Bin Laden spoke. Romeo watched. I wrote, my head bent low over the paper in the dim light of the room. The video played then paused, played then paused, as the words filled pages of the notepad. Bin Laden was warning his Somali brothers against falling prey to peace deals or diplomacy, all the trappings of compromise: How can intelligent people believe that yesterday’s enemies, on the basis of religion, can become today’s friends?
In other words, a war, once begun, must be seen through to the end.
41
Everything Is Changed
Romeo’s application for a student visa to the United States had been approved. He was in high spirits, asking more questions than ever. How long would the plane ride be? Was it true that girls in New York wore shirts that displayed their bellies? When he came now to give me lessons in Islam, he asked me to help him correct any pronunciation errors in his English, to smooth out the edges of his accent. He bought a special notebook—a thin, cheaply made book with pink and purple cartoon hearts across the cover—asking me to write down the most difficult English words I could think up, terms that would be useful for an eager student wishing to sound intelligent in a new country.
It was August. He was supposed to leave in September to begin school. I hoped that would put new pressures on whatever negotiations were happening with my family and Nigel’s.
In over three months at the Beach House, though his door was about eight feet from mine, I’d caught sight of Nigel only a handful of times. Every so often, when he heard the boys snapping to tell me I could go to the bathroom ahead of the noon prayer, he would crawl forward from his mat and crane his head to see across the narrow hall. The sight of him was a shock, his face thin and haggard, his beard a bushy mess. He wore a macawii and a tank top that hung off his bony shoulders. We peered at each other, mutually heartbroken and helpless.
Taking an extra risk one day, Nigel pointed to himself and then to me, making the shape of a heart with his hands. I love you. We’d been prisoners for close to a year.
Through the window in the bathroom, I watched the season change again, the daily rains slowly lightening to nothing, replaced by the hard-bitten burn of late summer, what Somali people call hagaa season. At the mosque in the distance, someone had switched out the entrance light from neon green to a garish, mesmerizing pink.
Along with the heat, tension was rising in the house among the boys, frustration laced with futility. Hassam had spent a couple of weeks stricken by malaria. Jamal’s wedding to Hamdi had been put on hold indefinitely. Now that Yahya, one of my primary guards, was gone, Young Mohammed—among the more violent members of the group—watched over me with renewed intensity. Money seemed to be running low. The boys complained constantly of their own hunger.
I took hope from the fact that Romeo was still talking about New York, as if money for his plane ticket—the money from our ransom—would be coming through any day. As an act of faith, I jotted down words for him to study.
Sectarian, I wrote. Parsimonious. Autonomous.
*
I could see that the boys were desperate to be done with our kidnapping, but I couldn’t begin to guess what was happening with the leaders of the group or at home. When I asked about progress, Romeo feigned helplessness, blaming my mother for not paying the ransom. Having invested twelve months of time and expense, and having conjured some idea that all Westerners swam in rivers of cash, my captors weren’t interested in compromising on money. They were convinced that my mother was the gatekeeper to their fortune. They just needed to find a way to break her down. Only later would I understand how calculating they were, what kind of chess match was being played across continents.
At home, my family had given up on the Canadian government, joining with the Brennans to hire an outside kidnap-and-ransom specialist named John Chase to get us out of Somalia. Attempts at diplomacy and intelligence gathering had yielded no visible progress. The families would need to raise money and strike a deal directly with our captors. At the start of August, they committed to a contract with Chase’s company, a British-based “risk mitigation” outfit called AKE. The two families agreed to split the costs—the ransom and AKE’s fee of about two thousand dollars per day—even if my family needed to rely on funds raised by the Brennans up front and repay them later. Quickly, they began pooling whatever money they had.
After months of not answering her cell phone when Adam called, my mother was back on the job as negotiator—this time with the guidance of Chase and his associates in England and regular phone input from Nigel’s family in Australia. Nigel’s sister, Nicky, was also communicating with Adam. The RCMP operational center in Sylvan Lake had been shut down: My mother rented a basement apartment for herself a few hours away in Canmore. She recorded phone calls with Adam on her own, transmitting them to Chase through encrypted e-mail.
On the phone, Adam sounded more bellicose than ever. The group, he said, was angry. They would take $2 million and no less. My mother, on behalf of the two families, made a series of counteroffers, rising in small increments, closely following AKE’s advice. Every move was meant to slowly fold our captors into a deal. Chase thought the matter could be settled for about half a million dollars. On August 2, my mother told Adam they could pay $281,000. By the end of the month, she was offering $434,000.
None of it was good enough. Adam dug in. The phone calls grew heated. He suggested that I must not be my mother’s biological child, since she cared so little about me. Fed up with his unwillingness to drop the ransom demand even slightly, my mother at one point accused him of “playing games.”
This ratcheted up Adam’s temper even higher. And led to a threat. “I am playing a game?” he said with blistering scorn. “You should see my game.”
*
With the start of another Ramadan late in August, I had let my defenses down. It was the holy month, a time of restraint. Sexual activity was forbidden during daylight hours, which helped me feel safer. Through my windows, I could hear nasheeds playing over the mosque loudspeaker.
Romeo had left for a while, not saying where he was going. The boys’ moods seemed to lighten a little. Skids had received some money and bought everyone new sandals. We were eating better—abstaining from food from dawn until sunset but then rewarded with fresh, sweet dates to break the fast. A couple of the boys would go to the market late in the afternoon and buy a sticky mound of them, delivering a few to me at dusk, wrapped in a piece of an English-language paper printed in Dubai called the Khaleej Times. Back when I’d been trying to freelance as a journalist, I’d pitched stories to an editor there. Now I read whatever small scrap lay beneath my dates, looking for any piece of news I could find. I saw stock market listings and, at one point, a short item from Canada—a story about how rabbits were overpopulating on the University of Victoria campus.
With the extra money, Jamal and Hassam had the supplies to prepare an evening meal, usually a dish of red beans and rice that they called ambola. They’d cook it all afternoon and serve it after the sunset prayer, topped with heaps of white sugar and salt for extra taste.
“You like?” Jamal would say, watching me eat, hoping for a compliment. “Is good?”
At night, the boys were busy running through extra sets of prayers, called taraweeh, or “rest prayers.” I’d read about them in the hadith. Nighttime prayers during Ramadan helped Allah forgive a person his or her sins.
One day things shifted abruptly. Three of the boys—Abdullah, Mohammed, Jamal—came into my room, looking grave. Abdullah barked an order, telling me to stand up. They were all business, avoiding eye contact with me.
They had me walk to the middle of the room and lie facedown, my forehead pressed against the concrete floor. Abdullah lifted the blue-flowered sheet from my mat. Standing over me, he used the sheet to tie my wrists behind my back. A minute later, he adjusted it, loosening and sliding the sheet so that it sat at my elbows, then yanked it tight again. My shoulders pulled painfully off the floor. My pulse raced, my m
ind careening toward panic. What was happening?
I could hear the boys conferring above me in Somali, sounding as if they were debating something. After a minute, they untied me and waved me back toward my mat, continuing their discussion all the while, as if I weren’t present. Sweating, I lay back down. Mohammed was pointing at a couple of pieces of rebar that protruded from a high spot on the wall, as if maybe they could hang something from them. Jamal twisted and tugged at my blue sheet, testing its strength. The three of them inspected everything in the room carefully, methodically. Without another glance in my direction, they left.
I lay on my mat, knowing that something terrible was coming.
I waited all day and the next.
The following evening, they came back after sunset, after the fast was broken and dinner served. It was Mohammed and Abdullah this time. They closed the door behind them. Mohammed carried a bedsheet, a pale shade of yellow. It had been twisted up like a rope. He dropped it on the floor.
I sat up on my mat. “Is everything okay?” I said. All I could see was that twisted sheet.
Abdullah said, “Stand up.”
I got to my feet very slowly, the chains clicking between my ankles. I looked at their faces and saw nothing there, just blankness. My mind started leaping along with my heart, ferreting for an escape. “I haven’t prayed yet,” I heard myself say. “I need to wash.”
The boys looked at each other. They could never argue with Islam. “Quickly,” Abdullah said.
Shuffling to the bathroom, I noticed that they’d closed the door to Nigel’s room.
Once inside, I stood at the open window, watching the buzzy pink light of the mosque in the distance, trying to steel myself against whatever was coming. The night was inky, starless. I could feel a low breeze. The dread I felt was primitive, animals racing for the hills, an ancient bell tolling loudly for the village to evacuate. They were going to hurt me, I knew. Gather your strength, I told myself. You need to be strong.
Abdullah and Mohammed waited outside the bathroom. They followed me back to my room, closed the door, and then sat against the wall as I prayed. I ran through the cycles of prayer as slowly and precisely as I could, hoping to lodge some reminder that I was like them. Finishing the last raka’ah, I commenced the silent prayer, one of the add-ons to regular prayers, in which you praised Allah a hundred times in your head. I was sliding a different set of words through my mind, as slowly as I possibly could. Be strong, be strong, be strong, be strong. I repeated it a hundred times over.
When I was done, when all my options for stalling had been used up, I stood and turned to face the boys. Abdullah told me to lie on the floor, on my stomach, as I had two days earlier. With the yellow sheet, he bound my arms together just above the elbows and below my biceps. My shoulders and chest pulled up awkwardly, and I felt them jerk back even more. My whole torso arched. My feet were being pulled upward, too, behind my back, in the direction of my bound arms. I felt cloth winding around my ankles and, suddenly, a connected tension. I understood then what they had done: My hands and feet were roped together, pulling in opposite directions. I was immobilized. My body had been drawn into a taut bow. My muscles immediately started to scream. Mohammed tugged off my head scarf and refitted it as a blindfold over my eyes, yanking it tight. My eyeballs instantly throbbed, the nerves behind them stabbed with pain. I saw white light. My head felt like it would pop.
I was trussed like an animal. My panic was immediate. I couldn’t last a minute this way. I couldn’t last even a second. I couldn’t form a thought beyond the pain of that position, my back straining from neck to tailbone. The twisted sheet dug into my arms and ankles, cutting off circulation. My lungs felt compressed. I struggled to breathe, gagging as if someone were pouring sand down my throat. “It’s too tight,” I shouted, my voice raspy and alien. “It’s too tight!”
At some point, the boys left the room. Neither had uttered a word the whole time.
*
What did they think about, the whole group of them, sitting outside my door during those first minutes, those first hours? Did they talk? Did they laugh? I’d never know.
I was lost to everyone, drilled down into some underground place, trying to lift imaginary boulders, trying to pull up enough energy to get me through. Pain tore through my shoulders and back, searing the length of my spine. My neck bent toward the floor, my head unable to reach it and take away some of the strain. My thoughts warred: I can’t bear this. You have to hang on.
At one point, in the dark of night, I heard the door open, some footsteps.
I tried to form words, but they came out a strangled moan. I begged at the darkness, at whoever was there, to untie me.
Something landed roughly on the small of my back, causing my muscles to seize up further. It was a foot. Whoever it was, he was tugging at the sheet, using his bare foot for leverage. I felt a new tension in my shoulders, my thighs lifting higher off the ground. He’d only come in to tighten the knots.
By morning, I’d peed myself, having tried to hold it back as long as I could. I heard voices in the room. I knew they could smell the urine. Maybe they could see a puddle of it seeping from beneath my dress. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but at first they sounded offended. Then somebody was laughing. I felt sure they were making jokes about who would have to clean it up.
More hours passed. I lay awake and fully alert, my body stuck with hot pins. I tracked the calls of the muezzin, intoning in his minor key. Units of time had unfastened themselves from wherever they normally lived and were floating around me, big and small. I’d undergone another adjustment with the bindings: Someone had entered the room and wrapped what seemed to be a scarf around my neck, tying its ends into the sheet that kept my arms and legs in place, so that any time my head started to sag, the tension on the scarf caused me to choke. They’ve studied this, I thought. They’ve consulted some manual on how to make a person suffer.
I’d coached myself through a full year of captivity by breaking time into survivable pieces, telling myself to try to make it to the next day. When a day felt too big, I told myself to make it to the next prayer session or the next hour. Now, lost in the cacophony of my mind, I worked only to get myself to the next breath.
The pain in my body had begun to blend, engulfing me like a swirling, pulsating star. Elbows, back, neck, knees—they’d lost all their distinction. I felt the pain every second. I was never unaware of it.
But something else was happening, too. Some little compartment had hinged open in my mind, like a perch. If I steadied myself enough, I could rest there. I could observe the pain more calmly. I still felt it, but I could feel it without needing to thrash, without feeling like I was drowning in it. When I didn’t thrash, the time floated by a little more easily. Though I’d figured out how to balance on that perch, it was only for a few minutes at a time. The hurt in my body always wrenched me back, setting my brain screaming again.
Every so often a voice cut into my thoughts—the same calming voice that always seemed to offer counsel, telling me I would be okay. This time, though I heard it, I couldn’t believe it. I was wishing my captors would kill me so the pain would leave.
Jamal came in at one point and removed my blindfold and the scarf that had been holding my neck. The light flooded my eyes. I begged him to help me, but he only looked at me coldly.
“I am sorry,” he said finally, his voice sounding flat. It seemed clear that he was not apologizing for himself. He was sorry I’d ended up in this situation, and that was it.
*
They came and went. They fussed with the ropes. They put the blindfold on and then took it off. When I screamed for help, they shoved a sock in my mouth, forcing me to breathe through my nose. I must have lost consciousness, because I woke to find Skids, on his hands and knees before me, peering intently at my face—checking to see if I was alive. Twice on that second day, they rolled me over onto my back, on top of my tied arms and legs, which caused my blood to flow
into all the parts of me that had gone dead. The sensation was excruciating, a blast of stippling circulation, but it gave my limbs moments of relief. Each time, though, when they returned me to the stomach-down position, the pain felt worse than ever.
The calm voice tried to say things, but I argued with it now.
Breathe, it said.
I can’t.
You’re going to be okay.
I’m not. I’m going to die.
You won’t die. Keep breathing.
I’m dying.
No, you’re not.
It was afternoon again. Or that was my best guess. Mohammed and Abdullah came in and kicked at my ribs as I yowled into the sock. I floundered in the riptide of my own panic, my mind going limp with exhaustion. I knew I would die in that room. The pain was vivid to the point of being electric, electric to the point of being like lightning on water. I couldn’t get away from it.
Then I felt a force whip through me like a strong gust of wind. It was like being seized by something, snatched, pulled upward. The pain was gone. I felt a bizarre, disembodied relief. Nothing at all hurt. I’d become unhitched, like a blown bit of dandelion drifting on a pillar of air. I was an observer, purely an observer, a self without a body. Maybe I’d died. I wasn’t sure. I was high up in one corner, looking down at what was below.
From above, I could see two men and a woman on the ground. The woman was tied up like an animal, and the men were hurting her, landing blows on her body. I knew all of them, but I also didn’t. I recognized myself down there, but I felt no more connected to the woman than to the men in the room. I’d slipped across some threshold I would never understand. The feeling was both deeply peaceful and deeply sad.
What I saw was three people suffering, the tortured and the torturers alike.
*
Late on the third day, about forty-eight hours after it began, they untied me. I don’t know who undid the knots or whether anything was said. I slumped forward onto the floor. The blindfold was pulled off. The gag came out of my mouth. Someone rolled me over. They picked me up by my arms and legs and tossed me heavily onto my mat. The sun had set and the house had gone dark. I could see Mohammed kicking me again and again, but I couldn’t feel it. They were yelling things at me. I squinted at them through bleary eyes. The words seemed to pour from their mouths in slow motion. I could feel myself drenched in sweat. My arms lay like dead things on either side of me.
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 35
