In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  Chapter 3

  Muhammad’s Journey

  May/Rajab

  In my dream, I sweltered, wrapped in blankets under a blistering sun. Deep in sleep, I could not wake up, tried, dreamt I did, only to find I still slept. A pillow of heat pressed against my face. Forcing my head sideways, I broke the dream and woke with leaden limbs and a pounding head—the afternoon sieste hangover.

  Sunlight filtered through the branches of the two neem trees that sheltered the hammock in my courtyard. Above me, slender leaves lay immobile against a white haze of sky. No air passed to ease the oppressive heat. I lacked the energy to get up and return to the office for the second half of my working day.

  I had seen a Wolof proverb once, written in black paint on a whitewashed wall somewhere: One does not have to learn how to fall into a pit; all it takes is the first step, the others take care of themselves.

  In the month since Rob’s letter, each day of the unrelenting hot season I had questioned whether I could survive for another year in a foreign land on my own, again. Most days were a resounding NO!

  What good could I do anyway? According to the BBC, UNICEF had just predicted twenty million Africans would die from famine and war in the next decade. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was already falling apart. Eight American soldiers had died attempting to rescue the hostages in Iran. Hell, they hadn’t even gotten anywhere near the embassy. I lay in the hammock, miserable and hot, unwilling to get up.

  Depression was relatively new to me. My sister, Tricia, had suffered from cyclical depression her whole life, as did Lily. I knew their depression was chemical. Tricia’s was a deep river of melancholy that ran in her blood. Lily was like a bottle of soda pop, so full of effervescence she overflowed now and then and left herself half empty, flat and immobile, until she filled up again.

  Mine was just a heart torn open by a barbed hook. That’s what happened when fish went for the bait too fast and swallowed it whole. When the hook came out, it ripped out a few guts with it.

  Rob had been in the dream, wrapped up somehow with the blankets. Lily had warned me about Rob that day we threw the I Ching. There had been an additional six lines at the top: A goat butts against a hedge. It cannot go backward, it cannot go forward. Nothing serves to further.

  I had chosen not to see those lines. Hell, I’d practically taken a stick and poked my eyes out.

  Lily’s recent letter lay on the low table next to the hammock. I had written, telling her of Rob’s Dear Jane letter and my inability to shake a terrible sense of hopelessness. She wrote back to remind me of the time she had not shown up in class for several days. Three of us had picked the lock to her room, found her in a deep funk in bed, and thrown candy at her until she got up. Her piece of candy to me was to use mental imagery to banish Rob.

  “Imagine he’s in a canoe on a river,” she wrote. “Then imagine him going around a bend and out of sight.”

  Closing my eyes, I tried it again. But he kept getting snagged up on a log, sitting there in the canoe, whittling a stick with my new deluxe Swiss Army knife.

  “Shit.” I pulled myself out of the hammock. If Lily could get up, by God, so could I.

  I shuffled across my patio to the barik, a fifty-gallon barrel that held water for drinking and washing. The water level had dipped to well below half. I picked up a gourd, leaned into the barrel, and scooped up the last of the water, pouring it into a tin bucket.

  With the bucket, a towel, and a cotton shift off the clothesline that stretched between the house and the tree, I walked the path to the hut that served as my bathing room, and pushed aside the mat to enter. My “shower” had a cement floor, walls of mud brick, and an open ceiling of tree branches and sky. I set the bucket on the floor and hung the towel and dress on a nail high on the wall. A tin cup dangled on a second nail.

  I unwound my pagne, a square length of cloth worn as an all-purpose wraparound, and draped it over the towel. The sun dappled my skin through the leaves. Blissfully naked, I poured water over the back of my neck and hair. The cool water sent a shiver down my spine and banished the pounding from my skull. Straightening, I splashed water over my upturned face.

  An image came, unbidden. Aunt Ethel stood against a green backdrop of alfalfa fields, hanging fresh-washed towels on a clothesline. Hands mottled with sunspots, she wrapped each towel end over the line and fastened it with a clothespin.

  The image faded. My own hand, holding the tin cup, had the same wide palm and long slender fingers of all the women in my father’s family. My father called them piano hands—strong hands, working hands.

  I continued to dip and pour. When the water level no longer filled the cup, I picked up the bucket and doused my head with a final splash—the ritual of the bucket bath.

  I shook the water from my short hair like a dog and rubbed my body dry. A breeze ruffled the leaves and brushed the hairs of my arms. I pulled the dress over my head and shook the loose cloth over my hips to mid calf. Leaving the bathroom, I draped the towel on the clothesline.

  From the pile of papers stacked on the table near the hammock, I picked up another letter. This one was from my parents. The first page was covered with the flowing Catholic school script of my mother; the second had a short paragraph in the doctor scribble of my dad.

  Dear Susan,

  Still snowing here. Seems like spring will never come. The Blackfoot is still frozen so haven’t been fishing yet. We’ve sold the piano.

  They’d sold my piano. I had played on that piano since I was eight years old when I started lessons. It was a pretty little spinet of polished blond wood. I had always assumed it would someday be mine. They’d sold it. I guessed they figured I was never coming back. How could I? If I quit now, on top of no relationship, I’d also have no job.

  With a sigh, I plucked a cassette from a shoebox, shoved it into the tape player, and pushed the play button. The tape player hissed white noise until the recording clicked on. The last paragraph of the letter was from my dad.

  We miss you and wish you were home where you belong. Understand you want to build a career but we all wonder why you can’t work here with your own kind.

  Keep writing.

  Dad

  The first notes of a Bach fugue began. I had played this one—Fugue #1 in C major. The piano tones rang alone and clear. The first voice, C D E F of the C major scale, was answered by a second voice in the dominant key. I closed my eyes.

  Two more voices joined and blended, singing the same melody in contrapuntal harmony. Rebel sharps invaded, modulated the key and added discord, forcing the themes to argue in minor tones. The last measures rang out in a finale of perfect harmony, ending with a simple chord that embraced the beginning notes of all four voices.

  I opened my eyes again to my father’s words: Your own kind. As far as I knew, my father had never known anyone who wasn’t white or Christian.

  “Sorry, Dad.” I crumpled the letter into a ball. “One voice just isn’t enough.”

  A truck horn beeped outside my gate. Three p.m., the daily afternoon sieste over, I stuffed papers and books into a large basket and headed out the gate to catch my ride back to the office. Hamidou was driving and I asked about his nephew. The little boy had received his tetanus vaccination and was doing well, though the worm had not yet completely exited the wound.

  A few minutes later, I walked through the doors of the main office into a loud conversation between Djelal, Adiza, Nassuru, and Fati. Djelal, a tailor turned administrator, had often vocalized his frustration over Save the Children’s policy of hiring American directors for their overseas programs. He was the assistant director for the Dori office and an obvious candidate to take Don’s place as director. A large man, made even larger by his boubou, a square-cut, floor-length robe made with yards of blue cloth, Djelal gesticulated as Adiza, Fati, and Nassuru listened quietly.

  “Just because some African in Cameroon has misused agency funds,” he said, “why should we have to prove ourselves befor
e Home Office will hire one of us to be director?”

  I hesitated just inside the door as he proclaimed in a loud voice that Home Office’s plan to replace Don with yet another American was another example of colonial white arrogance.

  As soon as Djelal saw me, the conversation stopped. The group turned as one to offer afternoon greetings, then Djelal went into his office and shut the door.

  The spacious entry room of the main office had two double doors, one leading to the side, the other to the central courtyard that separated the two buildings in the office compound. Avoiding eye contact, Nassuru hurried out the door to the courtyard. Adiza adjusted the elegant sculpture of cornrows that made up her latest coif, raised an eyebrow, and followed Nassuru. Fati smiled and laid her hand on my arm.

  I sighed. The reality of the situation was a combination of both Home Office and Djelal’s points of view. It was necessary but it wasn’t fair. Americans weren’t always upright citizens either. One agency had caught their American director running a brothel as an “income generating project.” Seemed like every extended family had its shady entrepreneur.

  At any rate, Djelal didn’t bother to hide his dislike of every white person on staff and I was no exception. For the first time in my life, I was being punished because of the color of my skin. So, I worked with Djelal when necessary and avoided him when possible, as he did with me.

  I crossed the courtyard to the second building that housed my office and sat at my desk under an open window. The bucket bath was long forgotten as sweat dripped from my armpits and pooled in the small of my back. Ignoring the urge to lay my head on my arms and sleep, I opened my drawer and gathered pen and paper. The office had one manual typewriter that required formidable finger muscles, and a French keyboard that mixed up the q’s and a’s, the m’s and w’s. It was easier to write longhand.

  For the next hour, I wrote up project descriptions. The writing took my mind off Rob and the heat and reminded me why I was there. The women of Sambonaye had asked for more cotton to spin into thread, which they would weave into blankets for their families and sell in the market during cold season. The goal was to sell enough blankets to reimburse the cost of the cotton and generate extra income for themselves. Various studies had found that when women had more control over the family income, the children’s nutrition improved.

  A breeze ruffled the leaves outside the window, and a cicada chirped far enough away to be soothing. Finished with the report, I sat back and shook the cramp out of my hand. Above me, sleeping in the cool darkness of the far corner of my office, hung two bats, wings folded. I had kept an uneasy eye on them for the first few weeks but had learned to live with them, the way I had learned to live with spiders the size of sand dollars in Liberia. Spiders and bats ate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes killed more people than any other animal, except maybe man. Now, I simply thought of my two bat friends as my landlords, loaning me their space when I needed a place to sit.

  A sudden gust of wind flailed the tree branches and slammed a shutter with a loud crack of wood against cement. Adiza’s round face and brilliant smile appeared outside my window. Adiza, half Ghanaian on her mother’s side, spoke excellent English and was my counterpart for women’s income generating projects.

  “A sandstorm is coming!” Adiza said loud enough for all within a half mile to hear. She slammed and locked my shutters.

  I hurried out to the courtyard and joined the rest of the staff who stood, looking west. Adiza continued to rush from window to window, closing and latching the shutters of the two office buildings. I faced west and stopped, unable for a moment to comprehend what I was seeing. A wall of churning red sand rose fifty feet into the sky, rolling toward us with the speed of a stampede. A warning wind hit the courtyard and bent the trees, whipping their leaves into a rush of white noise. We ran into the main building. Adiza followed and closed the metal doors, cloaking the office in shadow.

  The excitement shook me out of my doldrums and I laughed for the first time in a month. Adiza grabbed my hands and we jumped up and down like schoolgirls. Fati clapped her hands and laughed. Not the kind of laugh where only the lips stretched and a barking sound came out of the mouth. This was a laugh particular to Fulani women—a full body laugh that started at the eyes, came out the mouth in a whoop, and threw the body forward, hands slapping thighs and hanging on the nearest pair of shoulders. Legs and feet lurched forward and back in a stagger of uncontrolled delight. Laughter was serious business and done with great gusto. Don snorted, Djelal rolled his eyes, and Luanne joined in with a laugh like a Kookaburra.

  Then the sandstorm hit. The corrugated tin roof creaked and drummed and the shutters rattled as fists of wind and sand pummeled the building. We stood together wide-eyed in the semidarkness as the storm whined, spit sand through the shutter slats, and shook the doors on their hinges. I clenched my jaw and crunched sand between my teeth.

  After fifteen long minutes, the wind stopped as abruptly as it had started. A low rumble rolled overhead. Adiza threw open the doors and ran outside. Something that sounded like a rock knocked against the tin roof, then another, and another. I stepped into the open and caught a wet splat in my palm. Tiny puffs of dust danced across the courtyard where drops of water hit the powdered dirt. Rain! The first rain since my arrival, the first rain, they said, in six months.

  Children’s shrieks came from the market square and the streets. Raindrops splattered cold onto our hair and faces, more and more until the rain fell in a glistening curtain of glorious water. We ran inside to the sound of a thousand fists pounding the tin roof.

  The rain poured for twenty minutes. The pounding on the roof lessened to the sound of a hundred hands clapping, followed by the snapping of a hundred fingers, then fifty, then ten, until the last sigh of a fine mist washed overhead. Finally, all that was left of the storm was a cool breath of washed air.

  Chattering, we picked up branches in the courtyard until six p.m. Don offered a ride home, but I declined, wanting to walk through the cool left by the rain.

  Outside the office gate, I stood in the street. The moist air caressed my face. It smelled of wet earth and eucalyptus, and something new—a sweet, spicy scent I had never tasted before. The scent of awakening. I gulped lungfuls until I was drunk with it.

  Shopkeepers called to one another around the perimeter of the market square and built fires to roast meat and bake bread for the evening. Strolling down the wide street, I greeted a woman who carried a baby slung on her back in a pagne. Three children splashed in a puddle and skipped up to touch my hands. Tittering like little birds, they ran to catch up with the woman. Everyone I passed radiated a festive mood.

  I turned onto a side street, empty but for a few donkeys tethered outside gates. I lifted my face to the benign warmth of the setting sun, a cushion of sand beneath my sandals. Flocks of chirping birds flew in waves from tree to tree. Above me, the claustrophobic ceiling of white haze, which had hidden the sky the entire three months I had been there, had disappeared, replaced by a high dome of brilliant blue dotted with whiffs of cloud. I nearly cried for joy. Here was the big sky of my childhood. Here was room to breathe again.

  A goat ran out an open gate followed by a woman wielding a stick. She looked past the goat to me then back at the goat. She laughed and called, “Jam Kiri!” Good Evening!

  “Jam Tan!” I replied. Peace, all is well, and meant it.

  Where four roads intersected, I turned onto a street with eucalyptus trees along one side. Laya, the woman I had hired as a cook, lived on this street. I had hired her a month before and she and her children had eaten the noon meal with me nearly every day since. She was teaching me Fulfuldé, and each day gave us permission to begin our meal with the word, “Bismillah!” She was helping me begin.

  All this, and I had not yet visited her home. Her gate was first on the left. The thock thock of wood against wood, pestle against mortar, echoed into the street.

  I knocked, calling, “Bock, Bock!”

  S
everal small children ran to open the gate and took my hand. Laya stood off to the right near a one-room hut. Beaming, she put aside the long pestle, wiped her hands on her pagne, and came forward. Laya shared my height, five feet nine inches. Pencil-thin scars from a tribal rite of passage ran from the outer top of her cheekbones down across both cheeks, accentuating her slender nose and full lips. Black eyes shaped like almonds looked past my face and into my heart.

  “Jam Kiri, Laya.”

  “You are welcome.” She smiled, took my hand with both of hers, and led me toward an older man who sat in a folding chair near a hut at the back of the compound. The walls were cracked and the roof needed mending. The man looked twenty years Laya’s senior, cheeks sunk into dark hollows below protruding cheekbones. He stood with slow, deliberate movements.

  “This is my husband,” she said, then turned to her husband and talked to him in Fulfuldé, ending with my name.

  The man smiled and shook my hand. I touched my right forearm with my left hand to show respect. He sat down again, and Laya motioned for me to follow. We walked back to her section of the courtyard where her four children worked on various chores near the fire.

  Aissatou, the eldest daughter, pounded millet in the wooden mortar. Issa, the older son, broke sticks into pieces, and a smaller boy with a devilish smile, Hama, swept the sand with a broom of millet stalks tied together with twine. The baby, Ousmann, pushed sand into piles at Aissatou’s feet.

  I sat on a low stool against the wall of Laya’s hut. Her hut was very small and I wondered how all five of them could sleep inside. Laya said something in Fulfuldé to Issa, who ran out of the courtyard and returned in a few moments with a bottle of orange soda. He opened the bottle, careful to leave the cap covering the top, and offered it to me. I had noticed they did the same thing in the bars.

  “Laya, why do people leave the top on when they open a bottle?” I took a swig of the soda. It was warm and fizzed inside my mouth.

  “It is good manners,” Laya said. “This way you know no one has poisoned your drink.”