Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  When I returned to the shrine from the Berber woman’s house, the Great Abdal told me that I needed to study the fourth chapter again, Al Nisa’, “The Women,” but I could not touch the book until the bleeding stopped and I was clean. It was then that I understood the implications.

  There was no suggestion of absuma in the holy book as far as I knew, though might it just be a matter of certain words being interpreted differently here? “It’s not just the words,” I said to Dr. Aziz, “it’s how you read them. Sometimes there is more than literal meaning. You can go beneath them to discover batin.”

  “Batin?”

  “Hidden meaning. Inner meaning.”

  “I’m not familiar with this,” he said, looking at me directly.

  “Perhaps it is a Sufi philosophy,” I said, looking down self-consciously.

  “Are you a Sufi?”

  “Not in practice. But I have been influenced by the thinking. My teacher, the Great Abdal, was both a great scholar in the orthodox tradition and a Sufi philosopher. He showed me that if you probe beneath the words, you can often illuminate truths that are not apparent when you simply read them.”

  “I admire your scholarship, but I suppose you could say I am more literally minded,” said Dr. Aziz. “Forgive me, but I’m a scientist. I look at what’s presented to me.”

  “But no,” it occurred to me, “you also look beneath. A patient comes to you with certain symptoms. You can diagnose their origin, what disease might be at the root. How else could you know what the cure should be?”

  He nodded slowly and rubbed his chin, before bending down to release the brake on the wheels of Bortucan’s bed. He unhooked the bags from the wall and asked if I’d mind holding them while he pushed the bed out of the room.

  I walked beside the bed with the bags held high, down the corridor to the children’s ward, which trembled with the quiet din of women praying at their children’s bedsides. I stared at the doctor’s broad back as he hung the bags on a hook and willed him to continue the conversation. I hadn’t spoken like this since Hussein and I had lain in the desert and contemplated the true meaning of jihad; since the Great Abdal and I had discussed the mental fasting that works in tandem with the physical.

  He was different, this man, this Dr. Aziz. He made me feel different: stirred, compelled, vaguely anxious.

  The color in Bortucan’s face was already returning to brown from chalky gray. Dr. Aziz reached for her forearm to take her pulse and her eyelids fluttered open to reveal a mute wildness. I stroked her hair and offered a few words of prayer.

  “I think she’ll be fine,” said Dr. Aziz.

  “Insha’Allah,” I said, to which he surprisingly did not offer any refrain. I turned to him and asked: “Are you a Muslim, Dr. Aziz?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Did you think I was not?”

  “Do you discount the power of religion to heal?”

  “I do not discount belief in a general sense. Particularly the role of optimism.”

  “You’re different from most Muslims I know,” I said.

  “Because I look for a cure in science rather than God?” He leaned down then and whispered in Bortucan’s ear. “She calls me different, Bortucan. Can you imagine? The white Muslim of Harar is calling me different!”

  I had to laugh.

  “I know they think of me in this way,” he said. “I’m still trying to prove to them that I’m worthy despite my mixed blood. That I am actually a Harari, born and raised, despite the fact that my father was Sudanese. Both my parents, I might add, are very Muslim.”

  “My father was English,” I told him. “Not a Muslim. But I was brought up as a Muslim in Morocco.”

  “So I hear,” he said.

  “Really? What exactly have you heard?”

  “Mmm, let me see. I’ve heard that you are English, Italian, French. I’ve heard that you are a Catholic missionary sent here to infiltrate and convert, even that you are a spy sent by Haile Selassie to report back to him on the very insular ways of the Harari. Of course, it’s just gossip,” he tried to reassure me. “You should hear what they call me. Black savage, African, slave, barbarian, pagan. I have even heard it said that I was sent to medical school as a specimen, not a student, but that I somehow managed to slip away from the table just as they were lowering the blade to dissect.”

  When Dr. Aziz came to check on Bortucan later that afternoon, he pointed at the red bag suspended over her head. Blood was scarce because people would not donate, he told me; they feared losing some essence of their souls. The doctors and nurses routinely donated, and apparently it was common practice in the West. “The way farenjis give alms, I suppose,” he said, before asking me if I might.

  But I didn’t know if my blood would work. Mixed, he’d called his own. What did that make mine?

  He laughed. “We all have the same blood types, Lilly. Even the Sudanese, even farenjis.”

  “Forgive me,” I said, “but I’m not a scientist.”

  “I apologize.” He hung his head. “There are four blood types. Yours might not be compatible with Bortucan’s, but it will be right for some other patient. It could save another life.”

  Put that way, I could hardly not agree to do it. It felt like a challenge. I offered my arm as alms.

  “Perhaps you should not tell the little girl’s mother, though,” he suggested, swabbing my forearm. “She might think I’m trying to steal your soul.”

  But how do I know you’re not? I wondered as he drew blood. And if you are, where are you taking it? And will part of my soul be given to someone else in this exchange?

  “Now,” he said, putting a plaster on my arm, “I’ll get the orderly to bring you both some food, but this,” he said, pulling a cardboard package from his pocket and unwrapping it to reveal a piece of honeycomb, “just rub some on her lips if she refuses to eat.”

  I lay down next to Bortucan, who was sleeping soundly now, her nose whistling, a mucus bubble inflating and deflating at the corner of her mouth. “Little girl,” I whispered, and closed my eyes.

  A dream in English. The first dream in English in years. In Bilal al Habash’s shrine, where the frightening form of Sheikh Jami dominated, I stood pegged to a wall while the sheikh read off a list of my sins from a giant scroll. “Friend to unbelievers! Doubter of holy words! Perpetrator of lewdness! Audience of Satan!”

  I awoke as a woman threw the first stone. I must repent, I must repent, my heart pounded in panic. “Verily, Allah doth forgive those who repent,” I said aloud, picking at a hair stuck to my lip. My lips were sticky. Honey sweet.

  the education of girls

  Nouria had started to listen, even allow herself the odd smile. As Fathi and Anwar progressed further through the holy book, their fluency evident in greater speed and precision, their mother unconsciously slowed down. Her strokes, swoosh swoosh against the side of the metal tub, became an accompaniment of brush and brown water.

  As she softened, I found myself warming to her. It was hard not to: she was not inherently dour; she just had a very difficult life raising four children on her own. When she asked me if I would begin teaching the girls as well, though, I hesitated. Bortucan had recovered fairly quickly after her stay in hospital, though she had still to begin speaking. But then, elements of this education are wordless. Bortucan could hear the rhythm; it was obvious from the way she sometimes swayed from side to side when the boys and I recited. So lessons with the girls began, Bortucan in my lap, the two of us swaying together, Rahile repeating each line after me, swelling with the pride of someone who, though new to water, instinctively floats.

  There was something remarkable about Rahile. She had a self-confidence there was no earthly reason for her to possess. She exerted a subtle influence on the family that in any other environment might have been construed as manipulation. She’d had her absuma exactly when she wanted it, and I’d seen her weasel a new dress out of Gishta with flattery and a reasoned argument—she had aspirations, this girl,
even at five years old.

  It was Rahile who took my hand one Thursday night and insisted I come with them to the shrine.

  “But I can’t, Rahile,” I objected. She grabbed my wrist with both hands, dug her heels into the ground and tugged. “The sheikh doesn’t like me very much,” I said, not knowing how else to explain it to her.

  “Rahu! Leave Lilly alone,” Nouria chastised.

  But Rahile wouldn’t take no for an answer. “If you love God, you will come,” she said.

  People moved through the streets: small groups merging, individuals being swallowed up by the dark cloud that rolled through the market and down the steep road on the other side where drumbeats, thumping with the rhythm of a human heart, became audible, and the pace quickened, and one mass of humanity squeezed itself through the green arch into the compound surrounding the shrine.

  I was well covered for this outing, but still, people commented. I heard the whispers: “The farenji, the farenji.”

  “How can they see me when it’s so dark?” I asked Nouria.

  “It’s your skin,” she said. “White shines.”

  I wondered if I should turn around, for surely the sheikh would notice me, but fortunately he had not yet made his entrance. Hundreds of people were already crammed into the courtyard and still more were streaming in. And there was Hussein, standing where the sheikh would soon stand, his apprentice, his proxy, keeping his place warm. I resisted the urge to wave and hung my head instead. I left Nouria and wound my way to the far back of the crowd, past the murmurs about the farenji in their midst.

  The drummers announced the sheikh’s impending arrival with a dramatic crescendo, followed by abrupt silence as they muffled the resonating skins with their chests. With the sheikh’s entrance, I sank, my spine compacting, my guts crushed. Now nobody commented on my presence; they had much more important business to attend to. They clapped and offered the refrain after the sheikh bellowed the chorus, and they passed qat my way. I accepted politely, plucking a few leaves and grinding them between my teeth, sticking the masticated green into my cheek. I was doing my best, but it was an acquired taste. Even the best qat leaves were bitter and had to be chewed for hours.

  I scanned the crowd for Dr. Aziz, though knowing how unlikely it was that I might find him there. I suspected he who preferred intellectual to spiritual reasoning wasn’t much one for saints and their shrines.

  I’d seen him twice since Bortucan had left the hospital. The first time, all he needed was one quick look beneath her bandages to declare her healing well. The second time, I held a candle for him in the dark room while he removed her stitches. Nouria hovered in the doorway, wringing her hands. She didn’t have the courage to challenge the doctor, but she’d confided her disappointment to me. “The hole is too big,” she’d complained. “She has a hole like a sharmuta.”

  “Dr. Aziz said it would be better, less chance of infection—”

  “Lilly!” Nouria had said gruffly. “Who knows best? A mother, that is who.”

  In his presence, though, she said nothing.

  “I want you to continue to wash this whole area with water and soap every day and then apply this cream,” the doctor said. “It’s not enough just to pray. And I want you only to use this cream, okay? No more butter, no more of that herbalist’s oil, just this, and not too much.”

  He stood up, but he was too tall for the room. He crouched through the doorway and into the courtyard. He must have known he’d just insulted us both, dismissing the things in which we believed, particularly prayer, but I couldn’t help admiring his certainty, how it even seemed manifest in the fullness of his height as he stood there in the sun, his white shirt so bright against the mud of our surroundings, against the velvet darkness of his face.

  I caught myself staring and blushed. It felt like a swarm of bees had just been let loose in my stomach. Perhaps he could hear them buzzing, because he looked at me, and for no reason at all, he smiled. For all his self-assurance it was such a humble smile, with a hint of sadness around the edges: it was a smile to cup in one’s hands. He was looking at me, looking for something, though I couldn’t imagine what it was he was after.

  “I have to thank you,” he finally said, breaking this strange spell that had had us staring at each other.

  “Thank me? For what?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about something you said at the hospital. About how we as doctors can diagnose an underlying illness. You were right; it’s not unlike this search for batin that you explained. But you know, we don’t really have that luxury. Not here. We don’t have the resources to test all that we might, or to analyze the results. You saw how it was—we barely have a blood supply—so all we end up doing is treating the symptoms, never the cause. We forget we can do anything more.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said.

  “That might be, but it’s the reality. Still, I am grateful to be reminded of the possibility of something deeper, even if we are too poor to do anything about it.”

  His presence lingered far longer than his visit had lasted, like the smell of incense in a closed room, the residue crystallizing on the ceiling. It lingered in me as I wondered about the distance between all his conviction and his faintly troubled smile. I fed every piece of injera I dipped into the stew that night into Bortucan’s willing mouth, thinking about his provocative statements. I couldn’t bring myself to eat a single bite.

  “She is much better,” Nouria observed as Bortucan reached for the piece of injera in my hand. “But that farenji medicine has no power. She is better because God wills it, not because the doctor wills it.” The previous morning the faith healer had come and written a verse for Bortucan on a slate. He’d washed the slate and collected the chalky water in a cup, which Nouria had put to Bortucan’s lips throughout the day. By evening, her appetite had returned.

  I scanned the hundreds of faces that night at the shrine, but none of them were his. I could imagine him saying of what we did there: it is culture, local culture, which people attribute to Islam. Orthodox imams were known to say such things, dismissing our traditions as rooted in superstition, but if you look deeply for the inner meanings in the book, you will find God’s friends, the saints, hidden there.

  Whenever I tried to meditate beyond the page these days, though, an image of Dr. Aziz came to mind. Of his brown eyes made clear in sunlight. Of the uncertain corner of his mouth. Then the bees would awaken, rush into my throat and dance on the tip of my tongue, depositing pollen between my teeth, making it difficult to recite anything at all. Nothing in my life up to that point—not grief, not illness, not dislocation—had ever interrupted my religious practice. But then no one had ever challenged it.

  affliction

  I now taught Fathi and Anwar just after breakfast and Rahile and Bortucan just before lunch. Between these two sets of lessons I tended the stew over the slow fire and helped Nouria with some of the larger pieces of clothing, twisting one end while she held the other, squeezing out all the water we could before heaving it over the washing line to drip, drip and eventually dry.

  Except during the rainy season. For two months it was cold and the clothes would not dry, but the qat was so soft and plentiful and cheap that people complained less than they might have and simply chewed a great deal more. For two months we did not see the sun, and qat lifted the malaise caused by the thick, dull, gray blanket of low cloud that did not move and shed little rain despite the name of the season.

  But the euphoria we should have felt the morning the sun reappeared was stolen. Nouria awoke with a rash of red blisters running across her chest and down her arms.

  “An allergy?” I suggested. “Maybe spiders?”

  She shook her head with conviction. “Somebody,” she said, wagging a finger, “has cursed me with the evil eye.”

  Throughout the day, the rash crept up her neck, itching, biting at her jawline. She anointed herself with a poultice of sour milk and ash from the fireplace while I introduce
d Rahile and Bortucan to the next chapter of the Qur’an.

  After five days of itching and many variations of poultices, Nouria consulted a diviner, a toothless woman with several white hairs growing out of her chin. They sat together in the courtyard, the diviner drinking tea and consulting the entrails of a chicken laid out on the ground before her.

  “That is your problem,” she eventually hissed into Nouria’s ear. She was pointing across the courtyard at me.

  I glared at the woman. I’d worked hard for my place here: I taught Nouria’s children, helped her with the housework, the cooking, the shopping, went to the shrine on Thursdays and the mosque on Fridays and sat for berchas with her on Saturdays. How dare this woman try to unsettle this hard-won balance.

  The old woman cracked three eggs and rubbed the whites over Nouria’s rash. For this privilege, Nouria had to give her the chicken whose entrails pointed in my direction, payment she certainly could not afford.

  The next day, one of Nouria’s neighbors brought her ragged-looking daughter and son into the courtyard. “Will you teach them Qur’an?” she pleaded.

  I’d made such progress with Nouria’s children that I didn’t really want to have to start all over again. “Maybe when I get through with Rahile and Bortucan,” I tried to say politely, though that would be years, and the woman knew it.

  As soon as the woman shuffled dejectedly out of the courtyard, Nouria threw herself on the ground and grabbed the tops of my feet.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Please, Lilly. I beg you. You must teach her children.”

  “But why is it so urgent?”

  “The women are jealous,” Nouria cried. “They will curse me again.”