which someone had built by mortaring field rocks together. When I took a shower inside this ruin, I noticed that rotting wooden beams were slanting through the tops of the rough white walls. Also European-looking, like something from a spaghetti western.* Below us, to our right, lay the dull ranked houses of modern Hobyo. Beyond them, the vast blue sea.

  I wondered if Hanley had seen these buildings after the war. He certainly knew the feelings they evoked. The heat and isolation and dry loneliness of Somalia had carried some British soldiers to the edge of suicide, and Hanley tried to make sense of the ones who pulled the trigger. “It does not follow that because all the suicides I knew were very serious, earnest men with little sense of humor, that only the humorless kill themselves when they are in good physical health and still young,” he wrote. “We do not know the size and strength of our manias until they fall upon us and drag us down, or the barrenness of our inner deserts until real loneliness, fear, bewilderment and sun-madness have cast us into them.”