Someone was tugging on my jeans, sliding them down to just above where the chains lay yoked around my ankles. The air in the room was hot, and I was naked but for the hood over my head and the jeans at my feet. My skin prickled. I pressed my arms over my breasts and hips, trying to cover myself. Down by my feet, I could feel a set of hands moving around my ankles. I heard a murmuring and then a collective gasp. Someone pronounced the name of Ajoos, the fixer at the Shamo.
My heart sank at the sound. They’d been searching through the pockets, I knew, and had come upon my one bit of contraband. It was the two tiny scraps of paper onto which, prior to the escape, I’d copied my Somali phrases and phone numbers. I’d rolled the papers up until they were about the size of two sunflower seeds and tucked them into the narrow triangular front pocket of my jeans.
My captors were talking loudly, excitedly, almost triumphantly, as if they had permission now to continue.
And they did. They continued. They called it a search, what they went on to do to me that morning, in that room. But what they did was drag us all into new territory. All of the boys were there. I understood later how much this mattered, how it kept any one of them from judging the others in the months to come. Together, they crossed into a darker place, where there was no retrievable dignity for anybody. They became guilty, one the same as another. I bled not for hours or days but for weeks afterward.
34
New Rules
From here, I went into darkness. By this I mean real physical darkness, a bleak black void with four walls around it, in the form of a new room in a new house—this one seeming to be far outside of Mogadishu, deeper in the country, somewhere in the catacombs of another whitewashed village. Just hours after what had happened in the prayer room, under cover of night, they brought us—me and Nigel both—to the new location. Shrouded in my black abaya and head scarf, I was strangely numb during the ride. My body had been shredded. So much of me was raw and hurt that I couldn’t shift my weight without triggering a new pain. All the while, my mind felt caught in a net, rigged high above what was going on.
Next to me, Nigel was panting so loudly that I feared they’d hit him for it. He was shirtless, for reasons I didn’t want to imagine.
In the back of the car, where several of the boys sat jammed beneath the hatchback with their guns, I could hear the rattling of cooking pots and plastic bags at their feet, a sign that they’d packed us up for a full move.
*
I saw almost nothing of the next house. I was hurried from the car through a doorway and then down a long hall.
Before we were pulled inside, I turned to Nigel and said one thing. “Stay strong,” I said. “We’ll get out of here, Nige. But we might not see each other for a while.” My eyes welled at the thought. He, too, teared up. Despite everything, I wanted to crawl into his arms.
They put me in a room that was windowless and black, tossing in my foam mattress, several bags of my belongings, and the brown square of linoleum that appeared to travel with me now as well. The room was big. My mat lay in one corner, with the other walls far away. The air smelled sour, a stew of rot and urine. The room felt sealed off, like a cave, like a storage room, removed from light and the busier parts of the house. There was a bathroom inside the room, in an alcove near the doorway, smelling dank and unused.
Over twenty-two weeks of captivity, I’d nursed many thoughts that somehow Nigel and I would be found, that some cell phone signal could be traced and mapped, that maybe Canada or Australia would find a way to send soldiers or mercenaries to pluck us out or that someone—one of our captors’ wives or cousins or mothers—would blow the whistle on the whole operation and it would force an ending. My hopes had been dimming, but in the airless jar of the new room, they felt fully snuffed.
I’d lost a lot of blood and was burning with fever; my head ached viciously. I was certain I was dying and that it would happen slowly. As I lay on the mattress, my mind clung to the faintest of sounds: the scrabble of a rat in the far corner of the room, someone hammering something—a mosquito net, likely—into a wall. I heard something else, a light hacking coming from the hallway, a human cough that I didn’t recognize. The sound was distinctly female, but that seemed impossible. I wondered if I was hallucinating.
Eventually, I slept, figuring that morning would relieve some of the pain and also the darkness. When I awoke, though, I was dry-mouthed and soaked in sweat, with chills running through my body, the bruises tender beneath the surface of my skin. From my mattress, I could see only a thin line of daylight running along the bottom of the door to the room, illuminating nothing.
*
This was the Dark House. There were new rules here. My captors made them clear right away. I was not allowed to speak; nor was I allowed to sit up on my mat, not even for a minute. I was permitted to eat and drink only by propping myself on one elbow. Any infraction brought a beating. My prison was no longer the size of a room. It had shrunk to the size of that mat, three feet wide by seven feet long. Gone, too, was the practice of bringing me plastic bottles of filtered water from the market. I was now given the same two-liter bottle every morning, refilled from what must have been an outdoor tap with water that tasted like iron and left grit on my tongue.
On the second afternoon, Abdullah came into the room with a flashlight and found me lying on my back. He gave me a furious kick. “Over,” he said, using his toe to lever me to my side. “Like this only. No exercise.”
He kicked me again, to drive home whatever point he was making.
I realized later that they’d seen me go through my hours of daily pacing back at the last house, in the weeks leading up to our attempt at escape. I remembered the look of frantic rage on Abdullah’s face as he’d chased me through the mosque, the force of my legs thrashing as he’d dragged me across the courtyard. He wouldn’t risk a repeat. They were going to do all they could to keep me weak. I was banned from lying on my back, for fear that somehow it would make me strong. I guess they thought I’d start doing leg lifts or crunches and find another way out.
Five times a day, I was allowed to totter the short distance to the toilet, lassoed by the chains, with a boy and gun poised nearby. The bathroom had a small ventilation grate high in the wall that, during the day, let in a feeble mosaic of light, enough to reveal a Western toilet that didn’t flush, a sink without running water, and a rusted showerhead in the corner. The water came from a jug left inside the door.
After washing, I was expected to pray. I was now happy to pray, as it constituted the only bit of variety in my movement, the only moments I was allowed to remain upright aside from bathroom trips. Most of the time, one or two of my captors stood behind me as I prayed, using a flashlight or the silvery screen of a cell phone to provide light, watching as I went through the motions, murmuring the words, using my square of linoleum as a prayer mat. The leg shackles bit into my ankles as I moved from standing to kneeling. I could no longer sit back on my heels to finish each cycle of prayer.
The boys mocked my Arabic. They mimicked the pitch of my voice, my poor pronunciation.
“You are a bad Muslim, Amina,” Abdullah said to me, his laughter like a horsewhip traveling the darkness. “You are liar woman.”
By the fourth day, I was ill from the dirty water, my stomach scorched, my intestines gurgling. I used the plastic bottle to knock on the floor, signaling that I needed extra trips to the bathroom. Sometimes the boys obliged me, and sometimes they didn’t. They’d taken to leaving the wooden door to my room slightly ajar, which gave them the ability to sneak in noiselessly, to surprise me while I was sleeping. I woke a few times to find Abdullah and Young Mohammed throwing my belongings against the wall, demanding to know if I had “documents,” the beams of their flashlights raking over me. With the move to the Dark House, they’d taken away my books and medicine. I still had the Q-tips and the body lotion. I had a single change of clothes, the bottle of perfume, and the king-sized toothpaste. But that was about it.
The one new item I had, which had somehow ended up in my things, was a shirt belonging to Nigel. It was the shirt he’d worn during our escape—a purple button-up shirt that was torn in several places and missing a sleeve. I kept it in bed with me, sleeping with it pulled close.
I dozed in a fevered haze, my brain drifting, my body on fire. In the darkness, I felt myself shrinking toward nothing. Once I awoke in a panic to the feeling of someone kicking me repeatedly in the side. It was Mohammed, his foot jammed beneath my rib cage. It took me a few seconds to understand what he was doing. I’d accidentally rolled onto my back while sleeping, breaking the “no exercise” rule. He kicked me until I rolled back to my side.
A few times, I heard the faint sound of Nigel, his chains clinking in the hallway outside. I also heard, again and again, that unfamiliar cough coming from somewhere inside the house. It was jarring, barky, and decidedly female. I heard it at night and I heard it by day, which seemed to suggest she was living there. Whoever she was, she sounded quite sick. It confused my sense of things. Why would a woman be so near? Was she another captive? A wife? A servant? My mind reeled at her presence, though I was well past thinking that any woman, in any circumstance, would be able to save me. Whoever she was, I guessed she was just as stuck as I was.
*
When you are in darkness, time folds in on itself, surreal and elastic. It bellows like an accordion, stretching and then collapsing. An hour becomes indistinguishable from a night or a day.
My mattress floated like a raft in the middle of a black ocean. The darkness surrounding me had substance. It had weight. It was thick like tar, catching in my throat and gumming up my lungs. I had to coach myself on how to breathe it. There were moments when the darkness seemed aggressive, like it was trying to swallow me. I’d hold a hand in front of my face and see nothing. I fanned my arms, attempting to create wind, to exert some power over the dark. Sometimes I pressed the hollow at the base of my neck, just to remind myself that I was solid.
Eight days passed and then a ninth. I tried not to obsess about time, but without the rhythm of day and night, it was almost impossible not to. My thoughts were simple. Don’t panic. Don’t go crazy. I pushed my brain around like a miniature train on a track, traveling the same small circles. Stay calm, I told myself. This has to be temporary. They’re going to move us out of here soon. I marked the days by following the summonses to prayer. It sounded like there was a mosque next door, literally just beyond my walls. The muezzin’s singing voice was old and unpleasant.
My eyes strained against the blackness, causing a nearly constant headache. I began to keep them closed all the time, which was an effort, a disruption of the brain. I focused instead on my hearing, which I could feel was getting sharper. In the afternoons, I heard a tinny-sounding radio tuned to the BBC Somali Service, its announcer speaking in Somali. I listened for words I could recognize. I knew very few, most of my vocabulary accrued during the first several days in Mogadishu with Abdi, and in the early weeks of captivity, when our captors were eager to converse. I knew that bariis was rice and basal was onion. I knew biyo was water. I knew the words Somalis used for hotel, journalist, bathroom, mosque. I knew “How are you?” and “I am good” and “Help” and “We are doing everything we can to save lives.” But little of this surfaced on the radio. The words I caught most often were the names of places and famous people. Over days of listening, I thought I heard the Somali newsman mention Mogadishu and Ethiopia, Germany and George Bush. The words, in their familiarity, were almost like food.
Occasionally I heard the clatter of a cooking pot somewhere in the house, along with the etch, etch, etch of the woman’s cough as she moved about. I began to think she was likely a cook, hired to fix meals for the boys and clean up after them. I heard them delivering bags from the market to what must have been a kitchen at the end of my hallway. Every so often I caught the smell of onions frying in a pan. I decided she must be a widow, desperate for a job. No Somali woman of standing—unmarried or married, young or old—would be allowed to live with a group of young men as she was doing. And Somalia, I knew, had no shortage of widows.
From the words, from the sounds, I sometimes slipped into dreams. Once, with my eyes closed, I thought I heard the sound of Nigel laughing, but I didn’t fully trust my own brain. It was wishful thinking, I realized. I was wretchedly, unsparingly lonely. I pictured Nigel in a dark room somewhere on the other side of the house. I sent him mental messages, imploring him to hang on, to stay strong. I couldn’t stay angry with him for having tried to pin the escape on me. He was just so scared. I understood. None of it mattered, anyway. I tried to imagine him sending messages back to me.
In my lowest moments, I curled myself around his ripped shirt and cried. I lay with the fabric under my cheek, smelling the swampish scent of his body. We had a history now that added up to years. We had a catalog of shared experiences, though all I could recall for the moment, with my nose pressed into his shirt, was the sweaty paranoia of our escape, our frantic dash into the mosque. It was not a good memory, but it carried an electrical charge, a feeling I desperately needed. We’d been hopeful for how long that day? Ten minutes? Twelve? I wished for even three seconds of that hopefulness now. I craved just one hit of lung-clearing, odds-stacked-against-us, totally-fucked-up-but-still-not-impossible possibility. In the darkness, left with no other option, I tried to inhale it out of the fibers of that shirt.
35
A House in the Sky
Two weeks passed, then a third. And then something closer to a month.
I lay in nothingness, drifting deeper into a state of half-being, the stale darkness eating away all boundaries. I saw skeins of blue thread, little plumelike spinnakers that floated in front of me, whether my eyes were open or shut. Sometimes I wondered if I’d gone blind. Other times I wondered if I was alive at all.
Was this hell?
It was not an unreasonable thought.
Gradually, I found my way into a sense of routine, curbed on all sides by the dark and the rules. But still, there was comfort in anything I could do for myself. I arranged my small collection of toiletries in a line along the top end of my mat. I used the body lotion in the mornings, after my bathroom trip, massaging the cream into my hands and forearms and over my face. My captors had given me a razor, a small straight-edged blade, kept in a paper sheath. With it, I was supposed to shave my pubic area daily, in keeping with conservative Islam’s mandates on body hair. I did this in the dim light of the bathroom, testing the blade’s sharpness against my skin, knowing that if I wanted to, I could probably slash my wrists with it. It was a thought, an idea waiting to be activated, but nothing more.
Each morning, between visiting the bathroom and lying down again, I stole fifteen critical seconds to make up the bed, tucking the bottom sheet tightly beneath the sides of the mattress, using a hand to smooth any wrinkles. I folded my blue floral top sheet into a neat flat rectangle and set it at the foot. This, for me, marked the beginning of a new day.
To pass the time, I reminded myself of what I knew, of things that tied me to the world beyond: It was February, almost March. Back at home, the Rocky Mountains would be covered in layers of deep white snow. My mother would be wearing a scarf. My father’s gardens would be crushed and brown. The sidewalks in Calgary were being scoured by snaking winter winds. Wool, wind, dead flowers. I tried to feel them on my skin. I’d spent so many of my winters away from Canada, in far-off countries where it rarely got cold. Now, more than anything, I wanted the feel of a season, the coziness of a warm, safe house with the cold world outside.
In my room, the rats grew bolder. I sometimes woke to the hairy brush of a body scuttling over my legs in the dark. I looked for any pinprick of light, any movement inside the vacuum of blackness, but there was none. My legs ached from the enforced stillness. I rolled from my right side to my left and then back. I felt woozy and ill. I tried to drink as little as possible of the water they brought me. I ate what they carried i
n each morning—dry bread, pieces of camel fat over rice, bananas—with the same hesitancy.
All outside sounds seemed to come from a different world. Only the crotchety voice of the muezzin next door was clear, and the footsteps—the shhh-shhh-shhh of a pair of sandals approaching my door. Hearing them, I’d feel my heart start to pound. I don’t think I experienced something as simple as fear anymore. What I felt, when someone came near me, was a hot explosion of terror. With the footsteps, I never knew who was coming or why.
Most often it was Abdullah. The others paid visits to my room, too, sometimes under the pretense that they were inspecting me to see if I’d kept up with shaving my body hair, but often to abuse me. If, before the escape, I had been a curiosity to those boys—a foreigner with whom they could practice their English while earning points with Allah for indoctrinating me into Islam—all that was gone. They now treated me as a spoil of war. Some were worse than others. A few, like Hassam and Jamal, left me alone. But as a group, they seemed to believe that I’d shamed them by making a false accusation in the mosque, and that justified ditching whatever sense of dignity or communal restraint once held them back.
Abdullah sometimes came several times in a single day. He’d open the door and blind me with the beam of his flashlight. Then he’d drop to his knees on my mat, usually without a word. He didn’t so much touch me as grab handfuls of my flesh. He’d find one of my breasts in the darkness and squeeze it like something he hoped would burst. Sometimes he’d tell me in a jeering voice that I was “dirty” and “open,” since, unlike those of virtually all Somali women, my genitals had not been cut—my labia and clitoris had not been sliced off and my vagina stitched shut in some draconian bid to protect my honor.
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 30
