by Camilla Gibb
Gishta pointed at one, but I shook my head. Too gaudy.
I pointed at another, but Gishta shook her head. Too plain?
Nouria pulled an elegant but simple veil of swirling soft greens and blues off a hook, at which Gishta and I nodded our approval in unison. Nouria threw it loosely over my head and draped the end over my left shoulder, Harari-style. Gishta boldly dug into my pocket, acquainting herself with just how much money I had left, before handing over a couple of greasy bills to the amused merchant.
Hussein came to visit me at Nouria’s compound after our visit to the mosque that day, possessed with a confidence I had not seen in all the years I had known him: an aura of calm, as if overnight he’d outgrown the insecurities of an extended adolescence and become a man. His adolescence had begun with steps backward leading to steps forward, which ultimately led to steps beyond. Our first walk outside the walls of the Great Abdal’s compound had been to the small shrine of a nameless saint nestled in a cluster of palms on the other side of Tamegroute. Hussein had had to bend in half to fit through the door. I followed him in, but even I could barely stand up. It was very dark, but I could make out an old man sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room. He was swaying back and forth as he recited Qur’an.
Hussein approached him midrecitation, took the man’s hand from his lap and kissed the back of it. He then untied the incense crystals he had bought from a blind Berber woman in the market from the knot in the corner of his wool cloak and laid them at the man’s feet. The man picked up the incense and threw it with dramatic flourish into a small clay pot of coals, engulfing us in a sweet, sticky cloud so thick and gray that I could see nothing anymore.
“Hussein?” I said tentatively. “Hussein?” I said a little louder when he failed to answer.
“What do you see, Lilly?” he asked.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly.” He sighed. “The presence of God. Isn’t it beautiful?”
In the presence of God, nothing particularly extraordinary had happened, but perhaps that was the point. I had not sensed God in that moment, but I had seen Hussein’s awe and desire. That’s all I was: his witness. But to be seen in the dark is to be reborn.
He had been superstitious, connecting the path to wellness with my presence, keeping me by his side even though it conflicted with his aspirations as a Sufi. “Earthly love is a distraction,” he’d told me long ago when I’d tried to talk to him about my parents. “All our love should be for Allah. This is the Sufi way. It is good to be freed from earthly love. It is good for a Muslim. It is good for Allah. It is good for you. Do not worry. Allah will fill your heart. You mustn’t grieve. It is as Rumi said: ‘Anything you lose comes round in another form.’ ”
It was clear that Hussein was ready to dispense with earthly love and go blank to the world. He had pulled out the tent pegs nailing the corners of his woolen cloak to the ground and was moving in the slow way of all mystical seekers along the road to transcendence. He looked, as far as I could detect in the glazed, monotonous expression of a Sufi, content.
My needs, meanwhile, were as basic and worldly as they come: food and shelter, some way of earning my keep. I didn’t have the option of going blank.
a single wellington boot
I contributed to Nouria’s household in the ways that I could. I took the broom from her hands, swept away the dead insects and the cat and goat feces and sprinkled water over the dirt to settle the dust, leaving Nouria free to take in more laundry. She rubbed her hands raw washing richer women’s clothes in a big tub filled with water that her oldest boy, Anwar, carried by the jerry can each morning from the river beyond the city wall. Later, we used the pinkish brown laundry water to wash our faces, hands and feet, then our dishes and our own clothes. When the water was black, we threw it into the street, where it trickled downhill and eventually seeped into the parched ground.
The boys spent most of the day lingering in the market, selling peanuts or, when there were no customers or peanuts, begging. They kept their eyes glued to the fruit and vegetable stands, ready to pounce on anything rolling away from its seller. At the end of the day they scavenged for anything spoiled and discarded, returning home with the soft, battered remnants of what had once passed as food.
Nouria’s twin girls, meanwhile, spent most of their time playing—shoeless and filthy—in the streets. I would often find the smaller one, Bortucan, sitting alone in the road eating dirt. Seeking nutrients where she could.
The birth of the twins had changed Nouria’s fortune, not that her prospects, coming from the poor Oromo background that she did, had ever looked particularly bright. Like her cousin Gishta, though, Nouria aspired to belong among the Harari—their wealth and privilege powerful aphrodisiacs—and had made the language, the food and the customs her own.
When her husband died—of some mysterious illness called ground disease, people said—Gishta had encouraged Nouria to find a Harari man just as she had. Nouria did her best: for several years she had been a Harari man’s mistress, and although he had given her an allowance that enabled her to send her two boys to school, he did not ask her to marry him. When she got pregnant, he cut off relations altogether.
The boys were forced to drop out of school and go back to the streets; Nouria was forced to beg rich Harari women to let her do their laundry. She would not go back to being a household servant, as she had been as a child. She would not surrender her own home. Rahile gave up mother’s milk for water and stale bread and the black flesh of overripe bananas. Bortucan, however, still refused to let go of her mother’s breast, whether milk was forthcoming or not.
Dinner, which I would help Nouria prepare, was a modest meal, a stew made of onions and lentils and chili peppers sopped up with stale injera, or sometimes injera and ground red chili pepper alone.
We relieved ourselves on a patch of ground behind the kitchen, wiping with the left hand, pouring water over the left with the right. We tiptoed in flip-flops—mine hand-me-downs from Gishta—across this patch of earth, its slippery brown sheen no doubt caused by ingesting these foul-smelling thin stews made from poisonous water.
Nouria didn’t deny my help because it allowed her to earn more income, but there was no easiness between us as we settled into our reluctant arrangement. I knew this was not simply due to the limitations of language.
The children, on the other hand, were proving to be a blessing. The boys soon got over the giggle-inducing, wide-staring curiosity of having a foreigner in their midst, though they would still drag people to have a look at me over the corrugated tin fence and then beg to be paid for providing entertainment. I simply waved at the women and children who peered over, which would send them into flight. I hoped that the novelty would eventually wear off, though thousands of people lived within the city’s walls.
I felt immediately protective of Bortucan because she was in much greater need of attention than her sister. I was surprised to learn they were twins, both four years old, because Bortucan, unlike Rahile, hadn’t started speaking and never played with other children. She was sullen, where Rahile was perennially bright. Perhaps, in her wordlessness, her isolation, there was something I recognized and understood.
During the heat of the afternoon I sat on a mat in a shaded corner of the yard, fanning the flies away, making vocabulary lists, diligently recording each new Harari word I learned and doing my best to make some sense of the grammar. Many of the words seemed very close to Arabic, derived from the same root, though they were strung together in unfamiliar ways. And Arabic, I discovered, went far with some people. Among the more educated, the ones who were well versed in the Qur’an, as were some of Nouria’s wealthier neighbors, Arabic was familiar. Nouria didn’t know Arabic per se, but she had a number of Arabic proverbs on the tip of her tongue.
Anwar spoke some, which he’d learned during his few years at the madrasa. I would point at something in the compound—a cockroach, a sack of grain, a dress hanging from the washi
ng line—and Anwar would give me the Harari word. The last thing he named for me in the compound was the plant growing out of the rubber boot, but he didn’t have a word for the boot itself.
“Where’s the other one?” I asked him.
“What other one?”
“The pair to this one.”
“There is only this one,” he said.
What was a single Wellington boot doing sitting in this compound in a remote Muslim city in Africa?
“And the plant. What’s it for?” I asked Anwar.
He shrugged. “It’s for nothing,” he replied.
“It’s not used as a spice or a medicine?”
“It’s just for being a plant.”
For nothing. For being a plant. In this impoverished world where everything had its use, I found this one frivolous gesture reassuring.
Once he’d named everything in the compound for me, we moved inside the mud-walled house and named its meager contents. Armed with the word for foam mattress, I asked him where I might buy one of my own. He seemed proud to be able to escort me by hand to the market, where a man cut a piece of foam according to Anwar’s instruction.
“But Anwar, that’s far too big,” I objected, once the man had cut the piece.
“No, no, it’s good!” he said, and placed the thick tube of foam on his head.
“All right,” I sighed, and dug into my pocket.
As I thought, the tube was too wide to fit through the door of the mud house.
“No problem,” said Anwar and unrolled it on the ground. He went into the kitchen, returned with a knife and drew a clean line down the middle of the mattress with the blade. He carried each piece into the house separately and placed his clothes at the head of the second mattress.
My vocabulary grew over the months with words picked up from Nouria, from Gishta when she came to visit, as she did almost every other afternoon, and from the other women in the neighborhood who would gather in the courtyard on the occasional Saturday for what they called a bercha. They would spread a blanket on the ground and sit in a circle and share a little gossip and qat. They snacked on popcorn, roasted on a flat pan over an open flame, threw crystals of incense onto dying embers, drank tea and smoked the hookah, which here was the sole preserve of women. The qat, the tobacco, the popcorn and the gossip were the only extravagances in Nouria’s poor life, gifts brought by more affluent neighbors.
I sat on the edge of their circle, Bortucan often in my lap, me wiping her perpetually running nose with a rag. Some of the women wove threads of straw while they chatted, making baskets to adorn the interior walls of houses richer than Nouria’s. Bortucan often tugged at my breast, and inevitably crawled in frustration from my lap to her mother’s, where, although she could not always be assured feeding, there was comfort.
I learned from listening, from being corrected when I attempted to interact, from sheer exposure and immersion, through the days come weeks come months of hearing little else, from the knowledge that I had no choice.
In return for my new vocabulary, I offered to teach the boys some more Arabic. After dinner, we would sit by the dying light of the fire in the cramped kitchen and practice the alphabet together, writing the letters on slate with chalk.
One morning Anwar came to me carrying a book in his hands—my Qur’an, the one the Great Abdal had given me.
“Anwar, where did you get this?” I chastised.
“From your bag,” he said, pointing at the house.
“You shouldn’t go rummaging through my things,” I said, immediately shamed by the possessiveness in my voice. “Do you want me to read to you, is that it?” I asked more gently.
He nodded vigorously.
“Well, first we have to wash our hands. Then we have to state our intention—”
“Wait!” he said, and ran to get his brother.
Each morning after that we sat in the doorway of the dark room we all shared and recited quietly for an hour against the rhythmic sounds of Nouria on her knees scrubbing clothes in a big metal basin. Over the weeks, the two boys revealed their knowledge of verse after verse, then chapter after chapter. They ground to a halt at the last verse of chapter five. So it was here that we began in earnest. Listen and repeat. Listen and repeat. Line by line, verse by verse, just the way the Great Abdal had taught me.
The Great Abdal had taken me by the hand and said this is a flower and this is a rock and this is a tree. Under his guidance I put down roots word by word. Each utterance prefaced by bismillah al-rahman al-rahim , in the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. The world within the book was whole, and there was an order, a process, a logical sequence of steps. It was the antithesis of the peripatetic life I’d lived with my parents; it was the antidote to their death. There was always a safe landing, even when I made a mistake. If I stumbled over a sentence, I could just retreat to the one before. I could always go back to what I knew.
This is the way of Islam; it is passed like a gift through generations. It connects us through time. Through this process these children would be connected to the Great Abdal, to his father and teacher before him and his father and teacher before him all the way back through the generations to the saint himself. In a fatherless world, I was a link in a chain that connected God’s Prophet (peace be upon him) with two dusty Ethiopian boys.
purity and danger
Nouria and I sorted through a sack of sorghum as she’d taught me—shaking the grains over a mesh screen, getting rid of the loose chaff and picking out the grit and small stones. When we finished, we would grind the grain in a mortar, mix it with water and then leave it in a bucket to ferment. We would use that sour, hissing puddle in a few days to make enough injera to feed us all for a couple of weeks.
Rahile was standing at her mother’s side that morning, tugging her sleeve. Nouria tried to quiet her: “Hush. Soon, Rahu, soon. Do not bother your mother. Go and play.”
But Rahile started crying and stomping her feet. Bortucan, in the spirit of twinhood perhaps, burst out in the same manner; eyes squeezed shut, little fists scrunched into balls, she punched at the air and let out a strange moan while her sister’s crying escalated.
“Good God! What is the fuss all about?” Gishta yelled as she entered the compound. She was carrying a qat-stuffed leather satchel over her shoulder and a gourd of camel’s milk in her hand. “Did a stone fall on your head, Rahu? Are you possessed by the jinn?”
“I want absuma! Ab-su-ma! Ab-su-ma!” she wailed each syllable.
“What is this ‘absuma’ she wants?” I asked.
“It’s expensive, that’s what it is,” Nouria said, deftly tossing the grain up and down.
“She wants a party, like her little friends in the neighborhood,” Gishta elaborated, squatting down with us. “So people will come and say, Oh, aren’t you a good girl, here, have some sweeties, here is some money, have some more honey.”
For her birthday? I wondered, though no one seemed to know exactly how old they were. Maybe I am this many years, they would say with a shrug. What does it matter? Or, Four droughts have passed in my lifetime.
“But Nouria is right, this party is very expensive,” Gishta explained. “You have to kill some chickens, maybe even a goat, and feed everybody. And then, of course, you have to pay the midwife.”
“Why the midwife?” I asked.
“Because she makes the party happen, Lilly!” Gishta shouted, incredulous. “It’s not a party without the midwife. Don’t you know anything? She doesn’t know anything, Nouria!”
“Well, I’m not her mother!” Nouria hissed.
Had my mother not taught me anything? She’d shown me how to do simple crocheting and how to join my letters together. She’d taught me card games, including strip poker, telling me that nakedness was not cause for shame. I’d wondered about that at the time, though, because while they lay about with little or nothing on smoking marijuana and giving each other sponge baths, the rest of the world had been very much dressed.
Both of the women were staring at me.
“What?” I demanded.
“You know that you must always cover your hair outside the compound,” Gishta said.
“And that you must never be alone with a man, because the devil will be your third companion,” Nouria added, the first in her arsenal of Arabic proverbs, most of which seemed to concern relations between men and women.
“And you know that when you have the monthly blood, you must never visit the mosque or prepare food, for this is a hurt and a pollution,” Gishta said gravely.
I didn’t know what any of this had to do with Rahile’s party, but I wanted to help, and so I later pressed a small amount of money into Nouria’s hand.
Nouria smiled at me for perhaps the first time and said: “For both Rahile and Bortucan. You cannot do one and not the other.”
Rahile boasted about the forthcoming party for weeks, telling anyone who would listen. People on the street patted her on the head and told her she was a good girl. Even Bortucan appeared to bubble with anticipation.
Gishta had matching dresses made for the girls for the occasion, and even though Bortucan had managed to rub dirt into the front of hers within half an hour of putting it on, they both looked uncharacteristically neat. And happy.
Rahile perched herself on a small wooden bench that had been moved into the courtyard, sitting straight backed and waving her legs with excitement as women from the neighborhood flooded in through the parted fence. The women had marigolds and aromatic herbs tucked behind their ears and they carried shiny packages of sweets that they placed on the ground before sitting themselves down in a circle around Rahile. Gishta passed around a tray with small clay cups of tea made from coffee husks boiled in milk and water.
