Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  But that was four years ago now. Nothing was ever the same again. Mother almost never went out afterwards. Maybe she was still grieving, or maybe she was too terrified of the shooting, the mortars, the death dropping like soft rain from the sky, and later of the Al-Shabaab fighters screaming through the streets in their technicals.

  I know many of them, and I am still terrified. Some are Nadif’s friends, some are my friends, but I don’t know if you are allowed to be a friend when you are in Al-Shabaab. Nadif, I think, was always my friend, but he changed last year.

  He wanted me to join too. I said I was too young. In truth, I was afraid and I didn’t understand them, I didn’t understand the point of it all. They seemed fierce and their beliefs were so harsh. Of course, I never said this to Nadif. He disappeared for two weeks a year after my father was killed. When he came back, he was thinner, dirtier, harder. The warmth had left his eyes, except when he spoke to me. I think he still loved me. I don’t think they managed to take that from him. But my mother was frightened of this seventeen-year-old who no longer hugged her, but wore his anger on his sleeve and a gun on his shoulder. Then they had the row.

  He had returned for lunch. His gun was leaning against the wall. I picked it up, put the strap over my shoulder and held it across my body as I had seen Nadif do when he was manning one of the roadblocks around Bakara. It was heavier than I expected. I felt strong holding it. I felt like a man.

  “Abdi!”

  My mother had come in carrying plates of rice and vegetables, her face steaming.

  “Put that evil thing down. Now!” she hissed.

  Nadif was sitting at the table, resting his head on his arms. He was often out all night now. We didn’t ask what he did but sometimes his clothes were muddy and torn. Once I caught him washing his shirt in a bucket in the yard. Red drops dripped from his fingers as he waved me away, silently, wearily.

  “Hooyo, do not speak like that,” Nadif said, his voice serrated with a new authoritarian edge. I put the gun back against the wall and sat down quickly, opposite Nadif.

  “I ask you again, do not bring that thing into your father’s house,” my mother retorted, a soft spray of spittle sheathing her words as she bent with the plates to the table. She dared not look him straight in the eye, squinting at an unseen demon above his right shoulder instead.

  “I cannot leave it outside. Besides, why do you care if Abdi touches it? He needs to learn. It is his destiny, as it is mine, to drive the Crusaders and their apostate African servants from this country.”

  Nadif was almost shouting now.

  “Abdi will not join you,” my mother yelled back, her voice shaky but unyielding.

  She straightened her back and turned towards Nadif.

  “I have lost a husband, I have a son crazed with anger and bewitched by the foolish teachings of thugs with guns…”

  Within a second Nadif had leapt from his seat and slapped our mother across the face.

  “Do not speak of the Mujahideen and martyrs in that way!”

  My mother fell back. I could see the marks of Nadif’s fingers already forming on her cheek. I wanted to crawl under the table, crawl under the floor, crawl into the very heart of the earth where it is warm and quiet. I wanted to cry.

  “Out!” was all she said.

  I looked at Nadif. In that moment I thought his face was about to crumble, that he was going to weep as well. I saw it for the last time, his child’s face. I wanted to say something to comfort him, to stem the rage swelling behind his high forehead, but I was also scared. I used to know the why of what was in his head. But a part of his mind was closed off to me now.

  I knew he was lost to me for ever. He waited, his hand held at the ready, tense and dangerous, hovering near his hip. I thought he might hit her again. But Nadif just grabbed his gun and walked out. He gave me a strange look as he passed. It was as though he blamed me. When he was gone, my mother sat at the table and cried for a long time. I went to hug her and pulled her head to my chest, but after a few moments, she drew away. I had never seen her cry like that. Not even when my father was killed.

  Then, when they came to tell her, she fainted. Afterwards, she was silent for days. But she never cried. Not like this. Not these sobs that seemed about to consume her, to pull her limb from limb.

  Nadif did not come home again. Until his last day that is. They found his body in the street. Like my father’s. He had been setting up a roadside bomb near the presidential palace. It went off, leaving a huge crater in the road and taking Nadif. He was never very good with his fingers. His fingers are, were, like mine: thin and awkward. He used to tickle me with those fingers, ants on my stomach and my feet, making me squirm and squeal in pained delight.

  I wonder if the best bomb makers all have short fingers. Nadif’s body had no fingers and no arms when he was buried. His face was a bloody mess. The face of a martyr, they said. My mother refused to see the body.

  “No more,” she muttered when they carried him through the gate.

  She went to her room and only came out after the funeral. He was buried by his brothers, his other brothers. They fired their guns in the air, waved their black-and-white banners, and gave me an envelope.

  “Your brother was a martyr. He is with Allah. Allahu Akbar,” said Cabdulle.

  He and Nadif used to play football together, in the time before. Cabdulle has another name now. He is Sheikh Cabdulle. Another sheikh. We have become a country of sheikhs. Cabdulle, who had lost the teenage twitches and awkwardness I remembered, said I should come and talk with him.

  “You will want to avenge your brother’s death. We will find a way. You can continue his work.”

  “I… I… I don’t know,” I eventually said.

  My stutter, which I had conquered by the age of ten, came back when Nadif was killed. It only lasted a few days this time. I said very little for those first days anyway. I hid in the dark corners of the house. I did not want to go outside. They were outside. They were waiting for me to feel anger, to demand revenge. But I did not know who to blame.

  I told my mother what Cabdulle had said. It roused her from the apathy that had become her shield.

  “You will not join them. As Allah is my witness, if you do that, I will kill myself. I will kill myself in front of you,” she hissed.

  We were sitting outside, in the small garden behind our house. It was a beautiful morning, a soft breeze, the sun like a kiss and the smell of the frangipani perfuming the air. Mogadishu can be beautiful if you can sit still in a quiet place with someone you love. On days like this, the pain of Nadif’s death was all around us.

  I lowered my head.

  “Maybe it is the right thing to do,” I muttered. “I cannot let Nadif’s death go unavenged. Father is not here but he would not let it pass. He would act.”

  My mother lifted my chin, her henna-stained fingernails digging into my skin.

  “Your father was a man of life. A man of integrity. He would never have allowed Nadif to join those bandits who are ruining our country. Look what they have done to this town.”

  She opened her arms wide, taking in the frangipani, the broken wall we were sitting on, the half-empty buildings nearby, the devastated market, the mango tree and the waste land where Abdirakim and his brothers had died. Her dramatic, defiant gesture took in all the unseen horror beyond the walls of our garden of secrets.

  The shuttered bars, the blood stains on the stunted grass in the football stadium, the mutilated bodies found in the street at first light, the gunfire that had become the theme tune of our lives, the whoosh of the mortars, the slapping sound of bare feet running another casualty to looted hospitals that were little more than places to die.

  “I swear to you, Abdi, I swear, on the graves of your father and brother, that if you go near Al-Shabaab, I will turn this robe into a short skirt, and I will walk up to the first Al-Shabaab roadblock I can find and I will wait for them to kill me. And if they do not kill me for that, I shall take off
the rest of my clothes. And I will dance and swing my hips. And I will sing and loosen my hair, and I will swing it in their faces.”

  By now, she was giggling and I was smiling. Soon we were laughing. My mother’s face was light. She cupped my cheeks in her hands and laughed in my face. And we were happy. And so sad. How is it possible to laugh and be sad? I don’t know. But here it is possible.

  “Okay, okay,” I said when we had stopped.

  “I will not join them. But you know they will want me. You know they are taking children. Even younger than me.”

  She nodded.

  “I saw Mariam last week. You know, they took Mohammed. From the beach. He was looking for firewood. A lovely boy. Bright, decent, respectful. Mariam is going crazy,” she said.

  Mariam and my mother had grown up together in Mogadishu, attending the same school and then training as secretaries. When they met at our house, the kitchen rang with laughter. Mariam was taller than my mother, but thin and dainty like a gerenuk. Mohammed was her only son. Her husband had worked at the Ministry of Education. He was killed at a graduation ceremony. He was setting out plates of tuna sandwiches, and was blown away by a teenage suicide bomber.

  We went to their house when we heard. My mother walked straight up to Mariam, her face rigid. They embraced and then my mother led Mariam away from the guests, from the shrouded corpse. She took her to a back room where they stayed for a long time. When they came out, their eyes were dry, their faces like masks, proud, aloof, powerful in their unity. They were magnificent.

  “You must leave Mogadishu. We must leave Mogadishu,” my mother said.

  “We will go to Kenya. My brother is already at the Hagadera camp in Dadaab. If we can slip across the border, we can find him. We will go and live with him. He will get us one of those ration cards you need to get food. And when we make some money, we will try to get to Nairobi. It is not allowed but many have done it. I have heard of people who can help. You are a strong boy, and I can still work. We will make it happen.”

  As she spoke, her eyes flashed. She started believing her own story. She sketched an impossible future, waving her arms and nodding her head. We would need money. She would go to her family. She would raise what she could. She would sell the carpets, my father’s gramophone, Nadif’s clothes. She would sell everything.

  “Then, we can go. You and I. I will ask around for the best way. Maybe we can get a ride with someone. There are people who go to the border at Dhobley every week. But we will need money to get across to Liboi on the Kenyan side. We can bribe the Kenyans. They ask a lot, but we can find it.”

  She paused, took a breath.

  “Abdi, we can start again.”

  Tears were now rolling down her cheeks and in that moment, I saw my mother as a young woman. She was only thirty-seven and she wanted to live again. I saw the teenager who had studied typing and shorthand only to get married straight out of training college to a tall man who promised to keep her safe. And in that world he did. But then the world changed, and Somalia changed, and now that young woman was a middle-aged widow, the lowest of the low in her own country. Ryan Giggs was still playing for Manchester United when he was thirty-six. It isn’t that old. For my mother, thirty-seven was too young to give up.

  We decided I would go to Wanlaweyn while my mother tried to raise the money to go to Kenya. She was afraid of Al-Shabaab, afraid they would come for me too. Her cousin, Yusuf could take me in, and maybe I could even find a small job to help us on our way.

  I travelled by bus. It was ninety kilometres to Wanlaweyn along the road, but we veered into the bush a few times to avoid roadblocks. I think I slept despite the bucking and weaving, despite the smell of hot, unwashed bodies, the stink from the sputtering exhaust. My mother had given me a phone with some credit. She promised to call when she was ready to join me. Then we would make our way to the border with Kenya.

  That was in early July. Her last call to me was five days ago. She said she was finding it hard to get out to sell our goods. Government soldiers had joined with AMISOM and launched an attack on Al-Shabaab, a push to reclaim the city, they said.

  “But nothing is changing,” my mother said, her voice crackly and weak.

  I pressed the phone harder to my ear.

  “Nothing is changing. Al-Shabaab are still in the neighbourhood. But now it is so dangerous to go out, my son. I have not been outside for four days. I have very little food. I must go to the market soon or things will be desperate for me.”

  “Take care, Hooyo,” I said. Then louder in case she did not hear me, “Take care.”

  “I will. How are things with you?”

  I hesitated. By now, I was back in Wanlaweyn, but the week before I had been in Mogadishu, barely two kilometres from our house. Carrying food to a white prisoner in a black room. Because that is the job Yusuf offered me. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it at first. I didn’t want to be involved with kidnapping. This man had never done anything to me. Why should we imprison him? Weren’t we all prisoners here anyway? Why add to the misery?

  “My mother will kill me. She does not want me mixed up in that,” I said when Yusuf suggested I help out.

  “What? Now you are not Somali? Whether you like it or not, you are already mixed up in that, as you call it. We all are, because we live in this hellhole.”

  My cousin laughed.

  “Might as well make some money. And this is easy money. They have him already. They took him yesterday. But now they don’t know what to do. We just need to go there, hold him, and then move him here to Wanlaweyn when it is safe. You are just the help. We do not expect you to do the dirty work, Abdi. You are a boy. But if you want to make some money to help your mother, this is what I am offering you.”

  And so it began. My relationship with the white man with the scared, green eyes, the battered face that I slapped when he tried to escape, the stubbly beard and the dirty fingernails. I fed him in that dungeon in Mogadishu, then I came back here on another battered, stinking bus and waited for my cousin’s gang to turn up. Now I am feeding him again.

  This I did not tell my mother. I told her I was well, and that I was working as a trader’s assistant. I would have money for her when she came.

  “It’s going well. Your cousin is a good man,” I said, feeling sick.

  She said she hoped to join me in two weeks. That should be enough time to finish this job. Then I will have money to take us across the border. Out of this.

  But I have heard stories from these camps in Kenya. Poor, dry, dangerous places where thousands live too close together, sitting prey for bandits and Al-Shabaab. Because they are there too. Borders mean nothing to them. I want my mother’s dream of a new life to come true. I don’t want more of the same. I don’t know if I can bear that. But I don’t know if I can bear this.

  It is time to go. The Sheikh will be making the phone call now. He has asked me to be there. I think Yusuf told him about Nadif. They think I am connected. Later, the white man will need his food. I will give him another cigarette. He can do nothing now but smoke.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PETER

  Today, I spoke to my mother. She was in her apartment above the Tunisian restaurant where sometimes the owners park a camel outside the door to coax in finicky Parisian diners. I used to feel sorry for that camel, sitting grumpily on the cobblestones, feeling like a fool in a tasselled red saddle.

  The man with the beaky nose – I call him The Eagle – sauntered in, ahead of Abdi and two muscle men who held their guns at the ready, like boys playing soldiers. I stood. Not out of respect. I didn’t want to die sitting down, and I didn’t want to be looking up at them. A pathetic gesture of defiance, I know.

  “It’s time for business,” The Eagle said, almost cheerily.

  “We have informed your employers that we are holding you. We have demanded a ransom. If they do not pay, we will kill you.”

  It was almost a relief to hear the words. At last, the worst was out
in the open. They were prepared to kill me, but there was a chance. It wasn’t just about ideology. They wanted money. I knew others had paid to have their people released, despite all the official rhetoric about not engaging with terrorists. And I didn’t think Don Struddle would enjoy being in the middle of a media shit-storm about whether or not he should have allowed me to go to Somalia. Especially not if I was dead.

  The Eagle grunted something at Abdi. He stepped forward with a Thuraya, the satellite phone of choice for rebels and bandits everywhere in Africa.

  “They want proof that we are holding you. You will speak to your mother. You will tell her you are fine and that you are being treated well. Let’s see if that is enough. If not, maybe she’d like to listen in to hear what it is like when you are not being treated well.”

  He paused. He didn’t need to. I got it.

  “Tell her to get them to pay the money. This is your chance to do something to save yourself. Take it.”

  His voice was not unkind, just emotionless. In a way, the flat tone was more frightening.

  Abdi gave me the phone. He didn’t look at my face and I was glad. I dialled the apartment where my mother has lived since we returned from Ivory Coast. The apartment where we lived as a family until my parents couldn’t hold it together anymore.

  “Allo?”

  She sounded her full sixty today.

  “Mum, it’s me.”

  “Peter? Oh my God, where are you? Darling, where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve been… taken, kidnapped. They want money. They’ve contacted the Post.”

  I paused. What do you say to your mother when you are being held hostage? What you feel? What you want? What you need? What she needs?

  The Eagle was watching me, his eyes narrow, his face pinched. Suddenly, he lunged forward, grabbed the phone from my white-knuckled hand, and struck me hard across the face. I cried out and immediately regretted it. But I didn’t see it coming. In my head, I was in the apartment in Paris, standing in the red-tiled entrance hall, looking through the kitchen into the courtyard, listening to the noisy city outside.