Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  “The doctor was Harari?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Yes. The one who saved my life. Many lives.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “I don’t know this,” the man said. “I only remember he didn’t look like a Harari because he was very black. In any case, my brother . . .”

  I was convinced it had to be him: there weren’t many Harari doctors, I knew them all, and Aziz was certainly the blackest. But how on earth do you go about locating someone when all you know is that he was somewhere close to the Kenyan border about four years ago? All you can do is pray. And wait. And go a little crazy. I developed a fever and had terrible dreams and when I woke up after a week I found that all the cupboard doors in my kitchen had been torn off their hinges.

  “Do you think I’m losing my mind?” I asked Amina, as I stood there stunned by the destruction. My hands were scratched and bruised, but I had only a vague recollection of having been frustrated by a vain search through all the cupboards for some tea.

  “Perhaps you have just had a little encounter with the jinn,” she said sympathetically.

  The zar, the worst of the jinn, can take possession of one’s mind and body. I saw it happen a few times in Ethiopia. Always to women. Women who had reached their limits.

  “I called your work,” Amina said, sweeping splintered wood from the floor.

  “You didn’t—”

  “I had to, Lilly!”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Just that you had family business to attend to,” she said. “I spoke to a very nice man called Dr. Gupta.”

  “Oh shit,” I groaned.

  “He seemed very nice.”

  One of the doctors often on duty on my ward. Tall and arrogant. Good looking and altogether too aware of it.

  I’d missed five shifts in all and had to pay the price of undergoing a probationary hearing with a board of three doctors, including, much to my humiliation, Dr. Gupta.

  They asked me questions about depression and drug use, and I said, rather angrily, that this really had nothing to do with my mental health. I was dealing with family matters, and when you come from a family of refugees things can be unpredictable.

  “A family of refugees?” the chief of staff asked, as if amused.

  “Yes.”

  “That must be complicated.”

  I nodded and looked away.

  “And do you think this will continue to interfere with your work?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said firmly. “The matter’s been dealt with. It’s over.”

  I would not be blindsided like that again. Aziz was somewhere in southern Ethiopia, close to the Kenyan border. I was braced now: it was just a matter of time.

  The best we could do was try to get a message to the main UNHCR camp outside Nairobi, where Amina and her husband had spent time. I left my name, phone number and address with a Christian charity that distributes secondhand clothes among refugees in the camp, branding thin African men with slogans like “Let’s Boogie,” “Sex Appeal—Give Generously,” “Save the Whales.”

  No one from the charity or the camp has ever made contact.

  I topped off Amina’s tea. “So this something that turned out to be nothing—”

  “Lilly! Why do you do this to yourself, eh? It is nothing, I tell you.”

  “Please,” I asked, pouting like a child.

  Amina sighed. “I just heard about this doctor, he is called Dr. Berhanu, Berhanu Wondemariam, and they say he was very very famous, he used to be head of the medical school in Addis—”

  “Aha. So you were thinking maybe he was there when Aziz was a student.”

  “I thought there was no harm to try and ask. I heard from this lady at my work that he was here, that he came for some conference and declared asylum and that he was living with his friends in Camden Town. She made an arrangement for me to go and meet him.”

  “You know I would have gone with you,” I say.

  “That is exactly why I didn’t tell you, Lilly. In any case, this Dr. Berhanu is not well. He has had some trauma, it is clear in his eyes. It will be some time before he is ready to speak about the past.”

  I preferred it when she used to blame things on the jinn or the evil eye. She’s taking a psychology class at night school once a week. The refugee organization she works for is paying for it. The effects are beginning to show.

  “I asked him, ‘Do you remember this student Aziz Abdulnasser?’ ” Amina continues. “But the doctor just shook his head and apologized. His friend said, ‘Look, Mrs. Amina, Dr. Berhanu and I have taught hundreds of students over the years. I’m very sorry, but you can’t expect us to remember the name of every one, can you?’ ”

  “I suppose not,” I agree.

  Amina admits it was pushy but she told them it would be helpful to our office if he could make a list of those students he did remember. I suppose she hoped that there’d be a name we might recognize amongst Aziz’s classmates.

  “You’re sweet,” I say, squeezing her hand in gratitude.

  Of course, Dr. Berhanu’s friend said they couldn’t possibly. It would be far too painful. “But sometimes I am suspicious of ones like these,” Amina says, wagging a finger. “Sometimes those who don’t remember are refusing because they are guilty of some crime. In psychology it is called denial.”

  But each of us is guilty in someone’s eyes. If you are Amhara, you are guilty of supporting a brutal dictatorship; if you are Oromo, you are guilty of counterrevolutionary sentiment; if you are Harari, you are guilty of harboring wealth and exploiting peasants. If you are a refugee, you are guilty of the worst crimes of all: deserting your home-land and abandoning those you love. In every case, it’s a matter of perception: in the last case, self-perception, the most damning of all.

  Amina is suspicious of this doctor because of his Amhara name. In exile, the wars between us are not erased.

  “Now forget this, okay?” Amina says.

  “Sure,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

  a bitter habit

  I am seeking a little respite in the cafeteria while an eighteen-year-old boy lies dying upstairs, the result of a drug-motivated swan dive off a twelfth-floor balcony. I’ve just cranked up his dose of morphine: he’ll be dead within the hour. I’m fairly immune, given that I’ve done this so many times over what will soon be a decade, but sometimes, where dying is the result of something needless and senseless, like a fight or a beating or a head injury sustained by people who refuse to wear helmets, I have to battle the impulse to judge. When you live among people who have endured unimaginable tortures, who have sacrificed everything in order to give their children better lives, you lose sympathy for those who would throw it all away because of ego.

  It’s my job to help the dying on their way; it is humane and merciful, I remind myself, listlessly spooning tapioca into my mouth.

  Someone slides an orange-colored tray into view as I stare blankly at the table. Brown hands, short, trim nails, a few stray black hairs between the knuckles.

  “Hello, Lilly,” says a deep voice.

  I look up. “Dr. Gupta.”

  “Rabindranath. Robin.” He smiles. His teeth are very white. Suspiciously so.

  “Rabindranath,” I repeat. I would prefer to stew in silence.

  “It’s a Hindu name,” he says, “Bengali.” I watch him pull a bottle of Tabasco sauce out of his pocket and cover his mashed potatoes in red polka dots. “What about your name?”

  “English, I guess.”

  “Lilly, but not Abdal.”

  “No,” I concede.

  “And your accent’s not very English.”

  I laugh, taken aback. “No, it’s a mess.” People aren’t usually so rude as to draw attention to it.

  “More like a fruit cocktail,” he says.

  I shrug, hoping this will be the end of it. Doctors normally sit with doctors, just as nurses sit with nurses and orderlies sit with orderlies. Residents don’t eve
n sit with doctors or surgeons, and nurses, they’re the worst—the senior nurses, charge nurses and nurse specialists make a strict point of sitting apart from those of us who are simply staff nurses, stupid or unambitious or lazy or incapable or whatever it must be that keeps us in our lowly station.

  “I was intrigued when you said you come from a family of refugees,” Dr. Gupta says, putting his fork down.

  “Were you?” That was ages ago. I look at him curiously. I’ve never noticed this before but one of his eyes is slightly sleepy, like only half of him is awake. I wonder if he was teased about it at school.

  “I’m not entirely sure what you meant by it, but it nevertheless struck a chord in me,” he says. “I mean, very few members of my family are here. We’re all scattered about. My parents in Calcutta, family in Delhi, some in Manchester, cousins in Birmingham, Melbourne, Vancouver.”

  It’s not the same thing at all, I want to tell him. Your family left by choice. You know where each of them is. You can pick up the phone.

  I excuse myself, scraping back my chair, saying I must get back to my rounds.

  Ramadan begins at midnight. Sitta wears her white cotton veil and Ahmed fidgets with his knit skullcap as we take the bus to Brixton. I’m defiantly more colorful, wearing a bright veil like the Harari women do and a gold shawl draped over my burgundy dress. The bus is crowded with people from the estate who greet us, stroke the children’s cheeks affectionately, ask after Amina. She has her psychology class this evening but she will join us for supper at home.

  Many of us don’t attend the mosque as often as we might. In Harar, we visited the shrines more often than the mosques because they were where we felt closest to God. Ahmed’s Qur’an teacher insists that parents take their children to the mosque at least once a week. Good practices must be instilled before puberty. Between us, Amina and I seem to manage about once a month.

  Tonight, the imam speaks about the particular difficulties of fasting in a world of twenty-four-hour takeout, about the vigilance required to fight the temptations of tea and coffee and vending machines full of Mars bars, of having the discipline to say no to lunch in the school cafeteria when everyone else is tucking in. “When your school-mates ask you why it is you are not eating, you must use this as an opportunity to educate them about Islam,” he says. “And if any of them tease you or abuse you, do not react in anger. Use fasting as your shield.”

  On our way home, we stop to pick up fish and chips. The kids unwrap theirs in their laps in front of the television. They won’t be fasting, but Amina and I will. The fish and chips are a treat for us all. The hardest thing for me to give up is smoking. It’s the most English thing about me, this love of Silk Cuts.

  “Oh good, I’m starving,” Amina moans when she finally gets home, dropping her textbook on the kitchen table. She pulls open the oven door without even taking off her coat and tears at the newspaper. In between mouthfuls she asks me about my day.

  I relate my conversation with Dr. Gupta, Rabindranath, Robin, which is still bothering me. He might also be from elsewhere, but he comes from a wealthy family and studied medicine at Cambridge. He has relatives in England, no doubt goes back to India to visit his family and friends once every two years and has a special rate plan that allows him to spend hours on the phone with people in Bombay on the weekends. It’s not the same thing at all.

  Amina tsks and wipes oil from her lips with the back of her hand. “You sound so bitter sometimes.”

  “Do I?”

  “You don’t hear yourself? He’s just trying to establish some common ground with you. He’s not trying to compete, or I don’t know, whatever it is you’re thinking . . .”

  “Belittle my experience.”

  “Lilly, I’m sure this is not his intention. He doesn’t know your experience, does he? And besides, why would he bother? It sounds like he was trying to make friends. And it would be good for you to make some friends.”

  “You sound like a parent,” I scoff.

  “I am a parent.”

  “Not my parent.”

  “Ooph, Lilly.” She rolls her eyes.

  “Well, I didn’t ask you to be,” I say.

  She stands up, rubbing the salt from her palms. “You have to pull this dagger out of your heart!” she yells, complete with dramatic gesture. “You behave as if life is finished. You remember when you asked me if I thought you were losing your mind? You did not lose your mind, but you did lose something. You lost hope. Ever since that man told us about the doctor who saved his life you have had no hope. You have no dream for the future anymore.”

  She stuffs the greasy paper into the rubbish bin.

  She leaves me sitting at the kitchen table long enough for me to understand the point she’s making. In a few hours Ramadan will begin. Ramadan teaches us patience and restraint, and it is the time for each of us to wage jihad against the destructive habits we have acquired. Smoking is the least of mine.

  eid el fitr

  Aziz’s image is shimmering in the yellow and purple rainbow of oily residue as I thaw tubs of dorro wat in hot water. I wonder if he has fasted this Ramadan. I hope he had the choice. There are those who do not swallow their saliva all month: a discipline far greater than mine. Then there are those who beg off fasting more than most, like the women Amina and I know who claim to menstruate twice in thirty days. Most of us linger somewhere in the middle, erring once or twice, which we can make up by fasting sometime later during the year. Regardless of our personal success or failure, though, Eid el Fitr is the biggest celebration of the year.

  Amina returns from the shop with coriander, and I reluctantly pull the plug in the kitchen sink. Aziz becomes a circle and spirals down the drain.

  At night, a parade of color approaches from left and right. Women stream down the concrete corridors leaving punishing echoes in their wake; the piercing squeals of delighted children bounce mercilessly off the walls. En route, they bear the condemnation of unsympathetic white neighbors who stick their heads out into the hallway and ask them to keep the bloody racket down.

  A perfumed cloud wafts through the door of Amina’s flat. The guests are mostly Oromo, but we have also invited Mr. and Mrs. Jahangir and a few neighbors: Eritrean, Kenyan and Sudanese. The two Harari women who live on the floor below arrive in true Harari style, wearing all their silkiest finery, shining from their teeth to their ankles. Even here, in exile, they look rich.

  Mrs. Jahangir arrives with a small mountain of samosas heaped on a plate balanced over a curry of okra and peas. The Oromo women balance injera—which can now be purchased at the newsdealer’s in soggy stacks of six—on platters on their heads, carry plates of sweets and bowls of popcorn in their hands and tow multiple children in their wake.

  The men are off celebrating in more subdued fashion. The Oromo brothers took up a collection to buy qat from the Yemeni merchant in Brixton who charges more at this time of year for a small bunch of dry green leaves than it would cost to buy a cow in Ethiopia.

  While the men get high, we spend the night singing. One of the Harari women accompanies us on the drum as we sing dhikr, religious praises, known to all the Muslims in the room. We take turns singing our traditional songs, during which the children grow bored and tug at their mothers’ skirts until the women give them permission to go and play tag in the corridor rather than listen to these moral tales and songs of ethnic pride in which we wish they’d take more interest.

  Finally we eat.

  The following morning, hoarse from all the singing and still inflated from all the food, Amina and I drag our bodies to the community association office. We’re suffering from the Muslim version of a hangover, complete with a slight feeling of sadness and regret: one that comes from realizing that for all our disciplined reflection throughout the month, there has been no permanent shift in consciousness, no profound alteration of ourselves or the world around us.

  I smoke my tenth cigarette of the morning, sucking with a fury after a month of abstinence,
while drafting a letter to Amnesty. I do this routinely, this time because the dictatorship is forcibly relocating civilians again, taking hundreds of thousands of them from the famine-stricken north and depositing them in government-controlled villages farther south. They say it is the only solution because the north is on the brink of environmental collapse, but we know that it has nothing to do with famine relief. We’ve seen this happen twice already in the last three years. It’s an aggressive counterinsurgency measure designed to disperse ethnic concentrations, propelled by the dictatorship’s fear of rebel fronts in the north, guerillas who refuse to die, no matter how much Mengistu’s government tries to starve them through another famine of its own engineering. A famine that, in turn, allows Mengistu to fatten his army and make his officers rich with food aid sent by the governments and Bob Geldofs of the world, fueling the dictatorship to reach new heights of horror.

  Amina is sitting in the squeaky orange office chair with a stack of envelopes in her lap, scanning the names on the list on the table in front of her. She is wearing my old patent-leather shoes, ones I bought in a momentary lapse of judgment. Sitta is sticking her finger into the sugar lurking at the bottom of my coffee cup and humming the theme to Blue Peter.

  Amina suddenly stands up, sending the tower of envelopes onto the floor. Sitta giggles as the envelopes spill, but abruptly stops, caught by the look on her mother’s face. Amina is a photograph of agony: utterly still.

  I move toward her as if walking through water. “What is it, Amina?” I venture quietly, my hand on her shoulder.

  She shakes the list in her hand. “Yusuf,” she can barely manage, bursting into sobs.