The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History

Menelik’s daughter Zewditu, crowned after the brief reign and ruthless deposition of Menelik’s grandson Iyasu, was phlegmatic, conservative, uncomfortable in the presence of men and overwhelmingly pious, and had only once bowed to pressure to preside at the courts that operated in her name; she had hated the work, and never returned. She preferred, wrote her chronicler, kindly, to confine herself to ‘spreading spiritual wisdom by fasting, prayer, prostrations, and by almsgiving’. She read the histories of the female saints, ‘and a spiritual envy [to be like them] was stamped on her heart’. Each day she rose early and prayed into the afternoon, eating nothing, outdoing many of her monks and nuns.

Zewditu’s self-denial was matched by generosity – socially required, an expression of pride and status as well as charity, but prodigal nonetheless. Hardly a month went by without a banquet given to soldiers, to clergy, to the nobility or the impoverished laity, and late one November, after Tsega had been in the capital for nearly two years, he was invited to one. The floor of the great hall was laid with hundreds of carpets, some of wool, others of silk. Guests filled the vast space, seated according to their rank: the empress, her regent and senior princes of the blood on a raised platform at one end, surrounded by curtains, then, when they had eaten, the curtains drawn back so they could look down at long low tables filled with lesser notables, ranks of clergy in high white turbans and glowing white shemmas, straight-backed soldiers. Crosses blinked in the lamplight, phalanxes of servants and slaves brought horns of mead and baskets piled high with injera. The smell of dark red chicken stew; of zign, beef in ginger and cardamom and bishop’s weed; the sight of entire sides of fresh-slaughtered oxen carried on poles balanced on the shoulders of slaves so anyone could take a knife and help themselves, made him ravenous, but he ate nothing at all.

Eventually one of the higher-ranking servants enquired why. ‘Because this is the day the Ark of the Covenant, captured by the Philistines, was returned by God,’ he replied. ‘I am fasting in celebration of Zion.’ The servant, knowing this was the kind of thing that interested Empress Zewditu, told her there was a priest in her hall observing the fast of Zion, and who therefore could not partake of the abundance of meat on offer.

She turned out to be observing it too. She had had fasting food cooked for her, pulses and vegetables rather than meat, and she sent the young priest a portion of it. When he had eaten he stood and addressed to her a qiné of praise he had composed in preparation for just such an eventuality, a poem playing upon the biblical echoes of her baptismal name and lauding her holy magnanimity. She inclined her head in thanks. ‘And what can I do for you?’

This was why he had come to the capital, the moment he had been working toward for years. ‘I would like to lead Ba’ata Mariam church in Gondar,’ he replied. ‘And I would like to rebuild it to the glory of God.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. And she ordered the provision of all the accoutrements the new aleqa would require: a cape worked over in gilt, a tunic with a wide coloured band embroidered at the hem, a sash; bags of Maria Theresa silver.

Half of Gondar, it seemed, came out to meet him, ululating praise of their new chief priest. Aleqa Tsega accepted the celebrations calmly, savouring his sudden leap above those who had denied him welcome, noting the practised tributes from his fellow clergy, the underlying silences, the curdled smiles.

At her aunt’s house a feast was waiting. There too he looked about him – at the told-you-so pleasure of Tirunesh, the reluctant approval of Mekonnen. At the narrow-hipped girl in black who hung back, shaven head held low.

TIQIMT

THE SECOND MONTH

Sunny growing and ripening season. Honey removed from hives. The first barley threshed and winnowed for roasting and beer-making. Children play outdoor games; girls dance and greet storks arriving ‘from Jerusalem’.

She no longer hid as she had before he left, running to the storeroom, burrowing in among the wheat and split peas, the dusty green-smelling, crackling hops. Breathing shallow so no one could hear, crouching down behind a high basket or clay waterpot, willing herself invisible. If he found her he had chastised her, playfully. What, hiding again?

Now, nearly four years older, she did not hide, but still she retreated to the back rooms, to sit on a low stool among the comforting grains and watch the days crawl across the floor. She would have spent the nights there, if she could. She did not look up at him, or speak to him; even if she had been expected to, she could not.

When he was out the servants took charge, bossing her about the house like the child she still was, letting her help, yet refusing to play games with her because, being married, she was no longer a child. So she played alone, making a head from bunched-up cloth, a body from a dress, and rocking the form to sleep. Sometimes she heard children’s voices beyond the walls, whispering, calling – ‘coo-coo-loo!’ – and swallowed the voice that itched to answer.

Other times she sat at the window, craning for glimpses of life. Morose donkeys clopped by, or women doubled over beneath wide loads of firewood. Slaves with high packs balanced on their heads, nuns in yellow caps, children running errands. Once she saw a great lord riding in the direction of Ba’ata. His mule clashed and jingled with embellishments and the sun lit the dull barrel of a rifle. Retainers scurried to clear the way.

How handsome he was. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked the slave girl, who shook her head, and ran to see.

‘Ras Gugsa,’ she reported. Ras Gugsa. Their governor! From her father she knew she was distantly related to him, and even here, shut up among the servants, she had heard the rhymes and the gossip. He was pious, as required, a poet and a fair administrator, but somewhat hidebound, too, and a melancholy and determined drinker. He had been married to the empress, who, it was said, still loved him, but they had been forced to separate when she was crowned; it was no secret he blamed his loss of power on the regent. Just over a year later he would be tricked into battle against Ras Tafari and die on the fields of Anchem, his soldiers having scattered in fear of the regent’s most recent toy, the aeroplane. But for now he carried all the sheen of high office.

When they were first married her husband had hired a blind abba to lead her, singing, through the alphabet, the set texts of early church school, the psalms her mother had hummed to her. She found the abba kind, loving, but soon he was reporting that she was too impressionable, too prone to tears. And too quick to learn, too. ‘If you correct her or do her wrong,’ he said to her husband, ‘she will quote David at you. She will cry to God and God will listen to her. Do not teach her to read.’ So the lessons stopped, and she sat out her hours spinning thread from tight bolls of cotton, twisting coloured yarn around narrow bundles of straw to make serving baskets, or picking crumbs of dark earth out of quintal after quintal of wheat kernels, lentils, teff.

Sometimes, still, in a sudden access of spirit, she would run to the neighbours’, climb up into their peach tree, fill her skirts with the biggest fruits she could find, and slink back to enjoy them. Once she left the main door open by accident. A sheep had just been slaughtered and a dog crept in and got hold of one of the back legs. Heart thumping so hard it seemed it might deafen her, she managed to startle the animal into dropping it.

Other times she acted willingly enough in the play that had been written for her. Not that she necessarily knew the words, or her exits and her entrances. So at harvest time, after the peasants had delivered their tithes – two-thirds of the barley and wheat from the Jews who farmed at Gonderoch Mariam, the smaller church her husband administered; chickpeas and chilli peppers, peas and broad beans and teff from Ba’ata’s lands in Dembiya and Bisnit – she handed skiffs of wheat and barley, balls of butter, strips of beef jerky and cobs of corn out to anyone who looked as if they needed it. There was so much she felt it wouldn’t be missed.

Or guests dropped by. ‘Where’s your father?’ Sometimes she could not help but laugh. ‘Oh, you’re mistress here!’ By the time she turned twelve she was becoming accustomed to being called woizero. Lady. Enjoying it, even.

As such she was not expected to grind grain or collect water, but she was expected to be able to cook, to provide handsomely for the priests, the merchants, the visiting dignitaries her husband brought to the house almost daily. Sometimes, knowing her instruction had been interrupted, he helped her, tasting, suggesting, demonstrating, assuming she knew this had to be a secret held between them lest it diminish his station. Until one lunchtime he criticised her: the fish in the wat had been overcooked and was breaking up, there was not enough sauce. Child, he said, this is a bit dry. But we made it together! she protested, before she could think.

The next time she was brought fish, five fresh silvery creatures from the Angereb river, she was extra careful, stripping them, washing them, removing every bone, rubbing the pieces with spice. The resulting wat was succulent, perfect, and when that day’s guests arrived, and took too long at their conversational preliminaries, Tsega was impatient. ‘Never mind, sit down and eat.’ There was no feigning their enjoyment of what had been put before them. After they left he took her small hands and kissed them, over and over, until she thought he might swallow them.

He took a keen interest in her deportment. It wasn’t enough to wash her hands before and after meals; she had to scrub her arms up to the elbows. When her official mourning for her mother and brother was ended she had begun to grow her hair again and braid it back from her forehead. Other girls put silver rings in the plaits, but he would not allow it. Soon he found even the shining braids too much, and told her to hide them under a scarf.

She understood her new state meant she was to stay at home, but initially she did not understand how absolutely he meant it. She had always previously been allowed to run over to a neighbour’s to borrow pots, or muslin to strain butter, or a few shallots, and she still did so. One afternoon when she returned, however, he was waiting for her.

Come here. Her stomach seemed suddenly to have slid to somewhere around her feet. Come here, I said. He raised a stick, and he did not stint. At first she was so shocked she could not cry, but then the sobs arrived, deep and gusty so she could hardly breathe.

But with him it was as if a tempest had passed. Anxiously he stroked her head and picked at her shawl, straightening it, smoothing it over her shoulders. My heart, don’t cry. Don’t cry. Here. Here’s some money. Pressing silver thalers into limp hands. Get the servants to buy you something nice. Not jewellery, you know I don’t like jewellery, but something nice.

Sometimes he worried whether she ate enough. Lijé, he’d say. My child. My child is hungry. And at night especially, when there were no strangers about, he would draw her close and feed her from his side of the mesob. The portions were too big, so she would intercept his hand and break them up into smaller pieces, eating what she could, then closing her mouth tight.

Not infrequently he would arrive home to find her in a corner, weeping. Child, he would say gently, why are you crying? Who has harmed you? And at last the answer would come. My mother. My mother is dead.

Ayzosh, ayzosh, he would murmur, drawing her to him. He dipped a hand into a wooden vessel that had held butter from Asmara. When he drew it out it glistened with the remains of the butter, and with it he would wipe away her tears and gently soften her taut and salty face. Ayzosh. I will be like a mother to you.

After one of these moments he seemed to be concentrating on her longer than usual, drawing dark fingers down her neck. They stopped at the centre, traced a spot low on her throat. Are you growing a goitre? he said, almost to himself. She had little idea what a goitre was, so as usual she said nothing, and soon forgot he had asked the question at all.

But some days later a servant came to her to say, that lady the master asked for, she has come. What lady? But she greeted the woman, and watched as the woman set about heating oil-seeds over a low fire, stirring them until they smoked and burned. Watched as she scraped the soot off the sides of the gas lamps and added that to the black residue. A bit of kohl, too, so the mixture glistered and plopped on the heat.

The woman set it aside to cool, then walked over and took her by the hand. ‘Now, sit still.’ She took up a narrow stick, dipped it into the cooling mess, and began to draw a line around Yetemegnu’s neck, parallel to her collarbone. As suddenly as she understood she was on her feet. But the servants held her down as the woman drew another line, and then another and another, and at the ends of the longest, just under her ears, risen suns.

‘Araqi?’ Alcohol would numb her, but she could not assent to any part of this. She shook her head, a sharp snap of refusal. ‘Don’t move!’ She closed her eyes.

When the needle punctured her skin, she exploded, biting and scratching and writhing. But they held her tight, across her body, by her head, so nothing could stir – only her tears, streaming down her face. And her mouth, screaming. What had she done to God to deserve this?

After the scabs had hardened and fallen off, after she had spent two months delirious and burning with infection, she looked and saw she was imprinted with the tracks of her own tears.

In her first pregnancy she slept all the time. They fed her and she accepted it, and they fed her more. And when finally they wrapped her up tight and sent her on slow mule-back to her father’s home in the countryside she felt only relief, to be away from the big house, even though her husband had already left some months before, taking the road south to Addis Ababa as soon as he had heard word the empress was dead.

One morning she felt a trickle down her thighs.

The women gathered, aunts, grandmother, neighbours. None seemed especially concerned, though they did become quite busy. Some raised a dividing curtain across the main room, others began to roast and pound and boil coffee. Charcoal was brought in on a small stand and blown into redness. Incense curled into the rafters. Watchful laughter, and chat.

Yetemegnu, now fourteen, had been told birth would feel something like it did when she went to the grove behind the house at dawn and squatted to relieve herself, so she had thought of it as that painless and that quick. All she could think, as the contractions tightened and tightened their grip, was no, this didn’t feel like that at all. She gasped, and the women’s voices rose to meet her, to share her pain, to distribute it between them.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

Outside the sun shone on fields vivid with young crops, yellow oil-seed, blue flax, the nodding, dewy greens of new barley, broad beans, wheat. The air, washed bright after months of storms, picked out every tree on the hill that rose behind the house, every silver leaf in the eucalyptus brakes.

But inside it was dark with people and smoke and low talk. In the doorway, behind the curtain, a deacon read from the homilies of Ruphael. Listen, the women said. Listen, because Ruphael opens our wombs.

She sat at the centre, on a low stool. One woman stood behind her, strong arms clasped across her narrow chest. Another sat at her feet. They told stories, asked her questions, tried to divert her, but she sank further and further into herself, dreading the next visitation.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

They told her she was not meant to cry out, but she couldn’t help it. Oh Mary, mother of God, relieve me! Ayzosh, they said. Ayzosh.

She made wild and breathless promises, about the prayers, the fasting she would undergo if only this could stop. One of the women laughed. Oh, you’ll forget. And you’ll be having another soon enough.

The deacon read on, a baseline whose timbre changed only when he shifted in his seat, or coughed.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

An endless night, and another day. The women had put down a mattress so she could curl up on her side, but she was now back on the stool. They took turns holding her and drank cup after cup of coffee, but no one ate.

The deacon read on.

Another night, and another day. St Mikael’s Day, bathed in birdsong and sunlight.

Eventually the deacon put Ruphael aside and took another battered book out of its hide case.

‘NOW THERE WAS A CERTAIN CITY WHEREIN A CHURCH HAD BEEN BUILT, AND THE CHURCH WAS BUILT IN THE NAME OF THE ARCHANGEL MIKAEL, AND EACH YEAR, ON THE TWELFTH DAY OF THE MONTH OF HIDAR, WHICH IS THE DAY OF THE ARCHANGEL MIKAEL, GREAT NUMBERS OF THE INHABITANTS OF THE CITY DID NOT FAIL TO VISIT HIS CHURCH – MAY HIS INTERCESSION AND HIS SUPPLICATION KEEP OUR KING DAVID FROM THE EVIL ENEMY!’

The baby crowned. She was beyond pain, beyond comprehension. She felt her spirit departing, the world about her fading. The women’s voices rose.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

‘AND BEHOLD IT CAME TO PASS ONE DAY WHEN THE PEOPLE WERE JOURNEYING ALONG THE ROAD TO COME TO THAT CHURCH, THAT A MIGHTY ROARING RUSH OF WATERS CAME FROM THE SEA, AND IT BURST UPON THE PEOPLE AND ALARMED AND TERRIFIED THEM EXCEEDINGLY, AND DROVE THEM OUT OF THEIR SENSES; AND THE WATER SURROUNDED THAT PLACE AND ROSE TO THE HEIGHT OF ABOUT TWO MEASURES, AND THE PEOPLE WERE WELLNIGH DROWNED.’

And with a great tearing and an onrush of fluid, the baby arrived, pouring into the arms of the midwife at her feet. She fell back and they caught her and laid her down to rest.

When the placenta had safely followed they took a pat of butter and rubbed the newborn’s head. They pinched its nose, smoothing it, pulling at it, so it would grow long and narrow. And their ililta rose, loud and joyous.

Nine times. A messenger was dispatched to Addis Ababa, to tell Aleqa Tsega his first child was a girl, and that she was named Alemitu.

In her father’s village the feasting began. Araqi and tella flowed like water. Injera arrived by the mesob. Five sheep were slaughtered, and then someone brought four more. All who attended the birth and fasted for the duration ate their fill. But the new mother took nothing at all. They gave her honey, and buttered oatmeal gruel, but she would not touch it. She lay curled on the floor, hugging herself, trying to sleep.

It was only when, decades later, she herself beat through the streets of Addis Ababa in supplication that she began to get an inkling of where her husband had been when Alemitu was born: under a colder sky, walking raw avenues that criss-crossed the bottom of a green bowl surrounded by mountains. The city had been capital for only forty years, and they were still building it. Donkeys trotted through the main streets as they would in any town in the country, carrying firewood, dried discs of cow-dung, baskets for market, but here they also hauled scaffolding, sheets of corrugated iron, drew telegraph poles rattle-bouncing through the dust. Everywhere a new structure was going up, a road being metalled, cable installed, or a ragged work gang being whipped into a semblance of efficiency. Rumours eddied through the thoroughfares: that Tafari was overseeing every detail of the preparations himself; that every day he appeared, a small long-nosed black-caped figure, at a hotel, or the market, or the telegraph office or on the wide sweep of road leading from the railway station, checking on the quality of asphalt or of uniform or of welcome; on the impression his city would make on the foreign guests who had already begun to arrive.

As the coronation neared, the donkeys were joined by horses and mules, trotting footsore in from all across the empire. They carried warriors and their generals; lords of the north, the south, the east and the west, princes who owned more land than the regent, who commanded armies as big as or bigger than his. Princes and priests, priests and more priests, from Aksum and Debrè Libanos and Meqellé, from Sidamo and Harar and Debrè Marqos, or, like her husband, from Gondar, priests in white turbans, black capes, long self-regarding beards; monks and nuns in turmeric yellow, gold-red amber necklaces hanging heavy on breastbones. Prayer sticks and crosses everywhere, crosses of gold and silver, of brass and of humble wood. And Tsega moved proud amongst them, listening to them jostle over the niceties of hierarchy and opportunity afforded by Tafari’s achievement the previous year, of finally beginning to bring independence to their sixteen-hundred-year-old church.

Over sixteen hundred years since a ship on the Red Sea coast was attacked, leaving two Christian boys from the Phoenician city of Tyre to find their way to the Aksumite court where they became companions of Ezana, the emperor’s son. Sixteen hundred years since one of the brothers, Frumentius, now grown, travelled to Alexandria to tell the leadership of the Egyptian church that Christian merchants from across the Roman empire congregated in Aksum and needed a bishop. Frumentius himself seemed best qualified for the job so they consecrated him and dispatched him back to Aksum, where he converted his childhood friend (who, now emperor, well understood the usefulness of such ties with Rome, his chief market for ivory, tortoiseshell, gold, rhinoceros horn). The Ethiopian church had been led, in name at least, by an Egyptian monk ever since, but when Empress Zewditu promoted Ras Tafari to negus, or king, of Gondar, he had moved at once to free it. Assiduous diplomacy produced, within a year, a promising first step – division of the empire into dioceses led by five Ethiopian bishops, among them Abunè Abraham of Gojjam and Begemdir.

Eventually, seven days before the coronation, the milling priests resolved into an expectant phalanx. Serried rows of eyes, her husband’s among them, watched as an honour guard marched through the gates of St George’s Cathedral and up the steps. Rows of eyes watched the reverent handing over of robes, of a sceptre and an orb, of gold rings and spears, of a sword sheathed in gold and diamonds, of a gold-encrusted Bible and two heavy gold crowns. Then, for seven days and seven nights, seven times seven priests sang David’s psalms and the Book of the Praise of Mary, cycling again and again through all their strophes of light.

The words, of course, were familiar to all the men, who had each spent decades studying their order and their intent; so familiar they were all too often muttered and gabbled, boredom taking precedence, minds drifting to other things; but when, in the dark hours after midnight on the seventh day, Negus Tafari and his wife arrived at the cathedral to begin their vigil, it was as though the phrases had been renewed, charged with present meaning. Also that of the past: this coronation drew much of its power from the Kibrè Negest, the Book of the Glory of Kings, in which, as all here knew, it was told how Solomon of Israel was visited in Jerusalem by Makda, queen of Sheba. Solomon, who would eventually number among his consorts seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, was attracted to Makda, but she was a virgin and disinclined to yield, so he tricked her, feeding her spiced food and ensuring the only water in the palace was by his bed.

Solomon and Makda conceived a child, whom she called Menelik. Thus, claimed the chronicles, did the pearl God tucked into Adam’s body at the beginning of the world, the pearl which had been passed down through the children of Abraham to David and to Solomon (and would eventually arrive in Mary, and in her son), pass into Menelik also. When Menelik was grown, he travelled to see his father in Jerusalem. Solomon anointed him king of Ethiopia despite a troubling dream he had had, of a bright sun blazing over Israel then departing south. When Menelik I at last left for home he did so in the dead of night, taking the Ark of the Covenant with him.