Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  I’m reading about your city,” Robin says proudly. He has a copy of Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa in the pocket of his white coat.

  The sight of it provokes a pang of possessiveness. “You know, Hararis find Burton’s portrayal of them very insulting,” I tell him.

  “Mmm, it’s fantastically romantic and condescending,” he agrees. “It reminds me of much of the colonial literature about India. I should lend you the book he wrote about the Sindh.”

  I’ve just insulted Robin. I don’t have to put it in context for him; it’s a history he knows all too well.

  “So was your guardian also a traveler?”

  “Not really, at least not by the time I knew him. He’d lived in Morocco for decades. Tangier, then Marrakech. I think he’d traveled a great deal when he was younger. He even boasted that he’d played polo with the emperor of Ethiopia. I used to wonder how the king’s crown stayed on his head while he was waving a mallet about.”

  Robin laughs. And I think of how things changed. In 1969 King Hassan II began inflating the Moroccan army to rid the country of remaining colonials. Spain had just handed back the coastal town of Sidi Ifni, but the Spanish remained entrenched in the western Saharan provinces. This would be the final battle.

  Even Muhammed Bruce had grown despondent by then. He had lived in Morocco for more than thirty years. He had witnessed the country gain independence from France. He’d known plenty of foreigners who’d been murdered in the cities during those years, my parents included. But he’d stayed in Morocco despite all of this.

  “Perhaps it’s time to leave,” he had said wistfully.

  It felt like betrayal, but in truth it was simply Muhammed Bruce’s lament for the passing of an era. A time when Europeans had roamed the earth in pursuit of adventure, largely oblivious to the lives and laws of the people in the countries they picked through like cherries. Spitting out the pits. Just like my parents. They had stomped on the world like the Burtons of their era, only worse somehow because they did not think that their shoes left marks.

  “Do you know what happened to him?” Robin asks.

  “Vaguely.” Several years ago I’d read an obituary. He had returned to England, been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and died of a stroke in a private hospital in Guildford as Bruce MacDonald. I didn’t keep the paper. I prefer to remember him for the lovable enigma that he was: Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud, in his element in North Africa, surrounded by books and boys and birds.

  “You stayed in touch?” he asks—one question too many.

  prosthetics

  Yusuf is at home with Tariq all day now, and longs for a bit of adult conversation by the late afternoon. He prefers my company because I don’t ask questions. Since he started playing chess with Mr. J once a week, Amina has been pestering him about how he’s spent the day, when he might be ready to start looking for work, whether she should enroll him in some classes.

  Yusuf and I have taken to watching television together and I’ve been teaching him how to cook. He resisted at first: I had to work hard to convince him that this would not be yet another assault on his manhood. Hard enough that his wife is the one working. Harder still that he enacted a woman’s ritual by taking the baby to a shrine and that he is now at home with Tariq because Mrs. Jahangir’s been landed with another grandson. You’d never find a man in a kitchen in Ethiopia. And even among the poorest, this is a servant’s job. In Ethiopia, there is always someone poorer than you. Even Nouria was able to procure a servant eventually.

  I tell him my friend Robin likes to cook and he’s a doctor. Robin has told me he likes to grind his own spices and follow his mother’s recipes. He likes to scour secondhand bookshops and watch cricket on his days off. It made me realize I have no hobbies at all.

  Yusuf lifts the lid and stares into the pot. “Lilly, it’s burned. I burned the rice again,” he says, shaking his head in dismay.

  I have a look in the pot. “It’s not a total disaster. We can salvage what’s on top.” I scrape the rice into a bowl. “Pass me the dustbin,” I say.

  “We can’t throw it in there,” Yusuf says. “Amina will be furious if she sees the waste.”

  “All right. Put it in another bag, I’ll take it to my flat.”

  “Thank you, Lilly.”

  “Robin was asking me about my guardian today,” I say. Yusuf has heard most of the stories by now.

  “Is this good or bad?” he asks, poking at the rice left in the pot.

  “A bit awkward, I guess.”

  “Too personal?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I’ve noticed this about farenjis. You give them one piece of information and then they have ten questions. And they don’t think this is at all rude.”

  “I know. I’m still not used to it. But in Robin’s case it’s not just invasive but a bit off somehow. Like he’s asking the wrong question.”

  “And what is the right question?” Yusuf asks.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Ahh. A typical Harari woman,” Yusuf teases, a rare smile upon his face. “You want the man to read your mind.”

  Unfortunately, the one time Yusuf accompanied us to the community association office, we had to deal with a man in a fury over the fact that his wife had enlisted a friend to help her circumcise their daughter. He wanted this woman hanged. “She is preying on our women!” he shouted. “She is twisting their minds and stealing our money!”

  Amina and I assured him we would try to get a community health nurse to offer a seminar on harmful cultural practices, but we already knew it wouldn’t be well attended.

  Yusuf remained silent in the corner, embarrassed to hear a man talking so explicitly about women’s business.

  Then a woman we call the Sky Queen turned up. She used to work for Ethiopian Airlines and she treats us as if we are her servants. Neither of us can stand her. Amina, perhaps wanting to impress Yusuf, lost patience with her that day. She swore at the woman and told her to stop wasting our time with these ridiculous, selfish demands of hers for “inquiries” and “investigations.”

  “Bloody hell!” Amina shouted, much to my amazement. “We are dealing with crises here! We are not your team of private investigators!”

  Yusuf has declined to accompany us ever since, despite our reassurances that not every week is quite so dramatic or loud. He spends Saturday mornings with his new friends, Oromo he met at the mosque, whom he joins for coffee and a game of chess at a little Ethiopian café that has opened in Brixton.

  We have Tariq with us in the office now, just as we used to have Sitta. He squirms in the little nest we’ve made for him in a chair; he wriggles like a rasher of bacon in a pan. I’ve just picked him up to try to distract him from his own bodily discomfort when the door opens.

  “I hope you don’t mind me dropping in like this.” Robin hesitates in the doorway. He holds a cardboard box in his hands, tied with a pink bow.

  “No, come in,” I say, quickly recovering. I introduce him to Amina. He offers her the cardboard box—baklava, from a Lebanese bakery. Amina is charmed and offers Robin the orange chair and asks if he would like coffee. She excuses herself to fill the kettle from the squeaky tap in the hall.

  There is no apparent reason for his visit. He sits with us and sips Ethiopian coffee from a tiny porcelain cup. It looks like a thimble in his hand. He compliments Amina on the coffee and says it’s nice to see where we do our work. When he was a student he did volunteer work for an organization that sent used prosthetics to India. Our office reminds him of the one they had in Cambridge.

  But you were not missing an arm or a leg, I think while Amina smiles at him coquettishly and asks him how the organization was funded.

  “Donations,” he replies, then asks if we need any office supplies. He knows someone with a stationery shop who offers discounts to charities.

  Amina says “How wonderful” at exactly the same moment as I say, “I think we’re fine, thank you.”

  Robin looks
between us and laughs. “All right then, let me know when you’re running low,” he says and bids us good-bye.

  “He just wants to help,” Amina insists once I’ve shut the door behind him.

  “But our business here doesn’t concern him,” I say.

  “Let him help, Lilly. Men like to feel useful. Particularly when they fancy someone.”

  chalk outlines

  It is a rare bright Sunday morning, sunlight flooding the tiny strip of Amina’s kitchen. Amina pours a thin stream of batter in a circle onto the underside of a large frying pan and presses me again about Robin. She’s convinced I’m keeping something from her.

  “I hate to disappoint you, Amina. We’ve gone to a few lectures together, that’s all. There’s really nothing else to tell,” I say for a second time.

  On the way home from the last lecture he asked if I knew how to drive. He placed my hand on the gear stick, covering it with his own, and guided me from first through fourth. The order, the pattern, appealed to me. I wondered why I’d never imagined driving. It was more than the expense of a car.

  Amina sighs. “He’s such a nice man.”

  I have to agree. So cheerful all the time, but almost a bit too enthusiastic. “You would fancy any man who gave you baklava,” I tease.

  “You think I am some kind of sharmuta for sweets?”

  “Well, did you share them with anyone? Did you even bring them home?”

  “Never mind,” she says.

  “Shall I take them to the park later?” I suggest.

  “Make Yusuf go too,” she pleads. “Maybe he will come today because of the sunshine.”

  The park is full of frenetic children. Women with various types of headdresses sit clustered together on benches, so engrossed in conversation that they don’t notice the older children pushing the younger ones out of the way. Most are not familiar enough with English to know that “poof” and “wanker” are words that should concern them.

  “Play nicely!” I shout at Ahmed periodically. “Help your sister reach that, Ahmed!”

  Yusuf does not yell. He stares straight ahead at this noisy, colorful scene of children clambering on climbing structures, turning manic circles on rusted merry-go-rounds, fights breaking out over bicycles shared between too many siblings and acrobatic, attention-seeking feats that inevitably end up in tears.

  Yusuf is one of very few fathers in the park and the only father who is neither smoking nor sitting with another man. I wonder if he has always been an exception to the rules, whether this is what makes him special. I resist the urge to take his hand.

  “Why don’t you play chess anymore with Mr. Jahangir?” I ask.

  “He is fed up.”

  “Oh, dear. He wants you to change sides?”

  “No. He wants me to pretend that I don’t see him cheating.”

  The music of an ice-cream van works its way like an electric current though the crowd. “Can we, Baba?” The children are suddenly before him.

  “You don’t like this ice cream, do you?” Yusuf says, stalling. “Ooh, but it’s so cold.” He pretends to shiver.

  I lean forward and coins spill from my pocket. Yusuf has no money.

  “If you can find enough on the ground for two ice creams, then you can have them.”

  They’re immediately on all fours, elbowing each other out of the way.

  “I saw that one first!” shrieks Sitta, grabbing Ahmed’s fist with both hands.

  Ahmed elbows her. “You did not, you Paki!”

  “Ahmed!” I shout.

  He looks up, startled.

  “Don’t you ever, ever say that again. To anyone. All right?”

  “Sorry,” he mumbles, uncertain whether it’s all right to resume.

  “How much do you have now?” his father asks.

  Ahmed begins to count the coins in his palm.

  You’d think Sitta had spent the day trudging through the Sahara the way she drags her feet on the way home. We encourage her to practise counting in Arabic, hoping to distract her. Ahmed plays along, but Sitta continues whining behind us. As Ahmed reaches thirty-five, we hear the distant, plaintive wail of a siren coming our way. Yusuf stiffens at the sound, grabs hold of both of the children by the hands and yanks them down the next alleyway. He flattens his back against a brick wall. I can see the pulse pounding in his neck.

  “It’s an ambulance,” I say calmly.

  He squeezes his eyes shut and his Adam’s apple plunges as he swallows. In another second, the siren passes.

  “Maybe someone had a heart attack,” says Ahmed weakly. He will grow up like many of the children in the playground today: reading the landscape and detonating the mines for the generation before.

  There’s a message waiting for me the following morning at the nurse’s station. I’ve been called upon to assuage the fears of infibulated women in labor, to explain to a doctor that the scars on someone’s back are not the result of abuse but the well-intended evidence of leeching or cupping, to help bedridden folk perform ablutions before prayer, even to read from the Qur’an while someone slips away. Such requests are not unusual.

  The bed, though, is empty by the time I get there. All evidence of Mr. Tadesse has been laundered away. He died slowly in the night, his lungs punctured by a shattered rib cage, the impact of falling ten stories from a building on the estate. He’s a recent arrival and there appear to be no next of kin.

  People never actually say suicide, but it happens more often than any of us like to admit. No one uses the word for fear of contagion; we speak of accidents and noncommunicable diseases. It is a crime against God to kill oneself. No one wants to believe that things can get so despairing that one would abandon God. The streets around us would be awash in chalk outlines.

  I probe Amina for information when she comes by that evening to study at my kitchen table. She’s well plugged in to the dramas, good and bad. “They accused Tadesse of being a Dergue officer.” They are his Ethiopian neighbors. “They threaten they will tell the authorities that he is not a legitimate refugee. He says, please, no, my whole family has been killed by the Dergue. And they say, no, you are the killer.”

  Not only are the wars between us not erased, they are exaggerated, because here, people are allowed to speak. They can express their hatred of the Dergue without fear they will be wrenched from their beds at gunpoint in the middle of the night, forced to watch their wives being gang-raped, shot in the stomach and left to die in the street. Here they can even seek revenge.

  I offer Robin half my cheddar and pickle sandwich. I’m writing up notes, and when I pause, pen in hand, Robin taps my knuckles playfully, as if they are the keys of a piano.

  He persuades me to stay for another cup of tea.

  His attention is flattering, even if he does ask too many questions. His perseverance grates against my exterior wall, somewhat gentler than sandblasting but not quite as gentle as wind weathering paint.

  “Have you ever heard from anyone you knew in Ethiopia?” he asks. “I mean, through your work with the association?”

  “Not exactly,” I reply.

  He puts up with my evasiveness, being determined despite, or perhaps even, because of it. But I am slower than slow, glacial, an ice age.

  He rings me the evening of my day off, the first time he’s ever contacted me at home. He’s at a phone box, keen to chat. I can barely hear him over the traffic. It’s not a good moment: Amina is at her evening class, I’ve got Tariq clinging to my leg while trying to prepare supper, and Ahmed has just managed to pull a cupboard door off its hinges by swinging on it. I’m not a terribly good disciplinarian, and Yusuf is that much worse. Where the hell is he?

  “Yusuf!” I shout into Robin’s ear. “Sorry, Robin.”

  “I thought you lived alone,” he remarks casually.

  “I do. I mean, yes and no.” It would be too difficult to explain that Amina and I are like co-wives. We used to joke that all we lacked was the common tie of a husband, but even that’s not
quite true anymore. I seem to spend more time with Yusuf than she does.

  “I can fix it,” Yusuf mouths at me as he investigates the cupboard door.

  There’s an almighty wail just then, and Ahmed chases his sister through the kitchen with a fork.

  “Dear God,” Robin says.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” I say, ringing off.

  restricted access

  We’ve dressed up so the children can feel just as proud of us as we do of them. Yusuf is wearing a silk tie he bought from a car boot sale and the new navy blue pea coat Amina picked up for him for twenty-nine pounds because the lining was slightly torn. His hair glistens with Afro Sheen.

  The three of us file into the school gymnasium, and Amina throws our coats down on the seat beside me. “Reserved,” she says confidently. She scans the audience, then waves both her arms wildly. “Up here, up here!” She lifts the coats and buries Yusuf. Robin slides into the seat beside me.

  “I was afraid I’d be late,” he whispers as the lights dim. He’s still wearing his scrubs, though he’s changed his shoes. I can’t believe Amina invited him without telling me, without asking me. I pinch her elbow. She pulls her arm away and smiles coyly, raising her finger to her lips.

  A young woman stands onstage, her bottle-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. The microphone squeals and she recoils, wincing. She taps the microphone once she’s recovered and welcomes us all in her thick Kiwi accent to Kennington Road Primary’s annual pageant.

  As soon as the children fill the stage, Amina is shaking her hands above her head. Sitta smiles and waves back from the stage while Ahmed stares down at his bare feet. They’re dressed up as Maoris, wearing paper outfits painted red, black and white. It’s both endearing and absurd. Their blond teacher plucks a ukulele, and the children make waves with their hands.