by Camilla Gibb
I tiptoed out of the room and followed Aziz up a narrow staircase. The balcony overlooking the courtyard ran the entire length of the first floor. Aziz showed me to my room at one end. It was simply furnished, but it had a bed. I hadn’t slept on a bed since being at the palace. The edge of the mattress sunk under my weight.
“I thought only royalty slept in beds in Ethiopia,” I said.
“Grandfather’s second wife was Italian,” said Aziz, “and she insisted on beds. With Egyptian cotton sheets. And good chocolate. She had it sent from Rome. I’ll leave you now, shall I? I’ll come back and fetch you for dinner.”
I stretched out on the bed, leaving the door open so I could enjoy the late-afternoon sun, and stared at the dust dancing above my head. How strange to be here, free of prying eyes, liberated from cramped quarters. I thought about the grandfather and his Italian wife. Wondered how they’d met and whether the Italian woman had learned Arabic or Harari and converted to Islam, and whether they’d had children who were half black and half white and whether those children were despised because of their mixed blood. I wondered if the grandfather had ever been to Italy, skied the Alps. I envied his narcolepsy and drifted off to sleep.
Aziz was standing at my door. He was wearing a navy blue suit, the arms of which looked a bit too short.
“I thought I could take you somewhere European for dinner,” he said somewhat self-consciously.
“I didn’t know there were any Europeans living here,” I said.
“The Europeans are gone, but their food isn’t. There’s a very special Italian restaurant here. You can have anything you want—spaghetti, risotto, lasagna. They make all of it in their kitchen.”
I grimaced. “I’m afraid I don’t have any nice clothes.”
He pulled a scarf from behind his back and held it out to me—a loose and beautiful pink and purple chiffon. “Grandfather’s Italian wife used to wear this,” he said, pressing it into my hands.
“It’s beautiful.” I ran its soft length through my fingers. “But won’t he be upset if he sees me wearing it?”
“He told me to give it to you.”
I put one hand on his shoulder and stood on my toes to kiss his cheek. As I leaned into him he cupped the back of my head and pulled me in.
“I’m so glad you came,” he whispered in my ear. I could feel his heart beating through his jacket. He smelled like burned matches and cologne. I closed my eyes and breathed him in before stepping back and draping the scarf over my head.
He linked arms with me as we walked down the dark street. It was a lot less conservative in Dire Dawa, he assured me. “Harar is so old-fashioned. It makes me crazy sometimes,” he said.
We passed through a pair of red curtains into a small courtyard where a wooden shack sheltered a single long table covered in red-and-white checkered cloth under an awning. The table was lit with candles and lanterns hung from the beams. It was magical. It reminded me of sitting in a café with my parents somewhere in Europe. But such scenes were always noisy and crowded. Here a lone couple sat huddled together at one end of the table, too lost in each other to spare us a glance.
A man stepped out of the shadows and shook Aziz’s hand roughly.
“Ciao, Girma,” Aziz said. “It’s good to see you.” They gripped each other by the shoulders. “How are you? How is your family—that mischievous brother of yours?”
“I’ve got Ibsaa with me at the moment,” Girma said, lowering his voice.
“I haven’t seen him in years!”
“Since they closed the university.”
Aziz stepped back in surprise. “When did they do that?”
“Beginning of last week. The students were demonstrating outside the palace.”
“Because of the inflation?” Aziz asked.
“It started when they raised the petrol prices. The students came out in support of the taxi drivers; they even started setting the emperor’s buses on fire, but the police put an end to that with their batons. Of course, this only made the students more determined. But you know it, Aziz, they make trouble for themselves; they are too young to know that they are not invincible.”
“But they are right to act on their principles. I envy them what they don’t know,” Aziz said.
Girma sighed. “What is to envy? This time some of the students managed to get past the palace gates and, well . . . poof.” Girma raised his arms as if hefting a rifle.
Aziz encouraged his friend to continue, though he gripped my shoulder in a way that suggested he could sense my growing horror.
“So now they’ve prohibited public gatherings of any kind,” Girma continued. “You stand with four of your friends in the street talking about the weather and they can arrest you.”
“But we never see any of this on the television,” I blurted out.
“The emperor owns the television station,” Girma said. “We didn’t see the garbage collectors go on strike either. Or the civil servants. Or the journalists. Anyway,” he said, cupping Aziz’s shoulder, “this is enough talk of politics. You and your friend have come here for dinner. Let me not spoil it.”
Aziz was silent for a moment after we sat down. He stared at his hands in his lap.
“Why do we never hear any of this?” I asked him.
“We’re very cut off in Harar,” he finally said to the tablecloth. “We hear only bits and pieces. An uprising over here, a protest over there. People keep calling these things isolated incidents because most of them happen in small towns, but if this is what is happening in the capital, I really doubt . . .”
“What do you doubt?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It’s best I don’t let my imagination start,” he said, sweeping his palm across the table.
Girma handed Aziz a menu and set down two small glasses. “Grappa,” he announced.
“It’s a lot less conservative here,” Aziz assured me for the second time that night. “I don’t think it hurts anyone to have a drink now and then. In the right circumstances. And only if you don’t make it a habit and neglect your responsibilities.”
I smirked. “You’re very practical. The most practical Muslim I’ve ever met.”
“I think true discipline comes through exercising moderation. I see the rules as simply guidelines for those times when we lack the strength or wisdom to decide for ourselves.”
But that must take such courage, I thought. It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife.
Aziz ordered veal, and I asked for something called gnocchi because Girma described it as “every bite having completion.” Girma laid down napkins and knives and forks. I picked up the fork and turned it over.
“Do you miss eating with a knife and fork?” Aziz asked.
“I like eating with my hands.”
“But it’s not very hygienic.”
“It’s much more sociable, though. There’s something uncharitable about having your own plate, something wrong about stabbing your food with a piece of metal. Food tastes right from the hand.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Where did you get this open spirit from? Did your parents teach you this?”
I stared at him and found my reflection in his twinkling eyes. “In a way, I suppose,” I answered, having only just considered it. No one had ever asked me such a thing. Under the Great Abdal’s tutelage I was asked to look forward, never back, as if my life before was the Jahiliyya—the time of ignorance before the arrival of Islam. My memories of my parents were tainted. Predicated by questions. Were they fundamentally immoral? Did they deserve to die? It was easier somehow to believe that the answer to both questions was yes.
“They were very adventurous,” I struggled, not knowing how to put them into words. “Passionate and curious about life, but those same things often led them to be rather careless and irresponsible.”<
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Our food arrived, but neither of us touched it while I attempted to pull something concrete out of the hazy pre-Islamic times spent wandering Europe with my parents. Moments of joy were brief and isolated, lived out against a backdrop of uncertainty and not infrequent loneliness.
“I can see why Islam had such appeal,” said Aziz, offering me a first bite—a bit of veal from the end of his fork. “Here we are born to Islam,” he said. “We are not asked to choose between one life and another. The problem, I imagine, is what you do with the other life once you have chosen this one.”
“What, indeed,” I said. You ignore it. Or you condemn it. You think of non-Muslims, including quite possibly and perhaps especially your parents, as hedonists. You call them selfish and unethical because it is easier than having to reconcile it all. And you strive to be good in your new life. You strive to be a very good Muslim. But then you meet a man who says it is possible to have a much more liberal interpretation—to have the occasional drink, to be alone with a girl. And you are that girl. And you are alone with that man. And you find yourself compromising everything you thought you believed in to be here with him. And ironically, though things feel even more uncertain in many ways than they did when your life was a nameless existence governed by the whims of your parents, you cannot resist being here.
I snapped out of it, boldly raised my glass of grappa. “In French they say: to your health.”
The fire tore down my throat.
Hours later, we stumbled together along the nearly deserted street with bellies full of cake and heads full of grappa. Aziz recounted a tale about his grandmother, a blind woman who was said to have healing power in her touch.
“She was a great believer in the saints,” he said, “a frequent visitor to the shrines of Ay Kulleeyay, the patron saint of broken pots, and Aw Warika, the saint who can make warts disappear—especially the very big ones with black hairs growing from them.”
I laughed in disbelief, but Aziz insisted he was serious. “Really, there’s a saint for just about every problem you can imagine. If it is only a little wart you can visit Sidi Abou.”
I grabbed his cuff and stopped him in the street. “You don’t believe in them, do you?”
“I believe people believe,” he said, looking away as he considered the question. “They need to believe in something closer than God, because God often feels too distant.”
He was right: the saints offer us a ladder to reach Him more easily. “And they bring people together,” I contributed.
He nodded. “They do. Or at least belief in them does.”
“One and the same,” I said, sounding much more certain than I felt.
It was a hot night, a night of memories visited against the backdrop of the old man snoring boisterously below. I was a reluctant spectator, watching my parents crawl up through the rabbit hole and throw off their costumes. They usually remained underground. Under our feet where the jinn live.
It was so much easier to keep them separate, to divide the world in two: male and female, dead and alive, black and white, misguided and Muslim. It was easier to be bitter and condemn, deny the relationship and keep the distance, because without judgment, Aziz was leading me to discover, there lurked longing.
Philip from Basingstoke and Alice from Dublin, two people who died in search of different lives. And the daughter who was perhaps living that life that eluded them. Alice, through the looking glass, had become Lilly . . . and Lilly, in the presence of Aziz, was unveiled.
He stood angelic in the doorway, his feet bare, moonlight electrifying his hair. He inhaled and stepped gingerly into the room, and sat on the edge of my bed. He said my hair felt strange: slippery, almost wet. He touched my cheek.
“What’s this?” he asked, wiping a tear from my chin. “Why, Lilly? What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I was just thinking about my father.”
“I’m sorry,” Aziz said. “Now you are missing him.”
“I was just thinking about a time . . . a time we were on the beach outside Tangier. There was a cluster of women sitting huddled in black under an umbrella who were pointing fingers at us and shaking their heads. I asked my father why they wore all those clothes, even at the beach, and he said they do it in the name of religion. But aren’t they hot? I asked him, and he said: I’m sure they are, but maybe other things matter more to them.
“Like what? I wanted to know. We were drying off, getting ready to leave, and he said: Maybe one day you’ll have a chance to ask them. It was odd—like he knew somehow that I would. That this would become my world. But at the time I said: They scare me. And as he pointed out, they seemed to be scared of us too.”
Aziz stretched out on his back beside me, his head sharing my pillow, his arms rigid at his sides. I pulled his right arm underneath my head and lay my cheek on his chest. His chest was warm and solid, his heart loud, and he smelled faintly of sweat, like pepper and the woodsmoke of Girma’s kitchen. He clasped his hands together to hold me there.
I watched his soft face as the muezzins woke the world. Propped on my elbow, I leaned across his smooth, bare chest and lingered, eyes shining, lips hesitant and falling. His lips parted, pulled me in, filling my mouth with the sugar and warmth of his tongue. A bubble of silence carried us upward, where we floated on a sea of holy voices. He gripped the back of my neck and rolled his body lazily toward me, his eyes closed, as if in sleep.
He pressed his lean body into mine, his tongue still deep in my mouth, his hand slowly circling my back through the thin fabric of my diri, lulling me into something as tingling and drifting as mirqana. The movement of his hand kept me afloat as we rocked back and forth. He rolled me over, my back to his front. His fingertips circled my navel and he breathed heavily into my neck. I shivered and felt the hardness of him against the small of my back.
“Aziz! Why aren’t you awake, you lazy boy?” the old man hollered from the courtyard below.
Aziz wrapped his entire body around mine like a shell and squeezed me, the snail.
“I’m ninety-eight years old and I’ve got more energy than you!” he continued.
“Distract him, will you, Lilly?” Aziz whispered.
I straightened my diri, then slipped out the door and poked my head over the balcony. “Good morning, sir,” I called over the railing. “Shall I knock on his door?” I made a great performance of doing so. “No answer,” I shouted over the balcony. “Didn’t he say he had to run an errand early this morning? You don’t remember? Well, perhaps you had fallen asleep.”
“Perhaps,” the old man conceded. “Will you come and have breakfast with me, then? I’ve been waiting for some company for over an hour.”
“Of course,” I replied, hitching up my diri in one hand and making my way down the wooden staircase. But how could an hour have passed since the call to prayer?
I sat with Grandfather Ibrahim in the main room, breaking pieces of injera to lift lentils, but I could barely bring myself to eat.
“Where did Aziz tell me you were from?” the old man asked.
“Yemen,” I replied without hesitation.
“Ah yes, the real home of the great Queen of Sheba.” He nodded. “I don’t believe this Amhara story that she was one of theirs. I think they just invented this myth to convince themselves they were some kind of God-chosen master race. In any case . . . don’t get me started . . . Aziz says you’re visiting family here?”
“In Harar.”
“Pah,” he said with a dismissive wave. “I can’t see why Munir and Aziz are so intent on working there. We have a much better hospital here, and people aren’t so superstitious about it. I can’t stand all that nonsense—saints and miracles and that thing they do to little girls. It’s all folklore, not Islam. A pack of lies,” he said. “Believe me, I was married to an Italian woman for years. She was lovely and pure. Nothing dirty or dangerous about her.”
Aziz joined us, dressed and clean-shaven. He looked straight at me
and smiled. I felt my burning red skin of guilt.
“There you are, my boy!” shouted the old man. “A good thing, too. If I’d spent any more time alone here with this charming girl I might have started to believe I’d finally found a wife young enough to keep up with me!”
eyes peek over the wall
We returned to a different city. The Imperial Army had always stayed out, letting Hararis run their own affairs, but suddenly we could see fingertips, followed by the whites of eyes, as soldiers began peeking over the wall.
Two ragged-looking soldiers had stopped the minibus I took back from Dire Dawa and interrogated the driver. He was forced to slip them some money before they let the bus pass through the city gate. The driver rolled up the window.
“They have caught the Negele flu,” one of the passengers finally said.
“I heard that the soldiers are sick,” I said to Aziz when we next met for bercha, “with Negele flu.”
“Who said this?” Munir asked abruptly.
“I overheard a man saying it.”
Negele was a town in Sidamo province, it turned out. Soldiers there had staged a mutiny after inflation had made it impossible for them to buy teff or rice. They were living on moldy potato skins and water, demanding raises, while their officers continued stuffing themselves with meat and injera and beer. The soldiers put their guns to the temples of their senior officers, saying they were doing this in the name of the emperor, weeding out corruption and disloyalty in the imperial ranks and rewarding those who actually serve the imperial regime.
“This flu is very contagious,” said Aziz.
“It’s about time,” said Munir.
I didn’t know what Munir meant, because this Negele flu made it increasingly difficult for us women when we went to market. The soldiers now loitered there, resting on their guns, reaching out to touch women as they passed. Men got angry with their wives because they were reluctant to go to market, then got angry at their wives for going to market and being accosted. Nouria and I braved it as we had to, but I was “the farenji” again. Nouria could see how angry it was making me, so she told me not to worry, she would go alone. She came home from the market disgusted, washing thoroughly after being touched by these men who were dirty and stank of Christian meat and urine and beer.