Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  “But nothing came of that. The plot was discovered before they could overthrow the emperor,” said Munir.

  “Not nothing,” Aziz said quietly, staring at the floor.

  “Okay, sure. Now suddenly people saw a weakness in the mighty empire.”

  Aziz threw down the stalk in his hand. “Hundreds of people died, Munir.”

  The emperor had had all the members of the Imperial Guard executed. And virtually everybody else in the palace. He did spare his son, though he happened to be permanently disabled now and living in a hospital in Switzerland.

  “So were these allegations his son made true?” I asked.

  Munir glanced sideways at Aziz. “Well, the answer depends upon whether you are an aristocrat or just a poor ordinary citizen. Look at Harar. There really is no in-between.”

  “There is a small in-between,” Aziz interjected.

  Munir grinned. “Yes, agitators. This is the problem with education—you create people with opinions. It’s better if you don’t educate the peasants, because then they might start demanding rights. Stick to educating boys like me: sons of wealthy landowners, people who do well under this feudal system.”

  “This educational reform is a sham,” Aziz said, rolling his eyes.

  “Or you make sure you recruit all the best graduates from the secondary schools around the country for your army,” Munir continued. “That way you force the educated to be loyal to you by making them dependent upon you for their livelihood. They educate most of them right here, in the military academy just beyond the wall.”

  “Oh, here we go again. Chew this, Professor Munir,” Sadia said, passing him a stalk. “Hurry up and get mirqana so you’ll be quiet!”

  Sadia came to sit beside me while the men talked on. As much as I wanted to be part of their conversation, Sadia was intent on dividing the room into male and female, and the men were quite happy to barge on without us. She leaned against my shoulder and lifted the notebook out of my lap. She flipped to a blank page near the back and began sketching a picture of a woman in a wedding dress. “Sadia,” she wrote above the image. She drew her bridesmaids: her sisters, Orit and Huda, as well as Titune, Warda and me. I was distinguishable only by my height.

  We amused ourselves, taking turns with the pencil, adding details to the scene. She drew the cow that would be slaughtered. I wrote the name of Gishta’s mean wife Fatima above the cow. Sadia gave herself hoop earrings and drew a silver chain around her forehead, and I added a curl to the corner of her mouth to give her a mischievous smile. I pictured myself in Sadia’s place. I would do more than wait for Aziz to return from Cairo. I would go with him if he asked.

  But that afternoon there was no invitation of any kind. Aziz and Munir were still engaged in serious conversation when Sadia rose and said good-bye. Their conversation faltered.

  “It’s getting late,” Aziz said to me.

  “I’d best be going too,” I said, standing up and brushing the qat debris off my skirt.

  “Ciao,” they both said, “masalaama,” neither of them rising from the floor.

  calling all saints

  Nature added her voice. The sky was thick with cloud but there was no rain. We still had water brought by the bucketful from the river, but the tops of the boulders that sat midstream had been dry for weeks.

  Sheikh Jami had made a pilgrimage to the disciple of the saint who can communicate with the hyenas. He and this disciple had sat in a field at night and offered the hyenas a special bowl of buttered porridge and meat. Now the women were embarking on ritual reparation, making weekly pilgrimages to a saint with the power to bring rain. But the rainy season passed without delivery. We applied more perfume. We burned more incense. We found lice in the children’s hair once again.

  Our yard was parched and dusty and swarming with flies, though curiously, the once-battered plant in the Wellington boot had perked up considerably. In the middle of a drought, where not a drop of water could be spared, somehow an exception had been made: a plant that was good for nothing had been fed.

  Gishta siphoned off what she could from the supplies in her storeroom—a little sorghum, a little oil, a little butter, anything that we might be able to use. But without water, Nouria had no income. There was no way for her to wash clothes. But Gishta had her own problems. Fatima apparently became a monster when there was no water, bossy as only a senior wife can be, with her strict rationing, and her ussing and commands. “I’d like to stick her head in a bucket of water and make her shut up,” Gishta sneered, handing me a gourd of sour milk.

  Not only was life short in Africa, as Gishta frequently reminded me, it was often difficult.

  We began to hear rumors that a terrible famine was sweeping the north of the country. But all we saw on Aziz’s television were His Majesty’s speeches about the country’s development, and the shining-medalled officers of his Imperial Army surveying scenes of progress—a new well, the successful harvest of a new hybridized crop, a school for the blind, a textile factory employing amputees.

  “There has always been famine,” Amir said dismissively. “It has been this way for thousands of years.”

  “Ah, yes, but this time, the rest of the world has noticed,” Munir said, waving his finger. “It would not be such a problem if this famine were caused by drought and crop failure. That would be nature at work. But when you force the peasants to harvest the same amount in a year when the crops are suffering and then they have to give all of it to the landlords, they are left with nothing to eat. That is why there is famine.”

  “Not always,” said Aziz. “It’s different up north. There the problem is the war with Eritrea. They burn the fields so there is no harvest, and the peasants are forced to buy guns instead of feeding themselves. That is why there is famine.”

  “It’s terrible,” Sadia muttered, shaking her head.

  “Oh, don’t be so naive,” Aziz snapped. “Do you think it doesn’t happen in Harar?”

  “It’s just hard to picture,” I said in Sadia’s defense. Even though I had no difficulty believing in the unseen because God manifests his being in so many hidden ways, I couldn’t imagine what famine looked like.

  Munir said, “We’re not at war and we don’t get those terrible droughts. This thing we have been going through recently doesn’t even compare.”

  “No, but if it did? Do you think it would be any different? Do you think the Hararis would say to the Oromo: Oh no, keep some food for yourselves. You are our friends, our Muslim brothers, and after all, you harvest the food we eat, so we couldn’t possibly let you starve.”

  His mocking tone rang in the dead air. There was an uncomfortable silence. Aziz stood up, pulled his sarong tightly at the waist and left the room.

  He turned up at Nouria’s compound the following afternoon. It would have been too revealing for me to be overly familiar, so I buried my head and busied myself with my dictionary while he paid his respects to Nouria. She offered him tea, despite having so little water, and because he was polite he did not refuse, but when the cup was in his hand he tipped the contents into Bortucan’s willing mouth.

  Nouria was intimidated by the doctor; she must have been wondering what warranted this unexpected visit. So was I. But when he picked up Bortucan and the girl giggled, Nouria broke into a smile.

  “I was just wondering how she was,” he said to Nouria. “She looks good. Has she had any more of those lumps under her hair?”

  Nouria mumbled something and excused herself in order to stoke the fire.

  “They come and go,” I said, approaching.

  “That we can treat,” he said. “But this, I’m afraid,” he said, pointing at her temple, “we cannot.”

  Not even farenji medicine had an answer.

  “I really came to apologize for getting so angry yesterday,” he said, lowering his voice and switching to English. “You must just ignore me when I’m like that.”

  “But I want to understand.”

  “I wondered if yo
u would come to the farmlands with me next Saturday.”

  I hesitated.

  “There’s something I want to show you.”

  I nodded.

  He passed Bortucan to me and pulled a sweet out of his pocket for her. He poked his head into the kitchen to bid Nouria good-bye.

  “What was he saying?” she asked me as soon as he had gone.

  “He is studying for exams and his books are in English. He asked me the meaning of some words.”

  I was amazed at how easily the lie came.

  My students were cautious and slow. Their reserve must have had something to do with the strain in their households because of the drought, but I couldn’t help worrying that I was at fault. I must repent for my secrecy and lies, I told myself, but then I drifted off to see his palm raised before my eyes. I stared at the lines, wondering if he was trying to show me a map of some part of the world.

  Aziz and I huddled together in a horse-drawn calèche, hidden under the awning of the low cart as the driver led us north of the city into green fields by way of a well-worn track. We passed acres of qat shrubs, herds of goats and the occasional farmer with a gun slung over his shoulder.

  “Why do they need guns?” I asked.

  “Protection,” Aziz replied.

  “Hyenas?”

  “Mostly.”

  We followed a shallow creek toward a cluster of short palms bearing bunches of small green bananas. The breeze was sweet: an aromatic cocktail. It was here that we disembarked.

  Aziz carried a sack in one hand and took my hand in his other. He obviously felt much freer here. It was so open and so lush, so unlike our tight, walled existence within the city, but I felt awkward about holding hands in this naked light.

  “My mother’s land,” he said wistfully, unfolding a blanket at the edge of the stream.

  I admired the beauty of this place as we sat on wool laid over a grassy bed in the shade. A thin silver current ran past our feet. I wondered if this was the world I’d seen mapped on his palm.

  “It has belonged to my mother’s brother for decades now.”

  “Because she married a Sudanese man?”

  He nodded. “Disinherited.”

  He poured sweet tea from a thermos and unwrapped squares of fatira, a thin pastry stuffed with scrambled egg. He told me he was glad to be able to share this place with me. It was where he came whenever he received a new textbook—where he first opened it, a ritual of his own.

  “Somehow being here allows me to imagine things are possible,” he said. “You are like this air to me, Lilly: something fresh, something hopeful. You and your batin.” He reached for my cheek but then his hand fell away. “It’s hard to maintain your resolve, your determination to do good in a country where there is so much poverty. You hear our frustration—the inadequate supplies, the chronic illness, the people’s reluctance to seek our intervention until it is too late. It wears you down and then you hate yourself for giving up.”

  I wished there was a way I could help him, just as he had found a way to give me what I needed to teach my class.

  “We have a right to be angry,” he said, wiping crumbs from his lips. “Particularly with the injustice. We have this pride in the fact that we are a country that was never colonized, but what people don’t want to admit is that we live under a colonial regime of our own making. We call other Africans Barya—slaves. We call the Ethiopians in the south Shankilla. It means something like dirty blacks. We call the Oromo Galla. They would use all three insults to abuse me if they could, but I am an enigma to them. A black man with a Harari mother. A black man with a good education. They don’t know where to place me.”

  “Perhaps you are just a new kind of Ethiopian,” I offered. “A modern Ethiopian.”

  “Well, the modern Ethiopian is an angry Ethiopian, then,” Aziz said.

  We rose from the bank and in his silence he took my hand again, leading me through banana trees, across a field of qat shrubs, toward a wooden shack. The children playing in the dirt in front of the shack saw us coming and ran squealing toward us. “Farenji! Farenji!” they cried, stroking my arms, touching my clothes.

  “Uss!” Aziz quieted them, pulling sweets from his pocket. He said something in Oromiffa that sent all but one of them scurrying back home. Aziz lifted the straggler over his head and sat him down on his shoulders. The snotty-nosed boy laughed and ran his dirty fingers through Aziz’s hair.

  Aziz set the boy down at the entrance to the shack where chickens clucked away. We followed him in. The dark room was full of stinging smoke coming from a charred pot bubbling away on a small kerosene stove in the corner. It was so dark it took several minutes for my eyes to adjust, and even then, all I could really see were the whites of eyes—at least ten sets of them—peering sullenly from all four sides of the room.

  Aziz approached an old man lying on a cot. I couldn’t make out his eyes, and he moaned in response to Aziz’s touch.

  “The owner pulled out his eyes,” Aziz said to me. “Last year he only beat him with barbed wire.”

  I shuddered.

  “The harvest wasn’t as big as he’d expected. For two years running now we’ve had less rain.” Aziz pulled a pair of scissors from his sack and doused them with alcohol. He was removing stitches from the man’s face. “I had to sew the holes shut,” he explained. “There was nothing else I could do.”

  But what kind of harvest would this man reap next year, I wondered, without his eyes?

  “Can you take this?” he asked, holding the bottle of alcohol out behind him.

  I moved in closer to take the bottle from his hand. I could see then that the man wasn’t lying on a cot. He was reclining on a mountain of guns.

  shame

  There was disaster all around. No one seemed to know why things were so, but people agreed that it had all started that morning the one muezzin failed to call. Although he had been replaced within a day, the pitch of the new voice was different, slightly off-key, tainted by the mystery of where the original muezzin had gone and why. That day in March that had simply not begun had led to weeks and then months of false starts and less hidden bouts of anger. Farmers were now stockpiling guns in the countryside, poor women were being possessed by the spirits of the zar, young men like Aziz and Munir were agitated and angry, children were frightened and forgetting what they learned in their classes, and wives were inflicting cruelties on co-wives.

  In the absence of much water, people became parsimonious and mean, looking over each other’s shoulders, calling one another greedy, screaming if a drop fell needlessly to the ground. Gishta showed up bearing the evidence: a split lip, a blue cheek.

  “That Fatima is a monster,” she said, rubbing her jaw as we squatted in the kitchen making tea. “She used to beat me all the time. The first year of marriage is supposed to be a honeymoon. What did I get? Punched in the stomach and kicked in the head.”

  Gishta had struggled to get through that savage initiation without tears; Hararis hated tears, hated such displays of weakness.

  This latest battering was a result of Gishta’s having dared, in the dead of night, to wash her hair. But a senior wife’s ears are impossibly tuned, particularly during a period of drought. Fatima appeared around the corner as if she had been waiting to pounce the whole time, wrenched the bowl from her co-wife’s hands and threw it against the wall. “You selfish, selfish girl!” Fatima screamed as the bowl rolled away.

  Fatima boxed Gishta on both ears, held Gishta’s head between her hands and shook it back and forth as if she were rattling the last stubborn seeds from a gourd. Gishta tore at Fatima’s hands with her nails.

  “I should cut off your breasts!” Fatima had hissed before shoving Gishta to the ground. “You are only taking, taking, taking! Stealing from the kitchen for this lazy Galla cousin of yours and that farenji!”

  Gishta remained with us for a couple of days, helping us make berbere to sell in the Amhara market. Her lip only got worse when she rubbed ash into i
t to dry up the oozing pus.

  “Let me call the doctor,” I insisted several times. When she refused dinner, it was obvious that her lip was causing her more pain than she wanted to admit. “I’m going to call the doctor,” I said firmly. Strangely, she burst into tears.

  Within an hour, Aziz was pushing Gishta’s chin upwards with two fingers. I played nurse, holding on to his medical bag.

  “I can’t stitch it with this infection,” he said. “We’ll have to clear that up first.” He cleaned the cut with hydrogen peroxide and applied antibiotic ointment. “And take one of these twice a day, just in case,” he instructed Gishta.

  She stared with distrust at the white pills in the paper packet.

  “He’s a good man,” Gishta said after he left. “It’s a shame he is so black.”

  “So shankilla,” Nouria agreed.

  We made berbere in lieu of washing clothes. For three days, the yard had been covered in a red blanket of chili peppers drying in the sun. We had just begun picking up the crisp skins when Nouria looked up and asked, “Did you feel that?”

  “I did,” I marveled, wiping my forehead.

  “Alhamdullilah!”

  “Rain!” Fathi shouted.

  “Quick!” Nouria shrieked. “We have to get this inside! It will be ruined if it gets wet!”

  But the rain suddenly came pelting down, and though the children were helping us drag the tarps toward the door of the house, we couldn’t move fast enough. Nouria looked as if she were about to cry but she burst into hysterical laughter instead. This would be a disastrous waste, but we were so overjoyed that we threw up our arms and surrendered as the ground instantly turned to mud.

  Anwar led us through the Fatihah, the first chapter, that night, but when he began, Bortucan did not follow.

  “What’s wrong, Bee?” I asked, pulling her into my lap.