B009G3EPMQ EBOK (12 page)

But if not him,
who
was making all these decisions?

Somebody had a substantial vested interest here, and these squabbling, prancing morons didn’t seem like they could organize a decent picnic. Did they even know who pulled their strings?

I had to wonder:
Did I just happen to get picked up along with Poul, or was my kidnapping also intentional?
Because even though I only recognized a few words of their dialect, I kept hearing the term
“Amer-ee-cahn”
over and over while the men pointed toward me. Some appeared to be nervous and unhappy at the sight of me.
Great. So if I’m a fly in the ointment for them, the question is: Are they afraid an American will draw the ire of the U.S. military?

And will they feel safer if they just kill me or sell me off to other criminals, or worse yet, to Al-Shabaab?

For an instant I also wondered whether I might get released just so they could reduce their risk. But that thought felt like the empty hope it was. I let it go.

They kept us silent, as if afraid we might come up with an escape plan if allowed to communicate. They were probably right about that, but even with the clarity of hindsight I can’t imagine how we would have pulled it off. I think the forced silence was mainly directed at us as another mechanism of control by domination. They knew we hated being isolated, so of course that’s what they did. This kept us sealed off from the outside and from one another as the two victims.

We remained at our next stopover point for several days, a spot the men called the “Banda place.” It was essentially a large thatched roof mounted on tall poles. We were permitted under the roof’s shelter in the daytime. That was notable because it was the only time we weren’t kept under the scraggly tree branches during daylight hours.

Here, too, they marched us down near an abandoned goat pen and once again made us sleep out in the open air. I could never see any point to it, but they were adamant. No matter how the day was going otherwise, as soon as darkness fell they wanted us clear of all structures, whether natural or human, and out under the open sky.

Abdi was the camp sergeant, I guess. He acted as the point man in the rare moments when something needed to get done. Nevertheless, his green teeth revealed a man who loved his
khat
leaves at least as much as the other enthusiasts. Thus the even-handed logic necessary for competent command was a slippery concept for him. He could chew through an entire kilo of the tender shoots in
a single day. Protocol itself was all the more tiresome to a hyperventilated brain.

As long as Abdi had plenty to chew, he loved to talk. Listening wasn’t Abdi’s strong suit, but under the stimulant effect of a cheek full of
khat,
he could run his mouth nonstop while keeping his hands busy puffing on cigarettes and sucking down quantities of Coca-Cola.

Communication, it turned out, wasn’t always desirable. Abdi’s command of English allowed him to make the depths of his lunacy clear. They revealed a cauldron of rage.

His face was pocked by acne and his voice perpetually hoarse from shouting from within his constant state of tension. His mood swings were like nothing I had ever seen, cycling from chattiness to confrontational anger. He appeared to suffer from a massive bipolar disorder. I quickly came to regret being able to understand him, and instead longed for the pleasantly meaningless babble of an unfamiliar language.

He enjoyed discussing philosophy for as long as the
khat
supply held out, and when he got wound up tightly enough he felt compelled to offer words of wisdom. Sometimes he liked to riddle us with philosophical questions and then stare through us while we tried to answer. His eyes were completely empty, focused on some unseen faraway point while the imagination raged under the stimulant effect after chewing so long and so hard. It’s the common link between
khat
users: eyes empty of warmth but present in a vaguely malicious anger.

In their laughter there was even a specific sound to the
khat
high with these men.
Khat
laughter: a frequent, nearly constant chuckling, done with an inflection to the sound that effectively portrays sneering and mockery. If it’s coming from you, a nasal-sounding cackle will start up when your brain waves hit a certain frequency. You will then maintain that frequency until the
khat
runs out, or exhaustion claims you and you have to flop over and sleep like the dead—and then get up and do it again.

The cackling is a constant declaration of cleverness and an expression of the
khat
-generated sensation of “victory” over anyone else, everyone else, over all of it. An attacker can beat that
khat
user down with a billy club, and he’ll still go right on cackling over how many opportunities to inflict further damage the attacker missed, thus proving the
khat
user to be the more clever of the two.

One moment Abdi would be on the phone screaming orders about the daily delivery of
khat
leaves for all the men to chew, demanding more cigarettes to help fill his boredom, or haranguing someone on the other end to refill our supplies of canned tuna and biscuits. With the next intake of breath, Abdi could become curiously peaceful. In his calmer state he reverted to his philosopher role, with a series of questions he liked to pose to us. One of his favorites was, “Which are the four directions of the earth?” After the first few fruitless arguments about the correct answer, we learned to respond the same way each time.

“Well, Abdi, there are four directions: north, south, east, and west.”

He would then nod in approval, his worldview validated once more, and perhaps yank another leaf or two from a leftover stem. It’s amusing now, but wasn’t then, that Abdi wanted nothing to do with the concept of secondary directions: southeast, northwest, and so forth. And the finer distinctions such as north-northeast, south-southwest? Forget about it. He seemed to find the very notions tiresome and nonsensical. In his world, there were four directions. Abdi didn’t need any foreigners coming around to muck up his sense of cosmic order.

Early one morning, he offered up his most noteworthy moral precept, one I would often hear him repeat. “Jesses and Poul?” he began. For some reason he insisted on pronouncing my
name “Jesses.” Since he was the one who spoke English, the other men copied it.

“Yes, Abdi?” we responded with the exaggerated politeness that worked best in speaking to these men.

Abdi gave a smile of triumph and flashed his mossy greens. He pronounced the words with a knowing nod. “Every dog has its day.”

Sometimes Poul felt the need to counter with a question of his own, but I was happy to agree. “Yes, Abdi, you’re right. Every dog has its day,” to which I silently added,
And we can only hope yours is coming soon.

Abdi, it seemed, considered us his long-overdue payoff after his years of poverty. Even though my compassion for his people had brought me to this country, I had to differ with his rationale. In my eyes, when it came to matters of karma, Abdi was stacking up a mountain of consequences. I would have gladly handed him the bill. No matter how hard his life was, regardless of what he’d endured, he crossed the line when he made his rage the problem of people who were only available for capture because they were there to help ease his people’s misery.

By the end of the third day, I began to menstruate, so that was that. My reaction came in waves of disappointment and relief. As much as Erik and I wanted a child, under these explosive conditions I was in no position to be ushering in a new life. I was relieved to have packed tampons in my small bag, just in case.

But I opened the bag to find that the guards had gone through everything and taken my jewelry. They also took my tampons, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. So I had to be inventive and tore my tank top into strips to use as sanitary pads. When I ran out of the strips, I then tore strips from the scarf they gave me. The combination of using dirty pieces of cloth and being prevented from washing regularly only heightened my anxiety over the unsanitary condition they were keeping us in and our fear of what it was doing to our bodies.

Still, now that events had caught up with the story, it was a bit less painful to think of having already told Erik I wasn’t pregnant. It left me in the slightly better position of only going hungry for one instead of two. My task remained that of surviving through any combination of ways that might get me back to Erik, back to the joyful experience of starting our family.

So I prayed for protection and for strength. Beyond those silent requests, I could only hope Abdi was right in ways he couldn’t begin to imagine: that every dog would indeed have its day.

From the time Erik first got back to the their house in Hargeisa after Jessica’s abduction, their dog, Smulan, seemed to realize Jessica was in jeopardy. The dog had a special bond with both of them, instinctively grateful after being rescued from the streets, matted and starved—Smulan means “crumble” in Swedish, in reference to the dog’s initial appearance. Now upon Erik’s return, Smulan’s usual independent behavior changed to that of a worried dog, scurrying around close at his side.

Or maybe it was just his reaction to Erik’s condition. One of the security guards kept at the house by the NGO had been a fan of Jessica’s ever since her arrival there. He took one look at Erik and hugged him, angry tears in his eyes, and repeated over and over, “Sister Jess! F***ing Hawiye!” He spat out the name of the main clan ruling the area where Jess was said to be held.

His distress appeared genuine to Erik, but here again was a third party who knew details that were supposed to be kept quiet. The man was informing Erik of the name of the principal clan with members suspected to be behind the crime, something shared with Erik by the FBI in confidence. It made him wonder if he should go ask the dog if he had any details he might want to share.

In public, it was dangerously inflammatory for Erik to hold a
specific clan responsible for capturing a female aid worker who was only doing politically neutral work. It carried the prospect of inserting ancient tribal rivalries and disputes into this situation and rendering it into something complex beyond sorting.

The flow of information to the public remained difficult to control, and not all of it was bad. Erik was contacted by people of Christian, Muslim, and Hindu backgrounds. Nonbelievers expressed their concern, while everyone else spoke of praying for Jessica and for her safety. Some mentioned actively forming prayer groups on her behalf as well. Given Erik’s fear that Jessica would fall into the hands of Al-Shabaab, it was a beautiful and compelling indication of the difference between people who live their faith and murderers who hide behind it.

By the fourth day, he began to feel his anger getting to him. Every ring of the phone could have been news about Jess, leading to a spike of disappointment when the caller ID indicated something else.

In spite of the news blackout, calls came from people offering to “help,” but they clearly just wanted to inject themselves into the case. In truth there was no way anyone could offer genuine help until Erik found out whether they would get the chance to negotiate her return.

It sometimes helped him to write out his thoughts, so from the beginning he began writing to Jessica each day. It was a process he decided to keep up from then on, in a combination of journaling and love letters. It felt better to have some feeling of communication with her, at least a private place to put the torrent of emotions.

Jess, for some reason it feels good to cry and write to you. I imagine that you can see what I write and that you are doing the same thing, maybe not on paper but in your head. I just love you so much. You have to come back to me so I can show you all the wonderful things in life that we stupidly put on hold
 . . .

His imagination was his worst enemy during those early days
and nights, as it is for anyone who waits in fear and concern for word of a disappeared loved one. He tried not to picture the terrible things he already knew about the fates of some of the region’s captives, as if merely thinking the thoughts might somehow give them power to manifest for Jessica. He had never been a superstitious person, but the possibility of somehow causing a negative outcome with nothing more than the wrong thoughts suddenly felt real to him.

He wondered if that was a form of guilt for letting her take the trip. The weight of anything he might do
or fail to do
to gain her freedom suddenly loomed in every direction. There was no escaping the images of all the terrible possibilities that lay ahead for Jessica and everyone who existed along the chain of love for her. And as terrible as Erik knew it was for all of them, he was especially concerned for John Buchanan after the fairly recent loss of his wife. She had been the love of his life from the time they were childhood sweethearts. How could he possibly endure the loss of his daughter Jessica now?

Erik looked around to see how others handled this terrible stress. In dealing with John it was clear that the depth of his spiritual faith held him up like a better set of bones. John Buchanan reeled from the blow, but right away his internal gyroscope ramped up and began to spin. It appeared to Erik that the man was stabilized by the internal workings of his faith.

Seeing this quality in Jessica’s father made John Buchanan precious to Erik in a way he hadn’t felt or thought about until then. He realized he was now an intimate witness to the active spiritual life of this family. He felt convinced that anyone with an open heart would be touched to see John remain rational, strong, and purposeful, in spite of the terrible potential loss confronting him.

It made no difference that Erik had grown up so differently from Jessica and her family; those differences affected only the language used to interpret living. He saw that this man had raised
the girl with whom Erik had cast his lot in this life. John Buchanan had helped mold the essence of Jessica’s personality into something so fine Erik could no longer picture living without it. He was surprised to find that he was not only willing to take on Jessica’s fear or pain, he would have gladly taken her father’s as well. To Erik, John lived out the phrase “grace under pressure” while all of them hung by the hands of the clock.