Sweetness in the Belly (27 page)

a final aria and a manila wave

R
obin is nodding with vague recognition as we share a cup of tea in the cafeteria. “I’m sure this man was Ethiopian,” he says. “It was at that conference I attended last year on AIDS in Africa. You would have loved that conference, Lilly, but we weren’t really, you know …”

“Friends then.”

“In any case,” he continues, “it’s a shot in the dark but I probably still have the proceedings somewhere. That is, of course, only if you want me to look.”

“Can I help you look?” I ask.

“What? At my flat?” He laughs at this uncharacteristic forwardness. “I cannot believe I’ve finally managed to entice you to my flat. Ah, life is funny. Had I known all it would take was one of my files, I would have waved manila at you years ago.”

His flat surprises me. Statues of gods and goddesses with waving arms stand in the bookshelf, on the window ledge, on top of the television. Each is a tangled mass of twisted limbs and I cannot make out which arms belong to which head.

“Smells good,” I say.

“I cheated. Marks and Spencer’s.”

He slides a plate of biriyani in front of me with an oven-mitted hand. I am blinded by polka dots and steam.

When we’ve finished, I carry the plates into the narrow kitchen. I nearly drop them at the sight of myself in the mirrored glass above the sink. God, what a sight. I touch the stitched line running up my face and finger my bald patch.

Robin stands behind me, his reflection cut off at the neck. He pulls my hair back in his hand. My neck tingles as I stand there with plates in each hand, staring at the reflection of his jumper in the mirror.

“It will indeed make a fantastic scar,” he says.

He makes coffee with hot milk and flavors it with cardamom and cloves: not quite Ethiopian, but not at all English. I gulp it down anxiously, scalding my tongue.

“Right.” He rises from the table, taking his cue from me.

I follow him into the bedroom. He has a framed poster of elephants above his bed and a bright orange bedspread punctuated by shiny silver discs. A shelf full of books and a dresser topped with photos of family and friends. It feels like the bedroom of a girl. I am ashamed by how little I know about him.

He kneels down and pulls two dusty cardboard boxes out from under the bed.

I pick up one of the photographs on the dresser. “Your parents?”

He looks up. “My aunt and uncle. They live in Manchester, but they treat me like a son. They’ve had a hard time. Idi Amin threw them out of Uganda in ’72 and they’ve never been the same. They used to have their own import business.”

“Why didn’t they go back to India?”

“Oh, you know how it is. Once you are outside a place you can never go back. Not really.”

He’s right, but one can only know that when there is still the option of going back.

I hover over his shoulder as he rifles through the second box. It’s sweet the way his life is on display here. I remember him commenting on how I didn’t have any photographs or pictures on my walls. I still don’t, ut I can appreciate now how they cheer a place up. I absent-mindedly scan the spines of Robin’s books while he digs under his bed for a third box. A title catches my eye:
Tales of the Sufis of the Sahara.
The name tears at my heart: M. Bruce MacDonald. I pull it off the shelf by its thin spine. I open the cover, turn the first and second pages. There, a dedication printed on the creamy white page: “For Lilly.”

“My God.”

“Eureka!” Robin exclaims, pulling out a file.

I replace the book and swallow the lump in my throat while Robin rubs dust from his nose and sniffs, flipping through a booklet with the words “HIV/AIDS Prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa” stamped across the front. The white moon of his fingernail scans the index. He turns to page twenty-three.

“There it is.”

I look over his shoulder. Dr. B. Wondemariam. “Islamic Perceptions of HIV/AIDS Transmission in the Horn of Africa. Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford,” the heading of the abstract reads. At the end of the article there is a brief biography. Former chief of staff at Addis Ababa Hospital and chair of the faculty of medicine at Addis Ababa University.

“Oh my God!” I exclaim. “Can I use your phone?”

“Of course.”

I reach Amina at home.

“Where are you, Lilly?” she asks. “I thought we were taking Sitta and Ahmed to the Ritzy.”

I totally forgot. We were supposed to take them to see a film tonight. “I’m so sorry, Amina, please tell the kids I’m sorry. It’s just, I’m at Robin’s and—”

“Ooh la la,” Amina croons—her new favorite expression, one she uses to comment on anything from a ripe piece of fruit to news of a riot.

“That doctor, years ago. The Amhara. Do you remember his name?”

“What doctor? The one I went to visit in Camden? I don’t remember, Lilly. That was five years ago or something.”

“Wondemariam?” I try.

She pauses. “Yes, that’s very possible.”

“Initial B.”

“Yes.” I hear her nodding. “Berhanu was his name.”

I
didn’t question it when he said
we. We’ll take the bus. We’ll make a day of it. We’ll leave about eleven on Thursday.
I’ve willingly let him take charge. I even asked him to make the phone call.

“Who is this?” the man had demanded.

“My name is Dr. Gupta, from the South Western Hospital. I am a friend of a friend.”

“But why do you call me Ramadan?”

“A friend of a friend from a long time ago.”

Robin covered the receiver with his other hand.
It’s him,
he mouthed. I leaned in to listen.

“What do you want?”

“I want to ask you about someone we might have known in common, but I don’t want to ask you over the phone,” Robin said.

“You are not Ethiopian.”

“No, Indian.”

This must be why he agrees to let us visit. It must have terrified him to hear his real name, but less so than if it had come from the mouth of an Ethiopian. Your status might be legal in the new country, but that is meaningless in the wars of the old.

Amina has packed us a lunch as if we are children heading off on our first day of school. On the bus I unwrap white bread sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a thermos of tea and a note scribbled on a piece of paper stamped with paw prints and the words
From the desk of Amina Mergessa.
“I hope the day is enjoyable. If not the destination, at least the journey,” she has written provocatively.

I stare out the window at the countryside beyond my reflection. “That book,” I say to Robin. “By Muhammed Bruce. You never mentioned it.”

“I didn’t dare. I realized I had really crossed a line.”

“What’s it like?”

“I haven’t read it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I bought it for you.”

I kiss him. Once, twice, three times, hard on the mouth.

The lashes of his wonky eye flutter. He is startled. He smiles.

Dr. Ramadan’s office is a sparse room with a wisteria-wrapped bay window overlooking the road. He is a tall, distinguished man in his sixties, with a neatly trimmed gray beard. He has a formal air and wears a gray suit with a tie tucked behind a waistcoat missing a button. We sit on torn upholstery but keep our coats on. The brittle air is determined, finding its way into the room through invisible cracks, and although the day is dark, our host does not turn on the overhead light.

“Aziz Abdulnasser,” he repeats, rolling the name around in his mouth. He swivels in his chair. “And you say he was probably my student when?”

“Sometime in the late 1960s. It could have been as early as ’66.”

“Hmm. And then imprisoned in Jijiga?”

“In the mid-1970s. Maybe ’76, ’77.”

“I think I know why your friend has sent you to me,” he says somberly, leaning back and stretching the remaining buttons on his waistcoat. He scratches his temple with the eraser end of a pencil.

“Do you?” I have to tug each sentence from him.

“I am well acquainted with that prison.”

“Were you imprisoned there too?”

“No. Not exactly.” He puts his palms on the desk. “I’m afraid, Miss, that the prison was destroyed in 1978,” he says, talking to his hands. “As was everybody imprisoned there.”

I open my mouth but no words come out. Robin reaches for my hand. I have only a feeling that people must have just when the plug is pulled. A few involuntary spasms rattle my ribs.

“During the Dergue’s fight with the Somalis,” he says, his eyes rolling up toward the ceiling. I see only the bulbs of his eyes in profile—round, meditative moons. “The Somalis saw Haile Selassie’s departure as an opportunity to try and take back the Ogaden. They were quite right, I might add. That little mess was due to a bit of deal making between Haile Selassie and the British in Somalia. So, the Dergue did what the Dergue always does and started rounding up everyone suspected not only of fighting but even of
thinking
of fighting—you see, the Dergue prides itself on being able to read minds. As you might imagine, it was not long before the prison in Jijiga was full of Ethiopian Somalis.

“And then the Somali army invaded the area,” he continues, lecturing to the ceiling. “They occupied Jijiga. They even got as far west as Harar. The Dergue brought in Russian advisers and Cuban forces to fight the Somalis for them and suddenly the area was full of tanks and riddled with land mines and all this machinery we had not seen before in this part of Ethiopia. The Cubans pushed the Somali army back overland as far as Jijiga. And then they dropped down bombs from their airplanes. They deliberately targeted the prison in order to obliterate the Ethiopian Somali rebels. They killed a great many other people as well,” he says matter-of-factly.

I should have known. I should have known there was more that Munir did not want to have to say. It is very Ethiopian to spare the bad news. To keep hope, possibility alive. And very Muslim.
Insha’Allah.
There is always a chance that God will will what you wish. Aziz might have mentioned me every day, but those days ended for him, for us, in 1978.

I register that my nails have drawn blood from Robin’s hand. He doesn’t let go. He squeezes my hand even tighter.

“How do I know this, you might wonder?” continues the doctor, finally looking at us. “I am ashamed to say it, but I was employed by the Dergue. This is when I was forced to take an Amhara name. I had no choice. I was chief of staff at the hospital in Addis. I was ordered to become the personal physician to Mengistu and his senior officers when he came to power. And in 1978, Mengistu was in Jijiga. Watching this whole scene take place like he was attending the opera,” the doctor says with a dramatic wave. “He even gave a standing ovation.”

The Ethiopian in me would wail, make her grief known; she would look to the sky and cry at the top of her lungs, begging Allah for mercy, for forgiveness, for compassion for the souls of those she loves. But the English in me is mute.

I have to flee this room. I shake off Robin’s hand and tug at the door handle. The two men watch me through the window as I pound down the steps, as I tear down the street, as I look to the sky and rain floods into my open mouth, threatening to fill my lungs.

I cough and splutter and throw my hands onto the iron fence in front of me, clutch the bars beyond which stands a church, St. Giles, and a graveyard so old the names of the dead have been washed away. If this were a Muslim graveyard, there would never have been names. And no gravestone would be bigger than any other. We are all equal in the eyes of God. We are all nameless. We all return to Allah in the end.

A black cloud hovers above my head and the rain suddenly stops. Robin peels my fingers from the iron bar and puts the umbrella in my hand.

He turns his jacket inside out and covers me with it on the bus ride home. I lean my head upon his shoulder.

He whispers: “Hindus believe that the essence of the person—the soul—lives on, reincarnated over and over with greater maturity each time to the point where it ultimately achieves enlightenment, freedom from the body. It is what we all ultimately wish for.”

Like a Sufi, I think, only a Sufi attempts to do it in a single lifetime.

Do souls ever immigrate? I wonder later that night. I’ll have to ask Robin in the morning. I won’t wake him now. He’s sleeping soundly, his long legs crossed at the ankles and hanging over the edge of my sofa.

east, west and farther west

Y
usuf’s prediction was dead on. In May 1991, the EPRDF—a coalition of revolutionary forces led by Tigrayan guerilla fighters from the north—rolls its tanks into Addis Ababa and sends Mengistu and his officers into flight.

The Dergue is charged with having killed, unlawfully arrested, imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian citizens, abetting and using famine to kill hundreds of thousands more, creating an epidemic of displaced persons and a worldwide diaspora of refugees.

Aziz was one of millions. But he was my one.

Over the months since Robin and I visited Dr. Ramadan, I have begun to wonder if Aziz has, in some ways, always and only ever been an apparition. It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive. It is Muhammed Bruce’s dedication. None of us are orphans even if everyone we’ve ever loved has died.

It’s the end of seventeen years of terror and we live on.

Y
usuf has been offered a junior position at an agricultural college in a city in Canada’s west. They know nothing about Calgary except that it is apparently very, very cold in winter, there are mountains, and Yusuf’s cousins own a restaurant that is sandwiched between a grocery and a barbershop also owned by Oromo. But this is enough. This is more than London. They were forced into exile and now, several years on, they are ready to make choices about how and where they live. They are no longer refugees. A new wave of refugees has arrived to take their place.

“Where will
you
go?” Amina asks me.

“I don’t know. Do I have to go?”

“Well, you don’t want to live
here
for the rest of your life.”

“Why not? There’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, it’s been your home for ten years, hasn’t it?”

There is a critical difference between us that I’d never fully realized before. For Amina, arriving in London was random; it could have been anywhere. But for me, England was the only logical place, where the roots of my history, as alien as these might seem, are actually buried. My journey ends here. It ended here years ago, in fact, well before I was ready. It’s taken seventeen years for my soul to catch up with my body.

I’m reminded of when Hussein and I set off for Harar. I had begged the Great Abdal to tell me what more he knew of the fate of my parents. Just let one chapter end before another begins. He’d always been vague whenever I’d asked, saying only Allah knows, this sort of thing, but on this occasion, perhaps because he knew there might be no other opportunity for the truth, he told me that they had stolen from the coffers, taking a good portion of the money donated by pilgrims to buy an enormous quantity of opium, which they had been trying to sell in the alleyways of the medina in Tangier.

“But why would they have needed to make so much money?” I’d asked him.

“Because they were trying to earn the passage home,” was the answer.

You put roots down, they’ll start growing, my father used to say.

A
mina circles the ad, pushes it across the Formica tabletop and accompanies me north on the tube to Finsbury Park. It’s not far from Camden Market, for which I have a particular affection, but much more affordable. The flat is in a house, not a high-rise, on a rundown residential street of two-up two-downs with walled front gardens. Many of them have been converted into upper and lower flats.

It has central heating
and
a fireplace and, unlike the estate, my new flat has an English history: generations live in the hardwood floors, the tobacco brown of the drapes, the remains of a roll of wallpaper in the closet, the ashes in the fireplace. It has a warmth so unlike the concrete corridors of the estate, where the lonely echoes only exaggerate one’s sense of living in exile, only feed the desire to live in the past and feast in secret like a bulimic on a closet full of memories.

London will no longer loom large on the other side of the river. I will live on its northern edge and enter its depths as part of my new job as a nurse with a mobile public health unit that operates, among other things, a needle exchange. My nursing qualifications are necessary, but it was my Saturday work that recommended me for the job. Years of dealing with people who are battered and scarred and frightened and depressed and anxious and angry and suicidal have prepared me well for this tough inner-city work.

Robin suggests I take up a relaxing hobby such as yoga or meditation. It is clear there will simply have to be a separation between my work and my private life. Which is okay. I’m ready to cultivate the latter.

Robin borrows a van, and he and Yusuf help me pack up the contents of my flat, meager as they are. All the years in this place and I have never invested in anything worth keeping.
That can go to Leila down the hall, and if she doesn’t want it, we’ll take it to Oxfam. Oh no, that thing? It would be too insulting. You can throw that straight in the garbage.

By early evening on the day of the move, Amina has arrived with the children and a large pot of dorro wat she has carried in her arms all the way on the underground. She sets it down on the cooker and nearly loses her eyebrows with the initial burst of flame.

“Amina.” I smile, waving a pack of incense. We have to expel the spirits first.

She laughs and tells me that I am very fashinn qadim, just like an old woman of Harar. I ignore her, lighting half a dozen sticks off the flame, and I wave them about, uttering the prayers to wish any ancestors and spirits who have remained in the space good journeys to heaven. When the death of someone is not properly honored, their spirit remains caught between the earthly and heavenly worlds.

This is good-bye.

Yusuf inhales deeply, Robin looks on fondly, Tariq follows me from room to room, and Ahmed and Sitta, thinking it a game, compete to see who can laugh the loudest. This might be the only time they ever witness this old Harari tradition, I realize. This is what happens in the West. Muslims from Pakistan pray alongside Muslims from Nigeria and Ethiopia and Malaysia and Iran, and because the only thing they share in common is the holy book, that becomes the sole basis of the new community; not culture, not tradition, not place. The book is the only thing that offers consensus, so traditions are discarded as if they are filthy third-world clothes. “We were ignorant before,” people say, as if it is only in the West that they have learned the true way of Islam.

Even our own imam, at the mosque we’ve been attending for years, reinforces this, calling for the importance of uniformity of practice and dress in the face of a hostile world. The imams decry the erosion of Islamic values in the West, particularly the separation between men and women. “The preservation of the community depends on protecting our women,” our imam asserts, and obliges us to dress more conservatively and remember that our value on this earth is as mothers of the next generation.

Perhaps I am very fashinn qadim, but to become as orthodox as this imam demands, I would have to abandon the religion I know. He’s asking for nothing less than conversion. Why would I do such a thing? My religion is full of color and possibility and choice; it’s a moderate interpretation, one that Aziz showed me was possible, one that allows you to use whatever means allow you to feel closer to God, be it saints, prayer beads or qat, one that allows you to have the occasional drink, work alongside men, go without a veil when you choose, sit alone with an unrelated man in a room, even hold his hand or even, dare I say it, to feel love for a Hindu.

It’s an interpretation where jihad is as Hussein taught me, one’s personal struggle to be a good Muslim, not a fight against those who are not Muslim, as our imam has started preaching.

I’ve stopped going to the mosque, and I’m rather glad Amina is moving for this reason. She’s already given up her colorful veils for plain ones in navy. I don’t think she needs to hear anymore from this imam.

She is stirring the chicken stew with her back to me, but despite calling me old-fashioned, I can hear her saying the prayer along with me as I wave incense above her head.

W
e eat Ethiopian style, sitting on the floor, dorro wat at the center of a platter covered in injera, a bit of salad and a spoonful of white cheese at the side. We tear the injera with our right hands. I play mother and separate the meat from the bones and divide the hard-boiled eggs into pieces with my fingers. We dig in, and like all Indians who eat our food, Robin looks as though he has been eating this way his entire life.

“Do you have a daughter?” Sitta asks him between mouthfuls.

“No, I don’t, Sitta. Not yet.”

“Do you have a wife?” she persists, much to my embarrassment.

“No.” He laughs, looking at me, and I realize how much I like his slightly wonky eye, and I wonder if the world looks slightly different to him out of that eye or because of it.

“Not even in Ethiopia?” Sitta asks.

Everyone laughs, though it’s not surprising. Every adult she knows is missing someone. In her mind, Ethiopia must be the country where missing people live. And I suppose Robin’s coloring is not that unlike a Harari.

“Like Lilly’s husband,” she says.

The laughter stops and we look into our laps.

“He was never my husband, Sitta,” I say after a minute.

Sitta looks confused.

“Why are you not married yet, then, Dr. Robin?” asks Amina without a hint of subtlety.

He groans. “Oh, it’s my mother. I know it doesn’t sound very modern, but she wants me to marry a nice Bengali girl. She sends me pictures all the time. Last time she called me she couldn’t stop giggling and I asked her why she was so amused, and then she says in this high-pitched voice: ‘Mukulika? Now go ahead and introduce yourself.’

“She had this girl on the other end of the line! Can you believe it? It was terribly awkward. ‘And what kind of medicine do you specialize in, Dr. Gupta? My father was a doctor in Bombay. No, he has passed away I’m afraid.’ And my mother interjecting: ‘Tell Mukulika about the first-class honors; tell her about saving poor Mr. Parminder’s life.’ ”

Ahmed and Sitta find Robin’s imitation of his mother highly amusing. “Poor Mr. Parminder,” Sitta chirps in imitation.

I can’t believe how I’ve misjudged him. How I used to dismiss him because of his perfect English and his Cambridge education. Resent the ease with which he picked up the phone and called home. It’s amazing how similar many of our experiences have been.

“Do you know how to ski?” Ahmed asks Robin.

“Well, I once—”

“Because Ayo says we’re going skiing in the Rocky Mountains,” Ahmed interrupts.

“Are you really, Amina?” I laugh. “Masha’Allah!”

“Yes!” she exclaims. “You know”—she gestures, as if she is gripping ski poles—“and these special trousers and woolly hats with balls on top, it’s very fashinn gidir!”

The two of us shriek with laughter until we both realize that it’s not funny at all. This is just what the world looks like now: a veiled Ethiopian woman skiing down the side of a Canadian mountain. The picture of resilience. The new world.

For all the brutality that is inflicted upon us, we still possess the desire to be polite to strangers. We may have blackened eyes, but we still insist on brushing our hair. We may have had our toes shot off by a nine-year-old, but we still believe in the innocence of children. We may have been raped, repeatedly, by two men in a Kenyan refugee camp, but we still open ourselves to the ones we love. We may have lost everything, but we still insist on being generous and sharing the little that remains. We still have dreams.