Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  To read the Qur’an with your family around you is to be home.

  Daily life does not cease in honor of Yusuf’s arrival. All evidence of celebration is washed up and tidied away.

  “I’ll be fine,” Yusuf says when I pop my head in on my way to work. Amina has left a giant pot of soup on the cooker for him, and the smells of garlic and kohlrabi fill the flat. I offer him a stack of the day’s papers, which he politely accepts. We of all people should understand that Yusuf has no appetite, no interest in the news or ability to concentrate, but we nevertheless offer him things that you would ordinarily give someone with the flu.

  To some degree we feel helpless, but to a larger degree, perhaps, it’s that we forget, or rather, that we want to. I remember feeling like a Galla when I first arrived here, uncivilized in the ways of this place, like a Falasha: an exile, a landless one, treading on alien soil, tiptoeing so as not to leave footprints. It’s ghostlike, not a feeling one aspires to recapture. Attending to the ordinary demands of our English lives prevents us from joining Yusuf in the void he now inhabits. A place so close we can see it through a thin veil of gauze; a pit that reeks of mud, rancid butter and the bitter metal of spilled blood.

  The hospital, by contrast, is overilluminated, a pristine assault on the senses, a rude awakening. Robin stands out for me in this whitewashed, anodyne world. His brown skin, the timbre of his voice, his slightly wonky eye—for all his Cambridge education and upper-class accent, there is a vulnerability about him that I had failed to notice at first.

  I see it most acutely a few weeks later, when we attend another lecture together at the London School. Two California researchers have isolated a new strain of hepatitis they’re calling C. Robin is fighting to be heard over a cluster of white-haired men who have sequestered the Americans for themselves. Robin has genuine questions, which, unlike those of the white-haired men, have nothing to do with patents.

  He does not seem thwarted, however; he has the enthusiasm of a golden retriever: he waves his hand with tail-wagging earnestness.

  “Robin, I’m going to need to get back,” I say, moving to rescue him.

  “Oh. Yes, yes, of course.” He turns to me, disengaging from the crowd surrounding the Americans.

  We’re both struck by the similarities between this new virus and HIV—its mode of transmission, the populations it seems to affect— though from what these researchers had to say, hep C is caused by an entirely different type of virus, one belonging to the same family that causes yellow and dengue fevers, tropical diseases largely found in Africa. I can already see the implications.

  “Do you know, Robin?” I turn to him as he drives. “I won’t name names, but I’ve seen some of the most intelligent nurses at the hospital avoiding Africans in their care. They’re subtle about it: they just reorganize their rounds so that it’s the more junior nurses who have to care for them.”

  He unnerves me by abruptly pulling off to the side of the road and stopping the car. He’s nodding, lost in thought.

  “You know, I’m so used to this sort of thing that I don’t even see it anymore,” he finally says.

  “Depressing, isn’t it,” I say.

  “Among other things. Listen, shall we talk about it over dinner?”

  “Tonight?” I ask, taken by surprise.

  “A quick bite?”

  “I should really get home.”

  “Perhaps another time, then,” he says more politely than I deserve. He reaches over and squeezes my hand before putting the car into gear.

  The lift is broken again. I climb eleven flights of poorly lit concrete stairs. These halls can be dangerous, though most of the violence that occurs is man on man, drug related. My heart is about to slip out of my mouth by the time I put my key into the door of Amina’s flat. There’s a trail of flour from the sofa to the kitchen. Sitta is standing there with her sleeves rolled up, flour in her hair, rolling pin held at the height of her underarms as Mrs. Jahangir instructs her in the rolling of chapatti dough on the cracked kitchen counter.

  Mrs. Jahangir has come over to look after the children. Amina is at her class this evening, and Yusuf is just not ready. His awakening is proving a slow thaw, ice retreating inward from the edges of a frozen lake. Since the initial relief of reunion he’s grown inert. He hides in the dark, lights off, away from windows, while his wife and children are away. He returns the newspapers to me unread.

  Amina almost wishes Yusuf would get angry, even though, as we have seen time and time again among men emasculated by their helplessness and dependence, that anger is usually directed at women. “At least he wouldn’t feel powerless,” she laments.

  Money is an issue, though Amina does not push. Yusuf once held a senior position in the faculty of agriculture at Alemaya University, outside Harar. He researched the adaptation of American farming methods to teff cultivation and taught agricultural economics. It is hard to imagine a place for Yusuf in this dense concrete world where the only green is that of moss clinging to damp brickwork, and weeds making tenacious gestures through broken pavement. My gift to him is a window box of geraniums, but it is Amina who waters them.

  This evening he stands in the doorway of the kitchen and watches as I brush the flour from Sitta’s hair. His face has softened. The crease between his eyebrows is fading. Even the scar on his cheek looks less prominent.

  “Did you enjoy your lecture?” he asks. It is his first real initiative at conversation.

  “Yes, I did. I mean, enjoy might not be the word. It was informative, certainly. Where’s Ahmed?”

  “He is in the bed. Reading Qur’an. We were reading together.” Another good sign.

  The following morning, his fifty-fifth morning in London, Yusuf is left on his own once again.

  checkmates

  Yusuf must know in his heart that he is not Sitta’s father, for it is only when Tariq is born that the solid mass at his center begins to melt. I slip him some money so that he doesn’t have to ask. He gives it to one of the Oromo brothers down the hall, asking him to buy a small used black-and-white television he can give to his wife to keep her entertained during those forty idle days of ulma at home.

  But Amina does not rest this time. “How can I?” she shouts. “It’s totally unrealistic. I have to work!” She looks at Yusuf and me as if we are a pair of idiots.

  It’s not just practicality influencing her decisions. She scoffs at my suggestion that we bury the placenta in Kennington Park. “It’s just a silly superstition,” she says. “There is no need.”

  Somewhere in the last seven years need became superstition, tradition became voluntary, and then ritual further degenerated into a subject of some embarrassment.

  “But we must at a very minimum see that he is blessed,” Yusuf confides in the wake of her derision. He appeals to me, knowing somehow that part of me still remains in the old world, unwilling to let go, while Amina is “moving with the times.”

  Amina returns to work, dropping off her fourteen-day-old son and a supply of breast milk at the Jahangirs’ shop. Mrs. J has generously agreed to look after Tariq during the days just as she looks after her two youngest grandchildren. Either Amina or I pick him up on the way home, his breath smelling of milk, the scent of garam masala radiating from his thick, black hair.

  On the fortieth day of Tariq’s life, Yusuf meets me at the shop. It is one of the first times he has left the flat, certainly the first time he has ventured out alone. He has shaved his beard for the occasion, revealing more scars. He arrives carrying a frozen chicken wrapped in plastic, which he presents with a rather helpless shrug. This is what he brings by way of an offering. Mrs. Jahangir relieves him of the frozen bird, placing Tariq in his arms instead.

  I make my way through the shop, down the narrow hall and into the community association office at the back. Yusuf follows and surveys the cramped room with its bookshelf overflowing with black binders and manila files. He fingers the red, gold and green of the polyester flag bought from a Jamaica
n woman in the market for three pounds fifty.

  I wave my hand. “This is where it all happens.” Where reunions are facilitated, hearts are broken, hope is restored. “That is exactly where Amina was sitting the day she finally saw your name,” I say, pointing at the orange chair.

  He stares at the chair as if it is in some way responsible. “I’m afraid she is disappointed in me,” he says quietly.

  “Yusuf? She waited years to see your name. It was all she wanted.”

  “Like you are waiting.”

  “Insha’Allah.”

  Mrs. Jahangir comes through the door then, holding a tin plate of coals with an oven glove, pushing past us, sliding the bolt of the back door open and pouring the coals into the flowerpot. Yusuf descends the few steps with Tariq in his arms, and I pull the incense from my pocket and throw it onto the coals. Yusuf passes Tariq to me and kneels down in the dirt. He raises his palm upward and silently whispers prayers into the fragrant cloud. I rock Tariq back and forth as his fingers grope the air above his head and his father asks the saint to ensure the protection of his son through these vulnerable first years during which, in Ethiopia, every other baby seems to die.

  Mrs. Jahangir has prepared sweet cardamom-flavored tea. We sit on overturned crates by the fridge at the back of the shop and she offers us English biscuits from a tin. There’s a monumental wail as one of her grandchildren bites hard into the forearm of the other. She moves quickly to muzzle the offender and then comforts the victim while the cash register ka-chings at the front of the shop.

  Yusuf notices the chessboard perched on a case of tinned tomatoes and rises with interest. He studies the pieces and brightens.

  “Who is playing?” he asks Mrs. Jahangir.

  “My husband is playing my husband,” she says, laughing with a slight roll of her eyes. “The match is very uneven.”

  “Mr. Jahangir!” I call out. He approaches in his Tower of London apron, carrying the till drawer. “Maybe Yusuf would like a game.”

  Mr. Jahangir immediately puts the drawer down into his wife’s lap. “Count this,” he commands and unties his apron. “You are a serious player?” he asks Yusuf with great intensity, his eyes popping.

  Mrs. J pinches my elbow, amused by how seriously her husband takes this. Nobody will play with him anymore. He says it’s because his opponents are intimidated, but I’ve heard more than one person say that he’s argumentative and given to reinterpreting certain rules for his own convenience.

  “Well, I—”

  “Perhaps you recognize this board?” Mr. Jahangir says. “From the eighth game of the great match between Fischer and Spassky.”

  “I had a chess partner in prison,” Yusuf says quietly. “Although it was months before I knew who he was.”

  Everyone falls silent, even the children. It’s the first time Yusuf has offered anything about his time in prison.

  “We had fifteen minutes in the open air every day,” he says, staring blankly ahead. “They release us in shifts into this square yard of only dirt and stones. One day I find this pattern of stones of different sizes on the ground, and I recognize it as a chess game. It is something amazing to me. And I see the next move so clearly that I cannot help myself. I move the stone. And the next day? Someone has moved a piece on the other side. Day by day, one stone at a time, my silent partner and I play this game.”

  Mr. Jahangir admits that he cannot figure out the game from here, that he’s been stuck with this board for months. He’s even willing to give over the side that eventually wins. “You be stars and stripes,” he says. “I am hammer and sickle.”

  Yusuf stares at the board and considers the options.

  I think of Yusuf when I’m at work.

  “Who was your silent partner?” I’d asked him later.

  “The day I won the match, I found the door to my cell unlocked. It was the major. I know because he turned his head as if not to see me pass.”

  He continues to relay small anecdotes about prison. He meditates on the meaning of things. Meanings below the surface, like a mystical seeker looking for the truth beneath the words.

  “It’s all you have when they destroy your body,” he tells me, tapping his temple.

  Sufis deny their bodies, victims of torture detach from theirs: both seek transcendence in their own way.

  “You look lost in space,” Robin says, sitting down across from me at a table in the cafeteria.

  “Just thinking.”

  He looks eagerly for more; I dare an attempt to offer it.

  “You see all these people plagued with psychosomatic illnesses, but then you get people who have experienced the most extreme physical trauma who manage somehow to bear the pain. Even more than that—they maintain a fundamental optimism which the psychosomatic types don’t even seem capable of.”

  “Big thoughts to have before lunch.”

  I laugh. “Sorry. You asked.”

  “I agree, it’s interesting,” he says, spooning an alarming amount of sugar into his coffee. “There’s no physiological difference in what we feel. People’s pain thresholds seem to be influenced by any number of things. Culture, personality, childhood experience . . .”

  “You’ve never told me how you became interested in medicine,” I remark.

  “Me?” he asks, raising his eyebrows and pushing his coffee cup aside. “I really wasn’t given much of a choice. I think I knew I was going to be a doctor by the time I was ten years old. So many people kept telling me that I was going to be a doctor, and study in England—Cambridge, of course—that I suppose I began to believe it was who I was destined to be.”

  So mapped out. So certain. Such a straight line. Knowing exactly how your life would unfold. How could someone like him and someone like me end up in the same place?

  “You?” Robin asks.

  “Well, until I came to England and studied nursing, my education was mainly religious: Qur’an, Hadiths.” I am not really sure how to answer. “I’d read quite a few Western books. There was a man, British originally but he’d converted to Islam, who was a friend of my parents’ in Morocco—where I grew up. It’s rather a long story. This man, Muhammed Bruce, was sort of like my guardian because my parents, they didn’t really, well, you know, last.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Robin says, reaching for my hand.

  “It’s fine.” I shake my head, withdraw my hand. “Anyway, Muhammed Bruce was a bit odd and quite pompous. He claimed he was the great-great-nephew of this famous explorer, Sir Richard Burton—”

  “The one who wrote Arabian Nights?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m afraid ours was a rather sanitized, illustrated version for children, read to us at bedtime between Enid Blytons. But that’s fascinating. A descendant of Burton’s.”

  “Claimed to be. Claimed many things, but in any case, he was quite sincere, devoted to me, and I was enormously fond of him. He would visit me once a month with a stack of books and dump them into my arms. He was very insistent. ‘Well-roundedness is the goal of a British education,’ he used to say.”

  I hear the subtext now. In contrast to this rather exclusive education you receive at the shrine, where the Qur’an is your only book, Arabic your only language, God your only subject. Submission your only posture.

  “That sounds familiar,” says Robin.

  I pass the old Lambeth Hospital on my way home, as I do every day. I stop and pull a cigarette from my purse. This is where Sitta was born, right here on this pavement, six and a half years ago. Though it looks much the same, Tariq has been born into a much different world. His mother’s orientation has shifted from east to west between the births of her two youngest children.

  As west as Amina leans, though, those books I mentioned to Robin, these points of reference that Muhammed Bruce introduced me to would be foreign to her. They’re not part of the vocabulary we share. I remember reading Dickens and Jane Austen, verse by Rumi, an illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and of co
urse The Arabian Nights (the original, quite brutal and salacious), Anne Frank’s diary (I wanted to know her; I thought she knew me) and Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels and most of the work of Jules Verne.

  Muhammed Bruce’s choices were more deliberate than I’ve ever realized. He supplemented my diet of Islam with doses of other realities. He must have envisioned a time when I would have to make my way in the wider world; the books he presented offered lessons about war and morality and disease and love and betrayal and, perhaps most important, survival. Under the sea, at the center of the earth, on another planet, alone on a desert island, as a person hunted, in war, as a giant among little people, in the future, in a world upside down, a world through a looking glass, a world gone mad.

  A world like the one we live in. A world like the one we left.

  Yusuf describes Ethiopia as a field of fire: an infernal blaze leaving a trail of charred bodies and scorched earth. The civil war with Eritrea has continued to worsen, the Tigrayans are waging guerrilla war in the north, the Somalis have invaded the Ogaden again and the Oromo continue to operate underground in their fight for independence. Local insurgencies flare up routinely, and military camps form armed rings around every city.

  The Dergue needs all the men it can to fight these wars. Enforced conscription began in the early 1980s. Soon they’d closed all the universities, forcing students to enlist. We’re hearing rumors now that they are using food aid as incentive, and bribing and kidnapping school-children, forcing boys as young as nine to take up arms.

  Imagine Ahmed armed and dangerous. He could be leading a commando unit at his age. Imagine Fathi and Anwar forced to surrender their adolescence to war.