A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  Sometimes Abdullah tied my hands behind my back with the blue-flowered sheet from my mattress so that I wouldn’t push at him as he choked me. I blocked out the sounds he made.

  Death began to look welcoming. Whatever death was, it had to be better. I wasn’t sure how I would die—even with the razor, I had no urge to end my own life—but I could feel death close by, waiting for me. Death would require no effort, just the letting go.

  In my chest, I could feel pressure building every day, even every hour, as if a tree bough were bending inside me. I felt like I was approaching the point where I could no longer bear the strain, as if my mind were about to snap. The thought completely unnerved me. What would come with the snap? What lay on the other side? Death? Or madness? I didn’t know.

  I lay still as Abdullah did what he did, but my mind never stopped clambering to get away. I fought not to cross over. I fought to undo some of the pressure. He usually set his flashlight down on the floor. As he moved over me, exerting himself, his tongue poked slightly out of his mouth, the beam of his light shone up and away from us, illuminating things I otherwise never saw—the dark wooden beams of the ceiling and the dust particles that hung suspended in the air like little diamonds. I focused on these. I tried to climb away from the shock of what my life had become.

  In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I’d built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city—a calm, sparkling city near the ocean, a place like Vancouver. I put myself there, and that’s where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbor. I ate pancakes drizzled in syrup and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn’t longing, and it wasn’t insanity. It was relief. It got me through.

  After he’d gone, my other emotions came streaming back. I cried every time, unsettled by the rushes of fury and despair. I felt like I was standing next to an ocean slicked with hate, my toes wet with it.

  Day by day, though, I collected up old sweetnesses and fed on them. I remembered the happier moments in my life, unfolding them with languorous slowness, time being the one currency I had to spend. I revisited my early love for Jamie, with his mop of hair and his thrift-store outfits and his guitar.

  Where do you want to go? he’d asked one afternoon in a park by the river in Calgary, back before we’d been to a single place or seen a single thing.

  Anywhere, I’d said. Anywhere is good.

  It had been the right answer.

  In exacting detail, I could recall the rub of a heavy backpack on my shoulders, the petrol blur of Pakistani jingle trucks, the train stations and lamb kebabs, the flame-colored tent I’d slept in on the riverbank in Khartoum. I took myself back through the week I’d spent trekking to Everest base camp in Nepal one year with Kelly, the first nights I’d slept in Amanuddin’s house in Kabul. I recalled what it was like to scoop handfuls of sugared pistachios into my mouth in Calcutta and to dip triangles of soft pita bread into a bowl of creamy hummus served with mint sprigs in Beirut. I remembered the boy—that quiet, carefully dressed British stranger named Dan Hanmer—who’d sat by the green-black lake in Guatemala so many years ago, holding Kelly’s hand. I remembered diving into swimming pools, cold bottles of orange Fanta at the end of long bus trips, the fresh start of every conversation launched in the breakfast room of a two-star hostel, out there in the world.

  I conjured my father’s laugh and my mother’s cooking, the stars in the sky over Sylvan Lake. I made peace with anyone who might ever have been an enemy. I asked forgiveness for every vain or selfish thing I’d done in my life. Inside the house in the sky, all the people I loved sat down for a big holiday meal. I was safe and protected. It was where the voices that normally tore through my head expressing fear and wishing for death went silent, until there was only one left speaking. It was a calmer, stronger voice, one that to me felt divine.

  It said, See? You are okay, Amanda. It’s only your body that’s suffering, and you are not your body. The rest of you is fine.

  *

  Things became more bearable then—not easier, just more endurable. Though I was hungry, bruised, and had a fever I couldn’t shake, the rest of me was fine. I was alone and shackled, but the rest of me was okay. The rest of me knew not to panic. It had a place to go. It was as if that voice had come and quietly rearranged a few key things. As if, inside the stifling darkness, I’d been given more space, a cool pocket of air. I reminded myself again to breathe. I put a hand on my chest to be sure each exhale was really happening. I moved from one breath to the next.

  I followed my breathing from moment into hour, day into week, as the boys came and went from my room, as my hatred for them swelled and receded, each time feeling as if I were climbing hand over hand out of a dark hole—this endlessly cascading place they threw me into every time they raped me, or beat me, or said something horrible to me. It was easier, I decided, for them to think of me a certain way, to not acknowledge that I was a human like them, because if they did—if any one of them stopped to think about what they were doing—they, too, might snap.

  With this breath, I choose peace. With this breath, I choose freedom. It didn’t matter whether it was the tenth time or the thousandth; enduring their cruelties never became any easier. It always had the same effect, consuming me, putting me in a knotted and unhopeful rage. I’d spent my life believing that people were, at heart, kind and good. This was what the world had shown me. But I couldn’t find anything good about these boys, about any of my captors. If humans could be this monstrous, maybe I’d had everything wrong. If this was the world, I didn’t want to live in it. That was the scariest and most disabling thought of all.

  *

  One day sometime into the second month in the Dark House, Yusuf—the oversized boy who sometimes led the others in calisthenics in the yard—came into my room with a flashlight and handed me a softball-sized half of a papaya, cut crosswise with a knife, its seeds making a dark star in the center. I stared at the fruit and then at Yusuf, who was dressed in a sarong and a white shirt with thin black stripes. Nobody had smiled at me in many weeks, but he was smiling. I waited for him to lash out at me or take the fruit away, but he didn’t. I knew from earlier attempts to talk to him that he spoke almost no English. He patted his own chest to make sure I understood that the fruit was a gift from him alone, then he sat a few feet away as I bit into it.

  Very softly, I said, “Thank you.” The sound of my voice surprised me. I’d barely said a word in weeks.

  Yusuf smiled again. As I continued to eat, he leaned in my direction and reached his arm out, lining it up with mine so that our forearms were side by side in the beam of his flashlight. “Black,” he said, pointing at his arm. He then gestured at mine. “White,” he said. Looking directly into my eyes, he said, “No problem.”

  I was pretty sure he was telling me that our skin color didn’t matter.

  When he left, I got teary. The whole thing had been so odd. Yusuf was no less guilty than the other boys. But the small kindness stayed with me.

  The strong and calm voice stayed also. It told me to look for good, because good was always there. On days when I was really struggling, when I felt the pressure in my mind moving again toward a snapping point, the voice posed questions. It said, In this exact moment, are you okay?

  The answer, in that exact moment, was steadying: Yes, right now I am still okay.

  I ran through the things I had to be thankful for—my family at home, the oxygen in my lungs. I started a ritual for myself. Each evening after the six o’clock prayer session, I settled back on my mat and went through my own silent appeals, naming every person in my family, taking time to picture each face, asking that they all be protected. I did the same
for Nigel and his family and for each one of my friends. I went through the people I’d worked with in Baghdad, the Somalis I’d met in my first few days in Mogadishu. I prayed for the neighbor who’d tried to help me and Nigel during our escape and especially for the woman who’d clung to me in the mosque. I prayed that she was alive and unhurt. I pushed out the guilt that followed my hopes.

  I tried to locate what had been good about the day that had just passed. I looked for any moments when my captors had shown their humanity: I am thankful that today Jamal set my food down on the floor instead of throwing it at me. I am grateful that Abdullah offered the greeting Asalaamu Alikum when he came into my room. I am happy that I heard a few seconds of the boys laughing and horsing around in the hallway today, because it reminded me, if only for a minute, that somewhere inside each of them is a teenager who wants to be carefree.

  In the context of the life I once lived, these were small things, ridiculous things really, but in this place and under these circumstances, they meant everything. By concentrating on what I was grateful for, I managed to stave off despair. Each time my captors threw me into that hole, I found another way to climb out. It wasn’t easy—not ever, not once—but this way of thinking became my ladder, my doorway.

  Anywhere, anywhere, I reminded myself. I could go anywhere.

  36

  Danger Is Coming

  In Alberta, it was early spring. My mother continued to live in the government-rented house in Sylvan Lake, not far from my dad and Perry’s home. On the wall, she kept a calendar with each of the 210 days I’d been held hostage marked with an X. RCMP negotiators stayed on duty with her twenty-four hours a day. She was, however, no longer negotiating. After the last time my mother and I had spoken—in December, when the kidnappers threatened to behead me in the desert before handing me the phone—the investigators shifted their strategy, instructing her not to answer the phone any time a Somali number popped up on the caller ID. The idea was that if she stopped picking up, Adam would be forced to deal with a team of Canadian intelligence agents based in Nairobi instead. This, people seemed to believe, would lessen the emotional manipulation and yield more progress.

  Adam’s frustration with the new phone situation was evident. He sometimes called my mother’s number more than ten times in a day, hanging up without leaving a voicemail. Denied phone access, he sent angry e-mails filled with misspellings to the Hotmail address my mother had used when arranging to send our care package in the fall. One message, sent back in January, around the time of our escape attempt, summed up his ongoing point in its subject line: “Danger is coming soon to Amanda and Nigel if you don’t pay the ranson we want!!!!!”

  Seven months into the kidnapping, the hostage-takers had barely budged in their ransom demands. They were insisting on $2 million for both of us, down from the initial request for $3 million. Adam had rejected a onetime offer of $250,000 made early on in exchange for me and Nigel, an amount that had been put together by the Canadian and Australian governments and was technically categorized as “expense” money so that each country could maintain its official policy of not paying ransoms. They would offer nothing more than that. Any other solutions would have to come through diplomacy.

  My parents were given only vague pictures of what that diplomacy looked like. Sometimes, they were told, a government might offer to fund a hospital in a place like Mogadishu, say, as a way of helping to enlist the local government. They were informed that Canadian officials had been trying to put pressure on clan elders and other Somali leaders to compel our release. But with the Somali government in a constant state of peril, and amid reports that the group holding us had no strong affiliation with any one clan, again and again the efforts yielded nothing.

  The stalemate continued. Adam kept phoning my mother to no avail. Other calls came in from Somalia, and various strangers left voice messages, claiming to have news or a way to get us free. My mother never understood how people got her number, nor what they were after—whether they were connected to the kidnappers or just honest people trying to help. She usually wept, watching the ringing phone.

  Expectancy, sustained over many months, becomes its own agony. In the late afternoons, after it was nighttime in Somalia, when there’d likely be no news coming, my mother would leave the house for a sanity break. She’d go to the grocery store or for a solitary walk in the snowy woods nearby, trying to settle her thoughts. The negotiator on duty stayed back at the house, keeping vigil, though it was hard to say what anybody was waiting for.

  What my parents lived on, what they built their faith on, was the idea that others seemed hopeful. The government officers who called with daily briefings from Ottawa gave them opaque but reassuring intelligence reports. Nigel and I were being fed, they’d been told. We were being allowed to exercise. When, early on, my mother had fretted aloud about her worries for my safety as a woman, the investigators had been quick to soothe her: Among devout Muslims, rape was considered a crime worse than murder, they’d said. Chances were, I was not being abused.

  The agents hinted that they had plenty going on behind the scenes that could not be shared. According to my mother, the message from Ottawa, almost daily, was that our case was “very, very close” to being resolved. She lived on those words—“very close”—never once knowing what they meant.

  Tension built between my family and Nigel’s over how to proceed. Our two families rarely spoke directly, having been instructed to rely on the respective government intermediaries. Disillusioned with the lack of progress, Nigel’s older brother, Hamilton, had begun talking with a man in Australia named Michael Fox. He was allegedly some sort of security-expert bounty-hunter type who announced that he had a network of contacts in Somalia and believed that if the Brennan family could come up with five hundred thousand dollars, he could get at least Nigel out. It would mean stepping away from the Australian Federal Police’s agenda, but the Brennans were increasingly questioning how effective any government could be in this situation. They also had resources, as Nigel had told me: money banked from the sale of their family farm. Other members of the family had property they could use as collateral for a loan. There was dissent among the Brennans over how to handle my family’s lack of funds. If this Fox character was correct, they might be able to come up with the kind of money needed to free Nigel. Why, his brother was wondering, were they being saddled with the responsibility of getting me out, too?

  In early March, my mother had learned that Hamilton had struck some sort of private deal with Michael Fox, okaying him to go into Somalia and use their family money to negotiate for Nigel. She was devastated. She had angry phone conversations with both Hamilton and Nigel’s mother, insisting that the kidnappers would surely take the money, release Nigel, and promptly kill me.

  Late that month, our two families reached an uneasy truce. The Brennans agreed to call off Fox’s efforts and to sink their faith once again in the government agents working the case, hoping for some sort of breakthrough.

  *

  But then a blog post surfaced on the Internet, sending my parents into a dizzying tailspin. An American blogger reported that I was pregnant. His post—on a site that covered war and intelligence issues—was short, containing no specifics. He noted that the information came from Mogadishu, from a source he trusted, but at the same time, he warned his readers that it was little more than a rumor.

  The RCMP negotiators in the house with my mother insisted that it was likely just gossip, one of dozens of unconfirmed stories that had floated out of Somalia since we’d been captured. Quite possibly, they said, it had been planted by the disgruntled Adam or someone close to him in order to boost the urgency of the negotiations.

  Somalia seemed to be a factory for rumors, with a handful of news websites and uncredentialed bloggers pumping out what passed for information, largely for the benefit of the million or so Somalis who had fled the country and scattered across the globe. And also, it turned out, for the benefit of my mother, who
scrolled every morning through poorly translated reports on the shifting curtain of the country’s civil war, its clan politics and pirates, and the growing bond between Al-Shabaab and Al Qaeda. The media in Somalia was mostly underground and unofficial. Somali journalists attempting to do honest work were routinely threatened, detained, and sometimes assassinated. A number of radio stations had been attacked and forced to close. Some news sites were reportedly controlled by certain clans and accordingly biased in what they reported. It was impossible to know what was truth and what was not.

  Any news about me and Nigel arrived in unfocused glimpses, either via a blogger or passed on to the Canadian or Australian intelligence agents through a mysterious network of informants. The two of us had been spotted in the back of a car. There were other, more dubious reports, like the one that said I was happily teaching English to Somali children. It would astound me later to learn how accurate some pieces of information had been, how droplets of truth managed to leak out of our otherwise sealed-off existence. My parents had been told, for example, that I’d sprained my ankle early on in Escape House, during my weeks of pacing in circles, which was true. They had been told that my captors took it upon themselves to bring me ice, a rare commodity in Somalia, which was also true.

  It was the specificity of these fragments that both alarmed and reassured my mother. Despite the broken English with which it was delivered, the news was often worded in a chillingly sure-footed way. Most of the time, she took it as proof that I was alive and at least partially visible in Somalia, though it also could seem as if I’d been swept away and brainwashed, the phantom woman described in the news bearing little resemblance to the daughter she once knew. One of the more extensive reports, published on a Somali news website after we’d been held for nearly a year, read like this: