Jamal loomed overhead. He was holding a bottle. I opened my mouth, and a curve of clear water arced toward it. Jamal poured half the bottle down my throat, the stream causing me to sputter and choke and to lift myself into a sitting position. Jamal was thrusting something new at me—a paper and pen. “Take, take,” he was saying. They wanted me to write something down. My fingers couldn’t grasp the pen. My hands were useless. I could see in the light of the boys’ flashlights that they were a sickening shade of gray.
Abdullah was dictating notes for a phone call. “Today everything is changed. You tell your mum. Everything is changed.” I couldn’t take in what they wanted me to say. I was in too much pain.
I could hear the squawking of a phone on speaker being carried into the room. Skids held it to my face. Mohammed kicked one of my dead legs. The line crackled and spat, but my mother was on the other end.
“Amanda? Hello? Hello? Hello?” she said.
“Mummy.”
“Amanda . . .”
“Mummy,” I said, my head too drained to muster anything else, my need for her keener than it had ever been. “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy . . . Mummy . . . Mummy . . . Mummy . . . please.”
42
The Bird
In the end, I said most of what they wanted me to say to my mother, though it was an effort just to form words. I said, as they had told me to, “Everything has changed,” and I meant it. I told her I had been tied up and tortured. I told her I couldn’t handle even one more day.
She told me they’d offered Adam half a million dollars, but he wouldn’t take it.
Both of us wept the whole time on the phone. It felt like a farewell.
When the call was over, Skids and the boys filed out of my room, leaving me alone on the mat with a half-empty bottle of water. Just before exiting, Abdullah looked back at me. “Tomorrow we do to you again,” he said. “Every day until your mother pay money, we do to you.”
He left the room. The words fell like concrete blocks. This wasn’t the end of the torture. It was just a reprieve.
They were going to come back and do it all over again.
A blackness edged over me. I understood then what it means to feel hopeless. To despair. To feel no trace of faith in anything. They were going to tie me up again.
I lay rigid on the mat as the blood flowed back into my joints with a rotoring intensity. My mind stayed stuck on one thing: It was going to happen again. They would keep going. They would push and push at this impossible idea that our families had millions of dollars to pay. They would push for an eternity, because to them, time didn’t matter. Time on earth was just time spent waiting for a chance at paradise.
They had figured out how to destroy me without totally extinguishing me. They’d keep me alive till they got their cash.
I heard a sound rise out of my lungs, a long keening sob, more animal than human.
Was this my life? It was.
I was done.
It would be better to die.
This was the calmest thought I’d had in a long time.
*
My razor, the straightedge my captors had given me months earlier to shave my pubic hair, had gone rusty in the humidity, its blade spittled with orange. But it could cut. I knew that because I still used it. I kept the blade tucked in its paper sheath among my toiletries, the little fortress of bottles I’d lined up next to my mat. With some pressure on the razor, I was sure I could slice open my wrists.
In the dark, I lay waiting for the sensation to come back to my hands. I curled and uncurled my fingers, feeling their function slowly return. I planned how it would go. I figured all I needed to do was jab myself hard and then rip the blade through the vein, right side first and then left. I guessed it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, beginning to end. With some satisfaction, I imagined the boys coming in and finding me half alive, but not being able to save me. It gave me pleasure to think I could watch them lose their fortune as I died.
I decided I’d wait until the early morning to do it.
I had spent hours, many hours, in the last year being hard on myself. I’d chastised myself for the life I’d led, for all the self-indulgent things I’d done. I’d berated myself for having run stupidly into Somalia, for having empty ambitions, for believing I was invincible. I’d been mad at myself for never telling my mother that I forgave her for the ugliness of my childhood. I’d regretted the years I’d spent hating my body, starving it to stay thin. I’d wanted another chance to do all of it better, but now I accepted that it wouldn’t come.
With that acceptance, I felt something different, soothing. A peace, a receding of my regrets, a low tide sliding back to leave a skirt of glittering beach.
Had I lived a life? I had. Had I seen the world? I had. I’d done things. I’d loved people. I’d seen beauty. I’d been fortunate. I was grateful.
By the time the first thin light slipped through the cracks in my shutters, I had thought, person by person, through my family and my friends, through everyone I would miss when I was dead. I felt saddest about Nigel, for leaving him alone there in Somalia. In my mind, I’d asked forgiveness, his and everyone’s, for not trying to live longer. I’d sent love and hoped that somehow it would translate from my place on the mat, up over oceans and continents, to where each of them was. I’d cried a little, but I also felt ready. It was time.
What I wanted was to die quickly. I could hear, beyond my doorway, the sound of the boys sleeping out in the reception area—the occasional unconscious snort or sigh. The muezzin, I knew, was probably lifting himself from bed now, trundling through the dark toward the mosque with its pink neon to make his first call of the morning. Mornings, for me, had always been the most difficult, the drowsy moment when dream sorted itself from fact, when I woke just enough to realize the chains around my ankles. Sometimes I touched them to confirm that they were real.
I reached for the razor, and once it was in my hand, I lay back down, waiting another minute to make the first cut.
This is it, I thought.
But before I made a move, I felt a curious warm sensation spreading from the top of my head down through my body, like a liquid being poured into me. It relaxed me completely, making me feel as if I were melting into the mat. I didn’t feel any pain. I felt like I was pooling into something larger, connecting to a new source of strength. Images flashed through my mind—beaches, mountaintops, the street I lived on with my mom and dad for the first six years of my life—almost as if I were being taken on a rapid-fire trip. Its clarity was piercing. I longed to see it all again, to be a part of it.
Something moved in the doorway. The early sun at a window in the reception area had washed a pale square of daylight onto the floor of my otherwise dark room. In the middle of it was a small brown bird, something like a sparrow, hopping back and forth on the dirty floor, cocking its head and pecking at the ground. The bird looked up, seeming to study the room and me in it. A moment later, it lifted off the ground and, in a flurry of feathers, was gone—flying through the door, back into the reception area, out toward the sky.
I hadn’t seen a bird in nearly a year. I’d always believed in signs—in charms and talismans, in messengers and omens and angels—and now, when it most mattered, I’d had one.
I would live and go home. It didn’t matter what came next or what I had to endure. I would make it through. I believed it with a sureness I hadn’t felt since the beginning.
43
A Notebook and a Promise
Ramadan finished. Our captors slaughtered a goat, ate it, and moved us again, to a house far out in the country, away from Kismayo and the coastline, somewhere back toward Mogadishu. Bush House, I called it. The house had a big sandy yard with two broken trucks rusting in one corner and a high stone wall that surrounded the whole place. A row of ragged trees grew on the other side.
Skids and the boys had not come back to tie me up the next day. The abrasions around my elbows and ankles slowly began to heal. A few days
after I’d been untied, Skids had tossed a plastic bag into my room. Inside the bag were two new dresses, folded neatly, made of thin cotton, in bright floral prints. They were a gift, an acknowledgment that I’d suffered.
I sensed a lingering guilt among my captors over what had happened. Hassam and Jamal avoided me completely for several days. The others focused on the new dresses—asking me to try them on, complimenting me when I did, telling me I looked like a Somali woman. In truth, the fabric was too thin to feel comfortable. I felt exposed in the dresses and never wore them for long, sticking instead to the heavy red dress I’d worn for so long. Abdullah showed up in my room one day and gave me a small plastic tub of perfumed body lotion, telling me proudly that he’d paid for it himself. “From Germany,” he said. It seemed his way of appeasing his own guilt. I opened the tub and sniffed it but never once put it on my body.
Romeo had not been present in the house during the days I was tied up. When I told him what had happened, he pretended to be surprised, but I could tell from his expression that he was fully aware. It was possible, even, that he’d been the one to issue the order. As the weeks passed, he’d grown increasingly morose. Allah, it turned out, had not wanted him to go to graduate school in New York after all. His departure date came and went with no money surfacing for a plane ticket. His fate was to stay with me and Nigel and the boys and Skids, to keep waiting.
We spent about six weeks in the Bush House, long enough that, through the bathroom window, I watched a sea of green wheat sprout and grow tall in the backyard, swallowing up the two trucks. It was raining again, the start of another season.
Romeo threw himself into teaching me to recite the Koran. He brought me Nigel’s copy to study, leaving it with me overnight. Beginning from the back of the book, where the chapters were shorter, I learned the verses, usually five or six lines at a stretch, slowly working my way into longer passages, until I could chant thirty lines at a time in halting Arabic. I followed along with the English, trying to make sense of what I recited. Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his light is as if there were a niche and within it a lamp: the lamp enclosed in glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star . . .
Sometimes Romeo laughed at my pronunciation. Every so often, he’d slap me if I got something wrong. But once in a while I’d hit some benchmark and make him proud.
He’d summon the boys into my room so that I could chant for them, not unlike a prize canary. “You see?” Romeo would say to the boys, as if proving a point. “Amina is a good Muslim woman.”
This always seemed to be the debate.
The Koran was traveling regularly from Nigel’s room to mine and back, along with a hardcover book of hadith. I was allowed to sit up on my mat while reading them. When Romeo wasn’t around, Hassam came and gave me my lessons. He seemed contrite over what had happened and went out of his way to check on me, bringing me tablets of ibuprofen and stealing back to my room once in a while with an extra cup of tea. He also allowed me to have a couple of the books that had come months earlier in the care package, sneaking them to me for a few hours at a time. To help with my Koranic studies, he brought me a pen, a pencil, and a thin unlined notebook with mint-green covers, the UNICEF logo emblazoned on the front.
Catching sight of the notebook one afternoon, Abdullah tore it out of my hands and waved it in my face. “Do you know what this is?” he said in a seething voice. He was pointing at the logo—a mother in profile, holding a young child against the backdrop of a globe.
I said, “UNICEF?”
His finger moved from mother to child. He looked at me emphatically. “Very bad.”
He carried the notebook off, leaving me despondent. So far, I’d used it only to write down a few questions I wanted to ask Romeo or Hassam about the Koran, but it had mattered to me—the milk white of those pages, the freedom of making even a simple query visible in ink. About twenty minutes later, Abdullah returned, throwing the notebook onto the floor with disdain. He’d taken a marker and scribbled big black slashes over mother and child, abiding by the Prophet’s rule that living beings were not to be displayed in artwork. Now it was okay to use.
I spent hours staring at that notebook, daring myself to record a real thought in it, worried that Romeo—the only one who could read English—would ask to see it.
In the meantime, I noticed that Nigel had used a pencil to underline some of the English verses in his Koran. On a blank page at the end of the book, he kept notes—a simple list of page numbers, marking verses I assumed he wanted to revisit. What he’d underlined concerned captives and laws about behavior. It seemed that Nigel, like me, had been using the Koran to argue for better treatment.
I decided to try something. I paged through the book, skimming the English, looking for individual words with which to make a message. When I found one, I’d underline the whole passage surrounding it lightly in pencil, but under the word I wanted him to notice, I’d make a firmer, more distinct line, almost as if drawing an arrow to it. I picked one word, then another, then another, and then, at the back of the book, next to Nigel’s notes, I wrote down an ordered list of the page numbers on which they could be found. Later that afternoon, I told Hassam I was finished studying the Koran for the day. I watched him scuttle out the door with the book, trusting that he would bring it to Nigel.
The message I’d sent went like this: I / love / you / my / mother / says / they / have / half / million.
The next day, when the Koran came back to me, I waited until I was alone and then flipped to the end of the book. Nigel had jotted down a new string of page numbers. My heart leaping, I whipped through the corresponding pages, hunting for the references.
He’d understood the code and responded: I / want / home / I / despise / men.
*
During the weeks we spent in the Bush House, we were getting mixed signals about what was going on at home, whether any progress was being made. Nigel and I had been allowed a few quick, scripted phone calls. I’d overheard parts of one conversation Nigel had with his sister Nicky on speakerphone, in which she told him the family had sold two houses and a couple of cars.
One day Romeo came into my room, trailed by all the boys. He said, “There is one chance. Your mother has five hundred thousand dollars, and if she pays tomorrow, we accept that.” He added, “She can pay for you only, not Nigel. His family has money, and she is poor. But she decides today if she will save you.”
Moments later, his phone rang—a call being patched in from Adam, with my mother on the line. “Make her understand you have only this chance,” Romeo said. He gestured toward the boys, standing tall with their guns, and shrugged. “After this, I cannot say what they will do to you.”
With Romeo holding the phone in front of my face, I repeated his message. I begged my mother to get me out, even if it meant me alone. It crushed me to say the words. I knew Nigel would be able to hear some of the conversation. I hoped he’d understand that this was just another manipulation: Romeo was trying to assess how much money my family had. But my mother was resolute. The families were working together, she said. They had five hundred thousand dollars for both of us. There was nothing more they could offer.
Romeo then left the house, replaced for a few days by Ahmed, who arrived in his car, clean-shaven and in city clothes, a polo shirt and pressed pants. He brought a new proof-of-life question for me—What is your father’s favorite color?—and did not hide his disgust at the squalor in which we were all living. Seeing that my feet were swollen and scabbed from mosquito bites, he ordered the boys to hang my mosquito net over my mat. I’d had it in my belongings all along but hadn’t been allowed to use it since the time we’d escaped, nine months earlier.
It was less an act of goodwill on Ahmed’s part and more, I figured, added insurance that I wouldn’t get sick and die on him: Skids had fallen ill with malaria and spent his days curled in a ball on the floor. In order to reach the bathroom, I had to pass by where he lay, writhing
in fever on the floor in the main room of the house. He looked hunched and craven, his bald head gleaming with sweat. I hoped he would die.
“Hunter green,” I said to Ahmed. My father’s favorite color.
I asked if he could give me an update on the negotiations, whether we would go home soon. Ahmed shook his head vigorously and delivered some chilling news. The group, he said, had given up on reaching an agreement with our families and was working instead to strike a deal to sell us to Al-Shabaab. Shabaab would then sell us back to our families.
He passed me a few pages of paper and a pen and ordered me to write out a statement for him, something he referred to as “the Promise.” In it, I was to declare that wherever I ended up, I would adhere to the tenets of Islam and promote the faith. If I were freed, I needed to find a way to send him half a million dollars for jihad. He wanted me to put into writing exactly how I’d raise the money. I thought about it a minute and then wrote down that I’d start a jihadi website for profit and write a book that promoted Islam for women. Knowing how he loved documents, I used as much official-sounding language as I could, dropping in words like “hereby” and “herewith,” in case that would help tip the balance toward our release.
At the bottom, I put a signature: Amina Lindhout.
Ahmed looked the whole thing over and told me it was good. Before leaving, he said, “Inshallah, your situation will be better soon.”
I didn’t believe him for a second. If they struck a deal with Shabaab, it would not be better. I felt sure, in fact, that things were about to get worse.
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 36
