Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  “You have to concentrate more when you don’t have your eyes,” I offered.

  “Yes. Vision is a distraction,” Hussein agreed, and with that, he closed his eyes.

  For Hussein it was a question of retreating backward to where he had lost his way; for me it was a question of moving on from the loss of my parents. I suppose we met somewhere in the middle. Took each other by the hand and stepped forward into a life of prayer and learning and companionship.

  My Qur’anic study with the Great Abdal was supplemented by monthly visits from Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. He would bring me volumes from the library he slowly dismantled over the years. He was rather peculiar and certainly very pompous, but I adored him. “For your edification, mademoiselle,” he would announce, bowing dramatically and presenting me with a new stack.

  Muhammed Bruce told me stories about Bilal al Habash’s home-land, where he boasted having long-standing connections. He was particularly proud of his association with a man named Sir Richard Burton. He claimed the famous British explorer, who had been the first European to visit the city of Harar, was his great-great-uncle. Muhammed Bruce also knew the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, the King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. He told me they’d played polo together.

  Ours was a rich and good life in a small and peaceful place, a self-contained universe hooked up to its own generator. But after seven years of devotion—measuring the weight of every word, savoring the hard edges, feeling them dissolve in my mouth as I stood, as I kneeled, as I pressed my forehead to the ground—the insularity of our bubble burst.

  In the late 1960s, a new king came to power. He felt the shrines and brotherhoods had grown too powerful; they were a challenge to the way he wanted to govern now that the French had let go of the reins. The king’s army soon broke down the doors of the shrine in the nearby town of Tamegroute, sending its brothers into flight. Some of them landed on our doorstep, seeking protection from the Great Abdal.

  He worried our shrine would be next, since we received funds from the brotherhood in Tamegroute for taking in the local poor. We were dependent to a large extent upon them, just as they were dependent upon a larger brotherhood in the north, the leader of which had unfortunately tried to assassinate the king. Our beloved sheikh suggested that perhaps it was time for Hussein and me to make the journey to Harar. And then suggestion became insistence. Suddenly it became now rather than when, hijrah as well as hajj: as much a flight as a pilgrimage. He would follow with the rest of the Sufis, he promised, if the situation necessitated it.

  So in February of 1969, Qur’an in hand, and a letter of introduction from Muhammed Bruce to the emperor of Ethiopia (signed “Your supplicant, Your servant”), our hajj and hijrah began. The Great Abdal drained the coffers in order to send us across the Sahara in search of refuge in Ethiopia, just as the Prophet had sent his family and followers to what was then Abyssinia thirteen centuries before. I was sixteen years old.

  It made a noble and self-sacrificing story if you omitted the fact that we had spent just over a week living in luxury at the emperor’s palace in Addis Ababa, courtesy of an introduction by our friend and my guardian, Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. From there, at the emperor’s insistence, we had been driven to Harar by a member of the palace guard. And omit, Hussein did, for it was a crime for a Sufi, meant to fulfill himself on a diet of devotion, to have indulged.

  Hussein returned from his conference with Sheikh Jami to find me sitting in the bark folds of a giant tree. He was glowing with rare giddiness, and smiled sheepishly, gesturing for me to follow him through the tall carved wooden doors of the first in a row of three identical whitewashed buildings.

  Inside, a weary and sweat-stained crew of the sheikh’s friends and relations were strewn across the red-earth platforms of a large room with shiny turquoise walls adorned with baskets and wooden bowls and tin plates from China and gold-lettered Arabic proverbs hanging in frames. Fatima, the sheikh’s senior wife, somewhat taciturn but gracious, offered us a seat in a corner. We leaned back against silk-covered pillows and huddled under a blanket, and I soon fell asleep against the pitter-pat of women’s conversation and the hearty bass notes of men’s snores.

  It was just after sunrise when Sheikh Jami’s full figure nearly filled the doorway. My head snapped from the platform as his booming voice pounded the muted din. It was a terrifying sight: he was huge and ugly. His blue eyes were swimming in protruding ocher bubbles, his tobacco-stained teeth hung from his mouth like stalactites, his red hair cascaded from his turban to his shoulders, and his beard was so sharp it could have sliced bread.

  At first sight of me, Sheikh Jami bellowed angrily: “Yee min khowraja? Farenji?” Terms of insult in an unintelligible tongue.

  Hussein leapt forward, threw himself at the sheikh’s feet, grasped him by the ankles and begged his understanding.

  “Yes, of course!” bellowed the sheikh, switching to Arabic. “You, fine, but what is she doing here? A European! In my house!”

  I reached up gingerly and tried to recover the veil that had slipped to my shoulders while I’d been asleep.

  “The Great Abdal has sent us both,” Hussein said.

  Sheikh Jami’s barrel of a chest subsided at the mention of the name. “My brother,” he said. (Or rather, as we would figure out later, his third cousin, some dozen times removed.)

  Hussein continued: “She is the charge of a friend who once visited your greatness, a man named Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud—”

  “Stop!” the giant sheikh roared. “That man is the last farenji I had the misfortune to encounter! A charlatan!” he shouted, and spat on the floor just next to Hussein’s knee.

  I wondered what Muhammed Bruce could possibly have done to cause such a reaction. He had claimed to love Harar and its people.

  For all his usual timidity, though, Hussein offered a Sufi proverb as if asking the sheikh to excuse Muhammed Bruce. Or me. “Enlightenment must come little by little, or else it would overwhelm,” he said.

  Sheikh Jami pursed his lips as if he were sucking a lemon. Slowly, he spread his arms, inviting Hussein to stand up and come and join him in his breakfast, an enormous platter of meat and rice topped with fried onions that Fatima had just set down on one of the platforms.

  Gishta, the sheikh’s plump and dimpled youngest wife, held a bowl in one hand and poured a slow stream of water from a jug over her husband’s hands with her other. He rubbed his palms together vigorously and mumbled something to her. She nodded and stepped over to Hussein, and poured water over his hands as well. She handed the bowl to a young girl at her side and then reached for my forearm, though not to wash.

  “Where are we going?” I stammered in Arabic as she pulled me to my feet.

  She led me wordlessly to the door.

  “But why?” I pleaded.

  “It is just a small confusion, Lilly,” said Hussein quietly, as if something might break. “Everything will be fine, insha’Allah.”

  Gishta led me across the threshold. I clutched the outside wall of Fatima’s house. Hussein and I had come all this way together through hostile lands in search of refuge. He had been my shadow for years, my brother, beholden to me for his recovery. I couldn’t ask him not to stay; it was what he had always wanted. Tears spilled down my face, but Gishta only nudged me on with her knuckles pressed into the small of my back.

  call to prayer

  I wanted to disappear, to blend into the stench in the air, melt into the high white walls of the compounds that flanked us on each side, be an observer, not the observed. My life was now in the hands of a woman who was leading me left and right and right and left through tangled streets until I was sure we had come full circle.

  It was early, but the city was already in second gear. We passed toothless old women and shrunken old men and expressionless Sufis clinging to the edges of their wool blankets, and neatly groomed men with short beards and knit skullcaps, and clusters of veiled teenaged girls with fits of the giggles, and s
notty-nosed children who ran up and touched me, shouting “Farenji! Farenji!” and round, oily mothers standing in doorways with babies on their hips shouting at Gishta, who offered answers incomprehensible to me that made everyone except me laugh. I fingered the amulet the Great Abdal had given me, which I wore tied on a string around my neck. The small leather pouch contained a verse from the Qur’an to ward off the bad jinn, evil spirits.

  There was some relief once Gishta and I passed over the main road and climbed down a hill on the other side. We came to a less congested part of town, a rundown neighborhood where the compound walls were crumbling and dust colored. Makeshift shacks made of tin siding and wood scraps had been erected between broken walls. The streets reeked of urine, and there were people missing limbs who could not even be bothered remarking at the sight of me.

  We slipped through a narrow passage, where a runny-nosed girl sat alone on the ground eating dirt. “Bortucan!” Gishta snapped at the girl, hauling her up onto her feet. “Nouria!” she called, pulling back one of the rough pieces of corrugated tin that formed a fence at the end of the passage.

  A dark woman emerged from a dark kitchen, a grease stain on her face, her dress sewn together clumsily with thick string. She stood at a defensive distance, wringing her hands. The little girl clung to the backs of her knees.

  Gishta pointed at me; Nouria shook her head. Gishta shook her head; Nouria pointed at me. Gishta grabbed the woman’s hands and shook them and yelled, the rolls of fat around her middle trembling, the gold in her mouth flashing, until Nouria bowed her head and gave an exasperated sigh.

  Gishta, I suddenly realized, looked at me as a source of income for this woman, her cousin, expecting me to pay rent, and pay well. I would soon discover that rumor of the farenji who had arrived in Harar in a Mercedes was spreading as quickly as a cloud of locusts tears through a field. Rumor that seemed to neglect the fact that Hussein had arrived this way as well. But he was an Arab, a man and a Sufi, whereas I was an enigma and a threat.

  I surrendered to my new landlady a portion of the money the Great Abdal had given us for the journey. Nouria rolled the bills together and pushed the bundle down between her breasts. She did not look pleased.

  Nouria’s compound was nothing like the sheikh’s with its whitewashed buildings arranged around a treed courtyard. This was little more than a few square yards of dirt containing a small mud-walled building with a grass roof. To the left of the doorway stood a single Wellington boot, home to a battered-looking plant. The kitchen, with walls of mud and metal scraps, narrow as a closet and blackened with soot, leaned over precariously in one corner. A cat licked the flies from an open wound, an emaciated goat bleated in a corner, and the air smelled of sour milk and the oil Nouria had obviously left burning on the kitchen fire. A balloon of gray smoke drifted out the kitchen door to greet us, and Nouria threw up her arms and cursed me before ducking into the haze.

  Two boys whom I guessed to be Nouria’s sons, about seven and eight years old, had been staring at me through the parting in the fence, and now they pushed their other sister into the yard to get a closer look at me. She had the same wide eyes and nest of matted curls as the dirt-eater. All four of the children were dulled by a matte finish of dust and scabbed on elbows and knees.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the girl in Arabic.

  “Bah!” she shrieked, and disappeared back through the fence to cower in her brothers’ shadow. They pushed her through the fence again.

  This time I pointed at her sister, who was ignoring me as she stabbed a mound of dirt with a stick. “Bortucane?” I asked.

  “Bortucan,” the older girl corrected.

  “And you?” I pointed.

  “Rahile.” Hesitantly, she pointed at me.

  “Lilly,” I replied.

  This sent the boys behind the fence into hysterics, and they started banging their palms against the tin, which dragged their mother yelling from the kitchen. Her threats quieted them down, but they continued to stare through the fence. I closed my eyes and recited in silence, taking up a position I would occupy for much of the day. Learning Qur’an had taught me how to be engaged while perfectly still. It had also taught me patience, something I didn’t naturally possess.

  When the sky burned orange and dusk descended, Nouria set down a bowl of red water and called the children to supper. Come, the boy named Anwar gestured, holding out a stale piece of bread. The sky darkened with each bite, and it was black by the time we retired to the windowless mud-walled building. Nouria and her four children crawled onto a single foam mattress that covered the dirt floor against one wall; I wrapped myself in a blanket she reluctantly tossed my way against the opposite.

  I lay awake, alert to the hyenas whooping their strange way through the city streets, the children’s rib cages rattling as they coughed, the flying cockroaches batting their wings against the walls and the sound of what must have been rats foraging in the corners. I curled up in a ball, afraid I would lose my toes. But for all the discomfort, for all the distress at being dismissed by Sheikh Jami and separated from Hussein, I did feel some sense of relief. Hussein and I had come through hell. It was not just Morocco but all of North Africa that was on fire. Borders and whole populations were in flux as people, in the absence of a colonial enemy, turned weapons on each other and themselves. In these troubled lands we’d welcomed the appearance of occasional towns only to feel the tensions and suspicions of their people and rush back into the relentlessness and safety of more desert.

  Our Tuareg guide hadn’t spoken Arabic or French or English, but we’d prayed together after performing our ablutions with desert dust, and slept side by side on the ground like mummies wrapped in sheets under night’s mist of sand. Islam unites us, where language and borders do not.

  But then came the Sudan, where the Muslims of the north were imposing Islamic law throughout the land, killing the people in the south: Africans, animists, Christians. Three days into the Sudan, somewhere south of Khartoum, Hussein and I had left our camp to gather water from an oasis in the distance. Our guide had remained behind, burying bread dough in the sand, when we heard the explosion. The northern army had apparently marked the divide between north and south with land mines.

  For the first time in my life, I was made aware of the angry possibilities of Islam.

  That night, Hussein had reached, uncharacteristically, for my hand. “This is not the true meaning of jihad,” he spoke into the starless dark. “Jihad is the holy war we have within ourselves. That is the meaning below the surface. Our internal struggle for purity,” he said with emphasis, pressing his forefinger into his chest. “It is the war of ascendance over our basal instincts. It has absolutely nothing to do with others. The only thing we can have control over is ourselves.”

  It was a relief to find myself in a peaceful place again, no matter how unwelcome. In this city of saints, encircled by a protective wall. In a country that was not fighting these postcolonial wars, because it, alone in Africa, had maintained its independence.

  I awoke my first morning in Harar to a sky crackling with a staggered chorus of muezzins. The Allahu akbars rippled in waves down my spine. I reached for the rusty water can so I could perform my ablutions before prayer, but Nouria grabbed the can from my hands.

  “But how am I supposed to pray?” I snapped.

  She shrugged, not understanding, so I pointed at my chest, I pointed to the minaret in the sky above us, I raised my hands as if to bow down in prayer.

  She looked at me curiously and muttered: “Masha’Allah.”

  “Yes! Allahu akbar!” I cried. “God is the greatest!”

  She handed the rusty can back to me and nodded, as if to say: All right, then. Prove it to me.

  Later that morning, Gishta arrived carrying a sack of mangoes and bananas for her cousin. She was dressed elaborately in a voluminous red dress embroidered with gold silk across the chest and a clashing fuchsia veil. She was the embodiment of Harari wealth, complete with
arms laden with the fruits of her husband’s lands.

  Nouria, too, had made an effort: her dress was only a simple one of light blue cotton, but it was clean and well made.

  As they were about to squeeze through the tin fence, I grabbed Gishta by the elbow. “Masjid?” I asked.

  Gishta nodded and looked at me defiantly, as if to say: Yes, the mosque. What of it?

  I pointed at my chest and raised my palms as I had done with Nouria earlier that morning. Gishta turned to her cousin and chattered away for a good minute, pointing at me and then the sky and waving her hands about, ending her speech with what sounded like a question mark.

  To me she said one word: “Fohdah.” She tugged at her veil.

  “Yes, yes,” I said excitedly, raising a finger, asking them to wait a minute. I went into the dark room and pulled my one veil from my rucksack. Navy, plain, a little rough around the edges.

  Gishta made a sucking noise and shook her head.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

  “Ginee?” she replied.

  I frowned, not understanding.

  She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.

  I had a bit of money left, though not much. I patted my pocket in reply, and Gishta nodded and strode out of the compound, which I took as an invitation to follow.

  The three of us walked single file up the hill to the Faras Magala, the main market. It was barely recognizable as the square where Hussein and I had disembarked; by day it was a cacophonous junction where taxi drivers and qat sellers and merchants bartered at the tops of their lungs, fighting to be heard over the bells of the Medhane Alem, the turn-of-the-century church, ringing overhead.

  We made our way through the market and down the street on the far side, a steep, rocky slope lined with men rattling away on ancient sewing machines. We stopped at one of the fabric shops partway down the hill where several bright veils were displayed on hooks on the inside of the door.