Read Online Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb - Free Book Online Page B

and lay her on the foam mattress.
    I couldn’t bear it: Nouria was pulling Bortucan forward.
    “She’s too young!” I protested.
    Rabid whispers all around me.
    Nouria said, “She is old enough to remember the pain.”
    I had to turn away. I had to push my way through the crowd of women and stand alone in the street. I heard nothing from Bortucan, only the jubilant chorus of ululating women. A manic, headless chicken brushed my calf as it ran down the street. Anwar chased it a few feet before throwing himself upon it and stifling it with his chest.
    This was the party Rahile had been waiting for.

the doctor
    T he girls were instructed to lie bound for forty days, long enough for scar tissue to form, and to drink as little as possible so as not to have to remove the matchsticks to let their urine pass. Rahile—though she mewled when she had to urinate—told me she felt special, she felt loved.
    The women had lined up single file and entered the room one by one to congratulate the girls and offer them sweets and money and kisses on the forehead.
    “Now they will grow up to be respectable women,” Gishta told me with pride. “This is the greatest occasion in a girl’s life, Lilly—next to her marriage, of course.”
    And the latter depended on the former, according to Gishta: no one would dare marry an uncircumcised girl, a sharmuta, a girl wild with heat. Such a girl could only bring fitna—chaos—and shame to her family.
    Bortucan, however, did not appear to be faring as well as her sister. She moaned in a most unholy way. I gathered she’d lost consciousness during the operation, and although she awoke and took a few small sips of sugary tea the day after, her bandages were soaked in blood. I helped Nouria unravel and change the bandages, trying not to reveal my horror, lest I should alarm Bortucan even more.
    Her legs were stone cold and her teeth chattered while we wrapped her in fresh cloth. We covered her with blankets and every article of clothing we had. She drifted in and out of sleep, muttered as though delirious, and by the end of the second day Nouria was concerned enough to call for the faith healer.
    The old man came with his ink and quill. He sat in the doorway of the hut, and I watched over his shoulder as he wrote a few verses from the Qur’an onto a tiny square of paper that he rolled up and placed in a thin red leather cylinder. He strung a piece of thread through the open ends of the cylinder and handed it to Nouria, who tied it around Bortucan’s neck.
    I fingered my own amulet. To ward off the bad jinn, the Great Abdal had told me. But this situation was not the work of evil spirits. It was the work of a midwife, with the full support of every woman in the neighborhood. It was the outcome of a little girl demanding: “Ab-su-ma!”
    On the third day, Nouria called for the herbalist. The tattooed woman with the henna-bright hair stewed a sulfurous concoction over the fire until it thickened into a claylike paste. She applied this mixture to all of Bortucan’s orifices—her mouth, her ears, her eyes, the spaces between the thorns—and dragged her out into the sun on a blanket so that the paste would harden and crumble.
    Bortucan awoke the fourth day, her bandages once again soaked in blood. Now, Nouria lamented, we would have to call for the doctor. Nouria had never called for a doctor in all the months that I’d been here, though she and the children were often sick, their bodies unwitting hosts to parasites, tormenting them with diarrhea, inflating their bellies into hardened balloons. The doctor was the last resort in a community where midwives and faith healers and herbalists ruled.

    I lay between the girls in the dark corner, trying to distract them with the story of the Arab missionaries who had come to Abyssinia and heard the call of Islam’s first muezzin while passing through the eastern mountains. They had prayed to God, for it was a miracle, asking him if this was a sign