by Camilla Gibb
She leans into me. I put my arm around her neck, pull her forehead to my shoulder. Water rises to the height of my chest. “Alhamdullilah,” I manage to whisper in her ear, a bubble floating to the surface.
“Alhamdullilah,” she chokes. She grabs my hand and pulls it to her heart. “Can you feel?” she asks.
I can. I can almost hear it.
“One day you will feel this,” she offers.
We both know how unlikely that is. It’s now been twelve years. But there is a lesson in this. I stopped hoping. Amina was absolutely right. A dagger. She has tried to keep hope alive for both of us, and for that, she is being rewarded.
phantom limbs
Sitta has never been more talkative—the existence of a father she has never known seems to have given her language: questions and ideas. Ahmed, on the other hand, has gone rather quiet; missing his mother, I expect, during these weeks that she’s with Yusuf in Rome. He reads comic books, can’t get enough of them, grunting from the sagging brown sofa when I ask him if he’s ready for tea.
“Macaroni?” I ask him.
“Yes, please, macaroni cheese,” Sitta answers for the two of them, clapping her hands together with each syllable.
I put a pot of water on to boil. Sitta is stuck to my thigh in the tiny kitchen, nattering on like a talking doll with someone pulling repeatedly at the string in her back. “When did you get to be such a chatter-box?” I ask her.
She ignores that, busy fiddling with the dial on the radio.
“I wonder what your mother is up to at the moment,” I say.
“Eating a pizza with Baba!” Ahmed shouts from the other room—selective hearing, apparently.
“Eating a pizza with Baba!” Sitta repeats.
“What do you remember about your baba?” I call out to Ahmed.
“What do you remember about your baba?” Sitta repeats, as if it were a game.
A few things, I could tell her, though most of them rather vague. Swimming with him in the Mediterranean, him playing the guitar on the street with the case open, a few coins sparkling against the blue velvet. My mother and father naked and lazy in Tangier, where we lived in a decaying white hotel in the medina with a broken banister and stairs so rickety we couldn’t have two feet on one step at the same time. I seem to recall my father offering to fix the stairs and Haji Mustafa being so humbled by the offer that he said we could have the room for free, but I have no recollection of my father ever actually doing the work. They got far on charm and promises.
“What about Ethiopia—do you remember anything about Ethiopia?” I call out to Ahmed, who hasn’t replied.
“Do you?” he shouts back.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”
“What do you remember?” he shouts. He gets up from the sofa and stands in the doorway of the kitchen with his comic book in one hand. “What do you remember?” he demands. He wants stories now not of ailing Sufis and orphaned girls but of the place he comes from. His people.
It’s difficult for me to answer. It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind. “It’s complicated,” I tell Ahmed.
He skulks back to the sofa with his comic book.
Sitta watches while I pour macaroni into the pot. Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas” on the radio.
“We have a Christmas tree at school,” Sitta tells me.
“Do you, love?” My memories, I could tell Ahmed, are at once too powerful and not nearly enough.
“It’s sparkly and it has a star this big,” Sitta carries on, arms spread wide.
“That’s not very Muslim, is it,” I remark. At least a third of the children in her class must be Muslim.
“It’s pretty,” she says.
Fair enough. She’s a girl who likes pretty things. Christmas ornaments and the framed gold-lettered Arabic proverbs that hang on the walls of her mother’s flat. Barbie, whom she often wraps up and puts to bed in her mother’s purple silk veil. And Ahmed is a boy who reads comic books and listens to Prince. Posters of Mecca and Michael Jackson hang side by side on their bedroom wall. Both of them are looking forward to the Christmas holidays even though there will be no pudding, no tree, no photos of them on the fat man’s knee.
For all the differences between them, the missionized Ethiopians—Lutherans, Seventh-day Adventists and Pentecostals—take up a collection every year to give a Christmas present to each of the Ethiopian children on the estate. But we look upon these gifts with some suspicion. Not only did these people adopt farenji religions brought to Ethiopia by earnest Swedes and Norwegians and Canadians (why always the coldest countries? I wonder), they adopted a bit of the missionizing spirit as well. Pamphlets are surreptitiously left behind in the wake of presents.
For Sitta and Ahmed none of these things is a contradiction. Nor is this—a white Muslim woman who grew up in Africa making macaroni cheese for them in a council flat in London. The world beyond is, of course, full of alien encounters, contradictions that people cannot or do not wish to reconcile.
When Amina is dropping the children off at school.
Oi! Nig nog! We’ve already got too many fu’in for’ners. We don’t need the likes of you adding more bloody monkeys to the earf!
Friday prayers, the one time a week I wear a veil.
Would you look at ’is cunt! A white fu’in Paki!
A lout with a lager can mock-triggered to his head.
Master race. Go’ it?
On Saturday morning, Ahmed is keen to have a little lie-down on the sofa even though he knows he has his Qur’anic class.
“But why do I have to go?” he whines.
“Because it’s important, Ahmed. Come along.”
“But hardly anybody else at my school has to go to another school on Saturdays.”
I know that’s not true.
“It’s not fair,” he bleats.
I was desperate to go to school when I was a child. My father’s “school of life” involved so many lazy mornings that I was sick of it by the time I was six years old. I would have traded anything I owned—my toothbrush, my rucksack, my rag doll—to go to a real school where I could wear a uniform and have a pencil box and friends. But my parents refused to subject me to what they referred to as the stifling confines of institutional life. Thank God for the Great Abdal. When I told him I wanted to attend the madrasa in Tamegroute, he was very pleased. My entire day was then ordered by lessons: mornings at the madrasa, afternoon study with the Great Abdal and nights spent reading books from Muhammed Bruce by candlelight. “Are you eating the candles?” the Great Abdal used to tease. “It is a lucky thing the pilgrims are so generous.”
But we all want what we don’t have, don’t we? Ahmed wants to sleep in, and I want him to go to school.
“I’ll tell you what, Ahmed,” I say. “You can’t stay in bed because I need to get to the office, but you can miss the madrasa just this once.”
He’s suddenly bolt upright, about to leap out of bed.
“I haven’t finished. On one condition, all right?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You’ll recite chapter seven to me later.”
He groans. “Okay.”
Porridge for the kids for breakfast, and for me, a cup of tea and a cigarette—puffing with my head out the window. I’m dreading going through the new list from Rome this morning without Amina.
“Ahmed?” I ask, tossing the fag end into the dustbin.
“Mmm?” he asks between gummy lips.
“Listen, if you get to miss the madrasa today, does that mean I get to miss the office?”
“And do what?” he asks. Not an unreasonable question.
“Whatever you’d like to do.”
&n
bsp; “Make Christmas biscuits,” says Sitta. “Like the ones we have at school.”
Except that. “Eat your porridge, Sitta. What about you, Ahmed?”
“Watch cricket.”
“I’m not sure there’s any cricket on at the moment. Shall I ask Mr. Jahangir?” How difficult it is to please everyone. How does Amina do it?
Mr. Jahangir is more than pleased to have the young Ahmed by his side at the Kennington Oval.
“I’m very grateful to you, Mr. J. It’s not easy having two children.”
“Try having seven, my dear.”
Even if I wanted to, I’m afraid time’s rather running out.
This leaves Sitta and me with a whole day ahead of us. I should take her on an outing, something educational; that would please Amina. I’m being completely irresponsible—I should at least make the day worthwhile.
Sitta is keen to go to Kensington Palace. She’s developed a bit of an obsession with Lady Di since a school outing to the palace a couple of months ago.
“Let’s go somewhere you haven’t been before,” I suggest. Somewhere colorful, alive, multicultural.
It’s all very grown up of me to suggest going into the city when I leave our neighborhood so rarely. I’m not terribly good with the buses, but it’s too sunny a day to waste underground. Sitta is content dressing and undressing her Barbie beside me on the red plastic seat, oblivious as I pick at my cuticles.
We spill out onto the pavement in the midst of Camden Market and I stand and squint in every direction, trying to orient myself while we’re jostled left and right. I’ve been here twice before, both times with Mrs. Jahangir, who comes to buy fabric, but it’s a shifting landscape, fluctuating monthly depending on who can pay their rent.
Sitta swings Barbie in one hand and puts her other hand in mine as we wander down a street closed to traffic. Reggae blares from the entrance of a shop framed with pictures of Bob Marley and battles the soundtrack of a Hindi film across the road. Racks of clothes line the pavement. Women finger the fabric as they pass, and men try on hats and sunglasses and bend down to see their reflections in small mirrors held by squat Eastern European women. Farther down the road people haggle over great mountains of undergarments, and Nigerian men throw open duffle bags offering selections of watches and perfumes.
There are punks with Mohawks and white kids with dreadlocks and I wonder, just for a minute, why it is we don’t live here, why we live in benighted parts of the city with no street life, on estates built in the 1960s, in heartless high-rise buildings, half of which have no central heating, that have been deteriorating since the very moment they were conceived.
“I’m hungry,” says Sitta.
I scan the shop fronts, looking for a restaurant, somewhere sufficiently neutral, unintimidating. Sandwiched between a laundrette and a shop selling synthetic clothes and drug paraphernalia stands a café no wider than a bus with Amharic letters stenciled onto its window. I drag Sitta and Barbie across the road and through the entrance into the narrow space. Incense burns, Aster Aweke strains through cheap speakers, and the few men who are seated along the wall look up, look surprised, look away.
I help Sitta out of her coat and into a seat. “I want McDonald’s,” she says. “Mama always lets us have McDonald’s when we go on an outing.”
I sigh and unbutton my coat. “Can I just have coffee?”
She pouts, and a waitress with bright red lipstick and long lacquered nails approaches.
“Hello, little one,” she says to Sitta in Amharic. “Why do you look sad?”
“She doesn’t speak Amharic,” I reply in Amharic.
“But you do?” she asks in English. “You are missionary?”
“No,” I laugh.
“You want something?”
“Buna, please.”
She hesitates. “Nescafé?”
“No, buna,” I say, getting irritated.
She shrugs. “Ishi, okay. And for you?” she asks Sitta in Amharic.
“Sitta, do you want something?”
“McDonald’s,” Sitta says petulantly, swinging her feet.
My coffee is delivered on the heels of laughter between the two waitresses. The waitress sets down a tiny ceramic cup.
“Pretty,” Sitta comments, touching her nails.
“You like?” the waitress smiles. “It is called Strawberry Kisses.”
Sitta giggles.
This must be why I live on a blighted housing estate in a distant borough. That is where I belong.
I knock back the coffee. The bitter residue lingers in my mouth.
Sitta gets McDonald’s on her way home. She’s pulling chips from the bag when a sign catches her eye through the window of the bus. She jumps up and sends the paper bag and its contents cascading to the floor. “It says palace! Palace!”
Everyone on the bus turns around to look, amused by the African girl’s enthusiasm for the monarchy.
I’m reaching down to pick up chips off the floor when I hear my name. Dr. Gupta waves, his scrubs visible under his coat. He takes the seat in front of us and sits sideways.
“Fancy running into you,” he says. “Normally, I take the underground to work, but it was too nice a day. Who’s this?” he asks.
“This is Sitta. Sitta, this is Dr. Gupta.”
“Robin,” he says, though she doesn’t turn from the window. “Is she a relative?”
“My best friend’s daughter.”
“She’s charming,” he says. “Where are you two off to, then? You’re not working today, are you?”
“No, we just went on a bit of an outing. Took her to Camden Market, though it appears she’s much more interested in British royalty.”
You can neither see Buckingham Palace from here, nor is it the palace where Lady Di lives, but Sitta nevertheless remains with her face pressed to the glass.
“You know, there’s a palace in Ethiopia,” I try to interest her.
“You’ve been to Ethiopia?” Dr. Gupta asks.
“Mmm.” I nod. “It’s quite something, Sitta. It sits in a lush jungle, and there are all sorts of birds flying about, and there’s a zoo of exotic animals all moaning and groaning in golden cages.”
“Is there a princess like Lady Di?” Sitta asks over her shoulder.
“There was a princess once, but she wasn’t very beautiful.”
Her Royal Highness Princess Tenagneworq. Hardly the stuff of fairy tales. In her photograph she looked very plump and very old, and I distinctly remember thinking she had a round red face like a pomegranate crossed with the unfortunate wartiness of a toad.
“Did she have blond hair?” Sitta asks.
“No, she didn’t have blond hair,” I reply. “Not all princesses are blond.”
“Sounds like my sister’s children,” Robin laughs. “The girl won’t eat anything my sister cooks because she says ghee makes her fat—she’s all of ninety-eight pounds. And the boy came home with a crew cut the other day—his father’s a Sikh; he’s never cut his hair in his life; I gather he just about had a cardiac arrest. They only moved to Los Angeles six months ago.”
“Have you met Barbie?” I ask, sneering at the doll on the seat.
“Amazing how quickly they pick it up. Like sponges, really. In any case,” Dr. Gupta says, “I’d love to hear about your adventures in Ethiopia sometime.”
Adventures? Ethiopia wasn’t some gap year experience. I tug at Sitta’s arm. “Come on,” I say, standing up.
“Getting off here?” he asks with surprise. “Where are you heading?”
“Home.”
“Oh.” He hesitates. “I had no idea.”
“That I live in subsidized housing?”
The look on my face sends him rushing to clarify what he means. “No. That you live so close to the hospital. I don’t want to be anywhere near it on my days off, you know? I like to keep some separation between my life and my work.”
Me too, I think, taking Sitta’s hand and stepping off the bus. Sitta looks back
over her shoulder and waves. I am determined not to turn around.
I recite chapter seven with Ahmed after tea, have him backtrack and repeat certain words and discuss their meanings. I miss teaching, but at our local madrasa, the Qur’anic teachers are all men. Things are stricter here, much more orthodox on the whole.
I call Amina to check in. Her voice is light, ethereal, outer spacey. She tells me I’m trying too hard. All I have to do is let Sitta be Sitta.
“Even if that means Barbies and hamburgers?”
“Especially if that means Barbies and hamburgers.”
instinct
Amina arrived home after three weeks in Rome carrying a suitcase full of presents for the children and radiating with an unmistakable glow. It is the woman in me, not the nurse. Yusuf’s papers are being processed in Rome while another baby grows in Amina’s stomach; everything is growing round for her, round and buoyant. I have to try to make something else work in my life, something separate and apart from her, I tell myself, determined to find a way to care about nursing again.
It actually doesn’t prove all that difficult to ignore the sting of the fluorescent lights, to let go of the cynicism as I increase the flow of someone’s morphine, to talk to mothers, tell them to stay. “He needs you here. Do you see the way his eyelids flutter when you talk?” It doesn’t prove all that difficult, admittedly, because of Dr. Gupta.
I bumped into him a couple of weeks after Amina returned. Ward rotation brought him into my orbit. I saw him coming down the hall and tried my best to avoid him, staring intently at my clipboard as he approached, keen to engage.
“I’m so glad to run into you,” he said, gripping my wrist. “I’ve been worrying that we might have started off on the wrong foot.”
I stood there stupidly, not knowing how to respond.
“Look,” he said, lowering his voice as we flattened ourselves against the wall to prevent a collision between two stretchers. “It’s just that I’d like to be friends, but every time I talk to you I feel as if I’ve said something offensive. Or idiotic.”