Sweetness in the Belly (6 page)

a single wellington boot

I
contributed to Nouria’s household in the ways that I could. I took the broom from her hands, swept away the dead insects and the cat and goat feces and sprinkled water over the dirt to settle the dust, leaving Nouria free to take in more laundry. She rubbed her hands raw washing richer women’s clothes in a big tub filled with water that her oldest boy, Anwar, carried by the jerry can each morning from the river beyond the city wall. Later, we used the pinkish brown laundry water to wash our faces, hands and feet, then our dishes and our own clothes. When the water was black, we threw it into the street, where it trickled downhill and eventually seeped into the parched ground.

The boys spent most of the day lingering in the market, selling peanuts or, when there were no customers or peanuts, begging. They kept their eyes glued to the fruit and vegetable stands, ready to pounce on anything rolling away from its seller. At the end of the day they scavenged for anything spoiled and discarded, returning home with the soft, battered remnants of what had once passed as food.

Nouria’s twin girls, meanwhile, spent most of their time playing—shoeless and filthy—in the streets. I would often find the smaller one, Bortucan, sitting alone in the road eating dirt. Seeking nutrients where she could.

The birth of the twins had changed Nouria’s fortune, not that her prospects, coming from the poor Oromo background that she did, had ever looked particularly bright. Like her cousin Gishta, though, Nouria aspired to belong among the Harari—their wealth and privilege powerful aphrodisiacs—and had made the language, the food and the customs her own.

When her husband died—of some mysterious illness called ground disease, people said—Gishta had encouraged Nouria to find a Harari man just as she had. Nouria did her best: for several years she had been a Harari man’s mistress, and although he had given her an allowance that enabled her to send her two boys to school, he did not ask her to marry him. When she got pregnant, he cut off relations altogether.

The boys were forced to drop out of school and go back to the streets; Nouria was forced to beg rich Harari women to let her do their laundry. She would not go back to being a household servant, as she had been as a child. She would not surrender her own home. Rahile gave up mother’s milk for water and stale bread and the black flesh of overripe bananas. Bortucan, however, still refused to let go of her mother’s breast, whether milk was forthcoming or not.

Dinner, which I would help Nouria prepare, was a modest meal, a stew made of onions and lentils and chili peppers sopped up with stale injera, or sometimes injera and ground red chili pepper alone.

We relieved ourselves on a patch of ground behind the kitchen, wiping with the left hand, pouring water over the left with the right. We tiptoed in flip-flops—mine hand-me-downs from Gishta—across this patch of earth, its slippery brown sheen no doubt caused by ingesting these foul-smelling thin stews made from poisonous water.

Nouria didn’t deny my help because it allowed her to earn more income, but there was no easiness between us as we settled into our reluctant arrangement. I knew this was not simply due to the limitations of language.

The children, on the other hand, were proving to be a blessing. The boys soon got over the giggle-inducing, wide-staring curiosity of having a foreigner in their midst, though they would still drag people to have a look at me over the corrugated tin fence and then beg to be paid for providing entertainment. I simply waved at the women and children who peered over, which would send them into flight. I hoped that the novelty would eventually wear off, though thousands of people lived within the city’s walls.

I felt immediately protective of Bortucan because she was in much greater need of attention than her sister. I was surprised to learn they were twins, both four years old, because Bortucan, unlike Rahile, hadn’t started speaking and never played with other children. She was sullen, where Rahile was perennially bright. Perhaps, in her wordlessness, her isolation, there was something I recognized and understood.

During the heat of the afternoon I sat on a mat in a shaded corner of the yard, fanning the flies away, making vocabulary lists, diligently recording each new Harari word I learned and doing my best to make some sense of the grammar. Many of the words seemed very close to Arabic, derived from the same root, though they were strung together in unfamiliar ways. And Arabic, I discovered, went far with some people. Among the more educated, the ones who were well versed in the Qur’an, as were some of Nouria’s wealthier neighbors, Arabic was familiar. Nouria didn’t know Arabic per se, but she had a number of Arabic proverbs on the tip of her tongue.

Anwar spoke some, which he’d learned during his few years at the madrasa. I would point at something in the compound—a cockroach, a sack of grain, a dress hanging from the washing line—and Anwar would give me the Harari word. The last thing he named for me in the compound was the plant growing out of the rubber boot, but he didn’t have a word for the boot itself.

“Where’s the other one?” I asked him.

“What other one?”

“The pair to this one.”

“There is only this one,” he said.

What was a single Wellington boot doing sitting in this compound in a remote Muslim city in Africa?

“And the plant. What’s it for?” I asked Anwar.

He shrugged. “It’s for nothing,” he replied.

“It’s not used as a spice or a medicine?”

“It’s just for being a plant.”

For nothing. For being a plant.
In this impoverished world where everything had its use, I found this one frivolous gesture reassuring.

Once he’d named everything in the compound for me, we moved inside the mud-walled house and named its meager contents. Armed with the word for foam mattress, I asked him where I might buy one of my own. He seemed proud to be able to escort me by hand to the market, where a man cut a piece of foam according to Anwar’s instruction.

“But Anwar, that’s far too big,” I objected, once the man had cut the piece.

“No, no, it’s good!” he said, and placed the thick tube of foam on his head.

“All right,” I sighed, and dug into my pocket.

As I thought, the tube was too wide to fit through the door of the mud house.

“No problem,” said Anwar and unrolled it on the ground. He went into the kitchen, returned with a knife and drew a clean line down the middle of the mattress with the blade. He carried each piece into the house separately and placed his clothes at the head of the second mattress.

My vocabulary grew over the months with words picked up from Nouria, from Gishta when she came to visit, as she did almost every other afternoon, and from the other women in the neighborhood who would gather in the courtyard on the occasional Saturday for what they called a bercha. They would spread a blanket on the ground and sit in a circle and share a little gossip and qat. They snacked on popcorn, roasted on a flat pan over an open flame, threw crystals of incense onto dying embers, drank tea and smoked the hookah, which here was the sole preserve of women. The qat, the tobacco, the popcorn and the gossip were the only extravagances in Nouria’s poor life, gifts brought by more affluent neighbors.

I sat on the edge of their circle, Bortucan often in my lap, me wiping her perpetually running nose with a rag. Some of the women wove threads of straw while they chatted, making baskets to adorn the interior walls of houses richer than Nouria’s. Bortucan often tugged at my breast, and inevitably crawled in frustration from my lap to her mother’s, where, although she could not always be assured feeding, there was comfort.

I learned from listening, from being corrected when I attempted to interact, from sheer exposure and immersion, through the days come weeks come months of hearing little else, from the knowledge that I had no choice.

In return for my new vocabulary, I offered to teach the boys some more Arabic. After dinner, we would sit by the dying light of the fire in the cramped kitchen and practice the alphabet together, writing the letters on slate with chalk.

One morning Anwar came to me carrying a book in his hands—my Qur’an, the one the Great Abdal had given me.

“Anwar, where did you get this?” I chastised.

“From your bag,” he said, pointing at the house.

“You shouldn’t go rummaging through my things,” I said, immediately shamed by the possessiveness in my voice. “Do you want me to read to you, is that it?” I asked more gently.

He nodded vigorously.

“Well, first we have to wash our hands. Then we have to state our intention—”

“Wait!” he said, and ran to get his brother.

Each morning after that we sat in the doorway of the dark room we all shared and recited quietly for an hour against the rhythmic sounds of Nouria on her knees scrubbing clothes in a big metal basin. Over the weeks, the two boys revealed their knowledge of verse after verse, then chapter after chapter. They ground to a halt at the last verse of chapter five. So it was here that we began in earnest. Listen and repeat. Listen and repeat. Line by line, verse by verse, just the way the Great Abdal had taught me.

The Great Abdal had taken me by the hand and said this is a flower and this is a rock and this is a tree. Under his guidance I put down roots word by word. Each utterance prefaced by
bismillah al-rahman al-rahim
, in the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. The world within the book was whole, and there was an order, a process, a logical sequence of steps. It was the antithesis of the peripatetic life I’d lived with my parents; it was the antidote to their death. There was always a safe landing, even when I made a mistake. If I stumbled over a sentence, I could just retreat to the one before. I could always go back to what I knew.

This is the way of Islam; it is passed like a gift through generations. It connects us through time. Through this process these children would be connected to the Great Abdal, to his father and teacher before him and his father and teacher before him all the way back through the generations to the saint himself. In a fatherless world, I was a link in a chain that connected God’s Prophet (peace be upon him) with two dusty Ethiopian boys.

purity and danger

N
ouria and I sorted through a sack of sorghum as she’d taught me—shaking the grains over a mesh screen, getting rid of the loose chaff and picking out the grit and small stones. When we finished, we would grind the grain in a mortar, mix it with water and then leave it in a bucket to ferment. We would use that sour, hissing puddle in a few days to make enough injera to feed us all for a couple of weeks.

Rahile was standing at her mother’s side that morning, tugging her sleeve. Nouria tried to quiet her: “Hush. Soon, Rahu, soon. Do not bother your mother. Go and play.”

But Rahile started crying and stomping her feet. Bortucan, in the spirit of twinhood perhaps, burst out in the same manner; eyes squeezed shut, little fists scrunched into balls, she punched at the air and let out a strange moan while her sister’s crying escalated.

“Good God! What is the fuss all about?” Gishta yelled as she entered the compound. She was carrying a qat-stuffed leather satchel over her shoulder and a gourd of camel’s milk in her hand. “Did a stone fall on your head, Rahu? Are you possessed by the jinn?”

“I want absuma! Ab-su-ma! Ab-su-ma!” she wailed each syllable.

“What is this ‘absuma’ she wants?” I asked.

“It’s expensive, that’s what it is,” Nouria said, deftly tossing the grain up and down.

“She wants a party, like her little friends in the neighborhood,” Gishta elaborated, squatting down with us. “So people will come and say, Oh, aren’t you a good girl, here, have some sweeties, here is some money, have some more honey.”

For her birthday? I wondered, though no one seemed to know exactly how old they were.
Maybe I am this many years,
they would say with a shrug.
What does it matter?
Or,
Four droughts have passed in my lifetime.

“But Nouria is right, this party is very expensive,” Gishta explained. “You have to kill some chickens, maybe even a goat, and feed everybody. And then, of course, you have to pay the midwife.”

“Why the midwife?” I asked.

“Because she makes the party happen, Lilly!” Gishta shouted, incredulous. “It’s not a party without the midwife. Don’t you know anything? She doesn’t know anything, Nouria!”

“Well, I’m not her mother!” Nouria hissed.

Had my mother not taught me anything? She’d shown me how to do simple crocheting and how to join my letters together. She’d taught me card games, including strip poker, telling me that nakedness was not cause for shame. I’d wondered about that at the time, though, because while they lay about with little or nothing on smoking marijuana and giving each other sponge baths, the rest of the world had been very much dressed.

She’d taught me where babies came from but not where they go when they die. It was the Great Abdal who taught me about heaven.

Both of the women were staring at me.

“What?” I demanded.

“You know that you must always cover your hair outside the compound,” Gishta said.

“And that you must never be alone with a man, because the devil will be your third companion,” Nouria added, the first in her arsenal of Arabic proverbs, most of which seemed to concern relations between men and women.

“And you know that when you have the monthly blood, you must never visit the mosque or prepare food, for this is a hurt and a pollution,” Gishta said gravely.

I didn’t know what any of this had to do with Rahile’s party, but I wanted to help, and so I later pressed a small amount of money into Nouria’s hand.

Nouria smiled at me for perhaps the first time and said: “For both Rahile and Bortucan. You cannot do one and not the other.”

R
ahile boasted about the forthcoming party for weeks, telling anyone who would listen. People on the street patted her on the head and told her she was a good girl. Even Bortucan appeared to bubble with anticipation.

Gishta had matching dresses made for the girls for the occasion, and even though Bortucan had managed to rub dirt into the front of hers within half an hour of putting it on, they both looked uncharacteristically neat. And happy.

Rahile perched herself on a small wooden bench that had been moved into the courtyard, sitting straight backed and waving her legs with excitement as women from the neighborhood flooded in through the parted fence. The women had marigolds and aromatic herbs tucked behind their ears and they carried shiny packages of sweets that they placed on the ground before sitting themselves down in a circle around Rahile. Gishta passed around a tray with small clay cups of tea made from coffee husks boiled in milk and water.

Most of the women ignored me as I hung back by the kitchen, keeping an eye on another pot of milk and water about to boil on the fire. Two sisters from down the road, who clearly found me amusing, shouted: “Tell us, what new Harari words have you learned lately?”

“Absuma gar,” I replied plainly, wanting to keep the attention on Rahile, who was looking a little put out.

They roared and raised their hands above their heads.

“Absuma gar! Allahu akbar!” cried one.

“Allahu akbar!” repeated the others one after another, until the ripple of a whisper threaded its way through the crowd and the women fell silent. A large elderly woman with drooping eyelids and deep lines etched into her sagging face entered the compound, followed by a young Oromo girl gripping the creped legs of two upside-down chickens.

“Abai Taoduda,” Nouria fawned, rushing forward, dropping to her knees and kissing the fleshy part of the woman’s hand where the thumb and forefinger meet. Abai Taoduda exchanged greetings of peace with the women while the young Oromo girl handed the two chickens by the legs to Anwar, who was standing far back by the fence with his brother. Anwar held them proudly, talking to them as they protested this change of hands.

The elderly woman made her way into the center of the circle and raised her palms in praise of Allah. A chorus of praise shuttled through the air. She approached Rahile on the bench, pulled her to her feet and kissed her on the forehead before sitting down precisely where Rahile had been sitting and pulling the girl down onto her generous lap.

“Uma Sherifa!” called the midwife. Sherifa, a blind woman who lived in the neighborhood and had a reputation as a wonderful singer, rose to her feet. She was often paid to perform at weddings, but having never been invited to such an event, this was the first time I’d heard her sing. Her eyes were clouded by a white film, but her voice was so clear that I could hear the river of sweet water cascading down the mountainside, I could see the wall being built around the city inch by inch, I could feel the bittersweet joy of being ge kahat, a “daughter of the city,” one whose protection serves the community as a whole.

The midwife lifted up her skirt and spread her plump, dimpled legs. She pulled up Rahile’s dress as well and tied the girl’s thighs to the soft insides of her own with two long black scarves. Then she put a cloth in Rahile’s mouth, told her to bite hard, tugged at the folds of skin between Rahile’s legs and swiftly ran a metal blade down over them.

“What is she doing?” I couldn’t help but cry out.

“Uss!” the women closest to me chastised.

I stood with my hand over my mouth as the midwife made several quick slices with the blade, removing thin bits of skin. All the color drained from Rahile’s face. A tremor rippled throughout her body as a thick pool of blood grew between her legs. I lost all sensation in the lower half of me, watching in horror as the blood began to creep over the side of the bench. Rahile caught sight of it as it lurched toward the ground and she let out an agonized cry.

In the background, one of the chickens, which Anwar had beheaded with the last downward pull of the midwife’s blade, ran amok around the compound. The women raised their heads and cupped their hands over their mouths: a celebratory chorus of epiglottises as they ululated heavenward. I wanted to catch Rahile’s blood in my hands and give the color back to her. She was whimpering, her lips trembling, her eyelashes fluttering over her glazed eyes.

Nouria blotted her daughter’s wound with a rag, and then the midwife tugged the scarves loose and scooped the girl up under the arms. Nouria grabbed the deadened heap of her daughter by the ankles, and the two women lay her down on the bench. The midwife pinched together the two remaining flaps of skin between Rahile’s legs and began piercing them perfunctorily with a row of six sharp thorns. I bit my knuckle so hard I drew blood. The midwife inserted a matchstick in the space between the last two thorns, and Rahile’s whimpering slowed and deepened. She breathed heavily, as if through a blanket.

Abai Taoduda dragged her by the underarms and held her over a small smouldering pit of aromatic wood so that the smoke washed up over the wound. She held out her callused hand, and Nouria passed her warm ashes from the fire, which she patted up and down between the thorns with her flat fingers. Two women held Rahile by the shoulders as the midwife wrapped a bandage round and round her legs, binding her immobile from her hips to her feet. They carried her into the hut and lay her on the foam mattress.

I couldn’t bear it: Nouria was pulling Bortucan forward.

“She’s too young!” I protested.

Rabid whispers all around me.

Nouria said, “She is old enough to remember the pain.”

I had to turn away. I had to push my way through the crowd of women and stand alone in the street. I heard nothing from Bortucan, only the jubilant chorus of ululating women. A manic, headless chicken brushed my calf as it ran down the street. Anwar chased it a few feet before throwing himself upon it and stifling it with his chest.

This was the party Rahile had been waiting for.