Sweetness in the Belly (16 page)

kissing in english

N
ouria and I took turns pouring water for each other to perform our ablutions each morning.

Allahu akbar
—our necks, nostrils and mouths were washed clean.

Allahu akbar
—our hands, forearms, head, feet and ankles.

Night’s sins were washed away, fell in droplets to the ground, and thus purified, we kneeled together and prayed.

I’d taken to returning to bed for another hour, even though such behavior wasn’t encouraged. Nouria indulged me to a certain extent because, as she and Gishta had taken to reminding me, I would soon enough have to take on all the responsibilities of the adult world. Not only was laziness not a virtue, but being by yourself, they said, left your soul susceptible to the invasion of evil spirits. I’d developed a terrible suspicion they might be right. In my solitude, I couldn’t help but indulge secret longing. While I could discipline my brain to maintain purity of thought, my senses betrayed me. They had independent will, their own memories.

The warmth of his pink palms. The faint smell of sweat ironed deeply, repeatedly, into a cotton shirt. The chocolate brown of his irises. The butter-soft of his skin. The solid wholeness of his presence: not heavy, but bearing remarkable weight.

Our stolen moments, late on Saturday afternoons in a dark room once used for storing tobacco leaves; the secret world we shared with our friends.

S
adia had started to visit me after school for English lessons because she wanted to impress Munir. Our lessons were rather limited; she was interested in only one subject.

“I would be,” our first lesson began, with me exaggerating each word.

“I would be,” Sadia repeated.

“Honored …”

“Unnerred …”

“To be …”

“To be …”

“Your wife.”

“Your wife!” Sadia squealed.

“Uss!” I had to quiet her as Nouria and Gishta looked up from where they were squatting on the other side of the compound, dipping straw into dyes, one bucket of bright pink, one bucket of the Prophet’s favored green.

We burst out laughing and grabbed each other by the shoulders. Gishta looked over at us with amusement, a certain fondness, pleased to see the two of us being ordinary teenagers. They were delighted that Sadia and I were friends.
Such a good girl,
they always said.
From such a good family. Her father has made the hajj seven times. And she herself made the hajj at such a young age.

But little do they know what good girls from good families get up to on Saturdays. It is more than just holding hands, Sadia was keen to tell me once the women had left the compound to take the dyed straw to Ikhista Aini’s next door. She and Munir might leave Aziz’s uncle’s house separately, but only to reconvene ten minutes later behind one of the thatched round houses that sit in a cluster beyond the closest gate.

“The leper colony?”

“Exactly. We hide behind the far one so no one sees us. If the lepers saw us, they wouldn’t care. They won’t speak to our parents, and God knows, no one would believe anything they say anyway.”

“But aren’t you afraid of catching it?”

“It’s not so easy to catch, Munir says. And besides, I would cut off my leg to be with him. I have another. God was very kind to give us two of everything. Well, almost everything!”

“Sadia!” I gasped. “What do you get up to there?”

“Kissing,” she whispered conspiratorially.

It was one thing to hold hands in our closed room, but to take the risk of showing affection beyond those walls was quite another. The women would call her something worse than a sharmuta if she was ever caught. They would say no man would ever want her. Perhaps her family would even send her away to Dire Dawa to be rid of the shame.

But Munir did want Sadia for his wife, and the campaign to seduce Sadia’s mother into believing she had chosen him for her daughter had already begun. First, Munir went to her family’s compound to introduce himself, saying he was available to the family should they ever require the services of a doctor. Next, he took a keen interest in Sadia’s brother, who excelled at science, and asked him whether he would be interested in going to medical school. Then he’d involved his mother, sending her over on what would be the first of several goodwill missions. Although it was fathers who had to give approval, it was mothers who brought forth the candidates; it was mothers who were really in charge.

“Okay, Sadia, now let’s be serious,” I said. “When Munir tells you that your father has given his approval?”

“I say: I would be unnerred to be wife.”

“I would be honored to be …”

“I would be honored—”

“Sadia?” I interrupted, lowering my voice. “Has Aziz ever had a girlfriend?”

“Mmm …” She looked skyward. “Not a girlfriend, really, just, I don’t know … Munir tells me there was one girl in Addis Ababa but she was Amhara.”

“A Christian?” I immediately wished I hadn’t asked.

“Oh, Lilly, no,” she said. “She is Amhara, she cannot be his girlfriend. And besides, whose hand is he holding, hmm?”

M
y hand,
I tried to reassure myself as I walked along the dusty exterior wall the following Saturday.
My hand in his hand.

Qat and chatter and television in the dark, the elements of that Saturday’s bercha were indistinguishable. I felt sick, wondering if he’d ever kissed the Amhara girl.

Aziz asked me to stay at the end of the bercha as he did every week now. The desire to remain in his company overwhelmed common sense; I would pick up my good Muslim self on the way home. He closed the door after his friends, and it was dark and still again, the sweat of bodies in the air, qat debris strewn about us on the floor. He lifted his sarong slightly and sat cross-legged in front of me. He took my hands from my lap, both my hands in one of his. And then his other hand reached up and cupped my chin.

I swallowed the ball of wool in my throat as he traced the outline of my face with his thumb. My face felt tiny in his hand, like a mango he was holding up to admire.

I raised my hand and put my palm on his cheek. I ran my fingers over his eyebrows, down his nose. Then he caught my finger between his teeth and closed his full lips. He tugged my entire body forward.

This is why the Sufis try to erase the body, I realized in that moment. Not because it is a host for parasites, not because it demands food and water and sleep, but because one mouth to one finger can override the most sacred sentiment, the most pious intention. One mouth to one finger can lead to a kiss and that kiss can change the world.

He released my finger from his mouth and leaned into me, his mouth at my neck. His lips searched my face, grazed my cheek, my eyebrows, my forehead as if he was touching the raised letters of an old gravestone, trying to read the story of a life from its beginning. He wrote the future onto my face with his lips.

“I hear that you silenced the sheikh,” he whispered between kisses.

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“No Harari girl would ever have been so bold.”

“I was angry.”

“You fight for what you believe in. That is something beautiful and rare.”

obstacles in the path of righteousness

T
he residue of guilt coated my skin like egg white. One false expression and I feared the sheen would crack. I prayed for forgiveness every Thursday night. The sheikh’s rejection of me and my students had not deterred me from joining the heaving crowd that gathered around the squat shrine once a week to celebrate the saint and his miracles.

I bounced from my left foot to my right, whispering prayers. I asked Bilal al Habash to pay special attention to Bortucan, whose mind was not right, to ensure the Great Abdal was safe in heaven, to bring good fortune to Nouria, to recognize Hussein’s efforts, to help Aziz pass his exams, to forgive me my flirtation with the devil. I never mentioned my parents or Muhammed Bruce in my prayers because I feared they had gone to that other place, a burning pit Bilal al Habash would never have occasion to visit.

Hussein stood tall beside Sheikh Jami at the front of the crowd as the sheikh led us through the dhikr. I lingered at the back, clapping and dancing and chewing qat like everybody else. Well, almost like everyone else. Part of me, admittedly, could no longer surrender on these occasions and resisted mirqana. While everybody else’s mind loosened and expanded, my focus seemed to telescope to the singular image of a tall and handsome boyish man with a compelling bittersweet smile and a soft voice that contradicted his size.

It was not worship of him, for that would be a crime, the greatest crime a Muslim can commit: idolatry. We who believed in saints were sometimes accused of such a thing. Not everyone condoned our practices; many of the clerics in the cities dismissed our beliefs and rituals. They believed the roots of our devotion lay in the pagan practices that existed here before Islam rolled like a wave over our part of Africa in the ninth century. They called this ignorance, backwardness, African.

Beyond the critics were those who condemned, those who said we were engaged in practices hostile to Islam, saw our beliefs as heretical, our actions as criminal, and would have us imprisoned, even killed. In Saudi Arabia beliefs like ours were seen as a deadly plague. Hararis making the pilgrimage to Mecca had to suppress the names of the saints on their lips, but as soon as they returned home, they headed straight to the shrine of Bilal al Habash to secure his blessing for having fulfilled this pillar of faith.

We felt safe here, under the protection of more than three hundred saints, Bilal supreme among them, in a country with an emperor who was said to love his Muslim subjects as much as his Christian.

But then I had also heard Aziz say that the emperor feared his Ethiopia was a lonely Christian island floating in a Muslim sea. He needn’t have worried. Unlike Morocco, we did not have brotherhoods here, nor proselytizing disciples, simply a proliferation of local saints, their shrines cared for and memory kept alive by their descendants and the people under their care.

Our practices were gentle, diffuse, apolitical.

While I did my best to lose myself in the sway of the Thursday-night crowd, I imagined Aziz in his mother’s compound, wearing a sarong knotted at the waist, his hospital clothes hanging on a nail in the wall, making pencil marks by candlelight in the margins of a textbook. Closing the book and repeating entire paragraphs in English about the central nervous system.

I was glad to have the excuse of taking Nouria’s girls home and putting them to bed. This left their mother free to remain at the shrine and twist and turn and hiss and bounce into the dawn of the next day. And it left me alone, my susceptible soul leading me to imagine the kisses in the dark over and over, to carry the watery sensation of them with me into the early morning. It was not worship. It was more that distraction Hussein had always warned about: earthly love.

terms of endearment

I
sat cross-legged on a straw mat in the courtyard, taking advantage of the last light of the day. I was working on my new project, a Harari-English dictionary, an endeavor people encouraged because Emperor Haile Selassie had long been preaching the virtues of learning English, reforming the education system to reflect this and insisting it was the way to go forward as a nation.

Islam teaches us that education is the means to enlightenment, and that discipline is the only way to get there. But while Haile Selassie’s educational reforms might have been celebrated, they appeared to benefit very few. Except for the richest people in the cities, no one could spare their child for an hour, let alone half a day for school. The Hararis were that exception, ensuring all their children, girls included, got some education—at a minimum, in Qur’an.

I took great pleasure in working on the dictionary, though I occasionally annoyed people with my questions. “Precocious,” my mother used to say. “Curious Lilly-George,” my father called me, “monkey.” He too had loved language. He gave me a notebook when I was six, and it was soon after that that I began collecting words. Arabic words and later Harari, and even the occasional English word, usually to do with medicine or politics.

“Tell me the name of every plant you know,” I asked Gishta. “Tell me every single word you can think of that has to do with the sky,” I asked Nouria.

Sometimes they indulged me; other times they said they were too busy for my games. They liked it least of all when I asked about abstract entities—“I don’t know, Lilly. How would I know? Happy, sad, there is no in-between”—and obscure technical terms—“I’m not a farmer, Lilly. I don’t know what they call that thing. Why does it matter? It’s only a peasant’s word, after all.”

W
e were surrounded by the debris of another bercha, but instead of whispering and drawing close in the dark as we usually did after everyone left, Aziz rose and threw open the shutters. He had something he wanted to show me: a new medical textbook he had just picked up from the post office in Dire Dawa.

I admired its hard, shiny white cover and the color photographs of internal organs on its slippery pages.

“Do you know why I am showing you this?” he asked, looking over my shoulder as I flipped through its lurid pages. “Because this is the last one I need to study.”

“And then you’ll be ready to write your exams,” I said, realizing the significance.

“In six months’ time, at the end of August, that is when they are scheduling the next exams. I will have to go to Cairo to write them.”

I wasn’t sure how far away that was, but however far, it was away. “For how long?”

“I will probably only stay for one week. But there is the journey to Addis and back, so maybe I will be gone for two. Have you ever been on a plane?” he asked.

“Yes. A long time ago.”

“I have always wanted to go on a plane,” he said.

“What happens after you write the exams?”

“I wait for the results. I have to get top marks to be awarded a scholarship. I can’t afford the tuition otherwise. I’ve been saving money, but you know, this is Ethiopia, where even the doctors are poor.”

“Well, I know you’ll get the scholarship.”

“Insha’Allah,” said Aziz. “And if I do? You know this means I will be in Cairo for four years.”

“That’s a long time.”

“Then I will return and serve the community. I want to develop expertise that we don’t have here. Internal medicine—especially for children.”

He will be able to save a generation of children, I thought. He’ll rescue children like Bortucan from the dirt.

“Insha’Allah, we will have berchas together again after that. That is, if you are still here.”

Still here? “This is my home, Aziz.”

“You won’t return someday to Morocco?”

“Not now,” I said. Not since the Great Abdal died. Not since I started teaching the children. Not since knowing you.

“But then, of course, berchas will not exactly be possible because your husband will object.”

“My husband?”

“The ladies will find a husband for you,” he said. “Perhaps they have done so already. It is what ladies do.”

G
ishta had come to refer to me using favored terms of endearment:
kuday, kulayay,
“my liver,” “my kidney.” “If only you were circumcised,” she lamented. “You would be almost perfect. Are you quite sure you don’t want to be circumcised? It’s never too late.”

“Quite sure,” I insisted.

“Well, maybe your gums …”

“I told you I wasn’t having that done.”

“Just like a teenager,” she sighed. “So stubborn. So hot blooded.”

“It is a mother’s job to extinguish the flames,” Gishta would warn Nouria. But Nouria had never treated me like a parent. I tried to dampen the fire that Gishta rightfully suspected burned inside, but Aziz invariably rose from the ashes, his lips moving, his conversation endless, his words making me feel heavy and slow as if there would never be enough time before he left for Cairo to finish what we had to say.

Since the first day that Aziz had held my hand, I’d been discovering that nothing was quite as it first appeared. But then, this is where we begin in every new world: first we read the manual. We practice the laws as they are laid out, and it is only when we become literate through living them that we find the contradictions, the subtext, the spaces in between. There were signs everywhere: evidence of a current flowing beneath the strict rules of engagement that governed the relationships between men and women. Like the placement of the water jug in the small niche to the right of the main doors inside Gishta’s house. “Normally, the jug sits on the floor,” Gishta explained, “but if it appears in the niche, then it is my turn.”

This meant that most Tuesdays Gishta sent her two children over to her co-wife Zehtahoun’s house after the last call to prayer, leaving her alone to line her eyes with kohl, anoint her hair and body with oils and perfume and dress in a sheer diri, a Somali nightdress, pulled over her bulging breasts and plump thighs.

“He comes to surprise me in the night” was how Gishta described it. I wanted to press her for details, but I knew my curiosity would alarm her. I was meant to be passive. To wait until I was chosen by a suitor—a Harari suitor, my passport to full acceptance within the community, a man who would marry me, then teach me.

If she knew that I had kissed Aziz. That I craved being in the dark with this man, that I daydreamed him into the pauses between sentences. That I would wait four years for his return. That I was compromising the one thing, the only thing I had always believed mattered, to be near him.

People were not supposed to marry for love; they were supposed to marry to secure alliances between families: for lineage, for wealth, for status. And darkness like Aziz’s offered none of those things. Hararis turned away from the dark even when it ran in their own blood: they preferred to look east, not to Africa, for their origins. They preferred to think of Arabs—the Prophet and his companions, the saints—as their ancestors, rather than slaves. It was a fiction that was complicated by dark skin.

I was meant to wait for a suitor, but I was nineteen now. The wait was not meant to last too long.

“Life is short in Africa,” Gishta often said, “too short to waste time. You don’t want to stay on the tree for too long, Lilly. Eventually you will lose your grip, drop to the ground, splatter, go rotten. No one wants to eat the fruit that has fallen—that is for the beggars and the birds. They will only want to step on you.”