The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History

They were preparing for a visit from her father. Her aunt, Tirunesh, presided. Woizero Tirunesh, in her layers of white shawls, sitting stately, giving orders. Woizero Tirunesh, with her ever-present horn of dark beer, stirring up yet another domestic storm.

She was ambivalent about her father, Tirunesh’s younger brother. Mekonnen Yilma was proud, tall, a fast walker, a fast talker, a natural soldier. A good storyteller, too, and committed to witty conversation. Listening to the thrust and flash of his talk, his quick laughter and tight puns, or watching him settle himself onto a stool, take a sip of mead, then lean into his high ten-string lyre to sing slow low Lenten songs, she could almost forget she was afraid of him; almost forget the terror with which she watched him punish the other children, the spell of the thin hide whip curving through the air and kissing the backs of their legs.

Her father was proud, yes, but not too proud to beg. Over the years, from story after story – not all his – she had pieced together how she came to be. When Setechign – pale, beautiful, much-sought-after – first married Mekonnen the expected children did not arrive, so Tirunesh had taken herself off to church to have words with God about the situation. A boy was duly born, and named Nega, for the dawn.

Then Setechign left. No matter that Mekonnen was now a customs officer on the long lawless border with the Sudan. No matter that his immediate master was married to the empress’s sister. No matter that he regularly returned from military skirmishes laden with trophies and prisoners of war who often became valuable slaves, and that to this was added the tithes of the peasants who farmed his lands. Nor did it matter that – as Mekonnen, fond of genealogy (particularly his own) and possessed of a preternatural memory for names, made a point of reminding her – he could claim descent from at least three emperors and an empress, Taitu, and would thus give her offspring royal blood. No. His family was too big, there were too many hangers-on, it was all too much. So Setechign went.

He pleaded. He sent emissaries: his sister, his mother, elder after elder. They applied all the subtle pressures of home and hearth, and it took a couple of years, but eventually she returned, and they conceived a daughter.

In gratefulness Mekonnen plied his wife with gifts: trains of donkeys laden with wheat, barley, the whitest teff; pots of spiced butter, baskets of deep-red dried chillis, of cardamom, frankincense and rue.

Their daughter arrived the day before Christmas, on the feast of Ammanuel. There was no disagreement about what her baptismal name ought to be – Weletè Amanuel, daughter of Amanuel – but her daily name was another issue altogether. Her maternal grandmother favoured Genet, for the garden of Eden; her paternal grandmother Gedamenesh, or my sanctuary; while her mother called her Nigisté, my queen. Tirunesh and her father, however, chose Yetemegnu, or ‘those who believe’, and it was they who prevailed.

Again Setechign left. Distressed and in spiritual need she walked to Infiraz, where she had heard there was a great zar doctor. Perhaps he could heal her. But when she met him she was afraid. A huge, powerful man, he had once, when he was nineteen, crossed the high Simien on foot, scrambling down gorges and tramping over plains looking for his own mother, who had been abducted by a Tigréan lord. He found her, but could not release her, and on his way back had become possessed by a spirit that had never left him. He had learned instead to control it, and now his home was filled with incense and the smell of roasting coffee, with women speaking in tongues or stamping out their individual spirit dances; dancing, often, to his personal bidding too.

And this particular woman, with her tight-braided hair and neck so long it could take seven rings of tattoos – the zar doctor liked this particular woman. And the more Setechign fought him, the more she hated him, the more he liked her. She hated him so much that when she became pregnant with his child she tried to kill it, standing for hours under a waterfall in the hope of dislodging the growing thing. But it would not leave before it was ready and when it was born she called the boy ‘imbi alè’, or ‘he said no’. Not until he went away to school was his name changed, to Gebrè-Selassie.

Only Setechign’s third union, to a rich trader, gave her a measure of calm. The home she made with him was a place of dancing and honey wine, where an animal was slaughtered nearly every week, and parties included the neighbourhood poor, invited to eat their fill. Of warmth and love, where special meals were cooked for a shy daughter who basked in the unaccustomed glow of feeling singular, precious; who had gently to be encouraged to eat and was seldom allowed to stay. Yetemegnu made little protest, but every time she was taken away the grief curled deeper into her heart.

At her aunt’s there were fewer parties. Tirunesh was pious and severe, a disciplinarian who had little patience for a child who lost herself in games and dreams. But she made sure Yetemegnu learned to spin, and to cook. Every morning the child was required in the kitchen, to watch and to learn, and at last to try a few things herself – to feel the exact point at which it was best to add spices to onions and garlic turning gold in the pot; to judge just how thin to make the sourdough, so the injera would be delicate and light.

Their work was accompanied by a drone of words, but Yetemegnu never listened in any conscious way. Nor did she take much notice of the slight deacon who appeared after church each day, read from the homilies of Ruphael or of Mikael, then, having been fed, slipped away again, while the women turned to drinking coffee and pronouncing on the generally disappointing ways of the world.

Tirunesh had been watching the deacon, however. She questioned him about his education, his ambitions, and liked his considered answers. ‘If I had a daughter,’ she said to her husband one day, ‘I would marry her to this man.’

So when the deacon’s patron, a friend of hers, approached her with the news that the deacon was nearing the end of his training and looking for a wife, the suggestion that this wife be Yetemegnu fell on receptive ears.

‘He’s just another student from God knows where,’ said Mekonnen, disgusted. ‘Able, maybe, but so what? There are hundreds like him, cluttering up the churches. Absolutely not.’

‘He would be a good husband, perhaps the best she could have.’ To Mekonnen this was patently untrue. He could not believe his own sister could so easily squander their lineage on a nonentity; a nonentity, moreover, from Gojjam, an entirely different province, and thus foreign. ‘We don’t know anything about him. We don’t even know who his father is. No.’

‘Setechign,’ said Tirunesh on a visit one day, as gently as she knew how. ‘Isn’t it time your daughter was betrothed? The deacon who reads to me –’

‘She’s a child. She’s barely eight years old. I will not give my daughter to a man of thirty who has no women in his household, no mother in evidence, no nurse to care for her. How can you think of such a thing?’

Tirunesh turned to the elders. Deputations arrived at Mekonnen’s house, bearing blandishments, arguments, testimonies of character. Mekonnen listened, resisted all of them.

‘Look at me!’ cried his sister. ‘Look at me! I’m barren. Is that what you want for her? I’ll curse you for your cruelty!’

‘Now, now, no need –’

But she would not hear. ‘If you do not marry her to this man I will hate you forever. As Mary is my witness I will never visit your graveside. And you will never stand at mine.’

It was the strongest threat in the armoury, and her brother acceded with an angry sigh. ‘Very well. She can marry the student.’

His relenting made it harder for Setechign to hold fast. And different arguments were used with her. Of course the girl was young, but that was common and had its advantages: she could be moulded to her husband’s ways, she would grow up in an educated, pious house. It would be good for her. As for the lack of nurturing women, a nurse could be hired, servants, she could be given an experienced female slave.

No one told Yetemegnu what had been decided. Why would anyone bother to tell a girl child?

COME, O JEREMIAH, AND MAKE A LAMENTATION FOR MY MOTHER HANNA, FOR SHE HATH FORSAKEN ME, AND I AM ALONE IN THE HOUSE OF BRASS. WHO WILL POUR WATER ON MY HANDS? AND THE TEARS START IN MY EYES.

– LEGENDS

Before her husband left for Addis Ababa to petition for a parish, he had gone to see the governor of Gondar, to tell him of his marriage, and through his marriage, of his promotion both in Gondar society and from deacon to priest; to tell him that his wife was young and he a man who owned nothing. The governor had responded as the new priest hoped, awarding him a salary of twelve quintals of grain, teff and barley, a quintal of chillis, a generous measure of butter. Every month these things arrived on donkey-back and were received by her maternal grandmother, into whose care she had been returned. Here, too, they sometimes reminded her to put away childish things, but her life was really not so different from that of other children her age. She settled in quickly, helping around the house, visiting neighbours, family friends, sometimes forgetting, for hours at a time, that she could not stay. Now she really learned to dance, watching women at the weddings of her grandmother’s friends and relations, then slipping in among them and echoing every move. And when they saw how she loved it, how well and naturally it came to her, they circled her, and clapped and trilled and sang, encouraging her, laughing as she responded with tighter, more demanding movements, improving from day to day until she was nearly as good as some of the more accomplished adults.

One day she was passing the receiving room when she saw her grandmother had a visitor. This was nothing more than routine – incense, roast chickpeas, coffee, questions, how are you, and how are you, and well, thanks be to God. But something made her hesitate in the doorway. The visitor looked at her and set down her cup. ‘Your mother is tiring. You must come at once.’

Setechign had been ailing for months. On Yetemegnu’s last few visits she had sat by her mother’s bedside, trying to manage the fear that rose through her body when her mother complained of what felt like knives cutting through her stomach and refused to eat. Then, three weeks ago, her brother Nega had taken a month’s supply of food to their father Mekonnen, who, having come off worst in a dispute with a rival, was imprisoned in Debrè Tabor. On the way home the boy had had to swim across a river; that night a fever clenched his teeth and threw his head back in a rictus of pain. Holy water, administered in dousings and drenchings and trickles through rigid jaws, did not help, and he died the next midnight. The governor took pity on his prisoner and released Mekonnen so he could mourn his son. For three days Mekonnen had sat with his lyre, weeping, singing of his beautiful swimming boy. Setechign simply weakened, disappearing further and further into the hollow under the blankets.

Her mother’s house was full of people when Yetemegnu arrived. They cried in the corners and wept through the receiving rooms. They held her, and led her into the bedroom.

Setechign had already been washed and laid out. Her big toes had been tied together, as was done for Lazarus, and her thumbs, so her arms ended in a spear-point aimed at her feet. She had been wrapped in a winding sheet of rough white cotton, and then in a palm shroud. The child drew near, and stood by her mother’s head. The hair was glossy, the eyes closed. They would not open – decades later Yetemegnu would remember and weep as if it had just happened.

After the short service, and the first prayer for absolution, scores of people – priests and deacons, relatives and neighbours who had eaten Setechign’s injera and drunk her mead – followed the bier out of the house and down the road toward the church. The bearers had not travelled far, pacing slow, leading a low hubbub of gossip and care, when they set her down. At once the chat stopped, and the crying began again, the women leading. The deaths Setechign had suffered, the lives she had brought into being. Her loves, her lineage, her generosity, called out, rhymed out, echoed in chorus. Then the deacons sang another prayer, the bier was lifted, and they carried on. Seven times, so all the thoroughfare knew of her passing.

In the churchyard she was set down while her male relations dug into the ground. A smell rose, of loam and of rain. Yetemegnu was brought to the front. Now she could see the priest who clambered into the shallow grave; see his censer swinging, one corner, another, another, overlaying earth with pious perfume. Hear the final prayers. Watch the bending backs lower their freight into the ground, head to the east, feet to the west, feel, like a blow to her own body, the first handful of soil land upon her mother.

In the waning years of the Gondarine age, when emperors became puppets and warlords danced them on and off their thrones as mood and circumstance took them, Emperor Teklè-Haimanot II, godly, handsome (and not a little vain), tried to live up to his name by planting seeds of piety wherever he went. By the end of the eighteenth century, when he was ushered into a monastery by a brother eager to take his turn as puppet-in-chief, he had established six churches, among them a structure he at first called Debrè-hail-wa-debrè-tebab, mount of might and mount of wisdom, and then, because it was consecrated on the feast of Mary’s Presentation to the Temple, Ba’ata Mariam.

Ba’ata was, from the beginning, well endowed. Teklè-Haimanot settled upon it fertile lands that stretched down into the Bisnit and Qeha valleys, into Gabriel, and even to the districts of Dembiya and Deresgé, a whole day’s journey away – lands from which a fifth of all harvests flowed back to the church. A spring was discovered and designated holy. Ba’ata’s tabot, its life-giving replica of the Ark of the Covenant, was of marble, and the emperor commissioned the best of fresco-painters to illuminate its walls. By the early 1800s Ba’ata was among the richest, most powerful, and, some said, most beautiful of the forty-four churches in Gondar. Students walked for days to study under its dark trees, learning the syllabary, the psalms, the homilies of Mary, and especially the aquaquam, the slow dance of David before the Ark, of which Ba’ata claimed 276 masters.

When, some fifty years later, Emperor Tewodros II’s chronicler described the capital’s priests as debauched occultists (and his liege, of course, as the opposite of these things), there was perhaps something in it. Certainly they were not accustomed to being gainsaid, and especially not by a brawling upstart they mocked for being born to a mother so poor she’d had to sell purgative kosso to survive; so poor, one story went, the priests of Ba’ata turned her away when she brought her son to be baptised: she could not afford the two jars of dark beer, two bowls of stew and forty injera they demanded in payment.

But they would have done well to remember that this so-called upstart had also defeated lord after warlord to become emperor in act as well as in name, because they soon found that the churches, with their vast tracts of land and internecine theological disputes, were next. Five years later Tewodros stripped Gondar of its status as capital; ten years after that he seized from its churches any land he deemed surplus to requirements; finally, on the sixth day of the third month, when, wrote his chronicler, the very stars ‘began to fly about as though struck by fear’, Tewodros sacked the sanctuaries and set fire to the city. Castles, homes, churches – everything burned. Bells, chalices, drums, censers, crosses, manuscripts were torn out of their places and taken for his treasuries. Priests who fought to keep them were fed to the pyres.

In the silence after Tewodros and his soldiers were gone, as embers flickered against the dark like so many more burning towns, Ba’ata counted its blessings. The grand outer circles, the frescoes and the holy of holies smouldered and smoked, but the tabot, being marble, had not been consumed, and so the heart of the church was intact. The vestments encrusted in gold and silver, the sistra and the drums, the illuminated manuscripts, had been hidden underground, in a chamber below the holy of holies, and they too had survived. The priests built a temporary hut in the grounds and continued their ministry.

But they were again besieged. ‘Oh master!’ they wrote to Tewodros’s successor, Emperor Yohannes IV, borrowing from Psalm 79, ‘The heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Gondar in heaps.’ But Yohannes was already occupied, leading an eighty-thousand-strong force against Italian armies threatening to take the Eritrean highlands, so he asked Menelik, king of Shewa (and his chief rival) to intercept the Sudanese Mahdists advancing on Gondar. Menelik did not arrive in time: the jihadists razed nearly every remaining church to the ground. Only two escaped – Medhané-Alem and Debrè-Birhan Selassie, the latter protected, people said, by a swarm of holy bees.

By the early years of the twentieth century, when Tsega first followed his teacher of scriptures through the fields and thick woods, Gondar, which at its zenith had held up to seven thousand souls, was home to less than a tenth of that number. The castles, once hung with silk and ivory, chalcedony and Venetian glass, were bare and cold, fluttering with bats and pigeons. Thatched huts huddled as if for warmth against the outer walls. Only on Saturday, market day, did the town manage to summon up something of its former bustle.

Though Ba’ata, just up from the main market, had suffered an inevitable winnowing of its congregation, the itinerant students came still, and Tsega joined them. In the little village in Gojjam where he was born he had gone to church school with all the other wide-eyed boys, learning his alphabet in sing-song call and response. He had learned to write, shaping his letters so they fitted onto the bleached shoulderblades of sheep, because these were plentiful, especially after feast days, and vellum was not; and then he had been taught how to scrape and cure sheepskin to make his own parchment. He enjoyed all this, and found it easy, until one day his father, a priest, came upon him and a young male relative, a chorister, concentrating on a long scroll held down between them: crude archangels, demons, horned women; spells in angular letters, all red. How dare you! His father’s hand had twisted his ear until it burned. How dare you corrupt your learning, your soul, with – this, this dragging of Satan out from where he belongs! I forbid you to pick up a pen and write, ever again. May curses rain down upon you if you even think of tracing anything other than your name!

All the students had to learn most things by heart, but after that Tsega had to commit everything to memory: the divine offices and the book of hours, the antiphonaries, all of David’s psalms. When he graduated to the school of qiné, church poetry, he pulled his head through a rough sheepskin cape, picked up his leather book case, and left for a nearby village, where he had heard a respected teacher was working. A handful of others had done the same, walking in through the valleys and the mountain passes, choosing mastery of poetry in Ge’ez, the church language, over homes that they often never saw again. For five years the sun rose to find them gathered around their teacher, listening to him describe stanza forms, explain particularly pleasing metaphors, recite useful examples. They memorised model qiné and with his help peeled back their punning layers, looking for the gold hidden within the wax mould, the meaning nestling at the centre like the dark hard core of an olive tree. The church told them they were training their minds and souls, opening themselves up to apprehensions of divinity, but Tsega was learning worldlier things too: how to smuggle deniable meanings into seemingly innocuous conversation; how, because qiné carried with it so much prestige, it might be a way for a village boy disinclined to soldiery to chase social advancement.

During the day the students scattered across the countryside, composing their own poetry and begging, as the church provided no food. Tsega hated this aspect of his calling. He was proud, afraid of dogs, and quickly resorted to tall heart-tugging tales. In the late afternoon the students returned to their teacher, who listened to their verses, then easily, deflatingly, disassembled them. Near the end of the five years Memhir Hiruy, famed throughout the country for his skill with qiné, visited the Gojjam school to teach. The students vied amongst each other to impress the master, who after a couple of weeks singled Tsega out for praise. Would he like to come to Gondar to continue his studies? Of course he would. And, ignoring the protestations of his mother, he went.

Not long after they arrived at Ba’ata, the priests asked Memhir Hiruy to perform a qiné. ‘Ask him,’ replied the scholar, pointing to his new acolyte. They were insulted. Recent experience had only confirmed their deep suspicion of outsiders. And who was this anyway? A youth from the sticks – from Gojjam, no less, where everyone knew the evil eye flourished. Why was he here, assessing them with his noncommittal gaze, threatening them with his very presence? Why, he hadn’t even finished his studies. But after a glance at Memhir Hiruy for reassurance, Tsega stepped forward to puncture their scorn.

When Memhir Hiruy left for the new capital, Addis Ababa, Tsega stayed, learning the recondite church dances and committing to memory all the books of the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, their interpretations and commentaries, and the books of the Fit’ha Negest, the law of kings handed down from Byzantium and from medieval Egypt. He became a teacher himself, and, ambitious in the way of people who know they have only themselves to depend upon, quietly but steadily made connections, travelling across the city after church services to read to the families of increasingly important personages; for Tirunesh’s husband, among them, and for her oblivious niece.

Less than a year after his wedding, Tsega deposited his young bride at her grandmother’s house and was on his way south. The mules were watchful on the long trek down into the Lake Tana basin. Their riders, too, looked around, into shaded copses, up at the lips of ravines, and once they had arrived at the Blue Nile gorge and were picking their way down its steep sides, into anything that even suggested it might be a cave. Everyone knew, from childhood stories, from scarred survivors, that this fertile country ran with bandits who regularly stripped mule-trains of their valuables then pushed off in low reed boats, poling them through the mud-coloured lake to islands and promontories, or disappeared into caves. They were all grateful when they scrambled up onto the wide cool highland plateau and then down, through aromatic juniper and newly imported eucalyptus, down into Addis Ababa.

Once there her husband took his time, acclimatising, visiting Memhir Hiruy, attending services, listening to gossip about the empress, and especially about her subtle regent Ras Tafari, who had recently returned from an extended tour of Egypt, Jerusalem, and the European capitals (where, among other things, he had wisely declined to sign a treaty that would have allowed Italy to build roads, rails, and a port into Ethiopia). The regent also managed – daily, it sometimes seemed – to announce the institution of new-fangled things: a modern school, a printing press, a newspaper. Every decision of any importance passed through his hands, which was a useful thing to know, but for the moment was not what most interested the new-minted priest. Tsega presented himself at the head offices of the church, and was given the care of a country parish called Gonderoch Mariam. He travelled the city to read aloud in the households of great men, among them Ras Kassa, the regent’s pious cousin. And he joined the throngs that arrived daily at the palace, looking for an audience with the empress.