In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  I widened my eyes and swallowed. The children laughed.

  “People do not poison each other anymore,” Laya said, smiling. “Now, it is just a polite custom.” She stooped and fed sticks into the fire.

  “It rained today!” I clapped and the children laughed again, clapping with me. They had spent nearly every day of the past month at my house, helping their mother. Because we had eaten so many midday meals together, they seemed comfortable with me, even though they must have thought me a strange creature. When children in the outer villages saw me, they usually did one of two things: ran up to touch my hands or skirt, or ran away screaming to hide behind their mothers.

  “Soon the mar will fill and we will have fresh fish to eat!” Laya said, referring to the crater of dry dirt at the edge of town.

  I didn’t see how there could be fish in a seasonal pond that eight months out of the year was as dry as my love life. But I would wait to see. Wondrous things could happen in nature.

  In the other corner of the courtyard, a younger woman with several children built her fire and swept her corner of the compound.

  “That is my husband’s second wife,” Laya said. “I am his first.”

  Polygamy had a bad name in the Western World, even among most modern-day Mormons. But in Africa, I had learned to consider polygamy as not such a bad thing. Women worked from dawn to late into the night just to survive. Wives helped each other with the labor-intensive preparation of food and caring of children. When one wife was nursing an infant, the husband left her alone and visited his other wives, giving her a much-needed rest. This way the mother did not get pregnant again right away, and the infant was able to breast-feed longer, greatly increasing the chances of survival for both baby and mother.

  Perhaps life in Idaho had been similar a hundred years ago when the Mormons practiced polygamy. My own great-grandfather had taken two wives in the days when Idaho was still part of the Oregon Territory. When it became a state in 1890, the Mormon Church changed the law and required husbands to choose one of their wives. My great-grandmother was his first wife. But my great-grandfather chose the younger wife and moved to Canada, leaving my great-grandmother and five children to fend for themselves.

  I doubted that would ever happen to Laya.

  A teenager at the time, my grandmother never forgave her father for leaving them. The older girls, including my grandmother, had to live with other families and work as maids. She held the Mormon Church responsible.

  Laya asked if I had news from my family.

  “Yes, a letter from my mother and father. Tout va bien.” I told her my brother was doing well, studying to be a doctor in California, and my sister and her husband still hoped for children but had been unable to conceive.

  Laya shook her head at such sad news and bent to fan the fire with a small mat. Though she had never said so, I knew she considered me, so near to her in age, old not to have my own family.

  I sighed. There had been a day in Vermont when, just before saying goodbye to Rob, I crossed paths with a young woman pushing a stroller through a parking lot. A dog trotted alongside. Contentment radiated from an infinite distance behind the woman’s eyes. Her happiness had stabbed me with such pain it had stopped me in my tracks.

  It wasn’t that I never wanted a husband and children. I just didn’t want to have to give up everything else to have them. At any rate, nobody was knocking themselves over asking for my hand. The sensation of falling backward into a pit hit me again.

  I sat quietly for a while, watching. I had learned from the old women in Liberia that visiting didn’t always mean talking. Sometimes you just sat and kept people company. Laya went about her business, pounding millet for the evening meal. Hama sat on the ground next to me, bending wire into the shape of a toy car. Ousmann toddled over and crawled into my lap. I rested my cheek against his fuzzy head and breathed in the sweet-sour scent of baby pee and warm milk. Suddenly, the hole I had fallen into was not quite so deep.

  After a little, I rose, holding Ousmann. “Thank you, Laya. I’ll be going now.”

  Aissatou took Ousmann and the children walked me to the gate.

  “I’ll see you all tomorrow,” I called and left the courtyard.

  The children waved, and then disappeared behind the wall with an explosion of chatter. The sun had set, and above, the sky turned a slow crimson. The light reflected off the sand, painting the air the color of roses.

  Six blocks toward the other side of town, I came to my neighborhood corner. The odor of fermented cud permeated the camel parking lot in my part of town. Where two side streets crossed, an open space with a group of tethered camels butted up against the outer wall of my compound. Across the narrow street from my house was the compound of an older man and his family. The man, another Issa, sold goods from a small wooden kiosk on the corner opposite my gate.

  When he saw me, his face blossomed into a smile. “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle Suzanne!”

  “Bonsoir, Issa.” I had made it a habit to stop each day as I came home. “Tout va bien?”

  “Oui, oui,” he said as always. “The rains came today!”

  “Yes, and the sandstorm!” We smiled at each other. “Business is good?”

  “Oui, oui.” He laughed and his face crinkled into a hundred tiny lines.

  His kiosk had two shelves balanced on a small table. Boxes lined the bottom shelf, offering matches, AA batteries, crackers, Chicklets, and hard candies. Cans of mackerel in tomato sauce lined the second shelf, stacked alongside sixteen-ounce cans of green olives, fist-sized chunks of blue marbled soap, and rolls of toilet paper.

  I bought a box of matches and a can of olives, stained and dusty from their trip across the Sahara from Tunisia.

  “Bonne fete de Rajab!” Issa said.

  “Which holiday is that?”

  “Ah!” Issa held up a finger. “It is the holy day of Muhammad’s Night Journey.”

  Hamidou had referred to the Night Journey, but I had never heard the story.

  “S’il vous plait, Issa. Can you tell me the story?”

  He smiled. “Come.” He offered me a chair to sit and started talking.

  On a quiet night in 620 AD, while Muhammad was reciting the Koran at the holy shrine in Mecca, he decided to sleep. He was awakened by the Angel Gabriel, who lifted him onto a winged horse and flew him to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There, they saw Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

  “Abraham brought Muhammad three goblets,” Issa said. “One of water, one of milk, and one of wine. Muhammad chose the milk to show that Islam would walk the middle path between denying ourselves those pleasures we enjoy and indulging in them too much.”

  Gabriel then led Muhammad up a ladder through the seven layers of heaven. At each level he saw a great prophet, until he reached the Throne of God. There, God told him the people of Islam must pray fifty times per day.

  “But on the way down,” Issa said, “Moses prayed to Allah on Muhammad’s behalf, and by the time the Prophet reached the bottom, the fifty was reduced to five.”

  By the time Issa finished his story, the indigo of dusk had arrived.

  “Merci, Issa,” I said and rose. “Bonne fete et bon nuit.”

  “Bon nuit, Mademoiselle.”

  Out in my courtyard, I drank a beer, ate green olives, and counted the stars as they appeared, first one, then tens, then thousands. As the stars speckled the sky, fewer voices passed outside the gate. A ewe brayed and her lamb answered back and forth until they found each other. The glow from Issa’s kerosene lamp disappeared through the cla-lack of his compound gate. A dog barked in the distance and a mother shooed her children to bed. More stars came out, and the layered sounds of a village preparing for sleep quieted one by one until only the song of the crickets remained.

  Cleansed of its haze, the night sky shone clear, the stars brilliant. The new moon, its back to the sun, reflected no light to steal the show. Somewhere, not far from there, Rob sat under the same stars. I would not think of him. I wo
uld forget him.

  The fiery points of the Southern Cross, Scorpio, Ursa Major, Leo, and Virgo scattered across an infinite blackness and sparkled so close I reached up to pluck them.

  It would have been a night like this that Muhammad went on his Night Journey. Issa’s story had painted a picture so vivid, I imagined Muhammad flying through the velvet darkness on a horse with satin wings. Led by the Angel Gabriel dressed in a robe of starlight, Muhammad climbed a gossamer ladder of woven clouds. As there were layers of sound, air, and light, so Islam taught there were seven levels of heaven.

  Into the night, perhaps at the moon, Adam welcomed Muhammad to the first level of heaven and showed him a vision of hell. On toward the stars, Jesus and John the Baptist met him at the second level, Joseph the third, Enoch watched over the fourth level, Aaron and Moses, the fifth and sixth. Finally, past the stars and into a great void, Abraham welcomed him to the seventh level of heaven where he reached the throne of the Divine. There, Muhammad saw a sign of God, a flaming tree the size of a newborn galaxy.

  A comet tore a golden seam across the sky—the hem of Gabriel’s robe. How wondrous to go beyond oneself and see the Divine of one’s beliefs! What a journey that would be. Whether Muhammad had gone on his journey in a dream, a hallucination, or in his physical body did not matter to me. What mattered was that he had gone.

  Was I not also on a journey? The glorious afternoon and evening, the sandstorm, the rain, the cool, my visit with Laya and her children, Issa and his story, the stars—all had been a part of it.

  I lay back against the chair and looked up. Was this not a journey worth making? I did not have Rob, but I had the people of FDC, Laya and her children, and Issa to accompany me. I was not alone.

  Chapter 4

  The Goddess Wagadu

  July/Ramadan

  An early morning in mid July, Hamidou drove Djelal, Don, Fati, Adiza, and me to Sambonaye. No one was talking, so I pressed my face into the moisture-fat wind that blew in through the window and squinted at the landscape. A carpet of green grew in the low-lying areas where runoff from the rains had pooled and awakened the grass. The second week of July marked the midway point of Nduungu, the three months of rainy season that determined if people would eat well, eat enough, or starve from now until the next rains.

  Since that first rain in May, I had determined to do my job, learn as much as possible, and enjoy the journey. It was better than going back to Idaho.

  So, I kept my days busy with work and tilling the garden of okra, millet, and beans I had planted in my courtyard. But I could not control my dreams. Every night in my sleep, I ran through empty streets, looking for Rob, but never finding him. Despair loves the middle of the night.

  Time trudged onward, not giving a damn whether I had a broken heart or not. June had come with short bursts of rain, hot days, and cool nights, boosting my resolve to stay the course. In early July, friendly intervals of rain transformed the land into a patchwork of green grasses and seasonal lakes.

  I breathed in the spice of wet earth and let the green soothe my eyes. This was what it had been like over two thousand years ago when the great Soninke Empire reached from Senegal across the continent to Sudan, before the white man, before Christianity or Islam, when the Goddess Wagadu reigned.

  Four times Wagadu stood there in all her splendor.

  Pictures had been found of her—a figure of ochre and chalk painted on the mountain walls of the Sahara; a woman with pointed breasts and the long horns of a bull on either side of her head. I’d wager she’d had lots of pride and was plenty stubborn.

  A tiny cannonball of spit flashed by, just missing my face. I jerked back just as Djelal, sitting directly in front of me, spit out his side window again. Pulling my arm off the window ledge, I turned to Fati and Adiza, sandwiched between Nassuru and me in the back. They were both dozing. Fati had a rare frown on her face. Rumor had it she’d had a row with her new husband.

  On the other side of the car, Hamidou and Nassuru both spit out their windows. Everybody was spitting these days. It was Ramadan.

  The third pillar of Islam, Ramadan was the ninth month of the Muslim year. During Ramadan, the faithful fasted to remember the poor among them and to commemorate a key battle Muhammad had won twelve hundred years ago. Fasting meant no food and no drink from sunup to sundown. They weren’t even supposed to swallow their own spit. I got thirsty just thinking about it.

  Since everyone in the car was too cranky to talk, I returned my attention to the landscape, careful to keep my face out of spit range. In every direction, depressions of bright grass contrasted sharply with the higher ground where the bald earth had been washed of yet another layer of soil. The people of current day Sahel lived on an edge between the grass and the rocks, caught between the fickle promise of annual rains and the reality of an encroaching desert. And all of our work hung on the edge with them.

  Something somewhere had gone terribly wrong.

  Four times Wagadu disappeared and was lost to human sight: once through vanity, once through falsehood, once through greed, and once through dissension.

  “How did it come to this?” I gave my question to the land outside the window.

  Sitting in front between Djelal and Hamidou, Don answered, “A long period of cyclical drought.”

  “No, no,” Djelal said, throwing a frown over his shoulder. “It was the colonialists! They stole the land and cleared the bush for their plantations. They killed the lions to protect their cattle. It was their greed that killed the land.”

  Fati opened her eyes and nudged me. She pushed her lips out and her eyebrows up, pointing her chin toward Djelal. Her quiet way of saying, “Here we go again.”

  Hamidou shook his head at the windshield. “It was the Great Drought.”

  Djelal’s voice rose a decibel higher. “The Fulani have lived in the Sahel for thousands of years! The Tuareg, the Hausa. There were many droughts, but the land stayed fertile. It was the Europeans.”

  “Blame it on quinine,” Don said and Djelal grunted. “Malaria kept the Europeans out of the Sahel until they discovered quinine.” Don grinned. That grin had taken the tension out of many a conversation, but not this time.

  Djelal puffed out his chest and raised a finger. “The Tuareg and Fulani fought the French for a long time, but the French had guns. Then the French dug mines and shipped gold and diamonds to fill their banks.” Djelal sucked air through his teeth to show disgust.

  “They also brought missionaries who brought doctors, health programs, and vaccinations,” Don said.

  The car was quiet a moment. No one could argue against health programs. Toubacou, Fulfuldé for “doctor,” had been a revered word until it eventually came to mean “white person.”

  “But remember Jomo Kenyatta,” Adiza said. She waited, smiling, until everyone in the car except Hamidou turned to look at her. She adjusted a cornrow of hair twisted up in thin black wire. “‘When the missionaries came, the Africans had the land and the Christians had the bible. They taught us to pray, and our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land, and we had the bible.’” Adiza smiled. “That’s what Jomo Kenyatta said.”

  “Jomo Kenyatta.” Djelal nodded.

  Hamidou slowed the truck as we passed through a small village. At the base of a nearby hill, a man hacked at an acacia bush with a machete. Several women and girls walked a footpath carrying large bunches of sticks on their heads. This was how it had happened. Health improved, fewer children died, and the population grew. More people chopped down more trees for houses and cooking. More animals ate the vegetation.

  “When we got independence, many of the French stayed. But we governed ourselves.” Djelal smiled for the first time that day. “For years after, we produced enough food to feed the people and export what was left over.” His smile fell back into its usual upside down position. “But the balance had been broken.” He spit out the window. “Then came the Great Drought.”

  Hamidou nodded at the windshield.
“Gueno.”

  “Who’s Gueno?” I said.

  “In the beginning, the sun was the eye of Gueno. Gueno created the mountains, but they were too soft, so Gueno removed the sun from his eye socket and created a one-eyed king. This king hardened the mountains with his gaze.” Hamidou was my walking reference for everything that meant Fulani.

  “The rain stopped for ten years,” Nassuru said, as if describing a nightmare. “I was a small boy when the first rainy season did not come.”

  The land, stripped of its trees and shrubs, dried up under the relentless gaze of Gueno’s eye. Larger and larger circles of deforested land spread around the villages like ripples in a pond.

  “Crops were gone. Cattle herds were gone.” Djelal shook his head. “Tuareg and Fulani were begging in the streets of Ouaga.”

  A sigh settled into the car. Out the window, rust-colored water filled the riverbeds. At least the rain had returned. We passed a line of women balancing bunches of sticks and wide branches on their heads. A short woman carried a tree branch as big around as a trunk. The branch was so long it stretched about five feet in front and behind her, bouncing as she walked. Hamidou slowed for a herd of goats that tore grass out by the roots on both sides of the road. The rains had returned, but none of the vegetation survived long enough to reforest the land.

  Everybody was killing the land and, in the process, slowly killing themselves. People had tipped the balance and turned a once fertile area into a harsh, forbidding place. The inertia of it all, the sheer magnitude of the task was so heavy, so overwhelming, I wanted to lie down, close my eyes, and wake up in a place where hope still promised possibility.

  Wagadu is sometimes invisible because the indomitability of men has overtired her, so that she sleeps.

  The truck splashed and slipped through mud and potholes, squeaking on its springs; a battered, rusted old geezer of a truck. It wasn’t the years. It wasn’t even the mileage. It was the place. I rubbed a patch of dry sky on my arm. If I stayed here long enough, I’d end up looking like the truck.