The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  By day six my body had started to consume itself. I looked, and felt, like a scarecrow. I let Bashko convince me that a doctor would soon pay a visit. He called the runner and ordered sambusi, and I indulged in a greasy feast before bedtime, but I saved one, wrapped in plastic, for the morning.

  In the morning I asked Bashko about the doctor.

  “No doctor,” he said.

  “No chum-chum!” I said.

  “Fucking.”

  On day seven, I refused breakfast, then lunch. In the afternoon, two bosses arrived. Dhuxul and one elder who went by “Abdi Yare” came in, looking stern, followed by Yoonis and a strange new Somali they introduced as a doctor, a small-featured young man with glasses. He listened while Yoonis translated my complaint. He palped my shin and tried to look knowledgeable. But everyone could tell I wanted to hold out for some concession, just as I could tell this young Somali had no medical degree.

  “The leg is not broken,” he said. “You will be fine.”

  He handed me a small pot of Tiger Balm ointment to rub into my skin.

  “Okay, Michael?” said Yoonis.

  I said nothing.

  “The doctor says you are fine,” Yoonis insisted, with the bosses staring me down. “You do not need an X-ray.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You must eat.”

  I said nothing.

  X

  Sheer frustration after the failed hunger strike brought me to a pair of contradictory, dead-end realizations, neither one liberating or, in fact, very helpful. The same puzzle had ruled my captivity for more than two years, but now I felt it in my gut like the dull point of a pike.

  I wanted to die; I did not want to die.

  These feelings were compounded by the blanket of desert heat that pressed on Galkayo during an average afternoon. “It is almost impossible to describe the malaise, the very special weariness of spirit,” Hanley wrote in Warriors, “which eats into one after the sixth month in the midst of the tension and the hot silence.” Six months! “I know of fifteen cases of madness in that wilderness.” Hanley wasn’t reassuring to think about, and the worst part about not wanting to die was facing this malaise every day.

  But my hunger strike had rattled the pirates. It forced them to wonder what might happen if I died and denied them a ransom. Farrah, the long guard with a gentle manner, who had a sharp chin and large teeth, seemed impressed with my stamina. One afternoon while he sat alone on the mat, watching me in the room, he said, “Two years!” with a broad, lazy smile, as if he were tired of the routine, too. “Adiga.”

  “Haa,” I said.

  “Two—years,” he repeated.

  A bit longer, in fact. By now it was late March 2014. Two years and two months in captivity. Farrah kept smiling, as if it were some kind of achievement.

  I liked Farrah. He was a lank and quiet man, unsure of his role as a pirate. Sometimes I caught him deep in brooding pleasure over the music he played on his phone. He played air oud like a teenager—he followed the twanging notes with his long fingers, nodding his head—and he’d boasted innocently about K’naan as a clan brother, a fellow Sa’ad, before the others had shut him up.

  In case of a violent rescue, I didn’t want Farrah to die.

  In case of a violent rescue, I didn’t want me to die.

  One morning I listened to an hour-long program from Rome about the new pope, Francis. My shortwave was fickle in the hour before the World Service—usually it tuned in to Radio Sultanate of Oman, sometimes it preferred Vatican Radio. On this particular morning, I heard Francis compare human sin to the stars, and his simple image had an uncommon persuasion for a hostage lying on the floor of a prison house.

  “At night we look at the sky, and we see many stars,” the English reporter translated, and in the background I could hear the pope give his homily in Italian. (“Tante stelle, tante stelle.”) “But when the sun rises in the morning, the light is such that we can’t see the stars. God’s mercy is like that: a great light of love and tenderness.”

  This homily was the first stirring and relevant idea I had heard in many months. It reminded me of the Unforgiving Servant, the petty man in the Gospels who walked into the street after pleading for mercy from a king, only to hassle another servant for a much smaller debt. I noticed that if the pirates were in debt to me, morally, then I was in moral debt, too—up to my neck in it. Rotten with obligation. To my mom, above all; to my entire family, to all the institutions working to set me free. It would have been idiotic, hypocritical, to maintain some persecuted notion of myself. I was still alive, for one thing. In spite of my nasty circumstances it struck me as basically good that I hadn’t drowned myself off the ship. Therefore, I shouldn’t kill myself now. All the personalities from Epictetus to Pramoedya, from Thich Quang Duc to Derek Walcott, who had sustained me so far—all these different ideas of liberation from the self—seemed to congeal in the pope’s image of the sun, and a strange feeling of gratitude spread in my blood. I had nothing but a quiet throb of life, which itself was a gift, like the power of thought, and the simple poetry in the pope’s words unfastened something, so I could feel how bitterness and anger were acts of will, like suffering itself, and how a slight step backward, an unhooking of the mind, could let in a flood of mercy and light.

  XI

  So I called a private truce. I stopped treating the pirates like persecutors. I talked as pleasantly as possible to the men during the daylight hours when we had to sit in a single room among crumpled leaves of khat and kettles of oversweet tea. When they asked for mango juice, I gave them a bottle, without wondering to myself why they didn’t just go to the goddamn store.

  “Good—morning,” Hashi would say when he opened my steel shutters in the morning.

  “Subax wanaagsan,” I answered in his language, and meant it.

  My routine hardly changed—I listened to the radio, I drafted a novel in my notebooks, I raised my voice now and then to let any hypothetical drone discover my location—but I no longer cursed myself, or the pirates, every morning. My hair and beard were wild as a hobo’s, with startling new streaks of gray, but I no longer felt the strain coming from within.

  By now I had abandoned hope as a decadent indulgence, a fine flapping of the spirit that ended too easily in desolation. When I thought about my friends in Berlin, my family in Cologne, my grandmother in Holland, or my mom and my friends in California, I thought of them as shades from the past. I assumed Mom had packed up my apartment and stuffed everything into storage. I hadn’t spoken to her in fourteen or fifteen months. I knew there was a chance this dim existence in Somalia would end in gunfire, or with an unexpected hostage sale to al-Shabaab, who wouldn’t mind having an American to destroy in public. I assumed the past was gone; I just moved from one moment to the next.

  Epictetus said in more than one of his lectures that real human freedom is moral choice, the skill to choose good over bad and not to be distracted by “impressions.” This turned out to be a lot of work. By “impressions” he meant not just prejudice, reflex, and the first impressions we all form about strangers who might be enemies or friends—the usual bending of the light through a cognitive prism that modern psychologists also teach their clients to see—but the basic wrong impression that good and bad can be discovered out there, among the hordes of uncontrollable other people. “Sectarian strife, dissension, blame and accusation, ranting and raving—they all are mere opinion, the opinion that good and bad lie outside us,” Epictetus said. “Let someone transfer these opinions to the workings of the will, and I personally guarantee his peace of mind, no matter what his outward circumstances are like.”

  One afternoon I noticed two guards, Issa and Rashid,* absorbed in a movie on a sleek new phone. Everyone else at Dhuxul’s had gone to sleep. The voices of the actors coming from the phone sounded American, and I wondered which American film could hold these men so rapt. The BBC had been full of Oscar coverage of the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips, which followed the famous n
aval standoff between pirates and SEAL snipers in 2009.

  I listened for a while and thought, Fuck me, that’s Tom Hanks.

  “Issa,” I said with a sour grin. “Movie okay?”

  “Haa.”

  A week or two later, Farhaan, the youthful veteran of Mogadishu, came to squat heavily beside my mattress with the same smartphone.

  “Michael, look,” he said, and showed me a scene from Captain Phillips. To my surprise, he handed me the phone. While we watched parts of the movie—early scenes set in Oman and on the cargo ship MV Maersk Alabama—my nerves woke up from their slumber of the past few months and an idea arrived with a faint, stirring hope. What if I just called home? The pirates tried to keep their phones out of my reach because they worried about that possibility. Now I concocted a plan to dial Mom’s number without alerting Farhaan. I’d have to blurt something in German; then I would hang up, pretend I had shouted at the film, and curse and swear and apologize for somehow screwing up the phone. Oh dang where’d the movie go?

  Farhaan’s number could then be traced from America, and I could be rescued.

  For the first time in months I had a real alternative to my dull and hopeless prison life. My heart thudded. It could work, but the idea ran the considerable risk of leaving an American number behind in the phone’s software, which a pirate might see.

  Farhaan retreated to his mat. He chewed khat and talked with Farrah. I found the volume button. To dial a number I wanted a silent keypad. I killed the volume slowly, waiting for my guards to think about other things.

  Instead Farhaan blurted, “Michael.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Problem, telephone?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Volume, volume.”

  “Mm—yeah. Hit the wrong button,” I mumbled.

  He came over to fix it.

  “Thanks.”

  He returned to his corner, and I watched a little more. After a while he stood up to leave. Farrah, who spoke less English, remained in the corner with his pile of khat.

  Deciding whether to use this tool for my physical freedom was also a moral decision, discerning better from worse. I might die; the guards might die. But those were the terms of our existence here, imposed by my captors. I had not turned into a saint.

  I fiddled with the volume again.

  Farrah said, “Michael! Problem.”

  “What? No problem.”

  “Sound, sound,” he said.

  “Hmmm.”

  The whole house slumbered. Farhaan came back and the guards exchanged words. Farhaan, heavy and patient, came to squat on his haunches and stare.

  “No problem,” he said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  Flies buzzed. Afternoon light poured through the door. Farhaan squatted about a yard away. To distract us both from what was on my mind I pointed at the main Somali character, the pirate who would survive the movie and go on trial in New York.

  “This Somali,” I said.

  Farhaan nodded. “Abduwali,” he said, referring to the real pirate Abduwali Muse. “He is my friend.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, my clan brother. My friend from childhood.”

  “Darod?” I said, referring to the clan. Farhaan had said he came from Puntland, where the Darod dominated.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Abduwali is in America now,” I said. “In prison.”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t know why Farhaan showed me Captain Phillips. I think he was just being kind. It seemed like a morbid film for pirates to watch, since we all knew how it ended: three simultaneous bullets from the stern of a warship, three mutilated pirates; blood, horror, and a rescued American. No doubt they felt entangled in the same drama. (Maybe they were watching for tips.) The spectacle of Somalis in a Hollywood film also held a druglike fascination for them, and smartphones, even more than TV, had delivered the distant, narcotic world of pop culture straight to their hands.

  After forty-five minutes, long before the climactic sniper fire, Farhaan grew tired of squatting near my mattress in the buzzing heat, watching me watch the film.

  “Okay, Michael,” he said, and took his phone away.

  XII

  One afternoon in May, while I wrote in my notebook, Bashko came in and set a bottle of liquor on the concrete floor with a clink.

  “Alcohol?” I said. “Why?”

  “From taliyaha,”* he said, which was our word for Dhuxul.

  “Why?”

  “Good!” Bashko said.

  He lifted his thumb and went away.

  The bottle, from Ethiopia, had a yellow label showing a juniper bush and a brand name in Amharic, along with the English words dry gin. Dhuxul drank the same stuff. Since I was working, I saved it for sundown, when I would need help falling asleep. The bottle had an electric effect on my guards. Every time a new pirate came in and spotted the rare, clear, potent, forbidden liquor on the floor, he looked unnerved and tempted. A few words exchanged in Somali would explain the mystery—a gift from Dhuxul—but no guard was immune to the luxurious allure of the gin.

  First Abdinuur, the machine gunner, came in to beg with a plastic cup.

  “Sahib,” he said in a rough and pleading voice. “Aniga, gin, okay.”

  I laughed and poured him a little. He’d never used the word sahib with me before.

  “Adiga Muslim?” I said. Aren’t you Muslim?

  “Haa,” he said, and downed the shot.

  Later in the afternoon, Rashid, the Pirate Princeling, tried his luck. “Sahib,” he said. But Rashid had cheated me out of limes and sambusi and other little treats, and I liked him less than Abdinuur. I wagged my finger.

  “Muslim, no,” I teased him, though I knew he wasn’t observant.

  “Sahib,” he insisted.

  “No.”

  That evening, I mixed a cup of gin with mango juice to drink before going to sleep. It tasted vile. Abdinuur came in to wrap the chains around my feet and expressed, in a mixture of Somali and pidgin, that I should be happy about the gift from Dhuxul, because a bottle of Ethiopian gin could run twenty dollars.

  I felt real surprise. “It shouldn’t cost ten,” I said.

  The next day the pirates were no less surprised that my gin still existed. Why hadn’t the booze-starved Christian emptied his bottle? They paraded in, one by one, to stare or beg for more. I traded Rashid one slug for a lime, and in the evening I asked Bashko to cut my lime in half.

  I squeezed it into a tin cup of cloying tea from my thermos, and this concoction was tolerable. I made a note:

  Somali Gimlet

  One part Ethiopian gin

  Whole fresh lime

  Two parts sweet black tea

  Adjust gin content as necessary

  The pirates pooled their allowance to buy gin of their own, and one day, while Dhuxul was gone, a runner delivered an identical bottle. Abdinuur tilted it up to drink in great bubbling gulps. Four or five others gathered around with plastic cups. Bashko and Farrah both abstained, at least in front of me. But it was interesting to watch the others abandon Islam for an evening.

  A few days later, in early June, Hashi woke me up by opening the metal shutters at dawn, as usual, and said:

  “Michael? Adiga free.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Today,” he answered, with the flying-airplane hand gesture I had learned to loathe. “Adiga free.”

  “Really?”

  “Haa.”

  I went to the bathroom, returned, and ate my bowl of beans. Afterward Hashi and Bashko both told me to pack.

  “Why?”

  “Adiga free!”

  “Bashko, what’s going on?”

  He squatted near my bed and explained that sometime in the afternoon I would be driven “to Galkayo,” where I would board a plane for Nairobi. I couldn’t just sit here with my towel hanging on the shutter, my skin disinfectants on the windowsill, my bottled-up toothbrush and steel cup all waiting on
the floor. I had to be ready to leave.

  I didn’t believe him, but over the next hour I watched the pirates pack their own clothes into plastic sacks. My heart started to race. At last I packed my faux-leather bag. I even separated a few snacks and mango drinks into a plastic bag as a carry-on. The idea that my ridiculous satchel, which had to be tied with a dirty rope, would survive transshipment in a luggage hold was delusional. But for the first time in months I allowed myself a few inches of optimism. I imagined a U.N. plane, a skinny turboprop with a dozen seats. I wondered what to say to strangers.

  Around noon, Abdurrahman, the urbane translator, came to Dhuxul’s house with his telephone and showed me a text message in English:

  Tell Michael we will bring him back to Dunckerstrasse in Berlin.

  It also gave the correct house number. Astonishing. A current of hope stirred in me again.

  “You must answer this person,” said Abdurrahman.

  “Who is it?”

  “He has come to help you.” He handed me a notebook. “Please write your answer here. I will send it.”

  “I should write to him?”

  “Yes.”

  But Abdurrahman didn’t want me to type into his phone. He wanted to transcribe the message later and send it from a different location.

  “I see.”

  For the rest of the afternoon Dhuxul sat with his men on the porch, ruminating over piles of khat. His wooden leg lay next to him on a mat, suited up with a sock and shoe. Dhuxul’s moments of fatherly kindness to his men had a menace that reminded me of Indonesia, about ten years earlier, when I had visited a Koran school in Java. It was a plain but sweltering, banana-shaded dormitory where young Muslim radicals had lived with their teacher. “He is not like other leaders,” one of the boys had said. “He sits and eats his meals with us.” The teacher was a fringe-bearded ally of al-Qaeda named Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, who had masterminded the bloody 2002 bombings in Bali. This implosion of class difference and hierarchy was a technique of pirates throughout history—not just idealistic, not just admirable, but also a simple way for criminal bosses to win the devotion of poor young men.