Today, however, there was no greeting. Abdullah took a step toward me and pointed his gun at my chest. “Other side,” he said curtly, indicating that I should turn facedown on the mattress.
My mind went into a free fall, dropping through one trapdoor only to find another one opening beneath it. Slowly, I flipped over, pressed my forehead to the fabric, kept my palms next to my face. The two boys were at my bedside, guns hovering by my head. I could see Abdullah’s bare ankle, the color of dark coffee and hairless, maybe six inches away. Down, down, I fell. I heard them breathing. I closed my eyes, waiting for the next thing.
Mohammed said, “You are bad woman.”
Abdullah said, “The problem is you.”
The steel finger of a gun barrel prodded the back of my neck. I tried not to think. The two of them were talking above me in Somali, as if they hadn’t quite planned out their next step, as if debating what they could get away with. There was a pause.
Then Mohammed kicked me in the ribs, hard. The pain ripped through my left side, causing an instant rush of tears. “You are bad,” he said again. “We will kill you, inshallah.” I saw their feet turn and walk away. The door opened and then clicked shut. The room went quiet. They were gone.
I was still crying twenty minutes later, when Jamal stuck his head through the door. The sight of my tears seemed to make him sheepish. Before he could run away, though, I gave him the full Arabic greeting and then waited for him to say it back to me. Gathering my wits, I said, “Jamal, please tell me what’s going on. Please.”
I watched some sort of unidentifiable emotion track over his face. He looked almost reluctant to speak. He sighed. “Why,” he said, “you tell your mother no pay money?” He shook his head as if he were helpless, as if I’d brought it all on myself. He turned to leave. “We are here long time because she no pay,” he said. “The soldiers are very mad.”
I could almost hear how this theory was put into place. I could imagine Ahmed’s velvety voice, delivering his take on things to Captain Skids. Skids would have repeated it to the boys, stirring in his own bile. For your frustration and misery, blame the girl. For two months of stasis and boredom and homesickness, blame the girl. For everything you don’t have, for everything you haven’t done, you can blame the girl. It is she who told her mother not to pay.
24
Maya
There was a little girl living in the house down the alleyway from my window, the daughter of the woman I’d seen hanging laundry on the clothesline in her yard. In the afternoons, during the hot, lazy hours when my captors snoozed in the shade of the veranda, I listened to the girl playing as her mother washed cooking pots or hung more laundry. She squealed and sassed and occasionally pitched a fit, shrieking maya, the Somali word for “no.” I could lose a whole afternoon to her tiny voice. Sometimes I angled myself to look sideways through the grate toward them, catching glimpses of the mother’s head or clothing, a snatch of yellow or deep indigo, over the fence. Donald had given me a round compact mirror, small enough for me to fit through the window bars. When I held it just so, I could get a wider view of the neighboring yard, though I didn’t do it often, for fear the mirror might flash and someone would spot my white hand sticking out. The outside world—the threat of being kidnapped away from my kidnappers and held by another group looking for Western dollars or killed for show—filled me with worry.
The neighbor’s little girl was too short for me to see, though judging from her voice, I guessed she was about two years old. She seemed always to be in motion, toddling the perimeter of the yard, bellowing maya any time her mother tried to reel her in.
Her mother was trying to teach her to converse.
Iska warran? she would say to the girl. I knew from Jamal that this meant “How are you?”
When she was feeling agreeable, the girl would say it back. Iska warran?
Waa fiicanahay. “I am good.”
Waa fiicanahay, repeated the girl.
Waa fiicanahay, I whispered along with them.
Much of what they said I couldn’t understand, but the tones I recognized. A mother and her child, a mixture of love and exasperation. Once in a while I heard a man’s voice and what sounded like a grandmother back there in the yard. Sometimes I could hear a group of female voices—friends of the girl’s mother, I guessed—trilling and laughing. The sound made me weak with jealousy. Everybody seemed to dote endlessly on the child. In my mind, I could picture them all. I imagined them warm and open, as people who wouldn’t betray me. In my mind, I was going to follow them right through the back door and to their table for dinner, a phantom white lady appearing from nowhere, saying, “How are you?” in perfect Somali. I listened for the child’s name but never managed to catch it. I just thought of her as Maya.
In the afternoons, it was Abdullah who most often seemed to have guard duty. He stalked the hallway outside our rooms. Sometimes he opened my door without warning. He would step inside and stare at me, saying nothing, clutching his gun, keeping his gaze on me for full minutes without moving. Or he’d come in and tear through my bags as if searching for something. During the first week after I was separated from Nigel, he did this once, then twice, and then a third time. He tossed my things on the floor with a precise sort of violence. He still covered his face in my presence, even as the rest of them had given up and walked around unmasked.
I greeted Abdullah each time. I watched him move around my room. He was bigger than most of the other boys, with a thick torso and long arms. His eyes were dark and spaced widely on his face. He had a deep, barking voice, muffled slightly by his scarf. I did what I could to force a conversation, trying to trigger his interest in speaking English. “I wonder what we will eat tonight for the meal,” I said loudly and slowly. “I’m getting hungry. Are you hungry, Abdullah?” For the most part, he ignored me.
All the noisy rummaging through my belongings, I would later realize, was a testing of the waters. Abdullah was figuring out how much of a disturbance he could make while the other boys slept through, while Nigel stayed quiet on the other side of the wall. He was calculating just what he could do in those empty hours.
*
With nothing else to distract me, I immersed myself in the reading materials Donald had given us weeks earlier—the moldy, antiquated booklets that had previously caused us to howl with laughter. There was the Times of London student reader from the early 1980s, filled with reprinted articles about the House of Lords and a tanking British economy, followed by lists of study questions and writing exercises with blank spaces to do the work. There was an English-language storybook about twin Muslim boys learning to be kind. And then the college catalog meant to entice rich Malaysians to study in the UK, its pages rank-smelling and glopped together by moisture. Ha, ha, ha. Nigel and I had flipped through the books with disdain. We’d torn out some of the cleaner pages and used them as plates for our tuna and onion. We’d mocked Donald for the proud way he’d delivered the books, for having paid money for them, for thinking them relevant. We’d mocked the whole country of Somalia for sucking up what would have been trash and selling it in the marketplace.
I remembered laughing with Nigel with the same distant fondness I felt when recalling eating a spinach salad or a piece of cake at home in Canada.
I now sat on my mattress with those books and read every word on every page. I studied a washed-out editorial cartoon showing Margaret Thatcher dressed in a neat suit and a pillbox hat. As the tin roof over my head moaned and expanded under the afternoon sun, I dutifully answered the reading-comprehension questions at the end of each reprinted article in the student reader. Was this article written from a point of view that is objective or subjective? Please provide supporting evidence. When it came to the college catalog, I now saw the allure. The book listed universities in London, Manchester, Oxford, Wales, and many places I’d never heard of. Who knew England was so big? The text wasn’t terribly interesting—notes on class size and curriculum—but the photos were in c
olor, stained and faded, though still vivid. The buildings were stony and grand. I looked at the grass and flowers, at the students smiling on the pathways, backpacks hooked over their shoulders, talking about what I imagined were abstract and absorbing things.
Those students were now over ten years out of university, I figured. They lived in houses and had jobs, dogs, babies. I wondered: Why hadn’t I wanted that for myself? Why had I funneled my savings into plane tickets and not tuition? For fun, I pictured myself in a lecture hall, a dorm room, a cellar pub late on a Thursday night. It seemed to fit. It felt like a plan. I put myself on a quadrangle with brushed hair and a new laptop.
The door to my room opened and closed. I looked up from the catalog to see Abdullah. He wore a purplish sarong and a singlet that was stretched out and yellowed with sweat. His eyes glowered from the open slit of his face scarf. This time he didn’t pretend to search my room. Instead, he leaned his gun against the wall. “Get up,” he said.
When I didn’t move, he said it again.
It didn’t matter that I’d worried about this. That I’d had a sense it might be coming. It changed nothing. There was no preparing.
I slid the book from my lap and slowly got to my feet, feeling my body quake, my throat contracting. “Please,” I said, “don’t.”
Abdullah responded by clamping his right hand onto my neck, shoving me back until I was pressed against the wall. The heel of his hand jammed into my windpipe, lifting my chin. I started to cry while his long fingers climbed my face, covering my mouth, digging into my eye sockets. I felt myself suffocating. “Please don’t, please don’t,” I said into the taut skin of his palm, gasping for air. “Shut up, shut up,” he was saying back, tightening his hold on my neck. His sarong was now off. Beneath it, he wore a pair of gym shorts with an elastic waistband, and with his free hand, he was touching himself inside the shorts. My mind felt liquid, spilling out of me, unable to hold a thought. I felt him reaching down for the hem of my Somali dress, tugging it upward. I kept talking, my voice muffled, my arms batting uselessly at him. “Don’t do this. Please don’t.” He slammed a fist into the side of my head, and I felt my whole body go rigid. “Shut up I will kill you,” he said. “ShutupIwillkillyou.” Then he pushed himself into me and I wanted to die.
In ten seconds it was over. Ten impossibly long seconds. Enough time for the earth to rumble and split, making a gulch between me and the person I’d been.
When he released me, I fell to the floor, collapsing like a rag doll.
Abdullah rewrapped his sarong and picked up his gun. He opened the door and checked the hallway. I kept my head in my hands and didn’t look. I asked to go to the bathroom. I was desperate to wash, to cry, to hide myself away. He checked the hallway again. “Go,” he said. Before I could leave, he pointed his gun at my chest, close enough so that he was almost touching me again. “If you speak of this, I will kill you,” he said. And I felt sure he would.
25
Catch-22
Nothing had changed and so had everything. The sea-foam-green paint on the walls was the same, the windows with their shutters and grates, the dirt coating the floor, the roof overhead. The hockey-puck can of tuna that Jamal brought at dinnertime was the same. The call for prayer from the mosque near our house was the same, and the Koranic drone that drifted down the hallway from the boys outside was the same. What was different was me.
I lay on my mat and hardly moved. I kept my eyes closed, one arm covering my face. My back ached. Between my legs, I was raw and sore. I felt as if I’d been evicted from my body, like I no longer fit in my own skin. What had been outside me was now in, like some vicious flattening force. I was a ghost wandering the ruins of a wrecked city.
I should have hated Abdullah, but I hated myself more. My mind ticked through every mistake I’d ever made, every wrong thing about me. Why had I come to Somalia? What had I done? I’d spent eight weeks telling myself that this was all temporary, but now the reality felt unshakable. It didn’t help that every minute was basically the same as the last, every hour like the one just past. Alone with myself, I had nothing. Every fear I’d ever had now came back to me—darkness was scary, noises were scary. I felt like a child. Panic swept over me in waves, giant and forceful. To think even half-rationally was an effort. When I tried to steady myself, all I wanted was to hasten the inevitable. I thought about the blue-flowered sheet I kept on my mattress, trying to figure out whether it was long enough to be twisted into a noose. I thought through the layout in the bathroom, wondering if there was anything sharp or blunt or high enough to launch myself onto or off of, something to hammer me right out of the world. He couldn’t kill me, I reasoned, if I got to myself first.
I lay for two days like this, getting up only to use the toilet, mimic the motions of prayer, and drink water, unable to go through with trying to kill myself but with no interest in living, either.
On the third morning, not knowing what else to do, I left Nigel a frivolous note in the bathroom, saying nothing beyond a recognizable, half-sunny hello. If I faked sunshine, maybe sunshine would come. I knocked on the wall to tell him the note was there. Then I lay back down on my mat. Waiting for him to retrieve it and send a knock back, I looked around the room with its grotty floor and straw-colored light threshing through the window grates and tried to force a single positive thought. Was there something? There had to be. It would come. The expectation sat. It shot out roots. It became my stand-in for a positive thought.
*
Later that morning, I stood up and started to walk. I did one lap around the room and then another. The walking felt good. It gave me purpose. I walked calmly, at a steady pace, looping in bare feet, holding the hem of my red dress with one hand to keep from tripping. In motion, I told myself things, the words resonating right down through my legs.
I will get out of here. I will be okay.
There was comfort in it. I repeated the words like a mantra and kept moving. For once, I was grateful that the room I was being held in was so big. Now that I was walking, I couldn’t think of any reason to stop. Hassam peeked in at one point as if expecting to guide me in learning a new surah. I’d left my Koran sitting on the windowsill and made no move toward it. Hassam looked perplexed but said nothing and left. I was certain that none of them knew what Abdullah had done.
When the afternoon arrived—the hot, quiet hours I now feared—I was still walking, sweating like an Olympian. Jamal brought tea and a bottle of water. Mohammed opened the door a couple of times, scoffed at me, then disappeared again. Meanwhile, I was busy getting ready to be free. I’d wiped any uncertainty out of my plans, and all the desperation and vague, sideways bargaining that went along with it. No longer did I think, If I get out of here, I will be kinder, more patient, more generous. I was thinking instead, When. When I get out of here. When I got out, I would hug my father all the time. I’d take my mother to India, since she’d always wanted to go. I’d eat better food, look into going to university, find a man who really loved me, do something that mattered. I imagined Somalia as a story I would tell my friends. Not a happy story, clearly, but a story with an ending. Walking circles in my room, I awarded myself a future. Hold on for it, I said. Hold on, hold on.
It was a few days before Abdullah came again, in the late afternoon, just like the last time, pushing me to the wall, his hand gripping my neck, undoing whatever resolve I’d built. He came again several days later, and again on many other afternoons after that. Each time it felt like being robbed, like he was siphoning something vital out of me. Sometimes he’d just punch me and leave.
Six, seven hours a day I walked. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. The bottoms of my feet grew thick. A dirty pathway took shape in the room, a trammeled-on oval, a miniature one-lane track. I took breaks for water and for the bathroom. I stopped at prayer times and sat on my mattress, no longer bothering to go through the motions. I reversed direction several times a day to take the pressure off the inside foot. To an observer, I might ha
ve looked like a pacing, half-mad zoo animal, but what I felt, what I believed, was that I was getting stronger. I will get out of here. I will be okay. I strapped the men’s watch Donald had brought us weeks earlier onto my wrist. Suddenly, the time mattered. It allowed me to plan. I’d look at the watch and think, Oh, it’s eight o’clock. I’ll walk till noon, and then I’ll knock on the door and have my shower. As I moved, I shed despair. My body became all ropes and cords and knots of hard muscle. Hassam stopped me from time to time to work on my memorizations from the Koran. I took solace in my circles. Anytime little Maya let out a defiant yell outside my window, I silently cheered her on.
*
When Donald came for one of his visits, I begged him to let me spend time with Nigel. I asked why we’d been separated and then watched as he blinked placidly, explaining that unmarried men and women should not consort, according to Islam.
I knew that, of course. It was a familiar catch-22 for me. Now that I’d converted, I was supposed to agree with the rules. Never mind that there were plenty of moderate Muslims in the world who were more likely to see things the way I saw them. My captors were fundamentalists. If I argued with their views, I was exposing myself as an infidel. I still didn’t know why they’d allowed us to stay together for so long before imposing their rules.
Donald spoke in a consoling voice. He gestured at the room. “This is a good place,” he said. “It is better this way for everyone.”
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 22
