Sweetness in the Belly (10 page)

“That’s where we studied medicine,” Dr. Aziz told me, nodding at the screen. “Haile Selassie I University. Me and Munir and Tawfiq were in the same class,” he said, indicating two of the other men in the room. “And Tajuddin and Amir”—he pointed at the others—“were one and two years ahead of us.”

“We still are,” Amir ribbed.

“Not forever, my friend!” Munir answered back.

“We’re hoping to continue eventually, Munir and I,” Dr. Aziz said. “But to continue we must go to Cairo. And to get to Cairo we must study and pass the university’s entrance exams. The difficulty is, in order to study, we need textbooks from abroad, and more times than not they are lost in the post.”

“People steal them,” Munir said.

I recognized him then—the doctor who had stopped us in the hall of the hospital that day.

“They don’t steal them,” Dr. Aziz said. “Why would they steal books in English?”

“I don’t know,” Munir said with a shrug. “Perhaps they make good pillows, or excellent flames.”

“Will the exams be in English?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s all in English—the textbooks, the medicines, the curriculum—all of it comes from the West. Even some of our teachers at medical school were farenjis. From the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And from Johns Hopkins University in America. That’s partly why people resist the hospitals, particularly the older people. They prefer their traditional practices, the things they know. They feel insulted by the suggestion of alternatives, especially Western ones.”

“But these things can work,” I said, “the amulets and the herbs.”

“Because they want to believe they work.”

“I’ve seen them work.”

“Have you heard of spontaneous remission? The mind is a very powerful thing.” He pointed at the television. “The drama is about to begin.”

The program, like the news of the emperor’s day, was broadcast in Amharic—the national language, the language of education and state and, because it was state owned, television and radio—a language of which I knew only half a dozen words.

Dr. Aziz translated in whispers for my benefit.

We watched a line of people dancing in white, their shoulders moving swiftly up and down, their eyes thickly kohl lined and wide, a hissing sound coming from between their clenched teeth.

“Amharas,” Dr. Aziz said.

“As if they are the only ones who dance,” Munir mumbled.

The music was abrasive, and the room had grown quiet. Qat leads one through animation into mirqana, a mood of quiet reflection. All I was conscious of then was Dr. Aziz. I could hear him inhale and exhale as he sat cross-legged beside me in the blue glow of an otherwise entirely dark room. It
was
his breathing I heard at night; now I knew this for certain.

introducing custard

Z
emzem not only returned to class but brought with her a piece of paper folded into a small square. Inside, I found a silver necklace and a note from Dr. Aziz.

It seems it is Zemzem’s father’s pride that is the real issue. He does not wish to be seen taking charity—especially charity from a farenji—but he does want the girl to learn. It is my fault, I hope you can forgive me. I neglected to tell him you were a farenji, because it did not seem relevant. So when he came to find Zemzem that day he was shocked to find you. He offers you this necklace that belonged to his late wife as payment for her lessons.

He wishes you peace, as do I.

Later, I waved the necklace before Nouria’s eyes.

“Perhaps we could have meat for lunch after the mosque on Friday,” she said, glowing.

“With rice,” I added.

“And fried onions.”

Nouria’s affection toward me increased exponentially. She sold the silver necklace to Abai Taoduda, the midwife, and with that money safely stored between her breasts we walked to the market on Thursday morning, arm in arm, passing the beggars pleading “baksheesh” and “have mercy,” the goats bleating like bruised infants, the men bartering with the qat sellers—“If your skin is as tough as this qat, God has no mercy for your husband”—the merchants elbowing and outbidding each other—“Lady, lady, look here, this is real Indian silk,” “This mango is much much sweeter”—and the shouts of “Farenji! Farenji!” at which Nouria hissed in my defense.

We bought not only beef, rice and onions but also cucumbers, tomatoes, chilies, eggs, sugar and all the spices we would need to make berbere. We shared our extravagant lunch with Gishta and several women from the neighborhood. Rahile poured water over the hands of each woman in turn before we said our bismillahs and tucked in.

“So delicious, Nouria.”

“Yes, but how could you afford this meat?”

“And not goat, but cow!”

“Is it a special occasion?”

“You can thank Lilly,” said Nouria.

“Ah, so the farenji has more money after all,” said the neighborhood cynic.

“She earned it,” Nouria clarified.

I had even improvised a dessert my mother used to make when I was a child. Here we never ate dessert, apart from dates and sweet potatoes, which in season were so abundant that merchants had to give them away.

I offered the women spoons borrowed from Gishta and placed the bowl in the middle of the circle. “Eat!” I encouraged, as they stared at the bowl.

“What is it?” one woman whispered.

“Farenji food,” her neighbor replied.

“It’s good!” I exclaimed. “It’s called custard.”

“Cus-tard,” Gishta said, trying the word out. “Okay.” She inhaled before tentatively prodding the skin with her spoon.

“Here,” I said, taking the spoon from her hand and scooping up a generous amount.

She opened her mouth and we all looked on with expectation. She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.

One of the women leaned forward. “What does it taste like?”

Gishta grimaced. “You try it,” she said.

The woman took a small spoonful, looked heavenward and pulled a piece of skin from her mouth, holding it between her fingers for inspection. “What is this?” she said, sticking out her tongue.

“The skin. Like the skin you get on milk.”

“This is some kind of farenji milk?”

“It’s made with milk, eggs and sugar.”

“What a ridiculous thing to do to eggs,” she muttered to her friends.

Later that afternoon, after Bortucan and I had licked the bowl clean, I helped Nouria and Gishta lay out chili peppers to dry in the sun, transforming the entire courtyard into a bright red carpet. It would be three days before the peppers were properly baked. “Any moisture, you get rot and your berbere is finished in two weeks,” Gishta explained, smacking her palms together.

Nouria would sell batches of this fiery cocktail in the Amhara market beyond the city wall. We did not eat it ourselves, but Amharas could not taste anything without it. It was a compromise to sell to them, but given Nouria’s poverty, one that she was accustomed to making. We’d spent money in order to make more money.

While we waited for the peppers to dry, we prepared the rest of the spices, bouncing cardamom, fenugreek and coriander seeds with a hiss and pop, the buds of cloves and black pepper, the allspice berries, the cinnamon bark, the nutmeg and the shaved ginger root in sequence over the fire. It was hot, repetitive and tedious work, and while Nouria and Gishta sang to relieve the boredom, I thought about Dr. Aziz. “Your friend Aziz,” he’d signed the note Zemzem had carried. My friend Aziz, I thought, pressing my pocket to check if his words were still there.

“Lilly!” Nouria snapped.

“Mmm?” I turned to her.

“I thought you wanted to help!”

“I do.”

“Well, grind then, you lazy girl,” Gishta shouted, pushing the mortar and pestle toward me. “The spices are not going to disintegrate on their own!”

big fashion

G
ishta’s acceptance of me was gradual: hard won but mighty. Though she was Sheikh Jami’s favorite wife, as an Oromo she had once been on the outside herself. And it was for that very reason that her resistance to me had been far greater than that of many of the other women. When you’ve fought long and hard for it, belonging can come to mean despising those who don’t.

Gishta began life as a servant in a Harari household like most Oromo girls in the vicinity of the city. Her employer was unusually kindly disposed to her. As a lonely widow whose only son had made the pilgrimage to Mecca some years before, where he’d married a Saudi woman and set up shop, the woman loved her little Oromo servant like a daughter. She gave her gifts of boxed dates and gold thread sent from Mecca by the son she resented. And she sent Gishta to school for half a day until she was sixteen. She even gave her a Harari name—Gishta, meaning custard apple.

Gishta grew up with dreams of belonging in the city, but unlike most Oromo, she was given access, not only through education but also by virtue of being left a small inheritance by her employer. Gishta adopted the language, the manner, the dress and the customs of the Harari and took up the age-old Harari profession of selling qat in the market.

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.

In keeping me at a distance, Gishta had continued to refuse to believe Bortucan’s progress. “It’s just not possible!” she would say to Nouria quite deliberately when I was within earshot. Bortucan, who could still barely mumble the word for mother, was now able to recite Al Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur’an. These were actually Bortucan’s first words, as if she had the confidence to speak God’s words but not her own.

“It’s Lilly,” said Nouria. “I keep telling you; she just knows, somehow, how to teach her. And the other children as well.”

“Tell me,” Gishta would say, “how is it that a farenji can know Qur’an this well?”

Every time she asked, I told her the same story of being raised at the Moroccan shrine. “It was actually one of your husband’s distant relatives who taught me,” I said. “The Great Abdal. He was Hussein’s teacher as well.”

“Yes, yes, you and your famous story,” she would say dismissively. But then one day, the day after the second hidden bercha, she really listened. It seemed Gishta only began to believe me once I started keeping secrets.

I
had spent every day of the week after the first bercha with Aziz hoping that I might be invited to join him and his friends again. I fought off the disappointment when Saturday arrived without a sign. After lunch, the neighborhood women were gathering to carve meat in the compound next to ours. All the families had contributed toward the purchase of a cow that had been ritually slaughtered that morning. Large pieces now sat on burlap sacks in Ikhista Aini’s courtyard. Nouria was demonstrating proper technique to me, gripping a large knife between her feet. She rolled up her sleeves and moved a large piece of meat up and down against the blade.

I was just getting ready to help her when Sadia arrived, greeting the women with questions about their health, their well-being, their happiness.

“Stay,” the women insisted, “at least until we have carved up these ribs—you must take some home to your mother.”

Sadia protested but the women were insistent. The women insisted but Sadia protested. Then the women insisted a third time, which meant Sadia was now obliged to wait while Ikhista Aini carved up part of the rib cage and wrapped it in burlap.

“You are too kind.” Sadia bowed. “Jazakallahu khayran.” May Allah reward you for the good.

Sadia had nothing to say to me. She made no effort to conceal her dislike of me. We walked in silence around the wall, she several feet ahead, nose turned up, proud, me vaguely nauseous with anticipation.

When we arrived at Aziz’s uncle’s house, the room was bristling with conversation. Aziz and Munir were questioning the legitimacy of a Palestinian organization under a man named Arafat, not convinced by his justification for recent attacks on Israel. Tawfiq was in complete disagreement.

“Welcome,” said Aziz, patting the pillow beside him. He passed qat into my hand, and Tawfiq resumed, punching the air with his finger to make his point, which was lost on me. I sucked on the bitter leaves while the conversation digressed into an exchange of opinions about whether Abebe Bikila, who had been the first African to ever win a gold medal at the Olympics, was too old to compete in the upcoming games in Munich.

I might not have had much knowledge of secular affairs, but where was their concern for religion? I wondered. That was the source of this Palestinian situation they’d been discussing, was it not?

“It is an issue of imperialism and economics,” said Munir, answering a question it had taken me so long to formulate that they were already well on to another topic. His answer only left me feeling confused and uncertain. My questions not only came at the wrong time; they seemed to be the wrong questions, at least as far as the men were concerned. I was good at learning languages—why did theirs seem so foreign?

When the relief of mirqana descended over the room, Aziz leaned back and joined me in silence. I felt his presence beside me like one feels the day’s heat radiating from stones.

“See you next Saturday,” he said at the end of that afternoon, and suddenly the week ahead looked very long.

S
o that story is true?” Gishta asked the next day, raising one eyebrow.

I bit my tongue hard. “What other story is there, Gishta?” I asked with calculated calm.

I knew she wouldn’t repeat the rumors—that I was a spy, an anti-Muslim agent, a sharmuta here to lead their sons astray. In the year that I’d been here, I’d still not provided any evidence in support of these allegations. The women in the neighborhood had gradually come to accept my presence: those who knew me in the day-to-day, those whose children now uttered holy words. They even referred to me differently as a teacher—as Bint Abdal, daughter of Abdal.

“Call me Gish,” Nouria’s cousin said a few days after that second bercha.

“I made you these,” she said the following week, holding out an expensive-looking pair of trousers, the ones the wealthy Harari women wore under their long skirts, striped silk with colorful embroidered cuffs.

I told her it would take an eternity before I earned enough to pay her back. She scoffed and insisted I try them on right away. The cuffs were tight by design, so tight that I had to oil my feet before I could begin.

“Now no one will inflict you with the evil eye because they are jealous of the sight of your skin!” Gishta shrieked once I’d pulled them on, nodding wildly with approval.

So the trousers were not simply a fashion statement. I had been gently chastised; conformity is induced through gifts. Through flattery. And gossip. Once I was wearing these trousers, the remaining rumors seemed to subside. I was now fully dressed. And thus began another sort of apprenticeship, becoming a young woman of Harar—Gish, self-appointed as my guide.

I
’d never given much thought to my appearance until meeting Sadia and her friends. At the Moroccan shrine our rituals concerned cleanliness, not appearance per se. After I lost my mother, I’d simply let my hair grow because she wasn’t around to chop it off with a blunt pair of scissors anymore. My nails grew and broke of their own accord. And my clothes? In the past, I’d had to rely on the gifts of others and now I wore one of the dresses that Nouria and I had had made.

Clothes had always served a utilitarian purpose, and shoes hadn’t even been necessary. Until recently. Until the growing insecurity that Aziz, who was so neat and smartly dressed in his white pressed shirts, must think me a gypsy. Until these past few Saturdays of listening to Sadia and her friends, Warda and Titune, the two other girls who came to the berchas, admiring each other’s nails and calling this and that helwa (sweet) and fashinn gidir (big fashion).

Perhaps the reason Sadia disliked me had something to do with the lack of concern I showed for my appearance. They compared forearms and agreed it was time to strip them with honey, and they favored something called Roxy rather than henna for coloring their hair. It came from a fashinn gidir boutique in Mecca, brought back by relatives returning from the hajj. It turned their hair an alarming shade of orange. Sometimes they even dyed their eyebrows to match.

I thought of the Ka’bah when I thought of Mecca, not clothes shops. I was not like Sadia and her friends. What I did best, perhaps, was pray, recite Qur’an, teach. There were a few other women in the city who had made religion their profession: teachers at madrasas, Sufis, religious scholars or disciples of saints, but the thing was, all of these women were old.

I was shocked when Sadia told me she didn’t even fast during Ramadan; she even seemed proud of the fact. And when the subject of marriage came up one Saturday, she shrugged: “Not yet.” She nodded coyly in Munir’s direction. “Nineteen, even twenty, this is the best time for marriage,” she said. “Not fourteen like my mother—”

“Or thirteen like mine,” Warda piped in.

“
After
high school,” said Titune.

The vital ingredient, they agreed, was love. Love first, then marriage, reversing the order of generations before.

G
ishta applied a thick henna paste to my hair, dying my ashen blond a deep red. She combed my hair with oil, flattening it against my scalp, and draped a loose, lime-green chiffon scarf over my head. She trimmed my nails and painted them with henna as well. Nouria boiled honey in the kitchen, and she and Gishta applied it hot to my arms and legs. They ripped every single hair off my limbs with deft painful swipes. It tingled and itched and turned my skin bright pink, which sent them into hysterics.

Another afternoon, Gishta brought a woman with a leather pouch full of different-sized needles to Nouria’s compound. The woman did piercing and tattooing for both healing and aesthetic purposes. She could cure a sinus infection by punching two blue dots between the eyebrows; a kidney infection by tattooing a circle on the lower back.

Quick shocks ran down my spine as the needle burst through my earlobes. The woman had surreptitiously pushed gold hoops through before I’d even had a chance to recover. Then, much more painful, she did the same through the cartilage at the tops of my ears, which yielded with a distinctive pop.

She pulled out a third needle, a small stone and a pot of black ink.

“What’s that for?”

All three women pulled their lips away from their teeth to show off their bluish-black gums.

I cringed. “No way.”

“You don’t think it’s beautiful?” asked Gishta with an exaggerated pout.

“On you, yes,” I tried diplomatically. “I just don’t think it’s for me.”

Nouria tsked-tsked. “But it will make your teeth look so white.”

Long, long ago I’d used toothpaste. I knew there were gentler alternatives.

When I asked Sadia about it later, she waved her hand dismissively. “It was fashinn gidir maybe until twenty years ago. The mothers still think it is beautiful, but it is just fashinn qadim now.” And then she cocked her head and commented that my hair looked very pretty.

A
s my apprenticeship advanced, Gishta told me it was time that I had a special dress of pink and purple silk made to wear to weddings, a fuchsia veil woven through with gold threads to match. A traditional Harari dress. The dress was deliberately cumbersome, ostentatious. And it was, of course, expensive, made from silk imported from India, sewn by one local tailor and embroidered by another. I could not possibly afford it, but Gishta generously assumed the cost. Conveniently, the dress was reversible so that I might turn it inside out to reveal black should I need to attend a funeral. No matter that I had never been invited to either event.

“You will be sick of weddings in one year from now,” Gishta assured me. “You will say: I cannot possibly eat any more stomach lining and sausages. Insha’Allah, you will become fat!”

There were also skills for me to develop, primarily domestic: special foods to prepare, rituals to enact, techniques to perfect. At one of Nouria’s wealthier neighbor’s houses one afternoon, Gishta pushed some colored straw into my hands. The back wall of the room was adorned with baskets, each with a specific name and purpose—some large and flat, designed to hold injera, others neat packages with lids to hold jewelery, veils or incense. All were tightly woven pieces made with dyed straw, rimmed with leather and adorned with cowrie shells from the distant Red Sea.

“After a girl’s beauty and virtuousness, it is this skill that makes her attractive as a bride,” Nouria said with a giggle.