The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  I wasn’t yet in the grip of a mania—not sun-mad, not bewildered—but suicide was more than a literary topic for me. My father had killed himself. Mom had called it a heart attack to protect my impressionable mind, and I could understand the compulsion to shield a twelve-year-old kid from the shattering awareness that his father no longer wanted to live. But the fairy tale had lasted almost thirty years. I’d learned about his suicide only after some research as an adult.

  I did remember Dad’s drinking bouts—how he yelled when he drank, then forgot what he yelled. He also took Tylenol with codeine. He suffered from arthritis in his back, and before my mother evicted him, I remember Dad standing up from a nap one weekend afternoon to find her watering plants in the yard. “Five hours, no pain!” he said, and he must have meant the codeine, because he said it with the earnest passion of a man who wanted to convince his wife of something questionable.

  “That Tylenol is super,” he said.

  “Mm-hmm,” Mom said.

  Her attitude to his shysterism was to roll her eyes and keep watering the oleanders. Mom was a liberated woman for her time and place: tennis-playing, cigarette-smoking, ironic. But, even from her earliest girlhood she had a conservative understanding of right and wrong. Her first full sentence, as a two-year-old, burst out at a zoo in Frankfurt in the 1940s, when an elephant stole a wooden stick from her young hands by reaching its trunk through the bars of its cage. “Elephant took my stick,” she blurted, looking for justice from the adults around her. “But he’s not allowed.”

  After seventy years that story surfaced sometimes at family dinners, in L.A. or Cologne, to howls of laughter.

  Moving from a small German town to L.A. in the sixties was a long, pioneering step—glamorous from one point of view, dangerous from another—and her father at first refused to fly halfway across the planet just to visit her. The family lived in Europe, either in Catholic parts of the Rhineland in Germany or across the border in southern Holland. But Mom liked the New World. Germans impressed her as kind of stuffy and cold. She was traditional but free-spirited. She liked the weather in California; she liked the wine and the tennis in December.

  She kicked Dad out at the start of 1981. He found a bachelor apartment in our neighborhood and checked himself into an alcohol rehab center called Raleigh Hills, a short-term residential hospital with psychologists and counselors, mild and soft-spoken people who, when I visited, made a point of explaining alcoholism as an incurable disease. How it altered the mind, how it could turn a strong man into a raging stranger. A twelve-year-old could understand that. But I didn’t understand the pills, and when Dad seemed to master his urge for alcohol in the middle of his year of exile, I thought he’d won. He asked to move home from his apartment. Mom said no.

  “He wasn’t ready,” she said afterward. “He hadn’t even quit drinking. He certainly hadn’t given up the codeine.”

  We learned about his death, at the end of the summer, only when he failed to show up for work. The police went to his apartment and opened the door. Mom came home and told me the news. I believed her heart attack version of events because everything Dad liked was bad for his heart—cigarettes, booze, the rim of fat on every barbecued steak—but even at twelve it was a surprise to hear that no one would conduct an autopsy. How could they know it was a heart attack? That discrepancy, along with some others, lingered at the back of my mind long into what I thought of as a well-adjusted adulthood. In 2010 I ordered a copy of his death certificate, on a hunch. I had just read Legend of a Suicide, the novel by David Vann, which paints an adolescence lived under the shadow of a father’s suicide. It sounded like a grim way to grow up. I’m glad that didn’t happen to me, I thought, about a week before Dad’s death certificate came in the mail.

  I opened the envelope standing at my breakfast table in Berlin, which overlooked the cobblestones and the swaying, wavering, massive green trees in the park. I pulled out the colored certificate and saw four strange words in the bureaucratic box labeled cause of death:

  GUNSHOT TO LEFT CHEST

  I swayed a little on my feet.

  At the time I was happy in Europe, far from the oppressive heat of strip malls and liquor stores in Southern California. But the notion of a gunshot blast in Dad’s little apartment brought back all the hot and stifling emotion I associated with L.A. It was jarring, revelatory, alien, bizarre.

  Mom and I saw each other every year or so, either in Germany or in L.A. We had suffered a lot together, but we rarely talked about the past. We maintained a warm and cordial relationship. The unspoken idea was to keep from dramatizing our troubles, to keep from wallowing. I saw the drawbacks to this very German arrangement as well as the benefits—I wasn’t Californian enough to insist on “talking it out”—but the alternative was a closet-skeleton secrecy, a habit of suppression. In high school I had suspected Mom of “denial,” of covering something up with her cheerfulness and her relentless California pleasures, but after a while I realized the white wine and the games of tennis belonged to a conscious method of moving on.

  A month after I had ordered the certificate, Mom happened to visit Berlin. I brought up the suicide over dinner at a small restaurant. She said, “Oh—yes,” as if she’d been meaning to mention it all this time.

  “Was there a note?” I said.

  “No note.”

  And, I guess, we didn’t need one. What had happened was clear. Gutting and tragic, unspeakably bleak—but in part of my mind, for decades, perhaps I already knew.

  VII

  One night Ahmed Dirie came into our room and pointed at me.

  “Come on!” he said. “Get up.”

  He expected me to bolt to attention. I made a point of adjusting my sling, pulling on each sock and shoe, and gathering my spare items for wherever we were headed.

  Rolly groaned at my recalcitrance and muttered, “Not make them angry, Michael.”

  Together with Mohammed Tahliil—the reedy group leader from our forest camp—Ahmed Dirie held my elbow and walked me across a sandy waste of weeds and goat droppings, away from Mussolini’s Farmhouse to the newer, more thickly settled area, where slab houses stood in rows. As a free man, I had eaten lunch in this neighborhood with Gerlach and Ashwin. The moon was bright, the air was misted with brine, and to our left I noticed a blinking light on top of Hobyo’s cell-phone tower.

  We passed a Somali in a collared shirt, sitting on a berm of sand. I recognized Ali Duulaay and moved toward him; but the others steered me away and led me along a compound wall, where they unlocked a clanking door.

  The house had raw concrete floors and slab walls painted powder blue. No furniture. A plastic-wrapped mattress and pillow waited for me on the floor of one room. It was a safe house, new looking but barren, half-built, maybe waiting for a spurt of ransom cash to finish construction. By the light of a fluorescent lantern, I unwrapped the mattress and tried to make myself comfortable. A generator grumbled in the distance.

  Was this new arrangement a response to the riot outside Mussolini’s Farmhouse? A new phase of captivity? Or just softer accommodation for the American? I didn’t like one option better than the others, and while I pulled the thin blanket around my shoulders and tried to sleep, the generator stirred up dreams of helicopters and deliverance by gunfire.

  I called this place “Mohammed’s House,” because Tahliil seemed to be in charge. The guards acted mild mannered, less intentionally cruel. They let me sit outdoors in the afternoon. They spread mats on the porch and offered me cigarettes and khat. A “good group.” I resisted the khat even when I felt depressed, since I didn’t want to pick up a habit, but once in a while, with a bottle of mango juice or a glass of oversweet tea, I allowed myself the pleasure of a cigarette in the prison yard.

  One morning on the porch I noticed some useful items scattered on the pirates’ mat, not just Kalashnikovs and khat but also cigarette lighters, pens, and grade-school notebooks. The guards used these notebooks to keep track of their shifts.

/>   The young pirate named Hersi offered me a cigarette. When I lit up, I noticed that his lighter had an LED at one end.

  “Can I keep this?” I said.

  “Haa, yes.”

  Hersi flipped through a menu of songs on his phone. Pirate phones provided several forms of entertainment and distraction, not just songs but also video clips and recorded Sufi sermons.

  “K’naan!” he said, and played something by the Somali-Canadian rapper.

  The song Hersi had chosen—“Until the Lion Learns to Speak”—resembled a Somali folk song I had noticed in the pirates’ SUV. It had the same call-and-response, the same urgent falling rhythm. But the Somali version sounded more traditional.

  Hersi and another guard talked about K’naan in excited voices. A translator named Yoonis, who sat with us on the porch, said, “They are his cousins.”

  “Both of them?” I weighed the likelihood in my mind. “Both Hawiye?”*

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all Sa’ad?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I didn’t care very much.

  “This group, the good group, is Sa’ad,” he said. “The big group is Hawiye and Darod.”

  “A mix of clans,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I borrow this notebook?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I scrounged a pen, too, and retreated to my room, where I started a journal. From the radio I learned the date and made small notes about each day. But I had to restrict the writing to an hour or so at a time, because it bothered my wrist.

  One afternoon I took notes on a fascinating BBC report about spy plane flights over Somalia. The correspondent flew with the Royal Australian Air Force “over the pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa.” Its P-3 Orion amounted to an airborne surveillance station, stuffed with equipment and analysts. Every morning, these enormous planes lumbered out along predetermined paths from Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf, which told me that my guessed-at location on any given day would be one stop on a long, bureaucratic mission.

  This gave me an idea. I figured drones were overhead, too, somewhere out of sight, so I started going to the bathroom with Hersi’s cigarette lighter in my shorts pocket. The sky at dawn and sunset was dusky enough to make a sharp LED shine like a dim little star—I hoped—so I aimed the light through a toilet-paper tube, to hide the glare from my guards, and flashed SOS at the sky in Morse code.

  To my surprise it seemed to work. Surveillance planes started cruising low over Hobyo every other day. One afternoon, while I sat on the porch, I became aware of a distant buzz, strengthening over Hobyo like the noise we’d heard over the forest. Hersi’s eyes widened.

  “Michael! AC!”

  They hustled me into my bedroom and closed the dented shutters. The pirates called these aircraft “AC,” as shorthand for AC-130. The C-130 Hercules is a workhorse transport plane, similar in size to an Orion, but it can be outfitted for harder jobs, and a variant called the AC-130 gunship had hunted Somali jihadists in a battle for Ras Kamboni, near Kenya, in 2007. The carnage was so notorious, I think the pirates knew no other name.

  Each room in Mohammed’s House was a cube of concrete. The prospect of a raid sending bullets around in the dark tended to paralyze me. The less confusion, I thought, the better. One morning I drew a map of the compound in my notebook. I wrote in block letters that I slept alone in this room, while guards slept in this and that room: “7 GUARDS TOTAL,” I wrote, and slipped the page into my shorts pocket.

  “Kadi,” I said.

  The men stood at attention with their rifles and watched me cross the yard. I locked the outhouse door and unfolded my map. No drones or planes were visible. But I knew the rumor that certain spy satellites could read license plates from orbit. It was an antiquated rumor, maybe an urban myth, but my notebook page was almost the size of an American license plate, and I had nothing better to do.

  For the next week I unfolded the map on every trip to the bathroom. I made a point of taking a piss at the same time every morning, around six, because my only hope for such a desperate plan would be regular habit. I doubted a drone analyst would just stumble across an image of me flashing vital information from a compromising position; but if the LED signals drew attention to the house, and operators learned when to watch for my toilet runs, well, after a while, I thought, we might get somewhere.

  VIII

  My guards had a knee-jerk terror of aircraft, matched by a wild and defiant bravado, as you would, too, if you had to worry about a SEAL raid. I tried to imagine what they were thinking. The history of Somalia’s bloody relationship to air power stretched back further than Ras Kamboni or the Battle of Mogadishu. It dated to 1920, when a squadron of Royal Air Force planes landed in British Somaliland. In those days, few people on earth had seen flying machines of any kind; but Douglas James Jardine, the military chronicler of Britain’s imperial adventure in Somalia, pointed out that the “Z” squadron’s arrival in Berbera caused very little stir.

  The average unsophisticated Somali, instead of expressing surprise and admiration at such a remarkable invention of modern science as the aeroplane, gave but a passing glance at the machines and remarked that the Somali would also build aeroplanes “if he only knew how.”

  That’s from Jardine’s colorful but colonialist 1923 book The Mad Mullah of Somaliland. It describes the British war against Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who filled the same role in the Western imagination in the early 1900s that Osama bin Laden occupied a century later. According to Jardine, Sayyid Mohammed “traded upon the avarice and superstitions of his fellow-countrymen to convert them into robbers and cut-throats.” Maybe; but a lot of Somalis still consider him a national hero.

  Sayyid Mohammed came from the Ogaden, northeast of Galkayo, and his fighters were Somali herdsmen who gave up traditional clan allegiances to become “dervishes,” or Sufi devotionalists.* He stirred his men through fiery sermons to a spiritual-political cause. “With all the corrosive invective of the born agitator and the recklessness of the reformer,” wrote Jardine, “he inveighed against the luxury of the age. He proclaimed that the Somalis were wasting their substance on riotous living, especially on tea-drinking. He protested against the immorality of chewing kat, or the gluttony of gorging the fat of sheep’s tail.”

  Sayyid Mohammed’s odd strain of Sufism had historic links to Wahhabism,* which means that Sufi mysticism and Salafi fundamentalism aren’t mutually exclusive in this part of the world. Somalia has absorbed larger or smaller waves of fundamentalist influence from the Arabian Peninsula for at least two hundred years. The most recent wave started in the eighties, when Somali migrants moved north for Saudi service jobs. (Some came home radicalized.)

  The more I thought about the tidy categories Kapuscinski had noticed in North Africa, the more they tended to blur. There was a spectrum of Muslim belief, and a tincture of Wahhabism in Somali Sufism accounted for Sayyid Mohammed’s dervish holy war.

  His logic toward the British, in any case, was irrefutable. In 1903, Sayyid Mohammed wrote:

  I have no cultivated fields, no silver or gold for you to take. You gained no benefit by killing my men and my country is of no good to you. . . . If you want wood and stone, you can get them in plenty. There are also many ant-heaps. The sun is very hot. All you can get from me is war. . . . If you wish peace, go away from my country to your own.

  Sayyid Mohammed wanted to liberate his people from Europe and unify them under Islam, and he gave the British seventeen more years of sporadic war until London decided to solve the “dervish problem” with aircraft. The “Z” squadron’s bombing raids in early 1920 were a military experiment, the first Western air assaults in Africa. Sayyid Mohammed and his dervishes were far from prepared. One dervish told him the incoming planes were “chariots of Allah come to take the Mullah up to heaven.” Another declared them a Turkish invention from the Great War, bringing tidings of triumph from Istanbul. Sayyid Mohammed believed this man,
put on his best clothes, and went out to meet the messengers.

  “Then the first bomb fell,” wrote Jardine. One adviser “was killed outright, and the Mullah’s garments were singed. Thus the first shot all but ended the campaign.”

  Sayyid Mohammed’s dream of a united Somalia ended that afternoon in the desert. He survived until the end of 1920, only to die of the flu.

  IX

  One day I sat with Yoonis and Hersi on the porch, drinking from a bottle of mango juice and trying to enjoy the sunshine. Hersi handed me a stem of khat. “He wants to know if you are his friend,” said Yoonis. “He says he makes sure that you have mango juice and tuna fish every morning. He says you are his sahib.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said.

  “He says we may not get so much payment for protecting you in this house. Not as much as we thought. He wants to know if you will send him ten thousand dollars when you are free.”

  I cleared my throat and thought about it.

  “Of course,” I said at last, and Hersi looked surprised.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “If he gets me out tomorrow, he can have my firstborn.”

  Yoonis and Hersi conferred.

  “He says he would rather have the money,” said Yoonis.

  I shrugged and sipped my mango juice. Dry tree branches growing over the compound wall wavered in an ocean breeze. I heard cattle groan beyond it, some kind of cow or buffalo.

  “Hersi wants to know,” said Yoonis finally, “if you have ever had sex with a woman with a clit.”

  I nearly spat my mango juice across the porch.

  “He wants to know if you can bring him one,” he added.

  “A girlfriend with a clitoris?”