The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  After a week or two of making hopeful signs, in patchy correspondence, following my phone call in the bush, in mid-October “Fuad” announced a reduction in the ransom demand.

  “At last,” he wrote, “the bosses decreased to nineteen million and eight hundred thousand dollars US.”

  The fact that this bumbling criminal tag team woke up a glimmer of hope in California shows how desperate things had looked for most of 2012. My mother, in response, asked for a direct phone number to a pirate boss.

  “Fuad” wrote back:

  Hi marlis I am also glad for our contact and as human I much feel pitty for your problem, dear I can give you their number but, none of them speaks english . . . If you can understand somali language or get one who can speak somali in amerika with you I can provide you their contact addresses. You have the choice. thanks byeeeeeeeeee.

  V

  Abdinasser the Sahib came in one morning in October with a new, green, woven-plastic mat, still wrapped in a clear plastic bag. He flopped it on the floor, tapped his chest with his fist in a gesture of brotherhood, and said, in his barrel-chested voice:

  “SAHIB! Salli, adiga.”

  “Thank you, sahib.”

  “Okay!”

  I asked for a broom and swept the concrete. I spread out the mat in front of a window and used it, first, to do push-ups. When I finished, three guards from the hall were staring into the room.

  “Exercise!” I told them.

  I figured the pirates would find yoga kind of strange, so I tried to wait for a gap in the afternoon when no guard sat by the door. But I was under close observation. The men seemed to have orders to watch me day and night.

  I started by standing on the mat and lowering my pulse with a series of deep breaths. I had done yoga in Berlin to keep myself in shape to surf, and I liked a tough regimen that made my heart beat and my skin sweat. Meditation was never the point. But in Somalia I was so used to feeling wild with nerves that half an hour of mental concentration had a powerful effect; it calmed me for hours at a time.

  I moved through a few postures and noticed all the guards laughing and smiling at the door.

  “Exercise!” I said again.

  “Exercise!” said Abdinasser.

  “Exercise!” repeated Bashko, and he lifted his thumb.

  The next day, when I did it again, both men came into my room and spread flattened cardboard boxes on the unclean floor and imitated my postures, with enthusiastic smiles. At first I thought they were goofing around. Soon they picked up their boxes, laughed, and went out. But it happened again the next day, and the next. To my intense surprise, they wanted to learn yoga.

  “No, put your feet there,” I said. “Like that. Twist your back like this.”

  “Okay, sahib!”

  These lessons embarrassed the other pirates, but Bashko and Abdinasser, and sometimes Issa, came in for yoga class because they never got “exercise” of their own. They were locked in this Pirate Villa, too.

  I tried to imagine a yoga studio in Galkayo, or the intrepid teacher who would venture to Somalia to spread this bizarre but calming discipline, which, since it came from India, might be viewed with derision and hate. Though, come to think of it, either Indians or Pakistanis did seem to live in town. Sometimes the pirates ordered batches of samosas for me, the greasy Indian snack East Africans call sambusi, and they arrived from a local shop in scraps of newspaper printed in Urdu, Arabic, Sinhalese, or (occasionally) English.

  “Sahib—exercise!” said Bashko when he needed help with a pose.

  “Like this,” I said. “Don’t forget to breathe.”

  They never held a pose long enough to accomplish very much, and sometimes out of boredom they shifted from yoga to quasi-military calisthenics. I saw stiff and comical marching drills as well as wild, flailing backbends. I said, “Askari exercise?”—using the word for “soldier”—and Bashko lit up with pride.

  “Askari, yes,” he said.

  “But you are shifta,” I teased him. Thieves.

  “Haa, yes,” he added in a rare moment of bashful candor.

  When I quizzed him for biographical details, Bashko described himself as a Sa’ad from Mogadishu who had never worked as a pirate on the water. He’d trained, instead, as a soldier in Somalia and a commando in Russia. I had to weigh everything he said. Bashko’s name did sound like a Slavic diminutive of Bashir, and Somalia had maintained political links to Russia under Siad Barre; but Bashko spoke no Russian. He was also vague about the weather in Moscow. (He never mentioned snow.) He boasted about commando training in Pakistan, too, and that seemed more plausible. He might have learned some English there.

  In any case, he was handy with a weapon, which suggested training, and he liked the word askari, which elevated his self-esteem. The word had an odd resonance, because in East African countries once under the colonial heel of the Italians or the British or the Germans, askari used to refer to local soldiers trained by a European colonial power. Gerlach had used it as an epithet, something like “Uncle Tom.” But for Bashko it just meant “soldier,” which sounded better than “thief.”

  Bashko and Abdinasser both mimicked my yoga poses like housewives watching a weight-loss video. Through these improvised classes they became my “sahibs” in the Pirate Villa. Whenever I needed something, they were the guys to ask. Bashko, in particular, kept my hope alive with rumors of negotiations. He made it sound as if I would go free in a matter of days. Of course I was happy to believe him. But then hope is like heroin for a hostage, and it can be just as destructive.

  VI

  “This afternoon we must make a video for the U.N.,” said Yoonis in early November. “They will mediate your release.”

  “Really?”

  I sat up on my mattress. Yoonis loomed over me and seemed to sway with the uncertainty of his words.

  “What kind of message?” I said.

  “They want to know what you need. For your health.”

  Yoonis had a high forehead, round earnest eyes, and a light patch of hair on the end of his chin. In Hobyo, at least, his face had seemed friendly enough. Now he cultivated the deep, thuggish tones of a gang leader.

  “In the video,” he ordered, “you must say three things: You must give your name. You must talk about your health. And you must give a message to the United Nations.”

  I nodded.

  “And you must not give your location,” he warned me.

  “Don’t mention Harardhere?”

  “Yah!” he said with a grin.

  After lunch, Abdurrahman appeared, still calling himself “Mustaf,” and wearing a white robe with a turban attached—an obvious costume, unless he moonlighted as a sheikh. He also carried a digital camera. He hung the robe on a door and worked with several guards for a while in another room. I heard Bashko having an excited conversation in the hall. At last he leaned into my doorway.

  “Michael—news!” he said, using his hand to indicate the motion of a flying plane. “Rolly and Marc! Seychelles!”

  I sat up.

  “Really?”

  “Free!” said Bashko.

  “How much?”

  “Four million!”

  It was an exorbitant price, probably inflated by the rumor kitchen—the guards were encouraged by their bosses to believe that if two poor fishermen could be ransomed for a total of four million dollars, Michael might fetch eight or ten. How exciting! They talked about what to do with their cash. Most wanted to leave Somalia for Nairobi, Dubai, or even Europe. Bashko, with another flying-plane gesture, said, “Ahmed Dirie. London.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Haa!”

  “How?”

  But there was no time. I had to put on a ma’awiis, a sarong, instead of long pants. Yoonis led me to the other room. The men had converted it to a movie set by suspending an orange tarp from lines tied to metal shutters. Inside this tent lay a torn and dusty mat, a bag with clothes spilling out, and a fire-blackened field kettle. All of it fa
ced a window to let in natural light.

  “I see. We’re in the bush now?” I said.

  “Yah!” said Yoonis.

  More pirate theater. He ordered me to kneel on the mat. Someone wrapped the chains from the Broom-Closet Bordello around my wrists and looped them over my neck. Bashko and Issa and two other guards wrapped their faces in keffiyehs and surrounded me, aiming their weapons.

  Yoonis asked questions while Abdurrahman pointed the camera.

  “What are the names of your parents?”

  “Marlis Saunders and Bert Moore,” I said. “He’s deceased,” I added, in case they wanted to call him for money.

  “Your father is dead?” said Yoonis, who’d never heard this before.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any diseases?”

  “Not right now.”

  We ran through the date and circumstances of my capture, and Yoonis asked, “Do you have any message for the U.N.?”

  “These men tell me I’m about to go free,” I said. “I hope that’s true. I’ve been in Somalia for too long, and I don’t have any glasses or lenses—I’m half-blind—so, uh, I’d like to request a pair of glasses.”

  Strange interview. Afterward, I returned to my mattress, and for some reason I felt optimistic. It was early November, and the day felt bright and warm. The bustle of excitement over the video and the gossip about “the U.N.” suggested real momentum toward my freedom. The only hitch in the stride of Yoonis’s questions was that my father was gone, and I wondered if it shocked him to hear I had only one parent left to rob.

  VII

  I remembered a bargain “emerald” my father had once bought for $24.95, in a hinged plastic box, squirreled away in a drawer. The gem was faded green plastic. Dad went in for get-rich-quick schemes, and he’d ordered this one from the back pages of the L.A. Times. As a hostage I could imagine three reasons for Dad to jump at such a gimcrack idea. It might have been (a) drunken misjudgment, (b) common panic about the family budget, or (c) plain curiosity. But he never talked about the emerald, and he kept it in the desk in our study, where I sat with him sometimes to build model planes and ships. We glued plastic wings and tail sections together and painted them from little cube-shaped bottles of enamel paint that clacked in the drawer like thick glass dice.

  The father I remembered from my distant boyhood was enthusiastic and strong; but the older man, from my preadolescence, wore a troubled, clenched expression behind a pair of plastic sunglasses and seemed to take the world too seriously. I imagined the difference as a disturbance in psychic weather, a shift in the chemical patterns of his brain, and these perhaps heritable mysteries felt awful to contemplate in Somalia, where changes in psychic weather were so probable and sudden. For a twelve-year-old boy, they would have been impossible to understand. At that age you took everything personally. An adult who removed himself from your life did not obviously love you. In that sense I was grateful for Mom’s protection, since knowing details at that age would have left a permanent and baffling scar.

  But I couldn’t submit to these memories in Somalia and cling to the notion of my dad as a rival. We would have locked horns when I grew up, but who cares? Fathers and sons did that. The lack of a father to struggle against was the unnatural part. I hated his drunken binges, but I didn’t hate the man himself. I missed the man himself.

  Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by al-Qaeda after a wrong turn in Pakistan, had grown up in Encino. Not far from Northridge. While I stretched on my mattress in Galkayo I wondered if there was something about the dreariness of the L.A. suburbs that sent writers out to dangerous parts of the world, or something about white writers in particular, who thought the world was theirs to explore. Travel itself was a privilege. Package tours from the United States or Europe to the developing world were vestiges of colonialism, in the sense that tourism rarely operated in the other direction. Overseas journalism, and travel writing in the British or American vein—Gerald Hanley, Graham Greene, Paul Theroux—involved similar privileges. Then again, doing it well required no specific background, and it offended every instinct in my body to think that any writer of any shade of skin “should not” cover a certain story or travel to a certain place.

  Then again, I’d pushed the edges of privilege by chasing a book in Somalia. I’d taken a ridiculous risk.

  Then again—empires had always sent out travelers. Ibn Battuta, during an era of rising Ottoman power in the 1300s, had published an early and lasting description of Somalia, which he called Barbara, after a visit to the royal city of Maqdashaw (Mogadishu). The sultan of Maqdashaw welcomed Ibn Battuta with a meal of rice and pickled mango. “A single person of the people of Maqdashaw eats as much as a whole company of us would eat,” wrote Ibn Battuta, “and they are corpulent and fat in the extreme.”

  Writers always went wrong, but it was miserable now to think that I had such a bleak story to tell—a story about captivity, assuming I got out at all—when I’d wanted to write something more rich and detached, more original, more humanizing. I also loathed the parochial idea that writers should just “write what they know.”

  Then again, then again.

  My brain had time to waver over this question, back and forth.

  You have made a mistake. Mistakes are human.

  VIII

  A day or two after our video, I asked to use the bathroom while a guard named Madobe sat watch in the doorway.

  “Kadi,” I said.

  Madobe was the most pious-acting pirate in the group. All the men scraped and bowed toward Mecca in the hall, five times a day, but no one prayed with more punctiliousness or care. Madobe was long and precise, with a young handsome face, but he seemed to be illiterate, and he could be tediously sarcastic and cruel. When he wasn’t at his prayers, he chuckled and joked like a delinquent. He teased me about wanting “ham.” His skin was darker than the others’, which made a difference in Somalia—the nickname Madobe* meant “black” and referred to his color. He also belonged to a different clan, so even within the pirate gang, he may have felt like an outsider.

  “Kadi,” I said.

  He didn’t even glance over. I said “kadi” again and held up an empty water bottle containing my toothbrush, to show that I wanted to brush my teeth.

  No answer. He wasn’t doing much in particular.

  “Kadi,” I repeated, and stood up.

  Now he sprang to attention with his rifle and shouted in Somali. The other men rushed into my room. When I raised my voice in protest, they all shouted as if I had tried to jump over the compound wall. Even Bashko pulled a pistol and shook it in my face, like Ali Duulaay on the bluff. I had to sit down. But that wasn’t good enough for Madobe, who strode into my room and kicked the plastic bottle out of my hand.

  “Bullshit,” I muttered, which was a word they all understood. “Somali bullshit.”

  “Shut up,” said Bashko.

  Violence and fury were ecstatic states for these men, and the anger might simmer all day long until someone found an excuse to erupt. I remembered a line from Hanley: “When the violence came, one hated it, and one came to know how it damaged one’s slightly phony ideals about how Man longed only for goodness and peace, whereas, actually, he loved fighting and knew he shouldn’t. Hypocrisy is the keystone of civilization and should be cherished.”

  I warmed to this idea in Galkayo. Before leaving Berlin I had cherished the notion that civilized hypocrisy ought to be laid bare and corrected. The comforts of Western cities were just upholstery sewn over the violence and injustice at the heart of the civilized world, and I was against all that. I thought a writer should face unpleasantness, violence, entropy, and horror with unflinching eyes and an understanding heart. Right? Well, then. This broken hostage-world was all entropy and violence, and I was lying in it as punishment for my curiosity.

  I lacerated myself for believing I could learn something trenchant and real by coming to Somalia. An uncertainty principle follows writers into c
onflict zones, and I had noticed it even on the placid Turkish frigate in Djibouti. While we spent four days in the Gulf of Aden, another NATO vessel had captured a pirate mother ship, a dhow full of kidnapped fishermen, used by the pirates as slaves. These interesting people were rescued in the Gediz’s usual sector. I said to our minder, Yaşar, “You didn’t have your sector changed just because of us, did you?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “It is nice to have some quiet days.”

  So the presence of journalists had shifted the ship’s position. The uncertainty principle holds for writers and for anthropologists, quantum physicists, field researchers, even parents—anyone in any role where the fact of observation can change the thing observed. What the fuck did I expect in Somalia? A tall white man, hoping to make friends with pirates? Even during my first days in Galkayo, I was aware of my extreme whiteness, and I knew very well that I was observing Africa through the eyes of a privileged stranger. The Horn of Africa had been hermetic and violent to outsiders since long before Richard Burton’s nineteenth-century excursions there; and people in Galkayo had seemed electrically aware of our presence in town. I also lacked Gerald Hanley’s matter-of-fact reason to be in Somalia. His flights of lyricism and sense of drama as a white writer in Africa now rubbed me the wrong way. His ideas were good, but the romance of his style gave off too much perfume; the high sound of his prose contradicted his disillusionment about civilization and violence, and the supposed drama of writing about Africa left me feeling bitter and dull.