In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  Tricia looked at me again, as though she were dreaming. As though the hut, the fire, and the little girl could vanish as quickly as the steam from the thick glass mugs we now cradled in our hands.

  Asanti,” I smiled. “What is your name?”

  The little girl ducked her head and looked up at us through a veil of dark eyelashes. “Juliana.”

  “Asanti, Juliana. I’m Susan.” I pointed at my chest, then to Tricia. “And this is Tricia. Is your mother at home?”

  She nodded, then backed away and out the door.

  The fire popped and crackled. Out the window, gray mist spread over the fields. I let the steam from the mug rise into my face and smelled cardamom. The chai, strong black tea softened with milk and sweetened with spices and sugar, warmed a path down my throat and into my empty stomach.

  Tricia sipped her tea and stared into the fire. “I don’t know anybody who would do this back home.” She turned to me. “Would anybody we know, if they saw two Africans, complete strangers, walking down a dirt road, invite them into their home?”

  We both knew the answer.

  “I’d like to think we would.”

  A soft knock at the door, then it opened and the woman we had sat next to on the bus came in carrying two bowls. Juliana hurried in behind her with tin plates and two forks. The tiny room filled with the aroma of roasted chicken.

  My scalp tingled as I took the plate and fork from little Juliana. Her mother held out each bowl, offering us steaming potatoes and plump pieces of chicken breast.

  I clasped my hands together. “Oh, bibi!” As so often happened when offered food, I hesitated to accept what I knew to be such a precious offering. But to decline such hospitality would be unspeakably rude. I accepted the bowl with a small bow of my head. “Asanti sana.”

  Tricia’s brows folded and she pressed her lips together. For a moment, I thought she might cry. Instead, she smiled and took the bowl onto her lap. “Thank you. You are very kind.”

  “Usijifanye mgeni.”

  I cocked my head and opened my palms in question.

  “Do not regard yourself as a stranger,” she said and smiled the same smile of pride she had given me the day before when she had pointed to the mountain. A baby cried from nearby and Juliana and her mother left the hut.

  Tricia and I stared at each other, speechless. I kept hearing in my head, “What do you want to go over there and work with all those black people for?” And I knew Tricia was remembering the day she returned from South America when our parents wouldn’t let her friends into the house.

  “What happened to our hospitality?” I said.

  “We save it for family.”

  “What good is that?”

  Tricia shrugged. “Maybe it’s a Mormon thing. Maybe they were persecuted for so long, they don’t trust anybody but their own kind.”

  “The Kikuyu were colonized by the British, their land taken, the Mau Mau revolution. And still”—I held up my bowl—“this happens.” I shook my head. “There’s just no excuse.”

  “You’re right.” Tricia looked down at her food. “Let’s eat.”

  We forked potatoes and chicken into our mouths. The potatoes were rich with the flavor of earth. The chicken, slightly tough, tasted delicious with a hint of corn and fresh air.

  “Wow, this is really good.” Tricia closed her eyes and chewed.

  The thrum of rain lessened to a pitter-patter on the thatch. I rose with my bowl and opened the door. It faced east toward the mountain. A mantel of clouds obscured the base of Mt. Kenya, but above, so high I had to lift my chin, the seventeen-thousand-foot peak cut through the clouds.

  “It says here that all Kikuyu build their houses with their doors facing the mountain.”

  I turned. Tricia had the guidebook out. A rush of love for my sister washed around my heart so quickly and so strongly, my eyes teared up.

  “The Kikuyu believe that Mogai, the Kikuyu name for God, lives on Kere-Nyaga, their name for Mt. Kenya.” Tricia glanced up at the mountain, then bent her head to read. “‘In ancient times there was a man called Gikuyu. Once, Mogai came down from his mountain in the guise of a stranger. Gikuyu was a poor man, but took Mogai into his home and offered him sustenance.’” She looked up at me.

  I nodded. Juliana and her mother knew that a stranger could be a goddess or an angel in disguise. Not that Trish and I were anything close to either. But, you never knew.

  I was suddenly atop a riverboat, on the Niger, singing with my fellow travelers to a throng of villagers at midnight. I had almost been an angel, once.

  “‘For his kindness, Mogai gave Gikuyu the land around the base of the mountain—the central highlands of Kenya.’”

  We finished our food and sipped our tea in front of the fire, wondering aloud how we could thank Juliana and her mother. The rain stopped. Out the windows the clouds broke and a sheath of sunlight stole into the hut, washing the walls with lemon light. Voices came from just outside the door, and Juliana entered, carrying our sweatshirts.

  We stacked our bowls and mugs next to the fire. Our sweatshirts were dry and warm. Juliana bowed her head and shuffled her bare feet.

  “Thank you for inviting us into your house, Juliana.”

  She looked up at us. “Could I have some shoes?”

  Her mother stood outside, barefoot, the baby wrapped in a pagne. Two mud huts, a few chickens (one of which we had just eaten), a goat, a garden.

  Tricia handed me the guidebook and a pen. I opened the book to the myth of Gikuyu and beckoned Juliana over. Taking her foot, I pressed it onto the page and traced around it with the pen. I looked up at her face. “What kind of shoes?”

  “Tennis shoes?”

  “We’ll come back tomorrow with tennis shoes, OK?”

  Juliana nodded.

  We said goodbye to Juliana’s mother and thanked her again for her hospitality. I shook her hand with both of mine then touched my heart with my right fingers.

  Juliana slung her baby brother onto her back and, with her goat, accompanied us back down the footpath, across the field to the road. We waved at her mother then set off in the direction of Naro Moru.

  After a few steps, I turned once more to wave at Juliana. She stood at an angle so her baby brother could see us. The two of them watched us, their cheeks bunched up in smiles, the bright spark of life in their eyes.

  Nsissim is the soul. It is Nsissim who makes Gnoul live. And do you know where Nsissim lives? He lives in the eye. The little shining point in the middle, that is Nsissim.

  Juliana called, “Kwaherini!” her voice tinkling like glass chimes in the wind.

  My heart skipped a beat, slowed. There was Luc, his cheek pressed up against the back of the little girl in Foequellie, both of them smiling, waving goodbye. The baby goat bleated at us just as the sun broke from behind a cloud and washed the fields and mountain in brilliant green and gold.

  Something broke inside my chest. The steel band that had circled and squeezed my heart, loosened, and fell away.

  Foolish Miss Soosan, trying to make someone stay when they had already left.

  I couldn’t make someone stay when it was their time to go. And I couldn’t’ bring them back. The people of Africa knew this: Birth and death and everything that happened in between were all life.

  There is no beginning that has no end.

  I took a full, clear breath. I waved back and watched Juliana and her baby brother as they crossed the field back to their mother. Inside my head was Guy’s voice, saying the words he would send years later. “La vie continue, Suzanne.” Every end is followed by a new beginning.

  Nsissim goes away when man dies, but Nsissim does not die.

  A rainbow arched across the hills. Everything shimmered in a crystal clarity, the colors vivid, the scene unreal in its beauty.

  “I feel different.” Tricia breathed out as if she’d been holding her breath all her life.

  “Me, too.”

  “I feel so good, I could cry.”
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  “Today has been a gift.”

  We walked, following the sun back toward Naro Moru. It darted in and out of the clouds, throwing a light show onto the land. After several hours at a steady pace, no car or truck passing, the roofs of the village winked through the trees that lined the road. As the sun dipped below the horizon, we arrived, footsore and sunburned, at our tiny cottage by the river.

  The next day, at the market, we found pink and yellow striped tennis shoes that matched the footprint in our guidebook. A taxi drove us to Juliana’s house, where, along with our hearts, we gave her a pair of shoes.

  Chapter 38

  Somalia’s Sorrow

  August/Shawwal

  The lush green of central Kenya gave way to parched grasses as the plane flew north toward the border of Somalia. Soon, the brown and tan colors of the desert stretched from the horizon to the abrupt blue of the Indian Ocean.

  My heart sank. Why in hell was I even considering living in such a place again? My head focused on the water. There was an ocean. Oceans had beaches where you could swim and stay cool.

  Tricia and Bob were probably lying on a beach right then. Right as I flew away from the restored peace and relative prosperity of Kenya. Two days earlier, Nairobi’s international airport had reopened. Tricia’s husband, Bob, had arrived on one of the first flights to land in Kenya since the coup attempt. Aside from being pale and smelling like unwashed socks from his twenty-four-hour trip on three different planes, Bob looked, for the most part, the way he always had. A tall, lanky guy with glasses who possessed the kind of face that grew increasingly handsome the more you got to know what lay behind it. Excited and nervous, Tricia had whisked him off to the coast.

  I sighed and rested my forehead against the window. The land below looked so much like Dori my body sagged with the too recent memory of heat and dust. Here again were nomadic tribes of people hardened by the scarcity of their resources. Both the Fulani and the Somalis had embraced Islam. From what I had read, Somalia was a land of ancient tribal rivalries held at bay by the strong arm of the latest dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre, and his army.

  All of the harshness of Upper Volta’s climate, but none of the peace of its people. The challenges of working in Upper Volta had nearly unhorsed me. Hell, I’d fallen off so many times, by the end, I was barely holding on to the tail. The people of the coast had a saying: If you cannot manage horses, how can you cater for elephants? I had a feeling Somalia was more elephant than horse. My shoulders sagged.

  Out the window, a thin line of dark water snaked its way across the terrain. In a few minutes, we were over the coast where a second line of water joined the first to empty as one into the ocean. I unfolded the map and found the Jubba and Shebele Rivers. The plane engines whined into lower gear and my stomach lifted. Near the rivers, circular huts clustered on plots of cultivated land. Ahead, sun flashed off patches of metal, and hundreds of red roofs undulated in the rising heat. The Egyptians had sailed to this port, calling the Horn of Africa the Land of Punt, and its people, Black Berbers—the port of Mogadishu.

  As the city drew near, red dust roiled along the ground below. August was the dry season when monsoon winds off the ocean whipped up inland dust storms. My skin crawled with the sudden notion that I had just left paradise and was entering the gates of hell. I shrugged it off. Open mind. Keep an open mind.

  “I just want to take a look.”

  Hopefully, Don would be there to meet me as promised.

  Stepping from the plane, I walked into a wet blanket of hundred-degree humidity. Sweat beaded in my armpits and trickled down my sides. I crossed the tarmac and entered a cavernous room that smelled of mold. Following the other passengers, I stopped at the end of a long line. Loud voices and the wailing of babies bounced off the high ceiling. Heat took up all the space in the room.

  I closed my eyes and walked the road to Mt. Kenya. Clouds and wind, cool rain, fields and birds. Someone behind me cleared their throat. I opened my eyes and moved forward in line.

  Twenty minutes later, I reached a sour-faced man behind a desk. He opened my passport. Frowning, he looked from my picture to me, to my picture, to me, making sure I wasn’t some Ethiopian rebel disguised as a blue-eyed American woman.

  “Why are you here?” he asked in English with a sharp-edged accent.

  “Business.” I thought about smiling but decided not to. From what I saw around me, it was against the rules. “Save the Children Federation.”

  Not even Hamidou would have smiled in that place.

  The man’s frown deepened. He stamped my passport as if swatting a particularly pesky fly, then waved me over to a second, longer line.

  I sighed, wanting to close my eyes again and return to the hut at the base of Mt. Kenya with Juliana and her mother. I felt a tap on the shoulder, looked around, was still the last in line.

  Pay attention!

  The voice came from inside my head, but was so loud, so insistent, I looked around again.

  Pay attention even at unextraordinary times, be of the present. To be anywhere else is “to paint eyeballs on chaos.”

  It was Lily’s voice. A tingling rippled across my scalp and traveled down both arms. Though I thought of Lily often, it had been a while since I’d talked to her or felt her sitting on my shoulder.

  Nearby, a picture hung on a cinderblock wall. It was a large portrait, at least four feet by six, of a thin, unsmiling face with wide-set eyes and a threatening crease between dark eyebrows. Black hair crowned a high forehead of brown skin. Siad Barre.

  How can you see what’s coming if you close your eyes?

  I stared at the portrait. To live in Somalia meant living with a dictator and a dictator’s army. It meant living in a place where no one dared smile. Where no one had reason to. I thought of Hamidou’s smile, Adiza and Fati’s laughter, the chatter of the village women in Upper Volta. Dori was a harsh place, but its people had always found reasons to be joyful. Somehow, the joy had been leeched from Somalia.

  After thirty minutes of shifting my weight from one foot to the other, the portrait watching my every move, I faced a second, younger man. He stood with his back rigid and his mouth grim.

  “Visa!” he snapped and held out his hand. He flipped through the pages of my passport, then looked me in the eyes. I looked back with a neutral expression.

  “How long will you stay in Mogadishu?”

  “Four days.”

  He stamped the visa and pointed to a glass door. “Go in there.” His voice was flat, empty.

  I crossed the cement floor, pushed open the door, and entered a stifling room with low ceilings. This room held a stronger smell—sour and sharp. Sweat drenched the insides of my arms. I pulled away the hair that plastered the back of my neck and felt Jack’s gold chain. As I stopped at the back of another line, I pressed the crescent moon and star that hung beneath my shirt to my chest, praying for enough luck to get me through customs.

  Ensha’allah.

  An old man sat on the floor near the far wall, waiting for someone or begging. He wore a dirty turban with its tail end draped over a bony shoulder. He had the face of the marabou, the old medicine man I had met my first month in Dori, sitting in his shade under the thorn bush, blowing on a string.

  At the back of my neck, I tucked the chain well beneath the neckline of my shirt, out of sight. It was my string, my protection.

  Two men and two women stood behind low tables, opening suitcases and untying bundles. Tension hung so thick in the room it fogged the windows. Passengers hovered in front of open bags, answering questions in hushed voices. The customs agents, in a seemingly random manner, sent some of the passengers into a side room with their bags, or waved others to freedom by chalking a white X on the outside of their luggage. In the fifteen minutes I stood waiting, eight people were shuffled into the side room, their faces drooping. None of them came out. The sweat in my armpits grew from a trickle to a stream.

  When I finally stepped before the woman agent, sw
eat had soaked the armpits and back of my shirt. Wisps of hair feathered the agent’s smooth forehead from beneath her cap. Black, almond-shaped eyes followed delicate fingers as she unzipped the pockets of my backpack. Out came my books, notepads, a brush, my plane ticket. The man next to me slunk into the side room, clutching a camera with a telephoto lens. I congratulated myself on leaving my camera with Tricia in Kenya.

  The agent continued to rifle through my pack. Her mouth puckered at my dresses, bottle of shampoo, the tattered seams of my cotton underwear. She found a bottle of aspirin, opened it, then ran her hands over the canvas, searching for hidden pouches. I held my breath. She closed the flap and chalked an X on the outside. I picked up my pack and walked quickly to the exit door, praying that fresh air and Don waited on the other side.

  There he was, his bald head glowing in the shade of a flamboyant tree. I heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Well!” He stood to greet me. “I see you successfully avoided the dreaded ‘side room.’ Congratulations.” He grinned.

  Good old Don. It was so good to see him I almost cried. I dropped my pack and hugged him. “Thanks for the free ticket.”

  “My pleasure.” He picked up my pack. “Come on. I’ll show you around our lovely city.”

  I followed him down a crumbling sidewalk and across an empty street to a car. We drove past the airport terminal and turned onto Makha Road. I rolled down the window and sniffed the dust, wood smoke, and salt air. We passed two-story buildings of stone and timber with pitched, red-tile roofs. Verandahs opened onto unkempt yards. Here were traces of a once beautiful city, now neglected and sagging.

  “A long time ago, Mogadishu was a thriving port town.” Don nodded at the windshield. “Arab and European ships traded all along the African coast as far south as Mozambique until the Portuguese discovered an easier way to India via the Cape of Good Hope.”

  I imagined a time when flamboyant and jacaranda trees shaded tiled patios hung with silks.

  “How long ago?”

  “About four hundred years.” Don turned left, then right onto another wide street. “After that, the Europeans left this area to the clans and their feuds until the 1800s, when Britain and Italy ‘bought the land’”—he hooked two fingers of his right hand and etched quotation marks into the air—“from the Emperor of Ethiopia.”