Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  Suddenly it made sense. I was teaching her children and not theirs. I was the cause of Nouria’s rash. Nouria would have to share the good fortune, correct the imbalance, regain parity with her sisters. I would have to teach their children.

  And so it was that one by one, the poorer families in the neighborhood began bringing their sons and daughters to Nouria’s compound in the mornings to join in what seemed to be emerging as a local school. I sat the children in three circles on the ground based on the knowledge they brought with them. The two new children, who had had some schooling and could read, joined Nouria’s boys. That group of four had the tools to progress with the book shared between them, and could, to some extent, lead the several others who, though they could not read, had the first few chapters memorized. Rahile joined that second group even though they were much further ahead, but Bortucan would remain with the youngest, the easiest group in some ways because they brought to it nothing but their open hearts and mouths.

  Eventually, I would begin drawing the letters that give shape to the words for the younger ones, etch them into dirt if we had no other option. I would establish a routine that would allow the three groups to make progress simultaneously. It is how we’d learned when I was a child at the madrasa in Tamegroute: not just three groups, but ten, verses bouncing off walls and greeting us from every side.

  Within a couple of weeks, my class had settled at eleven students, seven of them girls. In addition to Nouria’s four, there were five other poor and dusty Oromo children, and two Hararis, scrubbed and much better dressed than their classmates. In addition to these regulars, there was the occasional, irregular appearance of two Somali boys from the countryside who turned up whenever their mother had something to sell in the market.

  It was good for Nouria; the parents agreed to pay a small fee—the Hararis in cash, the Oromo in kind—and they did so not a moment too soon. One morning we’d lost an entire washing line of clothes to a hungry goat, causing Nouria to pull a chunk of her hair out and rub dirt into her eyes.

  “If you take me for the lover of Satan, then so be it! Kill me now!” she wailed.

  I came up with a solution. Between the cash and the money Nouria made by selling the qat brought by the Oromo parents, we were able to replace the clothes within a month, not only placating four irate co-wives but leaving us with enough material to have new dresses made for ourselves.

  The first time I tried on my new dress, I ran my hands over the silky sheen, thinking it the neatest I’d looked since once, a long time ago, when Muhammed Bruce had taken me to Marrakech. That had happened twice. Eight hours on a bus stinking of cooking oil and petrol and cigarette smoke. Did he really make this journey once a month just to visit me? Perhaps I should dissuade him in the future, I remember thinking. He seemed very happy in Marrakech, after all. He owned a flat in an old French building on a wide boulevard outside the medina, with an elevator man and big marble ashtrays in all the hallways. A young Arab boy cooked all his food and washed his feet with warm water and slept like a cat at the foot of his bed. The flat was full of birdcages, and in the evenings, Muhammed Bruce let me close the balcony shutters and open all their cages so that they could flutter about the rooms. He didn’t seem to mind them dropping white splotches onto the sofas, but it was the Arab boy who had to follow the birds from room to room cleaning up after them. I could tell he was looking forward to the end of my visit.

  Muhammed Bruce took me to restaurants where we ate crepes, and we went shopping, not in the suq but in a glass-fronted shop with a French name, where he bought me a pinafore and a pair of shoes, which were very nice but didn’t alleviate my feeling of homesickness.

  I was about twelve the next time. On that occasion, too, we went to a French restaurant and he bought me a new dress. The old Arab boy had been replaced by a new one, and Muhammed Bruce took us both for a ride on a Ferris wheel and then we had ice cream, but although I was older than the last time, I still missed the shrine the whole time.

  He could tell I wasn’t happy. “I just wanted to make sure you were aware there were alternatives,” he said. “To help you make an informed decision.”

  I didn’t ask what decision I was supposed to be informed about.

  I was enjoying the feel of the blue silk against my thighs while I moved around the courtyard arranging my students when the fence parted. Dr. Aziz cleared his throat and I lost all memory of who should be sitting where and what the little girl with the plaits was called, and “You, you,” I said, “sit over there beside Rahile,” trying to regain composure, when he asked: “Do you have room for one more student?”

  He stood with his large palms on the shoulders of a black girl in front of him. His father’s cousin’s daughter, he said.

  “Will you teach her?” he asked, rephrasing the question when I failed to answer.

  “But how did you hear about our lessons?” I stammered.

  “I live just over there.” He pointed. “You know the house beside Sheikh Khalef’s shrine? That is where I live with my mother.”

  My heart plunged into my stomach, bobbed in that morning’s tea. I was dizzy with the sudden self-consciousness that he might have seen me en route to the market or the mosque, witnessed the shouts of “Farenji!” as I traipsed along the broken streets in flip-flops, with my dirty hair peeking out from under my veil, quite possibly muttering some new vocabulary to myself.

  “Yes, of course I’ll teach her,” I said, recovering. “Has she had any schooling at all?”

  “Just the verses her father has taught her. He doesn’t read, so he can only share with her what he remembers.”

  “We’re only doing Qur’an,” I thought I should clarify, “nothing more. Not any math or science like some of the madrasas.”

  “Of course,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It is just the beginning.”

  It was a beginning, but not just. Perhaps one day there would be an occasion for me to show him the science in the Qur’an. And the math in its numbers. I had heard it said that the wall surrounding the city was 6,666 arms’ lengths long—the exact number of verses of the Qur’an. There was as much spirit in the architecture of this place as there was science. Perhaps that is true of anywhere if you look deep enough.

  At lunch that day, when I was quite sure Dr. Aziz was far away at the hospital beyond the city wall, I went to the market to fetch a cone of salt. I passed a set of metal doors I had passed nearly every day, this time counting the footsteps between his compound and mine. One hundred and two. So close. He must fall asleep to the same sounds, I realized. Metal doors being scraped shut, babies crying and hyenas whooping as they roam the neighborhood scavenging for scraps. And if he were to listen closer: Bortucan blubbing, Nouria comforting her, Fathi’s mouth falling open, catching flies, and me lying awake with a pounding heart wondering if that was him I could hear breathing in the distance.

  in the blue glow

  Dr. Aziz’s father’s cousin’s daughter proved to be an extremely bright girl. Not only did she memorize without apparent effort, she asked surprisingly perceptive questions. Why does this chapter end here? she asked. Why does the voice in this chapter feel so far away? I could not afford to risk alienating the rest of the class by veering off into exegesis, so I tried to steer her back to the text, to get her to open herself to it, to trust in it. You will come to understand in time, I told her, if you just focus on repetition and memorization.

  I did not have answers for all her questions. I was not a Sufi philosopher like the Great Abdal or Sheikh Jami: I did not possess the wisdom and gifts that they both did as descendants of saints. I was nothing more than a dedicated student who, through sheer necessity, had been forced to become a teacher. But I relished this new role. And I was enchanted by this new student with her keen curiosity and her vague resemblance to her father’s cousin’s son.

  “If you want me to try and answer some of your questions, you’ll have to ask your father’s permission to stay after class tomorrow,” I to
ld Zemzem. “But during class try and stop your mind from interrupting the rhythm. Do not think; experience.”

  Rahile was not about to let me offer a private lesson to the new girl. She began interrupting at the end of every verse with questions that were far less relevant than Zemzem’s.

  “I have questions too,” she declared when Zemzem remained behind after class the following day.

  “You’ll have to take turns, then,” I said. “So why don’t we begin with the question about revelation that Zemzem brought up yesterday.”

  “Because I don’t want to begin there,” Rahile said.

  “Who is the teacher, Rahile?”

  “You are the teacher.”

  “That’s right. And the teacher says where we begin.”

  I spoke about revelation, how the verses were revealed to the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him, through the angel Gabriel over a period of twenty-three years. This is why some of the verses feel different from others.

  “Why twenty-three years?” Rahile asked.

  “Because God had a lot to impart,” I said, growing impatient with her.

  Just then, a man pulled back the fence and entered the courtyard, and Zemzem leapt to her feet.

  “Zemzem!” he said gruffly. “What do you think you are doing?”

  Her father, I assumed. I introduced myself, apologized for delaying her.

  “You are the teacher?” He blinked repeatedly as he stood before me, his legs apart, his hands on his hips.

  “I am. And your daughter is my best student,” I said truthfully, hoping to flatter.

  Rahile harrumphed and kicked the ground.

  “She has to work, she knows she has to work!” the man exploded. “I agreed with Aziz she can come for this class in the mornings, but now she is late. Who is going to clean the house? Who is going to go to market and do the cooking? Should we live in dirt and starve?”

  Bortucan, as she always did whenever she heard a man yelling, burst into tears. I pulled her into my thigh. “I’m sorry,” I said to Zemzem’s father. “She had some questions which were a bit too advanced for the rest of the class, so I offered to answer them after the other children left.”

  “Oh, paah, paah, don’t tell me this! It is a curse to have a girl who is advanced.” He yanked her by the arm, wrenched back the fence and pushed Zemzem ahead of him into the street.

  “What about my turn?” Rahile bleated, tugging at my sleeve.

  “School’s finished for today, Rahile.”

  “It’s not fair! You gave a turn to the black one but the red one is better,” she said, pointing at herself.

  Poor Dr. Aziz, I thought. He will never prove to them that he is worthy. Even a child sees only darkness. A poor child who is relatively dark herself.

  I stepped out of the compound and slipped out of my flip-flops. I had bought a pair of shoes in the market, but I was trying to keep this from Nouria lest she think I was developing pretensions. I pulled them from my rucksack and put them on. The shoes felt clumsy, but I ventured forth determined, counting to one hundred and two.

  I immediately regretted being so bold. I peeked into his mother’s compound, found him out of uniform, wearing a loose white galabaia, shaving his chin with a straight razor, eyes wide and boyish as he peered at his reflection in a broken mirror.

  “Good morning,” he said with surprise, dropping his razor into the bowl at his feet.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, gripping the edge of the metal door.

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s a nice surprise. Come in. My mother will give you tea.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “It’s just that Zemzem didn’t come to class yesterday. It’s my fault—the day before I kept her late and then her father was angry. I wondered if you could speak to him. I won’t keep her late again, but she’s very bright and it would be such a shame if she didn’t continue.”

  “I see.” He nodded. “She is the only child, so it is difficult for him to spare her for school.”

  “I appreciate that, but it’s essential to learn Qur’an.”

  “Essential,” he repeated. “Making sure you have enough food to feed your family is essential.”

  It was no use trying to explain it to him. “I’m sorry for interrupting you. Insha’Allah, Zemzem will return to class,” I said, stepping back into the lane.

  “Wait,” he said, and came up to the doorway. “I will speak to him. It’s no problem. I was the one who insisted it was important she have some schooling in the first place.”

  He of near-perfect English carried on, stumbling a bit, back-tracking—something about how difficult it can be to see the importance of other things when one lives hand to mouth—then asked if I might like to come to his uncle’s house that Saturday for a bercha. Berchas were how all Hararis and Oromo in the city took their leisure, from the time they were adolescents until the time they were toothless and mashing their qat leaves with a pestle. On the Saturday afternoons that neighborhood women did not gather in Nouria’s compound, she went elsewhere, often taking me with her, to do the same in the whitewashed clay houses of wealthier women with their red floors and raised red clay platforms and shining Meccan souvenirs.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was taken aback: men and women did not sit for berchas together.

  “I’ll draw you a map.” Dr. Aziz bent down and grabbed a stick.

  I smiled while he etched the shape of the wall into the ground, rubbing out sections with his palm, correcting himself, striving to convey its irregular shape accurately. He suggested the road adjacent to but outside the circumference of the wall and then he erased all evidence of the map from the ground.

  “I bought some shoes,” I said, still looking down.

  “I noticed,” he laughed.

  On Saturday the women from the neighborhood arrived with qat and hookahs and set down their blankets on the ground in front of Nouria’s house. I was squatting in the kitchen stirring coffee leaves into hot salted milk. Coffee beans were too expensive and mainly reserved for export, but nothing was wasted, not the husks or the leaves. I stared into the eddy of hot milk, thinking it impossible, a trip to the market, perhaps, but I couldn’t justify an absence from the compound of any longer than half an hour.

  A young woman I had never seen before stepped through the parting in the fence. She wore footless striped leggings, a modern variation of the trousers her mother’s generation wore, under a short dress of purple silk. A veil of loose lavender chiffon floated about her delicate face. She was flower fresh and about my age.

  “Sadia!” the women greeted her. “How is your mother? My, how you have grown. So beautiful like your mother. Have you come for bercha? Lilly, is qutti qahwah ready?”

  “Thank you, Aunties,” said Sadia, bowing politely, “but today I’m taking Lilly for bercha.”

  “Lilly?” Nouria asked curiously.

  I stood stunned in the doorway of the grim kitchen holding a wooden spoon.

  “Every girl needs girlfriends, no?” Sadia said brightly to the women. “Lilly and I were chatting at the market and I told her this: why do you have no girlfriends? Even a farenji must have girlfriends. So I made a promise and here I am!”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” they all agreed. “Go!” they shouted at me. Murmurs of approval all round. Such a good girl. And from such a good family. They were clearly surprised I was able to make such respectable friends.

  Nouria nodded. “Go!”

  I smiled at Nouria. She was wearing my shoes.

  Sadia and I slipped out the gate at the bottom of the hill and walked in silence, traveling left for a quarter of a mile along the dusty road that runs adjacent to the city wall. Only Oromo and Somalis travel this road: men leading animals by thick rope, women bent double under the weight of firewood, children carrying water from the river—people, in other words, for whom there is no day of rest.

  We slipped back into the city through the next of the five gates in the city wall. This was
the route Aziz had scratched into the dirt. The key, apparently, to moving around the city undetected. Aziz’s uncle’s house was right there, immediately to the left of the gate.

  We entered the compound and Sadia waved at an old man sitting cross-legged inside the main room with the Qur’an in his hands. “Good afternoon, Uncle.”

  “And good afternoon to you,” he mumbled toothlessly. There followed a series of inquiries about his health, each of which he answered, “Thanks to God.”

  I nodded politely and followed Sadia up a wooden staircase to a narrow balcony. It was a very old Harari house, one with an upper floor traditionally used for storing firewood and tobacco leaves. From the balcony there was a stunning view of the farmlands in one direction, the dense matrix of the city in the other.

  We took off our shoes and entered the last room, a place of discretion, dark and small, without windows. I felt burlap beneath my feet and could barely make out faces, but I could see the forms of several people, both young men and women, reclining against pillows lining the walls. In the middle of the room was an enormous pile of qat amassed on a scarf, and beside it, a tray with two thermoses of tea, a jug of cold water, plastic cups with daisies printed on them and the ubiquitous clay pot for burning incense.

  Dr. Aziz greeted me from the floor, patting the pillow beside him, but he did not introduce me. I sat beside him as he recited a du’a, distributing the qat as he did this, passing a bundle of fresh twigs to each of us in the room and keeping a tenth aside—the Prophet’s share, it was called.

  “These are the best leaves, the sweetest,” he said, passing me a few pale stalks.

  Once the qat had been passed round, he threw incense onto the coals in the clay burner and we said our thanks to God. Now chewing could officially begin.

  The men were all wearing sarongs, leisure wear, and sat with their left arms balanced on their left knees while they stripped the twigs quickly from top to bottom between their thumbs and forefingers. Their cheeks grew as they stuffed more and more leaves into the sides of their mouths. They chatted away in a mixture of Harari and English. I thought this must be for my benefit, even though nobody but Dr. Aziz addressed me directly. I didn’t want to change the language of this or any other room. It’s okay, I wanted to tell them, I even dream in Harari now. And Harari dreams are not like Arabic or English dreams: there are always a great many more people involved.