Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb Page B

comfort.
    I learned from listening, from being corrected when I attempted to interact, from sheer exposure and immersion, through the days come weeks come months of hearing little else, from the knowledge that I had no choice.
    In return for my new vocabulary, I offered to teach the boys some more Arabic. After dinner, we would sit by the dying light of the fire in the cramped kitchen and practice the alphabet together, writing the letters on slate with chalk.
    One morning Anwar came to me carrying a book in his hands—my Qur’an, the one the Great Abdal had given me.
    “Anwar, where did you get this?” I chastised.
    “From your bag,” he said, pointing at the house.
    “You shouldn’t go rummaging through my things,” I said, immediately shamed by the possessiveness in my voice. “Do you want me to read to you, is that it?” I asked more gently.
    He nodded vigorously.
    “Well, first we have to wash our hands. Then we have to state our intention—”
    “Wait!” he said, and ran to get his brother.
    Each morning after that we sat in the doorway of the dark room we all shared and recited quietly for an hour against the rhythmic sounds of Nouria on her knees scrubbing clothes in a big metal basin. Over the weeks, the two boys revealed their knowledge of verse after verse, then chapter after chapter. They ground to a halt at the last verse of chapter five. So it was here that we began in earnest. Listen and repeat. Listen and repeat. Line by line, verse by verse, just the way the Great Abdal had taught me.
    The Great Abdal had taken me by the hand and said this is a flower and this is a rock and this is a tree. Under his guidance I put down roots word by word. Each utterance prefaced by bismillah al-rahman al-rahim , in the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. The world within the book was whole, and there was an order, a process, a logical sequence of steps. It was the antithesis of the peripatetic life I’d lived with my parents; it was the antidote to their death. There was always a safe landing, even when I made a mistake. If I stumbled over a sentence, I could just retreat to the one before. I could always go back to what I knew.
    This is the way of Islam; it is passed like a gift through generations. It connects us through time. Through this process these children would be connected to the Great Abdal, to his father and teacher before him and his father and teacher before him all the way back through the generations to the saint himself. In a fatherless world, I was a link in a chain that connected God’s Prophet (peace be upon him) with two dusty Ethiopian boys.

purity and danger
    N ouria and I sorted through a sack of sorghum as she’d taught me—shaking the grains over a mesh screen, getting rid of the loose chaff and picking out the grit and small stones. When we finished, we would grind the grain in a mortar, mix it with water and then leave it in a bucket to ferment. We would use that sour, hissing puddle in a few days to make enough injera to feed us all for a couple of weeks.
    Rahile was standing at her mother’s side that morning, tugging her sleeve. Nouria tried to quiet her: “Hush. Soon, Rahu, soon. Do not bother your mother. Go and play.”
    But Rahile started crying and stomping her feet. Bortucan, in the spirit of twinhood perhaps, burst out in the same manner; eyes squeezed shut, little fists scrunched into balls, she punched at the air and let out a strange moan while her sister’s crying escalated.
    “Good God! What is the fuss all about?” Gishta yelled as she entered the compound. She was carrying a qat-stuffed leather satchel over her shoulder and a gourd of camel’s milk in her hand. “Did a stone fall on your head, Rahu? Are you possessed by the jinn?”
    “I want absuma! Ab-su-ma! Ab-su-ma!” she wailed each syllable.
    “What is this ‘absuma’ she wants?” I asked.
    “It’s expensive, that’s what it is,” Nouria said, deftly tossing the grain up and