The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  “Bashko,” I said in our mutual language. “Last week you said a Muslim could be a pirate because of the hunger problem.”

  He nodded.

  “Now you say a good Muslim has to bear up under hunger.” (In pidgin: Muslim no chum-chum, Muslim no problem—because, Islam?)

  He nodded.

  I bounced my fingers again. “No same-same.”

  Bashko laughed, then laughed a bit more and held up his thumb. I’d gotten him. “Good!” he said, and translated my response to the other guards. This time it sparked a discussion. I had criticized a faith I saw in action five times a day. Abdul, the effeminate guard, gave the most fervent defense. He’d signed on to watch me when he learned that a foreigner had been kidnapped, he said. He wasn’t a pirate—he was just doing the good Muslim work of protecting an infidel in a hostile place. He went on: Did I think Garfanji was a Muslim? Ali Tuure? Ali Duulaay? Had I ever seen them read the Koran? “Uh-uh,” he answered himself with a wag of his finger. Those men, he said, were the real kuffar, the real infidels.

  I’d gleaned this argument already. It was possible that some of my guards had never hijacked a ship. But they’d guarded me since the start of the year, so they had the trust of those infidel bosses.

  Bashko came around to his real justification later the same day. He acted sober and earnest while we sat alone in the hot room. The Koran, he said, called for “struggle against the infidel.” Thieving from non-Muslims, therefore, wasn’t theft.

  “What?”

  “Jews, Christians, Buddhists”—okay to steal from them, he implied. “Muslim, no.”

  “But there were four Muslims on the Naham 3,” I said.

  “Yes.” He sat cross-legged, upright, trying to seem very correct. “We must not take from their families.”

  Taking from shipowners or a foreign government—that was different. But if the bosses took ransom from a Muslim family, that would be theft, according to his reading of the Koran.

  “What about the captain?” I said. “He was shot dead.”

  “Christian!” Bashko blurted.

  “Buddhist, I imagine.” I held his eyes. “But does the Koran say you can kill non-Muslims?”

  Again I wanted a long, detailed interview with Bashko—I wished intensely for a translator—but in our pidgin mix of English and Somali, we could speak only in broad terms.

  “No,” he said, and turned pious again. “Allah speak, All life good.”

  This idea that all life was sacred under Allah separated pirates from al-Shabaab, said Bashko. Wahhabists in Somalia had interpreted the relevant Koranic verses as a call to lethal jihad. Sufi pirates had a different idea.

  “But under Allah,” I said, “it’s okay to steal from other faiths?”

  “Koran speak,” he answered, and smiled to imply that there was nothing he could do; the book said so, and the book outranked us both.

  One Koranic verse, 9:5, a so-called Verse of the Sword,* does mention abduction. “When the sacred months are over,” it reads, “slay the idolaters* wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful.”

  The “alms levy” is a tax for the poor. I could see how a pirate from one of the world’s most destitute countries might consider a ransom from the outside world an “alms levy.” And in the sealed-off deserts of Somalia, the spiritual notion that a total stranger might have aspects of the sacred was no use whatsoever.

  I remembered a Somali phrase from the trial in Hamburg: Qof aan loo ooyin, meaning “Those for whom we don’t cry.” It referred to minorities or strangers within Somalia, but from outside a traditional alliance of clans. For the world of infidels sliding past the country’s beaches on freighters full of expensive cargo there was little room for compassion, and no transcendent love. The glories of Sufism had failed to lift these men out of tribalism. In that sense they were no better than fundamentalists; they knew the letter of their religion and little else. But Bashko would have taken it as a mortal insult to hear he was no Muslim. He belonged to a vast pool of undereducated believers with a xenophobia made sharper, not milder, by the Koran.

  “It’s a funny religion, Bashko,” I said after a while.

  Part 7

  The Hostage Cookbook

  I

  In late December I was fast asleep in the Pirate Villa when the urbane translator, Abdurrahman, woke me up by turning on the querulous fluorescent light. He had a note from his boss:

  Dear Michael. My name is Fuad. For the cause of your freedom we must understand the name of your grandmother. Please write it for Mustaf.

  “What’s this about?” I said.

  “You are going free. We need to prove to your side that you are here.”

  “To my ‘side’?” I rubbed my face. “Is your name really Mustaf?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I stared at him.

  “Why do you need my grandmother’s name?”

  “Michael, it is for your mother.” He laid a soothing hand on my shoulder. “So she will know you are alive.”

  He was quick smiling, unctuous, with pale-brown skin and a small groomed patch of beard. He wore dark slacks and a collared shirt. I almost believed I was “going free.” But it was too late at night for such a sudden decision.

  “Are you telling the truth?” I said.

  He nodded. “If Allah speaks, you will go free,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “If Allah says yes, you will go free. In Arabic we say, Inshallah.”

  More Muslim correctitude. Inshallah meant “If Allah wills it,” but my pirates often used the term sarcastically.

  “Oh, fuck off, I know what inshallah means.” I was too groggy not to cuss. “You know, Allah hears everything you say. He knows if you’re lying.”

  “Yes, he is watching us now,” Abdurrahman purred. “He will know if you lie, too.”

  “Your name is Abdurrahman, by the way, not Mustaf.”

  This annoyed him. “No, it is Mustaf,” he said.

  “It is not.”

  “Please write the name of your grandmother.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “You will not go free.”

  My sluggish mind wandered through the possibilities. Maybe negotiators in the United States or Europe were trying to contact me. But it was also plausible that pirate bosses wanted to crack a bank account. On the other hand—I had to strain to remember—did I use my grandmother’s name on any account?

  I did not.

  I blinked and scratched my neck.

  “All right, here’s her name.” I took his pen and wrote leny yntema on the scrap of paper. Abdurrahman tried to pronounce it. Bringing a name as private and intimate as my grandmother’s into this filthy room disgusted me. But I corrected his pronunciation; he looked satisfied; he stood up.

  “Thank you, Michael.”

  “You said I was going free. I won’t forget.”

  “Inshallah,” he repeated.

  The fluorescent light went off again and I lay back on the sweat-dampened mattress. The night was humid, and I couldn’t sleep.

  My grandmother lived in a pastoral brick house in a Dutch village called Linne, not far from the German border. She was a mischievous lady with the bearing of a character from Proust or Flaubert, a small-town bourgeoise who remembered the Allied invasion of Northern Europe during World War II. Her face, in her eighties, had the mild wrinkles of a softened plum, and she used a scarf to cover her hair on excursions to the store. Time moved like molasses in Linne, and when email started to replace letter writing in the nineties, I used to get occasional, comical messages from her cousin, Rhinny, who sent them on my grandmother’s behalf. Oma would write her message on a piece of letter paper, wrap her hair in a scarf, and drive a quarter-mile to Rhinny’s, who would serve coffee or schnapps and switch on her computer. The ladies would gossip u
ntil it was time to type the email. Oma would read the letter while Rhinny took dictation, happy to use her computer as a village telegraph machine.

  I shifted on my mattress and tried to sleep. These memories were hard to stop. Oma cooked heavy European meals of boiled vegetables, pork or beef in great slabs, creamy cucumber salads, and potatoes and asparagus with rich sauces. Remembering this old-fashioned food made my mouth water. The meals seemed traditional and stuck in time, but Oma had surprised me one afternoon, in her lace-curtained dining room, by calling it a Catholic style of cooking. The recipes held purpose and pride. “We don’t cook like other people in Holland,” she said. “Here in the south we cook like the Belgians, or the French, with more alcohol and cream.” The Thirty Years’ War had been settled for centuries, but Catholics in Holland maintained old feelings of pride and persecution, and Oma maintained strong parochial links to the past. Even her culinary choices were a bulwark against Protestant austerities.

  One of my favorite meals as a kid at Oma’s house was Indonesian satay, spears of chicken simmered in peanut sauce. She cooked it first when I was eight or nine. Until then, I had never imagined that peanuts could be anything besides a salty snack at a ball game. The idea of turning them into dinner was fantastic and strange. Later, when I understood the relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands—when I had read about the violent Dutch East India Company and seen rebuilt colonial ships in the Port of Amsterdam, when I had finally walked the sweltering streets of Jakarta myself and bought satay from a char-blackened grill—I knew how sheltered and privileged I had been; but that first moment of surprise was still fresh and bright.

  Before my kidnapping I had lived in a twilight between privilege and poverty, the bohemian twilight of a novelist and travel writer. Travel was an escape from definitions and hierarchies at home, and, done properly, it was a discipline of erasing preconceptions, a way to approach the world with intelligence and attention. Travel writing had fallen out of fashion in America, but I still believed in a good travel book as a way to crumble barriers. The medium was imperfect, but so was language itself—so was most human understanding. The effort to step outside your narrow mind-set was important. I happened to like the sense of slipping through a foreign place as a near-invisible stranger, and I liked the lessons of friction during those inevitable moments when you were no longer invisible. But Somalia was another story. In Somalia I had to be Californian and European whether I liked it or not. This crimped self-consciousness was excruciating, worse than useless, because whether you flaunted it or cringed from it such barren labelizing had little to do with self-knowledge.

  II

  A few nights later, Bashko woke me up and said it was time to leave. “Telephone,” he whispered. “No problem.”

  We piled into a Land Rover and drove to the Broom-Closet Bordello, where they told me to “sleep.” After a few hours in this way station, I gathered, we would make another dead-of-night journey to meet Fuad. I didn’t know whether to feel hope or dread. But when I drifted awake at around two, most of the guards sat chattering in the darkened courtyard, high on khat, while one man, Issa, had stayed in the room, slumped on a plastic chair, listening to white noise on his phone.

  “Telephone?” I said. Are we going out for a call?

  “Maya,” he said. No.

  His phone played a high, oscillating signal. The men had started to listen to some open frequency through their phones at night—sometimes they heard pings, like electronic raindrops, and sometimes there was a watery signal, like high-pitched radio interference.

  “Problem?” I said.

  Issa pointed up and waved his finger around.

  Drones? Aircraft were circling Galkayo? To watch for our vehicles? Or had I misunderstood? Pirates obviously tried to detect drone signals on their phones, but I didn’t believe these techniques could be fail-safe, or unknown to the U.S. military. So why would a drone circle the house, at close enough range to startle my kidnappers—and prevent us from leaving—if the request for my grandmother’s name had been an earnest attempt to put me on the phone? Why would a military force try to shut down proof of life?

  Or did the phone technique really work?

  I puzzled my situation down to a pair of possibilities. Either the pirates had lied about my imminent release, and the phone-call appointment was another pointless exercise, which the military wanted to squelch, for some reason connected to ransom talks (because my pirates considered a phone call to be a major event, loaded with expectation); or the request for Oma’s name was an American ruse, and planes were trying to locate us.

  Then again, then again.

  At last I fell asleep, exhausted by my own thinking. In the hot morning we returned to the Pirate Villa. For the next two weeks the pirates raised my hopes with rumors of another imminent phone call—a climactic summit conversation that would settle my case and set the whole house free—while Orion-size aircraft swooped low over Galkayo almost every day. I had a weird feeling that the pirates wanted to wait out the planes, but also that the planes wanted to rattle the pirates, as if someone in the American hierarchy knew our approximate location, and wanted to spot us leaving the house. Or else force us to stay put.

  At last Yoonis came to the Pirate Villa one morning in mid-January of the new year to ask if I wanted to talk to my mother.

  “What, today?” I said.

  “If you say yes, they will come to this house.”

  “Who will?”

  “The bad group. The pirates.”

  Pirate bosses tried to separate their sprawling gangs into job-specific cells, and one cell did set up phone calls—as a rule, we drove out to the bush to meet those men—but my brain cycled through a fog of half-understood facts and came to no conclusion. Was a phone call good or bad? If our trip to the bush had been squelched by military planes, on purpose, was there some reason to say no to Yoonis? Or should I say yes, because pirate phones could be traced to the Pirate Villa?

  “Yes or no?” said Yoonis.

  “Let me think about it.”

  “I will tell the pirates no, you do not want.”

  “Don’t tell them that.”

  “So you say yes?”

  “I don’t know, Yoonis. Give me five minutes.”

  “I will tell them you do not want.”

  The strong-arming was bizarre. But he wouldn’t elaborate, and I saw little difference between yes and no. I liked the idea of surveillance, and maybe Abdurrahman had told the truth. Maybe I was about to go home.

  “All right. Tell them yes.”

  “Good.”

  I had the rest of the morning to wonder and think, which was long enough for my hopes to swell like a party balloon. I decided that the elaborate planning and the aerial surveillance pointed to a plan to set me free.

  In the afternoon, the steel door to the compound swung open and a rumbling SUV pulled inside. Three or four new Somalis came in and shook hands with my guards. Yoonis came to my mattress and coached me on the call—“Tell them you are sick; do not give your location”—and we moved to another room, where Bashko stood with a pistol.

  We sat on somebody’s comfortable double mattress. A Somali fiddled with a SIM card and dialed a number. Soon Fuad came on the line, from Mogadishu, and Yoonis leaned beside me to listen.

  “I will connect you now with your mother,” said Fuad, and my heart pounded.

  Mom started the call with a question about my health. She asked whether I needed “medicines.” I said something loud and simple about malaria, to please Yoonis. I was no longer sick, and didn’t say I was, but he wanted to hear me complain. I added in German that I still wore the same clothes I had used on the Naham 3, bright clothes photographed by drones on the ship’s laundry lines. I said they were hanging in the courtyard of this very house. I tried to describe the house. Mom just listened.

  At last I mumbled, in English, “Are negotiations close?” and waited with anxious and delicate apprehension while my mother said, “We
’ve talked to some clan leaders, some leaders of the community. We’re making progress, Michael. But we’re not very close. We’re still in the millions. Another couple of months!”

  My eyesight blackened. I saw pinpricks of swirling light.

  “Nicht aufgeben!” she said. Don’t give up!

  “I’ve been here too long,” I blurted. “These people aren’t negotiating.” I made sure the next sentence in German was clear: “A rescue would still be welcome.”

  Then I started to yammer in English about my health and my poor eyesight, to distract Yoonis from the drift of our conversation. What Mom had just said terrified me. What I had just said terrified me. The real stakes of the phone call were obscure to me still, and I had no clue what the pirates would understand, no sense of what I had done or what I had failed to do. But the hopes I had inflated for most of the afternoon just popped like soap bubbles. Fuad said something in Somali, and the line went dead.

  III

  I’d lived in Somalia for almost a year. My irrational heart had settled on some kind of anniversary release. Now those feelings panicked and flapped—all my sinews, every fiber of atrophied muscle, wanted to soar away from this villa, but every morning brought the flyblown realization that I would stay mired there for an unforeseeable stretch of time.

  I started to have specific fantasies of suicide. The greed and contempt of the bosses needed some kind of answer. Greed was the reason I was still in Somalia—greed, not just poverty; greed, not some ringing justification of Somali fishing rights. So I imagined using the sharp lid of a tuna can, or dismantling a Bic razor, to open a vein in my arm, and I would dip toilet paper in the blood and paint GREED on the wall and hope to die under that garish banner of protest while some pirate took a picture and posted it on Facebook or something.

  My heart beat through a deep sludge of emotion during these desolate afternoons. The only antidote to so much visceral anguish seemed to be yoga. Nothing else could settle the panic and straighten out my brain. The sweaty routine also gave me an excuse to wash my clothes in a bucket with Top-O-Mol and send my laundry out to dry. I wanted every fresh load to serve as a flag for drones. One guard or another had to carry my freshly rinsed yellow towel, my bright-green soccer shorts, and my red Manchester United jersey to hang in the sun-beaten yard, often with a look of disgust. (The infidel’s clothes were considered unclean, even after I’d cleaned them.)