Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb Page A

attention than her sister. I was surprised to learn they were twins, both four years old, because Bortucan, unlike Rahile, hadn’t started speaking and never played with other children. She was sullen, where Rahile was perennially bright. Perhaps, in her wordlessness, her isolation, there was something I recognized and understood.
    During the heat of the afternoon I sat on a mat in a shaded corner of the yard, fanning the flies away, making vocabulary lists, diligently recording each new Harari word I learned and doing my best to make some sense of the grammar. Many of the words seemed very close to Arabic, derived from the same root, though they were strung together in unfamiliar ways. And Arabic, I discovered, went far with some people. Among the more educated, the ones who were well versed in the Qur’an, as were some of Nouria’s wealthier neighbors, Arabic was familiar. Nouria didn’t know Arabic per se, but she had a number of Arabic proverbs on the tip of her tongue.
    Anwar spoke some, which he’d learned during his few years at the madrasa. I would point at something in the compound—a cockroach, a sack of grain, a dress hanging from the washing line—and Anwar would give me the Harari word. The last thing he named for me in the compound was the plant growing out of the rubber boot, but he didn’t have a word for the boot itself.
    “Where’s the other one?” I asked him.
    “What other one?”
    “The pair to this one.”
    “There is only this one,” he said.
    What was a single Wellington boot doing sitting in this compound in a remote Muslim city in Africa?
    “And the plant. What’s it for?” I asked Anwar.
    He shrugged. “It’s for nothing,” he replied.
    “It’s not used as a spice or a medicine?”
    “It’s just for being a plant.”
    For nothing. For being a plant. In this impoverished world where everything had its use, I found this one frivolous gesture reassuring.
    Once he’d named everything in the compound for me, we moved inside the mud-walled house and named its meager contents. Armed with the word for foam mattress, I asked him where I might buy one of my own. He seemed proud to be able to escort me by hand to the market, where a man cut a piece of foam according to Anwar’s instruction.
    “But Anwar, that’s far too big,” I objected, once the man had cut the piece.
    “No, no, it’s good!” he said, and placed the thick tube of foam on his head.
    “All right,” I sighed, and dug into my pocket.
    As I thought, the tube was too wide to fit through the door of the mud house.
    “No problem,” said Anwar and unrolled it on the ground. He went into the kitchen, returned with a knife and drew a clean line down the middle of the mattress with the blade. He carried each piece into the house separately and placed his clothes at the head of the second mattress.
    My vocabulary grew over the months with words picked up from Nouria, from Gishta when she came to visit, as she did almost every other afternoon, and from the other women in the neighborhood who would gather in the courtyard on the occasional Saturday for what they called a bercha. They would spread a blanket on the ground and sit in a circle and share a little gossip and qat. They snacked on popcorn, roasted on a flat pan over an open flame, threw crystals of incense onto dying embers, drank tea and smoked the hookah, which here was the sole preserve of women. The qat, the tobacco, the popcorn and the gossip were the only extravagances in Nouria’s poor life, gifts brought by more affluent neighbors.
    I sat on the edge of their circle, Bortucan often in my lap, me wiping her perpetually running nose with a rag. Some of the women wove threads of straw while they chatted, making baskets to adorn the interior walls of houses richer than Nouria’s. Bortucan often tugged at my breast, and inevitably crawled in frustration from my lap to her mother’s, where, although she could not always be assured feeding, there was