by Camilla Gibb
He’s also brought a jar for Amina, peach chutney he claims he made himself, following a recipe of his mother’s. And where do you find the small tart peaches that make a perfect peach chutney, Mrs. Jahangir wonders, holding the jar up to the light, and “Forgive me, this is Dr. Gupta,” Amina introduces him, “Lilly’s friend.”
“Robin, please,” he says as he shakes Mr. and Mrs. Jahangir’s hands.
Yusuf offers him a lager, Amina says, “Come, come and eat, we have a feast,” and the whole time I am standing there, flowers in my arms, feeling decidedly unlike celebrating.
I put the flowers down on the kitchen counter, return to the sitting room and proceed to pile food high on two plates for Ahmed and Sitta. Tariq is clutching the table leg with one hand, wavering on his unsteady feet while he reaches up for a piece of injera. Ahmed and Sitta take their plates and hold them at eye level in both hands, carrying them into the other room to watch television.
“Is something wrong?” Robin asks, suddenly at my side.
“Nothing,” I reply.
“You didn’t expect me, did you,” he says.
“Amina did neglect to tell me.”
“I hope it’s not an imposition,” he says.
“No, look, we’ve masses of food.” I leave him, busy myself in the kitchen.
“Lilies for his Lilly,” Amina croons as I stare into the sink, butchering the flower stems with a bread knife.
“He doesn’t belong here, Amina.”
She pouts. “Oh, why do you say this? It is a celebration, Lilly.”
I stab the stems into a pint glass.
It’s all a very happy scene unfolding in the sitting room. Mr. Jahangir is asking, “Your people, are they related to the pharmaceutical Guptas in Bombay? And which college at Cambridge? Do you play chess?”
Robin is bouncing Tariq on his knee, and the boy is in ecstasy. “Bow, wow, wow, wee,” he sings, throwing his injera to the floor.
“Oh, pah pah,” Yusuf says, “don’t be seduced by his mild demeanor, Dr. Gupta. Mr. Jahangir is a shark in a sea of minnows when he sits in front of the chessboard,” though what he means is that Mr. Jahangir is an utter cheat. I doubt a brass set or an apology could ever persuade Yusuf to sit down to play with him again.
Mr. J beams, thrilled to be likened to a predator.
Amina decides to ignore me and join the party. I decide to ignore the party and join the children.
“You look very beautiful,” Robin says, grasping my arm as I attempt to breeze by, and I hate the fact that he has seen me in my diri, the nightdress Amina also wears after dusk in her less tartan moments.
“Just going to check on the children.”
I switch the channel despite Sitta’s objections, turn up the volume, not caring if the news is unsuitable. The bed exhales as I sit down between them.
Ahmed burps. “Excuse me,” he says.
I make my way to the community association office in the morning. The street is deserted, the light strained. Amina is having a sleep-in, I imagine. Or a love-in, given the way Yusuf was staring at her legs last night. I managed to avoid the entire party between eating with the children, washing up and putting Tariq to bed. I managed to avoid having to talk to Robin the whole evening and said only the curtest good-bye.
Amina arrives about half ten, when I’m already halfway through opening the week’s mail.
“Have you had buna?” she asks, dropping her purse into a chair.
“Not yet.”
She picks up the kettle, about to carry it out to the sink in the hall.
“Real buna?” I ask. “I hate that Nescafé you drink now.”
“You are such a habasha,” she scoffs. An Ethiopian.
“I’ll make it,” I mutter, shoving back my chair.
I spill green beans out of a paper bag into my palm. Turn on the Bunsen burner, heat up the tin plate and throw on the beans. I shake the plate with my left hand and rest it over the flame, staring at the marks we have made on the Michelin map on the wall.
“I’m sorry you missed the party, Lilly,” she says, flipping through the rest of the unopened mail.
“I’m sorry, I just wasn’t up to it.”
“But it was such a nice party.”
“For you, maybe,” I say, still staring at the map.
“You resent me because I have Yusuf, isn’t that right?” she says, more statement than question.
She’s half right. I do resent her, but more for trying to put Robin in Aziz’s place than for the fact that she has Yusuf. For taking such liberties: failing to respect or recognize the space Aziz occupies. Now that she has Yusuf, she can no longer remember how it feels.
“Do you not think it breaks my heart every day to wonder if my sister is still alive, or whether my brothers are being tortured to death in prison?” she demands. “Do you think it has been easy trying to raise three children and deal with a husband who has been traumatized and is afraid of the dark and afraid of other men and sometimes he is even afraid of his own children because he has this nightmare constantly swirling in his head? You know, ever since he has been in England he has not wanted me to touch him because when he was in prison they put matches to his skin. Imagine someone you love looking at you like they fear you will hurt them.”
“At least you have a family.”
She inhales angrily. “You know, Lilly? You have to stop behaving like an orphaned child.”
“Oh shit!” I shriek. Smoldering, blackened beans spill from the tin plate onto the carpet and within seconds they are melting the acrylic at my feet. “Shit, shit, shit!” I stomp up and down.
Amina wordlessly tips the watering can over.
I avoid the cafeteria, standing outside during my breaks, watching stray sheets of newspaper take flight, clustered beside other addicts wheeling their drips and exposing their backsides to the wind. “Give us a fag,” says one, “I’ll catch my death,” a minute later.
One of my patients complains that I reek of smoke—this from a woman constantly soaked in her own urine. I have no patience anymore. I’ve even noticed it with the children. Their squabbling has been getting on my nerves.
“Where are you picking up this kind of language?” I shouted at Ahmed the other day when he called his sister a bloody bastard.
His bottom lip began to quiver.
“Tell me! At school?” I persisted.
He shook his head. “From you,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“From when you yelled at the cab driver.”
Because he’d said he had no change. Because I needed the change to buy milk. Because the only thing I was looking forward to was a cup of tea.
It’s only a matter of days before I run into Robin. I can’t avoid him forever. He looks up when I enter the cafeteria and waves. He offers me Tabasco sauce before peppering his beef stroganoff. He’s hating his job today. It’s all “shitty bureaucracy” and “shitty petty tyranny” and “shitty miserly shortsightedness” on days when Robin hates his job.
“Look, I honestly didn’t realize Amina hadn’t told you I was coming,” he says, grinding down the gears into awkwardness. “But it was a lovely party. I wish you hadn’t disappeared.”
“I just didn’t think it was appropriate that you were there.”
“I was invited,” he says, stunned.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Could you at least try and tell me what’s the matter?” he pleads. “I’m confused. You said you liked me too.”
I’m overcome with a green wave. I hold up my palm. “I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Just can’t,” I say, fleeing to the loo.
I stare into the warped tin mirror. The whites of my eyes are yellow, my hair is yellow, my teeth are yellow from smoking. Everything about me is sickly and dull. I look as though I’ve just emerged from a compost heap.
I take off my shoes and socks, run the tap, wash my hands, face and neck, rinse my nostrils and mouth,
bathe my forearms, the top of my head, my feet and ankles. I lay down my gown as a prayer rug. I don’t usually pray at the hospital; my colleagues complain about the mess, all the water on the floor, and they say that they feel too self-conscious, too respectful to use the toilet when I’m bent over on the floor, there are only two cubicles after all. It makes no difference if I tell them that when I pray, I am not of this time and place; I would not notice it even if they were throwing up in the toilet or snorting cocaine off the stainless steel shelf above the sink.
Perhaps they won’t notice me here, huddled in one of the cubicles, feet up on the seat, sniveling pathetically, using my gown as a handkerchief.
learning chess
Believing that all has been ordained by God can lead to fatalism, but fatalism is not the same thing as belief. It’s a cheat: an abdication of responsibility. Believers take action, while I lie inert. I can’t be bothered to get up off the sofa and answer the knock at my door. I’m not in the mood for interruptions, though I’m not doing anything but lying here wearing a flannel nightshirt and slouchy socks, clinging to a lukewarm hot water bottle and contemplating the cracks in the ceiling. I’ve tried to read, but I can’t make it through more than a paragraph at a time. The floor is littered with abandoned newspapers and empty yogurt containers.
Three days ago Robin accompanied me home after my meltdown in the loo. I finally let him into my flat. I put the key in the door, pushed it open and stood in the doorway while he entered my sitting room.
He laughed, looking rather baffled. “Aren’t you even going to come in?”
We drank tea at the kitchen table by the window with a view of another identical tower standing lonely in the navy blue dusk. We sat across from each other, our knees near the radiator, the fluorescent light droning above and the thin pane of glass rattling beside our cheeks.
“How long have you lived here?” he asked.
“Why?”
“It’s just, well, you don’t have any pictures on the walls, or any photographs, or anything.”
“I prefer it this way,” I said.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been pushing too hard,” he said for the second time. “Perhaps I’m just rather clumsy when it comes to courtship. I thought most women liked to be pursued.”
“It’s not that.”
“Well, I obviously stepped over some kind of line.”
He’s trying to find a way into a life that has no door. There is an inner courtyard, concealed from the street, but this is a place where sentinels stand guard, the space Aziz inhabits, walking around in his white galabaia memorizing passages from a book. It is as if I have to protect it all the more fiercely now that Amina does not share it with me.
I reached out to take Robin’s hand. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really appreciate all your effort.”
He laughed again. “You make it sound as if I’m trying to do you some kind of favor! Like fix your plumbing! I may have made a mistake, but I don’t think I’ve entirely misread things. You don’t have to shut me out altogether.”
I shook my head.
“What is it?”
I looked down at my shoes.
“Is there someone else?”
Finally the right question. The simplest question of all. No matter what I might feel for Robin, there’s an organ without a name that only registers the invisible. It’s why I sense Aziz in windows, in puddles, in glass—an image thin and distorted, persistent and deadly silent. He does not say: forget me, move on, I have forgotten you, or I am dead, Lilly, long dead, so engage with this man Rabindranath, give him room. He does not say: whatever happened to me is not your fault.
I looked up.
Robin sighed and hung his head. “Lilly, why couldn’t you have just told me? Now I feel like an idiot. It’s not really fair, you know.”
Aziz’s silence overwhelms everything else. It blanketed the sound of Robin’s footsteps as he retreated to the door, made his way down the concrete corridor, exited the building and walked away. Aziz’s silence has blanketed the last three days.
Yusuf lets himself in with a key. “It’s just that we haven’t seen you,” he says apologetically.
“Just tired,” I reply.
“Sick?” he asks, sitting down by my feet.
“Maybe.”
“Can I bring you something? Tea? Soup? I made one yesterday that Amina says she would like to taste every day.”
“Not that kind of sick. But I’ll be fine.”
“Shall I teach you chess?” Yusuf asks. He’s had a bit of a set-to with his Oromo friends after discovering one of them served, albeit briefly and coerced, in the Dergue’s army. Perhaps the game will distract me too, but it’s hard to imagine caring about a board game even though Yusuf insists chess is more like life than most people realize.
He returns with the board and names the pieces in Arabic as he sets them down one by one.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” he asks when I don’t move to pick up the phone.
I shake my head.
“Shall I?”
I shrug listlessly and stare at the squares—the burnt orange of an Ethiopian sunset, the dark brown of good earth. Men poised, ready and willing, for battle.
“It was Robin,” Yusuf says, sitting back down crossed-legged on the floor. “He was wondering if you were okay.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you are learning chess, of course,” Yusuf says, smiling.
“I’m running away from him, Yusuf,” I say quietly.
He considers this, scratching his beard. “Perhaps you are not running away from him but from your feelings.”
Yusuf says little, but that little is always precise. That is exactly why things with Robin have to end. My feelings for him only threaten to grow, while those for Aziz remain fixed, like the one photograph I have of him—twenty-six years old, staring straight ahead, deadly still in black and white. Staring at me as if I were still nineteen years old.
I pick up a piece from the chessboard. “What did you say this one was called?”
I pray for a sign that I have done the right thing, pray throughout the month of Safar, the dangerous month of the Muslim calendar, the one where we must not propose or marry or travel, because calamities will befall us. In Harar, Sheikh Jami used to take care to visit the shrines of every one of the more than three hundred saints of the city during Safar to maximize our protection from evil and illness. He’d visit the forgotten shrines, ones hidden in people’s kitchens, in holes in compound walls, in the bend of the river, in the hollow of a tree, ensuring he paid his respects to each saint in the pantheon at least once a year.
Here we have only our flowerpot. And only me to make prayers. Amina won’t accompany me to the back because the local imam asserts that these beliefs about Safar are superstitions carried forth from the Jahiliyya. I burn incense every day for thirty days, asking Bilal to reach out to all the other saints. I hope that some descendant of Sheikh Jami’s is doing the same in Harar.
Amina and Yusuf and the children do their best to surround me with the ordinariness of family life. Well-meaning neighbors stop by with curries and stewed cabbage, passing pots into Amina’s arms. “Tuck in,” I tell Amina and Yusuf. The smells are enticing, but the mouth, the stomach, remain unwilling.
Tariq teeters around looking for trouble and snacking on the inedible, and Ahmed and Sitta squabble in the kitchen. Sitta emerges in tears and Yusuf, who is sitting beside me, spreads his arms and pulls her onto his lap. Ahmed’s been teasing her about her mole, saying it looks like an ink stain. It’s not the worst of what kids say. I’ve heard other Ethiopian kids call her nig nog, Galla, Shankilla. They have twice as many cruel words as their parents: the insults of both the old world and the new.
Sitta buries her face in her father’s neck, and Yusuf strokes her cheek.
“He telephoned again today,” he says to me.
“He shouldn’t bother,” I reply. “He should just get on with his
life.”
Amina raised the idea of counseling, which I adamantly rejected, but when I think about how unfair I’ve been to Robin, I wonder whether counseling might be an act of public service.
My punishment for having missed a second week of work without explanation in the last two years is this mandatory leave of absence. There was no meeting with a board this time, for which I am grateful. It would have been too humiliating to have to see Robin. The head of nursing simply gave me a slip of paper with the phone number of the resident psychiatrist. That went straight in the garbage along with my uniform.
When I reached for the tea canister that night, I found a bottle of green and white pills inside my cupboard. Yusuf’s prescription for depression. Physician none other than Dr. Gupta.
part eight
harar, ethiopia
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1974
static
Gishta arrived out of breath, out of sorts, interrupting my class. “Send the children home!” she commanded.
“What’s wrong?”
“Send them home now!” she cried.
“Did you have to upset the children like that?” I asked, after packing them off with their borrowed booklets and the assurance that everything would be all right.
She was wild with anger, shrieking something about children and coddling and how she had been forced to work when she was eight years old. But as I looked in her eyes I realized it wasn’t anger but fear that had her ranting and waving and smacking the tin fence.
She’d been greeted with a gun in the face that morning, she confessed once Nouria returned from the market. The Oromo tenants who farmed Sheikh Jami’s fields were apparently complaining that they were fed up with having to break their backs so that the sheikh’s wives could wear silk. They’d turned them away with guns.
Gishta was not the least bit sympathetic, though her own father must have likewise labored to keep Harari women expensively dressed. But the converted are often more self-righteous than those born to their station. I had only to look at myself to know the truth of this. When I first met Aziz, my religious beliefs had been much more dogmatic than his. But then he held my hand, and in so doing, loosened my grip. And now? Without his hand? I was devastated. I longed for an easier time, when being Muslim was rigid and rule bound and the past belonged clearly to a pre-Islamic era. I wished there were something absolute in which to believe. It was a time, after all, when one didn’t know what to believe, where to turn. You could smell the suspicion in the air—it was being sprayed in all directions, whispers of allegiances, minor peasant revolts, disloyalty, feuding, betrayal. Fear was limiting the movements of women. Silence seemed to dominate the relationships between brothers and best friends. And fewer and fewer students were coming to my class.
