Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  Nouria shrugged. “She forgets.”

  “But she knew this chapter.”

  “Her mind is small. Twins are not good. Bad luck. One steals from the other.”

  “But she’d made such progress.”

  “Allah giveth and Allah taketh away,” Nouria said with resignation. “He gave Uncle Jami and then he took him away, after all.”

  I looked at her.

  “Their father,” she whispered.

  I gasped. “Sheikh Jami?”

  “Five years,” she said, holding up her hand. His mistress for five years. She spoke in signs: a pregnant belly, the end of the affair.

  This from a man who called farenjis hypocrites and liars.

  “Does Gishta know?”

  Nouria laughed. “Of course she knows. It was her idea. He is a good Harari man. She was thinking maybe he would take me for the fourth wife.”

  “So why didn’t he?”

  She shuddered. “Oh, that Fatima. She doesn’t like Oromo. Two Harari wives, two Oromo wives? No, she didn’t like the balance tipping. She is too old to have more children. She did not want these half-breeds running around and growing up to gain some inheritance she wanted for her own.”

  “But she accepted Gishta.”

  “Ooph! She tried to kill Gishta! She put the most evil of evil eyes on her. Gishta lost the first baby and the third baby and the fifth. She has had a very, very hard time.”

  And so had Nouria. Without marriage, a father would not recognize children as his own. Because paternity, as Aziz had said, was everything. Your liberation, your death sentence, your legitimacy or lack thereof in the world.

  a mother’s job

  Munir took on the job of distributing the qat that Saturday because Aziz was nowhere to be found. He separated the stalks, passed them around the circle and set the Prophet’s share aside, threw some incense onto the coals and said a du’a before inviting us to begin chewing. I never knew what happened to the Prophet’s share.

  “But where is he?” I asked, listlessly placing leaves between my molars and my cheek.

  “Probably a woman in labor,” offered Tawfiq, throwing down a stalk he’d already stripped clean. “The rain comes and suddenly women go into labor. It happens, though I cannot offer you a medical explanation for it.”

  But a doctor was rarely called upon to deliver a baby. A midwife first, a spiritual healer if there was a problem, but a doctor only if the situation was truly desperate.

  “It’s more likely he’s stuck in Dire Dawa,” said Munir. “No taxis.”

  “No taxis?” Sadia looked shattered. There was a new boutique in Dire Dawa she was hoping to visit.

  “On strike,” said Munir. “The emperor doubled the petrol prices.”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  Munir shrugged. “He’s the emperor.”

  “Perhaps if he realized he was going to interrupt your shopping, he would have waited,” said Tawfiq, but despite his teasing Sadia, the group lacked energy. It was not just the absence of the sparks that flew when Aziz and Munir sparred, but some other, intangible quality. My body felt limp, sluggish, abandoned in a room where I was used to feeling every fiber of me pulled taut with expectation.

  The next day Nouria returned from the market empty handed save for an onion and two tomatoes. How were we going to make the injera for the week without sorghum?

  “Sometimes it happens. I don’t know, Lilly.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I mean, suddenly it would take one month of what we earn to buy just the smallest handful. I don’t know why, but everyone was the same. That lady with the silver teeth, she had some which was a little cheaper, but it was riddled with mold; I could smell it.”

  “What about rice?”

  “Ooph. You should have seen it. I saw the Saudi lady—you know, she is married to the man with the glass shop?—and she was saying to Ikhista Aini, ‘Sure, I can sell you rice; just give me that gold ring on your fourth finger.’ ”

  We made do with the onion and the tomatoes, making a watery stew into which we threw some scraps of dry injera. Rahile searched in vain for a piece of meat. She said she didn’t like old injera. Her mother grimaced at me as if to say: just look at how spoiled she has become! Ever since I had been teaching we’d been eating better, and Rahile had taken to the good life as if it were her birthright. She’d procured her first veil recently by telling Gishta that when she grew up, she would like to dress exactly like her. “I wish I was grown up already,” she said, pouting, “grown up and beautiful like you.”

  “That one will never be poor,” said Nouria, watching her daughter parade around the yard in my shoes and her new veil.

  But that was before the cost of fabric soared—the fabric that came from India from which our veils and dresses were made. Gishta flounced into our courtyard, irritated, having just had a fight with the fabric merchant she most often frequented. “He’s trying to sell me this cotton for the price of silk. Who does he think he is all of a sudden? I bet his wife has forced him. She’s a greedy woman.”

  “I remember when his wife was a girl,” Nouria said. “She was greedy then, even stealing apricots from the market . . .”

  The women gossiped away while I retrieved my shoes from where Rahile had abandoned them. I smacked their soles together to get rid of the dust and wondered what to make of all the price increases and how we would cope if this continued. Aziz would know, I would ask him, but then what if he didn’t turn up again on Saturday?

  I donned my veil and told the women I was going to the market to see if all the cloth merchants had raised their prices or just this particular one.

  “And see if you can smile a little when you speak to the cloth man,” Gishta said.

  “And remind that Somali woman that her boys are lucky to have you as their teacher,” said Nouria.

  I knocked on the metal door of Aziz’s mother’s compound and he answered right away, wearing his loose white galabaia and sandals, holding a notebook in his hand. I slipped into the courtyard at his invitation. He was alone, his mother was doing shir shir, visiting; I could sit with him on a platform in the main room if I’d like and share a fizzy drink.

  I preferred to remain standing in the courtyard, too nervous that his mother might return and find us sitting together. He said he’d missed me on Saturday but that he’d had a family obligation to fulfill. It was an explanation that offered no comfort. Something called envy fermented in my stomach as he spoke. Apparently his mother had claimed she had found the ideal girl for him and sent him off to introduce himself. Finding suitable matches for one’s children was a mother’s job. In some senses, it was what success as a mother depended upon. It was the second time since he’d returned from medical school that she’d done this.

  What was ideal? I wanted to know.

  “Obedient, good at housework, skilled at handicrafts, light skinned, beautiful and from a good lineage,” Aziz replied without hesitation. “Though not necessarily in that order.”

  Light skinned, I thought. One out of six.

  “It’s like a game,” Aziz said, trying to lessen the significance of it. “I go to introduce myself to the girl’s mother and say that I’m available if the family needs the services of a doctor. She offers me a seat facing the wooden doors so that I can see the girl as she passes across the courtyard. It makes me very uncomfortable. It is a game where I am supposed to be a hunter and the girl the prey. In any case, my mother is furious now because I left long before it was polite to do so. I should have stayed and prayed with her father and eaten dinner with her brothers. But I just couldn’t.”

  I wondered if the girl was pretty. I wondered if I could bear it if this happened again. I felt slightly nauseated.

  As soon as I returned home Nouria asked me if I was sick.

  “No. Why?”

  “Rahile says you went to visit the doctor.”

  “I thought maybe his mother could tell me where t
o buy affordable cloth. She wears such nice clothes.”

  “And did she?” Nouria asked, her eyes full of warning.

  That was not enough to stop me from walking to the hospital at lunch the next day. I was feeling something new and awful. What if one of these days his mother introduced him to the ideal girl, or a girl whose beauty swept him away? And for that matter, what about the nurses? The hospital was a world, after all, where girls were much freer to interact with men.

  The front entrance of the hospital was blocked by a crowd of women shouting and waving placards. I found a way in through the back of the building.

  “What’s going on out there?” I asked as soon as I found Aziz in the dull green corridors.

  He led me out to the back courtyard. “The nurses are on strike,” he said as we sat down on a bench. “The doctors are taking extra shifts in order to deal with emergencies.”

  He insisted I share the bread and tomatoes he had brought for his lunch and he bought me a cup of tea in a tin cup from the canteen. He offered me powdered milk from the bag in his pocket.

  “Are you worried?” I asked him.

  “It’s always worrying. In any case, Lilly, I’m glad you came. I wanted you to know that yesterday, when my mother came home, I told her that I will choose for myself when I am good and ready. Of course she objects because it is not the traditional way. She is quite sure that only a woman can honestly judge another woman’s character. It is always best to leave it to your mother, she says.”

  “Is the girl pretty?” I asked, despite my best intentions.

  Aziz sighed. “My mother is doing this because she wants me to be married into a good Harari family. People rarely marry for love. They believe the heart leads you astray, leads you to make choices that will harm you in the end. Look at my mother—she’s still paying the price. She doesn’t want me to suffer the alienation she did. And honestly? I think she believes she can elevate her social standing through forming an alliance with an old established family. Gain her place back. And she probably can. Could.”

  “Through you.”

  “Through me.”

  “Isn’t it enough that you went to university, that you have this respected job with a title and an income?”

  “This isn’t a democracy, Lilly.” He looked lost in thought while he stirred his tea.

  “What about the girl in Addis Ababa?”

  “Ah, I see there has been gossip,” he said, looking down. “Mintiwab. She was at medical school with us.”

  My skin bristled at the sound of her name.

  “She did not love me back,” he said without apparent emotion.

  Envy rolled over me and spilled to the ground.

  “You know, before I met her—you’ll have to forgive me—but I used to think girls were rather silly. And then here we were at medical school and I see this girl who has no problem suturing a wound, or dissecting a cadaver, and I realize: girls are not passive by nature. They are only so because the culture demands they be.

  “One day I approached her and asked if maybe she would like to come to a small party Munir and I were going to have. But do you know what she said?”

  “That she couldn’t date a Muslim?”

  “No. She actually said she was not interested in anything other than her studies. She’d seen far too many girls abandon university when they met a man and she had no intention of not completing her studies and becoming a doctor. And the funny thing is, I think that is why I loved her,” Aziz said, sounding surprised. “I realized that given the opportunity, a woman could be a man’s equal. It made me wonder if perhaps this is the real reason why they keep men and women apart in Islam.”

  I didn’t have a moment to think about that. Aziz gripped both my wrists, his knees pressed into mine. “The fact is, my mother would like me to meet a nice Harari girl, but medical school ruined me for traditional marriage. None of them are like Minti. And then there is you, farenji, with such independence and conviction, with your desire to change the lives of poor children. Not just a desire—a plan and an effect. What am I supposed to do?”

  I stared at the impression of his fingerprints on my skin.

  to hold a girl

  The Faras Magala still fluttered. Qat addicts pleading with qat sellers, city folk bartering with peasants, tailors humming away on their old machines, goats and donkeys farting and dumping, children whining and groveling and lepers begging without arms and legs and noses. Produce had become fresh and plentiful again with the end of the drought. This was lucky: the qat addicts had become abusive during the drought, as they do whenever their drug is costly or unavailable, hurling insults and stones at passersby.

  There was only one communal taxi to Dire Dawa these days. The minibus was already full when I slipped on board, with several Oromo returning to smaller towns outside the city and two Harari women off to spend the day shopping or visiting relatives from whom I deliberately concealed my face.

  Over the years, many Hararis had gone to live in Dire Dawa. The French had built a railway from Djibouti to Addis Ababa at the turn of the century, and Dire Dawa was one of the only stops along the five-hundred-mile route. Imported goods, most from India and China, were cheaper there, where they were offloaded straight from the train.

  Hararis would move as far as Addis Ababa to make money, and prospered in trade wherever they went. But the majority of them still remained in the old city, and none of them left the country, except to make the hajj. Ethiopians as a whole did not leave their country. A few students had made their way west to pursue further education, which they planned to put to use back in their own country, but there was no emigration, there was no such thing as a diaspora; the words for these things would not even come into existence until sometime later in history.

  I paid a huge sum of money for the trip and as the bus pulled out of the main square, I waved behind me, a tear rolling down my face.

  “Why are you crying, dear?” a toothless Oromo woman with a chicken in her lap asked me in Harari.

  I was grateful she assumed this to be my language. It was in my dress and the way I carried myself. It helped that her eyes were clouded with a white film.

  “Because I’m leaving my mother,” I replied, looking backward again, lying because I didn’t really know the answer. Conflicted? Partly. Lies were becoming more frequent. And easier. Nouria and Gishta had given me their blessing, believing I was on my way to meet Sadia in Dire Dawa, where we would stay with some relatives of hers and spend the weekend shopping for items that Munir and his family were obliged to provide for their eventual new home.

  It was not implausible; we were planning to do this soon enough, just not yet. Sadia happily colluded in my risky adventure, saying she would cover my tracks if I might, in return, please try to visit the new boutique with its fashinn gidir imports from India and memorize everything on its shelves.

  “You are a good daughter,” said the old Oromo woman, stroking her chicken.

  After an hour of twisting mountain roads, we reached the desert floor. I had to fight my way off the bus as returning passengers attempted to cram their package-laden bodies on board. I lifted my head to see him, an obelisk standing strong and solid in the middle of the teeming square.

  “This way,” he said, leading me by the elbow through the crowd, past fruit stalls piled high with mangoes, goats scavenging for vegetables, a storefront displaying plastic buckets in primary colors, a boy shining shoes though he himself was not wearing any.

  We turned into a beautiful street lined with acacia trees bursting red and purple, speckling the street with color and shade. The buildings, modern and spacious, were cheerful pinks and yellows and crisp, clean whites. Vines spilled suggestively over their compound walls, saying: There is life here and life is good. It was so much cleaner and brighter than Harar. And so much hotter. The air was unwhispering, utterly still, and the sun blazed white even though it was already late afternoon.

  We slipped through an alleyway between two
buildings, at the end of which shone a bright blue metal gate, and I followed Aziz into a small, shady, meticulous courtyard made up of yellow and blue ceramic tiles, an ornate fountain standing at its center. The house belonged to Munir’s grandfather, and Aziz stayed here whenever he came to Dire Dawa, as he occasionally did to collect books or pick up medical supplies.

  “Let me introduce you,” Aziz said, climbing the three steps to the main room. “Prepare yourself,” he warned me. “Grandfather Ibrahim!” he yelled.

  A wrinkled little Harari man with flaming red hennaed hair was sitting on a pillow, a cup of water on one side of him, the Qur’an on the other.

  “This is the girl I was telling you about!” shouted Aziz. “The Arab girl!”

  The old man’s eyesight was obviously worse than his hearing, but what he lacked in senses he made up for in strength. “Ahlan wa sahlan!” he said surprisingly loudly. Welcome. “Have you ever met anybody who is ninety-eight years old?” he asked in Arabic.

  I laughed and told him no, I never had. He pulled out his false teeth then, and I couldn’t help but shriek, causing him to laugh so hard that his entire body shook. Suddenly, the old man leapt to his feet.

  “I might not have my teeth, but I can still dance!” he shouted. He jumped off the platform onto the floor and ran into the courtyard. “Look at me!” he shouted with a snort, running around in circles, his red curls bouncing. “I have the energy of a man half my age! All my wives died!” he yelled. “None of them could keep up with me!”

  “It’s true,” said Aziz. “He’s alone here now. Most of his children are dead. He’s got only his grandchildren and great-grandchildren now.”

  “You’re incredible,” I said.

  “I’m ninety-eight!” he shouted again, before running back into the main room and hopping onto the platform to resume his seated position. He immediately closed his eyes and began to snore.

  I stifled my laughter.

  “He has a medical condition,” Aziz whispered. “Narcolepsy. He drops off to sleep in the middle of things. I honestly think it’s what’s kept him so young. He must have slept through half his life. He’s really only forty-nine!”