I knew he didn’t believe that. It was clear that Donald was generally appalled by the way we lived—not just me and Nigel but everyone in the house. He almost always remarked on the dirt and lack of furniture. When he came, presumably driving from his home in Mogadishu where he had a wife who cooked for him, he often brought plates of fried fish or pots of stew for the boys. With me, he made a show of being accommodating. Each time I asked for the same things—a chance to talk to my mother, a king-sized bar of chocolate, more food of any kind. He always nodded as if taking it all in, then did nothing about it.
“How are you?” he said every time, after we’d finished the Islamic greeting.
“Not good,” I’d say. “I need to go home.”
His answer since the very start had been the same. “I think it will be soon. Inshallah.”
The word “Islam” comes from the Arabic language. It means “to surrender or submit to God.” I would time and again see what this looked like among my captors. We were, all of us, meant to wait without complaining and see what would come.
On this day, I decided to take a risk. “It’s not better that we’re separated,” I said. “One of the boys has been paying visits to my room.” I was careful not to name a name, convinced that Abdullah would find a way to kill me if I made a direct accusation. “He does things that are haram.”
Donald understood what I was saying. Sitting on the floor in the middle of my room with one knee pulled up to his chest, he appeared uncomfortable but not taken aback. Feeling the sting of tears, I gave him an imploring look. The leaders of the group had always struck me as more sophisticated than the soldiers. Surely they would disapprove of Abdullah. I didn’t know whether Donald would want to investigate or admonish the boys, or whether he’d make some sort of change to better protect me, like putting Nigel back in my room.
“I am your Muslim sister,” I continued. “You have to help me. Allah says the Muslims have to help one another. You wouldn’t let what is happening to me happen to your daughter or your wife, right? Please, make it stop. I need to go home and live with my family. It’s too dangerous to be here with these soldiers.”
He cleared his throat a few times. He then lifted a finger and pointed at my Koran, sitting open on the mattress, motioning for me to pass it to him. I handed it over and watched him shift into a cross-legged position, propping the book carefully on his lap. He flipped through the pages, skimming over the Arabic. “Ah,” he said after a moment or two. He then looked for the corresponding verse in English. “Here.”
He turned the book so I could see where his finger had landed. Chapter 23, Verses 1 through 6. I knew the passage. It was miserably familiar, one of several places in the Koran where female captives—those possessed by the “right hand”—seem to be referenced as the exception to the rigors of practicing good behavior and self-control. I got anxious every time I read them, and now the words hit like a cudgel.
Successful indeed are the believers
Who are humble in their prayers
And who keep aloof from what is vain
And who are givers of poor-rate
And who guard their private parts
Except before their wives or those whom their right hands possess,
for surely they are not blamable.
“You see,” Donald said, “what is happening is not obligatory but it is permissible.” He steepled his hands like a wise man, as if he’d just taught me something interesting. “It is not forbidden.”
I understood that the boys in the house took the Koran’s instructions as literal, but I’d figured the leaders—especially Donald, having lived in Europe—would leave some space for interpretation, viewing it through the lens of the centuries that had passed, similar to the way my pious Christian grandparents looked at the New Testament, which had its own provocative lines about slavery and the treatment of women, cherry-picking the good while disregarding the bad. Donald was having none of it, though. His verdict: not blamable.
“But,” I said, giving it another try, “I’m being hurt. What’s happening is a problem.”
He passed me the Koran and stood up to leave. He then said to me what I’d been saying to myself, though coming from him, it felt like a slap. “Inshallah, Sister Amina, you will be fine. No problem.”
*
November arrived. I kept track of the days obsessively, making note of the friends’ birthdays I was missing, imagining the turn of seasons in Alberta. I was aware that Christmas was on the horizon. In my mind, I trusted that I’d be safely home by then. Every Friday the boys in the house washed their clothes and took turns going to a mosque—another way of marking a week gone past. I walked myself to the point of fatigue daily, waiting and hoping for some sort of change. I replayed the last conversation—if it could be called a conversation—I’d had with my mother back in early September, telling her not to sell anything, not to pay.
My mother. I could build her in my imagination, head to toe, from the dark shine of her hair to the worn brown cowboy boots she liked to wear. I could put her in the room with me, practically. The last time I’d seen her was over the holidays, nearly a year ago, just before I’d gone to Iraq. We’d stayed in together on New Year’s Eve at her apartment in Canmore, watching movies—her on the couch and me lying on the floor—both of us long past any interest in crowded parties and drunken countdowns. My mother had recently turned fifty. I was roughly the age she’d been when she’d gotten pregnant with me. She was now the age my grandmother had been back then. We were like clicks on a dial. Young, middle, old.
Every once in a while, one of the leaders came to the house and posed a question to me, a query flung over continents, evoking something both intimate and concrete and sent directly from home.
What award did Dad win recently? Communities in Bloom, for his gardening.
Where does Oma keep her candy? In a pumpkin-shaped jar.
My answers were proof that I was alive, that my freedom was still worth negotiating for. To me, the questions also felt like gifts, an invitation to conjure my grandmother’s tidy house in Red Deer or the quivering dahlias in my father’s backyard. They were a reminder that I’d had a life outside.
In my mind, I talked and talked to my mother. I imagined thoughts strung between us, spider threads floating over the ocean. She was sending love, I knew it. I sent messages back. I love you. I love you. And I’m sorry, so truly sorry. And a reversal of my earlier plea, a thought I needed her to hear more than anything: Please get me out of here. Find a way to pay. Do everything, sell it all.
It hurt even to think it, but there it was. Each time Abdullah came to the room, I had to talk myself out of dying.
When I wasn’t walking or resting on my mat, I often stood at the window on the far right, next to the wall, where the light pooled on the ledge, making it easier to read the Koran or one of Donald’s lame books. Sometimes, especially in the mornings, I could hear the sound of rocket-propelled grenades ripping through the air and slamming into buildings not far from where we were. My guess was that we were being held in some satellite village at the edge of Mogadishu. It was impossible to know who was fighting whom—Al-Shabaab versus the Ethiopians, one militia versus another? All I knew was the sound. The fighting would flare and then, just as abruptly, it would stop. After that, the neighborhood would be quiet for hours, eerily so, as people hid themselves away in their homes, waiting for assurances that things had settled. I remembered Ajoos, our fixer at the Shamo, and his continuously ringing cell phone—friends and relatives with moment-to-moment updates about where the fighting was going on, which streets were safe and not safe, about who had died that morning and who had escaped.
Some days I stood at the window, hoping perversely that a mortar would fall on our house, collapsing the roof, filling the place with smoke, sending us all scampering in shock. I didn’t care who it killed. They all deserved it, every one. If I survived, I thought, maybe it would give me a chance to run.
*
My loneliness must have been telegraphing across the ether, because almost as if I’d called out to him, the man turned abruptly and looked over to where I stood half-hidden behind the window grille. We locked eyes, both of us startled. Instantly, I ducked out of sight, my heart beating fast. I worried that if my captors realized I could be seen by neighbors, they’d start keeping the windows in my room shuttered. Then again, the man’s look sent a wave through my invisibility. I wondered if he’d find someone to tell about me and whether that would bring about any change.
It didn’t. More weeks passed. I stopped looking out the side window altogether.
Standing at the other window, the one overlooking the alley, I could read the Koran and feel the outside air leaking in through the grilles. I delighted in the slightest shifts in air pressure, moments when the humidity rose toward bursting, when I could feel the traces of a gathering wind. I imagined that I could see the curve of the earth, the crescent line between me and my old life. Somewhere far away, a blade of cool air might form over the ocean and start to move in my direction, raking across the palm trees and over the desert. Changes in the weather didn’t come often, but when they did, it could feel symbolic, a thing running from there to here.
One afternoon, a light rain began to dapple the concrete wall across the alleyway. I stood at the window, listening to it drum on the roof, my elbows propped on the window ledge. The sky darkened to a powdery gray. The wind gusted, rushing through trees I couldn’t see, causing the rain to spray sideways on the wall.
“God, it’s beautiful,” a voice said, clear as day, articulating my exact thought at the exact moment I had it.
The voice wasn’t mine. But it was a voice I knew. “Nige?”
The voice said, “Trout?”
For a shocked second, we were both silent. He was maybe ten feet away from me at the window in his room, standing at the sill. Due to the narrowness of the alleyway and the fact that the tin roof of our house overlapped slightly with the roof of the house behind it, the acoustics were perfect. Our voices carried clearly, sheltered by the rooftops, bouncing off the high wall on the opposite side. When I stood at my window and he stood at his, I could hear him and he could hear me. A little miracle of physics. We’d gone weeks without figuring this out, but now we had.
26
A Feast Is a Feast
What I thought about the future was this: Nigel and I always would be close. Our romantic relationship was over, but it had been replaced by something different. We were friends, true friends, best friends, embedded permanently in each other’s lives. How else could it be? Not one other soul we would encounter on earth, as long as either of us lived, would know what it was to listen to the boys chanting Arabic out on that patio, or to have our lives regulated by their disinterested finger snaps. I thought we’d need to remember and discuss these things when we got out. We would build two side-by-side existences and have an abiding everyday love. We’d sit on each other’s porches for years to come.
At our respective windows, we managed to talk for hours on end, coming and going from our sills, keeping our voices low and our Korans open in case anyone walked in. I was terrified of being caught, but we were familiar with the routine of our captors, most of all their staggering laziness when it came to getting themselves off the porch. There were long stretches of each day when we were sure nobody would wander back to our part of the house.
My window sat at about shoulder height off the floor, and in order to best hear and be heard by Nigel, I had to lean forward, standing on the balls of my feet with my neck craned toward the window grate. I’d stay there until my feet ached. When it was time to take a break, I’d say things like “Okay, talk to you later” or “I’m going to eat my food now,” like an office worker about to wander back to her desk. Often, at the end, I’d also say, “I love you, Nige.”
He’d say, “Keep your chin up, Trout” and “Love you, too.”
If, before our separation, Nigel and I had taken each other for granted, if we’d been irked and touchy, we now knew enough to be thankful for each other. I hung on to the sound of his voice like a rope.
We ran through old stories, adding new details every time. We played word games and told every tired joke we could think of. We discussed our nighttime dreams, our interactions with the boys, our bowel movements. Nigel liked to think about beautiful women to pass the time. Cate Blanchett was his girl. We made guesses about what was happening with ransom negotiations. We guessed out loud that together our families might manage to come up with half a million dollars in ransom money for our captors—an amount that surely they’d have to accept. We talked about the future as if it were arriving at any minute. Nigel said he wanted to jump back into his photography and that maybe he’d even get himself to Afghanistan. I was fixated on spending time in Canada. When we said these things out loud to each other, they seemed like promises, sure to happen.
Images of home floated continuously through my mind. I hardly knew my brothers anymore. My grandparents were getting old. I had friends I wanted to visit. I daydreamed about cold air and the beauty of a snowy winter. I pictured myself moving to Vancouver, which to me was the most beautiful city on earth. On my walks around my room, I blotted out my surroundings and imagined myself pacing the pathways of Stanley Park, moving through groves of tall cedar and along the curving seawall next to the bay.
Something happens when you are alone most of the time, when there are no distractions. Your mind grows more powerful—muscular, even. It takes over and starts to carry you. In the month or so after Nigel and I were separated, I could feel a new sort of energy making itself known to me. It felt physical and also not physical. I could hold my hand several inches over my leg and feel the internal heat. The energy in my hands felt odd, but it felt like power, like a tool I could use if I learned what to do with it. I couldn’t tell whether it was a good thing or a bad thing or even a thing at all—whether it was a survival tool or the first flutter of lunacy. One morning I ate a tin of tuna and then sat for an hour holding the spoon in front of me, trying to see if I could bend it with my mind. I couldn’t, not even a little, but still, the idea seemed less crazy, more possible, than it once had. Later, at the window, when I told Nigel about my attempt at a carnival stunt, he’d confessed that he, too, was experimenting with his psychic energy, trying to transmit urgent messages about ransom payments to his parents at home.
*
“Who,” Nigel asked me one day, “do you hate most?”
We posed questions of one sort or another all the time. They were the springboard into many of our talks at the window. Conversation, for us, shot cleanly in two directions, backward and forward: We spent our time sunk in either memory or anticipation. What’s the best country you’ve ever visited? What’s the best sex you’ve ever had? What’s the first meal you’re going to eat when we get out of here? Which are you more excited about—taking a hot shower or sleeping in fresh, cool sheets?
Now he was asking about the present moment, about our captors. The answer was easy. It was Abdullah I hated most. I hated everything about him, from his hairless armpits to the foulness of his breath. I hated his cruelty and his violence. I hated facing every afternoon, not knowing whether he was coming to hurt me or not. He came three out of every five days, more or less, and when he didn’t show up in my room, I lost those hours awash in adrenaline, worrying that he would. When he did, slipping through the door while the rest of the house napped, I had active fantasies about wrestling the gun out of his hands and shooting him in the head with it—waking every damn soul in the neighborhood to the horror of what he’d been doing.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to die. Those thoughts got me through moments but not hours. And what I needed was to get through hours, lots of them. My hatred was there, simmering like a lava pit beneath the high-wire act of each day. I saw it, but I didn’t want to swim in it. I knew I wouldn’t last if I did. I would far prefer to talk about meals and sex and plans.
“I don’t think I can play this game,” I said to Nigel. “Let’s not do it.”
For everything we’d discussed, I hadn’t told him about Abdullah. I didn’t want to poison him with it. There was nothing he could do, though I did wonder if he heard noises through the wall.
His relationship to the boys was different from mine, anyway. For exercise, Nigel had taken to doing yoga in his room. He’d told me that Hassam and Abdullah walked in one day to find him moving through poses, and they’d actually joined in, earnestly trying to mimic his movements. They’d come back a few times after that, asking for instructions as they attempted new things, laughing as they winged their bony legs into tree pose beneath their man-skirts. I took it as a sign that they were bored beyond belief. A sign that my side of the wall would never feel like his side of the wall.
*
As the weeks passed, I wished for things that were large and abstract—freedom, comfort, safety. Beyond that, my most specific longings involved food—plates of medium-rare steak, bags of candy, a cold beer in a frosted mug. I could pass two hours imagining one meal in granular detail, the ecstasy of making an omelet, for example, the chopping of a crisp green pepper, the sssss of butter melting in a pan, the lemony yellow of eggs beaten in a bowl. More than anything, I craved a hug, the chance to fall into the arms of someone, anyone, who cared about me.
It never occurred to me to yearn for something more direct from home. But midway through November, Donald Trump walked into the room, carrying a big, sturdy-looking yellow plastic bag along with a smaller black bag.
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 23
