Sweetness in the Belly (12 page)

“You’re sweet,” I say, squeezing her hand in gratitude.

Of course, Dr. Berhanu’s friend said they couldn’t possibly. It would be far too painful. “But sometimes I am suspicious of ones like these,” Amina says, wagging a finger. “Sometimes those who don’t remember are refusing because they are guilty of some crime. In psychology it is called denial.”

But each of us is guilty in someone’s eyes. If you are Amhara, you are guilty of supporting a brutal dictatorship; if you are Oromo, you are guilty of counterrevolutionary sentiment; if you are Harari, you are guilty of harboring wealth and exploiting peasants. If you are a refugee, you are guilty of the worst crimes of all: deserting your home-land and abandoning those you love. In every case, it’s a matter of perception: in the last case, self-perception, the most damning of all.

Amina is suspicious of this doctor because of his Amhara name. In exile, the wars between us are not erased.

“Now forget this, okay?” Amina says.

“Sure,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

a bitter habit

I
am seeking a little respite in the cafeteria while an eighteen-year-old boy lies dying upstairs, the result of a drug-motivated swan dive off a twelfth-floor balcony. I’ve just cranked up his dose of morphine: he’ll be dead within the hour. I’m fairly immune, given that I’ve done this so many times over what will soon be a decade, but sometimes, where dying is the result of something needless and senseless, like a fight or a beating or a head injury sustained by people who refuse to wear helmets, I have to battle the impulse to judge. When you live among people who have endured unimaginable tortures, who have sacrificed everything in order to give their children better lives, you lose sympathy for those who would throw it all away because of ego.

It’s my job to help the dying on their way; it is humane and merciful, I remind myself, listlessly spooning tapioca into my mouth.

Someone slides an orange-colored tray into view as I stare blankly at the table. Brown hands, short, trim nails, a few stray black hairs between the knuckles.

“Hello, Lilly,” says a deep voice.

I look up. “Dr. Gupta.”

“Rabindranath. Robin.” He smiles. His teeth are very white. Suspiciously so.

“Rabindranath,” I repeat. I would prefer to stew in silence.

“It’s a Hindu name,” he says, “Bengali.” I watch him pull a bottle of Tabasco sauce out of his pocket and cover his mashed potatoes in red polka dots. “What about your name?”

“English, I guess.”

“Lilly, but not Abdal.”

“No,” I concede.

“And your accent’s not very English.”

I laugh, taken aback. “No, it’s a mess.” People aren’t usually so rude as to draw attention to it.

“More like a fruit cocktail,” he says.

I shrug, hoping this will be the end of it. Doctors normally sit with doctors, just as nurses sit with nurses and orderlies sit with orderlies. Residents don’t even sit with doctors or surgeons, and nurses, they’re the worst—the senior nurses, charge nurses and nurse specialists make a strict point of sitting apart from those of us who are simply staff nurses, stupid or unambitious or lazy or incapable or whatever it must be that keeps us in our lowly station.

“I was intrigued when you said you come from a family of refugees,” Dr. Gupta says, putting his fork down.

“Were you?” That was ages ago. I look at him curiously. I’ve never noticed this before but one of his eyes is slightly sleepy, like only half of him is awake. I wonder if he was teased about it at school.

“I’m not entirely sure what you meant by it, but it nevertheless struck a chord in me,” he says. “I mean, very few members of my family are here. We’re all scattered about. My parents in Calcutta, family in Delhi, some in Manchester, cousins in Birmingham, Melbourne, Vancouver.”

It’s not the same thing at all, I want to tell him. Your family left by choice. You know where each of them is. You can pick up the phone.

I excuse myself, scraping back my chair, saying I must get back to my rounds.

R
amadan begins at midnight. Sitta wears her white cotton veil and Ahmed fidgets with his knit skullcap as we take the bus to Brixton. I’m defiantly more colorful, wearing a bright veil like the Harari women do and a gold shawl draped over my burgundy dress. The bus is crowded with people from the estate who greet us, stroke the children’s cheeks affectionately, ask after Amina. She has her psychology class this evening but she will join us for supper at home.

Many of us don’t attend the mosque as often as we might. In Harar, we visited the shrines more often than the mosques because they were where we felt closest to God. Ahmed’s Qur’an teacher insists that parents take their children to the mosque at least once a week. Good practices must be instilled before puberty. Between us, Amina and I seem to manage about once a month.

Tonight, the imam speaks about the particular difficulties of fasting in a world of twenty-four-hour takeout, about the vigilance required to fight the temptations of tea and coffee and vending machines full of Mars bars, of having the discipline to say no to lunch in the school cafeteria when everyone else is tucking in. “When your school-mates ask you why it is you are not eating, you must use this as an opportunity to educate them about Islam,” he says. “And if any of them tease you or abuse you, do not react in anger. Use fasting as your shield.”

On our way home, we stop to pick up fish and chips. The kids unwrap theirs in their laps in front of the television. They won’t be fasting, but Amina and I will. The fish and chips are a treat for us all. The hardest thing for me to give up is smoking. It’s the most English thing about me, this love of Silk Cuts.

“Oh good, I’m starving,” Amina moans when she finally gets home, dropping her textbook on the kitchen table. She pulls open the oven door without even taking off her coat and tears at the newspaper. In between mouthfuls she asks me about my day.

I relate my conversation with Dr. Gupta, Rabindranath, Robin, which is still bothering me. He might also be from elsewhere, but he comes from a wealthy family and studied medicine at Cambridge. He has relatives in England, no doubt goes back to India to visit his family and friends once every two years and has a special rate plan that allows him to spend hours on the phone with people in Bombay on the weekends. It’s not the same thing at all.

Amina tsks and wipes oil from her lips with the back of her hand. “You sound so bitter sometimes.”

“Do I?”

“You don’t hear yourself? He’s just trying to establish some common ground with you. He’s not trying to compete, or I don’t know, whatever it is you’re thinking …”

“Belittle my experience.”

“Lilly, I’m sure this is not his intention. He doesn’t know your experience, does he? And besides, why would he bother? It sounds like he was trying to make friends. And it would be good for you to make some friends.”

“You sound like a parent,” I scoff.

“I am a parent.”

“Not my parent.”

“Ooph, Lilly.” She rolls her eyes.

“Well, I didn’t ask you to be,” I say.

She stands up, rubbing the salt from her palms. “You have to pull this dagger out of your heart!” she yells, complete with dramatic gesture. “You behave as if life is finished. You remember when you asked me if I thought you were losing your mind? You did not lose your mind, but you did lose something. You lost hope. Ever since that man told us about the doctor who saved his life you have had no hope. You have no dream for the future anymore.”

She stuffs the greasy paper into the rubbish bin.

She leaves me sitting at the kitchen table long enough for me to understand the point she’s making. In a few hours Ramadan will begin. Ramadan teaches us patience and restraint, and it is the time for each of us to wage jihad against the destructive habits we have acquired. Smoking is the least of mine.

eid el fitr

A
ziz’s image is shimmering in the yellow and purple rainbow of oily residue as I thaw tubs of dorro wat in hot water. I wonder if he has fasted this Ramadan. I hope he had the choice. There are those who do not swallow their saliva all month: a discipline far greater than mine. Then there are those who beg off fasting more than most, like the women Amina and I know who claim to menstruate twice in thirty days. Most of us linger somewhere in the middle, erring once or twice, which we can make up by fasting sometime later during the year. Regardless of our personal success or failure, though, Eid el Fitr is the biggest celebration of the year.

Amina returns from the shop with coriander, and I reluctantly pull the plug in the kitchen sink. Aziz becomes a circle and spirals down the drain.

At night, a parade of color approaches from left and right. Women stream down the concrete corridors leaving punishing echoes in their wake; the piercing squeals of delighted children bounce mercilessly off the walls. En route, they bear the condemnation of unsympathetic white neighbors who stick their heads out into the hallway and ask them to keep the bloody racket down.

A perfumed cloud wafts through the door of Amina’s flat. The guests are mostly Oromo, but we have also invited Mr. and Mrs. Jahangir and a few neighbors: Eritrean, Kenyan and Sudanese. The two Harari women who live on the floor below arrive in true Harari style, wearing all their silkiest finery, shining from their teeth to their ankles. Even here, in exile, they look rich.

Mrs. Jahangir arrives with a small mountain of samosas heaped on a plate balanced over a curry of okra and peas. The Oromo women balance injera—which can now be purchased at the newsdealer’s in soggy stacks of six—on platters on their heads, carry plates of sweets and bowls of popcorn in their hands and tow multiple children in their wake.

The men are off celebrating in more subdued fashion. The Oromo brothers took up a collection to buy qat from the Yemeni merchant in Brixton who charges more at this time of year for a small bunch of dry green leaves than it would cost to buy a cow in Ethiopia.

While the men get high, we spend the night singing. One of the Harari women accompanies us on the drum as we sing dhikr, religious praises, known to all the Muslims in the room. We take turns singing our traditional songs, during which the children grow bored and tug at their mothers’ skirts until the women give them permission to go and play tag in the corridor rather than listen to these moral tales and songs of ethnic pride in which we wish they’d take more interest.

Finally we eat.

T
he following morning, hoarse from all the singing and still inflated from all the food, Amina and I drag our bodies to the community association office. We’re suffering from the Muslim version of a hangover, complete with a slight feeling of sadness and regret: one that comes from realizing that for all our disciplined reflection throughout the month, there has been no permanent shift in consciousness, no profound alteration of ourselves or the world around us.

I smoke my tenth cigarette of the morning, sucking with a fury after a month of abstinence, while drafting a letter to Amnesty. I do this routinely, this time because the dictatorship is forcibly relocating civilians again, taking hundreds of thousands of them from the famine-stricken north and depositing them in government-controlled villages farther south. They say it is the only solution because the north is on the brink of environmental collapse, but we know that it has nothing to do with famine relief. We’ve seen this happen twice already in the last three years. It’s an aggressive counterinsurgency measure designed to disperse ethnic concentrations, propelled by the dictatorship’s fear of rebel fronts in the north, guerillas who refuse to die, no matter how much Mengistu’s government tries to starve them through another famine of its own engineering. A famine that, in turn, allows Mengistu to fatten his army and make his officers rich with food aid sent by the governments and Bob Geldofs of the world, fueling the dictatorship to reach new heights of horror.

Amina is sitting in the squeaky orange office chair with a stack of envelopes in her lap, scanning the names on the list on the table in front of her. She is wearing my old patent-leather shoes, ones I bought in a momentary lapse of judgment. Sitta is sticking her finger into the sugar lurking at the bottom of my coffee cup and humming the theme to
Blue Peter.

Amina suddenly stands up, sending the tower of envelopes onto the floor. Sitta giggles as the envelopes spill, but abruptly stops, caught by the look on her mother’s face. Amina is a photograph of agony: utterly still.

I move toward her as if walking through water. “What is it, Amina?” I venture quietly, my hand on her shoulder.

She shakes the list in her hand. “Yusuf,” she can barely manage, bursting into sobs.

She leans into me. I put my arm around her neck, pull her forehead to my shoulder. Water rises to the height of my chest. “Alhamdullilah,” I manage to whisper in her ear, a bubble floating to the surface.

“Alhamdullilah,” she chokes. She grabs my hand and pulls it to her heart. “Can you feel?” she asks.

I can. I can almost hear it.

“One day you will feel this,” she offers.

We both know how unlikely that is. It’s now been twelve years. But there is a lesson in this. I stopped hoping. Amina was absolutely right. A dagger. She has tried to keep hope alive for both of us, and for that, she is being rewarded.

phantom limbs

S
itta has never been more talkative—the existence of a father she has never known seems to have given her language: questions and ideas. Ahmed, on the other hand, has gone rather quiet; missing his mother, I expect, during these weeks that she’s with Yusuf in Rome. He reads comic books, can’t get enough of them, grunting from the sagging brown sofa when I ask him if he’s ready for tea.

“Macaroni?” I ask him.

“Yes, please, macaroni cheese,” Sitta answers for the two of them, clapping her hands together with each syllable.

I put a pot of water on to boil. Sitta is stuck to my thigh in the tiny kitchen, nattering on like a talking doll with someone pulling repeatedly at the string in her back. “When did you get to be such a chatter-box?” I ask her.

She ignores that, busy fiddling with the dial on the radio.

“I wonder what your mother is up to at the moment,” I say.

“Eating a pizza with Baba!” Ahmed shouts from the other room—selective hearing, apparently.

“Eating a pizza with Baba!” Sitta repeats.

“What do you remember about your baba?” I call out to Ahmed.

“What do you remember about your baba?” Sitta repeats, as if it were a game.

A few things, I could tell her, though most of them rather vague. Swimming with him in the Mediterranean, him playing the guitar on the street with the case open, a few coins sparkling against the blue velvet. My mother and father naked and lazy in Tangier, where we lived in a decaying white hotel in the medina with a broken banister and stairs so rickety we couldn’t have two feet on one step at the same time. I seem to recall my father offering to fix the stairs and Haji Mustafa being so humbled by the offer that he said we could have the room for free, but I have no recollection of my father ever actually doing the work. They got far on charm and promises.

“What about Ethiopia—do you remember anything about Ethiopia?” I call out to Ahmed, who hasn’t replied.

“Do you?” he shouts back.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”

“What do you remember?” he shouts. He gets up from the sofa and stands in the doorway of the kitchen with his comic book in one hand. “What do you remember?” he demands. He wants stories now not of ailing Sufis and orphaned girls but of the place he comes from. His people.

It’s difficult for me to answer. It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind. “It’s complicated,” I tell Ahmed.

He skulks back to the sofa with his comic book.

Sitta watches while I pour macaroni into the pot. Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas” on the radio.

“We have a Christmas tree at school,” Sitta tells me.

“Do you, love?” My memories, I could tell Ahmed, are at once too powerful and not nearly enough.

“It’s sparkly and it has a star this big,” Sitta carries on, arms spread wide.

“That’s not very Muslim, is it,” I remark. At least a third of the children in her class must be Muslim.

“It’s pretty,” she says.

Fair enough. She’s a girl who likes pretty things. Christmas ornaments and the framed gold-lettered Arabic proverbs that hang on the walls of her mother’s flat. Barbie, whom she often wraps up and puts to bed in her mother’s purple silk veil. And Ahmed is a boy who reads comic books and listens to Prince. Posters of Mecca and Michael Jackson hang side by side on their bedroom wall. Both of them are looking forward to the Christmas holidays even though there will be no pudding, no tree, no photos of them on the fat man’s knee.

For all the differences between them, the missionized Ethiopians—Lutherans, Seventh-day Adventists and Pentecostals—take up a collection every year to give a Christmas present to each of the Ethiopian children on the estate. But we look upon these gifts with some suspicion. Not only did these people adopt farenji religions brought to Ethiopia by earnest Swedes and Norwegians and Canadians (why always the coldest countries? I wonder), they adopted a bit of the missionizing spirit as well. Pamphlets are surreptitiously left behind in the wake of presents.

For Sitta and Ahmed none of these things is a contradiction. Nor is this—a white Muslim woman who grew up in Africa making macaroni cheese for them in a council flat in London. The world beyond is, of course, full of alien encounters, contradictions that people cannot or do not wish to reconcile.

When Amina is dropping the children off at school.

Oi! Nig nog! We’ve already got too many fu’in for’ners. We don’t need the likes of you adding more bloody monkeys to the earf!

Friday prayers, the one time a week I wear a veil.

Would you look at ’is cunt! A white fu’in Paki!

A lout with a lager can mock-triggered to his head.

Master race. Go’ it?

O
n Saturday morning, Ahmed is keen to have a little lie-down on the sofa even though he knows he has his Qur’anic class.

“But why do I have to go?” he whines.

“Because it’s important, Ahmed. Come along.”

“But hardly anybody else at my school has to go to another school on Saturdays.”

I know that’s not true.

“It’s not fair,” he bleats.

I was desperate to go to school when I was a child. My father’s “school of life” involved so many lazy mornings that I was sick of it by the time I was six years old. I would have traded anything I owned—my toothbrush, my rucksack, my rag doll—to go to a real school where I could wear a uniform and have a pencil box and friends. But my parents refused to subject me to what they referred to as the stifling confines of institutional life. Thank God for the Great Abdal. When I told him I wanted to attend the madrasa in Tamegroute, he was very pleased. My entire day was then ordered by lessons: mornings at the madrasa, afternoon study with the Great Abdal and nights spent reading books from Muhammed Bruce by candlelight. “Are you eating the candles?” the Great Abdal used to tease. “It is a lucky thing the pilgrims are so generous.”

But we all want what we don’t have, don’t we? Ahmed wants to sleep in, and I want him to go to school.

“I’ll tell you what, Ahmed,” I say. “You can’t stay in bed because I need to get to the office, but you can miss the madrasa just this once.”

He’s suddenly bolt upright, about to leap out of bed.

“I haven’t finished. On one condition, all right?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You’ll recite chapter seven to me later.”

He groans. “Okay.”

Porridge for the kids for breakfast, and for me, a cup of tea and a cigarette—puffing with my head out the window. I’m dreading going through the new list from Rome this morning without Amina.

“Ahmed?” I ask, tossing the fag end into the dustbin.

“Mmm?” he asks between gummy lips.

“Listen, if you get to miss the madrasa today, does that mean I get to miss the office?”

“And do what?” he asks. Not an unreasonable question.

“Whatever you’d like to do.”

“Make Christmas biscuits,” says Sitta. “Like the ones we have at school.”

Except that.
“Eat your porridge, Sitta. What about you, Ahmed?”

“Watch cricket.”

“I’m not sure there’s any cricket on at the moment. Shall I ask Mr. Jahangir?” How difficult it is to please everyone. How does Amina do it?

Mr. Jahangir is more than pleased to have the young Ahmed by his side at the Kennington Oval.

“I’m very grateful to you, Mr. J. It’s not easy having two children.”

“Try having seven, my dear.”

Even if I wanted to, I’m afraid time’s rather running out.

This leaves Sitta and me with a whole day ahead of us. I should take her on an outing, something educational; that would please Amina. I’m being completely irresponsible—I should at least make the day worthwhile.

Sitta is keen to go to Kensington Palace. She’s developed a bit of an obsession with Lady Di since a school outing to the palace a couple of months ago.

“Let’s go somewhere you haven’t been before,” I suggest. Somewhere colorful, alive, multicultural.

It’s all very grown up of me to suggest going into the city when I leave our neighborhood so rarely. I’m not terribly good with the buses, but it’s too sunny a day to waste underground. Sitta is content dressing and undressing her Barbie beside me on the red plastic seat, oblivious as I pick at my cuticles.

We spill out onto the pavement in the midst of Camden Market and I stand and squint in every direction, trying to orient myself while we’re jostled left and right. I’ve been here twice before, both times with Mrs. Jahangir, who comes to buy fabric, but it’s a shifting landscape, fluctuating monthly depending on who can pay their rent.

Sitta swings Barbie in one hand and puts her other hand in mine as we wander down a street closed to traffic. Reggae blares from the entrance of a shop framed with pictures of Bob Marley and battles the soundtrack of a Hindi film across the road. Racks of clothes line the pavement. Women finger the fabric as they pass, and men try on hats and sunglasses and bend down to see their reflections in small mirrors held by squat Eastern European women. Farther down the road people haggle over great mountains of undergarments, and Nigerian men throw open duffle bags offering selections of watches and perfumes.

There are punks with Mohawks and white kids with dreadlocks and I wonder, just for a minute, why it is we don’t live here, why we live in benighted parts of the city with no street life, on estates built in the 1960s, in heartless high-rise buildings, half of which have no central heating, that have been deteriorating since the very moment they were conceived.

“I’m hungry,” says Sitta.

I scan the shop fronts, looking for a restaurant, somewhere sufficiently neutral, unintimidating. Sandwiched between a laundrette and a shop selling synthetic clothes and drug paraphernalia stands a café no wider than a bus with Amharic letters stenciled onto its window. I drag Sitta and Barbie across the road and through the entrance into the narrow space. Incense burns, Aster Aweke strains through cheap speakers, and the few men who are seated along the wall look up, look surprised, look away.

I help Sitta out of her coat and into a seat. “I want McDonald’s,” she says. “Mama always lets us have McDonald’s when we go on an outing.”

I sigh and unbutton my coat. “Can I just have coffee?”

She pouts, and a waitress with bright red lipstick and long lacquered nails approaches.

“Hello, little one,” she says to Sitta in Amharic. “Why do you look sad?”

“She doesn’t speak Amharic,” I reply in Amharic.

“But you do?” she asks in English. “You are missionary?”

“No,” I laugh.

“You want something?”

“Buna, please.”

She hesitates. “Nescafé?”

“No,
buna,
” I say, getting irritated.

She shrugs. “
Ishi,
okay. And for you?” she asks Sitta in Amharic.

“Sitta, do you want something?”

“McDonald’s,” Sitta says petulantly, swinging her feet.

My coffee is delivered on the heels of laughter between the two waitresses. The waitress sets down a tiny ceramic cup.

“Pretty,” Sitta comments, touching her nails.

“You like?” the waitress smiles. “It is called Strawberry Kisses.”

Sitta giggles.

This must be why I live on a blighted housing estate in a distant borough. That is where I belong.

I knock back the coffee. The bitter residue lingers in my mouth.

S
itta gets McDonald’s on her way home. She’s pulling chips from the bag when a sign catches her eye through the window of the bus. She jumps up and sends the paper bag and its contents cascading to the floor. “It says palace! Palace!”

Everyone on the bus turns around to look, amused by the African girl’s enthusiasm for the monarchy.

I’m reaching down to pick up chips off the floor when I hear my name. Dr. Gupta waves, his scrubs visible under his coat. He takes the seat in front of us and sits sideways.

“Fancy running into you,” he says. “Normally, I take the underground to work, but it was too nice a day. Who’s this?” he asks.

“This is Sitta. Sitta, this is Dr. Gupta.”

“Robin,” he says, though she doesn’t turn from the window. “Is she a relative?”

“My best friend’s daughter.”

“She’s charming,” he says. “Where are you two off to, then? You’re not working today, are you?”

“No, we just went on a bit of an outing. Took her to Camden Market, though it appears she’s much more interested in British royalty.”

You can neither see Buckingham Palace from here, nor is it the palace where Lady Di lives, but Sitta nevertheless remains with her face pressed to the glass.

“You know, there’s a palace in Ethiopia,” I try to interest her.

“You’ve been to Ethiopia?” Dr. Gupta asks.

“Mmm.” I nod. “It’s quite something, Sitta. It sits in a lush jungle, and there are all sorts of birds flying about, and there’s a zoo of exotic animals all moaning and groaning in golden cages.”

“Is there a princess like Lady Di?” Sitta asks over her shoulder.

“There was a princess once, but she wasn’t very beautiful.”

Her Royal Highness Princess Tenagneworq. Hardly the stuff of fairy tales. In her photograph she looked very plump and very old, and I distinctly remember thinking she had a round red face like a pomegranate crossed with the unfortunate wartiness of a toad.

“Did she have blond hair?” Sitta asks.

“No, she didn’t have blond hair,” I reply. “Not all princesses are blond.”

“Sounds like my sister’s children,” Robin laughs. “The girl won’t eat anything my sister cooks because she says ghee makes her fat—she’s all of ninety-eight pounds. And the boy came home with a crew cut the other day—his father’s a Sikh; he’s never cut his hair in his life; I gather he just about had a cardiac arrest. They only moved to Los Angeles six months ago.”