Sweetness in the Belly (20 page)

the shrunken heads of enemy invaders

T
he events of the week did not prevent us from holding our bercha, though we were all unsettled. But where I was concerned about the kink in the holy armor that surrounded the city, Aziz and Munir appeared, as usual, to have more secular concerns.

Munir was all nervous energy. He and Aziz had heard of protests in the capital, university students leading demonstrations, people raising their voices in anger against the emperor.

“But people worship him like a God,” I said, thinking of the images we saw on television every Saturday: people throwing themselves on the ground and kissing his feet. Kissing the pavement he had walked upon. Kissing the tracks left in the dirt by his passing convoy.

“They’ve made him into a God,” said Munir.

“Come on, Munir,” Aziz objected. “You make it sound like it is the people who have given him this power.”

“Well, haven’t they?” Munir asked.

“He’s created this mythology around himself in order to instill fear,” said Aziz. “The Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, God’s Elect, the King of Kings, Might of the Trinity, all this business.”

I had certainly been afraid of the emperor: his reputation inspires it. The palace was a shrine to his greatness, with his coronation robes, his military uniforms, his wall of medals, orders and decorations, and the shrunken heads of ancient enemy invaders all on display in glass cases. His greatness was reinforced by all that surrounded him, including a veritable solar system of ministers and servants. To request an audience to offer him a simple thank-you, I had been forced to make an appointment with the venerable minister of the pen.

“You have a matter of business you would like to discuss with His Most Beneficent Majesty?” a tall man with a long, sad face had asked with all the gravity in the world.

“Well, not exactly business …”

“A matter of a personal nature?”

“I just wanted to say thank you, really. I wondered whether there might be a convenient time for me to do that.”

“Well,” the minister had said, clearing his throat. “After breakfast the emperor does his calisthenics and then he takes his walk through the zoological gardens. Then he goes to his office at the Jubilee Palace. He takes some requests from the soliciting masses at the gates en route to the Audience Hall, where his ministers await him for nine o’-clock. Nine to ten A.M. is the Hour of Assignments. When the hour is finished and all the assignments have been handed out, he moves on to the Golden Hall for the Hour of the Cashbox, where His August Majesty considers the requests of his subjects. At eleven, the Hour of the Ministers begins, and the emperor turns his most brilliant mind to imperial matters. At noon, the emperor dons his judge’s robes and opens the Hour of Supreme Court of Final Appeal. Then at one, the emperor returns here for a brief dinner with his family before resuming his station in the afternoon to preside over the Hours of Improvements, Corrections, Relations and Commissions. Then, after a light supper, he retires.”

“I see,” I responded, slightly concerned that the minister had not taken a breath. “So you’re telling me there is no good time?”

“I am telling you that unless you are a minister or a general, a family member, a zoological specimen, a subject or a criminal, there is no hour into which you fit. Unless, of course, you are a visiting dignitary.”

As a concession the minister agreed to convey our thanks, though I have no assurance that he ever did. I have no certainty the emperor ever knew of our presence in the palace, whether the letter from Muhammed Bruce had ever even reached his hands. It had been passed from guard to guard and ended up on the desk of the palace secretary. He had escorted us into Miriam’s care. In any case, the next day, the minister delivered notice of our travel arrangements. We would be leaving for Harar the following morning in one of the twenty-seven cars of the imperial fleet.

I had been struck by the driver’s comment that the Muslims and Christians of Harar were linked in an embrace. I had grown up with the sense that Christians were not enemies but rather people who had missed the last word of God. People more to be pitied and educated than condemned. We were all believers in the book, Christians, Muslims and Jews, but our version carried on for six more centuries. We had a responsibility to share this information with others.

But in Sudan we’d witnessed a Muslim government killing its fellow Christian citizens. And here, our city was surrounded by armed Amharas living in the corrugated-tin settlements on the nearby hills. If this was an embrace, rather than the circle of love I had imagined, it looked more like a barbed wire fence. Perhaps this is why Aziz had suggested I not imply any connection to the emperor: the words didn’t quite match the pictures. Like the Christian church in the center of the city. It was hardly a gift to the people of Harar; it was a garish reminder of conquest standing in aggressive opposition to its surroundings. What else can it mean when the tallest building in a city of Muslims is a church?

Munir’s shoulders slackened. “It works both ways, I suppose. People invest him with power but he certainly has his own … I don’t know the word exactly, maybe magic. Part of it is legend, myth, whatever you want to call it, but part of it is definitely his personality. Especially the way he handles the West. He has completely charmed them. I just don’t see who has the personality to succeed him after his death.”

Certainly not his son, Asfa Wossen, who I gathered from what Tawfiq was saying had tried to overthrow his father a few years ago. Apparently the prince had recruited people directly from the palace, members of Haile Selassie’s very own Imperial Guard, decrying his father’s regime as one governed by ego and nepotism. He said his father had no real interest in developing the country and alleviating poverty, only in increasing the wealth and privilege of the aristocracy by keeping ordinary civilians destitute.

“But nothing came of that. The plot was discovered before they could overthrow the emperor,” said Munir.

“Not nothing,” Aziz said quietly, staring at the floor.

“Okay, sure. Now suddenly people saw a weakness in the mighty empire.”

Aziz threw down the stalk in his hand. “Hundreds of people died, Munir.”

The emperor had had all the members of the Imperial Guard executed. And virtually everybody else in the palace. He did spare his son, though he happened to be permanently disabled now and living in a hospital in Switzerland.

“So were these allegations his son made true?” I asked.

Munir glanced sideways at Aziz. “Well, the answer depends upon whether you are an aristocrat or just a poor ordinary citizen. Look at Harar. There really is no in-between.”

“There is a small in-between,” Aziz interjected.

Munir grinned. “Yes, agitators. This is the problem with education—you create people with opinions. It’s better if you don’t educate the peasants, because then they might start demanding rights. Stick to educating boys like me: sons of wealthy landowners, people who do well under this feudal system.”

“This educational reform is a sham,” Aziz said, rolling his eyes.

“Or you make sure you recruit all the best graduates from the secondary schools around the country for your army,” Munir continued. “That way you force the educated to be loyal to you by making them dependent upon you for their livelihood. They educate most of them right here, in the military academy just beyond the wall.”

“Oh, here we go again. Chew this, Professor Munir,” Sadia said, passing him a stalk. “Hurry up and get mirqana so you’ll be quiet!”

Sadia came to sit beside me while the men talked on. As much as I wanted to be part of their conversation, Sadia was intent on dividing the room into male and female, and the men were quite happy to barge on without us. She leaned against my shoulder and lifted the notebook out of my lap. She flipped to a blank page near the back and began sketching a picture of a woman in a wedding dress. “Sadia,” she wrote above the image. She drew her bridesmaids: her sisters, Orit and Huda, as well as Titune, Warda and me. I was distinguishable only by my height.

We amused ourselves, taking turns with the pencil, adding details to the scene. She drew the cow that would be slaughtered. I wrote the name of Gishta’s mean wife Fatima above the cow. Sadia gave herself hoop earrings and drew a silver chain around her forehead, and I added a curl to the corner of her mouth to give her a mischievous smile. I pictured myself in Sadia’s place. I would do more than wait for Aziz to return from Cairo. I would go with him if he asked.

But that afternoon there was no invitation of any kind. Aziz and Munir were still engaged in serious conversation when Sadia rose and said good-bye. Their conversation faltered.

“It’s getting late,” Aziz said to me.

“I’d best be going too,” I said, standing up and brushing the qat debris off my skirt.

“Ciao,” they both said, “masalaama,” neither of them rising from the floor.

calling all saints

N
ature added her voice. The sky was thick with cloud but there was no rain. We still had water brought by the bucketful from the river, but the tops of the boulders that sat midstream had been dry for weeks.

Sheikh Jami had made a pilgrimage to the disciple of the saint who can communicate with the hyenas. He and this disciple had sat in a field at night and offered the hyenas a special bowl of buttered porridge and meat. Now the women were embarking on ritual reparation, making weekly pilgrimages to a saint with the power to bring rain. But the rainy season passed without delivery. We applied more perfume. We burned more incense. We found lice in the children’s hair once again.

Our yard was parched and dusty and swarming with flies, though curiously, the once-battered plant in the Wellington boot had perked up considerably. In the middle of a drought, where not a drop of water could be spared, somehow an exception had been made: a plant that was good for nothing had been fed.

Gishta siphoned off what she could from the supplies in her storeroom—a little sorghum, a little oil, a little butter, anything that we might be able to use. But without water, Nouria had no income. There was no way for her to wash clothes. But Gishta had her own problems. Fatima apparently became a monster when there was no water, bossy as only a senior wife can be, with her strict rationing, and her
ussing
and commands. “I’d like to stick her head in a bucket of water and make her shut up,” Gishta sneered, handing me a gourd of sour milk.

Not only was life short in Africa, as Gishta frequently reminded me, it was often difficult.

We began to hear rumors that a terrible famine was sweeping the north of the country. But all we saw on Aziz’s television were His Majesty’s speeches about the country’s development, and the shining-medalled officers of his Imperial Army surveying scenes of progress—a new well, the successful harvest of a new hybridized crop, a school for the blind, a textile factory employing amputees.

“There has always been famine,” Amir said dismissively. “It has been this way for thousands of years.”

“Ah, yes, but this time, the rest of the world has noticed,” Munir said, waving his finger. “It would not be such a problem if this famine were caused by drought and crop failure. That would be nature at work. But when you force the peasants to harvest the same amount in a year when the crops are suffering and then they have to give all of it to the landlords, they are left with nothing to eat.
That
is why there is famine.”

“Not always,” said Aziz. “It’s different up north. There the problem is the war with Eritrea. They burn the fields so there is no harvest, and the peasants are forced to buy guns instead of feeding themselves.
That
is why there is famine.”

“It’s terrible,” Sadia muttered, shaking her head.

“Oh, don’t be so naive,” Aziz snapped. “Do you think it doesn’t happen in Harar?”

“It’s just hard to picture,” I said in Sadia’s defense. Even though I had no difficulty believing in the unseen because God manifests his being in so many hidden ways, I couldn’t imagine what famine looked like.

Munir said, “We’re not at war and we don’t get those terrible droughts. This thing we have been going through recently doesn’t even compare.”

“No, but if it did? Do you think it would be any different? Do you think the Hararis would say to the Oromo: Oh no, keep some food for yourselves. You are our friends, our Muslim brothers, and after all, you harvest the food we eat, so we couldn’t possibly let you starve.”

His mocking tone rang in the dead air. There was an uncomfortable silence. Aziz stood up, pulled his sarong tightly at the waist and left the room.

H
e turned up at Nouria’s compound the following afternoon. It would have been too revealing for me to be overly familiar, so I buried my head and busied myself with my dictionary while he paid his respects to Nouria. She offered him tea, despite having so little water, and because he was polite he did not refuse, but when the cup was in his hand he tipped the contents into Bortucan’s willing mouth.

Nouria was intimidated by the doctor; she must have been wondering what warranted this unexpected visit. So was I. But when he picked up Bortucan and the girl giggled, Nouria broke into a smile.

“I was just wondering how she was,” he said to Nouria. “She looks good. Has she had any more of those lumps under her hair?”

Nouria mumbled something and excused herself in order to stoke the fire.

“They come and go,” I said, approaching.

“That we can treat,” he said. “But this, I’m afraid,” he said, pointing at her temple, “we cannot.”

Not even farenji medicine had an answer.

“I really came to apologize for getting so angry yesterday,” he said, lowering his voice and switching to English. “You must just ignore me when I’m like that.”

“But I want to understand.”

“I wondered if you would come to the farmlands with me next Saturday.”

I hesitated.

“There’s something I want to show you.”

I nodded.

He passed Bortucan to me and pulled a sweet out of his pocket for her. He poked his head into the kitchen to bid Nouria good-bye.

“What was he saying?” she asked me as soon as he had gone.

“He is studying for exams and his books are in English. He asked me the meaning of some words.”

I was amazed at how easily the lie came.

M
y students were cautious and slow. Their reserve must have had something to do with the strain in their households because of the drought, but I couldn’t help worrying that I was at fault. I must repent for my secrecy and lies, I told myself, but then I drifted off to see his palm raised before my eyes. I stared at the lines, wondering if he was trying to show me a map of some part of the world.

A
ziz and I huddled together in a horse-drawn calèche, hidden under the awning of the low cart as the driver led us north of the city into green fields by way of a well-worn track. We passed acres of qat shrubs, herds of goats and the occasional farmer with a gun slung over his shoulder.

“Why do they need guns?” I asked.

“Protection,” Aziz replied.

“Hyenas?”

“Mostly.”

We followed a shallow creek toward a cluster of short palms bearing bunches of small green bananas. The breeze was sweet: an aromatic cocktail. It was here that we disembarked.

Aziz carried a sack in one hand and took my hand in his other. He obviously felt much freer here. It was so open and so lush, so unlike our tight, walled existence within the city, but I felt awkward about holding hands in this naked light.

“My mother’s land,” he said wistfully, unfolding a blanket at the edge of the stream.

I admired the beauty of this place as we sat on wool laid over a grassy bed in the shade. A thin silver current ran past our feet. I wondered if this was the world I’d seen mapped on his palm.

“It has belonged to my mother’s brother for decades now.”

“Because she married a Sudanese man?”

He nodded. “Disinherited.”

He poured sweet tea from a thermos and unwrapped squares of fatira, a thin pastry stuffed with scrambled egg. He told me he was glad to be able to share this place with me. It was where he came whenever he received a new textbook—where he first opened it, a ritual of his own.

“Somehow being here allows me to imagine things are possible,” he said. “You are like this air to me, Lilly: something fresh, something hopeful. You and your batin.” He reached for my cheek but then his hand fell away. “It’s hard to maintain your resolve, your determination to do good in a country where there is so much poverty. You hear our frustration—the inadequate supplies, the chronic illness, the people’s reluctance to seek our intervention until it is too late. It wears you down and then you hate yourself for giving up.”

I wished there was a way I could help him, just as he had found a way to give me what I needed to teach my class.

“We have a right to be angry,” he said, wiping crumbs from his lips. “Particularly with the injustice. We have this pride in the fact that we are a country that was never colonized, but what people don’t want to admit is that we live under a colonial regime of our own making. We call other Africans Barya—slaves. We call the Ethiopians in the south Shankilla. It means something like dirty blacks. We call the Oromo Galla. They would use all three insults to abuse me if they could, but I am an enigma to them. A black man with a Harari mother. A black man with a good education. They don’t know where to place me.”

“Perhaps you are just a new kind of Ethiopian,” I offered. “A modern Ethiopian.”

“Well, the modern Ethiopian is an angry Ethiopian, then,” Aziz said.

We rose from the bank and in his silence he took my hand again, leading me through banana trees, across a field of qat shrubs, toward a wooden shack. The children playing in the dirt in front of the shack saw us coming and ran squealing toward us. “Farenji! Farenji!” they cried, stroking my arms, touching my clothes.

“Uss!” Aziz quieted them, pulling sweets from his pocket. He said something in Oromiffa that sent all but one of them scurrying back home. Aziz lifted the straggler over his head and sat him down on his shoulders. The snotty-nosed boy laughed and ran his dirty fingers through Aziz’s hair.

Aziz set the boy down at the entrance to the shack where chickens clucked away. We followed him in. The dark room was full of stinging smoke coming from a charred pot bubbling away on a small kerosene stove in the corner. It was so dark it took several minutes for my eyes to adjust, and even then, all I could really see were the whites of eyes—at least ten sets of them—peering sullenly from all four sides of the room.

Aziz approached an old man lying on a cot. I couldn’t make out his eyes, and he moaned in response to Aziz’s touch.

“The owner pulled out his eyes,” Aziz said to me. “Last year he only beat him with barbed wire.”

I shuddered.

“The harvest wasn’t as big as he’d expected. For two years running now we’ve had less rain.” Aziz pulled a pair of scissors from his sack and doused them with alcohol. He was removing stitches from the man’s face. “I had to sew the holes shut,” he explained. “There was nothing else I could do.”

But what kind of harvest would this man reap next year, I wondered, without his eyes?

“Can you take this?” he asked, holding the bottle of alcohol out behind him.

I moved in closer to take the bottle from his hand. I could see then that the man wasn’t lying on a cot. He was reclining on a mountain of guns.