Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  The older ones had the advantage of being able to write each line down on the two slates Fathi and Anwar had once used at the madrasa, giving them a visual association that helped them build a picture of a chapter in their minds. They were doing well, had progressed as far as the twelfth chapter, but to memorize each chapter individually is not to know the Qur’an. The Great Abdal had taught me that the relationships between chapters are just as vital.

  To know the Qur’an is to hold the book in your hands at a distance, too far to read the actual words but familiar enough with their patterns on the page that the book is less text than compass. If you have simply memorized the text in sequence you have no words when someone asks you to recite chapter forty. Unless you are one of those rare geniuses who can see the book laid out in his mind, you have to run through thirty-nine chapters in your head before you can speak.

  I needed more copies of the holy book. It occurred to me that Hussein might be able to help. I asked Gishta to ask him if he would come and visit me at Nouria’s compound.

  She shook her head. “That one does not leave the compound, not ever. You will have to go to him.”

  But that was impossible. She knew that.

  “This Sunday,” she raised her finger and said coyly, “our dear sheikh makes his monthly visit to his mother in Dire Dawa.”

  I was astonished to hear the sheikh had a mother. He struck me as so old. “Why is she not here with him?” I asked.

  “She prefers Dire Dawa because there is no Fatima there.”

  “You mean Fatima your co-wife?”

  “Exactly,” said Gishta, forming claws with her hands.

  And so, that Sunday morning, after brief lessons with my students, I threw my darkest veil over my head and made a hasty exit into the street. I walked through the meat section of the market, where the halal offerings of the butchers hung with bulging eyes off giant hooks, past the fruit sellers hidden behind their yellow and orange pyramids, through swarms of flies and the gray stench of diesel and down the steep street on the far side of the market where the tailors hemmed away against the open blue metal doors of their shops.

  I passed Oromo girls carrying more than their body weight in firewood, lepers on street corners waving their begging stumps, and Harari men with white knit skullcaps making their way to work in the shops lining the one paved road through the center of town. These merchants sold cheap imported goods from China and India—textiles, electronics and dinnerware—and dry goods, medicines and tobacco. The main street was a symphony of screeching metal doors and boisterous greetings shouted over tins of vegetable oil and bolts of cloth.

  People greeted me en route, I them. “Have you peace this morning?” “Peace, thanks to God,” we each asked and replied as we moved through the narrow, rubble-strewn lanes of the city, lanes so narrow they have names like “Meeting and Reconciliation,” for you may be forced to make peace with an enemy—and there are always enemies—in order to pass.

  My presence seemed as ordinary as the smells of donkey dung, rancid butter and frankincense. I felt relieved, in the wake of Aziz’s cautioning, that I was finally unremarkable.

  Sheikh Jami’s compound was an entirely different place without visitors, an oasis of calm, with aromatic herbs ringing its perimeter and fruit trees full of birds. The courtyard was largely empty. Fatima, Zehtahoun and Gishta had left early for the fields, as they did every morning, carrying great leather satchels on their backs, flat as deflated lungs.

  Uncle Jami’s farmlands were close to the city, beginning just beyond the river. They grew stimulants and fruit—qat, coffee, mangoes, oranges, bananas. The qat had to be picked fresh every day, for the softer and greener the leaves, the more intoxicating their effect and the higher the price consumers (both the addicts and the ordinary) were willing to pay. The fruit didn’t have to be picked as often, the coffee even less often than that.

  When their satchels were half full, the women would take a break, squatting on their haunches in the shade of an orange tree to share tea. Later, once they’d collected the day’s fill, they made their way back to the city, climbing uphill to relieve their burden in the market.

  Uncle Jami was so rich that his wives sold the qat in bulk to brokers who in turn employed girls to sell to customers throughout the day. Women who were less well off sat down on their skirts and sold qat straight out of their satchels. They sold to the wild-eyed man who preferred the green leaves to food and waited nervously in the marketplace from the first crack of morning, to the merchant who, like every other merchant in this city, purchased a generous amount after lunch to chew throughout the afternoon in the back of his shop, to the middle-aged woman who chewed the leaves of a few stalks with her friends as they weaved baskets and sorted grains throughout the afternoon, to the pious old man who had no teeth any longer and had to grind his qat with a pestle, adding sugar and water to form a thick paste, and to everyone who was paying a visit to a shrine—the adolescent and the ancient—for it was an essential component of any offering in a city of saints.

  At the end of the day, any remaining qat was sold to dealers who shrink-wrapped and transported it to Djibouti and beyond.

  It was a drug, the basis of an economy, a spiritual lubricant, a way of life.

  I smelled petrol and heard the swish of a broom being used behind one of the buildings. Each of the sheikh’s wives had her own house. The large wooden doors of these buildings opened onto the common courtyard, at the far side of which was the separate building Sheikh Jami shared with his sons.

  Each of the wives also had a servant, an Oromo girl—child, really—plucked from the countryside where her parents were tenant farmers on Harari lands. The girls swept the courtyard every morning, sprinkling water over the earth behind them to settle any dust. They brushed away goat feces and dead cockroaches and poured petrol over thresholds to deter flies.

  They resurrected a fire in the shared kitchen, a blackened hut where they reheated a giant cauldron that cradled an endless stew. They added more contaminated water, more garlic, more chili and fenugreek, leaving it there to simmer until the women’s return from the fields.

  Once a week, the girls would grind sorghum, for Hararis sopped up their stew with injera made from sorghum rather than the bitter teff used elsewhere in Ethiopia. It made them fatter, and the fatter they were, the wealthier they appeared. I was the antithesis of the Harari ideal: long and thin like a poor Somali nomad.

  Gishta was constantly complaining about the servants. Every week, one of them would run away because she’d been beaten by one of the wives or fondled by one of the sheikh’s many sons, denied her wages because of some misdemeanor or simply because she missed her family, missed a world where she was loved, for beyond its borders they called her people the Galla, “the uncivilized.”

  Gishta was just as likely to administer a beating as the others. It was one of the privileges she enjoyed for the hard work spent erasing her origins, work that had paid off with the ultimate coup—marrying a Harari man, and such a distinguished one at that. Here was the cement that had solidified all the foundations she had spent years laying down.

  “For you too,” she’d begun to say to me. “Especially for you. It will be the only way.”

  I passed a number of the sheikh’s children, too young and too absorbed in their stone-throwing game to remark as I walked across the courtyard toward the small white domed building clinging to the far wall. Through the arched doorway, I peeked into the dark cavelike interior of the shrine for the first time. I stepped gingerly over the threshold into a cloud of incense and paused as I adjusted to the dim.

  This was the inner sanctum. It was here that Sheikh Jami spent most of his time, and on Thursdays where he received visitors, people of the city and the surrounding countryside, and occasionally pilgrims from afar. One by one, visitors would fall to their knees before him, kissing the back of his giant hand. They would present offerings of qat, milk, money and crystals of incense or grains wrapped in n
ewspaper cones. They would whisper their requests into his ear and breathe gratitude as he threw incense into a pot of burning coals, releasing their prayers into the sweet smoke that rose to form a great sticky cloud above the congregation. Thus blessed, each visitor would take a seat against the walls of the shrine, lean back and begin stuffing their cheeks with qat, slowly grinding the leaves between their molars to extract their hypnotic power.

  At sunset, the drumming would begin, calling the rest of the faithful to the shrine. Only then, once darkness had fallen and the courtyard had filled with people, would I normally arrive.

  Today, the gray mist of incense cleared to reveal Hussein sitting alone: Idris, Sheikh Jami’s other apprentice, taught at the Bilal al Habash Madrasa in the center of the city in the mornings.

  “Lilly,” Hussein said vaguely, looking somewhere over my shoulder.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “I thought you were the jinn.”

  “Me?”

  “To see you here. So, you have heard, then.”

  “Heard what?”

  “That our Great Abdal has passed.”

  I bent to my knees before him and covered my face with my hands as the weight of this news sank like a stone in my stomach.

  Someone had sent news of the Great Abdal’s death to Sheikh Jami. According to Hussein, he had died “the ordinary way”—of old age. He had remained at the shrine, steadfast through the political changes. He had not been killed. At least there was that.

  “Innalillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” we both whispered. We are from Allah and to him we are returning.

  I put my head against Hussein’s shoulder. He didn’t move. “Maybe we shouldn’t have left him,” I said after a few minutes.

  “We didn’t leave him,” Hussein said calmly. “He is in you, he is in me, he is in Uncle Jami.”

  “I’m trying to carry on his good work,” I told Hussein. “I’m teaching Qur’an to the children in Gishta’s cousin’s neighborhood.”

  “So I hear.”

  “You know?”

  “Bint Abdal. I am always listening with one ear.”

  So he had not altogether abandoned the profane world where I lived. The rumbling low tone of the muezzin’s call began then, and I straightened. Idris would be returning at lunchtime. I wiped my eyes with the edge of Hussein’s rough wool and rushed to tell him about my class, how limited we were by the use of only one Qur’an. Surely there were others here? Surely I might borrow one without it going noticed?

  He looked at me blankly.

  “No?” I ventured.

  He picked up a bunch of qat stalks and offered them in lieu of saying there was nothing he could do to help me. The sky above was now filled with the chorus of the muezzins of all the nearby mosques—I really did have to move.

  “It’s okay,” I said, standing up quickly. “I’ll sort it out. Peace be upon you.” I bent down to hurry out the door, but as soon as I stepped across the threshold I smacked straight into Idris’s chest. He hissed and shuddered as though he had just been doused with cold water and he jumped back to let me pass. I bolted across the courtyard and out into the street.

  I found Bortucan alone at home, scratching her ear with one hand, jabbing a stick into the dirt with the other. I picked her up and carried her around on my hip while I nattered away and paced the courtyard. “How am I going to sort it out, Bee? Too many students, not enough books. All the willingness in the world, but so many obstacles.”

  Bortucan was distracted by her itchy scalp. I pulled her hand away to find her fingers covered in blood. “Oh, Bee,” I groaned. It was obvious a mess lay under her hair. Since Nouria wasn’t around, I didn’t have to consult. I carried her up the paved road and out the main gate.

  Bortucan whimpered at the sight of the hospital, clearly remembering it. I held her firmly with both arms and climbed up the steps.

  We passed several doctors and nurses before seeing someone I recognized.

  “Hey! It’s the Harari-speaking farenji and her sister,” Munir joked as he came toward us.

  “Her scalp’s bleeding.”

  “Shall we have a look?” he asked, stroking Bortucan’s cheek.

  “If you’d like,” I said.

  “Ahh. I will go and find your doctor,” he said with a wink.

  Aziz rounded the corner a few minutes later, breaking into a smile. “Munir told me that a beautiful girl was asking for me.”

  “It’s Bortucan,” I blurted out.

  “I can see that,” he said. “Her scalp.”

  I followed him into a green room, where I sat Bortucan down in a chair and he gingerly parted her hair. As he shaved around the bloody area he found several raised red patches. In the end, all her hair had to come off. She held her curls between her fingertips, looking at them as if they did not belong to her.

  “It’s a type of worm,” Aziz explained. “It burrows under the skin and lays its eggs there. This one here? She broke the surface with her nails and the eggs were released. I’m going to have to break the others.”

  “Ouch.”

  “We’ll give her something to make her sleepy.”

  When he returned, I held Bortucan while Aziz slipped a needle into her arm. She made a noise like a wounded cat. I felt the warmth of Aziz’s breath on my neck and the sudden heaviness of Bortucan going limp in my arms.

  I laid her down and Aziz made small incisions in her scalp, applying hot towels and pressure to the four other nests. He finished by painting her scalp purple.

  “Come, we’ll have a cup of tea,” he said. “She won’t wake for another half hour.”

  We sat in a small courtyard behind the hospital where several other men and women in white and green were seated together. The laws of separation did not appear to apply here. Aziz bought two tin cups of tea from the hospital canteen, set them down and pulled a bag of white powder out of his pocket.

  “Powdered milk,” he explained, offering me some. “I don’t drink any other kind. Is Bortucan learning anything in your class?”

  “A little.”

  “Zemzem’s father seems to be very impressed with his daughter.”

  “She’s exceptional. By far the brightest. Trouble is, there’s only so much I can do with one Qur’an. I can’t exactly tear out the pages so they can each study the part they need to work on.”

  “I know everything about having only limited resources to do your work. I wish there was something I could do to help.”

  “Do you have a Qur’an we could use?”

  “I do,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “And I’ll ask Munir.”

  The next day Zemzem brought a piece of injera to class for me. Folded into it was a note from Aziz: “I have a solution for your problem. If you can meet me half an hour earlier at my uncle’s house on Saturday, I can show you.” This time it was signed not “Your friend” but “Your servant.”

  I met him in his uncle’s courtyard just after noon that Saturday and followed him into the main room. His uncle opened a wooden chest in a corner, revealing dozens of thin leather-bound booklets. Each one contained a juz, the text of a thirtieth of the Qur’an. These were used on only one occasion, during the month of Safar, the dangerous month when people must not marry or travel, one juz for each day of the month. Aziz’s uncle was a member of a council of elders who met each night of Safar to read through one booklet and keep the danger at bay.

  “For the children,” said his uncle.

  I looked at Aziz. What a gift.

  “He just needs them back for Safar. For the rest of the year they’re yours.”

  We kneeled together and counted out two full dusty sets, which we wrapped in an old leather satchel used for carrying qat. I was speechless throughout, aware only of the soft worn leather passing through my hands and the desire to touch Aziz’s skin.

  “From Hussein,” I lied to Nouria, stacking the booklets in the corner of our room.

  the book of lies

  Several different
chapters being recited simultaneously produced a blissful blur of holy words that echoed throughout the city: my students reciting while Sufis sat in shrines and recited the ninety-nine names of God, and holy men like Sheikh Jami recounted Hadiths and imams sat in mosques and spoke to God and qadis filled their courtrooms with words of holy law and muezzins flooded the sky with their invitations.

  With the aid of the booklets, my older students could address their own weaknesses, working on the chapters they knew least well. I tapped a stick against the wall, encouraging them to keep a measured and consistent pace. At the madrasas the teachers used a whip, which they lashed against the floor and, not infrequently, across the palms and backs of their students.

  When the older children had managed to repeat an entire chapter as a group, without interruption, without falter or hesitation, I’d tap them into the next. With the younger students, more guidance was required. They would listen and repeat each line of a verse. I would correct their pronunciation, offer a line to jog their memories when they began to falter, encourage them to sway from side to side and find the rhythm of each verse in their bodies. She hadn’t gone beyond the first chapter, but Bortucan served as a metronome for the others.

  Once the eldest six could recite the entire first third of the Qur’an together, we deemed it time for a celebration. Nouria and I invited the students’ parents over one Friday morning. Gishta made a huge tray of sweets and provided milk and sugar for tea. All the children were instructed to wear their very best clothes, even though for some of them this simply meant a laundered version of the clothes they wore every day.