A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  Nobody in the car turned to look at me. One by one they pushed open their doors and climbed out. I sat in the backseat, crumpled over my knees, feeling like I was going to vomit. Someone’s hands pulled at my arm, tugging me toward the door.

  The moon was in the sky, narrow and bluish. The stars made a rich carpet overhead. I noticed it. I don’t know why. The sky was there and so was I, half in the car and half out. It was Donald who had my arm. “Come,” he said. I hung on to the inside handle of the open car door with both hands. He pulled harder, attempting to drag me. “Come, come on,” he was saying, sounding surly and fed up. My feet slipped through the sand. I let go of the door.

  I was upright. We were moving through spindly desert brush toward a clearing with an acacia tree, a gnarled thing lit up by the moon. The men from the car were there already, all but Donald and Abdullah, who were marching me toward the tree. Clearly, they’d discussed their plan, how to go about it. They had lined up, looking solemn and grim, ceremonial. There were no other cars in sight and no people. I let go of the idea I was being sold to Al-Shabaab, even though that had become the more hopeful option. This was it. I was going to die.

  Words streamed out of my mouth. I was talking to myself more than to them. I miss my mom, I miss my dad. I want to see my family again. All longings became simple. I remember sobbing and trembling and the constant feeling of falling, end over end, through a void. I remember it in ways I wish I didn’t, every step we took toward that clearing. How I clung to Donald when we reached the tree, how he put his hands on my shoulders and turned me—gently, it seemed—so that I was facing away from the line of my captors. How I reached and grabbed on to his shirt as he pushed me down, how I heard the fffft of fabric ripping as I went, and how all at once I was on my knees in the dirt with my back to the group. I felt the coarseness of the desert sand through my jeans. I remember how heat radiated from the ground, still trapped from the previous day.

  From behind, someone pulled off my head scarf and grabbed a fistful of my hair, snapping my head backward. Something thick and cool pressed against my throat, a knife, long enough that, from the corner of my eye, I could see its rounded tip, the end of the blade. I felt myself gag. Whoever was holding my hair gave my head a fresh yank and angled the knife so that it skimmed the left side of my neck, the soft part, the jugular. I realized the blade was serrated; I felt its teeth holding my skin. I begged them not to do it. I thought of every time Abdullah and Ali had mimicked the motion of beheading with their hands. I thought of the hacked-up Iraqi man I’d seen. I kept talking. I blurted a thought I’d never had, not once in my life, but which felt like a desperate certainty: You can’t do this. I haven’t had children. I want to have children.

  Was this really me? It was, it was.

  There wasn’t a way out. They’d said so many times that they would kill me, and now they were. In my body, some internal fuse box stripped itself right to smoke. My muscles went rigid. I heard myself draw in a breath.

  Behind me, the men were talking, saying things in Somali. It was Donald and Skids having some sort of disagreement, with Ahmed weighing in. A sharp word was said. The person holding my hair let go abruptly. I fell forward into the sand.

  When I looked back to see what was happening, Donald’s voice caught me. He said sternly, “You turn around.”

  They talked for a few more minutes as I sobbed in the dirt, sounding like an animal, like something wounded and incapable of speech. I remember my own sound acutely, the craziness of it. I don’t know how much time passed or what caused me to look back again, but this time I could see that Skids had his phone out and was dialing a number. He was talking into it—to Adam, it would turn out. Donald walked over. He leaned down and looked at me directly for the first time all night. He looked actually scared, afraid for me. “How much money does your family have?” he said.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said, my breath spent from crying. “They’ll get anything you want. Please don’t kill me. They’ll get money for you. They will.”

  “They want one million dollars,” Donald said. “You are lucky I am here. I have asked them to give you one more chance. You have seven days, and if there is not that money, then they will kill you.”

  A moment later, he handed me the captain’s phone, with my mother’s voice on the other end.

  28

  Call Home

  ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE

  LAWFUL INTERCEPTION OF TELEPHONE NUMBER

  Case ID

  Lindhout

  Line ID

  403-887-

  Session Number

  1122

  Date

  Saturday, December 13, 2008

  Start Time

  12:04:24 MST

  Direction

  Incoming

  From

  Adam ABDULE OSMAN

  Telephone

  2521537

  Location

  Unknown

  To

  Lorinda STEWART

  Telephone Number

  403-887-

  Location

  3939 50 Avenue

  Sylvan Lake, Alberta

  (Indiscernible conversation in the background)

  ABDULE OSMAN:

  (Clears throat)

  STEWART:

  Hello?

  ABDULE OSMAN:

  Hello?

  STEWART:

  Hello, Adam.

  ABDULE OSMAN:

  Okay, we want to talk and, Amanda (call cuts out temporarily), and then . . .

  (Foreign conversation in the background)

  [A second phone is patched in.]

  ABDULE OSMAN:

  And then at that time, it is a little time.

  STEWART:

  Okay.

  ABDULE OSMAN:

  Don’t waste our time and don’t waste your time. It is a little time, understand?

  STEWART:

  Oh, I understand . . .

  (Foreign conversation in the background)

  LINDHOUT:

  (Crying) Momma?

  STEWART:

  Amanda. (Crying) Amanda, I love you. (Crying) Amanda . . . Amanda, how are you?

  (In background: Foreign)

  LINDHOUT:

  Mom listen. Listen to me, okay?

  STEWART:

  Okay.

  LINDHOUT:

  . . . closely, okay?

  STEWART:

  Okay, I’m listening, hon.

  LINDHOUT:

  (Crying) If, if you guys don’t pay (sobs) one million dollars for me, by one week, they will kill me, okay?

  (In background: Foreign)

  LINDHOUT:

  Tonight they have brought me out to kill me (sobs), and, but, but they have, they’ve given me one more chance, to call you guys. (Crying)

  STEWART:

  Amanda, s-stay strong. Stay strong, hon. We . . .

  LINDHOUT:

  (Crying)

  STEWART:

  . . . we’re doing . . .

  LINDHOUT:

  Mom.

  STEWART:

  . . . everything we can

  LINDHOUT:

  Mom, listen to me. We have . . . one week, okay? And I don’t . . . I feel so awful. I can’t believe they’re doing this but (sobs) I’d . . . I hate that I am doing this to you guys. (Crying)

  STEWART:

  Amanda, Amanda, please do not worry about us. Please don’t worry about us.

  LINDHOUT:

  (Crying)

  STEWART:

  We love you.

  LINDHOUT:

  (Crying)

  STEWART:

  You need to . . .

  LINDHOUT:

  I know I . . .

  STEWART:

  . . . stay strong and . . .

  LINDHOUT:

  (Indiscernible)

  STEWART:

  . . . stay healthy.

  LINDHOUT:

  (Crying) Is there, is there any way that you guys will be able
to pay them in one week?

  STEWART:

  Amanda, we are trying to do everything we can, to get money together for you, ’cause the . . .

  LINDHOUT:

  (Crying)

  STEWART:

  . . . government won’t pay. We’ve gone back to the bank.

  (Call is disconnected)

  29

  Christmas

  Late, very late, that night, they returned me to my room. I crawled onto the mattress and pulled the blue-flowered sheet over me, too exhausted to draw the mosquito netting. The house had gone quiet. I had no energy to wonder what had happened, whether the whole thing had been staged—a mock moonlit execution meant to lead me precisely to the place I’d gone, blubbering and projecting terror across ten thousand miles.

  The next morning, after Hassam had come in to open my window shutters for the day, I went to my sill and waited for Nigel to arrive at his. When he was there, I told him about the previous night, crying about it all over again, leaving out the part about the serrated knife held to my throat—in some way, I suppose, to protect him from knowing that the knife existed, and not ready to dredge up the image again. I said only that they’d threatened to kill me. I let him assume it was with one of their guns. Recounting the story to Nigel didn’t ease anything. He’d heard them taking me away, he said, and wept for a long time. We both understood we’d entered a new and more dangerous territory with our captors. We were moving toward a conclusion. The whole group had rehearsed a death. My death. I tried not to think about it, but there was no shaking it off. I wept uselessly, reflexively, through much of the morning.

  Hassam surfaced at my door later, carrying the afternoon flask of tea. He paused and studied me with what looked like concern. I was still on my mattress and still crying—the wild sobbing of the morning having given way to a seemingly endless dribble of tears. Something in Hassam’s expression told me that although he’d stayed behind, he knew where I’d gone and what had happened.

  “Do you like go outside?” he asked me. At first it seemed like a cruel joke, a reference to the night before, but then I realized it was, in fact, an offer.

  “Go outside? Today? Now? Yes, please,” I said. I fumbled for my Koran and made like I wanted to pick it up and carry it with me, saying with a sniffle, “I can study outside.”

  Hassam nodded. “I ask,” he said, before closing the door.

  I was hardly hopeful. If you’ve had occasion to read 5-Minute Stress-Busting: Instant Calm for People on the Go, you will know that hope is a thing that can dry up. “People faced with emotionally demanding situations over a long period,” the book had told me in my weeks of reading after the care package arrived, “can reach ‘burnout’—physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. The sufferer experiences feelings of hopelessness, disillusionment, and cynicism (plus the usual physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of stress).”

  Which felt about right to me.

  To my surprise, Hassam came for me in ten minutes’ time. He waved for me to pick up my Koran and follow him down the hallway, past Nigel’s room, past the bathroom and shower, to a door that was almost never used. The daylight we stepped into seared my eyeballs, which were accustomed to shadows, causing pools of yellow to bloom between me and the outside world. Once the pools wore away, I could see we were in a small courtyard that connected to the driveway, around the corner and out of sight from the veranda where the boys hung out with the captain, though surrounded by the same set of walls. The sun blazed through the leaves of a papaya tree growing up out of the dirt, dangling a few nubs of dark green fruit.

  Now that we were outside, Hassam seemed almost shy. He had brought his gun. He gestured for me to sit in the shade by the tree on an overturned bucket. He then walked to the far end of the driveway, where a set of padlocked metal gates led to the road. I’d passed through here the night before, in the darkness, but now it was a different place. Still holding on to his gun, Hassam sat himself against the wall close to the gates, maybe twenty feet away from me. It was as much space as I’d been given in four months.

  Taking a seat on the bucket, I rested my hands on the cover of my Koran and stared at them, blue veins under opaque skin. I studied the papaya tree, with its arching branches and curved leaves. A few clouds floated like white popcorn against the bright sky. In the daylight, my polyester dress had gone a psychedelic red. The walls surrounding the compound were painted white with baby-blue trim running along the top, beneath a tangle of razor wire. A shredded plastic bag was caught up in the razor wire. Everything felt sharp, weird, unreal. Down the driveway, in his spot against the wall, Hassam appeared sunk deep into thought, his eyes scanning the sky. I hadn’t bothered to open my Koran, and he hadn’t bothered to look once in my direction. Before it was over, we’d stay out there about twenty minutes, me and Hassam, each of us having something that approximated a private moment. It was just enough time for the sun to work over my pale cheeks and nose and even the tops of my fingers, burning every exposed bit of me to a painful but dimly nostalgic crisped pink.

  *

  Nigel told me I should get my things in order in case they killed me. He said I should write down anything I wanted to say to my family, or tell it to him at the windowsill, and he would—if he were lucky enough to live through this and get out—deliver it to my family. Final thoughts, apologies, an agonized declaration of love, a last will, a dispensation of my worldly belongings, whatever it was. This was my chance. I tried not to be offended by the idea of it, the idea that I would die and he would live. He was, he argued, being practical.

  “Just think about it and let me know,” he said.

  “I don’t want to,” I said back.

  I thought of him now mainly as a voice, disembodied and floating, like a field of energy. I imagine I was the same for him. Nearly every interaction between us played out in the soft acoustics of the alleyway behind our house.

  Once, when I was coming back from the bathroom, Nigel had opened the door to his room and stood waiting at the threshold for me to pass by. I tried not to look shocked by the change in his appearance in the eight weeks since we’d been separated. He was dressed in a sleeveless white tank top with a sarong wrapped around his waist. He was extremely thin, heavily bearded, his skin sallow. His blue eyes were watery and a little jaundiced, the kind of thing you’d see in a very old man. I was my own horror show. I could read it on Nigel’s face. I was rickety and pale, and I’d seen in my compact mirror the white fungus creeping across my face, crusting on my cheeks like ribbons of dried salt. At his door, I mouthed the words “Look at me,” as in Look at what I’ve become. I smiled and shrugged, and he did, too. There was no changing it. We were happier, probably, thinking of each other as voices crisscrossing the alleyway.

  Taking one more risk before moving away, I reached for Nigel’s hand and held it. For a full thirty seconds we stood there, locked on to each other, saying nothing.

  Seven days came and went. I waited on edge for Donald or Ahmed or Romeo to show up and take me away. The seventh night passed with excruciating slowness. I awoke on the eighth morning in my room, unable to muster anything but dread. Automatically, I recalculated: When Donald declared that my family had one week to cough up the ransom money, he must have meant that they’d wait seven days and then kill me. Which meant now or soon after. The eighth day passed and then the ninth. Something vaguely like hope began to crackle, a single ember in an otherwise extinguished pit. I waited for a sign. None of the leaders had visited our house. The captain’s phone never rang. I spied on the boys through the tiny keyhole in my door, which gave me a slot view of their lives on the patio. I watched them praying, sleeping, eating, and drinking tea. In the late afternoons, after teatime, the boys often gathered around Captain Skids, who sat on a low circular wall—probably a garden planter in better times—and delivered lectures on what seemed to be military matters. Sometimes he’d stand up and demonstrate a maneuver with a gun.

  I watched the boys try t
o pass the long hours. When they weren’t praying or listening to Skids, I’d seen them meticulously plucking hairs from their own armpits using their fingernails, keeping up with the Prophet’s rules about hygiene.

  I was growing desperate for some signal that the immediate threat had passed. In my care package, there had been several sheets of Somali phrases with the English translations printed next to them. With phrases like “Does anything make the pain better?” and “Please don’t shoot: We are doing everything we can to save lives,” it was clear the sheets were meant for foreign doctors and nurses doing medical missionary work in Somalia. I studied them carefully, looking for a way to reach out to Captain Skids, who rarely came to my room but was the only person in the house likely to know what was happening with ransom negotiations. Copying a mishmash of Somali words and phrases onto a piece of notebook paper, I composed a letter meant to ask for news and to assure him that my parents at home were doing all they could to get some money together. The letter said something like: “Peace be upon you. It is one week. What is the situation? Please tell me. We are doing everything we can to save lives.” At the bottom, I signed it “Amina.”

  Later that day, I knocked on my door and signaled for Jamal to come see me. I handed him the letter and asked him please to give it to the captain and please to ask for a response. Jamal studied the piece of paper. I watched him first start to smile and then to giggle.