Sweetness in the Belly (26 page)

september 12, 1974

I
t was New Year’s Day according to the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian calendar. Aziz and I and the old man sat listening to the radio as we shared a bowl of sorghum porridge. Sadia had left for the shops early, determined to proceed according to plan. The old man was having difficulty, his teeth didn’t seem to be sitting quite straight in his mouth that morning. Each time Aziz reached out to spoon another mouthful I felt the hairs on his arm sting my own.

The music came to an end, and the New Year began with a proclamation over the radio in Amharic. Aziz translated.

“Even though the people treated the throne in good faith as a symbol of unity, Haile Selassie I took advantage of its authority, dignity and honor for his own personal ends. As a result, the country found itself in a state of poverty and disintegration. Moreover, an eighty-two-year-old monarch, because of his age, is incapable of meeting his responsibilities. Therefore His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I is being deposed as of September 12, 1974, and power assumed by the Provisional Military Committee. Ethiopia above all.”

With that, Parliament was dissolved, the Constitution suspended and the Supreme Court abolished. The emperor, who was the ultimate authority over all three, did not resist arrest. They say that he who had initially denied the famine at all, then denied its extent, then denied any knowledge of military involvement had been forced to sit down with the leaders of the Dergue the previous night at the palace and watch Jonathan Dimbleby’s film as it was broadcast to the nation. He was reputed to have replied, “If revolution is good for the people, then I, too, support the revolution,” then retired to bed.

S
adia managed to select the following items without my help: six sets of Egyptian cotton sheets (even though virtually no Hararis slept in beds), a toaster, a blender, a television (even though very few Hararis had electricity), a telephone (even though there were no telephone lines in Harar), a jug and twelve matching glasses (to serve her guests contaminated, parasite-ridden water?), six ice cube trays (even though there was no refrigeration) and enough clothes, shoes and gold jewelery to keep her looking extraordinarily rich for a lifetime.

She was reciting this list to me when there was a sudden banging on the metal gate of the old man’s compound. We all froze, but then the old man came to his senses and sent his servant to open it.

It was Girma from the restaurant.

Aziz jumped up to greet him. They exchanged some whispered words before Aziz turned and said: “Lilly, it’s time for you to leave.”

“What?”

“To go home,” Aziz said simply.

“To Harar,” I said cautiously.

“It’s not safe for you there.”

“But I don’t have another home.”

“I don’t think you have any other choice,” said Aziz. “I know
I
don’t have any other choice. Girma is here to escort you. You are going to have to leave now.”

“A fire is burning,” Girma added in a moment too urgent for metaphors.

“The Dergue,” Aziz began to explain. “They are taking anyone connected to the emperor in any way.” He waved about the room. “We are all at risk.”

Because of your association with me.

“Djibouti,” Aziz and Girma said simultaneously.

Aziz and I stared at each other. This couldn’t be happening. Aziz reached into his pocket and pulled out his hospital identification card. He lifted up the plastic and peeled off the small black-and-white photograph.

“I want you to have this,” he said, and placed the photo with its curled edges in my hand.

I stared at the tiny photo. “But what can I give you?”

“You have already given it to me,” he said, patting his stomach. “It’s in here. Whatever happens.”

Sweetness in the belly.

part nine

l
ondon, england

1990-1991

a story of famine and refugees

T
he list of names sent to us each month only grows longer. It’s become impossible to think of individuals anymore; I see a country being turned upside down and all the people being shaken out and deposited into the camps that straddle Ethiopia’s borders like a ring of fire. The majority will die there, forty miles from the borders of home, of starvation and disease, the newest epidemic of which is AIDS.

“I don’t think I can bear it any longer,” I say, throwing the most recent list down on the table and rubbing my eyes with my palms. “It’s all just a black smear.”

“Typical social services burnout,” Amina responds, armed with the language of her new appointment as interim director of Settlement Services with the Lambeth Council. She uses this same language to sugarcoat her own disappointment. She pushes her feelings aside in the pursuit of order and efficiency.

Amina comes to my flat when she needs peace and quiet and works at the kitchen table over a bowl of soup. I leave her to it and go to her flat, where I am of some help with Dickens but none at all with Shakespeare. Yusuf is brilliant with maths and all sciences. At least he’s found
some
use for his degree in agricultural economics.

Tariq, at two and a half, is something of a terror. We are generally happy to let him wreak havoc, though, knowing perhaps that in some other time and place he might be selling peanuts to qat addicts in the marketplace rather than banging pots, might soon be learning how to load a gun.

We’ve found two things that calm him: Marmite, introduced to him by some mumsy-type at nursery, which he licks off toast and sucks off his fingers, and the authoritative voices on the nightly news. He doesn’t watch the broadcast but rather sticks his head against the back of the telly, inviting the voices to speak directly into his ear.

I found Yusuf part-time work recently as an orderly at the hospital. He seems to like it well enough, in part, I think, because the relations are so clear. You have doctors, administrators and nurses above orderlies, but below them, you have patients. He does not have to feel intimidated by them because by virtue of being patients they are powerless. Yusuf might feel affectless in the global scheme of things, but at least at the hospital there are people looking up to him, asking him for help. Even white people. He is the one wearing the uniform.

It has clearly gone some way toward restoring his confidence, because lately he’s been reading books about farming techniques in modern Britain and asking me questions about soy cultivation and peat moss, things about which I have not a clue. He is slowly nurturing an ember of hope into a flame.

While Tariq continues to stick his head against the back of the television every night, Yusuf has begun to engage with the news. We sit side by side and watch the world uniting and dividing before our eyes. It is impossible to imagine that an empire could have lasted for two thousand years when in one year, the Communists relinquish sole power in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia explodes and cracks, Nelson Mandela is set free, the cold war ends, the European Union is agreed upon, Germany is reunited, and Iraq invades a tiny neighbor called Kuwait, sparking a new war more global than the West has ever known.

Yusuf says to me wisely, prophetically: “Muslims will become the new Russians.”

“There is never anything about Ethiopia,” he laments as we watch the world morphing before our eyes. “It is as if it does not exist.”

“Ethiopia doesn’t matter to the West,” I say, stating the obvious. “We offer them nothing they can exploit.”

This has proved both a blessing and a curse. We can feel proud that Ethiopia resisted Europe’s colonial overtures, but then we have to accept that the country does not exist in the European imagination as anything but a starving, impoverished nation with just about the highest rates of infant mortality, the lowest average life expectancy and the lowest rates of literacy in the world. As a story of famine and refugees.

“We do offer the West one thing they can exploit,” says Yusuf. “A fine example of the evils of communism.”

“True. But we were in this position before the Dergue,” I argue.

“It could have been different,” he says. “Haile Selassie was on the way. Through education, some developments in agriculture …”

“For the benefit of a very privileged few, Yusuf. And at the cost of leaving hundreds of thousands to die.”

“Well, we are certainly no better off now,” he says. “At least during Haile Selassie’s time we had some export—coffee—but we lost that market because of communism. Mengistu has alienated the rest of the world by allying himself with the Russians.”

“But now the Soviets have given up their monopoly—”

“Which means that very soon, Ethiopia will have
no
friends,” Yusuf insists. “Mengistu will be weakened by this change in the Soviet Union, believe me. I predict the end of the Dergue within a year.”

O
n Saturday I drift through the lists as I tend to now, more scanning for patterns than reading for details, wondering if Yusuf is right and whether our work here will end as a consequence. There is a whole new generation of refugees coming to live on the estate, mainly Somalis and Kurds. Ethiopians rarely get priority in housing anymore even though the numbers have only increased—as if it’s simply gone on too long to warrant special attention. A crisis is by definition short lived. An ongoing crisis is at best an oxymoron.

I slide the list across the table to Amina. “Mostly Christian names,” I conclude.

Amina glances at the cover sheet. “Hmm. They have a new secretary in Rome.”

“Do they?”

“This Munir Jamal Mahmoud. I guess Nadjmia moved on.”

I lean forward. “That name. Say that name again.”

She squints through her glasses. “Munir Jamal Mahmoud,” she reads. “M.D.”

“Munir,” I say.

“Who is Munir?” she asks.

“Aziz’s best friend.”

Amina pulls a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer.

some measure of happiness

T
here was a chill between Robin and me for about six months after we stopped dating—if you could ever have called it dating. Whatever it was or wasn’t, things have settled now at a polite remove. I assume he just stopped feeling fed up at some point, decided to put his energy somewhere else, perhaps direct it at someone more suitable. A woman who invites him into her well-furnished flat and has inspired hobbies like martial arts, or oil painting, a woman who offers a way in and has a life beyond work. As he should have, as I hope he has, but I wouldn’t know because we don’t exchange personal information; we exchange brief pleasantries in the corridor and carry on.

I run straight past him the day the letter arrives, charging down to the casualty ward where Yusuf is mopping the floor.

I need a filter. And I need the voice of an Ethiopian man. “Read it to me once,” I ask Yusuf, breathless, “but leave out the bad parts. Then read it to me again, this time with the bad parts.”

“Here?” Yusuf asks, looking round at the commotion.

I take the mop from his hands and he fumbles in his pocket for his reading glasses. He reads quietly, in the voice of a poet, and the noises of the hospital fade into the background.

October 1990

Dear Lilly,

I hope this letter finds you in good health and with some measure of happiness in your life in London. I cannot tell you how high my heart was lifted to receive this letter from you. I am fine, alhamdullilah. I wish I could offer you the good news that you ask for that would also lift your heart. I have not seen Aziz for several years, but the last time I saw him he was fine except angry like me about this brutal regime. Insha’Allah this Mengistu will die and all truths will be revealed but still it is very dangerous. One must not oppose.

As you know, Aziz and I very much supported this change in our country. We were part of this movement to put an end to imperialism and develop the country according to socialist principles. Our movement was of one mind until this dictator Mengistu started using guns and killing. We have a strong ideology but we believe in peace. Our student group fractured into two parties and then really, all hope for a socialist country is gone. Brothers are fighting brothers and this dictator sends his generals to arrest most of the doctors from the hospital. They tell us we are counterrevolutionary and send one of us here and one of us there, to different prisons all over the country. But in truth, we are not counterrevolutionary, at least in principle, they just need doctors for their prisons. The prisons are overflowing. Everyone in Ethiopia is counterrevolutionary, it seems.

Aziz and I are lucky in one thing. Since we are a medical team, we are sent together to Jijiga. Truly, the conditions are very bad. People sleeping on top of people and suffocating because there is no room. Later, of course, they don’t even bother with this pretense of jail. But for now it was jail and first we were not willing to work for these corrupt captors, but really they make it so we have no choice. But we survived this. I walk with a crutch because of my toes, and Aziz’s eye is not so good now, but truly we were lucky ones, alhamdullilah. They break you in the beginning and then enough—if they can make use of you they do.

In 1977 things are very bad with this nightmare they call Red Terror. They send me to a new prison in the far southwest where many Ethiopians are trying to escape to the Sudan. We beg the officers in Jijiga because we are a medical team, but they cannot lose two doctors and so they send the one with the bad foot but not the one with the bad eye. I feel guilty, oh my God, but this is my chance and I escape in a truck for Khartoum. And from there to Egypt and after some years in Cairo, by ship to Rome because I find my cousin here. For now I am working part time for the association, but insha’Allah, I will soon go to Toronto where my biggest brother is living. If I go to Toronto I will write to tell you God has granted my wish.

Maybe you can find this man in London. He is chief of staff from Addis Ababa and was teaching us at Haile Selassie I University. We hear he went to London for more training—sent by Mengistu himself!—but became political asylum seeker. He is a great man. Maybe he can help you. Mengistu gave him some Amhara name, but in truth, his name is Ramadan Sherif.

Insha’Allah there will be some news to lift your heart. Dear farenji—Aziz was speaking of you every day.

Assalaamu alaykum,
Munir

There is bad and relative bad. In the course of our work, I’ve heard so many stories that I could not invent a form of torture the Dergue had not already thought of. Munir has lost his toes and some of his English (or perhaps it’s just that my English has improved). Poor Aziz has lost an eye. I wonder what else has been taken from them. Certainly their hope for a new Ethiopia, in socialism as the way forward. Revolutions look like this, I have learned. The further left the theory, the greater the speed with which the pendulum returns to middle, the practice swings to right. Down falls an iron curtain.

Yusuf reads the letter again. The second version is identical to the first. These are my thoughts in order:

I was not the cause of his being sent to prison?
He spoke of me every day?
Sadia. He doesn’t even mention her.
Ramadan Sherif.
I was not the cause of him being sent to prison.
He spoke of me every day.

A
few days later I find myself splayed out on the terrazzo floor, blood in my eyes, spreading in a puddle under my chin.

“Jesus, Lilly, you’re bloody lucky you didn’t get it in the eye,” says Robin, who’s supervising the ward that day. “This looks like the culprit,” he says, picking a scalpel out of the pool of blood and instruments. The tray has managed to slide halfway down the hall.

He mops up the mess on my face with a handkerchief and helps me up.

“I tripped somehow,” I say, looking at my shoes as if they are to blame.

Robin shaves a patch of my hair as I sit on a gurney in the corridor. “What’s going on?” he probes, investigating the top of my head.

“I’m useless on a double,” I berate myself.

“Do you want me to freeze it first?” he asks.

I shake my head. He is kind. He has never been anything but kind.

“Are you getting enough sleep?” he asks.

“Not the past couple of nights,” I admit. There have been late hours and no answers. Amina has not found the name Ramadan Sherif in any of our files. I have not found his name or any variation thereof in any of the staff and faculty registers of the London hospitals and universities.

“Why is that, Lilly?” Robin presses. “Doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“I’m trying to find someone,” I say as he threads a needle into my skin.

“Uh-uh!” he says. “Keep your head up, I’ve just started!” He lowers his voice. “You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to.”

I cannot move because there is a needle in my head. The tears tumble down my cheeks.

“Oh, Jesus, I should’ve frozen you.”

“It’s not that,” I blurt. “I just feel so helpless. Things are such a mess in Ethiopia.”

“You’ve done a lot of work for Ethiopians here. At least that’s something, huh?”

“It’s not as altruistic as it might seem.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not good work. I mean, Muslims give alms, right? But that’s not exactly altruism. It’s about honoring a pillar of faith, being rewarded for being a good Muslim, it’s really all about the giver, not the recipient. And Jews make mitzvahs—same thing. And the Catholics say do unto others. Why? Because it’s all going to come back and bite them in the behind if they don’t. They’re still all worthwhile, these acts of goodness or charity; they make the world a better place, but I think it’s disingenuous to think of them as altruistic.”

I nod.

“Lilly, you’ve got to keep still! Like most people in the medical profession you’re proving to be a terrible patient.”

I ask him about Hindus. Acts of goodness.

“Oh, well, it couldn’t be more explicitly self-motivated,” he says. “Everything is about karma, creating the positive and reducing the negative so that you land somewhere better the next time round.”

“I’m so sorry, Robin,” I say. “About everything.”

“That’s okay,” he says, stepping back to admire his work. “I’m still standing, right?”

“You were really kind. Really patient. I just couldn’t …”

He sits down beside me on the gurney in this sterile corridor and in one slow move pulls me into his shoulder. I lean into him, my hands folded in my lap, my mascara making tracks on his white shoulder. Disinfectant. Rubber gloves. And beyond that, the hypnotic dusty warmth of turmeric, the body’s honest smell of ground cumin.