Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

The six children stood in a row facing east, Fathi and Anwar among them. I wore the traditional dress Gishta had had made for me and stood before them and recited the first line of a randomly selected chapter from the first third of the book. They repeated that line and then carried on through the rest of the chapter without me. I then turned the pages of the book and read out the first line of another chapter.

  The parents stood stone still, mesmerized.

  “Do they know which chapters you are going to select?” asked one father just as I was poised to choose a third.

  “No. Here.” I held out the book to him. “You choose.”

  He approached hesitantly and looked at the book over my shoulder. I turned the pages for him and invited him to tell me where to stop.

  “Yes, there, there is good,” he said.

  “Please, go ahead,” I encouraged him, nodding at the expectant children.

  He cleared his throat and sang the first line of the third chapter. He had a beautiful voice, but the page before us showed the beginning of chapter five.

  As the children finished the chapter, he burst into applause. More than one mother cried, and Nouria’s expression was one of rapture, as if she had never before been this close to God.

  “They are as good as the rich children at the madrasas!” declared Zemzem’s father.

  There were murmurs of agreement all around.

  “We shall bring them to Uncle Jami,” said Gishta.

  I glared at her. What was she thinking? The parents, too, murmured with uncertainty. Sheikh Jami was an imposing figure.

  “All the Harari children do this,” Gishta said with a wave of her arm.

  “True, true,” the parents agreed. The madrasas brought their students to the shrine once a year so that they could demonstrate their learning and receive the saint’s blessing for continued success.

  “But those children are wealthy and well dressed,” one mother said.

  “Shame on you,” Gishta chastised. “We are all equal in the eyes of God.”

  I warmed to the idea that Gishta seemed to have adopted as something of a mission. My students deserved the sheikh’s recognition as much as any other students and he could not, at least, fault me as a teacher.

  “He hates farenjis!” Gishta delighted in telling me. “The tourists are one thing, but the worst ones are those who come here and say they are on a spiritual mission. Ooh, this makes him so mad!”

  “But does that really happen?”

  “Oh, maybe once every five or so years. They say they are Sufis. One came from England, another from a place called Florida. I like this word, Florida; it sounds like a girl’s name. One from Pakistan. And one from California, another girl’s name. Why do farenjis call their cities after girls?”

  “My father was from a place called Basingstoke,” I offered.

  “That,” she said, “is a ridiculous name.”

  The sheikh apparently treated the arrival of any foreigner claiming to be on a spiritual journey with a suspicion bordering on contempt. You want to learn the Sufi way? he would demand of them. Then you must live as an ascetic, renounce all worldliness, all mortal concerns, walk barefoot in the hot sand, live off scraps, refuse, have one thought and one thought only—that of eliminating the self, erasing the ego through devotion, seeking grace, seeking unity with the divine.

  And they begged, Oh yes, yes, please, my master, that is exactly what I want, and threw themselves at his feet, saying they would do anything, anything at all.

  It wasn’t his job to test the limits of their devotion; the test was of their own making. But the conviction of the foreigner inevitably proved as thin as his reedy voice. Gishta’s husband did not believe a foreigner was capable of giving up mortal pleasures, no matter how much of a Sufi he claimed to be. Each and every one of them eventually proved himself a hypocrite. There was the one who came with chocolate that he hid under a blanket. There was the one who took farenji medicine that made him have violent dreams while awake. There was a particularly terrible one who’d kept a change of clothes in a post office box just in case he ever felt the need for a break—a binge where he could dress in a suit and stay at the Ras Hotel in Dire Dawa, drink beer and pay a sharmuta for company.

  But this would be different, Gishta insisted. Because I was a farenji doing good by teaching the poor children of Harar.

  We were a shining bunch with nervous smiles. Nouria had had new shirts made for her boys out of one of her long-ago deceased husband’s shirts, which appeared magically, as if it had been lying in wait for just such an occasion. The mothers of three of the four female students had hennaed their daughters’ hands and given them new white veils like the children of the formal madrasas wear; the boys wore white knit skullcaps. I had dressed Zemzem myself.

  Gishta met us in the lane, pulling strands of silver beads from her pocket and looping them around the astonished girls’ necks. She showered all the children with perfume before leading us through the green archway.

  Her co-wives, Fatima and Zehtahoun, had left for the fields that morning without her—though not before Fatima had cursed her with the ultimate Harari insult, calling her a lazy wife. A servant girl stopped sweeping, surprised by the sight of us, and Sheikh Jami’s voice floated through the door of the shrine. He and Hussein were reading together as they did every morning—esoteric texts with accounts of miraculous events, and some of the more obscure Hadiths, records of the actions and sayings of the Prophet made by his companions and descendants.

  We hovered at the entrance to the shrine, the children fidgeting. Most of them had been here in the compound among the hundreds one Thursday night or another, but never had they entered the shrine and stood before the sheikh and asked for his attention. Anwar’s grin wavered. He started when I put my hand on his shoulder.

  Gishta held me by the arm. “It would be best if you stayed back,” she whispered. She nudged the children through the door, and they filed inside.

  “Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim,” the eldest boy began singing after a moment, leading the group into their recitation of a section of the Qur’an particularly favored in Harar because it refers to seeking refuge in sympathetic lands.

  I stood holding my breath, one hand on the wall of the shrine, one hand on my heart. I had Aziz to thank for this moment.

  “Very good,” I heard the sheikh say, though not congratulating them with any particular vigor. “But I don’t understand. Which madrasa are you from?”

  “Bint Abdal’s,” said the oldest boy.

  “Bint Abdal,” the sheikh grumbled. “Who is this Bint Abdal?”

  “Our teacher,” answered the boy.

  “Yes, yes, but who is she?”

  Gishta nudged me forward. I ducked through the entrance and stood beside my students.

  The sheikh stared, utterly silent, Hussein kneeling beside him. “Masha’Allah,” the sheikh eventually muttered, shaking his massive head. Hussein opened his mouth as if he were about to speak. Anwar, still wearing that petrified grin, reached for my hand.

  “Ya’Allah,” the sheikh said dramatically, clasping his meaty hands together in front of his face. He inhaled deeply, eyes closed.

  One of the girls stepped backward, and the rest of the children followed her lead.

  Suddenly the sheikh looked up, his eyes brimming yellow. He threw his arms wide and bellowed: “Farenji!” He roared something that roughly translated meant bastard child of a charlatan. Then he named Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. The booming bass notes coming from his mouth would have shaken the foundations had there been any, but instead they fell dead against the soft clay walls, the ratty rugs and dirt floor.

  One of the children began to blub, and Gishta’s hands suddenly appeared through the doorway, tugging at the children’s clothes, pulling them out into the light.

  “Gishta!” the sheikh shouted. “What is this?”

  She spoke timidly through the door. “The students have come for blessing,” she said.

  “But
with a farenji? We do not learn our Islam from farenjis! These people are useless! Liars! Thieves!” he shouted.

  “How dare you judge me?” I said, staring into the oily puddles in his eyes.

  He was fuming, about to erupt.

  “Only God can judge what is in another person’s heart,” I said into the dim. “Peace be upon you.” I ducked out through the door to join my students.

  Do you remember this man Muhammed Bruce?” I asked Gishta once we’d made our humbled way back to Nouria’s compound. She nodded vigorously. Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud, she told me, was legendary as one of the most dangerous pilgrims who had ever set foot on Harari soil. He, who had claimed to be an albino Pakistani raised in poverty in Lahore, had been taken in by the sheikh, but made the rather great mistake of hiding his secrets inside the hollow of one of the trees in the compound.

  Shortly after Muhammed Bruce’s arrival, Sheikh Jami had thrown some burning coals inside that very hollow followed by a few lumps of incense, as he did once a month in honor of Bilal al Habash’s mother. That month he was met not by a sweet spiral of smoke billowing forth from the tree but rather by a smell decidedly more toxic. He was forced to throw a can of water into the hollow, dousing the smoldering fire.

  Bewildered, he reached inside the tree and pulled out a soaked and partially burned satchel. Inside, he found a roll of banknotes, a passport of the man who called himself Muhammed identifying him as Bruce Mac-something of the United Kingdom, a flask of alcohol, a book about Harar and a set of playing cards depicting naked boys.

  Sheikh Jami had sent Bruce and his burned satchel full of poison packing. “A less peaceful man would have killed you,” the sheikh had said. “But that, I’ll leave up to God.”

  The one thing the sheikh had kept was the book because books were revered, words were power. “A farenji book of lies about Harar,” Gishta told me with a shudder. “You will see! You will see!” she exclaimed. “I will bring it and you will see.”

  The next afternoon she dropped a battered volume onto the ground at my feet. It was First Footsteps in East Africa: A Journey to Harar, by Sir Richard Burton, the famous explorer Muhammed Bruce had boasted was his great-great-uncle.

  The sheikh could not read the book, but one of his scholarly friends had underlined certain passages and written Arabic translations in the margins.

  Gishta looked over my shoulder as I read the underlined passages. Burton called the place “a paradise inhabited by asses.” He denounced the people as “religious fanatics,” “bigoted,” “barbarous,” “coarse and debauched,” “disfigured by disease,” with ugly voices: “the men’s loud and rude,” “the women’s harsh and screaming.”

  He boasted of being the one to break the guardian spell said to protect the city and its people. He had sought to tear away the shroud of Islam and render the Harari people naked, vulnerable, beholden. To subjugate through contamination.

  “But he didn’t break the guardian spell,” I said, turning to look at Gishta. Burton or no Burton, Islam was within and all around us. And Sheikh Jami, as a descendant of the greatest of all the saints of Harar, was the fulcrum of this world; he was its heartbeat.

  “But after this man, the farenjis started coming,” said Gishta.

  “Even if they’d come and destroyed all the mosques and all the shrines, Islam would not have been broken,” I said.

  “Maybe one day you will write another farenji book and tell the truth,” Nouria said.

  “Insha’Allah,” I replied.

  “My husband is a blind man if he cannot see what is in your heart,” said Gishta.

  kissing in english

  Nouria and I took turns pouring water for each other to perform our ablutions each morning.

  Allahu akbar—our necks, nostrils and mouths were washed clean.

  Allahu akbar—our hands, forearms, head, feet and ankles.

  Night’s sins were washed away, fell in droplets to the ground, and thus purified, we kneeled together and prayed.

  I’d taken to returning to bed for another hour, even though such behavior wasn’t encouraged. Nouria indulged me to a certain extent because, as she and Gishta had taken to reminding me, I would soon enough have to take on all the responsibilities of the adult world. Not only was laziness not a virtue, but being by yourself, they said, left your soul susceptible to the invasion of evil spirits. I’d developed a terrible suspicion they might be right. In my solitude, I couldn’t help but indulge secret longing. While I could discipline my brain to maintain purity of thought, my senses betrayed me. They had independent will, their own memories.

  The warmth of his pink palms. The faint smell of sweat ironed deeply, repeatedly, into a cotton shirt. The chocolate brown of his irises. The butter-soft of his skin. The solid wholeness of his presence: not heavy, but bearing remarkable weight.

  Our stolen moments, late on Saturday afternoons in a dark room once used for storing tobacco leaves; the secret world we shared with our friends.

  Sadia had started to visit me after school for English lessons because she wanted to impress Munir. Our lessons were rather limited; she was interested in only one subject.

  “I would be,” our first lesson began, with me exaggerating each word.

  “I would be,” Sadia repeated.

  “Honored . . .”

  “Unnerred . . .”

  “To be . . .”

  “To be . . .”

  “Your wife.”

  “Your wife!” Sadia squealed.

  “Uss!” I had to quiet her as Nouria and Gishta looked up from where they were squatting on the other side of the compound, dipping straw into dyes, one bucket of bright pink, one bucket of the Prophet’s favored green.

  We burst out laughing and grabbed each other by the shoulders. Gishta looked over at us with amusement, a certain fondness, pleased to see the two of us being ordinary teenagers. They were delighted that Sadia and I were friends. Such a good girl, they always said. From such a good family. Her father has made the hajj seven times. And she herself made the hajj at such a young age.

  But little do they know what good girls from good families get up to on Saturdays. It is more than just holding hands, Sadia was keen to tell me once the women had left the compound to take the dyed straw to Ikhista Aini’s next door. She and Munir might leave Aziz’s uncle’s house separately, but only to reconvene ten minutes later behind one of the thatched round houses that sit in a cluster beyond the closest gate.

  “The leper colony?”

  “Exactly. We hide behind the far one so no one sees us. If the lepers saw us, they wouldn’t care. They won’t speak to our parents, and God knows, no one would believe anything they say anyway.”

  “But aren’t you afraid of catching it?”

  “It’s not so easy to catch, Munir says. And besides, I would cut off my leg to be with him. I have another. God was very kind to give us two of everything. Well, almost everything!”

  “Sadia!” I gasped. “What do you get up to there?”

  “Kissing,” she whispered conspiratorially.

  It was one thing to hold hands in our closed room, but to take the risk of showing affection beyond those walls was quite another. The women would call her something worse than a sharmuta if she was ever caught. They would say no man would ever want her. Perhaps her family would even send her away to Dire Dawa to be rid of the shame.

  But Munir did want Sadia for his wife, and the campaign to seduce Sadia’s mother into believing she had chosen him for her daughter had already begun. First, Munir went to her family’s compound to introduce himself, saying he was available to the family should they ever require the services of a doctor. Next, he took a keen interest in Sadia’s brother, who excelled at science, and asked him whether he would be interested in going to medical school. Then he’d involved his mother, sending her over on what would be the first of several goodwill missions. Although it was fathers who had to give approval, it was mothers who brought forth the candidates; it was moth
ers who were really in charge.

  “Okay, Sadia, now let’s be serious,” I said. “When Munir tells you that your father has given his approval?”

  “I say: I would be unnerred to be wife.”

  “I would be honored to be . . .”

  “I would be honored—”

  “Sadia?” I interrupted, lowering my voice. “Has Aziz ever had a girlfriend?”

  “Mmm . . .” She looked skyward. “Not a girlfriend, really, just, I don’t know . . . Munir tells me there was one girl in Addis Ababa but she was Amhara.”

  “A Christian?” I immediately wished I hadn’t asked.

  “Oh, Lilly, no,” she said. “She is Amhara, she cannot be his girlfriend. And besides, whose hand is he holding, hmm?”

  My hand, I tried to reassure myself as I walked along the dusty exterior wall the following Saturday. My hand in his hand.

  Qat and chatter and television in the dark, the elements of that Saturday’s bercha were indistinguishable. I felt sick, wondering if he’d ever kissed the Amhara girl.

  Aziz asked me to stay at the end of the bercha as he did every week now. The desire to remain in his company overwhelmed common sense; I would pick up my good Muslim self on the way home. He closed the door after his friends, and it was dark and still again, the sweat of bodies in the air, qat debris strewn about us on the floor. He lifted his sarong slightly and sat cross-legged in front of me. He took my hands from my lap, both my hands in one of his. And then his other hand reached up and cupped my chin.

  I swallowed the ball of wool in my throat as he traced the outline of my face with his thumb. My face felt tiny in his hand, like a mango he was holding up to admire.

  I raised my hand and put my palm on his cheek. I ran my fingers over his eyebrows, down his nose. Then he caught my finger between his teeth and closed his full lips. He tugged my entire body forward.

  This is why the Sufis try to erase the body, I realized in that moment. Not because it is a host for parasites, not because it demands food and water and sleep, but because one mouth to one finger can override the most sacred sentiment, the most pious intention. One mouth to one finger can lead to a kiss and that kiss can change the world.