This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  I didn’t feel I was in control of any of this. I thought, for a time, that Lev was. It was his power—a force of good or evil, I didn’t know which—that was forcing me back. I actually believed there was something supernatural at work. I felt that my only way out of the Middle East would be with him.

  Lev asked me to marry him. I said yes. We celebrated our engagement in Dahab by passing out sweets to the Bedouin children peddling clothes along the beach. Then he took me home to Dimona, one of the settlement towns built in the 1950s to house the influx of North African Jews who fled to Israel after the war of 1948. It was a hostile and poor city of barred and graffiti-covered housing blocks in the middle of the Negev Desert. It was the most depressing place I had ever seen.

  Lev’s mother was tiny and wrinkled and kind, and as soon as he introduced me as his fiancée, she led me straight to the linen closet. She proudly pointed out gifts for the marital home. I suppressed a feeling of panic. I wanted to run, but I was afraid of this place, of the town beyond the barred windows of his mother’s apartment.

  That night, I asked Lev if we could leave. In the morning we left for Tel Aviv so that we could both apply for Egyptian visas. During the two-week wait for our passports, we camped on an Israeli beach with drifters and addicts and tattooed ex-cons, living on crackers and baked beans. I hated it. And I started to hate him.

  With our passports back, we took a taxi through the desert into the Sinai. “I want to give you a baby,” he whispered into my ear as we huddled in the back seat.

  I stared at the back of the head of the Bedouin driver for a moment and then said: “Are you crazy?”

  He laughed and said yes, that’s why he didn’t have to do military service.

  I bought a ticket home. Lev sold his guitar and his jeans and had enough money for a ticket to England, where I would be changing planes.

  At Heathrow he said he was going to head up north to work with an old friend and earn the money to get to Canada. I wasn’t sure whether the friend up north existed, but I left him at the airport. I received a postcard a year later. “I am Lev. I am in Greece. I miss you.” I never heard from him again.

  Ever since, I have had a recurring dream that I cannot escape the Middle East. That I have seven passports in my purse and none of them are mine.

  Once, was the short answer I gave to the psychiatrist who asked if I had ever felt I was being controlled by outside forces.

  On the basis of this and what I relayed about my father’s history, I was diagnosed as having a bipolar disorder. I was now officially mentally ill. I would take lithium and an antidepressant and see a psychiatrist and have my lithium levels measured once a month.

  I went back to Canada for the rest of the summer, telling no one at home about my diagnosis. I listened to my brother’s unhappy stories instead. He had left his girlfriend and was sleeping in the park. Worst of all, he was getting into fights, fights he knew he could not win—provoking bigger men into beating the shit out of him. He did not understand why; he knew only that he needed to be beaten up.

  In our early twenties, we were both losing our minds. My brother’s situation broke my heart. He had been such a beautiful boy, such an innocent, so wide open. Put that defenceless spirit in the hands of an abusive man and it will not survive. Soul murder is a term I have heard used.

  3

  In September I went back to England to start my PhD. Where my master’s degree had entailed a weekly meeting with my tutor, the PhD program involved contact only when I sought it. I had no trouble being self-motivated and working for long stretches on my own, but it brought with it an unhealthy isolation.

  I was doing research about a walled Muslim city in Ethiopia—a fabled and mysterious place. I read every historical source about this city and chased down the little that had been written about it in the current era. I found a dictionary that had been compiled by a linguist in the 1950s and attempted to extract from this some understanding of the grammar of the unwritten Harari language. I wrote to priests and historians and Hararis in Ethiopia and abroad.

  The research was fascinating, but whenever I took a break from it I found myself thinking about suicide. It seemed possible, I don’t know how, to hold these contradictory possibilities of the future in my head.

  There were no bridges high enough in Oxford, but there was a fast train to London. Yet what if I made a miscalculation and ended up a quadriplegic for the rest of my life? Then I wouldn’t even have the mobility to try again.

  I don’t remember the precipitating moments, but one night, only weeks after returning from Canada, I sat on the carpet in my flat on the top floor of an old man’s house and took all my lithium tablets, antidepressants and sleeping pills. I sat there calmly waiting to feel something. And then I worried I hadn’t taken enough and swallowed a bottle of Tylenol. And then I still worried I hadn’t taken enough and would end up brain damaged for the rest of my life, which seemed a worse outcome than being a quadriplegic, but I had nothing left to take.

  I called my friend Sarah. She rang for an ambulance. She came to my flat. I wouldn’t know this for another day because I missed these events entirely.

  I have a memory, hazy and yet distinct, of a tube being down my throat and a doctor counting pills as they rattled up the plastic, becoming more and more lucid, a kind nurse holding my hand and saying my name. I spent what remained of the night on a bed in an area beside a nurses’ station. Four other people were there in beds, too, one of them a woman who had broken both her legs after jumping off a bridge not high enough. I heard another woman howling like a wounded animal. Then I saw a nurse at the end of my bed. She was repeating my name. That awful sound was coming from me.

  I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital in the morning. I had no fear of the place, no expectations about it—nothing, really, beyond a kind of numb disbelief that this was another day, that the world just went on like this, day after day, regardless of how you felt or where you had spent the night.

  I had a room to myself in the women’s ward: sterile, comfortable, a window in the door so a nurse could look in every fifteen minutes until I graduated from suicide watch to something else. There was a cafeteria for meals, a kitchen where you could make yourself a cup of tea or Ovaltine or toast, spreading your butter and Marmite with a plastic knife. The bathroom had a long piece of tin rather than a mirror, which gave you back only the vaguest reflection of yourself. There was a TV room where we all smoked.

  The ward housed women of all ages, in all states of dress, but I only really noticed the ones who looked to be about my age. The obese Sri Lankan woman who didn’t talk but played the piano. The slow-motion, broken bird of a girl named Jo who was afraid to wash her hair and needed to be held all the time, and frequently sat down in my lap, which I didn’t mind. The anxious and animated American woman named Morgan who would suddenly lapse into a daze in the middle of a conversation.

  After dinner we all lined up for our medication—Smartie time, Jo called it. One night I stared, horrified, fascinated, at a woman lying on the floor in the hall repeating things, rhyming words, mostly expletives.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked the nurse, as she checked off my name on a list and handed me a little paper cup.

  “Manic,” she said.

  Oh, I remember thinking, so that’s what it looks like. I dutifully swallowed my pills.

  The staff psychiatrist had changed my medication, or rather, added to it. Two antidepressants now, in addition to the lithium and sleeping pills. Did it make me feel any better? I have no idea. I felt quite calm in hospital, safe, relieved to be sequestered from my life beyond. My mother didn’t know where I was, which allowed me to maintain some fiction that this wasn’t quite real. I knew I wasn’t nearly as sick as some people, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable or out of place.

  One day, perhaps a couple of weeks after being there, I said to a nurse that I wanted to go outside for a walk. She granted me outside privileges, and I was allowed to wander
the grounds. I came across the woman who had broken both her legs. She hissed at me and said: “I put you in here.”

  “What are you talking about? You have nothing to do with me being here,” I said.

  “It was all those times I was calling you a cunt,” she said. “Only you couldn’t hear me.”

  It was the only moment during that time in hospital that I felt scared. It was also the only time that I thought: crazy.

  I had visitors during those weeks: Sarah, my tutor, and a professor from my college. He brought me a bag of plums and told me that when he was an undergraduate they used to consider this place just another Oxford college, given how many students you could find here at any given time. He made me laugh and he let me beat him at pool.

  One day Jo, Morgan and I went on a field trip with a nurse. We went to Oxfam and rifled through the second-hand clothes and books. We had lunch together in the world. Later that week I told the nurse stationed at the door that I was going for a walk outside, and she said: “You look nice. You’re wearing lipstick.”

  I felt embarrassed. But I knew then that I was ready to leave this place, and that it showed.

  Sarah came to collect me when I was discharged. We went for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant. A man at the next table caught my eye—brooding, handsome and intense, his masculinity offset by a lavender sweatshirt and big blue eyes framed with feather-like lashes. I wrote a note saying I’d like to meet him. I left it with the waiter to give to him after Sarah and I had left.

  Ted called me the following week and invited me for a drink. At a bar in North Oxford he told me he didn’t usually drink because of the medication he was taking. He said he’d been depressed for seventeen years. I told him about my very recent history. He told me about his recent hurts. And then we both proceeded to drink rather a lot.

  Two weeks later, he asked me to move in with him and I did.

  Once a month I went to the hospital for a blood test. I answered routine questions asked by a different psychiatrist each time. I was depressed but never manic. Having seen in hospital what that looked like, I wasn’t sure I ever had been. But the fact that I could keep on working as I did suggested to the professionals that I was. I often worked intensely to the exclusion of everything else. But this was Oxford. You don’t get to Oxford, or survive it, by doing anything less.

  My tutor had not been wrong to refer to the Warneford Hospital as an Oxford college. The university wasn’t unaware of the pressure put upon students. Each year there were inevitably suicides by high-achieving students, and residence dons were newly required to look out for and report the signs of depression. At my college, Magdalen, if you wanted to climb the clock tower, you had to have a letter declaring your mental rather than your physical fitness.

  I began to wonder whether my diagnosis hadn’t been a bit overzealous. I had doubts, but it wasn’t the time to raise them. I was soon going to be leaving for a year of field research in Ethiopia. It was time to assure psychiatrists that I was quite sane enough for the undertaking. They couldn’t stop me from going, but they could refuse to write a prescription for such a large number of pills.

  When I left for Ethiopia, I took two black duffle bags with me: one full of clothes and books, the other stuffed with ramen noodles, powdered soups and a year’s worth of psychopharmaceuticals.

  4

  I travelled from Addis Ababa overland to Harar, 518 kilometres on broken roads over three days. I was dropped off in Harar’s main square, where I stood holding a letter of introduction to the family of a museum curator with whom I’d been corresponding. My arrival didn’t go unnoticed. Within a few minutes, someone turned up to collect me and take me to Haji Mohammed and Fatuma Sitti’s house.

  They were a respectable couple in their mid-fifties: he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and she was a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. He was a cloth merchant, and she owned a farm outside the city. They had nine children, including two daughters living in the United States, from whom they received regular remittances. Perhaps that is why they were willing to risk the attention they would inevitably draw to themselves by taking in a foreigner. I was a complete aberration in this place; the only foreigner for miles.

  I paid rent, observed a curfew, dressed modestly and wore a veil and inhabited the women’s quarters along with Fatuma Sitti, her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Ekram, and any visiting female neighbours or relatives. We slept on red-clay platforms and passed a water jug between us in the courtyard in order to bathe. We ate all our meals together, sharing one bowl of watery, fenugreek-laden stew twice a day, fishing for tiny morsels of carrot and potato with our right hands. The women ate, slept and prayed together in one room; Haji Mohammed and their older sons in another room across the courtyard. The world was cleaved in two, with the exception of the younger boys, who moved freely in between.

  We lived like any other family, sharing triumphs, tribulations, news and the mundane details of daily life. After dinner the boys came to me for help with their English homework. The women helped me with my Harari. Ekram and I gossiped in broken English: I told her about my boyfriend; she told me about hers. Ted existed for me in a faraway place, a place where I’d been very unhappy. While I missed him at times, I did not miss the person I was with him; I felt more alert and alive than I had in a very long time.

  I was still taking a great trough of medication each morning. Even though I’d never felt the drugs had offered me any relief, I was afraid to change that regimen so far away from home. I was also, like most people in the city, chronically ill. It was principally a problem of water—the brown, intermittent supply of it from the pump that we drank and cooked with, washed dishes and bathed in, before throwing it out into the street where it trickled downhill and seeped into the ground. We drank tea and ate stew every day made with that brown water.

  There was a fly-filled pit latrine, rats and flying cockroaches. There was leprosy, TB, hepatitis, HIV. We all had bloated, gaseous bellies and severe diarrhea courtesy of intestinal parasites. We routinely killed the parasites by taking expired antibiotics sold singly along-side pieces of chewing gum and individual cigarettes in the makeshift stalls that lined the main street.

  I got better at interpreting the early signs of parasitic invasion, but I didn’t always catch it in time. When I failed to, I would get dizzy and my vision would begin to blur. I assumed this happened to everyone, except that on the worst of these occasions, I could see I was suffering differently. My hands had begun to tremble just like they did in the early days of taking lithium. The drug can be toxic, and I was pretty sure that the dehydration that results from chronic diarrhea had increased the lithium concentration in my blood. I was showing all the signs of blood poisoning, and that scared me enough to go to the local hospital.

  In a crumbling old Italianate building, I paid the hospital fee and sat on a bench against a wall of peeling green paint, waiting hours before seeing a doctor. Dr. Hassan was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-four-year-old who spoke excellent English. His soft voice contradicted his size. He was wearing a grey suit under his white coat, and proper laced-up shoes as opposed to the flip-flops I was wearing and had come to think of as national dress. He was back in his hometown for a year of mandatory community service after his medical training at Addis Ababa University. He had had only one training session in psychiatric illness and no clinical practice in the subject. He had no means of testing my lithium levels, but he listened and empathized as I revealed a deeply incriminating secret: a mental illness in a country where the crazy are hidden from view or, if they are without family, left to roam the streets. I was telling him something about the woman I had left behind in England, the woman under this veil. He was interested and completely unfazed.

  I realized that my only option was to simply stop taking lithium. I decided I’d rather take that risk than die of blood poisoning in a remote Ethiopian city.

  I was sick for a week and a half as the lithium left my system. I wanted to lie in the d
ark with a sheet over my head, sleep in silence, daydream, but this was not the Harari way. To be alone is to invite evil spirits, so the women in the neighbourhood kept me company, sitting around my prostrate body, singing songs together, weaving baskets, burning incense, sorting through grains. A tiny girl from the neighbourhood, a girl they called Biscutti, crawled over me, tickled me, hid under the sheet.

  Fatuma insisted I was sick because when I first arrived I didn’t wear trousers under my skirts. Someone must have resented my bare skin and cursed me with the evil eye. Aini, her sister, said I was sick because I wasn’t Muslim enough. She threw down a prayer rug and pointed in the direction of Mecca. “But I’m not Muslim at all,” I protested weakly. “Well, then?” they shouted. “What more proof do you need?”

  Dr. Hassan came to see how I was. He lived with his aunt and uncle just down the street, it turned out. Fatuma Sitti was impressed to discover I had such respectable friends. He took some tea from her and we had a talk about his medical training, his ambitions. He dreamt of doing specialized training in the States. He was busy preparing for the exams he was going to take in Cairo in a year’s time, the final stage in a special scholarship competition for African doctors. He had made it this far; he thought he stood a chance. He was at a certain disadvantage, though, not having the textbooks he needed to study. I was sure I’d be able to find them in England and promised to send them when I returned home in a few months’ time.

  Finally I felt better, and much to my relief, my mood hadn’t plummeted. Or soared. I was eager to get back to work. I was interested in speaking with local midwives and I had started by interviewing the midwife I knew in our neighbourhood: Biscutti’s grandmother.