A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  “Is it okay?” I said.

  Jamal composed himself. He folded the note in two, still grinning. “Yes, okay,” he said. “I will give.”

  Within minutes, I could hear them all laughing on the porch. Through my keyhole, I saw my note being passed around, the boys leaning in, sputtering with glee over my chunked-together bits of Somali. Soon they were falling down with laughter, the hilarity growing, their voices elevated as the letter got reread and reinterpreted. It was the hardest I’d heard them laugh the whole time we’d been prisoners. I caught a glimpse of Captain Skids; even he was swept up in the guffaws. The boys were talking excitedly, cracking one another up, creating what I guessed was a whole flow of secondary jokes about me and my words. It was my gift to them, I suppose, a little diversion on a hot day. I’d sent the message out, and now I knew that nothing would come back. I’d get no answer.

  You’re welcome, I thought from behind my door. You motherfuckers, enjoy.

  *

  Earlier in December, our captors had celebrated Eid again. The holiday comes twice each year in the Muslim calendar—once to mark the end of Ramadan, the breaking of the fast; and once two months later, around the time of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. This one was the second type of Eid, called Eid al Adha. It was similar to the last Eid, the boys washing and dressing themselves with extra care, food and prayers in more abundance. I spied on the festivities through my keyhole, watching as our captors came and went from services at the mosque, as Skids went out and returned with a big pot of food. He came to my room himself and delivered a tin plate with a few pieces of goat’s meat, taking a second plate to Nigel. Jamal brought us each three foil-wrapped toffees. Later that day, we were summoned to join the whole group as they prayed in a big empty room at the front of the house. Because I was a woman, I was expected to perform my prayers in the back, which was a vast relief. I’d gotten so lazy about my praying, I worried they’d notice that I’d almost forgotten how to do it properly. As the straggler, the sole member of the last row, I only had to follow along.

  Returned to our rooms, standing at our respective windowsills, Nigel and I made a decision—something small and also big—which was to save our toffees for later, for Christmas. Was it pessimism or pragmatism that told us we weren’t going home before then? I don’t know, but the thought of it was so stark, so totally miserable, I figured we should at least prepare. I couldn’t bear the idea that I’d be apart from my family for the holiday, stuck in a hot room with nothing but a mattress, a mosquito net, and a piece of brown linoleum, still enduring Abdullah’s assaults, still praying for a way out.

  Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my grandparents and father and Perry congregated to eat my mother’s roast turkey, when we took pictures and felt like a regular, united family. As the day drew closer, it seemed certain that even in the wake of my near execution, there was to be no change in the stalemate between our captors and our governments or our captors and our families. Nigel and I started to make more plans. We had the toffees, to begin with. I had stored mine in the lineup of care-package treasures I kept next to my mattress, right next to my St. Ives body lotion. We agreed to exchange gifts and write stories for each other—stories of the best Christmases we’d ever spent, recorded in exacting, drawn-out detail, especially the parts about food.

  I worked hard on my story, pulling up long-past memories of the Christmas my mom had surprised us with a trip to Disneyland, with a room at the Holiday Inn and an extravaganza of rides for me and my brothers. I wrote it all down for Nigel’s benefit and for mine. For his gift, I chose a white hourglass-shaped plastic bottle of cough syrup that had come in the care package and painstakingly converted it into a little doll. I drew a smiling face on the top part and took one of my black socks and fashioned it into a tiny tailored sweater, complete with sleeves. I sliced up a Q-tip stick to serve as my needle and unwound strands of dental floss for thread. I used Nigel’s beard trimmers—which he’d left at my request on the window ledge in the bathroom—to do the cutting. I embroidered three words—“My Little Buddy”—on the front of the doll’s sweater. I then made Nigel a Christmas card containing a pumped-up advertisement for his new toy. “Never feel alone again: Little Buddy is here!” Finally, I took out a blank sheet of paper and drew striped candy canes all over it, tucking Nigel’s gift inside as if it were wrapping paper, securing the whole thing with more dental floss. I made him a stocking, using more paper, stitched together with more floss, and stuck my three toffees inside.

  On Christmas morning, somewhat brazenly, I walked down the hallway with a bulge under my dress and left it all on the high ledge in our bathroom—the gift, the stocking, even the full notebook containing my story. I knocked on the wall to tell Nigel to go get it. A while later, he knocked again, instructing me to retrieve some things he’d left for me, a wrapped gift and a decorated paper stocking with his toffees in it.

  We spent the morning singing carols—“Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Joy to the World,” things like that. We sucked our toffees down slowly, one after the other, until each became a grain on the tongue. Nigel’s story was about the Christmas when he and his siblings bought airplane tickets for their parents to go to Ireland. At our windows, we asked each other follow-up questions to drag the stories out. I loved him in that moment, on that day, more than I’d ever loved anyone, in a way that reached past the standard boy-girl love and hit some sort of deeper bedrock. I loved him as a human, with no complication.

  Blessedly, our captors left us alone. We sang “Little Drummer Boy” and, each of us throaty with emotion, we sang “Silent Night.” Finally, standing at his sill, Nigel opened his little buddy with an amused gasp, and then I was allowed to open my gift. For the stocking, he’d used red ballpoint ink to color two full notebook pages. He’d torn them into matching sock-shaped sides and then sewn them together with dental floss, adding a dried strip of a Wet Ones to the top, as a stand-in for white fur trim. Inside it was a small box—the cardboard insert from a package of cologne Donald had brought Nigel months earlier—wrapped in hand-decorated paper. Inside the box was a delicate-looking bracelet he’d made for me, a chain of saved-up pop-tops from his old tuna cans, carefully and intricately strung together with threads and accessorized by colorful little tassels he’d pulled from the edges of his sarong, tying one to each link in the chain. It was clear he’d spent days putting it all together, using his fingertips to make knots the size of poppy seeds. It was done with care, made with exactly what he had. It was better than anything you’d find at Tiffany’s. It was better, in that moment, than anything I’d ever received.

  30

  Escape

  Was there some way out? There had to be. In January, we started talking about trying to escape. It began one day when Nigel announced he’d been studying the window in the bathroom and thought we could climb through it.

  I, too, had looked at that window, plenty of times. I saw no possibilities there. The window was about eight feet off the bathroom floor, recessed far back in the thick wall up near the ceiling, with a ledge maybe two feet deep, almost like an alcove or a cubbyhole. What was at the end of that alcove hardly counted as a window. It was, rather, a screen made of bricks with a few decorative gaps in between them, serving as ventilation holes for the bathroom. The bricks were cemented together. And then, as if that weren’t enough, laid horizontally in front of the bricks was a series of five metal bars anchored into the window frame.

  “Are you crazy?” I said to Nigel. “It’s impossible. How would we get out?”

  “You should crawl up there,” he said. “I’ve been looking at the bricks. The mortar is crumbling. We could dig it out.”

  “Yeah, but the bars . . .”

  “I think I could pull them loose. They’re not that secure. I don’t know,” he said, sounding not entirely confident, “but I think it could work.”

  I was doubtful. The idea was crazy for other reasons, the mo
st obvious one being that if we were caught trying to escape, I felt sure our captors would either kill us or punish us in ways we didn’t want to imagine. Besides that, having been driven into the desert, I’d seen the outside world—our immediate surroundings—a landscape of big bonfires and young men wandering around with guns. If we were to run, it wasn’t as if we were running toward any certain safety. Finally, too, there was the matter of the three Somali men being held captive with us—Abdi, Marwali, and Mahad—and what might happen to them if we got out. If we ran, I was convinced they’d be killed. And I could see no way that five of us would manage to escape together.

  I hardly knew the three Somalis, but I felt a sense of kinship with them and a responsibility for having gotten them captured in the first place. Whenever I was in the hallway, I found myself glancing in the direction of their door, where their shoes—two sets of sandals and a pair of Western-style hiking boots that belonged to Abdi—were always arranged in a neat line, presumably so they could slip into them when it was time to visit their bathroom outside. Every so often, I’d catch sight of one of them sitting there in the light, reading the Koran or sometimes stitching a piece of clothing. What I knew of them came only from these narrow glimpses and sounds that carried through the hallway and from what little we’d learned before being kidnapped. Abdi struck me as an earnest family man. Marwali, the driver from the Shamo Hotel, seemed more boisterous. I appreciated the sound of his laughter in the house. He seemed to chuckle easily and often, despite the circumstances. Mahad, who’d come from the medical clinic we’d been planning to visit on the day we were kidnapped, appeared to be extremely religious, loudly reciting verses from the Koran through much of the day.

  As we moved toward our fifth month of captivity, Jamal remained the best source of information on what was going on with our captors and our families back at home.

  “Any news?” I asked one day as he carried in the morning bag of food.

  “There is no news,” he said, shaking his head, adding with a sigh, “Inshallah, this is done soon.”

  When I asked when the leaders would next visit, he pursed his lips, wearing an expression of slight distress. He said, “I don’t know.” They hadn’t come in nearly a month.

  It was only through Jamal and his penchant to speak English, to linger and gossip in our rooms, that we knew the boys, to some degree, also felt like hostages, living as they were under the thumb of the captain and the group’s increasingly invisible leaders. They were eating poorly, Jamal said. The guard named Yahya, who was no more than eighteen or nineteen, had missed the birth of his first child earlier in the month, though Skids had granted him a few days’ leave to go home for a visit. Jamal had appealed to take time off and marry Hamdi, but Skids had denied him, saying he had to wait until the ransom money came in and the Program—all of them referred to our captivity as “the Program”—was finished.

  We all wanted it to be soon, every last soul in that house. I fell asleep at night thinking, soon, and I woke up in the morning and called the word back. Soon, soon. I believed it enough to think we shouldn’t try to dig bricks out of the bathroom window, that we should trust soon was coming.

  Until one day I stepped out into the hallway, headed toward the shower, and noticed a new quiet. It was January 14, a Wednesday. The shoes outside Abdi, Marwali, and Mahad’s door were gone, all three pairs. It appeared they’d been moved. My hope was that they’d been released, though I knew it was unlikely. Our captors wouldn’t want three witnesses roaming free.

  A while later, I was able to ask Abdullah what had happened to our Somali colleagues. He didn’t hesitate. Seeming pleased with himself, he lifted a finger to his throat and drew it in a straight line across. My mind flashed to the desert, to the lonely acacia tree under the moon. Had the leaders come in the middle of the night and taken them? How had I not heard anything? Was Abdullah telling the truth? When Nigel and I met up at the window, he said that he, too, had asked about the men’s whereabouts. While Jamal had given a vague answer, suggesting that maybe they had been let go, Abdullah had made the same emphatic throat-slitting gesture. My stomach started to churn. The worst case seemed the most likely: The Somali guys had been killed. And it was our fault. Before we were captured, Abdi had proudly shown me pictures of his children—two boys and a girl, smiling little kids in school uniforms, who now, thanks to me, had no father.

  Every part of me felt weak. The disappearance of Abdi and the others told us something important about our captors. Money to feed and house our group seemed to be running out. Desperation was setting in. That they could kill their fellow Somalis, Muslim brothers all three, didn’t bode well for me and Nigel. There was no question in my mind: We had to get out.

  *

  It took some effort to pull myself up to the window in the bathroom, to check the possibilities. I had to stand with one foot planted on either side of the toilet seat, reaching up past my shoulders to get my hands on the ledge, and from there, to boost myself up, as if levering my way out of a swimming pool. The alcove leading to the window was too shallow to hold all of me, so I leaned forward, holding my weight with my elbows, stomach balanced on the ledge, legs dangling heavily back toward the ground.

  With my chest pressed against the ledge and my face up close to the window, I could see instantly that Nigel was right. The bricks covering the opening were only loosely cemented. The mortar between them crumbled at my touch, coming away in small cascades of white dust. From my room, I’d brought my pair of nail clippers, and using the little knifelike apparatus meant to dig dirt from beneath the fingernails, I was able to reach between the metal bars blocking the window and poke into some of the deeper, rubbly spaces between the bricks, where I felt a promising bit of movement, the suggestion of bigger fault lines. With some diligent chipping, it seemed possible we could remove a few rows of bricks, creating an opening just big enough to fit through.

  The bars over the bricks were another matter. They were about three feet long and appeared to be sunk deep into the walls on either side of the window, though I could see that Nigel had already managed to loosen one of them from its anchor points. He’d sworn to me that he could muscle at least one more out of its hold. Feeling elated, I dropped back to the bathroom floor, covered in grit and cobwebs. I hurried back to my room, for the first time in months not thinking about danger or hunger or worry, consumed instead by the idea that we could make a hole to the outside, a body-sized hole, and slip through it.

  Standing at our windows, we began to work on a plan. What time of day would we go? What would we bring? Which direction would we run? Who would we seek out and what would we say? The considerations were enormous. We debated whether it would be best to escape at night, while most of the guards were asleep and we were less likely to cause a ruckus running down the street. Recalling the bonfires, I assumed night was a more dangerous time to be out. And maybe, too, we wanted to cause a ruckus. Maybe we needed to be loud and visible, forcing someone to call the authorities, whoever the authorities in these parts might be. Or did we find a sympathetic person and beg to use a cell phone, hoping he or she had enough calling credit to sustain a one-minute call to Canada or Australia? Or a cheaper call to Ajoos, whose number I had written on a hidden-away scrap of paper. Or to the Somali director of the World Food Programme office in Mogadishu, whose number I’d also been carrying when we were first taken.

  Nigel and I agreed that we needed to put distance between us and our captors as quickly as possible and that we’d be well served by trying to blend in. For me, in an abaya and hijab, looking like any other woman on the street wouldn’t be so hard. But there was no hiding Nigel’s white skin. We considered whether I should loan him one of my Somali outfits and he could pose as a very tall woman, fully covered, but even my longest abaya would reach only halfway down his calves. We knew, too, that dressing Nigel in drag was the kind of thing that could backfire on us in the end. Every option we explored felt like a blind corner. Every idea seemed like a g
amble, with myriad ways it could go awry.

  We spent many hours discussing the plan. All the while, we traded shifts in the bathroom, hauling ourselves onto the ledge with fingernail clippers in hand, chiseling at the window mortar in hurried five- and ten-minute bursts. The work was gratifying, like surgery or digging for gold. Sometimes I’d grind and get dust; other times, with some careful prying, I’d manage to extract a nice little slab of fully intact cement.

  Because my door was in easy sight of the veranda, I had to be more cautious—knocking for permission to leave my room, never staying too long in the bathroom, carefully brushing off all signs of white mortar dust before stepping back into the hallway. I also realized how frail I’d become, despite all the deliberate hours spent walking. Although my legs were strong, the muscles in my arms were wasted and wobbly. Midway through the second day, my elbows started to buckle every time I tried to pull myself up to the window ledge, and I had to give up.

  Nigel continued to work diligently. He was in a better position than I to make undetected trips to the bathroom. I kept watch through my keyhole, ready to create a distraction if any of the boys started heading his way. Using my medical phrase sheets, I cobbled together a little message and wrote the Somali words on a piece of paper to carry with me when we escaped, tucked in the front pocket of my jeans, which I’d wear beneath my black abaya. “Please help. I am Muslim. Don’t be frightened.” I rehearsed the Somali syllables over and over, not 100 percent sure of what I was saying: Fadlan i caawi. Waa islaan. Ha baqin. On a separate tiny scrap of paper, I copied the few Somali phone numbers I had in my reporter’s notebook, putting that in my pocket as well.

  Each time I visited the bathroom, I looked up at the window to track Nigel’s progress. Though he was careful to cover his work, sliding each brick he’d removed back into place, tucking it in with stray nuggets of cement, you could see the disturbance, the skewed bricks and mounds of loose mortar sitting on the sill. I tried to take solace in the knowledge that the boys walked into our bathroom only once or twice a week—mainly to take the oversized bucket we used for water and refill it. But still, the risk we were taking felt suddenly huge. Since Abdi and the others had disappeared, I’d felt too stressed to eat much, and now my stomach went into a full clench.