Sweetness in the Belly (25 page)

learning chess

B
elieving that all has been ordained by God can lead to fatalism, but fatalism is not the same thing as belief. It’s a cheat: an abdication of responsibility. Believers take action, while I lie inert. I can’t be bothered to get up off the sofa and answer the knock at my door. I’m not in the mood for interruptions, though I’m not doing anything but lying here wearing a flannel nightshirt and slouchy socks, clinging to a lukewarm hot water bottle and contemplating the cracks in the ceiling. I’ve tried to read, but I can’t make it through more than a paragraph at a time. The floor is littered with abandoned newspapers and empty yogurt containers.

Three days ago Robin accompanied me home after my meltdown in the loo. I finally let him into my flat. I put the key in the door, pushed it open and stood in the doorway while he entered my sitting room.

He laughed, looking rather baffled. “Aren’t you even going to come in?”

We drank tea at the kitchen table by the window with a view of another identical tower standing lonely in the navy blue dusk. We sat across from each other, our knees near the radiator, the fluorescent light droning above and the thin pane of glass rattling beside our cheeks.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked.

“Why?”

“It’s just, well, you don’t have any pictures on the walls, or any photographs, or anything.”

“I prefer it this way,” I said.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been pushing too hard,” he said for the second time. “Perhaps I’m just rather clumsy when it comes to courtship. I thought most women liked to be pursued.”

“It’s not that.”

“Well, I obviously stepped over some kind of line.”

He’s trying to find a way into a life that has no door. There is an inner courtyard, concealed from the street, but this is a place where sentinels stand guard, the space Aziz inhabits, walking around in his white galabaia memorizing passages from a book. It is as if I have to protect it all the more fiercely now that Amina does not share it with me.

I reached out to take Robin’s hand. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really appreciate all your effort.”

He laughed again. “You make it sound as if I’m trying to do you some kind of favor! Like fix your plumbing! I may have made a mistake, but I don’t think I’ve entirely misread things. You don’t have to shut me out altogether.”

I shook my head.

“What is it?”

I looked down at my shoes.

“Is there someone else?”

Finally the right question. The simplest question of all. No matter what I might feel for Robin, there’s an organ without a name that only registers the invisible. It’s why I sense Aziz in windows, in puddles, in glass—an image thin and distorted, persistent and deadly silent. He does not say: forget me, move on, I have forgotten you, or I am dead, Lilly, long dead, so engage with this man Rabindranath, give him room. He does not say: whatever happened to me is not your fault.

I looked up.

Robin sighed and hung his head. “Lilly, why couldn’t you have just told me? Now I feel like an idiot. It’s not really fair, you know.”

Aziz’s silence overwhelms everything else. It blanketed the sound of Robin’s footsteps as he retreated to the door, made his way down the concrete corridor, exited the building and walked away. Aziz’s silence has blanketed the last three days.

Y
usuf lets himself in with a key. “It’s just that we haven’t seen you,” he says apologetically.

“Just tired,” I reply.

“Sick?” he asks, sitting down by my feet.

“Maybe.”

“Can I bring you something? Tea? Soup? I made one yesterday that Amina says she would like to taste every day.”

“Not that kind of sick. But I’ll be fine.”

“Shall I teach you chess?” Yusuf asks. He’s had a bit of a set-to with his Oromo friends after discovering one of them served, albeit briefly and coerced, in the Dergue’s army. Perhaps the game will distract me too, but it’s hard to imagine caring about a board game even though Yusuf insists chess is more like life than most people realize.

He returns with the board and names the pieces in Arabic as he sets them down one by one.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” he asks when I don’t move to pick up the phone.

I shake my head.

“Shall I?”

I shrug listlessly and stare at the squares—the burnt orange of an Ethiopian sunset, the dark brown of good earth. Men poised, ready and willing, for battle.

“It was Robin,” Yusuf says, sitting back down crossed-legged on the floor. “He was wondering if you were okay.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you are learning chess, of course,” Yusuf says, smiling.

“I’m running away from him, Yusuf,” I say quietly.

He considers this, scratching his beard. “Perhaps you are not running away from him but from your feelings.”

Yusuf says little, but that little is always precise. That is exactly why things with Robin have to end. My feelings for him only threaten to grow, while those for Aziz remain fixed, like the one photograph I have of him—twenty-six years old, staring straight ahead, deadly still in black and white. Staring at me as if I were still nineteen years old.

I pick up a piece from the chessboard. “What did you say this one was called?”

I
pray for a sign that I have done the right thing, pray throughout the month of Safar, the dangerous month of the Muslim calendar, the one where we must not propose or marry or travel, because calamities will befall us. In Harar, Sheikh Jami used to take care to visit the shrines of every one of the more than three hundred saints of the city during Safar to maximize our protection from evil and illness. He’d visit the forgotten shrines, ones hidden in people’s kitchens, in holes in compound walls, in the bend of the river, in the hollow of a tree, ensuring he paid his respects to each saint in the pantheon at least once a year.

Here we have only our flowerpot. And only me to make prayers. Amina won’t accompany me to the back because the local imam asserts that these beliefs about Safar are superstitions carried forth from the Jahiliyya. I burn incense every day for thirty days, asking Bilal to reach out to all the other saints. I hope that some descendant of Sheikh Jami’s is doing the same in Harar.

Amina and Yusuf and the children do their best to surround me with the ordinariness of family life. Well-meaning neighbors stop by with curries and stewed cabbage, passing pots into Amina’s arms. “Tuck in,” I tell Amina and Yusuf. The smells are enticing, but the mouth, the stomach, remain unwilling.

Tariq teeters around looking for trouble and snacking on the inedible, and Ahmed and Sitta squabble in the kitchen. Sitta emerges in tears and Yusuf, who is sitting beside me, spreads his arms and pulls her onto his lap. Ahmed’s been teasing her about her mole, saying it looks like an ink stain. It’s not the worst of what kids say. I’ve heard other Ethiopian kids call her nig nog, Galla, Shankilla. They have twice as many cruel words as their parents: the insults of both the old world and the new.

Sitta buries her face in her father’s neck, and Yusuf strokes her cheek.

“He telephoned again today,” he says to me.

“He shouldn’t bother,” I reply. “He should just get on with his life.”

Amina raised the idea of counseling, which I adamantly rejected, but when I think about how unfair I’ve been to Robin, I wonder whether counseling might be an act of public service.

My punishment for having missed a second week of work without explanation in the last two years is this mandatory leave of absence. There was no meeting with a board this time, for which I am grateful. It would have been too humiliating to have to see Robin. The head of nursing simply gave me a slip of paper with the phone number of the resident psychiatrist. That went straight in the garbage along with my uniform.

When I reached for the tea canister that night, I found a bottle of green and white pills inside my cupboard. Yusuf’s prescription for depression. Physician none other than Dr. Gupta.

part eight

harar, ethiopia

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1974

static

G
ishta arrived out of breath, out of sorts, interrupting my class. “Send the children home!” she commanded.

“What’s wrong?”

“Send them home now!” she cried.

“Did you have to upset the children like that?” I asked, after packing them off with their borrowed booklets and the assurance that everything would be all right.

She was wild with anger, shrieking something about children and coddling and how she had been forced to work when she was eight years old. But as I looked in her eyes I realized it wasn’t anger but fear that had her ranting and waving and smacking the tin fence.

She’d been greeted with a gun in the face that morning, she confessed once Nouria returned from the market. The Oromo tenants who farmed Sheikh Jami’s fields were apparently complaining that they were fed up with having to break their backs so that the sheikh’s wives could wear silk. They’d turned them away with guns.

Gishta was not the least bit sympathetic, though her own father must have likewise labored to keep Harari women expensively dressed. But the converted are often more self-righteous than those born to their station. I had only to look at myself to know the truth of this. When I first met Aziz, my religious beliefs had been much more dogmatic than his. But then he held my hand, and in so doing, loosened my grip. And now? Without his hand? I was devastated. I longed for an easier time, when being Muslim was rigid and rule bound and the past belonged clearly to a pre-Islamic era. I wished there were something absolute in which to believe. It was a time, after all, when one didn’t know what to believe, where to turn. You could smell the suspicion in the air—it was being sprayed in all directions, whispers of allegiances, minor peasant revolts, disloyalty, feuding, betrayal. Fear was limiting the movements of women. Silence seemed to dominate the relationships between brothers and best friends. And fewer and fewer students were coming to my class.

In the past, if any child was ever absent for more than one day, I’d always made inquiries. This time was no exception. To my face parents said, “Times are uncertain; we would rather keep them home,” but then, as I shortly discovered, my students had been turning up at the Bilal al Habash Madrasa instead, their teacher none other than Idris—Sheikh Jami’s other apprentice, a man who, in our couple of encounters, had not hidden the fact that he despised me.

“When times are uncertain, people prefer the authority of a man,” Idris said smugly when I dared to confront him outside the madrasa.

The following Sunday, when Sheikh Jami was scheduled to visit his mother in Dire Dawa, I went to Hussein to confirm my suspicions. Hussein, sitting on his own at the shrine, said that Idris had waived the fee as compensation.

“Compensation for what?” I demanded.

There had never been secrets between Hussein and me, but he was reluctant to get involved. I was angry enough to twist his arm without touching him.

For what Idris was apparently calling “their inferior education up to this point.”

“And why does it suddenly suit him now?” I shouted. “And why don’t you defend me?”

Hussein hung his head.

“You’re a coward, Hussein,” I said. Even I was stunned by my harshness.

One by one, the channels of communication were turning to static.

And then no students turned up at all.

“Where is Rahile? And where are the boys?” I asked Nouria the next day.

“I sent Rahile to collect laundry. The boys are in the market. If they have no school, then they have to work.”

“But I can still teach them,” I said. “It will be like it was in the beginning.”

“Soon, insha’Allah,” Nouria said. “But for now, we need an income.”

I sat down and stuck my fingers into a hole Bortucan had dug in the dirt.

feast and famine

D
espite all the uncertainty, Sadia was still talking about little other than her forthcoming wedding. I didn’t understand how she could carry on pretending life was perfectly normal. She hadn’t even seen much of Munir over the last few weeks, busy as he was, like Aziz, with these mysterious meetings.

She was insisting we go to Dire Dawa on the weekend to shop. “There are so many things I have to choose,” she gushed. “Oh, it will be so much fun! We just walk from shop to shop saying, ‘I’ll have this and this and this,’ and then Munir must come with his mother and they will buy everything. And then when we move into our new home, there it will all be—everything a new wife needs to make her husband comfortable.”

I indulged her: her enthusiasm was a refreshing break from the apocalyptic mood that had infected everyone else. Her flippancy shouldn’t have surprised me; this was the girl, after all, who, when she talked about Mecca, didn’t even mention the Ka’bah. To her, Mecca was a great place for buying perfume and cosmetics. Fashinn gidir, indeed.

We left for Dire Dawa just after dawn on a Saturday. Sadia insisted we take a private taxi now that we had a choice again, not one of the crowded minibuses. In the backseat she chattered on as if there were no politics in the world. We were lucky the driver didn’t speak our language.

“You know why we haven’t seen Warda in weeks?” she whispered.

“Don’t tell me she gets invited to these meetings,” I replied.

“No!” Sadia whispered, pulling her skirt outward and inflating her cheeks.

“What?” I shrieked.

“Uss!” Sadia chastised, laughing. Warda’s mother was keeping her hidden. Once the baby was born her mother would claim it as her own. “This is normal,” Sadia said.

“Sadia?” I ventured hesitantly.

“Yes, farenji?” she cooed.

“Have you and Munir … ?”

“Oh my God!” She covered her mouth with both hands and laughed.

“Well, have you?”

She nodded and held up two fingers.

“Did it hurt?”

She winced and mouthed pain.

“Did you have absuma?”

“Of course,” she says. “But only the small one. Not like Warda, she has the big one.”

“That must really hurt.”

“Sure there is pain. But there is much, much bigger pleasure in here,” she said, tapping her temple. “And you and Aziz?”

I shook my head.

“It is funny,” she said. “They say it is farenji girls who are sharmutas.”

The taxi deposited us in Dire Dawa’s central market, and Sadia took my hand, pulling me down familiar streets. She stopped outside the unmistakable blue gate of Grandfather Ibrahim’s house.

I grabbed her by the wrist. “Why are we here?”

She shrugged. “The old man is my family.”

“But I thought he was Munir’s grandfather.”

“Well, he’s my grandfather too. Munir is my cousin. It would be very rude of me not to visit when I am in town, wouldn’t it?”

The old man was happy to see me, though he berated me for not having come to visit him again. He teased Sadia about Munir, saying she was like rrata, a piece of meat stuck between the poor boy’s teeth.

Sadia giggled at the compliment, and then the old man leaned over to me and said: “He’s waiting for you upstairs.”

I looked at Sadia, but she only grinned. “Go on,” she said coyly.

H
e greeted me with his own apprehension, his smile strained, his gestures tentative. I wanted to press my forehead into his rib cage. I wanted to cry. I wanted to rewind the last few months and sit in the innocent silence of our dark room.

His words took their time, a couple of false starts, beginnings phrased as: “What I mean to say … ,” “What I thought …” and then finally, “Lilly, I didn’t mean to be unkind. I’ve been trying to protect us both. I’ve never asked you how you knew the emperor, the extent of your involvement with him, but it doesn’t matter at this stage because any association puts you in grave danger.”

“And I suppose that means your association with me puts
you
in grave danger,” I said.

“It does,” he admitted. “And if it weren’t for the fact that I am committed to a movement that condemns the monarchy, it would be a little less difficult for me to reconcile.”

“You’re afraid that your new friends will reject you because of your association with me.”

“There is something you need to see,” he said gently.

“More guns?”

“You’ll understand in a few hours,” he said and fell silent.

He dared to bridge the distance between us by reaching for my hand. It wasn’t fair. His thumb traced the lifeline on my palm. He was trying to pull me back.

“Lilly, please,” he implored.

I
n the blue dark we watched as a parade of skeletons wobbled across the screen. Everything—bodies, earth, road and sky—was the color of sand. The thin membranes stretched over the chest cavities of these creatures fluttered with the profound effort of movement. They fell forward onto their bulbous knees and their rib cages splintered with the impact. Women carried dead babies with crusty mouths and giant eyes framed by fly-covered lashes. There was absolute silence. The parade thinned, leaving a trail of bodies lying on the road that continued into the northern city, where the market was overflowing with sacks of sorghum and teff and wheat and mountains of split peas and lentils.

Members of His Majesty’s army were standing guard throughout the market, keeping the beggars at bay with their rifles.

Hundreds of miles south, Haile Selassie was standing on his balcony greeting his royal subjects on the occasion of his eightieth birthday two years before. We watched the emperor tossing copper coins down to the poor and feasting at the palace with white dignitaries, feeding them champagne and caviar flown by the planeload from Paris.

Haile Selassie’s officials in the north ordered the army to rid the streets of the embarrassment of these tens of thousands of diseased, walking cadavers. This was a celebration, after all.

We saw footage of the army gunning down starving civilians in honor of the emperor’s birthday, while the emperor roamed the lush palace grounds feeding his pet leopards and dogs choice cuts of meat from silver platters held high by his servants.

We had heard the words
famine
and
starvation,
but we had never seen images before. Haile Selassie had only begun using the words the previous month. Until then, he had denied such things existed in Ethiopia. Now we had the images to accompany the words, thanks to a British journalist.

Sadia hurried from the room partway through with her hand over her mouth.

Grandfather Ibrahim was the first to speak into the dark. “It’s over,” he said, wonder in his voice.

He was old enough to remember a time before Haile Selassie. He was old enough to remember a time before Ethiopia was even a country.

“It has to be over,” replied Aziz, who had known only this country, and known it only to be this way.

I
saw a pool of blood on the steps of the palace. I saw the imperial lions, starving in their cages, too hungry to discriminate between enemies and friends. I saw cadavers clinging like barnacles to the palace steps and kicked off the sheet over me. It was a stifling night.

The moon cast a silver pool of light over the balcony. To my left, the floorboards creaked. Aziz was beside me. We stood arm against arm.

“They’ve already shown this film in Britain,” he finally said. “The military council thought it was time our own people knew the truth. The emperor has been accused of taking a hundred million dollars of state money and hiding it in a Swiss bank account. The commission sent in its officers and they found thousands of dollars stuck to the floors under the carpets. They seized documents and read lists of figures over the radio—money held in other accounts, foreign properties and investments all in the names of his ministers—assets purchased with money drawn from the state treasury while these hundreds of thousands of people in the north were dying of starvation. Nobody will be able to deny those images.”

“But what will happen?”

“The council is talking about an entirely new basis of power—in the hands of the peasants and the workers—the majority. And to do that? The land has to be taken from the wealthy who own it and given back to the poor who actually farm it. From the royal family, the Church, the mosques, the landlords. No more forced labor, no more rights to collect tribute from the peasants, no more payment for military service and allegiance in the form of land grants, no more private ownership.”

“That would mean taking land away from the Hararis,” I realized aloud. The Hararis thrived under feudalism; it was the basis of their economy, though for them to admit this would be to indict themselves as beneficiaries of the emperor’s corrupt system.

“They are one of the wealthiest communities in the country,” Aziz said.

“But I don’t imagine they will just give over their land.”

“That’s why it’s so important that some of us from Harar, Hararis included, at least some of the young and educated ones, have joined the revolutionary party. We know there’s going to be resistance. Hararis have enjoyed centuries of privilege—their wealth comes from the exploitation of peasants. Harar was one of the biggest slave markets in East Africa. The Hararis would trade black people like me for goods from the Orient. A black man for a bolt of silk from China. My father was bought for a vat of gunpowder.”

“So even in his lifetime …”

“Even in his lifetime. I carry this name—Abdulnasser—slave of his Harari owner.”

“But Bilal al Habash was a slave,” I offered.

Aziz sighed. “Well, in principle, Islam is about equality. We have tried to believe, but I think … many of us feel socialism, Marxism, might be the only possibility for equality. Not religion. Do you know about Marx?”

I shook my head.

“I could lend you a book,” said Aziz. “A small red book.”

I
woke with the call to prayer to find Aziz lying beside me. I stared at his feathery eyelashes, which trembled as if he were watching a film in his sleep, Charlie Chaplin, perhaps, from the way his mouth turned up at the corners. I could feel his whole body swelling, but just as he was about to levitate, I lay across him, my weight barely enough to hold him down.

Aziz opened his eyes, took me by the shoulders and rolled me onto my back. He stared at the middle of me, and began to stroke my stomach through the thin fabric of my diri. He drew hesitant circles, his fingers winding ever closer, my skin melting with his touch, my body begging. He kissed my stomach through the cotton, inching upward to kiss my nipples. I held his earlobes between my fingers and pinched while he bit me hard and warmth rushed through me.

He tugged up my diri and stroked the insides of my thighs with the backs of his fingers, watching his own hand against my skin. He propped himself up on one hand then and untied his sarong with the other before lowering himself gently on top of me, hard against my stomach and thighs. Life was too short in Africa for this not to happen. I spread my legs and he took his penis in his hand and moved it against me, stroking me with slow rhythm that grew faster until I lunged into his open mouth, my back arched, the clash of teeth, the twist of tongues, the good God, the please, the pleasure.

I dug my nails into his chest as the waves rolled over me. Then a slow burn—a cautious push inward on his part—and my mouth falling open. Tears streaming from the corners of my eyes with wonder and unbelievable pain.

He licked the tears that had fallen into my left ear, filled my mouth with the salt on his tongue and slowly pushed deeper. I reached out and grabbed him from behind to pull him in as close, as deep, as could be, me the shell, he the snail, home.

“Aziz!” the old man hollered from below. “Why aren’t you awake yet?”

Aziz sighed and collapsed on top of me. “Shit,” he said harshly, burying his face in my hair. “Shit.”

We lay in this defeated heap for a minute, hearts knocking against each other’s ribs.

Finally he spoke. “Whatever happens, Lilly, please know that I love you.” He pushed himself up onto his arms and looked down as he slowly pulled out of me.

I lay hollow, flat, still, jaw slack.
Whatever happens?
It was as if my stomach were made of glass and a bird had just flown into me, causing a hairline fracture with its beak.

“I love you too, Aziz,” I said weakly, holding my stomach, afraid it was about to shatter.

He took the corner of his sarong and gently wiped the blood from between my thighs. No matter how chaste we are, we are guilty until this moment of being proved innocent. If this had been our wedding night, he would have taken that piece of cloth and draped it over a large bowl of sweets that he would present to my mother that morning. Nouria, I suppose. Nouria and Gishta would have run out into the streets waving the sarong and ululating loudly so that everyone could celebrate the proof of my virginity. If this had been our wedding night.