In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  “A dog, a house, friends, a new life.”

  “Dad wants to know when you’re coming home.”

  “We’ll talk about that later.”

  I pulled her out of the chair, led her to the bathroom, and helped her peel off her pants, back brace, and T-shirt.

  “You can sleep in the hammock for the rest of the afternoon while I finish up at the office.”

  “Does it ever cool off?”

  “It might drop down to about ninety by midnight.” I handed her the tin cup and left the bathroom.

  I returned around six to find Rocky curled beneath the hammock. Tricia was sound asleep and sweating profusely. I roused her, gave her several glasses of water, explained the water filter system, and had her take another bucket bath. Six thirty in the evening our time, it was about 9:30 am Seattle time. Trish was wide awake.

  “Here.” I gave her one of my loose-fitting dresses that fell below mid-calf. “Put this on. We’re going for a walk. There are a few people I want you to meet.”

  We exited my gate, and I took her directly to Old Issa, who stood beaming behind his kiosk. I introduced them, and after a brief chat with lots of nodding and smiling on all sides, I led Tricia around the corner and into the streets of Dori.

  “I feel like I’ve walked onto the set of Lawrence of Arabia.” Tricia walked with her mouth open, swiveling her head from side to side. “It amazing here.”

  Behind us, a large bull with long pointed horns turned the corner and followed us up the street. Tricia looked over her shoulder at the bull and bumped into a goat.

  I remembered what it had been like, seeing it all for the first time: the mud-washed walls and cinnamon-colored sand, matted camels and straw-legged donkeys, ebony skin against white turbans and flowing robes. A feeling that you had entered a time warp and been sucked two thousand years into the past. I closed my eyes and breathed in the fragrance of wood smoke, roasting meat, and camel dung. The lowering sun warmed my face, and the sand cushioned my feet. I reveled again in the sensation of being in a place so incredible that just one day harvested a lifetime of memories.

  I took Tricia’s hand, and we walked as we had when we were kids, swinging our arms.

  “I met your director yesterday,” Tricia said. “Rumor has it you need a vacation.”

  After the VIP visit and the staff meeting, it hadn’t taken long for that rumor to spread.

  “So, tell me about home.”

  “It was snowing when I left.” Tricia turned to check on the bull, now only ten paces behind us. “I called Dad to say good-bye. He wants to know when you’re coming home.”

  Home. A sudden pang went through my insides—a meteorite of melancholy that seared past the inner spaces of my heart and stomach. We turned a corner.

  “Did you know they sold the piano?” I said.

  “They did?” Tricia raised her eyebrows.

  Out across a field, a clutch of women clad in bright blue and red rode away from Dori, each on a small donkey.

  “Who are they?” Tricia pointed.

  “Those are Bella. They used to be the slave class to the Fulani.”

  We circled around a donkey.

  “What’s this about you needing a vacation?”

  I shrugged. “It’s been a rough year.”

  “I was sorry to hear about Lily.”

  “Yeah.” My throat tightened. “That was the worst.”

  “What else?”

  Out on the horizon the sand dunes darkened from beige to burnt orange.

  “I came back to Africa thinking Rob would join me and I’d have a relationship and a career overseas.” I shook my head. “Now, I’m afraid of being lonely for the rest of my life.”

  A military truck drove by. “Terrible things have been happening in Liberia. My friends there, so much blood…”

  “I warned you about the violence,” Tricia said. Ms. I Told You So. “Do you think that could happen here?”

  “Sometimes,” I paused. “But it hasn’t. We’ve had strikes and a coup without any violence. Anyway, it wasn’t violence that killed Lily. It was a gas leak! A stupid gas leak!” I took clumps of my hair in my hands and pulled.

  Tricia shook her head at me. “It’s not just Lily. You’ve been mad since you came to Africa three years ago.”

  I threw up my hands. “Well how would you feel if you found out everything you’d been taught your whole life was a bunch of bullshit? The Russians aren’t the only ones who teach their own version of history.” I kicked at the sand. “All the U.S. meddling in the world. We try to do a good job but at the same time the CIA is assassinating people, and we get blamed. I hate being lumped in with the bad guys.”

  A radio blared from inside a courtyard.

  “So, why stay?” Tricia made a wide circle around the backside of a donkey.

  “I don’t know.” My head hurt from pulling my hair. “I just renewed my contract for another year. Now I’m not sure it was such a good idea.”

  “People break contracts.” She took my arm. “No one would hold it against you if you came home.”

  I thought of Hamidou, Fati, Adiza, and Nassuru. “Some might.” Although Djelal would probably throw a party.

  “Well,” Tricia said, “it seems to me it’d be kind of hard to do your job when you’re mad at everybody all the time.”

  “I’m not mad at everybody! Just God, and the U.S. government”—I kicked the sand again—“and the universe in general.”

  “Yeah, well, when you figure out who to blame for all the bad stuff in the world, let me know. I want to talk to them about not being able to get pregnant.”

  We walked a ways in silence. Several men lounged in the shade of a tree at the side of the road. Somebody was frying onions somewhere nearby. We turned a corner.

  “You could come home with me,” Tricia looked at me sideways.

  I let the idea flutter around inside. A grasshopper took flight, clacking like a card against the spokes of a bicycle wheel. The idea lost its wings.

  “There’s an old medicine man who lives under a thorn bush near here.” I explained the story of the marabou and how he had not moved from that place for two, now three years.

  “Why?” Tricia said.

  “It’s his place. It’s where he belongs.” A sigh ballooned up from inside and I let it out. “I don’t know where I belong.”

  “Ah, the old ‘finding yourself’ line. Dad will have a hard time accepting that one.”

  “It’s what he did when he was our age!”

  “Going to medical school in Philadelphia wasn’t exactly taking a job on the other side of the world.”

  “It was as far as Grandma and Grandpa were concerned.”

  “Well, it’s different for us,” Tricia said. “We’re girls. He’s convinced we’re running wild and sleeping with every man we meet. Remember when I came home from South America and he wouldn’t let my friends into the house?”

  I nodded. After Tricia graduated from college, she had taken off for South America in a VW bus with a good friend who happened to be a guy. They traveled through Central and South America for three months and when they finally returned to visit our parents in Idaho Falls, my dad, believing Tricia had been having sex with her friend, wouldn’t let him in the house.

  “We’d been given so much hospitality on our trip by complete strangers,” Tricia said. “Then I get home and my own parents won’t to let us in. My OWN house!” She shook her head. “I was so ashamed.”

  I remembered that summer. I was eighteen and promised myself I’d never let Dad trap me in the same way.

  “Well, you did sleep with that guy you were traveling with.”

  “I was twenty-five years old! It was none of Dad’s business.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  We turned a corner and the bull followed.

  “Speaking of sleeping with guys,” Tricia said.

  “Speaking of none of your business.”

  She nudged me. “Who is he?”
/>   “Was. A captain in the army. But he got transferred back to Ouaga.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Funny, sweet, very political.”

  The question rose with her eyebrow and sat in an upturned corner of her mouth. “That’s Dad’s greatest fear, you know.”

  “I thought his greatest fear is that I won’t come back?”

  “That’s his second greatest fear. No, wait,” she frowned, “maybe it’s his third.”

  “Well, it won’t bother him if you don’t tell him. Anyway, it’s over. Drabo’s gone.”

  She took my arm. “Actually, you know his greatest fear is that you’ll come home pregnant.”

  “Well, since he’s been telling us since we were thirteen not to come home if we did, what makes him think I would if I were?”

  Tricia shook her head with a sigh heavy enough to bring a camel to its knees. “You’re afraid of getting pregnant, and I’m afraid I never will.”

  We reached the edge of town and turned to walk along the banks of the mar. Evaporation and hundreds of buckets had reduced the water level to a few muddy feet. The mar would be baked dry by the end of the month. A breeze rippled the surface of the water, carrying the odor of moss and fish. Beyond the far banks, a thin boy tapped the bony flank of a cow with a stick. Nearby, two small boys splashed about. A young woman with thick brass bracelets on each arm crouched on the bank, stirring clothes into the dark water and rubbing them with a block of soap.

  We sat on the hard ground and watched. A deep crease etched a vertical line between Tricia’s eyebrows. She had brought her depression with her like an old backpack, heavy and frayed, full of bits and pieces of worn-out baggage.

  “So, still no luck getting pregnant?”

  Tricia kept her eyes on the boys in the water. “Still no luck. We’ve tried a bunch of stuff, but it’s just not happening.”

  The bull had stopped at the end of the street and was rubbing its horns on the trunk of a tree.

  “Have you figured out why?”

  “We’re doing more tests. The endometriosis has gotten worse.” The crease between her eyes deepened into what had become a permanent frown. “I don’t know what I’ll do if we can’t have kids. I’m not sure if Bob alone is enough.”

  “You’d leave Bob?”

  She shrugged.

  I shook my head. “Tricia, Tricia. He’s the only sane man you’ve ever been with.”

  She sighed. “Don’t worry. I just need some time to myself. Bob knows that.”

  I stood, pulled her up, and we resumed walking. A woman carrying a baby in a sling passed us with a smile. Three children skipped up to Tricia and touched her hands, then ran to catch up with the woman. We turned a corner and passed a group of donkeys tethered to a fence.

  “I hate to bring this up, but,”—Tricia cleared her throat—“I talked to Shelley before I left. She told me Rob got married a few months ago.”

  A train of emotion hit me head-on; a physical blow that nearly knocked me down.

  Tricia touched my arm. “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Shit.” Since Drabo’s departure, Rob had returned to haunt my dreams. “Damn.”

  “Sorry, Susan.”

  “I hate this.” I bent over with my hands on my knees, trying to get my wind. “I hate that I still react like this, over a goddamned jerk.”

  “Well, if he was such a jerk, why’d you fall in love with him in the first place?”

  I straightened and took a deep breath. “Thanks for being so understanding and supportive.”

  “Well for crying out loud, Susan, you’re so naïve when it comes to men.”

  “Hey, at least he wasn’t like that what’s-his-name maniac boyfriend of yours who got into arguments with people at bars and then went outside and peed on their cars!”

  “And I had the sense to leave him because of it.”

  “The only guys you ever went out with before Bob were a bunch of psychos, like that guy who had you convinced you’d been through a bunch of different lives together. You a Southern Belle and him a Yankee Captain.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Oh, shut up about that.”

  “YOU shut up.”

  She punched me in the arm. I gave her a full-body nudge. The bull was right behind us. We split to opposite sides of the street. The bull walked between us and ambled up the road. Tricia grinned at me and we started laughing. It helped, but I still had a rock the size of a tractor in the pit of my stomach from the news about Rob. I closed my eyes and imagined him in a canoe. It went down a swift river and over a waterfall.

  I threw my arm around Tricia’s shoulder and we turned the corner onto Laya’s street. The leaves of the Eucalyptus trees fluttered in the heat. At the end of the road, I knocked on Laya’s gate.

  “I want you to meet Laya. She shops and cooks the noon meal. She’s kind of adopted me into her family.”

  Little Issa opened the gate and led us toward Laya’s hut in her section of the courtyard. Laya stirred soup in a pot set over one of two plate-sized holes. Beneath the pot, a fire burned inside a hollow rectangular stove made of mud bricks. The surface of the stove was glazed with a clay/mud mixture. We had built a practice prototype stove near Laya’s hut. Smoke snaked out of a three-foot-high chimney built against the courtyard wall.

  “It’s working well!” I said.

  “Yes, the food heats faster.” Laya pushed another stick into the square opening in front.

  “And we don’t have to worry about Ousmann tumbling into the fire.” I inspected a large crack that had opened up along the edge—a problem with all the stove models. “We’ll have to get another layer of clay on this.”

  Laya touched me on the shoulder and nodded toward Tricia.

  “Oh! Je m’excuse! Laya, this is my sister, Tricia.”

  Laya smiled into Tricia’s face, shook her hand, and called her children over. Aissatou approached with Ousmann on her hip, and Issa came forward, pulling Hama by the hand. Smiling shyly, each one shook Tricia’s hand, touching their left fingers to their forearms to show respect.

  We stayed only briefly, as the sun was near setting and Laya had much to do to get her husband and children fed and to sleep.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow,” I called in Fulfuldé as we left the courtyard. The children waved from the open gate.

  Tricia watched them for a moment. “Do they all sleep in that one little room?”

  “Laya, the baby, and Aissatou. I think the boys sleep in different places around the courtyard.”

  The shadows stretched as the sun lowered. We walked to the end of the street and turned toward the central square. A camel tethered to a wall watched us pass with an annoyed expression.

  “Careful,” I warned. “He’ll spit at us if we get too close.”

  Tricia gave the camel a wide berth. “She doesn’t have much, does she?”

  “Not many people live much better. She’s one of the few women in town with her own income, though I’m pretty sure most of it goes to her husband. But, she never complains.”

  “We have so much,” Tricia said.

  “Way more than we need.”

  Shadows threw clean lines of dark and light across the street.

  “It makes me think of Grandma Annie.” Tricia rotated her head as a woman walked by with a baby tied to her back and a head-pan of wrung-out clothes balanced on her head. “Remember Aunt Ethel’s stories about Grandma Annie living in a two-room log house and clearing the land with a team of horses, a hand plow, and an ax?”

  “Grandma Annie.” I nodded. “Fired by life until she was tough and useful, like the women here.”

  The woman hurried down the street and was met at a gate by several children who pulled at her skirt and hands.

  I spread my fingers and turned my palms upward. “We’ve never had to work like that, Trish. We’ve never been tested that way.”<
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  Tricia stopped and looked at me with her “are you crazy?” expression. “We’re lucky we don’t have to work like that. Get bent and worn out before our time. Why do you think Grandma Annie died so young?” She shook her head. “Never been tested? I’ve been afraid my whole life because of my rape. And now, I can’t get pregnant. Five years, and I can’t get pregnant. I’ve been through plenty of fire and I’m plenty damn useful.”

  “Well, the useful part might be a matter of opinion.” I tried to grin.

  “And you. You’ve been dumped by the man you love. You’re living 6,000 miles away from your family on the edge of the Sahara with no electricity and no running water, working in a hundred degree heat, and being called an Ugly American for your efforts. And one of your best friends just died. You think you’ve never been tested?”

  My throat tightened into a knot. The harder I tried to keep my bottom lip from trembling, the faster my eyes filled up.

  The sun settled onto the horizon and grew into a huge orange ball. Waves of heat rippled across its face.

  I wiped a tear off my cheek. “But I think I’m failing.”

  She put her arm around my shoulder. “Look, you’re giving it your best. That’s as good as clearing the land with a hand plow and an ax.”

  I was five years old again, my big sister carrying me home after getting my foot caught in the bicycle spokes.

  Along the sides of the road, men rolled out prayer mats, knelt, and touched their heads to the ground. In the west, the desert slowly swallowed the sun. The clouds mellowed from orange to pink. As the chanting of the evening prayer quieted, the sky faded to the color of the sea.

  Chapter 14

  Champagne and Sand

  April/Jumada-al-Ula

  Over the four weeks of March, work continued. Tricia accompanied me, Hamidou, Nassuru, Fati, and Adiza to Sambonaye and the other villages to train masons, build and demonstrate smokeless mud stoves, and plant trees. (“Build a stove, plant a tree, you heard it first at FDC.”) Jack’s new project was to train the masons to build grain stores. Egg-shaped, mud brick bins the size of VW bugs set up on wooden frames would keep next season’s harvested grain from being eaten by rodents and insects. Weavers sat at their wooden looms, weaving long multicolored strips to be sewn together into blankets. Women gathered on mats to spin cotton into thread. Though the women had not saved seeds from last year’s gardens, they requested more to plant in late May when, Ensha’allah, the rains would come.